Before:
After:
Apologies for the blurry ‘after’ pic. In a rush to get to the eating part.
My dough slicing left something to be desired. So smaller bits were smoodged together to make right-size pieces. That’s where I go freestyle.
We’ve all endured them: The weeks that start with so much promise and fall apart. Nothing horrific, just the water torture of small events insistently eroding time and energy.
Then Thursday rolls around and I’m scratching my head, wondering what I can get done.
At least I made a cake, but even that started with little promise. It’s King Arthur Flour’s Golden Vanilla Cake. The recipe begins with mixing the butter and dry ingredients. Initially the consistency didn’t look right so I upped the mixer speed – not thinking that there’s no liquid yet.
After cleaning up the cloud of flour that precipitated on the counter, then baking the cake, I wasn’t satisfied. Again, the consistency: edges drier than I thought they should be, center on the brink of too moist.
The frosting was fine, but by now I was obsessed with consistency and didn’t like the way it spread.
Even the first piece of cake elicited a ‘whatever’ response. Too soon after baking, I think. At this point, I was pretty much Lucy in Peanuts.
For some reason, the hubs was mad for it. Had a second piece late in the day.
By the next day, I was pleased with the outcome. And as the week goes on, the cake tastes better. Could even make it again.
There might be just enough cake to get me through the week. Thank goodness.
Well, not so sure about coffee sugar. But as with almost all things Fishs Eddy, this made me smile. And that is a good way to start a Monday.
How about making this baking week? Baked good go well with coffee and I’ve just found two new recipes to try.
Nothing like focus to invigorate the creative mind.
The truth of it: Buying roasted chicken has spoiled me. Reasonably priced and ready to go. But the hubs loves to roast chicken on the grill. Variety of flavors, he says.
So I shrugged at the Whole Foods Market sale, whereas he stepped right up. The first chicken was quite tasty. Why not get two (or three) more? And so he did.
That’s Italian-seasoned on the left, mesquite on the right. And a third smoking on the grill. All the bones, etc., will end up in the same pot for stock. That ought to create an interesting taste sensation.
So I did Big Cooking again the other day. Green Soup, two kinds of cookies, then roasted a chicken and roasted a beef roast.
What did we eat for dinner? Leftover Chinese food. . . Something is just wrong about that.
Good people, I submit to you Exhibit A:
Of all the ‘junk’ foods I have readily, guiltily, repeatedly consumed, chicken nuggets have not been one. Until Super Bowl Sunday. A bag of Panko Chicken Nuggets, conveniently on sale at Costco this month, found its way into our cart and thus into the freezer.
Panko bread crumbs don’t trip my taste trigger, and enough chicken is served in other manners in this household. The hubs, however, likes Panko bread crumbs to the tune of two big bags (yes, Costco again) in the house, sprinkled to heavy accumulation on spaghetti and lasagna. On chicken nuggets, even better.
Exhibit A was first opened on Super Bowl Sunday. Then for an evening snack. Then actually for dinner one evening, a new low. Being a Costco bag, there’s still a few servings left. Do I like them? Not sure I but I can’t stop eating them. They’re a perfect carrier for my favorite condiment: a blend of catsup and hot sauce.
All fine and good, you might well think. Here’s the kicker: The sale ends today and I’m thinking of getting another bag. The apocalypse might be coming. . .
Winter remains, as expected, here in the Midwest. Mid-day temps mostly in the teens all week. Turning the oven on for a couple of hours to make the Pasta alla Vecchia Bettolana seemed an absolutely splendid idea.
Also absolutely splendid is this sauce! I anticipated a flavorful outcome, and using Italian plum tomatoes (rather than plain ol’ supermarket variety) no doubt added to the flavor. Still super rich even after cutting the cream by a quarter.
Now I’m trying to figure out why/if the oven cooking vs. simmering on the stove makes a difference. A good friend with oodles of cooking experience (former food editor for a major magazine) wasn’t convinced method significantly affected outcome in this case. My guess was the sauce perhaps steams rather than simmers. She shrugged – not a big diff.
Need to do a little investigating – and with at least an hour and a half of cooking time, maybe that’s time smartly spent researching.
Yes, the slow food, slow cooking thing isn’t new. And I was raised to cook mostly from scratch. Tomato sauce for pasta or pizza or whatever does taste better after simmering on the stove for a goodly while. At the same time, however, taking hours to make a meal just to zen out on the process doesn’t cut it for me. Keeping it real here!
So Ina Garten’s Pasta alla Vecchia Bettolana featured on Food52 has me intrigued. Again, nothing new to the world but new to my experience. So I’m all in for trying this. Only I’ll double the recipe because, well, that’s what I do. . .
Image from Food52
Why do I cook as though the infantry is coming for dinner?! Something in my upbringing gave me the impression it’s a waste of time and effort to not go big when cooking. There’s an efficiency expert hiding in some corner of my brain. This is rinsing kale and spinach by the boatload for Green Soup. Really – this soup is a fabulous thing even if the eponymous label doesn’t create a luscious mental (or actual) picture.
Oh, and I’ve got the same cooking issue with dessert: double batches of Buttermilk Oatmeal Cookies and Chai Spice Sugar Cookies.
And apparently a thing for recipes with blazingly obvious names!
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