Posted in Eats, tagged baking, food, kitchen, Mrs Dragon, Mrs Dragon's Den, pecan pie, Pi Day, pie, pie crust, postaday2011 on February 17, 2011| 2 Comments »
Is there such as thing as a pie gauntlet? If so, then Mrs Dragon has thrown it down.
In celebration of Pi Day — 3/14 — she has issued a pie challenge, complete with nifty prizes. I certainly won’t be making any more sweet potato pies, but I do have some pecans awaiting their destiny in the freezer.
I also have an awesome recipe from the folks at America’s Test Kitchen. All I lack now is the ability to properly roll out a pie crust.
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged 3/4-length sleeves, anger, baking, challenge, cleaning, coffee, decluttering, Do One Thing, King Arthur Flour, kitchen, kitchen gadgets, New Year, New Year's resolution, pie, postaday2011, resolutions on January 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 28: Clean angry. Choose a room. Get rid of anything that you don’t wear, don’t use or don’t love. Get rid of anything that doesn’t make you less angry. Get rid of anything that makes you angrier. If you start to feel less angry, go have another strong cup of coffee and remember why you were angry to begin with. Choose another room. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Previously this week:
Day 25: Chunked a couple of small, miscellaneous kitchen gadgets into the thrift-story bag. I can’t tell you what they were for. Seriously. Better to toss than to research, since I’ve lived without them for this long.
Day 26: Faced my true feelings for 3/4-length sleeves. I despise them, yet always seem to have a few in my closet. I was always a little tall and long-limbed as a child, and I sometimes had problems finding shirts with sleeves that were long enough. So, 3/4-length sleeves always make me feel like I should be tugging them toward my wrists. They’re gone now.
Day 27: I organized nothing, but I did go to a King Arthur Flour baking demonstration and might stand a chance of making a proper pie now. And pie makes any home nicer.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baking, postaday2011, Shakespeare on January 27, 2011| 4 Comments »
Baking class. Graduate seminar. Shakespeare production. All in one day.
There simply MUST be a name for my disorder.
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged alabama, baking, cabinet organization, cabinets, challenge, Do One Thing, guest room, hair bands, kitchen cabinets, Mobile, New Year, New Year's resolution, nightstand, organization, postaday2011, resolutions, small loaf pans, storage on January 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 13: Reorganized a particularly troublesome kitchen cabinet area. My house in Mobile, Alabama, had laughably little cabinet space, so I’m still getting used to maximizing the larger space I have now. I have this obsessive desire to keep all the baking items (mixer, cake pans, muffin tins, etc.) close together, but that just doesn’t work. I accept this limitation, and now I can reach the small loaf pans without interference.
Day 14: Cleaned out a box of hair accessories that was mysteriously stored in the nightstand in the guest room. Discovered that elasticized hair bands deteriorate and lose their stretch when stored in stupid places for long periods of time.
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, Travel, tagged baking, challenge, Christmas, Do One Thing, holidays, husband, junk, kitchen, marriage, New Year's resolution, New York City, pantry, piano bench, postaday2011, Pylones, resolution, stacking wine bottles, storage, travel, vacation, wine, wine pyramid, wine racks, Wine Stack, wine storage on January 4, 2011| 1 Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 2: I labored over whether I should include purchases in this challenge. As the sole board member, I voted “yes.”
When we were in New York City in early December, I saw this nifty little device in Pylones that allows you to stack up to 10 bottles of wine safely and efficiently. I realize that other people have wine racks on their countertops and walls and even on top of their kitchen cabinets, but proper wine storage demands protection from light and temperature variations. Thus, most of our everyday wine (“everyday wine” … we sound so sophisticated) is stored in the bottom of the pantry, far away from the stove and other sources of heat.
The bottles, however, tend to arrange themselves in a mishmash, no matter how carefully they’re initially placed. Any stacking at all requires something extremely heavy and unneeded to prevent rolling, and unstacked bottles rolling around on their sides waste a tremendous amount of vertical cabinet space.
Thus, when I saw the incredibly neat pyramid of wine bottles enabled by the Wine Stack, I pointed it out as just the thing we needed to fix the wine problem back home. My husband looked at it and declared that we would definitely figure something out when we got back.
I should have picked up the Wine Stack and carried it to the register, but what I didn’t realize at the time (yep, still learning after 15 years) was that his comment could be translated as follows: “I do not recognize this wine problem you describe; therefore, I shall forget this discussion in approximately 3 minutes.”
So, when I was trying to put the pantry in order last week after a round of holiday baking, I mentioned this solution we were going to figure out. The husband paused for a couple of seconds, and said, “I guess we should have bought one of those wine things while we were in New York.”
Sigh.
I ordered my Wine Stack on Sunday night, and I’m counting it as my second Do One Thing act of the year.
Day 3: I cleared off the piano bench, a hotspot for downstairs junk like books, magazines, gloves and scarves. Every house has a spot like this. Of course, now that I’ve swept it clean, I need to maintain a subresolution of keeping it clean.
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged baking, cake, chocolate, chocolate cream cheese frosting, cooking, cream cheese, CSA, food, freezer, fridge, refrigerator, sweets, zucchini, zucchini bread on September 24, 2010| Leave a Comment »
We don’t eat a lot of cake in the Haggerty household. It’s just the two of us, and we don’t particularly eat a lot of anything, especially sweets. Which is too bad, because I love to bake and can be quite good at it.
So when I DO decide that a cake is forthcoming, it needs to be out of this world.
This cake, alas, was not that memorable.
I found myself with zucchini remaining in the fridge last week, despite the fact that the CSA ended a few weeks ago. (I actually found more zucchini in the fridge yesterday. I fear it has become sentient and is reproducing at will.) I decided to end the season with a bang after I found a recipe for Zucchini Cake With Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting at Seriouseats.com. The recipe promised me a “triple-threat of complementary flavors,” including zucchini, chocolate and cream cheese.
It was … OK. The cake itself was kind of dry, and the chocolate frosting couldn’t make up for it no matter how rich it was. I would have been better off making plain old zucchini bread and wrapping it for the freezer while I made a more fabulous cake.
The cream cheese frosting is pretty delicious by itself, however. After I took the photo above I scraped it off, ate it and threw the cake away. Baker’s prerogative.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Eats, Photographs, tagged aroma, baking, cookies, cooking, dishes, food, home, kitchen, oven, pine nuts, smell, square silver bowl, toasted pine nuts on September 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Freshly toasted pine nuts: I don’t believe anything else makes the kitchen smell better, except maybe cookies baking in the oven. Cookies that someone ELSE is baking in the oven. Right before they wash their own dishes.
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged baking, co-workers, CSA, dehydrator, food, homemade, iPhone, photograph, souffle, vegetables on July 27, 2009| 5 Comments »
This week's CSA haul.
I’m up to my neck in CSA vegetables: Swiss chard, zucchini, cucumbers, poblanos, cherry tomatoes, squash and more. I made tiny souffles (my first ever) on Friday night with a recipe for Poblano and Cheddar Cheese Souffle from the 5 Star Foodie Culinary Adventures blog. I give credit to the Inspired Bites blog for helping me through the pepper-roasting process.
Oddly, I was more scared to roast a poblano pepper than I was to attempt a souffle. Go figure.
Truly, I could not handle this culinary adventure without the world wide web. Thank you, Internets.
You’ll note that there is no photograph of these alleged souffles. That’s because about three-quarters of the way through the 20-minute baking time, I realized that I WAS ACTUALLY MAKING A NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT DISH and I SHOULD BE SCARED and THEN THE TINY SOUFFLES ACTUALLY PUFFED UP and there was no way I was taking the risk that my first-ever homemade souffles would be served all sunken and non-poofy just so I could stop and take pictures.
They looked just like the ones here, and they were delicious. Trust me. I’m a woman who can make souffles.
I leave you with photos from the other half of this weekend’s food experiments: the Dehydration Debacle. Really, it was only half a debacle. Someone at work brought in some freeze-dried snap beans last week, and they turned out to be a crunchy, tasty snack. Having an excess of snap beans AND cucumbers crowding the CSA box, I decided to drag out my old-school stackable-unit dehydrator.
The results: crunchy bean curls that don’t really taste like anything, and thin cucumber chips that I would definitely pay good money for. I put just a slight sprinkle of salt on top of most of the slices before cranking up the dehydrator, and it seems to draw out the cucumber flavor.
Next weekend, I’ll bring out the dehydrator again to take care of all the pesky zucchini and squash taking up room and dealing out guilt in the hallway closet.
Dried snap beans.
Dried cucumber slices.
Entirely Adequate 