Monday, January 7, 2008

And another marathon...

Sunday was my cooking marathon day, since we had just returned from our trip to Idaho.

I did something new, my dear readers. I set off the carbon monoxide detector!

Now, it wasn't anything serious. I live in an apartment with a broken oven. Only two burners work, and the oven part is missing half the seal, so there's a lot of heat (and presumably gas) leakage. And since the apartment is small, the CO detector is like four feet away from the oven, which you probably should not do.

I had been running the oven for somewhere in the neighborhood of...oh, six hours I guess? I boiled two big pans of veggies, one of carrots and one of beans while I baked a double batch of almond butter brownies in the oven. I then made two pans of egg bread. After that, I made two meatloaves. Oh all right, I'll post the recipe, but it really wasn't anything special. Note to everybody: Don't use cheap ground beef. Just don't. You will be much happier if you use something better than that. Don't be like me.

STAGE ONE MEATLOAF

2 cups green beans, water squeezed out (after measuring)
2 cups carrots, water squeezed out (after measuring)
1 to 1 1/2 lbs ground beef
1 egg
1 tsp salt
Garlic cloves and onion

Mix with hands. Yes, it will be wet. Pat into a loaf shape and place into a pan that can catch the grease and/or water. I used a Pyrex dish and a LOT of liquid came out of these puppies, but I also used cheap meat so that may have something to do with it. So be warned.

Peel the garlic cloves and then stick little pieces of them all over the meatloaf, deep enough so they stay, but not so deep you can't pick them out later, because you can't eat garlic on stage one. Your meatloaf will look like a multicolored porcupine, and your family members will likely mock you. That is OK.

Quarter the onion and liberally cover the entire meatloaf in onion pieces.

Bake at 400 degrees for an hour or until it looks done. Pull out the garlic and strip off the onion pieces before you eat it!! On stage one you can't eat that stuff. No, not even the crispy pieces. No. NO!

Mine took longer but I was sharing oven space with another meatloaf and a lasagna for hubby, so it was more like 90 minutes.

It will still need more salt, in my opinion. And you can serve it with SCD ketchup, which also has salt. So yay.


After the meatloaves were done, I started a pan of cooked pineapple. And that was when the CO detector went bleepity bleep, with a reading of 51. That is not that dangerous of a reading, but we dutifully shut off the oven and opened the door, and soon enough it dropped back down to 30 parts of death or whatever.

So. A shorter marathon cooking session, but a marathon nonetheless.

And! I have a surprise for you! I do I do I do. I am taking the plunge and making YOGURT RIGHT NOW! OMG I KNOW RIGHT? :)

So I will definitely post about that experience when it's done...which should be somewhere around midnight tomorrow. I had poor timing, but where I am suffering, you will not! For you will learn from the error of my ways, because I shall tell you about the error of mine!

Isn't this fun? It is, isn't it?

Seriously. I love it!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you! what you doing is great!