Easy Enough A Two-Year-Old Could Handle It......Or Not.

Today was all about experiments when it came to our recipes……as usual.  Thanks to Pinterest, we found two amazing-sounding dishes to try: “Crack-N-Cheese” (obviously a spoof on Mac and Cheese), and Silk Chocolate pie (a perfect addition since it is, in fact, our pastor’s wife’s birthday; and every pastor’s wife needs silk chocolate pie on her birthday).  Easy enough a two-year old could handle it….or not.  Incidentally, even the simplest-sounding recipes seem to turn into ridiculous challenges (kind of like the ones on the tv show “Chopped”) when we are in the kitchen.  And even BEFORE we are in the kitchen, really.  Take, for example, our trip to the Wal Mart in Columbia to try to find pasteurized eggs to use in the pie.  Yeah, I think we forgot that we live in a small town.  Upon asking where we might find pasteurized eggs we were given the response, “What’s a pasteurized egg?”  “Well, we were kind of hoping the pasteurized egg carton might tell us that!”  Time to consult good ol’ google.  It turns out pasteurized eggs are heat-treated eggs to prevent the occurrence of salmonella in uncooked foods, such our silk chocolate pie.  Who knew?  It also turns out the Columbian Wal Mart does not carry obscure items…such as pasteurized eggs.  Next stop: IGA.  Surely a grocery store would carry something comparable to pasteurized eggs….not that we knew WHAT exactly was comparable to these apparently unheard of delicacies.  Again, no luck.  We did, however, spend about 10 minutes staring at the shelf of eggs in hopes that a magical box would appear out of thin air.  Or maybe we were hoping God would give us a revelation as to what to do next.  Either way, we stared and stared, and finally decided a carton of egg whites would have to do (by this point we had entered full experimentation mode), triple-checking, of course, that the egg whites were indeed pasteurized because, as Rebecca put it, “It’s never a good life decision to poison your pastor’s wife with salmonella-ridden egg whites.  Especially not on her birthday.” 

Upon returning to the house, the baking commenced…..as did the mishaps.  Mishaps such as accidentally purchasing margarine rather than butter (and subsequently finding the words “DO NOT USE MARGARINE” in the recipe book), opening the drawer to find about a quarter of the vanilla that was supposed to be there, and receiving a text message of hysterical laughter from our cooking mentor, Bridgette, in response to our questioning about the process of pasteurizing eggs.  Nevertheless, neither one of us is much for backing down from adversity, so onward we pressed.  Thankfully the crust-from-scratch recipe was a fairly easy one to follow.  Mix flour, shortening, salt, and ice water, roll it out, press into a pie pan, bake for 11 minutes, and you are good to go.  The chocolate filling, however, proved to be a different story.  The “butter” did not want to cream as well as it should have, the vanilla/sugar/butter mixture wouldn’t fluff up, and then there were the egg whites…..which only amounted to 7 eggs-worth when the recipe called for 8.  Again we pressed onward.  Ha!  Finally a step we can handle!  Melt the unsweetened chocolate in a saucepan (PS: don’t eat unsweetened chocolate. It tastes like chocolate for the first second, but quickly turns bitter in your mouth.  PSS: this also applies to cocoa powder…..minus the “it tastes like chocolate for the first second” part.)  The recipe says the mixture should come out nice and fluffy……ours came out like cake batter.  Close enough.  Time to toss the pies into the fridge in hopes of the sloppy chocolate mess firming up and somehow coming out looking remotely appetizing.  And “pastor’s-wife’s-birthday-worthy.”

Next we move on to the main course: Crack-N-Cheese!  Shell pasta, butter, cheddar cheese, bacon, milk and cream cheese.  Now THAT sounds like our kind of recipe!  As I (Christina) am triple-checking the recipe, Rebecca goes to check on the boiling water and pour in the noodles.  The recipe calls for 4 oz of noodles.  She poured in the whole box…….16oz.  “I like pasta,” she responded.  Maybe that’s why they call it “crack-n-cheese”.  Moving on, the noodles are cooking, Christina is cooking the bacon, and Rebecca is quintuple-checking the recipe.  Next step: melt butter in a pot, whisk (in our case stir) in flour………and then just look at the mixture.  The book says to cook 2tbs of butter and 2tbs of flour for 5 minutes.  Problem #1: we used the biggest saucepan in Rebecca’s kitchen.  Clearly there was not enough of the nasty-looking mixture there to cook for one minute, much less five, so we went ahead and added the 1 1/2 cups of milk and brought that to a bubble.  Yes, it said a “bubble,” not boil.  Once that was done we added the cream cheese and stirred until it thickened.  So far, so good!  Now came the fun part: adding 4 cups of shredded cheddar cheese, paprika, and salt and pepper.  Needless to say, with 4 cups of cheddar cheese, it was a very cheesy sauce J Mix in the chopped bacon (YUM!) and noodles.  And yes, we somehow used ALL of the noodles….it took a lot of heavy-duty stirring to get that mixed up.  The final step was putting the concoction in a pan, adding MORE cheese, and baking until it was golden brown.  After 15 minutes, the verdict: “Super hearty and delicious!  The bacon added a great flavor without overpowering.  The paprika was the perfect seasoning for it.”  A perfect meal when combined with a tossed-together salad, using whatever vegetables can be dug up from the fridge.  One success chalked up on the board tonight.  But there still remained one un-finished challenge: the pie, which had at this point been chilling in the fridge for over two hours.  It’s on.  We made whipped-cream for the pie which turned out to be surprisingly easy with the help of the Strawberry Shortcake Easy Cookbook CJ loaned us after our last kitchen escapade (which I just realized we haven’t blogged about yet…..it will come).  Heavy whipping cream, sugar, vanilla, and a splash of hazelnut.  Multiple taste tests revealed this particular recipe did not contain enough sweetness to satisfy the desires of our sweet teeth (Rebecca always says that “every tooth she has is a sweet one”), so we decided to pour in some more sugar.  You can never have enough sugar, right?  Turned out to be just what we needed, so we took the test pie out, decided to ignore the little jiggle in the middle, and proceeded to slather the cream on top.  As Christina cut into it and began putting the pieces on the plates, the entire pie began to suck into itself….you couldn’t even tell we had cut any of it out.  Yeah, the pie kind of…well, it was glorified pudding J  In hopes of the second one being a bit more set, we scooped out a big bowl of whipped cream, covered the pie, and headed over to deliver the birthday greeting.  We tried putting candles on it, but….well, if you have ever tried putting candles in pudding, you know how well that went.  It basically ended with the two of us laughing hysterically on our pastor’s unlit front porch and scrambling to keep the candles lit and upright, while our pastor stood on the other side of the door prepping his shotgun to ward off whatever intruders had made their way onto his porch.  Ok, so he didn’t really have his shotgun….but we did get accused of freaking him out (ironically his sermon this week was on “fear”) by standing on his darkened porch, giggling and holding falling firesticks.  

So today, was a day of experiments, and while there might have been many bumbling and blunders, everything tasted fantastic and many laughs were had by all.  Thus far there have been no reports of anyone getting sick…..or worse.  However, as I sit here in my room wondering about the best way to close this post out, I’m wondering if we should have had Kellis bless the pie before we ate it.  That way at least the eggs whites would have been PASTOR-ized.