No Milk

We have no milk in our house right now.  This is a problem for two reasons.  First, a winter storm is coming, and we all know that milk is essential for weathering a storm.  Second, well...here's the story.

Our wonderful neighbors invited us over for dinner tonight.  Yay!  All I need to bring is a dessert.  I love bringing the dessert for at least the following 3 reasons.  It lets me cook whatever I want because it doesn't have to go with the meal, it lets me experiment in the kitchen because an un-tried dessert is almost always still delicious even if it is executed miserably, and it lets me be creative and not worry at all about calories...no one expects a dessert to be good for you.  Also, I can leave whatever dessert we don't eat at the hosts' house.  They get to be happy longer, and I get to be happy because I'm not tempted to eat the whole rest of the thing.  I planned to make cream puffs.  I really wanted to make cream puffs.  They are easy, make you look like a rockstar, and can be filled with whatever makes you happy at the time.  What was going to make happy today was white chocolate pudding with raspberries on top all dusted with powdered sugar.  Well, here's the thing.  We have no milk, and you need milk to make both pudding and cream puffs.  So, off to the store I will go!

This plan would have worked had the car started when I turned the key.  It did not.  Why not?  Because it only starts when it is good and ready and/or when it has been run in the last 18 hours.  This has been going on for a few months.  Why don't I get a new car or get it fixed?  The short answer is because I'm stubborn.  Very very stubborn.  I hope to explain the long version soon in a blog post entitled, "My New (to me) Car: No More Dave Ramsey Beaters!"

Ok.  So no milk.  A new dessert plan was needed.  I pulled out my cookbooks and discovered that there are very few desserts (at least interesting ones) that don't require milk.  I did figure out that I had a can of sweetened condensed milk hiding in my cupboard, and I felt a strong compulsion to use it.  Maybe I was now fixated on this dairy-less situation and felt like I needed to defeat it.  I don't know.  I digress.  I found a recipe that required sweetened condensed milk, it was un-tried, and it already looked I wasn't going to be able to stick to the recipe, anyway.  Perfect!  Time to make some key lime pie.  Nevermind that I don't have limes.  I have lemons.  No problem.  Nevermind that I don't have a graham cracker crust.  Wait.  I actually DO need that.

What happens now takes, I know, a special kind of crazy.  I am just that crazy.  I decided that it can't be THAT hard to make graham crackers.  The Googles know these things, right?  It turns out that the only people out there on the interwebz who are making their own graham crackers are granola-eating hippies who use ingredients that I haven't got (and sometimes haven't heard of....such as sprouted einkorn flour.)  I finally found a recipe that I thought might work, and it only looked like it would destroy my kitchen and take half the day, so I decided to give it a try.  It destroyed my kitchen and took half the day, but I made them, and they are good!  I made the things into a crust, and all that was left was the filling.  The rest of the pie was a piece of cake...or pie.  All finished.  It doesn't look great, but I hope it tastes good.

It was about this time that I realized that my dear hubby would actually not like the pie that I just made.  In fact, he would hate it.  His sour taste buds are like that annoying kid in 2nd grade who yells and screams to the teacher when the slightest little thing annoys him.  He can taste a lemon a mile and a half away.  He does a pretty great Gollum impression where he says, "The lemonsesss...we hates them!   We HATES themmmmmm!!!"  He would have eaten a bite or two and tried really valiantly to like it, but he would have hated it.  So, I made some snickerdoodles.  They took me approximately 30 minutes and didn't destroy my kitchen.  Why snickerdoodles?  Two reasons: First, they are delicious.  Second, the don't require milk...because we have no milk

The chillin' pie...too much filling, but you get the idea.

This is a homemade graham cracker.

These are snickerdoodles.