Wed 13 Feb 2008
Posted in Good Food, The Good things in life
at 0:05
What’s for supper? Every day, that question needs to be answered, and Pat does better than most at coming up with a good answer every day.
This past weekend, she was wandering the aisles at a supermarket with a vague idea of making something from the chicken tenderloins that were on sale.
Then she saw a beef soup bone marked down and it gave her an idea. She went down a mental checklist:
- Do I have all the ingredients for soup? Probably. Carrots, got ‘em; celery, got it… can use some of those tomatoes from the garden this year, they’re in the freezer downstairs.
- I might not have beef broth but I can substitute Better Than Bouillon.
- It’s a little late in the afternoon to start, but using a pressure cooker on the soup bone will speed it up.
Once she got home, she started making soup at 3:30, and it was ready and on the table by 5:30.
And let me tell you, on a cold day, a warm homemade soup was delicious…
Old-fashioned Vegetable Soup
1 beef soup bone with meat
1 - 2 Tbs. fat
4 cups water
1 med. onion, chopped
1 cup sliced carrots
1 cup cut-up celery & leaves (2 stalks)
1 can tomatoes (2 cups)
3 sprigs parsley, finely cut
1 Tbs. salt
1/2 bay leaf, crumbled
3 peppercorns (Pat uses more like a dozen)
1/4 tsp. marjoram
1/4 tsp. thyme
Cut meat off bone into small chunks. Brown in hot fat in large kettle.
Add water and bone and simmer covered 1 1/2 to 2 hrs. Remove bone and skim fat from top of soup.
Add vegetables, salt, bay leaf and peppercorns tied in cheesecloth bag (bouquet garni), marjoram, and thyme; cook an additional 20 - 30 minutes, till vegetables are tender.
Remove bouquet garni before serving.
Makes 6-8 servings.
(Recipe from Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book (1961), page 405.)
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Wed 5 Dec 2007
Posted in Good Food, The Good things in life
at 0:05
Went looking for something different and easy and really, really tasty, and found Simply Elegant Chocolate Mousse Tart.
Simple stuff, with only five ingredients: Oreo crumbs and butter for the crust, and heavy cream, chocolate chips, and a little powdered sugar for the filling. Here, the crust is in the oven for about 15 minutes, and I’m about to put together the filling.
The dark brown crust is out and it’s about to go outside to cool off a little. The chips have been microwaved for one minute with half the cream, and above that is the other half of the cream, whipped with a bit of powdered sugar…
Mix the wet stuff, pour it in the crust, and (the hard part) put it in the refrigerator and wait 4 hours until it’s firm. Nothing intricate, nothing fancy, but it sure tastes good.
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Fri 23 Nov 2007
Posted in Good Food, This, that and the other
at 12:30
Not only is it Black Friday, it’s also the day after Thanksgiving, and more than a few of us have an ample sufficiency of leftovers. Need fresh ideas for yesterday’s food? Check out LeftoverChef.com.
Via Lifehacker.
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Sat 10 Nov 2007
Posted in Good Food
at 0:05
This probably isn’t the first time there’s been a post here about Blueberry Cream Muffins. The difference this time is that Pat wanted a coarse sugar topping like the muffins at Wegmans, and this red sugar topping is what we had to work with. So the result is some red, some blue, and the key ingredient, the white sour cream. Something for people in red states and blue states alike…
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Mon 8 Oct 2007
Posted in Good Food, This, that and the other
at 16:27
“O would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us!”
— “To a Louse,” Robert “Rabbie” Burns
(not to be confused with Rabbie Burns)
While I was in France many years ago, I looked through a French textbook for teaching English. In it, there was a lesson which explained that English speakers don’t simply say yes or no.
Did you do that? “Yes, I did.”
Are you going there? “Yes, I am.”
Never thought of it that way. Of course, that doesn’t take into consideration the millions of Americans who’d simply answer “Yeah.” (Or the many who’d just say “No.”)
So this morning, I read something along the same lines in Charles Bremner’s blog for the Times of London. The French tourist ministry published a book with advice for their restaurateurs about customers from outside France.
Bremner mentioned that the book warns that Americans don’t want “Offal dishes, frogs’ legs and snails”, but he left out another dish that was on the list — and correctly so, I might add… um… let’s use the French word and call it Lapin. (Just in case rabbits as well as cats are reading this.) Although I might make an exception for this…
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Wed 26 Sep 2007
Posted in Good Food, The Good things in life
at 0:05
Had a little more time today, as Pat continues to improve, so I visited some blogs for the first time in several days. It was good to see them again, too. I like going around and seeing how creative cats and their humans can be. If you’re on the blogroll here and I haven’t been by your blog lately, I’m going to try to get there as soon as I can…
In particular, I saw on the Cat Blogosphere Toosday Noos that curly cat Daisy’s sister Pixie was celebrating a birthday, and I stopped by to add our best birthday wishes. Pixie was enjoying all the bananas she received (um, I mean “bananers”), both the real ones and the ones containing catnip. And that led to this…
A baked graham cracker crust, made from the recipe in the 1961 Betty Crocker cookbook at the top left; a pot of whole milk on the stove top with banana cream pudding mix already stirred in; and way over there on the left, a couple of real ripe bananas with brown peels… I think you can see where this is leading…
On one side of the stovetop, I’m stirring the pot, waiting for the pudding to boil; and on the other, sliced bananas lining the crust. You can just feel the anticipation building, can’t you? 
And yes, that’s a couple of cans of Stinky Goodness on the countertop next to an open jar of Baby Chicken…
Finally, the finished product, topped with real whipped cream beaten in a chilled bowl. And at the bottom, my first piece of the pie. (Pat had a smaller slice and gave it her approval.)
It’s real nice to be able to take the time to do something in the kitchen, too…
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Thu 6 Sep 2007
Posted in Good Food, This, that and the other
at 0:05
I feel good today… beautiful weather since several days ago. I’ve always liked spring the best, with birds and baseball now and summer ahead soon, but right now is Pat’s favorite time of the year. Weather is still warm, but nights are cooler and we can sleep without air conditioning. Pat hangs the bedsheets on the line after washing them, and the smell of line-dried sheets is another of the world’s great fragrances — that, and fresh-baked cinnamon buns, and new car smell…
* …Another reason I feel good — a sense of accomplishment after fixing another problem with the PC upstairs. It was mighty slow to boot up, and the reason was the CPU was running at 100% usage, 100% of the time. First, disconnected Ethernet and checked for malware: none found. No reason to suspect it, really, since everyone here stays away from the seamy side of the web, and just in case, we have multiple layers of defense. Google turned up a solution: Run MSCONFIG and stop things from loading at startup, then reboot. I did it, and sure enough, no more 100% CPU usage… the rest was easy…
* …At our house, phishing has never been a problem — receiving phishing emails has been… for some reason, in the past week or so, we’ve been sent 17 of them purporting to be from Banco di Roma, and no one here even speaks Italian…
* …and now, here’s a word from our alternate sponsor:
* …And oh, by the way, here’s the list of ingredients on a can of Coke I bought at Wegmans for Labor Day weekend:
It says “sucrose.” Not “high-fructose corn syrup.” What’s going on here? According to some articles, people are passionate for Coke made with sugar, so then is The Coca-Cola Company meeting that demand by going back to its classic Classic formula? Can’t tell for sure. At Wegmans, the 2-liter bottles and 12-packs of cans were made with sugar, while 6-packs of plastic 1/2 liter bottles and 7-ounce glass bottles were HFCS.
And me, I’ve been drinking soda made with alternative sweeteners for about a year and a half, but Coke with sugar tastes mighty good, as good as Dublin Dr Pepper and Boylan’s Cane Cola… does this mean I’m falling off the diet soda wagon? Well, here’s where I invoke the rule of “everything in moderation (including moderation)”… and I’ll talk to you later…
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