Don’t sweat the small stuff…

“I tried to bake a cake for my mother’s birthday – it took me four hours. It was terrible, and I cried for three days.“

— Rachael Ray

(See? Even the pros fail sometimes!)

The Zen of Homemade Pizza (Or Serenity from Dinner for 16)

Serenity is not the word that normally comes to mind when you think about having a weekly dinner for anywhere from 10 to 25 people.

Crazy, yes. Chaos, yes. Serenity…not so much.

Serenity — the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled (according to Google, anyway).

Strangely enough, though, serenity is often what occurs in the time before the craziness hits.

The calm before the storm

For the past nine years, I have been part of a group who meets for dinner on Sunday nights. We call it Sunday Night Dinner, or SND. (We like to save our creativity for the food.) Imagine having a holiday dinner every week. That’s kind of what it is like. We set a theme or main dish, and everyone brings something to contribute. There are several people who love to cook and experiment and lots of willing guinea pigs to sample the results.

Last night was pizza night. Sometimes someone will show up with a takeout pizza on pizza night, but usually it is free-styling homemade pizza. (On one pizza night, a random person once observed, “Wow! When y’all said pizza, I was thinking pepperoni or maybe sausage. But y’all get serious about some pizza!”)

To my dream reader…do you know who you are?

When I looked at you right after you were born, I didn’t think about the everyday, mundane things of life, like teaching you to cook.

I remember my aunt teaching me to cook. I was probably ten when I started helping her in the kitchen. Most often, my main job was to chop the nuts. I can remember staying up all night doing the baking for Christmas. No, really, alllll night. I remember flopping down on the sofa to eat an orange while she smoked a cigarette before going to bed. We joked that it would keep us from having to get up for breakfast.

I’m blaming DST . . . for everything!

I haven’t posted in almost a week. I feel a little guilty . . . but not enough to lose any more sleep than I already lost this weekend!

Cupcakes inspired by Disney’s Frozen – Pt. 2 “Anna” (Orange cinnamon spice with red hots)

Hey guys — if you like the posts you’ve been seeing on my blog, why not check out the book, A Week with the Fake Gourmet: 20 Meals That Make People Think You Can Cook. Just click here to read about it! You’ll be winning friends and influencing enemies in no time! 

Believe it or not, I decided to go ahead and try my second cupcake inspiration, in spite of the way the first one went. (If you missed the story of that cooking fail, click here!)

For the Princess Anna cupcake, I knew I wanted it to have red hots. And chocolate. And plenty of spice.

And this time I decided to make my own recipe, instead of looking online first. (Yes, reckless and brave are my middle names!)

I figured a spice cake with extra orange added for the cupcake, with some red hots ground up in a chocolate ganache for the filling. Top the whole thing with brown sugar buttercream frosting decorated with raw sugar crystals and more ground up red hots. Sounds good, hmm? 🙂

Before I did this, I had no idea how hard it is to grind up red hots. I admit, I didn’t  try a food processor, because I thought they might be too hard. So instead, I took my marble rolling pin and used it to pound the red hots while they were still in the sealed package. I did that for a while, and then I actually rolled them some. Then I beat on them some more. (Be prepared. This is very noisy. Warn your family first or they will come running to see what is wrong.)

Cupcakes inspired by Disney’s Frozen — Pt. 1 “Elsa” (White chocolate Peppermint)

Hey guys — if you like the posts you’ve been seeing on my blog, why not check out the book, A Week with the Fake Gourmet: 20 Meals That Make People Think You Can Cook. Just click here to read about it! You’ll be winning friends and influencing enemies in no time! 

In the interests of not completely losing my mind during all the nasty winter weather last week, I decided it was a good time to finally try to create the cupcakes I dreamed up as a tribute to “Frozen.”  So after dinner, I started baking.

Why is it that things never turn out the way you imagine them in your head?

First, I wanted an Elsa cupcake. I dreamed of a beautiful white, velvety cupcake (maybe white chocolate) with a cool, peppermint center. Kind of a York peppermint patty  feel. I wanted to top it with a high mountain of white frosting, decorated with pieces of blue spun sugar for the ice palace. Sounds great, in theory, right? 

TBT: A love letter to Trowbridge’s and a banana split

In honor of Throwback Thursday, here’s a story of one of my favorite restaurants in my hometown. (This story was previously published on a now-dead blog I started. I guess that makes it a double-throwback!)

Best place in town for ice cream, chili dogs (if you like those skinny little red weenies), and Coke in a bottle so the straw floats up.

When I was ten, my mom had to go out of town for a week. Since my dad didn’t get home from work until late, my college-aged sister got babysitting duty. She worked for a furniture store downtown, where I got to hang out with her after school that week. I thought it was extremely cool to lounge around on the beanbag chairs in the television department instead of sitting on a regular couch to watch tv. Or to wander around and pretend I lived in the houses that had some of that furniture…

Something even better than playing on the furniture was across the street from the store. Trowbridge’s. The local ice-cream and sandwich shop.

Nostalgic for seeds

I like seeds. I’m not saying that I want to go plant things…mercy, NO! I was blessed with a black thumb — I have even killed an aloe plant, which I understand is difficult to do. Granted, it took a little longer than other things, but I still managed without going out of my way.

I just like the little paper packets of seeds. The pictures of vegetables on the front of the packets are bright colors. Even if I don’t really like eating most of them, I do think they are pretty. Especially in the pictures. The tomatoes are bright, shiny red. The lettuce is frilly and green. And the eggplant . . . it is probably my favorite. Dark purple and shiny. It definitely wins the award for prettiest vegetable. Overall, though, I like the idea of a vegetable garden much more than actually having one.

Pretty little seed packets

Who’s cooking tonight?

Do you ever have those days when you just don’t want to cook anything??

Yep, it happens to the best of us. You browse around on Pinterest, looking for something so good you can’t resist and nada.

Well, it ALL looks great, just not great enough to get you out from under your blanket and up off the couch to go make it happen.  If only someone else would make it happen . . .

I’ll admit it. That has been me today. Lunch consisted of leftovers from the Superbowl  that only had to be warmed for seconds in the microwave. That was followed by a snack of wheat crackers filled with fake cheddar cheese, right out of the package.  I plan to eat a dinner that is entirely cooked by someone else. Yay me!

I think some days you just deserve to have someone else cook for you!

Who’s taking me out?

Recipes from the Past…Link to the Future

A link to the past…and maybe to the future!

I was cleaning out some drawers a couple of weeks ago and found my grandmother’s recipe notebook. It’s just an old spiral bound notebook, nothing special in itself. But it is full of handwritten recipes and magazine clippings, which is a fragile link to the past.

By the time I was old enough to notice things, I don’t think I remember seeing her ever use a written recipe to cook.  She just knew. She was of the “add ingredients until it looks right” school. My sister once stood beside her in the kitchen and as Mother Eva (that’s what we all called my grandmother) added a “pinch” of this and a “handful” of that, my sister made her dump it into a measuring cup before adding it to the bowl. That day is the only way we know some of her recipes.