Happy New Year! It’s my first post of 2016, and I’m so excited to see what this year will bring!

If there’s one food I want to see lots of in the coming year, it’s homemade bread. We’re all familiar with the yeasty goodness of bread that doesn’t come in plastic bags from the grocery store, and it’s so easy to get a perfect loaf with just a little help from my best friend, a.k.a. the bread machine. Life was so cold and dark before we met!

Luckily, fresh bread is always possible, and this one is special. It’s made with mostly whole wheat flour, which will help you stick to your healthy eating resolutions. It’s also full of walnuts for an extra protein punch, not to mention sweet Craisins® Dried Cranberries. It’s a loaf worth making!

On a day like today, I really need the extra sustenance. Studies have shown that today is one of the trickiest of the whole year. People drag themselves back to work and school from the celebrations of weeks past and realize that winter is ahead. If you look at it that way, it can be pretty grim.

But there’s so much to look forward to! Good TV, for instance. A lot of shows took mid-season breaks, but now they’re back. I’ll get to find out if the world ends on Heroes: Reborn, or find out if the world ends on Once Upon a Time. Now that I think about it, maybe I should stop watching television shows that deal with any coming apocalypse. It might explain those disturbing dreams I keep getting.

When I wake up after a night of dreaming and prepare for a day of work after a too-short winter break, I need to have a motivating force to propel me out of bed and into the cold, dark morning. And that force is bread, pure and simple. How could breakfast get any better?

If I’m feeling energetic, the best topping for this bread is cream cheese. But honestly, if I’m in a rush, I’ll eat it alone. There’s so much flavor happening here. Plus, the walnuts provide protein while the Craisins® give me that sweet zing I crave every morning. And with the whole wheat flour, this healthy bread gets me through until lunch. When I have more of the bread, of course. I made sandwiches with this for my kids, and they had a ball calling it “crazy bread.” For years, they’ve referred to Craisins® as “Crazies.” I love it.

And if I’m not packing my Craisins® into the best bread ever, then I’m sending them to work and school with everyone. This time of year, when packing lunches gets harder and harder as we try to find new foods to make everyone happy, we know we’ll always be good with Craisins®! After all, fresh fruit is hard to come by in the winter, but these magical “Crazies” equal a fruit serving.

You might be fighting off a case of the post-holiday blahs, but remember that good things are still in store! Fresh bread and good TV make life better. Instead of making New Year’s resolutions you can’t keep, focus on the joys of life and make this a year to remember!

To find Craisins® and other products (like new Craisins® Fruit Clusters), look in the dried fruit section at Walmart!

My third (and not final, one more Monday) Cinco de Mayo offering are these easy dessert…quesadillas? Tortillas with a rich cinnamon chocolate filling?

Who cares what they’re called? As Shakespeare said, roses are cool even if they’re not called that. That’s exactly the way he phrased it. And while I wish my name had been different, I’m still me.

How many of you feel like you were given the wrong name? Names, no matter what Shakespeare said, matter. And the thing is, our parents never know how we’re going to respond to a name. I hope they do their best and hope in turn that their kids have names they love. But it doesn’t always turn out that way.

As a high school teacher, I have met my fair share of odd names. I can’t share any with you, of course, but let’s just say that parents should probably think hard before naming a child after an evil dictator, giving them a name that sounds like a cuss word, or giving them a number instead of a name. Yes, that has happened.

This dessert might not have a name that fits any specific category, but it’s delicious and not too unhealthy. I used whole wheat tortillas, for instance. That’s good, right? And the rest is simple.

All you do is brush the tortillas with melted butter laced with cinnamon and cook them in a skillet with a cinnamon chocolate filling. The filling is completely addictive and becomes appealingly gooey. Honestly, a scoop of ice cream on top would be perfection. Unfortunately, I ate all my ice cream before the photo shoot. That’s how I do, y’all.

If messing around in the kitchen a lot isn’t your bag, these dessert quesadillas are the answer. They take minutes to put together, and they are ridiculously good. I ate mine for breakfast, but I’m a weirdo with the wrong name. Hey, if I had a different name, I’d still bake sweet desserts. But I still wouldn’t know what to call these!

If I want a less indulgent version of that sandwich, I bake cinnamon raisin bread with whole wheat flour (mostly) and spread it with light cream cheese. It does the trick! Because really, what is better than freshly baked bread?

When we got married almost ten years ago, Kenny and I registered for (and got, yay!) a bread machine. I had visions of us in a perfectly appointed house with everything tidily in its place, eating bread that we’d made ourselves. With the help of the machine, of course.

And that’s come to pass, except with a lot more mess in the house and a lot lot lot more noise. The thing about bread machines is that some people think they’re cheating, and maybe they’re right. But I honestly don’t care. Bread that comes out of my oven is bread I made myself. And that is that.

Now, if you don’t have a bread machine, you can probably still make this bread using a dough hook attachment on your mixer, or even doing it by hand. It just won’t be so darn easy.

This recipe makes enough for two loaves, one for now and one to freeze. That way, I take out the frozen loaf when we’re having breakfast for dinner, reheat it, and it’s delicious. Because what could be better than cinnamon bread with, oh, just about anything?

This recipe works because even though it uses mostly whole wheat flour, I do put some regular all-purpose flour (or I also use bread flour) into the mix. When the dough is ready, you add the raisins and the cinnamon sugar. It’s very simple. I made this while watching my kids beat each other up.

Just kidding. Sort of. But the bottom line is, I can’t always get out for my cinnamon raisin bagel and cream cheese. When I want something warm, yeasty, and healthy, this bread is the best option. Talk about wish fulfillment!

Challah, that is.

Challah is too awesome to fly so much under the radar. It’s traditionally an egg bread made with white flour and sugar, kind of like brioche.  It makes amazing French toast.  There are also water versions, calling for no egg, as well as challahs filled with anything from raisins to chocolate chips.

And lately, whole wheat challah has begun to pop up in bakeries with more frequency, though it’s often put down by challah traditionalists, and who can blame them?  Challah is an indulgence, a bread so good that spreading butter or jam on a slice can actually take away from the yeasty, fresh-out-of-the-oven perfection of the bread itself.

I was pretty hestitant to give the whole wheat thing a try.  Why fix what ain’t broke?  But in a world where whole grains are healthier and white bread is just an occasional indulgence, I wanted to have my challah and eat it too.

After much experimenting, this puppy was born.

It tastes surprisingly non-whole wheat-y thanks to two things: a generous amount of honey and vanilla along with a hybrid of whole wheat and bread flour.  It’s mostly whole wheat, but I kept some of the bread flour in there to give the loaves that stretchy, chewy, yeasty texture that contrasts so nicely with a crisp crust.

See?  Isn’t she pretty?

Okay, honestly, I did the best I could.  Making the dough is the easy part, thanks to my best friend (a.k.a. the bread machine).  Braiding it, on the other hand, can be a real struggle.  As my son’s adorable friend asked, “Why does the chawwah wook so weiwd?”  Well, kiddo, I tried.

Speaking of kids, they love it when you make the dough into shapes.  I do the letters of their names, or Mickey Mouse.  Though note I did not provide a photo of that attempt.  The ears sorta fell off Mickey’s head.

But it’s all about the journey, right?  The journey to fresh, warm, home-baked bread that you can feel virtuous about eating. And serve on pretty platters.

So how do you achieve healthy bread heaven?  Take a look:

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs at room temperature
• 1 cup warm (not hot) water
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 2 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup bread flour
• 2 and 1/4 tablespoons yeast (if you use a packet, it’s pre-measured)

Instructions:

As recommended by bread machine manufacturers, start with the wet ingredients.  Put them into the bread machine in the order listed above.

Once the wet ingredients are in add the salt and sugar and then pour in the flour.

Using your index finger, make a small well in the flour.  Fill it with the yeast.

Select the dough cycle on your bread machine and press start.

Shortly before the dough is set to come out, line two cookie sheets with aluminum foil and spray liberally with cooking spray.

Once the dough is done (usually about an hour and a half, depending on your machine), take it out and put it on a floured surface.

Punch the dough down and let it rest for 5-10 minutes.

Using your hands or a sharp knife, divide the dough in half.  Then, separate each half into three equal sections.  Rolling each section between your palms, elongate each piece into a rope. Cross the ropes over each other into a braid and pinch the ends together.

Note: you can shape the challah any way you like, so you can also make rolls, round challah, or whatever suits you!

Once the dough is shaped, place it on the prepared foil-lined pans.  Cover the dough in plastic wrap and let it rise, about one hour.  Sometimes it takes an hour and a half, depending on the temperature and humidity of your kitchen.

When the dough is risen, preheat the oven to 350.  Once the oven is ready, put in the challah.

10 minutes into baking, rotate the challah pans so that they bake evenly.  Then, put the challah back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes until the tops are golden and the underside is medium brown.

Let the challah cool a bit before eating. However, if you are not eating it right away, wrap it in plastic or foil and then heat again before serving.