A New Recipe ~ Blueberry Almond Buckle

When I was younger I never wanted to learn to cook or try new recipes. Growing up my mom always made big meals that usually were already on the table when I got home from school. Because of my participation in sports, I was never home in time to help my mom, and honestly, I was fine with that. I did love to help out with holidy baking and it was my job every Thanksgiving to make the Lemon Meringue Pie, but I just didn't have any desire beyond that to learn how to cook. Luckily, my husband loved to cook. When we met he always was the one to cook me a nice meal, and even when we were first married, he did all the cooking and I did the clean up. This all changed when I was home on maternity leave for my son, Joey.

Hayley and Emily Helping in the Kitchen

Being home, I discovered the Food Network. I now find it very comical that I loved to watch the cooking channel, but it never struck me to try to make any of the meals. I mostly watched Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals. Probably the fact that it was "quick" meals was what drew me in. At that point in my life, I had a career that I invested 100% of my time and energy into. I was at work early and stayed late. I brought work home and worked on it at night and weekends. I hadn't worked yet as a mom, though my priorites changed quickly when I returned to work. One night when my husband came home, I told him that he should try one of the Rachael Ray recipes. Now keep in mind he would work all day and come home and cook. Looking back now, I can't believe it never struck me to do the cooking! But I digress, his response to me wanting him to try a recipe was, "Why don't you?" It was that moment that I realized there was no reason why I shouldn't be doing all the cooking. So the next day Joey, only a few weeks old at the time, and I ventured out to the local Barnes and Noble and bought the only Rachael Ray cookbook they had "30 Minute Meals Volume 2." I taught myself to cook from watching different cooking shows, mostly Rachael Ray, and this one cookbook. Since then I have purchased many, probably too many, cookbooks and find a lot of joy in cooking and testing out new recipes. Of all the cookbooks I have purchased that first one is still my favorite and I make recipes from it at least once a week.

So my endeavor today was to find and test out a new recipe. Blueberries were on sale at Hannaford and I wanted to find a way to use them. I had also picked up the free (if you spend $25) recipe book "Fresh" that Hannaford publishes every month or two. If you've never picked one of these up before, I highly recommend it. In this issue was a recipe for Blueberry Almond Buckle. I had all the items on hand, so the decision was made - Blueberry Almond Buckle it would be! The girls helped me make it, and it was delicious! This recipe is definitely going into my recipe book!  Of course, it never struck me that this was a fruit dessert.  I thought it was a type of breakfast bread, so I served it to the kids for breakfast ~ they were quite excited to have "cake" for breakfast!

If you want to try it out, here's the recipe: Blueberry Almond Buckle

The great thing about recipes on Hannaford's website is that you can add the items from the recipe directly to a grocery list that you can then print out for your grocery shopping trip, you can scale the recipe to the right servings for you, and you can save your favorites to your "Recipe Box" right on their site. Of course, that means you have to log in, but certainly it is worth it.

Let me know if you try out this recipe or test Hannaford's online recipes.  I would love to hear what you think!