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I baked my first cake from scratch last Thursday… A Pineapple upside down cake using Dick DeBartolo’s recipe. It turned out on the chewy side. I think I over-stirred it, or perhaps I didn’t get it in the oven quick enough after putting the baking powder in. I love the caramelized sugar on the bottom of it. An using strawberry jam instead of the candied cherries tastes a lot better to me.

Cooking cakes from scratch is quite a bit simpler than I thought it would be. Similar to cooking my favorite brownie recipe from scratch. It’s just a matter of getting everything together in the correct order . The tricky part of this was the room temperature butter. I’ve only had to deal with that when making pie crusts, and that was several years ago. I ended up mashing the butter up with a fork then mixing it into the eggs…. After all it wasn’t the time to be googleing the correct way to combine it in.

I’ve made pineapple upsidedown cakes before so the topping, or bottom, wasn’t a big deal. The jam was actually quicker than fishing cherries out of the jar, and added plus. Then I scooped the cake batter on top, like Dick recommended. Even though the pineapple rings where packed in tight, They still tried to move around a bit.

It was fun! I think I may try a chocolate cake from scratch next. I’m trying to move away from cake mix because the kind that I used to use was full of Hydrogenated oils.  Not good for you, no matter how good it tastes.  It didn’t take me any longer to make the cake from scratch, than it does to make one from a mix. Which saving time was the whole point in using the mix,  for me, in the first place.

On to more cooking experiments in the future… Right after we finish this cake though

I’m really starting to enjoy cooking from scratch. I baked that carrot cake I was talking about the other day, and last night I made taco shells.  I used to dislike cooking because it seemed like a lot of work to cook a dish, only for it to disappear a short time later.

Something changed in the last few years. Between rearranging the cookware, and learning a lot more about nutrition, and quite a bit more practice. I’ve come to like cooking, for myself anyway.

No not for my parents per say… When I cook, I cook extra for them. I usually start out with whatever I want to eat at the moment though. I’m still not good at cooking a lot of the things that they like (okra, salad greens, fish, the way mom likes to spice baked chicken, etc).

This works out fine as I mostly cook supper. Mom does lunch most days, unless she specificity asks me to cook on a certain day. Mom is better at cooking for a group than I am. I tend to cook just enough for that meal, mom likes to make enough that there’s a second meal. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet, accept for spaghetti (it’s hard to make a small pot of that though).

Making bread is something else I enjoy. I’d love to make it every week, but I’ve yet to figure out where to fit it in. Probably some afternoon, right after lunch, that way I can do some computer work while it’s rising, instead of my cleaning chores.

Any suggestions for some recipes to try next?

Yesterday dad brought in a grocery bag full of carrots from the garden, then ended up filling one half of our sink, till it was almost running over. (We have a stainless steel one with two basins.) I’d fill a dishpan and scrub the carrots with a rubber brush called a Rubba Scrubba. Then sitting them in another dishpan full of water to rinse them off.

I had a Instant Immersion Spanish cassette tape on, and scrubbed carrots till the tape was over with. The tapes seem to last about 20-30 minutes per side, and it looked like I hadn’t made a dent in the pile of carrots despite the rinse dishpan being full.

I switched to cutting the carrots up into slices for awhile. I’d almost emptied the dishpan, and had gotten a pot full. I hadn’t put the water on to boil yet. So I sat the pot, full of water, on the stove. While waiting for it to boil, I went back to scrubbing another dishpan full of carrots. By the time I had finished scrubbing them the water was boiling nicely.

I dumped the cut up carrots in. I wanted to freeze the carrots so Mom and I had decided to just blanch them. It was my first time blanching anything, so I think I might have overcooked the carrots a touch. They’re only supposed to be in the pot for two minutes after it starts boiling again. (When you dump them in they cool off the water an stop the boiling because they’re room temperature.) I was cutting up the 2nd batch of carrots while waiting for them to boil, and I’d forgotten to set my timer.

In the end we ended up with 3, gallon, freezer bags full of carrots. About a quart of small ‘baby’ sized carrots left out to just eat, and a quart sized pot of carrots that mom cooked to eat right away.

The process was interesting, and very tiring. We still have quite a lot of carrots in the garden, so I’ll probably end up freezing some more. Mom wants to make a Carrot Souffle. I want to make a Carrot Cake, and a batch of carrot bread. We’ll probably end up making them all at some point.