Happy π Day!

Sure, π Day is one of those weird little holidays that you only get on the Internet now that the Internet is a thing, but still. A lot of people like to make puns about pies today. I like pies.

Heck, I have a pie crust left over. Suggestions? Bear in mind that if it’s a sweet pie, I’ll have to eat it all by myself. Which is more of a problem than it was twenty years ago, when I had a metabolism with more than one setting.

The great advantage of the Impossible Burger, for me.

(Via Glenn Reynolds) I’ve had an Impossible Burger. It was fine. But my wife likes them, because they taste like hamburgers, and she has to limit her intake of red meat these days. Which means that I could have lunch with my wife today at the diner and we could both have burgers and fries and I won’t feel bad eating a bacon cheeseburger in front of her.

I honestly don’t care about whether it’s a nutritious burger or not. I care that she likes it and can eat it instead of a beef burger. Works for me!

A productive day! [UPDATED]

Cleaned the house, baked a strawberry pie, got dinner ready for cooking later, and wrote about 850 words of a story I’ve been trying to write for ten years and now I know how it’s going to go. Annnnnnd then I remembered that I write things on this site, too. Clearly, there need to be more hours in the day.

But the crust on that pie looks like it baked up pretty nice, though. I’m going to score a win on that in advance. If only because it’s really, really hard to mess up a fresh strawberry pie.

Continue reading A productive day! [UPDATED]

Uncle Moe’s Chili For People Who Don’t Make Chili.

I threw this together for the playtest yesterday. The core of the recipe comes from here, but I had to change things around because of dietary issues. Still, chili isn’t hard. I’m sure that everybody in the universe will call this version of it an abomination, but five people ate it all, so I guess abominations are tasty?

Time to cook: thirty minutes prep; six hours cooking in a crockpot at low.

What you’ll need:

Continue reading Uncle Moe’s Chili For People Who Don’t Make Chili.

Tweet of the Day, I Can’t Make These, Dammit edition.

Half of the ingredients are on my wife’s Not Allowed To Eat list.  Merely showing her the recipe would be cruel.  Seriously, I’m not even going to mention it to her.

The Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Mystery at Chez Lane.

Not my mystery, mind you (my family did pies); my wife’s.  She’s making her mom’s from-scratch chocolate chip cookies, and they’re just not spreading out in cooking the way that she remembers them doing when she was a kid.  We’ve just finished discussing the possible reasons why; she’s fiddled with the margarine, the mixing, and whatnot, but to no avail.  I think that it may be the oven, but that just may be my general opinion about electric ovens vs. gas*. Continue reading The Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Mystery at Chez Lane.

Seed cakes!

Did three at a time, this time.

Two of them are for the baronial meeting / Christmas party tomorrow; I made the third because the smell will drive my wife mad if it’s in the air there when she gets home this afternoon and there are no cakes for her to sample.  If I have a self-criticism, it’s that I may have skimped a little on the poppy seeds*.  Of course, the batter tasted fine, so maybe I’m worrying about nothing.

Moe Lane

*Recipe here.  Only, I went back to using poppy seeds and orange zest.  Don’t get me wrong: it’s delicious with caraway and lemon, but I just like it better this way.

Gonna bake this weekend.

Baronial populace meeting is a holiday party and a cookie contest this month.  I’ll let my wife make the cookies (she does pizzelles up a treat); what I’m going to do is some seed cakes.  I cannot conceive of a SCA gathering that will turn its collective nose up at Tolkienesque seed cakes.  I simply cannot.

Note: for this particular recipe I am going back to using orange zest and poppy seeds; I’ve done it up both ways, and I like it better without caraway.  Caraway seed cake is not bad, mind you.  It’s just not what I want in a seed cake.  Although I do admit that the shire had neither poppy fields, nor orange groves.  Be interesting if it did, no?