Trick or Treat!

Give me something good to eat! It's national eat candy and cake and anything orange day! In the spirit of this sweet holiday, I have some treats to share and some wicked humor. Senseless puns will continue until morale improves.

Ah yes, the magic of gadgets

The only thing better than one treat is two! Inspired to use my very last can of pumpkin, I made pumpkin boo bars (I didn't name them) and mummy cookies. The pumpkin bars were easy enough, it's kind of like making boo brownies. The cookies are really the interesting part.

What do you do with your cookie cutters for 11 months of the year? Put them in a box? Hang them on the wall for decoration? Well on this gloriously spooky holiday, someone had the brilliant realization that a gingerbread man is only a gingerbread man when it's made of gingerbread. Otherwise it's just a man...shape. So if you make little man-shaped cookies out of other dough and frost them with stripes, voila! You have mummies! How festive. One day, I can make these for my kids school parties (assuming people still eat cookies in 15 years and aren't too worried about sugar consumption and healthy eating to refrain from cookies because that would be a shame. I mean, they already got rid of cookie monster so it could happen...) and be the coolest mom ever (yes you will have to re-read that without the very long tangent in the middle).

The cookie graveyard

As it goes with new recipes, I was hesitant to think these would come out just like the pictures. After round one of mummy wraps, they looked fabulous! Inspired by my success, I confidently pursued batch number two with the bag of icing (fyi- plastic gets really hot). Huge failure. Round three involved using a knife as the bag had ripped at this point. Several cookies were lost in the fray, sadly meeting there end in my stomach. And I buried the crummy looking cookies on the bottom of the platter to take to work. Now it just looks like I have spectacularly creative and spooky cookies. I thought the red eyes were a nice touch--left over sprinkles from Valentine's Day.

Mummy cookies!

Hurricane in the Kitchen

I hope everyone is staying safe during this "Frankenstorm" that's looming. I am currently waiting it out after work was canceled (what? When is work canceled???). I spent the weekend preparing though, picking up canned food and batteries like everyone else. However, it occurred to me that I have a whole lot of meat in my freezer (all those buy 1 get 1 or weekly sales coming back to haunt me). Not wanting it to go bad, it seemed that the best decision was to cook a bunch of stuff and then freeze it again so then if the power goes out and it thaws, it thaws into normalcy and not spoilage. That's not to say that I don't still have meat that will go bad because that giant bag of shrimp that was on sale will make me very sad if it goes bad.

Step 1: Decide which meat to cook- two packages of Italian sausage.
Step 2: Search for appropriate recipes.
Step 3: Cook a lot.

I opted to make something new, an Italian Sausage Soup. It's one of those crockpot creations that requires little effort once the meat is made which fits well with my ambitious save the food campaign. But it kind of didn't come out as soup, it's pretty squishy pasta and not so much soupy broth. I think I did this wrong but desperate times call for desperate measures so it stays and will be eaten (none frozen from this batch).

Secondly, I made bolognese sauce. This sauce deserves a post all by itself so I don't want to give too much away but it's pretty simple and was immediately poured (well, cooled first) into a freezer bag. Hopefully for later. We have a theme here, lots of pasta items. I discovered last year that when the power goes out I can still cook on my lovely gas stove so boiling water is a go!

Laaaastly, I completed my preplanned list of things to cook before Frankenstorm: broccoli pesto pasta (see, more pasta). Somehow I ended up with two halves of an onion. Obviously I know how I ended up with halves but not sure how I overlooked already possessing half of an onion and chopping up another one, ya know? Oh well, now a half was used for this. The hardest part, besides chopping the onion, was the food processor part. I have an itty bitty food processor gadget so it took a lot of trips to chop up all the broccoli. It turned out a little bland but I only took a taste--before putting half of it in the freezer. We shall see but overall, lots of pasta going on.

There was a lot of cooking going on, not too many photos though :(

In addition to my frozen companions, I have the typical soup collection and bread. Now, bread can be used for the usual peanut butter and jelly (duh) oooor a grilled cream cheese and nutella sandwich. Again, another recipe worthy of a post in itself.

Stay safe during the storm! Hopefully Frankenstorm will pass in time for Halloween!!

Tomato Basil Parmesan Soup

Last Christmas, I was given a crockpot which at first may sound rather chauvinistic giving a woman a mechanism by which to cook and fulfill a stereotypical role but we can all think here and know everyone has to eat and therefore a crockpot is a very practical gift and really encourages non-traditional role because it frees up all this time to do other things like work. At any rate, I think this is a fabulous invention but I do not trust leaving it on while I'm not at home. I know the point of the crockpot is you turn it on and go about your day but you have to understand that I'm operating with a rather special kitchen set up.

For starters, there are two outlets in my kitchen. One is behind my fridge so has my fridge plugged into it and my microwave which sits on top of my fridge (I'm tall, it's okay). The other outlet is pretty much eye-level to me (again, I'm tall) and resides on a wall not near the china cabinet counter ie: the only surface in the kitchen. So I place the crockpot on the questionably stable wire rack where the blender normally lives. For the life of me, I don't understand the logic behind making the crockpot cord six inches long. This does not nearly reach the outlet and it seems silly to get an extension cord to go the extra few inches. The only other solution is to place the crockpot on a box--a cardboard box. This might be a fire hazard, I'm not sure because yes the outside of the crockpot gets warm but I think it's okay.

Ugh, I swear I'm a very capable person but it keeps rotating my photos automatically instead of saving properly

So I don't leave the crockpot on home alone, I leave it on overnight with the fire extinguisher near my bed just in case. This soup requires multiple steps, big progress for a crockpot. So I made the first half and then a few days later when I actually got around to eating the soup, I added the milk and butter stuff. The twist that makes this experience appropriate for my blog is I have a new addition to my little kitchen of misfit gadgets. It makes me think of the Brave Little Toaster (not that I have a toaster).

Welcome my little gadget!

I had commented to my mom that I was looking into buying an immersion blender or food processor to make up for the blender fail and to improve my ability to make soup. Of course she has an extra 'food processor' so now I have another gadget, woohoo! This gadget is a fantastic shade of olive green and does in fact look like a food processor (no, it will not replace an immersion blender, Santa Claus will have to help with that) so I thought I should figure out how to use it before I plugged it in since it has a blade and all. I quickly determined that you have to press down to make it start because there's no on-off button. However, it did take me a few minutes to figure out how to open it. Those olive ridges are not for decoration. Anyways, I got a little carried away so the chopping of the celery, carrots and onions (still cried, it only helps so much) so they kind of became mush. But it's soup, mushy is okay since it will ultimately be liquified. Er--it should be liquified.

I'm guessing you could freeze this soup but instead I've just decided to eat soup for the last week. It has been quite delicious but alas, I need the crockpot to be vacated so I can make chili. Gotta love fall!

Single Lady Pancakes

I love this recipe, compliments of Joy the Baker. First of all, it's a great name and makes me start singing Beyonce's Single Ladies. Secondly, there are multiple single lady recipes in her cookbook but currently I can only think of the pancakes and the chocolate cake. So many yummy one portion items.

It looks so promising!

The first time I made this pancake (yes, it makes one nice sized pancake), it came out wonderfully! It was perfect! Warm, delicious, yummy, and whole. The second time I made it, I forgot to add the flour. In my defense, pancakes are made in the morning so I am usually quite bleary-eyed and missed that ingredient. I did however realize that I had forgotten so I fixed it in time but still. Whoops. And this time, I'm not sure what happened. It expanded a little more than usual so when I tried to flip it...disaster. It reminds me of the fail Pinterest pins (Pinstrosity) where it looks so easy and pretty and then it just falls apart. So I tried to reassemble the fractioned pancake and flip it again. Similar fail but not quite as bad. Once I decided it was no longer gooey in the middle, I came to the conclusion that it was done.

Nailed it.

Despite being a mosaic of pancake pieces, it was still yummy. It doesn't matter what the food looks like, I'm not competing with anyone here, it tastes the same! Like green eggs and ham. Green eggs still taste like eggs, they're just green. You'd never know if you were color blind.

The moral of the story is things fall apart but that doesn't mean they're bad. Okay, I think that analogy only works with food, I was trying to be wise. I'll work on that.

Butternut Squash Soup

I went out to dinner tonight and was delighted with some Butternut Squash Soup so there aren't really pictures of this meal. However, I did attempt to make this soup last year. Huge emphasis on attempt.

Remember that time  I alluded to someone cutting their finger while helping me chop onions? That would be this experiment. Technically I was trying to make curry-butternut squash soup which sounded delicious and it's soup, how hard can it be? It's liquid! The recipe did say that you would need an immersion blender (one of those fancy things I do not possess) BUT it also said I could use a regular blender, which I do have....kind of.

Failure 1: Sobbing like a baby chopping onions. Someone offered to help me but given that they were unaccustomed to the chopping 'mat', they slipped and cut their finger. They claim it hurt for a good month thereafter but no serious injury occurred.

Failure 2: This isn't really a failure as much as a mess. Capacity is a constant struggle for me, I just assume things will fit in the pan. I don't have a big soup pot, of course, but I have pots for pasta so I thought it would be sufficient. And it was, but a very, very full sufficient.

Failure 3: Everything was going well! All that was left was to blend it. Side note: I have a blender but it's literally from 1988 and much like the other appliances handed down to me by my parents, it is missing a key component. The coffee pot they gave me had no pot and the blender had no lid. You would think that after all those movie scenes of blenders exploding, I would learn. And I did! I covered the blender thing with a plate. Please note that a plate is slightly rounded while the top of a blender is flat. Cue exploding yellow soup everywhere. Even though I had only put a small amount in the blender, it went everywhere.

Failure 4: Given the lack of counter space, I purchased a wire rack that conveniently sits under the only free outlet in the kitchen (which is far away from the china cabinet counter). It would have been better to purchase something like a butcher block but I'm cheap so wire rack it is. It works very well until you spill something or in this case, explode something. So there was yellow goo all over my cookbooks and everything I kept on the lower two shelves (soup cans, cups, papers...).

Success 1: Questionable success actually. So the soup technically survived, it was just a little---textured. I believe I ate some of it but unlike the creamy soup I had at the restaurant, this required chewing. Those pesky onions obviously weren't chopped into small pieces, nor were they blended so mmm chewing onions.

I would love to attempt soup again but alas, I think I will have to wait until I have an actual immersion blender. And for the record, Tupperware lids fit over the blender perfectly.