A true confession

 A couple of weekends ago, a dear friend came to visit. We had a lovely evening of baking and cooking; the pizza was simply phenomenal.





While the milk tart was less than a true success in terms of consistency and appearance, it's flavor was true to my memory, and prior to baking, it looked perfect.

After much convincing on Emily's part, I agreed to again attempt the caramel rolls that flopped the first time. We followed the same procedure and recipe combination, as I did the first time. However, lo and behold, with her as my sous chef, this time they were the beautiful, delicious rolls. (Please note hilarious potato.)


To be perfectly honest though, the first time I made the rolls, they likely failed because I was doing too many things at once. When I posted the caramel roll failure, I could not play back the memory of their creation without some deleted scenes due to the multi-tasking. But, after a week or so of pondering the mishap, that was eaten without difficulty or complaint by my colleagues, I had stitched the scenes together enough to realize that had possibly made two fatal errors.

The first was I substituted the required cornstarch with flour. I had followed Betty Crocker's advice on the substitution and never thought twice about it.  This time I thought twice about it and purchased corn starch.  The other was that I may not have put brown sugar into the caramel sauce. Had I omitted the brown sugar, the results would have been likely similar to what my initial results were. I'm not certain I left out the brown sugar, but it is a real possibility.

So with these possible errors avoided, the results were indeed what we hoped for. HOORAY!

I've had some other wonderful culinary feats in the kitchen as of late, some of which, I'll show you. Here's to Moroccan stew over brown rice!

And to baked quinoa with spinach and cheese! This recipe can be found on the New York Times - it was my first experience with quinoa and I'm sold!



I was sitting in my living room the other night, satiated after a good meal, reading a book, when I heard "dit-dit-dit-dit--dit-dit-dit-dit-dit--dit-dit:" the pitter-patter of small feet on the ceiling panels of my kitchen. Yes, it is true, my amazing foods have lured a new found "friend." Sadly, he or she is a mouse that is living in my ceiling panels. I had one mouse over Christmas that was living up there, which I had to trap. I despise killing things, however, I cannot live with a mouse pooping in my silverware drawer. The traps have been set since then to prevent future mice from taking up residence. Currently, they have seen no action. I am hoping the mouse goes away on his/her own.

Oh, the adventures in my kitchen!!