Cooking Baking Eating

I’ve had a rough time lately, but it’s not just one thing. The economy sucks, stress sucks, a lot of things suck. I’ve had a lot of “things” recently in my life that have seemed to just throw me out of balance.

Sadly it’s also given me cooking block.

I’m used to writers block or creative block, but cooking block is a new one for me. Either I cook something and it’s just “eh” or I do something and it just doesn’t come out looking right.

For the last few years I’ve almost felt like a cooking super hero. Every time I make something for friends they say they love it, I get rave reviews from work for my baked goods. It makes me feel rather awesome when I can just whip something up and it is just awesomeness.

Now it just feels like those powers have left me lately. I was doing great for the first month or so of the year, baking my first cake from scratch, experimenting with new ways of making breads without yeast, picking something up at the store that I’ve never eaten before and seeing what I can do with it….

I feel like Clark Kent and I just got beat with the kryptonite stick.

Now it’s my second batch of flat cookies and I don’t know what to do with myself. It was a double batch so I could make some ice cream cookies and still have some regular cookies around.

Now all I have is a large batch of flat cookies sitting on my counter.

Mocking me.

Mocking me and my dead cooking abilities.

Bastards…

I don’t know where I went wrong with this recipe. I’ve made it before and it turned out wonderful! It made some awesome ice cream sandwiches, but this time something happened and I’m not sure what.

I’ve tried:

• Changing pans. Going from a half sheet pan to a flat cookie sheet with no sides.
• Lowering the temp on my oven by 25F.
• Cooking for less time.
• Chilling the dough after scooping before baking.
• Chilling the dough before scooping.
• Making sure my pans are room temp before putting the parchment of dough on it.

But they all turned out pretty much the same. I’m really at a loss here.

What in the world happened to me?

This has to be one of those things that I can’t really believe I’ve ever lived without. Its a cooling rack that is oven safe. Awesome.

Using this I can make chicken parmesan without having the bottom get soggy, let the fat drain off of a meatloaf, or make some pretty awesome bacon.

Meatloaf can be a little tricky to make on an open rack through, right? Its just a loaf of ground meat balanced on a wired rack. I wanted to find a way to drain off the fat, but I really didn’t want to buy one of those loaf pans with holes in the bottom. To me, meatloaf should not resemble a loaf of bread.

So I took some heavy foil (another kitchen favorite) and put it over the rack. Now that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to just have it on foil. So I poked it.

I poked it a lot. This is why I wanted to have heavy foil, so it’ll stand up to the meatloaf weight and also the poking. I used a large pen to make the holes, so there would be lots of places

The foil worked really well. The fat drained off and out of the meatloaf and it didn’t have a whole lot of congealing fat attached to the sides of it. Sounds yummy huh? Plus I could cook my potatoes on the same rack and have dinner ready at the same time.

Awesome!

The love affair with bacon is hard to deal with when you really don’t want to be eating a whole pound of bacon at one time because you don’t want it to go bad, especially when there are only two people living in your house.

The Husband was trying to be a good man and cook me dinner one night. Dinner was bacon sandwiches. His version of a BLT is just bacon, bread and mayo. I appreciated it, gave him a hug and told him never to do that again.

I can’t eat that much bacon. I need balance. I need veggies!

So I’ve found a great way to store bacon when I know we won’t get to that much bacon in one sitting.

Well… Ok we COULD get through that much bacon in one night but we really don’t need to be doing that to our poor arteries.

I saw this method somewhere, I don’t remember and its been a while, but I LOVE it. The idea of individually frozen pieces of bacon just make my life better. And easier!

Take some parchment paper, and place a piece of bacon down. Fold over. Place another piece on top. Fold over. Place, fold, repeat, then freeze! Forgive the lack of picture, lighting has been weird lately with the weather/time changes.

This way you can pull out as many pieces as you need. Only have to unroll and stick them in the oven or pan. You don’t really need to defrost bacon, it just goes with the flow. Just store it in a freezer safe zip-top bag and squeeze out as you can. It’ll stay good for probably a few months, but then again I wouldn’t know since it doesn’t last that long in my house!

Husband calls bacon the gateway meat. It has to be one of the most addictive meat products you can buy in the market. I’ve known a few vegetarians who would randomly crave bacon from time to time.

It’s an addictive substance that I am so glad is socially acceptable.

The one thing I really hate about cooking bacon is the splattering, popping and eventual burning flesh and running away from the angry grease. So I’ve been looking for a way to make bacon without the fear I have of the burny fleshyness.

And the time. It takes too long for the bacon to cook in my opinion.

So after watching so many foodie shows on TV I’ve decided to start baking my bacon. Awesomeness. I don’t have to worry about splattering grease on myself and it’ll have it all be cooked and done at the same time!

Mmmmm… Bacon…

I bought this nice and wonderful contraption at Kohl’s before Christmas, an oven safe cooling/baking rack, and it has truly been my favorite thing ever to lower the fat in cooking. It can handle up to 475F I believe, but you don’t really have to use this, you can just lay the bacon on the tray and it’ll work great also.

Always line your baking sheet with a large piece of heavy duty foil, this way you don’t have to do much clean up at all and you wont mess up your pans with all that bacon grease. To bake your bacon, always start with a cold oven. That’s my opinion at least. It seems to cut down on the splattering and grease craziness in the oven. It also helps your meat strips to lay flat.

Lay as much as you can in your pan without overlapping the bacon, the more bacon the better my life.

Cook the bacon at 375F for about 15-20 minutes or until the crispness that you want. Thin bacon cooks MUCH faster than thicker cut, so you really have to watch your bacon the first few times until you get the hang of it. It also seems to take a little longer to cook on the rack, probably because its not cooking in the grease.

There is a definite texture difference if you cook it on the rack rather than just on the pan, it still tastes great but it does feel different in your mouth. Cooking it without the rack will produce bacon very similar to cooking on the stove. Either way its great. I think I just like the fact that the grease is draining off as it goes. It probably doesn’t make much of a difference calorie wise but it makes me feel better.

Do you ever get those weird voices in your head as you’re about to do something? Like sitting down to write after a long absence do you suddenly hear a creepy voice in your head saying “I have been to the edge…and back! And I survived… Only slightly…” It’s as though a pirate has stolen into my head and taken over for a brief moment…but without his parrot…and he might be high also.

Or it’s as though I look at a quilting project, full of needles and other such poking things and my inner toddler becomes giddy and squeals “I am on pins and needles!!!”

And yes that does happen. Often.

But I digress, my self imposed radio silence is ending. I finally feel as though I’m in enough control of life that I can come back and start talking again.

Because you know I’m from the generation who loves nothing more than to hear themselves talk and document their life. Well not really, I’m actually quite shy, but I’ll take that excuse to talk to the unseen masses anyways.

I’ve been busy in my absence though, baking, cooking, drinking (gasp!) and finding ways to get through the rough second half of 2009. I did take up drinking sometime after my radio silence, as a way to forcibly make myself relax.

It strikes me as funny that I refer to taking up drinking as having more than one wine cooler in a 3 month period. The real shocker was when it turned into two in one night. Husband had fun with me at that point.

I feel as though 2010 is a turning point for the Husband and myself. New ventures, new surprises, new…life.

This was also the first time I ever had a blast on New Years, celebrating the event with friends and chocolate shots.

And then much laughter when my friend realized we were doing one more shot to celebrate… And she had already started eating her chocolate shot glass.

Too much laughter to get a clear shot. Happy New Year everyone.

We all know about my love of making mass meals to freeze and have waiting to take to work.

Well I think I got just a little too inspired the other day in my cooking conquests.

I made 3 different meals, and enough to feed an army as well. I really do have this really annoying habit of not being able to cook for 2 people easily.

This time I made Un-Stuffed Bell Pepper, Beef Stew/Chili, and Balsamic Chicken Pasta.

Very motivated.

Very crazy.

Very dirty kitchen.

I guess I was hungry.

I made a total of 19 meals. Holy crap that’s a lot of food. I could have very easily just had a party and fed the entire block.

I need a nap just looking at all that.

Sometimes in the morning I’m really not awake. It takes me forever to wake up.

So the other morning I was chopping my apple for work and I saw what looked like a worm in the core. When I finally focused my eyes I realized that it wasn’t a worm, but a seed that had started to grow inside the apple!

I would have gotten a picture of the little seed but like I said, I wasn’t awake. It was 5 am, give me a break.

I did though put it in a pot I had in the kitchen, so I’m really hoping that it’ll grow and be a big strong tree! The last time I tried this, the little seedling died after a while, so hopefully my black thumb wont come in to play here.

Well it really did work.

I didn’t kill them! The only thing I did was change the water half way through the week. I’m really shocked at how quickly these things grew. I’ve seen the obligatory growing a potato in a jar but I never really grew up with growing an onion so this is pretty neat. The edible science experiment. Maybe the schools should look into growing onions instead of potatoes, and then teach them how to use the onions!

I think I’m reaching a little far with today’s school systems.

Oh well, at least I have fresh onions for this winter.

I love buying in bulk. I always love walking through the little aisles and finding something new to try.

This time I decided I wanted to try the honey. I never really knew there was a difference to honey until now. At the store I shop in, they have 3 different types of honey to bulk buy. Blackberry, Clover and Orange.

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There are times where I think I have a black thumb. Its not green, it kills things. An old coworker I had once gave me three tomato plants one year. Guess how many tomatoes I got off of those suckers?

Three.

Yep. Just Three.

I told you my thumb is black.

Now I’ve decided to try again. But this one involves no dirt, feeding, composting, or any of that crap. Just water.

I saw this in a magazine sometime before, that you can just stick the green onion bottoms in some water and you have instant onions! Well maybe not instant, they do have to grow a bit.

Besides this is kind of a fun project to do now that the weather is starting to cool off here and it’s really not a good time to be planting anything out side.

I’ll let you know next week how its doing!