Lady in Red

Some of you gentle readers may recall that I mentioned the demise of my food processor several months ago. I made a cherry pie to take to Maryland and, in the process of making the crust, I burned up my food processor. As in smoking, burned plastic dead. It was a cheap one that lasted longer than it should have.

So, for my birthday, Grandmother and Uncle of Ken asked what I wanted and I told them that I wanted to buy a new food processor. This time, I said, I want a good one and they generously gifted me with mucho dinero to use toward the purchase of my dream machine.

After some serious research involving various relatives, friends, and Consumer Reports, I decided that I wanted to purchase the Cadillac of food processors: the Cuisinart Prep-11 Plus, model DLC-2011. I think I put more thought into the purchase of this appliance than I put into where to go to college.

Once I decided upon a model, I searched far and wide for the best deal and found a red one on closeout clearance from Macy's with 99 cent shipping. The total price was about half of the usual retail price for this model.

The Chosen One arrived today:

I love this because it has all of the necessary pieces to provide maximum usefulness for the food processor, but not a bunch of other crap that I don't need and will have to store. There is the base, the prep bowl, a single top with a wide mouth feed tube (inside of the wide mouth feed tube pusher, there is a smaller feed tube that you can use if necessary, but it all snaps together), the steel blade, the dough blade, the slicing disc, and the grating disc. Everything a girl could want. It even comes with an instructional DVD. I don't believe that I have ever had a kitchen appliance come with an instructional DVD before.

She has taken up residence on the counter next to her sister, the Kitchen Aid mixer, which was a gift for my birthday a few years ago. I am going to be churning out the pies, people. Watch out!

In other cooking news, I tried this recipe for pork roast tonight:

This was very good, although I added some brown sugar to mine and I think that the next time I make this, I will leave the soy sauce out all together. I didn't taste it much in the finished dish, but during the roasting process, it made my house smell like Lo Mein.

Dinner tonight was pork roast (I ended up drizzling some of the cooking liquid over the meat after I took the picture), applesauce, and a baked potato with butter, sour cream, and chives from my garden. As delicious as the pork was, the potato was even better. I'm probably the only person besides Mother of Ken who would wax poetic about a baked potato on her blog, but you know when you get a really good, slightly sweet, perfectly tender baked potato? I get one of these about once or twice a year and I love them. All baked potatoes are good, but some potatoes just come out of the ground tasting better than others. This was so good--I would have eaten four of these potatoes if I had baked more. Okay, I'll stop now ;-)

I think that The Chosen One will have her maiden voyage later this week, making a pie for me to take to Leah's this weekend as an early birthday present. So, Leah, what kind do you want? Peach? Double chocolate (one of my specialties)? Grape? My Grambi made a grape pie once and has never lived it down.

Just Like Heaven

After the tree guys were gone, I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning and reorganizing my baking cabinets in preparation for a special project.

I have this corner cabinet in my kitchen where I store my flour, sugar, grains, pasta, etc. It is kind of a pain because of the weird angles inside the cabinets, but I try to make it work. Earlier this week, I used my birthday gift card from M to buy new canisters for my baking goods (thanks, M!). I already have these cool ones that Mother and Father of Ken gave me for Christmas a few years ago, but the openings are too small for a 1 cup measure to fit inside. So, I decided to repurpose those canisters for other things (coffee, vanilla sugar, cake flour, and whole wheat pastry flour) and move everything else into the new canisters that have larger openings. After I washed all of the canisters and started moving things around earlier this week, I ended up shoving them all back in the cabinet to get them off of the counter. It looked like this, which drives me crazy:

Everything came out of the cabinet, I scrubbed the shelves, got rid of some things, and reorganized (I love to reorganize!):

I have to work more on the top shelf, but never fear, gentle readers--I have a plan.

The next cabinet that needed help was the spice and smaller baking goods cabinet:

Again, everything came out, everything was scrubbed, some things were thrown away, and I ended up with this:


I have a long list of spices that I need to replace (some of those things came with me from Dallas four years ago), so I'll save some money and then hit Penzey's--I can't wait!

Now on to my special project. We did an instructed Eucharist at church today and part of the commentary was about how in the early church, people would bring small loaves of bread with them to use for communion. So, I thought that it would be nice for us to have some homemade communion bread for today's service. I used a recipe from the Virginia Theological Seminary. This recipe has six ingredients, beginning with whole wheat flour, baking powder, and salt:




All of the dry ingredients went into the bowl of my mixer:

Here are the wet ingredients: honey, water, and oil. I really like this view of everything in the measuring cup.

I stirred the wet ingredients together and then poured them into the dry ingredients, mixing them with the dough hook:

I let the dough hook knead the bread for about five minutes and then I cut the ball of dough into twelve equal pieces:

Then I had to roll each piece out into a circle six inches in diameter (I used a small plate to cut the circle):

Once the larger circle was finished, I had to use a juice glass to make a smaller circular indentation in the center of the bread and then I used a sharp knife to score the edges:

I baked all of them on Silpat to make sure they wouldn't stick and baked them until the edges were just slightly browned:

I ended up with eleven loaves because one got a little too brown. This was more than enough for today, so we froze the rest to use another time.

In other baking news, I made peach muffins today to use up the extremely ripe peaches that I bought on Friday. This is an Emeril recipe and, while I generally avoid his recipes because of his off-putting personality, this one looked really good, so I decided to give it a try. I only made half of the recipe and ended up with a dozen nice-sized muffins. If I make this again, I will use more peaches (I used one cup, but I think that 1 and 1/2 cups would be better), but the muffins were tender and flavorful and the pecan topping was light and crunchy.

So, yay for successful and delicious baking--try these peach muffins if you get a chance. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Don't Bring Me Down

Today it was my turn to rouse the neighborhood with loud noises on a Saturday morning. I have a Box Elder tree in my front yard (or "Box Alder" as my tree service people spell it) that leans at an unfortunate angle toward the house.

Before I moved in, we got a quote to take the tree out completely and the guy came back with a bid of about $2000. Needless to say, I decided to live with it for a while. Four years later, the tree has grown by leaps and bounds and the branches were hanging over my roof, allowing birds to get into the wood stove despite the cap on the chimney, and over the power lines, so we decided that it was time to do some trimming. I still want to keep the tree for the shade and privacy that it provides, but I wanted to get rid of the half that leaned toward the house and clean the rest of it up a little.

I hired a tree service to do this for me (the price was way less than the original quote to take the whole thing out) and they were supposed to do this in June, but it stormed on the day that they wanted to do it and then I was out of town. So, today was the day. Although there were some clouds in the sky and a few drops of rain, they were able to go through with the removal and trimming.

Here is the tree from the north early this morning:

From the south:

See what I'm saying about the leaning? The other half of the tree also leans, but not toward the house.

At about 9:15 this morning, two trucks arrived and four guys began milling around my yard, planning their attack on the tree.

When I was younger, my parents hired a man named Terry to cut down and trim some trees. Terry and his crew were about the only tree service in town, so you didn't have much choice if you needed to get some work done on your trees. They would wander around the yard for a while, looking at the trees from all different angles, all of them with their arms folded across their chests. None of them spoke, they just shifted from leg to leg, staring at the trees. Eventually, they would nod in unspoken agreement about a plan of action and amble over to the trucks to get out their equipment. Generally, Terry would send some poor other guy up into the tree and the rest of them would stand around staring at him as he worked. Occasionally, they helped pull down or direct the fall of a branch, but mostly they just watched the other guy, arms folded, shifting from leg to leg. This must be something they teach in tree removal school, because the guys who came to my house today did almost the exact same thing. It looks a little something like this:

(Note: This is not my tree or my crew, obviously.)

I will say that the poor soul up in the tree was the owner of the tree service, so he gets more points than Terry for actually contributing to the operation in a meaningful way. The other guys did their fair share of standing around, but they pitched in to help when necessary.

Here's part of the tree outside of my kitchen window just after it fell:



Toward the center of this photo, you will see the chipper shooting pieces of my tree into one of the trucks:

Here they are, actually working:

You can see the pile of tree remnants in the back of the truck with the black cover on the back:

Once they cut everything down, the forklift made its entrance:

They had to use it to remove the large pieces of trunk from the side of the tree that they removed.

Loading the trunk onto the truck:

I think this part rolled off of the truck, so they had to try again:

About two and a half hours later, everything was cleaned up and my poor tree looks like it got a bad haircut. This tree grows like a weed, so it will fill out in no time.

What should I do with the stump? Draw a smiley face on it? Perhaps put some plants on there? I'll have to think of something...

This picture makes it look like the tree is still tangled in the power line, but it isn't:

The guys wanted to have a look at the waterfall, so I was cleaning up small branches and debris in the yard while I waited for them to finish and found these berries growing near one of the trees:

I think they might be raspberries because the stems stay on the plant when you pull the fruit off.

Look at the other surprise that we found in the yard at the edge of the creek, far from the house (thank God):

The guys were gone by 12:15, but they snagged some other business in the neighborhood while they were here. I think they made two stops at other houses to look at potential projects.

I'm glad that we got this done so that the tree has time to recover before we put the house on the market next year. It definitely looks better without all of the dead branches and the one trunk threatening to fall on the house.

Life In One Day

I've got some great stuff coming up for you gentle readers, but before I get out the scanner, I thought I'd share some photos of my time in Kansas and a few from my return to New York.

First, the dead frog in Mother and Father of Ken's pool:

I call this series "Hose Beast:"

Boomer really likes to drink water from the hose. McKenna always says that hose water is the best.

He also likes to plop his 70+ pound self in the middle of the kitchen floor:

Piper, smiling for the camera:

Boo, mad that she got some attention:

Because I did a lot of shopping and also have extremely generous relatives who give great birthday gifts, Mother of Ken had to mail four boxes of stuff to me. They arrived today:

My new apple peeler poked out of the box in transit. I hope that no one was harmed:

After spending most of the morning unpacking the boxes and putting everything away, I made a blueberry crisp from a recipe that I got at Penzey's in Kansas City. Penzey's is a dream come true for people who love food. I had never been to the store before, but I love their products. I bought some double strength vanilla and some Vietnamese Cassia cinnamon, which I used in this recipe.

I began by putting one cup of blueberries in a ramekin:

The ingredients for the topping are oats, flour, brown sugar, lemon juice, salt, cinnamon, and butter:

I mixed all of the topping ingredients together with a fork:

Then topped the blueberries with the mixture:

Here it is just out of the oven:

This was really good, but next time, I think I'll add some flour to the blueberries so that the filling isn't so soupy.

Here's the recipe, courtesy of Penzey's:

(Note: I added oats to mine and also only made a single serving--the whole recipe makes six servings.)

4 c. blueberries

2 Tbsp. lemon juice

1/2 c. flour

1/2 c. brown sugar, firmly packed

1/4 c. butter

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Rinse the blueberries and then place in a 9 inch square pan or six individual ramekins. In a roomy bowl, combine the lemon juice, flour, brown sugar, butter, salt, and cinnamon. Stir the ingredients together with a fork and sprinkle topping over the blueberries and bake for 25-30 minutes.