Today was a rainy day and we had no more doggy food, so we opted out of the usual morning walk and went for a drive to the petstore with Navi in tow. We stopped at Target first, got some coffee, and then wandered over to PetSmart to pick up dog food. After we got the food, we walked back to the car and decided to take Navi to the beach since there was a lull in the rain. When we walked to the beach, Navi took off for the water as usual. I went off in search of something for Tim to throw for Navi and when I looked back to see where Tim was, I noticed someone waving at me. They had a hat on with their raincoat hood up and a big pair of sunglasses so I could not figure out who it was. I looked at the man behind her and noticed that he had Gabe's beard. It was Britt and Gabe with Nova! We talked with them for a while and laughed at silly doggy antics. After a while the rain picked up again and everyone decided to go home. Timmy started playing the piano. I spent a little time cleaning the kitchen and sweeping the floors. I can't believe how much sand and dirt we track in; I guess it makes sense because we are always out and about, but it just makes me wonder how much stuff gets stuck in carpets forever. I sweep up more daily than I ever seemed to get out with a vacuum at the old apartment. After a while, cleaning got boring and Timmy was still playing the piano. I noticed that I still had several oranges left over; I'd brought some home from work because the secretary ordered too many and they were going to go bad. I'd used the zest in the orange muffins I made, but I hadn't done anything with the orange itself. I don't really like to eat oranges, and I don't think Tim likes to because he never does. So I decided to make another loaf of orange cranberry bread. I squeezed all the oranges and used that juice, mixed it up, and popped it in the oven for an hour. Timmy was still playing the piano.
Pam and I had plans to make fresh pasta and meatballs for dinner, so I got to getting all the ingredients out of the pantry. I had a little shock when I discovered that the bottle of pasta sauce that was living in the pantry a few days ago grew a pair of legs and ran away. Or maybe we ate it when I found that day-old Gorgonzola walnut ravioli at the store...but how hard can it be to make pasta sauce, anyway? I turned on my laptop, turned to trusty google, and searched spaghetti sauce recipes. Every single recipe seemed like all you did was saute up some onions and garlic, throw in some variety of canned tomato, whether it be tomato sauce, pasta, whole tomatos, or diced, and then add lots of Italian spices and simmer. Do I need a recipe for that? Can't I just do the good old a dash of this, a dash of that, and a taste here and there to see how its going? I then opened up my favorite blog, smitten kitchen, and discovered that the latest blog post was, surprise, surprise, spaghetti sauce! With three ingredients. No spices. Canned tomatos, two onions (that you discard after simmering!), and butter. Well, after watching Julie & Julia, and seeing how much butter they put into everything, that was sounding pretty good. So I delved into my pantry and brought out two 28 ounce cans of whole tomatoes and two onions.
Enter Pam, and we start our cooking frenzy! First, we make the pasta dough so that it can rest for an hour. Since the dough had to stand for so long, we mixed together the meatball ingredients and rolled them all out. We had to wait before starting the rest of dinner, and I was coming very close to ruining the movie Julie & Julia for Pam, so I put it on so she could watch it before I ruined it! I watched it last night after snowboarding. While I liked the movie as a whole, I found Julie to be annoying. Pitching fits in the kitchen every time something little went wrong, treating her husband like scum when he treated her like royalty, and acting so completely ungrateful for what they had. I understand that it's a movie and they had to highlight some personality traits to add drama and such, but it doesn't change the fact that her character was incredibly annoying. Anyway, I learned a few things from the movie! For example, why doesn't my chicken ever brown? Cuz I never dried it. If you want your chicken to brown, you're supposed to dry it with a paper towel before you cook it. I had no idea! Another funny thing about the movie is the difference between the parts where there is actual dialog, and the sections of the movie where Julie is blogging. I don't mind the acting in the movie at all, except for when Julie is blogging. She moves her mouth all funny, has weird facial expressions, and it just doesn't correspond with blogging. I mean, as I'm typing this right now, my face is completely blank. Yet in a movie, you can't have twenty portions where you are typing with a blank face. So you have to gam it all up and do weird things with your mouth and be really into the blogging and...it just didn't translate very well. Especially since I'm a big facial expression reader.
Anyhow, don't get me wrong, it was a good movie. There was a funny part, although unrealistic, with lobsters. There was also another funny part dealing with onions. So I'd say you should watch it! Well, when Pam and I were sitting down watching Julie & Julia, I was also thumbing through a cupcake recipe book that she had brought with her. A chocolate batter and chocolate buttercream frosting caught my eye, and darn it...I wanted some chocolate. So we got up, started baking the meatballs, and whipped together a batch of cupcake batter and put it into a cupcake tin. The meatballs came out, the cupcakes went in...and then we started the tomato sauce. We threw butter, halved onions, and the cans of tomatoes into a big pot and let it simmer for 45 minutes. After that, you remove the onions. That's it! That's the pasta sauce! Then the cupcakes came out, and gosh, they looked a little silly. Maybe the eggs had been too small. They had the right texture and all, but they couldn't hold themselves together if their little lives depended on it. So we weren't having cupcakes. But we were having dinner, so we focused on that.
The sauce and the meatballs were almost done, so we got to rolling the pasta dough! The dough was a little soft, so we had a lot of problems getting it to flatten rather than just...smoosh all over the place and get stuck to everything. So we kneaded in more flour and that seemed to do the trick. We rolled it all out, then cut it up with another pasta attachment! We plopped it all into the water, and in probably 3 minutes, it was cooked! We tasted it...and it was so wonderfully tender! Its amazing! So that was a rousing success, I thought. By the time the pasta was done, the sauce and meatballs were ready, so dinner was served! At long last, Timmy stopped playing the piano to eat. Cooking marathon for Pam and I, and piano marathon for Tim. Dinner was yummy!
After dinner, we discovered that we really wanted some cupcake-y goodness...but our cupcakes were a mess. We decided to just scoop out all the "cupcake" into a big bowl, and we brainstormed what we could do with our new crumbled cupcakes. One of us made a comment that it would taste really good with vanilla bean ice cream and after I lamented that I had none, Tim piped in from the other room (while playing the piano, I might add), "you can make vanilla bean ice cream." Why, yes, we can. We made a simple vanilla bean ice cream (so that we didn't have to cool an egg custard) and at the last minute, we figured we'd throw in some of the cupcakes! Delicious, right? Well, since the cupcakes were still warm, no matter how hard our little ice cream maker churned...it couldn't freeze the mix into ice cream. So after running the ice cream maker for 30 minutes we just poured the mix into a pyrex bowl and put it in the freezer. It will taste good tomorrow! We were back to square one: brainstorming. We could just make the icing, and serve it on top of a bowl of cupcake crumbles. At this point I was getting tired of cleaning a never-ending mound of dirty dishes, so when I looked at the recipe for the frosting we had originally intended to make I was rather turned off by the amount of work it required. We'd have to re-make our "double-boiler" contraption, wash all those dishes all over again, use up tons of bowls....and then I remembered that Pam had told me she found an amazing chocolate icing that was really easy to make. So I looked that up, and we made that instead. You boil sugar and cream so it's all bubbling for a while. Then you dump in butter and chopped chocolate, stir it up, and add in vanilla. Then you cool it, and ta-da! But even in the fridge, it took forever to cool. It was getting late, I wanted my dessert...and after a while I just said, thats it! I'm going to serve cupcake soup! I got out three bowls, filled them with cupcake crumbles, and drizzled warm icing all over the top. I gave them each a bowl, and we were all very surprised how great it tasted. Yum.
So that was a lot of cooking. I think I'll stick to something simple tomorrow night. We'll see how long that idea lasts, especially if it's raining.
Pam and I had plans to make fresh pasta and meatballs for dinner, so I got to getting all the ingredients out of the pantry. I had a little shock when I discovered that the bottle of pasta sauce that was living in the pantry a few days ago grew a pair of legs and ran away. Or maybe we ate it when I found that day-old Gorgonzola walnut ravioli at the store...but how hard can it be to make pasta sauce, anyway? I turned on my laptop, turned to trusty google, and searched spaghetti sauce recipes. Every single recipe seemed like all you did was saute up some onions and garlic, throw in some variety of canned tomato, whether it be tomato sauce, pasta, whole tomatos, or diced, and then add lots of Italian spices and simmer. Do I need a recipe for that? Can't I just do the good old a dash of this, a dash of that, and a taste here and there to see how its going? I then opened up my favorite blog, smitten kitchen, and discovered that the latest blog post was, surprise, surprise, spaghetti sauce! With three ingredients. No spices. Canned tomatos, two onions (that you discard after simmering!), and butter. Well, after watching Julie & Julia, and seeing how much butter they put into everything, that was sounding pretty good. So I delved into my pantry and brought out two 28 ounce cans of whole tomatoes and two onions.
Enter Pam, and we start our cooking frenzy! First, we make the pasta dough so that it can rest for an hour. Since the dough had to stand for so long, we mixed together the meatball ingredients and rolled them all out. We had to wait before starting the rest of dinner, and I was coming very close to ruining the movie Julie & Julia for Pam, so I put it on so she could watch it before I ruined it! I watched it last night after snowboarding. While I liked the movie as a whole, I found Julie to be annoying. Pitching fits in the kitchen every time something little went wrong, treating her husband like scum when he treated her like royalty, and acting so completely ungrateful for what they had. I understand that it's a movie and they had to highlight some personality traits to add drama and such, but it doesn't change the fact that her character was incredibly annoying. Anyway, I learned a few things from the movie! For example, why doesn't my chicken ever brown? Cuz I never dried it. If you want your chicken to brown, you're supposed to dry it with a paper towel before you cook it. I had no idea! Another funny thing about the movie is the difference between the parts where there is actual dialog, and the sections of the movie where Julie is blogging. I don't mind the acting in the movie at all, except for when Julie is blogging. She moves her mouth all funny, has weird facial expressions, and it just doesn't correspond with blogging. I mean, as I'm typing this right now, my face is completely blank. Yet in a movie, you can't have twenty portions where you are typing with a blank face. So you have to gam it all up and do weird things with your mouth and be really into the blogging and...it just didn't translate very well. Especially since I'm a big facial expression reader.
Anyhow, don't get me wrong, it was a good movie. There was a funny part, although unrealistic, with lobsters. There was also another funny part dealing with onions. So I'd say you should watch it! Well, when Pam and I were sitting down watching Julie & Julia, I was also thumbing through a cupcake recipe book that she had brought with her. A chocolate batter and chocolate buttercream frosting caught my eye, and darn it...I wanted some chocolate. So we got up, started baking the meatballs, and whipped together a batch of cupcake batter and put it into a cupcake tin. The meatballs came out, the cupcakes went in...and then we started the tomato sauce. We threw butter, halved onions, and the cans of tomatoes into a big pot and let it simmer for 45 minutes. After that, you remove the onions. That's it! That's the pasta sauce! Then the cupcakes came out, and gosh, they looked a little silly. Maybe the eggs had been too small. They had the right texture and all, but they couldn't hold themselves together if their little lives depended on it. So we weren't having cupcakes. But we were having dinner, so we focused on that.
The sauce and the meatballs were almost done, so we got to rolling the pasta dough! The dough was a little soft, so we had a lot of problems getting it to flatten rather than just...smoosh all over the place and get stuck to everything. So we kneaded in more flour and that seemed to do the trick. We rolled it all out, then cut it up with another pasta attachment! We plopped it all into the water, and in probably 3 minutes, it was cooked! We tasted it...and it was so wonderfully tender! Its amazing! So that was a rousing success, I thought. By the time the pasta was done, the sauce and meatballs were ready, so dinner was served! At long last, Timmy stopped playing the piano to eat. Cooking marathon for Pam and I, and piano marathon for Tim. Dinner was yummy!
After dinner, we discovered that we really wanted some cupcake-y goodness...but our cupcakes were a mess. We decided to just scoop out all the "cupcake" into a big bowl, and we brainstormed what we could do with our new crumbled cupcakes. One of us made a comment that it would taste really good with vanilla bean ice cream and after I lamented that I had none, Tim piped in from the other room (while playing the piano, I might add), "you can make vanilla bean ice cream." Why, yes, we can. We made a simple vanilla bean ice cream (so that we didn't have to cool an egg custard) and at the last minute, we figured we'd throw in some of the cupcakes! Delicious, right? Well, since the cupcakes were still warm, no matter how hard our little ice cream maker churned...it couldn't freeze the mix into ice cream. So after running the ice cream maker for 30 minutes we just poured the mix into a pyrex bowl and put it in the freezer. It will taste good tomorrow! We were back to square one: brainstorming. We could just make the icing, and serve it on top of a bowl of cupcake crumbles. At this point I was getting tired of cleaning a never-ending mound of dirty dishes, so when I looked at the recipe for the frosting we had originally intended to make I was rather turned off by the amount of work it required. We'd have to re-make our "double-boiler" contraption, wash all those dishes all over again, use up tons of bowls....and then I remembered that Pam had told me she found an amazing chocolate icing that was really easy to make. So I looked that up, and we made that instead. You boil sugar and cream so it's all bubbling for a while. Then you dump in butter and chopped chocolate, stir it up, and add in vanilla. Then you cool it, and ta-da! But even in the fridge, it took forever to cool. It was getting late, I wanted my dessert...and after a while I just said, thats it! I'm going to serve cupcake soup! I got out three bowls, filled them with cupcake crumbles, and drizzled warm icing all over the top. I gave them each a bowl, and we were all very surprised how great it tasted. Yum.
So that was a lot of cooking. I think I'll stick to something simple tomorrow night. We'll see how long that idea lasts, especially if it's raining.
Glad the pasta attachments are working out! Grant and I had an Herbed Spinach Frittata with Feta for dinner tonight from the Williams-Sonoma Weeknight cookbook (one of my FAVORITES) - I got the idea to make it after your egg blog-posting last week!! It was DELICIOUS!!
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