A Whole Lot Crammed Into One Post

Yes, yes, Gentle Reader, I realize it's been almost two weeks since I've posted. Two whole weeks--that astounds even me! But I have a good excuse: Last week I was very busy around the house doing stuff to make it better whilst Mum was here, and this week has also been fairly busy, but I'll admit that after taking a week off, finding the gumption to post this week has been difficult. For my lack of initiative, I apologize and humbly (well, in truth, lazily) submit a post with, as its title suggests, crams a whole lot into it.

Holiday Misadventures
I noted in my previous post that we're not believers but do partake in certain Easter traditions. The boys love coloring Easter eggs, and this year I sort of indulged the boy (as in the son, not the husband 'o mine) and got him a kit for sponge painting eggs, not just dipping them in water in which a color dye tablet has dissolved.

Unfortunately, the kit was not well designed and fails to give users an option for painting the eggs without holding onto them. Ah well. Dudley's got my two bucks, and he ain't givin' it back!

Culinary Misadventures--Holiday Edition
Since Mum was planning to arrive on Easter Sunday, I felt compelled to make more of the holiday than we usually do here at Chez Boeckman-Walker. If you had any idea how many hours and hours I lost during my childhood waiting for Mum to finish up her conversations and plannings with the parish priest and other memembers after Mass on Sundays and how excruciatingly long we were there, particularly on holidays, you'd understand and fully appreciate, Gentle Reader, what a major thing her coming on Easter Sunday--after Mass, mind you--really was and why I felt a need to "do up" the holiday sorta big.

And big started with supper. Check out the big-ass filet of mahimahi (mahi-mahi? mahi mahi? Pick whichever style you like best, Gentle Reader) I scored at HEB super-cheap!

A boy and his fish--and Baby Crocagator

Beautiful, ain't it!

So what did I do with this gorgeous filet? Well, first I did my damned best to divvy it up and managed to get six portions out of it. Then I skinned the largest of the six portions for Easter supper, threw it in a Ziplock with some lime juice and freshly shredded ginger (okay, the ginger actually had been shredded about a week ago and stored in the 'fridge for future use) to marinate for about an hour then baked the sucker. Need I say (yet again) that this fish was delish?

But the big-time meal didn't stop with the big fish! I served a big bowl of fresh pineapple chunks by preparing two pineapples. Yes, Gentle Reader, you read that right--actual pineapples. That I cut up. All by myself.

The truth is that I'd bought the pair super-cheap at Wally World about a week before Easter with the intention of sending one home with Mum, who loves fresh pineapple. But they got a little ripe while sitting in my kitchen, so I thought it best to salvage what I could. And I'm happy to report that carving up a pineapple is not as hard as I thought it would be! If the things weren't so darn expensive, I'd do it more often.

The pineapple-palooza didn't stop with the big bowl of chunks....

Pineapple Orange CakeI whipped up a low-fat, low-sugar pineapple orange cake from the light dessert weekly recipe e-mail I receive from TasteofHome.com. You can follow the link in the previous sentence to see the recipe yourself, Gentle Reader. I'm too lazy to copy and code it up herein. (Just a warning: It's another Poppy Cannon-worthy recipe.) However, I won't deprive you of....

The Faudie's Futzings

• To get the lowest sugar content in the mandarin oranges, I bought a 15-ounce can of them and used them all. I wasn't too concerned about the additional 4 ounces because....
  
• I used a low-sugar yellow cake mix from Pillsbury and hoped the moisture of the undrained mandarin oranges would compensate for the dryness I experienced when I used the devil's food flavor of this line.
  
• I used fat-free HEB-brand Cool Whip. It's cheaper and, hey, free of that pesky fat!
  
• I only used about half a small package of sugar-free vanilla pudding. I had it sitting in my pantry for almost a year, and I can't recall now what I used the other half to make. But it was time for that half of an ounce to be used, so use it I did.
  
• I think I only used about a third of the topping I made when I followed the recipe. I was very concerned that its weight would crush the cake because, hey, crushed pineapple, even when mixed in fat-free whipped topping, still has some good heft to it. That remaining two-thirds found a good home in my gut and the husband's gut.

I was not impressed with the cake. The orange flavor of the cake itself was, to me, nonexistent. I should have followed my instinct to add a bit of orange extract to the batter. The topping also lacked any distinct flavor. The pineapple was muted: I suspect the HEB-brand can of crushed pineapple was to blame because I've found in the past it doesn't have as much flavor as Dole. I also wanted instinctively to reach for pineapple extract, but I have none. I also considered amping up the vanilla flavor for the topping since I'd only used half of the pudding mix I was supposed to use, but I wasn't sure if that would work. Let's face it: Whipped topping is a chemical plasma, and I don't trust that it would blend well with something such as vanilla extract.

As the husband and I were polishing off the bowl of leftover topping, I had a revelation about it. You're familiar with pineapple salad, right, Gentle Reader? The whipped cream, the mini marshmallows, the pineapple chunks, the pecans (maybe your version had walnuts), the maraschino cherry halves (the version Mum made never had these, but I've encountered pineapple salad elsewhere that included them). Well, I think the topping this recipe calls for is meant to emulate pineapple salad--and is a pale, pathetic imitation. Sad, but true.

Culinary Misadventures With the Boy
The boy was out of school Good Friday and Easter Monday. To keep him entertained and to maintain my sanity while getting some work done, I put him to work in the kitchen. Since that work involved knives, the boy was more than happy to comply!

The boy learned quickly the joy of cutting onions without wearing contacts. I tried to explain why he was crying, as well as why I wasn't. Then I teased him about buying him onion goggles or just wearing his old Thomas the Tank Engine sunglasses, which he promptly donned. Of course, he couldn't get back to chopping until he first did his impression of Cyclops (aka, Scott Summers, who'll always be Blinky to us), one of his newly discovered favorite X-Men. (That contentious bastard Wolverine, I'm more than pleased to report, is his favorite.) Ahh, it's always an adventure when the boy's in the kitchen!

For all his hard work, I rewarded the boy with his own chef's knife. Mind you, Gentle Reader, it's just a 6-inch one, and it's a great fit for him now. And before you call CPS on me, he never uses it unless he's under my eagle-eyed supervision. Trust me, I'm a true believer in adult supervision when it comes to using knives, and the same tendon-severing incident that made me a believer also made me a believer in knife skills classes. I'm saving the fam $65 by passing on what I learned to the boys.

Culinary Misadventures With Mum
For the first time that I can recall, I baked with my mother. Okay, that description isn't entirely accurate. I assisted. I...observed and documented. But we didn't kill each other! And the results were pretty tasty--although one was a bit of a disaster, but tasty nevertheless.

Whole-Grain Cinnamon-Nut Baby BiscottiI'd found this recipe in an e-mail from King Arthur Flour and forwarded it to Mum, as I usually do with e-mails I get from that company. I'd made a very similar batch of biscotti from a recipe I'd found in my copy of the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, and Mum was keen on trying this one out while here in Austin.

Again, Gentle Reader, I'm saving my carpal tunnel-stricken wrists by just embedding the link to the recipe herein. If you're too lazy to click a link, you're in bigger trouble than I am!

I have no futzings to report other than this: We omitted the nuts because neither of us are big fans of walnuts or pecans. Did the flavor suffer as a result? I don't think so.

In case you're wondering, Gentle Reader, the biscotti weren't the disaster. This other recipe was.

Chocolate-Dipped Coconut MacaroonsThis recipe is another one I'd forward to Mum in a King Arthur Flour e-mail timed perfectly for Passover. I'll admit that I've steered clear of coconut for several years now for fear of the fat content (yes, I know it's healthy fat, but coconut flavor is too addictive for me, so my arse and I are better off staying far away from the stuff), thus I personally had no interest in ever making the recipe. However, when Mum offered to do it, I was all for it!

I unfortunately didn't adequately photodocument this culinary misadventure. My fingers eventually became too busy scooping up the coconut milk goo from the pan of would-be coconut macaroons once it left the oven. By the FSM, that was good stuff! Sorta like coconut-flavored caramel--delicious!

That said, if you opt to try this recipe, don't think of the coconut milk powder as optional. Yeah, it's expensive ($9 at Whole Paycheck here in Austin), but I think it's the key to keeping the coconut milk in the cookies. If you don't use it, you'll probably wind up with the same result we got: The milk seeps out all over the pan. But damn is that goo good!

Horticultural Misadventures
Don't know if I've ever mentioned it, Gentle Reader, but Mum's a certified master gardener. She loves playing in dirt, making her literally as happy as a pig in mud basically. Well, that's not entirely true. She loves planting stuff and tending to flora.

So I take advantage of her whenever I can because I hate the great outdoors!

While I was working out or attending physical therapy or doing other things, Mum removed some old, dead grasses; split up and planted these beautiful butterfly iris plants the husband and I used waaay back in January '08 at our recommitment ceremony that had been lingering in their original plastic pots on our porch; trimmed up all the shrubs that have been neglected for a few years; installed a professional watering system for the new landscaping in the front of the house (we'll see how long it takes me to ruin it from negligence) and put out a bunch of new pine bark mulch. Yeah, the woman was busy--and, honestly, happy as a pig in mud.

The boy has somewhat adopted his Nana's green thumb. He was terribly keen on planting seeds after he and his classmates had done something similar at school. He wanted flowers--and I loathe flowers. I kill them. They're pretty in their containers at The Home Despot and Blowe's and installed in nice landscaping arrangements at apartments and other building. But I won't plant them at my house. Not at my house.

But I relented. I even helped Mum install on our fence--which I swore I wouldn't drill into or otherwise alter unless life depended on it--a planter in which the boy could plant his daisy seeds and cosmos seeds.

Adorable, ain't he?

The seeds are actually sprouting, and I'm doing my best to remind Mr. Green Jeans Jr. to go out and check them and all the other plants Mum kindly planted (thyme, red bell peppers, cilantro, a gerber daisy, rosemary that's already died and another flowering plant the boy just had to have). Perhaps the boy actually has a knack for keeping things green. If so--score! Another relative with a knack for the flora to take advantage of!

All righty, Gentle Reader, I'm stopping there. I have a few more recipes to share, but I'll give them their own posts. I'm tired now and ready for bed. I have physical therapy, a haircut and a racing packet pickup scheduled for tomorrow, so no rest for the weary!