It is my hope that you find this not only entertaining, but educational as well. I'm cooking. Really. Not just fixing stuff, like stuff out of a box, actually cooking. I now know why my mother's in law refrigerator was always full. Full, like not being able to wedge a stick of butter, up right, into the smallest crevice. She cooked and having a stocked frig meant most everything she needed was in there.....somewhere.
There is a lot of talk about meal prepping. This is planning and pre-cooking meals ahead of time. This technique works well for those who are watching their diet and helps to eliminate stuffing one's face with an unhealthy tidbit when the hunger bell goes off in the brain. Although prepping is not necessary in my case, it is handy to have a few things pre-prepared....like bacon.
Bacon ranks right up there with air. Bacon just makes everything better, kind of like cheese. It is handy to have the bacon cooked ahead of time, especially when craving a piece of bacon, or when fixing a dish that calls for a couple of slices.
Cooking bacon can be a chore though. It isn't one of those things that can be thrown on the stove and forgot about...unless a person enjoys their home filled with the odor of burnt bacon smoke...for days. Having been given an air fryer, I have discovered that for me, cooking bacon in it, is by far the best and safest method.....even though I did manage to set the smoke detector off while cooking said bacon the other day. In my defense, I was cooking two packages and should have drained the grease from the pan after the first package.
In preparation of baking a pumpkin pie, I discovered that pumpkin pie spice must be a seasonal item as it was not to be found in any of the stores I visited. A quick search on my phone led me to a page that explained this spice was a mixture of four ingredients, ground cinnamon, ground cloves, ground nutmeg and ground ginger....ground being the key word for each spice. It also stated that in order to create pumpkin pie spice, all that was necessary was to use an equal measurement of each spice and place in a sealed container until ready to use. Easy peasy. I grabbed the spices I needed and headed for home.
As I put a tablespoon of the spices into a small dish, I came to my small container of ground cloves, that were not ground, but whole.
Since I had already opened this pricey little item, along with the fact that is was super hot outside and I had managed to get all my errands done in one trip, I was not going back out the door. Another Google search informed me that it took three whole cloves to make 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves. I calculated that I would need 36 cloves to make a tablespoon and proceeded to count them, wondering if the little stems that did not have a seed on the end counted as a whole clove. The next step was to grind them. I did not have a grinder so I put them in a plastic bag, placed that on a plastic cutting board and beat the bejabbers out of them with my hammer. Whole cloves are really hard. After I had pulverized them as much as possible, I poured the crushed cloves into a wire mesh strainer and sifted the powder into a bowl. Peering into the bowl, I knew it was going to take more than 36 cloves and poured some more into the plastic bag. After several rounds of the hammer, I finally had what I considered as close an amount of ground cloves that would suffice for the mix.
Now, what to do with all the excess cloves left in the bag? It didn't seem right to throw them away, or put them back in the jar. Then, a wonderful thought came to mind, even the Voice, that lives inside my head thought it was a good idea. Since the place did have the lingering aroma of bacon, why not boil the leftover shards of cloves? Perfect! I put some water in a small saucepan along with the clove parts, placed it on the burner and turned it to the highest setting.
As I was going about cleaning up the mess I had made, I noticed something odd. The cloves smelled wonderful, but it seemed I was having trouble breathing. I turned the burner down to simmer. That didn't seem to help and as I was doing yet another Google search for the side effects of cloves, my eyes began to feel like there was a film forming over them. Just as my search revealed that too many cloves could create respiratory difficulties, the Voice ran by me with a gas mask on and went straight out the door.
The lesson here, I guess, is don't boil cloves...especially in a small space. One thing for sure though, my garbage disposal smells amazing.
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