What a year, huh? The world is getting healthier, but at the expense of it getting crazier, it seems. I’m gonna do my part to spread the joy, for what it’s worth, so I made a Cheese Ball Tree with my takoyaki maker. Cute or nah? Ha-ha.

All I did was make the batter, drop the cheese in and wait for it to cook so I could start flipping them into cheese balls. Here’s the batter recipe:
2 eggs (lightly whisked)
1 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups water
Combine the dry ingredients first, add the eggs and blend together. Add the water bit by bit while whisking to prevent lumps, until it gets to a runny consistency. That’s it!

Set your Gourmet Sizzler® fairly low because it cooks fast. Add whatever cheese you want—I used mozzarella and cheddar.

Summon up your takoyaki skills and start rollling. Sorry, I can’t help you here—you just have to practice. But if you oiled your pan it won’t stick at all, and you’ll soon have some golden cheese balls.

Dress it up with your favorite pizza sauce and sprinkle some herbs on it and you’re done. You guys might want to add bits of meat or veggies inside for a pizza flavor; I just wanted a simple cheese ball today. The sauce had plenty enough flavor for me.

Since we are celebrating the holidays, I challenged myself with a Panettone Bread, seeing as how there was conveniently one available on the Zojirushi site. I had to halve all my ingredients because I own the 1 lb. breadmaker and the recipe uses the 2 lb. Zojirushi model; but I think it translated correctly.

I wish it rose taller, but I suppose it’s about right for being only half of what the recipe calls for.

Plenty of dried fruit inside that I laced with cognac (he-he). Note that you take the dough out of the breadmaker and fold the fruit into it for this recipe (it’s easy). Overall the dough was a bit stodgy and overbaked, but the flavor was spot on. We’ve been watching a lot of the Great British Bake Off®—can you tell? If you’ve not seen this popular baking show on TV, I recommend it. They don’t compete for money like most shows; it’s strictly for the love of baking, which is why the contestants are such good sports and supportive of each other. Maybe also because they’re English and not American??

When you’ve had enough of your panettone and it’s gotten stale, turn it into bread pudding with sweetened milk. We had eggnog handy so that worked very well.

Bake it in your toaster oven.

And have it with ice cream! The perfect leftover holiday dessert.

So eariler I mentioned how we’ve had a pretty tough year this year, but we had a couple of family events that carried us through. At the top of our list was my daughter’s 21st birthday. We celebrated with balloons.

And cake.

And also crispy rice balls. (click to see how this was done with the takoyaki pan too)

And we all took a trip to Portland, Oregon.


By the way, I can say now that we’ve actually been to both Portlands in the U.S.; Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine. How about that?

How was your year? I hope you had a good one!
 
 
 
Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Home Bakery Maestro® Breadmaker BB-SSC10, Gourmet Sizzler® Electric Griddle EA-BDC10, Takoyaki Plate EA-YBC01

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

All images by Bert Tanimoto ©2022
 
 
 

People who love to make their own bread swear by the therapeutic benefits of kneading your own dough—as if it has a calming effect close to meditation. Nahhh; I’d rather have my breadmaker do it for me and just eat the fresh bread after it comes out of the oven. I’m in that “work smarter, not harder” group.

“Bready or not, here I crumb.” National Homemade Bread Day is coming up this month. Get your breadmaker out and bake! It’s safe to do that now—you can even find yeast in the stores and it won’t be sold out, like during the pandemic when everyone stayed home and baking was out of control. Remember that? Why don’t you join me for November 17th; take out your breadmaker and quit loafing around. Did you hear how the bakery caught fire? The owner’s business is toast now. Seriously though, do you know why bread jokes are the best? It’s because they never get stale!

My featured bread (above) that I’m proud to show off is a rustic French loaf baked in a Dutch oven. I mean, it came out amazingly good, with dough that I kneaded in my Zojirushi breadmaker.

I used this recipe from Heart’s Content Farmhouse for this one, but it looks like there are lots of similar ones online. Apparently being able to cover it with the lid of the Dutch oven creates the steam needed to bake this to the right texture. The recipe does call for extending the baking time with the lid off—I’m assuming to brown the top some more.

The result was a hard crust like it should be, and a chewy textured bread like it should be. I think the generous amount of salt also helped with the flavor.

If you know how I like to work in the kitchen, you know how I don’t like to work much. Guys, I present to you the easiest savory bread in the world. You know how easy it is to make plain white bread in the breadmaker, right? I give credit for this to my wife, who knows exactly how much I like to work.

Go to TJ’s (Trader Joe’s®) and get some of their Everything But The Bagel Sesame Seasoning. It’s a blend of black and white sesame seeds, dried garlic and onion, sea salt and poppy seeds; just like the topping on a typical Everything Bagel. Use the White Bread cycle and during the 2nd Knead time, add about 2 tablespoons into the dough. I even used the auto dispenser that comes with my breadmaker for this so I didn’t even have to open the lid. Check this out.

Savory homemade Bagel Bread!

Fragrant, fluffy, and fulfilling.

Here is where you insert your own favorite recipe for Banana Bread. I just wanted to show you how a toaster oven is so great when you don’t want to mess with your normal one. They’re more energy efficient, they do more things, they’re portable so I can move it around on my counter, and they can bake just about anything in smaller portions.

Our banana bread, perfectly done in a 9″ x 5″ loaf pan that fits no problem in the toaster oven.

Here’s what I think: if you want to do all of your baking in a toaster oven (like we do since our big one doesn’t work too well), invest in a good one. The better ones will heat more evenly and will probably be large enough to produce a better bake, with all the roominess inside. Just my opinion…

Happy National Homemade Bread Day!
 
 
 
Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Home Bakery Maestro® Breadmaker BB-SSC10

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

All images by Bert Tanimoto ©2022
 
 
 

Oh, Great Pumpkin, will you come to my pumpkin patch? Maybe we’ll have better luck than Linus did, if we put our faith in more pumpkin treats for National Pumpkin Month this October. This Pumpkin Mac & Cheese looks delicious, right? It’s kinda cheating because bacon makes anything taste good, but the creaminess of the pumpkin was a delightful surprise.

I took my Zojirushi Breadmaker and baked a Pumpkin Bread Loaf recipe I found online, just to see how easy it could be. Really, the only worry I had was hoping the 2lb. recipe translated well enough for my 1lb. breadmaker, but it came out pretty good. Moist, nutty and fragrant.

I love the ingredient dispenser too. It really helps when you don’t have to stop the process to mix in the dry ingredients. I know a lot of breadmaker owners use theirs to just knead and rise the dough, then actually bake in their own oven. I’ve done this as well, but it’s so gratifying to have the machine do the work from beginning to end. I used the dispenser to sprinkle the walnuts for this recipe.

Golden orange pumpkin bread. Don’t forget to use the “CAKE” setting, or whatever your menu says for non-yeast bread. The only time I opened the lid was to make sure I scraped some of the dough off the sides after the knead cycle

I feel breadmakers are great at baking bread; which is what they’re supposed to do. There’s a cake setting for cakey breads, but it doesn’t compare to baking a cake in an oven. As long as you know what to expect out of your breadmaker, you’ll never be disappointed.

Who woulda thought Pumpkin Mac & Cheese could be something? When I thought about what pumpkin things I could make, it always seemed like they were all sweet desserts. This Mac & Cheese is mostly prepared in an open skillet or cast iron pan until the pumpkin puree, cheese and cooked pasta is blended and heated through, but the final touch is to brown it in an oven, like any casserole dish. This is my Zojirushi Toaster Oven, big enough for our dinner.

This turned out to be a surprisingly intense combination of the smoky bacon and the velvety creaminess of the Gouda cheese and pumpkin. C’mon, I know you can smell it from there!

Aaand what would Pumpkin Month be without Pumpkin Cookies. My favorite kind of cookies are snickerdoodles. These are snickerdoodles jazzed up with pumpkin, pumpkin spice and espresso! They’re called Pumpkin Spice Latte Sugar Cookies—soft, chewy and sugary.

The espresso is blended into the dough as well as rolled onto it, so you get that hint of coffee as soon as you bite into it. You don’t need the drink if you can get it in a cookie!

I was 1 day old when I found out there existed a museum for the great cartoonist Charles M. Schulz in Santa Rosa, California. I looked it up and it looks pretty grand—with a theater, courtyard and exhibit areas devoted to his work. He was, of course, the creator of probably the most popular comic strip of all time, Peanuts; and with it, famous characters like Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the never seen Great Pumpkin. Poor Linus would faithfully wait for The Great Pumpkin every Halloween at his pumpkin patch, but he never came. We should all be so determined!

I’d love to go check out the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I do think it might make me love Snoopy and the gang even more. 
 
 
 
Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Home Bakery Maestro® Breadmaker BB-SSC10

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

All images by Bert Tanimoto ©2022