Real Life Cooking

Topping:

20 oz can of pineapple rings in juice (can substitute pineapple chunks)

1 c brown sugar

½ c (one stick) butter

Cake:

2 c all-purpose flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

1 ¼ c sugar

½ c (one stick) butter

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

1 c juice drained from pineapple (top up with milk if not enough)

Heat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a large oven-safe skillet, melt one stick of butter. Spread brown sugar evenly in the skillet, then arrange pineapple rings around the pan. You may not have room for all your pineapple.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar, add vanilla and eggs, and cream together well. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the pineapple juice. Pour the batter over the topping.

Bake at 350 for 35-45 minutes depending on the size of your skillet. A bigger skillet will cook slightly faster.

Allow to cool somewhat, then turn skillet upside down over a platter or cake plate. Decorate with colored sugar and/or maraschino cherries.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast Patreon bonus episode for April 2019! I’m Kate Shaw and we’re going to learn how to make pineapple upside down cake this month.

Most recipes for pineapple upside down cake call for a cake mix. I don’t see the point of that since cakes from scratch are so much better and just as easy. Besides, I don’t know what they’re putting in cake mixes these days, but it almost always upsets my stomach.

I got this recipe from a woman named Betty who I worked with back in my early 30s. Betty was an older country woman, practical and not given to flights of fancy, but bright and cheery too. She was nice to work with. One Monday morning she told me that she couldn’t sleep the night before so she’d turned on the TV and found a movie called Lord of the Rings, which she’d never heard of. She said she’d watched almost all of it but had fallen asleep before the end. She wanted to know if the hobbits had managed to destroy the ring, and I had to explain that it took them two more movies to do that. She also referred to Legolas yearningly as “that beautiful man.”

Anyway, I’d had Betty’s recipe for pineapple upside down cake for literally almost two decades but had never made it until last week. My family had an Easter get-together and my aunt Janice said we needed a cake and could I make one. I decided it was time for the pineapple upside down cake.

Pineapple upside down cake is unusual in that it’s made in a skillet. And it really is made upside down.

First, make sure your skillet is oven-safe. A cast-iron skillet is the best to use, but a steel skillet will work too as long as the handle is also fully steel. If your skillet has a plastic handle or a nonstick surface, don’t put it in the oven.

If you don’t have an oven-safe skillet, you can make this in a 9x13 cake pan, but it won’t be nearly as attractive. Don’t use a regular 9” round cake pan because it’s much too small.

The first thing you’ll do is unwrap a stick of butter and plop it into the skillet. Then turn the oven on to preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and set the skillet in the oven. Keep an eye on it and as soon as the butter has mostly melted, remove the skillet from the oven. Be really careful doing this, especially if your skillet is heavy. The metal is hot and it’s easy to burn yourself. Let the oven continue to preheat while the skillet cools a little and the butter finishes melting.

This is a good time to measure out your dry ingredients into a medium-sized mixing bowl. You do this just like you would any other cake or cookie recipe, so if you haven’t listened to our very first episode, which is about chocolate chip cookies and walks you through the process of measuring flour properly, you might want to give that one a listen.

By the way, the o

Strawberry shortcake * preparing strawberries * cutting fat into dry ingredients * biscuits * whipped cream

Strawberry shortcake

Strawberries:

1 quart strawberries

about 2 Tbsp sugar

Hull and cut up strawberries. Mix with a few spoonfuls of sugar, cover, and set aside (in fridge ideally).

Shortcake:

2 c. all-purpose flour

2 Tbsp sugar

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1/3 c. shortening or butter (1/3 cup = 5 Tbsp + 1 tsp)

1 c. milk

Heat oven to 450 Fahrenheit and grease a baking sheet.

Mix flour, 2 Tbsp sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in shortening or butter. Add milk and mix until just blended. Dough will be thick and lumpy. Scoop the dough into one loaf-shaped lump in the middle of the baking sheet, put in oven, and bake 16-18 minutes.

Whipped cream:

1 pint heavy whipping cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

about ½ c. powdered sugar

In a large mixing bowl using an electric mixer, whip cream until it starts to hold soft peaks. Add vanilla extract and about ¼ c of the powdered sugar. Whip to combine, then add the remaining powdered sugar and continue to whip until cream holds stiff peaks.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make strawberry shortcake! It’s really three recipes in one, so we’ll learn how to prepare strawberries, how to cut fat into dry ingredients, basically how to make drop biscuits since that’s what the shortcake recipe is, and how to turn cream into whipped cream.

When the really ripe strawberries show up in stores and the price drops, it’s tempting to buy as many as I can before they go away again except for the sad tasteless expensive ones you get the rest of the year. But there are only so many strawberries I can eat out of hand, and strawberries are moist, delicate berries that don’t always fare well in recipes.

So let’s make the most iconic springtime treat of all, strawberry shortcake. No, you don’t have to buy those gross little sponge cakes they sell in plastic-wrapped stacks next to the strawberry display. You don’t have to buy or make an angelfood cake. Basically, you just use your regular biscuit recipe, increase the milk, and make it into one giant biscuit.

Before we start, it’s easy to make your own whipped cream but you do need a handheld electric mixer, so if you don’t have one you can pick up a carton of Cool Whip or something instead. But homemade is much better.

First, you’ll need strawberries. Buy at least a quart. You don’t have to get the biggest ones since you’re going to cut them up anyway. Try to buy a carton where all the berries look good. Some may be a little underripe, with white tops or a paler pink shade, but you don’t want any that are totally unripe or any that are rotten. Unless they’re super cheap, of course.

A few hours or up to a day before you plan to eat them, you’ll need to prepare the strawberries. You’ll need a paring knife or other reasonably sharp, non-serrated knife and a medium-sized mixing bowl to put the berries in after you cut them up.

Work over the sink. I set up this way: I put the bowl to my left, the carton of berries in the sink, and run the water in a very thin stream. Pick up a berry, cut the green top off and any white if the berry isn’t fully ripe, and drop the discarded pieces into the lid of the carton if it has one. If not, you might want to put them in a small bowl in the sink.

After you cut the top off the strawberry, rinse the berry under the water. Then cut it in half, cut the halves in half, and if the strawberry was especially big, cut the bigger pieces in half again. Then drop the pieces into the mixing bowl and start over with the next berry.

This sounds like it takes forever and it kind of does, but it’s efficient and, of course, you get to eat as many berries as you like while you work. Discard any berries that are too unri

Lime crema * how to zest and juice a lime (or other citrus) * how to peel and chop garlic

Lime Crema

8 oz sour cream

1 lime (juice and zest)

¼ tsp salt

1 clove garlic, minced fine

At least four hours before you plan to use it, mix the sour cream with the other ingredients. You can double this recipe. Mix in a bowl, then replace the lime crema into the container the sour cream came in for easy storage.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast! I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make lime crema. In the process, we’ll learn how to zest and juice citrus fruit, in this case lime, and how to peel and mince garlic.

Lime crema is really easy to make but don’t substitute anything or leave any ingredients out. I am not a huge fan of sour cream or garlic, but I love lime so I gave this recipe a try. Now I’m obsessed with eating lime crema on everything. It’s delicious! I make it with a 16 oz tub of sour cream, double the salt to ½ tsp, but use just one clove of garlic, peeled and minced very fine. You can double the garlic too if you like. I zest one entire lime and use as much juice from the lime as I can get and that’s enough.

You’ll need a small mixing bowl for this one, or a medium mixing bowl if you’re using a 16 oz carton of sour cream. Take all the sour cream out of the carton and put it in the bowl. Add the salt and mix it in with a spoon. Then you’re going to need to zest your lime.

Zesting a citrus fruit is easy. It’s one of those things where it’s easier if you have the right tool, but if you don’t have the right tool it’s still not too hard, you just have to be a little extra careful. The right tool is a microplane or microzester. I got one for Christmas a few years ago and I love it. It makes zesting citrus so easy!

The zest is the peel of a citrus fruit, but only the part of the peel that has color. The layer underneath the color is white and has a bitter flavor. Ideally you want to get the color off but not any of the white part, which is called the pith. This is easy with a microplane, but if you don’t have one, you can use the small holes in a cheese grater. I have the kind of cheese grater that’s just a piece of metal with sharp holes poked through it. You rub the lime over the sharp points and it grates off the surface. You have to be careful not to grate one place too long or you’ll go through into the pith. The easiest way to use a cheese grater to zest citrus is to set the grater over the mixing bowl, hold it in place with your off hand, and rub the fruit over the small points. The zest will fall directly into the bowl.

This sounds way more complicated than it is, trust me. And there’s nothing that makes me feel more gourmet than adding zest to a recipe. Plus, it adds a ton of flavor and little specks of color.

Juicing a lime is easy even if you don’t have any kind of juicer. Just stick a fork into the lime after you’ve zested it, push the fork tines around inside the lime to break open the little juicy bits, and squeeze the juice into the bowl. Watch out for seeds. You can get a lot of juice out of even a small lime this way, just keep sticking the fork into it and breaking up the membranes that contain juice.

Make sure you zest the lime before you juice it. If you juice it first, it loses its shape and is much harder to zest.

Next, you need to peel and mince a garlic clove.

A head of garlic looks like a little white paper purse full of marbles. You may have seen it at the store and thought WHOOEEE that is expensive and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s only expensive because it’s probably marked as so much per pound, but pick up one of those pieces. It weighs almost nothing. So it’s not that expensive. Don’t be intimidated. You can handle the garlic.

Peel some of the papery outer parts off the garlic and you’ll start to see that the marbles are little teardrop shaped p

Chocolate Chip Cookies * how to measure flour * softening butter * how to measure brown sugar

Chocolate Chip Cookies

makes about 2 ½ dozen

Bake at 350 F for 10-12 minutes

Grease baking sheets

In medium mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add walnuts. In large mixing bowl, blend the butter and sugars until smooth. Add egg and vanilla to the butter mixture and blend well. Add half the flour mixture to the butter mixture, blend well, add half the chocolate chips to the butter mixture and blend well, add the last of the flour mixture and blend well, add the last of the chocolate chips and blend well. Spoon onto baking sheets, leaving an inch or two in between for the cookies to spread as they bake.

Welcome to the very first episode of Real Life Cooking, a podcast about spending less but eating well. Thanks to Richard E. for that tag line! In this first episode I’m going to give you some information about how the podcast will be structured and what my goals are, and then we’ll make chocolate chip cookies. This will involve learning how to measure flour and brown sugar, and how to soften butter.

My name is Kate Shaw. I also make Strange Animals Podcast, if my voice sounds familiar. I got the idea for this podcast a few weeks ago and thought it filled a gap. At least, I haven’t been able to find anything like it. My goal is to not just present recipes, but to go into clear detail about how to make them. The recipe will be in the show notes and if you’re an experienced cook that’s all you really need. But if you’re someone who’s new to cooking, or if it’s a type of recipe you’ve never tried before, the episode will walk you through the steps in as much detail as I can manage.

My recipes are all fairly ordinary, many of them ones I make for myself frequently. Before I put together an episode, I’ll have recently made the recipe so that every step is clear in my mind so I can share it with you.

Some episodes will be actual recipes, maybe for a cake or a pie where there are certain ingredients and certain processes you need to follow closely. Other episodes will be how to use a particular ingredient or how to cook something basic that doesn't require a step-by-step recipe, like how to roast a chicken. If you use Metric measurements for cooking, be aware that you'll need to translate any measurements to metric to use these recipes. When a recipe calls for, say, two cups of flour, the cup is a special measurement, not just any old drinking glass.

In some episodes, I'll describe techniques that apply to many recipes, such as this one that explains how to measure flour properly. Then in future episodes I'll refer back to that episode when a recipe calls for the same technique. That way you won't have to listen to 900 episodes where I explain how to measure flour.

If your podcatcher doesn’t download show notes, you can go directly to Anchor podcasting to see them.

The recipe, photos, and a show transcript will be in the show notes so you can refer to everything without needing to re-listen to an episode or frantically try to take notes.

I do sometimes use alcohol in cooking, but when I do, I’ll always indicate if the alcohol is optional. If it’s not I’ll provide a second recipe for something similar that doesn’t call for alcohol.

I also have food preferences and dislikes, as everyone does. I'll try to be fair and mix things up, but you can expect a lot of recipes that call for citrus of various kinds, zero recipes that call for mushrooms, and lots of southern U.