This and That

I haven't had a whole lot to report lately. As usual, things have been busy at work, but I'm sure that's not a surprise to anyone. Fortunately, though, I will be taking a long vacation at the end of this month, and I'm already counting the days until I can step on that plane and get away for a few weeks. I will probably still have to check my work e-mail and maybe do a few things while I'm on vacation, but at least I'll be able to do it from the comfort of home.

Pumpkin-Cranberry Muffin

Baking Adventures: I continue to experiment with baking. A few weeks ago it was my turn to bring in treats for our office food club. It was the Friday before Halloween and my partner for the day and I wanted to bring something that fit the holiday and the season. My partner, who was a little busy that week, bought some candy and caramel apples. But I got a little ambitions and decided to make pumpkin-cranberry muffins. I found the recipe on the Betty Crocker website, and it looked pretty simple. I haven't made those specific muffins before, but I have made other muffins in the past and I've been pretty successful (after a few failures), so I thought it was something that I could handle. The muffins turned out great and were very well-received. So this is another treat that I can have in my arsenal for future use. I'll post the recipe later in another post.

Weather (and Kitty update): For the past few weeks, we've had a few tastes of winter. Two weeks ago, the meteorologists were predicting a bad snowstorm. It was a Tuesday, and the skies started to get dark and cloudy in the afternoon. That night we happened to have a work happy hour to celebrate someone's birthday, so we spent most of the evening at one of the local breweries. At about 7:00 when we all started to go home, it started to rain and the temperature was dropping fast. I only live about three or four miles from the brewery, but by the time I got home the rain was already falling harder. I ran to my apartment, and Kitty was outside on my fence meowing loudly like he was upset with me. I let him in, dried him off with a towel, and gave him a few treats. Because I knew that the weather would be bad all night, I took Kitty to his parents apartment (just across the hall) to turn him over to them. The first time I knocked, they weren't home, so I grabbed Kitty and went back to my apartment and we hung out and watched TV for a few hours. By about 9:00 it started to snow. At the same time I happened to hear Kitty's parents come home, so I brought him over and knocked on their door. I told them that he sounded upset and was meowing on my patio, so I let him in for a few hours because I was worried about him being outside when the weather was getting so bad. His dad said that Kitty actually loves being outside and that when he used to live in Germany, Kitty would love to play in the snow. (Still, I was worried because it was going to snow all night and the temperature was going to drop to about 14 degrees.) Kitty's dad thanked me for bringing him over and he didn't seem to mind that I let Kitty in my apartment (which I have been doing for a few months anyway), so that's a good thing.

View from my dining room window

The weather started to get worse from that point on. It was snowing really hard when I went to bed, and when I woke up, I looked out the window and saw that we got about six or eight inches of snow and the snow was still coming down. The office was still open, so I went to work as usual and fortunately the roads were not that bad at all. They were wet and a bit slushy but not at all icy or snow-packed. We were fortunate to have really warm weather the previous days, so I think that helped to keep the roads warm and keep things from icing over. Still, only about a quarter of the office came in that day and most people decided to work from home. The snow pretty much melted off the next day. That was our first storm. We had another storm last week and again it was over a Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The second storm was exactly like the first. We got about eight inches, but the roads were still in good shape. I, however, had already planned on working from home that day, so I got to avoid the roads anyway.They are predicting more snow for tonight, but the worst of it will probably miss us, and if we get any snow at all it probably will not be that much. So far I've been grateful that even though we've been getting snow, the road conditions have been easy to deal with.

Current mood: tired from a busy day at work
Current music: iTunes on shuffle, Loreena McKennitt "Penelope's Song"
Current drink: Gabbiano Chianti

Banana Bread, Take 2

I tried to make banana bread a few weeks ago and it was a complete disaster for probably a number of reasons. Because I don't like to give up when it comes to cooking and baking, I decided to give it another shot. This time I used a different recipe from the Joy of Baking. One of the great things about this site is that several of the recipes include videos so that you can actually see how the recipes are made. Because I'm still learning how to bake, it really helps me to see what things are supposed to look like at each stage of the recipe. It also helps that the recipe was explained and demonstrated in a simple and straightforward way. The banana bread that I made turned out really good.

As it was making it, I could tell that the batter felt much different from what I made with the first recipe. Granted the first recipe used whole wheat flour in addition to all purpose flour, so that might have contributed to the dryness of the batter. And the second recipe I used had melted butter instead of softened butter, so that probably helped too. As the bread was baking, I could immediately tell that it would be better. When I pulled it out of the oven, it was golden brown and the crust was like a normal crust. In other words, it wasn't dry and hard. When I cut into it, the inside was nice and moist. And most important, it tasted great.

The only thing that seemed a bit off was that the bread didn't rise as much as I thought it would. I didn't make any adjustments for the altitude, so that might have changed things. I just need to experiment a little more to figure out what works. Either way, it was still yummy.

Baking Adventures - Failure

Apparently this was my weekend to be a failure in the kitchen. After my dinner failure on Saturday, I was feeling a little defeated. So on Sunday I got ambitious and decided to make banana bread. I have never made banana bread or any type of bread for that matter. I have made banana–chocolate chip muffins before, so I thought that it wouldn't be all that different to make banana bread. But I was still a little nervous. I found a recipe that looked easy and I had all the ingredients on hand, so I thought, what the heck, let's do it.

I often freeze bananas when they start to get overripe, so that I can use them in banana muffins. I pulled some out of the freezer and left them on the counter to thaw. And, knowing that I needed "softened" butter, I pulled that out of the fridge, too. Once I thought the bananas were thawed enough and the butter was soft enough, I decided to get started. Step one, preheat oven. Check. Step two, grease a loaf pan with butter. Check. Then things went downhill from there. Sad, I know. The next step was to cream the butter and the directions said to do it with a hand mixer (which I don't have), a food processor (which I also don't have), or a whisk. Great, I thought, I'll use my whisk. I even watched a video online to see how to properly cream the butter; all you have to do is whisk and whip it. That should be easy. Basically most of the butter got crammed up into a ball on the inside of my whisk. So I had to keep pushing it back out with a knife. Then I'd try to whisk it again, and it would clump up again. I kept this up for a while, but then started to get a little impatient and just told myself that what I had done so far was good enough.

The next step was to add two eggs and the mashed bananas. The next thing I realized was that the bowl I was using was too small. But, did I put it into a bigger bowl? No, of course not. So I tried to mix everything together. The next problem I ran into was that the bananas, although thawed, were still too cold. Once they hit my "creamed" butter, the butter cooled and solidified again. So I had a mix of eggs, bananas, and clumps of butter. It was at that moment when I knew that things were slowly turning into a disaster. But because I didn't want to just give up and throw away all of the ingredients that I had already measured out, I kept on going. I added the banana, egg, butter mix to all of the dry ingredients, and I gently folded everything in. The recipe said that "the batter would be a bit lumpy." Well, what I had was one giant, dry lump that was coated with various flours, powders, and sugar. The recipe then said to "pour the batter into the loaf pan." Pouring was not possible with the "batter" I had. Instead, I had to scoop the batter into the pan with a wooden spoon. And then I put it in the oven.

As it was baking it smelled nice. It smelled like banana bread, at least. When it was done, I pulled it out of the oven, and knew that it wasn't going to be great. For one thing, it did not look pretty and it was really dry on the outside. The top of the banana bread was so lumpy that it looked like I had topped it with a streusel topping. After I let it cool, I cut into it. As expected, it was dry. When I tasted it, it tasted OK, but it was just really dry and dense. It's probably the quality that I can eat myself, but it's not the type of thing that I would share with my family or friends.

There are probably a number of things that I did wrong. I probably didn't let the bananas completely thaw and let come to room temperature. I probably didn't let the butter soften enough before trying to "cream" it with a whisk. I probably made a mistake using the whisk, when just a wooden spoon would have been enough. Or maybe I need to buy an electric mixer. And, who knows, given my measuring skills, I could very well have screwed up the dry ingredients.

Anyway, I gave it a shot, and maybe things will be better when I try to make it again. Baking is entirely new to me, and I'm just not used to cooking or baking with precision. It's not like cooking a regular meal where I can just throw ingredients together. There is more of a science involved in baking, and I'm still trying to figure that out. Oh well. It took a few attempts to "perfect" my banana–chocolate chip muffins and my baklava bars. And it took three or four attempts to perfect crepes (or pannekoeken as my family calls it). So maybe I just need a few more tries to figure out banana bread. We'll see...

Baking Disasters

Just a few days after I proudly wrote a post about my baking adventures and how skilled and adept I was getting at baking, I had the ultimate baking failure on Thursday night. At work there is a food club and every week two people in the club bring in treats for everyone else. The schedule rotates every Friday and we all take turns bringing treats in. We usually gather in the mornings or afternoons, depending on the treats, and we usually spend about half an hour to an hour just eating and visiting with one another.

This week was my week to bring in treats and my partner and I decided to bring in breakfast treats. I had planned to "wow" everyone with my banana chocolate chip muffins, and he was going to bring in coffee, orange juice, and a fruit salad. I bought a large bunch of bananas the week before, and I hoped that the bananas would be ripe enough by the end of the week to make the muffins. Whenever you make banana muffins or banana bread, the bananas need to be really ripe. Actually they need to be beyond ripe and it's best when the skin is already completely black. The extra-ripe bananas make the bread or muffins taste better for whatever reason. Usually when I buy bananas just for eating, they are usually over-ripe by the end of the week. But for whatever reason, the bunch of bananas that I bought were still very yellow and under-ripe by the end of the middle of the week. The bananas at that stage, would have been great in cereal or just for a snack, but they weren't at the right stage for baking.

I read online that if you want your bananas to ripen faster, you can put them in a brown paper bag with an apple. When you close the paper bag, the apple gives off a gas that makes the bananas ripen faster. So on Wednesday I tried that trick and absolutely nothing happened. The bananas weren't any more ripe than when I put them in the bag.

So, because my bananas weren't ready for baking, I had to come up with a new plan. I decided that I could make blueberry muffins instead. I have never made blueberry muffins before, but I found a recipe that looked easy and you could use frozen blueberries instead of fresh ones. I went shopping on Thursday after work to buy the ingredients I needed. I decided to buy extra ingredients, just in case I screwed up and needed to make an extra batch. I guess I had a psychic moment.

Because there are 24 people in our food club, I had to make at least three batches of muffins. When I made the first batch, I thought I made everything according to the directions. The recipe said that the batter would be a bit lumpy, and my batter didn't seem lumpy at all. The batter was a bit on the watery side, but how would I know what it was supposed to really look and feel like when I haven't made it before. I put it in the oven and when I kept checking on them, they didn't look so great. They looked dark brown (not golden brown) and they didn't rise and puff up like they should have (they looked like hockey pucks). Even though this was my first time making them with a new recipe, I had a feeling that something was wrong.

I pulled them out when they were ready and set them aside and started to make the second batch. As I made the new batch, the batter immediately felt different. The batter was much thicker, a bit doughier, and, yes, lumpy. It was at that moment when I realized that I might have totally screwed up the first batch. I put the second batch of muffins in the oven and when I checked on them, they looked like real muffins. They were light, golden brown, and they were puffed up and had the rounded tops that muffins are supposed to have.

So, what happened? What happened is that I'm a giant moron and screwed up the measurements of the first batch. The recipe calls for 2 cups of flour, and even though I do have a 1 cup measuring scoop, it wouldn't fit in the flour bag. So, instead, I used my 1/2 measuring cup and told myself that I would just double the scoops I needed. Well apparently I can't count or I just lost count, because I added only half the amount of flour that I needed. In my defense, however, I was also trying to double the recipe for the first batch, so I needed a total of 8 scoops of flour. Apparently I have a difficult time counting to 8.

In spite of feeling like a giant moron and failure for a few hours, the next batches of muffins I made turned out OK. They tasted good to me, and when I took them to work my co-workers seemed to like them. Maybe they were just being nice, but at least no one choked on them or spit them out. So maybe with a little more practice, I will soon be able to perfect blueberry muffins.

Baking Adventures

By now my loyal readers know that I love to cook and they have probably read about my various cooking adventures. Even though I love to experiment with cooking, one of the things I haven't done much of is baking. The first, little apartment I lived in had a very small and very old stove/oven. The oven seemed to take forever to get going, and it would take about two hours to make a simple baked potato. Now that I've been living in apartments with a real oven, I've been able to use it more often. I've used it for baking pastas and roasting vegetables, but it's only recently when I've tried my hand at baking.

I've made Baklava Bars and I'm at the point where I've more or less perfected those. One of the things I love about the Baklava Bar recipe is that it uses sugar cookie mix as a short cut. The recipe requires a few different stages, but it is still fairly easy.

I love banana bread but while looking online for banana bread recipes, I stumbled across a recipe for Chocolate Chip–Banana Muffins. This recipe also uses a handy shortcut, Bisquick mix, and is super easy to make. I've made it two times already, and everything has turned out great.

And recently I've tried to make another one of my favorites, corn bread. A few weeks ago I tried to make corn bread muffins from a box of Jiffy Mix. That did not turn out as great as I wanted it to. For one, it didn't make many muffins. After I ate one, I had an unusual feeling and taste in my mouth, and when I took a second look at the box I saw that lard was one of the ingredients. And, maybe I did something wrong, but those muffins seemed a bit dry and gritty; when I tried to put butter on the muffin, it crumbled in my hand. So today I tried to make corn bread from scratch. I had a recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook and there was also a recipe on the canister of cornmeal. The recipes are more or less the same with the exception that one uses butter and the other uses vegetable oil. I made it with the oil this time and it turned out really good. It looks like corn bread, smells like corn bread, feels like corn bread, and tastes like corn bread. Yay! Next time I'm going to try it with the butter to see if it tastes different and see which I like better.