CFFC: Sense of Taste

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baking, birthday, cake, CFFC, cookies, cooking, food, food photography, Photo Challenge, photography

People who love to eat are always the best people. – Julia Child

Cookies are made with butter and love.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup. – Ludwig Beethoven

If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn’t have given us grandmothers. – Linda Hemley

A party without cake is just a meeting!

Strawberries are what make life taste wonderful. ― Anthony T. Hincks

Because everything is better with bacon, right?

Happy Wednesday!

This is my post for Cee Nuener’s Fun Foto Challenge: Sense of Taste

Holly Homemaker: The Prequel

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baking, cooking, food, homemaker, humour

Last week I promised to share “Holly Homemaker: The Prequel” but I have been scratching my head ever since to figure out just when Holly began whispering “house & home” suggestions in my ear…

My Mom was never a “domestic goddess” and I don’t think she’ll be offended for me saying so. We ate well, our house was clean and our clothes were always pressed. She sewed “little house on the prairie” dresses and skating costumes for me. She taught me to bake bread in a brick oven and how to embroider. And she tried new, “home-y” things too. We were a happy family.

But looking back, I suspect Holly tortured my Mom before me, with her sweet cinnamon-scented promises of profuse public praise of her skills from her friends and family. So, with motherly wisdom, she tried to protect me from the sad reality that I wasn’t destined to be a domestic goddess either!

I remember asking for an easy bake oven. Whether it was a money issue or fear that I would be creating burnt offerings at too young an age and become discouraged, I never got one. What I did get was a few tiny baking pans and a couple of mini cake mixes, which my mother patiently helped me mix and bake…and smother in chocolate icing to cover that underlying scorched flavour.

My Mom tried cake decorating for awhile and even entered a contest. As I wandered among the creative confections creations, I asked my Mom, “can I do this too?” She paused and looking at me with a smile, said “no”.

But I did learn a few things about home-making from my Mom…how to time my meals so I don’t have soggy veggies with my meat, why I shouldn’t leave plastic items in my oven, and how to beat down a smoke detector with a broom. I moved away from home 21 years ago, and I still open the oven door before I turn it on…even though I NEVER store or hide anything in my oven in the first place. See? I learned…

BUT the lesson I most need to stick, I haven’t seemed to sear into my brain…yet. Just how to oust the skank that invades my home in the Fall. Since posting the things Holly has convinced me to do THIS year, I have baked 2 dozen apple spice cupcakes with brown sugar & cinnamon buttercream icing and a chocolate chip banana cake with cream cheese icing – from scratch! I’ve also made hummus (which my kids won’t eat) and I’m tackling ricotta-filled ravioli tomorrow. Lord willing. Don’t ask about my diet. Just. don’t.

Seriously though, what is wrong with me?

Thanks Mom, for trying to impart your wisdom. If I burn the house down tomorrow, know that I love you!

Happy Weekend!

One Bowl or Two?

Tags

cooking, food, humour

Binge watching My Kitchen Rules (MKR) is having a serious effect on me. Last night, instead of admitting we were having leftovers again, I described our meal as the following:

Roast beef with brown gravy and sautéed red capsicum and mushrooms, together with sweet potato mash. For dessert, warm apple cranberry crisp.

So what if the roast had rested in the fridge for 3 days now? It was resting in gravy! So what if the mushrooms were a little wilty when I started? So what if the crisp wasn’t crispy anymore? It sounded more appetizing than leftovers…again!

Last weekend, I decided to learn how to make pasta. I know…me with all the cooking disasters and crime scene photos! But if I can’t travel to Italy this year,( especially after studying the language for the past year)…surely I could learn to cook like a nonna. And I reasoned that my bread baking skills were proof that I could be certain of success! If not success, than a really great blog post on what NOT to do.

I have been waiting to try my new pasta machine since my birthday, which was in April, but with the brutally hot summer that hasn’t given up its grip yet, I’ve had to keep waiting. And I could wait no longer.

Last Saturday was the “Day“! I spent the morning reading an excellent article on the “hows” and “whys” of making perfect pasta. Then I cleared off my dining room table and spread out my grandmother’s pastry mat, still dusted in flour and remnants from the last time she used it. I set out my bowls, my flour, and my eggs. I set up my iPad with step by step instructions (with photos). And then I stood there, holding Nana’s rolling pin and saying a little prayer…

* * *

If you were expecting a long-winded tantrum on my terribly traumatic flop with flour…for once, you will be disappointed! Sorry!

Everything went scarily smoothly. My egg nest blended together. I only broke a slight sweat kneading the dough.  Hubby manned the crank on the pasta machine for most of the dough, and boiled it up for supper (60-90 seconds per quarter batch of dough). We even tried all the attachments, so we had options: fettucini and tagliolini.

One bowl or two?

Next time, I’ll cut the pasta threads in half before boiling so it’s easier to dish it up. Or I’ll take on the challenge of ravioli!

And I’ll make a double batch because this one…didn’t last long!

Buon Appetito e weekend felice!

Deliver Us From Evil…

Tags

baking, cooking, family, food, humour

Around 5:30 last night, Hubby wandered into the kitchen and asked me, “what are you doing?”

I continued stirring onions in the frying pan but eyed him suspiciously. “I’m cooking”.

“What are you cooking?”

“I’m cooking käsespätzle”

“Bless you!” he replied. And then he started praying, “Deliver us from evil…”

* * *

As the two people who read this blog know, I am not a great cook. I’m not even a fair cook. My family survives on what I feed them…they come from strong Irish stock. And every now and then I try something new.

This weekend, I tried 3 new recipes in 2 days. I blame my Bible study group. We meet every other Sunday evening and each family takes a turn providing dinner. One mother of 4 boys made a yummy Egyptian dish (that I can’t pronounce but starts with an “M”), and then suggested that we each bring an ethnic dish from our backgrounds on our nights (btw, she’s Scottish & Irish)…

* * *

My background is Scottish, Irish and German, but…several generations ago. I searched and chose 4 recipes: German chocolate cake, käsespätzle, Irish wheat bread, and Colcannon. I went grocery shopping and bought everything I needed …for 3 of those recipes. Oops.

“Life is uncertain.Eat dessert first!” – Ernestine Ulmer

I started with German chocolate cupcakes. (I would have baked black forest cupcakes with kirsch whipping cream, but knowing my track record for disaster, I didn’t want to tempt anything involving alcohol). They are divine! (and full of fat)

It went downhill from there…

Then I moved on to Irish wheat bread, which does not reqiure yeast so no time to prove. I got my upper body workout mixing the thick, gelatinous glop and tossed it in the oven. I marked it with a cross, just like the recipe said…

Little Guy thought this cupcake looked too plain…so he added Smarties to his!

The bread was salty and the crust was bitter…just like a few Irishmen I know.

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” – William Butler Yeats

That was Saturday…and my family was still alive and well.

Sunday evening, I made käsespätzle…I mixed my dough carefully, measuring the 250g of flour with our scales (which to date had only weighed wooden toy cars). Then I measured that 250 g with 3 different measuring cups & got 3 different measurements… so maybe I wasn’t always the problem in my cooking disasters?

While the dough was rising for 20 minutes, I sauteed onion rings, and grated gruyere cheese. Yum! The recipe said to sieve the dough through a colander into a pot of boiling water, to form mini cylindrical shapes of “pasta”. Instead, my dough oozed slowly through the holes like viscous yellow snot. Once cooked, it rose to the surface of the water like white, dead & bloated mutant maggots. I choked back the bile forming in my throat and tasted one and I had a flashback to the paste I used to eat in Kindergarten. But I persevered, ditching the colander and using two spoons to drop little blobs of gummy dough into the water until I thought my back would break.

By this time, Hubby was back with pizza.

All was not lost…while it looked…unappetizing (and the onions were undercooked and crunchy – messed those up too apparently), my käsespätzle was delicious.

And I will never make it again!

My family are still alive and well; they have been delivered from evil!

Gut montag!

 

“What’s for Dinner?”

Tags

cooking, disasters, food, humour

It seems many of my  “cooking projects” end up just like my home reno projects – they end up creating more work and by the time it’s over, I’m too tired to enjoy the final product.

This weekend, Hubby fixed the clogged bathroom sink, but he also discovered a disintegrating pipe and a cracked sink, which has been leaking underneath. Small project just grew…

Today I bought groceries to make lasagna sauce from scratch to make a meal for a friend and her family. I also bought the ingredients to try a new chicken recipe. Do you smell disaster?

1. I searched the store for a can of cannellini beans. I don’t know what they are, and after scanning the aisles and identifying over 2 dozen different types of beans, I never found cannellini beans. So I bought a can of white kidney beans. It wasn’t until I got home and read the recipe again that I realized the beans were to be added to the side salad, so eaten raw. I don’t think cold, raw kidney beans taste very good, so now I have beans to make chili (new project #1).

2. I had thawed chicken breasts, not cutlets. The breasts were skinless but bone in, but I thought I could cut the meat off the bones to make my own cutlets. The knife was not the sharpest in the drawer – and I’m talking about me! This old bird had a hard time separating the flesh from the bone of the old birds! There was plenty of meat still on the bones, so I decided to boil them and use the broth to make soup (new project #2).

3. The panko crust didn’t want to stick to the chicken, which was cut too thick. I cut the second batch thinner, then covered them and used the can of kidney beans to pound them too (hey – a new use for project #1?)

I was so focused on the chicken though, that my pot of bones boiled dry, setting off the smoke detector. I opened the doors and dragged a chair to deactivate the smoke detector. Just as I was climbing down from the chair, I heard a voice asking, “What’s for dinner?” My neighbour was out front raking leaves in the dark. I replied, “Burnt offerings”.

By the time,  the cutlets were black rather than golden brown (3), the broth could not be salvaged (2), and I was ready to throw the beans (1).

And I still have to make the lasagna sauce…

Happy Monday (or what is left of it)!

Baking Bread – Savouring Memories

Tags

cooking, humour, memories

With a little fear and trepidation, with a box of tissue close by, I attempted a project 2 weekends ago, one that I haven’t done in over 20 years! Despite my bad track record with cooking and baking, I baked bread…from scratch.

I started planning on Monday so I would have plenty of time and all my ingredients. I started early so I wouldn’t be in a mess by suppertime. I followed the instructions carefully. And as I worked the dough, I started to relax. This was not my first time baking bread, and it was all coming back to me.

My Mom was a volunteer at a local working museum in the small town where we lived. It had once been the home of a prominent family in the town. The house itself was built in 1826, and I knew every crook and cranny (including the secret passage from the servant’s quarters into the master bedroom). I loved going with my Mom, dressing up in period costume and helping her churn butter, spin wool, care for the fire in the kitchen, and bake bread. I’d sit on the corn husk bench near the fireplace and embroider, waiting for the bread to prove so I could punch it.

When I was old enough, she taught me how to set the fire in the brick oven, make and knead the dough, and test the temperature, by feel. If the temperature was too hot, the bread would burn before it was cooked through; not hot enough, and the bread would be undercooked and pasty white. I served at fundraising dinners and helped press apple cider.

I landed my dream summer job in the house the summer before college, and the other student was a good friend. We baked bread and scones, and served Scottish cream tea once a week. On the other days, we cleaned the house, gave tours, played the piano, and worked in the gardens, all in costume. On Sunday afternoons, if it was quiet, we’d have our own tea party with cream and scones.

Unfortunately, that summer a group of “artsy” retirees took over the board governing the house with big ideas on how to turn this lovely small town icon into an establishment for the elite. They began to transform it from a home to a business. In the process, they wounded many volunteers who had served in the house for many years. The curator and her assistant quit, and were replaced by an “over anxious, uptight red-lipped broad” who knew nothing and liked to flounce around the house in a long dress and assert her authority. My friend and I were caught in the crossfire. At the end of the summer, I said good-bye to a cherished childhood haunt, my “dream house”, and I’ve never been back.

While I worked the dough, I savoured the happier times (and the smell – oh my!) And then we sampled…and it tasted even better than it looked.

Maybe after all the cooking disasters, I have found something that I enjoy and can do well…but I’d better try it again before I make that pronouncement. It could have just been a fluke!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

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cooking, disasters, Photo Challenge, photography, Weekly Photo Challenge

My friend kindly gave me a pile of tomatoes from her garden. Yum! The green ones were baked into a pie and frozen for Thanksgiving. This is our first year without my Grandmother.

The rest were lovingly washed and placed on my windowsill to ripen. Two weeks later, they were still changing.

This afternoon, with fear and trembling, and despite my terrible cooking record, I took matters into my own hands. And since I’m learning Italian, I decided to make a rich pomodoro sauce with my mutant tomaoes. My friend’s hard work would not go in vain (or to the guinea pigs)!

To make a long story short, I chopped, stewed, peeled, cried, begged and cajoled these tomatoes into the yummiest…tomato soup!

To see more Change photos, click here.

Mmmm…Marshmallows

Tags

cooking, disasters, food, humour, sweets

Berry Blush. Toasted Coconut. Vanilla Bean. Maple Bacon. Pineapply Rosemary.

Just a handful of flavours gourmet marshmallow makers have dreamed up. “Mallow artists” are revisiting and heightening this long overlooked fluffy delicacy and waving “good-bye” to the spongy, store-bought variety so many of us savoured around the campfire as kids.

Those mass-produced chemically-induced blobs of goo on the grocery store shelves were put there in the 1940’s. Marshmallows date back to ancient Egypt, where marsh mallow root juice was used as a thickening agent for early cough drops. Centuries later French confectioners added egg whites and sugar to create meringues.

For most of us, marshmallows conjure up nostalgic images of families perched on metal lawn chairs around a campfire. I have some of those nostalgic memories too. Golden-brown on the outside with a hot, sticky melted centre, at the end of a stick we pulled from the bush. Mom made us wash our faces and hands, sticky with gooey guts and consequently caked in sand and pine needles too, before we were slid into our sleeping bags.

I also have memories of marshmallows bursting in flames before it turned black and fell into the flames. On one occasion, in a desperate attempt to save my treat, I waved my stick so hard that my flaming marshmallow became a flaming projectile. In slow motion, it flew to my right and hit my brother in my knee. I ran to get the medical kit while he screamed in agony, as the melted blob burned his skin.

I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me.

Marshmallows are a combination of corn syrup, sugar, water, salt and gelatin. When heated, mixed and whipped, it becomes a delightful treat! No baking required. Marshmallow makers say that they’re finicky at first, but easy once you’ve perfected the knack. I don’t know… I don’t exactly have a knack for baking, even the easy things……like rice krispie squares with the store-bought variety of marshmallows.

What a Mess: “If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” – Will Rogers

I think I’d better leave this project for the “mallow artists”.

Source: From Cupcake Craze to Puffy Phase

My Black Friday Fiasco

Tags

cooking, humour, shopping

If only I had known that a Black Friday sale would nearly be the death of me…

We bought a stove online at a big box store’s site – nothing fancy but enough to eliminate one of my excuses for bad cooking. As promised, we received a recorded message with a delivery date and time, along with a phone number to reschedule should the date and time be inconvenient. So I called…

Call #1: I got the correct company but not the correct department. The service representative I reached had no clue what I was talking about and he kept suggesting that I call the store where I purchased the stove. I didn’t purchase it at a store. We talked in circles until I finally volunteered to hang up and try my call again.

Call #2: This time I got the right department but the representative was not the sharpest knife in the drawer (I had a flashback to my experience with Bambi). She kept confusing weekday and weekend, and my request for “after 3:30 p.m.” to “before 3:30 p.m.” After multiple explanations and corrections, she assured me that it would arrive on the following Friday after 3:30 p.m. with a confirmation voicemail to arrive the day before.

On the Wednesday evening, we moved the dining table and chairs to make room. Thursday was a “snow day – an unusually early snow storm hit the city. I ended up picking up work and bringing it home. That meant I was here when the voicemail came confirming my Friday delivery between 9:10 and 2:10.

Call #3: I immediately called and explained that I had been assured our delivery would be scheduled for afternoon. But according to this representative, the other representative had no authority to choose a time. And because our postal code placed us near the warehouse, we would have to accept a morning delivery. After a great deal of arguing, the only options given were to a) reschedule; or b) let the men attempt delivery, at which time they would leave a slip with the phone number to reschedule. I pointed out the flaw in his logic – my house still had not moved. I was still close to the warehouse and could most certainly be guaranteed another morning delivery. We could reschedule 50 times and I still wouldn’t have my stove. Finally, in frustration, I asked if I should cancel the order and take my business elsewhere. He told me to go ahead. I asked for the supervisor and was told one was not available. I pushed…he put me on hold. When he came back with the promise that a supervisor would call me back within an hour, I knew it was hopeless.

They tried to deliver the stove the next day. I was not home…

I emailed head office. They were no help.

Call #4: I called the local number left by the delivery gentlemen. I explained everything in as few words as possible. She apologized and explained again that a time could not be given, however, she was willing to send an email to the store to get “permission” to deliver it after 3:30 p.m. I didn’t bother pointing out that I didn’t buy it in a store…

I received a confirmation voicemail message last Monday, for my delivery…between 11:30 and 2:45.

Call #5: I spoke very quietly. I explained how many times I have called and the treatment I’ve received. I asked if there was any possibility I could schedule either a Saturday or a day after Christmas when Hubby is on holidays. In the spirit of the holidays, she booked it for this past Saturday.

I was disappointed on Friday when I got home from work. I expected a voicemail confirming my delivery for Saturday and with my luck, after 3:30 p.m. (rolling my eyes).  Instead, the highly anticipated voice message was strangely absent…

Call #6: Yes, I called to confirm my own delivery. Either something had gone horribly wrong and I would be back to square one, OR (like Elaine on Seinfeld), I was on a list somewhere and they were scared to call me.

The stove arrived before 2 p.m. I christened it by making Kraft dinner, peanut-butter marshmallow squares, and a turkey dinner.

Now I need to learn how to cook…

Holly Homemaker Must Die!

Tags

cooking, food, home, homemaker, humour

Holly Homemaker visited again this weekend. It’s always around this time of year, when the air is crisp and the leaves are golden. It’s been two years since she fled my home in tears. It was either my incompetence or my bad attitude!

After raking leaves for the morning, I dusted off the food processor and spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to put it together. Finally I chopped and buzzed and ground up a large head of cabbage (over 12 cups). Then I used the food processor to chop carrots and celery. You know those movies with the stupid Mom who doesn’t put the cover on and the food sprays everywhere…

When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. It’s only painful for those around you…It’s the same when you’re stupid.

I have to remember to check the toaster or someone might get a nasty surprise the next time they make toast.

I should have asked Holly to bring celery seed though, since my cupboards were bare. I made the coleslaw any way.

And then I used the food processor to chop cauliflower for soup. The recipe says to blend it after it’s been cooked and now I know why…raw cauliflower turns into dust like little Styrofoam pieces that stick to everything…

Doesn’t that look appetizing?

By the time I was done, I had a huge mess to clean up. There were bits of veggies all over the floor, the countertops, and the sink. And Holly? That sweet smiling domestic goddess had disappeared out the back door, leaving it all for me to clean it up! If she visits again, I promise you, it will end badly…

 

Your honour, I swear…it was self-defence!