A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Nannie's Banana Pudding for Gene

 

Kids Decorate Their Own Cake: Sydney's Butterfly Cake

One of my nieces' and nephew's favorite birthday cakes wasn't one that I decorated elaborately, but that I baked and put borders on, then let them decorate with candy pieces.  Sydney has always had a love affair with butterflies so for her 10th birthday I baked a simple butterfly-shaped cake (Wilton pan), piped purple borders and simple wing marking patterns, bought skittles, M & M's, gumballs, and sweet/sour candies and assigned each of them one quarter of the cake space. 

Look at those serious faces! They enjoyed it, as you can see in later pics, but they took the decorating seriously, carefully choosing their colors and gently placing the candies on the cake. 

Look at those adorable faces!

 I'm pretty sure Sydney LOVED her cake, aren't you? 

 

 

Sydney & Kaylee Birthday Party 2012: Pink Rice Krispy Cake with Buttercream Borders

In my family, as much as we love decorated cakes, we're not very big cake eaters.  At least, not me and my siblings. We grew up the children of a cake decorator so while all of our friends were jealous of the presence of cake and buttercream in our house all the time, we got sick of it!  We often laugh about what rotten kids we were to our Mom who would volunteer to make us any kind of outlandish birthday cakes we wanted but because we had so much cake around us every day we all requested things like my banana bread favorite, our brother Kenneth's angel food cake with no frosting, our dad and brother Carl's pie requests, and my sister Suzanne's Rice Krispy treat wish.  What whiners we were! "Pleeeeeease, Mom. Do not make us eat cake!" What kind of sick children were we?

While we were planning Sydney and Kaylee's birthday party last week Suzanne and I were talking about cake, or the lack of it being okay, and told stories to the nieces and nephew about our childhood brattiness and the fact that Suzanne's wedding cake just out of high school (1988) was made of Rice Krispy treats because she emphatically did not want cake at her wedding.  I see Rice Krispy cakes on Pinterest now all the time and people kind of verbally smack themselves in the head and comment "That's so cool! Why didn't I think of that?"  I'm proud that our Mom was 25 years ahead of her time, making my sister's whole wedding cake from Rice Krispy treats and everyone at the wedding loved it.  After that wedding Mom got tons of orders for rice krispy treat wedding cakes, birthday cakes, and anniversary cakes--she was a wedding cake pioneer in our little town in the Ozarks.

Smiling about all the stories we told, and already having planned to make Rice Krispy treats for the party, I decided to revive Mom's idea and go all the way with the girls' birthday and make it an unforgettable cake.

I'm pretty confidant the girls were pleased! 

Kaylee was really nuts about it!

Celebrating James' Birthday with Auntie Miranda's Grapefruit Cake

(Photo below: James demonstrating his "Dexter knife skills".)

 

After tweeting one night that grapefruit-flavored cake sounded "awful", as usually happens with my crazy family of foodies, the decision was made that we had to make it, bake it, and try it.  Auntie Miranda volunteered her time and James volunteered his birthday--win/win!

After reading through several recipes, Auntie used her own baking skills to create her own version based on elements from different recipes and her own experience.

Our prounouncement:   Delicious!  Just like orange, lemon, or lime, grapefruit is just a twist, so to speak, on the citrus genre.

Thanks, Auntie, for introducing us to this new dish and for sharing your recipe!

 

 

Note: Please excuse the phone pics--forgot my camera.

Halloween Food: Eyeball Rice Cereal Treats, Devil's Eye Eggs, Blood Clot Cranberry Dip, and I See You Meatballs

Bwahahahaha! Halloween--my very favorite holiday!  And a family favorite as well. No matter how old "our" kids get, this will always be our tradition: get together at Aunt Gonnie and Uncle Gene's house, eat great creepy food, dress up or dress down, take any little ones trick-or-treating the neighborhood and just hang out..

This year our creepy food was all eyeball in theme. We didn't really plan it that way but as the eyeballs piled up we just kept running with them it:  Gummy Eyeball Rice Cereal Treats,  Devil's Eye Eggs,  Blood Clot Cranberry Dip, I See You Meatballs, and just for fun, the un-eye-ball Mexican Villa Cheese Dip and Chips. There was also two crockpots full of chili and a few others goodies on the table like spinach dip, witch's pretzel/candy fingers, etc.    

 

 And now for recipes....

Timpano di Maccheroni: The "Mythic Pasta Dome"

  

This recipe was so much fun to make!  I'd seen it years ago, a classic Italian dish made famous by Stanley Tucci's movie "Big Night" , the story of two restauranteur brothers (Tucci and Tony Shalhoub, more recently starring as Adrian Monk) whose fortunates are on the wane.  In a last mad dash, they have one "Big Night" extravaganza to save the restaurant and this is one of the dishes they served.

I served it our Dexter Dinner group to celebrate the season six premiere of Dexter. We gathered for Timpano, Death in the Afternoon cocktails, and Dexter (Apple) cake. Everything, including Dexter, was delicious!  This recipe is definitely a showstopper and very flexible. I'll be serving it again.

Several years ago, I had planned on making it for my pasta-lovin' niece Jordan's birthday party as a truly celebratory entree but at the last minute I flinched, afraid I would leave the whole family in the lurch if I messed it up, and simply served baked mostacciola instead. While the dish does have several steps, almost all of them can be made ahead and the whole dish can easily be finished early on the day of serving and baked a bit before serving.  Actually, with at least a half hour cooling time it's a great dish to take to a potluck or to serve at an open house. I only made a 2qt bowl full and not only was it plenty of food for the four of us watching Dexter that night, there were leftovers, and during the dinner, the dish was still warm to the touch 45 minutes after cutting.

As much as I sort of dreaded and anticipated and was scared and excited all at the same time about preparing this dish, it really is much easier to make than it looks! I promise.

Dexter Dinner: Timpano, Dexter Cake, & Death in the Afternoon Cocktails

 

Dexter premiered season six last night and we were there! Last year, my cousin, James, came over to the house on Sunday nights so we could all watch Dexter together since we were all huge fans.  We adopted Auntie Miranda into the cult and have been a Dexter Dinner foursome ever since. We always meet at Gene's and my house and I make dinner, usually using them as guinea pigs to test new recipes.  It's a win-win for me and for them and the safety net is that if it's ever is a win-lose, there's always pizza that can be delivered.

 

Literally, for years I've been wanting to make Timpano, the classic "mythic dome pasta" (Mario Batali) dish made famous by the movie Big Night from 1996 where Stanley Tucci, as one of two restanteur brothers (Tony Shalhoub is the other) makes this dish for their "big night" make it or break it extravaganza.  My understanding is that Tucci himself came up with the idea to use this recipe in the movie since it's one that his family actually makes for special occasions in real life. In 1999, following the popularity of the food from the movie Tucci's mother and the chef who consulted on the film authored a cookbook "Cucina & Famiglia: Two Italian Families Share Their Stories, Recipes, and Traditions" by Joan Tropiano Tucci and Chef Gianni Scappin.

This week I'll be blogging my version of the Timpano recipe starting with a 15 hour slow cooker meat sauce for pasta, Auntie's fruited salad and vinaigrette, the apple cake with caramel apple filling, and Death in the Afternoon cocktail created by Ernest Hemingway using Absinthe which is now legal in the U.S. again.

Let's begin with the meat sauce...

Slow Cooker Meat Sauce for Pasta

Timpano the Mystic Pasta Dome

Death in the Afternoon Absinthe Cocktail

Apple Cake with Caramel Apple Filling

Nieces and Nephew Summer Slumber Party: Easy Cheesy Mac for a Crowd

 

Once a year or so we try to have a big slumber party with all three of our nieces and our nephew.  Two of them live here in town but the other two live about an hour away with their mom. Just because of work, school, life in general, we don't get to see them as much as we would like but we all know how it is, right? But we do try to have an overnighter when we can so that we can do an Aunt Gonnie and Uncle Gene and the kids thing where it's more about hanging out and catching up with what's going on in their lives.

One of the things I've learned over the years is to try to put aside the OCD "party" definition in my brain that tends to make all things including food and house cleaning into a spectacle so big that by the time my guests/friends/family arrive I'm so tired from over-working myself that I didn't use to enjoy the "together" part of getting together as much as I should have.  These guys are my nieces and nephews. They know I'm not a perfect housekeeper and they don't want a meticulously Martha Stewart set table or gourmet food so this family casserole my brothers and sisters and I were raised on is perfect fare for the occasion: quick and easy to make and yummy to eat. I even made it up the day before so that all I had to do was slip it in the oven when I went to pick up the kids at my brother's and then my sister's house.  We grew up with Mom (Karen) calling it "goulash" but it's not the traditional Hungarian dish of chunked meat with vegetables, it's an Americanized version from the 50's, I believe, that's made with hamburger, macaroni, and a tomato sauce.  Gene's mom had a recipe for it in her recipe box called "Chuckwagon Macaroni". The recipes follows the jump, along with lots of fun dorky pics.

Life as a Failed Easter Dessert

 

After hours, over half the day actually, of planning, mixing, kneading, chilling, boiling, dyeing, more rolling, more chilling, resting, mixing, rolling, filling, spreading, moving, shaping, pre-heating, cutting out decorations, egg washing, and sugar sprinkling, I slipped my multi-pound  humongo Easter masterpiece into the oven for it's hour-long bake and slumped down into my chair to watch TV and knit for my little Littles a bit while anticipating every sweet decadent pastry bite following Easter dinner.

And that's exactly how it would have ended in a movie, with a perfectly made up, but with just enough dusting of flour on one perfectly blushed cheekbone to let us know how HARD Julia Roberts worked in creating that amazing pastry using no experience and only the drive of personal willpower all the while squeezed into a niney minute framework as she pulled out the glorious, perfectly browned orgasmic dessert from her fake movie set oven.

Well kids...I ain't Julia Roberts. Nor am I Martha Stewart.  The reality in my life turned out to be that fifteen minutes after turning over my baby to that monster freak called my oven, I physically followed a slightly acrid and puzzling scent into my real working kitchen to see black smoking pouring out of the oven vent and opened the door to see my creation melting and dripping everywhere like the Wicked Witch of the West after a shower.

Pissed off? You betcha.  All that work and money for ingredients wasted, but the more than that, my hope was mocked. That's what hurt the most.  I was hugely disappointed but--evenutally--after releasing my annoyance with a good slam of the oven door, stomping out of the kitchen, and crying like a big baby in my bedroom for fifteen minutes,I could also see that as many things that do go well for me in the kitchen even when attempting dishes I've never prepared before, the Vegas odds are there's going to be a few failures along the way as well. When I had a chance to stop and think about it objectively, I realized that the bigger truth in this is that through this kitchen disaster I've learned more unforgettable baking lessons in one afternoon than I've learned in the last year from my successes.  That is the definition of experience. 

Birthday and Valentine's Day Rolled into One

 
What a great day today! 

We all know that Valentine's Day was this past Monday. Gene told me Monday that he had a gift for me but it would be late because of a delivering snafu. Hey, we're old and have been married since God was young, so no big.  We had a great dinner with our friends, Corbin and Jenn Monday night and I was a happy girl. I had all but forgotten him mentioning a gift. 

Then today, I had a wonderful French Onion Soup and Salad lunch with my cousin/friend Ann at Jimm's Steakhouse where she gave me my birthday present from a couple of weeks ago.  Not that she had forgotten or anything, it's just that we kept having to reschedule because of the snow storms. 

Not only did Ann give me a basket of my favorite scent of Bath & Body, White Citrus (heavenly), she gave me the funniest, cutest little gift ever, the inside joke being that I'm a Scrabble addict.  It's my favorite board game. So this was perfect!  I'm still smiling. Check this out and look carefully at the box.