Pondering cooking

A friend gave me a box of mixed fruit for Mother's Day. We've been eating our way through it steadily, but one item has stumped me.

One enormous grapefruit.

(Not my photo)

I don't care much for grapefruit, but it seems a shame to let it go to waste. So I poked around a bit and found this recipe for grapefruit cake.

Before I found it, Google served me up a couple of cooking blogs and many other grapefruit recipes, mostly for ices and salads.

As I was looking around at them, I kept thinking of a rant about cooking that my sister in law posted on her blog, and in particular, one comment she received on it.

Your generation and younger are a generation of non-cookers. Most unfortunately do not know how to prepare most foods because they were raised on prepared snack foods and fast food. So Sad!

I have pondered and pondered that remark. I have also pondered the huge success of Pioneer Woman's cookbook.



Her cookbook has very simple, tasty recipes that you can make even if you are a total cooking noob. I've made a bunch of them, and liked them all. (She introduced me to the wonders of kosher salt, for one thing!)

So what I conclude is that, although my generation does not cook, the current economic situation has put such a crunch on people that they are having to learn to cook. So they buy pretty cookbooks with lots of pictures and easy instructions, because it's a great way to learn.

Mother's Day

Happy mother's day!

I wish I had something really pithy to say, but my friend Jennifer already said it on her blog.

I'm a mommy now. And it's so much fun.





Look at that face!

Can she bake a cherry pie

I found some cherries in my freezer, and last night I made them into a cherry pie.

No wonder there's that silly song about making a cherry pie "quick as a cat can wink her eye". They're even easier than apple, provided you had the presence of mind to pit the cherries before you froze them. Which I had. :-)



As I was making my crust, I gave the trimmings to Alex to roll into a ball, and I let him make his very own tiny pie.



It had, like, three cherries in it, but he was very happy.

My mom had told me once that the key to perfect pie crust is 1, not to knead it very much, and 2, use ice water.

When you make baking powder biscuits, you only knead the dough ten times. I kneaded my pie crust five times, and it started getting stiff, so I divided it in two and rolled out the first crust between two pieces of wax paper. (I didn't have to keep adding flour to make it not stick, and thus didn't dry it out.) The other chunk of crust I stuck in the freezer until I was ready to roll it out, too.

Oh, my. It made the tenderest, flakiest pie crust I've ever eaten in my life. I could sit and eat that entire cherry pie all by myself. It smells exactly like a cherry Pop-Tart, too.

My morning

The kids were bouncing off the walls this morning, so I let them outside.

Funny how blogging affects your brain. I grabbed my camera, not with the intent of taking pictures of this fleeting moment of childhood, but "so I can have something to post on my blog!"



They ran around like maniacs for a while. Alex rode really fast on his car.



Holly walked, very carefully, with the popper. She's getting better and better at walking.



I had forgotten about my flower pots last night, and left them out on the grass where the sprinklers washed off all of my salty snail-deterrent. I was afraid the snails would have eaten all of my sprouting hollyhocks, but my fears proved groundless.





Do snails not like mint? They haven't gone near the stuff. But they did get into my other pot in order to re-slime the hyacinth bulb in there. Which had nothing growing on it, anyway.

There were little flies all over a bush, sunning themselves. They were so bright and iridescent that I tried to get a picture.



And the Children's Moon was out.



And a cat climbed up in our little juniper tree on the corner.



This is looking straight up at him. Or her. Apparently all the cats are in heat right now, so they wander around everywhere, yowling.

So that was my morning in the wilderness of urban Bako. :-)

Forts

Alex has discovered the wonder of building forts. And playing in them. And tearing them down. And rebuilding them.





Holly enjoys them, too.

Best rice and beans ever

I made the best rice and beans tonight. Oh gosh, best rice and beans EVER.



The beans were ones that I had cooked in the crock pot. Simple enough recipe: 2 cups of dried beans, 4 cups of water, 1 tsp salt, and 2 tsp black pepper. Cook on high for 8 hours and you have perfect beans.

Then I smashed about a cup and a half of beans in the blender on pulse until they looked like good refried beans. Then I sauteed garlic and onions in butter, then dumped in the beans and cooked them on low until they reduced quite a bit. SO GOOD.

The Mexican rice started out as Pioneer Woman's recipe. But I modified it because I had different ingredients. It was GOOD.

1 Tbsp butter/margarine
1 clove garlic, diced
Small handful of chopped onion (I don't like onion much, but it has good flavor once the crunch is cooked out of it)
1 cup white rice
1 can tomato sauce
1 can diced green chilies
1/2 tsp cumin
2 cups hot water with 2 tsp chicken bouillon dissolved in it

Saute the garlic and onion in butter. Once the onions have turned clear, pour in the rice and brown it. Mix in tomato sauce, green chilies and chicken bouillon water. Bring to a boil. Cover, turn heat to low for 10-15 minutes. Keep an eye on it, because it may have sauce on top still bubbling, yet be completely dry on bottom.

I omitted the salt that the original recipe called for because the bouillon is plenty salty on its own. It came out perfect.



Oh man. I ate and ate and ate this stuff, and so did Ryan and the kids. They wrapped theirs in corn tortillas. I ate mine plain. It was that good.

Doing pot

Gardening post! The only kind of pot I do.



Here are my pots. I made the mistake of rereading The Secret Garden, and got the worst gardening itch EVER. So I added more dirt to my pots, got some hollyhock seeds from my mom, and fluffed up my dirt.

That was last weekend. I checked and watered my pots all week, and nothing.

And then this morning ...




Sprouts!

But only in one pot. The other had been completely slimed by snails, and there was nothing left alive in it at all.

My mom suggested wetting the edges of the pots, and sprinkling salt on the edges to make a crust. I put my pots away tonight, and constructed my crust. Some of the salt filtered down into the dirt inside the pot (with my sprouts), where it had dried a bit and pulled away from the edge of the pot. And here came three little slugs, booking it out of the cracks to get away from the salt.

I flicked them out and salted them liberally.

After my other pots got slimed, it's officially war.