bag 'n' trash -- home of monster yarn

Second Half of the Weekend -- A Baking Experiment

this morning i decided that i would do a little baking.  the last time i baked was a success so i was feeling pretty brave.  i'm an experimental cook -- a little bit of this, a little bit of that -- and i'm not afraid of messing around with a recipe.  but baking i know can be a little hairy.  there's more chemistry involved and things have to be measured correctly, etc.

i had 2 really ripe bananas that needed to be used, which unfortunately was about 3 bananas short of making that banana bread from a couple of weeks ago.  and i had a can of pumpkin.  hmmm.  i googled "pumpkin banana bread" and found a few recipes but half of them required nuts or raisins, were stupidly complicated, were low fat (ha!) or required ingredients that i did not have in the house.  so i decided to take the original banana bread recipe and improvise.

so i replaced 1 1/3 cups of bananas with the can of pumpkin, added 2tsp of pumpkin spice, 1 tsp of vanilla extract, and replaced the 1tsp of baking soda with 2 tsp of baking powder* and hoped for the best.

it required a little more baking time -- 10 minutes more -- but it worked! 

*so i did a little research about the difference between baking soda and baking powder.  in brief, baking soda is a base that requires an acid (like yogurt, buttermilk, etc)  in the recipe to produce carbon dioxide when in the presence of a  liquid.  baking powder is a mixture of baking soda and cream of tarter (which is an acid) so that you don't need an acid for carbon dioxide to form.  so this got me wondering if baking soda was actually the right stuff for the original recipe.  are bananas acidic?  is pumpkin?  are eggs?  see, i don't know. how are we supposed to know these things without litmus paper?   anyway, baking powder worked fine and i do think the bread came out lighter than it did the first time.  and i'm seriously considering buying some litmus paper.  better living through science.

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day 212 -- i know i said there would be more pictures today, but i'm lazy.  and i also decided not to take pictures of adrian's november fiber until i'd given more people a chance to receive theirs.

Yes, We Have No Bananas!

i love a banana.  i love them in my cereal, i love them with chocolate or peanut butter.  i love banana flavored ice cream.  i just love bananas in all of their banana-i-ness.  so it's rare when a bunch of bananas last long enough in my house to end up looking like this. 

i also rarely bake. 

but this weekend, i made banana bread for the first time in a bazillion years. 

the recipe i used was simple, with very few ingredients:  flour, salt, baking soda, brown sugar, butter, eggs and bananas.  lots of bananas.  and no nuts. (i don't care for nuts in sweet things.) and so very easy. 

and the resulting "bread" is fan-freakin'- tastic in it's yumminess.  rich and buttery and banana-y but not too sweet, i'm going to enjoy eating it for breakfast for the next few days.  (yes, because i will be eating this by myself.  j doesn't like banana bread.  of course he hasn't tasted banana bread since he was a child, but whatever.  more for me).

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day 191 -- while i was working on the bread, i stopped to take some photos.  when j caught me taking this one he shook his head and said, "just bake it."

he's a man of few words.

Why I Do Not Have a Food Blog

if you've met me, you'll know just by looking at me that i do enjoy eating.  but if you've been reading this blog, you'll also notice that i don't blog very often about foods that i have eaten, or cooked, etc.  and there's a reason for that.

because i'm a lousy food blogger.

a couple of weekends ago, a few people in flickr and on the blogs started making these awesome looking soft pretzels -- using this recipe.  follow the link and check out the gorgeousness that are those pretzels.  and here.  go look at those.    

so i decided to try my hand at making them.

thing is... i didn't have parchment paper, my mixer is still in it's original box (a wedding gift people -- it's been almost 5 years!) somewhere in the basement and i didn't have kosher or sea salt.

but i threw caution to the wind and thought i could wing it.

alas, i could not.  without a mixer, i got lazy and  didn't knead the dough long enough.  without parchment paper, i instead greased the cookie sheet, and without the kosher salt, i sprinkled morton's on the top.   

and i ended up with these...

pretty fugly, huh.  interestingly enough they tasted ok.  but they didn't rise enough, and they were greasy (i was a little heavy handed with the melted butter on top too).  and the whole boiling them before baking step was seriously messed up because my pretzels kind of fell apart in the process.  they just didn't look right.

but yes, i ate them all.

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day 158  -- i need to dig out that mixer.   

Soup's On!!

with j out of town tonight, i was on my own for dinner.  i prepare virtually all of the meals in our household mostly because i don't think oreo cookies and munchos make for a proper dinner.  but that's just me.

anyway, since my mother-in-law had given me tomatoes from her garden (nice red ones) and i had one ugly red one and 2 small green ones that that fallen off too early, i decided to make myself some dinner.

so i chopped up the tomatoes and sauteed the green tomatoes in some olive oil and garlic.  once they were soft, i threw in the ripe tomatoes (tasted my ugly red one and damn did it not suck) and a small handful of coarsely chopped up basil (from my garden, thank you very much).

salt and pepper, and plopped on top of some pasta with shredded parmesan cheese, i have to admit it was pretty yummy.

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day 130 -- j would have hated this.  he's so lame sometimes.

Eye Crazy Ass Bagel Friday

i work near a bagel shop and yesterday, when coming back from a meeting, i got a hankering and decided that a bagel made a perfectly nice lunch.  so what if it was only 10:45am.

yes i know it's green.  but doesn't it look great with the strawberry cream cheese?  very spring like.

yeah, because if not for the green bagels, you'd never know that yesterday was the first day of spring.

What a Difference A Day or Two Makes

monday, i was so grumpy, i actually considered quitting blogging.  or at least taking a break.  "bah!" i thought. "i can't handle the pressure!"  and i thought of other things, but i won't go into them here because then i would be participating in over-excessive navel gazing and woe-is-me pity-partying.   like i tell my 2 month old niece ... "there's no crying in [fill in activity here]."

but today i'm better.  good enough to give you my list of "things i like monday "on wednesday.

1.  i like that dunkin dunuts, in honor of it being the first day of spring, is giving away free iced coffee.  i love iced coffee.  and when it's free, it's even better.  i picked one up on my way to work this morning.  i'll stop by on my way home.  woo-hoo.

2.  don't tell anyone because people will think i'm crazy but i kind of enjoyed our little snow storm this weekend.

and let me tell you why.  because i could hang out in my sweatpants at home guilt free.  i mean, i couldn't get the car out of the driveway, let alone drive safely down the road.  so i stayed home.

i baked bread. and i baked brownies.  the bread was good.  i hear the brownies were too.

 

"hey! where do you think you're going with those brownies?"

and while sitting on the couch i knit and i crocheted.  sometimes almost simultaneously -- one row on the blanket, one row on the sock, that kind of thing.

the old -- my ripple blanket.

the new -- socks.

3.  by sunday, the driveway had been cleared and the roads were clean so i got to spend time with the inlaws and my niece, eating corned beef and cabbage.  lots to like there.  (i love cabbage.  when that happened i haven't a clue.)

how creepy is that doll?   guess which one is real?  heh heh

finally, napoleon thanks you for all of the birthday wishes.  or he would if he were not a cat.  so on behalf of my old cat who tends not to really give a crap about anything except for tuna and cold fresh water (in protest to his water not being cold and fresh enough he's taken to straddling the toilet bowl and trying to drink out of it.)  i would like to thank you for the wonderfully warm birthday wishes.

have a good wednesday! 

MMMMM Cake...

Today's "Things I Like Monday" is easy  most notably because of reason number one.

1.  Today is a holiday so i didn't have to go to work.  I like not having to go to work.  Droopy cat had to go into the vet this morning because of bit of a health emergency over the weekend, but she's better and her feline leukemia test came back negative. 

2.  I like cake.  And my inlaws loved Crazy Aunt Purl's  Oma's Chocolate Cake recipe.  My inlaws like to celebrate birthdays (this weekend we celebrated J's) and i've been instructed to bring Oma's cake back again.  Thanks Laurie for sharing this wonderful recipe. 

3.  And i like cake ... yarn cakes of all of my handspun yarn.

here's the bittersweet skies shetland

some grey wool of unknown sheep origin (the wool was a very generous gift from maggie).

and some blue faced leicester.  who needs to go to SPA?

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my sock contest is now closed.  i'll be awarding two prizes.  one winner will be selected at random.  the other winner will be the one combo that causes J's eyes to burn the most.  his taste tends to be a little conservative so this should be fun, for me anyway.   i hope to announce the winners in the next couple of days. 

The Happy Homemaker

grumperina's got the look down with her beautifully made apron, high heels and pearls.  but i've got the mad skillz (ha!).  this weekend, i made bread.  my mother would be proud (although probably skeptical--she's always amazed whenever i accomplish something domestic).

over the holidays  i decided to give the no-knead bread recipe a try.   my first two tries were mediocre at best.  my dough didn't rise sufficiently most likely because the temperature of my kitchen was less than 70 degrees (i solved this by putting the bowl of dough on top of the fridge -- you know heat rises) and also i kept removing the plastic wrap to watch.  i also may have put too much flour.  but the third time may have been a charm.

the experiment started friday night when i mixed all of the ingredients.

there's 3 cups of flour, 1/4 teaspon of instant yeast (the kind you use with bread makers) and 1 1/4 teaspoon of salt in there.  that's it.

here's what the dough looked like after adding water and doing a little stirring.  i covered the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough sit on my refridgerator for  .... 18 hours.

this is what the dough looked like saturday afternoon.

the dough was rolled into a ball, allowed to rise  between two kitchen towels for two hours again and then lightly brushed with cornmeal.

then the dough was thrown into a pre-heated dutch oven seam side up and baked for 30 minutes with the lid, and 15 minutes without the lid at 450 degrees.

ta-daa!  bread!

isn't it pretty?

this isn't wonder bread though.  it's crusty and chewy and it's quite possible that it should be lighter and i still haven't gotten it right.  but it is pretty good.  and it's easy as pie.  hell, it's even easier than pie.

 

WW

so while my boston girls were on their way down to nyc to buy all of the yarn and eat warm chocolate cake and look at the rockefellar center  big ass CHRISTMAS tree (and i wasn't) i decided to do something proactive this morning.

writing up the lists in my last post got me thinking about STUFF.  you know, the stuff that clogs the brain and makes you feel sorry for yourself, the stuff that hurts.  plus with my birthday coming up --- 17 MORE SHOPPING DAYS PEOPLE!!!!  COUNT 'EM!  -- it was/is clear that although there are many things that i have no control over, there are some that i do.  being fat.  i can do something about that.

i wrote about that issue probably around this time last year -- set up a blog to track my progress and everything -- and failed miserably.  failed so badly that i'm 5 pounds higher than i was at my highest!  so now this is my highest!  i also took down my blog.

so it's time to re-activate the blog -- and admit that i can't do it alone.

so this morning i joined weight watchers -- not just the web version -- but the real live go every week and get weighed and sit through the meetings version.  i'm committing to 7:30am every saturday meetings.  they're convenient to my home, i get them over with, i'm up anyway, and i even met a few members who seemed friendly. 

anwyay -- wish me luck. 

Tarte Aux Pommes

so this is what i woke up to this morning.

i love snow, especially on a day when other than going to my sister-in-laws for thanksgiving dinner later on today, we really have no where  to be, or anything to do. 

dolly likes snow too. (and oregano -- she's standing in my kitchen herb garden)

i'm having a lot of fun making these little dolls.  this one is probably going to a niece.  (with a few extra dresses i think)

why is dolly smiling?  because she also likes pie.

i offerred to make something in chocolate for thanksgiving, but i had been craving my mother's apple tarte. (my mother is an excellent cook, but not much of a baker -- not that she can't bake, just that she doesn't like to all that much -- but she's known in her 'hood for her apple tarte) so i decided to try and make one myself (i did buy brownie mix in case this bombed).  i made the crust myself (thank you martha stewart for giving me the correct proportions of butter to flour) and i'm hoping for the best.  the inlaws are traditional (and sometimes a little boring) in their food choices so it's quite possible that even if this tastes almost as good as my mom's, that i'll be the only one eating it, but who cares.   more for me.

that "thing" in the middle is a turkey by the way.

have a happy thanksgiving everyone!