pie recipe

I hope you've all been over to Mike's blog and voted on this week's poll. Usually his polls are opinions, but this week there is very clearly a correct answer.

Nothing much has been happening the last couple of days. I'm mostly feeling better, although I had a coughing rampage that lasted for a good hour this morning. I've been watching more TV. We have over 72 hours free on our DVR right now. This is the most we've had since we got the thing. Usually we hover around 20, breaking 30 was a big deal a couple of weeks ago. The new TV should be delivered tomorrow, and our new HD satellite service is set up on Thursday. Alfred's a man with a mission, he's not messing around. Right now he's heating up milk to make yogurt. He's asking me what I'm writing about. Not much, obviously. Today's picture is from when we went to Ichetucknee with Mercedes and Ilya back in September. I was making bread dough sticks like we used to make when I went camping with my family. I was drunk from my multi-colored Russians. You can see some of the bread dough on my toes. Also, there are about 20 pictures of me with that flashlight wedged under my chin like that.

So, the aforementioned pie recipe. A couple of people commented on my last post asking for it, so here it is. It's the one my mom uses and that my grandma and great grandma used to use. History, people! Anyway, use 3/4 cup Crisco, 2 cups flour, and 2 tablespoons sugar. Mix it all together, adding a tablespoon or so of ice water as you need it. Then just roll it out and bake it at 375. I used to go wrong with the water, I never added enough, then I watched my mom make it and saw that she adds at least a couple tablespoons. It's simple but oh so delicious. I can eat it plain by the pound. This recipe makes 2 crusts, although I usually need to add a little more of each thing to make sure I have enough. Mmm, pie...

bad luck

I had all sorts of unfortunate things happen yesterday. First, I went to buy plane tickets to go to MN and the prices had gone up by freaking $80 apiece! From the day before! So waiting 24 hours would cost us $160. Sucks. So now I'm not sure when we're going or what's happening, which sucks because we had just finally managed to nail down a date and pick exact flights. Back to the drawing board. So frustrating!

Second, my computer will no longer turn on. It worked fine Monday night, Tuesday evening it won't respond at all. I'm hoping it's coincidence, and not that Alfred is systematically destroying or getting rid of my things when I do something to piss him off. First we sell my car, then my computer breaks. Whatever it was, I'm sorry! :)

Third, (this was technically this morning, but it can still count) I was at my lowest weight in about a year Saturday morning. I've gained 3 pounds since. Not that much, but considering it took almost a month to lose those 3 pounds, it's kind of discouraging.

But luckily I had this last night to cheer me up:


Seriously, the most delicious cake ever. (no wonder I gained 3 pounds, right?) It's a really dense fudgey cake, not a normal fluffy frosting type cake, very rich and chocolatey. You don't need a very big piece. Coming from me, that says a lot. I made some ganache to pour on top, which was really good, and some whipped cream, which was not really necessary but still ok. The recipe for the cake is here if you're interested. I highly recommend it.

busy weekend

Man, I get all these new readers and then skip a day posting. I'm a terrible person.

Yesterday was kind of crazy. We spent Friday night in Jacksonville at Ilya and Mercedes' house so we could drink and play Uno. Yesterday morning I left to go to a funeral for a guy I used to work with (he was only 60, very sad), and Alfred stayed and worked on some website stuff with Ilya. On my way back I stopped at a couple stores to buy lots of candy and decorating stuff, then we hung out at their house for awhile before we left. We had to stop at Walmart and Sears on our way home, so I was crammed into my seat with a billion things around me, then we took our 8 mile walk when we got home. By the time we were done with that it was 8, so we had dinner and got to work making things. We practiced making molding chocolate (we tried painting the first batch with some colored white chocolate but it took way too long), I guess I should have broken off the extra chocolate from the sides for the picture. Oh well. We also made some new cookie cutout dough to try, and caramel for the chocolates. I've got way more stuff to make today. My mixer's going to be busy!

So. Have you ever wanted a new delicious type of grilled cheese to try? No? Too bad! We found this recipe from Emeril I believe, it's super yummy. Mix equal parts of cream cheese and marscapone cheese and use that as the cheese filling, then grill the sandwich like normal. It gets all gooey and delicious. I buy 8 ounce tubs of each cheese and use about a quarter of it for 2 sandwiches. We had them for breakfast this morning. Yes those are with 2 different types of bread.

I'm a baking fool

We stopped at Costco on our way home from work yesterday and bought a 25 lb bag of flour. Since then I've done my best to put a dent in it. So far, I've made:

Rice pudding. I used leftover white rice from Alfred's mom's Chinese New Year party. I actually made 2 batches, one with raisins and one without. With is much better.

Irish soda bread. We ate it warm with some butter for breakfast. Pretty good.

Blueberry cream cheese muffins. We had these for breakfast too. Good, but I couldn't really taste the cream cheese in them. Maybe add more next time.

More soda bread. We haven't tried this yet, but I like the look of it better. It's a more traditional recipe than the other loaf.

And my crowning achievement: cake crumb cookies. We had about 1/3 of the cake left from dinner the other night, so I wanted to make something creative with it. It was chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. I found this recipe and adapted it a bit. I put the cake in the food processor to chop it all up. I ended up with about 2 cups of cake crumb/frosting mixture. I added about 1/2 c flour, 1/4 c sugar, 2 egg yolks, 3 tbsp water, and 1/4 tsp baking powder, and let my standing mixer go to town. Then I stirred in some chocolate chips and baked the cookies at 350 for 12 minutes. Voila! They're actually really good. They taste like chocolate chip cream cheese cookies. I'm giving a bunch of them away so we don't eat ourselves into a cookie coma tonight.

I think I'm done baking for the day. I'm going out to dinner with some friends from my old job, Lindsay and Allison, tonight. I also need to stop and buy a couple of loaf pans for tomorrow's endeavors. Our fridge is going to be so full!