Cocoa Nabana

For the cake we are going to bake, you will need the following:

Step 3) Mix the flour into the mixture until combined. Then separate the mixture equally into six different bowls. After this, put food colouring into it. You don’t need too much of it! (We used about half a teaspoon of each colour) Then stir the colours into the mixture.

Step 5) Once they come out of the oven, you’ll have cakes that look like the photo below! Don’t be worried if your cake looks a bit discoloured, it’s normal as the cake baked while touching the metal tin. We used a bowl as a template to cut around the cake to make it a bit smaller and to show off the vibrant colour!

Step 7) After the cakes have cooled off, place the first cake layer down (purple) and cover the top with icing. Next place the  blue cake layer on top and again cover the top with icing. Repeat this step for all the colours, next placing green, yellow, orange, and then red. Finish this step by covering the whole cake with icing.

2 cups dried milk (nonfat or whole)

1 cup cocoa powder, unsweetened (up to 1½ c for more chocolate flavor)

1 tsp salt

2 tbl cornstarch (or other thickener: arrow root, rice flour)

2 cups powdered sugar (3 if you like it sweeter)

Mix with whisk until it's blended and has no visible lumps.

@moss-wizard of course this isn’t how we serve it!!

Behold, my grandmother's recipe for Cranberry Surprise:

For the crust, combine 2/3 cup crushed ginger snap crumbs (put them in a large plastic bag and crumble with a rolling pin, or a mug if you don't have one) with 2 T. of sugar. Press into a 9" pie plate.

For the filling, pour a half-pint of regular whipping cream into a bowl, and beat until stiff. Mix in 2 T. of sugar and 1/2 tsp. of almond extract.

In another bowl, take a 14 oz. CHILLED can of jellied cranberry sauce and mash it with a potato masher if you've got one, or a fork if you don't. (My mom bought me a potato masher specifically so I could make this dessert at holidays without having to borrow hers.)

Once the log is goo, fold the cranberry sauce into the whipped cream mix. Yes, it's supposed to be THAT pink.

The frog, in accordance with the “frogs and cranberries must be fall” meme, is very much a bog denizen.

They probably feed on the spiders, who are very, very real.

@alilcajun @aralioideae

Air fryer

One of those panini press grill things (not only can you make sandwiches but you can grill chicken and steak if you have an expensive model)

Rice cooker (not only good for rice but quinoa and any other grain, alternatively you could buy an Instapot)

Electric kettle (depends on how much tea you drink but it’s good for boiling water for cleaning and preheating water for pasta etc)

Kitchen appliances I would not recommend buying when you move out on your own:

Cleaning supplies. Most cut rate sponges, bleach sprays, Clorox wipe knock offs and cleaning chemicals get the job done just fine.

Food staples like pasta, canned vegetables, rice etc.

Here are some things you should never buy off brand/cheap:

Trash bags. I made the mistake of buying Dollar General brand ones and they ripped several times, sending garbage all over my yard while I tried to take the trash out. I had to double and sometimes triple bag which was not economical in the long run.

Toilet paper. The two and one ply stuff sucks. You you have to use much more than you would if you bought quality paper.

Get a set of knives, and some kind of sharpener - steel, pull-through, whatever. Every time a knife is used, wash it, dry it, give it a couple of zips with the sharpener, then wipe it and put it away. Sharp knives are far safer than blunt ones - they cut with less effort, so if there's a fumble there's less oomph driving them in the wrong direction.

Even then, expect to pay Steel Fee at least once with each knife (so know where your Elastoplast / Band-Aid is).

This happens. It Is A Thing.

*****

If you have money, or generous relatives, with which to buy appliances, @dduane and I can't recommend one of these too highly.:

This is our Combi, a microwave / grill / fan oven which has the option to combine functions (grill & microwave, oven & microwave), bakes excellent bread, is the best defroster ever and, after several years of use, has our thumbs-up for perhaps the most useful single device in the kitchen.

*****

A food processor (based on experience we recommend Magimix, AFAIK sold in the US as Cuisinart) is another multi-function appliance. They can be expensive at the outset, but longevity pays that off and Magimix have a no-questions 30-year warranty on their motor units.

My Mum (then in her early 80s) once said we could take everything from the kitchen except her knives, her combi microwave and her Magimix and she'd do just fine. Considering she ran her own home and life until her 91st year, she had a point. This is a woman who knew where bodies were buried, and had the shovel for burying them hidden at the back of her garden shed. I mean, just look at her... :->

*****

If a dedicated processor is too much, or takes up too much room, then get a good-quality stick mixer / immersion blender / whatever the local name might be, with a whisk and food-processor bowl.

We've found the Braun brand totally reliable.

Get the best you (or those buying for you) can afford.

It really does pay off in the long run.

I stopped being able to slice or grate cheese in any quantity a decade and a half ago. Too hard on my hands, my spine, my hips, plus the clean up. I can make an entire warm sandwich in 5-7 minutes with pre-sliced cheese. I can prep all kinds of things in a few minutes with pre-grated cheese.

Quality pre-prepped cheese is huge for me.

I might do some experiments, but do you have any good recipes for baking with marmalade? Or cooking with it, for that matter? Your baking always looks fantastic and you were the first people I thought of when I was wondering how to find a good recipe or two. Thank you kindly!

My immediate first though was "a great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll" as mentioned in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", as I blogged about some three years ago, here.

Here's a recipe for one.

Since it calls for about twice the amount of marmalade you've got, you could either spend another $3, or halve everything and make a more personal-sized but equally sticky roll.

*****

Now for something savoury.

You didn't specify what kind of marmalade it was, and any will work with both recipes, but Seville / "Old-Fashioned" / "Traditional" types have a slight bitter edge that works really well with savoury stuff.

Here's something my Mum used to do.

Just a mention in passing, another version used small steaks parcelled with onions, mushrooms,smoked bacon, garlic, plenty of black pepper, a teaspoonful of red wine and the same of Worcester sauce.

That recipe did NOT use marmalade. This one does... :->

Put pork chops or chicken breasts on sheets of kitchen foil and season with salt and pepper.

Top them with a mixture of marmalade, Dijon mustard, chopped onion and sliced mushrooms. Finish with a knob of butter.

Close the foil into tight parcels and put under the grill (broiler) at medium heat for about 10-15 minutes.

Open one parcel to check with a knife or skewer if the meat is done, and if necessary close the parcel and cook another 5 minutes or so.

Turn the grill right down and leave the parcels there, wrapped, while prepping the plates - green beans, carrots and white rice look and taste good.

Unwrap the parcels, turn the grill right up and get the upper surfaces of the meat dark brown (don't scorch it, burnt marmalade is nasty), then plate up, pour the sauce over and dig in. :->

Instead of individual parcels you could use an oven-to-table dish with a tight cover of foil and, once done, bring the whole thing (with a trivet!) out for people to help themselves.

So the question of parsnips, and particularly parsnip soup, came up secondary to this quote from an interview with Terry Pratchett. (Thanks to @captainfantasticalright for the transcription.)

Terry: “You can usually bet, and I’m sure Neil Gaiman would say the same thing, that, uh, if I go into a bookstore to do a signing and someone presents me with three books, the chances are that one of them is going to be a very battered copy of Good Omens; and it will smell as if it’s been dropped in parsnip soup or something in and it’s gone fluffy and crinkly around the edges and they’ll admit that it’s the fourth copy they’ve bought”.

And when @petermorwood saw this, he immediately reblogged it and added four recipes for parsnip soup.

These kind of surprised some folks, as not everybody knew that parsnips were an actual thing: or if they were, what they looked like or were useful for.

The vegetable may well be better known on this side of the Atlantic. (And I have to confess that as a New Yorker and Manhattanite, with access to both great outdoor food markets and some of the best grocery stores in the world, I don't think that parsnips ever came up on my personal radar while I was living there.) So I thought I'd take a moment to lay out some basics for those who'd like to get to know the vegetable better.

The parsnip's Linnaean/botanical name is Pastinaca sativa, and in the culinary mode it's been around for a long time. It's native to Eurasia, and is a relative to parsley and carrots (with which it's frequently paired in the UK and Ireland). The Romans cultivated it, and it spread all over the place from there. Travelers who passed through our own neck of the woods before the introduction of the potato noted that "the Irish do feed much upon parsnips", and in the local diet it filled a lot of the niches that the potato now occupies.

You can do all kinds of things with parsnips. The Wikipedia article says, correctly, that they can be "baked, boiled, pureed, roasted, fried, grilled, or steamed". But probably the commonest food form in which parsnips turn up around here is steamed or simmered with carrots and then mashed with them: so that you can buy carrot-and-parsnip mash, ready-made, in most of our local grocery chains.

It also has to be mentioned that most Irish kids have had this stuff foisted on them at one point or another, and a lot of them hate it. (@petermorwood would be one.) I find it hard to blame anybody for this opinion, as one of the parsnip's great selling points—its spicy, almost peppery quality—gets almost completely wiped out by the carrot's more dominant flavor and sweetness.

Roasting parsnips, though, is another matter entirely. They roast really well. And parsnip soups are another story entirely, as it's possible to build a soup that will emphasize the parsnip's virtues.

So, to add to Peter's collection, here's one I made earlier—like yesterday afternoon, stopping the cooking sort of halfway and finishing it up today.

I was thinking in a vague medioregnic-food way about a soup with roasted bacon in it, but not with potatoes (as those have been disallowed from the Middle Kingdoms for reasons discussed elsewhere. Tl;dr: it's Sean Astin's fault). And finally I thought, "Okay, if we're going to roast some pork belly or back bacon, then why not save some energy and roast some parsnips too? The browned skins'll help keep them from going to mush in the soup."

So: first find your parsnips. I used four of them. You peel them with a potato peeler...

...sort of roughly quarter them, the long way...

...then chop them in half the short way, toss them in a bowl with some oil—olive oil, in this case—spread them on a baking sheet, and season them with pepper, coarse salt, and some chile flakes. (I used ancho and bird's-eye chile flakes here.)

These then went into the oven for about half an hour, and came out like this.

While that was going on, I got a block of ready-cooked Polish snack bacon out of the freezer.

On its home turf, this is the kind of thing that turns up (among other ways) sliced very thin on afternoon-snack plates, with cheeses and breads. But we like to score it and roast it to sweat some of the fat out, and then use it in soups and stews and so forth.

So I scored this chunk on most of its sides, browned it in a skillet, then shoved the skillet into the oven for twenty minutes or so. Here's the bacon after it was done.

While it was cooking, I made about a liter of soup stock from a couple of stock cubes. If you can get pork stock cubes, they'd be best for this, but beef works fine.

This then went into the pot and was brought up to just-boiling while the bacon and the parsnips were chopped into more or less bite-sized chunks. After that, the meat and veg were added to the pot and the whole business was left to simmer for a couple of hours while I went off to do some line editing.

Finally I turned it off and left it on the stove overnight (our kitchen is quite cool, it was in no bacteriological danger from being left out this way) and then finished its simmering time around lunchtime today.

And here it is. (...Or was. It was very nice.)

...Anyway, this is only one of potentially thousands of takes on parsnip soup. Recipes for more robust versions—based on mashed parsnips and more vegetables, or different meats—are all over the place.