Oatmeal French Toast

Yesterday my dear friend asked me a personal question. We were at play. The curtain hadn't opened: okay there was no curtain. The lights hadn't yet dimmed and we were small talking, surrounded by people, and she asked me if I'd ever had a notebook moment.

A notebook moment?

Yeah, like in the Notebook, were it's all super romantic and they're intensely in love (she trails off).

I look around. This is a high-school play. The thirteen year-old girl on my right beams at me.

I Hiss: Yesss. Of course.

I look around.

She nods. I knew it, she says.


The night before, Thursday night, my husband gave an artist talk at the community college. In this talk he read poetry. Poetry. Of course I've had Notebook moment.

Although, I do believe things like lingering breakfasts of hot coffee and french toast with home-made jam make all the difference.

We love breakfast. And french toast. Now, I didn't come up with this recipe entirely on my own. Chef at Home definitely had something to do with it.

Oatmeal French Toast for Two

1/2 a cup of milk
2 eggs
a pinch of salt
a dash of vanilla
4 pieces of soft bread (I used a poppy seed lemon bread and it was a winner)
1/4 cup oatmeal, or more as needed

Whisk together the milk, eggs, salt, vanilla in a shallow bowl. Scatter the oatmeal on a large plate. Dip the bread in the egg mixture then dredge it through the oatmeal. Fry in a hot pan until crispy on both sides. Top with your favourite breakfast condiments.

Soup Sundays

If you've been sitting in proximity of the Campbells at Heartland Fellowship on a Sunday this fall, you might have noticed a particular smell. It's not a bad smell, in fact in context it's lovely, but just not something that we're striving for in our daily hygiene. We smell like soup. From Mike and I, to our trendy Korean teenager, right down to baby, you can't miss that soupy scent. Ironically the soup-link is not from our name, Campbell; it is actually a side-effect of my Dutch heritage, and given the amount of Dutch blood in Chilliwack, I can guarantee we're not the only ones with this particular eau de cologne.

The love of soup is, along with the love of a good deal, in the Dutch DNA. A Sunday, just isn't a Sunday without a piping post-church bowl. When we first started scouting out Chilliwack as our future home, we were introduced to the soup of an expert soup chef, none other than my Dutch Soup-Nazi Uncle, Jan Van Wyk. It was at a post-church lunch that Finn first learned, from one of my triplet cousins (Mark), the art of slurping the final soup dredges from the side of the tipped bowl.

At our house Grace has labeled my beef-vegetable soup as Sunday Soup, alas, that recipe is difficult to transcribe as I have a different variation each Sunday depending on my vegetable crisper and particular whims. The soup that I have been feasting on lately is a simple lentil soup. The key to this soup is to combine your veggies, lentils, and broth and to let the whole mixture simmer for a few hours. This results in a thick and lovely soup, reminiscent of a dahl. This is actually a riff on my pea soup recipe, when I was out of split peas I substituted red lentils and added a shot of cumin. Delicious. There is no way to get an attractive picture of this soup, so I've included my little soup-eater in the shot. I made a batch of this soup on the weekend and have heating it up for lunches during the week.

Lentil Soup
(A flexible recipe, you can play with the quantities and types of veggies depending on your preferences and what you have on hand)


1 cup red lentils
3 chopped carrots
3 chopped stalks of celery
3 clove minced garlic
1 chopped onion
1/3 cup tomato paste OR several chopped tomatoes
6 cups chicken stock (I use Epicures chicken base)
1 tsp salt
good pinch pepper
1/2 tsp cumin

Combine ingredients, bring to a simmer and then simmer at low for as much time as you have - 2 - 3 hours is ideal. The soup should be nice and thick. Taste for seasoning, if it is a bit bland add salt, a pinch at a time until you get it right. Note that if you use chicken stock with sodium then I would decrease the amount of salt in the recipe.

Rice Pudding: My Cozy Food

Okay, so it's been a few months. Things happened: I moved and acquired deer for neighbors. Became an Aunt eight times over. Learned to make pea soup with a ham hock. Befriended two giant poodles. Got a temp teaching computers.

Anyone who knows me is shocked by the last admition. It's true. I'm now a Word and Excel specialist.

I also ran a half marathon. If you read Haley's last post, you've seen me in my glory. That was weeks ago. I'm wearing a tank top. Now I'm wearing a Russel hoody--the hood is actually over my head. A blanket is tucked over my lap. Times have changed. The running has tapered. Okay, pretty much stopped. I'm starting to knit. I like hot chocolate at night. Comfort has become my mantra, which leads me to the rice pudding.

Rice pudding is mostly memory for me. An early memory of raisins and creamy whiteness, of a time when this delicious mush meant rice. Stir Fries had not yet made their debut in my mother's kitchen (which they would with a fury) and rice, in my mind, was in no way connected to vegetables. Therein lay it's beauty. Tonight I recovered this delicacy. I have no idea if this rice pudding is at all like the one my mom use to make. I think, most likely, it is not. This particular pudding starts on the stove and finishes in the oven, rendering it both simple to create and extremely creamily delicious.

The recipe is from Marion Cunningham's The Supper Book (which is a super book, by the way) and I only altered it slightly. Marion uses one cup of cream in her recipe, which I replaced with two percent milk. The reason being that Marion serves her pudding for dessert, whereas I was feasting on mine for dinner. You might consider using part half and half cream, but my rice pudding was plenty smooth, rich and delicious.

Rice Pudding (serves 6)

1 cup water
1/2 cup white, short grain rice
2 cups milk
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk (here Marion uses heavy cream)
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup plus 2Tbsp sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350.

Bring the water to boil in a medium-sized pot. Add the rice. Cook on low for ten minutes. Add the milk and salt. Cook on low for ten to fifteen more minutes. The rice should be tender. Combine the remaining sugar, milk, eggs, and vanilla in a small bowl. Remove the rice from the heat and add the egg mixture to the pot. Whisk to combine.
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Pour the mixture into a square baking pan. Sprinkle with the cinnamon. Put the pan in a larger pan and fill the larger pan with boiling water one inch high. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until almost set. Let the pudding cool slightly, and firm up in doing so, before serving.

Half Marathon

It's time to brag about Rachel again - yes my absentee-blogger sister- whom we cheered on in the Royal Victoria half marathon on Sunday. Just recovering from the flu, at one hour and 32 minutes, she still managed to pull in 51st place out of 3231 women. Though the biggest workout I got was the 3 block walk from the car, I got a bit uppity about the whole thing - '2 hours? Nice job coming out, but too bad we SMOKED you!' Ah, the royal we.

Since we were in Victoria I didn't do a lot of cooking, just a whole lot of eating. I've provided a few links to some of our old autum posts - I must say that we Reems girls do like our apples. Which is good as I have 2 big bags of Jonagolds from the Chilliwack Corn maze to deal with.

Acorn-Stuffed Squash
Apple Cake
Apple Walnut Bread
French Apple Cake
Roasted Veggies with Feta
Zucchini Pancakes

Birthday Pancakes

I seem to be hurtling through a strange time warp, it doesn't seem like a whole year ago that we celebrated Coby's first birthday. Yet here we are, with our 2-year-old monkey. I am putting an argument forward that Coby actually hit the twos about a month ago, she now likes to add a bit of spice to our lives (code: she's a screamer). Favourite expressions include: 'Mine', 'Coby's____', 'I do it', and of course 'No!' Finn summed it up quite nicely a few weeks ago "Coby thinks that the whole world is hers."

She really is a sweetheart who likes to play with little people, likes to cart around her little people, gives near-suffocating hugs to her baby brother, and can't hear a tune without breaking into enthusiastic dance. In true Reems fashion, birthday celebrations revolve around good eats. We started the day off with banana chocolate chip pancakes, moved onto cupcakes, and rounded the whole day off the festivities with good friends at a wiener roast at the Chilliwack corn maze.

It's time I share a Reems classic, the Peter Pancake. This recipe comes from the Crazy Plates authors, Janet and Greta Podleski. I use the recipe as more of a guide. You can play with the ratio of white and whole wheat flours. I also like to add some oatmeal to the recipe (and with the oatmeal an extra shot of milk). I sometimes sub yogurt for part of the milk, I sometimes use maple syrup or brown sugar instead of the honey. For birthdays and special days, say a grumpy toddler morning, a handful of chocolate chips really brings them to a celebratory level.

Banana Pancakes (based on Crazy Plates' Peter Pancakes)

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp each baking soda and salt
1 3/4 cup buttermilk (I use regular milk and a shot of lemon juice)
2 T melted butter
1 egg
1 T honey
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup mashed banana

1) Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl
2) In a separate bowl combine the wet ingredients

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients

Cook pancakes in a skillet or griddle over medium high-heat in a pan coated with butter or non-stick spray. Best served with maple syrup.

Blackberry Cream Puffs

Yes, it's been a busy 2 months. The blog break was unintentional, but after you miss a week or two it's hard to get back in the swing of blogging. It's a vicious cycle of guilt and avoidance- actually, fairly similar to life. Not that we don't have a nice list of valid excuses: Rachel has been busy moving and living the care-free life of a teacher on summer holidays. I've been busy having a baby and living the care-free life of the wife of a teacher on holidays.

If any of our readers are still out there, be rest assured that the the Reems girls are still eating. And cooking. And eating. Oh, and did I mention eating?

My latest offering is a west coast special- after 5 years in Calgary, far away from wild blackberry bushes, I am still reveling in the delight of these juicy morsels. Rachel and I come from a family of serious berry pickers. My earliest blackberry picking memories are with my grandfather; he knew all the off-the-map bushes and every summer produced ice cream buckets fully of black, juicy berries. His daughters, Joan and Wiena shared the picking gene, earning money picking strawberries at the neighbouring Slater's field. If I recall Reems folklore correctly, it was Guy (our dad) whose genes I share - he also tried his hand berry picking at Slater's one day, on a long ago summer - this ended badly, with he and his friends getting packed off after more eating than picking, and the final culmination of a berry throwing war. I can only imagine Joan and Wiena trying to distance themselves from such hooligans.

Finally, our picking dynasty falls to my sister and co-blogger, Rachel. She and our baby sister Carmen are both pickers of some repute, spending adolescent summers biking down the road post-paper route to pick raspberries on hot summer mornings. If my memory serves me it was Rachel who was the top picker in the field. Myself? I'm a liability to a picking party. I like to sample as I go, which makes for a delicious outing, but alas a slowly-filling bucket.

While I am taking credit for the divine inspiration to add blackberries to the whipped cream filling in cream puffs, I must aknowledge Dorrie Greenspan for the cream puff recipe found in her book, Around the French Table. And I must give credit to Rachel for tipping me off to Dorrie's latest book. I was initially intimidated by the mention of French in the title; however the recipes I've tried are do-able and delicious.

Blackberry Cream Puffs-
Makes about 24 medium-sized cream puffs

First make the Cream Puffs:

1/2 cup whole milk (I used 2 percent with a splash of half and half)

1/2 cup water

1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup all-purpose flour

4 large eggs, at room temperature

Bring the milk, water, butter and salt to the boil in a heavy-bottomed 2-quart saucepan. When the mixture is boiling rapidly, add the flour all at once, reduce the heat to medium and, without a second's hesitation, start stirring the mixture like mad with a wooden spoon. The dough will come together very quickly and a slight crust will form on the bottom of the pan, but you have to keep stirring - vigorously - another 2 to 3 minutes to dry the dough. At the end of this time, the dough will be very smooth.

Turn the dough into the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or, if you've still got some elbow grease left, you can continue by hand. One by one, add the eggs to the dough, beating until each egg is thoroughly incorporated. Don't be discouraged - as soon as you add the first egg, your lovely dough will separate. Keep working and by the time you add the third egg it will start coming together again. When all the eggs are incorporated, the dough will be thick and shiny and, when you lift some of it up it will fall back into the bowl in a ribbon. The dough will still be warm - it's supposed to be - and now is the time to use it.

Using about 1 heaping tablespoon of dough for each puff, drop the dough from the spoon onto the lined baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches of space between each mound of dough.

Slide the baking sheets into the oven, bake for 15 minutes, then rotate the sheets from top to bottom and front to back. Continue baking until the puffs are golden and firm, another 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer the cream puffs to a cooling rack.

Keeping: You can spoon out the dough and either bake it immediately or freeze it. To freeze, spoon the dough in mounds onto parchment-lined baking sheets and slide the sheets into the freezer. When the dough is completely frozen, remove the balls from the baking sheets and wrap them airtight. They can be kept in the freezer for up to 2 months and don't need to be defrosted before baking.

Finally, when cool fill cut each puff open and fill with a dollop of whipped cream. Place 4 or 5 juicy blackberries on top of the cream. These need to be eaten soon after they are assembled. Any unfilled puffs will last over night but will need to be re-crisped in the oven the day of use.

Greek Chicken Meal Plan

I'm in my final two months of pregnancy - with two cranky monkeys ready to greet me after a day of daycare excitement, the last thing I want to do after a day of work is cook a big meal. I realize I shouldn't be complaining - I only work half time, and today is my Friday. On Tuesdays I rarely rise beyond a quick stir fry, or calling in my back-up dinner strategy - Mike making tacos. Today may appear like an exception to that rule - but it's a trick. This is a quick and easy meal plan.

Greek Chicken Meal Plan

1) Walk in the door - instead of heading for couch you need to go directly to the kitchen. This will require husband back-up support for childcare, or in lieu of, a cartoon will due in a pinch.

2) Dump your chicken in a bowl and sprinkle on some salt and pepper, dried oregano, a few tablespoons of lemon juice, and if you have the energy, some minced garlic. You can use whatever chicken cuts you want, today I cooked little drumsticks, I can't tell you what weight - maybe 8 drumettes.

3) Put some rice onto cook. I add a scoop of msg-free powdered chicken base for some flavour. This is not a time for brown rice, we're talking about a time-factor.

4) Put chicken on the barbie

5) Take some asparagus and toss with a drizzle of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt. When you go to flip your chicken over add the asparagus to the grill.

5) Make your yogurt sauce. This is a flexible sauce, you can add or subtract ingredients as you like. Today mine included: about 1 cup yogurt, 1 T lemon juice, 1 T olive oil, 1 chopped fresh dill, 1 T chopped chives, a sprig of fresh oregano, and aprox 1/4 cup crumbled feta. Finally add salt and pepper to taste. Chop extra fresh herbs (if using) to sprinkle on your rice. You could also take this time to make a quick salad if you have the inclination.

6) When your chicken is grilled almost to perfection take half the sauce and put a tablespoon or so on each piece. Leave on the grill for a last few minutes and then using your brand new silicon tongs (sorry, that was me), pile your chicken and asparagus on a platter.

7) Sprinkle the remaining chopped herbs on your rice and serve along with the chicken, asparagus, reserved half of the sauce, and your salad. I like to add a scoop of sauce onto my rice, though you can also give your chicken an extra douse.

The chicken was so good that after 6 months of abstaining, Coby rekindled a love for poultry.

You might correctly surmised that my herb garden has been planted; you can substitute dried herbs, but I love fresh dill in the sauce.