Of Root Beer Floats

The other day one of the grandkids and I were discussing root beer floats and I learned that this young man had never had one.

How anyone could reach the ripe old age of six without ever having had a root beer float was inconceivable to me.

Well, since we had all the stuff necessary to making a root beer float, he decided that he was willing to try one.

After trying it, he decided he was a fan, he liked it.  And I felt like I had done my duty as a grandfather, to introduce this young man to one of life's finer treats.

'Tis the Season!

Some families go crazy with their Christmas baking. They spend hours, if not days, cooking Christmas goodies, turning out treats galore that they then give away or enjoy themselves all through the holidays.  My own Mom used to bake all kinds of cookies, cookies of every imaginable kind.  She'd make enough to fill a couple of five gallon tins that then sat out on our unheated porch, staying cool and available all through the rest of the Christmas season.  Lots of snitching went on, but I don't remember that it was a bad thing.  Nothing tasted quite as fine as a cold cookie from off the porch.  Anyway, as a general rule, we have never gone crazy with Christmas baking.  We generally would make a few things but not to excess.  I guess "excess" is relative; those families that do all that baking don't consider it an excess, its just something they do.  In any case, while we do some baking, we don't get carried away with it.

This year, however, we probably did do more than normal.  It began when I saw a recipe for orange frosted cookies that caught my attention.  I decided to make some.  So one day after work, I pulled out mixer and got started.

One of the things that had attracted me to this recipe was how simple it was.  It only took a few minutes to throw all the ingredients together, including running a couple of oranges through the blender.  That part was fun.

Part of the liquefied oranges went into the cookie batter, the rest went into the frosting.  The result was some cookies that were light and yummy.

Not made for any particular reason, just because they looked interesting.  And, as it turned out, they were.

There were also some "Grinch cookies".  Chocolate chip cookies, only green.  They turned out pretty good, too.

There was a family in the ward that dropped off a box of treats one evening.  Sugar cookies, Chocolate chip cookies, and an assortment of candies that was really good.

There is one baking item that has become a tradition at our house; candy cane bread.  Brombeere got out her Mom's old mixer and made that one afternoon.  Candy cane bread is so good.

Its a sweet bread filled with any kind of filling you want to put in it.  This year it was a raspberry chocolate filling.

You fill it and then weave the top closed.  Then you put it on the pan and curl the top around into a candy cane shape.

Then you bake it.  The recipe makes enough for about three medium candy canes.  We made them just a little smaller this year so that we got four out of a single recipe. Delightful!

Then you drizzle a frosting over them, and garnish them with M&M to make like little holly berries on them. So, so good.

There was also banana bread.  Not for any particular reason, other than we had some ripe bananas sitting around.  I made these, my first time.  It actually turned out pretty good, I thought.

Brombeere needed some treats for school so she made a whole bunch of sugar cookies.  Snowflake sugar cookies, real pretty to look at and real yummy, too.

She needed a lot, enough to make a treat for each student in the whole third grade at her school, quite a few.  So it took a while to get them all made and decorated.  Thank goodness there were a few that weren't quite good enough to use for school so that we were able to enjoy some at home.  That was nice.

Then there were the "paw print" cookies we tried.  They didn't turn out quite like the photo with the recipe but they were still good. Chocolate chip, how can you go wrong?

Then Brombeere wanted to make some blossom cookies.  I ended up peeling almost two packages of Hershey kisses but it was worth it in the end.  They were yummy little morsels.  And these were just so we could have some goodies around with all the company we were expecting over the holidays.  Definitely a worthy cause.

And last, but not least, we were fortunate enough to have Erdbeere here for her birthday.  So, of course, we had to make some kind of birthday cake.  We went with cupcakes.

Cupcakes served with the traditional birthday ice cream.

So, yeah, even though, as a rule, we don't get carried away with Christmas baking, we ended up doing plenty of that this year and ended up with lots of baked treats.  No wonder new years resolutions so often include weight loss goals.

This Time with Fresh Fruit

A little over a year ago I tried a recipe for gooseberry cake I had pieced together from my grandmother's life history. I had been working on converting her life history, which she had recorded on cassette tapes, from tapes to digital files.  In the process of doing that I came across the recipe and tried it out.  However, being winter at the time, I was unable to use fresh gooseberries.  I had finally ended up buying some online because it was the only place I was able to find any.  It turned out pretty good but it left me wanting to try it again with fresh berries.  But then the other day I came across an advertisement from a berry farm and remembered I had meant to try again when I would be able to use fresh gooseberries.  So I called them up and confirmed that they did have gooseberries that were on right now and available.  I talked to Brombeere and we picked a date to go!

That day arrived Saturday.  We gathered together all the stuff that we thought we'd need and piled in the car, forgetting a few things we would have liked to have with us.

Anyway, we got there, got some basic instructions in how to pick gooseberries, and hit the field.

It was a warm day, but not too terribly hot. Or so we thought.  We were there probably nearly two hours picking berries.  Truthfully, we picked more than just gooseberries, which is why it took so long. We also picked raspberries, both black and red.  But that's a different story.  Today we're mostly interested in gooseberries.

These gooseberries were a little smaller than the ones that had been in the cans.  That's okay.  I had calculated what I figured I needed and that's how many we'd picked.  I had actually decided to try making the cake and having gooseberry ice cream with it, instead of the sauce my grandma had talked about.  From what I'd figured, I thought we'd need around six cups so we picked what we figured would be just a little more than that.

Then, because it had been a long time in the heat and sun, we went for ice cream!  Can't beat that!

Later in the day, after we had run a bunch of other errands, it was time to get busy.  I had decided to do the ice cream first.  That way it could be churning while I worked on the cake.  So I got everything out and got started.

First thing to do was get all the berries off the little stems.  That was something I hadn't had to worry about when I had made this before, using canned berries.  This part took a little longer than I had expected.  Maybe bigger berries would have been quicker.  As I was working, I kept imaging my grandma and her family sitting around the table in their kitchen, working together to prepare the berries.  Good times.  Anyway, once they were off the stems I still had a little more to do with them to get them ready.

So next they went on to the stove, with some sugar and a little water.  You cook 'em until they burst.  Then I ran them through the blender to turn them into a puree.

Then I pushed the puree through a sieve to end up with a nice, clean bowl of gooseberry liquid, all ready for ice cream.

See that stuff that was left over, that didn't go through the sieve?  Makes you glad it didn't make it into the ice cream.

So, once the gooseberries had been reduced to a nice, clean liquid, they went into the fridge to cool while I worked on the next step.

That was the custard.  This is Brombeere, pointing out to me that, as they say, a watched pot never boils.  Always helping.

Despite Brombeere's watching, the custard did come to a boil.

Then the custard and the berry mixture were blended together and went into the ice cream maker canister.  We got the ice, put it all together and placed it in the sink, and packed the ice and salt all around in the bucket.  At point, I plugged in the motor and listened to it hum.  Alas, though the motor hummed along quite nicely, the canister did not turn.  As a result, the ice cream did not churn. Bummer.

After tinkering with it a while without being able to get it to work, I decided that I had already invested too much work in this ice cream to just toss it.  So I made a quick trip to the store hoping they would have an ice cream maker.  When I got there, after involving two store clerks, the only thing we found was something that looked like a kid's ice cream maker.  At least it did in the box.  And it was less than half the price I had been expecting to pay.  I figured that couldn't be a regular ice cream maker but I got it anyway.  When I got back home and unpacked it, I was glad I had gotten it.  Apparently ice cream maker technology has come a long ways in the 20-25 years since we bought our last one and they are smaller and cheaper than they used to be.  Although the canister was the same size as our old one, the bucket was much smaller, which accounted for the smaller box.  In fact, except for one little design change, I could have used our old canister in this new maker.  Anyway, I moved the custard over into the new canister and got it to churning.  Back in business!

Then it was back to picking berries off the stem again.  This time it didn't take quite as long but that is mostly because there were fewer berries.  Most of what we had picked went into the ice cream.

Remembering, how much "trash" there had been left over after preparing the berries for the ice cream, and how unappetizing it had looked sitting there in the sieve, I decided the simplest thing would be to do the berries the same way for the cake.  That's a slight departure from how Grandma's recipe went, but, even though it was a bit of work, it still seemed simpler to me that trying to clean the berries up while keeping them whole.  So that's what I did.

So I made up the batter and added the liquid berries.  At that point, the batter was just a little too runny so I added a little more flour.  Grandma's recipe said you could do that.  In fact, she said to add the flour last so you could only add enough to bring it to a "good cake dough, just a regular kind of cake dough."  So I got it to that point, added the berries and then brought it to that point again.

Then it was into the pan, and into the oven.  Meanwhile, the ice cream had been churning away nearby.

We had made ice cream when I had been down visiting Heidlebeere a week before.  That time we just let the ice cream maker run until it shut off by itself so I had expected it to go like that this time, as well.  But after the cake was in the oven cooking, and it had been over an hour since the ice cream started churning, the mixer was still running happily away.  So I stopped it, opened it up, and took a look inside.

I was pleased with what I saw.  It turned out the recipe I had been using didn't make a lot.  But down in the bottom of the canister was some really nice looking ice cream.  It looked all ready to go.  So we tried it and it was yummy!  And it was all ready to go.  Most of the time, once you turn off the ice cream maker, you have "harden" it, let it sit a while and firm up.  But this stuff was all ready to go.  So we popped it the freezer to wait while we finished up the cake, which was still in the oven.

Pretty soon the cake came out of the oven, all nice looking, and all.  We let it cool on the oven a little and then served it up with the ice cream.

It turned out really nice.  It was a fair amount of work doing it all, what with picking the berries and all the work it was cleaning them, but in the end, it was pretty nice stuff.  Well worth the effort.

Back in the Kitchen Again

Today was Mother's Day so I decided I'd try to make something special for dinner.  And I wanted it to be a surprise, at that.  So I picked a menu and got the stuff.  I'm not sure what I was thinking because the menu I settled on was a bunch of stuff I have never fixed before.  Experiment on the big Mother's Day meal?  Experiment on the mother of my children?  Yeah, I was taking a big chance and feeling the pressure.  But what the heck.  Charge and move forward, right?

So I did the shopping and got all the stuff.  Then I decided to see what I could do ahead of time because we always come home from church hungry and I didn't want to make everyone wait a long time.  But, having never fixed this stuff before, I wasn't entirely sure how long it would take. Sure, lots of recipes gave preparation times and cooking times.  But how reliable is that?  I dunno, I usually don't pay attention to that stuff.  So I went through everything and picked out what I could do ahead of time.  Then on Saturday I fixed a couple of things early.

The main course was going to be marinated salmon.  I figured I could make the marinade ahead of time.  That part went pretty smooth.

One of the side dishes was a pasta dish, a mix of pasta and zucchini, with roasted tomatoes.  The recipe called for julienne cut zucchini. Julienne cut, umm.  For that I would need a julienne cutter.  For that I would need to know what a julienne cutter is.  Google is a wonderful thing; only took a minute to find out it is a tool we don't have in our kitchen.  But, happy day, my little spiralizer can do the same thing, or at least close enough.  So that's what I did.

So I ran the two zucchini through it and ended up with some wonderfully cut zucs.  And probably a heck of a lot easier than a julienne cutter would have done anyway.

Asparagus was also on the menu so I cut the woody ends off and set the rest to soak in water overnight, to soften it up.  My recipe said that was a good idea.  So once all that was done it all went into the fridge and I was done for the day.

I had intended to put the fish in the marinade before we left for church but I forgot.  Oh, well.  Soon as we got home that was the first thing I did.

With the fish marinading I started on the pasta.  First things was to roast the tomatoes.  I've never done that before but it was easy enough.  So I got that going and then put the asparagus on, as well as some hollandaise sauce, which is mostly milk.

That's where things started getting intense.  All this stuff cooking at the same time, a couple of the things needing constant stirring.  Alas, photos fell by the way side.  The last thing I wanted was to burn the Mother's Day dinner.  And I must confess, Mullbeere was here and helped with the desert.

But in about an hour it all came together and was on the table, ready to eat.  And it looked pretty good, too.

And when it was all done and everybody had eaten their fill, Brombeere said it was pretty good.  She said it is not the menu she would have come up with if she had been asked but she was pretty happy with it anyway.  That, and the fact that everybody had seconds of something or another, made me pretty happy.  I was happy with how it all turned out.  Happy Mother's Day!