Theresa And The Story Of The Most Convoluted Dinner I've Ever Made..

Often times, when I ask what's for dinner, my fiancee will challenge me to make Chicken Fricassee.

Today, I went "I see you your Chicken Fricassee, sir!", and googled that stuff right up.

Let me say, the finished product was so good. Soul food in the finest sense of the word - hearty, creamy, and with enough substance that it really settles into your ribs. It does, however, have a great ability to grow, so when your plating it, plate about half of what you think your going to want! We both learned that the hard way!

Thomas Jefferson's Chicken Fricassee.

That is the link to the recipe I made. Why it's cited as being Thomas Jefferson's, I don't know, but there you go.

The recipe could not have been simpler, both in terms of ingredients and in terms of the actual process. The only thing that made it so convoluted was that it took so bloody many steps!

Brown the chicken. Take the chicken out, make the gravy. Put the chicken back, let it simmer. Take the chicken AND the gravy back out (but store them seperatly, naturally), and saute the onions and mushrooms. Then put the gravy back in, then put the chicken back.

Doesn't it seem like that could have been streamlined at least a little? It wasn't at all hard, and the ingredient list is fairly short, there was just so many steps to it. Although oddly, I looked in another cookbook that had a chicken fricassee recipe, and it had a shorter list of steps, but a longer list of ingredients. So evidentally, it's an either or type of situation.

My next step was a pumpkin cake. Came from my Bisquick cookbook. Basically, it was bisquick, pumpkin pie pumpkin (which either my Kroger doesn't have pumpkin pie pumpkin yet, or alot of people were baking pie today, because I had to go with canned pumpkin, rather then pumpkin pie pumpkin), egg and sugar. Bake. If I'd gotten the pumpkin pie pumkin, I can imagine that it would have tasted like a really great piece of pumpkin pie. Don't get me wrong, it was still delicious, it just wasn't what I imagine the good people that wrote that book in the 1970's were really going for.

But I bought the big can of pumpkin, so I get to try pumpkin pancakes too!

And thus, we bring to a close an entry that included more mention of pumkin then I'd ever thought possible. Good night and good eats!

Gluten Free?

Little obsessed with the idea of trying to make a gluten free cake, won't lie to you. I got the idea in my head, and now I seriously can't get it out. Evidentally, I need a trip to a specialty store, because everything that I'm finding says gluten free isn't an easy think to do - there's alot of stuff that goes into substituting for cake flour!

But, I just found a gluten free red velvet cake recipe that in it's own way, looks better then original red velvet.

If I can, I'm doing it this weekend. Family cookout, and I'm gonna taste test, and make them decide which is better. Admittedly, I'm a pastry chef at heart, so they generally cringe when they see me coming for fear of what confection I've got neatly tied under my arm, but this might be a challenge their willing to take on!

Theresa Learns!

Thanks Bobby Flay!

I'm watching Throwdown: German Chocolate Cake right now, and I just learned something.

German Chocolate Cake is, in fact, not German. It's named for a man with the last name German.

From whatscookingamerica.net:

German Chocolate Cake is an American creation that contains the key ingredients of sweet baking chocolate, coconut, and pecans. This cake was not brought to the American Midwest by German immigrants. The cake took its name from an American with the last name of "German."

1852 - Sam German created the mild dark baking chocolate bar for Baker's Chocolate Company in 1852. The company name the chocolate in his honor - "Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate." In most recipes and products today, the apostrophe and the "s" have been dropped, thus giving the false hint as for the chocolate's origin.

1957 -The first published recipe for German's chocolate cake showed up in a Dallas newspaper in 1957 and came from a Texas homemaker. The cake quickly gained popularity and its recipe together with the mouth-watering photos were spread all over the country. America fell in love with German Chocolate cake.