What a day! I had some successes and some failures. Needless to say, I’m a little frustrated with the later, as it constitutes a waste of time and some money, but hey, you can’t be good at everything, and I’m not…certainly my greatest weakness is my “kitchen skills”. My mom is amazing in the kitchen and while she overcooks almost every veggie she puts on the table, and can’t figure out for the life of her how to cook a steak with the broiler (both are two of the few things I do excel at), she can cook. She can take a bit of this and smidge of that, a bucket of something else, and make a really yummy meal. She doesn’t bake a lot, but she does that well, too. She made all our bread growing up, as well as pretty much everything else, from scratch. I don’t think anyone will ever know why I didn’t glean wisdom from the years of living with her, in this area. Maybe I really was such a brat that I couldn’t be bothered to learn, maybe my mom was a doer not a teacher…I’m sure it’s a case of both, but regardless, I’m not a fan of kitchen time. I love good food. Good both in the healthy and wholesome sense, but also in the Yummy sense, and sometimes I stumble along and succeed, and others, not so much.
Today I canned a bunch more tomatoes. Some in simple sauce form and some are diced tomatoes. This is a very utilitarian straight forward kitchen skill, so one that went very smooth and I have several more jars of winter stash to show for it. 17 quarts and 5 pints to be exact.
One of the few dishes that I feel I possess bragging ability is my corn chowder. Mom did show me how to make that, and I got a groove over the years with how I make it, which is a variation of Mom’s…my secret ingredient is a bit of nutmeg. It really expands the flavor. I made some corn chowder tonight, to bring to a potluck at a friends house. 5 mintues before leaving, late already, I realized I never put in the potatoes!! Chowder without potatoes! Crap. Well, too late to even microwave and throw them in, so off we go with my very literal CORN chowder. The extremely gracious hostess, unsolicited by me beyond telling her of my faux pas, grabbed a couple potatoes, microwaved and added them before we served, so that little catastrophe was averted. The chowder was very yummy and several folks commented to that effect. Yay!
Not so successful was my attempt at “sun dried tomatoes” in the oven. I left them in too long and they are a bit crunchy, instead of that leathery feel they are supposed to have. I don’t know if they are lost or not, so I bagged them and will deal with them another day.
Pesto was next on the list. I bought all the ingredients necessary to turn that basil into some fabulous pesto. The directions I found online indicated you could use a blender if you lack a food processor. I tried, not really that effective, so I made one batch and will see about borrowing a food processor to do the rest. It’s really too thick for a blender. I was able to mix up the first batch with a lot of hassle, and I’m too tired to really taste it tonight, but the small sampling I did have seemed adequate.
Finally, for today, that sweater I’ve been working on. Not sure how I did it, but I misplaced my markers on 3 of the increases, at some point, so the increase lines are skewed. I need to pull out about 1/2 of the length, which is more than half of what I’ve knit so far, since it increases as you go. Very disappointing…and frustrating.
So today had some ups and downs, but overall I’m happy that I forged ahead, and tried, even if it didn’t all end up glowing in the end.
I have a yummy corn chowder recipe as well and sometimes I add a can of crab to it to make it corn and crab chowder. Yum!
Regarding the sun dried tomatoes, my suggestion is to put them in some olive oil and keep them in the fridge to be used sometime soon. Or you could do that and try to seal them like you do with your canned tomatoes.
BTW, why do they call them canned tomatoes when they are clearly in a jar?
~A