Category Archives: baking disasters

Downtown Portland

Today’s Foodday has a whole section of pie making tips which I will carefully read and then file in my bursting file of pie making tips. I’m doing a lot better but I’m still not making pies that would bring about world peace.

The paper also covers a pie making contest. One of the winners is a Cucumber-Honeydew-White Chocolate Pudding Freezer Box Pie. I know. It sounds crazy doesn’t it? I’d like to try to make it but I’m not up for an extensive multi-step recipe at the moment. I’m still trying to wrangle my tomatoes.

On Sunday I made a summer minestrone with all the leftover squash plus a bunch of other odds and ends including things from the freezer. We always seem to have a 1/4 bag of green beans freezer-burning in a dark corner of the freezer. The soup came out delicious.

Bob and I are watching Prom Night in Mississippi. It’s about a small town in Mississippi. The school holds two proms, one for blacks and one for whites. Morgan Freeman grew up there and he offers to pay for the prom if they integrate. This was in 2008.

I could go on about this movie all day but will condense my thoughts into two observations.

The first one is that I am stunned by how many people exhibit clearly racist behavior yet insist they are not racist and all their friends would tell you they aren’t racist. “I’m not a racist but I don’t want my daughter dating one of them people.” (*spoiler*) The white parents organize and pay for a separate white prom but refuse to be interviewed because they don’t want to be perceived as racist.

The second one is how clearly this small town is divided into black or white. Given this is what the documentary team is showing us but it’s like there is no other diversity. What if there was an Indian (either kind) or Hispanic or Asian person? What prom would that person go to? (Before integration.) You have to wonder what would happen to this small town if *other* people of color showed up.

The documentary is really good and thought provoking although a bit repetitive.

I made the Black Magic Cake today for tonight’s dessert.

Can you tell where the lid fell off of the shaker I was using to decoratively mist the cake with powdered sugar?

When I looked at the recipe this morning I realized I didn’t buy chocolate syrup. It was cold and rainy and I wasn’t about to put on clothes so I could go to the grocery store. I added some baking chocolate and a few extra ounces of buttermilk and hoped for the best. It came out great. Very dense, almost brownie-like.

This wasn’t the best weekend of my life but I’m feeling okay about it now. I managed to clean another layer of stuff off my desk. The taxes are ready to go out the door. I was in a writing rut but Kira helped me break through this morning. The garden looks pretty. We had a fun Easter dinner at Priscilla’s.

I’m ready for the work week.

How come I can’t make biscuits?

Unless I pop them out of a can. If you can pop them out of a can, how hard can it be?

I had a great recipe with buttermilk and I totally followed the directions. And the FLAT butter crackers that emerged were so embarrassing that I was too ashamed to take a photo. I ate 5 of them.

This was a big writing weekend which was unfortunately, not brilliantly productive. Today I gave myself a productivity goal instead of a time goal.

A time goal is when I say I’m going to keep my butt in the chair until x o’clock.

A productivity goals is when I say I’m going to keep my butt in the chair until I reach a million pages. Or, a million words. Or whatever the actual goal is.

The productivity goal keeps me honest when I’m distracted. It was a harrowing day. By 5pm my head hurt and my eyeballs were screaming for mercy. But I made the goal.

I told Bob I didn’t want to spend 4 hours watching the Oscars but I keep running out in the other room to see what’s going on. I thought they were streamlining the thing. It took 20 minutes to give out the first acting award. It was like a giant never-ending group hug. Like actors don’t get enough love.

So this is my tart shell. I got it home in one piece but I left my recipes at the office on Thursday so I had to think of something else to fill it with. I ended up trying this lemony buttermilk “over 50 year old” recipe from one of the Grange Cookbooks we got when we got married.

I guess the recipe wasn’t intended for a tart shell because when I checked to see if it was firming up it was boiling. I don’t think that was what I was aiming for. The recipe also called for a meringue topping which I’ve never done before but if it’s supposed to look dark brown and have the texture of rubber, I did awesome. The tart doesn’t taste terrible. Sort of a third rate lemon meringue pie.

In addition to turning my tart into something, I baked cookies for my work stash. I also fed the sourdough and refilled my homemade granola supply. Very few things are yummier than this granola.

Also I cleaned out one of the pantry annexes. We don’t have a real panty so our food is divided into areas. We have the main cupboard in the kitchen, the canned good shelf in the laundry room and the lazy susan next to the fridge. That last one is what I cleaned out this morning.

Do you have all kinds of bizarre odds and ends in your cupboards that you bought for a recipe that you made between zero and one time? Or something you read about and thought you’d try and apparently forgot about a short time after you stuck the exotic ingredient in your cupboard? Yeah. Why did I buy amaranth and millet? No doubt it was some health kick moment. I have a grains cookbook that I’ve always intended to become better acquainted with. I tossed a few things and made a list of some others with the idea that I may still eat them someday.

Here’s my colleague’s desk that I mentioned yesterday. He kindly sorted through it all and now most of it is piled in my office. The photo below is the pile that used to be behind his desk.

What he doesn’t know is that I throw lots of stuff away when he’s not around. Has he ever missed any of it? Has he ever said, “Oh, I need version 11 of that meeting agenda from August of 2005?” No. He hasn’t. Never. This post could probably be used as evidence in a malpractice case someday. If that happens, just kidding!

A couple more random items. I saw an ad for Ocean’s Thirteen and asked Bob if we ever saw Ocean’s Twelve. “Yeah,” he said, “I think we did.”

“What was it about?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“Yeah, me either.”

I don’t think we did. Are we that old and decrepit we can’t even remember Ocean’s Twelve?

Last comment: Gilmore Girls. I’ve never watched this show. I’m interested but for whatever reason, I never got into it. The DVDs are on my long term maybe someday list. But I see the previews during other shows I watch on the same station and it is my imagination or is every single preview about one or the other Gilmore Girl getting engaged? How many broken engagements are there between the two?

There is no end to ways I can find to make me feel bad about myself.

This weekend’s bread baking has been an exercise in monstrous futility. The sourdough hijacks the entire weekend. It must be baby-sat like a puppy with feeding and temperature adjustments and taking out at carefully monitored intervals. I thought I did okay this time since I was getting it to rise and it smelled nice and sourdoughy but my final shaped loaves didn’t rise as much as they oozed to the edges of the pan where they were resting.

Still they had a nice shape but they felt a tad sticky and I was out of time dangit—I needed my oven for dinner making purposes. I had a miserable time getting them out of their floured towel and onto the baking stone so they looked like spilled dough blobs and not like pretty loaves. They looked slightly better when baked and browned except I could not get them off the baking stone, even with a chisel and mallet.

At this point, dinner is ready to go in the oven. The bread must come out. The first one I ripped off the stone and the second one I sliced off the stone. Now I have a lava hot baking stone thickly crusted with the bottom half of my stupid bread that I spend all day babysitting and got flour and dough and crumbs all over my kitchen for and didn’t even turn out good and now how do I prevent the crust from igniting while I bake the dinner? Normally the baking stone lives in the oven.

I left the oven door open to get it cool enough so I could pull out the stone and load it onto a cutting board and it sits there still and makes me mad every time I walk in the kitchen. I still have to chip all the burned crust off of it.

The whole thing was a feel-bad experience. I’m going to take a break from baking for awhile.

My dear husband sliced off a thick, half-crusted slice and spread some margarine, Nutella and jam on it and proclaimed it delicious. That’s why I love him.

When I wasn’t making crappy bread I was breaking my vacuum and going to drop it off at Sears in the Mall on a Saturday sounded hideous. There used to be a tiny Sears outlet not far from our house. I called it the most depressing retail site in America because it looked like nothing had been cleaned or updated since 1954 and dusty packages of drill bits dangled from hooks on displays that were one swift breeze from collapsing.

I would go in there and there would be one other person in line and the defeated clerk tapping on the moldy Tandy 2000 and it would still take a half hour. One day I pulled up to grab some vacuum bags and the store was empty and somehow they’d managed to move all the junk inside without disturbing the dust.

Before I broke the vacuum, I cleaned out the fireplace so I could enjoy warming my toes in front of a crackling fire. I failed several attempts at fire making until I finally stuck a giant wad of newspaper in there, doused it with lighter fluid and whoosh! The entire front half of the house warmed up.

Just kidding about the lighter fluid! I don’t want to give my poor dad a heart attack. There’s more headache about the wood I used but I won’t get into it now. We never have the right tools.

There is no computer break this weekend because I’m working on something for my writers group (another unsatisfying creative endeavor) and I need to send it to them tonight. That’s today’s project.