Allison's Catfish and sausage soup
4 catfish filets, chunked
1 red bell pepper, chunked
1 green bell pepper, chunked
1 onion, chunked
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pack of loose sweet sausage, crumbled
1 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp fresh ground pepper
2 tbsp red pepper flakes
2 28oz cans crushed tomatoes
Add all ingredients to the crockpot and cook on low for 9 hours.
Grade: A
I made a cake for our friend Cara's birthday and I swear that the frosting waged a war against me. I was talking to Julie about how I could spruce up a plain old Devil's Food cake. I had a can of dark cherries at home so I decided to use that. I mixed some cherry juice with canned cream cheese frosting in my Magic Bullet. The frosting came out to a pretty purple, but it was a big mistake. I put it in the fridge to harden overnight, but did it harden? Nope. It was all liquidy and I only had half an hour to frost the cake, get dressed, and get to work. So I was frantically stirring in powdered sugar to the purple mixture, but it wasn't doing much good. I ended up having to get rid of the frosting. I had already filled all of my little piping mechanisms with the purple stuff the night before because I was "thinking ahead" so I had to rinse one out to try to use the remaining part of the untouched cream cheese frosting. I had put the little tub of frosting in the fridge so when I was trying to pipe my little flowers it was really hard to squeeze out. I put the frosting the the microwave for a couple of seconds and that helped, but then the excess water from rinsing the container started sputtering everywhere and making a mess. I was so frustrated that I just spread the frosting on top of the cake and put the cherries on. Since I didn't have the height or squishiness of the flowered piping all of my cherries rolled off when I put the cake in the car to take to Cara's place. I had to take it to work with me because I thought I was going to go to her place in Albany right after I had a meeting at St. Rose. It was pretty warm yesterday so I brought the cake inside (after much venting to Neil and Dave) so that the frosting wouldn't melt in the car. It was a good thing too. As it turns out, Cara stayed in Troy after her class. I still had to go out to Albany to have the meeting with my poetry prof so the cake went along for the ride. The meeting was only half an hour, but by the time I got the cake home, it was all drippy with frosting and bursting canned cherries. It was a frosting nightmare. I would have been better off with just dusting the cake with powdered sugar. Nevertheless, even though I thought it was a disaster and had said "It looks like a five-year-old made it." Cara was suprised and kept saying how beautiful it was (I didn't tell her that I thought it looked horrible). So the mission was a success in that aspect and now I know not to alter ready-made frosting with something other than food coloring.
It looks normal!
The cherries kind of look like grapes.
I was trying to be all artistic with putting some of the puprle frosting on the platter, but I ended up just wiping it all off because it looked awful.
2 comments:
I'm sure it was delicious anyway, Allison. Even kitchen disasters are good entertainment (as long as you don't burn the place down) and great learning experiences. So you still gained something, right?
To share in your frosting mysery, I wanted to frost my Valentine's Day cake and Japan only has whipping cream. I didn't have a mixer, but I figured that I'd do it by hand the old-fashioned way. It took Ron and I three hours alternating mixing between each other and it was still nowhere near the consistency I wanted (plus it tasted like crap). I left it overnight and tried it again the next day. It was a little better. I ended up making an ugly cake and bringing it to my English conversation class. Not to mention that the White butter cake it was suppose to be ended up ugly yellow because I used extra large eggs. Nevertheless, thank the power of "what they don't know won't hurt them." They ate it and seemed to like it. So we both can face the fact of learning new things and hopefully not making the same mistake again twice.
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