Mixing wet and dry

The recipe was another one from the Yogurt  cookbook, so of course it called for yogurt.

Cartoonist mixed the wet ingredients, and I mixed the dry. Here is what it called for, to make 3 dozen (thought of course we didn’t manage to make that many)

• 4 1/3 cups of flour (we used white rice flour)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/4 cup of sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 cup of yogurt

forming the donuts

Once the wet was mixed, and the dry was mixed, we were supposed to mix them together and then put them in the fridge to chill for a hour.

But, then , this is when it didn’t work. We were supposed to roll them out and use a donut cutter.

This was not somehting that we owned. We kind of looked at the dough, and Cartoonist said, now what?

Well, I said, what are donuts but balls with wholes in them, so we made balls, and then poked holes in them, and dropped them into the hot oil to fry.

posed finished product

They turned out quite well, and tasted even better with powdered sugar on them. We were quite pleased with them, and now Cartoonist is sure she wants to make these to give to her friends.

I got to use the pasta maker on some white rice flour pasta, and it turned out, resonantly well, for the first time out.

Pasta maker

I thought, wrongly, that this machine would do it all, flatten the dough, and make it into strips, and all that stuff. My sweetie, who got it for me, kept urging me to watch the youtube video on it. If you watch it, it will all make sense. But I hate watching instructions, i would rather read, so i read as much as i could, and it appears that what this does, at least the basic stuff, is flatten the dough.

And, here is the kicker, you have to let it go through several times, at smaller and smaller widths, so that it gets flatter. Easier than trying to do ti with a rolling pin, but not much nicer looking, just thinner.

Draining pasta

So, what was the verdict? Cartoonist like it enough to pack it in her lunch for school, and the marinara sauce I made seemed to help as well.

I even at a little of it when I was ill, but not too much, not knowing when I would be well again, and no knowing if Cartoonist would want to make anything on her own, while I was ill.

Mixing the apples

I love the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, as well as The  Moosewood Cookbook. I have not been let down by anything I have cooked from there, so I turned to these two books for what I made next. I found an Apple Bread that didn’t look bad, or too hard, so I set to it.

First, I chopped up the apples in the mini-Cuisinart. Then I added the ride and juice of one lemon.  The recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of packed apples. That only made a small dent in my mound of apples, but a dent it made. Next I added 1/2 cup of raw sugar, 4 tablespoons of melted butter and 1 egg. Then I mixed the dry ingredients which were 2 cups of rice flour, 2 1/2 tsp of baking power, 1/2 tsp baking soda, a dash of salt, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla extract.

Finsihed Bread

I popped it in the over for about an hour, and it came out tasting quite good.

Cartoonist took it to o the art center the next day, and it was gobbled up.

Still have apples

I still had plenty of apples, so the next recipe I decided to make was one from the newspaper, and I decided to alter it as much as I wanted…and yes, I knew that was a bad idea, but oh well. I not only wanted to use up apples, but the plums I had, and some of the blueberries. Oh, I was going to make the best cake.

I cut up two cups worth of apples, and dropped them in the food processor, along with some blueberries that had started to change color,and the plums that were going soft. It made a dirty purple color that looked a bit like cement, but I figured it would taste good, at some point.

Cement Apple Cake

I used one cup of raw sugar, 2 eggs, some bananas that had started to go bad, one cube of melted butter, 1 cup of coconut flour and 1/2 cup of gluten-free, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Finished cake

It looked dreadful going in, so I cut up another banana and another apple, and put it on top, thinking it would make it better. The recipe called to cook it at 350 for half an hour.

It was not done in half an hour. It was not done in an hour. It was still soggy and horrid, and after an hour of cooking, it came out looking like this. So I let it cool, and didn’t even bother to put it in the compost, just dumped it in the trash.

Failure in the kitchen number 2.

Cartoonist's take on my cooking

Putting everything together may not seem hard to others but to my mom and i it was complete bloody murder!! Having guests this week has made it hard on us since for some reason or other none of them really know how to cook, leaving us to provide and make food for them. As a going away or last good meal before you leave party thing we decided to make pasta with sauce and salad. Course my mom hasn’t ever made a full fledged meal all at once. She always just made maybe a pasta thing here, sauce there. But never all at once..My mom went nuts.

4 hours…thats how long it took..FOUR BLOODY HOURS!!! just to make pasta, sauce, salad, and meatballs. We were going to make it vegetarian but NOOOOO someone wanted MEAT! MANLY MEATY MEAT!! Not to mention we both tired from running around with my grandma to pick up all the blasted ingredients!! After all of it was done we were finally ready to taste it all. Course her sweetie asked if the pasta was fully cooked which was a BIIGG red flag right there. The rest of the evening felt like judging in “Iron Chef America”.

So, here is what the final mix was:

• 2 3/4 cups of non-gluten flour
• 5 Eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon of alt
• 1/2 cup of pureed carrots

Mixing the dough

The book is kind of cool, but I think it expects you to check other sources, because, although it explained how to mix it with our hands, it didn’t explain how to cut it up.

kneading the dough

Kneading the dough was sort of fun, and the dough seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, until I got to the part where I had to roll it out by hand, as I didn’t have a pasta press, or whatever it is called.

Cut up pasta

I fought I found a good source on the “How Stuff Words” website that showed people rolling out the pasta and then cutting it up, but they also showed people getting it really thin and hanging it up to dry.  I have never had luck with making pastry of any kind thin. I simply can’t do it. The dough always sticks to either the board or to the rolling pin, or to my hands, or  to something.  It just doesn’t work, and didn’t work this time either.

Testing the taste

One of the thing that the website said and the book both said was to drop the dough in boiling water, and then let it cook until it was al dente. I let it drain int he sink, and wondered if it would work. Cartoonist took the first bite, and said it tasted like pasta should, so I figured that I had sort of succeeded.

Now to just figure out how to make it thinner.

Not quite a kitchen failure, but not quite a success either.

I paused on that thought, and she had the same thought at the same time. “We need to make that from scratch too.” she said.

So, where to start. I found a good gluten-free recipe for the crust, and then we started talking about what you put on a pizza.

Tomato sauce came up, along with cheese. The cheese, I am not ready to make yet. I am only just getting the hang of making yogurt, of which I need to make more of, by the way, but the tomato sauce, I knew I could make. The first thing I needed to do was to find a recipe for stewing tomatoes, since that is one of the main ingredients in the sauce. I have fond memories of made from scratch tomato sausce, that would take several hours to make. It was so good, and my mother very rarely had the time. It was a recipe from my paternal grandmother, and I don’t think she ever wrote it down, and it was such a pain for my mother to do, that we only had it a few times, but oh, was it good.

I went to my Italian recipe book, but all it said was to open a can of stewed tomatoes, as did most of the recipes in most of the books I had. Next, I hit the internet, and after much searching found a crock-pot version of the sauce. It was in about.com, and here it is, which what we changed:

• 6 to 8 ripe tomatoes (we did 7)
• 2 tablespoons margarine (we used butter)
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced (well, I sliced it, not sure how thin it was)
• 3/4 cup chopped celery (didn’t have, so left out)
• 1/2 cup chopped green pepper (had a red one, so chopped that up)
• 3 tablespoons of sugar, more or less (so I did about 3 tablespoons of sugar, raw sugar)
• 1 small bay leaf (bay leaves were old, so added two)
• 1 teaspoon of salt (sprinkled a pinch)
• 1/8 teaspoon of pepper (ground a few turns)

Tomatoes in Crock pot

The recipe said to core the tomatoes, place in boiling water, for 20 seconds then in ice water to get the peel off. We decided we didn’t mind the peel, so skipped that step.  After that, it said to put everything in the crock pot and cook for 8 hours, and that is what it is doing right now. It smells so good, no exactly the way I remember it smelling, but good, none the less. Hopefully this part will not fail, and we can move on from there to the next step, the pizza dough, which we shall make tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to be glutton free, because I notice that when I am, I have an easier time breathing.  However, trying to make glutton free bread is a bit like trying to make water dry. The bread rises because of the glutton, and without it, it tends to be a heavy dense brick, as I discovered the first time I tried to make it. It was very dense, and very heavy, and my daughter and her friends thought it was so funny they tossed it about like a  football.

The next time, I used different flour, rye flour, because I thought, what the heck. I liked the taste of it, and I added Xyanth Gum, and rice flour, and wonder of wonders it rose. It was only later, when I was bragging that I had made a glutton free bread that wasn’t a brick, that my accountant pointed out that rye had glutton in it the same way wheat did.

Dang.

The good news is that I am using the Broccoli Forest as my guide, and it gives a very good description of what you can and cannot do when putting bread together.

So, I will try again, probably with rice flour next.

Or perhaps I’ll grind up all the left over garbanzo beans that I have, and make a flour of that.

My daughter, cartoonist, decided to draw herself with the bread. Here is her rendition.

Cartoonist hands the blump of bread off