Tag Archives: Food

Summer Is Nigh

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I removed the smidgens of the winter-evaporated ice in the ice cube trays, washed and refilled the trays. Summer temperatures are nigh upon us.

Here’s an entry about ice cube trays that I posted on July 4, 2010 on my old blog.


I was making lunch one day, kale and avocado salad. (I must explain, here, that the recipe calls for 1/2 avocado. Note to the world: there is no such thing as 1/2 avocado. There is only a whole avocado and it’s for me. There may well be two halves to an avocado, but they are eaten at the same time. There is no “later” for any avocado in my house.)

I was looking for a bowl big enough for all the chopped kale. And remember, I’m one who can use up most of the kitchen items in making a sandwich. This kale and entire-avocado salad (who cares what the recipe says) needed a bowl bigger than I usually use, so I started looking around in the cabinets.

You’d think that because it’s my kitchen that I’d know where everything is. Okay, well, I do now. Probably. Anyway, the bowl I was looking for was in the second cabinet I looked in, so that search didn’t take too long.

But in the first cabinet, where I thought the bowl was (and I’m thinking it used to be there, until I-don’t-know-when), I found some ice cube trays.

Ten ice cube trays.

I have two robin’s-egg blue trays with the square cubes, two white trays also with the square cubes, five light blue trays with oval cubes and one blue tray for miniature ice cubes.

The light blue trays each have 12 ice cube holders. The robin’s-egg blue, as well as the white trays, have 14 holders. The miniature tray has 60 holders. The two white trays in the freezer with square cubes have 14 each. That makes 12 ice cube trays, total. (Excuse me while I do math now.)

I’m pretty sure that’s 204 ice cubes, in one shape or another.

I have no idea how I ended up with so many ice cube trays. We’ve had only one refrigerator at this house. Wedding gifts, maybe, from friends and family who worry about global warming?

Six Pounds of Peaches

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A 6-pound can of peaches

Enough peaches for everyone on our road

I came home yesterday to find that hubby bought a can of peaches. From Costco. Six pounds. Six pounds of peaches. Six pounds of peaches in one can.

Showing the weight of the canned peaches: 6 pounds

That's a lot of peaches!

“Are we hosting a family reunion?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it’s for us. It was such a good deal!”

With two adults and seven dogs in our household, “good deal” is not the term I would have chosen. I’m probably the only one not interested in the peaches, but sharing them with the dogs is not what hubby has in mind, I’m sure.

We didn’t even have a container big enough to put them in, after opening the can. And all those containers we did put them in are taking up a lot of room in the refrigerator. If you’re coming to visit us anytime soon, I hope you like peaches.

Circus Peanut Gelatin

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A friend emailed me this recipe for Circus Peanut Gelatin. Wouldn’t it be fun, she asked, to make this?

No, it would not.

First off, Circus Peanuts are my weakness. So simple, so pure; mostly sugar and food coloring. To buy them, I have do a little squeeze test through the bag to ensure that they are fresh. Nothing worse than stale, hard Circus Peanuts!

I replied to my friend (although I’m wondering if I should still call her a friend, after having received this recipe from her) that I’d never be able to make this recipe.

Circus Peanut Gelatin

One for me and one for me

The recipe calls for 44 Circus Peanuts, divided. Divided, sure. Twenty-two for the recipe, twenty-two for me. Already I need 88 of them, just to have 44 on hand to get the recipe started.

The first instruction is to cut 32 candies into small pieces. I suppose I could use a knife to cut them, but a knife can be so …. sharp. If I use my teeth, which are blunter, I can ensure my safety away from the knife. The recipe doesn’t say how many small pieces are needed from each candy, but I expect that only half of those 32 would survive to become small pieces. Now I need 64 (more?) candies in order to end up with 32 of them in small, non-eaten pieces.

After some microwaving, mixing, and refrigerating, we are instructed to put a candy on top of the refrigerated gelatin. It serves 12, so that’s one candy on top of each serving. And we know how that goes: one for each serving, one for me. That adds up to 24 (more?) just for the decorating step. And since I nibbled on each of the small candy pieces that went into the gelatin, I’m guessing no one else wants a piece of the finished product and that means it’s all mine!

However, by now my eyes are crossed and I’m feeling a little woozy from eating all that sugar. That’s why I think I will stay away from ever trying this recipe. It’s just too sweet for me.

Chili Soup, Update

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I originally posted this entry on June 6, 2011 on my old blog. My update is at the bottom.
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Lately I’ve been in a soup mood. It has nothing to do with the outside temperature (hovering around 100 degrees everyday), but how easy it is to make soup.

How easy it is to make soup, usually.

Lately, soup recipes have been giving me trouble. One is a Black Bean Chili recipe I got from my friend, S. She has made it for years, she said, and it is one of her favorites. It is vegan and it looked easy enough, so I decided to make it.

First time I made the Black Bean Chili recipe, I could have renamed it 5-Alarm Chili. My mouth was on fire and my eyes were watering. What had I done wrong? I checked the recipe and nothing seemed to be out of kilter with what I had put together. Well, not-out-of-kilter or not, there was no way I could eat that without cutting the heat. I ended up adding about five cups of water and three baked potatoes. This downgraded it to 3-alarm chili soup and I could eat it with only mild sweating.

The second time I made it, it was a déjà vu experience. Smoke was practically coming out of my ears. I verified my ingredients against the email S. sent me. What could explain this result? I then checked the online magazine where S. had found the recipe. Did I mention that jalapenos and cayenne pepper are two of the chili’s ingredients? I used two jalapenos, just as the recipe called for. But I was also using one teaspoon — one full teaspoon — of cayenne pepper, as S.’s email listed, but the online recipe called for only 1/8th of a teaspoon. Eight times the desired amount of cayenne pepper may possibly, sort of, probably, might, could, should explain the spiciness of the chili.

That’s what I thought until I made it yet a fourth time with only 1/8th of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. It was still 5-alarm chili. I have no idea what my issue is with this recipe. But I like it well enough to continue to make it and so I have adapted: I always have two or three potatoes ready to be nuked in the microwave and added in, to cut the heat. The original water amount is 3/4 of a cup, but each time I made it, I ended up with about 5 cups of water and now that’s the way I like it. So for me, it’s 3-Alarm Black Bean Chili Soup. That’s as good as it is going to get.

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Update: I’m still working on making this soup mild enough that smoke doesn’t come out of my ears when I eat it. So far, I am unsuccessful in that effort. This last time I left out the cayenne pepper altogether. I put in the two Russet potatoes to help bring down the alarm level. It still didn’t work. I think that when I take the soup container out of the fridge, I won’t even have to heat it up; it still makes me sweat.