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Apparently i fail at shortbread

Or at least, this time i have.

Ben once told me his recipe for shortbread: equal parts butter, sugar and flour. So i grabbed a stick of butter, squished it into a measuring cup: 2/3rds of a cup. Gotcha. Got the flour and sugar out of the freezer, measured all the appropriate amounts into a mixing bowl, and went to down. Added some cinnamon and clove while i was at it, because YUM.

I couldn’t find a baking pan; apparently they’re all on vacation, or Ben keeps them in a secret cupboard. So i figured i’d roll it out into cookies, which i did.

Once they were baking, i decided to make a large batch of my pad thai sauce. That went off without a hitch, and i now have a half-filled jar (the size of a big jar of pasta sauce, which is what it used to contain) of it hanging out in my fridge. I can have my ghetto ramen pad thai anytime my little hormones desire it. Which they do. Often. And frequently.

That done, i checked back in on the shortbr… the hell? All of the cookies had merged into one large glomp of bubbling stuff. Oh dear.

Um. What to do, what to do… i found a muffin tin and scooped the stuff into three of the muffin cups. Put it back in the oven, where it merely sat and bubbled malevolently at me. In retrospect, i’m wondering if i actually measured everything correctly. I mean, did i think i used 2/3rds of a cup of flour… but did i really? Damn my brain fog.

I think next time, i will make Ben hang out in the kitchen with me when i make it; that way, if it just refuses to work out, i’ll know if it’s something i did wrong this time, or if shortbread just hates me.

November 28th, 2009 | Category: Failed Experiments | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

Ramen pad thai

I can eat my worth in pad thai. Which, to be specific, is a metric fuckton of pad thai.

There aren’t many Thai restaurants in my particular ghetto-burb of Atlanta, and the nearest pad thai places tend to be way the hell overpriced. Added to which, i am not going anywhere NEAR my front door on Black Friday.

So i had a conundrum on my hands. Because i NEEDED pad thai, more than my dogs need bacon.

It is known in my family that i am Not A Cook. At best, i am a pretty good baker. But Not A Cook. Bake your face off, yes; cook a mostly-edible dinner… maybe. There are jokes about pudding flambe in my past, and i refuse to divulge just how much those jokes are exaggerated.

But i reiterate: i NEEDED pad thai. And Ben was asleep.

I went to the kitchen and started nuking some ramen noodles while i pondered my problem. Given that our microwave is a glorified EZ Bake oven, i had plenty of time to figure it out. And figure it out i DID. Check this out:

  • 3 tbsp Pad Thai sauce (not fish sauce; i think the stuff i have has a tamarind base)
  • 1 tbsp peanut butter
  • 1 tsp soy sauce
  • 1 tsp orange juice (we had no lime juice, arg)
  • 1 tsp sugar

Mixed it all up, proclaimed it freaking astounding, and got my noodles out of the microwave. Drained the broth (i’d cooked the ramen noodles with the flavour packet added to the water), put the noodles into a bowl, and spooned about 2/3rds of the sauce onto it. If i’d heated up veggies to go with it, i’d have used the whole thing.

And holy snap, it was so good, the phrase “make you wanna slap your momma” came to mind.

In the future, things i would add to this:

  • veggies (especially green onion)
  • maybe some sprouts (mm, crunchy)
  • eggybits

Another possible change in technique: cook the noodles until almost too soft, then flash fry them with veggies and sauce. But that might be too much effort. Or just too much time to wait for overwhelming deliciosity.

I also think that i’m going to have to make a large batch of this stuff, so that i can have fake pad thai whenever i want it.

November 27th, 2009 | Category: Ramen | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)