Gourmet Brain Reviewing recipes once a week. One gourmet recipe that I cook in my little kitchen. A man who loves only meat and potatoes judges the dishes. Everything is written in light hearted humor, we have fun. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 2 0 17 1508

Articles from Gourmet Brain

Day 24 2007-11-07 21:52:08 Age 17. My mum’s mother has dentures. She has lost innumerable pairs of them, and not one set of dentures has ever fit right. We had tickets on a ferry, we were traveling to Nova Scotia. My mum, my grandmother, my grandmother’s friend Lois and a family friend, Kelli and I. Kelly has a big cleavage, something you have to know to appreciate this story. Kelly also is definitely a laughing stock, she thrives on the humor of any moment. In other words, if shes with you no matter what something is going to happen that will leave a memory. We were all settling down on the ferry ready to endure a 2 hour voyage together. Kelly, grams, her goofy friend and my mum all settled themselves at a table while I went to get drinks. We had not been on the boat more than 15 minutes. I return to the tables just in time to see all the women laughing hysterically, My grandmother loses control of her dentures and with one last belly bursting laugh the teeth fly across the table (there are people e ...

Day 23 2007-11-06 20:54:58 Age 6. A lady from our church lived just down the road from us. She and her husband became very close with our family so that they were like my grandparents. They had a big shaggy sheep dog named Bear that I hardly saw. He had a place of his own out back of their house, and occasionally I’d tag along with Hazel when she’d let the dog on the porch to feed him. My mother and I were over one day to Hazel’s like we often were, I was bored. Hazel said I could go out back to visit Bear. I went to the back of the house and stepped up on the porch where he was wiggling and whining for attention. He was so shaggy, it was hard to know if he even had any eyes with the shagginess all over. I started petting him, and like most dogs without much attention he jumped up on me, he was very excited. He kinda knocked me back a little and got me all dirty so I decided to turn around and go get some of his snacks. Just when I turned around he jumped on my back slightly tipping me to fall ...

Day 22 2007-11-06 11:11:14 Age 21. Giving birth. That’s the phrase we use when speaking concerning birth,”you gave birth” I would say that this phrase is deceptively misleading. I would call it, “you died, brought forth life and reluctantly was reborn yourself.” This is the birth process. This is my story of death, or what ultimately felt like death or what made me fancy death, what would have been a sweet relief from birthing pains. Its one thing to not know the day, the hour, the half hour, the minute, the second you’ll go into labor. Its another to know. I set up an appointment with the hospital to be induced a week before my due date. I’m a very impatient person, and already I wanted that child out of my body even before the induction date. My belly felt heavy, the only relief I got from the constant pressure in my pelvis was sitting on a big work out ball. That is where I sat, if not there I lounged out like a beach whale anywhere that was comfortable. I literally ...

Day 21 2007-11-04 21:27:37 Age 4. The day before Thanksgiving my mother loads my three cousins, Jackie, Ronnie and Huey in our old Subaru. My cousin Jackie and Ronnie were in the back seat with me where my mother double buckled all of us. Huey was belted in the front seat. We headed off to the local grocery store, Shop N’ Save. After shopping we were on our way home. We were getting close to my Uncle’s. He had a big road side field with cows out and about grazing. Us kids were having a blast in the back of the car, cannot remember why. Abruptly my mother swerved into the side road’s gravel, we were swerving but it seemed we’d recover until the car’s right tire grabbed tight onto the gravel one more time and took us into the fence and further into the field, the car rolled exactly three times. The car came to rest on it’s roof where the double buckles held us tightly.from the ceiling we screamed and screamed. My cousin Jackie who was in the middle sitting beside me unbuckled h ...

Leftover Pumpkin 2007-11-04 10:51:22 I’ve got loads of pumpkin puree hanging around. One of my guilty pleasures is a warm, fluffy scone with a nice morning style drink. I had been looking at a bunch of scone recipes and decided just to set my cookbook down and come up with one myself, I didn’t want them to sweet and I didn’t want them to taste like a random non-memorable biscuit. Heres what I came up with. Okay, Scones are not gourmet by definition whatsoever, but Scones are a constant in my kitchen, and that is where all my attempts at gourmet come from. Enjoy. Buttermilk Pumpkin Scones Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. 2 cups flour 2 tsp baking powder 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ginger 1 tsp nutmeg dash of cloves and allspice 4 TBS brown sugar 6 TBS butter 1 beaten egg set aside 1/2 cup buttermilk 1/2 cup pumpkin puree (or if no buttermilk, 1/3 cup milk with one TBS white vinegar set for a couple minutes till lumpy, then add in enough pumpkin puree to make one cup). Mix all dry ingredients including suga ...

Day 20 2007-11-03 23:23:51 Age 15. 1st year of high school I took a speech class that would forever change my life. I learned a lot of habits in that class. Like counting someone’s refuge word, a word that they fall on when they are confused during a public speech or just a casual conversation. This could be good, so during your own speech or conversations you could learn to avoid using these words. It can also be terribly annoying if you have the habit of counting refuge words all of the time. During lectures, student speeches, even t.v.! It’s like having a giant scab on your knee and trying not to pick it. Focus, focus! For my Holocaust class we were asked to write a children’s book on the subject of prejudice. We were to present the story books we created to the class. My cousin Aaron was taking this class as well, his turn next. He was a great socialite but he was very nervous about public speaking. His speech could have been titled, ” Oh The Multitude Of Um’s.” Mesmerize ...

Day 19 2007-11-02 20:46:14 Age 15. My lungs felt as if they were going to burst. My chest was hot from breathing quickly, I felt a 100 pounds heavier. I was running, running myself to exhaustion, but I couldn’t stop, I was close to capture. They were advancing closer and closer. They were forcing me up a steep mountain. I found myself around a cliff that was hugging my trail. Around the cliff I see what appeared to be an old outhouse randomly set near the top of this mountain, for no reason I could think of. I didn’t dwell on the curious situation, I was merely concerned about my life and welcomed this house. I walked through the entrance. It appeared at further investigation that this was an old mine entrance. Boards were hastily thrown on the floor of this entrance, it appeared to have caved beneath the mine, I briefly thought this strange but hurried deeper into the mine. Fatefully The brittle floor boards gave way and I found myself falling. I landed hard. Dust enveloped my vision, coughing and s ...

Day 18 2007-11-01 23:16:06 Age 6. My foster brother David Lapoint was about 8 years old. When he first arrived from the child welfare for my parents to care for I thoroughly enjoyed having another kid around my age. The first couple of months we got along fairly well all except his occasional anger tantrums. I cannot remember how long David was with us until this day but after this following memory was near the end of him being with us. There was a far back room of our house that was home to various misfit belongings intermingled with sewing effects. We would often play in here with our race car set seeing we could set the huge track up in that room. David and I set up the car set and started having some fun. Sometime during our fun David and I began some childish argument, something silly that I do not remember. I remember dialog between him and I, he began getting angry and lounged towards me. I backed up but not fast enough and he slammed my whole body into the wall. I remember thinking that this wasn’t ...

Day 17 2007-10-31 22:27:04 From age 12-19. The ages I lived in our home in Morrill Maine. After a few weeks since move in, we realized we were not alone. We eventually found that little squirrels were nesting in the walls. Through the night when things were quieter, you could hear scratching in the walls, above our shower in the ceiling squirrels would fall of a drop off behind the shower and get stuck, we’d hear them scratching for days. Then from starvation they’d die in the walls and cause a stink. It was disgusting, the only way to get rid of them was to try to find where they were coming in…We never did. All we knew is that we lived in the woods and every winter they nested in our house. My dad tried many things, he even brought the chainsaw in and cut a hole in the floor in our upstairs floor and shoved our cat in there after them. One evening during a huge get together for Christmas with lots of children and family and friends, we learned just what kind of squirrels they were. My mother ...

What did you say? Whoopie Pies? 2007-10-31 17:47:02 This picture isn’t mine, seeing I have not whipped up Whoopie Pie’s today, I wanted you to see what they looked like. This picture is from this link, this girl took a fabulous picture of a Whoopie Pie, all credit to her Flickr site. Oh My. I have to say for all those who have no idea about these little sweet buggers, they are a Maine phenomenon. Anyone who has grown up in Maine has consumed at least a million Whoopie Pies by age 10. Its a weird take on a southern Moon Pie. Course it just looks like a chocolate cake with a fluffy frosting center but believe me if you have authentic old school Whoopie Pies the frosting is made with tons of shortening. Giving it a very different taste from a Moon Pie. Growing up I had about a million or so Whoopie Pies that had passed through my system by the time I was 12. It stopped there. We were running late for church one Sunday morning so I hadn’t wolfed down breakfast; complaining I was hungry we stopped at a gas station (yes you ...

Day 16 2007-10-31 00:34:49 Age 8. This was my first time losing a tooth. It wasn’t really ready to come out. A couple of other little friends had lost lots of teeth by now and I wanted to as well. For a couple of days I yarned on a tooth and it started to get that annoying loose feeling. I was all excited and ran to my dad. The tooth wasn’t ready yet, it was stuck pretty good. We tried of course the many tooth ejection mediums; floss, floss tied to a door handle, floss on the refrigerator door handle, a bunch of things. Nothing worked, my dad resorted to a pair of pliers. He’d bunch up toilet paper around my tooth and then take the pliers and maneuver them around the wadded tooth. My dad was determined to loose the tooth from my mouth, the allure had me all excited about being the center of attention for the next couple of days. This by all means was not painful for me, it was like a great big itch in my tooth, it was like getting a full body massage when my father would simply poke, prod and w ...

Day 15 2007-10-29 23:01:38 Age 7. We were living near Greenville Maine, a little winsey town called Shirley. The living room had a big wood stove in the corner, the ceilings were very low, the room was claustrophobic but in it’s own way cozy. My mother left me with a couple bags of paper to cram inside the wood stove while she went to our neighbor Hazel’s house to grab something. I remember it was a Sunday, I was wearing a jumper dress with itchy white plaid tights. My father was outside chopping wood for the rest of that night. The house was chilly. The plank wood floors were cold. I shoved the bags in the wood stove and sat down on our couch, about 3 feet away from the stove and began reading my latest book. The stove was making a funny noise so I proceeded to investigate when suddenly the wood stove blew open it’s front door with a huge bang followed by more explosions. One of the bags I had crammed in the stove ended up being a bag of canned peas my mum had got from the Indian Hill Market. ...

Pumpkin Flan with Pumpkin Seed Praline 2007-10-29 18:50:02 I searched high and low for something decadent,luscious,scrumptious; melt in your mouth, like puffy clouds delicious! And I found it. Pumpkin Flan I’ve never made flan, this choice was so easy. The only sad thing was that I found this recipe on Monday of last week, and I had to wait till Saturday night to make it, then wait even longer to serve it Sunday night for some guests I had over! I was like a carnivorous salivating beast running to the refrigerator to just peek in on it time and time again until D-Day, Sunday the 28th of October 2007 I took my first bite. History, tasty history! Pumpkin Flan with Pumpkin Seed Praline 2 cups sugar 1 cup whole milk 2 (5-oz) cans evaporated milk 5 large eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 (15-ounce) can solid-pack pumpkin 2 tablespoons premium golden agave tequila or bourbon 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (Get a nice 2-2/12 quart soufflé dish) Preheat oven to 375 degree ...

Day 14 2007-10-29 12:59:14 Age 6. My mum and I had just returned from the Indian Hill Market grocery shopping. The day was beautiful, sunny, birds singing, the breeze could be seen dancing in the trees. We open our front door and hear a blood curdling scream coming from our bathroom. The kind that raises the hair on the back of your neck and crawling sensations swarm the torso. We run to the bathroom finding my mum’s friend Tammy had locked herself in there. She demanded we let our dog Sophie out of the house before she would emerge. She painfully walked to the living room and told us she had come to visit and realized we were not home. She drove quite a ways and decided to relax in the house to await our return. Our Sophie being the grand watch dog she is attacked, she got a great mouthful of Tammy butt and chased her to the bathroom where she locked herself in. Suffering puncture wounds to the butt had Tammy all up in a fury. Course we just laughed and mum told her it was her own fault. She never entered ...

Day 13 2007-10-27 22:08:56 Age 14. My mum, Aunt Tammy, cousin Jacy and I were all headed to Reid State Park on the mid coast of Maine. This beach boasts of long white sandy beaches along with the classic rocky coast. The place is beautiful and great fun. With Tammy we came to Reid about 4 or more times a summer. We came during the week so that the crowds would be minimal, we also came while it was overcast, we were hoping as making the journey to Reid that it would clear up. It didn’t. We still wanted to have fun so we hiked with our big beach bags and giant cooler to a nice spot on the beach. We noticed there were no people except us, we continued thinking nothing of it. Immediately as we laid our beach camp down a scene out of Hitchcock’s own mind descended upon us. Giant Moose flies attacks us from all sides. They literally grayed the atmosphere around us, there were so many. Moose flies resemble house flies, they are a deep brown color and their sting is many times worse than a mosquitoes. After ...