I can't win!

Thursday: Stuck in a webnar via gotomeeting...it started at noon...it's now 12:30 and one person can't figure out how to join the meeting online. Why is it always that way? There is always one who needs hand holding and holds everything up for the rest. I've been sitting here with my headset plugged in reading OD for 30 minutes.

Friday: Tomorrow is Tim's 16th birthday. He's been shaving for two years and I think he was getting tired of always cutting himself at least twice every time he shaves. I don't think he'll ever get the hang of a "safety" razor. So I ordered an electric shaver for him online at walmart.com and paid for rush shipping (cause I'm so organized you know and ordered it on Sunday). Yesterday I was getting nervous that it hadn't come yet when I paid for overnight shipping and it had already been four days. Tim went out to the shop to get something and came in carrying a box. He told me he had found it propped against the shop door. Stupid FedEx had left it out there. I don't know what the driver was drinking or smoking that day, but it isn't that hard to tell the difference between our house and shop.

Tonight I finally opened the box so I could put the present out for Tim to find in the morning. Did I mention that I paid extra for gift wrapping? When I opened the box and removed the packing, at first I wasn't sure what I was looking at.


So I reached in and picked it up.



Hmmm.......



Yeah, it's just what it looks like....a black pillowcase tied with a white ribbon. Some people may think it's cute, but I don't consider it appropriate wrapping for a birthday present. You can believe Walmart got an email from me right that moment. I haven't even opened the bag to see if it is the shaver I ordered. I'm afraid to.

Since Tim was in bed and it was getting late, I decided I'd better get his birthday cake put together. I decided to go all out this year for a sorta special birthday and baked a four layer devils food cake with filing between the layers alternating between caramel and homemade chocolate ganoshe, frosted with chocolate fudge frosting. Sort of my version of death by chocolate. A couple of months ago, Tim and Ram bought an old (1978) Mustang together and are fixing it up in the garage. Yesterday while I was getting gas at Stamart,I found a scale model Mustang just the right size for the cake. I bought Kit-Kats to make a road on top of the cake and put the Mustang on the road. After I finished with frosting the cake, I noticed that it was leaning a little bit and straightened it up, then decided that if it was in danger of sliding apart, I'd just put it in the deep freeze to firm it up for awhile. I went to check it a few minutes ago and this is what I saw.





The top layer cracked apart and slid off the next layer. The second layer has slid forward off the third layer. I think I'll just leave it there and try to put it back together in the morning. That's what I get for trying to be all "cheffy" as Tim calls it. At least he should get a good laugh out of it tomorrow. I just had an idea....maybe I should put the cake in the pillowcase. See? I just can't win!

Misadventures in bread baking

So yesterday while we were having our regular weekend snowstorm I was hankering for some French bread. Do you know how many recipes there are online for French bread? Only about a gazillion, but they are all mostly the same so I just picked one and ran with it. I thought the dough was a little bit stiff, but decided to consider it an upper body workout and just kept kneading. The recipe made two loaves and they didn't raise as much as I thought they should, but I baked them anyway. One was just normal French bread and the other was the herb bread that I was hungering for.





My first clue as to the texture of the bread should have been whan I was slicing a piece off. A hacksaw would have been handy to get through it. It was a little dense. I ate two pieces even though my teeth protested. I dug the empty yeast packets out of the garbage and checked the expiration date and they are good until 2011. But I think the poor yeast died an early death. This morning I gave one of the loaves to Tim and told him to take it outside, break it up, and give it to the birds. After he went out, I heard a loud noise and looked outside. There was Tim pounding my French bread on the steps trying to break it up to give to the birds. He was whacking it pretty hard, but may have lost some power in his swing, as he was laughing so hard. He finally got it broken up into three pieces and tossed onto the snow on the lawn. The last I looked, there were two jays fighting over it but it didn't look like they'd made a dent in it yet. I think I'll take them out some birdseed in a little bit.

Another thing I made yesterday was dulce de leche, which is literally translated from Spanish as "milk jam". It's actally a delicious caramel sauce that is to die for. Alton Brown made it on Good Eats but it involves cooking milk and sugar on the stovetop and standing there stirring it for about two hours. I had heard that you could also make it from condensed milk, so I went online and found several recipes. The most intriguing involved taking an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk and boiling it in a pan of water on the stove for two to three hours.

Now this sounded like a recipe for disaster to me, but there were many testimonials online from people who had made it numerous times and never had a problem with it. So I got down a can of SCM and my largest saucepan and started boiling. The only warning about this recipe is to make sure the can is covered by water at all times. Otherwise it might explode. So I boiled it for 2-1/2 hours and kept peeking at it and refilling the water to make sure the level didn't go below the can. After it cooled, I opened the can and tasted it. It was caramel colored heaven! So I used it on Tim's birthday cake, but there was so much chocolate on the cake that it was hard to taste the dulce de leche goodness.

So yesterday I tried the other recipe....the one where you take a can of SCM, put it in a pressure cooker with water and cook it for 20 minutes. I figured, why not? If it did explode, the pressure cooker should stop the worst of the can shrapnel and caramel lava, plus I could stay in another room while it cooked. So that is what I did.



This is the pot and can after cooking but before opening the can. As you can see, no disasterous explosions ensued.



And we got the same caramel goodness with only cooking it for 20 minutes. I think a bowl of frozen yogurt with a dollop of dulce de leche is on the menu for dessert this evening. Calories? Fat? It's winter and we need some extra insulation while the snowstorms rage! Tim had a snow day today because the bus couldn't make it up our road, so we've been futzing around in the kitchen and on Xbox all day. At least when we keep busy, the cabin fever doesn't get quite so bad. :)

The Cake (sigh)

At least the cake tasted good. Tim got a kick out of the odd shape and texture and he loves dulce de leche, so that was what he asked me to make more of. WTH...I can't get the italics to turn off.

Here is the cake after I put it back together one more time...



Yeah, it doesn't look much different, does it? Tim took the Mustang off the top of the cake right away to save it from any more earthquakes or landslides.



He blew out his candles and we sang Happy Birthday to him. BTW, Tim and Ram are morning people, so this was about 6:30 a.m. As we were singing, we heard a third voice join in.....



See the bird cages behind Tim? Our two cockatiels were still in their night cage (the covered one) and Angel decided he wanted to sing for Tim's birthday. He was still singing as I took this picture and Tim thought it was kind of neat.



This is Angel. He got to join the party.

Then it was time for the gift. Another good laugh was had by Tim and Ram at the gift wrapping.


But at least the right gift was inside.


He liked it and thinks it is the bomb. In fact, he used it right then and there.

Tomorrow, how not to bake French bread and what the heck is dulce de leche?

*Edit*
I am a child of the 60s and all I can say is, WHO??? I think they need to go back to the nursing home they came from!!! OMG!! The only good part was when they sang "Who are you?" and the audience drowned them out!
*End edit*

New Year

Holy smokes, where did December go? I turned around and Christmas was over and it's already a new year. Our Christmas was nice despite the snowstorm that dumped 25 inches of snow on us. We were going to have Christmas Eve at Ram's parents house which is about 100 miles away and then the Saturday after, the 26th, our daughters and their families from Fargo were coming out to the farm for our Christmas dinner. Nothing went as planned.

It stormed from Wednesday afternoon clear through Saturday morning. I had two turkeys, a huge ham, and a ton of other food to cook for Christmas and only the three of us to eat it. Ram was finally able to get his big 4WD pickup out of the yard on Sunday and we loaded up all the food and took it into Diana's house in Fargo, where everyone met and had a wonderful day. On Monday Ram borrowed a skid steer from his boss and cleaned out our yard and Tim and a friend cleaned off the two-plus feet of snow on the roof. I took pictures.


That's my Rodeo under all that snow.





Big weird ribbon icicle.



Ram trying to get his big (very dirty) pickup out of the yard. It took him over an hour, but he did it. Yeah, picture was taken through a window, okay?



I did go out for a walk the next day though. The house doesn't look too bad from this angle.



Riley says, "enough, let's go finish off that turkey!"

Our little Christmas tree on a table.


I just took the tree down today. I think that's the longest I have ever left it up. I usually take it down the day after Christmas, but since it was kind of an extended holiday this year (We finally had Christmas with Ram's family on New Year's Eve), it stayed up longer.

Happy New Year everyone!

The Moth of November

It's no secret in our family....I'm deathly afraid of moths. I used to have everyone buffaloed into thinking that I merely loathed them, but it is way more than that. It comes from growing up in a 100-year-old house...a house with lots of little nooks and crannies for moths to wiggle their way through into the house in the fall. They especially loved my room for some reason. On my wall was a huge photo of my dad as a baby. You know those old posed photos done by traveling photographers who dressed babies up in their christening dresses and posed them, sometimes on an antique-looking throne-like chair. The photo with the huge carved ornate, dark wood frame (another source of childhood oogies...the frame was covered with carved snakes!) and measured at least 3 x 4 feet.

I found a postcard size copy of the picture but couldn't find any of the huge photo in the even huger frame. Actually I have no idea who ended up with the monster picture, and I don't think I want to even know!


The moths loved to come in my room and fly around and around my ceiling light. Usually one but sometimes two a night. I would reach for something to swat it with and take a couple swings at it. About 1/4 of the time I was able to swat the moth and then had to find some way to pick it up and put it in the trash without touching it. Here comes the first oogie moth dance. Moth in trash, check. Dance done. If anyone in our house couldn't find a flyswatter, they knew to look in my room. I also had a good stash of magazines in there too,just in case someone made off with my flyswatter. The Saturday Evening Post or McCall's worked pretty well. The Reader's Digest and TV Guide were just too small and my big sister's Tiger Beat mags were too thin and flimsy.

Just after I climb back into my comfy bed and settle down with my book, moth's partner comes swooping into the room, flies a couple of turns around the ceiling light, and just as I swat at him, dives behind baby dad's picture. I rattle the frame, swat at the glass, sweep the fly swatter behind the picture, but the moth is nowhere to be found. I have to go to bed with a live moth IN THE ROOM WITH ME! I try sleeping with the covers over my head but that lasts about five minutes until I feel like I'm suffocating and have to come up for air. Listen....is that the soft bump, bump of a juicy moth body hitting the walls? What was that....something flew past my face! Turn on the light and find....nothing. Still do the oogie moth dance just in case.

Finally I fall asleep and dream of big gray wings beating at my face and trying to swoop me up. Then I wake up and feel a lump in my throat. No...couldn't be....swallow quick...gag....no oogie taste, but still, gag a few more times. Okay, we're up for the night. This is probably where my insomnia started....also my love of books that could take me away from the thought of dusty gray wings and fat, squishy bodies that you need a wet rag to clean the walls with after you swat them.

Now I'm grossing myself out again. This evening I spotted one of those small, dark, quick moths sitting on the wall behind the fridge but about 7 feet off the floor. I knew I couldn't reach it even with the fly swatter, so I called Tim in to take care of it. He is now 6'4" tall, so there is not much he can't reach. I wordlessly pointed at the moth on the wall and handed him the fly swatter. He just laughed and said he was wondering when I was going to notice it, but it wasn't a moth. "Then what is it?" I asked, "or don't I want to know?"

"It's a chocolate chip, and no, you don't want to know." (I don't!) He took the fly swatter but the fridge was too much in the way to reach the chip. I was holding a dish towel in my hand and gave it to him, saying, "You are supposed to be the champion towel snapper. Let's see you snap that chip down." He took a couple of half-hearted snaps at the chip but kept missing. He gave me back the towel when I booed him and told me to try. Now that wasn't just a chocolate chip on the wall....it was every moth that ever faked me out, that ever hid behind the picture, that ever crawled back out in the middle of the night to terrify a little girl. That moth was toast! It took me three whacks but suddenly the chip sailed off the wall to who knows where, because we couldn't find it again. In it's place is a divot in the wallpaper where it had been sitting....a reminder to all not to mess with a moth phobic, towel-snapping, angry woman!

The Wedding Cake

I was just flipping channels and watched a few minutes of "My Fair Wedding with David Tutera." The bride was getting her wedding cake from the supermarket and David was shocked. This reminded me of my first wedding and how we killed off or incapacitated all of the cake decorators in our small town with our cursed wedding cake.

It all began when we picked a lady on the recommendation of friends who had seen her work. We went to her house and looked at her photos and hired her to do our cake. A month before the wedding, her daughter called my mother to tell her that her mom had died that week. Okay, there was one more cake decorator in town and she agreed to do our cake. Two weeks before the wedding, she broke her arm and was not going to be able to do our cake.

Now what do we do? The only thing we could think of....we went to the local Super Value store and begged them to decorate our wedding cake. My aunt's brother-in-law happened to work in the bakery and agreed to do the cake on short notice. Whew! We were going to have cake after all!

The night before the wedding, we stopped at the Super Value to pick up the cake. Uncle Windy had assembled the whole thing in the bakery. I was pretty nervous about having to transport it in our little car the 30 miles to the venue. I needn't have worried about the car ride though, because Windy carried the cake out to the car for us and just as he was stepping over the doorstep of the bakery's outside door, he tripped and the cake went flying. Not one of the layers was salvageable.

Windy felt so bad about being the one to drop the cake (huh, better him than us!) that he offered to start baking right then and get our cake finished by the 10;00 a.m. wedding and even deliver it to us at the church. He did just that and this time brought the cake layers in separate boxes. I didn't breathe easily until it was stacked and stood for awhile, so we could see it wasn't going to fall down.

I do have pictures of the cake but haven't been able to find the album today. I did find one wedding picture though.

Yes, it's a Polaroid. We were poor and couldn't afford a professional photographer, so we ended up with whatever pictures were taken by family members. Don't we look scared? :)

Shrimp Heaven

Anybody else love shrimp? It can get really expensive to make for a whole family though. To save money, I like to add it to a pasta dish to make it go farther. I just made the recipe below for dinner, loosely based on a recipe by Melissa D'Arabian from Food Network but changed to suit us. I think I changed it enough so I feel okay posting it here. It is quite different from the original. Tim really liked it....and that's saying a lot because it's hard to even get him to try anything new. I think we have a budding gourmand on our hands now. While eating the dish, he remarked, "The shrimp really loves the lemon!" :)

The above picture is what was left over after Tim and I decimated the dish before Ram even got home from work. It was good!

Tim just got off the phone with his grandma....evidently we're getting a free load of firewood. To quote MIL, "Grandpa has been possessed by the chainsaw and everything is coming down!"

Shrimp Linguini

1 lb medium raw shrimp, peeled and deveined (reserve shells)

1 lb thin linguini

2 tbsp butter

1/2 bunch parsley, chopped

1/2 cup of reserved pasta cooking water

Shrimp Stock

Shrimp shells

Water

1 tbsp dehydrated onion or 1/4 cup chopped fresh onion

1-1/2 cup chicken stock

1 garlic clove, smashed

1/2 teaspoon pepper flakes

To make shrimp stock, after peeling shrimp, reserve shells & tails. Place in a small saucepan, add chicken stock and enough water to cover shells. Add onion, garlic, and pepper flakes. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain. Discard shells.

Shrimp Marinade

2 garlic cloves, grated (more or less to taste)

Zest and juice of 1-1/2 lemons

1/4 cup olive oil

Sea Salt and freshly ground pepper

In a bowl, combine shrimp, lemon zest and juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Set aside for a few minutes. If you want to marinade it longer, place in refrigerator.

Cook linguini as directed on package. Drain.

Heat a skillet over high heat. Drain shrimp, reserving marinade, and add shrimp to skillet. Cook for about 3 minutes until done, turning once. Remove the shrimp to a plate and add the remaining marinade. Let cook for 2 minutes and then add 1-1/2 cups of shrimp stock and about 1/2 cup pasta water. Continue to cook until reduced by half. Add the butter and parsley.

Toss together the shrimp and pasta, turn into serving bowl. Serve topped with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Serves 6.