Note: I was sent a copy of Slow Cooked Paleo by Bailey Fischer. Opinions are mine alone.
On weekends, I do my best to prepare some meals for the week. Typically, that means dinners, but every now and then I’ll bake muffins to have for breakfast. My husband is much more of a “savory” than a “sweet” breakfast eater, so he was thrilled when I was saw this recipe for Slow Cooker Paleo Frittata Jars in Bailey Fischer’s Slow Cooker Paleo Cookbook.
This cookbook is filled with awesome and easy slow cooker meals that are also Paleo, taking out much of the effort of maintaining a paleo diet. Some other delicious recipes include Coconut-Lime Poached Halibut, Simmering Hawaiian Fajitas, and Pumpkin-Maple Pudding.
The concept of these jars is brilliant and can easily be adapted to include whatever you want (perfect opportunity for a “fridge cleaning” breakfast).
Ingredients:
2 2/3 cups thawed hash browns (~2/3 cup per jar)
1 1/3 cups diced butternut squash (~1/3 cup per jar)
1 1/3 cups diced green bell peppers (~1/3 cup per jar)
12 eggs
1/2 cup dairy-free milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
I have such a sweet tooth. Seriously, if I could get away with eating ice cream and only ice cream for the rest of my life, I probably would. So, I am constantly looking for ways to satisfy my sweet tooth without, well, eating a pint of ice cream.
Cue this recipe for Overnight Chocolate Chia Pudding — its dairy-free, gluten free, and vegan. And, it tastes amazing!
The Coconut Almond Whipped Cream really puts it over the top. But the pudding is pret-ty darn awesome on its own!
Ingredients:
Chocolate Chia Pudding:
2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips (check the label to make sure they are vegan)
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #DelightfulMoments #CollectiveBias
It’s no secret that I love all things Pumpkin. I have over 20 posts on my blog including pumpkin/pumpkin spice, but haven’t posted a pumpkin-themed recipe yet this year, what an oversight!
To make up for my lack of pumpkin posts, I’ve got a pret-ty awesome recipe for you today that can be used as a super decadent breakfast (perfect for snow days or holiday mornings with family!) or a really delicious dessert.
This recipe for Slow Cooker Pumpkin Pie Spice French Toast Casserole is flavored with International Delight’s Pumpkin Pie Spice Creamer, which I picked up at my local Walmart. (It can be found in refrigerated bins near the milk, or at the end of an aisle in a refrigerated case.) The creamer adds a swirl of seasonal spice flavors into your coffee (and recipes), inspired by pumpkin pie. Yum!
This recipe pairs wonderfully with a cup of hot coffee flavored with International Delight’s Pumpkin Pie Spice Creamer; Walmart also sells single creamers as well. I picked up some of the French Vanilla Single Creamers, which I added to my coffee to enjoy with this breakfast.
As family gathers for the holidays, this recipe is the perfect addition to breakfast or brunch. It’s simple to make and uses the slow cooker to keep your oven and stove free for preparing the main holiday meal!
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Ingredients:
French Toast Casserole:
1 lb challah bread, cut into 1 inch pieces
4 eggs
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
2 cups almond milk (or regular milk)
1 cup International Delight Pumpkin Pie Spice Creamer
1 (8 oz) can pumpkin puree
Crumble:
3 tablespoons unsalted margarine or butter, melted
I am trying to get into the habit of making (and wanting) smoothies for breakfast. They are so simple to make and work great for meals on the go. My boyfriend is a huge fan of green smoothies, where he adds various fruits to the blender along with some kale. I don’t mind them, but I thought I’d baby step my way into the smoothie world with something a little more my speed: an oatmeal banana smoothie with espresso and chocolate hazelnut. Mmmmm.
This recipe is adapted from Foxes Loves Lemons, a fellow food blogger as well as a recipe developer. Her recipes are mouthwatering and her pictures are just amazing! She also manages to post daily which just blows my mind. How she manages to deliver such amazing posts daily is beyond me!
My recipe below is a touch different than Foxes Loves Lemons because I wanted to incorporate Nocciolata, a dark chocolate and hazelnut spread, into my smoothie. To see the original version, check out her blog post here.
Nocciolata is made with no chemicals, artificial flavors, GMOs, or palm oil. What it is made with is certified organic ingredients including dark chocolate from the Antillean Islands, Italian hazelnuts (16%), brown sugar, skim milk and Bourbon vanilla extract. Yum! Nocciolata can be found in many stores including Wegmans, King’s, and Whole Foods to name some in the Philly area. For a list of stores that carry Nocciolata, check out their webpage.
Ingredients:
1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 1/2 cups almond milk
1 banana, cut into chunks
1/4 cup vanilla Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon Nocciolata spread
1 tablespoon espresso powder
1 cup ice
Disclaimer: I was sent a free sample jar of Nocciolata to try. My opinions are my own.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, pumpkin season! My love of pumpkin flavored, well, anything, is well known among my group of friends. September means I am actually allowed to dive into my pumpkin obsession but it is still a bit warm so we will begin with a chilled version of my favorite gourd – Pumpkin Pie Milkshakes!
I had a Pumpkin Pie Milkshake post on here from 2011, but when I switched my blog over to WordPress, the post got a little funky. So I decided to make the milkshake again with a few changes.
Ingredients (makes 2 servings, multiply as needed):
2 cups vanilla ice cream
1 cup vanilla almond milk
1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 graham cracker (I used cinnamon graham crackers), crumbled
I made these Vegan Dark Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting for a lovely vegan bride-to-be for her bridal shower this weekend. I’m not going to lie, I was going to do a test run of these, and if I didn’t like them, she was getting normal egg-filled, buttercream-topped cupcakes. But. These are good. Really really good.
So when I did my test run, I passed them around to friends and family and conveniently left the word “vegan” out of the description until after they tasted the cupcakes. My “test subjects” didn’t seem too upset with my experiment, many went for seconds!
These cupcakes use dark chocolate (versus milk chocolate), and have no eggs, butter, or milk. And they are still super fluffy and moist. The best part, most of the ingredients are probably either in your pantry or really easy to find!
Ingredients (makes 2 dozen) adapted from the Curvy Carrot:
I love recipes that make it easy to serve a bunch of people with minimal effort. A slow cooker is usually a go-to for those types of recipes but I’ve never considered using it to make breakfast before. The Ninja Cooking System is the perfect tool for it though. They sent over this recipe for a Slow Cooker Apple French Toast Casserole and I couldn’t wait for the weekend to come so I could make it.
This recipe makes 8 servings so it would be great for breakfast for a larger group but I also packed up the rest of my servings to reheat during the week.
Ingredients:
½ cup butter
2 Granny Smith apples, cored and chopped
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
½ cup packed brown sugar
½ cup pure maple syrup
1 loaf challah bread (about 1 pound), cut into cubes
It’s spring! And spring means (among other things) that strawberries are back in season. So what better way to use them than for a delicious weekend brunch? This Strawberry Banana Stuffed French Toast uses strawberries three ways: fresh, in a strawberry sauce, and for an extra touch of strawberry goodness, in a strawberry jam. And because I love bananas, I threw in a couple slices of that as well. I found the strawberry sauce recipe here and my French toast recipe is based off of this post.
Ingredients:
4 challah rolls
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup vanilla almond milk (unsweeted)
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 cup sliced strawberries, divided
3 tablespoons honey
the juice and zest of one lemon
4 ounces low fat cream cheese
1 tablespoon strawberry jam
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 banana, sliced
1 tablespoon butter
Begin by slicing the challah rolls in half. In a large bowl, add the eggs, almond milk and 2 tablespoons sugar.
Add the roll halves and mix to coat.
Cover and refrigerate for one hour.
one hour later
Add 1 cup sliced strawberries, 3 tablespoons honey, and the lemon juice and zest to a bowl and mix to combine.
Allow to stand for 1 hour. (I actually ended up leaving both for over an hour. Whoops.)
one hour later
Combine the cream cheese, vanilla extract and strawberry jam.
Slice the rest of your strawberries and your banana.
Heat a saute pan over medium high heat and add 1 teaspoon butter. Add 1 set of challah rolls to the saute pan and cook for three minutes.
Flip and cook for three more minutes.
While waiting for the side to cook, add 1 tablespoon of the cream cheese mixture to one piece of roll.
Add slices of strawberry and banana.
When the bread is done cooking, assemble the pieces of bread. Add one to two tablespoons of the strawberry sauce and a few more slices of banana.
Repeat with remaining rolls. How good does that look?
The challah rolls were crispy while the cream cheese mixture was nice and creamy.
The strawberry sauce was tangy, just enough to complement the sweetness of the rest of the French toast.
And as usual, I am a big fan of the already portioned serving. It gives me a better chance of not being a piggy. 🙂
I loved this! I wish I could eat this every spring day. Except I think people would begin to judge me…
Recipes can tell you a lot about the time period in which they were written. I have always been interested in how recipes change over time to meet tastes, availability and personal income. A few months ago, I went to an event at the Historical Society of Philadelphia about a Civil War era cookbook they found within their documents. The cookbook, written by Ellen Emlenwas written around 1865 and is really well organized, especially for the time. Mrs. Emlen, a Philadelphia housewife, put a lot of time into the cookbook, organizing it into thirteen categories including over 200 recipes.
Some of the fun facts that I learned:
If you think Americans have a sugar problem now, you should see some of the amounts of sugar that used to go into recipes! Most recipes would have to be altered to include less sugar to make palatable to us today.
Despite their not so wallet-friendly prices now, oysters used to be “poor man’s food” in nineteenth century Philadelphia. The Delaware River used to be teeming with them! Because of that, there are some ridiculous-sounding recipes for things like “how to pickle 1,000 oysters”
It’s quite amazing how some things haven’t really changed. There is a recipe for eggnog in the book that is comparable to today’s recipe.
The affluent families of Philadelphia (Mrs. Emlen included) really had a thing for saffron. So many dishes include it in the ingredients!
The event was really interesting and we all were given a copy to take home with us! (Expect some posts including adaptations of her recipes in the future).I also picked up another book while I was there, 35 Recipes from “The Larder Invaded”, which also included historical recipes from local Philadelphians. I used a recipe from that book for this Blackberry Pudding, with a few slight changes.
I’m sure some of you just looked at that photo and thought to yourself “that is NOT pudding.” It’s actually an English pudding. Although in the U.S., pudding is usually a milk-based custard type dessert, pudding in the United Kingdom can be used for any sweet dish after dinner (think: Christmas pudding or “figgy pudding”).So, this recipe is actually more of a bread or cake.
Ingredients:
1 pint almond milk, plus more for glaze
3 1/2 cups flour plus more for dredging the blackberries
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 tablespoon melted butter or margarine to make dairy free
2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
1 pint blackberries
powdered sugar
To make this recipe a bit more my own, and bring it into the 21st century, I decided to try this with Vanilla Almond Milk. I thought it might add a nice extra flavor to the whole dessert. Feel free to use normal milk.
Beat the eggs together until light.
Add the almond milk and flour and mix to combine. Add the melted butter, salt and baking powder and mix to combine.
Wash the blackberries and dredge in flour.
Add the blackberries to the pudding and mix to combine.
The original recipe wanted me to put the batter into a pudding tin (I have no idea what a pudding tin is) and then place that in a pot with some boiling water and cook it this way, replenishing the water when needed, for 3 hours. Yep. Not happening.
Instead, I preheated my oven to 350, added the batter to some Pyrex bowls (I used one medium and one small to use all the dough) and baked them for 40-50 minutes.
Because I have a ridiculous sweet tooth, I decided to add a little bit of a glaze to the top of the dessert. Combine 2 parts powdered sugar to 1 part milk. (I made 1 tablespoon powdered sugar to 1.5 teaspoons almond milk).
So how was it? Delicious of course! Look at that beauty!
I was a bit afraid of how this would turn out because I messed with the method of preparation. But it looks fine to me! I enjoyed the glaze on top to give it an extra pop of sugary goodness. The blackberries were nice and tart, so it was a good contrast. I was really happy with the almond milk in it as well!
Best thing about this recipe is that it can easily be adapted to include any kind of berry you choose. It’s a wonderful base recipe to let your creativity run wild.
I actually had a really hard time taking these photos; I kept trying to eat the pudding!
3 1/2cupsflourplus more for dredging the blackberries
1/2teaspoonsalt
3eggs
1tablespoonmelted butter or margarine to make dairy free
2heaping teaspoons baking powder
1pintblackberries
powdered sugar
Instructions
Beat the eggs together until light.
Add the almond milk and flour and mix to combine.
Add the melted butter, salt and baking powder and mix to combine.
Wash the blackberries and dredge in flour.
Add the blackberries to the pudding and mix to combine.
The original recipe wanted me to put the batter into a pudding tin (I have no idea what a pudding tin is) and then place that in a pot with some boiling water and cook it this way, replenishing the water when needed, for 3 hours.
Instead, I preheated my oven to 350, added the batter to some Pyrex bowls (I used one medium and one small to use all the dough) and baked them for 40-50 minutes.
Let cool.
To make the glaze, combine 2 parts powdered sugar to 1 part milk and drizzle over the pudding while it cools.