Oh ... Sugar
A lot of my 'experiments' in the kitchen start with the phrase "I was SURE I had...". In this case, it was brown sugar. Light brown sugar to be exact.
Because my kitchen pantry has been stuffed to the point of spilling out when the door is opened, a number of my large bags of baking staples have been hung on hooks in the upstairs freezer 'nook' or stored in the basement on a set of wooden shelves that also hold my extra jars of coffee, spaghetti sauce, lentils, split peas etc. And I was SURE I had run across a bag of light brown sugar when I was doing a frantic search in the basement for baking utensils that I rarely use. They ended up in boxes. All unlabelled, of course.
I looked. And looked again. And then I looked one last time ... before the cleaned up title of this post was uttered.
I wanted to make butterscotch pudding. Even though dark brown sugar was called for in my recipe, I've used light brown sugar, in the past. Since I didn't think there was enough left in my tub for even a half batch, I didn't bother trying to measure it out.
Luckily I DID have alternatives.
Like a bag of turbinado sugar and a cone of jaggery sugar. Both are 'raw' sugars and between the colour and deeper flavour, a nice change of pace from ordinary granulated sugar. I was too lazy to dig out my grater and start grating the jaggery sugar so I just scooped up some of the coarse granules of the turbinado into my measuring cup.
And, because I'm frugal, I poured some hot milk into the bottle of vanilla bean extract I'd set aside before cleaning it out. Because there were so many lovely vanilla seeds in there that hadn't poured out when I emptied out the last dregs of my home made vanilla extract. (NOTE: I'm making another batch before I use up the last of what I've got now.)
Because my kitchen pantry has been stuffed to the point of spilling out when the door is opened, a number of my large bags of baking staples have been hung on hooks in the upstairs freezer 'nook' or stored in the basement on a set of wooden shelves that also hold my extra jars of coffee, spaghetti sauce, lentils, split peas etc. And I was SURE I had run across a bag of light brown sugar when I was doing a frantic search in the basement for baking utensils that I rarely use. They ended up in boxes. All unlabelled, of course.
I looked. And looked again. And then I looked one last time ... before the cleaned up title of this post was uttered.
I wanted to make butterscotch pudding. Even though dark brown sugar was called for in my recipe, I've used light brown sugar, in the past. Since I didn't think there was enough left in my tub for even a half batch, I didn't bother trying to measure it out.
Luckily I DID have alternatives.
Like a bag of turbinado sugar and a cone of jaggery sugar. Both are 'raw' sugars and between the colour and deeper flavour, a nice change of pace from ordinary granulated sugar. I was too lazy to dig out my grater and start grating the jaggery sugar so I just scooped up some of the coarse granules of the turbinado into my measuring cup.
And, because I'm frugal, I poured some hot milk into the bottle of vanilla bean extract I'd set aside before cleaning it out. Because there were so many lovely vanilla seeds in there that hadn't poured out when I emptied out the last dregs of my home made vanilla extract. (NOTE: I'm making another batch before I use up the last of what I've got now.)