The Newmans: blueberry crunch, hold the blueberries

I'm working on my domesticity. I hate cleaning. I like to cook, but for the last couple of years, I've been too tired to do it. There are a lot of nights that I just eat random crap until I'm not hungry anymore. One day last week I ate some grapes, 3 tomatoes, and cereal straight out of the box. Another night, I boiled some broccoli and made some toast. For the most part, if it can't be made within 10 minutes, I'm over it. I realize this is pitiful. This cannot continue throughout my adult life. So I'm working on it. My family put together this amazing cookbook last year:

I've been cooking things out of it lately. It's helping me with my domestic issue. I used to attempt to make things like my Mamaw (on the other side of my family). However, I cannot make things based on directions like "a little of this, a smidge of that, just enough to make it look good." Make it look good? Who cares what it looks like? I need it to not taste like rubber. My life revolves around science. I need an exact measurement. What the crap is a "smidge"? Please. I guess Mamaw is going to have to keep making things herself until I develop some kind of 6th culinary sense. Anyway, so this book is all of my dad's family's personal recipes. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make my great-grandmother's pineapple upside down cake from scratch... I do not make things from scratch. It turned out amazing, and I was quite proud of myself. We called my great-grandmother "Ma," and she lived to be 102 years old. Just FYI.

Ok, so I had these intentions of making Aunt Ruby's mandarin orange cake, which sounded awesome. Still does. Maybe I'll make that once I learn to read the directions. Maybe I'll rename my blog "Stupid crap I do." I feel like half my blog is just that... stupid crap I do. So this recipe isn't exactly from scratch. It involves cake mix. The key, though, is to substitute the mandarin oranges and juice for the water while making the cake batter. I read that. Then I got all my crap out. Then I forgot about the "don't put water in there" part. So I mixed the cake batter all up, con agua, re-read the directions, and realized that I wasn't going to be making mandarin orange cake today.

Fail.

So. I thought to myself... I have no icing, so I can't just make a regular cake. So I flipped through the Arnold family cookbook to find something that involved regularly-prepared cake mix and other ingredients that I happened to have. No dice. So I decided to make blueberry crunch without the blueberries. I guess I could just call it pineapple crunch, and it wouldn't sound stupid, but anyway...

Re-do:

If you've never had blueberry crunch, you're missing out. It also involves pineapples (I didn't just make that part up. I try not to be inventive when it comes to cooking. It usually doesn't turn out like I think it's going to.) You basically pour some crushed pineapples (and blueberries) in the bottom of a pan, add some sugar and butter, pour the cake batter on top, pour some more butter on top (this is really healthy) and top it with pecans. And bake. Voila! I like to add "refrigerate for a while" at the end of the directions. I'm not down with hot fruit. No cobblers for me. I like my fruit cold. It tastes much better after it's been refrigerated overnight.

So about those pecans. My dad's pal has a bunch of pecan trees. So every year, he goes and picks a million pecans and shells them and ziplocs them for me. God forbid we go to the grocery store and buy pecans like normal people. So I have 10 bags of pecans in my freezer. I mean, I'm not complaining. Pecans are expensive. Relatively. So are walnuts. It's a nut, not an imported delicacy. Geez. Why do you have to charge me $7 for a bag of nuts? That seems a little ridiculous to me. So I'll take my ziplocked pecans with a smile. Thanks, papa.

Along with the pecans, my kitchen has just been re-stocked from The Garden. If you missed my post about my family's aversion to store-bought produce, here's the explanation for the pictures below. We are fully stocked with creamed corn, corn on the cob, pecans, green beans, squash....