Category: Kitchen Sink

  • Mixer Meltdown into the Chocolate Chip Cookies

    Mixer Meltdown into the Chocolate Chip Cookies

    mixer

    I volunteered to bake chocolate chip cookies for the barn’s xmas party. Not brain surgery, I can do this.

    I pulled out my mixer, which i bought at a tag sale a while back. I invisioned the cream and butter creaming really nicely in the bowl, just like on TV. I added the 2 sticks of butter, but I didn’t cut them up, I just dumped them in. The butter wrapped around the blades of the beaters. I added the sugar and then the eggs, but most of the mix stayed stuck inside the beaters.

    Adding the dry ingredients helped, and I cranked up the mixer to power thru the dry ingredients. This worked great for a few seconds, then there was this mechanical gear grinding noise and the blades stopped moving.

    I turned off the mixer and unplugged it to find one of the beaters had bent itself around the other beater. Not Fun. I got most of the batter out of the beaters, and finished the job by hand.

    beater

    I was on the last cookie sheet of cookies when I realized that a small piece of the broken beater was missing. The small nylon washer that is at the end of the one beater to move along the bowl was gone from the beater.

    cookies

    And that missing piece was probably somewhere in one of the cookies. We carefully examined each cookie, but could not find the broken piece. We couldn’t bring these cookies to the barn party.

    We drove down to our local bakery, which is run out of the walk in basement of Wendy’s house. Wendy has great cookies, and we bought a pound of sugar cookies with dried cranberries in them. Off to the party the cookies went.

    Later on, a friend was over, we were in the kitchen, and he noticed Charlie Pup had something in her mouth. He fished it out of her mouth, and there was the missing nylon piece from the mixer.

    Now I have a nice batch of chocolate chip cookies in the freezer, ready for the long holiday weekend. Have you ever had something like this happen? Let us know below in the comments.

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  • Fedco Seeds, my favorite seed supplier

    Fedco Seeds, my favorite seed supplier

    OK, right now is dumping snow outside. I just helped my friend Bill switch out generators up at the camp ( where the Labs swim ).We had about 5 inches of snow yesterday, and I realize I forgot to cover my raised beds with black plastic before the snow dumped on them.

    Can I still put the plastic on top of the snow? or maybe shovel the now off the beds…

    Fedco Seeds
    Fedco Seeds

    All the while, I am thinking of spring. What I will do different, better, what I wont do.

    To help this planning, I have the Fedco Seeds catalog. Fedco Seeds is a seed cooperative, a pretty rare entity in this world of corporate consolidation. I was introduced to them when I joined a community garden in Brooklyn, and have stuck with them.

    Fedco has a great catalog chock full of great descriptions of neat vegetables and flowers, its not written in catalog-speak, its written by the people who grow the seeds out. Their seeds are untreated, and many are organic and/or heirloom. Many of their seeds have great stories about how a particular seed came to be, what family brought it from Russia, or how it sprouted out of a compost pile.

    What is equally cool is what Fedco also offers. They have several departments, Seeds, Moose Tubers, Organic Growers Supply, Fedco Bulbs, and Fedco Trees. Each one has a downloadable catalog.

    Moose Tubers has all kinds of potatoes and garlic.

    Organic Growers Supply is just that. Stuff I’ve never heard of, plus old standbys. I use their red ball spheres with Tanglefoot and a pheremone trap to keep bugs off my apple trees. And my apples look pretty good. No sprays, nothing more than a few easy solutions from these guys.

    Fedco Trees is cool, their big mantra is not big trees, but good root systems, and I can attest to the healthy robust plants they send you. All wrapped in plastic and paper mulch. I’ve bought many raspberries from Fedco Trees. They have a ton of antique or heirloom apple trees, all with great descriptions.

    Their website is simple, not full of a ton of pictures, but that’s not their thing. Their catalogs are downloadable, saving trees you know, so check them out.

    What are your favorite seed catalogs? tell us below:

  • Eric and the Labs check out the Ford Escape Hybrid. neat!

    Eric and the Labs check out the Ford Escape Hybrid. neat!

    While my Ford Fiesta was on the CBS News, Ford Motor loaned me a new Ford Escape Hybrid. So, we piled the Labradors into the Escape and went up to the house. Here’s my video review of the Ford Escape Hyrbrid, and of course, shots of the Labradors

  • Eric visits Martha Stewart Living Radio on Sirius Radio

    As part of our promotion of the Ford Feista, Ford arranged for me to have a Sirius Radio installed in my Ford Fiesta and then I got to visit the Martha Stewart Living Channel at the Sirius studios in midtown NYC. How cool is that? A big thanks for Ford and Sirius. watch, this is fun.

  • Dear Weber Grill,

    Dear Weber Grill,

     

    Learn more about this and other fun stuff at our viewer forum, The Greenhouse. Comments have been turned off here, but you can post your thoughts, pictures and videos at The Greenhouse.

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    Will Weber send gardenfork a smoker?

    still no response from Weber Grill about asking them to supply me with one of their neat Smokey Mountain Cooker Smokers for the show.

    After the Smoked Salmon debacle, I really want to smoke food the correct way, and their Smokey Mountain Cooker receives high praise on the web, so I sent their marketing dept. an email about gardenfork.tv and its thousands of devoted viewers. I asked if they would consider sending me one of these smokers, but have not heard back from them.

    How about a grass roots write-in campaign? You can contact them at [email protected] . Ask them to send one of these great smokers to us so we can show everyone how great a smoker it is. Lets show them how Web 2.0 and the power of social media can foster Weber Grill brand loyalty.

    Back to the Burnt Salmon. A reader sent me this email about what I’m doing wrong ( how unusual… )

    I use a smoker very similar to the one you used. I think smaller chunks of moist apple wood would be better so that you can avoid putting them on the heating elements. I shorted out mine doing that and had to get a replacement heating element and found out in the instructions about this fact. I use a flavored brine: the recipe follows and typically don’t need to smoke more that a couple of hours in my “tube smoker”. I then use a vacuum packer to store each piece in the refrigerator. Often I cut the salmon into 2 to 3 ” steaks. They make great gifts for neighbors.
    Brine recipe:
    1-2# fish
    1 quart H2O
    1/2 cup maple syrup
    1/4 cup salt
    1 tbsp black pepper
    1 tbsp garlic powder
    1 tps nutmeg/
    1 tps cinnamon
    1/2 tbsp meat tenderizer

    Recommend several hours of brine in the refrigerator. Prior to smoking, air dry for at least 1 hour.

    Back to gardenfork.tv main page

  • Farming in Maine: a blog

    Farming in Maine: a blog

    Learn more about this and other fun stuff at our viewer forum, The Greenhouse. Comments have been turned off here, but you can post your thoughts, pictures and videos at The Greenhouse.

    I received an email from Robin, who has a farm in Maine with a nice website and blog. Plus an amazing picture of a moose on her blog page

    “I knew I hated my office job and our second floor city apartment. … I traded heels and suits for jeans and boots and have never been happier. “

    Robin can grow those French red pumpkins, Rouge vif D’Etampe, I cannnot.

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