Naptime Everyday: Recipes for Everyday Cooking and Baking

One week from today I’ll wake up to a shower of roses, three hour long massage and bags of diamond jewelry. Or not. But it will be Valentine’s Day and, for the record, sarcasm aside, my husband always does something sweet for me and I for him. This year I’ll continue our tradition of a romantic homemade dinner after our little one is asleep, and will serve this tart for dessert. I came up with the recipe after my husband expressed his love for this awesome combination of salted caramel and chocolate I made for last year’s New Year’s Eve bash.

Until recently my daughter would finish her substantial plate of cinnamon waffles while I was still clutching hot tea and waiting for my oatmeal to cook. I’ve recently remedied this problem by preparing my steel cut oats in the slow-cooker the night before after my daughter was asleep, enabling us to eat breakfast together every morning. Prepping steel cut oats in the slow cooker overnight is an extremely popular winter breakfast, but I hadn’t tried it myself until this month. Once I realized how well the method works I started doing it weekly, piling in the oats after bedtime and digging into my hot cereal alongside my daughter the next morning. The leftovers of each batch were stored in a loaf pan so all week I could cut out a big slice and warm it up in an instant each morning.

Next up on my list of Slow Cooker Challenge dishes to try was a grain-based dish. Given my love of baking risotto I had to wonder, could it be slow-cooked? The principal of the dish, rice slowly absorbing moisture and flavors, seemed to lend itself perfectly to the idea. I also thought this might be true of polenta and couscous, but risotto is one of our favorite meals and felt like the right place to start on a busy Monday afternoon. Plus, I had suggested risotto to my husband as he walked out the door that morning and he smiled so wide so I knew my experiment would be right up his alley.

2011 was the year I finally became comfortable working with yeast breads. In the past I’d had lots of success with no-knead bread and pizza dough, but I was honestly, for some unknown reason, a little intimidated by the thought of making anything else. I credit my trip to King Arthur Flour with allaying my fears and teaching me to dive hands first into rising dough. After 24 hours with them I was much more confident that I wasn’t going to kill yeast with hot water or not knead dough well enough. Once my fears were gone I was, well, fearless. Now I am making yeast breads all the time and our latest favorite are these cinnamon rolls.

I made this soup over the weekend to get us back to neutral. Right after Christmas Day a solid mass of winter germs swept through our house. My daughter was on antibiotics in less than twenty-four hours and I was obsessively slurping down hot tea and clementines to beat my own sniffles and burning throat. My husband, lucky devil, was away in the office and generally avoided getting too close to us when he was home. During the day my daughter and I adopted a solid afternoon nap schedule. She napped for longer than I did, so when I got up from my rest I would use my brief burst of energy to make some healing soups. Early in the week I started with a big batch of Tomato Florentine to use up the spinach from Christmas dinner. Later in the week I moved on to using up the rest of the mushrooms I’d purchased for our holiday pot pie.

We are in holiday wind-down mode. All of our family has gone home, the presents are put away and we are more or less decompressing from all of the excitement. My daughter has actually been napping pretty regularly for the past few days. She really needs that hour or so in the afternoon to make up for all of the energy she is expending. Yesterday I used her naptime to make a quick, comforting baked risotto with the last of the Meyer lemons in my fridge.

I have our Christmas menu pretty much set. Instead of a ham, this year we are going to try this pot pie recipe from Williams-Sonoma. Our side dishes will include carrot souffle, green beans and twice-baked potatoes and they’ll be some delicious cheesecake for dessert. I am also going to serve up these rolls with dinner. These are not rolls I reserve especially for Christmas, they are more of everyday rolls that go with just about every occasion.