Culinary Exploits and other adventures

I wrote a dear friend this about the cranberry muffins:

This is the cranberry muffin recipe! For vegan I used a powdered egg replacement and OJ in place of milk. For the Christmas muffins I used 2 eggs plus Orange juice for the milk! The OJ is perfect with the cranberry! I have not had one of these Christmas muffins with milk but the fully vegan ones are lovely. I also did NOT melt butter and add sugar at end. I used raw sugar which I add to the top of the batter when in the muffin tins before baking.  I also add more than 1 cup raw cranberries per batch. And often add some at end on top.

[Picture above delicious samosas from Trader Joe's, sure hope I can go again to get more!] 

 The other day my Husband helped me with a culinary math question. 

I wrote it up like this:

I did not want to open a big can of evaporated milk when I had half of the 1/3 cup I needed... so I looked up evaporated milk substitutes. One option was to have powdered milk but only had 60% of the water needed and it will be evaporated milk! It was the easiest way forward! link: https://food52.com/blog/25012-best-substitutes-for-evaporated-milk?

I used this from the above link from food52.com:

"5. Powdered Milk

In the unlikely chance you have powdered milk somewhere in your kitchen, you can also rehydrate the powder into evaporated milk—that’s not even really a substitute. Simply add 60 percent of the amount of water called for to reconstitute the product into regular milk, and you’ll be good to go."

I wrote up the math process like this:

My Husband did a calculation 1/18 divided by 0.6 so that I could have HALF of 1/3 cup of evaporated milk - in which I had half of the 1/3 cup left of evaporated milk and needed the other half of 1/3 in powdered milk at 60% hydration of water to make a evaporated milk substitute (when normally 1/3 cup powdered milk makes 1 cup of milk).  Answer: 1.5 tablespoons of powder and enough water to make it halfway up the 1/3 cup.  When I did it it was nearly identical to the half of the 1/3 cup I already had in evaporated milk.  

It's cool to have a Husband who can do culinary math on a bit more of a complex level 🙂

And my post script about the math calculations: 

so [his] calculations were: 1/18/0.6 = 0.09259259259

and then 0.093 cups to tablespoons

I explained to a friend (who said she would be lost with this math, that:

I would have been lost too if I did not visually see that I only had half of my 1/3 cup full of the remaining evaporated milk and I needed a full 1/3 cup of it!

***

So there's the culinary exploits :) 

***

Today was kind of rough.

The neighbour's dog barked from midnight till 3 AM and

 I did not get to sleep until sometime after 3 AM.

So I missed liturgy this morning, was really tired and out of sorts. 

I did manage to prepare both the turtle bars and brownies 

for gifts and they are in the freezer now.

Also froze the Cranberry Muffins I made yesterday.

***

Tomorrow I hope to begin preparing gifts for Christmas on January 7th.

It's going to be a really strange, possibly hard Christmas.

Our far-away church is small and with the pandemic only so many 

can be inside and all the spots are already full, so 

we will either be in the basement (TV with audio of the service) if it is not

too crowded or we will be outside and hope we can hear something, while

seeing nothing.  

Usually when we go, it's not a problem but with it being Christmas, I think

more people will come.  

Well, at least our nearby church is large enough (it's huge) to accommodate 

more people with super good social distancing.

This pandemic is really hard.

***

Well. 

Last night I heard this on Instagram and was really taken by it.

The person who shared it told me it is this song and sure enough here it is:

(Strange band name, I think but it's beautiful, worth listening to!)

The lyrics seem to be, in English, this (from here):

The Virgin of the Angels

The Virgin of the Angels

Covers me with her mantle,

And protects me vigilantly

Sacred angel of God.

 

The Virgin of the Angels

And/She protects me, protects me,

The angel of god

And/She protects me

The angel of god

protects me.

And protects me.

-from here

*** 

And that, well, is what we needed.

Lord have mercy on us!!!

I pray for our salvation, for God's help in our time of need!

Lord be with us, do not leave us,

Your poor lost ones...