Photo Foodie

Thelma here.

There's a girl in California taking amazing Polaroids and discovering food. And she likes meatloaf and cupcakes. You can see some of her pictures in the slide show I just posted at the bottom of the page (I liked them all so much that I couldn't pick just a few). I'm sharing some recipes in her honor, and Louise no doubt will chime in soon claiming that her meatloaf recipe is better than mine. Tough beans. Mine is my MOM's recipe. Y'all be the judges.

HALLIE'S MEATLOAF

1 lb. ground chuck or ground turkey - mixed white/dark
1/2 of a large white onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely crushed saltines
1 egg
1/4 cup canned evaporated milk (*not sweetened condensed)
pepper and salt
1 can Cambpell's tomato soup, undiluted

Preheat the oven to 400F. Grease a loaf pan and set it aside. In a large mixing bowl or standing mixer, combine all but the last ingredient -- the tomato soup -- using your hands or the mixer on lowest setting. Add half of the undiluted soup from the can and mix it in well. Turn the mixture into the prepared pan, top with the rest of the soup, and bake for 1 hour. You can cover it with foil and uncover for the last half hour of baking time if you like. Serves 4-5 hungry people.



TWANGY LEMONADE CUPCAKES
2 dozen

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp salt

2-1/2 tsp baking powder

3 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup buttermilk

3/4 cup frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed

1/4 cup frozen lemondade concentrate, set aside

zest of 1 lemon

1 tsp. almond extract 



1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Place cupcake liners into two muffin pans.


2. Beat the butter briefly to soften it. Add the sugar and beat until fluffy, about 3 
minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well. Combine the dry ingredients; in a 
separate mixing bowl combine the liquids and almond extract. Alternate flour and liquid 
into the batter on low speed or by hand until well combined.


3. Spoon batter into cups and fill them 2/3 full. Bake 20-25 minutes or until cupcakes 
spring back in the middle when touched lightly. Cool for 10 minutes in pan. Brush 
reserved lemonade concentrate over tops of warm cupcakes. Cool completely before frosting.




LEMON BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

3 to 4 cups confectioner's sugar

1/4 cup frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed

1 tsp. vanilla

24 lemon drops (optional)

small mint leaves for garnish



Beat together the butter and 1-1/2 cups of the sugar. Add the lemonade and vanilla. Continue to 
add remaining sugar just until frosting is of desired spreading consistency (you may use 
more or less sugar). Tint the frosting if desired. Frost cooled cupcakes and garnish each 
with a lemon drop and a mint leaf.

Greetings from the Trenches

It's Thelma.

One of these guys is my brother.

The other isn't.



He's not Louise's brother, either.

He's Dwight Baker, my songwriting partner for the week. And he's a handful.






He's been making fun of me for 3 days. "You're so passive-aggressive! You hated my idea and you just gave me that 'uh-huh' face."
Guilty as charged.

See, co-writing is really hard. You have to do all these things I'm notoriously bad at. Like keep your mouth shut while you try out somebody else's (usually bad) ideas. Then try to shut your brain up while you try out your own. You basically pull teeth out of each other's heads for, like, 7 hours straight. Then you go home, drink a beer, and try NOT to think about the song for a few hours (which is impossible). So you go back and mess around with the lyrics while the other person isn't around. As big of a pain as it is (and just look at Dwight, what a smartass) I'm actually having a blast. I'm sort of relieved to be writing; as many of you know I'm notoriously neurotic about it and always convinced I've written the very last song I will ever write, ever.

Anyway, I've known Dwight for a pretty long time. He used to play drums in my band, way back before I even made my first record. He got to where he'd just say "thanks" when people would tell him it was good to see me and Darin working together again.

Everything Dwight touches turns to gold. When I met him he was playing in a band and running a small record label that he subsequently sold for way more money than I'd ever made. After that he built a studio and started producing records. Oh, and writing songs for the bands he produced. Not much really happened with the songwriting until this past year, when four of them ended up on a record that sold 2 million copies. Now he's getting calls for country songs, which is a problem because he doesn't really write those. That's where I come in. We've written two songs in the past three days, so technically we're one song behind. Two days to go. We'll see how it shakes out.

Oh yeah, and I had a great cooking class last night. Here's one of the recipes: Take some strawberries, puree them in the blender and put a few glugs of Grand Marnier in. And some vanilla. Then scoop some vanilla ice cream into a champagne glass and pour some of the strawberry stuff in. Then pour champagne on top of that. Put some whipped cream on the top. Celebrate something you just created....