Overheard...

via Wikimedia Commons

The kids are fighting over cleaning the toy room, and just now I heard the following:

Mary Grace:  This is a free country!

Claire:  No, it's not!

*sigh*  Happy Fourth of July.

Pinvestigating Impossible Custard Pie

I must really, really love Kim.


She asked, after my last foray into the Pinterlands, if I would test the Impossible Coconut Custard Pie that has been repinned all over the place.

Image via a gratefulprayerthankfulheart.blogspot.com, as noted in the watermark

And I just happened to have all of the ingredients handy, so I thought, "Why not?"

Now, with real Ogre!

Famous last words.


We need to have a brief discussion about sweetened condensed milk.  I have become somewhat of a connoisseur of sweetened condensed milk, thanks to a pin (what else?) about making your own coffee creamer.  It's stupidly easy - just equal parts sweetened condensed milk and milk, and a little bit of vanilla extract.  I'm absolutely addicted to it, and I can't drink the Fat Free French Vanilla Coffeemate stuff that I used to be addicted to anymore because it tastes like chemicals.


A pin that really worked!  I know! 


BJ doesn't love my creamer and continues to insist that I buy him the Coffeemate (back before they made liquid creamers, my mom used to get Coffeemate and its 1980s counterpart Cremora mixed up in her mind.  She called every powdered non-dairy creamer "Creammate."  No wonder she didn't drink coffee until she was well into her 50s!).  


Be that as it may, I have learned that there is no substitute for Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk.  I am totally willing to try the generic version of any food, but in the case of sweetened condensed milk I have tried the generic brands from Walmart (Great Value), Kroger, Aldi, and Marsh, and all of the generics taste gritty.  The Eagle Brand does not.  It is well worth the extra money to not have gritty coffee.


But I digress.  And even Eagle Brand couldn't save this pie.


The recipe wanted you to mix three eggs, a 14 ounce can of (Eagle Brand, for the love of God) sweetened condensed milk, 1-1/2 cups water, 1/3 cup Bisquick (I used the low fat version, but I doubt that the full fat kind would have made it any better), 1/4 cup of softened butter (I use generic butter), and 1-1/2 tsp vanilla extract in a blender.  


I have no idea where my blender is.  I know that normal people don't lose small appliances, but that's exactly what happened.  I had a blender once, and now I don't.  My kitchen is pretty small, so I don't think it's hiding somewhere.  I think it just moved out or something.  Maybe it was raptured.  I have no idea.  The point is that I assembled the ingredients in my Kitchenaid Stand Mixer.  I'm a rebel like that.

At this point, I started to get a little nervous about this recipe, and I triple checked that it was really 1-1/2 cups of water.  That seemed like a lot.  And it looked disgusting.  But I had measured everything correctly, so I beat it for 3 minutes, as instructed.


Meanwhile I greased the pie plate.  Channeling my inner Paula Dean, I used real butter.

You can tell I'm fancy because I still haven't put away the crystal creamer and sugar from the weekend, and because I use real butter.


Three minutes elapsed, and the filling was looking slightly less vomitous:

Action Shot!

I poured it into the pan and let it sit for 5 minutes, as instructed.

It looked sort of... otherworldly...

...like the surface of the moon, after being pummeled by meteors or something.

When I start thinking too deeply about things, it's a good sign that my blood sugar is dropping.  Good thing I made this excellent skillet lasagna (from Pinterest, of course!) for dinner:

We need to talk about this recipe, though...  Meet me at the bottom of the post.

While the pie sat and made its impossible crust out of Bisquick, I nibbled on my Weeknight Lasagna Toss and tried to clean all the burnt cinnamon and sugar off of my waffle iron.  True story.


The timer went off, so I sprinkled coconut liberally on top of the pie...

...and I put it in the oven.  I put a sheet pan under it though, because I don't trust pies.  I have chiseled enough burnt sugar off of the bottom of my oven to know better.


35 minutes later, it was still liquid in the middle, so I set the timer for 5 more minutes.  That time I stuck a fork in it, and it was done.  

I let it cool while I put Jack to bed, and came back out to find that BJ had given the girls each a piece, and they hated it.  He ate theirs, though, and said it was "delicious."  (He also likes to drink chemical coffee every morning, though, and I suspect that half the time he tells me he likes something, he's just being polite.)

I guess if I had never had real custard, or if the word custard wasn't in the name of this pie, it would have been fine.  The flavor was fine.  The texture, though, was somewhere in between sweetened condensed scrambled eggs and cottage cheese.  But warm cottage cheese.  Small curd.  And sweet cottage cheese instead of salty.  (Do I know how to sell it or what?)  That's not what custard feels like.


I have a feeling that it would be greatly improved by the addition of some Reddi Whip.  It would also probably be better cold.  And it needs a name change.  Coconut cream pie would have been more accurate, except for the fact that that's already a thing that is also nothing like this pie.  There is nothing custard about this custard.  We went out for dinner at a French restaurant on Friday night, and we had real creme brulee (this is America, and I refuse to use accent marks, especially those fussy backwards ones).  Real custard lingers heavily on your tongue like a smooth, creamy bite of heaven.  If that experience hadn't been so fresh in my mind, I might have liked this.  But since I had such a recent custard experience, I knew that this just didn't measure up.


The "magic" crust sort of happened - there was a slightly thicker crust-like formation at the bottom.  It was very soggy, though.  It's possible that it was still slightly underbaked, although the filling was completely set in the middle and the soggy crust persisted all the way to the edges.  If I wanted to perfect this recipe, I might try it again with a longer bake time, but I can think of lots of things to do with sweetened condensed milk (Eagle Brand, if you know what's good for you) that are much, much better than this.


Impossible Coconut Custard Pie gets a C-.  Desserts automatically lose a letter grade when they don't include chocolate.  It lost another full letter grade for the texture, and a half for being inaccurately named.  Weeknight lasagna toss gets a solid B, mainly losing points because I had to change so much to make it yummy (see below).  Sweetened condensed milk coffee creamer gets a solid A.  Would get an A+ if the sweetened condensed milk was easier to get out of the damn can.




* Regarding the Weeknight Lasagna Toss - I used bow tie pasta (a whole box) instead of the lasagna noodles because it's similar in thickness but easier for my kids to deal with.  I had to add approximately two cups of water beyond what the recipe called for during the cooking time (15 minutes) before the noodles were done.  Also, I added a metric ton, give or take, of garlic salt and Italian seasoning, because the original recipe was meh and needed to be kicked up a notch.  Once the pasta was cooked, I added 4 ounces of Neufchatel cheese, which is hard to spell, to give it a little creaminess.  I used shredded "Mexican style" cheese (how can you tell it's Mexican, Grandpa Bob?  It has an accent!) instead of mozzarella, because in spite of the fact that I remember grabbing it off of the shelf at the store yesterday, it has disappeared from my house.  So basically this recipe was nothing like the one on Pinterest, which is probably why it was awesome.

What should I Pinvestigate next?  Leave a comment...

Good Grief, Pinterest - Cinnamon Roll Waffles

After Kim's encouragement, I decided to start documenting the recipes and whatnot that I try from Pinterest, and sharing them with you.

Boy was the first one a doozy!

You've all seen this one, right?

What could be easier?  Pop the cinnamon rolls onto the waffle iron.  You don't have to heat up the oven when it's 99 degrees outside at 8 am!  Genius!

The first thing that concerned me was that my waffle iron only has one setting - on.  There is no low setting.  I've cooked long enough to know that something as thick as a cinnamon roll is going to burn on the outside before it cooks on the inside if it's cooked at high temperatures.  The second thing that concerned me was all the loose cinnamon sugar coming off of my cinnamon rolls.

But we soldiered on.  We liberated the cinnamon rolls from their can:

Freedom!

We heated up the waffle iron, which was a wedding gift.  We tried to remember whether the ready light being on meant it was ready, or if it was ready when the ready light went off.  We decided to go with off.

It's practically an antique.

Once the light went off, we applied the cinnamon rolls to the hot waffle iron.  The kids started whining in earnest as soon as they smelled the (burning??) cinnamon that they were hungry.  We persevered.

 Then we saw this, and we started to get really nervous:
  

Ummmm....

I stood right next to the damn waffle iron the entire time, and there was never any indication that burning was happening.  Waffles are done when the steam stops coming out, right?  Well, the steam never stopped with these.  In fact, it was still steaming when I opened it up and saw this.

Yum.

Fail.

Ok, Rome wasn't built in a day.  We still have half a can of cinnamon rolls!  Let's do this!  Right?

At this point Mary Grace piped up, "Mommy, just make them the way you're s'posed to!  In the OVEN!"  

"But it's an EXPERIMENT!" I replied.

Experiments often smell bad.

 Opening it up earlier revealed doughy nastiness.

...and peeling the tops off of the other side of the waffle iron revealed that they were every bit as burnt as the first set had been.

  

My project for the rest of the day is cleaning the burnt sugar crud out of my waffle iron. 

And after half an hour of screwing around, the kids had this for breakfast:

Jack likes his with cinnamon and sugar (syrup is too messy for toddlers) so it was sort of the same thing.  Kind of.  Claire had Nutella and MG, the purist, had syrup.

Waffle iron cinnamon rolls get an F.  A big fat burnt F.

Staying In My Bubble

I live in a bubble.

Photo by zzub nik via Flickr

I am surrounded by people who are educated, who avoid drama, who have good manners, and who are good citizens.  We don't necessarily agree on every issue, but if we talk about something we don't agree on, we can do so with respect for each other.  If these people have kids, they're awesome parents.  If they have careers, they're awesome at those.  Some of them are awesome at both.  Most of them are passionate about whatever it is they do - from anthropology to zoology.  I have a bunch of friends who are teachers and professors, so we talk a lot about ideas and the future.  Lots of our friends are leaders in their company or their industry.  They're just interesting people.

In other words, I have some seriously kick-ass friends and family, y'all.

I used to know quite a few drama-magnets, and I just don't talk to them anymore.  I'm not saying that I dump friends if they go through something tough.  We all have stuff happen that is outside of our control.  I am talking about the sort of people who seek out drama, and when there isn't any to be found they create it - I don't stick around people like that.  Toxic people have no place in my life.

And because I work for BJ, and we don't have co-workers, we don't have much work drama.  Sure, sometimes stuff happens that is frustrating, but we deal with it because it's mostly just us.  We have business partners, customers, vendors, subcontractors, etc. and we deal with them, but they're all professionals.  Honestly, if someone at work cheeses me off, I find a way to not have to deal with them anymore - either by finding another vendor or dealing with someone else at their company.  I just don't have to deal with difficult people at work very often (and we work with the federal government, so that's pretty impressive).


I figure my time is limited and I'm not going to waste it on people who drive me nuts.

I don't watch the news (I read the news - it's different that way), and I try to avoid stories that will upset me (if some kid gets beaten and abused and kidnapped and I hear about it or read about it, it's only going to upset me.  The chances of me finding that kid are a zillion to one, so I'm not going to pay attention to it.  This policy works as well as Zoloft for managing my anxiety).  I still know what's going on in the world, but those "if it bleeds it leads" human interest type stories?  Avoid.

So.  When it happens that I am forced to deal with someone who IS a drama magnet, or who enjoys being difficult, or who likes disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, or who is just mean or evil, it's always shocking.  I guess that shows that I've done an amazing job of insulating myself.

I could go into detail about the people who keep trying to pop my bubble (in fact, I did, for about 7 paragraphs, before I deleted it just now), but I won't.  I'm just not going to put that much energy into their negativity.  I'm not going to give them that kind of power over me.

Photo by Lagged2Death via Flickr

The thing I have to remember, is to not let the negative people drag me out of my bubble.  I can't let them make me negative, too.  Maybe that would be a useful visualization, when I'm getting angry at the bubble-poppers of the world, to imagine that I am in a bubble rising above it all...  Just floating clear of the drama and the hate and the negativity into the beautiful clear blue sky.

Photo by StellaJo1976 via Flickr

Just float.

House Hole Fixed!