Treats from the Tipsy Turtle

Today was not a satisfying cooking day. This morning I tried a new granola recipe but used the wrong kind of oatmeal. Tasted good, texture was terrible. Then I tried another version of a white chocolate cherry bread. A decent bread but you couldn't really taste either the chocolate or cherry. I was close to just picking up takeout for dinner when I remember I had a pound of lump crab meat in the fridge. Crab cakes it is! I found a basic recipe on one of my favorite websites, Once Upon a Chef. Of course, since this was a spontaneous crab cake, I didn't exactly have all the ingredients; one of which, was Old Bay seasoning. Crab cakes, Maryland and Old Bay go together. The idea that I would even attempt to make crab cakes without it was probably a criminal act. I went with it. I had just received an order from Penzey's Spices--they are back up and running after having shutdown due to the pandemic. One of the items I received is adobo seasoning. Meet New Bay seasoning....

No, I haven't given up on trying new recipes to blog about. I'm still cooking quite a bit but because they are my own recipes or ones I've made before, they don't fit the criteria for this project. Or, as Eric says, "they aren't bloggable." I started reading a fun cookbook by Cheryl and Griffith Day called The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook . The book included a few simple recipes for flavored sugar that I decided to try; especially because I have cardamom pods and I had purchased a vanilla bean. Not the greatest photo of their logo but this is where the vanilla bean came from. I poured some granulated sugar into pint-sized Mason jars--about 3/4 full. I added 1/4 c. of the cardamom to one, covered it and shook it around to distribute the pods. I think I opened up a vanilla bean only once before and that was a long time ago! I cut it in half and used a sharp knife to slit along the pod so I could extract the seeds. I used...

I bought my bread maker back in late December but I hesitated to use it. On the one hand, the idea of a fresh loaf with little effort on my part was highly appealing but, in my complicated brain, it also felt wrong. After all, one of the main things I enjoy about bread making is handling the dough. Wouldn't this be...cheating? What a difference a few months can make! Because my sourdough starters have been so successful, I bake a loaf twice a week. If I didn't have the bread maker and a very good sourdough bread recipe for it, I'd either be drowning in starter or wasting a heck of a lot of it. It's been great! I decided it was time to explore the other settings on the machine. Today's recipe has the machine doing the initial mixing so I got to do the shaping, raising and baking! Here's today's cast. I forgot the oil in the cupboard at this point... Warm water, yeast and half a cup of sweetened condensed milk is added to the machine's bread p...

I have been scrutinizing cake recipes that use lavender and cardamom for a while now but couldn't find one that I wanted to bake; not because they didn't look good, but because my family is not big on cake. I had visions of a fancy cake sitting sad and neglected on a counter with only a tasting slice taken out of it. Today's recipe, using lemon and cardamom, sounded good and it sounded like something that would tempt the guys. I'll have to find a recipe to utilize the lavender later. Today's cast--I had a bag of key limes so decided to sub them for the lemon. Before I did anything else, I prepped the cardamom and the limes. The cardamom pods went into the mortar. Seeds were removed... Then ground into a powder. I had 10 pods and they just made about a teaspoon of ground spice. All the dry ingredients were in a bowl. I added the cardamom to that. Next I zested the limes. A great tool for this purpose is a zester or microplaner. It's basic...