Death By Butter

Cranberry Cookies with the wrong colour chocolate chips because nobody’s perfect

Would that not be a much better name for the holidays? Merry Death by Butter Day? I don’t think I will actually die from eating my baking, but anything is possible. A week ago I had six 454 gram bricks of butter in my fridge. If you measure your butter in pounds you will get 453.592 grams in a brick, but here in Canada we rounded that up so as usual everything is bigger and better here. Don’t ask me for more examples, okay? I’m really busy.

There are three staples I make every Christmas. Fudge, short bread cookies, and butter tarts. The fudge has a much more alarming amount of sugar in it, but there’s butter in there too. Short bread is basically butter with a couple other ingredients for keeping it stuck together during baking. This year for the butter tarts I ended up with more filling than frozen tart shells, so I made a batch of butter pastry to finish. This helped me remember why I buy pre-made shells. Mine are uneven in thickness and shape, which is a polite way of saying they’re a complete mess. Except they taste good. And the pastry is lovely and rich and flakey even though the over-all end result looks like something exploded in the oven. Okay I’m done talking about that.

Butter goes in the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes and probably on the vegetables. W got me to make what he calls Swedish Bread this year. It’s a simple flat bread recipe made with – wait for it- butter. There is a lot of butter in my turkey stuffing. I bought a bag of dried cranberries because I like to put those in it too, and then discovered I already had lots. So I searched for a recipe to use them up and found one for cranberry cookies. Ingredients include white chocolate chips, a package of instant vanilla pudding, and a cup of BUTTER. They’re okay if you like a buttery chewy cookie but I think they might be better with nuts. And I seriously don’t understand the point of the pudding mix, but there’s a lot of recipes that baffle me so I’m not dwelling on it.

I don’t always make my moms Christmas pudding (steamed carrot pudding) every Christmas, but this year I had time so it’s ready too, except for the hot brown sugar and butter sauce you pour over it. When we were kids we preferred a bowl of sauce with a few pudding crumbs thrown in.

So my butter supply is dwindling! The reason no one gets gifts from me is because I’ve gone broke buying butter. But it’s only once a year. My dad always insisted it was better to use butter and not the cheaper substitutes if we wanted to keep the dairy farmers in business, so I’m doing my part. Ending up looking like a butter ball is just a small annoying side effect that should right itself in January.

Happy Holidays if you celebrate them! Peace, Love and buttery treats either way.

Delicious

My least favourite apples to eat raw are the ones with the misnomer “Delicious”.  The same guy who named them also named Greenland.  It’s a trick.  W professes to like them, but we’ve had a bunch of them sitting in our fruit bowl for a long time although other types have come and gone.  They are always the last to get picked so I’m putting them out of their misery.  Time to use them up before they reach the throwing into the compost bin point of no return.

Just look at how sun-shiny my kitchen is this morning!  I love this apple stabbing gut removing tool and eat a lot of apples because it is so much fun to use.  It does require some skill getting it to go straight through from the stem to the bottom.  Sometimes an apple will have to be double stabbed from the bottom up to get rid of the entire core.  Or maybe it’s just me who encounters this problem and can’t gut an apple in a straight line.

After the delightful gouging part comes the tedious peeling process, but not everything can be fun.  It always seems a shame to me to throw out all that fibre and all those nutrients but the time I made this and included the apple skins was not my proudest moment and less than a roaring success.  And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Whew.  That’s a lot of slicing and dicing.  In my serious quest to go mostly gluten and sugar free I opted to sprinkle Truvia here instead of refined white sugar.  Please refrain from telling me that this stuff will kill me faster than sugar will, because I don’t care.

This is my crumble mixture, consisting of soft butter, half a cup of rice flour, the last of the brown sugar in a shrivelled up bag that’s been in the cupboard forever, probably about a quarter cup, because I don’t think this crumbly topping would work without it.  And some gluten free steel cut oats.  I have no experience with steel cut anything, don’t know what it means or how it’s done, but the wheat free thing on the label totally sucked me in so that I bought them and have been wondering ever since what to do with the stupid stuff, besides make porridge which is pretty disgusting.  I’m a big fan of having baking supplies hanging around where I can see them and hoping they will guilt me in to actually making something.  So that worked, I guess. I didn’t measure it, but let’s guess about half a cup.  I also threw in some cinnamon.

Here we are all oven ready.  I hope these hard little oat nuggets soften up…..

The oven does it’s magic for about 40 minutes at 350.  The top is browned and the fruit is soft.  And it smells good. W thinks it will be great with ice cream.  We don’t have any ice cream.  Living with me involves learning to live with disappointment.  And the steel cut oats have stubbornly resisted the cooking process and remain hard and crunchy.  I’ll just pretend I planned it that way.  The apples will still be delicious.  There are some things it’s hard to mess up.

Hello Yellow

Yellow is the color of his

Mellow Yellow (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

True loves honey hair,

Blythe and breezy, light and lively,

Sapid, debonair.

Banana, lemon, mustard, cheese,

Butter, quince and maize,

Sizzling sunshine, dazzling saffron,

Goldenrod ablaze.

Animated, spirited,

Brazen and upbeat,

Yet dulcet, smooth and soothing,

Sanguine, warm and sweet.

Daffodils and marigolds,

Yellow daffodils (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dandelions bold,

Paper tigers eye and jonquil,

Sunglow harvest gold.

A chicken hearted scaredy cat,

School bus, submarine,

Ribbons, brick road, taxi cab,

Knife and ictirine.

Jaundice, peridot, ripe melon,

11_quince (Photo credit: Royston Rascals)

Fever, squash, canary.

Babouche, mikado, zircon, zinc,

Aureolin fairy.

Sunflowers, jackets, straw and ming,

Yellow mellows everything.