Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Yesterday I had to come home from work a little early, to meet the furnace guy. I decided to indulge in a little nostalgia, and use up some of the excess mini-marshmallows and rice krispies leftover from prom night to make chocolate-topped, peanut butter flavored, rice krispie treats. I used to make them a lot when  was the head cook at a co-op women’s dorm. They’re just the regular rice krispie treat recipe from the cereal box, with a half a cup of peanut butter thrown in – although I just realized that I doubled the recipe, and didn’t double the peanut butter. But still, seemed to be enough peanut butter to flavor the treats. Home made rice krispie treats must fall somewhere between white trash cooking and comfort food – I don’t think they’re flat out junk food – even the ones in the little foil packets are the type of thing you might resort to eating if you were stranded in an airport, and wanted something vaguely healthy for breakfast. I used kind of overly fancy chocolate for the topping, King Arthur Flour Burgundy Chunks – but I still wouldn’t call them gourmet. It only seemed right to make them in one of my more “house-wifey”, non-professional-chef pans: a non-stick, 9″ x 13″ pan, with handles and its own snap on plastic cover.

And lo and behold, all the food snobs around the house gobbled them up. I wasn’t surprised when the middle school girls hit them up right away, but I had 3, and even Al had a couple.

And the furnace seems to be working OK again – the horrendous noise has stopped. It’s still a little loud, but I think I’ve bought a little more time on the 18-year old furnace, for just a couple hundred bucks. Shoulda given the furnace guy a krispie treat.

Peanut butter rice krispie treats with chocolate topping

This is an experiment with the Portfolio Slideshow plugin, using rhubarb muffins photographed almost exactly 2 years ago.

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And speaking of rhubarb … This was a pretty good batch of muffins – I felt I had perfected my rhubarb muffin recipe. I have good luck with rhubarb & cake, and rhubarb and crumble – like rhubarb crisp, and even rhubarb pie – but think I am just going to have to give up on rhubarb and custard. This time of year I always get enchanted with rhubarb custard tarts and they never come out as well as other rhubarb preparations.

Last year, I featured rhubarb custard tart as part of a spring cooking class. I liked a recipe fron the restaurant at the UK National gallery, and I even bought a flan ring, especially for making it. It came out looking almost exactly like the picture, except it didn’t brown – the reason being, that even though I had macerated the rhubarb in sugar as the recipe instructed, I forgot to add the rest of the sugar to the custard.

Last night I tried out this recipe from Saveur. I just had a piece for breakfast. Again, pretty good, but even though I pre-baked the crust, it’s a little underdone on the bottom.  The custard is good – I like the technique of mixing the rhubarb-sugar-juice back into the custard, instead of not, as in the Brit recipe – although I was thinking of trying to re-create the rhubarb syrup with vanilla and gin cocktail I had at Fifteen, when we were in London (it was a special that night, and not on the regular drinks list)  the using the excess rhubarb juice. The rhubarb got cooked through – but the texture of the two together are not quite right – smooth custard and squishy rhubarb = NOT a match made in heaven.

In fact, the best combination of rhubarb and cream that I can think of is trifle with rhubarb pureé, layered in with the cake crumbs and custard … er, no, make that rhubarb pie with vanilla ice cream … or warm rhubarb crumble with ice cream … hmm, thought I just had breakfast.

And Portfolio Slideshow works way better than any of the rhubarb custard tart recipes I’ve tried. <grin> In fact, I think it can do what I’ve not been able to make my other image gallery do (the function that comes with the theme I am using) do – insert another picture into the same post, that’s not in the gallery. er well, I guess they’re in the slideshow, but they show up as block images too.

Saveur Rhubarb Custard Pie

Saveur Rhubarb Custard Pie

Saveur Rhubarb Custard Pie

On Saturday, I put on a cupcake decorating 8-year old’s birthday party, with eight little girls. And me and one nanny and the birthday girl’s mom & dad. It was a lot of fun. I made a double batch of yellow cupcakes – it was the batter that ate New York – it should have been about 3 dozen and was actually 3 dozen plus almost a whole pan (20 out of 24) of mini-cupcakes. I didn’t have quite enough baking powder and so I put in a little soda, and that was a mistake – there were some funny overflows – but since I had so much, I had 27 good cupcakes for the kids to decorate – 3+ per girl – plus the not quite perfect, slightly exploded, extras for my household to eat.

I splurged and ordered these two  cupcake books overnighted from Amazon: Hello, Cupcake &  What’s New Cupcake? (recommended by Dorrie Greenspan) – totally cute ideas, but almost all the decorations are candy, and I knew the kids would just eat it.

Hello, Cupcake has the cupcake garden idea – dip frosted cupcakes into crushed Oreo dirt and then decorate with lettuces, radishes, carrots and peas. Marzipan vegetables would be more traditional; instead, they use all kinds of candy ingeniously to make the veggies. Jolly Rancher, Starburst & Airhead fruit chews, M&Ms, green licorice laces (pea vines). I especially like the lettuce – cornflakes coated with green icing, arranged around a little ball of green Jolly Rancher on top of the dirt-covered cupcake. And of course, in the book, the cupcakes are arranged in neat rows. They even have plans for end of the row signs, the seed packs that say what vegetable is where – frosted graham crackers on pretzel sticks glued on with chocolate. Martha’s got a carrot cake with a marzipan vegetable garden on top – it was published back when my kids were about 8 & 9, and we were always going to make it – John and I both love marzipan – but we just never did. This candy version we might’ve accomplished.

I provided yogurt raisons, gummy worms, teddy grahams, dried papaya stick carrots, banana chips, coconut, and toasted pea crisps. I forgot to bring the mint I bought at the farmers’ market for leafs, but the birthday girl’s family brought a big bunch from home. The kids’ garden came out a little messier than the book – looking at the cupcakes the dad said, “That’s what I love about you kids – no holding back – whatever we’ve got goes on the cupcake”.

I was going to start by having us make Farm Cakes – they’d have baked while we decorated and the kids could’ve taken them home – but it seemed like too much for one party. We mixed up two flavors of icing: chocolate sour cream & strawberry drizzle – decorated, ate, and opened presents. There was maybe a 15 minutes span when we needed something to do, and the dad started a game of Twister. Oh, and the birthday girl was completely surprised!

Nice post from Dorrie Greenspan the other day about saving the ends of mustard jars to go into vinaigrette. I do that too, rinse out the mustard jar with the vinegar to go into the dressing. Ends of mustards also go into baked beans and the dressing for my brother’s roasted potato salad, which it’s getting to be about the right time of year for – new potatoes at the farmers’ market, carrots from last year (or maybe new), & frozen peas. I’ve been known to use the dregs of the ketchup in salad dressing, too, to make it “red dressup”; American French dressing, what my kids called it when they were little, and ate steamed broccoli dipped into it.

Heinz Ketchup on the supermarket shelf

Ginger at prom

On Friday, School Woods hosted a prom, created by Ginger Lukas, a.k.a. prom girl.

I made some snacks for the event, chocolate dipped strawberries again, rice krispie treats, punch, veggies & dip, punch with an ice ring with hunks of fruit in it. And I went to Costco for a mega-bag of candy, 5.75 lb. of jolly ranchers and Twizzlers and laffy taffy and Starburst.

The most fun part was that everyone went into their roles perfectly:  Ginger’s mom and I were instantly chaperones; there was the too-drunk, or otherwise ill, girl with hovering boyfriend; there was the glamorous dancing couple. Lots of great dresses and shoes. Even though most of the attendees were over 21 – legal drinking age in WI – the booze was still being sneaked in through the back; a few beers were being openly drunk, but many more spiked punches and bourbon & cokes.

Ginger works mostly in ceramic so there were these great topiary bushes. And crepe paper decked from my dining room chandelier, that sank through the evening as it absorbed moisture. And a fountain in a baby pool, that pumped water until it fell over with a big splash that sent a little water through the heat ducts to the basement.