Real Life Cooking

Vanilla extract

Several vanilla pods

Vodka

A clean jar with a close-fitting lid

Cut up the vanilla pods into pieces about an inch long and put them in the jar. Pour vodka into the jar. Close the lid up tight and place the jar in a cupboard. Give it a shake every week or so. After approximately three months, the vanilla should be ready to use. Do not remove the pieces of vanilla bean pods.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make vanilla extract! You may think it’s hard, but it’s so easy that I’m releasing this as a little bonus episode since it’s so short.

You have to use alcohol for this. No other liquid will work. The extract you buy in the store is also made with alcohol, although imitation vanilla is not.

The hardest part is buying some vanilla beans, more properly called pods. They’re expensive. You can get them at some grocery stores, especially the fancier ones, but I always order them online. Expect to pay about three dollars per pod minimum, but you only need three or four to make enough vanilla extract to last you a solid four years or so. I don’t know enough about types of vanilla beans to know which tastes like what, but there are various varieties. I shop by price and it all works just fine. This time I got Tahitian vanilla beans, last time I think I got Madagascar. Next time I’ll probably try Mexican. You can buy grade B beans for this; they work great for extract and are less expensive than grade A beans, usually because they’re smaller or blemished in some way.

You also need some vodka. I use Tito’s vodka because it’s reasonably priced, good quality vodka that’s readily available, but it doesn’t really matter. Just don’t use a flavored vodka, because the point of the vodka is to be as neutral a medium as possible to carry the vanilla flavor.

And finally, you’ll need a jar with a lid that closes up tight. Don’t reuse an empty bottle of vanilla extract because it’s way too small. I use a small mason jar intended for canning, which works just fine and is inexpensive. Give it a quick wash to make sure it doesn’t contain any dust, then dry it carefully so no water remains inside.

Once you have everything together, it will take you approximately three minutes to prepare your extract. Oh, you’ll also need clean kitchen shears. Open the package of vanilla beans, which of course aren’t actually beans but a skinny pod containing lots of teeny seeds. The pods are almost always dried and don’t look like much. They may not even smell all that great, although the smell is definitely vanilla.

Use your kitchen shears to cut the pods into pieces about an inch long, and put all the pieces into the jar. Yes, even the top piece which is obviously the end of a stem. Put it all into the jar.

If you happen to get your hands on vanilla pods that aren’t dried, you’ll need to flatten the pods and cut them in half lengthwise, then cut them into pieces. Everything else is the same.

Then, pour vodka into the jar. It doesn’t really matter how much you add. Fill the jar if you like, although not to the tippy top. Leave some room.

Next, screw the lid on tightly and put the jar in a cupboard where it will be dark and at room temperature. Leave it there for three months, but every week or so give the jar a shake. At the end of three months, you have vanilla extract. Use it just like the expensive stuff you buy in the baking aisle.

Don’t take the pieces of vanilla pod out. Leave them in and they’ll continue to infuse into the vodka, making the extract stronger and more aromatic the longer they remain. They won’t spoil because they’re in vodka.

You can use other alcohol for this too, but it will change the flavor of the vanilla slightly. Whatever alcohol you use, it should be at least 70 proo

Chicken and dumplings * dredging meat * how to remove chicken meat from the bone * making chicken stock

Chicken and Dumplings

All-purpose flour, salt, and pepper (for dredging)

Chicken thighs or quarters, skin removed

1 onion, diced

carrots, chopped

celery, chopped

chicken stock

about ½ c cream or half and half

Dumplings:

1 ¾ c all-purpose flour

¼ c cornmeal (or use 2 c flour instead)

½ tsp baking powder

dash salt

2 Tbsp butter

about ¾ c milk

In a small bowl, mix about ¼ c flour with some salt and pepper. Set aside. Put some oil or butter in the bottom of a large pot and heat to medium-high. Add half the diced onions and saute briefly. Then dredge chicken pieces in seasoned flour and add to the pot. Brown, then remove from pot and put the rest of the onions and the vegetables in the pot instead. Saute for a few minutes, then add plenty of stock (you can top up with water if needed), salt, pepper, and any other seasonings desired. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes. Uncover, remove chicken again, and use two forks to remove meat from bones and shred. Return meat to pot and add about half a cup of cream or half and half.

For dumplings, combine dry ingredients and cut in butter. Add milk just to combine, roll out thin, cut into strips, and drop strips into pot. Allow to simmer another ten minutes or so, stirring occasionally.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chicken and dumplings.

Uh, yeah, I disappeared for the better part of a year. Sorry about that. Last August I realized that I didn’t have time to do two podcasts so I just stopped this one. But you know what I have right now in plentitude? Time. Yes, like many people I am working from home and social distancing and self-isolating and everything else to help stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus. But what I am mostly doing is a lot of cooking. So I thought it might be nice to resurrect Real Life Cooking, at least for now. Let’s call this season two.

I can’t promise a regular publishing schedule, but we’ll see. Also, for me it’s editing episodes that takes so much time, so I’m going to go light on taking out breaths and room noises and so forth. I don’t think most people are bothered by things like that anyway, just me. So let’s go.

Chicken and dumplings is a great way to stretch a small amount of meat into a really big meal that’s also tasty and filling, and it doesn’t require any expensive or hard to find ingredients. You will need some flour, which can be hard to come by at the moment. You can use any kind of flour, though, from cake flour to bread flour, so just use what you have on hand.

Not only that, but I’m going to explain how you make stock in this episode. It’s time consuming but, yeah. Time is no longer in short supply, but chicken stock is.

For this recipe you will need a large pot, the larger the better. I made this recipe three times in my first month of quarantine and the last time I got out my biggest pot, doubled the recipe, and made a ton of really good food that I can eat all week. You’ll also need a small bowl, a large mixing bowl, and a clean dry surface to roll out the dumplings. If you want to make stock too, you’ll need another large pot, but how large depends on how much stock you want to make.

The first thing to do is chop your vegetables. Scrape or peel the carrots, rinse, and chop into pennies. Toss the carrot tops, any rejected pieces, and even the peels if you like into another big pot for stock. Cut the tops and bottoms off your celery stalks and toss the cut off pieces into the stock pot for later too. Basically you just want to use the thick green part of the celery stalk, not the skinny tops that sometimes have little leaves, and not the

4 eggs

¼ c. milk

½ c. diced/shredded ham (or cooked bacon or sausage)

½ c shredded cheese, plus a handful more

salt and pepper

fresh basil, torn into pieces

small tomato, chopped and most seeds removed

Preheat oven to 350. In a medium bowl, beat eggs and milk together until frothy. Add milk, ham, ½ c. cheese, tomato, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour into a greased pie plate or 9” cake pan. Bake for 20 minutes, then add the basil and extra handful of cheese on top and bake another 5-10 minutes, until browning at the edges and pulling away from the pan.

You can double this recipe. If you do, increase the milk to ¾ cup and bake for 40-50 minutes total.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this is our Patreon episode for June 2019!

This month we’re going to learn how to make an egg dish I’ve made for years and call omelet casserole, because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s somewhere between a quiche and a soufflé, I guess. It’s very good and easy to make.

You’ll need a medium-sized mixing bowl and a pie plate or a 9” cake pan or a 9x9 baking dish. It doesn’t really matter. I use my pie plate because it’s really pretty.

You’ll also need fresh basil. I grow basil in my yard, but if you don’t have a basil plant, you can usually buy some sprigs of fresh basil at the fancier grocery stores. It is so incredibly good, especially in this recipe, that you owe it to yourself to either pick some up or buy a basil plant and keep it in the windowsill. It’s easy to grow and if you have some in your garden, it will happily seed itself so you have more basil the following year. Dried basil is…meh.

First, preheat the oven. It only takes a few minutes to put this recipe together so you want the oven to be ready. Then, grease the pan. You can use anything for this recipe, but butter will give you some extra flavor.

Crack the eggs into the mixing bowl, add the milk, and beat them up with a fork or whisk. You want the eggs well mixed up, so beat them until froth forms. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or two by hand, less than half a minute if you’re using an electric mixer.

Add some pepper, the shredded cheese, and the ham, or whatever meat or not meat you want to add. If you don’t add meat, definitely add salt. I typically leave out the salt when I make this, because ham contains a lot of salt.

Then, if you’re using tomato, dice it up small and remove as many of the seeds as you can. You do this because the seeds are encased in tissue that contains a lot of moisture. You don’t want all that moisture leaching out into your egg dish while it cooks. It’ll make it soggy and gross.

You can add as much or as little of the tomato, meat, and cheese as you like. You can add diced onion if you want, too, although you probably want to saute the onions until they’re translucent before adding them unless you just want your egg dish to taste overpoweringly of raw onion.

Once you have everything mixed up well in the bowl, pour it into the pie plate. Make sure all the ingredients are well distributed, pushing them around the pan with a spatula or your fork if you need to. Then add another shake of pepper on the top because honestly, you cannot add too much pepper to anything except maybe ice cream. Then put the pan into the oven.

Set your timer for 20 minutes. That 20 minutes is the perfect amount of time to wash out the bowl and wipe down all the egg white you probably dripped onto the counter, then run out to the garden and grab a couple of basil leaves.

Rinse the basil leaves to remove any dirt, then dry them and nip them into pieces with your thumbnail or kitchen shears. The pieces shouldn’t be tiny, but you don’t want them to be gigantic either. Pile the pieces where you can get to

Zucchini Pineapple Bread * how to grease and flour a pan * how to grate zucchini * what to substitute for oil

Zucchini Pineapple Bread

3 c all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

¾ tsp nutmeg

3 eggs

1 ¾ c. sugar

1 c vegetable oil (or ½ c vegetable oil and ½ c unsweetened applesauce)

2 tsp vanilla

2 to 3 c grated zucchini

1 8-oz can crushed pineapple, drained

1 c chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour two loaf pans.

In a large bowl, mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. In a very large bowl, beat eggs with a fork, then add sugar, oil, and vanilla and mix well. Add zucchini and pineapple and mix in well. Add dry ingredients to wet alternately with nuts.

Pour batter evenly into the loaf pans. Bake for 55 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make zucchini bread! Yes, you can finally do something with all that zucchini your coworker has grown and keeps bringing into the office to give away.

Zucchini is a type of summer squash. It’s usually green but there are golden varieties. You can cook it like squash, and if you don’t know how to cook squash just stick around a few weeks because that’s an upcoming episode. But zucchini is also traditionally made into zucchini bread, which to my mind is the very best thing you can get at any bake sale.

Zucchini bread is a good way to use up large zucchinis, which aren’t as tender as young ones. If the zucchini you get is large, you probably only need one. The first thing you’ll need to do is give it a quick wash to remove any dirt.

This recipe makes two loaves, so you’ll need two loaf pans. You’ll also need a medium mixing bowl, a large mixing bowl, and a very large mixing bowl--the giant one that came with the set of bowls that you thought you’d never use. And, of course, you need a cheese grater to grate the zucchini up so you can use it.

Once you’ve got everything gathered, your first step is to grease and flour the loaf pans. Grease them as usual with Crisco or that spray stuff. Take extra care that you grease the corners and all the way up nearly to the top of the pan. Then put a small handful of all-purpose flour into one of the pans, pick it up, tilt it, and pat the bottom of the pan so that the flour falls to one side. You’ll see that some of the flour sticks on the grease, and you want to flour all of the grease. This will keep your zucchini bread from sticking and will allow you to actually get it out of the pan when it’s done.

Pat the sides and bottom of the pan as you tilt the flour all around. As more of the flour sticks to the grease, less and less flour will be available to grease the rest, but there should be enough from one small handful. If you run out, give the bottom of the pan a good hard bang with your hand. This will loosen some more of the flour. Make sure you’ve floured all the grease, then turn the pan upside down over the trash and give the bottom a final thump to release any loose flour. Then do the same for the second loaf pan.

This is a good way to get flour all over you and the floor, so you might want to wear an apron. I always end up cradling the pan to my stomach at some point, which means my shirt always ends up with lots of flour on it.

Once you’ve greased and floured the pans, set them aside and get out the large mixing bowl. Not the giant one, just the large one. Measure out your dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Whisk it together well with a whisk or a fork. If you don’t have nutmeg, you can use an extra spoonful of cinnamon instead. Set the dr

Peach Pie * how to separate eggs * how to whip egg whites * folding in ingredients

Peach Pie

3 egg whites

¾ c. sugar

14 saltine crackers, finely crushed

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp baking powder

½ c. chopped pecans

4-6 fresh peaches, peeled, pitted, and sliced

cinnamon

sweetened whipped cream

Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a 9” pie plate.

Whip egg whites until they can hold a peak. Add sugar and vanilla while continue to whip egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold in cracker crumbs, baking powder, and pecans. Spread into pie plate. Bake for 30 minutes, remove from oven, and let cool completely.

Arrange peach slices on top in two or more layers. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon (and a little sugar if the peaches are not very sweet). Top with whipped cream to cover the peaches completely. Chill before serving.

I like to reserve one peach, cut it into bite-sized pieces, and fold it into the whipped cream before topping the pie.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make peach pie with a meringue crust!

This is hands down my best recipe. It’s the one everyone at work wants me to bring for our end-of-semester potluck meetings. Even people who don’t really like peaches, pies, or me rave over this pie. And the best part is it’s really easy to make even though it looks difficult. You don’t even need to make pie pastry.

You do, however, need to whip egg whites to make a meringue crust. You’ll need an electric mixer for this, and you’ll need the mixer again at the end of the recipe to make whipped cream. Other than that, you’ll just need a pie plate, a large mixing bowl, and a lot of fresh peaches.

I’ve tried making this recipe with frozen peach slices, thawed. They were disappointing but if you can’t find decent fresh peaches and you want to make this recipe, you can use them. But really good fresh peaches are what make this recipe so good. The juice seeps down into the meringue and infuses the whipped cream with summer goodness.

Get the ripest peaches you can find, and buy more than you think you’ll need because when you’re getting really ripe peaches, inevitably one or more will turn out to be on the rotten side of overripe. Since the peaches aren’t baked, you don’t want to include any that don’t taste perfect. You also shouldn’t use peaches that turn out to be underripe. If you end up with just one or two decent peaches, that’s okay. I’ve made this recipe with only a single layer of peach slices and it’s turned out fine.

But whatever you do, reserve the very best peach to go in the whipped cream. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first thing you do, once you’ve got all your ingredients and mixing bowls and things, is crush up the crackers. You need exactly 14 saltines, with each single square counting as one cracker. If you have the type that are two crackers joined together into one, that counts as two crackers.

Get out a small bowl, like a cereal bowl, and use your hands to roughly crunch the crackers into the bowl the way you would if you were adding them to soup or chili. Then use the back of a spoon to further crush the pieces finer and finer. Eventually it becomes virtually impossible to get all the pieces crushed any finer—you’ll end up with basically cracker dust around the edges with slightly larger pieces in the middle, and no amount of stirring and crushing seems to make a difference. That’s fine.

Next, measure out your pecans and put them in the same bowl with the crackers. Add the baking powder on top and mix the whole thing up with the spoon a little bit, until the baking powder isn’t sitting there in a lump. Set the bowl aside.

Set the vanilla and measuring spoon where you can get

Peach Kuchen

1 c all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ c butter, softened

¼ c sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond extract

sliced fresh peaches (or other fruit)

Topping:

sliced or slivered almonds, 3 Tbsp turbinado sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon

Grease a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Heat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix the topping and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. In another medium bowl cream together the butter and sugar, then add egg and almond extract and blend well. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix well. Batter will be thick. Spread the batter into the pie plate or cake pan, smoothing the top with a spatula, thinly across the bottom and about one inch up the sides of the pan. Arrange the peach slices in a pretty spiral in the bottom, add any other fruit desired, and sprinkle with the topping.

Bake for 25 minutes for a ceramic pie plate, 35 to 40 minutes for a cake pan.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Peach Kuchen, which is basically a very thin cake with a lot of fruit on top.

It’s an easy cake to make. The hardest part is peeling and slicing all those peaches. Actually, no, the hardest part is finding decent peaches. I lucked out and found three small but perfectly ripe and juicy peaches, so I decided to make peach kuchen with them. I also had about half a cup of raspberries and blackberries I picked yesterday that needed to be used up, so this recipe is perfect.

You’ll need almond extract and sliced or slivered almonds, although if you don’t have almond extract or don’t like it, you can substitute vanilla. You can also substitute pecans for the almonds. But the almonds and almond extract give this recipe a sophisticated, delicate flavor that’s a little unusual. If you liked the raspberry almond coffee cake recipe from last month, you’ll like this recipe.

You can make this in a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Whichever you use, grease it well. Then you’ll need a couple of mixing bowls, but not big ones. Medium-sized ones will do, because there’s not actually a lot of batter for this cake. You also need a small mixing bowl for the topping, but there’s not a lot of it so you can use a big cereal bowl if you need to.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and set it aside. Then mix the topping and set it aside. I’ve always made the topping with slivered almonds until this time, when all I had was sliced almonds, and I like the sliced almonds just as much.

Next, make sure the butter is softened enough to work with easily but not melted, and cream it together with the sugar until it’s fluffy. Add the egg and almond extract and mix well. Then add about half the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, stir until it’s smooth, and add the rest of the flour mixture and mix until all the flour is incorporated and there are no lumps.

It’s a very simple standard recipe for cake batter, with the main difference being there’s not much batter. It’s also very thick. Spoon it into your greased pan and use a rubber spatula or the back of a big spoon to spread the batter around, right up to the edges of the pan and up the edges. Basically what you’re doing is making a shallow batter receptacle for the fruit.

Once you’ve got the batter spread, turn the oven on. Then you need to cut up the peaches. If you listened to the raspberry pie episode last month you may remember how to halve cherries, which is the same way you halve peaches before cutting them up. Take a paring knife, cut around the entire peach top to bottom, cutting down to the pit, then twist both halves in different directions. This will pull the peach in two, with one half retaining the pit. Unless the pit is rotten,

baked beans * how to prepare green bell pepper

Janice’s Baked Beans

1 32-oz can pork and beans, drained

1 small onion, chopped

½ medium bell pepper, chopped

½ c. brown sugar

½ lb. pork sausage, browned and drained

4 strips bacon

Put everything except the bacon into a baking dish and mix well. Lay bacon over top. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. You can double this recipe.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make my aunt Janice’s baked beans recipe!

It’s an easy recipe to make and it’s absolutely delicious. My aunt made it for the Fourth of July and I asked her about it. It’s a funny story, so I recorded her telling it.

To make Janice’s baked beans recipe, all you need is a pan big enough to hold everything. You can mix the ingredients directly in the pan.

First, though, you need to get all your ingredients ready. The very first thing you do is brown and drain the pork sausage the same way we learned to brown and drain hamburger meat in the lasagna roll-ups episode. Then turn the oven on. Then dice the onion the way we learned in the carrots episode, and pack the brown sugar into the measuring cup firmly the way we learned in the chocolate chip cookies episode.

The only aspect of this recipe we haven’t covered before is how to chop up a bell pepper. This is about as easy as it can be.

If you’ve ever looked at the bell peppers for sale at the store and wondered what the difference is between green, yellow, orange, and red bell peppers, they’re all the same thing. Green bell peppers are picked before they fully ripen. Yellow, orange, and red bell peppers are of varying stages of ripeness. Bell peppers don’t contain any capsaicin, which is what makes other peppers hot, so you can use the brightest red bell pepper you can find in a recipe and it’ll be perfectly mild. The flavor is a little different, with green bell pepper being a much more definite flavor and the yellow, orange, or red bell peppers being mellower. The brightly colored bell peppers are mostly used to give a dish extra color.

Bell peppers are easy to prepare. You’ll need a paring knife and a cutting board if you have one. If you plan to use every scrap of pepper, cut around the stem and discard it, and you can use the rest. Otherwise, just roughly cut the pepper into slices, then cut those slices into pieces.

The inside of a bell pepper is mostly empty. There are a lot of small seeds, though, which you should discard. They’re easy to remove, though. You can cut up and use the ribs inside the pepper or trim them off and only use the outer shell of the pepper. It all tastes the same but the outside is a shinier green that looks nicer.

Once your bell pepper is cut up into pieces, it’s ready to use. Easy peasy.

So you’ve got the ground pork browned and drained, the onion and bell pepper chopped up, and the brown sugar measured out and ready. Open the can of pork and beans and drain it. Then pour the beans into your pan, add the pork, onion, bell pepper, and brown sugar, and mix it all up really well. In the recording of Janice, the sounds you hear in the background are her stirring the mixture. She uses a heavy oven-safe pot to make it. She also doubles the recipe.

Once you have it all mixed up, lay four strips of raw bacon across the top. It will cook in the oven and add its delicious grease and flavor to the dish as it does. Make sure to lay the bacon strips side by side, not overlapping. If they’re too long to fit into the pan without overlapping, cut them short. If the bacon is especially fatty, trim off the fatty ends and discard them. That way you can pretend that you’re making the recipe healthier.

Put the pan in the oven and set the timer for one hour.

How to roast a chicken * a new way to peel garlic easily * how to use a meat thermometer

Roast chicken

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a whole chicken. If you know how to roast a chicken, you can save a lot of money and expand your choices when it comes to food. And it’s really easy, so let’s go.

First, you need a whole chicken. Don’t buy a roasting chicken. Roasters are huge and are actually best cooked by boiling, and who has a pot that big? Buy a smaller chicken, usually advertised as a fryer or just as a young chicken. You don’t want one more than about five pounds in weight, and preferably closer to four pounds.

The chicken is probably not frozen. If it is, stick it in the fridge for a day or two. But typically fryer chickens aren’t frozen. It’ll be in a heavy plastic bag. Sit this in the sink, round side down and the feet side up. Yes, I know you can’t see the chicken at this point and it doesn’t have feet anymore anyway, but you can feel the ends of the drumsticks and you want those pointing up. Cut the bag open at this end and pull it down around the chicken like a skirt.

Oh, and this is a good time to get out a pan with sides and preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. If you haven’t already done this, do it now, hopefully before your hands get covered with chicken grease. I usually use a plain 9x13 Pyrex pan, sometimes a metal pan that I line with one layer of tinfoil to help keep the mess down. Pyrex dishes are easier to clean than metal so I don’t use tinfoil in the Pyrex dish.

Usually the chicken will have giblets in a little bag stuffed into the cavity. Sometimes the chicken has loose giblets stuck in the cavity and probably surrounded by chicken-juice ice. Giblets are the edible organs, and even if you plan to cook them you need to take them out before you roast the chicken. If it’s a bag, that’s easy. If they’re loose, you’re going to need to pick the chicken up and shake it violently feet-side down over the sink. Hopefully the giblets drop out and you’re not too traumatized, because the wings and legs flop around and water droplets fly and it’s basically just like something out of a cut-rate horror movie.

If you can’t shake the loose giblets out, they’re frozen in place and you’re going to have to get in there with your hand. The main problem with this is that your fingers are going to immediately get so cold that you can’t tell what you’re doing, and trying to pick squidgy bits of chicken guts out of a matrix of ice with frozen fingertips is really the least fun part of roasting a chicken. I guess you could use a spoon.

If you’re still with me and haven’t given up on this episode yet, let’s fast forward to the point where you’ve removed those giblets. Usually it’s really not difficult. I almost always shop by price, so sometimes I luck out and the cheap chicken I bought is cheap because the giblets got left out so the chicken weighed less. That’s great, because in my house, the giblets go in the trash.

So you’ve emptied the chicken. You can rinse it if you want, but it’s really not necessary unless the skin doesn’t look clean. I mean, it’s going to look like dead chicken skin, but you don’t want to see any flecks of actual dirt. Also, if you dropped it in the sink at any point you should rinse it.

Plop your chicken on its back in the pan. Sprinkle it liberally with salt and pepper. You can add rosemary or other herbs too, but if you’ve never roasted a chicken before, just go the simple route. Salt and pepper, that’s it. However, if you’re a garlic lover, or even a garlic liker, and you have some garlic cloves on hand, get them out along with a knife with a broad blade.

You only need to peel this garlic, not cut it up, and after the lime crema episode my cousin Molly showed me the easiest wa

Iced Tea * Sangria * how to section oranges

Iced tea

6-8 c. water

2 family-sized tea bags

About 1 c. sugar

Heat water in a pot until it begins to boil but before it is at a rolling boil. Remove from heat. Place tea bags in the water, cover with a lid, and let steep for about 10-15 minutes. Remove the tea bags and stir in sugar until dissolved.

Allow the tea to cool to room temperature. Then fill a pitcher with ice and pour the tea over the ice.

Sangria (alcoholic)

1 bottle cheap red wine

½ c spiced rum

½ c orange juice

½ - 1 c pineapple juice

several oranges, peeled and sectioned

other fruit as desired

Mix everything together in a jug and refrigerate at least overnight (24 hours is best). Give the jug a good stir with a long spoon every few hours, making sure to press the pieces of fruit against the side of the jug to express some of the juice.

Serve cold with ginger ale (or Sprite) to taste.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sangria, which is alcoholic, and iced tea, which is not.

We’ll cover iced tea first, so if you want to listen to that part and skip the discussion of how to make sangria, I’ll tell you where to stop listening.

There are a number of ways to make iced tea. The recipe at the top of the show notes is how my grandmother made it, which I’ll go over in just a minute.

The easiest way is to cold-brew your tea. Fill a big jug with warm water—not hot—plop a couple of family-sized tea bags formulated for iced tea in it, and stick it in the fridge overnight. In the morning remove the tea bags and drink the tea. This is how I make it most of the time, because I like my iced tea unsweetened. You can’t sweeten iced tea properly once it’s cold, since the sugar won’t dissolve, so if you want to make real southern sweet tea, you have to make it a different way.

Whatever you do, don’t make tea the way you would to drink it hot, then throw ice cubes in it. I suspect that people from areas where iced tea is rare or practically unknown, like the UK, think that’s how you make iced tea. For the love of all that’s holy, no no no.

Also, you don’t want to use the same kind of tea you use for hot tea. If you make it right—and you will if you follow my recipe—the tea steeps for a relatively long time. Therefore, you can use lower quality tea and still end up with a strong but smooth brew. Conversely, if you start with high quality tea leaves, your tea may end up too strong. Plus, iced tea is meant for swilling, not sipping. I make it by the gallon every summer and go through it quickly. There’s no sense wasting high quality tea on something you’re going to chug after you mow the lawn. Save your good tea for chilly autumn days when you want to curl up with a hot drink and a murder mystery.

You can find lots of brands of tea made specifically for iced tea. I’ve tried them all and don’t really have a preference. This time I used one bag of Lipton tea meant for cold brewing, since that’s how I usually make it, and one bag of Walmart brand tea. I mean it that the quality of the tea has very little impact on the finished product if you make it right.

For this recipe you’ll need a pot with a lid and a pitcher. I measured out eight cups of water when I made the recipe this time, just to make sure I had the proportions right, but usually I just fill the pot with tap water and don’t worry too much about measuring.

So, fill your pot with tap water and set it on the stove. Turn the burner to high and keep an eye on it as it heats, because you want to bring the water to a boil but not a rolling boil. Once the water is moving briskly but not slopping around violently, move the pot off the heat.

Put two big

Making pie crust * rolling out dough * preparing fresh cherries * care of a wooden rolling pin

Raspberry Pie

Pastry:

2 c all-purpose flour

½ tsp salt

1 ½ tsp sugar

¾ c cold butter, cut up (or shortening)

3-4 Tbsp icewater

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl and cut in shortening or butter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add just enough water to hold together. Chill 30 minutes, divide dough, and roll out. Line the bottom of the pie pan with pastry, add filling, then top with the remaining pastry.

Filling:

5 c. raspberries (or frozen, thawed)

½ to ¾ c sugar

3 Tbsp all-purpose flour

Heat oven to 375.

Mix sugar and flour in a large bowl. Add berries and toss until coated. Pour into the pastry-lined pie dish. Top with the remaining pastry and crimp edges. Brush top crust with milk and sprinkle with sugar, and cut slits in the top to release steam. Cover the edges with tinfoil to keep from overbrowning.

Bake for 25 minutes, remove foil, and bake another 25-30 minutes. You can substitute blueberries, blackberries, or cherries for about half of the raspberries, if desired.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make raspberry pie. And yes, you are going to learn how to make your own pie crust. Do not be afraid.

I want to stress going in that this is not hard. It is 100% simple and you are going to make it successfully and be proud and it will be delicious. You can buy a premade pie crust, of course, but I guarantee you that a homemade one is better and well within the abilities of even a novice cook.

This recipe came from my friend Amanda, and I make it every summer when the raspberries and blackberries are ripe. You can use all raspberries in the filling or you can use a mixture of raspberries and other berries, like blackberries, blueberries, and fresh cherries. Amanda says not to use strawberries, though. I’ve never tried it, but I suspect strawberries are both too full of moisture and too lacking in pectin for the filling to gel properly.

The recipe calls for five cups of berries, and Amanda suggested a ratio of two cups of raspberries, two cups of cherries, and one cup of blueberries. I typically use about two to three cups of raspberries, about two cups of blackberries, and enough blueberries to make up the difference. You can use frozen berries, but thaw them first. Fresh is best, of course.

This time—you guessed it—I had to make the recipe before raspberries were ripe where I live, so I had to buy raspberries. I used frozen, along with fresh blueberries and fresh cherries. I didn’t have enough raspberries and it really showed. The pie was fine, but it wasn’t fantastic the way it would be if I’d had more raspberries. So I waited until nearly the last minute, when I had to get the episode finished and uploaded in time, until the raspberries were ripe. I made the pie again with about half and half raspberries and blackberries, with a half-pint of blueberries just to add a little sweetness. The result was much better. So if you look at the pictures in the show notes, the reason it looks like some of the pictures are from a different pie from the other pictures is because they are.

For this recipe you’ll need two large mixing bowls, a pie plate, also called a pie pan, and something you can use as a rolling pin, hopefully an actual rolling pin.

I recommend you spend some money on a real actual rolling pin if you can. I have a solid wood one my grandmother gave me ages ago that works beautifully. If you get a wooden rolling pin, treat it like a high quality wooden spoon. That is, hand-wash it with hot water and maybe a tiny dab of soap if absolutely necessary, dry it when it’s clean, and rub it with a thin coating of olive oil or other vegetable oil