Going Domestic

Cooking for Geeks

I received three new cookbooks for Christmas this year.  The one that I am really excited about is Baking Illustrated, by the editors of Cooks Illustrated. One of my cooking instructors once described the magazine as "cooking for geeks", and after perusing the baking cookbook, I understand why, and that's why I love the book.  It has a section at the beginning about high altitude cooking, and how it will affect a batch of oatmeal cookies, what changes to make to different types of recipes, etc. There are illustrations of what fluffy (good) egg whites look like and what curdled (bad) egg whites look like. Perfect for me. It reminds me of reading a graduate thesis in the sense that about a 1/3 of the recipes have a short essay accompanying them explaining how the authors tested out every plausible ingredient substitution or baking pan material before settling on a final recipe. Am now pumped to make blueberry muffins with cinnamon sugar and the yeastless cinnamon buns.

Next cookbook is the Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook. There's a recipe for peanutbutter frosting that is appealing, and lots and lots of cakes. My final cookbook is Double Dishing, which is authored by a group of women popular in the Calgary food scene. I've taken classes from about half of them, actually.  Lots of seafood recipes, but I go for the desserts, of course. Dreaming about the white chocolate blood orange tart (and I also received a tart pan with a removeable bottom for Christmas)!

Sew Deja Vu

Hmm ... at the moment I am taking a break from attaching the main part of a roman shade to the mounting board ... but wasn't I doing the exact same thing last year at this time of year???

Yeah.  We had a window replaced in our bedroom two weeks ago, and didn't really feel much like putting up the ugly horizontal blinds that were there before back up - they didn't really fit the window anyway.  So I volunteered to make another roman shade at lightening speed!

Much more successful than I was last year.  In less than four hours, the blind was sewn.  Another three hours to individually anchor all of the rings (by hand), and a small amount of time to do the work with the staple gun (not counting the time I lost when the staple gun decided to stop stapling).  What a difference a year makes! And a serger!  I almost wouldn't mind sewing another one :)

Would you like cranberry sauce with that?

For at least the last eighteen months, Chris had been talking about wanting to buy a turkey deep fryer, and a few weeks ago, he finally realized his dream.  I wasn't sure whether or not to believe him when he said that he was going to pick one up, but I did obligingly do some research on the web about the fine art of deep frying a turkey.  My favourite article (because the steps seemed well-explained) was this one from All Recipes. I will admit that I was little worried about the success of this endeavor, having heard a few stories on the radio about half-cooked turkeys coming out of the bubbling oil, but the one that we had for dinner two Saturdays ago was rather good indeed. Now the only thing perplexing us is what to do with the 9.5 litres of used oil that the turkey was fried in ...

Mile High Cookies (Almost)

I received this three-tier cooling rack for Christmas last year, and it took me until this December to use it and learn just how handy it is!!! I didn't have to wait at all between cookie batches for one batch to cool before unloading the next on off of the baking sheet. 

As a side note, I've made about five cookie recipes and five square recipes from the One Smart Cookie cookbook, and the square recipes are much better than the cookie one.  I guess that cookies just have to be fattening to be good :)

Unidentified Flying Breads

Yesterday I called up one of our favourite patisseries here in Calgary, Manuel Latruwe, and ordered a loaf of Stollen bread to go with one holiday meal or other. Chris had asked me to do this, and when I called him at the office to let him know that I'd made the arrangements, he asked, "Are there any nuts in it?"

Gosh, I don't know. I don't even know what Stollen is!  Luckily, there's a description, recipe, and photo here!  And there would be almonds in the marzipan, for the record.

Tiny Bubbles

If I ever hear again about how baggage is not man-handled at airports, I'm going to laugh. After watching some muscular guy volley the bags of all of our fellow passengers onto the conveyer belt to get them on our flight from LAX to Calgary twelve days ago, I'm not surprised that one of the bottles of wine that were bringing home from Australia broke.  It was shiraz from the Barossa Valley that Chris can't find here at home, so he's sad about that. Especially after it was mentioned in the latest issue of Saveur.

On the other hand, I was sad about all of the clothing that was sporting florid red wine stains.  I devoted the two days after we arrived home to stain removal. The first thing we tried was soaking the clothes with Dawn dishwashing detergent, but that didn't seem to work as promised by the stain-removal websites - I think that the wine had been soaking in for too long!  I ended up buying Shout with OxyPower - my first experience with an oxygenated bleach cleaner - and I love it!  I ended up soaking the stained clothing for about four hours in total, alternated with a few cycles in the washing machine, and it all came out!!!

One Flush Two Flush Red Flush Blue Flush

One of the things I was fascinated with while vacationing in Australia was the dual-flush toilets.  It's a silly thing to be posting about, I know, but they were very practical.  The newer ones we found in hotels and other public places had two flush settings of varying intensity - low and high.  The user merely pushed the appropriate button as needed.  I am surprised that I have never seen one of those anywhere in North America, as water conservation is also a hot environmental issue here at home.