Real Life Cooking

Raspberry Almond Coffee Cake

2 c. all-purpose flour

2/3 c. sugar

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

1 c. sour cream

¼ c butter, melted

1 tsp almond extract

2 eggs

About ¼ c. raspberry juice, drained from berries (or ¼ c. milk)

2 c. raspberries, fresh or frozen (thawed)

½ c. slivered almonds (or sliced)

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit

Mix dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, salt, cinnamon) in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, mix the sour cream, melted butter, almond extract, eggs, and juice or milk. Blend well. Add the butter/sour cream mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until just moist. Batter will be thick.

Spoon about half the batter into a greased 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Spread the raspberries evenly on top, then spoon remaining batter over. Top with almonds. Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes. (You may need to set the cake pan on a baking sheet to catch any drips.)

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make raspberry almond coffee cake. It’s so good.

Raspberries are my favorite fruit, and one of my favorite foods. I also know where raspberries grow wild near my house, so every year for a few blissful weeks I can have as many raspberries as I want for free, completely organic and fresh. All I have to do is pick them and then spend the next two weeks trying not to scratch my chigger bites.

I eat a lot of the raspberries by themselves, but I also like to cook with them. This week’s recipe is one I make every year with fresh berries and it’s delicious. But because I get these episodes ready well in advance, I needed to make this week’s raspberry almond coffee cake before raspberries were in season locally. Rather than spend ridiculous amounts of money on a tiny package of fresh raspberries that are half moldy anyway, I just bought frozen raspberries. They worked even better than fresh.

Then, a week later, I decided I needed to make the recipe again using fresh raspberries. So I bought the tiny package of fresh raspberries but I also added some early-ripening blackberries I picked this afternoon.

Besides the raspberries, which are expensive if you have to buy them, this recipe calls for almond extract and slivered almonds. Almond extract doesn’t really cost that much considering how long it will last you, and it gives a sophisticated and subtle flavor to recipes that you just don’t get from vanilla. But if you absolutely cannot get almond extract, you can use vanilla extract instead. Slivered almonds have a good texture, but again, if you can’t find slivered almonds, you can use sliced or chopped almonds instead. In fact, when I made the recipe a second time for this episode, I realized I’d forgotten to buy slivered almonds. I used sliced instead, and they worked just as well—maybe even better, since they’re crunchier.

This recipe is unusual in several ways, but it’s also really easy. You’ll need two mixing bowls, one large and one medium-sized. You’ll also need a 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Don’t use anything smaller than a 9” pan or the cake will overflow as it rises.

If you use frozen berries, you need to thaw them before you do anything else. The easiest way to thaw a bag of frozen raspberries is how I did it, which is to put them in a grocery bag in the car on a day when it’s 90 out and then get stuck in traffic. Voila, totally thawed before I even got them home! Or you can buy them a day or two before you need them and stick them in the fridge. If you forget to thaw them, you can either microwave them on defrost setting or fill a large bowl with warm water and plunk the unopened bag in the water for a while.

Once the berries are thawed, you’re ready t

How to string pea pods/green beans * How to use a steamer basket *

Carrot Recipes

Sauteed Carrots

some carrots, peeled and sliced up

half a small yellow onion, diced

cooking oil

salt and pepper

Saute onions and carrots in a little oil over medium heat for about a minute. Add salt and pepper, cover, and lower heat to medium low. Allow to cook for several minutes, then remove lid just long enough to stir vegetables. Allow to cook for several more minutes before stirring again. Add a little water if necessary. Continue cooking, covered, stirring occasionally, until carrots are tender.

Glazed Carrots and Snow Peas

some carrots, peeled and sliced (or baby carrots)

some snow peas in pods

some butter

salt and pepper

½ tsp cornstarch

about 1 Tbsp honey or syrup

Place carrots in a steamer basket and steam until they’re mostly tender, about 15 minutes. Add pea pods and steam another minute or two. Remove from heat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Melt butter in a small saucepan and stir in cornstarch. Add vegetables and stir gently, making sure to coat with the butter. Add honey or syrup and stir to coat.

Parmesan Roasted Carrots and Potatoes

some carrots, peeled and sliced (or baby carrots)

Some small red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into quarters

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp garlic salt

pepper

¼ to ½ c. grated Parmesan cheese

1-2 Tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 375. Pour olive oil into a 9 x 13 pan and add carrots and potatoes. Sprinkle garlic salt and pepper over and stir well to coat.

Roast for about 30-40 minutes. Carrots and potatoes should be getting tender. Sprinkle about a quarter cup of the cheese over the vegetables and roast another 10 minutes until cheese is lightly browned. Place in a serving dish, add butter and allow it to melt. Stir gently to coat, then add more cheese, stir well, and serve.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’ll learn how to cook carrots in three different ways.

I really like carrots, which are naturally sweet but not overpoweringly sweet. You may have noticed by now that I don’t typically like super-sweet stuff, so I tend to prefer carrot recipes that don’t add lots of extra sugar. But if you like your carrots to taste like candy, try the glazed carrots recipe.

If you aren’t sure how to prepare fresh carrots, I recommend you listen to the spring chicken soup episode since in that one I go over how to clean and slice up carrots. You can also avoid the issue completely by using baby carrots. Baby carrots aren’t actually young carrots, they’re usually carrot pieces that are too small to sell as whole carrots. They are pre-peeled and washed so they’re mostly ready to use. I do like to pick them over quickly to make sure there aren’t any carrot tops or bad spots on any of the pieces. If there are, just cut them off and discard before cooking.

Let’s start with sautéed carrots. They’re delicious and really easy.

To make them, you’ll need a skillet with a lid. I used two fairly large carrots and half a small onion, which made two good-sized portions.

Scrape or peel your carrots and cut the tops off. Then slice them up. You can slice them however you like, into pennies or sticks. I sliced one carrot into pennies, the other into sticks about three inches long, just to see which I preferred. I think I preferred the sticks but both were equally good and took about the same amount of time to cook.

Peel and dice the onion next. If you like onion or are making a lot of carrots, dice up the whole thing. Remember you can wipe your oniony hand on the metal sink spigot, or anything metal, to remove most or all of the onion smell. It’s science!</

Basic kitchen equipment * how to season a cast iron skillet * care of wooden spoons * food staples * baking soda and baking powder

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this is a bonus episode. I didn’t want to run it as a regular episode since there’s no recipe involved, although I do give some information about baking soda and baking powder toward the end.

A lot of people are graduating right now, from high school or college, and may be thinking about moving into their first apartment. If you’ve never lived on your own, especially if you don’t have much experience with cooking, you may not be sure what you need to equip your first kitchen. So let’s talk about kitchen equipment.

But first, keep in mind that what one home cook considers a vital piece of equipment that no kitchen should be without, the next home cook has never even used that piece of equipment. You can find lists of kitchen necessities all over the internet, and each one will be different. Here I’m only talking about the truly bare necessities. I don’t even bring up small appliances like mixers and food processors. This is a list you can build on to make your own kitchen work for you.

At bare minimum, you’re going to need a pot big enough to boil water for spaghetti noodles and a skillet big enough for a couple of good-sized pork chops. A skillet is the same thing as a frying pan. Both your pot and your skillet should have lids. Ideally, the pot should be heavy steel, with a copper bottom if you can afford it, and the skillet should either be heavy steel or cast iron. I own a good cast iron skillet, but I actually use a steel one for preference just because it weighs so much less. I don’t recommend that you get nonstick, because even modern nonstick coatings are easy to scratch up and ruin. You need pots and pans you don’t need to baby.

If you buy a new cast iron skillet, don’t worry too much about all the information online about seasoning it. Just oil it well, and when you’re done using it, instead of washing it out with soap, scrape it clean with hot water and a spatula or a scraping tool. Wipe it dry with a cloth, then set it on the stove over the lowest heat your burner will manage until all the moisture evaporates off the metal. If you do this every time you use it, it’ll become seasoned nicely after a while and you won’t need to oil the skillet every time you use it. But if you wash it out with soap, you have to start the seasoning process all over again.

My mom never understood this. She was a little bit of a germophobe and could not stand the thought of not scrubbing out a skillet with soap and hot water. When I was in my 20s, sometimes I’d come home from work and discover that Mom had cleaned my apartment for me. That was really nice of her because I was a complete slob back then, but she would always scrub my skillet with soap and ruin the lovely natural coating iron develops.

Anyway, one pot with a lid, one skillet with a lid. It’s also nice to have a second pot, maybe a smaller one you can use as a saucepan. If storage is an issue, the small pot will probably nest in the larger pot and you can put the lids in the drawer underneath your oven, if it has one.

You will also need at least two mixing bowls, one large, one medium-sized. Mixing bowls often come in sets of three or four, with the small one being barely larger than a big cereal bowl and the big one being huge enough to hold rising bread dough. If you have room for the whole set and can afford it, I recommend you buy them all. I don’t use the giant-sized mixing bowl very often, but when I need it I absolutely need it and nothing else will do.

Your mixing bowls should not be plastic. Plastic is too hard to keep clean, since bacteria hide in scratches in plastic. Metal bowls may react with some foods, especially eggs, causing a nasty taste in the finished

Lasagna Rollups * how to ready an onion for cooking * how to brown ground beef * how to cook pasta

Lasagna Rollups

9 (or 12) lasagna noodles

1 lb. ground beef

1 small onion, diced

1 24 oz can or jar of pasta sauce

dried oregano, pepper, garlic powder

4 to 8 oz cream cheese

1 to 2 c shredded cheese

For 9 servings, use a 9x9 baking dish. For 12 servings, use a 9x13 baking dish.

Brown the meat with the onion, add spices and the pasta sauce, and simmer while the lasagna noodles cook. Add enough of the meat sauce to the bottom of a casserole dish to cover it in a thin layer. Spread cream cheese on each noodle, then add meat sauce. Roll up and place seam side down in the dish. Cover with leftover meat sauce and shredded cheese.

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until heated through and cheese is melted.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make fake lasagna, or as I like to call it, lasagna rollups. Instead of making an entire dish of lasagna in layers, you roll up each individual lasagna noodle around the filling, creating layers that way. And instead of sixteen different types of cheese, you just need cream cheese and some shredded cheese for the top. Yes, this sounds disgusting but it is incredibly good.

We’ll learn how to brown ground meat in this recipe and we’ll learn a little bit about how to cook pasta.

You’ll need a skillet, a pot, and a baking dish for this recipe. This sounds complicated but it’s actually not. There are a number of steps, and one of them is fairly labor intensive, but nothing about it is hard. If you want to make 9 servings of lasagna, you need a 9x9 baking dish. If you want to make 12 servings, you need a 9x13 baking dish. If you make 12 servings, though, you’ll probably run low on meat sauce, so add extra pasta sauce to the meat when you get to that step. This makes this recipe a great way to use up leftover pasta sauce.

First, drizzle just a little bit of olive oil or other oil in your skillet and turn the heat on to medium or just below.

While the skillet’s heating, dice your onion. I’m not a huge onion fan so I only use half an onion, but unless you’re also not an onion fan you can use a whole onion. Take a paring knife and cut the top and bottom of the onion off, which is the stem side and the root side of the onion. Then remove the outer layer of the onion, including the papery onion skin. The easiest way to do this is to make a shallow cut top to bottom on one side of the onion. You’ll see how an onion separates into layers, and it’s easy to pull the outermost layer off. Once you’ve removed it, you’ll have an onion that’s ready to chop up into little pieces and cook.

So, dice your onion. By the time you’re done, the skillet should be hot. Add the pieces of onion to the skillet and give them a quick stir with a spatula to make sure the oil is spread all around and that none of the onions start to stick. If they do start to stick, turn the heat down a little. Sautee the onions for a minute or two, moving them around with the spatula and turning them over so that they all get a chance to cook evenly.

Next you need to add the ground beef. It doesn’t matter what kind of ground beef you get. I typically go for ground chuck because it’s relatively inexpensive and has a lot of flavor without massive amounts of grease. You can use ground turkey or chicken in this recipe if you want to, but ground beef has more flavor.

Before you add the meat, make sure you’re wearing an old shirt, since hamburger grease spatters and you may end up with grease spots on your clothes.

Open the package of ground beef and plop the meat into the skillet on top of the onions. You don’t have to touch it, just drop it in directly from the

Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Pretzels

“Bark” chocolate coating

whole strawberries (or anything you want to dip in chocolate, really)

Wash the strawberries and dry every last drop of water off them or the chocolate will solidify and never melt again. Make sure any utensils you use to stir the chocolate are also dry. Melt the chocolate in a saucepan (or double boiler) on low and dip the strawberries one by one, holding by their leaves. It looks nice to leave a little red showing at the top. Place in paper candy cups to dry (or on waxed paper). Work fast, because once the chocolate’s been on the heat for a while it’ll start to chunk up.

--dictated by Kelly R. (she refused to write it down)

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast Patreon bonus episode for May 2019. I’m Kate Shaw and we’re going to learn how to make chocolate-covered strawberries and pretzels.

I learned how to make these from my friend Kelly back when we both worked at a big used book store. I got the idea that we should put together a cookbook with recipes from both staff members and regular customers. That idea never went anywhere but I did gather some recipes. I’ve since lost them all except for Kelly’s recipe.

Every Valentine’s Day, I see prices for chocolate-dipped strawberries that are just ridiculous. Don’t people know how easy it is to make them at home? The only hard part is finding decent strawberries in February. It’s too late for this year, unfortunately, but they’d make a great Mother’s Day treat.

Before you do anything else, prepare your strawberries by rinsing them and drying them carefully with paper towels. Your goal is to get as much moisture off the berries as you can, with the acknowledgement that they won’t stay dry for long, so do this soon before you plan to dip the berries. Discard any strawberries that look overripe or underripe. Also get out anything else you plan to dip and make sure you can get into the package easily with one hand. I used mini pretzels, but anything that would taste good with chocolate on it is fair game. If it’s a fruit or vegetable, rinse and dry it.

Next, place a piece of waxed paper on the counter where you can reach it easily from the stove. You can also use a clean paper bag which you’ve unfolded and opened flat, but I never seem to have paper bags these days and I do have waxed paper. Kelly recommended using paper candy cups, and I suppose you could use regular baking cups.

Next, get your chocolate out. The recipe calls for Bark coating, which is a brand you can find in the baking aisle of most supermarkets. It’s not the highest quality chocolate, but it does taste good and it has the added benefit of drying quickly to a hard surface. That’s important, and I learned it the hard way today. I didn’t have any Bark coating but I did have a bag of Hershey Special Dark chocolate chips. I melted those and they worked great, but the better part of a day later and the pretzels are still sticky. Presumably the strawberries would still be sticky too, but I already ate them.

There are several ways you can melt chocolate. You can use a double boiler if you have one, or improvise a double boiler. If you have one, you know how to use it, so I won’t go into details about double boilers here. You can also microwave the chocolate in short bursts. Start with 30 seconds, stir the chocolate pieces, microwave for another 30 seconds, stir again, and follow up with 10-second intervals followed by stirring.

I tried the microwave method today with some white chocolate I had in the cupboard. I thought it would look nice drizzled over the dark chocolate pretzels and strawberries. But…it didn’t work. The most I got from the white chocolate was a sort of thick paste that smelled gross. Then I noticed the sell-by date on the box. The white chocolate expired in December 2014, so I

Deviled eggs * how to hard-boil an egg

Deviled Eggs

6 hard-boiled eggs, shelled

about ¼ c. mayonnaise

about ¼ tsp yellow mustard

pepper and/or paprika

Cut the shelled eggs in half lengthwise. Remove yolks with a spoon and put into a small bowl.

Mash the yolks with the edge of the spoon until they’re very finely crumbled. Mix in the mayonnaise and mustard until they taste right. Spoon the yolk mixture back into the whites. Sprinkle with pepper and/or paprika to garnish and add flavor.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make deviled eggs. Summertime picnics and cookouts are coming up and you want to be prepared!

Deviled eggs are easy to make. The hardest part is boiling the eggs without overcooking them. Even if you overcook a boiled egg, it’ll be okay, but getting it just right results in a better tasting and better looking egg. You’ve seen boiled eggs where the yolk is sort of greenish around the edges, right? And it’s tough? That’s an overcooked egg.

You’ll need one pot with a lid for this recipe. Choose however many eggs you plan to boil and place them gently in the pot. Then run water over them until they’re covered by a good half-inch or more of water.

You don’t need to warm your eggs to room temperature before plunking them in the pot. You don’t need to salt the water. You don’t need to do anything except put them in a pot of water.

Place the pot on the stove over high heat. Don’t cover the pot, just keep an eye on it while you do other stuff around the kitchen. When the water is at a full boil—that is, when big blobs of agitated water are pushing the eggs around constantly—move the pot off the heat. Put the lid on the pot, set your timer for 15 minutes, and don’t touch the pot until the timer goes off.

While you’re waiting, prepare the egg’s ice bath. Grab a mixing bowl or another pot and partly fill it with ice. Then add enough water to roughly cover the ice. Make sure you have enough room in the bowl or pot to add the eggs without it overflowing.

As soon as your timer goes off, remove the lid from the egg pot and carefully pour the hot water into the sink. Then use a spoon to carefully move the eggs into the ice bath.

Let the eggs sit in the ice bath for ten or fifteen minutes. Every so often, give the icewater a stir and add more ice if necessary as it melts. After ten or fifteen minutes, remove the eggs. They are done. You can either put them in the fridge to peel and prepare later, or you can peel them now and use them.

This method of boiling eggs is a lot more involved than you may be used to, but it’s also a lot easier than it sounds. It takes time, but it’s almost completely hands-off so you can do other stuff while the eggs are cooking or cooling down. And when it’s time to peel the eggs, they’re cool so you won’t scald yourself or drop any eggs because they’re just too hot. The ice bath is critical, because it stops the eggs from overcooking.

Here are some tips about eggs from someone who used to keep pet hens. I always buy cage-free eggs or eggs from local farmers, and usually those eggs are brown. Brown eggs are no better or worse for you than white eggs. The shell color depends on the breed of chicken. When you break open a brown egg, sometimes you’ll find little spots of rusty color around the yolk. That’s just pigment and is perfectly normal. Sometimes when you break open an egg of any color, you’ll find a spot of blood inside. That isn’t a dead chicken embryo, it’s just a spot where a capillary broke in the hen’s egg canal while the egg was forming, and a little drop of blood was incorporated into the egg. The hen wasn’t hurt and it won’t change the flavor or quality of the egg. When you buy eggs from the supermarket, eggs with spots of

Spring chicken soup * how to brown meat * how to clean carrots * how to clean spring onions and leeks

Spring Chicken Soup

Oil

about 1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs

about 1 c sliced leeks or spring onions

about 1 c sliced carrots

about 3 to 4 c chicken stock

Thyme, salt, pepper

about 1 c frozen green peas (thawed)

about 3 c leaf lettuce, cut up

some fresh parsley, cut up (optional)

Brown chicken in about a tablespoon of oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add salt and pepper, cover, and cook for five to ten minutes. Turn over occasionally.

When chicken is cooked through, remove from pot. Add leeks and carrots and sauté about five minutes, then add stock, thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil. Cover and turn down heat, simmer until carrots are almost tender, then add chicken pieces and peas and simmer another five minutes. Remove from heat and add lettuce and parsley, stir in, and serve immediately.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make chicken soup, but not the kind of chicken soup you want in winter. This is light and delicious, full of spring vegetables. My Uncle Keith made it recently and I loved it so much I demanded he give me the recipe.

Then, of course, I changed the recipe to fit my own tastes and budget.

The recipe calls for leeks, but leeks are more expensive so I bought spring onions. Spring onions are mildly oniony the way leeks are, but they’re much smaller. In retrospect I probably should have bought the leeks, which were $3 compared to $1 for the spring onions, because the soup needed a little more onion flavor than the spring onions supplied.

I literally didn’t measure anything in this recipe, just tossed stuff in until it looked right. The result was an excellent light soup that was nevertheless filling.

You only need one pot for this recipe, although it does need a lid. I used my everyday pot and it was plenty big enough. I recommend buying boneless chicken thighs, although as I’ve mentioned before, you don’t necessarily need to buy skinless since the skin is easy to pull off chicken thighs. A lot of times you can’t find boneless chicken that’s not also skinless, though.

Start by putting a little bit of oil in the bottom of the pot, no more than a tablespoonful or so. I used olive oil but it doesn’t really matter what you use. Heat the pot to about medium and drop the chicken pieces into the pot. I like to trim a lot of the fat off the pieces with a pair of kitchen shears, and drop them into the pot as I finish with each piece.

Brown the chicken for a few minutes, basically just sautéing it in the oil to make sure it’s starting to cook evenly all over. Push it around and turn the pieces over. If the pieces start to stick to the bottom of the pan, turn the heat down a little. Your pot is probably too small to spread all the chicken in one layer on the bottom, so make sure every piece gets some time on the bottom of the pile to get plenty of heat.

After all the pieces are starting to turn whitish all over and none of the pieces has big spaces where it hasn’t been exposed to the heat, you’ve browned the meat. Throw some salt and pepper on them, put the lid on the pot, and let the pieces cook for three or four more minutes. Then turn the pieces over and replace the lid and let the chicken cook for another three or four minutes. At this point the chicken should be done. Scoop the pieces out of the pot with a spatula and remove them to a plate.

If you were on top of things, before you even got the chicken out of the fridge you were already cleaning and preparing your vegetables. If you didn’t do it ahead of time, though, peel and chop the carrots while the chicken is cooking. You peel carrots with a potato peeler, preferably over a trash can so the strips of peel fall into the trash. Then you cut the tops of

Cornmeal pancakes

½ c all-purpose flour

½ c cornmeal

3 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

½ c hot water

¼ c milk

¼ c corn oil

1 egg

Preheat skillet over medium-low heat. Grease lightly. Mix ingredients well in a medium-sized mixing bowl, then drop spoonfuls of batter into the skillet to make small pancakes. These cook very fast, no more than a few minutes. When bubbles in the batter stay open, flip the pancakes over and cook for another 30 seconds or so on the other side.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week let’s make some pancakes--but not just any pancakes. These are cornmeal pancakes and not only are they super easy to make, it’s hard to mess them up and end up with gummy half-cooked batter inside as sometimes happens with regular pancakes.

I’ve made this recipe hundreds of times and I’ve never had any trouble with it, not even when I was a new cook. I originally got it from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, which was the only one my mom owned except for a cookbook put together by our church, which she illustrated. There are things in the recipe I sometimes question--like, why does the water have to be hot? But because it turns out so perfectly every time, I’ve never tried to tinker with it.

Or so I thought. After I wrote that paragraph, I cleaned out the garage for a yard sale and actually found my mom’s battered copy of Good Housekeeping Cookbook--specifically, it’s called The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook, published in 1963. I found the cornmeal pancake recipe on page 488, called Southern Pancakes, and it turns out I have made small changes to it. The original calls for boiling water, not just hot. It calls for melted shortening but I’ve changed that to oil. And it specifies all sorts of fiddly little details I dispensed with immediately, because these are really forgiving pancakes that literally always turn out well.

You’ll need cornmeal for this recipe as well as all-purpose flour. I love cornmeal and keep it on hand the same way I do flour, in a glass jar with a screw-on lid to keep bugs out. Cornmeal keeps a long time and isn’t expensive.

You’ll also need one mixing bowl and a skillet, and a spatula. The mixing bowl doesn’t need to be big. A medium-sized one will do.

Turn the heat onto medium or just under and add just a tiny dab of oil. While the skillet’s heating, measure your dry ingredients into the mixing bowl, then add the wet ingredients. I just use water that’s hot from the tap. Mix everything really well with a big spoon, pressing out any flour lumps and making sure the egg is fully incorporated into the mixture. Batter will be runny.

By the time you’re done mixing, your skillet should be hot. Use the spatula to spread the oil around if you haven’t already, then push any excess oil to the edges of the skillet. Then use your big spoon and drop a spoonful of batter onto the skillet. In my skillet, I have room for three of these pancakes. They should be small. When I was a kid we called them silver-dollar sized, but I’m not sure kids today have seen silver dollars. Basically, if you’re adding more than one big spoonful of batter to a single pancake, you’re making them too big.

Now let them sit in the skillet without touching them for a few minutes. Watch them, because it’s really easy to tell when you need to flip them over. See how there are bubbles coming up in the batter and popping? At first the batter oozes together to mostly hide where the bubbles were, but as the pancake cooks, the bubbles will pop and the batter stays open, showing a little hole. When most of the holes stay open, it’s time to flip the pancake. I’ll put a picture of this stage in the show notes so you can see what it looks like.

So, flip the pancakes over. The cooked side should be more or less golden. If you see any blackened or very dark areas, you either waited too long to flip th

Chicken Tacos with sweet potato

1 or 2 lbs chicken thighs, skin removed (boneless is easiest to use)

1 medium sized sweet potato, peeled and diced

flour tortillas (small)

canned corn (optional)

lime crema or sour cream

baby spinach leaves (optional)

Marinade:

4 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp white wine vinegar

2 tsp chili powder

1 ½ tsp salt

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

½ tsp ground cumin

½ tsp black pepper

the juice of 1 or 2 limes

Combine ingredients in a large bowl and place chicken in the marinade. Turn chicken several times to coat. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes up to about 24 hours.

When ready to cook the chicken, heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add a little oil and the chicken. Cook five to eight minutes per side, until cooked all the way through. Remove chicken from skillet to a plate lined with paper towels to soak up excess grease.

Peel a sweet potato and cut into cubes about the size of dice. Toss these into the skillet in a single layer and add a little water. Cover, stirring frequently, and add more water if the skillet starts to dry out. When the potatoes are tender all the way through, remove them from the skillet into a bowl.

Toss a flour tortilla into the skillet for a minute or so, then turn with a spatula and let sit for another minute or so. Remove and do the same for another tortilla until you have as many as you need.

Open a can of corn, drain, and pour as much of it into the skillet as you want. Saute briefly until it’s warm through. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

While the corn is warming, use the tortillas to make tacos. Add generous dollops of lime crema (or sour cream), then place chicken and sweet potatoes on top. You can top with baby spinach if you like.

When the corn is warmed through, you can have it as a side dish or toss some into the tacos. Or both.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re making an amazing meal that looks complicated but is actually simple. You make the lime crema in advance, you prepare the chicken in advance, and when you’re ready to cook everything, you only need a single skillet. It’s chicken tacos with sweet potatoes and lime crema, pretty much all my favorite foods in one dish.

You’ll start with a marinade for the chicken. A marinade is a good way to season and tenderize meat before you cook it. The marinade in this recipe calls for a lot of ingredients and many of them are ones you may not already have on hand. The ingredients you really need are the olive oil, the white wine vinegar, the chili powder, and a lime. I trust you have salt and pepper on hand. White wine vinegar is actually pretty cheap. You don’t need to get a big bottle. You can use red wine vinegar if that’s all you have, or even just regular white vinegar. Olive oil can be super expensive, but again, you can get a small bottle of the cheap stuff and it’ll work just fine. If you absolutely can’t get olive oil, you can use regular vegetable oil. Basically you just need something that will help the other ingredients stick to the chicken. You can substitute various things for the onion and garlic powder and the chili powder and cumin. For instance, if you have fresh garlic but not powdered, just mince up a clove and add it. If you have literally any kind of taco seasoning, whether it’s actually chili powder or something else, like a packet of dried-out Taco Bell seasoning that came in something you don’t even remember buying, use that in place of the chili powder and cumin. You can substitute lemons for limes if you don’t have limes. You just want citrus in there of some kind. When I made this, I left out the onion powder because I didn’t have any, and it was fine. Marinades are flexible.

If you can find boneless chicken thighs, get them. Sometimes there will still

Strawberry Scones

2 ¼ c. all-purpose flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

¼ c. sugar

½ tsp salt

6 Tbsp cold butter

1 cup strawberries, chopped small

¾ cup milk (or half and half) (may need to add a little more)

turbinado sugar (optional)

425 F

greased baking sheet

11-13 minutes

Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Cut butter into the flour mixture. Toss berries to coat with flour, then add the milk and stir until just combined. Drop onto the baking sheet and sprinkle with turbinado sugar before baking. Makes about 8.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make another recipe that calls for strawberries. Last week we talked about strawberry shortcake, which included how to cut up and sugar your strawberries. But sometimes you have strawberries left over after you eat up all of your shortcake. You notice them in the fridge, lonely and unloved, getting kind of gross and wilted. Can they be saved?

Of course they can! Turn them into strawberry scones. Look, I just ate four of these and the recipe typically only makes eight so believe me, they’re good. Especially with coffee.

You can use sugared strawberries that are left over from another recipe or that you aren’t sure what to do with, or you can prepare the strawberries specially for this recipe. You don’t even need to sugar them, just cut them up.

You will only need one bowl and one baking sheet. Grease the baking sheet. I usually use Crisco but it doesn’t really matter what you use for this recipe.

In the bowl, mix up the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar with a fork or whisk. If you’re not sure how to measure flour properly, check out our first episode, about chocolate chip cookies.

Then you’ll cut the butter up into the flour mixture until all the butter is in little tiny pieces and each piece is coated with flour. You do this the same way you did it in the strawberry shortcake episode. The pieces don’t have to be infinitesimal, by the way. Just make them reasonably small, like little peas, although if you have the time and patience to really make them small, you’ll get a better result. The goal of cutting butter into dry ingredients is to end up with lots of tiny pieces of butter all coated with flour.

Before you start cutting in the butter is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Strawberries contain a lot of liquid. If they’ve been cut up and sitting in a bowl in the fridge for a day or two, a lot of that liquid has pooled at the bottom. Put the cut up berries into a measuring cup, then hold the berries in the cup with your fingers while you turn the cup over. Let any moisture you picked up by accident drip out. Then add the berries to the flour mixture and give them a few good stirs to coat them with flour.

Finally, add the milk. I don’t remember where I got this recipe, but it originally called for a full cup of cream or half and half. You are probably not going to need this much. I start with three-quarters of a cup of milk, usually 2% unless I bought whole milk by accident. Pour this in and mix it around until there’s no dry flour left. If there’s a lot of flour left after all the milk is absorbed, you can add a little more milk, but be cautious. You really don’t want this dough to get too soupy. It should be bouncy and sticky, not smooth and drippy.

Don’t try to make the batter smooth. It won’t happen, for one thing, and for another, time is of the essence now. You want to get this dough in the oven before it loses some of its oomph.

You don’t roll these scones out. Just get a spoon, large or small, doesn’t matter, and scoop great big lumps of dough onto the greased baking sheet. Make these big and roughly all about the same size. I usually get eight big blobs out of the dough onto one baking sheet.

If you have turbinado sugar—you know, big sugar crystals that some people l