Jalapenos

Today's theme for the Photo Friday challenge is edible. Here's my answer to such a challenge, a photo from my files (click here for a larger version):

Last summer we planted three little jalapeno plants outside our apartment window. The landlady had given me permission to cultivate a little patch of neglected ground out there, and while my own mind went toward flowers, foliage plants, and herbs, Eddie (those are his hands in the picture) decided he wanted to try hot peppers. For some reason I had my doubts as to how they would do, but they turned out hearty, hardy, and prolific! This year we're hoping to plant some lesser-known Peruvian peppers. I hope they do as well as Eddie's jalapenos.

It's Groundhog Day!

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I'd like to take a short break from the brownie-related posts to wish everyone a Happy Groundhog Day!

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This is a scan of the Groundhog Day card I produced this year and sent to a few people. It's a lino print, which means I carved my design into a piece of flexible material which I then inked up with red and used to make prints on yellow tissue paper. The teal outlining accents were done by hand with a Sharpie marker. I think he turned out quite cheerful, don't you?

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I've been enthusiastic about Groundhog Day ever since I read All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life by Jack Santino. That is such a good book! What was that, maybe about 15 years ago? The funny thing is that that was when I was living in Mexico, where Groundhog Day is unknown (though they do have their own special -- non rodent related -- celebration on February 2nd). I just fell in love with the history and lore of this holiday. It also might have to do with the fact that I have quite a bit of German heritage, and it supposedly was the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were and are actually of German extraction, not Dutch) who started the groundhog tradition here in the USA. So perhaps I have a tendency towards groundhog love in my genes.

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Well, whatever. I just wish there were someone else near me who loves the day as much as I do and would enjoy really celebrating it. My dear, dear hubby goes along with all my carrying on, but his heart isn't totally in it. I guess he doesn't have groundhog blood like I do.

Brownie Quest: There's Pudding in the Mix!

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Another "healthier" brownie idea I have come across involves using a boxed chocolate cake mix and a can of pureed pumpkin. I had both on hand, so I tried it. You just combine the mix and the pumpkin, then bake. Yes, that's it -- no other ingredients. Supposedly you get a dense, fudgy brownie-like thing.

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I used a Pillsbury Moist Supreme Dark Chocolate cake mix and a 15-oz. can of Libby's pumpkin. I baked this in a 13 x 9-inch baking pan until a knife inserted in the center came out clean. It smelled good. It looked good. The texture was good. It tasted good.

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But it wasn't brownies. The end product looked and cut just like cake, and was not at all dense and brownie-like. The flavor was very chocolately and only very slightly reminiscent of pumpkin. I doubt if I will be making this again, however, because of way the cake became a heavy, sticky yet slippery mess once inside my mouth, which was not very pleasant.

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And so the search continues.

Brownie Quest: First Tentative Steps

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And so the adventure begins!

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I made a batch of brownies with a very promising recipe that some ladies were raving about over on a forum I frequent. This version uses pureed black beans instead of flour and Splenda instead of sugar. I was pretty excited over the prospect of a brownie with fiber in it.

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I followed the recipe to the letter and ... they turned out awful! So bad, in fact, that we had to throw them out -- but first I let them sit over night, to see if they improved with age. Well, they didn't.

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I was disappointed, but not dissuaded from my mission. I'll try again another day.

Brownie Quest: The Beginning

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What could possibly motivate me to update this blog after more than six months of inactivity? What could shake the snow off of my winter-anesthetized state of lethargic hibernation (how's that for an overladen, redundant metaphor?) and get me to actually write something here?

Only chocolate.

More specifically: brownies.

I am on a quest to discover new horizons in brownies. I have been Googling recipes and reading ideas about different kinds of brownies on forums and blogs as well as in old fashioned print cookbooks, and I am ready to begin.

But before I try some new recipes, allow me to post an old one. This is my starting point, my "standard," so to speak.

I associate cream cheese brownies with the seventies, which is when we started making them in my family, but it's anyone's guess as to where and when they were born. I love them because of the creamy aspect of this recipe, which makes it less stick-to-your-mouth-and-make-you-pucker-from-the-sweetness rich and yet no less delicious.

These have been a huge hit when I've taken them in to work, and plenty of folks have asked me what the "white part" is, which kind of surprises me. Hm. I guess not everyone has had cream cheese brownies before. Who knew? Maybe they just weren't there in the seventies.

By the way, brownies tend to be difficult to cut neatly into bars. I've found the best way to do this is to completely line your baking pan with alumninum foil (leaving an inch or so hanging over the edges), then grease the foil before you pour in the batter. Once your brownies have been baked and cooled, you can just lift the whole thing out of the baking pan, peel away the foil, and cut with a large chef's knife on a cutting board. This sure beats trying to pry baked-on brownie out of the corners of the pan!

Okay, so my "classic" recipe is the following:


** Those Seventies Brownies **

(or simply Cream Cheese Brownies, if you prefer)

You'll need:

one box of your favorite brownie mix, plus the ingredients it calls for (typically, an egg, a little oil, and some water)

1 (8-oz.) package cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Prepare brownie mix according to the directions on the box and pour it into a greased baking pan. (See foil tip, above recipe.) Blend the cream cheese, sugar, egg, and vanilla until smooth. Pour this mixture over the brownie batter, then drag a spatula or knife through both the chocolate and the white layers of batter until it looks "marbled." Bake it at 350F for anywhere from 40 - 60 minutes. The time will vary according to the size pan you are using, but due to the addition of the white "layer," it will take longer than the times given on the brownie mix package. Be careful not to overbake them, though; the surest way to ruin brownies is by baking them too long. Slightly underbaked is best if you like gooey, rich, fudgy brownie goodness.

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Note: Please feel free to leave a comment with your own ideas, recipes, and/or thoughts on brownies.

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Photo Friday: Spiral

My offering for today's Photo Friday theme, spiral:

Click here to see photo full size, then use

your back arrow to return to this blog post.

The location of this shot is inside the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City -- but in the "back of the house" part of the basilica, not the main area where pilgrims and tourists go. It's not all ornate back there; there's mainly just your basic practical painted concrete walls and everyday tile floors. I was in that section once and only once in my life (in contrast to the public area, where I went probably at least a couple of hundred times during my 20+ years of residence in that city) -- in May of 2002, when I participated in a recital of Marian poetry composed by one of the Basilica's priests.

Though I only had a few seconds to get this picture (taken with my little Kodak DC3200 digital camera), I couldn't pass up the opportunity to photograph the spiral staircase that went down many floors through the heart of the building. Don't get me started on the possible spiritual allegories here; they'd be numerous and wind round and round like the staircases in the photo ...

Quotes about Books

I love good quotations -- but maybe you knew that from the long list of them on the side bar of this blog. :-D

Well, the first quote below showed up in my inbox today in the very nice newsletter from Quote of the Day that I subscribe to; it got me thinking about good quotations about books, and I searched around and found the others. There must be a gazillion more out there, so if you know of a pithy quote, quip, or saying about books, please share it with us in a comment!

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
-Franz Kafka

The covers of this book are too far apart.
-Ambrose Bierce

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in, but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
-Bert Williams

A book is a garden carried in the pocket.
-Chinese proverb

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
-Clifton Fadiman

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.
-Moses Hadas

German Chocolate Cake Sandwich Cookies

My mother makes really good German chocolate cake from scratch. I mean really good. It's a complicated and many-stepped process, and she does it superbly. So it is with a touch of shame and embarrassment that I confess to never having made that particular kind of cake from scratch. I have made it from a purchased cake mix; in fact, I made a German chocolate cake from mix this past Memorial Day for a pitch-in and got some enthusiastic compliments on it. And, though it will never reach the glory of Mom's scratch recipe, my little mix cake (with purchased coconut pecan frosting, as well) did turn out pretty darn good. I was pleasantly surprised at the great texture (quite soft) and excellent flavor of the cake.

And since I had purchased two boxes of it on that occasion and only prepared one, I had an extra box of German chocolate cake mix lying around, and yesterday I decided I wanted to make some cookies out of it. I found several recipes online, most of which included chocolate chips and/or raisins -- and while I like both of these things, I did not want them in these particular cookies. I decided to use the recipe that follows, and I am glad I did. These cookies were super easy to make and so good. We will be making these again and again in this house.

Easy German Chocolate Cake Sandwich Cookies

1 (18.25 oz.) package German chocolate cake mix

2 eggs, beaten

2/3 cup shortening

1 (16 oz.) container coconut pecan frosting

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (175 C) and grease your cookie sheets.

Place cake mix, eggs, and shortening in a large bowl and mix until well combined.

Roll dough into balls of approximately 1 inch in diameter. Place them about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet and bake 8 to 10 minutes.

Let cookies cool 4 or 5 minutes on sheet before removing to wire rack to cool completely.

Place a generous spoonful of frosting on the bottom of one cookie, then place another cookie on top of frosting to make a sandwich.

Refrigerate any cookies not eaten the day they are made.

Yield: about 2 dozen sandwich cookies.

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(I'm going to try this with butter next time instead of shortening, due to the whole "trans fat" thing.)

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See a few more of my recipes.

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Cemetery Crosses

Last Sunday dear hubby Eddie and I went out for an exploratory drive, something we have been wont to do lately. On this occasion we drove to another nearby Chicago suburb, Des Plaines. Now, it used to be that the pronunciation of this town ("dess planes"; that is, both of the letters s are pronounced) bugged me, since the name so obviously is French. However, once I realized that trying to prounounce it in the French way but with an American accent would produce something that sounds like what Tatu used to say in the series Fantasy Island as the aircraft carrying their new guests approached ("Deh plane, deh plane!"), I came to accept the Midwestern pronunciation of the town, and I'm even starting to become fond of it, actually.

So one of the things we discovered on this drive was the All Saints Catholic Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois. (Funny how the s in Illinois is silent.) Visiting graveyards is something Eddie and I enjoy occasionally; they are usually very peaceful, and it's interesting to read the names and wonder what all these people did when alive -- and it's kind of fun to think we will meet a lot of them in Heaven one day.

At this particular graveyard it seems that cross-shaped headstones are the dominant style. We were intrigued, as we have a small cross collection (mainly wall crosses) of different types at home. There are crosses in this cemetery of all sizes and styles (though not of all shapes, since they are cross-shaped, after all, heh heh). I'd never seen anything quite like this in any other burial ground, and I took some photos so you, gentle blog reader, could get the gist of what it is like.

This last picture is a shot of the door to one of the mausoleums at that cemetery, which I found quite beautiful.

Baseball Movies ... and Magic

I have this "thing" about baseball movies: I love them!

The thing is, I'm not a huge baseball fan. I've never been to a professional game; don't know if I've been to any games, actually, since my dad dropped out of his softball league when I was a small child. I currently live in a metropolitan area that is home to two major league baseball teams, and yet I don't particularly support either one of them. Okay, if hard pressed I'd probably choose the Cubs, since I do have a couple of uncles over in Indiana who love the Cubbies and no relatives (that I am aware of) who root for the White Sox. But I follow about as much baseball in the news as I do any other sport -- which is to say, none.

So what's the deal with me and baseball movies? In the last couple of years I have seen and enjoyed a bunch of them, and we now own three: 61*, Field of Dreams, and A League of Their Own. (Okay, I confess, I don't actually own that last one yet, but I do have it on order from my used dvd swapping club and hope to hold it in my sweaty little paws very soon.) Our dvd collection at home is not at all large, and I don't believe there is any other theme on which we actually have three films. Why baseball? It's a mystery.

What made me reflect on this was that I watched Field of Dreams again last night, after having seen it for the first time a couple of years ago. A marvelous movie! It got me thinking about magic -- the good kind, the kind that leaves you tingling with wonder -- and about how we as adults are so quick to scoff at even the idea of such a thing. And how, thinking it silly, we stop thinking about it at all, and then we stop noticing it happening ... and pretty soon we are complaining about the dullness of life in general. Hm. Maybe I'll start trying to remember to look for a little more magic during my day. I'm pretty sure it's happening all the time, all around me.

In the meantime, if there are any baseball-themed movies you'd like to recommend, don't hesitate to leave a comment below. Play ball!