Not Frantic Yet

Normally nothing would make me happier than a large plate full of tater tots, but I had heard rumors that Whole Foods had waffle fries. Apparently, that would be the Whole Foods in Long Island only, unless there’s hope for the Bowery location. I had to have instant something, though, so I went for tater tots instead. On day 1 of Christmas Crafting for the Family they were a bit of a let down, but they weren’t supposed to be my prime focus. My grandmother’s lap quilt was:

I didn’t have the time to spare to move the pieced bits off of my bed, so yes . . . I slept on my grandmother’s quilt. Fortunately, this is not one of the evenings I slept on a sewing needle. Or a crochet hook. Or scissors. Or knitting needles. Clearly, I need to stop crafting in bed.

Christmas Miracle?

I firmly believe in bookending my years with a nice healthy bout of delusion. This delusion usually tends to manifest in list form. While January’s resolution list tends to contain one or two things I accomplish (I learned to crochet this year. Maybe next year I’ll actually learn how to read a crochet pattern.), my holiday present to-make list tends to require a Christmas miracle for completion or, at the very least, understandable Disneyland employees who let me enter the park with my needles on Christmas Eve so I can finish my mother’s cardigan in front of her. The fact that I was much further ahead this time last year has me a shade concerned. Granted, last year this time three-quarters of my craft corner and half of my apartment wasn’t in boxes in anticipation of a move that still hasn’t happened. I know that there will be problems ahead, however, as I don’t even know what everyone’s getting yet . . .

Hard Crack

Apparently I shower long enough for several dollars worth of sugar, corn syrup and cornstarch to go from “soft boil” to “hard crack.” After staring at my newly acquired candy thermometer, patiently waiting for the temperature to rise to 270 degrees, I decided I would be there for a while and really ought to shower because I decided “pulling taffy” would be a miserable excuse for being late to work yet again. It seems that’s all it took for the temperature to get a move on it, and by the time I stepped back out of the shower it had risen over 100 degrees, making my sugary mass no good for anything other than hard candy. Had I set it up accordingly. I didn’t, because I wanted to pretend as if those 30 degrees really made no difference, so I popped it into aluminum foil, still suffering from the delightful fantasy that I could turn sugar that should be soft crack but wasn’t into anything pliable. I do now accept the fact that I have been saddled with a rather tasty door stop.

Lump of coal cookies.

Wodgy

When Nigella used the word “wodgy” to describe her chocolate gingerbread in Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, I knew instantaneously what she meant. Isa’s Fudgy Wudgy Blueberry Brownies in Veganomicon are definitely wodgy. Any good chocolate dessert is wodgy, really. (Except that all good brownies are required to be a little crispy in places they’re not wodgy, too. I know many disagree, but I love edges.)

The thing of it is, making something both gluten-free and vegan at the same time is definitely a trial and error situation. Not to mention that, from the moment you read a list of recipe ingredients on a page, it’s easy to formulate an idea in your head as to what you think the recipe should taste like. I should have bore in mind the truth that chocolate is a flavor bully, not unlike green peppers and onion. Strong things like mint and raspberry (and I suppose I should say orange even though my brain does not really register orange as a food, outside of those mostly orange-free jellied orange slices my daughter-craving neighbor used to feed me as I cleaned her fish tank and learned to sew Cabbage Patch Kid clothing and watched every Hayley Mills movie known to mankind) tend to hold their own. Ginger normally does, too, but I will be the first to admit that I expected the classic gingerbread spices to resonate a little more boldly.

Unlike the slight fall suffered by my mini loaves, the spices are more of a matter of taste than that of veganization/de-glutening, so those will be simple to adjust. I think I’ll probably cut back on the Earth Balance a touch in the final version to balance out the fat, and hopefully minimize sinkage. You can’t really see it once the loaves are glazed, but it just seems as if I should fix it anyway to be thorough. I’m reluctant to cut back too much on the EB, though, because I want to make sure they stay wodgy. So, bearing my caveats in mind, this is the current recipe.

Sorry, Mom

I am such a bad daughter. Through the years I have been claiming “My mother can’t cook.” But every time I look at the New Farm Mac recipe (and on the one other occassion that I have dared to make it), I’ve always thought it was missing something — onions. Then I remembered, my mother used to make macaroni and cheese from scratch but, ungrateful family that we were, we clamored for Kraft so my mother’s one recipe didn’t come out very often. The thing of it is, I have this idea that I really liked the homemade mac and cheese when I was a kid. I also have it in the back of my head that it was my father who liked the Kraft stuff the best, although we all universally despised Velveeta’s mac and cheese.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it New Farm mac, but New Farm Little Dreams seemed to be pushing the beauty of this recipe just a tad. I love that we GF people get shapes now. I definitely ate a pentagram or two last night. And a bunny. Is that vegan?