Wil Wheaton Effect

I have a confession to make. This confession may come as a shock. Everyone who reads this blog knows I am a Disney fan and book nerd, but few know that I am also a Trekkie. Next Generation Trekkie to be precise. (And while I am on the confession train, I am a Star Wars nerd and a Gleek!) Whew, those confessions felt good.

My Trek-dom began at an early age. I use to watch Star Trek, Next Gen. with my father, and we went to see all the movies together. I still go to the the movies with my dad and let my husband, also a Trekkie, go with a friend. Dad/ Daughter Dates are important! However, since I no longer live at home, my Star Trek watching partner is now my husband, and we have AT&T U-verse, with the BBC America, which loves to play Next Gen thanks to the British hunk Patrick Stewart.

Last week was a long...very long and stressful. Saturday night found me not baking, which I normally do for church, but instead on the couch with Trae watching Next Generation. I was feeling guilty about not baking, but my bum clad self was highly enjoying the couch. The episode we were watching was Wil Wheaton joke-heavy. Poor bloke; he got the short end of the stick a lot, and this episode was no different. Long story short...he literally got banana split all over his face. (I have no idea why space aged banana splits are blue)

Well, the Whil Wheaton effect happened around 9:30 pm. At 9:45 pm, I am melting vanilla ice cream in the kitchen. I was going to make a banana split trifle for church! Who knew that Whil Wheaton would inspire a dessert!

I divided the carton into three equal portions and flavored two of the portions (chocolate and strawberry). I then made the three flavors into ice cream bread (recipe at end of entry). While the bread cooled, I braved the monsoon-like rain, and went to get bananas and more strawberries. When I got home, I made homemade whip-cream and prepped the layers. The bread got cubed and then a trifle was assembled!

The bottom layer was chocolate bread topped with strawberry pie filing, banana, and whip-cream. The next layer was strawberry bread topped with pineapple, banana, and whip-cream. The final layer was vanilla bread topped with chocolate ganache, banana, and whip-cream. I topped the entire thing with cherries, because every banana split deserves a cherry on top!!

Overall, the dessert was good. When you got a bite of all the elements, the thing really tasted like a banana split, which was honestly, was a little weird to be eating bread, but feel like you are eating ice cream. Not overly sweet, but room for improvement is obvious. The chocolate bread needs tweaking, and the whole thing needed more whip-cream. Still, for a Star Trek inspired dessert, I would give it a thumbs up. Guess you just never know when and where or what will inspire a dessert! Therefore, Live Long and Bake!

Ice Cream Bread

• 2 cups ice cream, any flavor
• 1 1/2 cups of self rising flour
  
  Mix 2 cups of semi melted ice cream with 1 1/2 cups of self rising flour. Put the mixture into a greased loaf pan. It wouldn't hurt to flour the pan, but you do not have to. Bake at 350 for 30 to 40 minutes. Makes a great loaf of bread to eat plain or to transform into many delicious goodies, such as bread pudding! (Butter Pecan Ice Cream Bread Pudding is wonderful!) 

Paula Deen Cried

I burnt "burnt butter sauce." I mean really burnt "burnt butter sauce." Two sticks of wasted butter with garlic carbon bits and charred capers. I know somewhere Paula Deen felt the butter's pain and cried. With the burnt-ness I got on that sauce, the two sticks deserve a memorial service. The bottom of the pan was a harden shell of crusted black butter.

Yet, since the sauce foams as it cooks and I could not see to the bottom of the pan, I was in happy land because the foam was a golden amber color. I started to mentally pat myself on the back for turning my cheap SAM's Club gnocchi into a delightful, late night meal as I poured the sauce on to the gnocchi. Then the blackened garlic remains stuck to the gnocchi, as a warning sign of a plagued sauced.

I panicked. Trae tells me to wash off the gnocchi. The Good Eats worshiper is telling me to wash a pasta.

Alton Brown would not be amused by this idea. Starch is the binder that holds together the pasta party. But I did have black death infecting my pasta party. I took the chance. I washed the pasta.

Then I pulled out the last clean pan in the kitchen, and quickly whipped together a sauce of butter, marsala wine, balsamic vinegar, dash of white wine and flour to thicken it. I always keep marsala wine and balsamic vinegar in the pantry. The last tablespoons of butter had a prayer said over them as they plopped into the mixture, that were christened with the white wine. Topped the sauce and salvaged gnocchi with parmesan cheese. The result was good...surprisingly so and tasty!

Moral of the story: Sometimes you can do everything wrong and yet still come out right, or at least with a good pasta dish.

Up Up and Pixar

My husband and I are kids at heart. I can any song (out of tune) from any Disney animated movie, and Trae went to school to learn animation arts. Our kitchen is adorned with a movie poster of Pixar’s Ratatouille. Yet, despite our not-so-secret love of Disney and Pixar, I would have never guessed the role that an animated movie would have in our relationship, as well as our decision to get married. In May 2009, Trae and I went to see Pixar's Up, and in December 2009, we became engaged. Our relationship, even before Up, was already “tangled” up with Pixar movies: Cars, Wall-E, Ratatoullie. We loved going to see them together and relished being children together for an hour and half in a darkened theater. Yet, Up didn't move us backwards into childhood, but instead moved us forward to where we are today: married.

For those who haven't seen the movie, I don’t want to give it away. All I can tell you is to go see it now; I do not care if you claim that animations are for kids. Go See Up…Now! The movie is based around Carl’s love for his wife, Ellie. The bulk of their relationship is presented in the most touching tribute to silent films I have ever seen. Pixar captures the depths--heart aches and joys-- of a relationship in a five minute montage, enhanced by a waltz titled "Married Life." I am including two versions below of it:

The scene from the movie with music


The music without the movie scene

After leaving the theater, we realize that while we were never going use balloons to fly our house, we could still get over all the trials that marriage had offer. We didn't have to talk about it; we didn't have to express it. All that happened was that Trae squeezed my hand at the end of the five minute waltz as I wiped tears from both our checks with my other hand.

Since finding a deeper meaning in the movie for us personally, we have incorporated Up in our lives, not only by adopting "Adventure is out there!" in marriage, but also in fun, unique ways. Some of those ways are:

• Baking a fun Up cake as a surprise for Trae. (The house if fondant, with the roof having little individual shingles!)

• Giving Trae a Ellie merit Grape Soda cap badge that he kept in his pocket during the wedding.

A good motto for marriage, no?

• Doing a choreographed dance for our first dance to the "Married Life" waltz.  Everyone was shocked, surprised, and stunned by it!

Overall, these little reminders, such as saying to each other, "What would Carl and Ellie do?" help us to look at marriage as a whole. We are starting off, young, fun, and full of adventure. It is up to us to keep that adventure that going. The importance of working together and having a good marriage has become increasingly apparent to me after losing my grandmother. My grandmother and grandfather had a respect and love for each other. My grandfather adored my grandmother and did all he could to make her happy, which she was. I look at Trae's grandparents and literally my heart aches for what I use to have...a house owned by grandparents filled not only with love, but good food as well,which was  token of their love. Trae's grandparents are the kind of elderly who still hold hands, kiss, and dance, even though PaPa (grandpa) is in a wheelchair. Their adventure is still going, even at the ages of 84 and 90. Trae and I's adventure is just starting, and I pray that we too will be cutting a rug and sneaking kisses at the age of 90.

The Southern Way

Southern Women are an interesting breed. Through the generations, we have evolved, but a few things remain the same. For example, when tragedy strikes, we give it a coronary embolism with baked goods and if that doesn't work, we suffocate it with Lysol.

My grandmother (I called her Fanny) passed away today at 12:09 am. A Southern Lady who was determined to die on the Lord's Day. My mother and her sisters rushed to my grandmother's side on Thursday. While I am sad, I mainly feel relief that she is no longer suffering. Yet, since Thursday, my Southern roots have been glowing along with the shiny mopped floors. (I even scrubbed the base boards.)

I also baked a cake for the church's pot luck lunch and dropped it off yesterday...just another one of my Southern traits coming out. Southern Women keep their promises, especially if it is a promise to a church. No one is going to say "Bless her heart!" about this Southern girl!

In my manic state, I got the ingenious idea of trying something new; I was going to make a roll cake. I am not sure why. Roll cakes are normally associated with Christmas and Yule Log cakes, and my mind has been wondering back to Christmas a lot.

Christmas was always a large affair at my grandmother's house. She has the formal living room where the tree was, and my cousin Missy would play the Chipmunk's Christmas Song on the piano. Cousin Ryan is a TALL man and when the three grandkids got in front of the tree for a picture, the angel looked as if she had sprouted from his head.

I now have my grandmother's tree. She once had a fat Christmas tree, but around the time when I was in middle school, she replaced the tree with a more fashionable skinny tree. As a child, I hated--loathed even-- that tree. It looked silly and lost in her large formal living room. When the cousins stood in front of the tree for the annual Christmas picture, the tree was completely hidden. The angel became almost a blessing from God; magical suspended in air with a sweet porcelain face offering a blessing to these tree-less cousins. When my grandmother and grandfather moved to a nursing home, my aunts and mother bequeathed the skinny tree to me. Fanny was delighted that one of her grandkids was going to use her beloved tree. Me? I found humor in the situation but couldn't believe I would have to use the ugly tree! Yet, the first year I unpacked that tree (around 2005), I saw the love Grandpa had for Fanny. As branches started to fall off, he carefully whittled down pencils to make replacement pegs. Christmas 2010 was rough on the tree; Mona the cat ate through the weakened metal and ran off with a whole branch. Yet, Christmas 2011 will see that tree with dropping branches held on by pencils, and as I hang the ornaments on the tree with my husband, I can only hope that will have the same love for each other as my grandparents had for each other.  I hope that we have pencil years: years that are spent working together on making something last through the ages.

Culinary Creations

I briefly mentioned before that I have had a plethora of jobs. Right now, I am an adjunct English teacher at a community college, and I love it. I get to teach and find new ways to make writing interesting and relevant. I also have an awesome schedule that allows me to indulge my passions: writing, reading, and BAKING!

I have a stack of recipes known as the "Will Make One Day" stack. Well, that will make day is now! With more time, I get to make more dirty dishes. I have conquered two recipes that I feared tremendously in my "one day" stack: homemade caramel sauce and homemade marshmallows.

 Caramel sauce is a fairly easy thing to make. I used this recipe from BakedBree.com (a great food website): http://bakedbree.com/caramel-sauce

I even propped the laptop on the bar so I could look at the pictures for reference. Doing that provided to be extremely helpful, because when the mixture of sugar and water started to turn into amber bubbles, I knew not to get nervous. Mine did, however, turn out a little darker than hers, but still delightful!

The sauce was the perfect topping for the leftover Bailey's Irish Cream cake, which I turned into bread pudding. (I guess it would be cake pudding in this case!)

Homemade marshmallows were not as easy as caramel sauce. The recipes I used were on the Food Network website, and they were on a mixture of an Alton Brown (Good Eats) recipe and an Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa) recipe.

Somehow after finishing the marshmallows, the kitchen had an oil-coated sheen. My original pot was the right size to contain the expanding bubbles made during caramel sauce, but it almost over flowed during marshmallow making. During mid-boiling, I had to change pots, causing some sugar mixture to hit the stove eye and catch fire. Oops. Also, my old Sunbeam stand mixer did not like being left on high for so long. I had to say sweet and tender words to the old girl so she wouldn't riot on me and throw half thickened marshmallow goo all over the kitchen.

Anyways, the marshmallows after all the oil, pondering, fire, and fear, turned out great. I couldn't, however, successfully scrape the entire marshmallow mixture out of the bowl, and I turned my back on the left over goop.

By the time I had finished smoothing out the mixture on to a greased cookie sheet, husband had graham crackers crumbled in the bowl and was asking for melted chocolate. A quick whisk with the mixer and we had smores on a stick! Best thing EVER! Homemade marshmallows are great, but homemade smores on a stick are blissful.

Enjoying his creation!

Ordinary Day

My husband and I are very blessed by having loving friends and family. I was humbled and overwhelmed when the outpouring of love started to come in material formats, known as wedding gifts. One day a mysterious box appeared and it was filled with delightful pasta, a wedding gift from the lovely woman who did a reading at our wedding. The box contained chocolate linguine (wonderfully delicious with a raspberry sauce and home-made whip cream) and lime, mango, chili shells.

For our one month anniversary, we made lamb ragu and finished the meal by watching the wedding video as we slurped down chocolate linguine Lady and the Tramp style. The other pasta was going to be consumed on another special occasion. The occasion, however, never came. Six month anniversary brought steak and a mini-wedding cake dessert.

A Tuesday came along and I came home hungry and happy. The husband was already home; however, when he left for work that morning, he had not started a crock pot meal. (He is a wonderful husband; on Tuesday and Thursdays, he starts crock pot meals because I get home late!) We had left over chicken in the fridge and salsa in the pantry. The lime, mango, chili shells pasta was in a pot of boiling water in a matter of moments.

 

Sitting at the table with my husband made me realize we cannot wait for the special moments, because even the ordinary moments are extraordinary. I know I sound like a sappy Hallmark card from the 99 cent rack, but it is true. That delicious meal would have gone unmade; the pasta still sitting in our pantry. Who knows when we would have deemed it a "special day;" instead, an ordinary Tuesday ended up being the perfect day.

The Role of Food: Part Two

Not all of the creations to come out of our kitchen are sugar laced; however, I have already gone through two small bottles of vanilla extract in the last month.

When we first started dating, my husband knew very little about kitchens and how they operated. He had cooked some, yet he was predominately a microwave man. My apartment at the time was stuck in at time warp from the 1950s/ 1960s. The push buttons, which controlled the eyes on the stove, did not encourage a fondness for cooking in him.

(The buttons did even bring down cooking enthusiasts with simple tasks such as making tea!)

"It has buttons!" was all we could hear from the living room!

I had lovely green sinks and gold speckled counter tops in that apartment as well as brown/ sparkly gold plaid wallpaper in the living room. It was my first single abode apartment and I loved ever out-dated, cheap-rent square inch of it!

With that stove, I woo'ed and won my husband....bacon, pasta, a Death Star cake. Now, I live in an apartment with nice kitchen that has proper stove and my husband has discovered Alton Brown. I thank Alton Brown, the Mr. Wizard of food, for introducing my husband to cooking. Together we have bonded over dishes; dishes, to us, that have been culinary masterpieces. Each meal has caused us to talk, laugh, and learn.

From our one month anniversary dinner!

A dinner is a lot like a relationship. Not every relationship is the same even though all relationships uphold the same titles: boyfriend/ girlfriend, serious, causal, dating, married. My ragu is not going to taste the same as my other married friends; my ingredients will be different, yet when all the sauces are done, they all going to be classified at ragu. Even if we all followed the same recipe, our ragus would still taste different. A pinch of salt? How much is really a pinch? Therefore, we are all married, but each marriage is going to be different.

I will admit, I have trouble at times accepting this. A lot of our friends have houses, take vacations, and have job provided insurance. I wish we had all of those things; however, when I am in the kitchen with him with the cats hoping we drop something on the floor, our three bedroom apartment is home. I do not need a house or a vacation. I can make a wonderful dinner, turn off my phone, and be taken away with a movie or reading silently together. One day we will have those things, but if I keep focusing on those, I will miss what today offers us.