Tag: food

Vintage Cakes. Texas Sheet Cake


Quite delicious and easy to make.
I encountered two difficulties.  One was that I had a 9 X 13 pan, but not a 10 X 15 pan.  My mom did, and I was all set to borrow it, but then left it at her house, and thus, ended up using the 9 X 13.  That didn’t seem to make a ton of difference.

My second problem was that the directions didn’t explicitly say to leave the cake in the pan and so I tried to remove it.  That was a bad idea and ended with me dropping the cake, causing part of it to shift, as you can see in the picture.  I wrote myself a note to leave the cake in the pan for next time.  You make the cake, make the frosting, pull the cake out of the oven, pour on the frosting and then let the whole thing cool.

Overall, very good cake and I’m excited to try the variation with cinnamon and coffee.

Boise Farmers Market

There were no farmers markets in Boise upon my last living there.  So I wandered down to check out the one near my hotel.

These girls were selling play-doh which I found kind of genius.  It also made me wonder just how much it costs to rent a stall at this Farmer’s Market.
 

Coffee and pastries were selling well.
 
This guy’s business was called “North End Lavender.”  If only I liked lavender, I would have bought some.

My impression was that there were a lot more vendors of meat than the farmers markets I come across in Portland.  Also, I bought some cheese curds that were flavored.  They had many choices, but the one I went with was tomato basil.  I found flavored cheese curds to be a very good food product idea.

I also bought some cherries for friends I was visiting and delicious raspberries.  So good!

Vintage Cakes’ Cherry Chip Cake. Also Chocolate Ice Cream.

I’ve been busy this weekend making ice cream.
 
And a beautiful Cherry Chip Cake to celebrate the end of school.

It’s Cherry Chip cake with a thin spread of ganache between layers and then frosted with a cherry buttercream frosting.

The cookbook author developed it because she missed the Cherry Chip cake mixes from her childhood.  I too enjoyed those and was happy to try this cake.  I assumed that the Cherry Cake mixes were no more, however when buying ingredients at New Seasons, the cashier told me that the Cherry Chip mix is still made and that New Seasons carries it.  It was rather deflating news.  I still made the cake from scratch anyway.

Sometimes, you just need a good grilled cheese.


All week long I’ve been craving grilled cheese.  Thanks to my sourdough starter, I keep myself in homemade whole-wheat sourdough bread, which is good for many things, but not the grilled cheese I was thinking of.  So I made a some perfect sandwich bread, bought some delicious ham, sliced up some Tillamook medium cheddar and made a pot of tomato soup to boot.

It really hit the spot.

Two headlines from today’s paper

Reading this, I audibly gasped, mostly because I’ve been waiting for years for male athletes to start coming out of the closet.  Also: same last name!
 
Oh Grant Butler.  A few years ago you decided to experiment with being vegan for a few months and I thought, “I hope you can make it that long without cheese” because cheese is the number one reason I don’t want to be a vegan.  The number two reason is that I don’t think it’s actually a healthy way of eating.  But you, Grant Butler, took to it like a duck to water and now your write columns that amuse me such as this:

Now I don’t mind a good veggie burger now and then, but really, the bun?  The bun is the best part, in fact,  the main reason for eating the veggie burger.  When you get right down to it, I would eat the bun with a bit of butter rather than the veggie burger wrapped in lettuce or what have you.

I make a pizza.

Matt is out of town and I have the day off, so I will make pizza for dinner.  It’s also the end of the month which means there isn’t much left in the grocery account, so I’m going to make a pizza with what I have.  I picked some asparagus from the garden and sliced that up and sprinkled it on. Then I opened a can of sardines and added them.  There were Lima beans that needed to be used up, so on those went.   I had some leftover shredded mozzarella, which was good.  Then, after I baked all of that, I cracked four eggs on top.

This was a very fine pizza.

Potato recipe

So the Lint Project is going along.  Eating mashed potatoes every day has been easier than meditating every day, but I’ve been doing my best to do both.  It occurs to me, that someone might want my mashed potato recipe, so here it is, in all its glory. This is adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

Boil three pounds of skin-on potatoes (of similar size, if possible) in salted water until they are soft.  I check to see if they are soft by fishing out a larger candidate with a spoon, and poking it with a toothpick.  If the toothpick goes all the way through, they are done.

Drain the potatoes in a colander.  Put your potato boiling pot on the counter and get out your ricer.
An aside:  I used to always roll my eyes at mashed potato recipe instructions including references to using a ricer.  I had a potato masher, and why should I spend 20-plus dollars on a rather large kitchen gadget that only did one thing?  Then I made a few batches of for-public consumption mashed potatoes that had bits of unmashed potatoes in them.  And the next thing I knew I was forking over $20-plus dollars for a rather large kitchen gadget that only does one thing.  And let me tell you, that was money well spent.

That said, if you cook your potatoes well and mash enthusiastically, you will be fine.
 

Now before you start the peeling process, get out a stick of butter.  Yes, that’s half a cup. Yes, you are putting that entire stick in the recipe.  Don’t argue with me, here I know what I’m doing.  Get out a small pan and melt the butter (a low setting is best) while you are peeling the potatoes.

To peel the still-hot potatoes, take a fork, stab a potato and use your paring knife to slip off the peel.  Throw the naked potatoes in the ricer, and press, or throw them in the pot, ready for mashing.
 

When you’ve pulled all the skins off (if the potatoes are small and there are many, they will cool down enough so you don’t have to use the fork after awhile) and riced or mashed, pour in your half cup of now-melted butter. You ricer people, now is the time for you to get out your masher and mash in all that delicious butter. Take one cup of cream and pour about one half of cup of the cream in and mash some more.  Add cream a little at a time, until the potatoes reach your favorite consistency.   For me, that’s at about 1/2 cup of cream, but you might like more.  Mash in some salt, not too much, and you are done.

For this project, because I don’t really want to eat a TON of potatoes every day, I portion them into 1/2 cup servings using the smallest jelly jars you can buy in the canning section.  Then I store them in the refrigerator. But first I serve myself up a bowl of delicious, hot, homemade mashed potatoes.

To sum up:

3 lbs potatoes, boiled, peeled and riced/mashed
1/2 cup butter melted and mashed in
1/2 cup to 1 cup cream, mashed in
Salt.

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Potatoes. Sometimes, they are what’s for dinner.


I remembered that I never finished harvesting the German Butterball potatoes last fall and dug up a pound of them.  They were in great shape, just muddier than if I had pulled them out of the ground last September.  I roasted them up and, man, were they good.  They were so good, I just had a double helping and called that dinner.