Category: cooking

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May 25 – What’s for Dinner?

I thought today would be an all-day fun day since it is Saturday and because The Lady wasn’t at school during the week, she could have gotten her chores done on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, or Friday.  Well, I was a very wrong little monster about that.  Today was an all-day chore day!  Mr. Guy and I worked in the greenhouse and the yard while The Lady collected canine fur from all over the house.  Part of what Mr. Guy and I did was collect “other stuff” that the canines left out in the yard.  What I don’t understand is while we were all picking up stuff that the canines left everywhere, they were all snoring on the couch.  Something isn’t right here.

I thought doing chores was all about getting rid of dirt, but Mr. Guy and I filled all of the clean plant pots with dirt and moved plants into these new pots.  When we were done with that, Mr. Guy said we needed to go work on the flower beds.  We had just put all of the plants and flowers in clean new pots and now we had to make their beds too?  The flowers are beginning to sound like the canines…they too just sit around and look pretty while this little monster does all the work.

And if all that work wasn’t enough, Mr. Guy and I also had to make dinner.  Well, the truth is that Mr. Guy said he wanted to make dinner and he asked me to help.  He said that it would be something nice that we could do for The Lady since she makes dinner for us most other nights.  I don’t know much about cooking, but I said, “OK.  I’ll help.”  I asked Mr. Guy what we were having for dinner.  He said stakes and cold straw.  That sounded…interesting.

We put tall skinny stakes in some of the pots for our plants.  I thought they were there so the plants didn’t fall over.  I guess they are food too and keep the plants from falling over because they are so hungry.  I didn’t know that plants, humans, and little monsters all ate the same thing.  We pulled the stakes out of the bags and fed them to the plants just as they came.  They must be plant fast food.  I assumed we would eat them raw too.  Good choice to have stakes for dinner, I guess…no real work for us!

I told Mr. Guy that I would go get the straw from the compost bin and take it to the refrigerator.  He looked a little confused and asked my why I was going to do that.  I told him, “Because you said we were having cold straw for dinner and it is ninety degrees outside and our straw is hot.  He then explained that we were not having cold straw.  We are having cole slaw, a salad made from cabbage.  That makes a lot more sense and sounds a lot tastier, especially with the raw stakes.  Mr. Guy and I made the cole slaw together and put it in the fridge so that it became cold cole slaw with NO straw.

Then it was time to get ready to eat dinner.  Mr. Guy said that we were going to cook outside on the grill.  What were we cooking?  The cole slaw was cold and the stakes were raw.  Mr. Guy said that we were going to cook the stakes.  I think that is why The Lady makes Mr. Guy cook outside.  Cooking the wood stakes sounded more like he was  going to make a bonfire, which would make lots of smoke, rather than dinner.  Smoke in the house is not good.  It makes the smoke detector go off and that is an awful sound.

Mr. Guy let me turn the grill on.  It has a big lid.  I guess that keeps all the smoke from the bonfire in.  Ouside we have smoke deflectors instead of smoke detectors!

I asked Mr. Guy if he wanted me to go to the greenhouse to get the stakes.  He said that they were in the fridge with the cole slaw.  How did the stakes get in the fridge with the cole slaw?  I went to get them.  I didn’t see any stakes.  Mr. Guy went and got them himself.  He couldn’t find them either because he came out with two pieces of meat instead of the stakes.

I asked, “Why do you have meat?  I thought you were cooking the stakes.”

He said, “This is them.”

“Those don’t look like stakes.,” I said.

“Why not?” Mr. Guy asked.

I said, “Because stakes are long skinny pieces of wood and those are short fat pieces of meat.”

“S-T-E-A-K-S not S-T-A-K-E-S,” Mr. Guy said.

“Hmm.  And how was I supposed to know that?” I asked.

“Good question,” he said.  And we cooked our s-t-e-a-k-s.

Mr. Guy and I make pretty good steaks and cole slaw…

…probably much better than our stakes and cold straw would have been.

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A Month of Me: Day 12 – Cookie Monster For A Day

When I am out and about in the world, people always mistake me for some monster named Cookie Monster.  When I tell them that I am not Cookie Monster, I am Blueper B, they always seem a little disappointed.  I finally had to figure out who this Cookie Monster monster is. 

Mr. Guy helped me find a picture of the Cookie Monster on the Internet.  He and I have the same color of fur and sort of the same eyes, but Cookie Monster does not have orange horns, or claws, or orange fur on his belly, or orange stripes on his arms.  In fact, Mr. Cookie Monster doesn’t have anything orange on him.  Why do people get us confused?

Mr. Guy said that sometimes people will lump all monsters with one similar characteristic into a big group even though they may be very different in lots of other ways.  He said that this happens with humans too.  I don’t think that this is a good thing.  Every monster and every person is unique and special.  Just because we may look like or be like another person on the outside doesn’t mean that we are like them on the inside too.  We probably don’t like the same things, feel the same things, want the same things, or need the same things.  I think people and monsters need to look more than fur-deep before they come to conclusions about others.  I don’t look like Mr. Guy or The Lady, be we are all alike in lots of ways that others can’t see.

So, since i am always mistaken for this Cookie Monster monster, I decided to try to learn a little about him.  

Wow!  This Cookie Monster monster is famous!  He has been on television for almost fifty years.  And, he likes to eat, especially cookies.  Cookie Monster is a lot older than me.  I am only three.  Yet, we still look a like.  Does that mean that monsters don’t get gray fur or that their fur doesn’t fall out when they get older?  Mr. Guy’s hair used to be brown and now it is gray.  I have wondered what color my fur will be when I get as old as Mr. Guy.  Will it be gray?  Or purple? Or a darker or lighter blue?  I don’t know.  Now that I see Mr. Cookie Monster monster, I think that maybe my fur will stay blue and orange for ever and ever.  That sounds good to me.

I told The Lady that I wanted to eat cookies so that I would know what it feels like to be Mr. Cookie Monster.  She said that we could work on that because she had to make cookies today for her food blog, Sifted Together, that she writes with her friend Ms. Tracey.  Ms. Tracey and The Lady send messages to each other about food all the time.  They make the food, take pictures of it, eat it, and write about it on their blog.  They are kind of like Mr. Cookie Monster, especially today since they were making cookies.

The Lady told me that we were going to make Animal Cookies.  I wondered why we were making animal cookies.  Why weren’t we making monster cookies or human cookies?  The animals at our house did not ask for cookies.  The Lady explained that animal cookies have nothing to do with who is going to eat them.  They are called animal cookies because they are shaped like animals.  Okay..I wondered how that was going to happen.  We are going to make cookies shaped like animals?  This could be interesting.

We began by gathering all of the ingredients.


We put them all together in the big blue mixing machine.


When we did that, the eight ingredients mushed together and became one big blob of ingredient.  The Lady called it dough.  When we got it all mixed up, we had to put it in the refrigerator to chill before we could make the animals.  This was strange to me because we took the butter, one of the ingredients, out of the refrigerator first and we had to put it in the melting machine even though we didn’t want to melt it; we just wanted to make it a little soft.  Then after we made our blob dough, we put it back in the refrigerator to make it cold.  I did what The Lady told me to do, but it all didn’t make much sense to me.

After the dough got cold again, we took it out of the refrigerator and rolled it so it was one great big cookie.  I bet Cookie Monster would really like our great big cookie!  Then The Lady told me that we had to cut all of the little animal cookies out of our great big cookie using special plastic pieces with a button.


They worked like magic!  I pushed it in the dough, pressed the button, and out feel a dough animal.  We put them in the oven and they turned into animal cookies.  We made lions,  zebras, giraffes, and elephants!


Then we ate them!

I liked being Cookie Monster for a day, but I am most happy as me, Blueper B, a little furry blue and orange monster who is not on TV.

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A Month of Me: Day 6 – What Not To Wear

Mr. Guy asked me to go outside with him this morning so that he could show me his zoo-kini.  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see that, especially first thing this morning!  First of all, Mr. Guy doesn’t really like to go to zoos because it makes him sad to see all of the animals in captivity.  And secondly, Mr. Guy doesn’t seem like a bikini kind of guy, at least I hope he isn’t a bikini kind of guy.  So why would he want to show me a special outfit, that I don’t think that he would like. to wear to a place that I know he doesn’t like?  Maybe his brain is more re-tired than I thought!

When I asked him about his zoo-kini, he said that he most definitely was not putting on a bikini and that we most definitely were not going to the zoo!  Oh, thank goodness!

Okay then…so what was Mr. Guy talking about?

He has a zoo, well maybe its a garden not a zoo, full of zucchini in the backyard.  He has big zucchini that we picked, little zucchini that are still growing that we can pick in a few days, and lots of yellow flowers that will turn into more zucchini soon.  It is a good thing that everyone at my house likes zucchini because it may be all that we eat all summer long!  The Lady told me that there are many  different ways to cook the zucchini.  We can sauté it or grill it.  We can make pancakes with it.  We can even make bread with it.  Sometimes The Lady lets me help her cook.  Maybe she will let me make something with all of our zucchini.

I am so happy that Mr. Guy has the eating kind of zucchini and not wearing zoo-kini!!!

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A Month of Me – Day 6

My furry little monster head is spinning!  I could not keep up with Mr. Guy and The Lady today.  They went non-stop all day long.  They got up early and went to school.  I stayed home with the four-legged furry monsters and Offspring No. 1.  The Lady came home at lunchtime and I thought we might get to do something fun. Nope!  She had to work on her blog that she writes with her friend Ms. Tracey.  They write about food and pictures and stuff, I think.  Then Mr. Guy came home.  I thought surely that then it was time for us to play.  I was wrong again!  Mr. Guy and The Lady had to go to a service at church.  I went, but I fell asleep in the car on the way and slept through the whole thing.  I don’t know why I was such a sleepy monster.  I didn’t have any fun all day!  When we got home, I had hoped someone would read me a story or something before I went to bed.  The Lady had to bake a whole bunch of bread stuff for a friend and Mr. Guy was busy doing chores.  I helped The Lady bake for a little while, but then it was my bedtime.  The Lady helped me write about today while her bread was in the oven.  I will have to wait until tomorrow to try some.  I am not staying awake until it comes out of the oven.  It is way past this little monster’s bedtime!

Now I understand why it is so hard for Mr. Guy and The Lady to find time to help me with my blog.  They are so busy!  I sure hope when their school is over, our lives, well their lives, won’t be so crazy.  

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Blueper B. and the Birthday Boy’s Cake

Hi!  It’s me, Blueper B., and I’m back!!!

Finally The Lady and Mister Guy have finished their school year and we can do stuff together.  I miss them when they are teaching, but I know that they need to do that to make money so that they can take care of me, their furry blue and orange monster.

We started off our summer vacation together by celebrating Mister Guy’s birthday.  I learned that on your birthday people make you special treats.  You can have anything you want.  Mister Guy wanted a Citrus Angel Food Cake.  The Lady said that she would make it for him.  I asked if I could help because I have never made a cake before and I was ready to learn something new.  I’m not sure that The Lady really wanted my help, but I made her feel guilty when I said that she had spent the last nine months teaching her students at school new stuff and I had waited patiently.  Now it was my turn for her to teach me.  It worked! 🙂  I got to help make the cake.  It was a lot of work!!!

The Lady said that some people make their cakes by buying a box of mixed up stuff at the grocery store and then all they have to do is add one or two things and they had a cake.  We didn’t make ours that way.  She said we were going to make it from scratch.  Scratch?   I thought scratch was what you did when something made your fur feel funny.  The Lady explained to me that making a cake from scratch means that you don’t buy a box of mix from the store; you collect all of your ingredients yourself.  I asked her how you knew what ingredients you need and she showed me a piece of paper called a receipt…no, a recipe.  It tells you all of the ingredients that you need and then exactly what you are supposed to do with them.  The cake that Mister Guy wanted had a lot of ingredients, more than I could count on my orange fingers.  The Lady said that we had to get all of our ingredients out and measured and ready to go because this cake was kind of temperamental…whatever that means.  I didn’t ask because I was more interested in learning how to make a cake than learning new words that day.  Some day I’ll find out what temperamental means.

The Lady said that we would start by zesting an orange.  I didn’t know what “zesting” meant either.  This time I asked because it had something to do with making the cake.  The Lady showed me how to use a special tool, a “zester.”  


A zester is used to scrape the the outer skin from the orange into tiny little pieces.  I don’t know why you want to take off the pretty bright orange skin, but I am a good monster and I followed The Lady’s instructions.

She told me that the the zest would eventually go into the cake and make it taste “orangy.” 


 I was surprised that we did not use the inside of the orange.  I ate it.  This monster needed a little nourishment to get him through this adventure.



Next we had to juice a lemon.  


Just kidding.  This is not how it’s done.  Juicing a lemon took a special tool too…a juicer.  Haha.


Juicing the lemon was easy.  Again, we did not use the inside of the lemon.

Next we had to separate the eggs.  I asked if there was a special cooking tool for that too.  The Lady said that there was, but that she did not have one so we would separate our eggs without one.  The Lady said that the eggs are the most important part if this angel food cake that Mister Guy wants.  She said that eggs are fragile and that I was going to have to be very careful if I was going to help with this part.  


(I know what fragile means.  The Lady taught me that word early because she was worried that I would break something in the stores when we go shopping.  Sometimes I am not aware of how big my monster hands and horns are and I don’t control them very well.)  

The Lady explained that we had to crack the eggs and put the white part in one bowl and the yellow part in another bowl.  I wasn’t so sure that I could do that all by myself so I asked Mister Guy to help me. 


 Bad idea!  Either he can’t tell the difference between white and yellow or his hands are less controllable than my monster hands.  He kept dropping the yellow part in the white bowl.  Finally we got twelve eggs cracked and separated.  We only needed the white bowl for the cake.

We were finally ready to start mixing all of the ingredients together.  Here came another kitchen tool. This one was great big!  It was blue and had weird pieces attached to it and it had to be plugged in.  

I thought that we would just use a big spoon and stir everything in a big bowl.  I was such a wrong blue and orange furry monster!  First we had to whip the eggs in this big blue machine.  


The Lady talked about foam and soft peaks and stiff peaks.  I wasn’t really interested in all of that.  This was taking a long time.  Little by little we got all of the ingredients in the bowl and finally it was time to put the cake in the pan and bake it.  The Lady asked me to get the pan for her.

This is the strangest looking pan I have ever seen!  First of all, it fell apart when I picked it up.  I thought it would make better armor for a monster in case he had to do battle with that big blue kitchen machine. 




I felt sort of like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street except that I’m a happy monster, not a grouchy one!

 The Lady was not amused.  She suggested that perhaps this was taking so long because I was not giving my full attention to the task at hand.  Possibly, but I was bored with the cake by this point.

We got the cake in the pan and in the oven.  Woohoo!  Playtime!  Again I was wrong.  The Lady told me that now we had to clean up all the mess that we had made in the kitchen.  This cake making thing is a whole lot less fun than I thought it would be.  Because I am a good monster, I helped The Lady wash all the stuff that we got dirty making this cake. 


 The only good part of this cleaning up part was that I got to lick the the bowl.  


The uncooked batter tasted good so I figured the cake would too!

When the cake came out of the oven, we had to let it cool.  Then The Lady took the pan apart and there was the cake…with a hole in the middle.  That is how it was supposed to be.  It looked light and fluffy.  Mister Guy said is really good.  When I saw how much he liked it, I was glad that The Lady and I had gone to the trouble to make the special cake that he wanted.

I makes me happy when I can make other people happy!


If you want to know exactly how The Lady and I made Mister Guy’s birthday cake, The Lady wrote more about it here.