Explore every episode of the podcast Real Life Cooking

Whole-Wheat Bread * how to proof yeast * how to knead bread dough

2 packages (or cakes) yeast

½ c. warm water

1/3 c. honey

3 c. whole-wheat flour

1 Tbsp salt

1/4 c. shortening

1 2/3 c. warm water

3 1/2 to 4 c. bread flour or all-purpose flour

Dissolve the yeast in the 1/2 c. warm water and add honey. Mix, then set aside to proof (about 5 minutes).

In a very large bowl, mix whole-wheat flour and salt. Add shortening and 1 2/3 c. warm water and mix well with a fork. Add yeast mixture and mix well again. Add three cups of bread flour (or all-purpose flour) and mix first with the fork, then with your hands.

Flour working surface well and knead for a full ten minutes, adding more flour as needed (up to another cup). Grease a very large bowl and turn the dough until greased on all sides. Cover with a towel and let rise in a warm spot until about doubled in size. Punch down dough, then divide and shape by hand into two loaves. Place in greased loaf pans, cover with a towel, and allow to rise another hour or so. When dough has doubled in size again, place in 350 degree oven for 40 minutes.

Turn out on racks and rub tops with butter. Allow to cool for at least ten minutes before cutting. Makes two loaves.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make whole-wheat bread.

I’ve been planning this episode for a long time, because everyone should know how to make bread from scratch. It’s not hard, but it does take a lot of time because the dough has to rise twice. This will also be the final episode of Real Life Cooking. The old episodes will remain for you to listen to, though.

This recipe is my mother’s, and as you may remember, she wasn’t actually a great cook. But she could make bread and it was always amazing. I’d like to say this is a family recipe passed down for generations, but she actually got it off the back of a flour bag when I was a kid.

You’ll need two kinds of flour for this recipe, whole wheat flour, preferably stone-ground because it’s coarser and more robust, and either bread flour or all-purpose flour. You’re also going to need a lot of both, so make sure you have plenty. If you bought whole wheat flour during lockdown, thinking you were going to make bread, it’s probably pretty stale by now so I recommend you buy fresh. Just, you know, an observation, no real reason. Also, check the date on your yeast. You need ordinary yeast for this recipe, not quick-rise. You’ll also need a really big mixing bowl and two large loaf pans.

First, clean your working surface and give it a good scrub. Then get out your very biggest mixing bowl, the one you sometimes wonder why you own because it takes up so much space. Give it a wipe to make sure it’s clean if you haven’t used it for a while. You only need one giant mixing bowl even though if you read the recipe, it sounds like you need two. We’ll go over that in a minute.

Get out a small bowl too. A cereal bowl will do. Measure half a cup of warm water into the bowl. The water shouldn’t be anywhere near boiling but it also needs to be more than just lukewarm. Then add the yeast to the water and stir it in until it dissolves, more or less. It’s easiest to do this with a whisk if you have one, but a fork or even a spoon will do. Don’t worry if you can’t get it to dissolve all the way. Add the honey to the mixture and stir it in until it’s dissolved, then set the bowl aside.

This process of adding warm water and honey or sugar to yeast and letting it sit for five or ten minutes is called proofing. Sometimes a recipe will just direct you to proof your yeast, without any further instructions or amounts, or it might say to proof one package of yeast in X amount of water. Even if a recipe doesn’t say so, you have to add some form of su

Cranberry Coffee Cake * how to make substitute buttermilk

Cranberry Coffee Cake

1/2 c. half and half

1 tsp lemon juice

2 c. flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 c. butter

1 c. sugar

1 egg

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 tsp almond extract

2 c. frozen cranberries (do not thaw), plus a few handfuls more for topping

2 Tbsp turbinado sugar or other large-crystal sugar

Grease and flour 9x9 pan. Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix half and half with lemon juice and set aside. (You can substitute 1/2 cup buttermilk for the half-and-half/lemon juice mixture.)

In a medium bowl, mix flour with salt and baking powder and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add egg and extracts. Mix well, then add flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the milk mixture. Fold in 2 c. cranberries last. Spoon into prepared pan and top with reserved cranberries and turbinado sugar. Bake about 45 minutes. Cool in pan about 15 minutes before turning out.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cranberry coffee cake. The whole reason I’m cooking with cranberries in May is because I discovered a bag of frozen cranberries in the freezer the other day, left over from fall. I found this recipe to use them up without needing to thaw them. If I had more frozen cranberries I’d tinker with the recipe and try to get it to work in a loaf pan, but it’s quite good as it is.

For this recipe you’ll need a 9x9 pan, two large mixing bowls or one large and one medium, and a small bowl. This makes it sound complicated but it’s actually not.

First, turn the oven on to preheat. Then grease and flour the pan. The initial recipe just said to grease it, but you’ll get a better result if you grease and flour it the way you would for a cake. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out the zucchini pineapple bread episode from August of 2019.

Next, measure the half and half into the small bowl. This can be a cereal bowl; it doesn’t have to be big to hold half a cup of milk. Add the lemon juice and stir it in. Basically what you’re doing here is making substitute buttermilk, so if you happen to have buttermilk on hand, you can use it instead of the half and half and lemon juice. Ordinarily a recipe that calls for buttermilk or its substitute also calls for baking soda, because soda neutralizes the acids in foods like buttermilk, but in this case those acids give a lovely sour flavor to the bread that goes well with the citrusy flavor of the cranberries.

Set the milk mixture aside. You may notice it getting kind of weird and clumpy-looking, but that’s fine. The lemon juice curdles the milk slightly, giving it the acidic tang you want.

Next, measure the flour, baking powder, and salt into a medium or large mixing bowl. Whisk it well or blend it with a fork, then set it aside too.

Next, cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until it’s light and fluffy, then add the eggs and extracts. If you don’t have almond extract, you can use a full teaspoonful of vanilla, but almond really brings out the flavor of the cranberries.

Now you just need to add the flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the milk mixture, just as you would for an ordinary cake. The batter will be thicker than cake batter, more like cookie dough. Once it’s blended, you need to fold in the cranberries.

Until now, you should have the cranberries in the freezer. You don’t want them to thaw out because they need to remain frozen until they’re in the oven. Measure them out now and toss them on top of the batter, but then—and this is important—mix them in as quickly as possible. You don’t need to be caref

Cream Cheese Tarts

8-oz package cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 c. sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla

6 vanilla wafers

1/2 can (21 oz can) cherry pie filling

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line muffin pan with cupcake papers. Put one vanilla wafer in each.

Mix the cream cheese and sugar together until fluffy, then add egg and vanilla. Beat well. Spoon the mixture into each cup on top of the vanilla wafers.

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove and allow to cool. The tarts will deflate and form a dip in the middle. Spoon cherry pie filling into the dips. Chill. You can double this recipe to make 12.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cream cheese tarts.

Okay, finally, yes, this is the start of our third season. I’m going to try to release two episodes a month, but I can’t promise that I’ll manage it every month. We’ll see. The episodes themselves are usually pretty quick to record and edit, but it takes time to actually make the recipes and record all the details properly. Anyway, let’s learn how to make cream cheese tarts.

I have a vague memory of finding this recipe in a cookbook I got from the library, but I don’t remember which one. It makes a pretty and unusual treat that’s showy enough for office parties or holiday parties while being easy to throw together quickly. You just have to have enough time to let the tarts cool completely and then chill in the fridge after they’re done.

The recipe as listed in the show notes is halved from the original, since I rarely need to make 12 of these things. They’re rich, and since they’re made in ordinary muffin pans, quite large. They taste a little like cherry danishes and a little like cheesecake, but with a lighter texture. You can easily double the recipe if you like, in which case you’ll need a larger mixing bowl.

You only need one mixing bowl for this recipe, and if you’re only making six you can use a medium mixing bowl instead of a large. You’ll also need a muffin pan and some cupcake liners. If you remember to get the cream cheese and egg out of the fridge a few hours beforehand to warm to room temperature, it’s much easier to make these.

Put the cupcake liners in the muffin pan and turn the oven on to preheat. Then place a single vanilla wafer into the bottom of each cupcake liner, flat side down. Yes, it looks too small. No, do not put more than one in each cup. The vanilla wafer just adds a little bit of texture to the finished tart and implies the existence of a crust without you needing to actually make one.

Next, cream together the cream cheese and sugar just like you would cream butter and sugar to make a cake or cookies. If you started with room temperature cream cheese, it shouldn’t take much time at all to get the sugar fully incorporated. Then add the egg and vanilla extract and mix it up thoroughly, until it’s light and fluffy.

Hopefully by this time the oven is ready, because you are done and just about ready to bake it. I told you this was easy. Fill each muffin cup with the cream cheese mixture, plopping it on top of the vanilla wafer. You’ll fill the cups pretty much all the way to the top.

Then put the pan in the oven and set the timer for 20 minutes. When the time is up, take it out and set the pan on the stove or sink to cool completely.

When you first take them out of the oven, the tarts are puffed up like little soufflés. Just like a soufflé, they’ll start to deflate and crack almost immediately, and that’s fine. They’re supposed to. They’ll form a dip in the middle as they sink, and once they’re cool, that’s where you’ll spoon the cherry filling in.

Cherry filling is canned cherries cooked down with sugar and a few other ingredients, like lemon juice, and thickene

Double Chocolate Cookies * cooking with cocoa powder

Double Chocolate Cookies

1 c flour

1/3 c cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/2 c plus 2 Tbsp butter

1 c sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 c chocolate chips

2/3 c. walnut pieces (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla, blend well. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture, mixing well after each addition. Dough will be thick. Add the chocolate chips and mix in well.

Bake on lightly greased baking sheets at 350 Fahrenheit for 9-11 minutes. Makes about two and a half dozen.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make double chocolate cookies.

I found this recipe online while I was looking for something else, but it made something like five dozen cookies. I don’t need five dozen cookies. I halved the recipe and made a few tweaks, and the result is a more manageable two or two and a half dozen.

You make these cookies the same way you make ordinary chocolate chip cookies, but you use cocoa in place of some of the flour. The cocoa in question is unsweetened cocoa powder. Don’t substitute any kind of sweetened cocoa mix or the result will be horrendous. These cookies are plenty sweet on their own, trust me.

For this recipe you’ll need two mixing bowls, one large, one medium, and at least one cookie sheet. You can use butter and an egg straight from the fridge, but it’s a lot easier to make the dough when all the ingredients are room temperature, so if you think of it earlier in the day, take a stick of butter and an egg out of the fridge and set them on the counter. You’ll actually need two tablespoons more of butter than one stick, but I’m assuming that you already have some butter out next to the toaster.

In the smaller mixing bowl, blend the flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon with a fork or whisk. Be careful with the cocoa since it’s very fine and will poof everywhere if you try to handle it quickly. It’s hard to measure and easy to inhale. Once you get it mixed with the flour it will settle down some, though.

Set that bowl aside and put the butter and sugar in the larger bowl to cream together. This is also a good time to grease the baking sheets and turn the oven on to preheat. Once the butter and sugar are creamed together until they’re light and fluffy, add the egg and vanilla and mix them in well.

I’m going through this quickly because it’s so similar to my chocolate chip cookie recipe, which was our very first episode. If you need to brush up on how to measure flour or how to cream butter and sugar, listen to that episode because it walks you through the process.

Once you’ve mixed the dough except for the chocolate chips (and nuts, if you decide to add them), the dough will be extremely thick. You’ll wonder how on earth you can mix in those chocolate chips, but it’s actually not hard.

Place spoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet. These cookies don’t spread very much so you can put them pretty close together without ending up with one big cookie. Pop the pan in the oven and set the timer for ten minutes, or nine if you made your cookies very small.

When the timer goes off, take the pan out of the oven and let it cool for a few minutes. You’ll notice that the cookies are a little puffed up when you first get them out of the oven, but they shrink and crack a little as they start to cool. After about five minutes or so, use a spatula to move the cookies from the pan to a wire rack if you have one.

Depending on how big or small you make the cookies, you’ll get between two and three dozen from this recipe, so it’s easier if you have two coo

Corned beef and cabbage * how to prepare cabbage

Corned Beef and Cabbage

about 2 to 3 lb piece of corned beef brisket

one cabbage, cut into chunks

1 lb carrots, scraped and cut up

1 onion, diced (optional)

some potatoes, peeled and cut up (optional)

peppercorns (optional)

Place the meat fatty side down in a very large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and simmer about one hour per pound of meat. Add peppercorns if you’re using them. Add water as needed as it steams off.

About half an hour before the meat is done, add all vegetables except the cabbage. Ten minutes later, add the cabbage. Continue to simmer for about 20 minutes or until the cabbage is fork tender.

Cut the meat into thick slices against the grain. Serve hot with the vegetables.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make corned beef and cabbage.

I’m not officially out of the season hiatus but it is spring break and I’m taking the week off work. Since I was making corned beef and cabbage anyway, I thought I’d do an episode about it.

Corned beef is not to everyone’s taste, and cabbage certainly isn’t. I cannot stand cold corned beef on a sandwich, and I’m not a huge fan of cabbage in general, but for some reason I love the combination of corned beef and cabbage. The salty, fatty meat contrasts beautifully with the mild, clean flavor of cabbage. I also add carrots, and if you want to throw in an onion too I approve although I don’t usually bother. You can also add potatoes, but if you do, you’re going to need a really big pot, more of a cauldron.

For this recipe you need to be able to keep the meat submerged while it boils, while still having room at the end for the cabbage and other vegetables, so you need a really big pot. Try to find a piece of meat that’s under three pounds or so in weight, because while it doesn’t look so big in the store, once you get it home and stick it in the pot, you realize just how enormous that thing is. Also, just a heads-up, corned beef and cabbage is considered traditionally Irish although it’s actually not, so in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day prices are high, but they often drop afterwards. I ended up paying $2 for a head of cabbage and that is just highway robbery.

Anyway, this is a really easy recipe to make. It just takes a few hours to cook, so about three hours before you plan to eat, you need to get started.

Open the package of meat and discard the little packet of spices that is usually included. I’ve used them before and found they don’t add anything to the dish and just get all over the cabbage, looking gross. If you like little seeds and crap stuck to your cabbage, that’s fine. I throw that mess out. The corned beef is already highly flavored as is and doesn’t need any help beyond maybe some peppercorns if you have them.

Put the meat fatty side down in the pot and add as much water as the pot will safely hold. Ordinarily I’d say “add water to cover,” but you’re going to have to add water as it steams off so start with plenty.

Turn the stove on high and bring the water to a boil, then turn it down to about medium or just above so it simmers briskly. Whatever you do, don’t turn it on to high and then wander off to hang pictures in your newly painted bedroom, only remembering the stove is on when you hear the violent sloshing and hissing as water hits the burner.

After you turn the heat down, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of gross whitish foamy gunk floating on the water. That’s just fat that has rendered out of the meat. Skim it off with a spatula or something and throw it out.

You want to boil, or rather simmer, the meat for about an hour per pound. My piece of meat is two and a half pounds exactly so

Grilled Cheese * how to use a broiler

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make grilled cheese two different ways: under a broiler and in a skillet.

I made grilled cheese for myself today and realized that not everyone knows how to do it. It’s really easy, so let’s go over it.

Let’s start with the slightly less bad for you version of grilled cheese. This one requires you to use your oven’s broiler, and there are a few specific things you need to know about how to do that.

Most ovens have a setting that says broil. What this means is that only the top heating element will turn on, and it will get very hot. It’s used for searing certain dishes, often to finish, but you can use it to cook steaks in a pinch. I’ve never been too good at that so pretty much the only thing I use the broiler for is to make grilled cheese.

First, before you do anything else, move the top rack in your oven up to the very top slot. Do not turn on the oven yet!

Next, get out your bread. I just use ordinary sandwich bread. Then get out your cheese. You can use presliced cheese meant for sandwiches, the kind my brother and I called smashed cheese when we were little, or you can slice thin pieces of any kind of cheese so that you have enough to nicely cover the tops of both pieces of bread. I’m assuming you’re only making two slices, but of course you can make more at once if you like.

Now you have a choice. If you like your grilled cheese toasted on both sides, it takes a little more work. If you’re fine with just toasting the top and having the bottom still soft, it’s easier and quicker. We’ll go over both ways.

If you want to toast the bottom first, slice your cheese but set it aside. Don’t put it on the bread yet. Instead, set your bread slices directly on the oven rack, but near the front so you can keep an eye on them. Do not shut the oven door all the way. You’ll notice that the oven will naturally stay propped open a few inches if you don’t shove it all the way closed, and that’s because it needs to stay open while you’re broiling.

Turn the oven on to the broil setting and for approximately two minutes, do something else while it heats. After just about two minutes, look into the propped-open oven door and look at your bread.

It’s probably starting to toast. Watch it like a hawk until it’s as done as you want it, then turn the broiler off and open the door all the way. Carefully remove the half-toasted bread, and I usually use a spatula or metal tongs because if you use a cloth to grab them, it’s easy to accidentally knock the bread through the bars of the oven rack so it falls into the oven.

When you’ve got it removed, set it down on the counter or plate or whatever toasted side down. Arrange your cheese on the untoasted side. Obviously, if you don’t want to toast the bottom you can skip straight to this part.

Once you’ve got the cheese on the bread, put it into the oven again directly on the top rack, cheese side up of course. Prop the oven door open again and turn the broiler on.

After a few minutes, the cheese will start to get melty and bubbly and the edges of the bread, where it’s not covered by cheese, will start to brown. Watch it carefully and as soon as it’s as done as you want it, turn the broiler off and remove the toast from the oven carefully. Tada, you have made grilled cheese! It makes a lovely snack on a chilly day, or the perfect accompaniment to tomato soup.

It does not keep at all, but only a monster or a very small child would leave grilled cheese uneaten.

You can use any kind of cheese you want, whether or not it’s supposed to be a type of cheese that melts. You’re basically just heating the cheese up and maybe toasting it just a bit. I usually use cheddar.

Befo

Chocolate Butterscotch Cookies * how to make butterscotch

Chocolate Butterscotch Cookies

saltine crackers

1 c butter, unsalted

1 c light brown sugar

1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips (12 oz, or about 2 cups)

1 c M&M candies (optional)

1 c chopped nuts (optional)

sprinkles (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil and grease. Place crackers all over it in a single layer, touching. In a medium saucepan, melt butter and brown sugar over medium heat, stirring constantly. Bring to a boil and stir constantly while boiling for about four minutes. Pour evenly over the crackers. Bake 7 minutes.

Remove from oven and pour chocolate chips evenly over the pan. Allow them to sit for a minute or two to melt, then spread with a knife. Sprinkle with M&M candies, chopped nuts, decorative sprinkles, etc., as desired.

Allow to cool for several hours or until the chocolate hardens, then break apart and serve.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chocolate butterscotch cookies. I don’t actually know what else to call them. The butterscotch does not taste like butterscotch flavoring, fortunately. It’s much, much better. [It may actually be toffee by the time it gets out of the oven, now that I think about it. Toffee is just butterscotch that’s been cooked longer.]

This is the recipe you make when you remember late at night that you promised to bring cookies for the office meeting the next day. You don’t have time to do anything fancy or run to the grocery store, but you want something everyone will like.

This recipe only really needs four ingredients: saltine crackers, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips. That’s it. You can put these together in half an hour, literally. The only drawback is that they need to cool completely before you can break them apart, which takes at least two hours. But they’re just fine sitting out overnight while they cool and while you sleep, and in the morning you just grab them and go.

For this recipe, you need a baking sheet and a pot. That’s it. No mixing bowls to wash. You don’t even really need to measure out anything but the brown sugar.

First, line your largest baking sheet with tinfoil and grease the foil. This is one time when it really is easiest to use the spray stuff, but you can also grease it with just a bit of vegetable oil, shortening, or butter. As soon as you’ve done that, get the saltine crackers out. Yes, just ordinary saltines that you eat with soup or chili.

You’re going to need at least one sleeve of crackers, depending on the size of your baking sheet. Mine fits 48 crackers. Place them on the tinfoil in a single layer so that they’re all touching on all sides. If you have the kind of crackers that are joined together in pairs, you can either keep them in pairs or snap them apart, it doesn’t really matter. Once you have the baking sheet covered, set it aside, but make sure it’s somewhere you can get to easily.

Next, turn the oven on to preheat. Then put two sticks of butter and a cup of light brown sugar into a pot. The recipe says saucepan, but that’s basically just a fancy word for a pot. Remember to pack the brown sugar firmly into the measuring cup. You don’t need to soften the butter before using it, because you’re about to boil the heck out of it with the brown sugar to make butterscotch.

Butterscotch is related to caramel and toffee, but it’s richer than caramel and softer than toffee. But don’t be nervous—you don’t need a candy thermometer or anything. Just throw the butter and sugar into the pot together and turn the heat on to about medium, or maybe a little higher. Unsalted butter is best but if you only have salted butter, that’s fine too.

Heat the butter and

Sugar Cookies * coloring dough * rolling out and cutting cookie dough * coloring sugar

Sugar Cookies

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 c. butter

3/4 c. sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

food coloring (optional)

cinnamon candies (optional)

sparkle sugar (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar, then add egg and vanilla and blend well. Add a generous squirt of food coloring to the butter mixture and blend it in well. It should be really green (or whatever color). Add flour mixture to butter mixture. Divide dough, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least half an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease two cookie sheets. Roll out chilled dough on a lightly floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on cookie sheets and decorate with sparkle sugar and cinnamon candies (if desired). Bake for 9-11 minutes. Makes about two dozen.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sugar cookies! This is hands down the best sugar cookie recipe I’ve tried, and my family has made it for many, many years. We call them holly cookies because we use food coloring to dye the dough green, then cut them out in holly leaf shapes and decorate the tops with green crystal sugar and cinnamon candies like holly berries. I’ve included all the steps to make holly cookies, but if you don’t have a cookie cutter shaped like a holly leaf, you can use any shapes you like or just cut them out round.

For this recipe, you’ll need a large mixing bowl, a medium mixing bowl, a surface where you can roll out the dough and something to roll the dough out with, and at least one cookie cutter in a shape you like.

If you want to make holly cookies the way I do, you’ll also need some cinnamon candies, and that can be a problem. These are the small round pieces of red candy that are cinnamon flavored, usually called cinnamon imperials or red hots. You can get them specifically for baking, but those are actually not very good for this recipe. The best red hots you can find are sold by Brach’s, but they can be hard to track down. I was going to order them online this year and actually went to the Brach’s website to find them, but when I followed their link to buy, it took me to an Amazon page that said they were sold out. In the end, I lucked out and found them in a small grocery store I almost never go to. Brach’s are better than the ones sold for baking because they’re much cheaper, but also because they’re flattened instead of round. Those big round baking ones tend to just melt into goo in the oven. But you can use any kind you can get your hands on, or, of course, you can leave them out. But they do really contribute to the overall flavor of the cookie.

A few hours before you start the recipe, it’s a good idea to get the butter out of the fridge and let it warm up to room temperature. You can do the same with the eggs too. If you forget, though, no problem.

These cookies follow the same basic method for most cookies, including the chocolate chip cookie recipe from our very first episode. If you haven’t listened to that one, you might go back and do so for basics about measuring flour and mixing dough.

First, grease your baking sheets and set them aside. I use a little butter to grease the pans, since I have a theory that greasing the pan with the same fat you used in the recipe gives better results, plus I already have the butter out. When you unwrap the butter, especially if it’s at room temperature, there’s often some left on the paper wrapping. I put the wrapper face down on the pan and rub it around as an easy way to grease the pan.

It’s best to use two pans minimum for this recipe. It should make just enough to

Cranberry relish * cooking cranberries

Cranberry Relish (small amount)

1/2 c. orange juice (or apple juice)

1/2 c. brown sugar

2 c. fresh cranberries

1/4 tsp allspice

Combine ingredients in a saucepan and heat to a boil. Turn heat down to medium low and simmer for 15 minutes. The sauce will thicken as it cools.

Cranberry Relish (large amount)

1 c. orange juice

1/2 c. white sugar

1/2 c. brown sugar

1/4 tsp cinnamon

12 oz fresh cranberries

Dissolve sugars and cinnamon in juice over medium heat. Stir in cranberries and simmer 10-20 minutes. The sauce will thicken as it cools.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cranberry relish, also called cranberry sauce, just in time for Thanksgiving.

I know many of us grew up with the cranberry relish that comes in a can, and which comes out of the can can-shaped, at which point an aunt or somebody slices it carefully into thin discs and arranges it on a plate, where it looks festive on the table and almost no one eats it. But you can make your own cranberry relish very easily from fresh cranberries that’s not only delicious, but it looks lovely in a glass compote if you own such a thing. It also takes very little time to make and can be done ahead.

I’ve included two recipes in the show notes, because I have two recipes that are very similar but make different amounts. You can also half or double the recipe you prefer or just tweak it to fit your own taste.

First, you’ll need fresh cranberries. These show up in the produce section of the grocery store right before Thanksgiving and they’re pretty cheap, two dollars for a 12 ounce bag in my local Walmart this year. You can sometimes get them on sale. Keep them in the fridge until you’re ready to cook them. Before you start the recipe, pour the cranberries into a colander and give them a good rinse, and pick out any berries that are under- or over-ripe. Sometimes a bit of leaf or stem makes its way into the bag and you obviously want to remove that too. Fresh cranberries should be a nice red color and should be firm to the touch. If you cut one open, you’ll see that it’s mostly empty inside except for thin membranes that separate little round seeds.

For this recipe, you’ll need a saucepan. That’s it.

Start by deciding whether you need a lot of cranberry relish or just a little. The recipe that makes a lot uses the whole 12 ounce bag of cranberries, the recipe that makes a little uses two cups of fresh cranberries, which is half the bag. If you don’t have any use for the remaining half a bag, go ahead and make the larger recipe.

Measure the orange juice into the pot and add the sugar or sugars along with the cinnamon or allspice. One note about how much sugar these recipes call for: I think you can half it. I didn’t this time, but when I tasted the finished relish it was just so super sweet that I wished I had. Then again, as you know, I have been trying to eat a lot less sugar so everything tastes sweet right now. Also, one recipe calls for allspice and the other calls for cinnamon, but it doesn’t matter which you use. They’re both good. I think the allspice has a richer, more complex flavor, but cinnamon is always a winner.

Turn the heat up to about medium high and stir the orange juice and sugar as it heats, until the sugar has mostly dissolved into the orange juice and the mixture is starting to boil. Then turn the heat down to about medium and add the cranberries. Set the timer for fifteen minutes and let it cook, stirring occasionally. The liquid shouldn’t be at a full boil but at a brisk, energetic simmer.

An important thing to remember about cranberries is that they pop while cooking. Do not be alarmed, but do be careful, because they wi

Mashed potatoes * Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes * what “water to cover” means * parboiling

Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes

2 ½ lbs baking potatoes, peeled and quartered

4 oz cream cheese, softened

1 stick salted butter, softened

1 ½ tsp sugar

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

about 1/4 c. milk

Boil potatoes until tender. Drain. Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Add all other ingredients to the potatoes and beat until fluffy. Add the milk last so you can adjust the amount; the milk is just for consistency. The potatoes should be creamy enough that they won’t dry out in the oven.

Grease a 9x9 baking dish and spoon in the potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes or until heated through.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make honest-to-goodness mashed potatoes from scratch. They won’t be lumpy, I promise.

Instant mashed potatoes are pretty good and they’re definitely fast, but homemade mashed potatoes are really easy to make. All you need is a few ingredients and some time. And a pot big enough to hold the potato pieces.

First, you need some potatoes. This is when you want to buy a bag of potatoes. White or yellow-fleshed potatoes are fine, but if you have red potatoes those will work too. Basically any potato will do. You can usually get a three or five pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars, and definitely go for what’s cheap. Don’t buy those individually wrapped potatoes meant for baking. They’re overpriced. Just buy a bag of cheap potatoes.

Bagged potatoes are usually pretty small, but you’re going to chop them up and then mash them anyway so it doesn’t matter. Generally, grab two small to medium potatoes per person to make mashed potatoes. If you ended up with big potatoes, more the size of ones you’d expect to get if you ordered a baked potato in a restaurant, then one per person will do. When I’m making mashed potatoes just for myself, I’ll usually use four small potatoes, since that gives me plenty for leftovers.

You need to peel the potatoes first. You can do this with a paring knife if you don’t have a potato peeler, but really, a potato peeler only costs a buck or so and will literally last you your entire life, so it’s worth buying one. That said, I did go through a phase when I was in my late teens where I wanted to feel rustic, so I peeled potatoes with a knife. It’s not hard, and you can pretend to be a pioneer woman or Cinderella or a captive of pirates who have put you to work in the galley, only the pirate captain is secretly a kind man who falls for your honest beauty and your cooking skills, and eventually you become a pirate too, but you only steal from bad people. Also, the pirate captain is super handsome.

Anyway, peel the potatoes using your method of choice. It’s easiest to peel them over a trash can or bowl so you can just let the peels fall without worrying about clean-up later. If you’re using a knife, you can go ahead and trim off any bruised or rotten places while you work. If you’re using a peeler, you’ll need to trim the potatoes once you’re done and have switched to a knife to cut them up.

Potatoes, of course, are roots of the potato plant that grow underground. That means they’re dirty. Don’t worry that your hand holding the potato gets all grotty and the potato gets covered in muddy handprints. Once you’ve finished peeling, take your naked potatoes to the sink and rinse them and your hands. Then cut the potatoes into pieces. The pieces shouldn’t be too small. You want chunks about the size of, I don’t know, an egg—several inches across, don’t dice them up tiny.

Drop the pieces into your empty pot as you cut them. Once all the potatoes are cut up and in the pot, add enough water to just cover the potatoes.

When

Roasted carrots and parsnips * how to prepare parsnips * Shepherd’s Pie

Roasted carrots and parsnips

About 1 lb each carrots and parsnips, scraped and cut into sticks about 2” long

Olive oil

Salt

pepper

Preheat oven to 425. Pour olive oil in a 9x13 pan to just barely cover the bottom, then add carrot and parsnip pieces. Drizzle another Tbsp of olive oil over the vegetables and add salt and pepper. Stir with a spatula and turn over the vegetables until they’re coated with oil. Add more salt and pepper. Cook for 20 minutes, remove and stir. Return to oven and cook for another 15 or 20 minutes or until tender.

Shepherd’s Pie

Leftover vegetables

Leftover meat

Leftover gravy

Leftover mashed potatoes

Preheat oven to 350. Place the vegetables in a 9x9” pan with the meat on top (in bite-sized pieces). Pour about one cup of gravy into the dish and top with mashed potatoes. Bake for about 30 minutes or until heated through and the potatoes are starting to brown.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to cook parsnips. Specifically, we’re going to learn how to roast parsnips and carrots, which go well together and which make a fantastic accompaniment for turkey. Then we’re also going to learn how to make shepherd’s pie to use up your Thanksgiving leftovers.

Parsnips look sort of like pale yellow-white carrots, and they taste slightly sweet like carrots too but with a little more zing and a chewier texture that I really like. They also pair well with carrots. You peel them just like carrots, then slice the tops off just like carrots, and for this recipe you cut them into little sticks just like you do carrots. Parsnips often have much bigger tops than carrots of the same length do, though, which taper to a much thinner end.

For this recipe, all you need is a 9x13 pan with sides. Pour enough olive oil into the pan to just cover the bottom with a thin layer when you tilt it around, then set it aside.

Next, clean and cut up about a pound each of carrots and parsnips. You can cut these into sticks or pennies, but I think you get a better texture and flavor from the sticks. You can start with baby carrots, but you still need to slice them up. You want the pieces to be thin so they’ll cook faster. I typically cut the baby carrots in half lengthways, and cut the parsnips into pieces about the same size. This takes a while, but it’s not difficult and you can listen to a podcast or some music while you work.

When you’re about halfway done cutting the vegetables up, turn the oven on to preheat to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time you finish the oven will be hot.

Once you’ve got the carrots and parsnips cut up, put them into the pan and drizzle more olive oil over them—not a lot, maybe about a Tablespoonful. Sprinkle salt and pepper over them, then use a spatula to carefully stir them around and turn them over until they’re pretty well coated with oil. Then sprinkle more salt and pepper over them and put them in the oven.

Set the timer for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, take the pan out of the oven. You need to really give those vegetables a good stir and that’s hard to do while they’re still in the oven. Make sure to close the oven door so heat doesn’t escape while you’re working. Use the spatula to turn the vegetables over again and stir them around. They’ll still be hard at this point.

Put the pan back in the oven when you’re done and set the timer for 15 minutes this time. When the timer goes off, use a fork to test a few of the pieces. They’re probably not fully softened yet but they may be, depending on how thin you cut them. If they’re not tender, stir them again and set the timer for another five minutes. They should be done at this point unless you cut them pre

Roasting a turkey

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a turkey!

This year (2020) has been endless and horrible, but somehow we are finally approaching the winter holiday season. In the United States we’re nearing Thanksgiving, a feast day celebrated with family and friends. The traditional main course for Thanksgiving is turkey, but a lot of people don’t know how to roast a turkey without drying it out. Hopefully this episode will help you roast your turkey perfectly every time.

As soon as turkeys start showing up in the stores in October I usually buy one and cook it for myself, because I love turkey. I always buy the very smallest one I can find, of course, because I am just one person and while I do have an astonishing capacity for eating turkey, I have my limits.

Don’t forget you need to have something to cook a turkey in, because even a small one is too big for ordinary pans. You can buy those heavy-duty foil roasting pans, but while they make clean-up easy, they’re also not great. You have to put a pan under them because otherwise you can’t safely move the roasting pan once the turkey is in it, because heavy-duty or not, no aluminum foil can stand up to the weight of even a small turkey. But since the roasting pan is also bigger than a typical cookie sheet, it’s still really hard to move safely. If you have room to store it, though, you can usually find inexpensive steel roasting pans this time of year. I spent less than ten bucks for mine and I’ve had it five or six years now, so I figure it’s paid for itself.

It doesn’t matter what brand of turkey you buy. They’re all pretty good. The cheaper ones sometimes have surprise bags of premade gravy tucked in the cavity, which you just paid for and they’re mostly water, but I can never feel too upset because it’s actually pretty good gravy.

Unless you’re cooking for a huge crowd, you’ll probably want to get a smaller turkey. Thirteen pounds is actually on the small side, but you can usually find turkeys that are a bit under ten pounds when you have a big selection to choose from. If you get a turkey that small on sale, it can cost less than a four-pound chicken.

So let’s assume you have acquired a frozen turkey and a roasting pan big enough to hold it. Four or five days before you plan to cook the turkey, put it in the fridge. It takes at least four days to thaw, or a day or two longer for bigger turkeys. If there’s even a slight chance you’ll forget to move it to the fridge from the freezer, put a reminder in your phone. Don’t thaw it on the counter, put it in the fridge to thaw.

Okay, the big day has arrived. It’s time to cook that turkey. People sometimes say that you cook a turkey for 20 minutes per pound, but that’s actually too long. It’s more like 15 minutes per pound, maybe even a little less. For a small turkey, up to about eleven pounds in weight, you can count on it cooking in about two and a half hours or just a bit more at 350 degrees F. My 13-pound turkey needed more like three hours. So if you like to have Thanksgiving dinner early, remember you’re going to have to get that turkey in the oven early. You also need at least an hour to prepare before the turkey goes in the oven, and at least half an hour afterwards. That’s why your grandmother was always up at dawn on Thanksgiving.

The first thing to do is clean out the sink. Wash any dishes sitting in it and give it a quick scrub or at least wipe it out with a sponge. Then set your roasting pan out so you can get to it easily. If it comes with a rack, you can use the rack. Otherwise, you’ll set the turkey directly on the bottom of the pan. I line my pan with foil because it’s a cheap pan with cheap nonstick coating, and despite my care over the years, the coating has started to peel off and I don’t want to accidentally eat any.

Carrot-Banana Bread * how to grate carrots * how to choose bananas for baking

Carrot-Banana Bread

2 very ripe bananas, mashed

2 carrots, grated

1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/3 c. shortening

1/2 to 2/3 c. sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

Grease a loaf pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix the mashed banana and grated carrots. In a large bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. In another large bowl cream together shortening and sugar, then add eggs and vanilla. Mix well, then add flour mixture alternately with banana and carrot mixture. Batter will be thick.

Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make carrot banana bread.

The weather here in East Tennessee is rainy and cool as I record, which has made me want to bake. But I’ve also been trying to cut back as much as possible on sugar. So I pulled out this recipe and tinkered with it to see if I could make it slightly more healthy. I like the results, so let’s get started.

First, of course, you’ll need some bananas that are getting over-ripe. They don’t have to be completely black, but they can’t have any green left on the skins. I’m not a huge fan of bananas, but I do eat them from time to time, and I like them very ripe. The two I had on the counter were to the point where they were perfect for eating, to my mind, and when I peeled them there were no places where they were getting gross. That’s ideal for banana bread too, personally, but if you have some that are getting really over-ripe, they’ll work just fine.

As for the carrots, peel and cut off the tops just like you would for any other recipe. Then you’ll need to grate them. I feel like we’ve talked about grating carrots before but if so, I can’t remember which recipe it was for. Possibly I’m remembering the zucchini pineapple bread recipe, where you have to grate zucchini. But let’s go over it briefly here.

Once your carrots are cleaned and ready to use, get out your grater. My cheese grater is just a piece of metal with holes punched in it that I set across a medium mixing bowl. If you have the kind that’s like a little metal house, you’ll just stand it on a clean surface.

Hold the grater steady with your off hand. Then just start grating the carrots against the smallest holes in your grater. It actually goes pretty quickly. It’s easiest to hold the carrot perpendicular to the grater so that you’re grating the end of it right across, not grating it at a slant which will be awkward to hold as the carrot gets shorter and shorter. It doesn’t matter if you start grating at the thin end or the thick end.

Eventually you’ll get down to a little carrot nub that’s too small to hold without risking grating your fingers too. Just pop that little piece of carrot in your mouth and eat it. It’s a healthy snack.

As you grate, you’ll need to occasionally knock down the pile of grated carrot you’re creating, because you don’t want it getting so high that it touches the grater. Just shake the bowl. If you’re using a standing-up grater, stop occasionally to remove the grated carrot into the bowl you set out.

Okay, so that’s that. I kind of got ahead of myself so let’s start at the beginning and catch up.

You’ll need a loaf pan for this recipe and three mixing bowls, one of them medium-sized and the others larger. Use the medium-sized bowl for the grated carrot and mashed banana. It doesn’t matter what size loaf pan you use as long as it’s not teeny, but if you have a choice of sizes go for a medium-sized one.

So, grate your carrots first. You should have a good amount of grated car

Khuushuur (Mongolian fried meat dumplings) * basics of kneading dough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4YbtfbkuE

Khuushuur (Mongolian fried meat dumplings)

Filling:

about 1 lb. minced meat (beef or mutton is traditional)

small onion, diced small

several garlic cloves, minced

Pepper and/or paprika

Cumin

1 Tbsp or more salt

a little water

oil for frying

Dumpling dough:

about 3 c. flour

about 1 c. warm water

Mix the meat, onion, and garlic and add plenty of spices. Mix a generous amount of salt with a small amount of warm water and add to the meat mixture, and mix it in well.

Make a well in the flour in a large bowl and slowly add water, mixing with your hand until the dough has a pliable but firm texture thicker than biscuit dough. Knead the dough a few times if you have trouble getting all the flour combined. Let the dough rest, covered, for 15 minutes before working.

Cut the dough into quarters or thick slices. Work with one piece at a time and keep the others covered so they won’t dry out. Roll into a rope and slice off pieces about two inches thick. Roll these pieces into balls, then flatten and roll out into little round pastries, ideally about 4” across. Roll only one or two at a time, since they become harder to work with as they dry.

Place a spoonful of the meat mixture onto the piece of flattened dough. Fold the pastry over and pinch the edges closed to seal them. This is traditionally done with a pretty pattern that makes the edge look braided. Gently flatten the filled pastry so that it resembles a taco that just ate too many tacos.

Place dough pockets into hot oil and fry until golden brown on both sides. Eat hot, out of hand. Makes about 25-30. This recipe can be halved.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make khuushuur, a traditional Mongolian dish that’s basically a deep-fried meat and onion pie, or fried dumpling. Hopefully I’m pronouncing the word right, since it’s 100% of all the Mongolian I know. I’ve seen it spelled different ways, sometimes with just an H at the beginning, more commonly with a KH. The sound seems to be a soft H that’s sounded in the back of the throat.

I learned about khuushuur because I’m currently obsessed with a Mongolian folk metal band called the Hu. Their music is amazing and I was supposed to see them live in May, but they had to cancel the rest of their tour because of Covid-19. I follow the band on social media and knew they had spent at least a while quarantined in Australia before they were able to return home to Mongolia.

At some point, though, I stumbled across a series of 14 videos called “Hu’s in the Kitchen.” I haven’t watched all of the videos because the earlier ones appear to be the band and crew eating at restaurants or at people’s homes, and it’s frankly kind of boring. But the last few videos are the band cooking for themselves, and the very last one definitely was recorded while the band was in quarantine in Australia.

I love these last few videos, because it’s just the band. They’re adorable and I admit that at first I was just interested in watching and listening to them, especially Gala who has the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen. But then I started paying attention to what they were cooking. And it’s that very last episode, released in July of 2020, that features khuushuur. Gala, by the way, is the guy who introduces the video at the very beginning. He’s so adorable.

I had to try making the recipe, and luckily my first effort turned out AMAZING. It wasn’t perfect and it definitely wasn’t pretty to look at, but it was delicious, which gave me the enthusiasm to keep working on my khuushuur-making skills. This episode is the culmination of what I’ve learned, both by

Roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon * how to prepare Brussels sprouts

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

about 1 or 1.5 lb Brussels sprouts, cut in half

2 Tbsp olive oil

1-2 Tbsp honey or maple syrup

1 tsp salt

about 1/2 tsp pepper

5 slices of bacon (uncooked)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rinse, cut off stems, and slice Brussels sprouts in half. Place in a large mixing bowl and drizzle with olive oil and honey or maple syrup, then toss to coat. Add salt and pepper, mix well, and spread onto a greased baking sheet in a single layer. Cut up uncooked bacon into very small pieces and drop onto the sprouts evenly. Sprinkle with more pepper.

Place in oven and roast for 20 to 25 minutes, until bacon is cooked, stirring carefully halfway through.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Brussels sprouts that you won’t hate. I promise.

I have hated Brussels sprouts for my entire life until last year when my uncle made them and they were actually good. It turns out that everyone has been cooking those things wrong all this time, so here’s how to do it right.

Brussels sprouts are little round green things that look like teeny cabbages, and they are related to cabbage. They taste like cabbage too. And it’s funny, because I will happily cook and eat cabbage in certain recipes, like corned beef and cabbage which one day I might cover on the podcast, and spring rolls which as I understand are mostly stuffed with cabbage. But Brussels sprouts, ew.

But instead of boiling Brussels sprouts, which makes them mushy and bitter, we’re going to roast them. We’re going to roast them WITH BACON. I’m not one of those bacon maniacs but it is hard to dispute that bacon tastes really good and imparts its flavor to any food it’s cooked with.

So, for this recipe you’re going to need a large mixing bowl and a baking sheet, preferably one with edges instead of the totally flat baking sheets. You’re dealing with little round things that roll easily and you need to turn them over while they’re in the oven, so having edges on your baking sheet will help keep the Brussels sprouts from burning to the bottom of your oven.

The first thing you need to do is prepare the sprouts. Throw them in a colander or run water directly into the plastic bag they’re in, and give them a good rinse. Then you’ll need to trim the stubby stem off and remove any outer leaves that look gross. Generally these leaves will come off by themselves when you cut the sprouts in half, which is the last step. Then toss the halved sprouts into the mixing bowl. Do this for all the sprouts, which actually doesn’t take too long once you get into the rhythm. You can also get them ready ahead of time, then cover the bowl of sprouts and refrigerate them for a few hours until you’re ready to cook them.

You can add other vegetables to the sprouts if you like, as long as they’re vegetables that can stand up to cooking at high temperatures, like broccoli.

Once your sprouts are ready and waiting in the bowl, turn the oven on to 400 F to preheat, and grease your baking sheet. You can use vegetable oil or shortening or the spray stuff. I have found, by the way, that using shortening to grease a pan that you then put in the oven at a high temperature, like 400 or higher, will cause the shortening to become super sticky and impossible to remove, and may discolor your baking sheet.

Next, pour two Tbsp of olive oil over the sprouts, then two Tbsp of honey or maple syrup. If you measure the olive oil out first, when you measure the honey or syrup with the same spoon it will just pour off the spoon without leaving any behind, just like magic.

Mix the sprouts around well so that they’re all coated with a thin layer of oliv

Drop Biscuits * how to fry bacon * using bacon grease * what “make a well” means in a recipe

Drop Biscuits with Bacon and/or Cheese

2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

4 Tbsp shortening

1 c. milk

1 c. shredded Cheddar (or other cheese) (optional)

5-7 slices cooked bacon, cut up small (optional)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut shortening into dry ingredients. Add cheese and/or bacon pieces. Add milk and drop in large spoonfuls on a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 12-14 minutes. For rolled out biscuits decrease the milk to 2/3 cup. If you leave out both the cheese and bacon, increase the salt to one teaspoon.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make drop biscuits, with or without cheese and/or bacon!

I’d like to say this is an old family recipe passed down through generations of women, but in fact I got it from an old cookbook called Good Recipes for Hard Times that I owned in my 20s. I’ve regretted for years selling it in a yard sale but through the magic of the internet I just ordered a paperback copy. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the same copy! Actually, my copy was hardback and would be worth a whole lot today, although by the time I sold it, it was pretty battered. Like, literally battered because there was batter on some of the pages. *rimshot*

Okay, so, we’ve talked about biscuits once or twice in past episodes, but we’ve never actually featured a biscuit recipe. This recipe doesn’t make the most delicious biscuit, but it is the easiest and most adaptable recipe I’ve found. I primarily use it for making bacon and cheese biscuits, or sometimes just cheese biscuits. We’re also not going to bother to roll these biscuits out. This is a recipe you can whip up quickly when you need something filling and cheap. I will warn you that if you leave the cheese and/or bacon out, the biscuits sort of taste like glue. But put enough butter and jam on them and they’re fine.

For the purposes of this episode I’m going to assume that you want to make cheese and bacon biscuits. That means we need to talk about how to cook bacon before we do anything else, because you need cooked bacon for this recipe.

First, of course, you need the bacon. It doesn’t matter what kind you buy, but thick cut bacon takes forever to cook. I tend to shop by price so I get the cheapest, fattiest bacon I can find—but I don’t buy bacon often these days, maybe just a few times a year. I’m also trying to cut back on the amount of sugar I eat, so this time I bought bacon that was cured without sugar, honey, or any other sweetener. It tasted fine. It tasted like bacon.

Cooking bacon is messy, so when I do cook it I typically make the whole package at once. In this particular case I didn’t since I needed five strips raw for a different recipe that we’ll talk about soon. You’ll need a large, heavy skillet and make sure to either wear an old shirt or put an apron on to protect your clothes from grease.

Heat the skillet to about medium low. Place the strips of bacon in the skillet while it’s still warming up, and try to position them so that as much of the bacon as possible contacts the bottom of the pan. If you’re cooking the whole package of bacon, though, you won’t have enough room, so once I fill up the bottom of the pan I just layer the rest of the bacon over the first layer but facing the other direction, so I have a criss-cross pattern of bacon. I’m not sure that makes sense. Don’t stress about it. Just separate the slices and lay them out as flat as possible.

As the skillet heats, the bacon begins to cook, and as it does it releases a lot of grease and begins to shrink and curl up. After a few minutes use a spatula to loosen the bacon from the bottom, because you don’t want it to burn. Specifica

Marinated Tuna Salad * how to prepare cucumber

Marinated Tuna Salad

1 medium-sized cucumber, peeled and diced

2 celery stalks, sliced

1/3 onion, diced (optional)

1/2 tomato, diced (optional)

1 c balsamic vinaigrette

1 can tuna in water (drained)

mayonnaise

feta cheese (optional)

Place the diced vegetables into a medium-sized mixing bowl and pour the balsamic vinaigrette over them. Cover and place in fridge for at least one hour.

Drain the tuna and mix with a little mayo—just enough to combine. Scoop the veggies from the vinaigrette with a slotted spoon or fork and add to the tuna mixture. Stir and serve as a wrap or pita with feta cheese sprinkled on top.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make marinated tuna salad. This recipe is from my friend Jennifer, a science fiction writer who you may know by the name J.B. Rockwell. If you’re looking for something new to read, I recommend her Serengeti trilogy, which is about an AI spaceship. I’ll put a link to the first book in the show notes. It’s also available as a really good audiobook.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29006650-serengeti

Anyway, Jen sent me this recipe a few weeks ago and I’ve made it several times already. It’s easy to make, and marinating the vegetables gives them a delicious tang. You will need to start the marinade about an hour before you plan to eat, though.

For this recipe you’ll need a medium-sized mixing bowl and a small mixing bowl. You’ll also need a cucumber and a few celery stalks. You can add any other vegetables you like, but the cucumber and celery are the heart of this recipe.

If you’ve never made a recipe that calls for cucumbers before, you may not know how to prepare them. Choose small to medium-sized cucumbers that are dark green in color and firm to the touch. Also make sure you’re buying a cucumber and not a small zucchini, which I almost did without thinking, because they look a lot alike at first glance. The larger a cucumber is, the more seedy it is, and you want to minimize the seediness. Peel the cucumber just like you would a potato, then slice the ends off. Then just cut it into thin slices. For this recipe you’ll want to cut the slices into quarters too, because you want the pieces bite-sized.

Put all your diced vegetables into the medium-sized mixing bowl and pour about a cup of balsamic vinaigrette over them. This should cover the veggies; if it doesn’t, add a little more. On the other hand, if you didn’t use that many veggies you may not need a full cup of the vinaigrette.

You buy balsamic vinaigrette in the salad dressing section of the store. Jen says you can make your own with 2/3 c balsamic vinegar mixed with 1/3 c olive oil and Italian seasonings, but if you do end up making your own you’ll probably want to make it a few days ahead of time if possible so the seasonings can flavor the other ingredients properly.

Cover the bowl with foil or plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least an hour. You probably don’t want to leave this marinating overnight, but a few hours is fine.

After an hour is up, or when you’re ready to eat, get out your small mixing bowl, or a small serving bowl or a big cereal bowl. Drain a can of tuna well and put the tuna into the bowl. My cats would like to remind you that you can drain the tuna onto a saucer and give them the tuna water. Then mix the tuna with a little mayonnaise—just enough to stick the tuna together, basically. You don’t need a lot.

Then take out the bowl of marinating vegetables. You want to add the veggies to the tuna, not the other way round, because you don’t want all that vinaigrette in your salad or it’ll be more like tuna salad soup. You can scoop the veggies out of the marinade with

Cream scones * how to bake with whipping cream

Cream Scones

3 ¼ c all-purpose flour

½ c sugar

1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

1 c. nuts (or chocolate chips)

1 c. dried fruit

2 c. cold whipping cream

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add one cup of dried fruit (not fresh) and one cup of nuts or chocolate chips.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the cream until froth forms. Fold into the dry ingredients until just combined. Form into one or two balls and pat out on a lightly floured surface until the dough is about an inch thick. Cut into wedges.

Place wedges on greased baking sheets and bake for 17-19 minutes. Makes about two dozen scones.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cream scones! This is another recipe I got from my cousin Molly, and I think she got it from a friend or maybe online. Either way, she calls these “the best scones” and they certainly are.

The reason I don’t make these scones more often is that the recipe calls for heavy whipping cream, and the only time I have whipping cream is when I buy it for a specific recipe. But occasionally I buy it just for making these scones.

Before you start thinking, “Hmm, I bet half and half would work and I’ve got some in the fridge”: no. Nothing works except heavy whipping cream. I know because I have tried everything from half and half to whole milk to evaporated milk, and the result is always a dense, flat mess. If you look at the ingredients, you’ll see that the recipe doesn’t call for butter or any other fat. It needs the fat in the cream to become scones instead of doorstops, and because cream is so light compared to other fats, the scones are light too.

In addition to the heavy whipping cream you’ll need a cup of dried fruit and a cup of nuts. If you can’t eat nuts or don’t like them, you can substitute chocolate chips. Don’t use fresh fruit, though. I like using chopped pecans and dried cranberries, which is the combination you’ll see in photos in the show notes, but chopped walnuts and dried cherries are great too, or whatever you like. I like the texture of the nuts so much that I’ve never tried the recipe with chocolate chips.

You’ll also need two large mixing bowls, or one large and one medium mixing bowl, and some baking sheets. This recipe makes a lot of scones so unless your baking sheets are larger than usual, you’ll probably need two.

First, preheat the oven to 375. Then put the smaller mixing bowl in the fridge to chill. Just trust me on this. Then grease the baking sheets and set them aside. Then make sure your working surface is clean, because these are scones you have to pat out and cut.

In the large mixing bowl, the one that’s not in the fridge, mix the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. The recipe calls for a lot of baking powder but don’t worry, you won’t be able to taste it. Once you have the dry ingredients mixed up nicely with a fork or whisk, add the fruit and nuts and mix them in too. I actually ran out of all-purpose flour when I made these today, and the new bag of flour in the cupboard that I thought was all-purpose turned out to be bread flour. So I used almost a cup of bread flour to make up the difference. Bread flour is a little heavier than all-purpose so I was worried, but it worked just fine.

Next, it’s time to get the mixing bowl out of the fridge. It should be cool by now, which will help keep the whipping cream cool. Pour the whipping cream into the chilled bowl. If you bought a pint of whipping cream, that’s two cups so you don’t have to measure. Then use a whisk or a fork and beat the whipping cream briskly for about a minute. You’re not trying t

Baked citrus spice fish * what “white fish” is

Dave M’s Citrus Spice Baked Fish

2 white fish fillets

oil for pan

salt and pepper

about 1 Tbsp mayonnaise

1-2 tsp citrus spice mixture (I use Badia Mojo Rub “citrus blend”)

1 tsp garlic powder (if spice mixture isn’t garlicky)

bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Oil a baking sheet lightly. Salt and pepper the fish fillets on both sides. Mix the mayonnaise and spice mixture in a small bowl and spread on the fish (both sides). Mix the bread crumbs with garlic powder (if using) and more salt and pepper if desired, and sprinkle mixture over the mayonnaise. Bake for 15 minutes. Serve immediately.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to cook fish! I don’t eat a lot of fish because I’ve never cared for ocean fish, and until my friend Dave gave me this recipe, I never knew how to reliably cook fresh water fish so that it had consistently good flavor.

Dave lives in Scotland so he uses something called Sumac, which he describes as a citrusy spice. I only know sumac as a poisonous shrub that grows wild on hillsides, and while I’m sure I could order the spice called sumac online, my local Walmart definitely doesn’t carry it. I bought a spice blend called “Badia Mojo Rub Citrus Blend” to use instead and was happy with it. If they want to give me money for advertising their spice blend I will accept it with dignity.

This recipe is really easy. I’ve made it a couple of times now and it turns out great every time. The fish is tender and flavorful and prep time only takes a few minutes.

You’ll need a baking sheet and a small bowl. First, turn on your oven to preheat to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Then rub a little vegetable oil on the baking sheet so the fish won’t stick.

You will also need fish, of course. White fish just means any inexpensive, mild fish. It doesn’t have to be a particular kind. I buy tilapia because it’s a readily available, inexpensive river fish (and I didn’t know it was a river fish until I started fishing them up from rivers in Animal Crossing), but if I can find locally caught trout or catfish I’ll definitely try them too. The recipe also specifies fillets, so don’t get whole fish unless you know how to fillet them. I do not know how to fillet fish. When I was 16 I made a pest of myself asking my uncle Sean to teach me how while my family was at the beach, but he never got around to it. He did teach me how to clean shrimp, though.

Anyway, get out the fish fillets and salt and pepper them on both sides. Then, in your small bowl, mix about a Tablespoonful of mayonnaise with whatever citrus spice or spice blend you have. The citrus is the real trick, because it goes so well with fish and enhances the mild flavor of the meat. The mayo helps the spice stick to the fish and keeps the fish from drying out in the oven.

Spread the mayonnaise mixture on both sides of the fish. I usually just work on the baking sheet, but if you want to put the fish on a plate and then move it to the baking sheet when you’re ready to put it in the oven, that works too. I use the back of a spoon to spread the mixture on the fish.

Next, you will need bread crumbs. I use Panko crumbs because they stay crispy. If the spice mix you used isn’t garlicky, or if you just love lots of garlic, mix about a third of a cup of bread crumbs with about a teaspoonful of garlic powder, and you can also add more salt and pepper if you like. As it happens, the citrus blend I use is nicely garlicky so I don’t mix anything with the Panko. Sprinkle the bread crumb mixture generously over the fish, then flip the pieces over and sprinkle the other side. Then, if the fish isn’t already on the baking sheet, move it there because it’s ready to go. Look how easy that was! The oven may not e

Coconut chocolate chip cookies * how to measure coconut flakes

Coconut chocolate chip cookies

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 c. butter, softened

1/2 c. light brown sugar

1/4 c. white sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 c. sweetened coconut flakes

1 c. chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and lightly grease baking sheets.

Mix dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, cream together egg and sugars until fluffy, then add egg and vanilla and mix well. Add flour mixture to butter mixture alternately with coconut flakes. Mix in chocolate chips. Scoop onto baking sheets and bake 11-13 minutes. Makes about two dozen.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make coconut chocolate chip cookies! It’s been a while since we had a cookie recipe and this one’s really good.

If you’ve listened to our very first episode, you should know the basics of how to make cookies. This recipe is almost the same as that one but with the addition of coconut flakes. Some people hate coconut, but those of us who love it know that it helps retain moisture in a cookie and makes it chewy too.

I have no idea where I got this recipe, but originally I wrote “optional” after the chocolate chips. Then, later, I scratched “optional” out. These cookies are so fantastic with the chocolate chips I can’t imagine leaving them out.

It’s a pretty straightforward recipe. You’ll need a large mixing bowl and a medium mixing bowl, and a couple of cookie sheets. Grease the baking sheets lightly with butter or shortening, then set them aside. Turn the oven on to preheat. In the medium bowl, mix the flour, soda, salt, and cinnamon with a whisk or a fork.

Then, in the large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and both kinds of sugar. Remember that when you measure the brown sugar, you pack it down hard into the measuring cup.

Once the butter and sugars are thoroughly combined and the mixture is creamy, add the egg and vanilla and mix well. Then add part of the flour mixture to it and mix it in well. The recipe says to alternate adding the flour mixture and the coconut, but honestly, you can combine the flour mixture with the butter mixture and then add the coconut.

But wait, how do you measure the coconut? Is it like brown sugar where you pack it down, or is it like flour where you scoop it into the cup lightly and level off the top?

You measure flaked coconut like you do flour. Scoop it into the measuring cup, press it down very lightly and add more if you need to, then level it off. Then just dump it into the batter and mix it in well.

I’ve made this recipe using sweetened coconut and I’ve made this recipe using unsweetened coconut, and I’ve made this recipe using a mixture of the two. I usually use a mixture, but all three work just fine and the cookies are plenty sweet. Just use whatever you have. Make sure to seal the rest of package of coconut well or put it in an airtight container so it doesn’t dry out before you use it again.

Once you’ve mixed in the coconut and flour mixture and combined it all thoroughly, add the chocolate chips and mix well again. Then you’re all set to bake your cookies. I try to make these fairly small, but if you like big cookies that’s fine too. Scoop batter up with a spoon and drop on the cookie sheet, leaving an inch or two between cookies since they’ll spread a bit as they cook. Then pop the pan into the oven and set the timer for eleven minutes.

In my oven, with fairly small cookies, eleven minutes does the trick. If you make your cookies bigger or if your oven tends to run a bit cool, you might need another minute or two. When they’re done, the coo

Fajitas

yellow onion, sliced

green pepper, sliced

boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced into strips

fajita seasoning (about 2-3 Tbsp per pound of meat)

Preheat oven to 375 Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with foil and coat with nonstick spray.

Arrange onion slices in a single layer on one side of the pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss chicken slices with fajita seasoning and arrange in a single layer on the other side of the pan.

Bake 15 minutes, remove, add bell pepper, and give it all a stir before spreading back out into a single layer, as much as possible. Bake another ten minutes.

Serve on flour tortillas with shredded cheese, sour cream, and guacamole.

Fajita seasoning recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/232967/fajita-seasoning/

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make fajitas! This is my cousin Molly’s recipe, which only requires a single sheet pan.

This recipe is so easy that it doesn’t seem possible the results are so good. Molly says she got sick of having to clean out the skillet every time she wanted fajitas, and worked out this method. Since she gave me the recipe I’ve made it multiple times, and I’m sure you could adapt it to use other types of meat.

You’ll need some fajita seasoning. I’ve linked to a recipe to mix your own seasoning in the show notes, but you can buy it prepared too. If you make your own, just put it in a clean screwtop bottle and it’ll last you quite a while. I used an empty spice bottle that I washed out and dried well. It’s so easy to put together that I decided to just link to the recipe. I mean, literally all you have to do is mix everything together with a fork and pour it into a bottle. The hardest part is pouring it without spilling it everywhere, which is why getting a little food-safe funnel is such a good idea.

Anyway, for this recipe you’ll only need a baking sheet. That’s it. Line the sheet with aluminum foil and coat it with nonstick spray. This is one time when I prefer the spray to greasing by hand, but if you don’t have any of the spray you can coat it with vegetable oil instead. Make sure to grease it all the way to the edges.

Turn the oven on to 375 if you haven’t already, then get your cutting board out. Slice up a yellow onion and a green pepper, and of course you can use other kinds of chili pepper too if you like. Slicing the vegetables into thin strips is traditional, but if you prefer to dice them you can do that too.

Then you need to slice the chicken into strips. This is easiest to do with a pair of kitchen shears if you don’t have a really sharp knife. If you’re using the pieces of breast meat often sold as tenders, you can just cut them into two or three strips. I haven’t tried this with thigh meat but it should work just fine too. Don’t slice your pieces too thin, though. I did that the first time and while they were still great, the meat was a little overcooked. Remember that the meat will lose moisture as it cooks and will shrink.

You can go ahead and arrange the onion slices on the pan, but only put them on half the pan. You need to keep the other half empty so you can add the chicken in a little bit. Arrange the onion in a single layer, not piled up, and shake a generous amount of salt and pepper over it. That’s black pepper, not hot pepper.

Next, you need to toss the chicken in the fajita seasoning to coat it. The easiest way to do this is in a small paper bag, like the kind they sell for sack lunches. You can use a plastic bag if you have to, but the chicken sticks to the sides. If you don’t have anything else you can put the chicken and the spice mix in a bowl with a lid and shake the bowl, but a paper sack is best because you can shake it vigorously. Drop the chicken in first, then spoon t

Fried Squash

Squash

1/2 c. milk or buttermilk

1 egg

1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 c. cornmeal

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/8 tsp garlic powder

1/8 tsp onion powder

1/8 tsp paprika

Oil for skillet

In a small bowl, combine the milk and egg with a whisk or fork. Scrub the vegetables clean and cut off the stems and bottoms. Slice very thin and put slices in the milk and egg mixture to soak. In another bowl, combine the other ingredients. Put enough oil in the bottom of a skillet to cover it well and heat to medium high.

Retrieve the squash pieces from the milk mixture, then dredge in the flour mixture to coat. Shake off excess flour mixture. Fry the slices, flipping once, until they are golden brown on both sides. You may need to add more oil to the skillet depending on how many you have to fry. As you remove pieces to drain on a paper towel, sprinkle with salt. Serve hot.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re finally going to learn how to make fried squash.

It’s made by slicing the squash thin, battering the pieces, and frying them until they’re slightly crispy on the outside and tender inside. They make a great side dish or main course. It’s the same batter and method you use to fry green tomatoes and okra, but we’ll just focus on the squash.

You can use any squash for this recipe, including zucchini, but I like yellow squash because it’s so easy to grow that people give it away in piles as summer progresses and the squash plants get bigger and more aggressive. A few small squashes will make a lot of fried squash, too.

Once you have your vegetables, you’ll need two small bowls, a skillet, and a plate lined with paper towels.

In the first bowl, mix the egg and milk well, until the yolk is incorporated into the milk and the mixture is pale yellow and a little foamy. It’s easiest to use a whisk to do this, but I usually just use a fork. You can use buttermilk for this recipe if you have it, but you can also use regular milk.

Then give your vegetables a scrub if they’re dirty, or at least rinse them off. Then slice off and discard the stems and the bottom stub where the flower was. Then slice the rest of the vegetable up very thin. You don’t need to be able to read a newspaper through them or anything, but they should be thin. If they’re too thick they won’t cook all the way through.

After you slice the pieces, dump them in the bowl with the milk mixture. They probably won’t all fit, depending on how much you’re making, but this is a good way to keep them out of the way without them drying out.

In the second bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, and spices. The amounts I listed in the recipe are just suggestions—I never measure the salt, pepper, and so forth, and just make sure I use the same amount of flour as I do cornmeal. You want generous amounts of the spices, though. If you’re only frying up one or two small squash, you can halve the dry ingredients because you’ll have plenty even so.

Next, pour a generous amount of oil into the skillet and turn the heat to about medium. You want more oil than you would use if you were frying meat or sauteeing onions. Cover the bottom with oil to about the depth of one of the vegetable slices you just cut, or a little less. I use olive oil but it doesn’t matter what kind you use. If you want to deep-fry your vegetables, you can add more, but oil is so expensive that I hate to waste it when shallow frying is just as good.

While the skillet is heating, set a plate next to the stove and line it with a few thicknesses of paper towel. You might also want to set out the serving dish you intend to use so you can move the cooked and drained pieces to it as you work. You’ll be frying these in batches.

Before you do anything

Vanilla crepes * buttercream crepe filling * strawberry buttercream icing * stewing fruit

Vanilla Crepes

1 1/2 c. milk

2 eggs

1 Tbsp vanilla

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

3 Tbsp powdered sugar

1/2 tsp salt

3 or 4 Tbsp butter, melted

Combine ingredients in a large bowl and mix well, until batter is smooth. Cover and chill for about an hour. Lightly butter a crepe pan or skillet and heat to medium low. Pour about 1/4 cup batter into the skillet, swirl to coat, then cook over low to medium low heat for a few minutes per side. Fill and top with fruit, powdered sugar, buttercream, whipped cream, etc.

Buttercream crepe filling:

4 oz cream cheese

3 Tbsp butter

1/2 c. powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Cream butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add vanilla and powdered sugar and blend well.

Peach Topping:

2-4 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced

1-2 Tbsp sugar

1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon

In a small pot, combine peach slices with sugar and cinnamon. If peaches are not very sweet, add a little more sugar. Simmer on medium low, stirring frequently, for about half an hour. Use as topping for crepes or other desserts.

Strawberry Cream Cheese Icing:

1 c. fresh strawberries, hulled and cut up

1 Tbsp sugar

1/2 c. unsalted butter

8 oz cream cheese

1 tsp vanilla

about 2 1/2 c. powdered sugar

In a small pot, mix strawberries, sugar, and a few spoonfuls of water. Simmer on medium low, stirring frequently, for about half an hour. Add more water if it appears dry. Set aside to cool.

Cream the butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add strawberry mixture and vanilla and blend well. Add powdered sugar slowly while beating until mixture is smooth and of the desired consistency.

Makes enough to ice a two-layer cake.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make several delicious things, including vanilla crepes and strawberry buttercream icing. It all fits together, you’ll see.

2020 may be a horrible year in many ways, but the peaches available where I live have been amazing! I’ve made all my peach recipes to take advantage of this happy event, and have also eaten a lot of peaches while standing over the sink, juice dripping down my arm. So earlier this week I decided to use my last two peaches to make a topping for vanilla crepes.

Also earlier this week there was the whole cake meme going around online. If you’re listening to this after July 2020 you probably don’t even remember it, but for the better part of a week everyone online has been doing the whole “cut into an object, reveal it’s a cake inside” thing. Naturally enough, it made me crave cake, so I made one. The cake itself turned out to be kind of disappointing, but the strawberry buttercream icing I made for it is fantastic, plus it’s made almost the same way I make the filling and topping for the crepes. So it makes sense to put all these recipes together in one big episode.

We’ll start with the crepes. I’ve eaten amazing crepes in Paris and I’ve eaten terrible crepes at IHOP, and I think my crepes are closer to the Paris ones than the IHOP ones. They’re also really easy to make.

You’ll need a medium mixing bowl and a skillet. If you happen to have an actual crepe pan, lucky you, but most of us are ordinary people who don’t have room in their kitchen cabinets for specialized pans, so an ordinary skillet will do. A crepe pan mainly just has really shallow sides at an angle that makes it easier to get your spatula under the edges of a crepe without tearing it up.

Mix all the ingredients together in the mixing bowl until it’s as free of lumps as possible. Then stick the bowl in th

Summer Fruit Cobbler

Filling:

¼ c water

2 Tbsp cornstarch

2 Tbsp lemon juice

¼ to ½ c sugar

4 c fresh blackberries and/or other berries, and/or soft fruit such as peaches (peeled and sliced)

Topping:

1 ½ c all-purpose flour

1/3 c sugar

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

6 Tbsp butter

1/3 c milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut in butter.

In a large saucepan, mix cornstarch and water until smooth, then add lemon juice, sugar to taste, and fresh fruit. Heat to a boil, stirring, then pour into a 9x9 or larger dish.

Add milk to the topping mixture and blend until just combined. Roll out like biscuit dough and cut into rounds. Place rounds on top of the fruit mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until topping is done through. Allow to cool somewhat before eating.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make a cobbler! Technically it’s a blackberry cobbler but you can use pretty much any kind of summer fruit. I’ve never tried it with apples or pears, but my guess is you would need to cook them longer on the stove over medium heat until they soften before putting them into the baking dish. The baking is basically just to cook the topping, so it isn’t in the oven long enough to fully cook harder fruit like apples.

I don’t make this recipe often because if I have the berries, I’d rather make a berry pie, which was an episode I released last summer. But a lot of people love cobbler. A cobbler has a layer of fruit filling topped with pieces of sweet dough. This recipe has a relatively thin layer of fruit, but be careful if you use more fruit than the recipe calls for because your pan may overflow in the oven while it bakes.

You’ll need a 9x9 baking dish, or a 9x13 baking dish if you’re using more than four cups of fruit, a large mixing bowl, and a pot big enough to hold all the fruit. What kind of berries you use is up to you, but blackberries are traditional. This time I used about a cup of blackberries, a cup of raspberries, and two cups of blueberries that I bought, since the blackberry and raspberry harvest isn’t very good this year in my usual spots and I didn’t get as many as I hoped when I went out picking. You can use soft fruit for this too, such as peaches or plums.

Start with the large mixing bowl. Mix the dry ingredients of the topping together: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut the butter in until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Then set the bowl aside.

Next, take the pot and dissolve the cornstarch into the water and lemon juice. It should only take a few moments to mix it up, although you will have to fight with the cornstarch at first because it wants to make a solid hard lump in the water that takes some scraping with a fork or whisk to break up. Once you’ve done that, you need to add the fruit to the pot.

If you use soft fruit, peel and slice it into the pot. If you use berries, give them a rinse and pick them over to remove any leaves or bugs, then pour them into the pot. Stir them up with the cornstarch mixture, then add the sugar.

How much sugar you add will depend on what kind of fruit you use. I recommend going with less sugar than you think you might need, since the topping is sweetened and it’s easy to overdo it with this recipe. Too much sugar will overwhelm the flavor of the fruit. If you use all wild blackberries, you might want to up the sugar to half a cup, since wild blackberries are not usually very sweet. If you use blueberries or soft fruit like peaches, you definitely don’t want more than a quarter cup of sugar. Pour the sugar over the fruit and mix it up well.

At this point, turn the oven

Beef stew * how to clean and use turnips and parsnips

Beef Stew

1 or 2 lbs beef, cut up

about ½ c flour

salt and pepper

thyme

1 onion, diced

carrots, sliced

potatoes, peeled and cut up

turnips, diced (optional)

celery, sliced (optional)

stock or water

In a small bowl, mix the flour with some salt and pepper and use it to dredge the meat. Put some oil in a large pot and brown the meat along with the diced onion. When the meat is browned and the onions mostly translucent, add 4-6 cups of stock, broth, or water. Add the chopped vegetables, bring to a boil, turn heat down to low, and simmer. Add more salt and dried thyme.

Simmer, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are tender. To thicken, mix about a teaspoon of corn starch or flour with a cup of the stew’s broth and return it to the pot. Stir it well, bring back to a boil, and turn heat off. Stew will thicken as it cools.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make beef stew.

I don’t eat a lot of beef these days. It’s too expensive, for one thing, it’s not that good for you, and cattle ranches contribute to a lot of environmental issues like deforestation of the Amazon and other areas. But occasionally I just really want to make beef stew, because it’s one of my favorite recipes and one of the first ones I ever made.

When I was in high school, specifically tenth grade, a friend of my mom’s hired me to pet sit for a week in the summer. She had a cat and a tiny dog which was actually smaller than the cat, and they were good friends. I would go over and spend hours every day in the fenced yard, letting the animals play together while I read in the shade. And mostly what I read was my mom’s friend’s cookbooks. When I found a recipe I wanted to try, I would copy it carefully into a spiral notebook. The only recipe I specifically remember is this one. Except that it wasn’t beef stew, it was lamb stew, with beef suggested as an option if lamb wasn’t available. So if you can get your hands on a good cut of lamb, it should work great instead of beef. I love lamb and mutton but it’s really hard to find where I live.

Anyway, you’ll need a small bowl and a big pot for this recipe. How big a pot is up to you, but like all stews and soups this recipe is really flexible and you can make as much as your pot will hold. You also don’t have to have a lot of meat. I found a half-pound package of stew beef and used it in an enormous pot, and it’s still rich and tasty.

By the way, you don’t actually have to buy meat labeled as stew beef. Any cut of beef will do. I mean, don’t use ground hamburger, but you can certainly use a little piece of chuck roast or anything else. You cut it up yourself and it’s easy. I’ll go over that in a minute.

The vegetables you use in this recipe are flexible too. I always use lots of carrots and potatoes, but I really like to add a turnip or two if I can get them. Turnips and parsnips are criminally under-utilized in my part of the United States—that would be the southeast—so they’re expensive here and can be hard to find, just like lamb. But both are great in this recipe. Celery is good in it, of course you’ll need onions, and if you just want to use up some bits and pieces of leftover veggies, toss them in.

The first thing you’ll want to do is dice your onion. Then pour a little oil into your pot and add the diced onion, but don’t turn the heat on just yet. Take the small bowl and mix flour, salt, and pepper to make seasoned flour. You’ll dredge your meat in this just like we talked about in the chicken and dumplings episode.

Now, get your beef out. If you bought stew beef that’s already cut up, you’re still going to want to cut it up smaller and trim off any gristle. If you bought a piece of beef t

Chicken pecan quiche * pie crust *

Chicken Pecan Quiche

½ to 1 c cooked chicken, chopped

1 ½ shredded Cheddar cheese

¼ c onion, diced

1 Tbsp flour

½ c chopped pecans, divided

3 eggs

1 c milk

1 tsp brown mustard

salt and pepper

about ¼ c vegetables, chopped small (broccoli florets, green pepper, etc.)

Swiss cheese slices

Pie crust:

¾ c all-purpose flour

¾ c whole wheat flour

½ tsp salt

½ c fat

4-5 Tbsp ice water

Grease the bottom and sides of a deep-dish pie plate. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix the flours and salt in a mixing bowl and cut the fat in until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add enough ice water to make a firm dough. Do not overmix. Roll the dough out thin, fold in quarters, and place in the pie dish. Trim edges and prick the bottom of the pie crust all over with the tines of a fork. Bake for about eight minutes, remove, and set aside.

Saute onions in a little oil while the pastry is baking. If you are using fresh broccoli or green pepper, saute with the onions until tender. Once the pie crust is out, place slices of Swiss cheese in the bottom of the pie to roughly cover the bottom. Turn the oven down to 325 degrees.

In a medium bowl mix the chicken, shredded cheese, sauteed onions, flour, and half the pecans. Pour into the pie crust over the Swiss cheese. Then beat the eggs well with the milk, and add mustard, salt and pepper, and broccoli. Pour over the chicken layer and top with the remaining pecans.

Bake at 325 for 50 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chicken pecan quiche.

I have no idea where I got this recipe. I’ve had it written down for a long time but only tried it recently, and it’s phenomenal! It’s a great way to use a small amount of leftover chicken, too. The recipe calls for a full cup of chicken, but I only had a scant half cup and it worked out just fine.

This is basically a quiche, which means it’s rich but doesn’t feel heavy. The crust is the best part and really makes the dish, so while it is a little bit of a hassle to roll out dough, it’s absolutely worth it. You can use a ready-made crust, but make sure it’s not sweetened and that it’s a deep-dish crust.

You will need a big mixing bowl, a skillet, and a deep-dish pie plate for this recipe. Before you do anything else, you need to do some prep. If you want to add vegetables to the dish to add color and flavor, get them out now and chop them up small. I’ve made this recipe twice and both times used frozen broccoli. The first time I thawed it, the second time I forgot but cut the frozen florets up tiny with a pair of kitchen shears, and both methods worked fine. Dice the onion and cut some thin slices of Swiss cheese, unless you’re using pre-sliced Swiss. If your chicken pieces aren’t already shredded or cut up small, do that now.

Measure out your pecans and break them into smaller pieces if you need to. Pecans are usually sold as “halves and pieces,” and you want the pieces for this recipe. It takes a few minutes to break the halves in two or three pieces, so do this ahead of time. Or just use pecan halves, I don’t care.

Next, grease the pie plate well and set it aside. Then measure out your dry ingredients for the pastry. This recipe calls for half all-purpose flour and half whole-wheat flour, which makes the pastry more robust and toothsome than if it’s made of only all-purpose flour, but if you don’t have whole wheat flour you can use all-purpose. Bread flour works well in this recipe too. Incidentally, this pastry recipe is a good one to keep on hand for any recipe that calls for a savory pie crust. It makes enough to easily line the bottom of a deep-dish pie plate

Caramel Brownies * using a cake mix in a recipe * using evaporated milk * melting caramel

Caramel Brownies

1 German chocolate cake mix

1 1/2 sticks melted butter

1/3 c evaporated milk

1 c pecans, chopped

1 bag caramels, unwrapped

another 1/3 c evaporated milk

12 oz chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 9x13 pan.

Melt the butter and stir in the evaporated milk, pecans, and cake mix. Spread about half of the mixture in the pan and bake for exactly six minutes. Melt the caramels and 1/3 c evaporated milk together (it takes 3 minutes in the microwave). As soon as the six minutes of baking are up, remove the pan from the oven and immediately pour the chocolate chips over the top, then pour the caramel mixture over them. Drop the remaining cake mixture over it all. Bake another 15 minutes exactly and remove from oven. Do not overbake; mixture will look underdone when first removed from oven. Cool completely before cutting. Brownies will be soft inside after they have cooled.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Caramel Brownies.

This recipe is one that calls for a cake mix. I don’t usually like using cake mixes in recipes. For one thing, it feels like cheating, and for another, sometimes it just doesn’t taste as good as homemade and it’s certainly more expensive. But it occurs to me that some listeners who are new cooks may not know how to use a cake mix in a recipe.

This is another recipe I got from a coworker many, many years ago, in this case a woman named Alice. I was so enthusiastic about these brownies when she brought them in for a company potluck that I begged her for the recipe. I was still a new cook at the time and the recipe sounded so complicated that I never tried making it—until now, when I found it in my recipe box. And it’s not really complicated at all.

For this recipe you’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small bowl you can microwave, and a 9x13 pan. You’re also going to need a German chocolate cake mix, and it doesn’t matter what brand you get. Make sure it’s specifically German chocolate, not just chocolate, because you need that cocoa flavor from German chocolate cake mix to make the brownies taste like brownies.

You’ll also need a bag of caramels. Alice didn’t specify how big a bag, so I bought the only bag I could find in my local grocery store. I didn’t keep the package but I think it was about 12 ounces or so, certainly not a big bag. These are the little square soft caramels that are wrapped individually in cellophane. I think you can buy them unwrapped for baking these days, but if you buy the wrapped ones, as soon as you get a minute, open the package, unwrap all the caramels, and store the caramels in a plastic baggie. That makes them a lot easier to use them later, and in fact my recipe has a note that says “this takes forever so do it first.” The hardest part is not snacking on them as you unwrap them.

You’ll also need evaporated milk, and Alice helpfully pointed out that the small can you can buy in the baking aisle has exactly 2/3 of a cup in it. This is the little bitty can, not the 12 oz can. It’s also evaporated milk, not condensed. Be careful because the two are sold side by side and it’s easy to grab the wrong thing.

So, you’ve got all your ingredients together and unwrapped your caramels. Before you do anything else, cut the top off the chocolate chip bag and set it somewhere where it won’t spill but you can grab it easily. Once the pan goes into the oven for the first bake, time is of the essence and you don’t want to have to stop and find the scissors to open that bag.

Then turn the oven on to preheat and grease the 9x13 cake pan. I use my Pyrex pan but metal is fine too.

Put the butter into the large mixing bowl

Sweet potato casserole * how to bake a sweet potato

Sweet Potato Casserole

3 c. cooked sweet potatoes, mashed (about 3 15-oz cans, drained)

1 c. sugar

¼ c. milk

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon or allspice (or ½ tsp each)

Topping:

½ c. butter, melted

1 c. brown sugar

½ c. all-purpose flour

1 c. pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Grease a 9x9 baking dish or casserole. Mix sweet potatoes with sugar, milk, egg, salt, vanilla, and spices, mix well, and pour into baking dish. Mix the topping and spread on the sweet potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sweet potato casserole! This was an episode I had planned to run last November in the run-up to Thanksgiving, but you know what? You can have sweet potatoes whenever you like, not just at Thanksgiving.

Sweet potatoes are really easy to make and are a great accompaniment to a mild meat like turkey or chicken, or a salty meat like ham. This recipe is sweet without that gooey over-the-top marshmallow topping many people use, and the pecans give the dish a pleasant texture.

The easiest way to make sweet potato casserole is to use canned sweet potatoes. These are almost always marketed as yams but they’re the same thing as the whole sweet potatoes you can buy in the produce section as far as I know. But if you prefer to start with whole sweet potatoes instead of canned, I’ll give you directions for that too.

You’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small mixing bowl or large cereal bowl, and a casserole dish or something similar. I use a round Pyrex casserole dish but you can use a 9x9 pan. Grease it well and set it aside.

I’ll go over the canned sweet potato version of the recipe first because it’s so simple. You need about three cups of sweet potato, so either buy three of the smaller 15-oz cans or one big 29-oz can and one 15-oz can. Open the cans and drain them, then dump the potatoes into a big mixing bowl.

You’ll notice that the sweet potatoes are already peeled. They’re also already cooked. You just need to mash them. Use a fork, and don’t try to get them creamy smooth like regular mashed potatoes. You want your sweet potatoes to have more of a chunky texture than regular mashed potatoes. Mash them up good with the fork, breaking each piece up. You also want to remove any discolored or bruised areas and especially the tough fibers. Sweet potatoes are fibrous, especially at the ends, and those fibers are unpleasant to chew and hard to swallow—sort of like the string of a string bean. Don’t worry about the little bitty fibers, but fish out the longer pieces you notice or any mats of fiber.

Once the pieces are all mushed up reasonably well, you just dump all the rest of the ingredients on top of them and mix the whole thing up really well.

But let’s back up again and go over directions for baking your sweet potatoes from scratch. It’s easiest to do this in the microwave one at a time, and you can do it in advance.

First, you’re going to need to buy some sweet potatoes. Choose medium-sized ones, neither gigantic nor tiny. Sweet potatoes are funky in shape compared to regular potatoes, but choose ones that are roughly the size of a regular potato that you’d want to eat as a jacket potato. You’re going to want four or five of them at this size. Don’t think you can buy two gigantic ones instead, because a lot of times those really big ones have started to get woody inside. You can use really big or really small ones if that’s all you’ve got, but it’s easier to work with medium-sized ones. Try to choose sweet potatoes that aren’t too blemished, although it’s hard to find them that are perfect.

Give each potato a scrub in co

Spicy turkey meatloaf * how to make a substitute for bread crumbs

Spicy Turkey Meatloaf

oil for sauteeing

2 carrots, chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 lb ground turkey

2 eggs

1 c bread crumbs

¼ c milk

1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp ground nutmeg

½ c ketchup (plus more for garnish)

Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit.

Saute the carrots, onion, celery, and green pepper in a little olive oil or butter until the onions are mostly translucent and the other vegetables are starting to get tender, about five minutes. Add garlic and saute another minute. Put in very large mixing bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix until well blended. Shape into a loaf and place in a 9x13” pan. Top with extra pieces of green pepper and drizzle with more ketchup.

Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes. Let stand ten minutes before serving.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make spicy turkey meatloaf. It’s really easy and makes a huge amount of food that doesn’t get boring—in fact, it gets even better after the first day as the flavors mingle.

You’ll need a really big mixing bowl, a skillet, and a 9x13 pan, because this makes a lot of meatloaf. Don’t try to make it in a bread loaf pan—it just won’t fit.

The first thing to do is chop up your vegetables. Dice your onion, chop your celery and carrots into pennies, mince the garlic, and slice the green pepper in half and dice one half of it to add. If you don’t know how to clean a green pepper, you can listen to the baked beans recipe, but basically you just cut the stem off and remove the seeds, then use the rest of the pepper. My mom always kept some green pepper slices to garnish the top of her meatloaf and I do this too. It looks nice. So take the second half of the green pepper and cut it into slices so you have half-rings of green pepper.

Next, put a little oil in the skillet and turn the heat to medium low. Then add the onions, carrots, and celery, plus the diced half of the green pepper, and saute for about five minutes until the onions start to turn translucent. That means they’re cooked enough that they will contribute their flavor to the meatloaf without taking over. Then add the minced garlic and saute for one more minute. Then turn the stove off and shovel all the sauteed vegetables into the big mixing bowl.

This is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Next, add the ketchup, the milk, the Worcestershire sauce, and the spices, including salt and pepper. Mix that up well, then add the eggs and mix them in well too. Then add the bread crumbs. I use Panko crumbs because they don’t get soggy, but you can use other types of dried bread crumbs. I can never find the bread crumbs in the store without a hunt, and then I forget where I found them, but Panko crumbs will be on the same shelf. Maybe try the salad dressing aisle. Don’t just crumble up a piece of bread and think that’ll work—it’ll turn into goo as soon as it gets wet. Maybe one day I’ll cover how to make your own bread crumbs, but for now, if you don’t have any, you can crush up some crackers or salad croutons and use those instead. To crush the crackers or croutons, you can put them in a clean paper bag, roll the top closed, and press down on the bag with a rolling pin or something else that’s reasonably heavy and easy to handle, although not breakable. The bag will probably end up tearing, especially if you’re me, but it will hold up to the crushing better than even a heavy-duty plastic bag will.

Once you have all this mixed up well, you will think it looks pretty unappetizing, and you haven’t even added the meat yet

Sally Lunn bread * yeast * letting bread rise

Sally Lunn Bread

1 ½ c flour

1/3 c sugar

1 envelope rapid rise/quick-rise or instant yeast

½ tsp salt

½ c water

½ c milk

½ c salted butter (one stick), cut into pieces

3 eggs (room temperature)

About 2 ½ c more flour

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl (flour, sugar, yeast, and salt). In a medium bowl, heat water, milk, and butter until butter is melted and mixture is hot but not boiling. Add to dry ingredients. Mix in eggs and enough flour to make a dough about the consistency of biscuit dough.

Cover and set aside ten minutes, then beat well for about a minute. Spoon into a greased tube pan, cover, and let rise another hour, or until doubled in size. Bake at 325 Fahrenheit for 40 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Sally Lunn bread. This is a rich, delicious yeast bread made in a tube pan that doesn’t require kneading, so it’s a good introduction to making bread.

You can’t use any old yeast for this recipe, though. You have to use a type that’s specified quick-rise, rapid-rise, or instant. It should be plainly marked so you don’t have to guess. If it doesn’t say something like quick-rise on the packet in nice big letters, you don’t have the right yeast.

Other than that, the recipe is pretty straightforward. You will need one big mixing bowl and a tube pan or Bundt pan. You’ll also need a small mixing bowl that you can microwave.

First, grease the tube pan and set it aside. Then get out your big mixing bowl and mix the first cup and a half of flour, the yeast, sugar, and salt. Set that aside too. You can use all-purpose or bread flour, or if you have whole wheat flour you can use it for up to half the called-for flour. Of course you could use whole wheat flour for all the flour, but it tends to make a dense, robust loaf and Sally Lunn bread is meant to be light, more like a brioche or tea cake.

Next, cut up a stick of butter and put the pieces in the small mixing bowl. I usually use salted butter for this recipe. Add the water and milk and stick it in the microwave for 30-second bursts until the butter is mostly melted and the liquid is hot. You can do this in a small saucepan on the stove if you don’t have a microwave, but be really really careful that you don’t let the mixture get so hot it starts boiling. You’ll be adding this to the flour mixture and you don’t want to kill off your yeast.

See, yeast is alive. It’s a fungus that’s dormant when dry, but add moisture, heat, and some form of sugar and it becomes active and starts doing its thing. Its thing, in this case, is to consume sugar and release carbon dioxide, which is what makes bread rise. But if it gets too hot, it dies. You don’t want it to die until, you know, later.

So, add the melted butter mixture to the flour mixture and blend it in. This is where you’ll notice the difference between making yeast bread and making quick bread, which is the term for bread made with baking powder or soda. As you mix, you can actually see the dough expanding as the yeast activates. You’ll also notice the pleasant smell of fresh bread and a faint smell sort of like beer, which is actually the smell of the yeast.

You also need to add the eggs and the rest of the flour. This is why you want to use eggs that are room temperature. If you use eggs that are cold from the fridge, you’ll cool the yeast and it’s most active when it’s nice and warm. You can use cold eggs, of course, but if you can remember to take three eggs out of the fridge a few hours before you plan to make bread, even better.

So, add the eggs and mix them in well. Then start adding flour. I’ve tinkered with the amounts and can verify that you should add two and a half cups at this

Vanilla extract

Several vanilla pods

Vodka

A clean jar with a close-fitting lid

Cut up the vanilla pods into pieces about an inch long and put them in the jar. Pour vodka into the jar. Close the lid up tight and place the jar in a cupboard. Give it a shake every week or so. After approximately three months, the vanilla should be ready to use. Do not remove the pieces of vanilla bean pods.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make vanilla extract! You may think it’s hard, but it’s so easy that I’m releasing this as a little bonus episode since it’s so short.

You have to use alcohol for this. No other liquid will work. The extract you buy in the store is also made with alcohol, although imitation vanilla is not.

The hardest part is buying some vanilla beans, more properly called pods. They’re expensive. You can get them at some grocery stores, especially the fancier ones, but I always order them online. Expect to pay about three dollars per pod minimum, but you only need three or four to make enough vanilla extract to last you a solid four years or so. I don’t know enough about types of vanilla beans to know which tastes like what, but there are various varieties. I shop by price and it all works just fine. This time I got Tahitian vanilla beans, last time I think I got Madagascar. Next time I’ll probably try Mexican. You can buy grade B beans for this; they work great for extract and are less expensive than grade A beans, usually because they’re smaller or blemished in some way.

You also need some vodka. I use Tito’s vodka because it’s reasonably priced, good quality vodka that’s readily available, but it doesn’t really matter. Just don’t use a flavored vodka, because the point of the vodka is to be as neutral a medium as possible to carry the vanilla flavor.

And finally, you’ll need a jar with a lid that closes up tight. Don’t reuse an empty bottle of vanilla extract because it’s way too small. I use a small mason jar intended for canning, which works just fine and is inexpensive. Give it a quick wash to make sure it doesn’t contain any dust, then dry it carefully so no water remains inside.

Once you have everything together, it will take you approximately three minutes to prepare your extract. Oh, you’ll also need clean kitchen shears. Open the package of vanilla beans, which of course aren’t actually beans but a skinny pod containing lots of teeny seeds. The pods are almost always dried and don’t look like much. They may not even smell all that great, although the smell is definitely vanilla.

Use your kitchen shears to cut the pods into pieces about an inch long, and put all the pieces into the jar. Yes, even the top piece which is obviously the end of a stem. Put it all into the jar.

If you happen to get your hands on vanilla pods that aren’t dried, you’ll need to flatten the pods and cut them in half lengthwise, then cut them into pieces. Everything else is the same.

Then, pour vodka into the jar. It doesn’t really matter how much you add. Fill the jar if you like, although not to the tippy top. Leave some room.

Next, screw the lid on tightly and put the jar in a cupboard where it will be dark and at room temperature. Leave it there for three months, but every week or so give the jar a shake. At the end of three months, you have vanilla extract. Use it just like the expensive stuff you buy in the baking aisle.

Don’t take the pieces of vanilla pod out. Leave them in and they’ll continue to infuse into the vodka, making the extract stronger and more aromatic the longer they remain. They won’t spoil because they’re in vodka.

You can use other alcohol for this too, but it will change the flavor of the vanilla slightly. Whatever alcohol you use, it should be at least 70 proo

Chicken and dumplings * dredging meat * how to remove chicken meat from the bone * making chicken stock

Chicken and Dumplings

All-purpose flour, salt, and pepper (for dredging)

Chicken thighs or quarters, skin removed

1 onion, diced

carrots, chopped

celery, chopped

chicken stock

about ½ c cream or half and half

Dumplings:

1 ¾ c all-purpose flour

¼ c cornmeal (or use 2 c flour instead)

½ tsp baking powder

dash salt

2 Tbsp butter

about ¾ c milk

In a small bowl, mix about ¼ c flour with some salt and pepper. Set aside. Put some oil or butter in the bottom of a large pot and heat to medium-high. Add half the diced onions and saute briefly. Then dredge chicken pieces in seasoned flour and add to the pot. Brown, then remove from pot and put the rest of the onions and the vegetables in the pot instead. Saute for a few minutes, then add plenty of stock (you can top up with water if needed), salt, pepper, and any other seasonings desired. Cover and simmer for about 20 minutes. Uncover, remove chicken again, and use two forks to remove meat from bones and shred. Return meat to pot and add about half a cup of cream or half and half.

For dumplings, combine dry ingredients and cut in butter. Add milk just to combine, roll out thin, cut into strips, and drop strips into pot. Allow to simmer another ten minutes or so, stirring occasionally.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chicken and dumplings.

Uh, yeah, I disappeared for the better part of a year. Sorry about that. Last August I realized that I didn’t have time to do two podcasts so I just stopped this one. But you know what I have right now in plentitude? Time. Yes, like many people I am working from home and social distancing and self-isolating and everything else to help stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus. But what I am mostly doing is a lot of cooking. So I thought it might be nice to resurrect Real Life Cooking, at least for now. Let’s call this season two.

I can’t promise a regular publishing schedule, but we’ll see. Also, for me it’s editing episodes that takes so much time, so I’m going to go light on taking out breaths and room noises and so forth. I don’t think most people are bothered by things like that anyway, just me. So let’s go.

Chicken and dumplings is a great way to stretch a small amount of meat into a really big meal that’s also tasty and filling, and it doesn’t require any expensive or hard to find ingredients. You will need some flour, which can be hard to come by at the moment. You can use any kind of flour, though, from cake flour to bread flour, so just use what you have on hand.

Not only that, but I’m going to explain how you make stock in this episode. It’s time consuming but, yeah. Time is no longer in short supply, but chicken stock is.

For this recipe you will need a large pot, the larger the better. I made this recipe three times in my first month of quarantine and the last time I got out my biggest pot, doubled the recipe, and made a ton of really good food that I can eat all week. You’ll also need a small bowl, a large mixing bowl, and a clean dry surface to roll out the dumplings. If you want to make stock too, you’ll need another large pot, but how large depends on how much stock you want to make.

The first thing to do is chop your vegetables. Scrape or peel the carrots, rinse, and chop into pennies. Toss the carrot tops, any rejected pieces, and even the peels if you like into another big pot for stock. Cut the tops and bottoms off your celery stalks and toss the cut off pieces into the stock pot for later too. Basically you just want to use the thick green part of the celery stalk, not the skinny tops that sometimes have little leaves, and not the

4 eggs

¼ c. milk

½ c. diced/shredded ham (or cooked bacon or sausage)

½ c shredded cheese, plus a handful more

salt and pepper

fresh basil, torn into pieces

small tomato, chopped and most seeds removed

Preheat oven to 350. In a medium bowl, beat eggs and milk together until frothy. Add milk, ham, ½ c. cheese, tomato, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour into a greased pie plate or 9” cake pan. Bake for 20 minutes, then add the basil and extra handful of cheese on top and bake another 5-10 minutes, until browning at the edges and pulling away from the pan.

You can double this recipe. If you do, increase the milk to ¾ cup and bake for 40-50 minutes total.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this is our Patreon episode for June 2019!

This month we’re going to learn how to make an egg dish I’ve made for years and call omelet casserole, because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s somewhere between a quiche and a soufflé, I guess. It’s very good and easy to make.

You’ll need a medium-sized mixing bowl and a pie plate or a 9” cake pan or a 9x9 baking dish. It doesn’t really matter. I use my pie plate because it’s really pretty.

You’ll also need fresh basil. I grow basil in my yard, but if you don’t have a basil plant, you can usually buy some sprigs of fresh basil at the fancier grocery stores. It is so incredibly good, especially in this recipe, that you owe it to yourself to either pick some up or buy a basil plant and keep it in the windowsill. It’s easy to grow and if you have some in your garden, it will happily seed itself so you have more basil the following year. Dried basil is…meh.

First, preheat the oven. It only takes a few minutes to put this recipe together so you want the oven to be ready. Then, grease the pan. You can use anything for this recipe, but butter will give you some extra flavor.

Crack the eggs into the mixing bowl, add the milk, and beat them up with a fork or whisk. You want the eggs well mixed up, so beat them until froth forms. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or two by hand, less than half a minute if you’re using an electric mixer.

Add some pepper, the shredded cheese, and the ham, or whatever meat or not meat you want to add. If you don’t add meat, definitely add salt. I typically leave out the salt when I make this, because ham contains a lot of salt.

Then, if you’re using tomato, dice it up small and remove as many of the seeds as you can. You do this because the seeds are encased in tissue that contains a lot of moisture. You don’t want all that moisture leaching out into your egg dish while it cooks. It’ll make it soggy and gross.

You can add as much or as little of the tomato, meat, and cheese as you like. You can add diced onion if you want, too, although you probably want to saute the onions until they’re translucent before adding them unless you just want your egg dish to taste overpoweringly of raw onion.

Once you have everything mixed up well in the bowl, pour it into the pie plate. Make sure all the ingredients are well distributed, pushing them around the pan with a spatula or your fork if you need to. Then add another shake of pepper on the top because honestly, you cannot add too much pepper to anything except maybe ice cream. Then put the pan into the oven.

Set your timer for 20 minutes. That 20 minutes is the perfect amount of time to wash out the bowl and wipe down all the egg white you probably dripped onto the counter, then run out to the garden and grab a couple of basil leaves.

Rinse the basil leaves to remove any dirt, then dry them and nip them into pieces with your thumbnail or kitchen shears. The pieces shouldn’t be tiny, but you don’t want them to be gigantic either. Pile the pieces where you can get to

Zucchini Pineapple Bread * how to grease and flour a pan * how to grate zucchini * what to substitute for oil

Zucchini Pineapple Bread

3 c all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

¾ tsp nutmeg

3 eggs

1 ¾ c. sugar

1 c vegetable oil (or ½ c vegetable oil and ½ c unsweetened applesauce)

2 tsp vanilla

2 to 3 c grated zucchini

1 8-oz can crushed pineapple, drained

1 c chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour two loaf pans.

In a large bowl, mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. In a very large bowl, beat eggs with a fork, then add sugar, oil, and vanilla and mix well. Add zucchini and pineapple and mix in well. Add dry ingredients to wet alternately with nuts.

Pour batter evenly into the loaf pans. Bake for 55 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make zucchini bread! Yes, you can finally do something with all that zucchini your coworker has grown and keeps bringing into the office to give away.

Zucchini is a type of summer squash. It’s usually green but there are golden varieties. You can cook it like squash, and if you don’t know how to cook squash just stick around a few weeks because that’s an upcoming episode. But zucchini is also traditionally made into zucchini bread, which to my mind is the very best thing you can get at any bake sale.

Zucchini bread is a good way to use up large zucchinis, which aren’t as tender as young ones. If the zucchini you get is large, you probably only need one. The first thing you’ll need to do is give it a quick wash to remove any dirt.

This recipe makes two loaves, so you’ll need two loaf pans. You’ll also need a medium mixing bowl, a large mixing bowl, and a very large mixing bowl--the giant one that came with the set of bowls that you thought you’d never use. And, of course, you need a cheese grater to grate the zucchini up so you can use it.

Once you’ve got everything gathered, your first step is to grease and flour the loaf pans. Grease them as usual with Crisco or that spray stuff. Take extra care that you grease the corners and all the way up nearly to the top of the pan. Then put a small handful of all-purpose flour into one of the pans, pick it up, tilt it, and pat the bottom of the pan so that the flour falls to one side. You’ll see that some of the flour sticks on the grease, and you want to flour all of the grease. This will keep your zucchini bread from sticking and will allow you to actually get it out of the pan when it’s done.

Pat the sides and bottom of the pan as you tilt the flour all around. As more of the flour sticks to the grease, less and less flour will be available to grease the rest, but there should be enough from one small handful. If you run out, give the bottom of the pan a good hard bang with your hand. This will loosen some more of the flour. Make sure you’ve floured all the grease, then turn the pan upside down over the trash and give the bottom a final thump to release any loose flour. Then do the same for the second loaf pan.

This is a good way to get flour all over you and the floor, so you might want to wear an apron. I always end up cradling the pan to my stomach at some point, which means my shirt always ends up with lots of flour on it.

Once you’ve greased and floured the pans, set them aside and get out the large mixing bowl. Not the giant one, just the large one. Measure out your dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Whisk it together well with a whisk or a fork. If you don’t have nutmeg, you can use an extra spoonful of cinnamon instead. Set the dr

Peach Pie * how to separate eggs * how to whip egg whites * folding in ingredients

Peach Pie

3 egg whites

¾ c. sugar

14 saltine crackers, finely crushed

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp baking powder

½ c. chopped pecans

4-6 fresh peaches, peeled, pitted, and sliced

cinnamon

sweetened whipped cream

Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a 9” pie plate.

Whip egg whites until they can hold a peak. Add sugar and vanilla while continue to whip egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold in cracker crumbs, baking powder, and pecans. Spread into pie plate. Bake for 30 minutes, remove from oven, and let cool completely.

Arrange peach slices on top in two or more layers. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon (and a little sugar if the peaches are not very sweet). Top with whipped cream to cover the peaches completely. Chill before serving.

I like to reserve one peach, cut it into bite-sized pieces, and fold it into the whipped cream before topping the pie.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make peach pie with a meringue crust!

This is hands down my best recipe. It’s the one everyone at work wants me to bring for our end-of-semester potluck meetings. Even people who don’t really like peaches, pies, or me rave over this pie. And the best part is it’s really easy to make even though it looks difficult. You don’t even need to make pie pastry.

You do, however, need to whip egg whites to make a meringue crust. You’ll need an electric mixer for this, and you’ll need the mixer again at the end of the recipe to make whipped cream. Other than that, you’ll just need a pie plate, a large mixing bowl, and a lot of fresh peaches.

I’ve tried making this recipe with frozen peach slices, thawed. They were disappointing but if you can’t find decent fresh peaches and you want to make this recipe, you can use them. But really good fresh peaches are what make this recipe so good. The juice seeps down into the meringue and infuses the whipped cream with summer goodness.

Get the ripest peaches you can find, and buy more than you think you’ll need because when you’re getting really ripe peaches, inevitably one or more will turn out to be on the rotten side of overripe. Since the peaches aren’t baked, you don’t want to include any that don’t taste perfect. You also shouldn’t use peaches that turn out to be underripe. If you end up with just one or two decent peaches, that’s okay. I’ve made this recipe with only a single layer of peach slices and it’s turned out fine.

But whatever you do, reserve the very best peach to go in the whipped cream. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The very first thing you do, once you’ve got all your ingredients and mixing bowls and things, is crush up the crackers. You need exactly 14 saltines, with each single square counting as one cracker. If you have the type that are two crackers joined together into one, that counts as two crackers.

Get out a small bowl, like a cereal bowl, and use your hands to roughly crunch the crackers into the bowl the way you would if you were adding them to soup or chili. Then use the back of a spoon to further crush the pieces finer and finer. Eventually it becomes virtually impossible to get all the pieces crushed any finer—you’ll end up with basically cracker dust around the edges with slightly larger pieces in the middle, and no amount of stirring and crushing seems to make a difference. That’s fine.

Next, measure out your pecans and put them in the same bowl with the crackers. Add the baking powder on top and mix the whole thing up with the spoon a little bit, until the baking powder isn’t sitting there in a lump. Set the bowl aside.

Set the vanilla and measuring spoon where you can get

Peach Kuchen

1 c all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ c butter, softened

¼ c sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond extract

sliced fresh peaches (or other fruit)

Topping:

sliced or slivered almonds, 3 Tbsp turbinado sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon

Grease a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Heat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix the topping and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. In another medium bowl cream together the butter and sugar, then add egg and almond extract and blend well. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix well. Batter will be thick. Spread the batter into the pie plate or cake pan, smoothing the top with a spatula, thinly across the bottom and about one inch up the sides of the pan. Arrange the peach slices in a pretty spiral in the bottom, add any other fruit desired, and sprinkle with the topping.

Bake for 25 minutes for a ceramic pie plate, 35 to 40 minutes for a cake pan.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Peach Kuchen, which is basically a very thin cake with a lot of fruit on top.

It’s an easy cake to make. The hardest part is peeling and slicing all those peaches. Actually, no, the hardest part is finding decent peaches. I lucked out and found three small but perfectly ripe and juicy peaches, so I decided to make peach kuchen with them. I also had about half a cup of raspberries and blackberries I picked yesterday that needed to be used up, so this recipe is perfect.

You’ll need almond extract and sliced or slivered almonds, although if you don’t have almond extract or don’t like it, you can substitute vanilla. You can also substitute pecans for the almonds. But the almonds and almond extract give this recipe a sophisticated, delicate flavor that’s a little unusual. If you liked the raspberry almond coffee cake recipe from last month, you’ll like this recipe.

You can make this in a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Whichever you use, grease it well. Then you’ll need a couple of mixing bowls, but not big ones. Medium-sized ones will do, because there’s not actually a lot of batter for this cake. You also need a small mixing bowl for the topping, but there’s not a lot of it so you can use a big cereal bowl if you need to.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and set it aside. Then mix the topping and set it aside. I’ve always made the topping with slivered almonds until this time, when all I had was sliced almonds, and I like the sliced almonds just as much.

Next, make sure the butter is softened enough to work with easily but not melted, and cream it together with the sugar until it’s fluffy. Add the egg and almond extract and mix well. Then add about half the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, stir until it’s smooth, and add the rest of the flour mixture and mix until all the flour is incorporated and there are no lumps.

It’s a very simple standard recipe for cake batter, with the main difference being there’s not much batter. It’s also very thick. Spoon it into your greased pan and use a rubber spatula or the back of a big spoon to spread the batter around, right up to the edges of the pan and up the edges. Basically what you’re doing is making a shallow batter receptacle for the fruit.

Once you’ve got the batter spread, turn the oven on. Then you need to cut up the peaches. If you listened to the raspberry pie episode last month you may remember how to halve cherries, which is the same way you halve peaches before cutting them up. Take a paring knife, cut around the entire peach top to bottom, cutting down to the pit, then twist both halves in different directions. This will pull the peach in two, with one half retaining the pit. Unless the pit is rotten,

baked beans * how to prepare green bell pepper

Janice’s Baked Beans

1 32-oz can pork and beans, drained

1 small onion, chopped

½ medium bell pepper, chopped

½ c. brown sugar

½ lb. pork sausage, browned and drained

4 strips bacon

Put everything except the bacon into a baking dish and mix well. Lay bacon over top. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. You can double this recipe.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make my aunt Janice’s baked beans recipe!

It’s an easy recipe to make and it’s absolutely delicious. My aunt made it for the Fourth of July and I asked her about it. It’s a funny story, so I recorded her telling it.

To make Janice’s baked beans recipe, all you need is a pan big enough to hold everything. You can mix the ingredients directly in the pan.

First, though, you need to get all your ingredients ready. The very first thing you do is brown and drain the pork sausage the same way we learned to brown and drain hamburger meat in the lasagna roll-ups episode. Then turn the oven on. Then dice the onion the way we learned in the carrots episode, and pack the brown sugar into the measuring cup firmly the way we learned in the chocolate chip cookies episode.

The only aspect of this recipe we haven’t covered before is how to chop up a bell pepper. This is about as easy as it can be.

If you’ve ever looked at the bell peppers for sale at the store and wondered what the difference is between green, yellow, orange, and red bell peppers, they’re all the same thing. Green bell peppers are picked before they fully ripen. Yellow, orange, and red bell peppers are of varying stages of ripeness. Bell peppers don’t contain any capsaicin, which is what makes other peppers hot, so you can use the brightest red bell pepper you can find in a recipe and it’ll be perfectly mild. The flavor is a little different, with green bell pepper being a much more definite flavor and the yellow, orange, or red bell peppers being mellower. The brightly colored bell peppers are mostly used to give a dish extra color.

Bell peppers are easy to prepare. You’ll need a paring knife and a cutting board if you have one. If you plan to use every scrap of pepper, cut around the stem and discard it, and you can use the rest. Otherwise, just roughly cut the pepper into slices, then cut those slices into pieces.

The inside of a bell pepper is mostly empty. There are a lot of small seeds, though, which you should discard. They’re easy to remove, though. You can cut up and use the ribs inside the pepper or trim them off and only use the outer shell of the pepper. It all tastes the same but the outside is a shinier green that looks nicer.

Once your bell pepper is cut up into pieces, it’s ready to use. Easy peasy.

So you’ve got the ground pork browned and drained, the onion and bell pepper chopped up, and the brown sugar measured out and ready. Open the can of pork and beans and drain it. Then pour the beans into your pan, add the pork, onion, bell pepper, and brown sugar, and mix it all up really well. In the recording of Janice, the sounds you hear in the background are her stirring the mixture. She uses a heavy oven-safe pot to make it. She also doubles the recipe.

Once you have it all mixed up, lay four strips of raw bacon across the top. It will cook in the oven and add its delicious grease and flavor to the dish as it does. Make sure to lay the bacon strips side by side, not overlapping. If they’re too long to fit into the pan without overlapping, cut them short. If the bacon is especially fatty, trim off the fatty ends and discard them. That way you can pretend that you’re making the recipe healthier.

Put the pan in the oven and set the timer for one hour.

How to roast a chicken * a new way to peel garlic easily * how to use a meat thermometer

Roast chicken

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a whole chicken. If you know how to roast a chicken, you can save a lot of money and expand your choices when it comes to food. And it’s really easy, so let’s go.

First, you need a whole chicken. Don’t buy a roasting chicken. Roasters are huge and are actually best cooked by boiling, and who has a pot that big? Buy a smaller chicken, usually advertised as a fryer or just as a young chicken. You don’t want one more than about five pounds in weight, and preferably closer to four pounds.

The chicken is probably not frozen. If it is, stick it in the fridge for a day or two. But typically fryer chickens aren’t frozen. It’ll be in a heavy plastic bag. Sit this in the sink, round side down and the feet side up. Yes, I know you can’t see the chicken at this point and it doesn’t have feet anymore anyway, but you can feel the ends of the drumsticks and you want those pointing up. Cut the bag open at this end and pull it down around the chicken like a skirt.

Oh, and this is a good time to get out a pan with sides and preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. If you haven’t already done this, do it now, hopefully before your hands get covered with chicken grease. I usually use a plain 9x13 Pyrex pan, sometimes a metal pan that I line with one layer of tinfoil to help keep the mess down. Pyrex dishes are easier to clean than metal so I don’t use tinfoil in the Pyrex dish.

Usually the chicken will have giblets in a little bag stuffed into the cavity. Sometimes the chicken has loose giblets stuck in the cavity and probably surrounded by chicken-juice ice. Giblets are the edible organs, and even if you plan to cook them you need to take them out before you roast the chicken. If it’s a bag, that’s easy. If they’re loose, you’re going to need to pick the chicken up and shake it violently feet-side down over the sink. Hopefully the giblets drop out and you’re not too traumatized, because the wings and legs flop around and water droplets fly and it’s basically just like something out of a cut-rate horror movie.

If you can’t shake the loose giblets out, they’re frozen in place and you’re going to have to get in there with your hand. The main problem with this is that your fingers are going to immediately get so cold that you can’t tell what you’re doing, and trying to pick squidgy bits of chicken guts out of a matrix of ice with frozen fingertips is really the least fun part of roasting a chicken. I guess you could use a spoon.

If you’re still with me and haven’t given up on this episode yet, let’s fast forward to the point where you’ve removed those giblets. Usually it’s really not difficult. I almost always shop by price, so sometimes I luck out and the cheap chicken I bought is cheap because the giblets got left out so the chicken weighed less. That’s great, because in my house, the giblets go in the trash.

So you’ve emptied the chicken. You can rinse it if you want, but it’s really not necessary unless the skin doesn’t look clean. I mean, it’s going to look like dead chicken skin, but you don’t want to see any flecks of actual dirt. Also, if you dropped it in the sink at any point you should rinse it.

Plop your chicken on its back in the pan. Sprinkle it liberally with salt and pepper. You can add rosemary or other herbs too, but if you’ve never roasted a chicken before, just go the simple route. Salt and pepper, that’s it. However, if you’re a garlic lover, or even a garlic liker, and you have some garlic cloves on hand, get them out along with a knife with a broad blade.

You only need to peel this garlic, not cut it up, and after the lime crema episode my cousin Molly showed me the easiest wa

Iced Tea * Sangria * how to section oranges

Iced tea

6-8 c. water

2 family-sized tea bags

About 1 c. sugar

Heat water in a pot until it begins to boil but before it is at a rolling boil. Remove from heat. Place tea bags in the water, cover with a lid, and let steep for about 10-15 minutes. Remove the tea bags and stir in sugar until dissolved.

Allow the tea to cool to room temperature. Then fill a pitcher with ice and pour the tea over the ice.

Sangria (alcoholic)

1 bottle cheap red wine

½ c spiced rum

½ c orange juice

½ - 1 c pineapple juice

several oranges, peeled and sectioned

other fruit as desired

Mix everything together in a jug and refrigerate at least overnight (24 hours is best). Give the jug a good stir with a long spoon every few hours, making sure to press the pieces of fruit against the side of the jug to express some of the juice.

Serve cold with ginger ale (or Sprite) to taste.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sangria, which is alcoholic, and iced tea, which is not.

We’ll cover iced tea first, so if you want to listen to that part and skip the discussion of how to make sangria, I’ll tell you where to stop listening.

There are a number of ways to make iced tea. The recipe at the top of the show notes is how my grandmother made it, which I’ll go over in just a minute.

The easiest way is to cold-brew your tea. Fill a big jug with warm water—not hot—plop a couple of family-sized tea bags formulated for iced tea in it, and stick it in the fridge overnight. In the morning remove the tea bags and drink the tea. This is how I make it most of the time, because I like my iced tea unsweetened. You can’t sweeten iced tea properly once it’s cold, since the sugar won’t dissolve, so if you want to make real southern sweet tea, you have to make it a different way.

Whatever you do, don’t make tea the way you would to drink it hot, then throw ice cubes in it. I suspect that people from areas where iced tea is rare or practically unknown, like the UK, think that’s how you make iced tea. For the love of all that’s holy, no no no.

Also, you don’t want to use the same kind of tea you use for hot tea. If you make it right—and you will if you follow my recipe—the tea steeps for a relatively long time. Therefore, you can use lower quality tea and still end up with a strong but smooth brew. Conversely, if you start with high quality tea leaves, your tea may end up too strong. Plus, iced tea is meant for swilling, not sipping. I make it by the gallon every summer and go through it quickly. There’s no sense wasting high quality tea on something you’re going to chug after you mow the lawn. Save your good tea for chilly autumn days when you want to curl up with a hot drink and a murder mystery.

You can find lots of brands of tea made specifically for iced tea. I’ve tried them all and don’t really have a preference. This time I used one bag of Lipton tea meant for cold brewing, since that’s how I usually make it, and one bag of Walmart brand tea. I mean it that the quality of the tea has very little impact on the finished product if you make it right.

For this recipe you’ll need a pot with a lid and a pitcher. I measured out eight cups of water when I made the recipe this time, just to make sure I had the proportions right, but usually I just fill the pot with tap water and don’t worry too much about measuring.

So, fill your pot with tap water and set it on the stove. Turn the burner to high and keep an eye on it as it heats, because you want to bring the water to a boil but not a rolling boil. Once the water is moving briskly but not slopping around violently, move the pot off the heat.

Put two big

Making pie crust * rolling out dough * preparing fresh cherries * care of a wooden rolling pin

Raspberry Pie

Pastry:

2 c all-purpose flour

½ tsp salt

1 ½ tsp sugar

¾ c cold butter, cut up (or shortening)

3-4 Tbsp icewater

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl and cut in shortening or butter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add just enough water to hold together. Chill 30 minutes, divide dough, and roll out. Line the bottom of the pie pan with pastry, add filling, then top with the remaining pastry.

Filling:

5 c. raspberries (or frozen, thawed)

½ to ¾ c sugar

3 Tbsp all-purpose flour

Heat oven to 375.

Mix sugar and flour in a large bowl. Add berries and toss until coated. Pour into the pastry-lined pie dish. Top with the remaining pastry and crimp edges. Brush top crust with milk and sprinkle with sugar, and cut slits in the top to release steam. Cover the edges with tinfoil to keep from overbrowning.

Bake for 25 minutes, remove foil, and bake another 25-30 minutes. You can substitute blueberries, blackberries, or cherries for about half of the raspberries, if desired.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make raspberry pie. And yes, you are going to learn how to make your own pie crust. Do not be afraid.

I want to stress going in that this is not hard. It is 100% simple and you are going to make it successfully and be proud and it will be delicious. You can buy a premade pie crust, of course, but I guarantee you that a homemade one is better and well within the abilities of even a novice cook.

This recipe came from my friend Amanda, and I make it every summer when the raspberries and blackberries are ripe. You can use all raspberries in the filling or you can use a mixture of raspberries and other berries, like blackberries, blueberries, and fresh cherries. Amanda says not to use strawberries, though. I’ve never tried it, but I suspect strawberries are both too full of moisture and too lacking in pectin for the filling to gel properly.

The recipe calls for five cups of berries, and Amanda suggested a ratio of two cups of raspberries, two cups of cherries, and one cup of blueberries. I typically use about two to three cups of raspberries, about two cups of blackberries, and enough blueberries to make up the difference. You can use frozen berries, but thaw them first. Fresh is best, of course.

This time—you guessed it—I had to make the recipe before raspberries were ripe where I live, so I had to buy raspberries. I used frozen, along with fresh blueberries and fresh cherries. I didn’t have enough raspberries and it really showed. The pie was fine, but it wasn’t fantastic the way it would be if I’d had more raspberries. So I waited until nearly the last minute, when I had to get the episode finished and uploaded in time, until the raspberries were ripe. I made the pie again with about half and half raspberries and blackberries, with a half-pint of blueberries just to add a little sweetness. The result was much better. So if you look at the pictures in the show notes, the reason it looks like some of the pictures are from a different pie from the other pictures is because they are.

For this recipe you’ll need two large mixing bowls, a pie plate, also called a pie pan, and something you can use as a rolling pin, hopefully an actual rolling pin.

I recommend you spend some money on a real actual rolling pin if you can. I have a solid wood one my grandmother gave me ages ago that works beautifully. If you get a wooden rolling pin, treat it like a high quality wooden spoon. That is, hand-wash it with hot water and maybe a tiny dab of soap if absolutely necessary, dry it when it’s clean, and rub it with a thin coating of olive oil or other vegetable oil

Raspberry Almond Coffee Cake

2 c. all-purpose flour

2/3 c. sugar

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

1 c. sour cream

¼ c butter, melted

1 tsp almond extract

2 eggs

About ¼ c. raspberry juice, drained from berries (or ¼ c. milk)

2 c. raspberries, fresh or frozen (thawed)

½ c. slivered almonds (or sliced)

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit

Mix dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, salt, cinnamon) in a large bowl. In a medium bowl, mix the sour cream, melted butter, almond extract, eggs, and juice or milk. Blend well. Add the butter/sour cream mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until just moist. Batter will be thick.

Spoon about half the batter into a greased 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Spread the raspberries evenly on top, then spoon remaining batter over. Top with almonds. Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes. (You may need to set the cake pan on a baking sheet to catch any drips.)

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make raspberry almond coffee cake. It’s so good.

Raspberries are my favorite fruit, and one of my favorite foods. I also know where raspberries grow wild near my house, so every year for a few blissful weeks I can have as many raspberries as I want for free, completely organic and fresh. All I have to do is pick them and then spend the next two weeks trying not to scratch my chigger bites.

I eat a lot of the raspberries by themselves, but I also like to cook with them. This week’s recipe is one I make every year with fresh berries and it’s delicious. But because I get these episodes ready well in advance, I needed to make this week’s raspberry almond coffee cake before raspberries were in season locally. Rather than spend ridiculous amounts of money on a tiny package of fresh raspberries that are half moldy anyway, I just bought frozen raspberries. They worked even better than fresh.

Then, a week later, I decided I needed to make the recipe again using fresh raspberries. So I bought the tiny package of fresh raspberries but I also added some early-ripening blackberries I picked this afternoon.

Besides the raspberries, which are expensive if you have to buy them, this recipe calls for almond extract and slivered almonds. Almond extract doesn’t really cost that much considering how long it will last you, and it gives a sophisticated and subtle flavor to recipes that you just don’t get from vanilla. But if you absolutely cannot get almond extract, you can use vanilla extract instead. Slivered almonds have a good texture, but again, if you can’t find slivered almonds, you can use sliced or chopped almonds instead. In fact, when I made the recipe a second time for this episode, I realized I’d forgotten to buy slivered almonds. I used sliced instead, and they worked just as well—maybe even better, since they’re crunchier.

This recipe is unusual in several ways, but it’s also really easy. You’ll need two mixing bowls, one large and one medium-sized. You’ll also need a 9” round cake pan or a deep-dish pie plate. Don’t use anything smaller than a 9” pan or the cake will overflow as it rises.

If you use frozen berries, you need to thaw them before you do anything else. The easiest way to thaw a bag of frozen raspberries is how I did it, which is to put them in a grocery bag in the car on a day when it’s 90 out and then get stuck in traffic. Voila, totally thawed before I even got them home! Or you can buy them a day or two before you need them and stick them in the fridge. If you forget to thaw them, you can either microwave them on defrost setting or fill a large bowl with warm water and plunk the unopened bag in the water for a while.

Once the berries are thawed, you’re ready t

How to string pea pods/green beans * How to use a steamer basket *

Carrot Recipes

Sauteed Carrots

some carrots, peeled and sliced up

half a small yellow onion, diced

cooking oil

salt and pepper

Saute onions and carrots in a little oil over medium heat for about a minute. Add salt and pepper, cover, and lower heat to medium low. Allow to cook for several minutes, then remove lid just long enough to stir vegetables. Allow to cook for several more minutes before stirring again. Add a little water if necessary. Continue cooking, covered, stirring occasionally, until carrots are tender.

Glazed Carrots and Snow Peas

some carrots, peeled and sliced (or baby carrots)

some snow peas in pods

some butter

salt and pepper

½ tsp cornstarch

about 1 Tbsp honey or syrup

Place carrots in a steamer basket and steam until they’re mostly tender, about 15 minutes. Add pea pods and steam another minute or two. Remove from heat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Melt butter in a small saucepan and stir in cornstarch. Add vegetables and stir gently, making sure to coat with the butter. Add honey or syrup and stir to coat.

Parmesan Roasted Carrots and Potatoes

some carrots, peeled and sliced (or baby carrots)

Some small red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into quarters

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp garlic salt

pepper

¼ to ½ c. grated Parmesan cheese

1-2 Tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 375. Pour olive oil into a 9 x 13 pan and add carrots and potatoes. Sprinkle garlic salt and pepper over and stir well to coat.

Roast for about 30-40 minutes. Carrots and potatoes should be getting tender. Sprinkle about a quarter cup of the cheese over the vegetables and roast another 10 minutes until cheese is lightly browned. Place in a serving dish, add butter and allow it to melt. Stir gently to coat, then add more cheese, stir well, and serve.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’ll learn how to cook carrots in three different ways.

I really like carrots, which are naturally sweet but not overpoweringly sweet. You may have noticed by now that I don’t typically like super-sweet stuff, so I tend to prefer carrot recipes that don’t add lots of extra sugar. But if you like your carrots to taste like candy, try the glazed carrots recipe.

If you aren’t sure how to prepare fresh carrots, I recommend you listen to the spring chicken soup episode since in that one I go over how to clean and slice up carrots. You can also avoid the issue completely by using baby carrots. Baby carrots aren’t actually young carrots, they’re usually carrot pieces that are too small to sell as whole carrots. They are pre-peeled and washed so they’re mostly ready to use. I do like to pick them over quickly to make sure there aren’t any carrot tops or bad spots on any of the pieces. If there are, just cut them off and discard before cooking.

Let’s start with sautéed carrots. They’re delicious and really easy.

To make them, you’ll need a skillet with a lid. I used two fairly large carrots and half a small onion, which made two good-sized portions.

Scrape or peel your carrots and cut the tops off. Then slice them up. You can slice them however you like, into pennies or sticks. I sliced one carrot into pennies, the other into sticks about three inches long, just to see which I preferred. I think I preferred the sticks but both were equally good and took about the same amount of time to cook.

Peel and dice the onion next. If you like onion or are making a lot of carrots, dice up the whole thing. Remember you can wipe your oniony hand on the metal sink spigot, or anything metal, to remove most or all of the onion smell. It’s science!</

Basic kitchen equipment * how to season a cast iron skillet * care of wooden spoons * food staples * baking soda and baking powder

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this is a bonus episode. I didn’t want to run it as a regular episode since there’s no recipe involved, although I do give some information about baking soda and baking powder toward the end.

A lot of people are graduating right now, from high school or college, and may be thinking about moving into their first apartment. If you’ve never lived on your own, especially if you don’t have much experience with cooking, you may not be sure what you need to equip your first kitchen. So let’s talk about kitchen equipment.

But first, keep in mind that what one home cook considers a vital piece of equipment that no kitchen should be without, the next home cook has never even used that piece of equipment. You can find lists of kitchen necessities all over the internet, and each one will be different. Here I’m only talking about the truly bare necessities. I don’t even bring up small appliances like mixers and food processors. This is a list you can build on to make your own kitchen work for you.

At bare minimum, you’re going to need a pot big enough to boil water for spaghetti noodles and a skillet big enough for a couple of good-sized pork chops. A skillet is the same thing as a frying pan. Both your pot and your skillet should have lids. Ideally, the pot should be heavy steel, with a copper bottom if you can afford it, and the skillet should either be heavy steel or cast iron. I own a good cast iron skillet, but I actually use a steel one for preference just because it weighs so much less. I don’t recommend that you get nonstick, because even modern nonstick coatings are easy to scratch up and ruin. You need pots and pans you don’t need to baby.

If you buy a new cast iron skillet, don’t worry too much about all the information online about seasoning it. Just oil it well, and when you’re done using it, instead of washing it out with soap, scrape it clean with hot water and a spatula or a scraping tool. Wipe it dry with a cloth, then set it on the stove over the lowest heat your burner will manage until all the moisture evaporates off the metal. If you do this every time you use it, it’ll become seasoned nicely after a while and you won’t need to oil the skillet every time you use it. But if you wash it out with soap, you have to start the seasoning process all over again.

My mom never understood this. She was a little bit of a germophobe and could not stand the thought of not scrubbing out a skillet with soap and hot water. When I was in my 20s, sometimes I’d come home from work and discover that Mom had cleaned my apartment for me. That was really nice of her because I was a complete slob back then, but she would always scrub my skillet with soap and ruin the lovely natural coating iron develops.

Anyway, one pot with a lid, one skillet with a lid. It’s also nice to have a second pot, maybe a smaller one you can use as a saucepan. If storage is an issue, the small pot will probably nest in the larger pot and you can put the lids in the drawer underneath your oven, if it has one.

You will also need at least two mixing bowls, one large, one medium-sized. Mixing bowls often come in sets of three or four, with the small one being barely larger than a big cereal bowl and the big one being huge enough to hold rising bread dough. If you have room for the whole set and can afford it, I recommend you buy them all. I don’t use the giant-sized mixing bowl very often, but when I need it I absolutely need it and nothing else will do.

Your mixing bowls should not be plastic. Plastic is too hard to keep clean, since bacteria hide in scratches in plastic. Metal bowls may react with some foods, especially eggs, causing a nasty taste in the finished

Lasagna Rollups * how to ready an onion for cooking * how to brown ground beef * how to cook pasta

Lasagna Rollups

9 (or 12) lasagna noodles

1 lb. ground beef

1 small onion, diced

1 24 oz can or jar of pasta sauce

dried oregano, pepper, garlic powder

4 to 8 oz cream cheese

1 to 2 c shredded cheese

For 9 servings, use a 9x9 baking dish. For 12 servings, use a 9x13 baking dish.

Brown the meat with the onion, add spices and the pasta sauce, and simmer while the lasagna noodles cook. Add enough of the meat sauce to the bottom of a casserole dish to cover it in a thin layer. Spread cream cheese on each noodle, then add meat sauce. Roll up and place seam side down in the dish. Cover with leftover meat sauce and shredded cheese.

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until heated through and cheese is melted.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make fake lasagna, or as I like to call it, lasagna rollups. Instead of making an entire dish of lasagna in layers, you roll up each individual lasagna noodle around the filling, creating layers that way. And instead of sixteen different types of cheese, you just need cream cheese and some shredded cheese for the top. Yes, this sounds disgusting but it is incredibly good.

We’ll learn how to brown ground meat in this recipe and we’ll learn a little bit about how to cook pasta.

You’ll need a skillet, a pot, and a baking dish for this recipe. This sounds complicated but it’s actually not. There are a number of steps, and one of them is fairly labor intensive, but nothing about it is hard. If you want to make 9 servings of lasagna, you need a 9x9 baking dish. If you want to make 12 servings, you need a 9x13 baking dish. If you make 12 servings, though, you’ll probably run low on meat sauce, so add extra pasta sauce to the meat when you get to that step. This makes this recipe a great way to use up leftover pasta sauce.

First, drizzle just a little bit of olive oil or other oil in your skillet and turn the heat on to medium or just below.

While the skillet’s heating, dice your onion. I’m not a huge onion fan so I only use half an onion, but unless you’re also not an onion fan you can use a whole onion. Take a paring knife and cut the top and bottom of the onion off, which is the stem side and the root side of the onion. Then remove the outer layer of the onion, including the papery onion skin. The easiest way to do this is to make a shallow cut top to bottom on one side of the onion. You’ll see how an onion separates into layers, and it’s easy to pull the outermost layer off. Once you’ve removed it, you’ll have an onion that’s ready to chop up into little pieces and cook.

So, dice your onion. By the time you’re done, the skillet should be hot. Add the pieces of onion to the skillet and give them a quick stir with a spatula to make sure the oil is spread all around and that none of the onions start to stick. If they do start to stick, turn the heat down a little. Sautee the onions for a minute or two, moving them around with the spatula and turning them over so that they all get a chance to cook evenly.

Next you need to add the ground beef. It doesn’t matter what kind of ground beef you get. I typically go for ground chuck because it’s relatively inexpensive and has a lot of flavor without massive amounts of grease. You can use ground turkey or chicken in this recipe if you want to, but ground beef has more flavor.

Before you add the meat, make sure you’re wearing an old shirt, since hamburger grease spatters and you may end up with grease spots on your clothes.

Open the package of ground beef and plop the meat into the skillet on top of the onions. You don’t have to touch it, just drop it in directly from the

Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Pretzels

“Bark” chocolate coating

whole strawberries (or anything you want to dip in chocolate, really)

Wash the strawberries and dry every last drop of water off them or the chocolate will solidify and never melt again. Make sure any utensils you use to stir the chocolate are also dry. Melt the chocolate in a saucepan (or double boiler) on low and dip the strawberries one by one, holding by their leaves. It looks nice to leave a little red showing at the top. Place in paper candy cups to dry (or on waxed paper). Work fast, because once the chocolate’s been on the heat for a while it’ll start to chunk up.

--dictated by Kelly R. (she refused to write it down)

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast Patreon bonus episode for May 2019. I’m Kate Shaw and we’re going to learn how to make chocolate-covered strawberries and pretzels.

I learned how to make these from my friend Kelly back when we both worked at a big used book store. I got the idea that we should put together a cookbook with recipes from both staff members and regular customers. That idea never went anywhere but I did gather some recipes. I’ve since lost them all except for Kelly’s recipe.

Every Valentine’s Day, I see prices for chocolate-dipped strawberries that are just ridiculous. Don’t people know how easy it is to make them at home? The only hard part is finding decent strawberries in February. It’s too late for this year, unfortunately, but they’d make a great Mother’s Day treat.

Before you do anything else, prepare your strawberries by rinsing them and drying them carefully with paper towels. Your goal is to get as much moisture off the berries as you can, with the acknowledgement that they won’t stay dry for long, so do this soon before you plan to dip the berries. Discard any strawberries that look overripe or underripe. Also get out anything else you plan to dip and make sure you can get into the package easily with one hand. I used mini pretzels, but anything that would taste good with chocolate on it is fair game. If it’s a fruit or vegetable, rinse and dry it.

Next, place a piece of waxed paper on the counter where you can reach it easily from the stove. You can also use a clean paper bag which you’ve unfolded and opened flat, but I never seem to have paper bags these days and I do have waxed paper. Kelly recommended using paper candy cups, and I suppose you could use regular baking cups.

Next, get your chocolate out. The recipe calls for Bark coating, which is a brand you can find in the baking aisle of most supermarkets. It’s not the highest quality chocolate, but it does taste good and it has the added benefit of drying quickly to a hard surface. That’s important, and I learned it the hard way today. I didn’t have any Bark coating but I did have a bag of Hershey Special Dark chocolate chips. I melted those and they worked great, but the better part of a day later and the pretzels are still sticky. Presumably the strawberries would still be sticky too, but I already ate them.

There are several ways you can melt chocolate. You can use a double boiler if you have one, or improvise a double boiler. If you have one, you know how to use it, so I won’t go into details about double boilers here. You can also microwave the chocolate in short bursts. Start with 30 seconds, stir the chocolate pieces, microwave for another 30 seconds, stir again, and follow up with 10-second intervals followed by stirring.

I tried the microwave method today with some white chocolate I had in the cupboard. I thought it would look nice drizzled over the dark chocolate pretzels and strawberries. But…it didn’t work. The most I got from the white chocolate was a sort of thick paste that smelled gross. Then I noticed the sell-by date on the box. The white chocolate expired in December 2014, so I

Deviled eggs * how to hard-boil an egg

Deviled Eggs

6 hard-boiled eggs, shelled

about ¼ c. mayonnaise

about ¼ tsp yellow mustard

pepper and/or paprika

Cut the shelled eggs in half lengthwise. Remove yolks with a spoon and put into a small bowl.

Mash the yolks with the edge of the spoon until they’re very finely crumbled. Mix in the mayonnaise and mustard until they taste right. Spoon the yolk mixture back into the whites. Sprinkle with pepper and/or paprika to garnish and add flavor.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make deviled eggs. Summertime picnics and cookouts are coming up and you want to be prepared!

Deviled eggs are easy to make. The hardest part is boiling the eggs without overcooking them. Even if you overcook a boiled egg, it’ll be okay, but getting it just right results in a better tasting and better looking egg. You’ve seen boiled eggs where the yolk is sort of greenish around the edges, right? And it’s tough? That’s an overcooked egg.

You’ll need one pot with a lid for this recipe. Choose however many eggs you plan to boil and place them gently in the pot. Then run water over them until they’re covered by a good half-inch or more of water.

You don’t need to warm your eggs to room temperature before plunking them in the pot. You don’t need to salt the water. You don’t need to do anything except put them in a pot of water.

Place the pot on the stove over high heat. Don’t cover the pot, just keep an eye on it while you do other stuff around the kitchen. When the water is at a full boil—that is, when big blobs of agitated water are pushing the eggs around constantly—move the pot off the heat. Put the lid on the pot, set your timer for 15 minutes, and don’t touch the pot until the timer goes off.

While you’re waiting, prepare the egg’s ice bath. Grab a mixing bowl or another pot and partly fill it with ice. Then add enough water to roughly cover the ice. Make sure you have enough room in the bowl or pot to add the eggs without it overflowing.

As soon as your timer goes off, remove the lid from the egg pot and carefully pour the hot water into the sink. Then use a spoon to carefully move the eggs into the ice bath.

Let the eggs sit in the ice bath for ten or fifteen minutes. Every so often, give the icewater a stir and add more ice if necessary as it melts. After ten or fifteen minutes, remove the eggs. They are done. You can either put them in the fridge to peel and prepare later, or you can peel them now and use them.

This method of boiling eggs is a lot more involved than you may be used to, but it’s also a lot easier than it sounds. It takes time, but it’s almost completely hands-off so you can do other stuff while the eggs are cooking or cooling down. And when it’s time to peel the eggs, they’re cool so you won’t scald yourself or drop any eggs because they’re just too hot. The ice bath is critical, because it stops the eggs from overcooking.

Here are some tips about eggs from someone who used to keep pet hens. I always buy cage-free eggs or eggs from local farmers, and usually those eggs are brown. Brown eggs are no better or worse for you than white eggs. The shell color depends on the breed of chicken. When you break open a brown egg, sometimes you’ll find little spots of rusty color around the yolk. That’s just pigment and is perfectly normal. Sometimes when you break open an egg of any color, you’ll find a spot of blood inside. That isn’t a dead chicken embryo, it’s just a spot where a capillary broke in the hen’s egg canal while the egg was forming, and a little drop of blood was incorporated into the egg. The hen wasn’t hurt and it won’t change the flavor or quality of the egg. When you buy eggs from the supermarket, eggs with spots of

Spring chicken soup * how to brown meat * how to clean carrots * how to clean spring onions and leeks

Spring Chicken Soup

Oil

about 1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs

about 1 c sliced leeks or spring onions

about 1 c sliced carrots

about 3 to 4 c chicken stock

Thyme, salt, pepper

about 1 c frozen green peas (thawed)

about 3 c leaf lettuce, cut up

some fresh parsley, cut up (optional)

Brown chicken in about a tablespoon of oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add salt and pepper, cover, and cook for five to ten minutes. Turn over occasionally.

When chicken is cooked through, remove from pot. Add leeks and carrots and sauté about five minutes, then add stock, thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil. Cover and turn down heat, simmer until carrots are almost tender, then add chicken pieces and peas and simmer another five minutes. Remove from heat and add lettuce and parsley, stir in, and serve immediately.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make chicken soup, but not the kind of chicken soup you want in winter. This is light and delicious, full of spring vegetables. My Uncle Keith made it recently and I loved it so much I demanded he give me the recipe.

Then, of course, I changed the recipe to fit my own tastes and budget.

The recipe calls for leeks, but leeks are more expensive so I bought spring onions. Spring onions are mildly oniony the way leeks are, but they’re much smaller. In retrospect I probably should have bought the leeks, which were $3 compared to $1 for the spring onions, because the soup needed a little more onion flavor than the spring onions supplied.

I literally didn’t measure anything in this recipe, just tossed stuff in until it looked right. The result was an excellent light soup that was nevertheless filling.

You only need one pot for this recipe, although it does need a lid. I used my everyday pot and it was plenty big enough. I recommend buying boneless chicken thighs, although as I’ve mentioned before, you don’t necessarily need to buy skinless since the skin is easy to pull off chicken thighs. A lot of times you can’t find boneless chicken that’s not also skinless, though.

Start by putting a little bit of oil in the bottom of the pot, no more than a tablespoonful or so. I used olive oil but it doesn’t really matter what you use. Heat the pot to about medium and drop the chicken pieces into the pot. I like to trim a lot of the fat off the pieces with a pair of kitchen shears, and drop them into the pot as I finish with each piece.

Brown the chicken for a few minutes, basically just sautéing it in the oil to make sure it’s starting to cook evenly all over. Push it around and turn the pieces over. If the pieces start to stick to the bottom of the pan, turn the heat down a little. Your pot is probably too small to spread all the chicken in one layer on the bottom, so make sure every piece gets some time on the bottom of the pile to get plenty of heat.

After all the pieces are starting to turn whitish all over and none of the pieces has big spaces where it hasn’t been exposed to the heat, you’ve browned the meat. Throw some salt and pepper on them, put the lid on the pot, and let the pieces cook for three or four more minutes. Then turn the pieces over and replace the lid and let the chicken cook for another three or four minutes. At this point the chicken should be done. Scoop the pieces out of the pot with a spatula and remove them to a plate.

If you were on top of things, before you even got the chicken out of the fridge you were already cleaning and preparing your vegetables. If you didn’t do it ahead of time, though, peel and chop the carrots while the chicken is cooking. You peel carrots with a potato peeler, preferably over a trash can so the strips of peel fall into the trash. Then you cut the tops of

Cornmeal pancakes

½ c all-purpose flour

½ c cornmeal

3 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 Tbsp sugar

½ c hot water

¼ c milk

¼ c corn oil

1 egg

Preheat skillet over medium-low heat. Grease lightly. Mix ingredients well in a medium-sized mixing bowl, then drop spoonfuls of batter into the skillet to make small pancakes. These cook very fast, no more than a few minutes. When bubbles in the batter stay open, flip the pancakes over and cook for another 30 seconds or so on the other side.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week let’s make some pancakes--but not just any pancakes. These are cornmeal pancakes and not only are they super easy to make, it’s hard to mess them up and end up with gummy half-cooked batter inside as sometimes happens with regular pancakes.

I’ve made this recipe hundreds of times and I’ve never had any trouble with it, not even when I was a new cook. I originally got it from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, which was the only one my mom owned except for a cookbook put together by our church, which she illustrated. There are things in the recipe I sometimes question--like, why does the water have to be hot? But because it turns out so perfectly every time, I’ve never tried to tinker with it.

Or so I thought. After I wrote that paragraph, I cleaned out the garage for a yard sale and actually found my mom’s battered copy of Good Housekeeping Cookbook--specifically, it’s called The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook, published in 1963. I found the cornmeal pancake recipe on page 488, called Southern Pancakes, and it turns out I have made small changes to it. The original calls for boiling water, not just hot. It calls for melted shortening but I’ve changed that to oil. And it specifies all sorts of fiddly little details I dispensed with immediately, because these are really forgiving pancakes that literally always turn out well.

You’ll need cornmeal for this recipe as well as all-purpose flour. I love cornmeal and keep it on hand the same way I do flour, in a glass jar with a screw-on lid to keep bugs out. Cornmeal keeps a long time and isn’t expensive.

You’ll also need one mixing bowl and a skillet, and a spatula. The mixing bowl doesn’t need to be big. A medium-sized one will do.

Turn the heat onto medium or just under and add just a tiny dab of oil. While the skillet’s heating, measure your dry ingredients into the mixing bowl, then add the wet ingredients. I just use water that’s hot from the tap. Mix everything really well with a big spoon, pressing out any flour lumps and making sure the egg is fully incorporated into the mixture. Batter will be runny.

By the time you’re done mixing, your skillet should be hot. Use the spatula to spread the oil around if you haven’t already, then push any excess oil to the edges of the skillet. Then use your big spoon and drop a spoonful of batter onto the skillet. In my skillet, I have room for three of these pancakes. They should be small. When I was a kid we called them silver-dollar sized, but I’m not sure kids today have seen silver dollars. Basically, if you’re adding more than one big spoonful of batter to a single pancake, you’re making them too big.

Now let them sit in the skillet without touching them for a few minutes. Watch them, because it’s really easy to tell when you need to flip them over. See how there are bubbles coming up in the batter and popping? At first the batter oozes together to mostly hide where the bubbles were, but as the pancake cooks, the bubbles will pop and the batter stays open, showing a little hole. When most of the holes stay open, it’s time to flip the pancake. I’ll put a picture of this stage in the show notes so you can see what it looks like.

So, flip the pancakes over. The cooked side should be more or less golden. If you see any blackened or very dark areas, you either waited too long to flip th

Chicken Tacos with sweet potato

1 or 2 lbs chicken thighs, skin removed (boneless is easiest to use)

1 medium sized sweet potato, peeled and diced

flour tortillas (small)

canned corn (optional)

lime crema or sour cream

baby spinach leaves (optional)

Marinade:

4 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp white wine vinegar

2 tsp chili powder

1 ½ tsp salt

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

½ tsp ground cumin

½ tsp black pepper

the juice of 1 or 2 limes

Combine ingredients in a large bowl and place chicken in the marinade. Turn chicken several times to coat. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes up to about 24 hours.

When ready to cook the chicken, heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add a little oil and the chicken. Cook five to eight minutes per side, until cooked all the way through. Remove chicken from skillet to a plate lined with paper towels to soak up excess grease.

Peel a sweet potato and cut into cubes about the size of dice. Toss these into the skillet in a single layer and add a little water. Cover, stirring frequently, and add more water if the skillet starts to dry out. When the potatoes are tender all the way through, remove them from the skillet into a bowl.

Toss a flour tortilla into the skillet for a minute or so, then turn with a spatula and let sit for another minute or so. Remove and do the same for another tortilla until you have as many as you need.

Open a can of corn, drain, and pour as much of it into the skillet as you want. Saute briefly until it’s warm through. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

While the corn is warming, use the tortillas to make tacos. Add generous dollops of lime crema (or sour cream), then place chicken and sweet potatoes on top. You can top with baby spinach if you like.

When the corn is warmed through, you can have it as a side dish or toss some into the tacos. Or both.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re making an amazing meal that looks complicated but is actually simple. You make the lime crema in advance, you prepare the chicken in advance, and when you’re ready to cook everything, you only need a single skillet. It’s chicken tacos with sweet potatoes and lime crema, pretty much all my favorite foods in one dish.

You’ll start with a marinade for the chicken. A marinade is a good way to season and tenderize meat before you cook it. The marinade in this recipe calls for a lot of ingredients and many of them are ones you may not already have on hand. The ingredients you really need are the olive oil, the white wine vinegar, the chili powder, and a lime. I trust you have salt and pepper on hand. White wine vinegar is actually pretty cheap. You don’t need to get a big bottle. You can use red wine vinegar if that’s all you have, or even just regular white vinegar. Olive oil can be super expensive, but again, you can get a small bottle of the cheap stuff and it’ll work just fine. If you absolutely can’t get olive oil, you can use regular vegetable oil. Basically you just need something that will help the other ingredients stick to the chicken. You can substitute various things for the onion and garlic powder and the chili powder and cumin. For instance, if you have fresh garlic but not powdered, just mince up a clove and add it. If you have literally any kind of taco seasoning, whether it’s actually chili powder or something else, like a packet of dried-out Taco Bell seasoning that came in something you don’t even remember buying, use that in place of the chili powder and cumin. You can substitute lemons for limes if you don’t have limes. You just want citrus in there of some kind. When I made this, I left out the onion powder because I didn’t have any, and it was fine. Marinades are flexible.

If you can find boneless chicken thighs, get them. Sometimes there will still

Strawberry Scones

2 ¼ c. all-purpose flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

¼ c. sugar

½ tsp salt

6 Tbsp cold butter

1 cup strawberries, chopped small

¾ cup milk (or half and half) (may need to add a little more)

turbinado sugar (optional)

425 F

greased baking sheet

11-13 minutes

Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Cut butter into the flour mixture. Toss berries to coat with flour, then add the milk and stir until just combined. Drop onto the baking sheet and sprinkle with turbinado sugar before baking. Makes about 8.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make another recipe that calls for strawberries. Last week we talked about strawberry shortcake, which included how to cut up and sugar your strawberries. But sometimes you have strawberries left over after you eat up all of your shortcake. You notice them in the fridge, lonely and unloved, getting kind of gross and wilted. Can they be saved?

Of course they can! Turn them into strawberry scones. Look, I just ate four of these and the recipe typically only makes eight so believe me, they’re good. Especially with coffee.

You can use sugared strawberries that are left over from another recipe or that you aren’t sure what to do with, or you can prepare the strawberries specially for this recipe. You don’t even need to sugar them, just cut them up.

You will only need one bowl and one baking sheet. Grease the baking sheet. I usually use Crisco but it doesn’t really matter what you use for this recipe.

In the bowl, mix up the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar with a fork or whisk. If you’re not sure how to measure flour properly, check out our first episode, about chocolate chip cookies.

Then you’ll cut the butter up into the flour mixture until all the butter is in little tiny pieces and each piece is coated with flour. You do this the same way you did it in the strawberry shortcake episode. The pieces don’t have to be infinitesimal, by the way. Just make them reasonably small, like little peas, although if you have the time and patience to really make them small, you’ll get a better result. The goal of cutting butter into dry ingredients is to end up with lots of tiny pieces of butter all coated with flour.

Before you start cutting in the butter is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Strawberries contain a lot of liquid. If they’ve been cut up and sitting in a bowl in the fridge for a day or two, a lot of that liquid has pooled at the bottom. Put the cut up berries into a measuring cup, then hold the berries in the cup with your fingers while you turn the cup over. Let any moisture you picked up by accident drip out. Then add the berries to the flour mixture and give them a few good stirs to coat them with flour.

Finally, add the milk. I don’t remember where I got this recipe, but it originally called for a full cup of cream or half and half. You are probably not going to need this much. I start with three-quarters of a cup of milk, usually 2% unless I bought whole milk by accident. Pour this in and mix it around until there’s no dry flour left. If there’s a lot of flour left after all the milk is absorbed, you can add a little more milk, but be cautious. You really don’t want this dough to get too soupy. It should be bouncy and sticky, not smooth and drippy.

Don’t try to make the batter smooth. It won’t happen, for one thing, and for another, time is of the essence now. You want to get this dough in the oven before it loses some of its oomph.

You don’t roll these scones out. Just get a spoon, large or small, doesn’t matter, and scoop great big lumps of dough onto the greased baking sheet. Make these big and roughly all about the same size. I usually get eight big blobs out of the dough onto one baking sheet.

If you have turbinado sugar—you know, big sugar crystals that some people l