A Gelatin Mistake and a Surprise

Awhile ago, I bought a fairly large bag of gelatin. It was the non-GMO grass-fed whatever beef gelatin, and my whole idea was that I could use it to make rhubarb jello when we had lots of rhubarb.

Now we have lots of rhubarb! It's time to make jello!

Except . . . I couldn't find the gelatin.

Poppy and I spent at least twenty minutes looking for it. I remembered when I used it the first time, I decanted the contents of the bag into a jar, because the bag wouldn't really re-seal and I didn't want gelatin powder all over my pantry.

I knew I had labeled it, though. And I could not find it. 

Then I had a thought.

That gelatin looked an awful lot like the cream of wheat I also keep in a jar in the pantry. And the last time I made chicken food because we ran out of store-bought food, I poured cream of wheat and hot water into the chicken scrap container, but remembered thinking it didn't get very thick.

Perhaps because I poured the ENTIRE JAR of gelatin powder in there instead of cream of wheat?

Yes. I'm pretty sure I did.

So! I hope the chickens enjoyed their gelatin treatment! They're sure to have lovely strong toenails now.

Sigh.

On a happier note, look what we have now!

LAAAAMBS!

You can't really tell in the photo, but there are two. One girl, one boy, and both doing very well.

Boo gelatin, but yay spring lambing. 

That's all.

Look! A Pie! FINALLY

 I'm just gonna come right out and say it: I don't like pumpkin pie. And I don't really like baking. So why did I spend almost an ENTIRE DAY baking a pumpkin pie?

Because I love my son. That is the only reason.

Cubby wanted to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. He's into pie, as I've mentioned before, and he knows pumpkin pie is the traditional pie for Thanksgiving. So he asked to make one.

We have so much squash on hand, it's ridiculous, so I said okay. I thought, since neither of us is an expert pie baker, it would be best to make this pie the day before so I wasn't dealing with a kid in the kitchen and an unfamiliar dish while simultaneously cooking the rest of the holiday meal.

This turned out to be the only smart thing I did in the entire process.

Although I have plenty of squash already cooked and in the freezer, I figured I might as well just cook one of the squash that's still sitting in A.'s office. So I stuck one in the oven at 8 a.m. 

When the squash was done, Cubby scooped it out into the food processor and we pureed it. Then he started making the crust, using this recipe. He wanted to do it all himself, so I just read the recipe to him while he did it.

While he was doing that, I started removing the squash from the food processor. It was nice and smooth and thick. I tasted a bit as I was putting it in a Pyrex to measure it. Good thing, because the entire thing tasted like mold. 

Awesome. This is what I get for not using a can of pumpkin, like a normal person.

So all eight cups of that nicely pureed squash went to the chickens, and I took two bags of frozen squash out of the freezer after all.

Cubby meanwhile had finished his pie dough and put one half of it in the refrigerator to chill. The other half went into the freezer for some future use.

I had to thaw the frozen lumps of squash, so those went into a pot on the stove to simmer until it was all thawed. I had to use a pot anyway for the pumpkin pie filling--according to this recipe--so I figured I might as well thaw the squash in the pot.

Then I transfered the squash to the food processor, again, and pureed it. Again. And then I tasted it, again. No mold. Hooray!

Moving on.

I measured out the approximately four cups of squash we would need back into the pot and then called Cubby back into the kitchen to add the spices. Again, he wanted to do it himself as I read the recipe to him. I sat at the table to read the recipe from my computer while he was at the stove measuring spices. Then he turned the stove on and the squash started blurping all over my stove. And the wall behind it.

Cubby thought this was awesome and called Charlie in to see. I told him to STIR IT so I wouldn't be washing half the squash off the wall.

I was so over all of this already. 

Now it was time to get the pie dough out of the refrigerator and roll it out. I told Cubby I would stir the squash while he did that. 

While I was stirring, I tasted a bit. Remember how well that went last time I tasted squash. Yeah, this wasn't any better.

No mold this time, but waaaay too many spices in that pot. This was explained when I asked Cubby what he used to measure the spices and he showed me the teaspoon measure. He was supposed to use a half teaspoon measure. So there was twice as much spices as there was supposed to be. 

It tasted gross, all acrid and way too gingery. Even though Cubby definitely added more than the recipe called for, I think this recipe as written called for a LOT more ginger than necessary. I had to add all the rest of the pureed squash to the pan, and it still was too spicy. So I ended up adding a can of pumpkin I actually had in the pantry, thanks to our neighbors and the commodities drop-off, to further dilute the spices.

Yes, you can all chortle over the fact that after all that crap with the squash, I STILL ended up using a can of pumpkin. I just couldn't face thawing and pureeing yet more squash.

Anyway, we ended up with twice as much filling in the pot, which did not help the spattering situation.

Who's having fun now! NOT ME.

I froze the extra pie filling, to be used at some future date with the other pie dough in the freezer. How fortuitous.

There were no notable disasters with the rolling of the pie dough, although Cubby did have to be instructed more than once to roll it out more. I don't have a pie plate, so we were using a cake pan, which is a little higher, I think.

Looks pretty good so far.

We used pinto beans as our weights for the blind baking. I dumped a full quart jar of dry pinto beans into the lined pie crust and found when I poured them back into the jar that the hot pinto beans had apparently swelled a bit in the oven. I found this out when many beans went cascading all over my counter and onto the floor.

Sigh.

The blind baking proceeded without incident, and then we put the custard filling into the pie shell. I did not push the filling through a strainer as instructed by the recipe, because I was not about to get involved in anything like that after everything that had already happened.

After the complete pie was in the oven, I set Cubby to washing some of the millions of dishes that had been used during this fiasco. The pie was supposed to bake at 400 degrees for ten minutes, at which point I turned it down to 300 degrees, per the recipe.

About ten minutes after that, I realized that the oven had been accidentally turned down to less than 200 degrees while Cubby was putting dishes on the stove to dry.

At least I noticed it relatively quickly, I guess, although it was just the icing on this incredibly annoying cake. Or rather, pie.

The pie came out of the oven at 1:35 p.m. That's five and a half hours after we embarked on this ridiculous project. 

Obviously, we haven't eaten it yet, but I think I can state with some certainty that it was definitely NOT WORTH IT. I don't care if it's the best pumpkin pie in the history of pies. And I know it isn't, because of the overabundance of ginger.

But it's done, and we will have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner. 

So there.

We are also having turkey, which I also don't like and have never made but promised Cubby, again, that I would do it this year because EVERYONE has turkey for Thanksgiving, MOM.

I can only hope the turkey isn't as annoying as the pie. 

In Case You Were Wondering . . .

This is what it looks like when you forget to put the sourdough starter in your sourdough bread:

You should, of course, replaced "you" and "your" with "I" and "my."

The worst part is that I realized something was off when I got to the stage where I was supposed to take starter out of the rising dough and put it back into the refrigerator.  There was quite a lot of starter in the jar I was meant to be re-filling and I thought, "Huh. I must not have taken very much out to start with," and continued stupidly on. Despite the fact that nothing was rising. I went all the way to actually baking the bread. I was tipping it out of the pans before I realized that I probably hadn't ever actually put the starter in.

Not my finest moment.

So now I have four heavy, doughy bricks of "bread" to use. 

You didn't think I would THROW IT AWAY, did you? Perish the thought.

I read that they could be used for croutons. Or bread crumbs. Or cracker-ish things, if brushed thinly and re-baked with some oil.

And of course, I will start a new batch of bread tomorrow. With starter in it.

Not Recommended

A friendly bit of advice, my lovelies: Should you wish to soften your refrigerated butter a bit for your husband, who just the night previously had said we must be sure to have soft butter in the morning for waffles as nothing ruins waffles more than hard butter chunks that won't melt into the waffle, do NOT put two sticks of butter on top of the coffee maker "for just a second" while you make your coffee.

I mean, unless you really feel the best way to start your day is by cleaning up a greasy puddle of melted butter all over your coffee machine and the counter. And everything that was near the coffee machine on the counter.

At least it didn't get it into my coffee. And it wasn't quite as bad as the time the jar of maple syrup tipped over and spread a cup of maple syrup across a whole shelf of the lazy susan.

But still. Don't be like me. No butter on top of the coffee maker, okay? Okay.

Carry on.

Random, Here We Come

Last week when I was making dinner and holding Jack at the same time, I used a fork to take a taste of what I was cooking and managed to stab myself in the corner of the mouth. Not one of my more coordinated moments, but I'll blame it on the toddler weighing down one side of me that put me off balance.

Anyway.

This is a terrible place for a little cut, because of course it never really scabs over and is just kind of there, forever. Well, not forever, but it's been like five days now and it still hurts. Plus, I can't really camouflage it, so it kind of looks like I have a cold sore or something. Pretty.

I went freezer diving this morning and decided I'd better haul out one of the ENORMOUS pork shoulder roasts that are sitting on top of everything else in the cellar freezer. The last pig we had slaughtered was a relatively old sow, and so the resulting roasts are huge. HUGE.

It barely fit in our biggest roasting pan.

I either have to have a party for about twenty people to eat all this at once, or freeze some of it. Probably gonna go with freezing. It would be kind of nice to have some pulled pork in the freezer for those wretched hot days of summer when the last thing I want to do is turn on any heat source for cooking. How long do you think it will take to cook a roast the size of Jack? Probably at least twelve hours, I'm guessing.

'Kay, I'd better go do some laundry. A. took Cubby and Charlie fishing yesterday for the first time this year, and of course Cubby fell in and returned with soaking wet clothes plastered in mud. No fish, though.

Peace out.

What Remains

The other day I was making a recipe for cornbread that calls for an 8-inch cast iron pan. But I wanted to double the recipe, so obviously the original pan size would be too small. The MiL is usually the one who uses this recipe, and I knew she usually doubles it, so I asked her what size pan she uses when she doubles it. She uses the 10-inch pan. Righty-o.

I made some offhand remark about how it was kind of odd that twice the amount of batter should fit inside a pan that's only two inches wider.

Later that night, the MiL presented me with a list she had made of all our sizes of cast iron pans and their respective areas in square inches.

I looked at it for a second, and then said, "How do you figure out the square inches in a round pan?"

At which point, the MiL asked me very pityingly, "Didn't you take any geometry in high school? Pi times "r" squared?"

Yeah. Right. I took geometry in high school, all right. Almost failed it, too. The chances of me remembering anything from it other than the feeling of dread before a test are pretty much nil. On the other hand, I do remember how to sing "Rubber Duckie" in Spanish, which has made me pretty popular with Cubby, who is learning Spanish in school now.

We all have our own areas of expertise, I suppose. Geometry is not mine. But song lyrics I learned twenty years ago will never leave me.

I Hate It When I Do This

Cleaning out our woodstove, no matter how carefully it's done, inevitably results in a layer of fine ash on every surface of the dining room. This is why I usually plan ahead to do my dusting the day I clean it out (or, um, the day after, if I'm lazy).

We haven't been using the woodstove all that much, though, with the periods of warm weather we've been having, so I haven't been paying as much attention to it. I dusted yesterday. Then I realized today that it's going to be cold again starting tonight, and the woodstove needed to be cleaned out for the coming continuous use.

So I cleaned it out. And now I have to dust again. Dammit.

Slowing My Peach Roll

I was out on the front lawn with Charlie yesterday afternoon when I noticed an enormous branch that had broken off and gotten hung up on a maple tree. The jagged end of the branch was pointing straight down about five feet off the ground, very close to the horse chestnut tree that Charlie and Cubby have been playing under lately.

I had a vision of two small boys I know whacking that branch with sticks and it crashing down on them, possibly impaling one of them with that jagged end.

So I told Charlie to stand over by the driveway while I investigated closer and determined whether it was securely lodged in the tree or just swaying precariously up there.

Here's where I caution you to not do what I did.

What I should have done was gotten a long rope to toss around the branch and yank on it from a safe distance. What I actually did was walk right up to it, grab it with my hand, and yank on it to see how secure it was.

It was not secure.

It came crashing down immediately. Thankfully, not on top of my stupid head, because the bulk of it was in front of me. It did, however, wrench my right shoulder* pretty good, scrape up my whole left forearm, and leave a few deeper gouges in both hands.

But at least it didn't kill or maim one of the children, right? Right. Idiot.

Anyway.

My injuries are mostly superficial and not worth mentioning (except I just mentioned them in about, uh, six paragraphs), besides the fact that they are going to make it hard to deal with all the peaches I have.

No, not the peaches in the bushel basket. Those are already pureed and in the freezer. I now have the same amount of peaches again, because our Very Elderly Neighbor called on Sunday and said he had more I could come pick up and . . . well, I'm a sucker, I guess. And a glutton for punishment.

Peeling all those nice acidic peaches with cuts all over my hands will probably be pretty punishing, but we're going to be all set for peach yogurt this winter.

Maybe this time I'll be smarter than my branch-pulling self and wear gloves. Maybe.

* Luckily, it was not the shoulder I use to carry Jack around. I found out at the doctor's office yesterday that he weighs 22.5 pounds, which is a lot to be hauling around even with an uninjured shoulder. He is also 31 inches long. That is insane for a nine-month-old.

Me+Recipes=Disaster

Last week I finally used up the last of the broth left from cooking the home-brined corned beef. There may be recipes for using it, but I just made different things a bunch of times until it was all gone.

The last thing I made was chicken cooked in it, and then I added diced carrots and frozen spinach and garlic powder and white wine and cream to make a sauce for the chicken and some rice.

I mention this because it was exceptionally good. The MiL said I should remember how I made it so I could make it again. Not that I could ever re-create it, because although the ingredients are listed up there, I have no idea how much of anything I put in. It's not as if it was a recipe. I just threw things in until I thought it was done.

This is my most common method of cooking, and it's definitely one I should stick with. Because here's what happened when I used a recipe.

I was making hummus. I spent ten minutes skinning chickpeas for the proper texture and then prepared to obliterate them in the food processor with the standard tahini/lemon juice/garlic combination. I was just going to throw everything in until it tasted good, as I usually do. This is what I should have done. Instead I looked at a recipe, and then everything went wrong.

I decided to look in this enormous Middle Eastern cookbook of the MiL's. I've never made anything from it, and I thought maybe there was some secret ingredient or tip that would make hummus even better. The recipe listed chickpeas, water, tahini, lemon juice, and garlic*. All good, although the water gave me pause. I've never added water to hummus, but I thought maybe the chickpeas absorb it and it makes a nice texture? Three cups seemed like a bit much, though.

So I added about half a cup of water to the food processor. I realized two things simultaneously: One, that it was now waaaay too thin. And two, the recipe was starting with dried beans, whereas I used canned. The water was for soaking and cooking the chickpeas. That were then supposed to be drained.

How's that for complete idiocy in the kitchen?

I was really pissed that I spent all that time skinning the chickpeas only to screw up like that. I added a can of cannellini beans to thicken it up, as we were out of chickpeas. It's still too thin, but at least edible.

I think I'm just going to swear off even trying to follow recipes anymore. It's just not for me and my apparently unfocused brain.

* This recipe also calls for skinning the chickpeas, and I felt very smug for already doing that. How the mighty (and smug) will fall . . .

A Cautionary Tale, and a Success

I love parchment paper. I use it pretty much any time I put something in the oven*. It saves so much pan scrubbing. Last night, however, I had a little lesson about parchment paper.

It's flammable.

I know! Paper! Flammable! Who would have thought!

See, what happened was, I put some pork chops on a parchment-lined baking pan and stuck them under the broiler. But one corner of the paper was sticking up, so when I went to pull the pan out of the oven, I just brushed the super-hot heating element with that edge and HELLO FLAME.

It was a very small flame that I just blew out, but it reminded me to be a lot more careful with the position of that parchment near the heating element. I could just see the whole thing burning up in the oven without my even noticing.

And now for something I did that did not result in inadvertent flame.

I bought this puffed corn cereal that was all healthy and organic and blahblahblah. No sugar! No salt!

No taste. Literally nothing but puffy corn.

So then I thought, "Well, I'll just add some stuff to it." Stuff like maple syrup. And melted butter. And salt. And peanuts.

After baking, this makes something akin to Cracker Jack. Yup.

So I pretty much failed on the healthy cereal thing, but I win at an extremely addictive dessert. I'll take it.

* This may be a totally obvious thing to everyone who has ever used parchment paper, but the best way to get it to lie flat on the pan is to spread a drop of water on the pan first, then lay the parchment over that and press down. Kristin's Kitchen Tip of the Day. Or, uh, decade.

Way Harsh

I have this very nice watch that my mother gave me a year or so ago that I had to stop wearing about four months ago. The catch on it kept coming open and it was very annoying. I thought the catch had just worn out or broken or something. I meant to get it fixed, but the only good watch repair place in the Small City closed a few years ago and getting to the Not-As-Small City to get it fixed was way more hassle than I could handle.

It never occurred to me that maybe the catch on my nice watch stopped closing because my wrists got all swollen and fat because of my wretched pregnancy bloating.

It's embarrassing how long it took me to think of that.

In the meantime, when I was still stupidly assuming that watch was broken, I bought a really cheap watch at Sears and have been wearing that since then.

And THEN, just this week, I've apparently developed some kind of allergy to the back of my cheap watch. I don't know why I just developed this allergy now, after wearing the thing for months, but the red, itchy circles exactly the size and shape of the back of my watch that are now on both wrists are a pretty good indicator of the problem.

So this afternoon I finally dug out my nicer watch that will now stay latched on my no-longer-fat wrists.

Except I forgot that this watch had not been adjusted for the time change in November. So I was going around this afternoon thinking it was an hour later than it was. Then I went in the kitchen and saw that the clocks in there read 2:45 p.m. and there I was, thinking it was 3:45 p.m. and that salvation in the form of A. would be arriving in just a couple of hours.

HAHA NOPE. Three hours, you silly woman.

A cruel blow, indeed.

And now that I've spent way too much time and far too many paragraphs explaining my own idiocy and subsequent crushing disappointment, I'll be going. Have a nice day.

In Which the Butcher Makes Me Laugh

I mean, how often does that happen at a butcher shop? Nice guys and all, but not exactly comedians. But oh, did I laugh when I went to the butcher yesterday. Lemme tell you all about it.

I went to the butcher shop in the Small City to pick up the brisket I had ordered. I ordered a whole brisket. I thought I knew what a whole brisket is. 

I did not.

When we would get our whole cows, we would get a couple of briskets in the boxes, maybe six or seven pounds each. That's what I thought I was getting.

When the butcher told me that it came to $57.49, I was kind of shocked. I was thinking, "Man, that is some premium beef." But it was my fault for not asking the price per pound when I ordered it. So I handed over my debit card.

My next inkling of something different than my expectation was when I saw the box the brisket was in. It was big. And reinforced on the bottom with duct tape.

And then the butcher said, "I'll carry it to your car for you."

What? He thinks I can't carry a brisket? What do I look like, a weakling?

I made some joke about having to lift it into the pot, so I might as well train by carrying it to the car.

Then I pulled the box off the counter, looked inside, and . . . laughed.

There was this HUUUUGE slab of beef, all covered with white fat, and just . . . big. Like, fifteen pounds maybe. So, so big, and so, so not what I was expecting to see.

It appears that the brisket that we would get from the meat processing place was all nicely trimmed and in two pieces: the flat and the point. I had never seen the two together.

So then I had to trim this thing up and cut it into pieces.

My cutting board was barely big enough.

First I had to cut off the fat. And cut and cut and cut. 

Happy dogs ahoy.

So that took care of about five pounds of the brisket. 

Then I sliced off the point, following this really thick kind of vein of fat that runs diagonally along the end of the brisket and separates the two pieces.

Except I missed a chunk of the point and had to cut it off separately. Who cares.

I am obviously no stranger to cutting up meat, so this wasn't as intimidating as it could have been. The nice thing about trimming meat like this is that you can't really screw it up too badly. I mean, no matter what you do, you're gonna end up with food. And the cow is past caring what you do to it, so you've got nothing to lose.

While I was doing this trimming, I was also heating my brine for the corning part. I decided to corn the point and save the flat for some other preparation. 

Any recommendations for The Best Brisket Ever? I happen to have a brisket to spare.

And Then There Was This

Good thing I created that new label for Stupidity, because I have YET ANOTHER to add to it today.

I went with my parents to the farmers market in the Small City last Thursday to buy tomatoes, since my tomatoes haven't done jack this summer and I haven't had any to can. I bought about a bushel of seconds, intending to make salsa and then maybe just freeze some. They were all in my reusable grocery store bags, of which they filled about three.

I did make a batch of salsa, but there were still a couple of bags of tomatoes. They couldn't be stored on the floor in the kitchen, thanks to a certain small someone who likes to pull them out one by one and leave them all around the kitchen. So I put them on top of the table in the kitchen.

And then it was yesterday. Which was three days after I bought them. The MiL went to move the bags off the table and found . . . grossness. Specifically, one of the tomatoes in one of the bags had rotted to the point of liquefying, which then leaked out of the bag and made a black-ish stain on the table. The antique farm table that is probably 150 years old and that I just made an indelible stain on thanks to my stupidity.

Once again . . .

SHIIIIIIIIT.

The MiL thinks she may be able to bleach it off, but still. I'm considering retiring from my position of head housekeeper, because I apparently can't be trusted to take care of anything without damage anymore.

And Yet ANOTHER for the Stupid Archives

I should just create a whole label for "Stupidity," because that's apparently my new hobby.

Yesterday afternoon after canning the salsa I had made the day before, I did all the dishes and, as I usually do, put the big pot I had made the salsa in on a hot burner so it would dry quickly and could then be put away. My big pot that I love. The indispensable, perfect big pot that I actually dedicated a whole (admittedly somewhat lame) post to not very long ago.

Then I went outside to harvest pole beans and tomatoes. About ten minutes into this activity, my sister-in-law came out to tell me there was an empty pot on a hot burner on the stove.

Shit.

I asked her, of course--and quite calmly considering the circumstances--to turn the burner off. Then I ran inside to find that the MiL had taken the pot off the stove and that the copper core bottom had actually come clean off the aluminum bottom of the actual pot. Some aluminum had melted onto the stove, but the stove was okay. The pot, however? Not okay. Not at all. Not salvageable.

SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT.

So that was the end of my favorite pot of all time. The MiL was actually about to leave for the Small City, so she found a replacement pot for me. It's the same brand, the same size, and the same general style, but it's just not quite the same. Not quite as heavy, not quite as nice. My fault, though, so I can't complain.

I can swear though, right? Right.

SHIIIIIIIIIT.