Chocolate

Blessings, Darlings!

I've been on a chocolate binge lately.  Chocolate frosted yellow cupcakes, hot cocoa, chocolate pudding, moon pies, candy bars, sleazy Hershey's Kisses (TM), you name it - if it has any chocolate in it I've been eating it.

This has happened to innumerable people before, and will continue to happen in the future.  No news there.

The only thing new was that I made chocolate pudding from scratch. This was ENTIRELY the fault of @jmfield on Twitter, who tweeted "Cheffirmation: I am never more than 15 minutes away from homemade chocolate pudding. :)".  Well!  I took that as a challenge.


In fact, it took me 18 minutes - mostly because my husband or son had put my whisk away in .... well .... a place I would NEVER had put it, and it took me FOREVER to find it.


One of the many joys of chocolate pudding is that the ingredients are mostly pantry-stable.  I could have used powdered milk instead of fresh (and, while looking at recipes, I saw that the 'instant chocolate pudding' recipe by America's Test Kitchen uses powdered milk), I suppose I could have used baking chocolate instead of cocoa powder and butter (yes, the cocoa powder is shelf-stable, but the butter isn't), the flour and cornstarch and salt and vanilla the recipe called for last forever.


It was fast to make.  It was easy.  It tasted WONDERFUL.


Everyone to the kitchen, grab that 2 to 3 quart saucepan, set your timer (so you can see how fast this really is), and GO!

            CHOCOLATE PUDDING - served the 3 of us because we showed some restraint

1/2 cup white sugar                         2 3/4 cups skim milk

3 tablespoons dutched cocoa          2 tablespoons butter      

1/4 cup cornstarch                          1 1/2 tablespoons amaretto

Into that saucepan you grabbed, add all the dry ingredients.  Whisk them a bit to make them as smooth as possible, it helps reduce lumps later.  Add the milk.  Heat at medium (medium high on my stove, but your stove will vary!) until boiling, stirring constantly.  Reduce to a simmer, keep stirring. Soon it will be thickened.  Take off the burner, add but butter and amaretto (you may prefer the more traditional vanilla).  Try to let it cool long enough that you don't burn your tongue.  Can be served warm or cold. 

We tasted it before the amaretto was added - it was nice, but 'flat'. Amaretto and butter kicked it up wonderfully.

Frondly, Fern

Food FAIL

Blessings, Darlings!

I had a new experience today - I took a bite out of a dish and had to throw it out.  And I'm NOT one to waste food!

The culprit was a Spaghetti Squash.  It turned out to be INCREDIBLY BITTER - far too bitter to eat.  And I'm no Supertaster when it comes to bitter (my husband is, and what a pain THAT is to live with).  This has NEVER happened to me before.  NEVER has a trusted food been inedible.

Has anyone else run into this with spaghetti squash?  I've even dumped the seeds instead of seasoning and baking them!  If this has happened to y'all before, how do you avoid bitter ones in the future?

Frondly, but grossed-out, Fern

Raising A Foodie

Blessings, Darlings!

The Spawn, now a 23 year old man-like thing, is well on his way towards being a foodie.  I'm not saying that he loves the work involved in, say, grating real parmigiao-reggiano when he makes an al fredo sauce, but he does it and knows WHY he is doing it.

Obviously, just having parents who are foodies helped make him this way.  But I think that our approach to his eating when he was young helped, too.

Like many young American children, he had times of being a picky eater.  ("Picky Eaters" are kind of the definition of "First World Problems", wouldn't you say?) We let him pick a few foods he didn't have to eat at all, one fruit (he always picked grapefruit) and two other foods (usually cooked dried beans and Brussels sprouts, sometimes spaghetti squash, or winter squash, or whatever).  He got to change his selections every 6 months.  But for all other foods, he had to eat a serving at any meal it was served at.  A serving was defined as 'as many bites of it as you are years old".  Also, when we ate out, he had a sample of whatever we adults ordered, to help expose him to new tastes/textures/foods.

Now, the spawn has always been a pretty easy child outside of his speech delay, fine motor skill issues, and sensory integration issues, and this level of respect plus explicit expectations worked for us.  There were no meal time negotiations, no excessive whining, no tantrums over food. 

For us, this worked.  The Spawn is now into darn near all foods (even those dried beans, on occasion). He also does a good job as a food critic, and is experimental in the kitchen and when out to eat.  He makes his own sushi.  Yeah, he's still an American male and eats his share of fast food, too.  I'm proud of him!

Frondly, Fern

I'm a bad blogger

Blessings, Darlings!

I know - I've been missing in action, and not blogging.  But it's because life has had SO VERY MUCH action.

I've been canning and drying food.  I've been balancing paying creditors while my husband (and thus our business) has been working on bringing out a new product line instead of doing consulting which actually brings in cash.  Yeah, new products will pay off 'someday' - but Baltimore Gas and Electric wants their bill paid NOW.

And - get this - our landlord stopped paying the mortgage a year ago April.  The house we rent has been foreclosed on.  We just got our formal notice that we have to move. By law we have 90 days.  But we will lose consulting income during a move, since we have a home-based business.

Right now we don't even know what state we want to move to. Stay in Maryland? Move to Pennsylvania? West Virginia? Indiana?

I'm a bit overwhelmed, and part of why I've not blogged is that EVERYTHING I typed seemed too whiny to publish. 

In good news, the spawn has officially dropped out of college, but has finally gotten a job.  Part time, slinging chicken at Popeye's.  It's a good thing.  And the garden is producing huge amounts of tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as marvelous grapes.  I just planted fall crops before we got notice to move, dang it ..... ooops, heading towards whining.... The torn meniscus in my knee is doing better, I'm working out on the exercise bike and regularly increasing the resistance.

But ... having a ton of canned food isn't a great thing for moving.  So I'm stopping the canning and dehydrating instead, and we're going to push eating canned foods at every meal up to the move. Which is a shame to have to do when veggies are still cheap and available!  Fresh beans are 79 cents a pound this week, and we're eating canned beans instead of saving them for when fresh beans are $2/lb or unavailable.  Le Sigh.

Well, that's the summary.  I've got all sorts of ideas for what I'd like to be posting here, but time's going to be scarce for the next few months.

Anyone have a house with some 2200 square feet of living space available to rent, for $1500 to $2000, east of the Mississippi and from DC on north?

Frondly, Fern