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I had been meaning to make some egg noodles and use the hamburger in the fridge to make some beef stroganoff. I hadn’t yet bothered to go to the store to replace the flour I used up cooking for Christmas Eve dinner, so I decided to improvise before the beef went bad. Here is what I came up with:
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My parents had a fun gift for each of the kids this year, K-Tec blenders. These are the same basic blenders that you can see doing crazy things as the Blend-Tec Blender on Will It Blend? On this site they blend up things like 50 glass marbles, a video camera, glow sticks, etc. It is fun to watch them go at it, but I wouldn’t do it with mine.

I’ve learned over the years that you wind up not spending much more to just get a good product at first. Unfortunately, that usually cost some money. In this case, a Champ HP3 is around $330. I figure that I’ve spent around $150 for the various blenders than never really worked over the years. What I’ve been using lately is an immersion blender, because I could force it into the thick smoothies. Regular blenders just peel out. Well, the peel out is over.

What will this blender do? Well, I was out of flour and needed to thicken a soup. So I dumped in a half cup of uncooked rice and blended it into a rice flour. I put in a cup of milk, a little sugar, and two cups of frozen strawberries. Hit cycle 4 and then scoop out the ice cream. (Really an ice milk.) Smoothies are completely blended in under 40 second, silky smooth, even from frozen fruits.

In short, this blender ROCKS. I’m sure you will hear more about it as I play in the kitchen.

It is unfortunate that fruit cake has gotten a bad name. It is the brick hard gift that keeps re-gifting. The typical insults about fruit cake are true with most store bought fruit cake. I love my mom’s fruitcake. She purchases her own fruit, with exception of the orange peel that she candies herself.

Serves: 32
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My sister brought this dish to dinner at my parents yesterday and it was a hit. Very quick and simple to fix, but yummy.
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I haven’t had this in quite a few years. It was a staple when we were growing up. I don’t think I would be exaggerating to say I’ve probably had over a hundred servings. I might have to make a batch for old time sake.

Serves: 10
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This is probably the most basic recipe I will ever post. Standard Egg Noodles. However, these are so easy to make and quicker than boiling store bought noodles. It takes around 10 minutes to make the pasta dough and 1-3 minutes to cook them. For store bought noodles, you are lucky to finish in 15 minutes, if you can get the water boiling in 5 minutes.
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I love these. They are like little pecan pies, with a sweet glaze. Kind of addicting, but what good desserts aren’t?

Serves: 32 (if you cut them into 32 bars and only eat 1… I’ll call it serves 16.)
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This is the first of what I expect to be many experiments. I haven’t fleshed this out to an exact recipe and will probably modify it as I repeat the same dish.

I wanted to make some type of baked Penne dish today. I started the pasta cooking a little earlier than I should, but they hydrated back up while baking. I decided to go with a white sauce and use mushrooms and broccoli. So here we go:
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The first step of fixing any problem is to admit it. I have a cooking problem. Me cooking, itself isn’t a problem. I have a problem following recipes. This is something I learned from my Mom. To make a dish, you need to look at a half dozen recipes on the subject, then go in the kitchen and cook.

My sister, Ruth, is the exact opposite. She prefers the nice guide of a recipe. Some of Mom’s recipes that I will post on this site were translated by Ruth from watching Mom make them. I’ve often told my Mom that she needs to keep a kitchen lab book. There are times that a dish is just superb. We enjoy it, because we know there is no chance of recreating it. Even Mom didn’t know exactly what she did.

I am going to attempt to keep track of my successful experiments on this site. It will be a lab notebook for all to see and an easy place that I can reference again when I want to make the same type of dish.  These experiments won’t be as detailed as a recipe.  Just a log of what I did to make the dish.

As a kid, we made sugar cookies with cookie cutters. These are the plastic type of cookie cutter that include both the outside shape and other details. For example, a snowman with facial features, a scarf, etc. Once they are baked, we used food coloring to paint on the cookies.

Years have gone by since we last did this. Our family decided to paint cookies with the kids, this year. Here is the sugar cookie recipe that we have use, originally from the old red family cookbook.
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