Something for your tuesday night.

So, I don't know how closely you follow the happenings at Target but apparently their debut of Missoni clothing and housewares was a total bench clearer. The demand was so high that it crashed the Target website within moments of the product being available and shelves in the stores have literally been wiped completely clean. ON THE FIRST DAY. Woah. I love me some Missoni, but let's get a grip.

But, I digress, let's bring it back to something a little more entertaining. (Yes, I can hear your stifled laughs from here)

The succulents in my terrarium are blossoming.



Here I was freaking out about having to keep them alive and the little babies just start shooting out flowers!



Two of them are sending out buds and as you can see one of them has already blossomed with another bud just waiting to pop.



And the other one has some funny little bitty buds on it.



I'm pretty excited to say the least!



On a sad note, the very last bloom fell off of the orchid plant our dear friend Jake gifted us as a house warming present when we moved into our new apartment. Jake has since moved back to Minnesota where I know he is thoroughly enjoying himself and I hope he knows he is missed. I will be doing my very best to get it to bloom again in his honor.



And then you say, "why would you show us a crooked picture of the stairs to your apartment?"

And then I say, "the picture is not crooked, the stairs are really that jacked up!"



Here's a close up of the metal stabilizer bar they have installed so that the stairway to the apartment above us doesn't collapse down on top of us.
Please note the oh so visible safety tape applied to the cross bar so we down twack ourselves into a coma.

Wanna see something else even a little more disturbing?



In this photo you can see where the stairs USED to meet up with the adjacent wall.

You can also see where the support bar is NOW resting on the stairs.



And in this photo you can see the line where the support bar USED to be resting on the stairs.

We have been assured that an engineer has come to survey the situation and they will hopefully start construction on both sets of stairs sometimes soon.

The cause of all this craziness?

Termites.

2 different kinds to be exact.

You know what that means?

The house has to get tented.



We live an extremely charmed life.

Norma's Ginger Cookies

I recently received a stack of recipes from my sister that once belonged to my maternal grandmother.

Norma Sophia Johnson Prosnick

Born September 1st, 1921. She would have been 90 last week.

My sister and I spent a good deal of time at my grandmother's house on Coffey Lane growing up.

Most of the memories I have of her surround food. 

Reheated homemade spaghetti when we arrived after the 2 1/2 hour drive from our house to hers.

Glasses of eggnog  and slices of patica at Christmas.

Bowls of rice pudding.

Liverwurst sandwiches.

And the ever plentiful pile of oatmeal raisin and ginger cookies.

I was apparently lucky I was as active a child as I was.

I've tried several different recipes for ginger cookies; trying to recreate that certain taste and texture from my childhood but none have really been exactly what I was looking for. All certainly delicious and all by definition "ginger cookies" but none replicated that snap shot of sitting on the lawn in the middle of summer with my sister. 

Until that little fat envelope showed up in my mail box. 

Not all of the recipes are typed out. Most of them are in her hand writing which make them that much more precious. Although I'm sure my grandmother would claim that she hated her hand writing and would be embarrassed that I would post something like that publicly.

This one has a little note at the bottom. V.G. Stay Soft. All of the recipes have a little something like that. Good. V.G.-very good. Mike likes- Mike is my dad. Or indications of quantities of ingredients that she adjusted or the origin of the recipe. All make the recipes absolute gold to me.

These cookies are super simple and the fussiest part is having to roll them into balls and coat them in sugar. But I find this an extremely relaxing and fulfilling task but that's just me.

The recipe specifically calls for Brer Rabbit molasses. Although I have this in my pantry I also have another brand that I favor over Brer Rabbit, but heaven forbid I should go against my grandmother's instruction.

Plus, I do adore the graphics on the bottle.

Do you know what they call molasses in the UK? Treacle. Except our molasses isn't the same thing as their Treacle.

The recipe calls for melting the shortening, letting it cool and then adding the sugar, molasses and egg.

Because I'm horribly impatient (BTW this is not a good thing to be when baking and cooking) I didn't wait very long to let it cool and just dumped the sugar and molasses in. I did know better than to just dump the egg into the hot mixture. How do I know this? Because I have learned the hard way previously. Scrambled eggs are good for brunch. They are not good in baked goods.

So, I stood over the pot watching while the sugar and molasses congealed in a pool of melted margarine. Completely separated. If you read my previous post you will understand why I started freaking out. Once again, second guessing my abilities in the kitchen.

I pulled it together. Tempered the eggs with a bit of the crazy oily sugary congealed mess and slowly added the eggs to the rest of the mixture.

This is what came about:

Yes, well, that's just perfectly fine, right? Disaster averted, Continue on.

Add the sifted dry ingredients to the pot. I really enjoy this method.

You could keep the dough in your original pot and put the whole thing in the fridge but because my dutch oven is so indispensable to me, I transfered it to the bowl that I had sifted the dry ingredients into, covered it and let it rest in the fridge.

If you opt to refrigerate it longer than an hour or two, which is perfectly acceptable and is what I did, I would suggest letting it sit at room temperature for about 20 mins. It will make the scooping and rolling much easier.

Like I said before, I find the portioning out and rolling of the dough my very favorite part. Scoop, roll, sugar, arrange on cookie sheet. I love things perfectly arranged. So satisfying.

In a world where I very rarely feel like I do anything correctly or perfectly, sometimes my kitchen is the only place that I can really nail it.

The recipe called for baking 8-10 mins but I found that after 10 mins they still didn't look done to me. So, I baked them for more like 15-18 until they formed craggy cracks.

Although this made for a lovely aesthetic it also defeated the purpose of my grandmother's note of "stay soft". If you want soft and chewy cookies do as Norma says and bake them for only 8-10mins. Mine turned out crispy and crunchy, which honestly were just as delightful.

Ask me how many I ate after they cooled.

The answer is 5. I ate 5 of them. I was in my grandmother's back yard. With my bare-feet in the grass. Chasing my sister. It was awesome.

It's a hot one out there folks.

It's currently 96 degrees at our house.



K went golfing. I hope that he doesn't die and I hope that he's worn sunscreen.

I'm sure he'll stay well hydrated.



(Gosh, he's handsome. He still makes my knees a little wobbly.)

As for me, I will be camping out in our apartment with the AC going while watching Jamie At Home re-runs and shopping for Aaron Rodger's jerseys. MMmmm. Aaron Rodgers. Have you seen his new mustache? Uh yeah. I'm pretty okay with that. He still can't make my knees wobbly like K does though.



I shouldn't complain about the weather because my peep's on the east coast are getting hammered by hurricane Irene.
I was worrying about my bestie in Key West and extended an invitation for her to crash on my couch if evacuation was imminent but apparently I needed to be sending my couch surfing application a little more north. Who knew.

I'll be thinking and praying for you all on the east coast. I hope that everyone comes out unscathed with your livers fully pickled because, really, what else do you do when waiting for a hurricane?



So, it will be an extremely stressful day of drinking coffee and hanging out with The Woo. That's Emma's new nickname. (It has evolved from Emma Lou to Emma Woo to The Woo) She's trying it out. Seeing how she feels about it.



Here's The Woo watching the hummingbirds at our hummingbird feeder.



They're super active in the morning.
She gets a real big kick out of them. She wouldn't even be able to catch one and I don't think she would know what to do with them if she did.



We also have some squirrels that she would like to get a run at as well.



They love to run in front of the window in the kitchen.



But, let's be honest. She spends most of her day snoozing on an assortment of places, mostly consisting of bed, couch, chair or rugs. K is convinced she sleeps on his desk too. But I have assured him that this does not happen. She knows better than that. Sometimes.

Super Mega Huge Failure

Lately I've been getting a little cocky about my kitchen abilities.

People have told me that I'm not too shabby with the mixing and the cooking and I let it go completely to my head and I thought I needed to challenge myself a bit and while watching Amelie for the hundredth time, it came to me. Amelie's Famous Plum Cake. I need to make that. And it will turn out lovely and my post will be so charming and sweet, just like the movie.



I did some research. Turns out that people have already done this. Obviously. Who wouldn't want to make something out of that movie. By the way, if you haven't seen Amelie, then get that baby on your Netflix queue or run to your nearest Blockbuster. Watch it. We can talk about how it changed your life afterwards.



Heather at Wisk, Flip, Stir did most of the heavy lifting on this one and figured out that it's a Kouign Amann or Butter Cake. She also pointed me in the direction of David Lebovitz because, if you're going to make a buttery french confection, he really is the man with the plan.

So, I gathered my ingredients. Farmers market, Trader Joe's, Gelson's.



I made sure my yeast was fresh. Doesn't it look like it would be fresh with you?



David suggests you use the best quality butter you can find. And I said, "But of course!" (insert cheesy french accent here)



I used the Fleur De Sel I actually bought in Paris when I was just a little baby foodie.



And things actually were going pretty well.



Things were rising when they should be rising.



And resting when they should be resting.



While my little plummy butter cake was resting in the fridge, I thought I would make some pizza dough. I like to make it ahead of time and then divvy it up and put it in the freezer for future use. It's ridiculously easy to make pizza dough, or so I thought.

I just picked up Jamie Oliver's cook book at the library.

He's lovely and his recipe's are lovely too.

Except for his pizza dough recipe. It calls for all 7 cups of bread flour to be dumped on the counter with a deep well in the middle to pour the wet ingredients into.

No bowl.

No pan.

No containment unit what-so-ever.

I was okay with this because 7 cups is a lot of flour.

Then I got to how much liquid should be dumped in the well.

2 1/2 cups.

I tiny little read flag went off in my head.

My inner safety child said, "Elizabeth Ann, that's a lot of unharnessed liquid to be pouring out onto your counter".

My inner Julia Child said, "Be fearless in the kitchen. On Wisconsin!"

The real Julia didn't ever say, "On Wisconsin!", but the Julia in my head did and that's the kind of pep talk I needed.

Well, as the 2 1/2 cups of liquid started to slowly seep out from the bottom of the pile of flour and started to quickly spread out over my counter, I was cursing both Jamie and my internal Julia.

There was a lot of cursing. K came to the rescue.

We stood there frantically scooping armfuls of yeasty doughy goo back onto the counter.

Alas, there was some major collateral damage and any kind of redemption was sadly a lost cause and the whole thing got scraped off the counter and into the garbage.

And scrubbed from the floor.

And wiped from the cupboards.

And rinsed from our forearms.

And clothes needed to be thrown into the laundry.

Mega, super, epic fail.

K asked if the cake was going to be a bigger success. I assured him it would be.

At least I thought it was going to be. Until I pulled this out of the fridge...



This is after the second and final rise in the refrigerator.



What the hell is that syrupiness oozing from it? David didn't say anything about that!

I was now supposed to ROLL it out to the size and shape of the pan.

That was not happening. I kept it on the plate and used my fingers to kind of squish it into the right shape.



Remind you of something? Yeah, things were looking a bit dodgy.
And then the recipe called for me to lift the dough off the plate and transfer it to the pan.
That was also not happening.

 

So, I just put the pan over it on the plate and did a little flip-a-roo.

A little better. But still highly questionable.

I added the plum conserve that I previously made and slices of fresh plums.



Much better!



Kind of almost looks good, right?

Into a 450 degree oven it went. I had high hopes.

Let's flash back to all butter. There was a large amount of sugar too. Sugary syrup.

So this all started leaking out of the pan and I did put a pan under it but it just started burning and smoking. And smoking and burning.
I had the hood vent on and all the windows open and the ceiling fan on.

After 30 mins of highly skeptical looks from K and swinging the back deck door to help with the ventilation I pulled this out of the oven:



Oh, well, that's pretty good right?
And was it fantastically delicious?



Um, yes. Every single buttery, sugary, delightful bite.

What was the biggest lesson from this whole thing?



Nothing is really as big of a failure as you think it might be.

And as long as you feed boyfriends the successes they will help you clean up the failures.