CarltonFoster.com

If you had been a subscriber on this site but are not any more, please feel free to re-register.  However, this time, please at least fill out part of the user info beyond just email.  I regularly delete all registered users that I think are spam registrations (grouchy that way).  If the registration seems questionable, it goes.

Sorry.  I just have little patience for annoyances…

Carl tells me that today- 101010 is 42 in binary so happy 42!

Why in the world did you decide to kick the bucket behind the veggie garden? You’re stinky! Thankfully it’s been raining or you’d smell even worse. Hopefully some nice guy or gal will be coming to remove you from that corner tomorrow. ICK!

This is for Cleo. Brandon said the filling wasn’t turning out quite right for you and since I don’t know if he passed along the tip to add powdered sugar to the peanut butter, I’m posting the whole recipe here.

For the chocolate cups:

12oz bag of semi sweet chocolate chips

2 TBSP vegetable shortening

paper or foil liners

For the filling:

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup powdered sugar

1 TBSP butter, melted

For the filling: Mix the peanut butter, powdered sugar and melted butter together then put in the fridge to chill.

To make the cups: Put the chocolate chips and vegetable shortening in the top of a double boiler. Stir until smooth. Set the paper liners on a cookie sheet and fill about 1/4 to 1/3 full with the melted chocolate. Spread the chocolate up the sides of the paper liner. Put in freezer for a couple of minutes to set.

Once the filling and the cups have chilled and set up, start making balls of filling to go in the cups.  They should be large enough when flattened to almost fill the cups, but small enough to leave room for more chocolate to cover them. Once all of the cups are filled with the peanut butter filling, spoon melted chocolate over the top to cover. If you want to add chopped nuts or sprinkles to the tops, do that before they set. Put the finished pb cups in the fridge to harden.  If you left the tops plain and want to drizzle a white chocolate or dark chocolate over the tops, you can do that before or after they have hardened.

The number of cups made depends on what size you make them and how thick or think the chocolate is.  If you are going to use the standard size muffin cups or the jumbo muffin size, I recommend putting the paper liners in a muffin tin and not a cookie sheet. The larger liners can flop open instead of holding their shape when you want the chocolate to set up.

I am going to start posting the recipes for the baked goods I send in for the brown bags. If anyone wants the recipe, I can direct them here instead of trying to track them down. I will also have the recipe handy in case I can’t find where I have it written down.

These brownies use almost every size measuring cup from the set I have. If you just have a basic set (1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1 cup,) you’ll have to do some rinsing/wiping of your measuring cups. They are yummy brownies that you can dress up by icing them or by adding chopped chocolate. I usually just make them plain.

1 2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 sticks butter, melted

2 TBSP water

2 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla

1 1/3 cup flour

3/4 cup baking cocoa (I used regular unsweetened, but you can use dark unsweetened or a combo of the 2)

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 9″ x 13″ pan.

Mix the sugar, melted butter, and water together in a medium sized bowl. Add the eggs and vanilla, stirring well.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Stir into the wet ingredients.

Pour into prepared pan and bake 20- 25 minutes. The brownies should pull away from the edges a bit and a tooth pick inserted near the middle should pull out with just a few crumbs or just a little streaky. If you pull out the tooth pick and it’s coated with batter, it’s not done yet.

As a side note: I was stumbling around today and ended up on a food blog. I swear it was written by a 3rd grader. The grammar mistakes were more than just basic typos. I can ignore things like teh or spacing errors where the first letter of one word ends up on the end of the one before it. But oh my cow, if you are going to offer giveaways sponsored by well meaning companies, please learn the difference between accept and except and when to use a and an.  If you are trying to make money with your blog, you really need to try to communicate with at least a middle school level grasp of the language. Spell check can only do so much to catch mistakes.

Here’s the peanut butter cookie recipe I use. For the cashew butter cookies, I just subbed cashew butter for the peanut butter. If you get it at Fresh Market, the smaller plastic tub is one cup of cashew butter.

1 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup peanut butter

2 eggs

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375°. Cream the shortening and sugars. Add the peanut butter and mix. Add the eggs and mix well. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, and vanilla and mix well. Roll into balls or use a medium cookie scoop and put on cookie sheet. Using a fork, make a criss cross pattern on top of the cookies, flattening slightly. Bake for 10 minutes. Allow to cool on cookie sheet for 5 minutes before moving to cooling rack to cool completely.

There ya go guys. I can’t remember if I have made you guys peanut butter cookies before, but if I did, that is the recipe I used. They are good as is or you can dip them in chocolate to make them yummier.

Yes I know that Christmas was months ago, but I never posted what turned out and what didn’t.  The maple fudge turned out well. It was popular with Carl’s coworkers so it will definitely be made again next year. I used Pioneer Woman’s sugar cookie recipe. It always turns out well for me, but the regular recipe makes a small amount of cookies so I always double it. I also made oreo pops. Take a double stuffed oreo and separate the cookies  and dip a lollipop stick in candy coating then into the oreo stuffing. You don’t want to push it down too much as the cookies may break. Then put the other half back on. You want a good bit of candy coating to make contact with both halves of the cookie. After the candy coating is set, dip the cookie pops into melted chocolate or candy coating. Lay them on parchment paper to set. I also make hot chocolate on a stick. I think I got the recipe from a link on giver’s log, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to look for it again.  The first batch of toffee did not set at all. I think the issue was my candy thermometer. I bought a better one and the second batch turned out great. I did flip it over and add a second layer of chocolate so there was chocolate on the top and bottom.  The chocolate mice turned out pretty well. If anyone in the family has a request for next year, please let me know.

Last year when we got back from vacation, Carl and the boy made me 2 garden boxes. I planted some beans, 2 types of lettuce and spinach. I also planted broccoli. The beans and leafy stuff did really well. The broccoli did ok. I got 3 tiny heads of broccoli that looked more like an individual floret than a head of broccoli. Gardening is always an experiment and the broccoli just wasn’t the best one.

Anyway, I have already started on the Spring garden. I have corn, peas, green beans, 2 types of tomato, anahiem peppers for the girl, zucchini, black tulips, rosemary, chives, and parsley. The girl wants to grow mint so I have a pot ready for that whenever the garden store gets in mint plants.  I also have a cayenne pepper plant to give as a birthday gift. We’re trying out some citronella plants to see how well they work at keeping the mosquitoes away. Those are in pots so we can move them around as needed.

The peas, beans and corn have come up. The tomatoes and peppers are starting to sprout. The zucchini were seedlings I bought so they were already sprouted.

OH! I also put in 4 blueberry bushes. They when in last night. Two of them have some nice green growth on them and they should do ok, but I’m not too sure how the other 2 will do.

It seems to have been a few months since anything was posted.  I’ll have to try to do a better job to post to the website and not let 3 months go by between posts.

Update it to the newest version and then do this:

1. Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
2. Select Edit>Preferences
3. Select the JavaScript Category
4. Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
5. Click OK