Eating without a Kitchen

Okay, people. We’ve been down a kitchen now for almost a week, and I’ve discovered that cold cereal, while generally awesome for me, doesn’t quite cut it for the family day after day. Especially when it’s getting colder out, and people want actual hot meals. But Denisa has also discovered that cooking without a kitchen is . . . difficult to say the least. Right now, she’s got a set up with a hot plate on a card table. There’s not much in the way of prep surfaces, and perhaps the biggest problem is trying to clean everything in a bathroom sink.

(As far as the renovation goes, it’s proceeding well. We almost have all of the stuff out of the kitchen now. We have to replace the entire back wall, since it’s not really providing the structural support it’s supposed to, and what’s the use of a wall that’s not supporting anything? That’s going to add on a few days or a week, depending on how long it takes. We also still don’t know what we’re doing for flooring, or how we’re going to handle some of the ceiling. But progress is being made, and that’s encouraging. Now if it would only stop raining . . .)

So anyway, I’m trying to think of healthy alternatives to real honest to goodness home cooked meals. (Or at least, as healthy as possible.) We almost never eat anything that goes in the microwave. No frozen foods. No prepackaged things. So we don’t have much experience trying to feed a family with that. However, I realize that there is this whole world out there of microwave dinners. (Or at least, television has told me there is.)

Are there healthy versions of all of that? I’m really a complete idiot when it comes to any of it, so don’t assume that I even know the basics. If you had to eat healthy, but you couldn’t do a full meal prep, and you didn’t really just want to eat out every night, what would you do?

Remember, hot pockets don’t count . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Adventures in Juicing

Several years ago, my brother-in-law was out and about exploring our property and came across a huge concord grape vine off in the jungle behind our house. It’s spread across a number of other trees and bushes, and ever since we discovered we had it, we’ve been tinkering around trying to figure out how best to use it. The grapes are delicious, but they have seeds. We thought we could use them for smoothies, but that hasn’t proven popular. (The seeds end up making things too bitter.) We made some simple canned juice from them (put grapes and sugar and boiling water in a can, and seal), and we’ve given some away to friends, but we still hadn’t found anything that really worked.

A friend on Facebook posted about her juicing approach with grapes. She uses a steam juicer to get the job done. After some back and forth with her, it seemed like something I wanted to try. We borrowed a steam juicer from another friends, and last night we decided to give it a whirl.

First, Tomas and I went out to Pick the Grapes. This is more difficult than your standard grape picking experience, mainly because the vine is wild, and you have to really climb all over the place to get all the grapes you’re looking for. That said, after about a half hour, we had gotten two big buckets full of grapes. I would guess it was about 4 gallons of grapes. I have no idea if that’s a lot of grapes or not, but it certainly felt like a lot to me.

The steam juicer is pretty straightforward. There’s a large pan at the bottom where you put in a ton of water. On top of that goes a juice collector with a spigot, and on top of that goes a strainer, essentially: a receptacle for putting whatever you’re juicing into. It’s all capped off with a lid. Once you get the water boiling, somehow that makes the juice all come out and go into collector. I’m personally convinced it’s little demons, but maybe there’s some science involved as well.

We cleaned all the grapes (rinsing them off and taking out the grody ones. We left the stems on.) and put them into the receptacle. Once we had them all jammed in there, all of them fit in one batch. Then it’s just sit back and let the thing steam steam steam. Meanwhile, we cleaned jars and got the lids boiled for canning. We kept the jars in a 250 degree oven, because when that juice comes out, it’s very hot, and you don’t want the jars shattering. (Something I have personal experience, from an earlier canning expedition . . .)

Honestly, it went much more smoothly than I expected. The one trick was just figuring out how best to get the juice into the jars. It took some tilting of the juicer to get the right angle. Definitely a two person job. But the spigot has a clamp so you can start or stop the flow, and now that I know what I’m doing, I don’t think it would be bad to do again. We did notice the juice stains really quickly. I think we permanently stained our countertops. Luckily, we’re ripping them out next week, so that’s not that big of a deal, but I wouldn’t wear anything I was too attached to the next time I do this . . .

The two buckets made 6 quarts of juice, though after we finished, we realized we probably could have let it keep steaming for a while and gotten maybe another quart out of it. From start to finish, it took about two hours (not including grape harvesting). The juice itself is really potent; I had to add some water and sugar to get it just right, though I’ve now heard adding Sprite can really hit the spot.

In the end, it was definitely a success, and I will probably try it again next year.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Hurray for Second Chances: Return of the Bundt Cake

Last Sunday, Daniela and I made another foray into co-baking, and it ended with a pretty spectacular fail. (I should have taken a picture of it, in hindsight. Just imagine a half-baked bundt cake plopped upside down into another pan, and then baked again. It was bad.) I’d say it left a bad taste in our mouth, but that would be a lie, since we ate it the rest of the week, and it tasted incredible. This week, Daniela wanted to give it another go. Not with a new recipe. With the same one we’d messed up the week before.

I’m all about learning from my mistakes, so I readily agreed. For as bad as last week went, it wouldn’t have taken much for this week to go better, but it went pretty much perfectly. For one thing, we both knew what we were doing when we were making the cake. Last week was tricky, but this time, we already had it down to a process. The peanut butter filling also went off without a hitch. (We used chunky peanut butter this time, and these days we’re almost only buying the natural kind (the one you have to stir). I imagine smooth Skippy would make it even easier, though I did like the crunch of the natural after all was said and done.)

This time, we only filled the Bundt pan 2/3 of the way, and we used the leftover batter (of which there was a TON) to make 12 peanut butter-filled chocolate cupcakes. The cake was done in an hour, and the cupcakes were done in 20 minutes. When the cake was finished, we were both a little apprehensive. We used a wooden skewer to check it this time (much longer than a toothpick, to ensure we weren’t missing any pockets of raw batter), and we checked it about five times in five different places. Each time it came out clean. Picturing another mess, we steeled ourselves, flipped the cake out . . . and it was perfectly done. It cracked a little on the way out, but Daniela made a ganache to cover that up.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a real baking experience if we didn’t make a goof here or there. This time, it was that we forgot to get extra butter, so we didn’t have enough for the ganache recipe we usually use. Daniela decided to pull an audible, mixing oil and chocolate chips and milk in amounts that felt generally good to her. It seemed to have turned out fine at first, but it was done well before the cake was cool enough to put it on. Once the cake had cooled, it had solidified, and when she went to reheat it, the oil separated. It looked very (very) gloppy.

I tasted it, and it was super dark as well. We were also out of powdered sugar, and we only had about a half cup of white sugar left in the house. I threw caution to the wind and added all the white sugar we had left, and Daniela added some more milk, hoping that would fix it.

It did not. It tasted good, but there was no way it was going to turn out as a ganache. After some reflection, we decided to try whipping the heck out of it in the stand mixer, thinking that might be enough to mix the oil back in. A few minutes later, that turned out to be successful. We ended up with a (very) dark, smooth ganache that went perfectly over the cake. I’m chalking that up to divine intervention.

In any case, I was happy to have such a great object lesson to talk to Daniela about how to respond when things go wrong. Take some time away, think about what you could have done differently, and then try again, incorporating those changes. We still had to improvise, but the end result was delicious.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Adventures in Bundt Baking

Sunday, Daniela and I decided we wanted to make a cake for our Fourth of July dinner later that day. After debating the merits and proper “Americanness” of various cake and frosting combinations, we settled on a bundt cake (because we hadn’t made one before) that would be chocolate with a peanut butter filling. How hard could it be?

(Note: When you’re setting out to try something new in baking, the phrase “how hard could it be?” should usually tip you off that it will, in fact, be much harder than you think. Because “how hard could it be?” doesn’t actually set a limit, you know.)

Since it was Sunday, we were limited to using only the ingredients that were in our house already. We weren’t going to make a special trip to the store for anything. This made some problems for us, since the recipe we found that we really wanted to use was this one in the New York Times. However, that one called for cream cheese for the peanut butter filling, and heavy cream for the glaze, neither of which were in our fridge. So I called an audible and used the chocolate cake recipe from the NYT, and swapped out the peanut butter filling for this one (that I didn’t want to use the chocolate cake recipe for, since it was just a box cake, and who needs that?)

We got to work on baking. Everything went off without a hitch. It was complicated, sure, but nothing the two of us couldn’t handle. It came time to fill the bundt pan, and we hit a slight snag: we had too much cake batter. So much, that it filled the pan right to the top. I knew from experience that cakes typically rise, so for a moment, I was concerned this was too much batter.

“Maybe it just doesn’t rise that much,” Daniela pointed out. That seemed like a good enough answer for me. Into the oven it went!

An hour later, and the cake had not, in fact, flowed all over the oven. It had risen a little, but mostly it had puffed up in a ring around the middle. We took it out and tested it with a toothpick. The recipe called for baking at least an hour, so I was skeptical that it would have been done already. However, no matter how many times we put the toothpick in, it always came out clean.

“I guess we should just dump it out and see what happens,” I said. Daniela concurred. (Note: “Dump it out and see what happens” might not be the best approach for baking, but we’d been baking for a while by then. We were tired.)

We got out a cooling rack, I paused for a moment, and then turned the bundt pan over in one fell swoop.

Reader, the top two or three inches of that cake (the bottom of it, once it was turned out) was done to perfection. The peanut butter filling was great. But the part that was beneath the peanut butter filling? That was still molten cake batter. It oozed right through the cooling rack and spread out in a puddle all over the counter.

If I had been left to my own devices, I think I would have given up then. The beautiful bundt cake we’d worked so hard on was more of an amorphous cake-like mass. There was no way it was getting back in the oven in anything remotely bundt shaped. Denisa, quick thinker that she is, sprang into action. “Just put it back in a regular cake pan and finish baking it,” she said. “It’s still hot.”

That seemed like a ridiculous idea. Keep baking it? How do you bake what’s rapidly turning into a raw pancake with some chocolate and peanut butter cake heaped in the middle of it? But it was better than my idea of just giving up, so we let Denisa give it a try. We scooped up pieces of the cake, stuck them in a new pan, and then she used a spoon to get as much of the batter in as she could.

Back in the oven it went.

Twenty minutes later or so, the cake was finished. It looked about how you’d expect it would. Spots of it still had ridges from the bundt pan, and other parts looked like someone had just sort of thrown cake batter around and hoped for the best. In short, it looked like a disaster.

The taste, however . . . The taste was just right. Chocolate and peanut buttery goodness we’ve been enjoying since. When it’s dark and you’re watching a movie, it’s not like you need to look at your cake to enjoy it, you know?

In hindsight, we should have filled the pan only two thirds of the way, and cooked the rest of the batter in cupcake form. We think there was just too much batter for the heat to really get everywhere it needed to. But despite how big of a pain it all was, I think Daniela and I might give it another go at some point.

It really is a good tasting cake . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

My Orange Juice Approved List

Call me a purist, but when it comes to orange juice, there are only a few ways that I think you should consume it. In fact, it would be easy to assume a post like this doesn’t even need to be written. But then I come across people who are using orange juice in decidedly unapproved ways, and I just can’t remain silent. It is my obligation–no, my duty–to speak out.

Case in point: Saturday, I came into the kitchen to see one of my children eating granola. Nothing wrong there. Good old fashioned crunchy goodness, right? Except they were eating their granola . . . with orange juice. I realize a number of you still don’t quite grasp the horror. After all, multiple sugary cereal commercials reminded us all growing up that orange juice is part of a complete breakfast, right? Nothing like having some granola and maybe some sips of orange juice from a glass next to your granola.

Except this child was eating orange juice with granola. Meaning, taking a nice bowl of granola and milk. Now take out the milk and replace it with orange juice. I apologize to those of you with weak constitutions, but that child isn’t the only one with such flagrant orange juice violations. On my mission in Germany, one of my companions would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches . . . and then dunk them in orange juice.

No, my friends. This sort of food abuse simply won’t do. What’s next? Pouring orange juice over pizza? Spaghetti and orange juice? Chocolate cake with orange juice? A tuna fish orange juice smoothie?

Not on my watch. If you want to safely consume orange juice, here are the approved ways to do so:

• In a glass. By itself.
• In some sort of a smoothie. This smoothie may contain fruits and possibly some vegetables if you’re feeling particularly healthy. No solids shall be added to the smoothie that is not fruit or vegetable based. Additional juices or milk is allowed, but don’t go crazy.

And that’s it. It’s a short list, so it shouldn’t be that hard to master. Any time you’re tempted to veer off the list and add something funky to your orange juice, don’t. End of story.

Friends don’t let friends abuse orange juice.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.