My thoughts on powdered buttermilk

Hmm...where to begin...

Okay, Husband's favorite meal ever is "brinner." (Breakfast for dinner - he got the term from "Scrubs.") So, I try to make Brinner at least once every other week if not weekly. We love buttermilk pancakes, and I have a pretty awesome recipe for them (to be posted next week). I rarely use the entire jug of buttermilk, so I thought I would try the powdered form you see in the supermarket where the dry milk is. Exhibit A:

Well, it sounded easy enough. Add the buttermilk powder in with the dry ingredients in your recipe, and add the appropriate amount of water to the batter when the recipe calls for the buttermilk. I did just that, and I wound up with the runniest pancakes I've ever seen. They were super-thin, not airy and thick the way they usually are, and they also didn't quite taste the way they normally do. For the sake of truly testing the product, I will try again, but not in pancakes - maybe I'll make Mardi Glade/Texas Cake with it sometime soon and post the results of that. The jury's still out on this. I'll definitely be buying some buttermilk next week, though, for Brinner night...

Wow, sometimes I amaze myself

I like to think that I am a decent cook. I'm pretty sure I am. Today, though, I totally butchered something VERY simple. Carrots. I was just trying to cook some carrots for Baby to try, since we're trying more and more to get away from the jarred baby foods (though he is resisting a bit). He liked carrots a lot as a jarred food, but I know raw carrots are just too hard for a one-year-old, so I read the package of the package of organic baby carrots that I had bought, and I thought I read to just put them in the microwave, covered, for 5-7 minutes, until "desired doneness." I assumed that Baby would need them softer, so I grabbed a few carrots, covered them with some Press n Seal, and set the micro to 7 minutes. About 5 minutes later, something starts to smell, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Then, when the microwave dings to tell me it's done, I open the microwave door and am horrified by what I find. Crusty, black carrots. Yuck. I missed one very important portion of the directions - the carrots should be submerged in water.

I must also say, though, that I am sick (thank you Baby), so perhaps I can blame this little incident on my foggy brain. Yikes.

Last Week's New Recipes

Well, I didn't do a very good job sticking to the menu last week, in part because Husband wound up going away for work for several days, so I was a little lazy. I did, however, manage to make one new meal this week: beef stroganoff. I was not entirely thrilled with the recipe, though, so I think I may try another one next time I get around to beef stroganoff. I used to call beef stroganoff "noodles and mushrooms" when I was little, though my mother would fish out the mushrooms for me because I hated them. I skipped the mushrooms tonight, naturally, so maybe that was enough to change the taste of the sauce. I don't know. I also don't recall my mother adding wine to the sauce, like this recipe called for. Oh well, I'm not feeling so hot tonight anyway, so maybe that messed with my taste buds anyway.

My blender is no food processor

OK, so the honest truth: I made my breadcrumbs in a blender (gasp!). Oh, the horror!! It wasn't exactly horror, it was just difficult. You definitely couldn't do more than one piece of bread at a time, and even then, it was like I needed to tear up the bread for the blender to really chop up the bread well. I bought the bread that America's Test Kitchen (my kitchen gods) said to - Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse Soft White bread. It sure does smell good. The morale of the story? Don't send a blender to do a food processor's job. I guess I must start saving for a food processor, if I want to continue cooking the way I have been. Or maybe I'll get one with our tax return, who knows.

What's for dinner?

On tonight's menu, we've got chicken fingers and honey mustard dipping sauce. Yum! I'm just debating as to what I will do with the breadcrumb situation. See, I don't have a food processor, which is what's required to make things like breadcrumbs from scratch. And that's the tastiest way to have things like chicken fingers, crab cakes, and the like. I used to have a Mini Prep food processor, which worked fine for the most part, before I really got into cooking, but it's died. :( So, I either need to experiment and see if my blender will do the trick (I'm thinking it will more puree the bread than chop it), buy a food processor (which my husband would kill me for), or just use Panko (which is a distant last choice). Hmmm...we'll see, I guess.