Questions for You Cooks & Bakers August 2, 2007
Posted by Karen Joy in Celiac Disease, Cooking/Baking/Food/Recipes, GF Recipes, Random Stuff.13 comments
I have a recipe posted which continues to be the most-read entry on my blog. It’s for gluten-free roll-out sugar cookies. I got a fairly negative comment yesterday from someone who thought that the number of ingredients was excessive. She called it “a thousand separate ingredients.” It has 12, which I suppose is on the high end, but doesn’t seem extreme or anything like that to me.
However, I will say that I just keep turning the pages in a cookbook if the list of ingredients seems too long. I probably won’t even read the recipe. But for me, the number of ingredients don’t matter so much as, “Do I have these ingredients? If not, do I have a sufficient substitute? Or, can I easily obtain the ingredients?” If the answer is ”yes” and if the recipe looks good, I’ll give it a shot.
So, for you cooks & bakers, at what ingredient-count do you say, “Well, that’s just too much. That’s not even worth trying.”?
I did a little look-see at my favorite recipes, and while most of them have 8-10 ingredients, many have far more, and few have less than 7. How about your recipe favorites? What is your average number of ingredients?
The commenter also said that the recipe was complicated. By nature, roll-out cookies are somewhat labor-intensive — that’s just how they are. One doesn’t make a billion different kind of cookies, say, at Christmas, just because they’re quick ‘n’ easy, though recipes that are tasty + easy + have few ingredients are always keepers. Plus, being gluten-free, which usually means that in place of wheat flour, one is going to need a minumum of two separate non-gluten flours, plus a binder (like xanthan gum), it’s just going to be slightly longer and perhaps a bit more complicated than your standard eggs-butter-sugar-flour-baking powder cookie recipe.
Anyways. I guess I feel defensive about my recipe. It doesn’t seem to me to have an excessive number of ingredients, nor does it seem (for the nature of the product) to be extremely complicated. I know a lot of my readers do a fair amount of baking, and many are gluten-free, and I thought I’d pose the question to all of you.
The Middle Name Meme August 2, 2007
Posted by Karen Joy in Christian Living, Introspective Musings, Memes, Random Stuff.3 comments
Sarah at The Learning Umbrella, tagged me eons ago (actually, July 13th) for a middle name meme. I rather dislike memes that have bunches of rules, but the meme itself is quite interesting, so here goes:
- You have to post these rules before you give you the facts.
- Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of their middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
- When you are tagged you need to write your own blog-post containing your own middle name game facts.
- At the end of your blog-post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.
- Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
My middle name is JOY. So…
J ~ is for jog. Breaking my toe, which has rendered me unable to hike, let alone jog, is heightening my desire to get out and run again. I love to run, but right now I’m not in great shape, and want to start up again. It’s my goal to run a marathon by the time I’m 35, so I need to get crackin’ because I have less than a year left to reach that goal!
O ~ is for obstinate. I tend to be rather unyielding. I like to figure out the best way to do something, then do it. I don’t like for anyone to try to dissuade me, and it’s hard for me to alter course, once I’m set in motion. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
Y ~ is for yesterday. I want to be on a course of continual improvement. I don’t want my tomorrows to be stuck in my yesterdays. One of the things I love best about Christianity is that I’m not stuck forever with my faults and flaws and errors of yesterday — Christianity is all about going “further up and further in” and not being stagnant, nor having a victim mentality, nor about making excuses about “that’s just the way I am.” Hope isn’t just about heaven; it’s about a better life here on earth.
And now… whom to tag??? Julie at Five Past Clock, Kiva the Southern Girl, and Melissa at Tea with Milk (I know you’re not real big on memes, my friend, but maybe you have a short middle name???)
My boy Micah Owings gets his act together August 2, 2007
Posted by Karen Joy in Arizona, Baseball, Christianity, Sports Stuff.4 comments
I’ve blogged a few times about Diamondbacks rookie starting pitcher Micah Owings. I feel like I have a special interest in him and his success; I’ve followed his progress since he was drafted from Tulane (where I went to college). Plus, he’s vocal about being a Christian (but not stagey, fakey, pre-planned soundbite vocal), which I love.
He started this season like a house afire, jumping out to a 5-1 record with an ERA in the low-3s. Then, he had a string of Very Bad Starts, and dropped to a 5-5 record. Several of his starts, he didn’t even get into the 5th inning. For at least two of those starts, he did awfully, but the team came back and got the win.
Last night, he did great. He went six innings, gave up one run, and got two hits and an RBI to boot. He did get into trouble in the 5th inning — one of the most tense innings that I’ve watched all season. He started walking guys, giving up hits, and loaded the bases. If it wasn’t for Chris Young’s Sportscenter-worthy over-the-fence catch of the would-be grand slam by Mike Cameron, Owings would have most likely gotten, at best, a no decision, because if that hit would have sailed only six inches further out, the score would have been tied at 5-5. (Thanks to www.azcentral.com for that pic.)
Then, Jose Valverde, who has been extremely reliable, gave up a game-tying two-run homer in the bottom of the 9th, and blew both the save, and Owing’s chance for a win. Rats. In one of the HUGE injustices of baseball rules, since the D’backs came back with the win in the 11th inning, while Valverde was the pitcher of record, Valverde gets the win. Micah SO deserved it.
Well, at least he lowered his ERA below 5. He upped his batting average to .235, which is 12th among all D’backs players with 30 or more at-bats. And, at least he didn’t get another loss. At least he got through the 6th inning. ~sigh~ I just would so have loved him to up that record to 6-5.
