Milkshakes and Baking

This has been my diet for the last few days. I have no clue what the heck happened, but I somehow came down with a nasty bout of food poisoning Sunday night. We can't figure it out because my boyfriend and I have been eating the exact same things and he's okay. The only thing I ate that he didn't was a bowl of chips...could they somehow have been contaminated??? I'll spare the world the details, but let's just say I thought I was dying for about seven hours that night. I couldn't even keep water down until Monday night! I never want to go through that again ever! I take food safety really seriously and I can only think that it was something from the store...more reason to try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Eegad.

But I'm feeling a bit better today...I might try a little soup and toast. I'm bored to tears. I'm not the type who can stay in bed for a long time! I decided to post my recipe for beef jerky that I make for my boyfriend. The dehydrator is PERFECT for this! And the house smells all beefy and smoky all day when I make it...gosh I wish I could eat this!!! I use this recipe:  Doc's Best Beef Jerky. (I follow all of the ingredients, except that my "meat tenderizer" is balsamic vinegar). After 3 hours or so in the dehydrator, they're done. I usually let it all marinade overnight in the fridge for the most flavour. I also find that the best cut of meat for this is the "sandwich" cut that is pre-packaged at our grocer. It's never expensive and the slices are pretty thin. I don't have a good enough knife, nor a steady enough hand to thinly slice a cut of meat! If anyone hasn't used liquid smoke before, beware...get that stuff on your fingers and be prepared to smell like a hickory barbecue for days! I always wear gloves when I make this!

And I can't forget the fur kids. I have yet to find a good cat treat recipe so we stick to Greenies for them. For the dogs though, I make these little cookies.

Pumpkin Peanut Butter Oatmeal Dog Biscuits 

Ingredients:

3 cups oats 

½ cup peanut butter 

1 cup pumpkin puree 

1 teaspoon baking powder 

2 eggs 

Instructions:

1. Place the oatmeal into a food processor and pulse it until it's not so coarse, but it doesn't need to be a fine as flour. 

2. Add oatmeal, pumpkin, peanut butter, baking powder and eggs to a bowl and blend until it's all mixed. 

3. Roll out with flour and cut with cookie cutters. I end up using a lot of flour because the dough is quite sticky.

4. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes. 

5. Cool on a rack until completely cooled. These make lots of dog cookies! My bone-shaped cookie cutters are about 2 1/2 inches long and the recipe makes a good four dozen but it depends each time how thin I roll them out. I keep half of them in a cookie tin and the other half goes into the freezer. The dogs adore them and one of our three cats loves them too.

My lovely fellow Blogger, Mama Pea, asked me for my milkshake recipe. This is a photo from last summer and I WISH I could have some of that right now! We got lucky last summer and found a box full of these glasses. There were 5 Sundae glasses and 10 milkshake glasses, all for $5.00. I can't wait for garage sale and flea market season to start again!

Strawberry Milkshake For Two

Ingredients:

1/2 to 1 cup of vanilla ice cream (depends on your thickness liking) 

1 cup half-thawed frozen strawberries

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tbsp pure maple syrup

1 cup milk (again, add more if you like it thinner)

**Note: in the summer when the berries are much fresher and sweeter, we use fresh berries and omit the maple syrup

Instructions:

Shake shake shake

I have an old Osterizer blender that is circa 1983 I believe. I lived on the East Coast of Canada for a year on Prince Edward Island. That was a lovely time for summers by the ocean, sunsets, lobster dinners and bargains! They LOVE their flea markets over there and I accumulated a lot of old kitchen appliances. I love this blender, but every time I use it the motor stinks! I hope I don't have to replace it anytime soon because the quality of everything has declined so much lately that it's criminal...I could go on and on about how many returns and re-returns I've had to make since Christmas, it was unbelievable...but I choose to try to see only the positive! Anyway, we eat a lot of ice cream, any season actually. I've made chocolate cherry shakes as well, replacing the vanilla ice cream with chocolate and adding the juice of canned cherries...magnificent! I love kitchen gadgets, I do have an excellent ice cream maker that is getting very good use! I used to make ice cream by hand, but for $40 (back in the early 2000's) that ice cream maker was so worth getting.

And for those cozy nights, you can also make an adult version of a milkshake! My boyfriend mixes these up for us now and then in the cocktail shaker with some ice cubes. It's milk with maple syrup and a jigger of your favourite spirit or liqueur. Lately we've been big on brandy in these cocktails. Just strain and pour. Just a note: we use pure maple syrup as a sweetener whenever we can to avoid processed sugar, so you'll see it a lot in my recipes! (please excuse the dust on my night table lol!)