Tres Leches

 Tres Leches is Ice Cream and Cake.  Birthday Cake!  And, after all,  my favorite vanilla ice cream has always been home-made Eagle Brand.  This is by far the quickest Tres Leches I have ever made.  And it makes a small cake, important for space because you keep it refrigerated.   If you need to,  it can be doubled,  but this is enough
for 8 people.
Here's what you will need:

3 eggs
3/4 c. sugar
*1c. Self-Rising flour.  (or 1c AP flour with 1/2 tsp. baking powder.)
1/8tsp. salt
1/4 c. milk
Evaporated milk
Sweetened condensed milk
Heavy cream
Powdered Sugar
vanilla optional
*I always use SR flour when I bake.  It just seems to me to be more dependable and no sifting.
Preheat your oven to 350.
Separate the eggs and put a pinch of cream of tartar in the whites and beat to soft peaks.  I love, love, love this whipper for egg whites.  You can do this by hand in about one minute.

Mix up the yolks with 1/4 cup milk and gently mix it into the whites in about 3 portions.

Combine the SR flour and sugar and salt and add that, gently, in about 3 portions.

When it is just  combined, put it into a prepared pan more or less 8x8. 
By the way, I love this stuff for cake pans.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, sticks to this stuff.  You can get it at Walmart.  And I wish I were getting something for my recommendation, but nahhh.





Put it into the oven for 20-25 minutes.
While it is cooking, mix a can of sweetened condensed milk, about 3/4 of a big can of evaporated milk or 2 small cans, and 1/2 c. Heavy Cream.

When your cake is done, you can take it out of the pan like this, or just leave it in and poke holes all over the cake with a skewer (not too skinny) and use the flat end.

Pour the milk mixture over the cake and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.

And for even more smooth delicious milkiness, whip about 2 cups of heavy cream with 2 T powdered sugar and a few drops of vanilla.  Did you know that powdered sugar has lots of cornstarch in it?  If you use powdered sugar in the cream it will "stabilize" the cream and the whipped cream will stay whipped much longer.  Good to know, for us cream freaks.

Hide this in the refrigerator and just see if this lasts long enough to be worried about.  I bet it won't.

Hello, Cutie.

Hey!  So glad you could make it!  Come on in....I mean up! Wow, little Rattlesnake Bean, you are not shy, are you?

 Awww... Have you ever seen anything so sweet?

Baby Zuchinni is one of those really, really agressive kids.

Little okra, you steal my heart!

Update on the Raised-Bed Square-foot Garden

This, right here, this goofy little plot, is  my 10x10 "Square-Foot Garden".   I'll tell  you  about some of the steps we went through to make if you're interested.  If not, pass on by to Fried Chicken.
Below is some of the stuff, er.. .amendments, we put in the soil; peat moss, and vermiculite, and I don't show the kitchen and yard compost I made last year but we put that in as well.

Below is how the garden turned out with all the amendments dug in and  covered with weed blocker.  You can never have too much protection.  Against weeds.
I also consumed some medicinal tequila later to loosen up my back.
The roof tiles were there to make the soaker hose behave.  I removed them later.

Then I covered it all with a bale of "hot" hay that my neighbor kindly gave me, also some insides from some evaporative cooler pads, (left over from another idea) and got started putting my old collection of picket fence around it, mainly for vine support but also just to be funky.  I am planning to make a bigger support trellis for the beans later on.

And...then I had this idea about the "squares" in the square foot garden.  In order to be able to have two (admittedly) narrow walking paths through the garden, (the burlap) I bought lath and made it into long T's with cross pieces.  Each one of those rows is 20 square feet.

This was actually fun to do, mostly because  I got out Left Brain's skill saw out to cut the 2 foot pieces.  Wow!  I love power tools.  Left Brain just hates it when I use his tools.

At this point,  I needed some help to make the "gates" into the "walkways' and Left Brain got out his own power tools and made me two lovely little gates that just stick into the soil.  Waaaay cool.

Now that I have all the soil ready and the plan laid out, I sketched out my spaces and had fun figuring what to plant where.  I have 60 square feet to work with!  These are the plants I will plant, either as seeds or seedlings:
Red Ripper Cowpeas (isn't that the coolest name?  My dad told me about them.)
Black eyed Peas
Rattlesnake Beans (who could resist this?)
Okra
Zucchini
Yellow Squash
Eggplant
Bell Pepper
Jalapeno
Poblano chile
Cucumber
Cantaloupe
Beets (Beets?, really?)
Pumpkin
Radishes
Greek Oregano
Fennel
Watermelon
Tomatoes

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of you reading this are laughing out loud at the idea of all those plants in this little space, and you are probably right!  But this is experimental, and however it turns out, I'll show you the results.  I just could not resist all those lovely little seeds.  I'm missing my Mom, and this helps.

However,  I do have to admit that my funny little mother never made such a to-do out of a vegetable garden.  She just put seeds in the ground and out they came.  She would probably have laughed at this. But I have never had her luck or skill.  This garden is actually my most all-out effort at a vegetable garden.  So wish me luck, por favor.

Raised-Bed Vegetable Garden, the Easier Way

There are a million schemes for raised-bed gardens, and if you are going to put yours on an unleveled spot, it can be tricky.  Pioneer Woman's is a good plan, but takes a lot of leveling of dirt.  That's hard!  And Hard Work!  My garden bed plan was based on one I helped build for St. Clement's School, and the 4th graders grow some beautiful flowers and vegetables, and have learned so much about gardening.  What you do is make a real....bed.  With legs.  you can level it easily by digging under the legs, not necessary to level the entire ground under it.

This plan  is easy and only took myself and Cerebro Izquierdo 2 hours to put together, but that was using some power tools, a saw and a drill, to be specific.  Here are some of the hand tools you will need.
I decided to use 2x12x10ft. boards.  They were about $8 apiece.  I also bought a 4x4 inch post which was also around $8.00.  The Square Foot Gardener says that you only need to use 6 inches of soil, so you could use 1x6's.  Also, using 10x10 is going to cost me about $100 to have filled with a soil compost mix from a local materials outfit.  You figure 27 square feet in a square yard of soil, and since I don't want to fill it to the top, and I'm going to amend the soil some, I need 2 yards.  All together this garden is going to cost me around $200.00.  However, it will be moveable if I need to, and it's very large. That's a ton of vegetables, and over the years....what's that word?  Amortize?

You will need 16 bolts, like this, 3/8x6,
and washers and nuts to tighten them up.
I realized that if I set the boards up on the posts with some space underneath like a real bed, we could easily dig holes under the posts to get the top level, which is what we did.  We cut the 4x4in. posts to 18 inch lengths, giving ourselves a 6 inch leg to use when leveling. If your space is not as sloped as mine was, you could leave less space on the "legs".
I made two templates with drill marks spaced so the bolts wouldn't hit each other.

We marked the posts with the templates like this, and then used the drill to make a 3/8 (the same size as the bolt) hole through the post.

We then set up the boards and posts on the ground and held the boards to the posts and used the drill to mark where to drill on the board.  Then we drilled holes in the boards and used the bolts to connect the pieces.  Voila!!  Then we used the level to check which sides were uneven and dug underneath the high posts until the level was happy.

I decided I didn't need the bottom of the boards to touch the ground, and I'm using some left over vinyl flooring that I used for the chicken coop to close the larger openings, but I'm not sure I even needed it.
Now for the dirt, the peat moss, and the vermiculite. Hmmmm.  Seeds or plants?

My Arctic Air Glass Door Refrigerator

I am posting this because when I was thinking about buying an Arctic Air restaurant glass-front refrigerator for our home, I could only find 1 opinion about it, and that was, I believe, on epinions.  That person loved it.
So, I am posting this after owing and using this for a year and a half, and I am saying, "I love it."

However, you have to have another freezer to keep ice or an ice maker or some scheme like that.   Because of course, this fridge won't freeze anything or make ice.  It doesn't have the shelves on the door for condiments.  And that's OK.  There's plenty of room in here for condiments.  I keep my veggies in one box and my cheese in another and my meat(ish) stuff in another and my condiments and tortillas in another.  The top shelf holds a ton of milk, drinks, yogurt, cream and sour cream.  

Having a glass door isn't everyone's dish of fish.  And I did, admittedly, spend quite a bit of time finding just the right plastic boxes for keeping things organized on the shelves.  I finally bought a plastic thingy with drawers at Walmart, keeping the drawers and ditching the plastic drawer holder.

But, here is the thing.  It's alive.  It's light.  It has a pleasant hum.  It's food.  I can see what's in it and know when I need to pick up some milk.  It's not boring.  I can keep tons of food in here, much more than any other fridge I've ever owned.  And it's the easiest-to-clean refrigerator I ever cleaned. I bought it from an internet restaurant supply, no tax and free shipping.  My own epinion is: A+.

Mazatlan Sourdough Bread, Part 2

This is my waaay-easy, almost knead-less bread recipe.  It only involves using the starter 7 hours before you make the bread.  So sometime in the morning, put 2 ladlesful of flour
  in a big bowl.  I just used AP flour from Ley.   Add two ladles of sourdough starter to the flour in the bowl and one ladle of water, more if your dough is too dry, also 2tsp. of salt.  (Remember to add two ladles of flour and 3 of water to the starter and stir well, then put that away.)

Stir up your flour, starter and water, just until well mixed, and cover it with plastic or a towel and let it sit in a warm place.  It needs to double in size and that could take as little as 2 or three hours, depending on how active your starter is.  You'll just have to check.  If you want to leave it until the next day, you ought to put it in the fridge so you don't wear out your yeast.  I usually leave it until 2 hours before dinner, so it's just cooked but not hot when it's time to eat.

At this point take it out of the bowl and turn it onto a floured surface.  Knead it for a couple of minutes, adding more flour if it's really sticky, until it makes a pretty ball like this.  You can leave it in the dutch oven to rise a while, but I found I didn't have to with the starter I used.
Put the ball of flour in a heavy dutch oven with the lid on, and put it into a cold oven.  Set the oven to bake at 400F and let it bake for an hour.   Take the lid off and let it cook about 15 minutes more.  Then, it's done.
Wrap it in a towel when you take it out of the dutch oven. Serve with lots of good butter and wine, or course.  Don't you just feel like an earth mama now?  Try and not break into "I am Woman".  But I know you'll feel like it.







So, to recap:
1. Two large ladles full of starter in a bowl.
2. Two ladles  of  flour.
3. Three ladles of water.
4. 2 tsp. salt.
5. Mix well, cover, and leave in a not-cold spot.
6. When doubled, knead with enough flour to make into a ball.
7. Put the ball into a dutch oven and cover. You can let it rise a while in the dutch oven or,
8. Put the dutch oven into the oven and set to bake at 400.  
9. Leave in for 1 hour, then uncover for 15 more minutes.
10.  Try (it's hard, I know) to let it cool down before eating.

Mazatlan Sourdough Starter

I love to bake bread.  And sourdough, made with wild yeast?  It's so ... miraculous.  And easy.   Just look what you can do with air, flour, and water!

What is wild yeast?  It's yeast that is floating around in the air, everywhere.  Maybe not so much in the dry Mojave, but tons around the ocean or humid places.  The day I caught my little yeastie pals in Mazatlan was sunny and breezy.  All you do is mix an amount of pure water and flour, 1.5 to 1, and go outside and stir, stir, stir.  Leave it outside for a while and then stir some more.  Put it in a clean jar and don't screw the lid down all the way, because the little yeast organisms digest and produce co2 which will need to escape.  But you'll need to nourish and grow your little colony of yeast.  So, after your initial "catch" has sat in room temperature anywhere between 8 and 12 hours, take half of it and throw it away, Yes, it seems a waste, but until you have a good batch you have to do it. Then, you need to feed the remaining "batter" with more pure water and flour, in 1.5 to 1 proportion.  Stir, stir, stir again, because yeast likes oxygen.  Think of the remaining yeast organisms getting stronger and healthier, and reproducing at a faster rate.    Do this 3 or 4 times and you'll have a lovely little Yeast farm in your jar.  It should smell pleasantly tangy,  sour and ... yeasty, and a little liquid will form on the top, this is "liquor" and it is alcohol.  You can either stir it back in or let it drain off.  I think the flavor doesn't improve the sourdough batter and when I make bread, I use a lot of starter, so I pour it out.
So, to recap:
1. Put flour and purified water in a bowl on a breezy day.  About 2 to 1 water to flour. Stir well.
2. Set outside for a couple of hours.
3. Stir again and put in a clean jar or container.
4.  8 to 12 hours later, take out half, and put more flour and water in.  Stir well. Cover with a loose lid and let it sit out unrefrigerated.
5. Do it again.
6. Do it again.
7. Do it again.
8. Add 2c. flour and 3c. water the last time.  When it's bubbly, either use it or put it in the fridge until you do.

9.  Always add flour and water every time you use some.  It can go right into the refrigerator afterwards.