Let's make some peanut brittle!

It's cold. It's snowy. Christmas is over. I'm holed up in the house. And I need a sugar fix. Y'know what sounds good right now? Peanut Brittle!

I made two batches of this microwave recipe before we went up to NY for an early Christmas at my parents' place, and it was so easy and fast that I was able to make a batch at mom and dad's from memory. The stuff is a big hit...and isn't nearly as labor intensive as the old-fashioned method involving big pots over hot stove tops with candy thermometers, waiting and watching for the sugar temp to hit the hard crack stage, etc. Screw that! In about 10 minutes you can have a batch cooling on your kitchen counter, and at no point did you have to watch a candy thermometer. Notice I said that in 10 minutes you have it COOLING. Do NOT think you should be eating this stuff right out of the microwave - you WILL scorch yourself.

(Did you ever play "hot lava" as a kid, where you and friends/siblings were on the sofa, or the stairs, or where ever, and you KNOW that if you ever touched the floor, aka the hot lava, you would surely die? Or at least have to scream and laugh and fight your way back up the stairs/sofa/whatever... Well, if you eat this "hot lava" concoction too soon, there would be screaming but no laughing...)

Ok, enough chatting - you just want to eat brittle, right? Fine. Get your stuff together.... For one batch of microwave peanut brittle you will need:

• 1 1/2 cups of raw, unsalted peanuts (in NY dad requested more peanuts, and we found 2 cups was totally fine. I've also used spanish peanuts before just fine)
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup (aka the see-through Kayro syrup)
• 1/8 tsp salt (a decent sized pinch will do)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp butter (don't measure it! just lop off a tiny piece)
• 1 tsp baking soda

What else do I recommend?

• 1/2 sheet pan (10x15) - this is a good size pan for this recipe. You could PROBABLY go with a 1/4 sheet pan (9x12) (I have two and love 'em - I need to see if this recipe would hit all four edges of the 1/4 sheet pan)
• Parchment paper (maybe lightly sprayed with non-stick spray) or a Silpat to fit the sheet pan. I haven't tried parchment paper without the spray.... You could also just pour the hot brittle directly onto a LIGHTLY greased sheet pan....I just like having something that makes it easier to lift/peel up the brittle.
  
• Something heat-resistant that you can stir with. I recommend a silicone spatula. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND avoiding old-fashioned rubber spatulas. My mom hates the silicone and loves the rubber spatulas and, well, let's just say after the Christmas batch of peanut brittle, I need to replace two of her old rubber spatulas! ;-)
• Something big and heat resistant that you can nuke the stuff in. I HIGHLY recommend something that has a handle because, once you take this stuff out of the microwave to pour it, a handle becomes VERY handy. I've done it in casserole dishes and Pyrex bowls without handles...and that's why I'm recommending something WITH a handle. A 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup MIGHT be ok - I need to test this. I got an 8-cup Pyrex measuring cup and it works PERFECTLY!

So here's all the ingredients. Check out that rum bottle - that's HOMEMADE vanilla from Emily (former coworker, lives down the street). SOOO COOL!


As I said, I find a 2 qt/4 cup Pyrex measuring cup works great for this. (Oh, and as a note - "Pyrex" stuff isn't actually Pyrex anymore....I guess this stuff isn't as tough as it used to be...but so far I've never ever had any crack or chip)


Stir together the sugar, corn syrup, peanuts and salt, then nuke for 4 minutes.


Here's the mess before going in the microwave.


After 4 minutes the stuff's seriously starting to boil, but there's no real color change yet. This wouldn't make very good peanut brittle.


Give it a stir with something that won't melt, and stick it back in the microwave for 4 more minutes.


While I was waiting (4 minutes can seem like an eternity sometimes!), I decided to get a little experimental....what would CINNAMON peanut brittle be like? Hmm....we'll come back to this!


After the second 4 minute nuking you can see why I wonder if a 4-cup measuring cup would be big enough - you can see that the goop clearly raised up as it was cooking!


Here it is fresh out of the microwave.


Dump in the vanilla (1 tsp) and butter (1 tsp), and stir it up. This is when I also decided to add 1/8 tsp of cinnamon...


Now the original recipe calls for 2 more minutes of nuking, but this is where you have to use your judgment. I've made the brittle specifically as the recipe instructs, and have found it can sometimes be a little pale in color. LOOKS pretty, but isn't quite hitting you with that "burnt sugar" taste. At mom and dad's, either because we added so many more peanuts, or because we were nuking in a Corningware casserole, or because their microwave is stronger, the batch turned out MUCH darker than the ones I'd made here at home. I kept apologizing because I thought it looked burnt. WOW was it GOOD!!! So this time I checked the color after the final 2-minute nuking, decided it looked pale, and kept adding on 15 second increments and checking again. I was happy at 45 additional seconds...you'll just have to experiment with this and learn from tasting each batch. Make lots of trial batches! ;-)


Now that the brittle has had it's final nuking, you need to act FAST! You should've already had your pan/silpat/parchment paper/whatever ready. Dump in the 1 tsp of baking soda, and give a quick stir to mix it in - you'll find the brittle concoction really foams up at first - this is good. It's adding a slight airiness to the brittle so it's not hard as a brick and risks breaking teeth. (Oh, btw - if you're taking pictures, you should've put the camera down by now - you need to move fast)


As soon as you've stirred the baking soda in, quickly scoop the mess out onto your pan and spread it out. The recipe suggests pre-heating the pan in the oven to make spreading easier. That's too much work for me, plus I'm sure I'd burn myself.

Here's the brittle, all spread and still molten-hot! NO TOUCHY!


Hint: We HAVE found you can take this and put it out on your ultra-clean (right?) garage floor in the middle of winter, and that helps speed things up for quicker snacking! ;-)

Oh, and that big measuring cup you were nuking the brittle in? Don't throw it in the sink to soak and dissolve all that sugar just yet! There's nibbly bits to pick out and eat first (ONCE it's cooled some!). Sure, you might even cut yourself on sharp sugar....but it's worth it.


You can even bend and twist that spatula around to break off brittle - yummy!

Enjoy! I think I'm gonna go see how it turned out now....

Yummy biscuity goodness

Awhile back I posted about making my own homegrown (partially) dog biscuits for Doogie....and just before Thanksgiving I whipped up another batch. I figure not only are they good to feed our dog, but they'd make good gifts for friends with dogs. I still had bags of homegrown pumpkin in the freezer, and there's still kale growing outside (barely!). I started with the same recipe as before, and continued to have fun stirring in extra stuff.


Original Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup canned pumpkin (or more!)
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons dry milk
• 2 1/2 cups flour
• water

My Add-Ins:

• Chopped up kale that you've dried by baking in a hot oven for maybe 10-15 minutes (don't let it start to burn - it gets stinky!)
• Apple butter (I used homemade - the biscuits smell like cinnamon!)
• For the flour get creative - I've read that some dogs have wheat allergies, and so I tried potato flour and rice flour. There's also some whole wheat flour since I ran out of the other two non-wheat flours. So far no reports of allergies!

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
• Blend the wet ingredients, and then work in the dry ingredients, adding water if necessary to loosen things up a bit. Seeing how I was working with very wet home-roasted pumpkin, plus kale and apple butter, I never needed to add extra water. Instead I needed to add more flour to thicken things up a bit.
• A stand mixer, such as a KitchenAid, is great for a recipe like this. You want the stuff to be like a THICK sugar cookie dough. Once it's all bound up into a ball roll it out and cut into shapes. I think the thicker cookies (about 1/2" thick) give Doogie more of a workout with the chewing.
• Bake the cookies on ungreased cookie sheets. Silpats or parchment paper are great for this. If you use something like foil (as I did on one pan) you WILL need to spray it with a little Pam/non-stick spray or the biscuits ARE likely to stick! (voice of experience here)
• Bake for 20 minutes on one side, then turn over and bake another 20 minutes. Depending on what you add to the biscuits, some brown easily and some remain pale.
• Because I wanted to ensure these biscuits were going to be REALLY dry and last awhile, plus to add some extra toughness for chewing, I ran them in the dehydrator for several hours after they'd cooled from baking.

Here's the chopped up kale, about ready to go into the oven. The first time I made these I cut out all the central stalks before baking. The second time I got lazy, left the stalks in, and they were just fine.


Three batches of biscuit dough - and you can see each resulted in a very different sized blob. Bottom left is the original recipe. Top left has chopped up/dried kale added to it. I'm not sure why the recipe turned out so much more pale? Maybe I used some whole wheat flour in the bottom left batch? And the batch on the right I dumped in maybe 3/4 - 1 cup of apple butter AFTER adding the pumpkin - and boy did I have to add a lot of flour to get the dough to form into a ball!


Sometimes you don't want to make a ton of cookie-sized biscuits. Sure, green Christmas trees are cute to feed your dog at the holidays, but since you KNOW the dog's going to want more than one biscuit, why not roll some of the dough out into a skinny log, and then cut it (bench scraper works well for fast cutting!) - all the small "nubs" of biscuit mean you can give you dog a couple extra treats without the guilt. Plus I think they love coming back "for just one more" - and probably don't care if they're getting a big one or a small one - it's the fact that you're STILL giving them treats!


I wonder if dogs think cats taste better than snowmen?


See how brown some of these get? You might consider that "burned" if it was a cookie for people - but the dogs don't care one bit!


Time to try 'em out. Once the biscuits are cooled, find yourself a willing guinea pig. Note: this is NOT hard to do! (Check out that tail blur!)


Tell the guinea pig that you've made these with love and, in our particular case, homegrown goodness...


Let the guinea pig sniff the biscuit - you don't want to rush this. They might decide to decline the biscuit if it doesn't appeal to them. (In case you can't tell - this is a joke)


Oh yeah, that went over well. Right after taking this picture Doogie was GONE! Since then he's had maaaaany of these biscuits. I've made six batches so far this fall/winter - three at a time, and after they're dried out in the dehydrator I toss 'em in a big glass jar. It's just like having a cookie jar that we don't dip into for ourselves. Doogie KNOWS the sound of the lid on the jar and comes running when I open it.


Oh, and yeah, you COULD actually eat these - you know what all's going in them - it's basically people-cookies minus the sugar and leavening. Do I recommend it? No, not really. My sister-in-lawn and I tried 'em at Thanksgiving and while they weren't BAD, they weren't really GOOD either. ;-)

If you're not going to dry the cookies out extra, and if you've added extra wet ingredients, I might suggest keeping a close eye on them if you have them around too long.... I haven't had any "go bad" or mold, but I don't know that they won't. Maybe keep 'em in the fridge or freezer if you're at all concerned?

What's been going on...

Thanksgiving and Christmas are over.
Sure, there's still New Year's Eve, but the big time-consumer holidays are over...and hopefully I can get back to blogging. I've actually had people write and ask if everything's ok (yup! just fine!) because I haven't been posting. Well, now I have A WEEK off from work (thank you Kent State University!!!), so I can get caught up on blogging, blog READING, house projects that aren't holiday related, reading, and having more fun! Woo hoo!

Here's one of the things that had me tied up between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The pics aren't the most flattering, but that's because you're looking at my sexy legs. Mom's incredibly hard to shop for when it comes to Christmas. You just don't know what she'll already have, or what she might've implied she wanted earlier in the year but won't remember come holiday time, etc... This is true with a lot of people actually. Since I had a hard time finding something to buy her that I thought she'd like, and I know how chilly their place can get in winter with hardwood floors, annnnd because she'd mentioned maybe she'd like a pair when we were up for Thanksgiving, I decided to "just whip up" a pair of socks. You know, the things where my first attempt took me nearly a year? Oh, and we were going back up to my folks a week BEFORE Christmas....so I had less than 18 days to get 'em done. AND I had no idea what colors she would like, nor did I have a lot of any one color...so this is what I managed to "power knit" in 12 days:

Funky, hunh? My rule was to basically NOT duplicate any stripe/color/sizes between the two socks - to just be as random as possible while using up the yarn I had. As the socks were forming I realized they sort of had a fall/Christmas feel to them with the colors...so that was nice.

The socks were a bit snug on me, and definitely big on mom. But that was my goal - she would need to wash them (gently!) and dry them (gently!) to shrink them a bit, getting them closer to her size, and also taking out some of the "newness" in them. I think freshly knit socks, while looking cool when held, just don't look quite right on the feet. Give 'em a wash or two without shrinking them too much, and they're perfect! For my own socks (or for the ones I knit for Brett) I cast on 60 stitches - for this pair I went with 48. That's a nice number that gives me 16 stitches per needle (three needles), AND allows me to knit 2, pearl 2 for the calf area with each needle starting with knitting and ending with pearling - just made it easier to remember where I was on the socks.

From those pics above it looks like I knit them to different lengths. I HOPE that's not the case - I think I just had them pulled up my legs differently?

You should see the insides of the socks! With all those color changes, all the transitions from one color to the next leave a LOT of little strands of loose yarn inside. Again, with washing and wearing, those strands should sort of frizz out and bond themselves to the insides of the socks.

Hm, y'know, those socks are so fun looking I may have to knit us a pair like that!

So not fair...

I suddenly have all this time off, we're pretty much getting snowed in, there's no more holiday To Do lists to check off, no social gatherings for days, and THIS is what I'm greeted with when I come up to the computer?

Um, hello! I wanted to play computer games!!! It's MY time now.

Fine, I'll go do a load of dishes or clean house or something. But when I come back - that chair is MINE!

(BTW - the sheet draped over the chair? That's because Moxie decided the chair was her scratching post not too long ago, and has managed to rip the back out of it...nice girl!)

Bondi Beach Fun!

Yeah yeah, I know, I've been buuuuuusy "in the real world" and slacking on the blog updates. I'm sorry. But hey, you can usually tell it's a good sign if I've been away for awhile and then start up with YouTube postings etc, 'cause I seem to follow up with my OWN content after the build up with fun stuff like this. So while you're waiting to see pics of food, critters, Brett or yard stuff, check out this fun video! Man, I think it'd be a BLAST to witness a flash mob sometime!!!