Chocolate cake and a story

I love to cook. I''m comfortable following a recipe, or improvising. The running joke between me and mother is "where'd you get your love for cooking?" A family member asked me this straight-faced while my mom was RIGHT there. Awkward. The same person mused that I must have gotten it from a dead relative. Slam. I know where I got it, and so did that unnamed family member. I got it from my mom. She is the best home cook I know. I'm supposed to say that, because she's my mom, but even church people think so, too. Anything I make well, she makes better. When I got married, she wrote out many of my favorite recipes in a little journal. The journal is one of my favorite things. (Cue Julie Andrews.) The recipe I'm going to share is not from said journal, but it was a nice story to intro some of my cooking/baking adventures.

I'm not a baker. I love to cook, but baking stresses me out. Everything from the weather to the size of the measuring spoon has to be exact. I once read an article that showed the variation from one teaspoon to the next. Bah!  I want the perfect recipe, too, but I don't bake often enough to have the perfect recipe. I rely on All Recipes a lot for the user reviews, but even that has failed me sometimes. Not this time! I'm bringing chocolate cake to EVERYthing.

I found this recipe on AllRecipes, but after reading a few reviews, I discovered that it's the same recipe on the back of the Hershey's Cocoa box. Let's give credit where credit is due. My mom said her grandma used to make it. I didn't know this, but how 'bout a connection to the family matriarchs for the win!  (Enjoy the recipe.)

Basically, dump everything into a bowl, mix, pour into a prepared Bundt pan, and bake. I made THIS glaze to finish it off.

P.S.: I will get better at taking process pictures.

Saving Money: Cooking Dried Beans

I'm linking up today with The Vanilla Tulip to share my own Thrifty Thoughts. We live on (almost) one income, and we like to make our dollars stretch, especially when it comes to grocery shopping. One of my best money saving measures is using dried beans instead of buying canned beans. Canned beans are convenient, but if you eat a lot of beans like we do, they add up quickly. The BPA that lines ALL cans (except one brand) is questionable, so I do my best to avoid it whenever possible. It's in EVERYthing, so it's nearly impossible to eliminate completely.

Dried beans are EASY to cook, and they can and freeze beautifully. You can cook them on your stove top, slow cooker, or in a pressure cooker. I find mine have the best flavor when cooked in a slow cooker and seasoned, but I also find myself in a time crunch a lot, and use my pressure cooker. (It was a gift from my mother-in-law a few years ago, and I absolutely love it.)

1. Buy your dried beans from any grocery store. I like to buy organic or locally grown beans, but the nearest natural foods market is 45 minutes away, and sometimes Wal-Mart has to suffice. Dried beans are significantly cheaper than canned beans. I usually use 2-16 ounce bags of small red beans in chili. Yes, we eat beans in our chili. Sorry, to any of you die-hard Texas chili fans out there.

2. Rinse your beans, and if you're particular, remove any broken beans or rocks. Yes, sometimes there are rocks in dried beans. You can soak your beans ahead of time to speed up the cooking time. I usually don't soak my beans.

3. Cover them with water per your pressure cooker's instructions, or put them on the stove top or in the slow cooker. The slow cooker is definitely the slowest cooking method (hence, the name), but I hate to watch and stir beans on the stove top. Sometimes, I will throw in celery, onion, spices, or a bay leaf to flavor the beans, and sometimes I don't. If you salt your beans during the cooking process, it can make them tough, so wait until they are finished cooking to add salt. If you use a pressure cooker, I use this site to determine cooking times.

4. Enjoy! Depending on the type of bean and what I'm going to use them for, sometimes I rinse them with water, and sometimes I save the water they were cooked in. I make up big batches at a time and will freeze them in 2-cup portions for later use. I know people who can their beans, but I haven't added canning to my bag of tricks, yet.