Baked Goods

I am not the world's greatest baker. Oh, that doesn't stop me from trying, though: flat cookies, loaves of soggy-bottomed banana bread, I've done it. Can you tell I never took home-ec? I don't know why I have such a hard time with baking, but it's probably for the best that I can't turn out gourmet treats, for I have an enormous sweet tooth and zero self-control (overall dangerous qualities for a type 1 diabetic).

You may find it fitting that I nicknamed my daughters after baked goods, what with my love for sweets and my inability to properly create them. Both girls were born premature, after all. Somehow, my body's internal timer is set to 33 weeks' gestation. Ding! Baby's done! Time to take her out! Oh wait, this one's not quite ready yet... let's put her under the warming lights and see if she'll cook a bit more. Maybe she'll set up better after some time on the cooling rack. Is that a cute euphemism for the NICU? It sure makes me feel better about the time spent there. Oh, but if only it had been my own kitchen that held these two little treats! No driving back and forth to the hospital many miles away. No waiting to fully enjoy them. But then I wouldn't have had the help and experience of the more seasoned chefs, or doctors and nurses. Yes, the professional kitchen is where the Cupcake and the Cookie needed to be at the time. To be baked to perfection. Out of my hands.

While I am done trying to bake children in *this* oven, maybe one day I will come up with a perfect tray of moist and fluffy chocolate chip cookies. My family can only hope for as much.

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

I tried my hand at canning this year. I had never done it myself, though I had watched my Mom make strawberry jam, spiced peach jam (my favorite!), and canned peach slices in the past. Our tomato plants had exploded this year (as they usually do, actually) with more tomatoes than we could use up at once, so I decided to try making homemade spaghetti sauce. I followed the instructions, including the seasoning recipe, found here, omitting the celery and salt.

The first time I tried making tomato sauce earlier in the season, we picked every tomato we could find, including the yellow variety, to try to get the 20 lbs required. I started right when R went to bed at 8 pm, and did not finish until 2 in the morning. I am not impressed with that batch. The texture was watery and stringy because the tomatoes would not boil down, and the 1/4 cup of lemon juice in addition to all of those yellow tomatoes made it taste incredibly tart. I canned it anyway and called it "Zesty Marinara."

I decided to try again. This time, I collected and froze the tomatoes as they ripened in batches. I had heard that freezing and thawing tomatoes was an easy way to remove the skin, and I thought it might cut down on the preparation time. Not at all. I started the process this morning at 9 am, and I'm writing this post as the jars are in the canning bath now at 2 pm. My back hurts from leaning over the sink trying to remove seeds for three hours, and my feet hurt from standing in front of the stove seasoning the sauce for the rest of the time. When I looked at the large pile of unusable skin, seeds, liquid, and other tomato parts, and compared it to the pile of usable tomato flesh that was HALF its size, I told myself, "Never again." This is far too much work. I would rather let tomatoes rot on the vine than try to do this again.

The plus side to today's aches and pains is that this batch can be properly labeled "Spaghetti Sauce." I didn't use a single yellow tomato, I only added two splashes of lemon juice instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe called for, and I blended the sauce to make it a better texture. Freezing and thawing the tomatoes removed far too much liquid, though, and I had to add 3 cups of water back into the sauce. I'm only getting 5 pint jars out of this batch, which is incredibly frustrating since only 4 jars fit in the canning bath at a time. I'll be waiting an extra 35 minutes just for one jar to process, grrr. But at least it tastes good.



My kitchen is a disaster, sigh. Next time I try canning, I think I'll stick with jams.

Cooking Smarter: Life, Unmicrowaved

We unplugged our microwave.


And plugged in this baby.


We haven't looked back.

It all started with Senpai being miffed at how long it takes to preheat our conventional oven (20 mins), when we typically only cook little things that are in the oven for less than 10 mins (garlic bread, taco shells, na'an). This happens multiple times on a weekly basis. He wondered why we should expend the energy (natural gas) to heat the entire oven, when we're only using a fraction of the space. Enter the idea of a toaster oven. Now, when it comes to this family, we believe in buying quality goods that will do exactly what we need, instead of buying a cheaper product that will only work marginally as well. All of a sudden that toaster oven idea became a countertop convection oven. A very expensive countertop convection oven known as the Breville Smart Oven. This thing is AWESOME.

We ended up buying it with the intent to not only bake more efficiently, but also to replace our microwave. You may or may not have heard about the science project in which a girl heated water in the microwave, let it cool down, and then watered a plant with it. That plant died. Well, that experiment has been replicated with better controls, and the theory that microwaved water kills plants was debunked. But still, it plants (pun intended) that seed of doubt in one's mind. What if this is true? What if microwaved food isn't just not good for you, but worse, hazardous to your health? So we bought the Breville Smart Oven and decided to jump right into unmicrowaved living by banishing the microwave oven to the cellar. It's still there if we ever need it again (technically, TWO microwave ovens are in the basement: the countertop unit and the above-the-stove-mounted one that I insisted be removed when we remodeled the kitchen. I just couldn't stand the thought of that thing going right by head while I was cooking... and pregnant), but the Breville has not let us down.

The main difference I have found is that I have to figure out everything that will go on the table before I start cooking; no more deciding on a vegetable dish halfway through food prep. I find myself using potholders more often, heating water in the kettle, and eating out of pots so as to cut down on dishes. I have had to beef up my stock of oven safe dishware. If I haven't thought out a meal in its entirety before I start cooking, I find myself in situations like this: Oh! I didn't think of cooking the Morningstar Farms Chik Patty until after I had already started the noodles and veggies on the stove! It needs 18 minutes in the Breville plus the 3 minute preheat time! Hem. Haw. It's going to take FOREVER! But you know what? Even though the stovetop foods finished cooking first, they still needed time to cool down. By the time they were cool enough to eat, guess what? The oven beeped; the Chik Patty was done. Though 18+3 minutes had seemed like forever when I was punching the settings into the Breville, by the time the meal was ready to eat, it really hadn't felt like a long time had passed. So my lunch took 20 minutes to prepare instead of 10, but, really, what's an extra 10 minutes to prepare a meal where there's no worry of free radicals, radiation, or nutritionally "dead" food?

It is SO worth it.