Jan 12

I made pie

I made my first two pies this weekend. I’ve been re-reading Pascale LeDraolec’s American Pie (nothing to do with movie of the same name). It chronicle’s the author’s drive across America looking for pie, and it includes a bunch of pie recipes.

My first two attempts were marriage pies (pies containing two different but complementary fruits). I made AppleBlack™, or blackberry-apple first. I hybridized the crust recipe from the back of the Crisco package with Dave’s Huckleberry Pie recipe from Pascale’s book. I adapted the filling recipe from Doris Kemp’s Accidental Apple-Blueberry Pie from Mammy’s Cupboard in Natchez, Mississippi.

The AppleBlack was good, but not awesome. The crust turned our great: nice and flaky. The filling, however, I had two complaints about:

  1. Way too much nutmeg. I only used .5 teaspoon, in accordance with the recipe, but that was still way too much.
  2. Way too much sugar. I thought 1.5 cups of sugar seemed like a lot, and it was.

My second pie was strawberry-peach. I used the same crust recipe, but accidentally mixed in the spices destined for the filling with the dough. It didn’t seem to make any difference, good or bad. For the filling, however, I omitted the nutmeg and .5 cups of sugar. This pie was much better. In the future, though, I will add more strawberries (I was afraid of adding too many).

I’m really enjoying cooking and baking, so much so that I turned down my wife’s offer to bake me an apple pie.

“It’s not just the having of pie, but the baking of pie,” I told her.

While I am far from conquering pie, I do think I made a good first attempt, at least good enough to eat, and encouraging enough to keep trying. However, this could turn into an expensive habit. Not so much the fruit and flour, but the dishes, utensils, and appliances that I will no doubt need if I keep this up.

Next step: apple dumplings!

Jan 11

Overheard: 35 yr old female

“Could you hit me, like, right around Iowa?”

Jan 09

Overheard: 30 yr old female

“I don’t think you have a huge butt.”

Jan 07

Serial girlfriend

n., A girl or woman who is always in a relationship with someone, and who moves from relationship to relationship.

I learned this term from my daughter. When I attempted to look it up to see if a coherent definition already existed, I found quite an oddity in Google’s autosuggestion:

What the heck?

Jan 05

13 Months Today

Today is the 13 Month Anniversary of my MadMania blog! To be honest, I’m kind of surprised I have stuck with it this long, but I’m enjoying it now more than when I started.

Thank you to everyone who tunes in to see what I’m rambling about.

Jan 05

Buying a stove wasn’t that hard, part 3

Part three in the chronicle of my stove-buying experience (parts 1 and 2).

So I was telling all this to my buddy Kaleb. He suggested I go to Nebraska Furniture Mart. I had never been there, so I asked him if they had a decent selection. He must have thought that was rather humorous.

Christmas Eve I got up and starting looking around online for a stove again, and remember Kaleb’s NFM recommendation. I quickly found my model, and saw that they were offering two years with no interest through TODAY. Ally and I hopped in the car and drove all the way out to KCK, racing the impending snow and ice storm that was coming in.

For those of you who have never been to Nebraska Furniture Mart, it gets it’s name from the fact that the store is roughly the size of Nebraska. Within five minutes I had located my stove (it was $20 cheaper than it showed online). Within another minute an employee offered to get a sales associate. Within another five or six minutes Randy, our sales guy, had a ticket for us with warranty and delivery (can you believe they deliver within a 150 mile radius?).

Randy then pointed us to the credit desk so I could take advantage of their sweet financing option. Another 5 minutes of taking down info, and the credit associate said it would be about 10 minutes. Ally and I sat down and were in our seats for less than a minute when the sales clerk called our name. We were already rung up and everything; I just had to sign the receipt.

I still had another purchase to make, and even with that Ally and I were in and out of the store in less than 30 minutes with a promise that our stove would be delivered on December 30th.

At 8:15 a.m. December 30th our stove arrived, delivered by a couple of jovial guys named Danny and Steve who drove through the snow from Kansas City, Kansas.

Heather loves her stove, and I’m pretty darned fond of it myself (last night I made chili, and today I am making French Toast as soon as everyone gets up).

So, sorry Lowe’s: you blew it. Sorry Best Buy: you double blew it. If either of you had had better service, I would have never ventured out to Nebraska Furniture Mart. The selection was gigantic. Every single employee we worked with was helpful and cheerful. Both of our sales associates ignored their telephones so they could focus on us.

Guess where we are buying our next refrigerator?

Part 1

Part 2

Jan 01

Buying a stove shouldn’t be this hard, part 2

In part 1 I detailed how the oven in our crummy Frigidaire range had died, and how we had attempted to purchase a new range at Lowe’s, but ended up ordering through bestbuy.com.

The range we ordered was a high-end consumer model, a Whirlpool Gold gas convection oven with 5 burners, three racks, a split rack, and a warming drawer. Since it was kind of a specialty item, Best Buy said they would order it in six weeks.

On week five, I received a bill from Best Buy. I’m not accustomed to being billed for items until they have shipped, so I called Best Buy and told them so. However, Best Buy and the bank that issues their card are two different companies, and both referred me to the other. Neither was willing to help me, and the credit card company representative, knowing I was already unhappy at the prospect of paying for a purchase I had not yet received, still attempted to sell me a stupid credit service add-on.

Fine, whatever. As long as I got my stove.

On week six I get an email from Best Buy stating that there was an error and my order had been cancelled. That’s OK, I didn’t really want a new range right before Thanksgiving. Would I like to reorder, they asked?

No, no I would not.

Part 1

Part 3

Jan 01

Happy New Year 2010

Happy 2010 everybody. I hope you are having a wonderful holiday.

Dec 30

Pasta in Black and White

I gotta say that’s a darn good title for a blog post, as well as a good title for:

  • a mystery novel (she walked into my kitchen like a 6-burner Vulcan range)
  • an album
  • an art-house flick that garners a bunch of Oscar noms and wins Best Cinematography

Anyhoo, it turns out that Heather and I are fundamentally dissimilar when it comes to pasta. She likes long noodles covered in several molecules of spicy pasta sauce. Me, I like short screwy noodles covered in plethoras of sweet pasta sauce. I don’t like spaghetti, and peppers belong in chili, not pasta sauce.

But perhaps it goes deeper than that: maybe we like pasta the way Greeks like their gods: like us. Heather, being tall, likes her pasta tall. Of course, I guess that makes me short and screwy. Moving on, we like our sauce like we like our spouses: Heather likes hers spicy, I like mine sweet.

Like all analogies, this one breaks down at some point. For instance, might I like my spouse full of garlic and basil? Well, yes in fact.

Anyway, this was just a followup to my previous post re: MadMan Dan’s Antimario Pasta, and Heather doesn’t care for it.

Dec 29

MadMan Dan’s Antimario Pasta Sauce

Did you ever wonder why spaghetti sauce is cheaper than just plain tomato sauce? Let’s put it this way: would you put carrots in your spaghetti? Heck no, you wouldn’t. You also wouldn’t add all the other stuff on the side of the can that those guys add.

Today I made my best batch of homemade pasta sauce EVAH. Here’s the recipe:

MadMan Dan’s Antimario* Pasta Sauce

Ingredients

  • 2 onions
  • ~1 lb hamburger
  • 1 tube R.B. Rice Italian sausage
  • 3 29 oz cans tomato sauce
  • 3 TBL basil
  • 3 TBL oregano
  • 3 TBL minced garlic

Hardware

  • cast iron skillet
  • large pot

Directions

  1. In the large pot, combine tomato sauce, 2 TBL basil, 2 TBL oregano, 2 TBL garlic and begin heating on high.
  2. Chop onions into small pieces and sauté in the cast iron skillet in either garlic oil or olive oil. Sauté the onions until they are translucent, then mix into the sauce.
  3. In the cast iron skillet, combine hamburger, sausage, 1 TBL basil, 1 TBL oregano, and 1 TBL garlic. Stir together, and when the meat is brown, drain off the grease and mix into the tomato sauce.
  4. Continue heating sauce until it begins bubbling. Reduce heat and simmer until the sauce is nice and thick, then remove from heat.
  5. Pasta is always better after it has stuck in the fridge for several hours, so if you have already cooked your noodles (I use rotini almost exclusively–more surface area to hold sauce) then add them to the sauce and stick it in the fridge.

Enjoy! Prep time is pretty short; I made this whole dish in just about an hour.

Also, why Antimario? Because I don’t like mushrooms in my pasta sauce.