Two Foodgoat misadventures

1. Last weekend I went with Foodgoat to go house-hunting and I insisted on stopping by a lemonade stand run by a ragtag group of kids. How sweet, I thought. How enterprising, said Foodgoat. The lemon-and-limeade was 50 cents a cup, but since they were offering Girl Scout cookies for free, well, I gave them $2.

Unfortunately, it was the nastiest cup of lemonade I ever did come have in my life.

I couldn't even quite bring myself to finish it off. Not to mention the bits of dirt clinging to edge of the styrafoam cups.

"Well," concluded Foodgoat philosophically, "at least we know they made it themselves."


2. The hardest part in making truffles is breaking the block of chocolate. So one day, in an effort to expediate the process, Foodgoat took a cutting board, one pound block of Belgian chocolate, another cutting board, and a hammer.

And what do you get with two cutting boards, a block of chocolate and a hammer?

Four cutting boards, a block of chocolate, and a hammer.

The board on top split in half on the first stroke. Two more smacks on the chocolate and the board on the bottom split in half too.

And the chocolate was barely dented.

The loss of the boards wasn't too painful. One had cost $5 at Wal-Mart, and the other I picked up off the curb back when my paychecks were considerably smaller.

The replacement board, from Sur La Table, was bigger, sleeker, and conveniently (and hygienically) labelled with a chicken on one side (for meat) and a carrot on the other (for vegetables).

In an effort to keep this board in pristine condition, every couple of weeks I (plan to) wipe it down with mineral oil. You can buy fancy cutting board treatments and waxes, but mineral oil works just as well.

In addition, we have tried to avoid whacking it with a hammer. The meat tenderizer, though, is fair game.