Success on day 1

WOOHOO! Made it through my first day of gluten-free-ness! I was a bit disappointed by the selection, or lack there-of, of gluten-free baked goods at the store yesterday...something will have to be done, but more on that later. I just finished a bowl of amazing potato soup and threw a loaf of bread (minus the oh-so-tasty wheat) in the oven. I have a delicious pear for dessert, Dog and Cat are lounging contentedly, and I made it through 24 hours with no wheat....overall a great day! Here's the recipe for the potato soup (from my mom, with a few modifications)...I don't measure anything for it, so I'll do my best to describe it by look...

Potato Soup (Gluten-free optional)

Dice up potatos into about 1/2 inch squares (personally, I love red potatos for this with the skin on, but peeled brown potatos work too). Put the potatos in a stock pot with enough water to cover them, plus a little, and a chicken bullion cube. Boil about 15 min, till they are soft enough to poke easily with a fork, but not so soft as to fall off of the fork.

Drain the water, leaving about 1/2 in. Put the potatos back in and add 2-4 tablespoons of butter, and let the butter melt. Meanwhile, Mix 1 cup of flour (regular or gluten-free) with a generous pinch of salt and pepper as well as some dried parsley and oregano...or fresh....or any other seasonings you want. Crack an egg into the bowl with the flour/seasonings and use a fork to mix it up, set aside.

Pour enough milk into the pan with the potatos to cover, then add about another cup...you can also add some half & half. Turn the heat to med-high and let the milk warm up. Meanwhile, dice up any bacon or ham (or whatever else you want in there....) and grate about 1 cup of cheese. Once the milk is hot slowly add the rivels (the flour/egg mixture) and stir to keep them from all sticking together. Add more milk if needed. Allow to cook for about 15 min. Add your ham/bacon/etc. Adding sour cream is fabulous too, I just never seem to have it on hand. Add the grated cheese and salt and pepper to taste, stir till the cheese is melted.

This goes great with cheesy rolls....haven't tried any gluten-free ones yet, but if this bread turns out I'll work on it. Enjoy!

Cream puffs and kiddos

It's been a while....lots of the same going on in general--working and baking. Christmas was great, lots of support from my parents....it's weird to think I've been single for 6 months, but it's slowly starting to sink in. Dog is getting enormous, haven't taken him to the vet to be weighed but best guess is between 80 and 90 pounds. Cat got a new condo (compliments of carpet remnants, an old basketball hoop pole, and my dad's ability to make anything) and is in kitty-heaven. My neice is in town for a visit...20 months old and so damn cute!

Work is getting....frustrating. I'm excited that one kiddo will be graduating the program at the beginning of February. She was my first ever client and I've been with her family since she started the program 2 years ago. I'm so proud of her for the progress she has made, but I'm also insanely nervous for her to transition out....what if she regresses? What if her parents stop following through? I guess I should have a little more faith in all of them...she finally started sleeping in her own bed again after 4 years of sleeping with mom, so they must have been listening to me at some point over the last 2 years.

On the flip side of things, another of my kiddos is regressing big time, but it's not his fault or his family's. This kiddo has a serious degenerative disease that will eventually be terminal. His seizures have increased and their anatomy is changing....not good signs. As a result of the seizures he is losing some of his recently gained skills and is constantly tired....resulting in him being constantly grumpy and emotional and having a big increase in behaviors. I know that following through when I give him a directive is important to his therapy, but what about what's important for his happiness? I mean, no one knows just how long this kid has, so it makes me feel like a terrible person when I have him engage in non-preffered activities....a big part of me just wants to let him play all day.

Ok. Enough depressing-ness. I have been doing quite a bit of baking lately, from making my own caramel for a 'Twix' torte and Mexican toffe (both from "The Perfect Finish" by Bill Yosses) to general Christamas baking to mini beef wellingtons and mini maragarita cupcakes. But my favorite over the past month has by far been the cream puffs. Frenchie's husband loved the blueberry coffee cake, so she ordered another one at the beginning of December. She didn't request anything for Christmas, but asked for cream puffs for New Years. And, if possible, nougatine or florentinas. After several trials, and one attempt to rip my stove from the wall, I declared the nougatine impossible with my current stove (it's an electric flat-top and the burners don't hold a constant heat, but insead turn on and off--making caramel and candy rather difficult). So I switched to the florentina. Which cannot be cooked on parchment--as I discovered the hard way. I got one useable florentina rolled before my cookie sheets warped and all the batter ran to the centers. Damn. So cream puffs it was! After a slight debacle the morning I was due to deliver the pastries (apparently cream puffs can't be stored in a sealed container....who knew?), I whipped up another batch and they were crazy successful! Unfortuantely I have not been committed enough to look for my camera charger, and I'm sick at the moment and so feeling too lazy to go get the cable to get the pictures from my phone to the blog. But who know, maybe I'll get a burst of energy...but don't count on it.

Today was banana bread (favorite recipe for this is the one from Southern Sideboards) and laundry...generally a lazy, sicky day. Are constant body aches a sign of anything? All I know is tomorrow I go back to work with a school kid who is very.....hands-on. As in, lots of physically blocking him from various objects of obsession and lots of physically aggressive melt downs. And this achy-ness? Yeah, it is so not going to work for me tomorrow.

Baking-induced insomnia

So much baking and so little posting. I made the cake for Frenchie...used an old family recipe (how cliche does that sound?) that I've always liked, but found the flavor a little flat. So I personalized it a bit with dark French chocolate and buttermilk....fabulous. Made a divitinty icing and a chocolate ganache to top it off...

Sadly...that was the last picture before my camera battery finally called it quits....wouldn't be so bad if I could find the darn charger. Since the cake, there have also been successful chocolate pumpkin cupcakes with a cream cheese/whipped cream frosting as well as yesterday's amazingness: a spiced honey pound cake with a honey liquer syrup. So very very good.

So this weekend's baking is actually serving a purpose. I recently joined The Daring Kitchen and the Daring Baker challenge for this month is donughts. I have 2 ideas in mind so far, and a potential 3rd....so there might just be copious amounts of frying in my house this weekend.

I'm also toying with a frosting idea (based on the frosting used for the chcolate pumpkin cupcakes) for the chocolate hazelnut cake Frenchie wants...I previously topped the cupcakes with Nutella and a piece of chocolate, but will need something a bit lighter for an entire cake.

So that about sums up my kitchen activities till now...more pics to come once I find the damned charger.

Amazing amazingness.

Amazingness #1: Over the weekend, in between two separate 8 hour shopping stints, I made about 70 mini marzipan pumpkin stems and curly-cues...along with, of course, mini pumpkin cupcakes....


The beginnings of my mini pumpkin patch

Amazingness #2: This morning when I stopped in the office at work for some papers Frenchie, my boss, asked if she could place an order for Thanksgiving! She had mentioned it in passing a few times, but this morning said that she definately wanted the mini chocolate hazelnut cakes (see this post) and that she had her mom bring some chocolate from France (French chocolate!!!!!!) for me to make them with! YAY!

Amazingness #C: After informing me about the chocolate (French chocolate!!!!), Frenchie told me she had something I could borrow. Ok...we are currently at a day care/pre-school, so when she takes me into the kitchen telling me how excited I'm going to be I really didn't believe her...till she pulled out 2 of these:

SO FREAKIN CUTE! Yes, those would be little mini carrots. And radishes. And cabbage (cabbages?). And look at the adorable little peas!!!!! I'm planning carrot cake for them and am super excited to spray paint the frosting...I bought a can today to start practicing :) (And yes, that would be a Williams Sonoma bag in the background....which also makes me happy, because, although I did not buy the cute little pans there, I did see other cute little pans there and purchased a fabulous cutting board and spatula)

Amazingness #4: It's 8 pm onTuesday. Which means that a) I survived an atrocious Monday and b) Glee is on. And I'm a Gleek. So this makes me happy! Woo! (But seriously....look at the cute little peas!!!!!!)

Tranquilizer glove not included

Good things this week (as inspired by Portland):

*Dog is a celebrity. Well, as good as. Everywhere I take him people stop what they are doing to tell me how beautiful he is and the trainer at puppy class pulled me aside after to tell me how great and smart Dog is....this makes me hugely happy : )

*new Calphalon pans for $160 instead of $400

*got a new wireless printer, but didn't know I needed a wireless router....this is still a good thing because it gives me more of a reason to finally get actual internet

*the new cookbook my mom got me....although it is strictly a cookie cookbook, and although typically I thoroughly dislike making cookies, I'm going to give it a chance...there some rolled up apricot raspberry thingies that look promising

*for the last 20 min Cat has been sitting on the back of the entertainment center staring intently at the backs of the wii and antenna and jumping spastically...I'm entertained

One potato, two potato, three potato, cupcake!

So far this has been a very productive week in terms of baking. I promised my roomie, Portalnd, peanut butter frosting before she moved to Oregon, so that meant I had to come up with something to go with the peanut butter frosting. Don't get me wrong, in the process I ate about half of the frosting on its own, but I didn't think bringing a bowl of frosting and a bunch of spoons to work was going to go over so well. So after deciding against chocolate cake-ness (too expected and, really, not one of my favorite combos for cake and frosting) I did some research online and came across a bunch of recipes using banana cake. This looked promising, till I realized that it was Saturday....and I had to bake on Sunday....and there was no way that I was going to have over-ripe bananas that quick. So nix the bananas. But it led to a random recipe for applesauce cake...oooh! I like apples and peanut butter. And cinnamon. I like cinnamon. So I modified a favorite recipe and here are the results:

Aren't they cute!!!



...and delicious!

Several people at work were a little hesitant about the cinnamon and peanut butter (till they tried it and lovevd it), but it really added some depth to the frosting and the cake. All in all, absolute success.

Second episode of the week....I was approached today by Lady P (aka: my boss and the co-owner of the company) and asked to bake something for Owl's last day of work tomorrow. I was very excited about the whole conversation actually, basically L.P. offered to finance a fabulous state of the art bakery and pay me for it....and buy me a pony. Ok, not really any of that, but she did say that I had her support if I ever left my job to open a bakery, which is almost as good as that other stuff. Anyway, as a result of her offering to pay for any groceries I needed to bake for Owl, I decided to go with the dark chocolate hazelnut cupcakes I've been plotting lately. I'm totally thriilled with how they taste and look (dark chocolate hazelnut cake topped with Nutella and a piece of dark chocolate with hazelnuts in it), but I kinda misjudged their remove-ability-ness....that is to say, they don't come out of the wrappers so easy. But, messy eating aside, here they are:



It's a whole herd of them!



 I have 6 dozen of these....and 8 mini-loafs. I have a lot of chocolate. But, really, when is that a bad thing?

Happy

Ok...so drunken panko coconut chicken was fabulous (few minor tweaks, needs salt), coconut rice recipe was awful--the liquid to rice ration was totally off so it ended up as more of a coconut rice mush. Flavor was all right, again though, some adjustments needed. Aside from that, here is a little bit of happy.

practicing my happy dance

So I have jury duty coming up. I was totally excited about it (sorta being paid to totally not be at work? um, yes!)...till I found out the dates. Turns out I have jury duty on the same day that Redneck is being sentenced (yeah...I picked a winner). When I went to the court house to ask if this was a conflict of interest the woman's over-tweezed eyebrows almost shot off her forehead and she asked if I was serious. I considered telling her that no, I was just bored today and this seemed like a good way to spend my time, but decided that a simple 'yes' might be a smidge more professional. She told me that on my first day to let the people know and they would decide if I should be there or not. Personally, I do not think I should be in the same building as Redneck....I'm typically a semi-rational, calm-ish person (or at least I like to think so), but I might just burst out into song and dance if I see them leading him off in handcuffs...not that I've been practicing the song, just the dance.

Anywho (does anyone say that anymore??), I made the panko-walnut crusted chicken tonight....good concept, bad recipe. It called for the chicken to be baked....turned out terribly dry. Good flavor, but dry. I think I will go the pan-fried route next time. I am, however, now a huge fan of panko. How did I not know of its existence?? Oh well, I have found it now and am in love.

Chicken or steak?

I love to cook. And bake. And guess what? It's here! It's finally here! My shiny new Kitchen Aid stand mixer is sitting happily on my kitchen counter! It's first duty was to make mini coffee cakes to take to work, and I must say that it accomplished this admirably. Unfortunately, I over-filled the mini-muffin tins and now can't get them out without destroying them. Oh well, I suppose I will just have to scoop them into a tupperware and get rid of them some other way that does not require much in the presentation department (any volunteers?). And while these taste great, there are a few more tweaks I want to make to the recipe (I already changed the streusel topping to one that is much more moist), so I guess it all worked out.

I have really enjoying cooking dinner for myself over the last week. I mean, I have always loved cooking--the planning of it not so much, but the actual cooking part I find extremely relaxing. And now that I'm cooking for just me, it's gotten even better. Redneck ate for the simple fact that he had to to survive, enjoying a meal, but never really appreciated the flavors of a meal. I got frustrated with this and worked myself into a rut. There were only so many things that we both liked. Chicken is one of my favorite things ever and he does not like it (see "Who does that?!" from previous post). But, then again, I'm a pretty darn picky eater, especially when it comes to vegetables...as in, I generally don't eat them.

So anyway, this past week has been fantastic for cooking....capellini noodles with meat sauce and homemade garlic bread, beef stir-fry cooked in butter with rice, a fabulous cheeseburger, soprasata with french bread and grapes, and tonight, steak alfredo with tortellini and garlic bread. In the last week I have rediscovered how much I love to enjoy food....eating slowly, enjoying the rich buttery flavor of the stir-fry, the little kick of the oregano in the meat sauce, the sweet woodsy flavor of the soprasata, and the hint of rosemary in the alfredo. Tomorrow is up for debate at the moment....I'm torn between trying out a new recipe for breaded chicken with walnuts or pan-frying a flat iron steak with home-grown garlic mashed potatos. These are the tough decisions in life.