Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo, Day 5

Happy Fifth Anniversary of the Kiddo's First Full Day Stuck With Me as a Mom! Hope your anniversary celebration is going well. The human residents of Chez Boeckman-Walker have been hustlin' and bustlin' since early this morning to make this day a memorable one. While not quite as important as the anniversary of the day the folks at Eastern Social Welfare Institute placed our kiddo in my arms and said he was ours and to be on our way (really, it was about that quick since we had to rush to the airport to catch our flight), we decided to make this day special too.

Big M Little M Cookies -- A Family Affair
As you may recall from the rambling that was "Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo, Day 4," I noted the three of us humans would be making cookies. And so we did--without blowing anything up, breaking anything or killing one another, so that's one for the history books, folks. Our recipe of choice was for Big M Little M cookies from Emeril's There's a Chef in My Soup!, which is your basic chocolate chip cookie recipe except with a cup of peanut M&Ms and half a cup of plain M&Ms in lieu of chocolate chips or other things such as that.

Were there substitutions? You bet your sweet patooty there were! Granulated sugar? Ha! Try a one-for-one sub with Organic Zero. Brown Sugar? Forgedduboutit! Bring on the Splenda Brown Sugar Blend. Whole egg? No way, no how. Liquid egg whites all the way, baby. All-purpose flour? Nu-uh. Half whole-wheat and half all-purp with half the necessary baking powder in addition to the full amount.

Oh, and, uh, I overestimated the amount of peanut M&Ms in a regular (1.74-ounce) bag, so the cookie batter only got half a cup of the peanut Msies instead of the full cup. Oh well. Live and learn.

Supper Time: Meat Loaf!
We had about a pound of ground beef left over from last night's bulgolgi burgers, and I think refreezing it would be terribly wise. So I pulled out a recipe for a beef loaf (instead of a chicken loaf or a turkey loaf) I'd saved when I once found myself having a hankering for beef meat loaf. (I know. Strange, non? But, hey, I am a freak. We all know that.) How friggin' all-'merican can you get?

(Well, we could have had hamburgers on the grill, but I don't think so. The residents of Chez Boeckman-Walker are not a patriotic crew. No flag-wavers here. Move along.)

There's not much to report on this one. The recipe's straight forward and was rendered quite tasty and spicy with the help of Emeril's BBQ chicken pizza sauce and red onions, which I figured would be kickin' in the loaf with the BBQ sauce since they're kickin' on a chicken pizza with said sauce--and they were! Paired with reheated japchae from last night, and you've got yourself a good sinus-clearing feast.

Disaster Dessert
Of course, this would be a misadventure without a little disaster, and that came with dessert. For only the third time that I've used my little Cuisinart ice cream maker, I totally screwed the pooch when attempting to make peppermint ice cream.

I recognize, Gentle Reader, that sometimes I get carried away in my attempts to make a recipe "healthful" with various substitutions. I recognize, Gentle Reader, that there are some ingredients you really shouldn't substitute because those ingredients initiate a key reaction in the food you're preparing to make it as it's supposed to be. And while I recognize this, I routinely ignore that knowledge and set myself up for disaster.

Methinks using the rough equivalent of two large egg yolks of liquid egg whites was my mistake. Yolks, I understand at a crude level, help the ice cream to whip, thus when I heated skim milk (in lieu of 1 percent milk, so the absence of milk fat probably contributed to the failure as well) and the egg whites and the mixture didn't really thicken as the recipe called for, the yolks probably contribute somehow to the thickening that didn't happen for me.

I realized I was on the path to culinary heartache when I saw that my mix didn't thicken, but I plowed ahead, hoping that dumb luck would once again be on my side. Alas, I evidently spent my dumb luck this evening when I found the 2008 companion for America's Test Kitchen for six bucks at the Parmer HPB. After a little more than 20 minutes (the recommended max) of freezing/churning in the Cuisinart, I poured pretty much the same liquid into one of my new Lock & Look bowls to stow in the freezer. Yeah, a little smattering of ice cream-like stuff had formed and clung to the inner wall of the freezing bowl, but that was it. I did stow the stuff in the freezer and now sit here hoping that by some miracle the stuff with freeze into something edible.

Le sigh.

Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

Tomorrow's culinary misadventure will be (hopefully) somewhat scaled back as we attempt to make yet another version of chicken tikka masala, this one from America's Test Kitchen. Keep your fingers crossed!

Holiday Delights
I already mentioned finding the 2008 companion for America's Test Kitchen for only six bucks at the Parmer HPB, but I had a few more delights.

While tromping around Bed, Bath & Beyond (Bloodbath & Beyond, as we like to call it), we found a nice pair of locking, silicon-tipped tongs on the clearance rack and just had to pick them up. They worked quite well for serving up japchae tonight.

We were tromping around BB&B in search of Cook's Illustrated's top-recommended wooden spoon, a model from the Mario Batali line. My sister-in-law in our early e-mail conversations had told me how much she liked these products, and she's in good company. BB&B advertised Batali's wooden spoon on its site for $4.99, so we headed to the store near us in hopes that it might be in stores. No luck.

After a quick trip to Whole Foods and an impromptu visit to the Linens 'n Things next door (for absolute bubkes), we hit The Domain. Macy's, which I could have sworn carries the Batali line, was a big nothing, but then we hit Sur La Table (yes, another addiction of mine) and found what we'd come to dub "the magic wooden spoon." The kiddo seemed enthralled by this simple tool, and we had to stop him from brandishing it like a sword as we trolled the store in search of summer sale bargains. (I'll have you know I passed over a $200 14-cup Cuisinart food processor. But what the hell do I need a 14-cup food processor for, even it is half the regular price?)

Speaking of addictions and diseases, I swear that HPB has absolutely ruined book shopping for the husband and me. We hit the Borders next door to Macys at the Domain, and even though I was armed with a 25 percent coupon and a $15 gift certificate, I couldn't find anything I wanted to buy. The husband didn't either. I thumbed through several Indian cookbooks, but I just couldn't buy one, largely because I have probably more than enough as it is but moreso because there was no thrill in finding them. They were just sitting there where they should be sitting, on a shelf with a tag labeled "Indian" in a section for cookbooks. A sticker noted the buyer would pay full price. Yawn. Where's the thrill of the hunt? Where's the thrill of the find?

We'll remedy that boredom tomorrow, I'm sure, since we'll probably be heading south. Or north to the Round Rock store, where we haven't been in a while (well, I'm thinking it was Memorial Day weekend). Hell, we'll probably hit both before the weekend is over. Vive la bargain book hunting!