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Sam’s Club sells a lovely fruit salad.  It’s six pounds for like 9 dollars and the juice from it has this melony flavor the fancies up mixed drinks in a way that makes grenadine seem a methadone-like substitute.  Knowing this, I avoid consuming the fruit salad juice and bottle it when I’m done in a latch-top bottle from Ikea and store it until it’s cocktail time.

I polished off a container of fruit salad a few weeks ago and decanted the juice.  Then about a week ago, I popped the top to try some and noticed it fizzed.  I couldn’t remember if I had mixed half a left-over bottle of sparkling wine and the taste suggested I had so I recapped it and left it again.  Today I returned home after work and knocked a bottle of Mountain Dew off the top of my fridge.  It hit the ground and I looked down and saw a yellow/green puddle thinking the bottle had opened.  I picked up the bottle and saw it was intact.  I opened the fridge and saw what I can only describe as carnage.  The bottle contained the apparently fermented fruit juice had exploded with enough force to embed shards  of glass in the door.  A fact I found out while wiping the door down and the wash rag being stopped repeated by jagged shards poking out.  Bottles on the second shelf of my fridge had been knocked over and the top rear of my fridge was even hit by the blast.  I threw out some things that were in open containers as they may have received glass spall.  On the plus side, my fridge has never been cleaner.

Part of me wants to science it and see if it’ll happen again.

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I’ve gotten better at baking over time. This may sound obvious but today the contrast was stark. The first carrot cake with cream cheese frosting I ever made took me about six hours. Of this, three was actual work and the rest was baking, cooling, and other time where I could do other things. Today, I did this all in about two with one hour being baking time.

Here’s what I think I’ve done differently:
*I use 1 more bowl – In baking, many ingredients can be done in sets. For instance, fats and sugars in cakes will usually be done together. Historically, I tried to use as few bowls as possible, but you can speed up prep by measuring the next ingredient in another bowl while the previous one mixes. This saves the time of removing the mixing bowl from the stand mixer and returning it.
*Knowing when I can over mix – Some ingredients will over mix. For instance, once flour is added, you can mix too much and the gluten in the flour will make the dough tough. It’s hard to over mix butter/sugar and somewhat hard to over mix the semi-final batter. This lets me do a step without watching the mixer.
*Prepping Butter – When I’m going to bake a lot of things, the night before, I leave 2 lbs of butter on the counter still wrapped in a sealed container. Room temperature butter is so much easier to work with.
*Excess Inventory – I follow a simple rule for common ingredients. Always have an open bag and backup bag of something. This means that I always have 2 bags of chocolate morsels, one in use, one in reserve at all times. It requires extra space, but this extra space doesn’t often get accessed so things can be arranged snugly in it. This has almost eliminated emergency store trips.
*Split Recipes – Some recipes are “bases”. The cheesecake recipe I use makes 2 9″ rounds so making two cheesecakes of different types is easy. In this case, ½ was kept plain, the other had cookie crumbs added to it.
*Better balance – A good kitchen balance is indispensable. My previous balance was 5g accurate so I needed a second smaller balance for things like salt. I purchased a $40 quality balance that is gram accurate up to 5 kilos and haven’t looked back.
*Clean everything all the time – I have a half dozen kitchen towels on hand at all times. This allows me to clean as I go. You figure I can probably re-use some dirty bowls between cakes but for whatever reason I find it easier to just clean everything each time and never have to think about where to put something.

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Making cookies follows a repeating cycle once the batter is made.  For peanut butter cookies, after each tray does 7 minutes 30 seconds on each of rack A and C in the oven, they’re left out to cool for 9 minutes before being transferred to a cooling rack where upon the baking sheets are repopulated with dough and put in the oven.  I ordered a second set of baking sheets and silicone mats thinking this would reduce my total baking time, instead I chose to double the batch.  The double batch doesn’t quite fit in my stand mixer so I’m getting a 6 qt mixer which appears like it won’t quite fit in my appliance rack.  A larger rack would require me to either move it find a new home for my crockpot.

It all starts small; this is why the national debt is topping $14 thousand thousand million.

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It has literally be five months since anyone has gone food shopping.  We’d consumed just about everything to the point where I was marinading 4 month old venison  in Italian dressing and Arby’s Horsey Sauce to serve with broccoli florets emancipated from a solid block of ice.  Today that ended.  And it was good.  I repeatedly looked at things on the shelves and said to myself “that looks good” or “I’ll enjoy broiling that”, I’d then look at my AmEx card, and place the item in the card while giggling like a school girl.  I repeated this from about produce to cereal before it wore off, it again return when I found cheese and ice cream that were buy one get one free.

I brought in the food and immediately had some yogurt, a pickle and 3 pieces of fruit.  I was saddened that there were more things I wanted to consume but couldn’t due to insufficient stomach capacity when I noticed that the walls of my kitchen featured cabinetry I could use for storage, thus allowing me to consume them later! How did no one think of this previously?