Where I Make Mayonnaise With One Egg

I bought myself a hand blender yesterday. It's a Cuisinart style. On and off. The one I used to have was cordless and had a milk whipper. They don't seem to make that kind anymore and I'd been wanting one. Got the yen tonight to make something.

This could be titled One Egg Mayonaise. I went searching for recipes...some years ago I got into a mayonnaise making frenzy and was trying out all sorts of variations. Wrote them down too. Except, now I can't find them, so I did what all clueless cooks do...I Googled mayonnaise recipes.

Now, technically this is a blog whereupon I get hints and tips from those old naked ones who've passed on. (Tell me again? You don't wear clothes in Heaven?) I'm teasing. Anyway, I did not seek help from on high and decided this time to pound away at it myself.

The recipes I kept coming up with called for either one or two yolks. I hate wasting anything and did not particularly want to freeze the egg whites. I know I would forget they were in the freezer and I swore all those recipes I'd fiddled with years ago only called for one egg at a time. So, I finally found a recipe that called for one egg. And, it is simple. Here's what I ended up with which is not what was on the internet...I tend to add this and that.

Break one egg into the handy beaker cup that came with my hand held stick beater. Take the juice of one lemon (mine had a slice removed from it, but was mostly all there) and squeeze out the juice. I was looking for 1 tablespoon. It yielded a bit more than that and I did, in the end use the whole thing.

I beat the egg and lemon mixture for a few seconds. Then, I began pouring in the oil. Beating and slowly pouring and before I was done pouring the mixture had emulsifed so well that now the beaker was spinning around too. This is where you wish you had 3 hands. So, I just dumped in the tail end of the oil and with a hand holding the beaker did the up and down thing with the beater. I tasted it and it was horrible. I'd forgotten about seasoning it.

So, I guess I put in 1/2 teaspoon of salt and mixed that up. Still sort of yucky. Then, I spun my turntable with all my spirces on it and found some Beau Monde. Definately, some of that would be good. Then, I went looking for some dried mustard. In some of the recipes I'd looked at that was one of the ingredients. Couldn't find any, so this batch has no mustard. Then, I figured, "How about some pepper?" Right. I used some black pepper. Then, on the third or fourth spin of my spice turntable I spied some white pepper. I used some of that. Still, the mayonnaise didn't taste quite like I wanted it to taste.

Then, the sweet tooth in me went off and I thought, "It needs sugar!" Right, that was exactly what it needed. Two tiny spoonful's from the sugar bowl and stirred a bit more with the spatula and voila, a very nice mayonnaise.

One Egg Mayonnaise with No Mustard

1 egg
Juice of one lemon
1 cup vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
Beau Monde seasoning
About 1 teaspoon of sugar (more or less)

Beat in a blender or with a stick hand blender the egg and lemon juice. Very, very slowly add the oil. If you can get somebody in your house to come hold the container while you are doing this so much the better. Leave off with the mixer and wield your spoon or spatula. Begin adding in your spices. Taste as you add so you can be certain you are going to like it in the end. Put it in the fridge. This tastes better after it is cold. Good on sandwiches, tuna, potato or macaroni salad. Lie to members of your family about where it came from and they will tend to eat it. Especially if you use white pepper rather than black pepper.

Be proud of your mayonnaise.

Egg Mystery Message

In our house we like to eat hard boiled eggs. We also store them in an egg carton. Once, a long time ago somebody tried to use a hard boiled egg thinking it was raw. That's when we got the idea of making little X's on the top of the eggs.

This system of identifying eggs has evolved and today my husband, Dee Dude, is in charge of the eggs. Every time he makes a batch he puts a message in code on the eggs. It is my job to figure it out. Most times I can't.

Pauline will never figure this out it has nothing to do with the eggs.

Channeled Plum Muffins

3 cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 heaping TBS baking powder
½ tsp salt

½ cup milk
2 eggs
1 stick butter – ½ cup
½ cup sour cream
½ cup cream cheese
1 tsp vanilla

Mix dry ingredients together and set aside in a large bowl. Mix liquid ingredients together and mix into dry ingredients just until it all balls up. Gently mix in about 1 cup of chopped up dried plums (or use raisins) and ½ cup of almonds. I took a handful of the plums and chopped them up with my curved mezza luna knife.

Drop into muffin pan (I used paper cupcake liners) and bake at 400° degrees Fahrenheit for 15 to 18 minutes. This recipe makes 16 muffins piled high into the cups.

Now, for the interesting stories behind this recipe. I purchased the dried plums from China Town in Oakland yesterday. I did have candied ginger in my basket, but one of the guides suggested I put it back and get the plums instead. Raisins or dried cranberries would work just as well. It’s fun to shop with the guides.

The cream cheese was the store brand. Beyond the fact that my husband gives me grief every time I buy it I will persist in trying to save money and not spend the extra money on the Philadelphia brand even though I tend to agree with him that is the better tasting cream cheese. This time I thought I would fancy it up somewhat by mixing it with agave syrup. You could have heard him next door, so the logical thing would be to try and use it some other way, hence it worked its way into this recipe.

I argued with the guides about using a whole stick of butter. Turns out it boiled over onto the glass turnaround thingie in the microwave oven. I squeegeed off the boiled over part into the bowl, but it might have been slightly less than ½ cup. Close, but not quite.

I also argued with the guides about the sugar. They’re saying, “Collaborate, Dear. We were collaborating.” Okay. Okay. Anyway, they suggested a whole cup of sugar. I worked them down to 2/3 of a cup.

These are really good muffins. DeeDude who is having an adventurous day today might be glad of some comfort food when he gets home. He and one of the Erics were over in San Francisco doing some research on their upcoming book, “San Francisco – Then and Now” the second edition. The first one by Bill Yenne was released in 2002 by Thunder Bay Press. The publishers contacted DeeDude, Eric and Karl to see if they’d like to update the book. So, they were off in San Francisco at the library doing research on it. The problem, though, was when our car broke down. Luckily, it was on a side street near the library and DeeDude moved it to the side of the road to wait for a tow truck. Towed it off to our favorite place in Oakland where they will work on it, probably tomorrow. Meanwhile, DeeDude and Eric will eventually find their way home. He didn’t want me to come and get him. Said they’d either take Bart home or hop the ferry home.

It’s been awhile since I channeled a recipe and this is the very first time I pretty much wrote it down quickly beginning to end. I was able to let the juices flow and didn’t try to interrupt the guides as they were listing off the ingredients. I think it’s a pretty neat way to channel and enjoy the special interaction with the guides.

And, by the way, these muffins also taste very good. This is a keeper.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Honesty is the best policy. Why write only about the successes in life? Why not write about the failures too? Sometimes they are just as interesting.

Yesterday, for Thanksgiving dinner we decided to have lasagna. It had been a long time and I was having cravings for it. Now, right off, before you read any farther, I want to say that the main course of lasagna turned out wonderfully. You’ve got to read to the end of this before you get to the stuff that didn’t turn out so well.

So, I took off for the store, got 2 packages of lasagna noodles and began to read the recipe on the back of the box while I was in the store. This was a package of Ronzoni. I wanted to spend some effort so, instead of a jar of spaghetti sauce I decided to make my own. I have to say, as I did my shopping at Farmer Joe’s in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, I picked up a couple of large cans of crushed tomatoes. This was a brand I was unfamiliar with. They are absolutely fantastic. I will only, from now on, get the DiNapoli brand of crushed tomatoes.

I bought hamburger, Italian lamb and pork sausage (I wanted to get sweet, but they didn’t have any), cottage cheese, mozzarella and the usual vegetables of onions, red and green pepper, garlic, mushrooms and, wait for it, carrots. My co-worker told me in their family (she is Italian) they used to dice up the sweet, skinny, long carrots for their pasta sauce. I didn’t find skinny and long, but I did dice tiny.

I began the sauce the day before Thanksgiving. I know from experience that these sauces are always better the next day. It simmered on the back of the stove for about 2 hours. Tasty? Ahhhhhh. Thick? Ohhhhhh. Good? Yes. Very, very good sauce. And, I think it was the canned tomatoes that did the trick on this one.

On Thanksgiving I assembled the lasagna. Little bit of sauce on the bottom of a buttered pan. Big old pan. Layered in some noodles, overlapping the edges. Then, I spooned in some cottage cheese and layered that with mozzarella. Then, more sauce and began again with the noodles. The pan I use is super deep. It was a really thick lasagna. Ended with a mozzarella. The directions said to cover with foil and bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes. Then, uncover and continue baking for another 5 minutes. At 25 minutes I uncovered the lasagna only to determine that it needed a heck of a lot more baking than just 5 minutes. I let it go another 25 instead.

There was another smaller pan of lasagna on the rack underneath the big pan. For some reason the bits of mozzarella on top of that one never melted. They baked and looked like weenie marshmallows. Very strange. I put that one into the fridge thinking I could pick off the marshmallow-mozzarella before anybody eats it.

So, now I continue on to the part of the dinner where I got some help from Spirit. There were a bunch of noodles left over after I’d filled up the big pan and the little pan with lasagna. At that point I’d run out of sauce. What I had left over was a big baggie full of noodles and a half a carton of cottage cheese. I’d originally purchased 2 big containers of it. Over-kill, I know. I’d only boiled up 1 ½ boxes of the lasagna noodles, but even so, there was a lot left over.

There’s a part of me that hates to throw things away. That’s when the guides stepped in. As I was puzzling over a cottage cheese and mozzarella rolled up in a lasagna noodle concoction one of the Guides said to me, “Sweeten the cottage cheese and use that big jar of homemade strawberry jam. Make a sweet lasagna.”

Ah, that sounded really good. So, I did that. A few teaspoons of sugar into the cottage cheese, which, by the way tasted really, really good. I’ll have to remember that for future snacks. I’ve made barley-dukes with cottage cheese, but I’ve never simply sweetened it with sugar. By the way a barley-duke is cottage cheese with some jam or jelly mixed in. My great grandmother Neddie always favored grape jelly, which is also my favorite way to make a barley-duke, but other jams or jellies are just as good.

Anyway, I buttered up a loaf pan, sprinkled it with a little sugar and began layering in noodles, cottage cheese and the strawberry jam. I baked it alongside the lasagnas.

In theory, this sounded like it was going to be good. It actually tasted pretty terrible. Well, what was terrible about it was that the cottage cheese bits were hard and they sort of reminded me of eating bits of hamburger with strawberry jam. I had a few bites and then tossed the whole thing. Lessons everywhere. Does anybody out there have a family recipe for sweet lasagna? Where did I go wrong?

We did enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner. I hope you had a memorable one too.

Chicken Pot Pie With Cornbread Crust

I took the day off today and had the opportunity to watch some afternoon television, something I rarely get to do. I tuned in to part of Oprah's show.

They were discussing how to economically stretch a roasted chicken to several meals. Seeing as how DeeDude (my husband) had gotten us a rotisserie chicken from Costco the other day and there was still quite a lot of meat on it I decided to make one of the recipes. Interestingly, after I'd cut up 2 cup's worth for the recipe there is still just as much meat left on the bones. Maybe I'll make the enchiladas they made on another segment of the show for tomorrow's dinner.

Actually, the plan for tonight's dinner was to have been a chicken pot pie but I'd been putting off making the pie dough just because I was having an attack of the lazies. The meal they made on Oprah was a chicken pot pie with cornbread as the topping.I stuck to the recipe until it came to the cornbread. I didn't make mine up from scratch, but instead used one of those boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix I had up in the cupboard. I wait until they go on sale and stock up. It was perfect to use as the crust. I also had enough filling for a large, deep dish pie pan and two individual serving sized casseroles.

This is my version of Chicken Pot Pie Adapted from the Oprah Show

1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 Tbsp. butter
1/4 sweet onion, chopped
1/4 cup flour
2 cups chicken stock
2 cups chopped chicken (this was one leg, one thigh, one wing and some of the breast meat)

1/2 cup frozen peas
1 potato diced

1 chopped carrot

1 chopped rib of celery

I boiled up the potato, carrots and celery for a few minutes until they were just slightly cooked. They would finish the rest of the way in the oven. I put the oil and butter in a skillet dumped in the onion and sauteed that for a little bit. I put in the flour and messed that around a bit so the flour would cook up a little. Then, I poured in the hot chicken stock. I stirred it around a bit until it wasn't lumpy anymore and then added the veggies and the chicken. Stirred it a little bit on the heat and then turned the heat off once the sauce was cooked.

Then I prepared the Jiffy cornbread mix. I didn't mix it much, just until it was lumpy. I divided the chicken mixture between the pie pan and the two small casserole dishes and then smoothed the Jiffy cornbread over top in a relatively thin layer. There wasn't enough that it went to the edges of the pan. The one they did on the Oprah show was thicker on top. But, we enjoyed the thinner version I put together.

I baked it all at 350 edging up to 400 degrees for 20 minutes. I was aiming for 400, but by the time I was ready the oven hadn't gotten up that high. It worked out fine just the way I did it. Nice and golden brown on top. You can go to Oprah's website and get directions for their version which includes a from scratch cornbread topping. They also called for pepper where I used only a sprinkle to season and lots of dashes of Tabasco which I didn't use at all.

Even so, DeeDude and I really enjoyed dinner and it was perfect that I got to watch them make it on television today. If you're interested, and I think you should, go look at the recipe for Chicken Pot Pie at Oprah's site here or the Enchilada recipe here.

Birthday Muffins For My Husband

My husband's birthday was a week ago, but our schedules were hectic and he had a cold at the time, so we have designated this as his birthday weekend. In honor of that I decided we could start it off with some home made muffins. Again, I turned to my copy of Granny's Muffin House for basics and for inspiration I turned to my Guides. Here's what happened:

Mix together dry ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup sugar

Mix together wet ingredients:
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup sour cream (I didn't have a cup, so we used what we had)
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 tsp of vanilla
a handful of crushed walnuts
a handful of Craisins which are cranberries that have been dried and look like raisins (the guides wanted me to use up some old prunes we had in the refrigerator, but I balked at that idea and opted for the cran-raisins instead)

I mixed the wet into the dry ingredients and right away realized it wasn't wet enough! Yikes. So, as I was reaching for the milk one of the guides suggested I get the half and half instead. I know this isn't the proper way to mix up muffins, but hey, it was an emergency and it worked out fine. I splashed about 1/4 cup worth of half and half onto the already mixed up dough and mixed it around some more. It was fine. So, the 1/4 cup of sour cream that was missing needed to be replaced by something and that something was the half and half.

I piled high 12 muffin cups (lined with baking papers) and baked them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes.

Very yummy.

Blueberry Buckle Muffins

Blueberries are in season and we picked up a nice sized container of them at CostCo. I made muffins using a favorite recipe for Blueberry Buckle Muffins on page 40 from, “Granny's Muffin House” by Susan Ashby. This has got to be one of my favorite cookbooks. My copy has all sorts of goop all over it a sign of a well used and well loved cookbook; either that or a really messy cook.

Blueberry Buckle Muffins

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar

1 egg, beaten
½ cup milk
½ cup sour cream
1/3 cup butter, melted
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1 ½ cups fresh blueberries

Topping:
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift the first 4 ingredients together. Stir together the next 6 ingredients and add all at once to the dry ingredients. Stir just until moistened. Mine ran on the dry side so I splashed in some extra milk and worked it around a little bit more trying not to work the dough too much. Fold in the blueberries. Mix the topping together separately.

Fill paper-lined muffin tins full of the batter. Sprinkle (I patted) the topping over each muffin and bake about 20 minutes. This will make 12 really big muffins.

When I took them out of the oven they’d spread all over Timbuktu and there wasn’t a bit of muffin pan showing between each muffin. I puzzled over how I was ever going to be able to get these humongous muffins out of the pan without burning the you know what out of my fingers. That’s when the guides stepped in with a suggestion that is fabulous. They said to take a teaspoon in each hand and hold them upside down. Then, carefully lift out each muffin angling the bowl of the spoon into the muffin so the tops wouldn’t get cut off. I’m telling you, this might not have been a recipe that came from a guide, but getting those muffins out of the tins sure was their wonderful contribution.