Barley Brownies

I made brownies for a party the other day.  From a box.  I know, I know, way to go against my own principles.  (Even worse was how many I ate...)  When I was putting away my bag of Bob's Red Mill barley flour yesterday, I noticed a recipe on the package.  A brownie recipe.  With barley flour.  Whole grain brownies.  YUM.  (Note: they are still not healthy.)

They came out delicious.  Brownies from a box, although they are probably full of things that I don't even want to know about, have a certain chocolatey deliciousness to them.  These definitely performed as well as a boxed recipe.  I like the dark chocolate fudge brownie mixes, so I'd like to play around with adding a little more chocolate to this recipe - maybe some melted dark chocolate.

Wild Rice Medley with Braised Chicken in Balsamic-Fig Sauce

It's time to get back to cooking real meals.  There have been times when I could plan an ambitious week-long menu stuffed with recipes to try.  I never got to all of them.  Now, I can barely think of something for tonight's dinner, let alone lunch and dinner for any other day this week.  I've taken to making brief shopping trips almost every day to pick up just what I need.

This one was planned.  In an effort to get back to making dinners, I have been flipping through some of my books.  In the same book where I found my project, teff waffles, I found this lovely recipe for a wild rice medley with chicken and a delicious-sounding sauce.  I planned to make it on a day when I had a lot of time (Friday), because a quick glance at the cooking times showed me that it was going to take a while (which it did - I was working on this for about 1.5 hours).

It was worth the work.  I put a lot of time and effort into this and was rewarded with something delicious.  I have never braised anything and it came out fine.  We had a nice dinner out on the balcony :)

Pear and Buckwheat Pancakes

I have been wanting to try something with buckwheat flour since this post on 101 Cookbooks.  I bought the flour to try that recipe but haven't gotten around to it yet.  As I was thinking about what to make for dinner with the minimal ingredients I have on hand (due to not having cooked in a long while since baking is my thing right now) I got to thinking about breakfast for dinner.  I peeked in the fridge and saw the buckwheat flour.  Hmm.  I looked around a little more and saw two pears.  Hmm.  Didn't I see this somewhere?  I went to The Book (if you've read ANY of my posts in the past two months, you know which book) and there were the Pear and Buckwheat Pancakes.  What a coincidence.

This was an easy recipe.  You just grate in the pears, right over the bowl so that the juices fall in, mix wet into dry, and make as pancakes.  I, however, am bad at pancakes.  This was not always so.  Once upon a time I could flip a pancake and it would work out just the way it was supposed to.  Now, for some reason, they are always falling on top of themselves.  You would think I would have gotten better, not worse, but oh well.

The pancakes tasted good.  They were nice and moist.  The buckwheat flour has a strong taste, but the kind where you keep taking another bite trying to really figure it out.  The recipe calls for a honey butter to be poured over the pancakes, which I would love to try sometime, maybe for guests, but I felt it was too indulgent for something I was eating right at the stove.