FloorCookies

It’s probably safe to say that for many people – especially in America – pancakes belong to the category of favorite breakfast foods.  In any season.

I still use store bought puff pastry – and not homemade – when the recipe calls for it.  It’s very convenient and time saving.  This is a big enough reason for me not to embark on making it from scratch – not yet.

What do you do if you suddenly crave something sweet?  Try to find something sweet in your pantry?  Run to a store to buy something?  Start baking?  Maybe cookies or even a cake?  Yes, a cake!  The type that doesn’t require any filling.  Then you can justify your baking as preparing snacks or the next day’s breakfast.  Yes, seriously.  We don’t even need a special occasion to bake a cake.  If the ingredients are available, we are ready to start.

No, this is not my grandmother’s apple cake.  I’ve been baking it from the Hungarian cookbook Gyümölcsös édesség by Mari Lajos for decades.

In one of our raised beds the arugula looked really wonderful the other day, ready to be used.  I harvested it all – some for a tasty salad, some for some sandwiches.

On some of the islands of Puget Sound around Seattle, WA, there are many lavender farms and annual lavender festivals – a favorite destination for many in the summer.  It was already a few years ago during one of these festivals where I tasted my first lavender scone and bought my first little bag of dried culinary lavender.

This is a very satisfying, healthy, baked breakfast dish.  Although not the quickest, but definitely one of the easiest ways of preparing oats – in our household suitable as a weekend project.

From the many ways of preparing potatoes, I love the simplicity of these roasted ones with caraway seeds and flaky sea salt.  Perfect and very delicious as a side to any roast meat or just by itself.

Sometimes the simplest food is the best.  When faced with the choice whether to eat a bowl of store bought cereal for breakfast or something else – which might actually need quick preparation – I prefer the latter.  Even on workdays.

In many Hungarian meat recipes you start with a pörkölt, then you enhance this base to create a new dish.  Such is the case with this popular one-pot dish called székelygulyás.  Székely is an ethnic group of Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania) but the dish is not named after them.

If you need a quick and easy recipe for a summer dessert, you just found one.

In these days, you can often read that you should be eating baked goods made with whole wheat flour.  Yes, but sometimes you just need a piece of delicious white bread.