Let's try this again.

So, another blog, The Cupcake Project, made me decide that I truly needed to try making this. It's not really fair, given that I keep deciding to cut down on sweets and start exercising, then I find something that I MUST make. This time, it was dulce de leche.

All you do is buy sweetened, condensed milk. Take the labels off. Put the unopened cans in your crock pot and make sure they're submerged in water. Set the crock pot to low. Go do other things. (For me, it was buying some strawberry plants at Home Depot, getting my sister's birthday present at Teavana, and some cleaning, not in that order. I have one of those Topsy Turvy upside down strawberry planters, that I'm itching to try. It's springtime in the Pacific Northwest, which means it's time for me to start killing some perfectly good herbs, (rosemary, lavender, and peppermint,) and try my hand at strawberries.)

Well, I did that. I took the first can out, and I opened it up. It...ejaculated, all over the wall, one line of dulce de leche coming out and splashing. I wish I could have filmed that, it was hilarious.

Then I tried it. If I were a guy, I might have imitated the can, it was that good.

I tried a spoonful with a few crystals of kosher salt and almost cried. We topped some Samoa Ice Cream with it. That made my fiance and son very happy. I actually preferred it with a bit of salt, and plain. We've got a little less than half a can left, plus the one I put back in the crock pot, because I want a darker caramel flavor. And I've been informed that if I made homemade cheesecake to go with this, sex would become unnecessary. I don't think that's much of an incentive to make the two at the same time!

Cobbler. Or maybe Clafouti. Plus, a scarf.

So, there I was, four against four hundred. Toughest four we ever fought. No, wait. There I was, at the farmer's market, this week. And I was with my son and the only thing I knew for certain is that I wanted some kettle corn. But the produce was lovely, so I ended up with some leeks, a bunch of carrots that are everything carrots should be, and a half-pint each of raspberries and some of the biggest, tastiest blackberries I've ever bought. (I prefer picking them in my back yard, but for various reasons, didn't happen. Spiders and not being able to reach them were the biggest problems.)

Anyhow, I ended up with gorgeous berries and no clue what to do with them, beyond eating them. The thing is, I love cooked raspberries, but the fresh ones always taste too tart to me to eat them fresh. Enter The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond.

I remembered seeing a recipe, not very long ago, about individual raspberry cobblers. I checked out the recipe: milk. I had that. Self-rising flour. I only had all-purpose, but I also have baking powder and salt. Vanilla extract. I have that. Butter. I have that. Raspberries. Ladies and gentlemen, we had a winner.

Yesterday, I carried out the experiment. Into one cup of flour went 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and .5 teaspoons of salt. Then in went the sugar, and it was all combined vigorously before I added the milk, the vanilla and the melted butter. And then overfilled the muffin tins, and then added raspberries. (I ended up using half of what I had. And I even halved the recipe.) To make matters worse, there was a LOT of batter leftover.

They were HEAVENLY. Best ever. In spite of needing 20 extra minutes because of my oven.

So, today, I decided I needed to use up all the berries I had left. Turns out that with my muffin tins, one half-batch of these things made twelve cobblers and I had just enough berries for 6 raspberry ones and 6 blackberry ones. The blackberry ones nearly made me cry, they were so good.

On the knitting front, I finally almost got back to it. I'm not just a slow knitter, but worse, I developed carpal tunnel, so I had to stop for a while. I'm finally starting to get back to it. This scarf is for someone else, it's using some kind of Lion Brand thick/chunky yarn in charcoal grey, stockinette stitch. It's getting kind of long and it's boring, which is funny because I'd love to knit a Dr. Who scarf. Like that would be interesting? I know, I know.

First.

I suppose a bit of introduction may be in order.

I am currently an unemployed...well, I generally do office work, although I'm schooled in luthiery. (Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, class of Fall, 2003, and haven't done diddly with it since then.) I'm a mother, a very amateur cook, (although I love cooking, most of the time,) a terrible housekeeper, a reader, a very slow knitter, and an opinionated bitch. I'm also intensely liberal. I play RPGs, although mostly, these days, it's a version called mushing, or MUshing. (More about that in another paragraph.) I love to read, watch movies, I'm a sci-fi/fantasy geek, and I can't write fiction to save my life, but I can write essays, which is mostly what blogs are.

My favorite blogs are the ones that talk about people's lives, although I tend to read ones that are skewed towards cooking, or knitting, and mostly cooking, at that. For years, my favorite tv channel was the Food Network, although I'm skewing towards the DIY Network, these days. (I miss the shows that were genuinely informative, that had chefs who became personalities, as opposed to the ones who start off as personalities. Except for Alton Brown, who has always been my personal favorite.)

As for what to expect from this blog, it's going to be a little of this, a little of that...a whole LOT of that. (Oh, in case anyone gets the reference, yes, I'm also a fan of musicals. If you didn't, it's Ben Vereen in Pippin.)

Now, introduction's over, feel free to introduce yourself, as well. In the meantime, I shall offer a recipe, just as an opening gift. It's a take-off on some of the very best stuffing that I ever had in a piece of poultry, from a dear friend's grandmother. The stuffing was mashed potatoes with fried onions, but it was more the apotheosis of mashed potatoes with fried onions, because the juices from the chicken or turkey lifted the potatoes into a realm that they hadn't known before. The friend's grandmother did this with margarine, for reasons of being kosher. I do it with butter, because I'm trayf and I hate margarine. I made this version because I was living with someone who rarely ate at home, and I couldn't see cooking an entire bird when I only like white meat, but I was longing for the stuffing. Luckily, this turned out to be so good that I've had people tell me they dream of it. I even converted my fiance from an onion-hater to a fried-onion-lover with this dish. (The first time I made it for him, I told him that he had to try it, but that if he hated it, I was ok with it. It was the first time I was actually sorry that he loved something I made: it meant I had to share.)

Potato Gunk

Preheat your oven to 400.

Take about five pounds, more or less, of Yukon Gold potatoes. Peel them, chop them, boil them until tender. While you're doing this, finely dice 1 to 2 large onions. (I find that you can't go wrong with too many onions in this dish.) Slowly caramelize your onions in butter, in a frying pan, and cut up 1 to 2 pounds of raw chicken into bits. Sprinkle celery salt over the chicken and set it aside until the onions are done frying.

When the onions are lovely and soft and not-burnt-but-browned, put them in a bowl. Saute the chicken in the same pan that the onions fried in, until browned on both sides. Pour in a little chicken stock, and simmer until your potatoes are ready for mashing. Drain the chicken.

When the potatoes are ready, drain them, return them to the pot, and mash them with butter, salt, pepper and milk or cream. Once they're mostly mashed, crack in a raw egg and stir that in, very thoroughly.

Now, take your pans: they can be a deep casserole, or loaf pans, or whatever you choose, as long as it's deep. Spoon in a layer of mashed potatoes, making sure to cover the entire bottom, and make it a layer that's at least a third of the way up the pan. Put in a layer of chicken bits. Cover the chicken bits with the fried onions. Cover that with potatoes, the rest of the way up the pan, trying not to dislodge either onions or chicken. Bake all of this until the sides and top are crusty and brown, about 20 to 30 minutes. Serve in spoonfuls.

I find that I love the leftovers cold, when I'm lucky enough to have them, and that the potatoes set up nicely enough to be served in slices, if it's cold, first.