Weekend projects 2

I had intended on posting the previous post and this one staggered through the week but forgot to upload the pictures so you're getting two in one day!! Enjoy!

The other thing I usually do on the weekend is cook and bake. The last two weekends have included a good bit of both! Here's a recap (sorry, not many photos).

Weekend 1:

We were low on bread so I made four loaves, trying two new recipes - oatmeal bread and fig and fennel bread. Improvements could be made but they turned out pretty well for the first time.The fig and fennel bread is odd but was a nice change. Not sure I would make it again.

The great thing about bread making is that it gives you plenty of time in between to get other things done. But it also takes up time that can be used on cooking meals. So the week following we did not have two big meals with lots of leftovers like we usually do. Instead, we had a few leftovers from dinner on Sunday - hoisin chicken and green onion pancakes, and lots of vegetables to add to couscous, pasta, pizza, or quesadillas depending on what we felt like each night.

Weekend 2:

I had a lot of wild hairs for this weekend. I recently found the blog whiteonricecouple and found tons of recipes I wanted to try. I picked a few for the weekend: ginger peach muffins (more savory than you think, different but quite tasty), crispy shrimp tacos (yummy, but of course anything from Rick Bayless is yummy), spicy kale chips (odd but decent and relatively healthy), and turkey sloppy joes with homemade Asian ketchup (one word - AMAZING).

Ginger peach muffin

My baking wild hair was the fault of Pioneer Woman and this post. So I made the dulche de leche cupcakes. Tasty.

And here's some proof that we work together in the kitchen (I'm grateful the husband deals with my cooking whims, likes to cook, and is good at it). This is an action shot of rolling and frying the crunchy tacos.