Lucky Number 13

So we celebrated a birthday.

That big one...the eldest...she's reached the momentous teen age years.  sigh.  I'm only 22...and some, how could I possibly have a 13 year old girl child??

Anyway...

A few days ago, I picked up a fun recipe magazine.  It's one that I used to love and subscribe to..."The Taste of Home"....and this one was a special edition, it had kid-friendly, party-friendly foods.  And just in time for the great child's birthday.  She found a cake that must be made.  MUST.

Isn't it cute?




And it seemed so simple.  That middle section is set jello...blue raspberry jello.  We found all the candy, made the cake...all was going SO well...

And then...



 

I think we nailed it...don't you??

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It was one of those slow motion things...we cooled the jello just so...and then poured the sorta set, sorta liquid blue raspberry goodness into the prepared middle of this cake...it seemed to hold  for a few seconds...maybe a minute...and then the worst happened...

A fissure appeared.

I tried to stick my finger full of frosting into the hole...like the little boy who held back the sea with his finger in the dyke...but see, that kid only had to deal with the entire ocean and one small hole...I had blue raspberry goo, three screaming girls, an ever-widening crack and THEN the second side also SPRANG A LEAK...

Grandma was helpful though...she's the one who thought of the cup measures.  Hat tip to ya, Gram.

Lucky for my girl, I was NOT in the mood to make another cake.  So I handed everyone paper towels and told them to "SSHHHHHHH" and MOP or LEAVE...and commenced scraping that nasty looking cake, and as much of the blue goo as I could OFF the top of the bottom cake.

Luckier still was the fact that I had taste-tested the frosting recipe and found it scrumptious and so had intentionally made too much.  I re-frosted that bottom cake...used some of the candy to spell out her name...told Beanie that she should figure out something to do with SOME of the candy we would not be using...and walked away.

A few minutes later...we had a mostly respectable cake.









I used this as a teaching moment...I'm good that way.  I explained, "Sometimes things don't come out exactly as we expect...sometimes they are WAY funnier".

Happy Birthday tomorrow to my new Teenie-Girl Beanie...I love her very much.  And I THINK we just made my favorite cake, ever.

See ya around.

Barbeque Chicken Pizza...

I am an odd duck. I readily admit it.

I suppose that if you know me at all, this does not come as a surprise...but for some reason, every now and then one of my quirks hits me and I'm still surprised by what a complete dork I really am.

Case in point...the subject of our blog today, boys and girls, is not REALLY Barbeque Chicken Pizza...nope...it's actually..."how Stackey is missing her girls after several days of planning, gathering, writing for things that don't directly concern them...and after 2 days of absolutely necessary and interesting meetings...with one more to go...and just wants to connect with them in some way when she is not here..."

You can see, dear reader, why I had to simplify the subject a little.

So, as is my nature when ANYTHING out of the ordinary happens...I've not been sleeping. So in my wanderings of late last night and early this morning...I realized that I really like handwriting.

Stay with me here...remember the Topic Sentence, "I am an odd duck" we are now getting to a supporting sentence.

I REALLY like handwriting. I've kept some sort of handwritten journal most of my life...and sometimes wrote often enough to keep a timeline. I notice handwriting...My dad's was small and succinct...Beloved has an account's hand...My brother is a lefty and a boy and he is how I learned that MANY lefties...even boys...have a more open script that as a kid I thought was a more feminine look...it's just how they hold the pencil. My cousin Oddy has some of the most beautiful script I have ever seen, and yet it was a little difficult to decipher until I'd really sat still and TRIED, because some of her letters are very flowery. I've poured over both of my Grandmother's writings...and noticed as their hands became more shakey and jagged...and yet remained the same lovely lines.

I really like typing too...but that is not the point of this ramble.

Let's stay on topic shall we? That's right, 1) Odd Duck 2) Missing my girls 3) Handwriting.

So this morning...knowing I was going to meetings that would keep me away from them for another whole day, I got thinking, "I need to write them a NOTE! That's it! At least that is REALLY me...I would have actually touched that piece of paper and although I won't be here to touch them...they can touch the paper and it's sorta like touching each other" (I'm a touch sentimental at 3 am...it's part of my charm).

So I DID write them a note. And then I thought, well, hmmmm, Grandma might like a project for them, and I might be tired this evening, so maybe they could make dinner and if I WRITE them an easy enough recipe, maybe all of them can be involved...and then I can put it in MY recipe book and when they are old and gray and I'm dead (I'm also a touch morose at 3 am) they can look at it and remember my handwriting. (Please note, run-on sentences are the norm when I'm low on sleep...I may come back and edit this...but probably not...).

So, in the end I wrote them a note...and a recipe...in my own handwriting. And THAT, dear reader, is why this post is called Barbeque Chicken Pizza...for this ONE scan.



When they are old, they will also remember that their momma loved turquoise...if it'll only hold the color...and that brings my sentimental heart joy.

See ya around...

Dude...Cool Pancakes!

Happy First Day of our 2010-2011 School Year!

All three of the girls are in school this year...that's right Monkey Face is a big ole Kindergartner this year. So nothing for it but to make this a great day.

A few weeks ago, I saw a cool pancake trick on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (yes, I am a cooking show dork...moving on) and thought, "eh, I could totally do that". So I set about figuring it out.

And figure it out...I DID!




We made a bunch of them...and quite a few of them flopped. Those flops provided sustenance until such time as we could figure it out...which, of course, gave us MORE time to figure it out...but by the time the technique was perfected, we weren't really all that hungry. I think I started making them at around 8:15 and we started cleaning the kitchen around 10...nearly two hours WELL spent.

After I'd really figured out what to do, Bean wanted to give it a go. I figured that I'd offer ya'll a tutorial in case you ever want to make them.

First of all...get yourself a big flat pan, griddle or some such...We're using my electric skillet. Take your favorite pancake recipe and thin it out. Then you need TWO dispensers, one for writing and one for flooding. I started trying to write with the squeeze bottle that Beanie uses to "flood", but because I'd cut the top off to make the hole bigger, it was too big to be precise enough to write. No matter, we used the squeeze bottle to flood and we ended up having the best luck with a standard baby medicine dropper for writing.

Here is Beanie after she has drawn her picture, in this case a tree. You want to let it cook for a good long while, the darker it is the better it will show...



Then once the outline is PRETTY dark you flood it...wait 15 seconds and then flip it. The part of the pancake that is flooded will be MUCH lighter...if you wait, it will catch up to the outline part in darkness, and where's the fun in that? In this clip, Beanie wrote "Go Mom"...remember, if you are writing, you have to write BACKWARDS because you flip it...and if you don't WRITE it backwards your final pancake will be backwards...we lost SEVERAL that way...

(Oh, the weird part in the middle where I turn the camera is because I thought I was flipping it, and she decided mid-stream that she could do it...eh...with a real film crew, you'd get some sort of editing...that is not the case here...)



Here is an example of one that was left too long after the "flooding"...


Once you get the hang of it, the only limit is your own drawing ability...I don't draw much...but I am working on my penmanship...(Still too long on the pan)


It was a great first day activity...we just wish Grandma had been here to share it...



See ya around...

Not Naan...but not bad...

Last night I was on an indian food kick. I'd found a recipe for Butter Chicken that resembled my favorite Indian Restaurant's Chicken Makani...and I found a recipe for Naan (with an option for Garlic Naan).

Ooooooo...I was SO excited.

And then reality hit.

The Butter Chicken didn't suck. I wouldn't throw it BACK atcha. I wouldn't grab a jar of pickle relish to eat with a spoon INSTEAD. That's really all I can say about it. Oh, I guess ONE other thing...my Indian restaurant REALLY has no cause for fear.

But the Naan. Well, for some reason I was thinking it was a quick bread...so I didn't start it until 5:00pm. As a yeast bread it was impossible to finish by dinner time. I did MAKE it to a degree...but it started getting late. You know, I had to cook the Butter Chicken, make the rice, clean the kitchen, goof off with girlies...throw things at Bubba. ANYWAY...so I got as far as punching down the dough...making it into golf ball sized rounds that I put on a cookie sheet and covered with a tea towel and stuck in my cool oven.

In almost clarvoiant fashion, I also stuck a pink sticky note on the oven door (just in case I forgot to mess with it) to remind myself not to just crank up the broiler before checking that I'd removed the stuff. I am very wise to my own idiosyncracies...and frankly it only takes one tea towel flambe, one time, 22 years ago to remind this old girl how terribly forgetful she is. But I digress.

As is my common practice, I took the girls upstairs and completely forgot there was a lower floor to my house for the rest of the night.

I got up this morning and noticed that, indeed, I'd forgotten the Naan. Well, hmmm, they looked a little overblown...but not much worse for the wear. I pulled them out of the oven, pre-heated it to 350 F, extricated my tea towel from the couple of pieces that had grown sticky overnight. When the temperature indicator beeped, I popped them in the oven as-is and baked them for about 15 minutes...I know it was longer than 10 because I'd set the timer...but beyond that I'm not sure.

Anyway, they CERTAINLY stuck to my cookie sheet...that will be a soak job for sure...but I scraped the top part off and put a little butter and agave nectar on it and it was definately yummy.

Real Naan is usually a flat bread, you do the second rise, flatten it and cook it on the grill (or so saith my recipe)...but this was crunchy on the out side, puffy and soft on the inside...sort of like an english muffin but not quite so chewy...yummmy!

So here is what my Not Naan, looked like...


and here is a link to the recipe. I think I'm going to try it as ACTUAL Naan next time...but I also am TOTALLY going to try it as more of a biscuit again...um, adding in the greasing of the cookie sheet, of course.

See ya around...