Baked oatmeal - 4 points on WW blue

I absolutely love oatmeal. I eat it for breakfast, sometimes for lunch and often as snacks. I don't even need to put sugar in it if I load it up with fruit, chocolate chips or nuts. However, I often find these delicious additions don't fit well into my daily points when I'm trying to follow weight watchers.

In fact, when I chose my WW plan, I went for blue because oatmeal is zero points on purple and I knew I would over eat it if it didn't have any points attached. I also love sweet potatoes, so that would've been another temptation!

In moderation though, oatmeal can be a great option and this baked oatmeal is further fortified with eggs and applesauce to make it fluffy and filling and only 4 points.

Ingredients

2/3 cup quick oats

2/3 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk

2 eggs

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 tsp Lankato granulated monkfruit or other zero calorie sweetener of your choice, optional

1 cup fresh or frozen fruit (such as mixed berries, blueberries, chopped apples, chopped peaches)

1/4 tsp of baking powder

1 generous sprinkle of cinnamon

cooking spray

Cooking equipment: small baking pan, I use a 7" round pan.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray small baking pan with cooking spray. Put fruit in the bottom of the pan. Mix wet ingredients, taking care to whisk the eggs fully. Add dry ingredients and mix well into a wet batter, pour into the pan over the fruit. Bake for 18-22 minutes until the oatmeal is fully set.

Half the pan is 4 points.

You can also double the recipe and make four servings and use a standard 9" round pan to bake it. I tend to each too much when I do this, since I love oatmeal so much.

4 serving double recipe - this one had peaches on the bottom!

On the WW blue plan if you use the recipe builder it's 4 points for one serving and 7 if you eat two servings. Since WW sometimes has weird math, if you put half of the ingredients individually, it's only 3 points. I use the higher recipe builder calculation.

Slow Cooker Pumpkin Streusel French Toast

If you are looking for an easy, seasonal breakfast for Thanksgiving look no further than this pumpkin streusel french toast made in your slow cooker! It's easy and delicious.

The great thing about a slow cooker french toast is you can throw it in early and it cooks while you get anything else you are having ready. I put mine in, cleaned up the house a bit, took a shower and then fried some bacon. Meanwhile it cooked on low in my Crock Pot.

Ingredients:
For French Toast:
Cooking spray
1 loaf of French bread
2 cups of cream
6 eggs
1 small can of pumpkin puree
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice
1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon
For streusel topping:
1/2 cup of flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
4T of butter (1/2 a stick)
1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon

Topping, just needs butter

If using 2 cups of heavy cream is too much for you, I can see how it would be, you can substitute milk. Probably also almond milk or other non-animal milks, though I haven't personally tried this yet.

Cooking equipment:
Large slow cooker, I use a 6qt oval Crock Pot
Pastry blender (or large fork)

Directions:
Tear or cut bread into 1 inch pieces. Mix eggs, cream, pumpkin puree and spices, with a whisk ensuring that eggs are beaten and well-incorporated. Spray slow cooker crock with cooking spray and add bread pieces, covering them thoroughly with liquid and spice mixture. Stir until all bread pieces are lightly coated. Refrigerate in crock for at least 4 hours and up to overnight.

Shortly before you begin cooking, you need to prep your streusel topping. I don't suggest doing this the night before but it's pretty quick in the morning, it takes maybe 10 minutes. The butter needs to be close to room temperature, I microwave mine for about 30 seconds to achieve this. When your butter is warmed, add all streusel ingredients to a small mixing bowl and blend with your pastry blender or large fork until they are well mixed.

Just prior to cooking, sprinkle the top of the bread mixture with the streusel topping. Cook in slow cooker on low temperature for 2 to 2.5 hours and serve.

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Grandma's Apple Pie

Making a pie from scratch has been a goal of mine for a long time and I've finally done it!

I started out by looking at apple pie recipes online and they looked very complicated...one said I needed to refrigerate the crust dough for 4 hours or ideally overnight! I called my grandma and she set me on the right track. Grandma says that refrigerating the dough is completely unnecessary and her pie crust had 4 ingredients and one of them is water. The one I was looking at online had at least 8 - yeah, Grandma's won.

Ingredients

Pie crust
2 cup flour
4 Tb butter or crisco (grandma says a "good Tb" so you might toss in a little extra)
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp cinnamon *I added this because I'm making apple pie
water, as needed (approx 2 Tb)

Filling
6 apples, cored, sliced
1/2 cup of sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
Additional 2 Tb of sugar

Equipment
Pie plate, 10"
Aluminum foil
Rolling pin

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix salt, cinnamon and flour together, cut in butter. Add enough water to moisten the crust as you work it into dough. Kneed for 5-10 minutes. Take half of the dough and roll it out (using a little flour) until it's about 1/4 in thick and place it in the bottom of a greased pie plate. The bottom crust should go up the sides of the plate, trim any excess away.

Place sliced apples in a medium sized pot with 2 Tb of sugar and enough water to cover the apples. Cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes. Drain any excess liquid and allow to cool. Mix the 1/2 cup of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg with the apples and place them in the pie plate.

Roll the second half dough out until it's a 1/4 in thick. Place on top of the pie plate and press around the edges to seal with the bottom crust. cover the edges of the pie with foil (or a pie shield if you have one) Bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes, removing the foil for the last 15 minutes.

Bierocks - the food of my people!

In Kansas, everyone eats bierocks. Bierocks are a bread pocket filled with meat & cabbage. Yes, I said cabbage! They are a delicious Volga-German food (most people in Kansas are part of this ethnic group somewhere along the line) and so far as I'm aware, they don't eat them anywhere else. Though they are clearly (to me at least) a cross between German and Russian food.

Everyone's grandma makes them better than anyone else's but few people under the age of 40 know how to make them, which is both sad and adds to their allure - if you only eat them a few times a year they taste darn good!  Most people make a whole bunch in one day and put them in the freezer, this can be a whole day project and aside from making the house smell vaguely of cabbage, a fun way to spend a long afternoon.

Shortly before Christmas, I went out to my Grandma's house for a visit, dinner and board games (I lost sequence a lot and won rummikub a lot). What was for dinner? Bierocks. I was in heaven. The problem with living so far away from everyone who knows how to make bierocks, is I never get to eat them.

So I needed to learn to make them. I had a consultation with Mom, with Grandma and I dove in. Now, keep in mind this is not a recipe but more like "orally communicated guidelines." Mom and Grandma (paternal) don't make them exactly the same way, so I pieced it together from what they said to figure out what would work for me.

Bierock guidelines

Ingredients

bread dough
ground beef
green cabbage, shredded
salt
pepper
garlic, onion are optional 
butter

-Make a non-sweet bread dough (Mom recommended using Pillsbury hot roll mix, Grandma uses some frozen dough for making dinner rolls, or you can go make some dough from scratch. I used the roll mix.)

-While your dough rises, brown ground beef in a large pan with  shredded cabbage, seasoning as desired. Allow meat mixture to cool somewhat.

- When dough is almost ready, grease a larger cookie sheet and preheat oven to 370.

- After dough has risen, take a small ball (bit smaller than a tennis ball) and roll the dough out into a circle. Place about 1/2 cup of meat mixture in the center and pull the corners of the dough up and join them together in the center. Pull the new corners up and join them together, until the dough is sealed and circular (so much as you can, it takes practice to get them a nice shape).

- Flip prepared bierock over onto a greased cookie sheet. Repeat until cookie sheet is full and bake for 20 minutes at 370 or until nicely brown.

- After removing from the oven, baste tops lightly with butter. Repeat until ingredients are depleted.

- Allow to cool and enjoy!

Notes:
- If you use 1 box of Pillsbury hot roll mix, 1 lb of ground beef and 2-3 cups of cabbage you will get about 7 bierocks.
- Mom shreds the cabbage in a food processor to make it smaller, very few people make their bierocks this way but Mom always receives accolades for "less cabbagey" nature of hers and this is the secret.
- I said the directions to roll the bierocks out, my mom makes them in her hand, but how she does it is completely beyond me, feel free to try that if you're an over achiever!
- Most people like these with ketchup (including me) and some also with mustard, though this isn't strictly speaking traditional. 
- They also freeze very well but I don't think they are as good after being in the freezer.

Does anyone else's family eat these? If so, I want to know about it!

Date & walnut "icebox cookies"

My aunt made the best cookies when I was home for Christmas! Well, truthfully, she made lots that were so-so and one kind that was fantastic! It came from a Taste of Home cookbook/pamphlet that looked like it was circa late 80s.

1 cup butter/margarine/shortening

3/4 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

2 1/4 3 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 cup chopped dates*

3/4 cup chopped walnuts*

 Mix ingredients thoroughly and then shape dough into a log (or two),wrap in plastic. Chill logs for 2hrs or up to 1 week, unwrap and cut into 1/2in slices. Place on  un-greased baking sheets and bake 350 for 10 minutes. Yield 2 1/2 dozen.

*The original recipe says 1 1/2 cups of "extras" and suggests different types of raisins, chips, nuts or various other things. The dates & walnuts are what my aunt used and what made this yummy.

I changed the recipe to call for more flour because I don't know what happened but this was the stickiest cookie dough I have ever encountered. It stuck to me, the mixer, the spatula - everything. I added almost a whole cup of additional flour. It might be because I did not have enough stick butter and used some spreadable margarine to get up to the needed 1 cup, but I would plan on having some extra around if I were you. I could not fathom how I was to form this sticky, gooey dough into a log, so I added flour until it was workable and used more to coat my hands when I made the logs.