Moral: "Never fry gnocchi!"

Steve shows us how not to prepare gnocchi.

Moral: "Never fry gnocchi!"

Cherpumple pie cake

This article on how to make a cherpumple monster pie cake (the bakery equivalent of a Turducken) is fun. Because, you know, a diabetic needs to have yet another way to put unnecessary sugar into his life.

Cherpumple pie cake

Instructables.com

The Instructables.com website is so cool, I figured I'd try adding a recipe to it and see how it worked. This link is for the Habanero Garlic Pasta recipe that also appears here on this blog. Take a look at both and see which format you like better.

Instructables.com

Kamikaze Cooking: The Perfect Steak

This is amazing. The opening bit before the real segment ("Cooking Is Easy If You're Rich and Famous") is perfect.

Kamikaze Cooking: The Perfect Steak

Habanero Garlic Pasta

This is one of my favorite recipes of the Babe's. Sadly, I really can't indulge as much as I'd like, as the pasta is really bad for diabetics. I made it for us a few weeks ago and decided to photograph the process so I could publish it here. Mangia, mangia!

Habanero Garlic Pasta

Ingredients

• 8-12 peeled cloves garlic (good-sized)
• 1 fresh habanero (dried will work if you soak it in hot water to soften)
• ½ stick of butter
  
• ½ cup olive oil
  
• 1 pound angel-hair pasta
• ½ cup shredded (not grated) romano or asiago cheese
• finely minced fresh parsley (optional garnish)
• salt & pepper

Procedure

1. Start a pot of well-salted water for boiling the noodles.
   
   
2. Slice the peeled garlic gloves into thick slices, about 4-5 slices/clove. The amount of garlic is a matter of taste, so be sure not to over-garlic this.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Slice open the habanero, remove the seeds, pith, and stem, and slice as finely as possible into thin threads of habanero.
   
   
   
   Tips:
   
   
   
   • Wear a glove on your left hand—a plastic sandwich bag or spare plastic grocery bag will do nicely—so that your skin never, ever comes into direct contact with the habanero.
   
   • Slicing into fine threads can be done easiest with the point of the knife on a chopping block if you prefer.
   
   • Be careful when cleaning up so you don't get habanero juice on you from the cutting surface or the knife.
     
     
4. Melt the butter in a skillet, add the olive oil, and heat over a medium heat until a bit of garlic dropped in sizzles very gently.
5. Put the angel hair pasta in the (now boiling) water.
   
   
   
   
6. Immediately put the garlic and habanero into the olive oil. The ingredients should sizzle gently. Stir with a wooden spoon to break up any clumps and to ensure that everything browns evenly.
   
   
   
   
7. Cook the garlic and habanero for 5 minutes or until the garlic starts to caramelize slightly. The angel hair pasta should be done by now (check for doneness). Remove the skillet from the heat. Caution: Don't let the garlic overcook or it’ll get hard and crunchy and taste slightly burnt.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Remove the pasta from the heat and take to the sink. Add 1 cup of cold water to the pot, then drain immediately into a colander. Return the pasta to the pot.
   
   
9. Drizzle the oil/garlic/habanero mix over the noodles. Use a fork full of noodles to swab out the skillet and get the last of the oil and the garlic and habanero pieces.
   
   
   
   
   
10. Toss the pasta gently to mix.
    
    
11. Put 1/4 to 1/3 of the pasta on a plate. Dust with salt and pepper. Put 2-3 Tbsp of the shredded romano cheese in a line or an “X” across the pasta. If desired, sprinkle with 1 tsp. of finely minced fresh parsley for garnish (be sure to try the dish with and without; parsley may compete with the other flavors too strongly for your tastes).
    
    
12. Serve.

You can vary the amount of garlic and habanero—I've had it up to as much as 2 balls of garlic and 3 habaneros—but go slowly with your experimentation. It's shockingly easy to get it too strong or too hot for your tastes.

Habanero Garlic Pasta

Dinner

The Babe made this incredible chili that was a chili cook-off winner. Wonderful stuff for keeping the cold out.

Banging the keys on so much stuff right now. Vacation coming soon. Hurrah!

Dinner

Cookies and Anaheim

The Babe spent all Sunday baking four different kinds of cookies--fruitcake shortbread cookies, triple ginger molasses cookies (with fresh ginger, candied ginger, and powdered ginger), lemon ginger cookies, and pepper cookies--and a batch of chocolate pecan fudge.

We gave a lot of this away to the neighbors in gift plates, that being our intention from the start, and the Babe took a big tray in to her office for the judges and staff, but there is a disturbingly large tupperware container with leftovers. I think I've already had a full meal's equivalent of carbs this afternoon from nibbling on these things, which is not good for a diabetic who's hoping to do well on his blood sugar test next week.

Unfortunately, the Babe flew off to Anaheim to teach at a judges' conference this morning and she'll be gone until Friday, so it's me and my shabby excuse for willpower. Oy.

Cookies and Anaheim

Weekend :)

I made a bunch of banana-carrot bread that was really more of a cake recipe. Good stuff! I took a loaf over to neighbors a block away who are finally back in town (we've tried to stop by several times in the last few months, but they've been out of the country on business and pleasure a bunch; catching up with them has been impossible 'till now). I gave another loaf--with a cream cheese icing--to Brian & Inger next door.

I also tried out a new recipe for bagels. They're not done yet, as the recipe requires you to let the bagels rest overnight in the fridge before they're boiled and baked, so they're currently out in the fridge in the garage and I'll do 'em up tonight. Should be pretty nice, though; they look very good.

The Babe was in Tacoma for the weekend at the wedding shower for one of her nieces. I'll see her this evening.

Weekend :)

Wotta day!

I thought I'd be spending the day starting the process of reformatting a couple computers and adding a pair of 500Gb hard drives, but no, it didn't work out that way. But it has been a very nice day.

I slept in a little, got up, cleaned the kitchen, and made banana bread--I've been wanting to make banana bread for the neighbors and now that I'm done with a lot of little things, it was a perfect day for it. I met someone online in an unusual venue who turned out to be from the Snake River chapter of the STC who's pretty nice. Well, networking does happen in the oddest places.

The Babe and Susan went to see Susan's friends Jeff & Mariah, who're getting married in July and are having the Babe do the service. They did some planning about the ceremony and program. Meanwhile, I did a bunch of cleaning here in the office, so that there is now more floor visible than paper, and most of the remaining tax stuff is ready to be boxed up (yay!).

The Babe came back around 2:00 and asked if I wanted to go get more bedding plants. Yes, I did, and I was interested in using up a coupon for Decker's Nursery out in Junction City (they'd sent us two coupons, one for 3 six-packs of bedding plants and t'other for 20% off of everything we bought).

We drove through some rather pretty rural sections of Lane County and got there. Nice place!! We loaded up a cart in fairly short order with about 250 bedding plants. Sure, sure, it sounds like a lot, but it isn't really. In this case, it means one plant every six inches about 4-1/2 rows deep for maybe 15-18'. We could have gotten a whole lot more plants.

We drove home and the Babe started prepping the ground while I worked on the garage, something that I'd been thinking of. We plugged away for hours, with occasional breaks to talk to the neighbors across the street (Harry & Julia, a gastroenterologist and an ER physician, who're going to have a baby around September 9 we discovered) and on both sides of us (Inger & Brian, lovely people to have for neighbors, with four kids, and Tim & Angela, with two daughters, on the other side).

At the end of the day, we have:

• 250 new plants in the front of the house (marigolds, Mexican marigolds, petunias, impatiens, and something else that's escaping me at the moment)
• pictures of some of this (I finally recharged the digicam's batteries and I'll upload those soon so you can see how pretty it all is)
• a huge empty space where there'd hitherto been boxes in the garage
• a pile of stuff in the back of my car to go to St. Vinnie's for the tax write-off
• things to go upstairs to my office

I made potstickers for the two of us. It hurts to move with all this toting and lifting, so I'm now going to go downstairs, slither into a bathtub, then as bonelessly as possible slither into bed. We sing tomorrow and then vote on accepting the new minister at the Unitarian church, who we like.

Wotta day!

Bunny bao

I grew up eating bao tzu (hum bao for all you lo-fan) when we had guests and Mom was making big food for everyone. I have her bamboo steamer and I make them every so often, myself.

Brian sent me photos and a recipe for Easter bunny bao tzu. If you have trouble with them, here are some tips for making sure you get them just right.

Bunny bao.... mmmmmmmmmmmm!

Bunny bao

It's been a lovely Christmas day!

We started the morning with an amazing blueberry French toast dish that the Babe found the recipe for online. We opened presents under the tree: I had gotten The Babe EQ 5, a program for designing quilts and quilt blocks that also shows you wonderful things like how much fabric of each kind you'll need to achieve the design with your chosen dimensions. It's got lots of other nice things for quilters, too. (If you quilt, check it out.)

The Babe and I went off to church services at 11:00. Not surprisingly, it was rather sparsely attended. We came back, did a thing or two around the house, then went over to visit friends for a large dinner and an evening of games and conversation.

Nice day. :)

It's been a lovely Christmas day!

Further fruitcake fun

Making the one fruitcake a few days ago just wasn't enough for me, and I did have a bunch of the candied fruit bits left to use, so wotthehell? I wanted to try a recipe on one of the containers for a fruitcake that's really a fruitcake: there's a ton of fruit and nuts with a lot of eggs and just enough flour to glue everything together. I actually didn't have enough fruit to do this (it calls for about 6 pounds of fruit and nuts), so I looked for more fruitcake bits at Safeway and found them at about half the price I'd paid for them before. Oh, well... I bought four pounds of fruitcake mix and I had almost everything I needed except for bourbon to soak the fruit and nut mixture in.

I made it to the liquor store Thursday and bought a fifth of cheap bourbon ($6.45, good for cooking or swilling) and a fifth of cheap rum (not much more expensive and with the same level of, erm, quality) so the Babe can make a rum cake. I threw all the fruit and nuts into my biggest porcelain mixing bowl, sloshed it with the bourbon, and then covered it with plastic wrap and set it aside to cure. I'll be mixing the remainder of the ingredients at some point soon to finish the process, but the biggest problem is that you bake everything at 250 degrees for 3-1/2 hours and I don't foresee a 3-1/2 hour window of time until Saturday afternoon at least.

I sloshed a little more brandy on the fruitcake in the refrigerator and wrapped it back up. It's doing very nicely. I'm looking forward to it. :)

Further fruitcake fun

December

Decembers are always kind of difficult for me. There's an awful lot of work that goes into them and this year is catching me emotionally shorthanded. But there are things that are perking me up: I'm working on the Yule letter for cards, which I truly intend to get out this year (didn't last year and only got a few out the year before). I've been baking tons of stuff and will be baking more shortly, as I bought proper fruitcake mix and a few other things for more sweets. And "A Charlie Brown Christmas" has just started, something that made me feel good the first time I saw it 40 years ago. I have three or four copies of Vince Guaraldi's album of music from this. It isn't the holiday season without this. I'm smiling.

December

More biscotti news

I was still up around 10:00pm, so the loaves were just about cool enough to slice. I covered the trays with cloths and put them outside in the 33-degree weather to cool the last bit. I did keep an eye out for the raccoons, who showed up again Sunday night. They stood up on their hind legs and plastered themselves against the sliding glass door to look in, clearly after food. (You know how raccoons are.) They were not in the slightest afraid of people, which isn't a good thing but it's inevitable in the in-town suburbs. While everything was cooling, I did all of those domestic things you do the night before the garbage & recycling gets picked up: emptied all the trash containers, cleaned the cat boxes, swept, mopped, and so on.

When everything was cleaned up, I washed up thoroughly; then, fresh, pink, and slighly damp, I got the cold biscotti loaves and sliced them up and baked them. I now have 80 or 90 fresh biscotti on trays and plates in the kitchen. This morning, I need to put them in an airtight container and do something about the pounds of crumbs I've gotten all over everything. After that, I'm making a cheese and onion omelette for breakfast, then probably starting the second double batch of biscotti. The first had dried cranberries (aka "Craisins"), pistachios, and a little cured citron, as well as the rather obligatory almond and vanilla extracts and the anise and fennel seed. I used all the pistachios I had on the first batch, so the second batch has lots of dried cranberries, grated orange peel, and macadamia nuts (as well as the de rigeur flavors). Hey, and you think chocolate chip cookie dough is fun to eat out of the bowl....

The house is smelling heavenly.

More biscotti news

Biscotti and Seahawks

I've got the first double batch of biscotti loaves baked now. (If you've never made biscotti, you make a large loaf of this wonderfully eggy sweet dough full of fruit and nuts and so on, then when it's cool, you slice it diagonally into the classic biscotti pieces and you bake them on a tray on the cut sides to crisp them up.) They're so nice I'm starting a second double batch. The dough will have to rest overnight before I bake it, but it'll be a way to make the house smell nice Tuesday, too.

And I've been checking the Seattle Seahawks-Philadelphia Eagles game periodically. It's the middle of the 4th quarter and it's 42-0, Seahawks!! Who taught these guys to play football? And can they get some of this will-to-win to rub off on the Mariners??

Biscotti and Seahawks

Catching up from the last few days

Having uploaded some pictures, I wanted to take a moment to update the blog.

First, the cat news: Willow keeps hanging in there, although she's down to maybe 6 pounds and the tumor is huge. But she's still in no apparent pain or signficant discomfort and, while she may be eating only a little, she's definitely drinking enough liquid. I know this because she's still peeing on the rug and, oh, yeah, there's plenty of liquid in her system (sigh). I haven't a clue as to how long she's going to last, but I'm very pleased she's still doing okay.

BC is responding well to the Lasix and the biggest problem has been getting him to eat enough. However, he's continuing to lose weight and I am pretty sure that the underlying problem is, in fact, some kind of cancer. Bleah. We don't know: blood work for cats is not yet sophisticated enough to track protein markers for cancers. If he doesn't present any further symptoms, he may be fine. At this point, I'm pleased that he's alive and stable and still as snuggly as ever.

BC & me

BC & me

We picked up a tree on Saturday, a grand fir (the Babe's favorite). I got it set up in the corner and Susan and I brought the ornaments in from the potting shed. I then went out and picked up ingredients for biscotti and fruitcake and other baked things that I want to make, while the Babe decorated. This year's tree has a Santa theme to it, so there are all kinds of Santa decorations on the branches.

The Yule/Christmas tree

We sang the Bach cantata at church on Sunday with a Renaissance consort: double bass, harpsichord, oboe, and several other instruments. We were a hit.

Susan was getting ready for a date Sunday evening and she looked pretty darned good. She also had on heels of some kind that made her even taller. The Babe only came up to mid-chest on her.

Susan, the tall girl

Never one to resist an opportunity, Susan mugged heavily for the camera. The Babe stuck out her lip.

Susan mugging for the camera

Sunday night, I had a hankering to make fruitcake (I like fruitcake, damnit!), so the house had a wonderful smell of cinnamon, ginger, and molasses. I left it to cool overnight, then wrapped it in a linen cloth, drenched it in brandy, and wrapped everything in foil and tucked it into a corner of the refrigerator. I'll pull it out in a week or so and add more brandy. Making fruitcake is a bit of an exercise in delayed gratification: the recipe (I used the Betty Crocker recipe for this) says that you have to let it age with the brandy for 2 to 8 weeks.

Today (Monday) I made a pan of gingerbread and then started a double batch of cranberry & pistachio biscotti. The bowl of biscotti dough is resting outside on the picnic table with a cloth over it (you're supposed to keep it cold while it rests). I'm going to post this and go grab the dough and start baking the biscotti loaves, so the house will smell like almond, anise, and vanilla.

Catching up from the last few days

Posting on the fly....

I've got a moment or two so I figured I'd add something to the blog.

The yard guy's here at the moment mowing and the like, so I'm not going to go out and plant until after he's gone--too noisy. The peas are breaking ground in a lot of places, though the sweet peas up against the fence may have been slowed or killed by an application of casoron granules a couple months ago for weed control. I hope not--sweet peas are gorgeous additions to the garden. I'll give it another week or so and if necessary, replant. The yard guy's going to bring by a bunch of large pots (that trees are shipped in) and I can use those for some container planting of tomatoes and melons. I think it's going to be a good year for melons.

Dick the Amazing Handyman (and a really nice next-door neighbor, too) came over yesterday and the day before and repainted a section of wall that we'd made some changes to and sanded and stained some new floor boards. I need to hit the floorboards with a little fine steel wool, but it's looking pretty nice!

Been getting a bunch of things set up for being the STC Region 7 Director, mostly downloading files and reading them. Going to be a ton of paperwork. I'll need to dedicate a couple file drawers just to this, I'm sure. Oy.

I'm baking a couple chickens and a bunch of large potatoes for dinner and the house smells wonderful.

I'm reading Lawrence Block's "The Burglar in the Closet." I got turned on to this series a few weeks ago and I recommend it for pleasant, light, fresh mysteries. They're written in first-person and have deal with the quiet adventures of Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar who runs a bookstore by day.

Posting on the fly....