Concentrate, Woman, CONCENTRATE!

Why oh why am I always juggling a dozen things AND trying to cook at the same time?! It happens again and again!! Gah!!

I’m trying to pull out the ingredients for the Bavarian-Filled Eclairs while talking on the phone, starting a load of laundry, and assisting my son with his English homework.

WHY did I do that?

As I’m cooking the mix in the first step (butter and flour, trying to get the dough to firm up), it’s not working. It looks like Cream of Wheat when it should be looking like beautiful bread dough. I went over and over and OVER the ingredients list, and had my daughter go over it, too. It looked correct. After 45 minutes of non-stop stirring, hoping it would thicken, my blistered hand could take no more. I added more flour to the pot, and the mix started to change into something that looked more accurate.

I doubled the amount of butter needed. I measured 1 stick of butter to be 1/4 cup when it is 1/2 cup.

I tried baking a few anyway, just to see if they would turn out. My vote would be, uh, NO.

GRRRRRROOOOOAAANNNN!! This recipe was for my church group, too, which was meeting tonight! :’(

Well, I added more flour, what I could, and a lot of eggs. This is what they are. Not exactly the glorious products from Amish fireplaces… but over all, not too shabby.

They look OK. A little too brown for me, but still nice. They have a cake-ish consistency, not like the puff-pastry texture it is supposed to have. I will fill it with the most luscious Bavarian Cream filling and see how they turn out. I think they will be OK, just… different.

Well, lesson learned. NEVER multi-task when preparing an important recipe! NEVER!!!

Search for a Recipe By Ingredient

Here is an absolute gem of a website I have found: Supercook. It’s so cute! All you do is type in your ingredient (I typed in “pork chops”), and the search engine will search a slew of recipes for your ingredient. I love this thing! I always seem to have a bunch of odds and ends in my freezer and pantry (everything from canned pineapple to wacky stuff like candles, sewing floss, and jars of eye cream :-p!)… some I am clueless about using, especially since I dislike pineapple and the eye creams are not very tasty, haha! … *ahem* Well, ANYWAY, this is a cute website and the recipes so far look very easy and very good.

There’s a video Supercook made that explains the site:

I will be placing the link to Supercook in my sidebar, so look there if you need it for future reference.

P.S. this is not a paid promotion, I just felt like mentioning the site.

Four Foods For Friday

Well, I’m going to give this meme a go. I am woefully bad with weekly memes, because my schedule is always so crammed and I lose track of the days! But I’ve admired this meme because it’s so brief and the questions are thoughtful. So I’m going to give it a whirl! I promise that I will try to do this faithfully every week!

Here are this week’s questions:

1. Name one bad habit you have in the kitchen.
…Just one?

Well… I don’t dry my dishes and put them away. (I have no dishwasher, cry with me, my friend!). The kids and I wash dishes BY HAND once or twice a day (for 9 people, five days a week). There are usually two mountains of washed dishes on my countertops, where they sit and air dry (so I can go catch my breath!). My kitchen is woefully inadequate– it needs replacing from the plaster walls to the tile flooring to the countertops. Someday I’ll get it renovated. And I’ll definitely get a dishwasher when I do!

2. Do you have a tv in the kitchen?
No. I don’t have TV. I do own two sets, but they are rigged up to VCR/DVD players. We don’t get television reception.

3. What’s one food you can’t stand cold?
Coffee. I’m a horribly fussy coffee drinker. It must be mild, fresh, and HOT. I also hate cold (and lukewarm) tea. I sip it poured right out of the boiling tea kettle.

4. What’s your favorite juice?
I’m not much of a juice drinker. I drink cranberry juice when I have to (for the bladder), but the only juice I will ever reach for if it’s in the fridge is orange juice. And I don’t drink it very often.

So this was fun! I look forward to next week.

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