Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

“Smoke quickly filled the room” is a dramatic yet accurate way to begin this story. I was wandering through our yard, checking for groundhog damage and picking the last of my grapes. This sounds much more interesting than it really was, I have but one concord grape vine and this year at the summer solstice, the animals surrounding my house gathered round and feasted upon everything I had planted this spring. When the feasting was done, I was left with a few grapes and strawberry stumps, my lilies, tomatoes, beans and roses were trashed. I threw some netting over the grape vine to keep the deer from getting all of the grapes and forgot about them. Last weekend I realized there were quite a few grapes and called the children round to harvest, my teenage boy had no interest so my daughter and I set forth to fill our ziploc bag.

I was about to update my readers (though Google analytics tells me that I have no readers) about a decent cake I made. A few posts back, I discussed my ineptitude for baking but I am capable of occasionally making a cake that doesn’t look like it fell from a great height onto the pavement. Occasionally.

Every year, I ask my beloved children what cake they would like for their birthdays. No matter how ridiculous, I find a way to make this cake. As they have matured, I thankfully no longer have to figure out how to make a race car or a bunny shaped cake.

Bunny is a little scary, car doesn’t look like it would pass inspection….

This year, my daughter’s request was to have a chocolate cake with coconut-vanilla frosting. I used my trusted Ina Garten recipe for Beatty’s cake. I am not sure if this is pronounced Betty as in Crocker or Beady as in Richard Gere’s eyes or Beatty as in Shirley Maclaine’s brother. This recipe borders on too many ingredients and steps, hence the mind wandering about the pronunciation.

Beady, Betty, Beatty?

Anyway, I made jam, which as I have learned is the lazy person’s jelly. I only had enough precious grapes for serving size of jam. I found a recipe that involved as few ingredients and steps as possible since my attention span is inversely proportional to both ingredients and steps.

It tasted delicious, my husband claimed it gave him a stomach ache but the rest of us enjoyed jam with dinner and breakfast the next morning. I look forward to making enough jam for 6 people next year, provided I can stop the wild rumpus from eating all of my bounty on the solstice.

Back to the room filling with smoke. I intended to “brown” some ground beef. I find that I usually don’t pre-heat my pan enough and end up boiling my meat. Mmm, boiled meat. Eat up kids! My pan was hot. Too hot. I knew as soon as I added my meat that it was not only “browning” but burning. I turned down the heat and opened a door to allow the cool, 90 degree breeze to carry away the smoke before the alarms went off. In my haste to move around the “browning” meat, I sent a few raw pieces airborne and onto the backsplash. Not quite a fail but ironic as I was about to write about my cake and jam conquest. Hubris.

Banana bread is my nemesis

This brings me to my next baking fail, the pile of banana bread. I had to use spell check to figure out how to spell banana, I still think it should have 3 n’s but google tells me it does not. Banana bread should be vaguely bread-like, maybe not sandwich bread-like but some sort of slice-able bread. As mentioned in other posts , https://learningnewtricks.com/index.php/2019/05/20/i-am-not-a-baker/

directions are usually not my thing.

I was making a banana bread and tried to make it “healthier” by omitting a bit of sugar and substituting roughly half of the “evil gluten flour” with “lamb of god almond flour.” Some say it was too humid that day, some say I was in a rush to pick up one or the other kid and took the sad banana pile out of the oven too early, others say my kitchen is haunted.

I present to you, my banana pile! Eat up kids! Sometimes I can say it still tasted good but in this case, it tasted like baking soda.

My garden is now facing the first frost, even though my veggies were a huge failure this year and my one serving of jam was a feeble showing, my flowers were beautiful!