Rum Crispie Squares?

Um...

So I tried to make rum balls. I say 'try' because the end result was most certainly NOT anything remotely resembling a ball of truffly, chocolaty, rummy deliciousness. Instead, well...

You know what? Let me go back to the beginning.

Fresh off the high of making gorgeous bread in my previous post (and yes, despite the wait time, the puffing and the sticky dough, I fully intend to experiment with bread again) I thought: Wow, I should make rum balls! Okay, truth be told I've wanted to make rum balls since my last day of classes when a classmate brought in homemade rum balls and handed out the ridiculously easy looking recipe (<--baking gods - they're just waiting for me to say it!). I all but ran to the nearest grocery store and bought:

Ingredients!
one can condensed evaporated milk  (I'll explain that in a minute)
one bag of chocolate chips
rum
vanilla
Tada!

You mix'em all together. That's it! You chill them and then you roll them into rum ball loveliness complete with powdered sugar or sprinkles! It just sounds perfect, doesn't it? Who could possibly mess this up? 

Well, I think it goes back to that condensed VS evaporated milk thing. You see, I've always thought that they were the same thing (And you know what? I can hear all you kitchen-savy folk shaking your head and face-palming at me). Well, I quickly learned that - guess what - they're not the same thing. Condensed milk is more like sugary milk syrup that can thicken and bind to other ingredients like chocolate chips, vanilla and rum.

Evaporated milk on the other hand... isn't... and doesn't.

Thus after putting all my ingredients in the bowl I found myself staring at, what can only be described as, chocolate-rum milk - a very expensive drink to enjoy with your pb&j.

I swore.

I've been told by a baker that you're never supposed to swear or get angry around chocolate but I did it anyway and I think the chocolate heard me, because it was resolute about not thickening. So I grabbed my laptop and fought through the jungle of recipe websites out there to find hints on how to thicken up my rum ball hopefuls. I wasn't giving up without a fight.

I won't bore you with the details, sufficed to say that over the next hour I added: powdered sugar, flour, crumbled up crackers and (oh get ready for it - this was an act of desperation) Rice Crispies. Even as I was tossing them into the bowl voices in my head were shouting out:

What are you doing? 
NO!
Egads girl, you've ruined it! 
This will never work....

And the voices were right.

I swore again and decided that these were not going to turn into rum balls without help, so I shoved them into the fridge behind the cucumber (yes THAT cucumber) and hoped my bowl of chocolate soup would magically transform. Then I went and read a book.

No, I'm not kidding. I hid my problem and ran away from it. What? You've never acted like a five year old?
Okay, in all fairness I knew I was going to have to deal with my chocolate soup eventually, but that eventually would include a man-friend with new ideas on how to fix the problem and perhaps even a: "Oh that's happened to me before! Here's what we have to do!"

Man-friend came home. You know what the man-friend did when I showed him the chocolate soup/rum-balls-that-weren't? He rolled up his sleeves, assessed the situation from all angles, took a sip of beer and the took the bowl out of the fridge. Then he PUT IT IN THE FREEZER! He was as clueless as I was!

Well at that point I was done with the idea of rum balls, cracked an egg into that soup and tossed it in the oven. That's right folks, when in doubt set it on fire. Foolproof.

And you know what happened? Man-friend and I actually stared in shock at what we'd created, because it made absolutely no sense. Souffle. My rum balls turned into a souffle! The whole mix puffed up and the Rice Crispies crackled and stiffened into a hard shell on the top, and underneath that hard shell was warm smooth souffle. It was delicious!

Somehow my oven opened a portal into a 5-star restaurant's kitchen (I'm guessing somewhere in Monte Carlo) and pulled the old switch-a-roo. While my man-friend and I were able to enjoy a delicious $90.00 souffle baked in Monaco, some poor man fresh from his win at the blackjack table was given a bowl of rum-crispie-soup.

1. I'm sorry man in Monte Carlo. I hope we can still be friends.

Baking Bread

Bread is delicious.

You disagree? Try some baguette. You will see.


However, bread is also expensive. And the more delicious the bread, like pumpernickel or (as I've already mentioned) baguette, the more expensive the bread. And to be quite honest the store-brand, white-bread (no matter how cheap) just makes me cringe at its lack of flavour... and how unnatural it looks. I mean, white-bread BP&J? Just try and think of something more fake-wholesome looking. I can't. No really, I can't.

So, to save money AND avoid creepy bread, my man-friend and I thought that it might be fun to try baking bread from scratch. Now, despite past disasters with brownies and biscuits, I am actually a decent baker and have been known to make up my own cookie recipes from time to time... and then forget what the hell I did and never be able to make them again. So, it seemed fitting that I would be the one to try my hand at bread.

Four ingredients? (that's it?)
4 cups of flour
1/2 tsp of salt
2 tsps of yeast (which makes the whole house smell like baking - yum!)
1 tsp of sugar

How hard can this be!? Dude, bread is going to be easy!

Quotes that swiftly followed this deceleration:

... when is yeast frothy? How do you know when its frothy?...

... OMG get it off me!...

... wait, I was supposed to add water?...

... OMG get it off me!!...

Oh... I should never be allowed to speak. The baking gods just lie in wait, I swear. They're hiding behind the stove, or under a mixing bowl just waiting for over-confident bakers to say over-confident things. Then they make your furnace room cold so that the warm place you were going to let your dough rise looks like the north pole!

And on that note, some thoughts about baking bread.
It's sticky and it takes a lot more time than you think it will. This is why jobless, medieval housewives baked bread. They were in their houses all day. And I'll bet they invited bread-buddies over, because they needed conversation to occupy the many hours of waiting for the dough to rise.

I know I wish I had a bread-buddy right now... instead I just have Cambridge (yes, I named my laptop). I have been in the kitchen for hours! No really, hours. As I type, I am sitting (wearing my sparkly apron) on my kitchen floor and waiting. Yep, just waiting for my dough to become puffier dough; because apparently under that tea-towel, my dough is rising and breadifying... and then I will have to knead it down and let it rise again... like I'm some sort of bread bully. Then I will put it in a pan and wait for it rise again before I shove the whole thing in an oven and set it on fire!

Hours.

So, as you can imagine,  as I sit, I am reflecting on my experiences with all this bread business and I have come to some conclusions, which I hope others will find helpful.

1) If you start baking by cleaning your kitchen, you'll want to keep that kitchen clean throughout the entire baking process.... this is silly. Don't think this way. I never will again! I say this because as soon as you even look at the flour it puffs onto everything. EVERYTHING. The bowl - puff! Your hair - puff! The floor - PUFF!

It will puff down your shirt and you won't even notice until you are sitting with your laptop, and flour is somehow puffing onto your keyboard. .... I am not speaking from experience or anything.

Damn you flour... why must you go in everything tasty.

2) Keep your cell phone out of the kitchen. When you are making ratatouille, people will laugh your mistakes (again I do not speak from experience, or anything) and, most recently, I've learned that when you are elbow deep in kneading bread and puffed in flour, people will text you. And I don't mean one text, I mean some trilly text-tone will flitter all around you for ten minutes announcing the joyous arrival of your many text messages, until you are ready to either crush that cheerful little bastard of text-tone with your makeshift bread bowl (in my case, a casserole dish) or try to respond to these texts with your nose (again... I do not speak from experience).

3) Never laugh in the face of the baking gods.

Ratatouille

I love ratatouille.

I first made it in London with my sister-in-law. And the whole time we were cooking, other hostel-mates kept asking us "why are you making ratatouille", as though using the hostel's kitchen was a strange occurrence. By the way, that question should always be answered with: Why aren't you making ratatouille?
I mean, ratatouille is delicious! It's like making a vegetable pasta sauce/stew that you're going to eat all on its own. It's colourful. It's healthy. It's - well if you haven't tried ratatouille then you just don't know what you're missing.

And there are so many ways to make ratatouille. You can bake it. You can cook the whole thing in a frying pan. You can just order it in a restaurant. The possibilities are endless!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A few days ago I was shopping at the absurdly overpriced St John's Sobeys that people flock to for its free plastic bags... and overpriced everything else (really makes you question people's priorities). However, in the midst of the $7 per lb apples I found on-sale-peppers! Now, like any normal person, my immediate thought was: I could SO make ratatouille with these!

But I didn't. Nothing else required for making ratatouille was on sale... because its Sobeys. Instead, THAT night, I made chicken soup from scratch (without the noodles). The next day though, I went to the Dominion, which is just Loblaws with an identity crisis, and I bougth:

Ingredients
eggplant
zucchini
onions
garlic
peppers (already purchased)

And home I went to make my ratatouille... except that took a while because I FaceTimed my family and we talked ALL afternoon. I didn't get anything done.

oops.

Well, that's not completely true. I finally realized that I was on a camera phone and propped up my phone in the cupboard while I put on a cooking show... and sadly, this is not the first time I've done this. I think the apron gives me an alter-ego or something.

Anyway, so there I am, showing off spices and ingredients and talking about what I'm doing, until I get to my zucchini. I quickly learned that it wasn't a zucchini at all.

It was a cucumber.

Now, before you think that I can't tell my vegetables apart, let me just say that even the receipt rang this baby in as a zucchini. This was one convincing cucumber. It was a cucumber on a mission. Well too bad for the cucumber, I had no use for it in my ratatouille - or any other dish. Instead I chopped up the rogue vegetable and stuck it my fridge to await its fate.

I still had all my other ingredients, plus a squash, so I made some sort of curried eggplant/pepper/squash soup. It was lumpy and delicious... but it was not ratatouille :(