A Mini Bulk Cooking Spree

I've been itching to build on my first bulk cooking experience back in September but I've had trouble finding the block of time to do it. This weekend I did a smaller verison that should last the week.

I began by making 6 loaves of Barbara's bread. The results were once again spectacular. I should mention that this bread is a dream to mix in my bread bucket. It comes together into a ball beautifully and cleans the inside of the bread bucket in the interim. Like Barbara, I wind up using about 3 1/2 cups of whole wheat bread flour for each recipe.

I also made a huge batch of black beans and rice, actually I used barley. We had this for dinner Saturday along with salsa, guacamole and tortilla chips. The leftovers will be topped with cornbread batter for a meal later in the week.

I cooked up a big batch of white beans to use as the base for several meals during the week. Since the beans are already cooked, I can set them up in a recipe in the slow cooker the night before, refrigerate and then begin cooking in the morning. You need to have a slow cooker with a removable crock to do this.

Finally, I made 4 loaved of Apple Bread and a triple batch of my granola to use as breakfasts and snacks. I tried something new with my granola to cut down my use of sugar. I put 1 cup of date pieces into my Vita-Mix, covered them with water and pureed them. I added this to my granola recipe and cut the sugar from 3/4 per recipe down to 1/4 cup per recipe. That amount of dates is for the triple version of the recipe but you get the idea. The results were fabulous, no one detected the change and once I mentioned it, no one cared!