The Daring Dilettante

Happy day before Mother's Day everybody! Today I wanted to talk for a minute about experimenting in the kitchen. I used to be terrified of the idea of wasting food by having an experiment turn out to be an awful failure. For years I almost never experimented by making up my own spice rub or trying to modify a recipe to suit my tastes. As the years went by though and I read and learned more and more about the art and science that is cooking I became slowly braver. First I started by modifying recipes that I thought were good but could be better. The first recipe I made any real changes to is called "French Canadian Meat Pie" (I love meat pies!) It was published in a Taste of Home Cookbook that I'm not sure I even have anymore. I wrote the recipe down though so I still have that. Anyway, the original version of the recipe was pretty bland as far as my husband and I were concerned so we switched it up by changing out a big portion of the plain ground beef with s...

This economy is tough. I don’t care what the people on the news say; I haven’t seen an increase in job opportunities. My husband is looking for work and I’m eight months pregnant. Both of us lost our Federal Emergency Unemployment benefits back in December. As a result we are getting by on SNAP benefits and WIC checks and borrowed money from generous relatives. So I’ve been learning how to take full advantage of these benefits. It is not easy. For one thing, WIC checks are very strict and specific. You can only buy specific brands, sizes or types of food. This can be a real shock to the palate if you’ve had the luxury (as we did) of buying almost anything you wanted before. Take bread for example. Husband and I used to eat whole grain white bread. WIC checks only pay for 100% whole wheat bread. Not really a bread we like. Beggars can’t be choosers though so we’ve struggled to find ways to use this bread and enjoy it. One of our favorite recipes is a Broccoli Casserole c...

Flour Substitutions You have a recipe for a delicious cake that uses cake flour, but all you have on hand is all-purpose flour and you just can't go to the store and buy cake flour. What do you do? Or perhaps you have a member in your family diagnosed with Celiac disease, which means she can't eat wheat gluten anymore. What do you do? Quit baking cakes? Or maybe you want to get more whole grains into your diet, so you decide to banish all white flour and white flour products from your kitchen. But your ten year old REALLY wants a cake for her birthday, what do you do? The answer is: make substitutions! While I won't claim that all your recipes will come out just like they used to I will tell you that you can make delicious baked goods by modifying your recipes and using different kinds of flours. In this article I will give you the basic formulas for the flour substitutions I have been asked about the most. Unfortunately, that does not include gluten free changes...

This beautiful treat is a piece of the pie my fantastic younger sister made for my Bridal Shower back in May of 2007. It was just as tasty as it was gorgeous.