I have recently attempted to broaden my culinary skills by taking up baking banana bread, then pizza & now I've just put in the oven a thing called blonde brownies. I ran across the recipe in a blog comment thread and because I had all the ingredients except one I got it in my mind that it would be worth trying. Kill me now.
Turns out I didn't have 3 ingredients. One I thought I had in the jumble of heaped up crap on the two shelves of the cabinet I keep everything in next to the stove. One I completely did not read when I read the recipe. And one I was absolutely sure I had but turns out I absolutely did not.
Well, actually, that's pretty good for me. Missing only 3 ingredients out of a recipe that calls for 8 in my world is a WIN.
What I knew I was missing for damned sure was chocolate chips. What I thought I had was pecans but instead I had walnuts. What I thought I had was vegetable oil but after digging through the seventyzillion bags, boxes, cans, bottles & whatever it turned out I had somewhere in the neighborhood of a tablespoon & a half of what turned out to be rancid. The ingredient I completely skipped over when I read the recipe was light brown sugar & I was pissed as hell this morning when I decided to finally take the plunge. But lo & behold I actually did have a bag of ORGANIC light brown sugar in a bag in the very back of the bottom shelf. Only it was like a brick that I couldn't even get out of the bag to beat with my sledgehammer. I asked Lila if she knew any way to soften hard light brown sugar & she gave me her stock answer, "why don't you look it up on the internet." She also said maybe I could put it in the microwave with a cup of water beside it and try that. I'm thinking, "Oh sure, THAT'S going to be on the internet. Maybe I could also go on the internet and search for how to find a needle in a haystack for christ sake. But I did it and sure enough there's only "365,000 pages for softening brown sugar." I'm not even going to go into how I did one of the methods (putting it in the microwave with a bowl of water beside it) and how it did not work at all like they said it would. Maybe my light brown sugar was seventyzillion times harder than most people's. All I will say is that during that tedious and somewhat successful process I scattered light brown sugar over most of the countertop to the left of the sink & at least a couple tablespoons on the floor after it first smashed & splattered me in the chest, belly & one time my face. And after completely cleaning the countertop & sweeping the floor I was good to go. Kill me now.
Let me just cut to the chase here because nobody wants to read about how many calamities a person of my limited skill set can have in the process of making one freaking batch of blonde brownies. Except for this one note; the brownie concoction I ended up with had the consistency of concrete approximately one minute before being hard enough to build a house on. I just don't think that's right. Lila checked it before I extracted it from the bowl using my now patented method of using 2 large spoons in a kind of sword battle that really cannot be described. I then smashed, pounded & damned near got it to fill most of the bottom of the pan. By this time I was simply too exhausted to get it right. And as I type this I've already had to increase the cooking time because the toothpick Lila told me to use to check doneness came out indicating undoneness. Sigh.
But that's not really why I'm writing this. There was a point during all this that just cracked me up & I'd already decided before most of this shit happened that I was going to write about it. It was a kind of who's on first thing.
Setup: I had asked Lila awhile back if I could use olive oil when all these recipes I was reading called for 'oil,' and she said she thought probably I should be using vegetable oil. So, ok, no problem. Only one extra trip to the store. So there came the point in my concrete mixing that I had to take a break to catch my breath & went to the bottom of the stairs to yell up at Lila and ask her if that olive oil ban included not using olive oil Pam to grease the pan. I was looking ahead just in case I recovered enough to go back to beating & pounding the dough into submission. Here is a reasonable reproduction of that conversation (and I really need to say that Lila had her earphones on because she was doing a RosettaStone German lesson...
Lila?
What?
You know how you said I should use vegetable oil because olive oil had a 'taste?'
Yeah
Well does that also include greasing the pan?
Yeah, I'd say so.
So I shouldn't use olive oil Pam?
I'd use Pam or butter.
I only have olive oil Pam.
Yeah, use Pam.
The Pam I have is olive oil Pam.
Yeah, Pam.
Lila, the Pam I have is olive oil Pam.
Oh, ok... use vegetable oil.
Turns out I didn't have 3 ingredients. One I thought I had in the jumble of heaped up crap on the two shelves of the cabinet I keep everything in next to the stove. One I completely did not read when I read the recipe. And one I was absolutely sure I had but turns out I absolutely did not.
Well, actually, that's pretty good for me. Missing only 3 ingredients out of a recipe that calls for 8 in my world is a WIN.
What I knew I was missing for damned sure was chocolate chips. What I thought I had was pecans but instead I had walnuts. What I thought I had was vegetable oil but after digging through the seventyzillion bags, boxes, cans, bottles & whatever it turned out I had somewhere in the neighborhood of a tablespoon & a half of what turned out to be rancid. The ingredient I completely skipped over when I read the recipe was light brown sugar & I was pissed as hell this morning when I decided to finally take the plunge. But lo & behold I actually did have a bag of ORGANIC light brown sugar in a bag in the very back of the bottom shelf. Only it was like a brick that I couldn't even get out of the bag to beat with my sledgehammer. I asked Lila if she knew any way to soften hard light brown sugar & she gave me her stock answer, "why don't you look it up on the internet." She also said maybe I could put it in the microwave with a cup of water beside it and try that. I'm thinking, "Oh sure, THAT'S going to be on the internet. Maybe I could also go on the internet and search for how to find a needle in a haystack for christ sake. But I did it and sure enough there's only "365,000 pages for softening brown sugar." I'm not even going to go into how I did one of the methods (putting it in the microwave with a bowl of water beside it) and how it did not work at all like they said it would. Maybe my light brown sugar was seventyzillion times harder than most people's. All I will say is that during that tedious and somewhat successful process I scattered light brown sugar over most of the countertop to the left of the sink & at least a couple tablespoons on the floor after it first smashed & splattered me in the chest, belly & one time my face. And after completely cleaning the countertop & sweeping the floor I was good to go. Kill me now.
Let me just cut to the chase here because nobody wants to read about how many calamities a person of my limited skill set can have in the process of making one freaking batch of blonde brownies. Except for this one note; the brownie concoction I ended up with had the consistency of concrete approximately one minute before being hard enough to build a house on. I just don't think that's right. Lila checked it before I extracted it from the bowl using my now patented method of using 2 large spoons in a kind of sword battle that really cannot be described. I then smashed, pounded & damned near got it to fill most of the bottom of the pan. By this time I was simply too exhausted to get it right. And as I type this I've already had to increase the cooking time because the toothpick Lila told me to use to check doneness came out indicating undoneness. Sigh.
But that's not really why I'm writing this. There was a point during all this that just cracked me up & I'd already decided before most of this shit happened that I was going to write about it. It was a kind of who's on first thing.
Setup: I had asked Lila awhile back if I could use olive oil when all these recipes I was reading called for 'oil,' and she said she thought probably I should be using vegetable oil. So, ok, no problem. Only one extra trip to the store. So there came the point in my concrete mixing that I had to take a break to catch my breath & went to the bottom of the stairs to yell up at Lila and ask her if that olive oil ban included not using olive oil Pam to grease the pan. I was looking ahead just in case I recovered enough to go back to beating & pounding the dough into submission. Here is a reasonable reproduction of that conversation (and I really need to say that Lila had her earphones on because she was doing a RosettaStone German lesson...
Lila?
What?
You know how you said I should use vegetable oil because olive oil had a 'taste?'
Yeah
Well does that also include greasing the pan?
Yeah, I'd say so.
So I shouldn't use olive oil Pam?
I'd use Pam or butter.
I only have olive oil Pam.
Yeah, use Pam.
The Pam I have is olive oil Pam.
Yeah, Pam.
Lila, the Pam I have is olive oil Pam.
Oh, ok... use vegetable oil.
posted by garyb50 at 1:16 PM
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