The Icing on the Cake...

New Year's (as well as Christmas) really crept up on me this year. I don't know if it's age, or just weariness (or most probably a combination of the two), but I used to be able to keep a lot more balls in the air. Some days they seem to be falling all around me, and keeping up with them seems to have become both more difficult and less interesting.

Miss Serious commented last night that we weren't doing anything interesting for New Year's this year, so I got up this morning and made these (cinnamon buns from the America's Test Kitchen Baking Book):

The picture in the cookbook had a gentle drizzle of icing on the top, but I decided that if I had all that nice icing, we should be eating all that nice icing - thus the less than pretty pile on the top. Delicious though!

May we all have a healthy, happy, productive, and fulfilling 2018. Happy New Year!

Tying Up Loose Ends....

As we will be leaving for Cape Cod tomorrow at the crack of dawn (NOT my most favorite time of the day), I've been packing all the necessaries and sundries for our vacation (you know - snacks, wine...) and trying to make sure everything that needs to get done (i.e. paying the mortgage) gets finished before we drive off into the sunrise. 

We've been going to the Cape for a few years now, and learned a valuable lesson about departure times on our first trip.  We left our home at a decent hour, drove blissfully up the highway towards our lovely destination, and landed smack-dab into some of the stinkiest traffic I have ever experienced (and as I'm from Long Island, that's saying something).  Turns out there are only two skinny little bridges that lead to Cape Cod, and everyone who is renting a cottage (pretty much all of the cars on the road) rent from Saturday to Saturday, thus requiring everyone in the world to proceed over those two little bridges at the exact same time.  We reckoned we learned from our mistake, and vowed to leave really early next year.

What didn't occur to us (and The Professor and I have a FRIGHTENING amount of schooling under our belts....) was that everyone would also be leaving Cape Cod at the exact same time on the following Saturday.  This become horrifyingly apparent as we sat in the traffic going the other direction in our attempt to leave - and this time around I had definitely lost my sense of humor.  At the time, Big Trouble was just a toddler, and Miss Serious was probably 3.  After spending a week in a small cabin trapped with these little people, I was yearning for some quiet time.  Unfortunately, Miss Serious took this opportunity to talk the entire way home.  If there's a way to make lots of traffic and a long drive even more unpleasant, that would be it.  I think when we got home I went in my room and forbid everyone to talk to me for an hour, but that just may have been wishful thinking...

I have taken a little break from the sock yarn blanket, as it has just been too hot to have it draped across my lap, but I did finish the perfect article for a hot July - wool socks - don't hit the beach without them!  They're made with Adirondack Bearfoot Mountain colors, and are wonderfully soft. 

And, because it's not warm enough in here and I thought heating the place up with the oven would be a good idea (totally worth it though), I made some lime squares (just a lemon square recipe, but I had some limes, and thought they would be good - they were REALLY good), and a coffee cake. 

The coffee cake recipe is from Martha Stewart and uses an obscene amount of butter and sugar in the crumbs, but the resulting ratio of crumbs to cake (about 2:1) is truly genius. 

If only I could figure out why my shorts have been feeling snug?  I must be retaining water because of the heat....

Summertime...

and the living is busy!  Even though the calendar says it's not yet summer, the thermometer begs to differ.  Especially last week, when we all sweated through some frighteningly hot & humid days.  Being on the fourth (and top) floor, we tend to get pretty toasty up here, and there are times when I definitely regret our green resolve in giving away our air conditioners.  However, the really awful days are very few, and we know if we kept the air conditioners, we would definitely be tempted to use them on a more regular basis.  Not good for the environment, and not good for our electric bill! 

We also decided to try to make some more inroads in both these areas by investing in a new refrigerator.  We had planned to do this a while back, but like many projects we start here at Chez Necessity, we lost some of our mojo partway through the researching process, and it languished.   However, our old fridge is now rusting and dripping, so we decided to get moving.

Unfortunately, like many things, this was easier said than done. NY State is offering a rebate program if you replace an existing appliance with an Energy Star product.  This rebate goes up if you can prove that it was recycled.  The recycling bit was the difficult part, because Home Depot told us that they simply crush the appliance they remove rather than recycling it.  So, we dug a little deeper, tracked down some local appliance stores, and for just a little more money were able to get the refrigerator we wanted and have our old one recycled, allowing us to get the full rebate.  When The Professor dug up the serial number on the old fridge for the application, we discovered that it was from 1987 - a good run, I think, but as it seems to run all the time and the top gets really hot, we should hopefully be seeing a lower electric bill in a month or two.  Now we have a couple of days to dig out all the collected nonsense that has managed to find a home in my fridge and freezer (I'm always amazed what I find when I start digging). 

Miss Serious is having her class picnic today (and sadly it's a bit gloomy outside, but third graders don't seem to care), and I've been assigned potato salad.  I never liked potato salad until I found this recipe (I think it's from my mother's neighbor), and even The Professor (who firmly dislikes potato salad) will eat it.  And, it's easy.  The recipe is:

Red Potatoes
Red Onion (about 1/4 - 1/2, finely chopped)
Chopped Parsley
Mayonnaise
Salt and Pepper

Cook the red potatoes until tender (not too soft, or you get mashed potatoes - ask me how I know!), and cool.  Cut them up, leaving on the skins.  Add the rest of the ingredients, and mix.  I find it's even better the second day, but it's pretty tasty right away, too!  Now it's off to the third grade picnic - including sprinklers, t-shirt decorating, and a large group of loud, excited 9 year olds.  Do you think there's any possibility of wine being served.........?

Trying Hard Not to Lose That Vacation Weight

Yesterday I decided that as I didn't consume nearly enough calories through mountains of ice cream and fried seafood on Cape Cod that I should produce some rich, high calorie food at home. I dug out my food processor and pasta maker, and the kids and I made a lovely pile of homemade fettucine noodles.

Many years ago, being younger and more foolish, I first attempted homemade pasta. I watched a chef make it on tv, and the dough looked beautifully simple to prepare - just put the flour on the counter, make a well in the middle, pour in the eggs, and beat gently with a fork, incorporating the flour. Easy peasy.

Until about 2 seconds after I put the eggs in the well, and they broke through the walls of the flour creating a charming mess all over the counter, floor, and me.

Enter the food processor - dump everything in, mix it up, and voila! Pasta dough ready to go with no need to scrape a pile of slippery goo off your kitchen.

I made Fettucine Alfredo with it, and it was yummy (even though Big Trouble decided he didn't care for it - I will never understand what makes them like or dislike something - pasta, cheese, cream, and butter - what's not to like?), and it made a tasty lunch the next day, too.

* My original reason for choosing this dish was that I had bought heavy cream a while back for a recipe I didn't end up making, and thought this would be a good way to use it. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that I had bought it quite a loooong way back, and it had congealed into something rather unpleasant. However, necessity being the mother of invention I discovered that you can make a great Alfredo sauce with half and half - I just reduced it for a bit until it was thicker like cream, and added butter and cheese until the consistency looked right. I know - not really the most efficient way to drop those vacation pounds, but life is short!

But Don't Put Them in Your Gin and Tonic...

Summer is here, and that means that we get a farm share box every week. We joined a couple of years back, and it's been very successful. The food is organic and really fresh; we go once a week to the delivery site (it's only about 5 minutes away) and pick up our box. It's always like a little surprise to see what we get - most things are easily identifiable, but sometimes we get something that I have to look up (like garlic scapes). You take what comes in the box, which is good for me (although the children may disagree) because it gets me to try some new recipes and we get to eat something different than the same old things I tend to churn out of the kitchen.

Pretty much every week we get a handful of basil. The first year we joined the co-op, this little handful generally got shoved to the back of the refrigerator and forgotten, resulting in a little pile of black leaves in a startlingly short amount of time. Last year I decided to make pesto out of it, and it was very successful; we ate pesto all winter. Since it's generally a small amount of basil, it doesn't always make a full batch, but it doesn't matter, because I just take what I've got, freeze it in ice cube trays, and then bag the frozen cubes. Then when I need some, a cube or two comes out and gets plopped on my pasta. Voila, dinner is served!

Here's the pesto recipe I use, and it can easily be halved when one only has a little bit of basil:

2 cups packed basil (I use just the leaves - the stems are a bit fibrous for my taste)
1/2 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoons pine nuts
2 cloves garlic

Plop all these in the blender and whiz them around until you've got a paste. Then scrape it into a bowl and add:

1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup grated parmesan or romano cheese
3 Tablespoons softened butter

Mix it well, and either freeze or refrigerate. It keeps beautifully in the freezer, and lets you have a little bit of really yummy summer in the middle of winter when everything is rather gray.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Well, dinnertime came again here at Chez Necessity. It seems to have the annoying habit of doing that every day, and 'round about 6:00 everybody keeps expecting to be fed. Go figure! Now, I like to cook, but meals are an unrelenting part of being a parent. Before we had kids, The Professor and I were perfectly happy to grab a sandwich, plop ourselves down in front of the television, and call it good. And then those kids came along. Not only do they expect dinner, but breakfast and lunch too! Maddening - I've tried to actually cancel lunch a few times, but this has promptly been met with eye rolls, and the ever popular, "Oh, Mommy!"

Summertime is good, though, because our farm co-op kicks in, so rather than cooking the same 5 things every week, I'm forced to branch out a little bit and use what comes in our farm share. We are vegetarian (though we do eat fish) so I'm always on the lookout for something that not only appeals to me, but to the youngest members of this household (and the oldest - he can be unhappy with the best of them).

Thus, tonight I made tortilla and black bean pie from Everyday Food. I find most of their recipes are really great - they use what I have in the kitchen, aren't too fussy, and are usually pretty yummy. This was no exception. I did have some misgivings about the kids, however. I never know what will be a hit and what will cause them to create faces as if I just placed a severed foot on their plates. These misgivings were dispelled, however, when Big Trouble looked at his plate and happily said, "Oooh - nacho cake!"

His speech was a tad on the lispy side, as he lost his first tooth today. This tooth, mind you, has been loose for about 2 months, and as you can see in the picture the adult tooth had not only broken the surface but was about halfway in. We've been working on it all week, and today it finally dislodged itself (with a little help from The Professor and a length of cotton sock yarn. I love it when someone in the house asks me, "Do we have any string?" Ummm, yeah!).

I'm glad we were able to save him from having a double set of teeth, and hopefully the tooth fairy will get not fall prey to some of the previous difficulties she has had in this house and will visit him tonight.

One can only hope.

The Big Finish!

Well, today was the last day of school; Big Trouble is no longer a Kindergartner, and Miss Serious is no longer a 2nd grader. They both had wonderful years, and I'm so grateful that we live in such a terrific school district. It's nice as a teacher to see my children not only enjoying school, but learning and thriving as well. There's nothing more wonderful than seeing kids excited about going to school.

On another note, I made a tactical error last night and made these:


We were out of cookies, so as I had some unsweetened chocolate, I decided to make some black and white cookies. I had never made them before, and they went together really easily. Unfortunately, it made quite a lot of cookies. And, I love black and white cookies.

Something I have learned about myself lo these many years is that I don't possess a lot of willpower, which is why I don't keep things like potato chips in the house. When bad food is not here, I cannot eat it. However, last night I somehow felt the need to conveniently forget this fact, and now I have a lot of really yummy cookies sitting on my counter (unfortunately, 2 less than I did when I first made them....).

Tales Of A Shut-In

Well, I think the great illness of '09 is finally ending. Miss Serious has been sick since last Friday (thus home from school), and I think we're both more than ready to be done with this thing. Big Trouble continues to be healthy, although I'm touching his forehead and shoving a thermometer in his mouth whenever I can get him to stop tearing around the place (which isn't that often - I swear someone sneaks in here and feeds him espresso...), and I figure (actually desperately hope) that if he hasn't gotten it by now, we're safe. I know this is denial, but sometimes that's the only thing that keeps me sane.

Being housebound with a sick child could not be more fun. The fact that I was excited to take Miss Serious to the doctor yesterday (and thus actually breathe in some fresh, if not freezing cold, air) shows just how far the bar has been lowered.

However, being stuck in the house does have a few benefits. I baked pumpkin bread, cookies, and granola:

I know, you're jealous of my fancy storage containers (old Trader Joe's cookie tubs). A helpful hint - when the pumpkin bread recipe calls for 2 cups of pumpkin but you only have 1 3/4 and you think, "Oh, that won't make any difference.." it actually does make quite a difference, and your pumpkin bread comes out really flat (but still tasty).

I finished a sweater for Miss Serious (it's a summer sweater, but she was dying to wear it immediately - I know, whose child is this? Must have been the fever...) so she put it on over a turtleneck, thus it looks a tad odd:


I also finished a sock and began its mate:

(Yes, I was able to stand on one foot and take this picture while my other foot was on the couch. I think I got a lot more flexible doing yoga that one time last week....)

And then (because have I mentioned that I really need to get out of the house???) I decided that I needed something new and interesting to knit. In the spirit of National Thrift Week and in my ongoing effort to pare down some of our stuff, I went hunting under my bed and unearthed this:

Yes, I do know that's a lot of yarn. It's the Knitpicks Palette sampler, a wonderful gift from my mother-in-law at least 2 Christmases ago (it may be 3 - don't judge me). I had visions of making Latvian mittens (I've also got the book, but oddly enough, still no mittens). Due to my moth infestation, I had to frog a pair of fingerless gloves I had made myself a couple of years back, so I thought now would be a good time to try Eunny Jang's endpaper mitts (have I stunned you all with the amount of links in this paragraph?):


This is such a lovely pattern, and the Palette works really well with it. I picked brown and pink to go with my brown coat. I still can't decide if I like the colors together - I am not a trendy dresser (some might say boring) and though I see this color combination often (and like the way it looks) I am still somehow uncomfortable with it (I know, I'm very complicated...). I love knitting things like this, and while the pattern is complex enough to keep me interested, it's something I can work on while the kids are around (as opposed to lace, where I need a silent room, and sadly more brainpower than I can muster most days - thus, no lace on the needles).

Here's hoping that fever stays gone and everyone can happily go off to school tomorrow - I've enjoyed my time with you Miss Serious, but have I mentioned that I'd kind of like to get out of the house?

Crazy Eyes, Part Duh

Well, it's still the day before Thanksgiving, and I'm still feeling a bit under the weather. For the record, when you're really exhausted and you're trying to decide which you should do first - nap or make piecrust - pick nap.

I chose unwisely, and decided to get the piecrust out of the way, and apparently I am incapable of reading a recipe and realizing that 1/4 pound of butter and 1/4 cup of butter aren't the same thing, and that when you only put 1/4 cup of butter in the piecrust and then add the water, it doesn't form anything resembling piecrust. And when you realize your mistake and try to add the other 1/4 cup of butter after the fact, it sort of just globs all over the outside. If this were for my family, I would roll it out and move on, but as I am bringing it to someone's house, I wrapped up the first try and stuck it in the freezer (for us to enjoy at a later date) and made another, complete with the correct amount of butter. Now for that nap - I hope it fixes me, but I don't have high hopes....

Mmmm Mmmm Good

I found a recipe floating around the internet last week, and even though I usually print out recipes and put them in the pile of nothingness and forget about them until I can't stuff anything else into the space above my cookbook shelf, I actually made it right away. Now, this is probably because anything with a combination of potatoes and cream cheese will catch my interest right quick. It's supposed to be a knock-off of the potato soup at Panera Breads (I've never had it there, so I can't comment on that aspect) and the original recipe was:

1/4 cup minced onion
4 cups peeled and diced potatoes
4 cups broth
8 oz. stick of cream cheese
salt and pepper

Intriguing, isn't it? Unfortunately, if I want to continue fitting into my pants, I decided that I would need to modify it a little bit, so I came up with:

1/2 cup finely minced onion
3 cloves minced garlic (I thought it could use a little more flavor)
6 cups peeled and diced potatoes
6 cups broth (I used vegetable)
4 oz. cream cheese (now I'm trying to plan something for the other half of the bar...oh the possibilities!)
salt and pepper

Saute the onion and garlic in a little olive oil; add the potatoes and broth and cook until potatoes are tender. The original recipe had you mash some of the potatoes here, but you really had to stir to melt the cream cheese, and the whole thing got mashed in the process. If you want chunks of potatoes, I would pull some out before mixing in the cream cheese. Add the cream cheese (cut it up in chunks first) with the heat on low and stir until melted. This was easier said than done, and I finally got out my whisk and stirred rather intensely to make it melt. If I do it again, I might melt the cream cheese separately and add it in. Add salt and pepper to taste.

It was YUMMY, even though the kids complained quite a bit. I have to say, I never can predict how foods will go over with them - they love mashed potatoes, and how different is this, really (except of course, for the addition of cream cheese, and how can that possibly do anything but make something more delicious)? Apparently very different, and a cause for quite a few uncalled-for faces at the table. I made it slightly more palatable to them by sprinkling it with a little shredded cheddar cheese, and making biscuits (Oh, a spoonful of biscuit makes the potato soup go down...).

Easy, quick and tasty. My favorite kind of cooking.

Who Knew?

I really like books about saving money, but as I also like actually saving money, I check them out of the library and rarely purchase them. The one exception to this is The Tightwad Gazette series by Amy Dacyczyn. These books are a compilation of a newsletter that she wrote out of her home as well as letters from readers. Most of the articles and letters are interesting and useful, and some are downright off the wall, like making children's toys out of bread tabs and melting the tiny bit of deodorant left in the dispenser in the microwave so that it can be melded with other remnants to make a new deodorant.

Years ago I read about how she replaces an egg in baking with a heaping tablespoon of soy flour and a tablespoon of water. I wasn't terribly interested in this fact, as eggs were dirt cheap at the time, and I didn't have children eating at a rather astonishing rate. I've been reading more and more (I think I really need to just stop reading!) about the treatment of chickens on egg farms, so I've been trying to buy organic and cage-free eggs. This is excruciatingly painful for me, as it makes my eggs now cost about 33 cents apiece.

So, in the spirit of experimentation I toddled on over to my local health food store and purchased some organic soy flour. I used it in place of the egg in the muffins I made this morning, and lo and behold it worked beautifully! Everyone scarfed them down, and as the soy flour only cost 3 cents, I think it was a success. Now I have to figure out how to invest that 30 cents.....

Mmmmmmmmmm!

We have started getting our deliveries from our CSA, Roxbury Farm, and we are enjoying it immensely. We began doing it last year, and although it was painful for me, I bit the bullet and paid the $$. The price as far as CSA's go is very good, and I need to keep remembering that the vegetables are organic, fresh, and local. We go every Wednesday and pick up our share of vegetables and fruit - in the beginning of the summer it's a lot of leafy greens, and now we're getting cucumbers, zucchini, cabbage, herbs, and......strawberries!

The Professor worked at the pickup site that day, and got to bring home the extra quart that was left over, so we were doubly blessed. Of course, when I have delicious strawberries in the house, we must have strawberry shortcake.

For those of you that haven't made it, there are just a couple of hints - when you chop the strawberries, chop them with something kind of dull - I use an old cookie cutter - as it produces more juice. Sprinkle some sugar over the berries, and let sit at room temperature.

Then the biscuits - you need them warm, so either bake them right before you need them, or slice them and pop them in the toaster oven. The secret (don't know if this is from my grandmother or mother) is to butter the biscuits. Then dump generous amounts of strawberries and juice on top of them, and some freshly whipped cream. They are just heaven (even though the kids only want juice, none of those pieces) and everyone, especially The Professor was very thankful for summer.

If At First You Don't Succeed....

Well, the heat finally broke (who would have thought 85 would feel COOL?) and after many days of lying dormant, I turned on my oven again. Miss Serious' school is having a flag day celebration, and needed cupcakes. As we have planned to have more food there than any class of first graders can reasonably consume, I decided to make mini cupcakes. And, unlike my normal operating procedure, I even remembered to pick up the cupcake wrappers in advance. So far, so good.

Big Trouble and I got to work and mixed up the batter. The cupcake wrappers were foil, and too large to fit into my pans. Apparently this kind just sits on a baking sheet. Fine - I lined them all up and filled them with batter. My usual batch of batter makes enough for 24 regular sized cupcakes. I was planning on 48 minis, and filled the little cups all the way to the top with batter. I bake a lot, and you'd think I would have recognized the problems with this. First of all, 24 regular cupcakes use a lot more batter than 48 minis. And, as batter cooks, it rises quite a bit. Thus, if you use a full recipe of batter to fill these cups, and then in some fit of insanity fill them all to the top of the wrappers, you'll probably end up with something like this:


Yup, an entire batch of 48 mutant cupcakes. In my optimistic (and lazy) way, I thought I would be able to just pull off the excess cake, but after several torn foil wrappers and cupcake crumbs flung all over my kitchen, I saw reason and just mixed up another batch of batter. This time I made the 48 minis AND 12 regular sized cupcakes like I should have done in the first place. The only thing I can say is that my brain must have melted from all the heat stress of the last few days - I'm hoping it will come back soon, because I have things to do.

Miss Serious said that we needed a flag to celebrate flag day, so this is what I came up with. Happy (early) Flag Day!

Crunchy Granola

I don't like to spend money. This is partly a result of my upbringing, but mostly because of the fact that I don't have any money. Living where we do, housing is really pricey, and as I don't want to live in a box somewhere under a bridge, I need to save money so that I can pay the mortgage. The food budget is one of the most obvious targets, and I try to make as much as I can from scratch. Thus, today I made a batch of granola. I try not to mention that I make things like this. When socializing around here (I'm telling you, people here are not just ordinary wealthy. They are SCARY wealthy) I tend to keep the chit-chat light and on neutral topics. Once in a while I've slipped and mentioned making things like bread or granola from scratch, and the person I'm speaking with generally eyes me warily and takes a step backward as if I've just announced I beat my children with sticks or perform pagan rituals around the trees out front. I then realize I've said too much, and steer the conversation back to pediatricians, school systems, and taxes.

Here's the granola recipe:

6 cups dry oatmeal
1 cup wheat germ
1/2 cup dry milk
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup ground flax seed (optional)
1-2 cups chopped nuts (optional)
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp. vanilla
1-2 cups raisins or craisins

Mix the oatmeal, wheat germ, dry milk, cinnamon, and nuts together. Heat the oil and honey on a stove just until boiling and add the vanilla. Mix into the dry ingredients and pour the whole thing onto a pan sprayed with PAM. Cook in a single layer in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes; stir and cook another 10 minutes. If you like it really crispy, you can put it in for a little longer. Take out of the oven and mix in the dried fruit.

This makes a yummy breakfast or snack, and can be made into granola bars (I'll post the recipe another day). I buy most of the ingredients in bulk, which cuts down on cost and packaging. It's easy to make, and much cheaper and healthier than what comes in pricey little boxes in the grocery store. Just don't mention it at your next cocktail party.