Bad ideas

Making candy in a rainstorm is a bad idea. It didn't occur to me at first that it would be, which is why I started my candy cooking at 7 pm. The recipe calls for about 2 hours of cooking time, until it reaches soft ball stage.

Now, this is the recipe that we try and fail to make every single Christmas. We decided last year that it must be because of our increased humidity in Oregon versus Minnesota in the winter, and decided that cooking the candy to medium ball stage would probably compensate for the humid problem.

What I didn't anticipate was the storm adding greatly to our humidity. Which, in turn, means that instead of two hours of cooking, the candy took a full 6 hours to reach medium ball stage. Yup, that does mean I was up until 1 am checking the damn stuff.

It started as a white mixture, turned tan, then brown, and finally, in the end, was a dark brownish blackish almost burned looking mixture. Yeah, 6 hours later.




I let it cool overnight when I finally went to bed, leaving it loosely covered with a lid that would let steam escape to that dog hair didn't have a chance to settle into it.

The next key stage after cooking is to stir, stir, stir until it turns light in color and is able to be formed into balls. This is the part we always fail at every year, spending hours stirring a mixture that obviously does not want to be stirred. It is thick and hard to begin with, like mollassas except harder.

This year, it worked. And after a mere 20 minutes too. Maybe it was trying to make up for taking so long to cook?



Once the balls were able to be formed, I melted up some chocolate, rolled the candy into balls, and began the final stage of candy making.


The entire dipping sequence is pretty fun, but after a while it gets really boring. Especially once the chocolate gets low.



In the end though, I have some beautiful chocolate cremes, and look forward to surprising my sister at Christmas with them.



I did also make some toffee later that day. The weather cleared up enough that it was not the worst idea ever to make more candy.

Toffee is super easy though. Equal parts sugar and butter over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the smell makes you positive it is burned to a crisp, then poured in on a cookie sheet to cool and covered with chocolate.



And then broken up onto a plate for serving.



And now all the remaining candy is hidden so that we can't eat it all before Christmas comes.

Silly looking beasts, anyway

Well, I took the dogs out for a long walk down to the railroad bridge yesterday, but of course forgot my camera. Probably a good thing with how hard it started raining before we got back.

Over the summer though I got some amazingly stupid looking pictures of plenty of dogs.

Koira, in her infinite grace and wisdom, tried to catch a frisbee.



Raffles the golden retriever, because we know they are always noble and intelligent.



Again with the noble golden dogs


Although Pallo is not immune from looking stupid either
In fact, he spends a lot of time doing this. Driving me nuts with the itching and scratching.



And of course being the over excited puppy he is


So basically I'm cheating by sharing old pictures. But at least they are funny old pictures. And Keon says she'll bite you if you disagree

Black Beans

I had a number of peppers in the fridge that needed to get used, and to me, peppers mean black bean soup. So after work yesterday, I picked up black beans and red beans while in town, and set them to soak over night. This morning, they were well soaked and ready to cook.



So I took some a couple of onions, four bell peppers, and four peppers of kinds I can't ever recall the names, and a whole ton of garlic. Everything got chopped up (bell peppers in rather large pieces, hot peppers in tiny little pieces, since while I love hot foods, I don't much care for getting an entire huge bite of spicy) and then added to some hot oil in the soup pot. Tossed the veggies around in that for a while, then added the beans, vegetable broth, and water and set the whole mess to simmer for two hours while I got ready for work.



I decided that it must be done, and served myself up a bowl with a dallop of plain yogurt (we were out of sour cream, a problem I have since fixed while in town). The final touch on seasoning was sea salt, cinnamon, and cocoa powder.



The soup is almost all gone now, having been served with a great response to the people working booths at the holiday bazaar down the street while I was at work.

The cheesecake from a few days ago, made with the surplus of yogurt we had, is just about all gone as well. It turned out pretty good, though it could have used a bit more sugar mixed in. That problem is solved by tossing some strawberries with sugar or honey over the top.



Tomorrow I plan on eating nothing but leftovers, and taking the dogs on a long hike. Working and cooking for the past couple days has left them with nothing more than a few games of fetch, meaning they are waking me up by bouncing on the bed like mad in the morning.