Marie Cookpad

  The recipe I am sharing with you today is for an Oatmeal Batter Bread and it is one I adapted from Better Homes and Gardens: 365 Comfort Foods, and I will tell you up front, this is a real winner of a recipe!   I have always had a fondness for batter breads.  They are so much easier to make than regular breads. You can make them simply with a mixer and a bowl.   The mixer does all of the hard work of kneading and helps to create a bread that is both light in weight and in texture. Because these breads are not kneaded it is important to beat the initial batter with a mixer until it comes away from the sides of the bowl and appears stringy.   The remainder of the dry ingredients is mixed in by hand with a wooden spoon and it can be a real work out getting it all incorporated, but do persevere!  Its worth the effort!   Since batter breads use less flour than regular breads, they form a batter rather than a dough and it can be a rather sticky batter! ...

  Did you have a job picking local strawberries when you were a teenager?  I am pretty sure that if you lived in a fairly rural location you probably did.  Local strawberry growers depended on teens hungry for extra money back in the day! I did it for a few weeks every summer for a couple of years. It was a back breaking labour spending the day crouched low to the ground and in hot sun.  You picked long and hard for a few dollars a day, but we were grateful for the work. The farmers would actually send a truck to pick you up and take you to the strawberry fields.   I wonder if teens still pick berries for money?   Or do our farmers have to rely on immigrants.  I don't know.  You would have thought all that picking would have soured my taste for berries, but nope.  I adore strawberries above all other berries. I don't think there is a way I could ever not like them, and here in the UK we grow some of the best.   One thing we all real...

  I really love skillet meals like this Cheesy Tuna Pasta.  Meals/entrees that can be cooked all in one pan on top of the stove.  In the summer they are especially welcome as they don't heat up the kitchen like oven bakes do.   This Cheesy Tuna Pasta is just like your favourite Tuna Casserole, except it is cooked in a skillet.  Amazingly there is no need to cook the pasta first.  It cooks right in the pan with everything else, which also helps to cut down on the washing up!   So what do you need to cook a fantastic meal like this?  Nothing unsual.  Its simple, economical, quick and easy to make. small pasta shapes (I used smaller size macaroni) Albacore white tuna (I only ever buy albacore) whole milk (homogenised, don't use a lower fat milk, the richeness of the sauce comes from the use of whole milk) water butter dry mustard powder sweet paprika (the opposite of hot paprika) greated strong cheddar cheese (don't be tempted to use pre-grated ...