The horrors of holiday cooking are upon us aka pumpkin pie, why hast thou forsaken me?

So it starts today, the day before Thanksgiving - holiday cooking. You know, I love it, I really do. And I consider myself quite a good baker, if I do say so myself. But this year I decided for turkey day, that I would venture into the quasi-unknown: pie crust. My Brother-in-law is the champion Mac-Daddy of pie crusts and breads. He has unlocked the key to making a pie crust that is on par with the quintessential pie crusts of my childhood that set the bar for all pie crusts to come - my Grandma's and Aunt Addie's. They were marvelous. Unbelieveably flaky, always baked perfectly, light and lovely, and looking like a crust from a magazine cover, every single time. Unfortunately, I have been completely unsuccessful in making good pie crust. Well, any pie crust actually. Mine melt while they're cooking, are gummy on the bottom, impossible to roll out. Terrible. And I freely admit it. But today is the day! I am going for it!

Part one: identify proper recipe.
I know none of my past recipes worked. Pate Brisee from the Queen of all Things Martha Stewart - nope, too buttery, melts while cooking, especially blind-baking so forget it. My BIL and I have always surmised that the secret to my Grandma's crust (and really it was probably my aunts who cooked 24 hours a day, it seemed) was probably lard. Since I don't like to be responsible for raising someone's cholesterol levels, or hardening their arties, let's not do that. I considered it, yes, but in the interest of being slightly healthy, it was a no. Now said BIL has done many test recipes for he is a much more intrepid cook than I, and I think he said that he has settled on half butter/half shortening. Maybe he said that, I can't quite remember, but sounds good right now. Where do I find that recipe? Let's see I have Julia Child's baking book, I have The Joy of Cooking, I have Fannie Farmers baking book...hmmm..hey! Let's ignore all of those and search Epicurious! Oh internet, when have you ever failed me?

Part two: execute said recipe.
Epicurious of course yielded many crust recipes but I settled on one that had half butter, half shortening, and only basic ingredients. I'm off! Flour and sugar in food processor, pulse. Cold butter cut in pieces, cold shortening, ice water at the ready...wait...the shortening is supposed to be frozen? ok - put you in the freezer. I've never frozen shortening. Does it really get frozen? Well, I'm impatient so, 10 minutes should be good. Put butter and shortening in, pulse, pulse...course looking mix! Yay! So far so good. Next mix icewater and apple cider vinegar. What? No problem - I have apple cider vinegar. Now I am supposed to take mixture out of processor and put in another bowl, pour ice water mixture on top and mix by hand until....screw that..ice water mix into processor, pulse until comes together in a ball (because I remember that from Martha Stewart's show). Now I can divide into two, because this makes two crusts, and one will freeze for 30 minutes, the other will be wrapped and frozen for up to one month, so Epicurious tells me. ok!

Part 3: Interim pie prep
I only bring this into the saga of the crust because, well, it's the reason for the development of the crust in the first place. I figure while my unformed crust is in it's cryogenic suspension, Ill make the pie filling. I'll get one step ahead of this process - genius. So I go to my basement pantry, get my can of pumpkin, can of cat food for the cat I forgot to feed this morning, and... where's my evaporated milk? I know it was here, I checked Monday before I went to the grocery store... what the...???? Now here is where I digress momentarily to tell you that I have a poltergeist, pixie, imp, SOMETHING in my house that messes with me and I am NOT kidding. But that's another post. Bottom line is - condensed milk gone. Great. I am feeling hellish and quite sure I have a fever (did I mention I've been sick fo 3 days now? well, yeah, there's that too) and now I have to go to the grocery. Go upstairs check can, and I need two cans EVAPORATED milk. What? I thought I needed condensed, I need evaporated, whatever I have neither, but why would I need TWO cans? Ohhhhh this recipe makes two friggin' pies. Now what? Both crusts are in freezer, I am up to 30min mark and I need to go to the store. Plan: take both out of freezer and into fridge for store trip, back in freezer when I return. Now go!

[Pie intermission]

Part 4: dun dun dun...(ominous musical intro)...roll out crust
So for the sake of brevity let's just say everything has gone fine with pie filling manufacturing and pie crust refreezing. Now, the moment of truth. This is where I have huge issues and everything fails. This is where I crumble, no pun intended, and turn defeated to call upon the Pillsbury Doughboy (which usually doesn't turn out much better, honestly) or to the good people at Orchard pie crust, preformed right in it's own foil pie dish. But not today! I am doing this come hell or high water! So I get out my trusty tools of the trade: my French rolling pin, two deep dish pie pans, and my Tupperware pastry prep mat.

Let me talk for a moment about these items. The French rolling pin is a must. I have no problem rolling out other types of pastry, but if you must, you have to have the French kind. The old-fashioned two-handled free-spinning type leave lines in your pastry, it's just horrible. The Tupperware mat is really only because my Grandma had one, and therefore I feel it must be the secret to success, or at least a good talisman. It serves no other purpose really. Anyway onto the moment of truth.

So put out the mat, cover it and the rolling pin with flour, put my dough down and....start your rolling! Yeah, about 30 seconds in the dough is not cohesive anymore and sticking to everything. I pull it all off, wad it back up, and figure I'm heading to the store...again...for crust. But no! I must resolve to do this once and for all dammit. I put the dough back together, knead it a little, do whatever you're not supposed to do: handle it a lot, use a LOT of flour...BUT...holy crapoly it's working! I am rolling a damn crust! (At this point I also realize that I am talking out loud and describing how to do this to my dog, who is very attentive, but just thinks a scrap is coming.) AND I put it in the pan! I try to do a decorative border, it looks horrible, but screw it - a have a whole, unbroken, freakin' crust in the pie dish! So I do it again! Second pie! I even decide to glaze it. I put the filling in, pie goes in the oven.

The FINISH LINE:
Well the pie takes an inordinate amount of time to cook, about 30 min longer than the instructions, and I keep checking it by "inserting a thin knife near the center" and it should come out clean, and it doesn't, and I am doing this every ten minutes so at the end both pies look like they have been the victims of a horrible murderous attack. And then of course my oven thermometer falls and gets stuck on one pie and digs a hole in it, but I don't care. I have a crust. When it was served it was deemed "good and a nice flakiness" from my BIL whose opinion was really the only one that mattered to me, strictly because of his pie prowess.

That's probably not a very interesting story but it was actually a huge accomplishment for me. Just wait until my saga of Christmas cookies, coming soon to a blog near you. I know, I know, you wish it was sooner, but...Christmas is still a way off from now. You'll just have to live in suspenseful anticipation. Sorry.

Don't judge me!

Yeah yeah yeah...so I don't put in entries like a faithful blogger should. And you know what? It really doesn't matter - you're not reading my blog anyway. That's right, I'm talking to you, whoever you are, not reading my blog. So I must blog for myself just because I feel like it; it's just for me because I like to write and if I talked incessantly about myself (which is my allowed indulgence here), people would hate me. Oh wait, I do that anyway. Well you can just talk to the hand then, haters! Do people still say that?

So let's get down to business. I promised that I would begin working my way through Julia Child's baking book. I was going to start at the beginning and go through to the end. Aaaaannnnnddd...I haven't started. You know, I'm just not feeling bread and brioche and puff pastry when we can't even figure out from one day to the next whether it's going to be 80 degrees and 100% humidity, or 40 degrees and so dry there's static in the air. It makes me unsettled and makes me not want to bake, especially things that are a labor of love, like puff pastry, and hours of adding butter and folding and turning and rolling and chilling... You have to sort of psych yourself up and then go for it. And I wasn't in the mood.

What I did to was take a look into the cookbook that I have been pretty fearful of: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Remember I said I was going to do the "Julie-Julia" thing but I was basically too overwhelmed and quite the coward and decided it was too much for me. And then soemthing happened. Over the summer I had a farm share. "What's that?" you ask...it's a local farm that offers shares of it's harvest over the season. So for the summer, once weekly, we'd head over to the farm and pick up our box full of fresh veggies for the week. And every week it was different, both in variety and volume. Some weeks it was tons of Swiss Chard, other weeks it was all herbs, and other times a mixture. My freezer is now full of oregano, mint, blanches chard, blanched green beans, etc. But one week in particular I found myself looking at tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, onions, among other things. So what do I do with this...and I thought ratatouille. And no I didn't thinkof it because I'm brilliant and knew all the ingredients off the top off my head. Actually I literally thought of the scene in the movie Ratatouille where the little rodent actually makes the dish and serves it a man who practically cries because it reminds him of his mother and home. So that inspired me - I mean why not? I have the ingredients, so what the heck. Go for it.

I actually didn't turn to Julia first. I went to one of my favorite sources. I have a few: Joy of Cooking (the cooking Bible, according to me), Martha Stewart (I have a couple of cookbooks of hers), and epicurous.com. So I checked epicurious first and yep, I appear to have the right ingredients. Then I did a general web search to see if I could find another recipe to compare to, and a link for Julia's recipe comes up, which actually had a pdf version of a copy directly from the book. Excellent! I have that book! I don't need no stinkin' pdf! So I'm off and running!

So page 503 - Ratatouille. Julia says that it smells like the "essence of Provence". Excellent! Because this is probably as close to smelling Provence as I'm ever going to get. And it goes well beef, which is great because we're grilling steak (and by "we" I mean "the man, not me"). It also says a really great one is "one of the quicker dishes to make". I am confused by this because I don't know what it means. Is it quicker than a bad Ratatouille? Or is it quicker than say, beef bourguignon, which takes something like...oh I don't know, a week and a half to make. Doesn't matter, I am forging ahead, dammit. I will say that MAFC is very thoughtfully laid out, but if you are seriously going to make something from it, READ THE RECIPE all the way through first. And maybe more than once. So this quick and easy recipe, which by the way can also be served cold, only has 6 steps, and 10 ingredients, starts with using an enameled skillet. Who the heck has an enameled skillet?! I have enameled stock pots, bakeware, a beautful Chantal enameled roasting pan that is too nice to actually cook in, but a skillet? No. And why? Well, too late now, we're using my normal heavy stainless skillet and that's that. So you go through this very long process of slicing your vegetables a certain way, peeling and seeding tomatoes, layering things in a certain order while they simmer away in the [wrong] pan. Somewhere along the line you are suddenly putting things into a casserole...well never mind that either, I missed that.

The end result was a wonderful mixture of these vegetables from a local farm, all mixed together, even melted together, it seemed. B loved it but I can't go by his reaction, he eats everything that's not moving and some things that are. Kids were meh about it - they eat all these things but were suspicious of them all in one mixture together. And then a miracle - a friend of my Puddin's who stayed for dinner. She ate it. All of what was on her plate. And did not say she didn't like it, it looked wierd, I don't like it (without actually tasting). Ate it and said thank you and had more. And her father is a chef who does cooking competitions in Europe. So my ratatouile was validated, at least to me. It was edible and worthy of a second portion.

But here's the real kicker: this child have the most wonderful table manners I have ever seen in a person under the age of 16. She sat down to dinner, put her napkin on her lap, made polite conversation, cut her own met, and at the end of the dinner, she thanked me. AND when I was putting dishes in the dishwasher, all of a sudden she was standing behind me, had already scraped her leftovers into the trash, and asked to put her dish in the dishwasher. I actually had a tear in my eye. I thought to myself "how can I keep you"? THAT was just mind-blowing. I'm lucky when my kids realize thatI'm there, never mind clean up after themselves. I was flabberghasted.

What wil I make next? I was thnking about reading Julia's section on eggs and omelets. Maybe some bread? We'll see... Hoping I'm motivated, otherwise this could take an awfil long time to make any headway. We'll see... I do like eggs...

Aha! I've got it!

I am sitting here today with a ridiculous migraine and watching Julie and Julia through my brilliant wifi Netflix connection through the Wii. Meryl Streep is pure genius, as always! Anyway, I read the book first, and it was wonderful. Then I looked up Julie Powell's blog, which is still out there by the way. After I was done reading I procured my very own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume I. I had (and still have) every intention of working my way through it just like Julie. I was very inspired, I love cooking and thought the challenge would be...for lack of a better word, fun. Now it is months later. I haven't touched it. It still sits on my kitchen table, and I think it sometimes looks at me disdainfully and whispers "chicken". But I'm not really. My culinary bible has always been The Joy of Cooking. I had an edition from 1960-something, which included lovely sketches of certian kinds of game and how to prep and cook, such as squirell and possum. Or opossum. Whatever, anyway I also have the 2000 edition and I use it all the time. You'd think I knew how to roast a chicken, but every single time I do, I faithfully open to page 379, the poultry section, actually the book just falls open there now, and pull the red ribbon book mark over to the stained and wrinkled page, and reference how much time per pound and what temperature the meat should reach when I insert the instant thermometer into the thigh without touching the bone, and look for clear juices. I'd be lost without it.

Anyway, so I thought, I don't just want to copy Julie, I want to do my own thing. I thought about working my way through one of my trusty Martha Stewart cookbooks. Yes, I unabashedly love Martha, and for about 10 years waited with bated breath for and reveled in each new issue of her Living magazine. I find her cooking to be a very American style and here's the problem - but for desserts, (oh I'm so sorry to say this Martha, mea maxima culpa) I really find the end results of most entrees kind of...meh...completely lackluster. Her techniques are precise, and really take a lot of fear out of cooking, but the end results are just sort of bland. I thought of trying something from each section of JoC...nah....and then...a revelation!

I love baking. Anyone who knows me knows that even on a 90-degree day in July, my oven will be on, and my kids will be asking me to put on the light so they can see what's inside. Now on my cookbook dedicated shelf, I have a copy of Julia Child's Baking Book. She presented this on TV as well, as a completely separate show from the French Chef, and every recipe was demonstrated by it's originator. The recipes are from the baking experts for each area: bread, puff pastry, cakes, etc. Julia wasn't exactly a spring chicken at that point so every episode had the recipe originator demonstrating and Julia attempting to try her own hand, but then mostly just eating along the way, as well as digging into the end result. When I originally got the book, my plan indeed was to work my way through it. And I started, but alas, I had no audience. Case in point: had some dinner guests who, when I announced desert (ok it wasn't an announcement so much as me yelling "who wants cake?!") looked at me like I was crazy and said "We don't eat sweets". Not even no thank you. Just waving away my white chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. So, not only did I never cook for the people again, I pretty much never baked from that book again. Or much at all.

Now circumstances are different and I do bake. In fact I havea great boyfriend (aka the "pseudo-husband") who, along with my children, will pretty much eat anything resembling food, even when dangerously past the printed "best by" date on the label. So I've decided to revisit my old plan. I am going to work my way through the book again. Maybe not in order, or maybe I don't know yet. But I'm going to do it. And then I'll write about it. Whether you want to read it or not.

I'll let you all know when you can come over to be fed. But do NOT refuse my white chocolate cake with raspberry sauce.

Boy I'm crappy at this...

Really, I am. I'm a terrible blogger. I think of all kinds of witty things to say all day long. I think of stories to write - dramatic, heart-wrenching, funny, ironic - all true too - and I get here and pffft. Sometimes I think I should write my life's story, but eh... all these people are alive and might not find the tales as humorous or interesting as I do. Sometimes I think I should write about my kids, but ditto - not everyone will be amused by my anecdotes about my children. Sometimes I think I'll write about my cooking, my crocheting, books I'm reading, one of the thousand things I'm doing or ideas I'm having, or just even about feelings. This could be my therapy, maybe I'll have some kind of catharsis and voila, I'm normal. mmm....no... I don't think so. So what then? Randomess I guess.

I'm home sick today - got up with a sore throat like my vocal cords had been scraped with steel wool, ear pain, tired, cold...blech... So working from home which of course, does not include resting in any way. Along with following all the latest crises and questions at work, I've done 3 loads of laundry, will still cook dinner later, watched an episode of Housewives of New Jersey. I'd like to rest, there's just two things standing in my way: Harry and Bella, the hounds from hell. I wonder what they do when we're not home. When we are home, they are on constant patrol and bark explosively at every noise they hear. A leaf rustling must surely be an intruder, jogger passing quietly in front of the house - serial killer for sure, oh hey Bruce coming to the back door, yes bark at him too. So napping may not be happening.

This makes me think - I really think God does not want me to exercise. I swear it. This week for example - not only do I have nightly/daily activities, BUT my sneakers literally split in half last night, today I am sick, maybe tomorrow I'll have a fighting chance but I think it will be raining which means indoor working out. This does not occur at the gym. No. Here's some irony for you. I can't afford a membership at the Y for myself. I shell out for the kids, and they use it, but it's too much for me, seriously. However, if I had less money, I would potentially have a free or close to free pass for being "needy". This is not to knock those who take advantage of this or any such programs; they're there, take them while you can, I don't blame you. It's just ironic, and further proof that God clearly does not want me to exercise. In the meantime, the thyroid does what it will, and the rest of me reacts as though stalk of celery = hot fudge sundae. It's really depressing.

On an up note: my Puddin' had a wonderful play in school yesterday and a great chorus concert last night. The kids just love what they do and really get into it. Their faces and body language are so fun to watch -some of them are jammin' like it's their own little solo show, some are singing to each other, some look so serious like a vein's going to pop out on their foreheads from the concentration, others look so frightened like they just might not have clean underwear later. But it was a great night for them. Tonight she's got a band concert and hopefully I'll feel a bit better during it.

That's all today. I guess. Unless I have more random thoughts. Ok just one - I really think my impact on the web would be much more fun (read: annoying) if I had an iTouch to constantly communicate my randomness. Just saying.

So here we go again...maybe

So I thought I would resurrect my blog. I don't know why, I don't know if anyone reads it and not sure if I care. I just have a lot of random thoughts (ergo the title) and like to vent them from time to time. Funny, sad, dramatic, goofy, whatever. So I guess let's catch up. Ummm let's see - girls had successful dance season and a lovely recital. Waiting to find out if/when (more likely when) Connor's ginormous tonsils will come out. Hmmm..what else? I finally got a diagnosis of secondary hypothyroidism! Boo and yay! What does this mean? It means that my pituitary gland is probably telling my thyroid all the right stuff, but thyroid just says "talk to the hand" and does whatever it wants. Hopefully knowing this and treating all the weird stuff that goes with it will help me get back on track with fatigue and weight and all.

So my thought of the day is this:
Why are we so crippled by the idea of having our children not win? Sometimes you are not the best. Sometimes you are even the worst. Sometimes you are the best. Why can we not teach them to win and lose graciously. Why do children play a whole afternoon of soccer and never score a point? Everyone's a winner! If my child is not great at something, please tell me before people snicker at them, or they can't get proper instruction, maybe they hate what they're doing, there's so many reasons to tell the truth and sometimes the truth is great. Sometimes it's not. Maybe the greater lesson in life is to learn to take criticism, learn to talk about it, do something about it or not, accept it or not, but develop a skin and a coping mechanism. Someday someone important will give you criticism, constructive or not, someday you will win, someday you will lose, someday you will just go home. Learn to deal with it all. Where did all this coddling start? And at what point does it stop?