Faith is Baking

I am proud to say that Faith made the dessert for the rehearsal dinner last week.  We kept it simple because no matter how fancy a dessert I make, nothing pleases a crowd on a summer night more than brownie sundaes.

The recipe?

Put a brownie in a bowl.  Put vanilla ice cream on top.  Pour chocolate sauce over it.  If you’re feeling inspired, offer other toppings.  This time I put out sprinkles and pecans.

Faith made three pans of brownies that we cut up and set out and they were scrumptious.  Just the right combo of chewy on the edges and moist in the middle.  She did a great job.

It’s a good thing she’s been practicing on us first.

Like with these chocolate chip cookies she made a couple of weeks ago.

I walked in the door after work to the MOST amazing smell of freshly baked cookies.  I headed, excitedly, for the kitchen and saw these rather … round looking treats.  They were in the exact shape they had been when Faith put the dough on the cookie pans.  Absolutely no spreading had occurred during the baking process.  I tried to be encouraging and picked one up and bit into it.

The taste wasn’t bad at all but the texture was exceptionally crunchy.  Biscotti like actually.

Trying to not seem critical, I gently questioned her about what ingredients she used.  She went down the items listed in the recipe and admitted, “I wasn’t really sure what shortening is, so I used this.  I’m pretty sure it’s shortening.”

And then she pulled out the big tub of corn starch.

Corn starch?

That is really not shortening.  Actually, I’m pretty impressed the cookies turned out at all.  We dubbed them “low-fat” and they mostly got eaten.  So if you ever want a short cut to making biscotti, just sub corn starch for the shortening.

Hoping to boost her confidence after the chocolate chip biscotti, I left the ingredients out for her to make lemon cookies from a cake mix a couple of days later.

I came home to these:

There were a few that weren’t too browned to eat, but Faith and her friend had polished those off and left us with brown lemon cookies.

I may have tossed them, when she wasn’t looking.

But she had redeemed herself with the spectacular brownies.  And I am more than happy to try her baking attempts any time at all.

When it comes to baked goods, I’m not picky.

How To Attend A Potluck

A good potluck event is one of life’s joys.  You walk into a party with your dish and nestle it onto a table full of culinary goodness prepared by friends or family or coworkers who care about you and want you to have the best.  Walking along the table with your Chinet, you can pile it high with casseroles and salads and muffins until you reach the desserts.  Oh, the desserts! At this point you have to just decide to come back for those so you can try a little taste of everything.

It’s marvelous.

A bad potluck event is sad.  Tragic even.  You walk in with high expectations only to be met with the pathetic sight of deli fried chicken, still in the bag.  The chicken sits next to plastic containers of store-bought potato salad, slightly congealed along the edges.  But the potato salad is still a better choice than the dried out veggie plate from the grocery store with the container of nasty dip.

And let’s not even discuss the catastrophe of store bought cookies and cheap cupcakes.

Over the past few years, I’ve had occasion to attend several potlucks of the second variety.  While I hate to generalize, what these events have in common is … they are largely populated with people under the age of 30.  I find this to be truly alarming.  Is the art of potluck going to be lost?  Do today’s coming of age adults lack the wherewithal to create lovely and enjoyable shared dish suppers?

The thought makes me shudder and thus I have created the following:  A primer on potluck attendance.  In it I will cover three types of attendees:

1. Those that absolutely lack the time and/or skills to put together a food dish of any kind.
2. Those with minimal time and/or skills.
3. Those that want to grow their potluck attending skills.

Type One: Those Short on Time or Skills

So you can’t put together a decent pasta salad or bake cookies.  It’s okay.  You can still be a vibrant, contributing member of the potluck party.  In fact - be the first to sign up so those that come behind you can’t steal your thunder.  What will you sign up for?

Beverages.

Get a large cooler, fill it with ice and add an assortment of canned pop and bottled waters.  If there will be children there, throw in some juice pouches.  I find that people like the kind of pop they don’t normally purchase for themselves.  Flavors like grape, strawberry or root beer are always a big hit.  

Without going anywhere near your stove, you’ll have people thanking  you for saving them from the watered down lemonade in the big orange jug.  Potluck hero status!

Alternate plan:  offer to bring rolls and then go to a decent bakery to buy them.  The key here is to not just plop them down in the plastic bag, but to put them in a large bowl so it looks like you care.

Type Two:  Those With Minimal Skills or Time

If you have a knife and a large bowl, there are a couple of things here that are surefire hits that you can accomplish in under fifteen minutes.

1) Watermelon.  Buy a big one, slice it into wedges and put it in a bowl. Everyone loves watermelon.

2) Tossed Salad.  Dump two bags of Romaine lettuce into the bowl.  Add a bag of sliced carrots and maybe some of that pre-cut broccoli.  Finish off with a pint of grape tomatoes and a bag of croutons.  Set a bottle or two of dressing next to the bowl.  

If you’d like to get fancy, throw in a small bag of chopped pecans, Craisins and bacon bits.  Poppy seed or Raspberry Vinaigrette are good choices here.

3) Angel Food cake with Berries.  Buy an Angel Food cake and slice it up.  Thaw out a container of frozen, sweetened strawberries.  Arrange the cake slices on a plate and put the berries in a bowl (with a spoon) next to it.  People can take a piece of cake and top it with the berries.  Bonus points if you also provide a can of spray whipped cream.  

 Type Three: Those Who Wish To Grow as Potluck Attendees

I’m just going to go ahead and toot my own horn here by posting some recipes from this site.  I’ll justify it by claiming that they are tried and true potluck favorites.  Because they are.  I’ve selected things that a novice cook can do.

1) Kahlua Pork

Go ahead.  Be bold.  Sign up to bring a “main dish”.  If you have a crock pot, you can do this.  Just three ingredients plus a package of hamburger buns and you will OWN that potluck!

2)  Southwestern Black Bean and Rice Salad

If you can cook rice, you can make this. The rest is just chopping and stirring.  

3) Cookie Dough Brownies

Cheat and use a boxed brownie mix (9x13 pan size) and these are easy as can be.

4)  Susie’s Chocolate Cake

This is one of the first things that Reagan learned to bake.  It does require that you buy or borrow a Bundt pan, but since it uses a mix as a starting point, it’s great for novice bakers.

So here you go:  Eight whole choices of things to bring to your next pot luck that do not come pre-packaged and pathetic.  Go out there and make me proud! 

Resolutions - The Same as Last Year. And The Year Before. And The Year Before That. And The Year . . .

Over the past month or so, I ate everything.  As in, all the food.  All of it.  There are probably people starving in this city because I ate ALL. THE. FOOD.

Or at least all of the food that contained butter and/or sugar.

Because all of the very best foods do, you know.

The result of eating ALL THE FOOD is tight pants which I do not enjoy and we all know I’m too cheap to go out and buy new ones so it’s repentance time.  I have purged the house of baked goods, candy, chips and crackers (and by “purged” I mean I ate all that was left).  I made a gigantic batch of roasted vegetables which I divided into five portions for my lunch all week.  For breakfast I’m eating oatmeal with almond milk. (Again, made a big batch on Sunday night to reheat during the week.) Snacks are fruit in the morning and 25 almonds mid-afternoon.

25 almonds.  NOT 24.  Because then I would think about that extra almond until dinner.

All week long I am making new recipes for dinner from the latest edition of Cooking Light.  Last night we had Moo Shu Lettuce wraps which everyone but Hayden declared to be delicious.  Hayden hates lettuce which kind of makes a lettuce wrap unappealing I suppose.

Tonight’s dinner was so good that I’m posting the recipe In The Fridge.  It involves prosciutto and I have to confess:  I have never cooked with prosciutto before.  I always sub thinly sliced ham because it’s much cheaper.

Never again.

People.  Prosciutto is SO MUCH better.  More flavorful x 50.  I’m in love with it.

I also made polenta for the first time and guess what?  Polenta is just a fancy word for corn meal.  Who knew?  Ok fine, maybe you did but it was news to me.  It made a flavorful substitution for mashed potatoes (which I loathe anyway.)

It was so good that portion control would have been a major struggle had I not made exactly enough for four people.  

Portion control?

Definitely not my favorite thing in life.

So how about you guys? Anyone else on a healthy food kick?  Any “good for you” recipes you’re loving? 

Milli Vanilli and Thanksgiving. Such An Obvious Connection.

Hey there.

Thanksgiving is in five days.

Did you know this?  Or are you trying to live in grocery store denial like I am?  The grocery store is so hard.  First you have to look at your recipes, then you have to make a list and then you have to put on clothes that are NOT pajamas and actually drive to the store.  Once you’re there, you have the whole going up and down the aisles and checking things off your list bother which you have to do while there are other people in your way.

The nerve of people - wanting to grocery shop at the same time as me.

Can you make it through the store without having to backtrack at least once to an aisle you’ve already gone through to get something you missed?  You can? Oh.  Yeah.  Me too.

Not.

(Do people still say “not”? Also?  Is “not” what that voice is saying in the background of this video? I’ve always wondered.)

Anyhoo … once we get through Thanksgiving I have to actually, really start thinking about Christmas.  I love Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  I really do.  It’s the journey between Thanksgiving and Christmas that I do not love.  More lists, more shopping … 

Ah well.  At least there is a lot of baking involved and I love baking.  Speaking of which, I made Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies the other day and took some to work, and there was an honest to goodness battle for the last cookie.  Make them sometime in the next month.  The colors and flavors are perfect for this time of year.

If you don’t have your menu for Thanksgiving set yet, here are my top suggestions:

Pumpkin Crunch: a great alternative to Pumpkin Pie.  It’s SO good.

Sage Sausage Stuffing:  I am all about stuffing on Thanksgiving.  Seriously.  You could hand me a plate of stuffing and a piece of pie and I would not offer a peep of complaint.

Brown Sugar Ham: My grandpa hated turkey so we always had a ham and a bird on Thanksgiving.  This recipe is great because you use the crock pot.  You think about the ham for 10 minutes in the morning and then not again until it’s time to eat. 

Peanut Butter Pie:  Hayden’s favorite.  This takes about 15 minutes to make and requires no cooking or baking.  Easy, easy, easy.

Strawberry Pretzel Salad:  So wrong and yet so delicious.  Only in the midwest would a mixture of Jello, cream cheese and pretzels be called a salad.  If you are serving food snobs this holiday, you MUST make this salad.  They will turn up their noses and politely take a small spoonful to be polite and then run back to the pan to gobble up the rest because it’s so good.   

What is the MUST have item on your Thanskgiving menu?

Them Apples

You want a quick way to check how my life is going?

Go look in my storage room.

Last year the upright freezer was empty and the shelves were bare.

This year the freezer has 8 pie fillings, 3 ziploc bags of cookies, a dozen pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (there were 2 dozen but I sent some back with Reagan yesterday), several loaves of peach bread, 4 bags of grated zucchini (for brownies or vegetarian chili) and batches of frozen peach puree for various recipes.  The shelves of the storage room have six quarts of apple-pear sauce and 8 pints of apple butter.

When I am happy I store food.  Weird but true.

The whole last week I’ve been processing apples.  It started with a trip to the apple orchard.  We’ve been going to Martin’s Hillside Orchard since the kids were little though it’s been a few years since we’ve had time because Reagan’s fall volleyball schedule always packed the weekends.  If I remember correctly, the last time we went, we pulled a wagon behind us which the kids filled with 80+ pounds of apples.

That was too many.

This time it was just four of us (family outings with one kid gone feel weird, just so you know and makes for a sad picture) so I told them to just fill two grocery sacks each and we’d call it good.

Guess how much eight grocery sacks of apples weigh?

76 pounds.

Sigh.

It wasn’t Hayden’s fault.  Hayden was determined to pick only apples out of reach, thus I think he only filled half a sack himself.

It took him three full minutes to pick one apple from the top of this tree.

This was the tree right beside him.

Faith and I quickly ditched the boys and went for the trees dripping with Jonathans.

We quickly filled our bags and headed back to Rich and Hayden to help them finish up with Jonagolds and Fujis.  The Fujis are for eating, but I had plans for the other varieties.

First up was applesauce.  Normally I use Golden Delicious for this, but they weren’t quite ripe yet so I crossed my fingers with the Jonathans and Jonagolds.  The first batch was actually a little tart for my taste (I don’t like to add sugar) but that was ok, because I made it into apple butter.

You really should make some apple butter.  There is no better smell at the end of the day, than walking into a house filled with the aroma of apple butter bubbling in the slow cooker.  Mouth watering.  You don’t even have to make your own applesauce to make the apple butter.

One of my very favorite gadgets of all time is the thingy I used to make applesauce or tomato sauce.  I don’t know what it’s called … food mill maybe? but it’s magical.

You don’t have to core or peel the apples, just quarter them and cook them in a big pot until they’re soft and then dump them into the top.

Then you just turn the crank and apple sauce comes pouring out through the screen.

While all the seeds, hulls and peels plop out the end.

When you’re done, you have a big pan of hot applesauce and a disaster area in your kitchen.

That last picture is of the first batch I made which was pink from the red skins of the Jonathans - another reason I usually use Golden Delicious.

For the second batch, I had a bunch of over-ripe pears that I threw in to cook with the apples and Oh. My. Word. did the combination make the BEST applesauce ever.  The pears made it sweeter and added an extra layer of flavor that’s just delicious.  They also made the sauce more golden in color which people seem to like.

So now I have all these jars of home made goodness and a freezer full of pie potential and I am torn because while it’s all delicious, it was so much danged work that I don’t want to eat any of it and deplete my supply!

It’s a conundrum I tell you.

But I love pie enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it.