craving

Goodness almighty on a piece of toast but I feel like I've been hiding or buried or sitting in a cave for weeks and weeks, all disconnected and inarticulate and mumbling nonsense while the whole world spins on. The other day I glanced down at Bean's fingernails (ones that I could swear I just clipped a few days prior) and they were like eagle talons for all their length and breadth. Life outside my head right now is like that: could've sworn I just checked on y'all a few days ago and now what heck is UP with you guys? It's like you have LIVES or something.



(And this is where we dismiss the fact that I just likened your sweet selves to FINGERNAILS. Uck and ugh.)



Anyway and moving on.

I've been on an obsessive food kick. I want to cook and bake and buy unusual ingredients. I blame my intense watching of Food Network. It happens to be one of my favorite things--- from shee-shee fancy Ina Garten to the quirky weird science-behind-food Alton Brown. Love it all. And the best part is the Bean enjoys watching it with me. She likes to ask what they're doing on screen (my creative answer is almost always They're cooking, baby!).

Part of the food kick includes searching for recipes for some fairly inscrutable items. Like a susan cookie recipe to replicate the ones you buy at Safeway. (And oh if you've never sampled them, think dense and buttery, the near-consistency of fudge, I'm not kidding, but not chocolate fudge-- it's like VANILLA FUDGE base as a cookie, with a dollop of rich chocolate on top. I'll post the recipe sometime soon, promise.

Another food obsession: pancakes. Oh sweet fluffy goodness of pancakes. I like to whip up a batch in the morning and freeze the rest. So far we've had a few versions of classic pancakes, and some with buttermilk. But I'm dying to try this brown sugar version (can you IMAGINE?), without the syrup (we eat our pancakes plain or with powdered sugar). And I stumbled on a recipe for strawberry vanilla pancakes that we are sooooo having soon. Reports to follow on all of the pancake madness.

Which brings me to peaches. We still have some that I froze in the late months last summer fresh from Yakima, Washington (if you're not familiar, imagine the fruit basket capital of the Pacific Northwest and you've got Yakima). Chip brought home a whole flat of them fresh from the grower and what we couldn't just eat whole from our hands (faces slick and sticky afterward), I put into pie. And what I didn't put into pie, I froze to eat sometime later. I am thinking that I can use those peaches for some pancakes. And also these cookies--- we'll see how they come out using fresh instead of dried. But there's one last thing that I can't seem to get out of my little food obsessed brain and I desperately need your help and your sympathy, because what I want to eat, in ginormous heaping steaming spoonfuls----

is this. It doesn't get much more brown bag and jello than using a yellow cake mix and a can of peaches to make a 'cobbler'. And I say it as 'cobbler' because if you've had the yellow-cake-mix-peach concoction you know that it doesn't really taste anything like actual cobbler. Which is fine, because I LOVE the weird buttery/sweet/yellow-cake-mix-flavor of the peach NOTcobbler. Love it. It is synonymous with warm summer nights and skies spread with stars. Delicious. Now I know how to make the NOTcobbler. But what I want to do, and what I need your help to do is create the NOTcobbler as cupcakes. Bite-sized and mouth-poppable cupcakes. Peachy creamy gooey cupcakes. I've thought about just sort of dividing the directions and ingredients between twelve cupcake papers, but I'm not sure how it would work exactly. I'm going to give it a shot, but if you have any words of wisdom or warning, let me know.

More random foodiness:

--homemade waffle cones without owning a waffle cone maker. I have no idea how, but I keep thinking about it.

--homemade chicken nuggets. I've amassed a few different recipes to try.

--homemade fish sticks. Bean is allergic to all seafood except for cod and salmon. But the child loves carbohydrate-encrusted meat (see above re: chicken nuggets). I want to try to make some fish sticks but must do so with 100% cod and with Chip at least 100 miles away, because the mere thought of me rustling up anything seafood related within our four walls sends him into a lurching tizzy. Not a fish fan, is the Chip.

--finding a recipe to make homemade animal crackers as close to the ones you buy in the little red barnum n bailey box as possible. It's such an iconic taste, with a smidge of grahaminess and sweet cookie flavor with an ever so slight touch of lemon. The next time you eat one, think about the exact taste and you'll know what I mean. You'll also know that no one has written a recipe for making them.

I could go on, but my stomach is growling.