Food News

I did that thing tonight where I baked something from scratch.  It happens on occasion, and always results in my kitchen counter and my clothing being covered in flour, but also results in tasty homemade baked goods.  Tonight's baking adventure: pumpkin scones, with glaze and everything.  I followed this recipe, and it went very well.  That is, besides one ill-fated moment when I decided to use my hands to mix ingredients together instead of "stirring" and got the unexpectedly sticky batter (which had not yet become dough) all over my right hand, and felt a striking likeness to those guys covered in sea barnacles in the second Pirates of the Carribean movie.  There's an image that's not often associated with baking.  Anyway, after scraping the sticky batter off my hand with a knife (most of it, anyway), I tipped the batter out onto the counter and with the help of more flour kneaded it into actual dough, formed it into two circles, and cut it into slices because this is apparently how scones get shaped like wedges.  Somehow I always pictured them forming those little triangles by hand.

Then I set the pieces on a cookie sheet and brushed milk over the top, popped those babies in the oven for 13 minutes, whipped up a glaze of powdered sugar, milk, and pumpkin pie spice, and bam!  Pumpkin scones :)

They're all kinds of delicious.  The scones themselves aren't super sweet, but the sweetness of the glaze complementing the more subtle flavor of the bread just makes them taste heavenly.

In other food-related news, today I discovered that my inability to cook good rice is not because I'm a rice-cooking failure, but because I'm a rice-buying failure.  Inspired by my continuing association with Filipino people, I bought jasmine rice at the store today (as opposed to instant rice), and lo and behold, it was marvelous.  And, ironically, not that much harder than instant rice...same general procedure (boil water, pour in rice), it just takes 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes.  And I'm totally willing to wait an extra 15 minutes for really good rice.  For dinner I topped the rice with the remaining ratatouille and topped the ratatouille with goat cheese.  Let's just say it was a fancy and delicious dinner.  Even better, I improvised crock pot ratatouille to use up the remaining vegetables from the real ratatouille...it's obviously somewhat soupier than the oven version, but seems promising.  Looking forward to more tasty ratatouille/rice meals for dinner this week :)

And then I'm going to eat large quantities of chicken and dumplings, because I was feeling sick this morning and chicken and dumplings seemed like an appropriate sick-person food when I was making up my grocery list.  The recipe I have makes a ton of it, but at least I won't starve if snow flurries close down Dallas later this week.

Hooray for cooking!