Candied Lemon Peel and Blueberry granola

 

 

 

I absolutely love making my own granola. It is so much better than the store bought kind and you get to add everything you like to the mix. Basic granola is so easy to make. This recipes is by far my favorite that I have tried. I recently made a blueberry granola from dried blueberries and I thought it was the best until I had the idea for adding candied lemon peels. Making your own granola is usually pretty quick you. You mix all the ingredients and then bake. However, this one is a little more time consuming for the lemon peels. Getting the lemon peels off is probably the hardest part of this recipe,but I feel that the freshness and flavor is worth it. This site shows some pictures on how they removed the peel spiflipflopfoodie. I have always thought blueberries and lemon flavors compliment each other. So I searched pinterest for candied lemon peel recipes the site I used was une-deuxsenses.

Recipe Ingredients
Candied Lemon Peels
2 lemons
1 cup sugar
about a Tbsp sugar for coating
1 cup water
Granola
3 cups old fashion oats
1 cup raw sliced almonds
1 cup sweeten or unsweetened shredded coconut flakes (I used sweetened)
 1/2 cup dried blueberries
1/2 cup of ground flax seed
1 Tbsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt
1/4 lemon simple syrup from candied lemon peels
candied lemon peels chopped
lemon juice from your 2 lemons

Direction - Candied Lemon Peels
1. Wash lemons really well and take a knife cut lemon in half.
2. Use your knife and remove the peel. I ran my knife around the edge of the lemon pulp flesh and peel and removed the peel.
3. Try your best to remove the white pith with your knife carefully because this part is bitter.
4. Slice lemon peels into slices and boil the peels in water for about 5-10 mins until peels are translucent.
5. Drain the peels from the water and then bring another cup of water to a boil. Add sugar to the water and dissolve sugar. Once sugar is dissolved add your peels. Allow peels to cook in syrup for about 5-10 mins (while this process is going on make mix granola together).
6. Drain and remove peels from syrup. Place peels onto wax paper or plate and allow to cool. Save your syrup for granola because this will be a sweetener.
7. Once peels have cooled coat peels with sugar and complete cooled chop the peels for the granola.

Directions- Granola
1. Preheat oven to 300°. Mix the first 7 ingredients together (while the peels are cooking in syrup)
2. Once you completed all the instructions above add the chopped peels into granola mixture.
3. Use you lemon juice from your 2 lemons that you have peeled and strain into your simple syrup mixture. Mix the syrup and strain again to make sure it does not have bits of lemon. Add 1/4 cups of this syrup to your granola. Place extra into a mason jar or some container for sweetener for tea or other drinks.
4. Mix the granola. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray and/or coconut oil. Spread granola onto sheet. I had to split up the mixture onto 2 baking sheet. Bake for around 10 minutes until granola is slightly brown. I suggest to bake for 5 mins and then move the granola around to make sure it bakes evenly.
5. Allow to cool and enjoy!!

Oh yes FOOD....I love cooking!

I love to cook and now that I live back with my parent temporary I have people to cook for! I made homemade pizza with my sister recently and it was soo good. It was really easy basically you need pizza dough (I used pillsbury), tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese ( we used fresh mozz and shredded moz chs), veggies ( we use mushrooms, red onions, zucchini, tomatoes, yellow peppers , and meat (we used shredded chicken) and fresh garlic.

We put some moz cheese in the crust and it was really easy just roll out the dough place pieces of moz cheese near the edge and pinch the dough over the cheese. I sauteed the veggies before putting them on the pizza just to give it some extra flavor, but you can put them on there raw.

Over the crust we brushed on some garlic infused olive oil. Then we put the fresh mozz chs on the bottom over the sauce then layered the veggies and chk and topped it off with shredded mozz.

YUMM. It was pretty awesome!

Another Treat

So this morning I woke up feeling sluggish. Im pretty sure it had something to do with the weather and also not wanting my break to end. I turned on the tv for a lil while and Martha had Andy Samberg so heres a lil clip, which made my morning a little better.

Heres the link http://www.marthastewart.com/show/the-martha-stewart-show/the-cold-show-with-andy-samberg.. Martha says "richard in a box" hence she cant say the real title.

Image found.

 SO I GUESS I GOT SOME INSPIRATION TO COOK..

Anyways this morning I decided to make breakfast! I love quiche so much so I decided to come up with a recipe. I bought some fillo dough the other day for my cannolis and I have so much left over. So I figured instead of making a crust I would use the fillo dough on top of the quiche.

Heres the end results

It turned out so good! and pretty too!

Heres Recipe.

ingredients

6 eggs

1/4 cup of 2% milk

2 tbsp of half and half

1/2 onion

1/2 red pepper

1/2 cup of cooked spinach

lean sausage (however much you want) I only did a little bit

salt and pepper

about 8 sheets of fillo dough

non stick spray

about a tbsp of melted butter

also - FYI ( you can use anything cheese, bacon, ham, zucchini, mushrooms)

also to make it healther you can use more of the egg whites instead of using whole eggs

Preheat oven to 350. I cooked ground sausage until done (and added some red pepper flakes to make sausage spicy) then I sauteed the spinach, red pepper, and onion with salt and pepper and a little bit of olive oil to cover the pan. I just lightly sauteed them though just for flavor.I drained extra oil out of the sausage, spinach, onions, and red peppers on a paper towel and allowed them to cool.

 

You dont want to add them in the egg mixture hot off the stove. Next crack all eggs in a bowl and whisk, add milk and half and half, add some salt and pepper. Add cooled sausage, onions, red pepper, and spinach to the egg mixture. Next I sprayed (really good) a 9inch round pan with non stick spray. Add the mixture to the pan and bake for around 8-10 minutes.

Take fillo dough out around 10 sheets cut up sheets into smaller pieces ( but enough to cover the top of the quiche). Melt some butter ( or you can spray with non stick spray) and then apply the melted butter to your fillo dough. After the quiche is in there for 8-10 mins add the fillo dough on top to cover the quiche. Bake until quiche is firm around 6 mins. I used a toothpick to make sure it was done. Stick tooth in the middle of the quiche and if it comes out clean then its done. It was so yummy and the fillo dough added some light crunch to it!