Unintended though it was, this past weekend was a weekend of making things -- mostly food. On Friday, after a delicious surf 'n turf meal (in which I almost burnt the house down when the grill caught fire, but miraculously managed to keep the steaks from getting charred or overcooked), I decided to try the bagel recipe from my bread book.  I used the provided recipe, only I added sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil, since that's one of my all time favorite bagel flavors -- and it's hard to find! I made up the dough on Friday and refrigerated it overnight. Saturday, I attempted the bagels. They turned out...just...slightly...misshapen.  I got two out of nine that were fairly good looking and decidedly photo worthy.

A couple of them actually looked like bagels!

...The others had a sort of rough texture on top...but they still taste good!

I had my mom and step-dad over on Sunday for Mother's Day. We went out to lunch, but I decided to make a dessert we could eat at home. I had bought a whole giant container of fresh blueberries at Costco and had some lemons on hand...I thought this flavor combination would be great in a dessert, but wasn't sure what I wanted to make. Actually, I started with breakfast. I had been wanting to try lemon poppy seed pancakes for a while, and I found this awesome looking recipe for Blueberry Lemon Sauce, which I thought would make an awesome topping. I was not wrong. I kind of cheated on the pancakes, though. I just added some poppy seeds, lemon zest and lemon juice to a double batch of Krusteaz pancake mix! It turned out pretty tasty, though.


Now, I had lots of leftover Blueberry Lemon Sauce, so it was onward with my dessert plans. I had this idea that a vanilla cheesecake type dessert would be scrumptious with the sauce on top. Only, I didn't have much time and I'm not very good at cheesecakes. After a quick search for an "easy" or "no bake" recipe, I stumbled across this one. The only problem is that it is a recipe from the UK where they call ingredients by different names and measure everything by weight. That's not really a problem, though, because I know how to make a graham cracker crust and I can Google "demerara" sugar and use my (ahem, Tom's) new kitchen scale to weigh ingredients. Except...I didn't do all of the conversions before I left for the grocery store...and I came home with about half of the cream cheese that I needed. So, without time to go back to the store, this was one of those recipes born of necessity -- which sometimes ends up working just fine! Cheesecake is normally too rich for me, so I wanted something lighter anyways. With less cream cheese on hand, I made a really thin layer of cheesecake filling atop a graham cracker crust and then added the Blueberry Lemon Sauce. The result was success! A delicious, light vanilla cheesecake that paired excellently with the sauce.

• 1 packet of graham crackers
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 3 Tbsp. butter, melted
• 8oz cream cheese
• 8oz frozen whipped cream, thawed
• 1/4 cup powered sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp. vanilla
• 1 batch of Blueberry Lemon Sauce

How NOT to stretch mozzarellla...apparently.

Last on the list for food-making this weekend was Cheese Making Attempt #2. I had previously used a cheese making kit to make Tangy Feta from cow's milk. This time I was going for the under-an-hour-to-make mozzarella. I found a couple of recipes online, and was following this one. It was really easy to make. I only had two problems: 1) The instructions on how to stretch the cheese were not clear (neither were other recipes I looked up), and I think I accidentally squeezed too much moisture out of the cheese in the process; and 2) I didn't know how to store the cheese -- and as it turns out, it's best eaten fresh. Shoot. We had just gotten back from a late lunch and I was not planning on making a real dinner that night. We'll find out tonight how it turned out! From the small tastes that I took, it tasted like mozzarella. One gallon of milk made maybe 16 ounces of cheese (I did not use said kitchen scale, just a guess). I made two mozzarella balls and gave one to my mom to take home. All in all, I was able to make the cheese in just slightly more time than it took my mom to apply online to adopt a dog -- for whatever that's worth!

It was a productive weekend, looking back! The non-food item I made this weekend goes back to my Apron Obsession. I finally made that harvesting apron -- but that deserves a post of its own. More to come!