Meringue Powder

Yikes it's been a long time since I posted anything! I've been working on a couple of other things at the moment so there hasn't been much time. I started the following blog post a few weeks ago and I hope you don't mind me posting it. Maybe you're still in the mood for sugar cookies or still in the Christmas spirit. I don't know.

Here it is a few weeks late:

With Christmas just around the corner I thought it would be a good time to blog about a sugar cookie recipe I found that is perfect for the holiday season. I found this recipe in the Good Housekeeping book and I used an icing recipe I found online. Before I tell about my sugar cookie adventure I think its important to tell you that this is not one of the recipes that just happens. What I mean by this is, is simply that in no way shape or form will you make this with perfection unless you are God or Martha Stewart. (Keep in mind I made these cookies on the Monday before Thanksgiving)


In my mind, I pictured the following scenario:

(No exaggeration)

I made the cookies wearing a super fabulous apron. I didn't spill a thing. My hair was perfect. My makeup was perfect. Christmas songs played in the background. I say along to the songs in a voice that was unrealistically harmonious, kind of like Ariel in the Little Mermaid. I cut leaf shaped cookies out and they cooked perfectly in the oven. I painted them in fall colors with homemade icing I had dyed. The icing went on smooth. It was glorious. Jason came home from work, kissed my forehead, and tasted the cookies and said they were delicious.Why wouldn't they be, I made them. I placed them in cute bags, labeled them with tags that said "Happy Thanksgiving! Love, The Yarbroughs" and tied them with neat perfect bows, because I'm an excellent bow tier so this would make perfect sense. I delivered them to my neighbors and family who were delighted by them. It was magical. ____________________________________________________________

Here's how it really went... I'll start from the beginning. Filled with the spirit of the holiday season I decided to bake some sugar cookies and ice them with homemade icing with the above mentioned scenario in my head. I really believed it would be effortless and it would take me an hour at most. I used a sugar cookie recipe from the Good Housekeeping book and an icing recipe I found further down the page that called for Meringue Powder. What the heck is meringue powder?! Of course, I didn't have it and had never heard of it anyway so off to the Casey Jones (our local supermarket) I went.


SIDENOTE: Have I told you how much I love our Casey Jones? I can't remember. Well I do. I love it. It's not like Wal-mart where I dodge carts like I'm in a bumper car cage and people ram into you like they're on speed. And God forbid you actually fall over because at Wal-Mart they would roll their cart right over your body. People at Wal-Mart scare me. At the Casey Jones its like you stepped into Mayberry well a different kind of Mayberry anyway. People know each other there and ask about your family and how your tomatoes plants did this year. Once when I was there, a woman hollered down the isle, "how's your mama" and a girl yelled back, "she's good, she's in jail." and everyone smiled and chuckled a little. Local New Orleans grocery stores. I wouldn't change a thing about them.

Back to the main story: So I'm here at the Casey Jones and one of the managers comes flying by with a very big mission, who knows what. I say excuse me, I can't find meringue powder and he drops everything he's doing. Meringue powder?.....he scratches his chin. He's walks one way then he walks the other way. He scans the shelves. More determined then ever he calls over other employees. Suddenly I felt like I was on a battlefield where troops were being dispatched to war-ridden area by the general. He barked out orders 'John! miscellaneous baking goods isle!" "Frank! isle 8!" The manager takes off on his own mission and I am left standing there blinking. I follow John to the miscellaneous baking isle and begin scanning shelves. Turns out none of the store's troops could find it. Finally we give up and the manager comes flying over with pages in hand. "Here", he says handing them over to me. "I googled it." Pages about Meringue powder and what to use instead. He apologizes for not having it and tells me some stores to check. If they don't have it come back and I'll order it, he says.

Wow.

This is customer service. :)

I go home and flop myself on the couch, not defeated but amazed.

After alot of thought, I decided not to go with Meringue powder (which seems to exist only on Google) but I googled a pretty great icing recipe that seemed to work just fine.

On the day I finally made the cookies, it took the WHOLE day. I was covered in flour all over my super cute apron, my face, my baseball cap that covered my not so cute hair. I made a horrible mess of the kitchen. I played Christmas songs but I sang them with no hope of a singing career. The cookies tasted awesome but God love them they didn't look like leaves and the icing colors were too bright to be considered fall colors. The icing was a mess, I had a tough time painting it on the cookies and I ended up with more on me than on the cookies. In the end, I ziplocked bagged them, I never attached a cute note to them and I never distributed to my friends and family, because I was pretty tired of looking at them. And Jason? Jason came home to my wonderful cookies. My wonderful mess. It turns out he thought they were perfect. And me, I think I'll buy cookies from the store next time :)


The Recipe for Sugar Cookies -

Ingredients:

• 1 cup(s) (2 sticks) butter (no substitutions), softened
• 1/2 cup(s)sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon(s) vanilla extract
• 3 cup(s) all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon(s) baking powder
  
• Ornamental frosting

Directions:

1. In large bowl, with mixer at low speed, beat butter and sugar until blended. Increase speed to high; beat until light and creamy. At low speed, beat in egg and vanilla. Beat in flour and baking powder just until blended.
2. Divide dough into 4 equal pieces. Wrap each piece with plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour or until dough is firm enough to roll. (Or place dough in freezer for 30 minutes.)
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. On lightly floured surface, with floured rolling pin, roll 1 piece of dough 1/8 inch thick. With floured 3- to 4-inch assorted cookies cutters, cut dough into as many cookies as possible; wrap and refrigerate trimmings. Place cookies, 1 inch apart, on ungreased large cookie sheet.
4. Bake cookies 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Transfer cookies to wire rack to cool. Repeat with remaining dough and trimmings.
5. When cookies are cool, prepare Ornamental Frosting if you like; use to decorate cookies as desired. Set cookies aside to allow frosting to dry completely, about 1 hour. Store cookies in tightly covered container (with waxed paper between layers, if decorated) at room temperature up to 2 weeks, or in freezer up to 3 months.

Recipe for Sugar Cookie Icing:

Ingredients:

1 cup confectioners' sugar 2 teaspoons milk 2 teaspoons light corn syrup

1/4 teaspoon almond extract assorted food coloring

Directions:

1.	In a small bowl, stir together confectioners' sugar and milk until smooth. Beat in corn syrup and almond extract until icing is smooth and glossy. If icing is too thick, add more corn syrup.
2.	Divide into separate bowls, and add food colorings to each to desired intensity. Dip cookies, or paint them with a brush.

Muffin

Some call her Snow White. I call her Muffin. Jason calls her Cotton. Whatever her name really is -- she's the neighborhood cat.

I don't remember when it was exactly that she began to grace us with her presence. Maybe four months ago? That's seems about right. She showed up in our neighborhood as if she had always been there. As if she had always owned this street.

I admit when I first met her I felt sorry for her. She was a mess of fluffy white cotton hair caked with mud and specks of leaves and sticks tangled throughout her coat. Her big yellow green eyes drew pity out of any one who locked eyes with her. She couldn't have been a whole year old, maybe six months. Her skinny little body made you wonder just how long it had been since her last meal.

I decided to take her on. I grab two bowls from inside and filled one with water and the other with some of Murphy (our inside cat)'s food. Jason couldn't believe what I was doing and said that before long I would become the neighborhood cat woman. But she's could die, I told him. She would starve, no one is taking care of her...

That's how is started. That was Muffin in her first days in our neighborhood. Over the next few weeks a unique transformation took place...

At first I noticed a love or a hate for muffin from our surrounding neighbors. She ate their plants. She harassed their dogs. They sprayed her with hoses. Some had adopted her as their own. Some had even named her Snow White which I thought was a ridiculous name. She was not Snow White and I would never call her that. One week, a pink flea collar showed up on her neck from the neighbor two doors down that's when I realized that Muffin's visit to our neighborhood was more permanent than anyone had hoped for.

Once Muffin knew she had us, it all went down hill from there. One day I was driving home from work and as I neared our house I saw her walking down our driveway. She'll move, I thought. Cat's are good about dodging cars for the most part. As I pulled my car into the drive. She didn't move. In fact she wouldn't budge. I honked and she sat there staring at me. Finally, I threw half of my body out of the car door and fussed at her. She moved alright, but only after minutes of fussing went by and aggravated drivers lined their cars up behind mine.

That wasn't the only thing.

The ragged washed up Muffin from the early days was no longer visible. Muffin was looking good. Her once tattered coat was a puffy fluff of pure cotton. She was beautiful. But noticing the change in her appearance made me notice something else just as important - her stomach.

Muffin's stomach was growing at an alarming rate. Is she pregnant, we wondered. We - meaning all the neighbors were noticing it too. Muffin's possible pregnancy was the topic of conversation among the neighbors for days. We wondered how many kittens she would have, we wondered where she would have them, and we wondered who had claim to which one of the kittens she would have. Would they be all white like she was or would they look like the father whoever he was. It never dawned on us that she wasn't pregnant.

Muffin's fat belly was the result of her dining habits. One weekday night when the neighbors sat on their porch swings and watered their gardens the truth came out. As one neighbor placed a bowl of food for Muffin on her porch it started a "You feed Snow White (Muffin)?!, well so do I!". Muffin had been making the rounds. Literally. She started on our side of the street in the mornings and crossed the street to hit up some houses in the afternoon.


I knew all to well the guilt she caused. I too had fallen victim. Every morning since she had shown up in our neighborhood, muffin would meet me on my porch. Her shrill cries were enough to send me running back into the house and back out with bowls of food. One day I had had enough, I rushed out the door and patted her on the head and said 'Not today Muffin I'm going be late'. As I pulled out the driveway I tried not to look at her but she glared at me. I pulled into the street and turned in the first u-turn to make my way to the bridge. Glancing back at the house, I couldn't believe it. Muffin had never left my porch. Her eyes followed my car as it moved down the street. The farther I got away the more pitiful looking she got. At that moment the guilt swept over. Before I could even really think about it I was u-turning again, jumping out of my car, running into the house and throwing food into Muffin's bowl. Everything I had in my arms (my lunch, my purse, my keys) fell all over the place. You know what she did? She took a sniff at it, realized it was a new kind of cat food and trotted back down the porch steps. And me? well I was late.

That's muffin. No matter how much she aggravates, no matter that she harasses your dogs, no matter that she almost peed on your neighbor's kid because she doesn't doesn't care where she goes, you love her because she is after all the neighborhood cat and I guess that means she ours.

Already Cooked Ham

I found recipe number 2 on my list of 31 quick and easy (most importantly tastes great!) recipes. After doing a little research I found a black bean soup recipe that is, in my book, a pretty good recipe. It's not a wow recipe like my pork with grapes posted early but after eating the leftovers a day later I reconsidered my original plan to not include it in my 31 and decided to make it number 2 on my list (I have no idea why I set the number at 31).

Anyway, there is website called All Recipes that has tons of great recipes on there. Normally the CD Kitchen is my go to website but not this time. I found a recipe called "Fast and Delicious Black Bean Soup" and I knew that this was it! (why? because you don't just throw out the word delicious all the time in a recipe title - so it must be good!). AND there were 7o-something reviews on this recipe all of which raved about it. If you don't read recipe reviews, you should. Sometimes people will tell you that the recipe needs more red pepper or another can of beans added - all great things to know! None of these reviews tell you where to find all ready cooked ham in the grocery store or what the heck already cooked ham looks like but I'll tell you that in case you are as clueless as I am.

So after locating this recipe. I called Jason to fill him in on what we were eating. He didn't sound thrilled. I asked him if he had ever had black bean soup and he couldn't recall. He wonders if it was the same stuff they give you on the side of your burrito at a Mexican Restaurant. No I say, it's not. But trust me you'll like it. :)

I printed it and went to the grocery store to get what I needed. Everything was relatively easy to find but the already cooked ham really got to me. What does that look like? I know you're laughing or probably shaking your head. Yes I googled it before I went to the store and that's when I realized that it looks a lot like lunch meat or the meat you find in a lunchable. Duh, Carrie!

I couldn't find it anywhere and of course I'm on my cell phone talking to Bowman, one of my friends. Bowman says its by the lunch meat. It's not. She says it's by the regular meat. I don't see it. She tells me I can substitute sausage and add something and then something else and it will taste like ham. I tell her the truth. Even if I tried to do that God knows what will happen. I will forget something important about her directions and the next thing I know we'll be eating sausage seasoned with cocoa and paprika and cinninamon. This brings back a memory.
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I immediately think of the last time I tried to remember a recipe she told me. She tells me this detailed recipe over the phone for some really interesting spaghetti. It's so good and so easy to make she says. Bowman's a great cook, so when she tells me this recipe I immediately stored it in my mind because I wanted to use it later to impress Jason who at that time I had only been dating a few months. One day I call him over for dinner and throw some spaghetti on his plate with a big confident I made this all by myself smile. Spaghetti made with noodles, butter, lemon juice, and salt - that's the only ingrediants I could remember from the recipe she told me. After a few painful-to-watch attempts to eat my impressive spaghetti, he tells me it is in fact- horrible.

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Let's get back to our story.

I did eventually find the cooked ham, but it was only after I paced thirty times back in forth between the lunch meat and the regular meat. Guess what?! It's in the regular meat section in a lunch meat type bag. I grab one when I really needed two. Here's where I tell you how important it is to know your measurement conversions. If you are like me, and you crammed for tests and the moment you walked out of the door you forgot everything then let me tell you something- you are in for a cooking disaster! Everyone on the planet knows that 8 oz. equals a cup but I didn't think about it when I grabbed the bag of meat in the store. I was an entire cup short in my recipe. Thank goodness I bought a bag of finely chopped ham because every bite of my soup had some ham in it. I really recommend ham that's chopped really small for this reason.

When I got home I immediately went to work making the soup. The soup calls for a large pot. This doesn't mean the largest pot you have. That's what I thought. It's just not necessary. I don't think I got even a quarter of the pot filled. You can see the pot I chose in the picture. I almost used a bigger pot than that. Maybe they should have specified in the directions.

As I was adding the ingredients, I had my doubts. I wondered what could make it taste so great since most of the ingredients were...well, bland. When it came time to pour our bowls of soup I topped them with the scoop of sour cream and shredded cheese it called for. Apparently the sour cream and cheese were the perfect compliment, because it did turn out delicious. Just like the recipe said. It wasn't mind blowing. It wasn't wow. It was nice and it was delicious.

In the end I give the recipe a B+, because it wasn't as spicy as I had hoped for but I think that with a little red pepper, problem solved. I give the leftovers and A- ............ a minus because they are leftovers but an A because I thought the leftovers were actually better! Jason had two bowls of leftovers and I had one. That's says alot.


Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 medium onion, chopped 1 green bell pepper, chopped 1 large carrot, peeled and thinly sliced 3 cloves garlic, minced 2 (15 ounce) cans black beans If you want a thicker soup get 3 cans and puree 2 of them 1 (14 ounce) can chicken broth

2 cups cubed cooked ham 1/4 teaspoon cumin 1/2 teaspoon salt ground black pepper to taste 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese 1 cup sour cream

Directions:

1.	Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Stir in the onion, bell pepper, carrot, and garlic, and cook 5 minutes, until tender. Mix in 1 can black beans and chicken broth.
2.	In a blender, puree remaining can of beans until smooth. Mix into the pot. Bring soup to a boil. Reduce heat to low. Mix in ham, cumin, salt, and pepper. Simmer 20 minutes. Garnish with Cheddar cheese and sour cream to serve.

So this goes down as number 2.

1. Pork with Roasted Grapes
2. Easy and Delicious Black Bean Soup

Cooking Queen

It's been so long since I've written anything on here! I've been sort of busy. Instead of talking about all the obvious things, I'll go straight to cooking. :) Since I'm now a wife and hopefully one day a mom I have been trying to master the art of cooking. I use to hate cooking maybe because I have no patience for something when its product is devoured and its left overs thrown away or put in a refrigerator. It's not at all like anything else I'd rather be doing when I have a finished product that lasts. On the other hand, I hate that I'm not a good cook! So my goal after the wedding, among a million other goals, was to learn and maybe actually grow to appreciate the process of cooking. Before the wedding I was a pro at cooking tacos. Ask anyone. And eggs, I make great scrambled eggs....Yes that's about it. It stops there. :)

Because I don't have the patience for it, I decided that I'm going to stick to short and sweet recipes, basically anything that doesn't take longer than 30 minutes to prepare and put in the oven. I want recipes that produce great dinners fast. I want to find and master thirty one recipes like this so that in the end, I would possibly be able to cook a different meal every day of the month. I know it sounds crazy but I have plenty of time to learn and I won't have to learn by myself. My husband (I feel so weird typing that) loves to cook, so together we are working on it.

Last Sunday, Jason and I decided to pick a random recipe and cook it. Jason chose a Pork Tenderloin and Roasted Grapes recipe from my Good Housekeeping book and it seemed simple enough. We set out to the grocery store and came back determined as ever. We decided to change a few things in the recipe and it still turned out amazing. I'm posting the recipe on here because I think you should try it. It's ridiculously easy and has so much flavor. As you may or may not know, I'm not a fan of leftovers. Slowly but surely I am changing my ways. The leftovers from this pork recipe were awesome! I give the recipe an A+ and the leftovers an A- (a minus because they are after all leftovers), so this means this is offically my number 1 recipe of the 31 fast meals I want to know how to make. Here it is:

1. Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Grapes

1 teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed - Jason and I just bought a bottle of whole fennel seeds and then smashed them on a cutting board with a meat tenderizer thing. :) Hey, don't judge. I'm sure there are easier ways but at that particular moment, it was all that we could come up with.

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

1 pork tenderloin (1 pound) - We used a centercut pork tenderloin.

2 teaspoons extravirgin olive oil

3 cups seedless red and green grapes (about 1 pound)

1/2 cup chicken broth

1. Preheat the oven to 475*F. (we did 450* because we have a gas stove.) In cup, with fork, stir fennel seeds, salt, and pepper. Use to rub all over pork.
2. In 12- inch skillet with oven safe handle (if skillet is not oven safe, wrap handle of skillet with double layer of foil.) heat oil over medium-high heat until very hot. Add pork and cook five minutes, turning to brown all side.
3. Add grapes and broth to skillet; heat to boiling. Cover and place in oven. Roast until meat thermometer inserted in center of roast reaches 150*F, 15 to 18 minutes (we did 17 min. and no thermometer). Internal temperature of meat will rise to 155*F upon standing. Transfer pork to warm platter.
4. Meanwhile, heat grape mixture to boiling over high heat; boil until liquid has thickened slightly, about 1 minute. Slice pork; serve with grapes and pan juices. Makes 4 main-dish servings.

Each serving: 245 calories.

I hope you try it and enjoy it as much as we did!

Where Do I Start?

Let me just say we (Jason and I) have been soooooo busy. I guess you can figure out why. If not, well we're getting married one month from tomorrow! I had a much funnier blog in mind but I'm too tired to type it all out. I'll give you a hint though it has to do with some of the funny things that have happened to us in the past few weeks with the stress of planning the wedding. Mostly me, though since the wedding has been my main project. :) We had two wonderful showers, one in New Orleans and one in New Hebron. They were both so much fun and have really pyched us up for the wedding. We'll have one more shower this weekend. I'm excited to hang out with Jason's friends and relax!! I hate that I am cutting this off short when I have so many things to say but I'll leave with some pictures of the shower at my Aunt Christine's, the one in New Hebron at the Women's Activity Club and finally a picture of Murphy and me trying to figure out where to start with all the gifts we recieved. Thank you so much to everyone who has been involved with our showers, we feel incredibly blessed. ;) We are very thankful for all of our friends and family who have been there for us in this preparation for marriage.

Orange and Leathery Skin

I have a confession.

I've been going to the tanning bed.

Yes I know its horrible for me but I, like every girl before her wedding, I want that beautiful glowing tan skin, unfortunately I can't get that when I'm sitting inside on the computer all day at work. A couple of months ago, after much deliberation I decided to go ahead and get fifteen sessions at the our local tanning bed. I went over to the tanning bed place, sat down at the check in desk and waited for someone to notice me -- no one was at the counter. A man walks in, sits behind the desk, and asks if I have an appointment. As I glance up to say no, I make eye contact with the tannest man I have ever seen in my entire life. I mean he was ORANGE. -

-The same orange I was when I accidentally put too much Bath and Body Works Self tanner on six years ago. I didn't read the instructions. I applied ten layers of self -tanner and went straight to bed. Overslept for school the next day, threw on my uniform, didn't realize it until I was sitting waiting for the bell, and I noticed my carrot colored skin legs peering out from my knee-length brown plaid skirt. Thank God I grabbed my sweatshirt it would have been a whole lot more obvious. It took three days and some major scrubbing to get my skin back to normal. -

- Back to the tanning bed - My first instinct is to gasp but thankfully I didn't do that. I want to tell him he could get skin cancer and that he is aging himself by years maybe decades. But I don't. Instead I gingerly sign my skin away to fifteen sessions.

He asks me how many minutes I'm going for and I tell him something that won't fry my skin (or make me orange and leathery like you). Really I have no idea how long. He gives my skin the once over. I mean he's really considering its ability to withstand the bulbs. He gauges nine minutes and I'm ushered over to bed 5. I always get bed 5 for some weird reason.

Once I'm in there I have accepted all that could happen to me, this is about the wedding of course. I climb into the tanning bed, pull it closed and my first thought is of a movie I saw - I'm not sure which one- where the girls get trapped in the tanning beds. I think it was final destination. What if I get locked in here? What if someone comes into room 5 and locks me up in here. For good measure I open the tanning bed ever two minutes, poke my head out and check to be sure I'm the only one in here.

My second thought is how many bodies have flipped around in this thing - I'm flipping around because I think that's what your supposed to do in there so you don't get tanned more on one side. What if they forgot to clean it and I'm sitting in the sweat of the person before me. What if I'm sitting in a bunch of people's sweat... What if I get sick? What if I get a staff infection. Are the safety glasses I have on really clean- because the container I took them out of had green water. Maybe that's the color of the cleaning agent....and man this is the longest nine minutes of my life.

And suddenly the lights flicker off and its safe for me to take my glasses off and jump out of it. I inspect my tan lines and of course I see no improvement. This means I'll be back fourteen more times. Maybe I'll end up like all the orange people that work here or the orange people from the reality show about tanning beds. And one day someone, a friend maybe, will say you uh....your skin kind of has a weird orange color and I'll come to my senses and my tanning days will be over. Hopefully it won't get that far.