the happy homewrecker

Happiness is a new set of cookware.

Gary received an annual gainshare from his company recently; most of it is going toward bills (unexciting, but necessary), but we took a small part and used it to buy a new set of pots and pans. We've had a T-Fal set for almost eight years, and the nonstick finish had started chipping off. I begged Gary to save us all from getting ill from eating nonstick finish, and we decided on this stainless set from KitchenAid that was rated well in Consumer Reports. It's so shiny.

One of my very favorite Christmas gifts this year was the subscription to Cooking Light that my sister gave me. In every issue I find at least five or six recipes that we like, and having access to the archive of recipes online is widening my source of dinner ideas.

In the current issue there's a little blurb about edamame, the green soybean that can be salted and eaten as a snack. I'd love to try it, but I wasn't at all surprised not to find it in the freezer section of my local grocery (which is where CL said to look for it). Anyone know if these things are sold anywhere other than health food stores? What do they taste like?

My pet peeve of the day: I got a free issue of Cook's magazine, and it featured a recipe for a four-cheese pasta dish, kind of like a grown-up version of macaroni and cheese. It calls for four cheeses that I consider 'specialty' cheeses (i.e. I don't have them sitting around in my fridge all the time); when I went to the grocery to get this week's food and starting hunting down the cheese, the four cheeses alone added up to more than $20! There wouldn't even have been that much left over to use for something else. Substituting something cheaper would be silly, since it's the fact that they're 'good' cheeses that makes it taste good, so I guess that's one dish I'll never get to make.

I just squeezed a dozen oranges in my food processor's juicer thing. Yield: 2 cups of juice. Sheesh. No wonder orange juice is so expensive.

Linzer tarts made using this recipe.

Forgot to mention that I posted one of Gary's favorite holiday cookie recipes over in the recipes blog. I think I got it from a magazine article that said they were submitted by an editor who made them for Hanukkah, something about them being dairy-based. I'm not up on Hanukkah customs, but they're delicious!

I'm roasting my first turkey. I think. I have this vague memory of rubbing butter under poultry skin, but I've roasted a lot of chickens so maybe that's what I'm thinking of. We got a free one from the grocery for spending so much money during a certain period of time, and I need to get it out of my freezer so I can freeze Christmas cookies. We'll see what happens!

Mom asked me to bring dessert for Thanksgiving dinner. Since we're leaving Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday morning we'll be busy having our family Christmas pictures taken, and tonight I'll be crazy packing, I made one dessert last night and will make another tonight. Last night I did this Caramel Pecan pie. I'm not sure what to make of it. I'd never made it, or anything like it, before, so I tasted it this morning. I did my pie crust in the food processor and I think I may have overmixed it because it almost dissolves the minute you touch it. The pie filling is  . . . well, I don't really know what it's supposed to be like, so it's hard to describe. I put it in the fridge and tried it cold; some of the reviews said that it was better heated, so I guess I'll take it to dinner and we'll try it warm. Tonight I'm making this recipe from the Cake Mix Doctor----it's peanut butter cake and frosting (three layers!) with crushed Reese's cups between the layers and whole ones decorating the top. Can't go wrong with peanut butter and chocolate . . .

So last night I was seriously craving brownies. I'd made Alton Brown's brownie recipe a few times over the summer, and both Gary and I liked how it was less sweet, more of a dark or bittersweet chocolate flavor. I was out of vanilla, but I wanted the brownies so badly that I drove up the store just for extract.

A few hours later, I was standing over a pan of very bad brownies trying to figure out what in the world had gone wrong. The top was oddly smooth, they'd taken much longer to bake than stated in the recipe, and they tasted awful. I remembered later that I'd originally made the brownies following the recipe in Brown's book, as opposed to the one on the Food TV website. The two recipes are slightly different, but I didn't think that the differences would account for the weird confection I'd ended up with. Fast-forward to this morning, when I was roasting some pumpkin seeds. I went to microwave a teaspoon of butter, and found myself staring stupidly at a bowl full of semi-melted butter. Two sticks of partially melted butter, in fact---the two sticks of melted butter that were supposed to have gone into the brownies.

I'm losing my mind. I mean it. I've also misplaced our 35mm camera and a brand-new pair of jeans we bought for Ginger over the summer.

During the past two weeks, I made two cakes and took them to stitch n bitch to get feedback from the ladies there. The first week I made a white cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting, with a thin layer of raspberry filling and fresh raspberries on top; the second week I made a from-scratch cake with chocolate frosting, pecans, and semisweet chocolate. The hands-down favorite was the white cake, a recipe from The Cake Doctor's book---basically a white cake gussied up with extra eggs and butter and vanilla, plus this incredibly rich frosting. It really was divine. The chocolate one was just so-so. Compared to the box mix white cake, the kinda white-kinda yellow from-scratch cake was flavorless.

So Saturday morning I made a second white cake and that afternoon we took it to Gary's company picnic. I was very nervous because while they'd said the cake competition would be between 5 and 5:30, they didn't actually do the judging until 6:30, and I was terrified that the frosting would be melted by then. Luckily it wasn't too too hot, the cake held up, and I came away with second place (out of 11 cakes). Strangers were coming up to me to ask about the recipe and where did I get those huge raspberries? I'd picked them up at the local grocery; they were kind of big, I guess one of the judges thought at first that they were strawberries. I won a $10 gift card to Wal-Mart, whoo hoo! Afterward, an older woman who'd been assisting the three (male) judges came over to ask me about my recipe, then leaned in and whispered, "Mr. So and So and I wanted you to know that we thought you should have won first place." Hee. And hey, I get my name in the company newsletter!