Monday, May 28, 2012

Wonder Pie

So today’s recipe is the first one in the Pie section of Grandma G’s cookbook. And it’s a doozy. Nothing like a pie with absolutely nothing fresh in it!


Here are the assembled ingredients…. Feel free to shudder. I did. I guess those lemons count as fresh ingredients… I’ll cling onto that shred of ‘healthiness’.


The first step is to put together the jello filling. Here was my first big mistake. You see I mixed raspberry jello, sugar, lemon juice, orange juice and boiling water.

Okay – raspberry jello is weird. I haven’t made jello since I was a kid. It is so so red!

(And yes, my mixing bowls are pink. Does that surprise you?)


Somehow 4 ½ cups of sugar just seems wrong… really wrong…


Let me take a closer look at the recipe. Oh… crap….


Yeah. That’s not 3 cups of boiling water and 4 ½ cups of sugar. It’s ¾ cup boiling water and ½ cup sugar. Yeah that sounds better. So now it’s time to run to the store to buy more jello.

On a side note I hate wasting food. So I dumped this weird mix of jello and sugar back into a container and if anyone has any suggestion of what to do with a lot of sugar mixed with a bit of jello powder I’d love to hear it!

Okay back with more jello and I’ve mixed the whole thing. Still it looks so so wrong. So very very red!


In any case I put it into the fridge to partially set and make my graham cracker crust. At least the crust looks good.



Okay the jello is set a little. I’m supposed to whipped the condensed milk. I was curious if it was supposed to whip like whipped cream so I looked online. I found that if you slightly freeze condensed milk that it whips like whipped cream and is slightly lighter and better for you than cream. Who knew! I learned something new!

I took the condensed milk out of the freezer and opened it and… well… it was frozen. I thought I left it in for too long. So I thought that I would jam a spoon into it like ice cream and scoop it out. Ummm… bad idea. It wasn’t frozen in the centre and… well… I was wiping drips of condensed milk off my cupboards, floor and myself.

But look… it whips! That’s pretty neat!


Now I mix it with the partly set Jello. Yeah… this is super weird.


I pour it into the pie shell and chill. It is so so PINK!


So I cut myself a small piece. It really highlights how very very pink it is.


So are you are wondering how it tastes? Very very very sweet. It tastes… pink. Sweet and artificial and pink. I feel like I should make this and invite girls over for a sleepover with makeovers and gossip about boys.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Claire's Hot Casserole

This is the first recipe I’ve chosen to make from my Grandma G’s cookbook and I’ve chosen one of the many casseroles or ‘hot dish’s to start with.

Here is the recipe. This one illustrates a few things I’ve noticed about Grandma G’s cookbooks, the first being that she always lists the name of the person she got the recipe from if she asked for it. I see the same names repeated over and over although I don’t know who they are. You can also see she labelled it ‘Good’. She did this with a few throughout. Some are ‘Very Good’. Finally – the canned soup. My god the canned soup! This recipe has FOUR CANS of it!


Here are the assembled ingredients – without a can of tomato soup and the 2 pounds of ground beef. I forgot to put those out for some reason.


I was starting to doubt I even had a casserole dish big enough for this.

Two pounds is a lot of beef! I don’t eat a lot of meat and I almost never cook it for myself… so this is a lot of meat!


Here is the process happening… pasta boiling… meat browning… veggies being chopped into the casserole dish.


Okay veggies are chopped and it’s time to add the scariest ingredient… the one I really didn’t want to use. But heck… it’s in the recipe and the recipe is ‘Good’.


Oh god canned mushrooms are disgusting.


Okay… speaking of disgusting. Please note my artistic way of highlighting the four canned soups this recipe called for.


It’s about this point when I decided I needed to add my own ‘ingredient’ to the process.


Oh and yes – my dish isn’t big enough. The pasta isn’t even in there yet. According to Grandma G I should also add salt and pepper… I added pepper but I could not in good conscience add more salt to a recipe with four cans of soup! Sorry Grandma.

So I now have two of these casseroles. I hope I like it. Grandma G gave the option to either use buttered crumbs or crumbs and cheese so I thought I would at least sneak some freshly grated parmesan into the recipe.


And now we just pop it in the oven for…. What?!? An hour? But everything is cooked! Oh okay.


So here it is – final dish. I have to say it’s pretty much how you would imagine it would taste. Once in my life I have had hamburger helper and this kind of reminded me of that. I don’t know how good I think it is but I’m sure it’s very ‘Good’ when you are trying to feed a husband and three hungry boys on little money.


Next time: The strangest pie you have ever seen