Blatherings of Boredom

From the Silly Yaks archive. Original poster doesn't know provenance of recipe. Easier to keep it here in my memories:

I use finely ground brown rice flour.

Moist Chocolate Cake
( recipe here )

Heat some olive oil in a pan. Add an onion, garlic, crushed red pepper, and sauté until you remember what you're doing. Toss in a small red sweet pepper and a hot hungarian wax pepper (both chopped). One apple, peeled and chopped. . . I used an Albemarle Pippin. Add a pound or so of boneless/skinless chicken thighs. Cook for a few minutes, then add a couple of glasses of white wine. Stir in some dried sage and thyme, along with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary. Add a bit of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, and cover. Simmer for 30 minutes.

Uncover. Add a teaspoon of fennel seed. Season with more salt and pepper to taste. Reduce liquid until it's just about gone.


Boy accuses me of buying wine according to the bottle. That would explain why tonight's wine was Goats Do Roam. I like whimsy. It's sweetish and fruity. It really brought out the flavor of the apples and fennelseed. The chicken dish was quite rich. It would go nicely with wild rice or brown rice, but we just had leftover greens and roots soup.

The cheesecake was a disaster.

Well, perhaps not a disaster, more like a comedy of errors.

First, I realized I was out of cornstarch and sent boy out to buy some. I quickly realized I was also out of butter, so I left a message on his cell phone. When he got home, I realized he didn't have his cellphone, so off he went, back to the store. (Poor thing, lights were out up and down Fifth St due to the storm we had yesterday afternoon). He tried to call me twice, with a dead battery, because he thought I said I wanted unsweetened butter, not unsalted. As we know, all standard grocery store butter is sweet cream butter. Anyhow, he came home and I had my ingredients, which I added to the batter.

Thing is, I was brain dead yesterday. I grabbed a GF baking mix, rather than just using sorghum flour with a pinch of xanthan gum. Baking mix, of course, contains baking powder.

My cheesecake is more like a souffle. A gooey, scary souffle.

And it turns out that boy doesn't like it. The flavor is fine, the texture is a bit odd, but the recipe called for no extra sugar. He realized that sugar-free cheesecake just isn't all that tasty. The strawberries don't add enough. I suggested he top it with some peaches or strawberries with a tiny bit of fructose, but he's not into it.

So I'm about to toss the behemoth into the trash. I can't eat it--I had a handful of strawberries yesterday and triggered a histamine reaction. He doesn't like it. It's too ugly to donate to my friends. So into the trash it shall go.

Meanwhile, I need to finish the dishes and take out the compost trimmings. anmorata will be arriving in the next couple of hours. Fortunately, the house is still more or less picked up from when indyansel visited.

After I finish up, I'll attempt to make a peach cobbler. That should be much harder for me to destroy, even in a brain-damaged state.

I went to my memories to link the zucchini bread recipe, only to discover that the community I'd posted it in is long gone.

That's okay, I can repost it here. ;)

( great-grandma's zucchini bread )

Someone just posted results of using a specific GF flour mix for banana bread. The bread looks fab, so I simply must try that mix with my beloved zucchini bread.