Thursday, March 19, 2015

Some People Have A Memory, I Have A Blog

Going through the list of old posts on this blog, I noticed that there is a weird counter intuitive pattern.

I have commented about how I put recipes on here because I want to be able to get to them.  We have a recipe box.  It is the size of a microwave.  I mean this is more than the card file that "mom used to have", this thing is a beast.

Now, mind you, it does serve two people with two very different cooking styles.  Every fall, for example, when it comes time to bake Fruitcakes, we dig down to the bottom of the box.  Finding the recipe, we place an order for the candied fruit, and wait.  When the fruit arrives, we make up these cakes.  They're nothing like anything you would find in a supermarket. 

At least in a larger supermarket.  Those things are cloyingly sweet and gooey. 

Homemade fruitcakes are rich and sweet but in a savory and almost spicy way.  That was the original recipe.  Not the gloppy stuff you find at a roadside tourist trap in the south.

Trust me it's a different world I'm talking about.

But that's the thing.  Since it is a box, the recipe you haven't used is always buried under the flotsam of baking.  My own recipes, pre-blog, were printed out and saved into a book.  Then, I started to "print" them to PDF files and saved them on my chip, a 128gb postage stamp sized memory chip.  I can move that between machines, and old copies of the files sit on servers now.  Since there are so many I threw up my hands and moved the best online.

So the blog serves as a mental scratchpad. 

Any task like that I tend to write up. 

Thinking that nobody really wants to read about my recipes, I would cast them off to the four winds like the milkweed seeds that I casually tossed over the fence that one day.

Shhh, don't tell anyone.

But you see, that's the weird thing.  The postings that I think are so much filler are the ones that the internet seems to like.  My recipe for Gold Medal Self-Rising Biscuits gets hit more than any other blog posting in the four-plus-years that I've been at this.

The stories about my McNab Superdog, Rack, get hit heavily too.  Apparently there really is an attraction for those feel good stories coupled with a picture of an admittedly good looking dog.

What was all this navel gazing about anyway, you ask? 

Simple.  I ran out of bagels.  I ran out of biscuits.  So I needed to make more over the weekend.  That caused a cascade of things.  Pizza Dough was made, risen, then half of it is rolled.  The remainder goes into Pretzel rolls

Serendipity is that act of finding something you wanted more than what you were looking for in the first place.  In my case, it's Challah Bread.

In March.  Sure, it's not traditional to have Challah in March, but Mom got it all the time and called it Jewish Egg Bread, and we loved it with peanut butter and jelly, or toasted with butter.

Buttah?

No, Mom's accent wasn't "Like Buttah", but she did have a funny way of saying things.  "Jew-eesh Aig Bread" was how that came out along with her Zs that came out "D'Zs".  I guess if you spoke only Italian until 7 you'd have an accent too, even if you did have an appreciation for proper Italian foods and sauce that you start on Saturday for Sunday's dinner.

Don't judge me.  I still say "Crick" for creek from time to time...

Even if I am not planning on churning butter for those biscuits, and settling for Cream Biscuits, I was going to do some serious cooking.  Since there was Char Siu Pork in the crock pot, there's extra ginger.  Can't waste Ginger since it is too good, so why not make Crystalline Ginger?  While that's simmering there's always time to make Lemon Curd since there are two Meyer Lemons in the fridge.

Recipes aside, those jokes that I feel a little guilty about posting always get hit heavily after the immediate posting.  They save me from Writer's Block, and I haven't had to do any during the week.  But if I ever get completely blocked, or have somewhere to go in an emergency in the morning, you'll see one during the week.

No, I wasn't going anywhere with this.  Other than the kitchen.  That's what happens when you need to do some cooking and your recipe file is online.  You start finding things you forgot you knew how to do.

Now, does anyone have any good ideas of what to do with Ginger Simple Syrup?  Pancakes perhaps?

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