The problem started with the buttered baking pan.
I was making a casserole in a standard Pyrex 9×13” pan and had everything ready to shlorp into the pan when I checked the recipe and it referred to the “prepared” pan. Prepared? I just hauled it out of the cupboard, is all.
Preparing pans is one of my least favorite things. I have a wonderful cake recipe that starts out “Preheat oven to 350,” followed by “Prepare three round cake tins by buttering all around, dusting with fine bread crumbs, cutting out rounds of wax paper and putting them in all three pans, buttering the wax papers, and dusting once more with fine bread crumbs.” Presumably this should be done at midnight on Samhain by an oiled-up naked boy with a pan flute. The oven has dinged up to temperature even before the wax paper got cut out, there are crushed cracker crumbs all over the counter, no ingredients have been used as of yet, and it will be another half hour before anything goes in the oven.
I hate preparing pans.
But sure enough, there at the top of my recipe it says to prepare a pan by buttering it, first thing. Well, crap. I hate buttering pans. I’m either pushing cold butter into the corners with my fingers or goobering up a little paper towel and either way is unpleasant. But I did it, then went back to the recipe and discovered it had whole different ingredients than what I’d already whomped up, and in fact was a whole different recipe in a whole different tab on my computer. Something I had merely been checking out.
Well, shit. Now I have a buttered pan and a second pan that didn’t need buttering after all, which I went ahead and made my casserole in, but I would be damned if I was going to let that buttered pan go to waste. So I made both recipes, then and there, and froze one of them.
A few days later I bought whipping cream for a tart recipe. It called for three cups of cream. Cream used to come in pints and half-pints but I haven’t seen the smaller size for years. So I was resigned to having an extra cup of cream left over, and then the event I was baking for got postponed, and I wasn’t about to let that cream go bad after all the trouble the cow went through to make it, so I decided to make pots de crème. But that still left a cup of cream and I thought maybe I could make frosting. I didn’t have anything to frost so I made a batch of brownies. But the frosting is enough for a three-layer cake. Turns out you can freeze frosting too, although by the time you get around to pulling that ziploc bag of brown stuff out of the back of the freezer in a half year you’re going to have some doubts about its provenance. You’re probably going to throw it out just in case, but at least you don’t have extra cream.
It all reminds me of the the hot dog conundrum—the most ingenious marketing ploy since “Lather, rinse, repeat.” Weenies come in eight-packs but hot dog buns come in six-packs. Now you have to find the lowest common denominator to get them all used up. Your lowest common denominator is not now, and never has been, “the stupidest or lowest-quality people,” but, in fact, twenty-four, or three packages of weenies and four packages of buns. Hope everyone likes hot dogs.
If not, maybe they’d be interested in my Frosted Green Bean Pudding Bake.
…And I just was reading a comment from one of your readers yesterday that sliced cheese comes in a pack of 15 or 24. Huh? How’d they come up with 15? I mean, 24 — I could see that as a multiple of a dozen, but the first number isn’t a dozen. Is it a trick to make you think you’re getting twice as much with the big pack but you’re only getting about 60% more? Why isn’t the smaller pack 12 slices? Why isn’t the larger pack 30 slices?
And why do you need your cheese pre-sliced? Gotta keep that cheesy goodness intact!
When I had foodstamps and lived with Joan M. in Richmond in 1974, somehow we always ended up with extra hotdog buns. Go figure. Money was so tight that we’d toast the extra ones and slather them with butter and eat them for breakfast.
Yeah, it was very sophisticated — I would pretend that I was a little schoolboy in Paris, and it was my breakfast “tartine”.
That good imagination came through for you.
I’ve never made a casserole where it tells you to butter, flour, and put waxed paper in a dish. Usually it’s just butter it. If it has all those steps, I’d google a similar, but easier recipe online. Sometimes cake recipes call for all those steps, but I don’t like sugar, so I don’t make cakes. Problem solved.
An easier way to use butter: I cut two sticks into tablespoon-sized pats and put them in a container in the “butter keeper” part of my fridge. Most recipes call for tablespoon-sized portions, so this way, they are on hand, and I don’t have to cut one portion each time, greasing up a knife and my hands. I just pluck one out of the container and plop it onto the pan. Or use it to grease a pan. Or to roll over an ear of corn. When the container gets low, I cut up more butter. I always have some in my freezer, as I like a particular brand I can only find at Whole Foods: Organic Valley unsalted. Why I like it? It has a higher butterfat content, so it spatters less.
I had to check again, but yes, I did say that wax paper BS was a cake recipe. It was Maida Heatter’s carrot cake and totally worth it but I sure hate that prep. And corn? I used to try to slide a pat of butter over my corn until Dave introduced me to the glory of rolling the corn over the whole stick. So during corn season we often have a stick of butter with a nice big dimple in it.
I had an uncle in Springfield who would butter, liberally, a slice of bread, and use that to butter his corn co. Aunt Jessie would shake her head and offer me more gravy. The same uncle, Deke, put gravy on his apple pie, so I didn’t follow his example.
I’ve never followed directions in cooking, at least not amounts and directions that seemed odd. My daughters complain this has made them unable to follow directions in school…they both managed somehow.
I want to say I’ve heard before of buttering bread and then wiping it onto corn. Maybe not, strikes me as genius!
I want to follow your uncle around and make notes. I never would have thought of buttering the bread but my mom made all our bread and it wasn’t squishy enough for that, probably.
I’ve seen a holder that you drop the stick of butter into and then you hold onto it and brush the butter onto the corn. We always twirled the corn on the stick of butter.
Our town has a corn festival every summer. They have tall cans of melted butter that they dip the ear into for the perfect amount of buttering. Works great if you’re preparing thousands of ears.
Tall cans of melted butter. [blacking out]
Seems like cake recipes keep getting more complicated as we have access to more ingredients and more food-focused media. I never saw anyone do a 3-step pan prep back in the fifties, and I was watching in case a bowl needed licking. No home cooks I ever saw were weighing flour, either, or scraping vanilla beans, or fretting over sea salt sources. First world problems, eh? I blame Mary Berry.
Oh now. Not Mary Berry.
Pre-sliced cheese comes in handy when you are making a stack of cheese toasties for hungry kids or grandkids and since all slices are the exact same size none can complain “he’s got more cheese than me” I’ve seen them in packs of 12, 15, 24 and 30, the pack reseals well so the cheese is good right up to the last slice. I don’t use a lot of cheese so it’s handy for me. I do buy block cheese for grating if I am making a cheese sauce for any reason.
That does make sense.
I’ve got a biscuit recipe that specifically says not to grease the pan. That never made sense to me and I didn’t want to end up chiseling biscuits off a pan, so I greased them.
Not sure when or why this happened, but one night I put the biscuits on the pan without greasing and they slid right off when they were done.
I should add that I don’t use pans or pots with no-stick surfaces. Seemed like a bad idea and then a friend had two cockatiels drop dead that were in a cage in a kitchen while a coated wok was in use.
I also don’t scrub metal pans. I coated them with lard years ago, baked it on and then continued coating with lard and just wiping down the pans after use. They live in the oven and get baked every time the oven is in use.
Probably there was enough oil/grease in the batter so that you didn’t NEED to coat the pan.
I haven’t used non-stick pans for a long while. I have parrots, and have read that they can die very quickly from the fumes. Birds have delicate respiratory systems. (Which is the “why” behind “canary in a coal mine.”) Also, I’ve read that if a parrot has had a respiratory ailment at any time in its life, it is more likely to die before its time.
I use lard, too! And I have seasoned cast iron pans that work just as well — if not better — than “non-stick.”
Fortunately, they carry lard at my local farmers market. When I’m using one tub of it, I buy another to freeze. I only buy stuff that my grandma would recognize as food. Also, duck fat is wonderful! I use it to make duck fat fries… which are basically roasted steak fries. The duck fat makes them especially crispy on the outside, without overcooking them inside.
I would never second-guess a recipe that said not to grease the pan.
A baker friend explained once that like greases will meld, if you will, so if your recipe uses butter, prepare the pan with lard.
From the title of this blog post, I thought the subject was going to be about TIFI*’s recent trial and the star witness against him. How the newscasters could keep a straight face all those weeks, I can’t imagine. The inside of their cheeks (or their tongues) must be raw from all the biting.
(*Rhymes with ‘twice impeached f*cking idiot’, mainly because the words are identical)
Oh there’s no conundrum about that little wiener.
Mmmm…pots de crème. This blog is making me hungry!
We’ve always done the ‘roll the corn on the butter’ technique. Butter comes in squares in Canada rather than sticks. Weird, eh? But it works just the same.
Murr, your kitchen experience reminds me of what happens in my workshop all the time. Hey, with this leftover piece of wood I can make a ___, but first I’ll need to make a ____ to go with it. And so it goes…
I have a whole basement full of things I don’t recognize that you’re welcome to make something out of.
Oh, that would be so much fun for someone like me! Kind of an amateur version of Chopped! That could be Pictionary for foodies!