Real Life Cooking

Caramel Brownies * using a cake mix in a recipe * using evaporated milk * melting caramel

Caramel Brownies

* 1 German chocolate cake mix

* 1 1/2 sticks melted butter

* 1/3 c evaporated milk

* 1 c pecans, chopped

* 1 bag caramels, unwrapped

* another 1/3 c evaporated milk

* 12 oz chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 9×13 pan.

Melt the butter and stir in the evaporated milk, pecans, and cake mix. Spread about half of the mixture in the pan and bake for exactly six minutes. Melt the caramels and 1/3 c evaporated milk together (it takes 3 minutes in the microwave). As soon as the six minutes of baking are up, remove the pan from the oven and immediately pour the chocolate chips over the top, then pour the caramel mixture over them. Drop the remaining cake mixture over it all. Bake another 15 minutes exactly and remove from oven. Do not overbake; mixture will look underdone when first removed from oven. Cool completely before cutting. Brownies will be soft inside after they have cooled.

The brownies before and after the second baking:

The brownies the next day, when I’d started nibbling on them:

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

This recipe is one that calls for a cake mix. I don’t usually like using cake mixes in recipes. For one thing, it feels like cheating, and for another, sometimes it just doesn’t taste as good as homemade and it’s certainly more expensive. But it occurs to me that some listeners who are new cooks may not know how to use a cake mix in a recipe.

This is another recipe I got from a coworker many, many years ago, in this case a woman named Alice. I was so enthusiastic about these brownies when she brought them in for a company potluck that I begged her for the recipe. I was still a new cook at the time and the recipe sounded so complicated that I never tried making it—until now, when I found it in my recipe box. And it’s not really complicated at all.

For this recipe you’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small bowl you can microwave, and a 9×13 pan. You’re also going to need a German chocolate cake mix, and it doesn’t matter what brand you get. Make sure it’s specifically German chocolate, not just chocolate, because you need that cocoa flavor from German chocolate cake mix to make the brownies taste like brownies.

You’ll also need a bag of caramels. Alice didn’t specify how big a bag, so I bought the only bag I could find in my local grocery store. I didn’t keep the package but I think it was about 12 ounces or so, certainly not a big bag. These are the little square soft caramels that are wrapped individually in cellophane. I think you can buy them unwrapped for baking these days, but if you buy the wrapped ones, as soon as you get a minute, open the package, unwrap all the caramels, and store the caramels in a plastic baggie. That makes them a lot easier to use them later, and in fact my recipe has a note that says “this takes forever so do it first.” The hardest part is not snacking on them as you unwrap them.

You’ll also need evaporated milk, and Alice helpfully pointed out that the small can you can buy in the baking aisle has exactly 2/3 of a cup in it. This is the little bitty can, not the 12 oz can. It’s also evaporated milk, not condensed. Be careful because the two are sold side by side and it’s easy to grab the wrong thing.

So, you’ve got all your ingredients together and unwrapped your caramels. Before you do anything else, cut the top off the chocolate chip bag and set it somewhere where it won’t spill but you can grab it easily. Once the pan goes into the oven for the first bake, time is of the essence and you don’t want to have to stop and find the scissors to open that bag.

Then turn the oven on to preheat and grease the 9×13 cak...

Sweet potato casserole * how to bake a sweet potato in the microwave

Sweet Potato Casserole

* 3 c. cooked sweet potatoes, mashed (about 3 15-oz cans, drained)

* 1 c. sugar

* ¼ c. milk

* 1 egg, beaten

* 1 tsp salt

* 2 tsp vanilla

* 1 tsp cinnamon or allspice (or ½ tsp each)

Topping:

* ½ c. butter, melted

* 1 c. brown sugar

* ½ c. all-purpose flour

* 1 c. pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Grease a 9×9 baking dish or casserole. Mix sweet potatoes with sugar, milk, egg, salt, vanilla, and spices, mix well, and pour into baking dish. Mix the topping and spread on the sweet potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes.

Sweet potato baked in the microwave for 7 minutes and about to be eaten plain–look, it’s the only picture I have until I can remake this recipe:

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sweet potato casserole! This was an episode I had planned to run last November in the run-up to Thanksgiving, but you know what? You can have sweet potatoes whenever you like, not just at Thanksgiving.

Sweet potatoes are really easy to make and are a great accompaniment to a mild meat like turkey or chicken, or a salty meat like ham. This recipe is sweet without that gooey over-the-top marshmallow topping many people use, and the pecans give the dish a pleasant texture.

The easiest way to make sweet potato casserole is to use canned sweet potatoes. These are almost always marketed as yams but they’re the same thing as the whole sweet potatoes you can buy in the produce section as far as I know. But if you prefer to start with whole sweet potatoes instead of canned, I’ll give you directions for that too.

You’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small mixing bowl or large cereal bowl, and a casserole dish or something similar. I use a round Pyrex casserole dish but you can use a 9×9 pan. Grease it well and set it aside.

I’ll go over the canned sweet potato version of the recipe first because it’s so simple. You need about three cups of sweet potato, so either buy three of the smaller 15-oz cans or one big 29-oz can and one 15-oz can. Open the cans and drain them, then dump the potatoes into a big mixing bowl.

You’ll notice that the sweet potatoes are already peeled. They’re also already cooked. You just need to mash them. Use a fork, and don’t try to get them creamy smooth like regular mashed potatoes. You want your sweet potatoes to have more of a chunky texture than regular mashed potatoes. Mash them up good with the fork, breaking each piece up. You also want to remove any discolored or bruised areas and especially the tough fibers. Sweet potatoes are fibrous, especially at the ends, and those fibers are unpleasant to chew and hard to swallow—sort of like the string of a string bean. Don’t worry about the little bitty fibers, but fish out the longer pieces you notice or any mats of fiber.

Once the pieces are all mushed up reasonably well, you just dump all the rest of the ingredients on top of them and mix the whole thing up really well.

But let’s back up again and go over directions for baking your sweet potatoes from scratch. It’s easiest to do this in the microwave one at a time, and you can do it in advance.

First, you’re going to need to buy some sweet potatoes. Choose medium-sized ones, neither gigantic nor tiny. Sweet potatoes are funky in shape compared to regular potatoes, but choose ones that are roughly the size of a regular potato that you’d want to eat as a jacket potato. You’re going to want four or five of them at this size. Don’t think you can buy two gigantic ones instead, because a lot of times those really big ones have started to get woody inside. You can use really big or really small ones if that’s all you’ve got,

Spicy turkey meatloaf * how to make a substitute for bread crumbs

Spicy Turkey Meatloaf

* oil for sauteeing

* 2 carrots, chopped

* 1 onion, chopped

* 1 celery stalk, chopped

* 1 green pepper, chopped

* 3 garlic cloves, minced

* 2 lb ground turkey

* 2 eggs

* 1 c bread crumbs

* 1/4 c milk

* 1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

* 2 tsp salt

* 1/2 tsp pepper

* 1 tsp ground cumin

* 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

* 1/2 c ketchup (plus more for garnish)

Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit.

Saute the  carrots, onion, celery, and green pepper in a little olive oil or butter until the onions are mostly translucent and the other vegetables are starting to get tender, about five minutes. Add garlic and saute another minute. Put in very large mixing bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix until well blended. Shape into a loaf and place in a 9×13″ pan. Top with extra pieces of green pepper and drizzle with more ketchup.

Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes. Let stand ten minutes before serving.

Sauteeing the vegetables:

Meatloaf before and after cooking:

Yum!

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make spicy turkey meatloaf. It’s really easy and makes a huge amount of food that doesn’t get boring—in fact, it gets even better after the first day as the flavors mingle.

You’ll need a really big mixing bowl, a skillet, and a 9×13 pan, because this makes a lot of meatloaf. Don’t try to make it in a bread loaf pan—it just won’t fit.

The first thing to do is chop up your vegetables. Dice your onion, chop your celery and carrots into pennies, mince the garlic, and slice the green pepper in half and dice one half of it to add. If you don’t know how to clean a green pepper, you can listen to the baked beans recipe, but basically you just cut the stem off and remove the seeds, then use the rest of the pepper. My mom always kept some green pepper slices to garnish the top of her meatloaf and I do this too. It looks nice. So take the second half of the green pepper and cut it into slices so you have half-rings of green pepper.

Next, put a little oil in the skillet and turn the heat to medium low. Then add the onions, carrots, and celery, plus the diced half of the green pepper, and saute for about five minutes until the onions start to turn translucent. That means they’re cooked enough that they will contribute their flavor to the meatloaf without taking over. Then add the minced garlic and saute for one more minute. Then turn the stove off and shovel all the sauteed vegetables into the big mixing bowl.

This is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Next, add the ketchup, the milk, the Worcestershire sauce, and the spices, including salt and pepper. Mix that up well, then add the eggs and mix them in well too. Then add the bread crumbs. I use Panko crumbs because they don’t get soggy, but you can use other types of dried bread crumbs. I can never find the bread crumbs in the store without a hunt, and then I forget where I found them, but Panko crumbs will be on the same shelf. Maybe try the salad dressing aisle. Don’t just crumble up a piece of bread and think that’ll work—it’ll turn into goo as soon as it gets wet. Maybe one day I’ll cover how to make your own bread crumbs, but for now, if you don’t have any, you can crush up some crackers or salad croutons and use those instead. To crush the crackers or croutons, you can put them in a clean paper bag, roll the top closed, and press down on the bag with a rolling pin or something else that’s reasonably heavy and easy to handle, although not breakable. The bag will probably end up tearing, especially if you’re me, but it will hold up to the crushing better than even a heavy-duty plastic bag will.

Sally Lunn bread * yeast * letting bread rise

Sally Lunn Bread

* 1 ½ c flour

* 1/3 c sugar

* 1 envelope rapid rise/quick-rise or instant yeast

* ½ tsp salt

* ½ c water

* ½ c milk

* ½ c salted butter (one stick), cut into pieces

* 3 eggs (room temperature)

* About 2 ½ c more flour

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl (flour, sugar, yeast, and salt). In a medium bowl, heat water, milk, and butter until butter is melted and mixture is hot but not boiling. Add to dry ingredients. Mix in eggs and enough flour to make a dough about the consistency of biscuit dough.

Cover and set aside ten minutes, then beat well for about a minute. Spoon into a greased tube pan, cover, and let rise another hour, or until doubled in size. Bake at 325 Fahrenheit for 40 minutes.

The dough before and after the first rise:

Be careful if you keep the dough warm this way while it rises:

Risen dough with fingerprints in it, and you can see those three fingerprints in the baked bread:

Delicious with butter! This loaf was made with half whole wheat flour since I was running low on all-purpose. That’s why it looks like brown bread.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Sally Lunn bread. This is a rich, delicious yeast bread made in a tube pan that doesn’t require kneading, so it’s a good introduction to making bread.

You can’t use any old yeast for this recipe, though. You have to use a type that’s specified quick-rise, rapid-rise, or instant. It should be plainly marked so you don’t have to guess. If it doesn’t say something like quick-rise on the packet in nice big letters, you don’t have the right yeast.

Other than that, the recipe is pretty straightforward. You will need one big mixing bowl and a tube pan or Bundt pan. You’ll also need a small mixing bowl that you can microwave.

First, grease the tube pan and set it aside. Then get out your big mixing bowl and mix the first cup and a half of flour, the yeast, sugar, and salt. Set that aside too. You can use all-purpose or bread flour, or if you have whole wheat flour you can use it for up to half the called-for flour. Of course you could use whole wheat flour for all the flour, but it tends to make a dense, robust loaf and Sally Lunn bread is meant to be light, more like a brioche or tea cake.

Next, cut up a stick of butter and put the pieces in the small mixing bowl. I usually use salted butter for this recipe. Add the water and milk and stick it in the microwave for 30-second bursts until the butter is mostly melted and the liquid is hot. You can do this in a small saucepan on the stove if you don’t have a microwave, but be really really careful that you don’t let the mixture get so hot it starts boiling. You’ll be adding this to the flour mixture and you don’t want to kill off your yeast.

See, yeast is alive. It’s a fungus that’s dormant when dry, but add moisture, heat, and some form of sugar and it becomes active and starts doing its thing. Its thing, in this case, is to consume sugar and release carbon dioxide, which is what makes bread rise. But if it gets too hot, it dies. You don’t want it to die until, you know, later.

So, add the melted butter mixture to the flour mixture and blend it in. This is where you’ll notice the difference between making yeast bread and making quick bread, which is the term for bread made with baking powder or soda. As you mix, you can actually see the dough expanding as the yeast activates. You’ll also notice the pleasant smell of fresh bread and a faint smell sort of like beer, which is actually the smell of the yeast.

You also need to add the eggs and the rest of the flour. This is why you want to use eggs that are room temperature. If you use eggs that are cold from the fridge,

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 proof, preferably 80.

Cooking rice * rice pudding

Rice

* 1 c white rice

* 2 c cold water (or broth)

* 1 tsp salt

Combine all the ingredients in a heavy pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Stir once, then cover tightly and reduce the heat to very low. Cook covered for 18 minutes.

Rice Pudding

* 2 or 3 cups cooked rice, cooled (leftover is fine)

* 1 1/3 c. milk

* ¼ tsp salt

* 1/3 c. sugar

* 2 eggs

* 1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 F

Bake 45-50 minutes

Use butter to grease a 9×9 baking dish. In a large bowl, thoroughly mix all ingredients except rice. Add rice and mix well, breaking up any lumps in the rice. Pour into the pan and put in oven. Sprinkle with nutmeg before serving, if desired.

Rice in my rice cooker, before and after it’s cooked:

Rice pudding, before and after it’s cooked (with nutmeg sprinkled over it):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to talk about rice.

This was an episode I had almost finished last year when I stopped making the podcast. It was going to be mostly about Bento boxes and packed lunches, to run in mid-August in time for school starting. I stopped making the podcast because I was frantically trying to get ready for a trip to Ireland, including making and scheduling episodes of Strange Animals Podcast to run while I was gone. Remember when we could go places and have fun with friends in person?

Anyway, things have changed a whole lot since then, so I’m going to dump all the talk of packed lunches and Bento boxes. We’re just going to learn how to make perfect rice. I’ll also walk you through my recipe for rice pudding.

It’s very possible many of my listeners associate rice with tastelessness. That’s because many Americans have no flipping idea what makes rice good and they’re cooking with the worst type of rice possible.

If you don’t already have some rice, you need to buy some. Don’t buy any kind of minute rice or fast-cook rice or boil-in-bag rice or whatever. You want rice that comes in bulk, usually in a bag that holds at least one pound. The cheapest will be plain white long-grain rice. Grab that if you’re not sure what you’re doing with rice, or you can get a little fancier and buy basmati rice, jasmine rice (my favorite), or whatever else strikes your fancy. Or, honestly, whatever is left in the rice aisle. For this episode we’re only talking about white rice, but the same principles apply to brown rice and wild rice mixtures, although wild rice takes a little longer to cook.

The rule for making any grain, like rice or oatmeal, is to use one part grain to two parts liquid. That means if you add one cup of oats to your cooking pot, you need to add two cups of water. This makes it really easy to cook because you don’t need an actual measuring cup. You can literally take a coffee mug out of your cupboard, fill it with rice, dump it in the pot and then add two coffee mugs full of water to the pot and cook it. And it will turn out perfect.

You don’t have to use water, though. If you’re cooking rice for a savory dish, use broth or stock instead of water. Handy hint: if you have a can of chicken noodle soup, you can drain the broth off and use it as part of the liquid for your rice. Then when the rice is done, mix in the chicken noodles part of the soup and eat it with the rice.

One of my favorite easy meals is to make rice with chicken stock, and when it’s done, mix in an undrained can of cooked chicken. Yes, you can get chicken in cans just like tuna. It smells kind of like tuna when you open it. This makes a nice sticky rice that doesn’t require any added salt. It’s perfect for lunches and keeps in the fridge for several days. If you add leftover home-cooked chicken instead, it’s even better. You can also mix in veggies.

Ham Souffle

* 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.

[pictures go here but I’ve lost them]

Back when I first started Real Life Cooking, I released three Patreon episodes. This is one of them. I closed the Patreon last year and don’t intend to reopen it, so I’m releasing those three episodes as extras. Enjoy!

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 9×9 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.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

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.

[pictures should go here but I’ve lost them all]

Back when I first started Real Life Cooking, I released three Patreon episodes. This is one of them. I closed the Patreon last year and don’t intend to reopen it, so I’m releasing those three episodes as extras. Enjoy!

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 9×13 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.

Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Pretzels * how to melt chocolate

“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)

[pictures go here but I’ve lost them, which is too bad because they were so pretty]

Back when I first started Real Life Cooking, I released three Patreon episodes. This is one of them. I closed the Patreon last year and don’t intend to reopen it, so I’m releasing those three episodes as extras. Enjoy!

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.

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.

 

The dumplings (most of them were already in the pot when I realized I should take a picture). These are actually not rolled out as thin as they should have been:

Chicken and dumplings simmering just after the dumplings were added:

The stock simmering (on left) and finished (on right):

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,