Less Effort, More Muffins -- Works-for-Me Wednesday

Is it really Wednesday already?

I have a Works-for-Me Wednesday tip for you!

Do you have a big family? Are you short on time? Do you need a lot of muffins at once, or want to freeze some? Or maybe you're just lazy, like me?

Take that favorite muffin recipe that makes 12 muffins.
Double it. Or quadruple it. It's up to you.

Now don't be freaking out about scooping it evenly and carefully into 24 or 48 little circles. Instead lightly grease a 9x13 pan for each doubled recipe. Spread the doubled mixture in the 9x13 pan. Bake the muffins at their regular temperature a little longer, about 30 minutes, but check them at 25. When a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean, they're done. Then cut them in to 24 pieces!

You get double the muffins, faster, with less effort! Okay, so they're square, but who's gonna complain about that?

For more Works-for-Me tips, visit Rocks in my Dryer today!

Did I blog today?

Huh, I guess I didn't. Sorry about that. Were you all sitting at your computers, clicking the "refresh" button or checking your RSS feeds or bloglines, breathlessly waiting for a new post? Yeah, I didn't think so.

I have stuff to say, but just haven't said it.

Some of it is, well, you know ... too deep to say out loud, or something. Or would just take too long to ramble out and you'd all be thinking, "Enough, already, Wordy-Girl!"

I *did* to a "remix" on the Belgian Jut recipe posted down a few (she realizes she should link it, but lazily decides not to at the moment ... so lazy ...) -- I took the leftovers and I added some half & half, enough to make a thickish soup, and some chicken stock bouillon, and some more garlic, and some pepper. I think that was it. And heated it all up. We liked it better that way, even the kids ate some. Well, 2/3 of the children did, which, around here, isn't bad.

I took a picture of it as soup. It was supposed to get it's very own post, in all it's glory, but ... (trails off since she has no real reason for not doing that ...) Anyway, here it is. Kinda pretty, I think.

Once The Grand Lunar and I ate in a super fancy restaurant -- one so fancy that they had someone spread the linen napkins on our laps for us, and a different person pouring water in our glass every time we took a sip. I had some sort of soup there that had a little dollop of cream in the middle that was sort of artistically swirled in. I should've done that with this. Just the swirled-in thing. Because the REST of the fancy treatment was a little too upscale for us. We're just not that ritzy-smart, so we spent the entire fancy dinner giggling about how foolish we felt, not knowing how to behave.

We also got in trouble for that meal. Because we were on a business trip, back when we both worked at the computer shoppe, and we'd been given a daily food allowance. So we ate super cheap most of the days and saved up the allowance allotment for this one ritzy dinner. We still came in under the allowance, but apparently there's some unwritten rule that you have to spend it more evenly or the little old lady in accounting freaks out. Okay, she wasn't really that little or that old, but it sounds funnier that way, doesn't it?

Ooops, gotta go, Lunar's home! Whoo Hoo!

BelJuWhat?

I asked The Grand Lunar, and he said I should first list the Kimodified Recipe, then the "inspiration piece", and so I will.

Tonight's dinner I will call "BelJut: The Spinach Hater's Sausage".

I had planned to make half a recipe, since I was very unsure of it's reception. Only I didn't really halve things, but decided based on ease, laziness, and some made up "health quotient" how much to include. I made one preparation-oriented substitution and one addition. The resulting Kimodified Recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:
1 - 12 oz. package of breakfast sausage links, chopped
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
1 - 10 oz. box of frozen, chopped spinach
1 - 32 oz. bag of frozen diced potatoes ("Western Style Hash Browns", containing only frozen potatoes & preservatives, no oils, spices, or other stuff)
2 Tbsp. minced garlic (I used the kind pre-minced in the jar, it's cheating, I know)
water to keep things moist (maybe 2 cups total by the end?)
salt & pepper to taste

Directions:

• Brown sausage until somewhat surfacy-crispy in a big pot. I added some water and let it cook completely off, I read that somewhere , sauté chopped onions with sausage.
• Pour off any remaining grease (um, there wasn't any? I'll pretend that doesn't mean the onions soaked it all up)
  
• Add frozen spinach, potatoes, garlic, and some water so it isn't sticking. Simmer on medium low, covered, until mixture is hot.
  
• Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Impressions:
Well ... it didn't kill us!!!
What do you say when someone tells you even spinach haters will like it? We decided "Will like it" is too strong. "Will not hate it" is a possibility. I, for one, am not quite a spinach hater. But I am far from a spinach liker. Having read that the potatoes and spinach would taste sausagy, we were wary, and rightly so. The sausage we liked. The potato wasn't bad, just a bit bland. And the spinach ... well, it still tasted like spinach. :)

Over all, neither Lunar, Baby Buzz, or I hated it. It was okay. Lunar and I felt it needed more ... something. We found it rather bland. Perhaps this was due to my proportion of sausage-to-potato being low. But if you hate spinach you will certainly not be fooled. Of the other 5 children, 4 declined to taste it. One tasted it and fumbled to politely say she didn't like it, because she thought we liked it, and didn't want to offend. She was relieved to hear us say it wasn't our favorite, either.

I have enough leftovers to do another Kimodification ~ I am thinking maybe a little half-and-half and chicken stock, a splash of vinegar or lemon juice, and more garlic might give it a new twist. I'll let you know.

Staci, I hope I haven't offended you!

Inspiration Piece: Staci's Beligain Jut (pronounced like Foot)

You might love this recipe if you like sausage and garlic. Because you can't really taste a "spinach-y" taste. The spinach tastes garlic-y and sausage-y. Only four ingredients are needed: sausage links, spinach, potatoes, and garlic

1) Brown a large package of sausage links (about 20 oz.) in a skillet until they are nicely browned and crispy;
2) Pour the sausage links into a pot and scrape the bottom of the skillet into the pot also for flavoring;
3) Pour in two boxes (or one lb. bag) of frozen cut spinach (you can also use fresh or canned);
4) Peel and cut about 8 potatoes and add those to the pot;
5) Add 2 heaping tsp. of minced garlic (I buy it in the jars); you can use more or less garlic depending on your taste
6) Add water just to cover the potatoes (keep your eye on it as it cooks and if you need to add a bit of water, do so)
7) Add salt and pepper to taste

Cook it on medium-low until the potatoes are tender. It's quick and easy and savory and most kids, believe it or not, like it because it has potatoes and sausage in it. When my kids were really young they wouldn't eat the spinach but as they grew older they realized the spinach tasted like sausage so now they eat that too.

weird little snippets

Every time I make a new entry, for some reason, it seems to be rebuilding using my old template. I'm not sure why. I keep losing the picture of all of us. I'm really confused as to what it's doing. So if you sometimes see it, and sometimes see just me, and don't know why ... you're in good company. I'm clueless too.

Several people have asked, on the tail of my "should I change the blog name" question, what T'Mahk Too is all about. When I started blogging, way back in 2003 ... the only blogs I'd really read were ones that made fun of stuff. "I can do THAT!" I thought. Ramble and make fun of stuff. That's right up my alley. So I thought I'd call it "to mock" only that didn't seem clever enough for a blog, so I called it T'Mahk, which I thought had a nice Vulcan sound to it.

Then iBlog started eating my entries and that was awful, so I moved over to my andfam space and using Movable Type. Since I left my old blog up, I thought this one should be T'Mahk Too/Two -- the second and also still mocking. Not that I really mock THAT much. But that's where the name came from. My own little Star Trek joke.

I was also going to tell you about this weird dream I had, but by the time I started writing I'd forgotten most of it. It had something to do with -- and this is going to sound really weird -- the balance of colors between (blog entries? people's lives?) there was some balance to be maintained, so if I used something blue, I had to make sure it was equally replaced from the (blue world?) I don't know. But in my dream a lot of effort was expended in trying to figure out which colors were being accounted for where. There was a lot more to my dream, including fellow homeschoolblogger chickadee, but I can no longer remember any details. Maybe I visited her as part of the color balancing thing. I don't know!

But remind me to tell you later about my dream YESTERDAY about the plane crash.

I think there was something else I was going to tell you, too, but I can't remember.

For now, I better go clean the kitchen.