Corn starch to the rescue

My daughters have a special dessert that their brother enjoys. And as he was coming over for dinner, they said they would make this dessert. It's a yellow cake, with fudge frosting, and caramel sauce over the slices. Decadent, right?

Anyway, something went wrong with the caramel sauce. One daughter tried to fix it late Monday night. She finally went to bed and I found it like this, in the morning. The chunks are lumps of butter.

I told her I'd do something with it during the day, while she was in class. When heated, the lumps of butter melted, but a layer of butter would form on the top of the sauce when it cooled. My thought was that I needed a binder to hold the butter in the sauce. I cooked their sauce with a little cornstarch and allowed to cool.

After cooling, some of the butter did rise to the top. However, as what I had just made was basically a very sweet, thin pudding, I thought I could now mix in the butter that was on top of the rest of the sauce, using a mixer. And it worked beautifully. (see top photo) The pudding-like caramel sauce was cooled enough that the butter was held in the sauce, and could be poured over slices of cake.

Now who wants a slice? Incidentally, egg, flour, and arrowroot are also binders. All require cooking in a liquid to bind ingredients together.

Definition of insanity

You've probably heard this -- the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.

I feel like that is what I have been doing for the last couple of years. Same thing, same thing, but expecting to feel differently about it all. With awareness, and in response, I am trying to create a different path for my life. This has led to me taking classes and preparing for a career. It is also what prompted me to turn over some of the dinner-prep tasks in our house to other members of the household. And it has led me to judiciously use more prepared foods.

I am trying to listen to my body and my spirit. Always making everything from scratch is tiring. There are some good shortcuts available in convenience foods, such as the frozen pie crust that I used last week. I'm making burritos for dinner tomorrow night, and using canned refried beans. I know that I could make refried beans and save about 50%. But just knowing that I can wait until the late afternoon to start on dinner prep frees my mind to pursue something else for the entire day.

Other areas where I am simplifying include the holidays. Christmas gifting will be greatly simplified this year. And I really am okay with that. I've asked each of my children to tell me one thing, just one thing, that they'd really enjoy receiving this year. If I happen to also buy or make something else, that will be a bonus. We all have so much stuff, anyway. There's no need to add to the piles and piles of belongings. Fewer gifts, overall, mean less wrapping paper and ribbon, which also means less clean-up on Christmas day. Fewer gifts mean a simpler credit card statement in January. We may spend nearly as much as previous years, but the statement will be simpler to audit for errors. Fewer gifts mean more time to spend relaxing during the season, and on Christmas. Fewer gifts may also mean fewer headaches for me. Fewer gifts mean less waste in the garbage for December, less gasoline used to get to stores or have merchandise delivered to me, and maybe less of a sense of greed. Fewer gifts mean greater appreciation for the abundance that we already have. Less gives us more.

What I've discovered is that I don't feel like less of a mother, wife, homemaker, friend, sister, etc. On the contrary, simplifying my daily work has given me more energy to really be present with the people in my life. Just something I was thinking about.