.:: Fire The Housewife ::.

Sorry for the delay, my internet was not playing nice with my website and I couldn’t post.  There are a lot of things happening right now, like shampooing carpets, gardening, and planting an herb garden but this will have to suffice for now!   I have lots of things coming along though and I did make my own cookies from my own recipe the other day and people loved them.  Look forward to that!

 

As you can see I’ve had some baking adventures while living in you-know-where (It’s kind of like with Voldemort, I can’t ACTUALLY say the name.) I’ve even tried my hand at a few recipes of my own that I’ve decided to share with you. My dad has pretty much peed his pants over the food I’ve been making, so here is post number one dedicated to And She Cooks!
So those cookies there in the background. I finally talked my Grandpa into letting me bake for him, but he’s worried about his blood sugar (which is always normal by the way) so he didn’t want anything with too much sugar. So I decided Oatmeal Cookies were the way to go. Now here at home we covered them in whipped cream and ate them like oatmeal cream pies and then died slowly of obesity, but whatever. This makes about 3 dozen.
2/3 cup Shortening
2/3 cup Brown Sugar
2/3 cup White Sugar (we don’t discriminate because of color around these parts)
2 Eggs
1 Tbsp Vanilla
1 cup Flour
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 Tbsp Cinnamon (I thought this seemed like a lot of cinnamon, but trust me, DELICIOUS, plus it made the whole house smell a little bit like Christmas!)
2 cups Oatmeal (just the oats, not the instant business.)
First things first: Cream together the shortening and sugars
Second things second: Add the eggs and vanilla and keep mixing
Third things third: Add everything else except for the oats
Then finally, when you think you can mix no more, mix in those oats. About a spoonful is enough per cookies, they didn’t spread out TOO much, but they spread a little, use about the same as you would for some regular old chocolate chip cookies and they turn out great. Bake for 10 minutes and then pull them out of the oven and fall in love. These have an almost perfect consistency for oatmeal cream pies and I plan to try and whip up some homemade cream filling for them sometime.

MMMMmmmMMMM
Whew, and for the double whammy, here is the chocolate pie I made as well.
I used This Lovely Lady’s Recipe for the filling but added a few other things.

 

Like she says, bake that pie shell good and done.
Then, what I did, for a little kick was add a layer of raspberry jelly to the pieshell right after it came out of the oven. That’ll help melt that jelly and it’ll spread out pretty easily. You don’t have to accidently get it all over the side while jabbing a piece of crust that had bubbled from the side, but I definitely recommend it.

While the pie bakes mix up your filling per The Pionneer Woman’s directions, yes, you really do have to mix it for 20 minutes.

It is extremely handy to have a mixer that mixes all on it’s own and has a timer on it to remind you to add more eggs. Even if it is 100 years old. It’s still so nice.

It also helps to entertain yourself by making fun shapes in the mixer bowl with your spatula, isn’t that fun looking?

Then after allll that mixing, just dump it on in. You can fill it pretty full, it’s a pretty sturdy filling, it won’t slosh or anything and it’s not like it’s going to expand in the fridge .

Okay, and for the jelly on the top. First, you’ll have to chill the cake for a couple hours before this, then, you’ll have to pop a couple tablespoons of jelly in a bowl and microwave it for about 30 seconds. You’ll be able to drizzle it on top then. Now that I’ve done this once, I think next time what I’ll do is do it while the cake is still warm-ish and not set, that way you can make it a little prettier.
The only problem was, I put it in the fridge and the next morning I woke up to this…

IT’S A MYSTERY!!

(Niloo I left you a long comment on my last post telling how to make homemade versions of everything for the cupcakes, good luck!!)

Okay, so I know I steal a lot of recipes, but I really can cook! All on my own! I promise! And to prove it I think I’ll show you what I made my dad and I for dinner tonight. I’m spoiling the old man since he’s been living off of frozen dinners and fast food for years now. Moving into Dad’s has proved to be an adventure when it comes to figuring out what food he does and doesn’t have in his cluttered cabinets. I’m trying to use up everything he has so we can start fresh and new. We had some hamburger, sausage, and spaghetti noodles (but only enough for one person) and some fettucini (enough for a few) so was born Spagettucini Bolognaise!

First, the ingredients:

1/2 lb pork sausage
1/2 lb hamburger

1 can tomatoes

Italian Seasoning

Basil Leaves (chopped)

1 Bay Leaf

1 red onion

2 Tbsp Garlic

1/2 cup Milk

Flour

Okay, so here’s what you’ll do, first you’ll dice up the entire red onion, mine was on the smaller side and I could have stood some more onion, so don’t be afraid to toss a lot in. Also, toss in some olive oil at this point, just to help with the onions. Throw in that 2 tbsp of garlic now too. I used minced garlic from a jar, but fresh cloves will work just as lovely, I’d use 2 cloves I think. Cook those onions and garlic for about 5ish minutes, you want the onions to be soft but not browned. While the onions cook you can be dicing up those tomatoes. I really feel like I could have used more tomatoes to balance this a little, if you’re feeling it, throw in one of those small cans of tomato paste.

Once the onions are soft, throw in your meats to fry. I mixed mine in a bowl first because I live in this constant fear that my meats won’t mix. Why do I fear this? Who knows.

Okay, once you’ve browned your meat with the onions and they’re all mixed and wonderful, add in the 1/2 cup milk. Let that come to a boil while you add in 2 tsp Italian Seasoning, 2 tsp Basil Leaves, and 1 Bay Leaf. Let that boil for about 5 minutes, then turn down the heat just a smidge and add the tomatoes. I tossed in the tomato juice too.

It’ll look a little something like this…

Mine was a little juicier than I’d like so I threw in a handful of flour. Just play it by ear, if you want it to thicken, throw some in. Oh and make sure you don’t drain out all that delicious fat that will seap off of the meat, thats what gives it the flavor

While this simmers for a bit, I used up that spaghetti and fettucini by boiling that up for the noodles. Now, I can’t just boil noodles up like a normal person, throw in about a Tbsp of butter, some onion salt, and some garlic powder into the water with those noodles while they boil, trust me, it makes all the difference.

You’ll end up with something a bit like this…and it’ll be delicious, trust me.

I have a ton of things to share with you, friends, but I don’t want to be overwhelming, soooo, we’ll start with this first, for my new blog reader, heres a short description of what I did with those cupcakes…

I started out with just a plain cupcake mix, nothing difficult, I didn’t even make it from scratch.

I baked the heck out of those cupcakes (using the directions from the box)
and frosted them with pre-made frosting.

Easy as pie. Okay, keeping with the theme of VERY EASY. I bought pre-made fondant from Michaels (or any craft store really) and rolled it out so it was maybe 1/4 inch thick, even thinner would be fine.

Then I used a ruler and a knife to cut it into squares, about an inch on each side, this size really depends on your cupcakes.

You’ll want to smoosh those squares a little bit so they look more like diamonds than squares, you can also do some smooshing if your squares aren’t exactly the right size for your cupcake, smooshing, thats a technical term, right?

If all goes as planned your steps should look a little like that. Remember, fondant dries out REALLY quickly, so you want to make sure you keep it wrapped up when you’re not using it. I also was a little afraid my frosting would dry before I got the fondant stuck to it (it has to be stuck to something) so I would frost a few, put the decorations on, and continue to the next bunch. It worked pretty well and I didn’t get so tired of repeating the same thing over and over.

To finish them off you just pipe on a little icing making two X’s on top of your diamonds. I used pre-made icing as well (I was feeling EXTREMELY lazy, as you can tell) and it worked out great. You can make all of this stuff yourself and I’m sure they’d turn out just as delicious.

The really tough part is finding a group of friends as great as these to gather around and share them with you.

NOW YOU CAN ALL HAVE A BIRTHDAY JUST LIKE MINE! (or at least make a trendy cupcake for a friend of yours that is just like me)

I had my first comment from a non-friend reader! I’m so excited! This reader has asked that I tell how to make those argyle cupcakes I made for my birthday, and tonight, that is exactly what I’ll do. So you wait for that, friends, you wait for that.

Sorry friends, I’m not feeling up to it tonight, it’s not a blog sort of night for me.  Perhaps tomorrow!

So, today I spent my entire day making productivity graphs, I know what shifts at goodyear are sucking, what kind of tires are getting tossed out the most, what excuses people are making for their productivity shortcomings.  I absolutely love it.  Perhaps it’s incredibly dorky, but I love looking at those graphs when I finish and thinking about why people aren’t making the productivity progress we had hoped for.  Today they got my computer all hooked up and I can’t wait to just sit at my happy little desk tomorrow and work away.  I have an early morning project to work on tomorrow as I spent two hours today working on this amazing graph of which tire codes from the work ticket are being messed up and I had just finished it when I looked at it, looked at my boss and said “whoa. I’m an idiot. I just realized I didn’t split this graph into a green tire graph and a cured tire graph…” He kinda laughed a little and probably thought “what kind of moron did they hire here?” but I told him I’d redo it in the morning when I got there and he was down with it.  Homedawg also offered to buy me a coffee today, but like a real Goodyear employee I had a thermos full that I quickly downed as I was sitting around working on graphs.  It was a great day!

I also walked over to visit Dad in his (and my old) department.  I hate to admit it but I missed that guy and missed that place a little too.  Please forget that I just said that.
Why don’t you guys tell me a good work story?