Cooking MeMes...you know I love them

ROFL...Paula Deen, you silly bitch!

That's A Lot of Grease and Other Grossness

Four months of oil and bacon grease

Guess Where I Am!



SQUEE!!!



Celebrating a Milestone with a Cake Wreck

This week, my blog got its 6,000th page view. This is a totally awesome feat considering the humorless garbage I post on here. Of course, the bulk of the people are looking for wedding cakes with butterflies on them, but that's besides the point. Hopefully, those folks are sticking around long enough to read other content and enjoying it enough to visit more often than once. You never know, or can guess, what brings a person to the site unless you directly ask them...and they actually respond.

I'm rambling...let's get our ugly cake on.

A few of you from the beginning probably remember the incident of the exploded Banana Cake Bomb. If not, refresh your memory. The main reason this cake went so horribly wrong the first time was because I used a pan that was WAY too small for the batter. Only after I had coated the inside of my in-law's new convection oven did I read the fine print that said, "Requires a over-sized pan." Armed with this knowledge, (and some over-ripe bananas) I thought it was time for a banana cake redo. And as we've learned, kids, knowing is half the battle.


See, told you so.

 If you haven't noticed, we tend to buy a lot of bananas with the best intentions of eating them. Only later we find the forgotten fruit causing a serious gnat infestation in our fridge a few weeks days later. When looking back over the history of the blog, it is sad how many times I have had to find an emergency preparation method for bananas. Just do a search for the "banana" at the top and you will find a good deal of the posts. The sad thing is, I really do love bananas, I'm just really bad at choosing a healthy snack over Rock-o-licious Peanut Butter Cups. I mean, who would choose a banana over awesome-tastic candy? But I really DO love bananas. See, I had this awesome sushi the other night that had bananas in it.

Dragon-Naner Sushi. om nom!

So, instead of making banana cake or pudding, I went for the cake. I had intended to make a cake when the blog hit 5,000 page views, but I procrastinated. Shame on me. This was probably a jinxed cake from the start. Kind of a, "have you learned nothing about procrastinating" warning message. I mean really, who bakes a cake at a weird, random 6 number anyway? Well, I do. Therefore, we have a wreck.

I started by trying to avoid coating my horrible stove with banana napalm by halving the recipe. My thighs have no need for an over-sized cake anyway. The baking was uneventful, thank God, and I had 2 beautiful rounds of cake resting on my stove. They needed to cool before being iced with cream cheese, so what did I do? What any red-blooded American would: went out for a sushi dinner, ran full speed into Spec's Liquor at 8:56 p.m. and slid my bottle of Jack Daniels over the check-out scanner before the 9 p.m. close like I was stealing home plate, drove home, drank profusely, and passed out watching Iron Chef: Battle Cabbage. What? Isn't that what you do on any given Saturday night?

I woke up the next morning, went to the kitchen to make breakfast, and noticed my two cakes still sitting on the stove top. Hmmm....guess they're cool enough to ice now! Well, the napalm-like material of the bananas thwarted my ability to get them out of the pan in a single piece. They crumbled, stuck, and generally made a huge mess of my counter top. I whipped up some cream cheese icing and started spreading icing on the first layer. Obviously, the icing was too cold as it pulled tons of little crumbs up when I spread the icing. *sigh* Icing a cake when you are hungover does not usually end well. Long story short, I ran out of icing and was too lazy tired to make any more. So here it is America, my "Woo! I've got 6,000 hits on My Blog" banana cake wreck.

Ummm...nom?

My Friends Love Me and Other Wordlessness

My two loves, birds and cooking.

Wine FAIL and Other Wordlessness

Doh!

April's Fool: That Would Be Me

Setting: I'm driving down the road on a Monday evening, trying desperately not to fly off the most pot-hole ridden street in Houston. I'm listening to NPR and decided that I am going to blow my head off if I heard just ONE more story about civil unrest or natural disasters. (I get it, it's a bad situation over there. Can we just have one other story type or must my entire 2 hours of commute each day be this: tsunami, earthquake, Libya, nuclear meltdown, Egypt, Gaddafi, nuclear power, Libya, Libya, Ivory Coast, Rick Perry dicking over education and making a lot of racist comments, Libya, Libya.)

*Suddenly my phone rings*
(So weird, my phone just rang as I finished typing that)

It's my lovely husband. He has come into a possible barter situation with some high end baking tins for muffins. He said that our buddy Patterson was in possession of said tins and was willing to barter for Rock-o-liscious Peanut Butter Cups.




A far better picture of Patterson than my earlier portrait.


Jon asked me what a fair barter was for the tins. He started at 6 dozen PB cups.

That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that would be the equivalent of 36 packages of the store bought Reese's. That's a package a week for most of a year.

I get a little dizzy. That is a lot of work. I waver. Do I really want these tins THAT bad? In a shaky voice, I tell Jon that I feel that number might be a little high. Would Patterson settle for a smaller number? We proceed to seriously barter for the next 5 minutes until we agree on 4 dozen. I still feel a little shafted, but I detour to the poor-people grocery store for chocolate.

At the store, I found a few bricks of bulk melting chocolate for a reasonable price for the very first time. I carefully read the package to see if it was the dreaded milk chocolate that would cause problems noted in previous posts. Although it had some different ingredients than the baker's chocolate, I got it anyway to save time and money. A one pound brick of  bulk chocolate was the same price as a half pound brick of the Baker's chocolate.

Yes, I like my chocolate with Jack...

I drag ass out of the store, get home, cook dinner, then set to work cranking out candy. I started melting the bulk chocolate, which, by the way, melted horribly like the milk chocolate did for some reason. After about a dozen are complete, Jon stepped in to start helping. He sweetly started me a second pb ball, and started chopping the second brick to melt. After awhile, he steps out to go watch the NCAA Championship Game. I put two completed muffin tins of candy in the fridge to harden.

Jon stepped back in a few minutes later to help me finish of the 3rd and 4th dozen. I sigh with exhaustion. Then, Jon asked if I could make him a special one (read extra fat with 2 layers of peanut butter and chocolate.) I told him I would, except there was a slight problem: we were coming up a little short on chocolate for the 4th dozen. We were about 5 cups shy. He told me that was OK and not to worry about making the full dozen, that we would just stop when we ran out of chocolate.

I got upset because that meant I would have to, at some point, pay Patterson the additional 5 or so cups I owed him. This meant another trip to the store, and another evening making a mess of the kitchen. Jon seems oblivious to why I am upset despite my whining clearly thought out communication. Then he  begins to realize why I'm so upset when I say, "I am almost to the 4 dozen, I just want to finish them out with whatever chocolate we have in the cabinet."

Jon: *blank stare* Four dozen?
Me: Yea, you said Patterson wanted 4 dozen for the tins.
Jon: Yea, but you only have half a dozen here and 1 dozen in the fridge. You're not even close to 4 dozen.
Me: Umm... open the fridge

The only food in our fridge

Jon: Oh my...
Me: What?
Jon: I was only joking about the 4 dozen. You couldn't tell?
Me: EXCUSE ME?
Jon: I was only joking about that number, you just had to make a few for Patterson. I didn't honestly mean for you to make a whole 4 dozen.
Me: *facepalm*

*On a side note, I am now the proud owner of 2 restaurant quality muffin tins. Jon took some of the cups to Patterson at work today. Here is Patterson's response: "These are better than Reese’s!  They’re hearty like they’re full of sustenance.  You should sell give me some of them around Christmas."

Keep dreaming Patterson, you should have enough to last you until about Christmas if you only eat 2 a week, for the rest of the year.

My new pans

Bored at the Office and Other Wordlessness

Rotten Bananas: Take 2

We buy an awful lot of bananas around this joint, and dammit if they don't go bad before we get a chance to use them. I think I've Banana Breaded out everyone, so I thought perhaps a banana pudding would be a better way to go this time. I know it's almost foolishly simple to list how to make it here, but there are some people who cook so bad, they may need my assistance in getting it right. So, here we go.

Ingredients
1 box of instant vanilla pudding
2-4 medium sized bananas that are as spotty as a Las Vegas Grandma's forearms, chopped into small discs
1 box of Nilla Wafers Cookies
2 cups of cold milk

In a bowl, whisk together the instant pudding and the 2 cups of milk. It will soft set in about 3 to 5 minutes of whisking. When it soft sets, put it in the fridge to chill.

Next find you a good casserole dish or a large bowl to make make the final product in. You can get all Polly Perfect on it and make concentric circles of wafers and thin banana slices if you like. I, on the other hand, just made a bottom crust of cookies, the slapped a good mess of naners on top of those.

Fuck Polly Perfect

Then, you will need to add your chilled pudding. You can do a thin layer, then add some more bananas, wafers and more pudding. Or, you can just dump in your pudding like me. No appreciates your artistry here.

After that, you can add a nice layer of bananas and wafers to the top portion. I like to crumble a few for texture and prettiness. You don't have to. You can be all pirate's treasure on yours and trick your guests into thinking they are just eating plain pudding until they chomp into some mystery item. Is it banana, cookie, or toe nail? Only you will know the truth and you can giggle menacingly at their psychological torture. BWAHAHAHAHA!

On Nom

Sunday Suppers: Homemade Veggie Broth to Chicken Noodle Soup

A recent gift of homemade chicken broth got me thinking about how to make my own stock at home. I go through so much stock nowadays because of all these high-falutin' recipes that it is becoming rediculous to spend that much money on a can/box of stock. I thought the easist broth to make would probably be vegetable, plus it would clean out all those random veggies that were racing sneaking towards going bad. There, how's is that for being green and not wasting money?

I found a simple recipe that basically says take any aeromatic veggie, chop into 1 inch chunks, and boil with some spices for about 30 minutes. They listed a variety of vegetables you could include, but here is how I rolled:

4-5 ribbs of celery with some leaves
1 large onion
3 large carrots
5-6 cloves of minced garlic
Hefty sprinkle of thyme and parsley
2 bay leaves
a good pinch of salt

Nom

Some other veggies you may consider including: Green onions, mushrooms, potato peels (washed of course), bell peppers, chard, pea pods, basil, fennel, eggplant, corn cobs, asparagus butts, you name it.

First thing you got to do, aside from cutting your washed veg into 1" chunks, is throw about a tablespoon of olive oil in the bottom of  a soup pot and heat to high. Then, throw in your 1" chopped veggies. Enjoy how aeromatic your house is about to smell. I seriously dragged Jon off the couch while he was The Sweet 16 to come and smell. I was in foodie heaven. If Julia Child's house had a smell, it probably smelled like this...and butter.

Moving on.

Let your veg weep (let go of water) for 5 to 10 minutes. Stir frequently lest you have a charred flavor to your broth. Add 2 quarts of water and then BTB-RTS as Chef Anne would say. (Bring To Boil - Reduce To Simmer). Simmer for 30 minutes uncovered. This is how it will start to look

Om Nom

The next step is to seive out the solids and take only the liquid bits.

"taking the liquid bits"

Then, you are left with all the veggie mush. The broth recipe said to discard the remaining veg stuff. I thought that was a lot of hooha. What a waste. I sat around and thought about what I could do with all that awesome veg, and EUREKA! I got an idea. All of that stuff goes into a chicken noodle soup, so that is what I made. Saved time and money.

Because we aren't big chunks of veggie eaters, I took about 3/4 of veggies and pulverized them in a food processor. That gave me a nice thick puree that fattened up the broth a little. I added some more water and some chopped up chicken breasts. Again, BTBRTS for about 30 minutes. Season to taste.

About 10 minutes before you are ready to serve, add some noodles. I, unfortuantely, added the noodles like 45 minutes ahead and they got a bit mushy. My bad, I was waiting on a loaf of bread to bake. Oh well, lesson learned. Not bad for a first try though.

Chicken Mush-Noodle Soup