These "french toast sandwiches" were somewhat of an experiment, at least for me. I started out with this recipe called "stuffed french toast". I didn't have cinnamon raisin bread, so I just used (homemade) whole wheat bread. I didn't have "cream cheese spread" (whatever that is!) so I just softened some regular cream cheese. We don't eat ham, so I used turkey pastrami. :) And pouring syrup over the top of the sandwich didn't sound good to me, so I skipped that part.

The sandwiches were good, but not great. I don't think we would have liked them any better if they had been made like the recipe said, though! It just sounds so sweet, and we don't do well with that much sugar in our main dish... even if it's breakfast.

Well, it was a nice change of pace, even just for one meal. :)

This is the Perfect Apple Pie I made last week, which didn't turn out so perfectly because the apples never got soft. Everything was fine, except for the crunchy apples, and somehow crunchy apples ruins the taste, in my opinion.

Next time? I'm not buying Granny Smith apples from Aldi for the pie. Besides the persistent crunch, the apples were small and starting to go bad in the centers. I had to use all of 6 pounds of apples for my three pies, and the pies weren't even very full. That's a lot of peeling and coreing... and probably at least partly why the pies ended up being so time-consuming.

There's a disaster in progress, in my oven. I'm making a cake, and the recipe said I could use a 9x13 sheet pan. I thought the pan looked rather full, but I wasn't expecting it to run over. (The recipe actually said to put two stacked cookie sheets under the pan.)

After 45 minutes (the supposed baking time), the cake was very jiggly, and starting to run over. I put a bigger cookie sheet in the oven to catch the drips, but not soon enough to stop what was already on the oven floor... and which is filling our house with a lovely... burnt smell. Good thing it's a cool day outside and I already had the windows open! :)

I put a piece of foil loosely on top, since the top of the cake was getting rather dark, and I'm going to keep baking and checking until the cake tests done. I have a feeling I'm in for a real disaster-treat, but I'm not pulling an under-cooked cake out of the oven -- which is a sign of giving up early. You never know what could happen.

Plus, there's a whole cup of honey in this cake. The worst disasters are the expensive ones!! At least this cake was easy to mix up, and Yehoshua had a blast helping me make it. :)

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to Meredith's quick and easy fruit cobbler recipe. She made it look so easy and yummy!

 I actually did make the cobbler not too long after my post, but something didn't go right, because it was a disaster. (And for your reference, numerous people commented over at her recipe saying how fabulous it tasted! So this is truly "Tammy's Disaster" and not "Meredith's Mistake"!)

For starters, the recipe called for an 8x10 or 8x8 dish. I don't have an 8x10, but I do have an 8x8. I have very frequently taken recipes that called for an 8x8 dish, doubled the recipe, and made it in a 9x13 dish... with great success. (Joshua says... it's 117 sq. in. versus 128 sq. in.)

Anyway, I thought I'd do that with this recipe, too. After all, it was going to be so fabulously yummy, I'd save myself even more work by just doubling it to begin with, right? :)

So I melted two sticks of butter. That looked like a lot, but hey, this wasn't supposed to be health food. ;) I melted the butter in the dish like the recipe said, which meant I put the dish in the oven as it was pre-heating. The dish got rather hot by the time the butter was melted, so when I poured the batter on top, it started cooking a little at the sides. But maybe this was supposed to happen?

I sprinkled about 4 cups of fruit on top. (The recipe said at least two cups but up to four cups of berries, and I was doubling the recipe. So I guess I used the minimum amount.) My fruit was a juicy mixture of cherries and mulberries (a combination that makes delicious pie, by the way!).

The dish didn't look too full, but as it baked, it got very full. It started to run over a little, but the edges got dark and formed sort of a crust that held everything in.

I was glad I hadn't used any more fruit than I did, and I was also realizing that the suggestion of an 8x10-inch dish was probably more accurate than the 8x8. Or else the 5.5 square inches I was missing (per recipe) were really important to the cleanliness of my oven.

"Bake 40 minutes." Unfortunately, at 40 minutes, the entire middle section of my cobbler looked like pancake batter that had sat for a few hours. Bubbly and wet, and most certainly NOT cooked. I set the timer again and again, and continued checking for doneness.

I put a piece of foil loosely on top, because the edges were getting too dark. I think I baked the cobbler for about 90 minutes before deciding it was finally done.

Sadly, the edges were really too dark to be very enjoyable, and the part that wasn't so dark was soggy with grease. We decided that maybe the butter should be cut in half for the recipe (it tasted THAT greasy to us!) and certainly, I had used the wrong size of pan.

Does anyone know what else I could have done wrong?!

I seem to have lost the link to whoever shared this recipe for quinoa on their blog. That's okay, though, because we didn't like it.

I will admit that it's partly my own fault... my black beans were undercooked, and I didn't have fresh lime juice (I used bottled lemon juice instead). I'm also pretty sure (now) that I don't care for a lot of cumin and chili powder on black beans, corn, or quinoa.

My quinoa was getting pretty old, too. I'd had it it my cupboard since we moved to Ohio, about 3 years ago. At least now I know how to cook it! Have you ever bought something and then felt too intimidated to use it? This happens to me especially when something was purchased from a bulk foods store, and lacks the fancy labeling and instructions... :)

I especially enjoyed this post by Crystal about housekeeping through difficult seasons. I wish I could chalk up my lack of energy to being pregnant, but I'll still be taking her advice to heart. :)

A number of people asked for more details about my "once a week cooking" day last week. I'm hoping to have more on this in the future, since last week was basically a flop... and I've been too exhausted this week to do much of anything... but read more for a few photos and an account of my pathetic cooking day! :)

Okay, these weren't really a disaster. These homemade bagels are really delicious! But I thought you might enjoy seeing a picture of my first bagel-making experience. I didn't follow the directions about a 2-inch hole in the middle, and when the bagels came out of the oven, they were like big round balls. :)

Joshua and I made these homemade blintzes a few weeks ago. Neither of us had made blintzes before, and I had never even eaten one before, so I was a little clueless about what they were like.

We used a recipe from a cookbook, and the batter was a thin, flour-y, unleavened batter. It got rubbery as it cooked. The sweet cottage cheese and egg filling didn't fully cook inside. When we tried to roll the blintzes after putting the filling inside, they cracked.

They tasted good enough to eat, but not good enough to make again, that's for sure!! I wonder what we did wrong...??

Are any of you skilled at making blintzes? Tell me your secrets! :)

I somehow lost my previous photos of my homemade wheat bread. I can only find one, small, cropped photo of the bread, and that just won't do. So all these weeks, the thing that was keeping me from sharing my wheat bread recipe was the fact that I needed some pictures.

That's easy enough to remedy. I made bread... but it was a night when we were having guests, and by the time I had it sliced, it was time to eat. By the time we had eaten, there wasn't much left to photograph.

So, I made the recipe yet again. This time, before I could even get one picture, my little baby got up to the table and stuck his fingers in the loaf! I turned around when he started saying "Ahhh! Ohhhh!! Ooooohhh!!!!"

So I sliced up the rest of the loaf and took pictures of those other slices. ;) Recipe coming tomorrow... I hope! :)

These cookies look harmless enough, but trust me -- they were as hard as rocks!

This was a new recipe I had tried, and I was congratulating myself on following the directions so accurately (the only thing I changed was adding whole wheat flour instead of white flour).

I should have gotten a clue when I tried forming the cookies into balls, and I had to press the "dough" (more like crumbles) together as hard as I could, or else it fell apart.

A little water or milk, perhaps? Well, leave it to me to actually follow directions even when red flags pop up -- but hand me a tried-and-true perfectly-good recipe and I'll find something to change!!

P.S. I guess I'm not the only one who has cooking disasters -- check out Bethany's awesome chocolate mud cake here! Hmn... tired mommy, trying to do five things at once? Sounds familiar! I'm blogging through my nap time yet again! ;)