Every now and then my husband wants to go to Staples to look for a binder or file folders, or some other boring thing to organize the farm paperwork.  And I love it.  Because while he looks for plain old boring things I wander the aisles looking at pens, and glitter, and stickers, and markers, and journals, and various other art and office supplies that are significantly more fun and colourful.  AND I search every time for 8.5x5.5” page protectors (half of an 8.5x11” computer paper).  Because I KNOW they exist.  How could they not?  And I want them to keep my recipes in.  

You see, I have a template on my computer that I keep to type my recipes into.  I like to have all my recipes formatted in the same way, and when I find a recipe I like I can just plug the information into the template and it looks uniform with my other recipes.  

I made the template half of a page, because it seems wasteful to use a whole page for a lot of recipes.  But I’ve never been able to print them out for use because I wanted these hypothetical page protectors first.

And for a couple of years now I’ve come up empty handed.  Until very recently.

Oh yes, I found them.  It was a glorious moment that night in Staples.  My eyes caught a glance, and everything kind of slowed down.  I walked towards them in hopeful anticipation, and reached out - could it be true?  It was!  Here they were!  I knew they were out there!  I KNEW IT!!!  And now they were in my hands.  And not only they, but a cute little apple green binder that matches my Kitchenaid mixer and a few other green accessories in my kitchen.  It was meant to be.  It was a Staples Happily Ever After.

Just thought you might need some good news for your day.

So I’ve been busy printing them out and arranging them.  I created lists for meal ideas, toddler snack and lunch ideas, and a reference page to remember how to cook some of the little things perfectly.

I’ve also been noticing the gaps in my recipes, so I’m on a mission to collect a few good ones: cinnamon buns, tzatziki, puffed wheat cake…

(And P.S. I also bought chalk so I don’t have to use Little M’s huge sidewalk chalk on our chalkboard wall any longer.  Pretty stoked about that too.  In case you haven’t noticed yet, I get pretty excited over little things.)

I’ve been chipping away at my 30 before 30 goals, and today I got to cross one more thing off of the list!  #23 was to make holubsti (Ukrainian cabbage rolls).

And I can think of no better way to try making holubsti for the first time than with a dear friend who also enjoys a good ole’ Ukrainian heritage!  We set out today “to make our Baba’s proud”.  However, somewhere along the way we realized it was probably more likely that they’d laugh, or shake their heads at us instead!

A while ago I e-mailed my great grandma to ask her for her mushroom sauce recipe.  I have vague recollections from around the age of eleven of visiting my second cousins, and she made delicious cabbage rolls with a scrumptious mushroom sauce.  They were unlike any other cabbage rolls I’ve had.  They were petite, and yummy, and not as tomato-saucy as most I’ve eaten.

I was delighted and honoured when a few weeks later I received a package in the mail containing a true treasure:

Her old cookbook, a “Traditional Ukrainian Cookery”.  The book was printed in 1959 and it is jam-packed with recipes and information about Ukrainian cooking and traditions.

The book is from such a different era, so the instructions were interesting.  There were many options and variations - which in an time/place (mid century/ Canadian prairies) when little was wasted and supplies weren’t available on a whim, I’m sure this was a good thing.

And so, today my friend Amy and I donned our aprons, cracked open the cookbook, and started boiling cabbage! 

We opted to do a filling with rice, ground beef, onions, bacon, and mushrooms.  I mean really, how can you go wrong with that?  We also opted to use our bacon fat rather than butter for different parts of the recipe - about which Amy exclaimed “I’m cooking with bacon fat!  I feel so Ukrainian!” 

The filling/rolling portion of the adventure was clearly our weakest point.  The cookbook had no instructions about how to fold the little guys shut.  We figured this would be an especially good time to have a Baba come teach us.  But with no Babas around we turned to YouTube (the next best thing?).  

YouTube did not teach us much more, however, so we faked our way through.  After we’d wrapped at least a dozen each Amy proudly announced, “Look!  This one actually looks like a cabbage roll!”  Ha ha… technique will hopefully get better with experience!

But in the end we actually have some very yummy cabbage rolls!  Even more importantly we now have the knowledge that we can/will do this again - just with a few little tweaks and changes next time.

Hooray!  

And we may even have a new recipe to try next time…

“Here is an attractive way of serving brains.”  Super!

Made this cake from Toasty Biscuit this week!  Yum. :)

prettyfoods:

 Banana Cake with Nutella Frosting (via toasty biscuit)

I made these today.  I emphatically suggest that you do too.  And eat them with a tall glass of cold milk.  SO good.  (Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies from Everyday Food)

photo from www.marthastewart.com

Here’s the recipe from this post.

Some of you might be lucky enough to have spring.  But around here the weather is yo-yo-ing between extreme cold and above zero temperatures.  It seems every week has a temperature span of about 40 degrees Celsius.  That leaves Little M and I iced in some mornings, as you can see from our window above.  What makes makes those cold days bearable?  Some homemade chicken noodle soup!

It’s so easy, and you as long as you have a chicken, some water and a pot you can be pretty creative from there.  It works out to be pretty easy, thrifty, and you can even freeze leftovers to multiply the fruits of your labour (see the note at the bottom of the recipe)!  So here’s how I do it:

Spaghettini with Lemon Zest and Chives.

Lighter Chicken Pot Pie.

Lemon and Caper Mashed Potatoes.  So yummy; I’ve made them a few times.

Lemon Cake.

Glazed Lemon Pound Cake.

Lemon Poppy-Seed Cookies.  Sooo wanna’ try these.