A Year of Life Lessons

So since I last blogged I've had 906 page views.  906!  I'm so sorry to those 906 people.  Mostly because I haven't had anything on here in so, so long.  Everyone told me to work on the blog before my son arrived, and they were right.  A lot has changed since that last entry.  I was gifted with a Little Guy.  A Little Guy is a perfect little person in the form of a rough and tumble boy with dark curly hair and blue eyes, and the sweetest disposition to ever grace the Earth.  Little Guy loves music and laughter, dogs, kisses, tickles, basketball and ballet.

Since then - November 2013 - I learned that maternity leave is, in fact, too short, and breastfeeding is no joke.  I learned about Day Care and Mom Guilt.  I have learned that you can't baby your baby and your dogs equally, no matter how hard you try or how much you love your dog-babies.  I have also learned that DogMom Guilt is no joke, either.

I learned that my career really didn't stack up to mean as much as it once did, and I learned that I could, in fact, be a stereotype and own it, realizing that I am who I am - changing my mind is nothing to be ashamed of, even if I contradict my 20s self in so many ways.  I am still me.  No, you older people who said I would see are still wrong - I did not become what you said I would.  I did change.  We, as people, are meant to do that, you know.

I learned that being good at a job really depends on where the job is, not just what it is, and that word that we recruiters throw around all the time - "fit" - weighs a lot more than I thought it did.  I learned about struggle and sadness.

I learned about depression, postpartum and otherwise, and what it's like when you've been so sad about something for so long that it actually messes with your brain, and low becomes the new normal - so much so that you can't imagine anything higher, and mediocre days can feel like pieces of perfect and you find yourself crying with relief over a decent parking space or something.  I learned how easy it was to shut everyone out.  I learned that if you go long enough without doing the things you love you forgot how to do them.  I learned that your friends, if they truly love you, won't let you forget how to be their friends or who you are, and when you finally emerge from that darkness and you start to remember who you were when the world crashed down around you, they will be there, with your amazing spouse, and your perfect child, and you can all start living again together.

So that's my year, I guess.  My doctor's note:  Please excuse Lisa from life - she just wasn't up to it for a while.

Not to say there wasn't joy.  I found joy in my tiny family and their unstoppable, unconditional love.  I found joy in the new lives of my friends' children as they arrived, in new relationships (one that is turning into marriage in less than a month!!), and in a new job, one that allows me ten additional hours with Little Guy a week.  TEN HOURS.  That, my friends, is Heaven itself.  If you don't think so, you simply haven't met my child.  :)

And, there was cooking.  I didn't find the same joy or connection in it that I thought I would...or perhaps there was too much connection.  Either way, I look back at the few and far between moments and grumble that I didn't get pictures when I should have.  You guys, I actually made both a Blueberry Pie and a Coconut Cream Pie for Christmas and the husband's birthday (one for each, not both for both).  I made pie and my father-in-law devoured it!  It was my first pie and it got the Taylor stamp of approval!  And the second one?  Y'all, I actually toasted coconut.  Personally.  I made Fancy cookies for Christmas, beef stroganoff, balsamic pork chops, and Pecan Pie Bars, and my stepmother made some really incredible gravy at Thanksgiving.  I don't do gravy and I loved it.  OH!  And we made veggie pumpkin lasagna for my fantastic and vegetarian sister who says that being veggie is healthy except for how much she loves cheese.  Below are a couple pics, but I suppose I'll just have to make these things again and share the recipes at that point.

See?  Fancy.  You already know.

It was as good as it looks - I think, in the history of my cooking, I'm the most proud of making this pie

Breakfast for Breakfast - Buttermilk Biscuits

When I first met my husband, we were flat broke.  Together, we had a combined amount of spending money that equaled, like, nothing.  But I knew he was for me.  I didn't know how I knew, but I knew.  One night, as we discussed what we could do while hanging out, we determined we didn't have the money to go out.  Also, he lived in the middle of nowhere at the time and it was more trouble than it was worth - we'd already lost one car to an angry deer.  He looked at me and said, "Hey - have you ever had breakfast for dinner?"

It was a sign.

I realize this may be a THING for a lot of people, but until he mentioned it, I didn't realize families other than my own would do breakfast for dinner.  My mom would offer this suggestion at least once a month growing up and I never turned it down.  Usually it was some kind of breakfast meat, scrambled eggs and her mom's homemade buttermilk biscuits.  She also made these biscuits with her roast and omg...nothing is better.

So this morning when my dogs played their typical Saturday morning game -

Chanel: I'm bored.  Let's put down our weapons of war and make a truce to get outside RIGHT NOW.
Gina: YES!
Chanel: If I scratch my collar, and you do that horrible hacking thing you only do between the hours of 2:00AM and 8:00AM, Mom will get up!
Gina: OKAY!  HAAAAAAAACK!  HACK HACK HACK!
Chanel: jinglejinglejinglejingle

-I got back inside and turned on the tv to the Food Network to watch people cooking.  No greater inspiration.  My tummy is funny in the mornings, thanks to our Baby Boy, and while I tried to decide what to make, biscuits came to mind.  Even years ago, when I was homesick for my mom, or when I could tell it was about to get chilly (for Houston, that's about 75 at night), I would make these and call her.  So, upset stomach and missing my mom made me crave these biscuits today.

The issues I have when I want to make these are that I never have Shortening or Buttermilk in my house.  Shortening you do have to have - the good news is once you've bought it, it lasts forever.  I never use mine unless I'm making these, homemade pie crust, or snickerdoodles, which means I buy a can a year, and I don't mean the Sams size cans.  Normal, tiny can.  Buttermilk, however, you do NOT have to have.  In fact, I've been doing this for years, but I just heard Pioneer Woman tell everyone how to do this on her show this morning!

Put a tablespoon of white vinegar in a measuring cup.  Pour in milk (any kind but skim will work) until you hit the 1 cup mark.  Let it sit for 5 minutes.  When you stir it, you'll see some funky separation and grossness. Face it - buttermilk IS gross.

See?  Clots=Gross.  But tasty in bread.  I never said cooking made sense.

Buttermilk Biscuits

Oven temp.  450

Makes about 15 biscuits

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

5 tablespoons shortening

1 cup buttermilk

Sift together all the dry ingredients.  I used my whisk again.  Then you cut in the shortening.  I used to think I could do this with a fork, but that was NOT true.  I needed this funky little tool that my mom got me when I complained enough.  

If you know what this is called, PLEASE tell me.

Basically, you put the 5 tablespoons in your bowl of flour and run this through it.  

It's kind of a mess, but when you get to where most of the dry stuff has touched the shortening, you can stir in the milk.

This dough is RIDICULOUSLY sticky.  Set out some wax paper or baking paper, and dust it with flour.  Cover your rolling pin with flour.  I LOVE my rolling pin.  It was a Christmas gift from my husband.  He knows me so well.  The measurements are seriously helpful when you're making crusts, even cookies, or a kransekake , which I did last year for the first time and it was SO much fun.  Anyway, you want this dough to be about 1/2 an inch thick.  

I need to learn to take better pictures.  :(

So my mom had this ancient round cutter that must've been her mom's.  I don't know what happened to it - it could've been tossed by her years ago for being rusty or something.  I don't have one but I have these awesome glasses.  My very good friend, and bridesmaid, Amanda gave us our glasses for a wedding gift.  She's a NICU nurse, so not only does she give great gifts and advice, she's an amazing person.

A lot of shout-outs in this blog!  Crate & Barrel no longer makes these.

Spray a cooking sheet with nonstick spray, and place the cut biscuits on the tray.  You don't have to worry about them expanding a lot.  They stay put.  Bake 10-14 minutes, or until golden brown on top.

Enjoy them!  They'd be great for homemade Egg McMuffins, or with jelly (apple is my favorite).  They even make pretty good shortcake bases if you don't mind them missing some sweetness.  

Lazy Days & Chocolate Chess Pie

It's been a really busy few weeks, so I'm sorry for the delay.  Baby Boy Taylor looks great!  He's very active in his little home (which doesn't feel or look so little to me).  We hit 19 weeks tomorrow!  The doctors have suggested I spend some serious time with my feet up, which has put my husband in the kitchen more.  He's awesome in there, though, so I don't mind.  Here's a shot of our little troublemaker at about 16 weeks - he happened to look up at the sonogram wand, open his mouth, and give us some jazz hands at the right time:

In the midst of all this sleeping, working, sleeping and sleeping some more, I honestly haven't done a lot of cooking.  Shocker.  But I did attempt one of the scariest recipes in my mom's book.  Chocolate Chess Pie.  

Chocolate Chess Pie, in our family, is legend.  I don't remember when Mom introduced it to Thanksgiving but I remember holidays without it.  See, I'm not a huge fan of pecan pie or regular chess pie.  Mom never liked pumpkin so it wasn't always present, and really, I probably wouldn't have liked it until the past ten years anyway, when I jumped on the pumpkin from September-December bandwagon.  

But holidays were experiment days, especially in a family full of teachers who had a week or two surrounding each event to plan and research new recipes.  So one day this pie showed up, probably around the time I was 8, and suddenly I had a dessert I loved at Thanksgiving - aside from the pumpkin roll which we'll get to later.  

This pie belongs to a lot of people!  It is what my cousin's son Roland recently requested for his birthday dessert.  It is what my mom made my uncle Charles for his birthday every year.  My cousin, Eric, knew Aunt Debbie made this for him every Thanksgiving, and he wasn't wrong!  This pie was a huge gift from Mom, and everyone loved to receive it.

The problem is this pie is a legendary challenge.  Ugly - this dessert is, at least according to my mother, the ugliest dessert in existence and if you follow her rules, you have to apologize for its appearance at every turn. 

I'll just put out a blanket apology now, and say it really doesn't matter what it looks like.  All you have to do is taste it.

And now that I think about it, I will go ahead and let you know that my mom had a way of writing recipes that makes no sense to me.  We'll talk about this more when we hit cornbread dressing, but she tended to write the brand name rather than the item on every recipe.  So I'll include both :)

Chocolate Chess Pie 

1 uncooked pie crust - Pet Ritz frozen (now Pillsbury)

1 1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1 Tablespoon flour

1/2 cup melted butter

3 eggs

1/4 cup milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

whipped cream for garnish - Redi Whip or homemade.  Homemade is super easy.  I'll add something about it at the bottom.

Place your oven rack on the lowest position.  I did this, but it may have been a mistake.  We have a gas oven, and putting it on the bottom puts the pie closest to the flame.  Our crust was just a little bit chewy, so I will be experimenting with this.  In an electric oven, it should be fine.

Mix together sugar, cocoa and flour in a bowl until there are no lumps.  In older recipes, Mom mentions running them through a sifter.  I prefer to mix dry ingredients with a whisk.  It saves time and does the same job :)

Stir in melted butter.  

Mix in one egg at a time until smooth.  I don't know that I'd call it SMOOTH, but it starts to look like a glob of fudge, or chocolate cookie dough.  It also smells amazing.

Stir in milk and vanilla - no extra vanilla this time.  It's important to stick to the numbers with pies!

Now that is smooth!

Place the pie crust on a dark cookie sheet for stability.  Dark cookie sheets are better for this because the lighter ones are made to reflect specific heats to give crusty shells, nonstick bottoms, and a lot of other stuff that doesn't matter when you're just trying to balance a hot pie.  Pour the mixture into the pie crust.  Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes.  

When the pie comes out, it will have developed a dome.  Somehow I didn't get a picture of this.  I'm sorry.  I wish I had because it really freaked me out to see it.  Set it to cool to room temp and it will fall.

See?  Ugly.

Cover and place in the fridge.  This pie is best served cold, covered in whipped cream.  Also, the whipped cream covers all the ugly.  If we'd been serving the pie all at once, I would have made it beautiful.  But I only had four friends coming over, so I took a picture of the destruction.

The clear plate makes it look like we eat straight off the counter.  Aww yeah.  Fun fact - those clear plates are leftover from our wedding in 2009.  We don't waste!  They even made the move from the townhouse!

*Homemade Whipped Cream

1 carton whipping cream (I like the small cartons - they're more manageable)

1-2 teaspoons vanilla  

Whip these together with an electric beater.  A whisk attachment is best.  You'll do this forever.  Then it will look and taste like whipped cream!

Oatmeal Anything Cookies - Or how I managed to bake when I could only digest ginger ale

As I mentioned before, my brother was visiting when I came up with the idea for this blog.  He had a really terrible visit, just so you all know.  First, it started with cleaning out my mom's furniture, including selling the less important pieces, and loading a UHaul with my AMAZING husband in North Texas Summer heat.

On that note, I'd like to say a thank you to Rodney and Michael, my brother's best friends (and for all intents and purposes, my adopted brothers as I've known them since I was seven).  They were so, so helpful in keeping things light and moving heavy things.  Additionally, my second cousins, a couple of awesome guys named Roland and Jonathan, also came to help.

Anyway, I had asked my brother to stay longer with us, promising him that we'd have fun after.  We sure did!  We had fun at the hospital!  Yup, the same hospital we visited twice with my mom last Christmas, including on Christmas Day!  I mean, seriously.  While I'd promised good dinners, new restaurants, and fun times, he got to go to Whataburger with the husband a few times, and I went to bed at 8pm over and over.  So when he asked me to make "those cookies", I could not refuse.

"Those Cookies" are a cookie I call Oatmeal Anything cookies.  Starting with my mom's Oatmeal Raisin cookie recipe, I created this to compensate for the fact that I hate raisins.  I hate them.  Why ruin a good grape?  If you don't want it fresh, turn it into wine.  Be productive, people.

So this recipe is a very basic, delicious Oatmeal Cookie recipe.  Nearly everything in it, once you get past the base, is optional.  It's also REALLY easy, and I've never made them when people didn't scarf them down.  My brother was first introduced to them when he and my mom came to visit last summer.  I made them so we'd have a snack during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.  Secretly, I made them so I could have a little bit of the dough.  It's REALLY good dough.  But don't eat it.  Raw eggs are bad.

Oatmeal Anything Cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a few cookie sheets.  I use Pam for Baking, and probably grease about three.

You'll need:
1 cup butter (2 sticks)
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 cups rolled oats

Beat butter and sugars until smooth.  Add both eggs, and vanilla and continue beating until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine all the dry ingredients (except oats).  Slowly add the dry to the wet mixture, beating on low, until fully combined.

Add oats and, at this point, you can add any of the following, or combination of the following:

walnuts
pecans
raisins (if you must)
peanut butter chips
chocolate chips
toffee chips
butterscotch chips
cinnamon chips

My best successes have been 1/2 bag tiny semi-sweet chocolate morsels with 1/2 bag of peanut butter chips.  I then add 1/2 cup chopped walnuts.  I've also had a lot of people love the cinnamon chips with chocolate chips, toffee with pecans, or just plain chocolate.  This part, along with the oats, has to be stirred in with a spoon, not with a mixer.

Scoop cookie dough onto cookie sheets.  This part also depends on what you like.  My brother and I tend to love big cookies, and this recipe works well with big cookies.  I use my inch scoop.

Bake them 8-10 minutes, or until they're the right consistency.  Again, cookies are so dependent upon what you like.  I like soft, doughy cookies so I lean toward pulling them out slightly tan, and letting them finish baking while the sheet cools.  A fresh out of the oven sheet will bake for 1-2 minutes, so really, you're probably covered.  Once they're solid, move them to a cooling rack.  Don't skip this step - it's completely worth your time to use a cooling rack.  Cookies stop baking, for one, and are easier to remove from a cookie sheet while warm.  Also, it frees up the cookie sheet for another round of baking.  The butter in the cookies will leave enough grease so that you don't have to spray the cookie sheet again.

The final product.  Not beautiful, but very tasty.  I have a feeling this will be a running theme.  My mom's cooking wasn't always pretty, but it was always delicious!  I guess I'm just following in her footsteps.

A long time coming

My apologies for the delay in posting!

The day after I started this blog I woke up with what I thought was my first food poisoning.  I mentioned in the last post that the recipe thing was half of the reason for starting this blog.  As you all know by now (probably), the other half of our reason is our Baby Boy Taylor, who will be making his debut in the world sometime around December 1.  Well, Baby Boy Taylor decided in my 13th week to require a huge amount of HCG, the pregnancy hormone, which in turn hit me with a case of Hyperemesis Gravidarum.

Naturally, I didn't have much interest in food for a while.  I've managed to settle, with the help of Zofran and ginger ale, and I even eat meat and eggs again!  Hooray!  So I'm back to thinking about what recipes I want to include in the family cookbook.

The process of deciding is a lot tougher than I thought.  I have to decide what I want to include, know what I can make, and plan for the things I'm not even close to ready to try, IE homemade candy.  This scares me to death.  I also have to figure out how to use a bread machine.  Yipes.  I'm very grateful technology has offered me something much more awesome than that ancient hand-crank ice cream maker that required boxes of salt and what felt like hours of waiting.

Lastly, there are many recipes my family loves, my mother LOVED, and the world tells me are awesome that I just do not like.  Pregnancy might change my mind, or make the process hellacious.  We'll see how that goes together.

Why a new blog?

Hello Everyone!  It's been a while since I had a blog, and probably never since I regularly maintained one, but life seems to be moving pretty quickly these days, and this may be the best way to share.

It seems that every time we turn around a huge change has happened without us even noticing it!  Of course we saved and saved for the house, and we did buy that and move in - we definitely saw that coming!  But other changes... some not as nice, were surprises.

On April 1, 2013, we lost my mom.  This was definitely the worst change.  My mom left a legacy that could rival any rockstar or world leader - or so it seemed when the church filled with former students, parents of students, and lines of people arrived at her memorial in Burleson.  There's a tree planted for her at Bransom Elementary, in case you ever drive by, and you'll find each faculty member with a story to tell about my mom's time in education.  We received tons of cards, emails, flowers.  Members of her sorority messaged me on Facebook, a former student stationed in Afghanistan sent me messages, her college roommate sent me pictures of her with my dad!  The memories, like the grieving, seem to go on and on.

As we recover from a weekend of sorting through her things, I see our new house filled with pieces of my childhood.  There are antiques we know the history of, and some we know were given to her, but we're not sure from where or when, and I struggle with re-purposing them.  After all, what else would a 19th century copper dry sink be used for other than storing Christmas decorations?!  I found I had no trouble thinking of selling her dining table, but expressed to my brother my struggle with selling the matching hutch.

"Of course," he said.  "It's not what it is, but what it stood for.  It's the Monolith.  It's this thing that's been important, in our lives, for all our lives."

And that's what it comes down to.  What things stood for.  So that brings me to half the purpose of this blog.  My goal is to do what my mom apparently started to do - create a family cookbook.  I want to combine the recipes she felt sustained our holidays with some she only told stories about, from grandparents and great-aunts, and even add in some of my own.  I'm surprised to find I'm a pretty good cook, and I married a darn good one, too!  Eventually, I'd like to make a publish-worthy book to distribute through the family and that's where all of you come in.

My mom used food to express her love for people.  She loved ALL of you.  If you have a favorite one or twenty of her meals, comment or email them to me.  I can't guarantee I'll include them all, but I can share them.  I also promise not to include or share them without trying to make them first.  Surely, I will regret this, when I'm hammering toasted coconuts open or pretending I know what divinity is supposed to look like before it boils.  But I will try, and I'll include any tips I may figure out along the way.

I can also promise this food will be good.  REALLY good.  If you knew my mom, you know this is fact.  I can't wait to see what you all want to see me cook!