Fudge

Fine.  I will admit it.  I used to sneak fudge out of the pan after my Mom had cooled it and hide under my bed to savor in its delicious fudginess.   And no, this wasn’t last year!  I was so little that I don’t know how old I was.  I just remember it was worth hiding and later itching and scratching from the allergic reaction.

But that was then and I don’t remember what it tasted like.  All I have is now.  Fudge tastes like a chocolate marshmallow dream; a dream because it’s so creamy and melts in your mouth so quickly that you have to wonder if you imagined it happening at all.  The only way to find out is to eat another piece and start the process all over again and repeat until you are left with an empty tin.

Now sure this is a problem because of all the calories, but for me it's a problem because store bought chocolate including baking chocolate has soy in it.  I've read different accounts regarding the degree that people are allergic to soy lecithin.  Some experts say that people are only allergic to soy protein and not the oil or lecithin; however, other experts disagree.  I'm not an expert and I'm not going to pretend to have the answer, so I just have to be careful and not over do it. 

As with my first admission, I'm still sneaking fudge.  I'm just not hiding under the bed to eat it!

Mom's Pecan Pie

What completes the perfect Thanksgiving dinner better than pecan pie?  As soon as I wrote what was meant as a rhetorical question, I answered it anyway – pumpkin pie, cherry pie, apple pie, as long as it’s pie!  But I’ve legitimately (meaning before my change of allergies) had those pies before.  Before the big change, pecan pie had way too many eggs in it for me to splurge. I actually don’t remember the last time I had tasted it.  I know there are many recipes out there, but this post is specifically dedicated to my Mom’s Pecan Pie, which was also her mom’s pecan pie.

You can imagine that I was dying to eat dessert throughout the entire dinner.  I was careful not to overindulge on the turkey and stuffing so that I could overindulge on the pie.  It was definitely worth the wait: nutty brown sugary sweetness, the taste of home, a nostalgia that I couldn’t quite place.  I’m sure I had stolen a sliver of this tempting dessert in the past, but that’s not what I was remembering.

Have you ever experienced this before? Tasted something that transported you to another time, another place, but you just couldn’t recall where or when? Luckily after devouring two pieces of pie, I dropped into a welcome turkey (pie?) coma and the burning question didn’t drive completely crazy.

It wasn’t until the next day during a pre Black Friday shopping snack, consisting of, you guessed it, another piece of pecan pie that I realized or maybe my taste buds realized where I had tasted such yumminess before. It wasn’t from the pseudo pecan pies we tried making without the eggs – still delicious, but without the fluffiness, more like bar cookies or candy than pie.  Pecan pie actually reminds me of a dessert we used to eat a lot when I was growing up, a dessert that only has pecans and sugar in common with the pie.  What is this dessert? Pineapple Dump Cake!

There is no pineapple in pecan pie, but the combination of the pecans and the brown sugar reminded me of my favorite part of the cake; that deep sugary sweetness.  The dump cake is made with layers: pineapple, brown sugar, cake mix, butter, coconut, pecans.  This got me wondering if coconut would be a good addition to the pie.

Of course, I’m not the first person to thing of this!  Mom informed me that her Aunt Mae does that with the recipe.  I love Mom’s Pecan Pie, but I think I want to try Aunt Mae’s Pecan Pie too.  And why not?

Celebrate with Cake

Have you ever noticed that just about every milestone we come to we celebrate with cake?  Weddings, birthdays, and even other holidays all marked with the surgery confection we call cake.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining!  I’ll make up a milestone if it means there will be cake.  Luckily, I don’t have to as I have a lot to celebrate!

Wedding Cake   

My husband and I just celebrated our first anniversary.  You know what that means? We got to eat the cake top!  (Oh yeah, and we love each other.)  That cake top dominated our freezer for an entire year, but more than that it dominated our thoughts and the desire for that yummy butter cream frosting on our taste buds.  OK, so it didn’t dominate our entire lives or anything that dramatic, but when we reached our first year milestone we were ready to celebrate – with cake.

For those of you who have frozen your cake tops, you probably now that you are supposed to wrap the cake.  I didn’t know this.  Give me a break – I’ve never been married before!  So…the cake sat in a box free to breathe in all the other freezer foods.  You can image what our cake top tasted like – freezer burned!  The frosting is my favorite part of cake, so you know it had to be pretty bad when I scraped it off and refused to eat it.

The cake itself even a year after its creation was still as divine as it was on our wedding day – a taste of heaven and a reminder of all the happy moments from our special day.  White wedding cake – firm yet spongy, sweet yet not overpowering – with a whipped raspberry filling that complimented that cake perfectly. 

Birthday Cake 

My mom just celebrated a very big birthday.  The world has been lucky to have her for 60 years!  We obviously needed a special cake to celebrate this very special lady, a special bakery bought German Chocolate cake.  German Chocolate is her favorite and I can see why.  I’m not usually a fan of chocolate cake, but German Chocolate seems to be sweeter than other chocolate and the cake itself seems to be lighter. But it isn’t the cake that makes this dessert so special, it’s the icing: chunky coconut blended with milk, sugar, and pecans. One taste made me completely understand the phrase “icing on the cake” and instantly reaffirmed my belief that the frosting really is the best part of cake.

This cake was so delicious, that it not only excited my sense of taste but my curiosity as well.  I couldn’t just leave it at “oh, that tastes good.”  That’s not really my style.  No, I decided to do a bit of research on German Chocolate cake and discovered that the chocolate isn’t from Germany as I expected!  Instead, it’s named after a person with the last name German who was hired by Baker’s chocolate to develop a sweet chocolate in the 1852, hence the name German Chocolate.  The cake wasn’t made popular until the 1950’s when recipes started appearing in magazines and newspapers.  For more information, check Wikipedia.

Thank you, Mom, for letting us share in your birthday celebration and thank you for sharing your favorite cake with us! My favorite is still the white cake with butter cream frosting, but German Chocolate is a close second.

Celebrate with Cake

I tasted cake before I discovered that I’m not allergic to milk and eggs – a splurge here and there. Again, what celebration isn’t complete without cake?  But now I can enjoy it without having to worry about any reactions later on.  I can “have my cake and eat it too” – enjoy my dessert and the celebration.  I’m not sure why we celebrate with cake, but I’m sure glad that we do.

Caramel Sauce

Just when I thought nothing could taste better than vanilla ice cream, I discovered caramel.  And, yes, I feel like I discovered it – a new and wonderful flavor to my dormant taste buds.  But they are dormant no more.

What does caramel taste like?  My husband said “caramel” and looked at me like I was dumb for asking.  But when we both swirled that tan caramely goo over our creamy vanilla ice cream and then swirled that spoon right into our waiting mouths, do you know what happened?

………

Silence.

………

Two spoonfuls, three spoonfuls, four spoonfuls later and still

……….

Silience.

……….

To me caramel is the taste of silence – the kind of silence that is welcome, the kind that is comfortable, the kind that allows you the opportunity to ponder all that is good in life and to really think about each flavor that you’re experiencing.

I read somewhere long ago that caramel is really just burnt sugar mixed with butter into a gooey sauce or candy  I personally believe that nearly burning something brings out natural flavors that were hiding in its raw form.  For example, a hot dog tastes so much better when it’s been charred on the grill and has that flaky black look to it than its slimy microwaved counterpart. Of course, caramel tastes nothing like a hot dog, but it does have a deep, rich sweetness that reminds of something nearly burned.

To me caramel is a nearly burned perfection, a completely yummy confection.

While the delicious silence consumed me, I consumed the caramel sauce and so there is no picture to post.  I guess I will have to sacrifice for the sake of this blog and buy more.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

My sister made red velvet cupcakes as our family’s 4^th of July treat.  This is exciting because not only is this cake, but it’s cake made with an egg.  That means that it didn’t fall apart when I took a bite! That means I was able to enjoy the whole cupcake (and then another one!) without worrying how much of a mess I was making, how many crumbs were stuck to my chin and my shirt.  (Or maybe I just didn’t care about the mess because it was so delicious!)

There isn’t any way to describe these cupcakes without using the very words its name: RED VELVET.  They are RED – not stoplight red, but an enticing red, a crushed VELVET RED – subtle, yet mysterious enough to draw you in, tempt you take another look.  And they are VELVET to the taste too – smooth, not overpowering like some chocolate cakes are.  My sister said they are “chocolate, but not chocolately chocolate.”

And she’s right; red velvet cupcakes are the perfect balance of chocolate and sugary cake. And my sister, the culinary goddess that she is, topped them off with sweet butter cream (soy free!) icing, complete with blue sprinkles. Yet another reason to celebrate the red, white, and blue.

Birthday Brownies

My mother-in-law made me her famous brownies for my birthday.  I didn’t think I liked chocolate until now.  These brownies were so delicious that I think they would make anyone a believer in the emotional healing powers of chocolate.  Hard day at work?  One  of these brownies will make you forget that work exists.  Headache? One of these tasty morsels will completely cure it.  (OK, so this isn’t scientifically proven, but I like to believe it anyway!)

Has anything ever made you want to curl into your own toes and just stay there to revel in the bliss?  The sweet taste of sugar mixed with a bit of butter flavor along with the deep, richness of this chocolate brownie will do it.  It’s bliss from the taste buds to the toes.

Whoever invented the brownie is a culinary genius.  My mother-in-law is a culinary genius for adding her special touch on a delightful dessert.

(All brownies were eaten before I could snap a picture!  The brownie may be an endangered species rarely left alone on a plate and rarely captured on film.)

Coke Floats

The coke float may be one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.  I’ve been thinking of ways to describe it for over a week now and nothing seems to fit exactly.  Every simile and every metaphor are too much of a cliché,  How do you describe a taste that makes you forget about tasting anything at all and instead transforms you into the very cloud you were hoping to savor, a cloud to float carelessly and carefree above the earth?  That’s how powerful and flavorful a coke float is.  It’s pure happiness in a glass. 

But how does it taste? It is the perfect blend of flavor – cool vanilla cream with the sweet zip of carbonated coca cola.  When the ice cream starts to melt into the coke, the flavors fold into one another just as if that was the desired effect.  The coke and the ice cream are that perfect couple who bring out the best in each other: the cool, calm, and collected character side by side with an interesting, inspiring, and intoxicating individual. Perfection.

I’ve tried two different types of ice cream in my floats: Dreyer’s Vanilla and Blue Bell Country Vanilla.  They are both extremely creamy, but in different ways.  Dreyer’s has that soft serve texture that just melts in your mouth (and your coke!) and has a clean vanilla taste.  Blue Bell has a much richer vanilla flavor that makes me wonder why I never splurged on ice cream more often.  It makes me regret missing out on these delicious flavors for most of my life.  But that’s ok.  I plan on making up for it this summer!

2% Milk = 2% Taste?

What is the big deal about milk?  After 30 years of never having a glass of milk, 30 years of saying “no thank you" to the creamy, white glass of liquid, 30 years of completely avoiding the dairy aisle in the grocery store, I ask that question.  What is the big deal?

First, there are a zillion choices in the cold refrigerated shelves of the grocery store: 1%, 2%, whole, Vitamin D fortified, cream, etc., etc.  Again, I’ve lived 30 years without having to make the decision about what kind of milk to drink, so I did the natural, logical thing and made my husband choose.

He picked the 2% milk because he didn’t want to overwhelm my milk deprived tummy with too much creamy richness.  However, 2% milk doesn’t taste like anything to me.  It’s flavorless! At least water has a crispness to it that my taste buds recognize as water.  This was just cloudy, crisp-free water.  Perhaps my judgment stems from the fact that I’ve never had a glass of milk before, so my taste buds have no comparison.  However, I would rather drink water than 2% milk as water seems to have more taste and less calories.  I would also rather drink any of my milk alternatives, preferably almond or coconut milk when I want something a little sweeter.

Maybe you can put this into perspective for me.  What’s the big deal?

Steak & Eggs

I was disappointed with my first taste of scrambled eggs.  I imagined them to be light and fluffy, salted clouds with a yellow ribbon of yoked flavor.  Unfortunately, my imagination tasted better than the reality.  The eggs were rubbery, flat and didn’t even tease my taste buds.

Of course, my husband I thought we were being creative for my first real helping of eggs.  We had leftover steak from Easter that were already seasoned and grilled.  We thought the eggs would complement them nicely, so we chopped up onions and green bell peppers and whisked them into the gooey mix.  Then we dusted the mixture with paprika before dumping it all into an olive oiled skillet.

It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t GREAT either.  I always expect greatness from food, my calories.  If I don’t have it, I will seek it out.  I tried sprinkling the eggs with salt and pepper, but still couldn’t escape the flatness.  And then the husband suggested the miracle of all condiments: ketchup!

I squirt a huge pool of ketchup on my plate and dipped the eggs and the steak in it.  The combination of sweet and salty tomato saved my steak and eggs combo.  I’m more impressed with the versatility and surprising flavor of ketchup than the scrambled eggs.  (Expect another post on ketchup in the future!)

Potato Chips

I never understood what the big deal was about potato chips. They’re greasy, they’re salty, and they’re noisy. Crunch, crunch, CRUNCH.  And they’re served with everything from deli sandwiches, to hamburgers, to appetizers at birthday parties.  This was one food item that was hard to avoid as a kid.  Luckily, I didn’t like it, so it was easy to just say no.  The corn chip has always been an excellent alternative.

But now that I’ve been cleared for eating potatoes, I have given the potato chip another chance.  I’ve discovered Ruffles Natural Reduced Fat Sea Salted Potato Chips.  They are soy free and corn free, but most importantly not taste free.

These chips don’t seem to be nearly as greasy as other chips that I’ve tried. That means you can have a handful of chips and the only residue left on your hands after you have gobbled them all down is salt. What’s even better is that there are only three ingredients in these yummy treats instead of a novel of unpronounceable mystery products. Yes, they’re still noisy, but I don’t seem to mind it now that I’m the one making the noise.  Crunch, crunch, YUM!

Why a picture of an empty bag of chips?  Because I ate them all!