nosrednayduj

Jocelyn and her boyfriend did all the work; all I did was make the dough ahead of time. I took this picture before it got too crazy (they later put wheels on the house – you can see it will be pulled by the elephants in this picture)

So we had all the things: turkey, stuffing, candied yams, gravy, baked green beans with yummy breading, home pressed cider, cranberry things. We didn't have to have: a vegetarian main dish, gravy made without milk for those keeping kosher, being extraordinarily careful when stuffing the turkey so as not to touch the vegetarian "out of the bird stuffing" with accidental bird cooties, plain unspiced copies of various dishes for those with various issues. E.g. candied yams have butter so they're not kosher. I did try to do it with oil once, and that was a disaster: little burnt strands of brown sugar threading through oily horribleness. We didn't have bread, some people think because we forgot about it in time to start the bread maker, and other people thought because we decided we had enough food.

I had thought because we didn't have anybody kosher this time, we could have the "cheese soup in a pumpkin tureen" that we used to make in California, but really, we had way too much food already for five people. I have become inspired to make it some time, and we have one fairly large pumpkin still in good shape, so perhaps I'll do that sometime soon before it goes bad.

Today we scrounged leftovers, tomorrow I will make some kind of turkey stirfry, and I started the turkey soup process by boiling the bones for four hours. I'll finish the job on Sunday I guess.

In the end, we forgot to find out when/where there was a broadcast and listen to Alice's Restaurant.

I went to BJ's, the local wholesale store (think Costco; only less national). One of the things I often buy there is giant bags of dark chocolate chips, with intent to just eat them by the handful. (Secretly this is less healthy for me than M&Ms because it has higher fat content, and I have a cholesterol problem, not a blood sugar problem.) Anyway, I picked up the bag by the end when I put it in my cart, when I put it on the conveyor belt, and when I put it in the car. Then, when I got home, I picked it up by the middle of the bag. That's when I discovered it was fairly solid. Chocolate chips should feel like they have individual small things inside the bag. Whoops. Apparently this had a bad day with heat sometime in its travels to the store.

Well, I didn't really feel like going back to the store, and chocolate is chocolate, right? So, first I just kind of banged the bag on the counter to break it into smaller chunks, and then out comes the rolling pin and a Ziploc bag, where I dumped the chunks in and attempted to hammer them. A bunch of chip-sized objects fell off of the larger chunks, and I scooped them into a separate bowl, but eventually it got to the point where I was just banging on large chunks of chocolate and having them get mashed rather than breaking up. So, out comes the chisel, which I washed carefully, and I chiseled the large chunks into smaller ones.

Most of the chunks are still too big for making any kind of cookies, but they are at least smaller than king-sized candy bars, and since mostly we just eat these by the handful, we will just eat them by the chunk instead!

Cookies, with springtime and snowflake sets:



One of the snowflakes looked like coronavirus:




(Apologies to people who read me both here and on twitter, cuz I'm duplicating the pics, mostly.)

When we last left our hero, she was dealing with too much frosting. Well, still doing that.

Specifically, I had somewhat more than a cup left in the refrigerator. I ate some with a spoon, but I didn't really want to finish it that way.

But wait, it's mostly sugar and butter. Ingredients in cookies! However, "how much" was a bit of a mystery. So I took about 3/4 cup, decided it was "not much butter" and "a lot of sugar", added 1 cup of peanut butter, two eggs, and flour to taste (to texture?)

It can't be that easy. It would've been a good idea to have added baking soda.

So, since it's kind of hard to mix in 1 teaspoon of baking soda directly to a fairly stiff dough, I took a little more of the frosting, a little more peanut butter (I scraped the bottom of the jar, so I have no idea how much it was), whipped it around in the mixer, took 1/2 cup flour and added a teaspoon of baking soda and stirred, and tried to mix that into the little frosting and peanut butter I had going. Whoops. Too much flour. So, I dribbled a little milk in until it was a little sloopy, and then mixed the rest of the dough back in. Baked at 375 for 11 minutes.

Came out OK! A little cakey. Too bad, we'll never have that again. (And, if it had been bad, at least we would never have had it again.)

The fact that it was a little cakey is interesting; I think it's because there was kind of too little butter. I have done various peanut butter cookie experiments before: http://www.olum.org/yduj/recipe/peanut-butter-cookies.txt

There's just a little frosting left. I'll probably just eat it with a spoon.

Tonight, I frosted and decorated my second birthday cake. This one, I made for George Washington, who will be turning 288 Saturday.

I decided to use a cooked caramel frosting. The recipe book said it made enough to frost "the top of a 8 by 12 sheet cake". Since I wanted to frost the top and sides of a 9 by 13, I decided to 1.5x the recipe. It called for 6 tablespoons of milk. I multiplied 6 by 1.5, and got 9, which was good, until I made it ounces. While I was boiling it, I realized my mistake, because it seemed to me that it ought to act a little bit like the chocolate in no bake oatmeal drops, and it seemed a lot thinner. So, I doubled everything else too. However, no way did I want 3x the recipe, besides which I didn't have enough powdered sugar. So, since it seemed to be acting like no bake oatmeal drops, I decided to take half of it and put a little oatmeal in! They work OK, although they seem to be a little too sticky, probably because the proportions are slightly different. (Collateral damage #1.)

Then, it was time to think about the actual frosting. The recipe said to wait until it had cooled somewhat, add powdered sugar, and "beat until spreading consistency". So I did the first two parts, and then I got tired of watching the mixer, because it didn't seem to be doing anything useful. So, I decided to cool it to room temperature (hooray for our unheated porch), and beat again. It still seemed too thin. Ken suggested adding some more powdered sugar, and since I hadn't used it all up, quite, I did, and that seem to work.

I don't know if I used up more than 2/3 of the batch frosting the cake. Possibly not, and possibly I could have frosted slightly thinner, and it would've worked fine with just one recipe.

Now time to decorate. If I were artistic, I would have tried to make a dollar bill, or maybe a quarter (if I'd made a round cake, which I didn't). However, I'm not artistic, so I did the best I can, which was to make a cherry tree. Happily, I had a few M&Ms. and, happily, I had a can of vanilla commercial frosting, because I didn't think that the light brown of the caramel frosting with some green food coloring was going to come out well. Unfortunately, I had Duncan Hines, which turns out not to taste anywhere near as good as Betty Crocker! Note to self.



To make the trunk, I had to melt a little chocolate. Well, I melted a little more than a little chocolate, and we had some strawberries, so now we have chocolate covered strawberries too. (Collateral damage #2.)

I suppose really these are #3 and #4, because #2 was really the cupcakes from yesterday, and there was collateral damage from the previous cake as well. I had made way too much cream cheese frosting, and rather than save it, or throw it out, I decided to see if I could turn it into cream cheese cookies by adding flour. Turns out, there was a lot more sugar per cream cheese/butter in the frosting, and sugar kind of turns into a liquid ingredient when baking, and so they were really flat, even though I thought I was adding plenty of flour (of course, there was no measuring since it was just what was left over so there was a lot of guessing). They were chewy and too sweet but we ate them anyway.

Output of my kitchen today:

75 meatballs to be frozen and reheated at my birthday party
100 mexican chocolate cookies to be eaten by the ravening hordes at home

Dinner (not round things)

As I posted several years ago, we have a small cider press. Well, it's getting to be apple season again, so we needed some apples.

What better excuse for a bike ride? We only got about 5 pounds to add to the existing 3-4 pounds we bought earlier, so it wasn't a huge issue to ride home with the produce. Sometimes when I bike to the store I buy a lot...

21.35 round trip to farm stand in 2:02 for an average of 10.4.

Together with 15.5 yesterday just riding around, and my Friday adventure, I've got 60.6 in three days. So if I average 10 miles/day for four days I'll have another hundred. However, that's often hard to do on a workday; frequently I only have time for a short 5-6 mile loop...

Inspired by lauradi7dw's post on volunteer vegetables, I post my own volunteer squash adventure this year.

Enjoy!

So we did our usual multiple dietary restrictions thanksgiving and it was all delicious anyway.

10pm I get a call from callyperry, "Do you want this carcass?" I'm like, "yeah, sure, on your way back from dropping your mom off, toss it in the porch" (closed door, so no animals get at it, but unheated so it acts like a nice fridge.)

So now we have TWO turkey carcasses for our soup! It made really a lot and I needed to use the gigantic pot that we use for corn in the summer. callyperry and luckylefty share a birthday which is just prior to Thanksgiving, and this year they had a no-planning last-minute joint birthday party yesterday, so I was able to return the carcass with interest. We still ended up with well over 2 gallons for our freezer. It was entertaining to answer allergy questions. "Well, MY stuffing had no nuts, go ask what Cally's stuffing had!"

Tonight I'll make stir fry with turkey. I'll have to split it after all the vegetables are done so I can put tofu in some of it for the vegetarian in the household.