Cooking In The Dark

0:00It is more of the best of the cooking the dark show. Welcome to Cooking in the Dark. The Kitchen. I will go to the kitchen. And although some recipes I cannot breathe, still I'm sure I can do everything I need. This show cooking in the dark, it is the key. Hey, Zama, say top of tip taxon. You know Cheryl should tell himself, I know Dale Campbell would like to welcome you to this hair show. Cooking in the dark is a presentation of Blind Mice Megamall, at www.blindmicemegalmall.com. Holy moly, welcome moly! Welcome to Cooking in the Dark. This is Cheryl Cummings and I'm going to introduce you to the man who proves us every week

1:00that you don't need sight to cook dinner tonight. Dale Campbell. All right Cheryl. Man, I'm so pumped. Like I was telling you before we started the show, over the holidays my next door neighbor's son made beef jerky. We both have the same similar smokers. He's got a newer model, more fancier than what we have. But it's all right. So I thought, man, I'm going to make me some beef jerky. So I started reading about it and doing it and made it. And instead I didn't do it on the smoker, but I did it on my dehumidifier here. And came out great, man, teriyaki jerky. I'm so excited. Well, I have to come do it. Jerky's not, I mean hardest part is letting it sit and marinate for a day or so. You know, if you have that marinator, like Tim told me about that you guys have, gosh, I just marinated it overnight and that dude, man. Very good. Yeah, I also had, I took the teriyaki. Recipe and I added a jalapeno to it. Oh, typical, typical. Yeah. So wintertime, man, gotta stay warm somehow. Oh, we cramp.

2:03It's nuts. So it might, it might as well be inside out. Man, I'm right. Heck yeah. Protect myself in case I have to go outside. Exactly. One of these pieces of jerky with the jalapeno. I'll be glowing. But yeah, man, came out. That was very cool. Hey, today's show. We're going to be doing something. I got a giant cupcake pan. Giant cupcake cake. Giant cupcake cake pan. How's that sound? It's very cool. You bake it in two pieces. One parts the bottom, the base, the other parts the top. And what's cool is that as I'm checking it out where the bottom is. It's even ridged like, you know, cupcakes are when you pull the paper off of them. Oh, that's really nice. Very cool. So we're going to check that. We're going to do that later. And well, actually, we're going to start off with that because I'm fired up on this because I want to make a giant cupcake. I'm so happy. Hey, that's hey, I made jerky. First thing off. Oh, yeah, it's good to.

3:04I should have brought you some, but I forgot it. Oh, it's so typical. Forgot it right in my refrigerator where it's going to stay. Oh, maybe I should bring some of this again. Yeah. Not into sharing quite as well. Not yet. Not yet. Maybe the second batch. The batch isn't real good here. Have some. Yeah, be Larry of friends bearing gifts like that, right? You know, try this beer I made. Oh, I want to thank you. Can't waste alcohol in Texas. I ain't going to drink it. Oh, Mercy, me. Hey, if you're on to getting into checking out recipes, ideas, sharing things like that, lots of recipes being shared. They're on the cooking in the dark list. All the beef jerky stuff I've been doing is going to be up there. We're also going to make because it's winter time. Chili out there. One degree in Minnesota. No. Yeah, negative 20s. They're low.

4:04Oh, my gosh. God bless them. Make sure you plug your car in if you're in Minnesota. When you live someplace, Sheryl, you've got to plug a car in to keep it warm at night so it doesn't freeze. Yeah, it's too cold. Wow. Oh, my gosh. I just got to move. Yeah, I mean, right now it's what's going to be a low of 36 and Houston and I'm thinking, man, I only got 30 miles. I can go further south. Yeah. And I run into the water. About as south as I can get. Let's start going down, living in the valley down there, where it's, you know, 240 in the summertime. There are drawbacks to going. Even the cactus are sweating down there. Derek, what are we going on? Yes, yes, yes. So we're going to do, I'm going to show you, I'm going to make chicken noodle soup. But we're going to get there by, I'm going to show you this awesome broth. And from that broth, the tree just grows. You know, you can do chicken noodle soup. You can do chicken and vegetable. You can do vegetable dumplings.

5:07Dumblings, chicken and dumplings. Oh, oh, oh. It's delicious. All of different ways, but this broth, I've worked on it, worked on it. Not to me, it reminds me of my grandma's broth. So I think I did pretty good getting there. And like she said, just a pinch of this and a little of that, Dale. No, wow. Okay. So I learned how to cheat. And I'll show y'all how. But anyway, anyway, hey, Cheryl, there was this guy who was having a drink in a bar. All of a sudden, he's like, I got to go to the bathroom, you know. So he asked the bartender, where's the bathroom? It goes down the three doors down the, go down the hallway, third door on the right, three doors down. Okay. A guy goes down there and said, go into the right, he goes to the left and walks in and he sees this golden toilet. Wow. So he does his business and goes back, you know, bar. Next couple, you know, next few weeks he's in there and you know, whenever he has to go to the bathroom, he goes in and uses that golden toilet. Well, one night he has to go to the bathroom, goes in, opens the door. The toilet's gone. No golden toilet. He goes back to the bartender and you know, he's having his drink and bartender

6:08they're yacking and he asks the bartender, hey, what happened to that golden toilet? He goes, oh, so you're the one that's been pooping in my tuba. Oh shoot, I like that. That's pretty cute. Pretty cute, y'all. All right, we're going to be right back, cooking in the dark and we're going to check out this cupcake, this giant cupcake pan right here. We're going to throw a cake mix in that and then we're going to do a chicken noodle soup. Don't go anywhere. It's cooking in the dark. Happy new year. Now here's more of the shell with Dale Campbell and Cheryl Cummings. All right, y'all. I'm just over here in the digging in the pantry, getting my mixer out and getting my apron on while I'm here. And we'll get after this. The first thing we're going to do is make the cake mix. We're just using a box cake mix to check out this giant cupcake.

7:12It's cool, man. It's probably about the top of the cupcake, you know, I mean, where the crown of the cake is, you know, it's probably a good maybe six inches or so. That is a big cupcake. And then the base of the cupcake is probably about five inches in diameter, probably about four inches deep. Wow. So it's a couple big cavities. Yeah. Now we're going to have to grease and flour that, dude. So I think I'm going to use some vegetable spray on it to get all the nooks and crannies. It doesn't have ridges in the base. Or it looks like you pulled the paper off. That's funny. Isn't there like a spray thing that's sort of like a flower slash oil? Yes. Okay. And you know what? I think we have some of that. I'll have to check the pantry. So we're going to make a chocolate fudge cake. Very easy to work with here. We're going to take our large, perfect mixing bowl, 12 cup. So we got lots of room. I'm doing that because it's got a pour spout on it.

8:14Well, I'm also doing it because I just love to put these bowls, man. If you don't have one of these bowl sets, oh, you're missing out. If you have one, everybody's got one saying, oh, yeah, I know. Reach into the choir. Let me get a canife over here. Crazy bags don't tear anymore. So sorry, sir. You're going to have to go work out for 12 months on serious steroid weightlifting brand. Practice tearing the bag of food. Without filling the cake mix all over you. Yeah. That's the other thing. That's the key. That's the important part. Stay in clean. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we need a cup of water. And a third cup of oil. Oil. I'm just going to use some olive oil. Okay. So we've added our oil. We're going to get three eggs. Nor does such a nice job keeping these eggs right here, keeping us fresh.

9:17I know, considering all the things you know, you've occasionally said about her. She's pretty good. Yeah, well, let's not let it go to her head. All right, breaking the eggs in. There's the third one. So we've got a cup of water, a third cup of oil. Dale, do you have a technique for like breaking eggs? Because they mean sometimes you know, you do it and like the shell gets in or I don't think that's what I try to do is tap against the side of the bowl. Yeah. Until I get just a small crack in it. And then I get my thumbs on either side of that crack and just you know, the little opening there that I made by hitting it against the side of the bowl and just pull the shell apart. Break it open like you're opening a book. Sometimes that works. So we're supposed to mix this up for about a 30 second.

10:20On low speed. In about two minutes on high speed. We're not high speed. I'm sorry. I said the batter will be a little bit bumpy. So that would be something to check for. One piece okay I guess. One piece is not your gravy right? This is true. Well, no, no, no. You don't want a lumpy cake either. So lumpy is, this doesn't sound like a good option at any time. I think so. Right. Yeah, lumpy is not good.

11:20Yeah. I think about lumpy that carrot that was on leave at the beaver. Flare it. Or lumpy pants. That's not good. When you get lumpy pants, when somebody takes your golden foil. Oh, dude. Who said that? Not you. Hey, people in the audience here, I'm telling you so close. Okay. Let's pop the heads out. Pop the beaders out of the mixer. Let me get that spray. Spray this cupcake down. Cupcake pan. The cupcake pan. It's all one pan, y'all. It's all just one big pan. It's about 15, 16 inches long, about 8 inches wide. It's got a nice solid base on it. I think I am going to put it on a cookie sheet, though. Just because the side of the base where we're baking the top of it is kind of small. I don't want it to fall down between the grays.

12:28Some spray in where the bottom is. Pretty good because it's got all those little places, little ridges in it. Lots of good places to miss that'll cost your cupcake to stick. Don't you hate to open a cupcake off and then half of it sticks to the paper? When you're in public, you really can't just like stick the paper in your mouth and pull the rest of the cupcake off. You have to go, oh no, I don't mind that that didn't come out. That's not proper etiquette. Something along those lines. You can pretend that you don't care. It's my cupcake. I'm going to eat it however I need to eat it.

13:29But you know there's somebody watching going, look at that like maladjusted blind person over there. Okay, so I'm just pouring out the batter into both sides of this. I'm just kind of guessing. I'm thinking that I need to fill up at least halfway on both of them. Because you think about a cake when you bake a cake, you know, and say a three inch cake pan or even a two inch pan. So your batter fills up about half of it but it always bakes out over the top. Right. So that's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to do. And again, Sundance baking and cooking, you know, is where we got this cupcake pan. They've got all kinds of cool other pans too. They have one that's a jersey pan so it's like a t-shirt, like a jersey. You know, right, you know, congratulations on your championship. Get well soon or whatever.

14:31We're about halfway full on both of these on the crown side since it's the top of the cupcake upside down. I filled it a little more than halfway. And then the rest I just poured back into the other side to the base. And that came out to be just about maybe two thirds of the way full. So let me understand. Is this pan two pieces or one piece? It's two, oh, so one piece is like the top of the cupcake. Right. The crown of it and the other pieces of the base. The base. Oh, okay. So that's what we divided it up. And what we'll do is we'll once it bakes, what I'm hoping for is it to bake over the top. And then once it does that, I can, you get a cookie sheet out here. I can cut the top of, you know, cut the excess off. So I've got a nice flat surface on both sides to slap a little icing down and just combine it to.

15:34Oh, I see, I see, and that's that's why you're talking about the importance of spring and flowering it because it needs to come out of the pan. Yes, so you can put it together. Right. So we can go. I'm sorry, I was not paying close attention to you. Believe me, not the first time that's happening. Well, I'm neither that's neither here nor there. You don't have to. You're in the burger or wake up. All right, y'all. We've got that in a 350 degree oven. 35 minutes. We'll be checking on periodically as the show goes on. So stick around and we'll see what happens. In about 35 minutes, I'm going to pop it out. We'll do the old toothpick taste test on it. Toothpick taste. Freudian slip might have to taste it then too. Anyway, but we'll check it and make see how she's doing. So don't go anywhere y'all. We'll be coming right back on the other side with chicken noodle soup. Perfect. We're going to nice chilly night.

16:42Now with more of the show, here's Cheryl Cummings and Dale Campbell. Welcome back to more cooking in the dark. We are back! Yes. Cupcakes bacon. I'm excited. It sounds fascinating. I just got to put a fire. I put a six-court pot on the stove. Yep. Put a medium fire under that and I'm fixing to throw in three chicken breasts. These are about oh goodness, probably about six ounce breasts. Maybe a little bit bigger. If you want to throw in four of them, throw four in there. It's all right. We're just making soup. We ain't putting somebody on the moon. And this is your soup so you can do almost anything you want with it. That's right. You have our permission to make your soup the way you want to. One of our listeners up in Canada, she likes to make some of the recipes we make. You know? Right. And try them out on her friends and stuff.

17:43And one of her friends made like some kind of root comment. You know, why don't you put this or something like that in it? And I was like, well, what did you say? You know, and I go, man, I would have told her you make it that way and I'll come eat it at your house. Right. This is the way I made it. Right. You know? That's funny. I'm sorry, you're blind. You don't know how to cook. I've been told that. I was told, you're blind. You don't know my stove. You're not touching my stove. Oh nice back away. Step away from the stove. No stove for you. Oh my goodness. Hello. I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. Wow. Considering I have a stove at my own house and it's still there. I haven't burnt it down. Yeah, the house is still there. But I could be wrong. Maybe I have burnt it down and I'm at somebody else's place. But I'm too blind and too stupid to realize the change.

18:48Yeah, I just moved in next door after my house burnt down. Sorry. Let's trade. All right. So we've got a pop the heat up to about medium high. And these breasts, they're four frozen, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I'm going to toss in about a couple water. And what that's going to do, we put a lid on the pot. The water's going to get hot and start boiling. It's going to help to not only thaw, but steam cook. These chicken breasts. All right. So all that's happening. We're going to get prepped for the rest of our recipes. So I'm going to start. I've got to take an onion. We need a white onion or yellow onion. I prefer whiteness recipes because I like the colors in this recipe. It's very nice. Yellows, oranges. And I like the white of the onion. Don't shoot till you see the white of the onion, boy. So I'm going to start dicing up. I've got one onion here. A little bit bigger than, yeah, a little bit bigger than you want one

19:51about tennis ball size, but this time of year, one of the time it's kind of onions are big. Quite big. So I'm going to take about two thirds of this onion. I've already cut off one root end. I just made another slice through it. Start peeling off some of these here. I want a little onion in here. I don't want a lot. I'm going to probably end up using this whole onion though. We'll see what happens when we get them dicing this one up. I'm not going to use the dicing slice chopper. On this, just because I mean, it's just not enough. I can dice this up pretty quickly here. But if you want to, if you have one, by all means, use that dude. What I did is I just cut this slice I have. I just cut it in the quarters. One cut top to bottom, 12 to 6. And I turned the onion slice at a 90 degree and did another cut 12 to 6. And now I'm taking each of those quarters and just kind of cutting them down into smaller slices. I'm hoping I'm shooting for about a half inch wide, maybe three eighths of an inch, okay? About the diameter of a pencil or a pin.

20:55Something we don't have to worry about. Well, the low vision folk you got too. Where's my 2020 pin, honey? That was one thing as a salesman. I always had a pin on me. This is good. Or if you were in a hurry, the pin you grabbed would never write. A few things from the sighted world I don't miss. To a small list, but so I'm just kind of dicing this. What I'm hoping for, y'all, is I'm wanting pieces, you know, about oh, three eighths by three eighths or so. Yeah, I'm thinking when I'm going to try one time, I'm going to use that the, just a slice mandolin. But I'm going to take an onion. And I'm going to make cuts into it on each, you know, like, you know, on the 12 o'clock, the six o'clock, three o'clock, and the nine o'clock side. Cut, oh, maybe two thirds of the way into the onion, you know, down into the side. And then put it on that adjust a slice mandolin, slice it down.

21:56Because where you make the cuts, those are going to be little slivers. The center part are going to be little, little onion rings, you know? Oh, that would be nice. I think those would be cute. Yeah. You know, I should have done that in this soup right here. I'll do that if we ever go on location. If I ever cook for the president, I'll make little, little cute little onion rings and as chicken noodle soup. So as you were talking about this, I did a quick Google search. And they said that chicken noodle soup has been used since the 12th century. Wow. As a remedy for the flu. Wow. They don't know exactly what it does, you know, one person says, maybe the benefit of it is that it's a liquid and when you have the flu, you're dehydrated. So it's good. You need the liquid. They also said it could be that it's hot and it's steamy. So it's sort of it's clearing up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's been around for a little while now.

22:58Wow. Man, I'm sorry for the chickens. You're delicious. Sorry, boy. You're going to be around. I think this one, this onion is going to be perfect right here. What we've got. Lovely. We're getting that we're going to end up with almost about a cup of diced onion. So what we're going to do, our game plan here is y'all, once the chicken cooks through a little bit more, we're going to pull the chicken out. And we're going to throw the onions in. It's going to be a little water in there, but we're going to kind of let them saute and cook, do this a little bit. And then we're going to start adding the good stuff. So, um, sure, why don't you give them a run down on what we're going to need for this recipe. All right, here we go. As Dale said, we're going to start, we're going to use one onion, but size of a tennis ball. One. If you've got to get a bigger one, get a bigger one. Yeah, this is a little bit up to your taste. It's like, I'll make you a sandwich. Yeah. One large box of chicken broth. We think it's about 24 ounces.

24:00Yeah, it's either you can use it. They've got a box. It's about 24 ounces. They've also got a bigger box that I want to say is 32 ounces. Either one of those is perfect. All right. If you use the larger box, you want to add, we're going to add about two cans of water also. Once we get all of our ingredients in, and if you use the large box, the 32 ounce, you can add, I mean, you can add up with, you know, three cups. I mean, you can add more water than that if it's just all of your taste, but I like that rich brothy. That's one thing I like about this recipe. It ends up having that same rich broth taste that my grandmother required. You know, with hers, but she'd boil it, check in and blah, blah, blah. And, ah, you know, bless her heart. I was like, okay, there's got to be an easier way. And there is. So, yeah, so I'm going to stay off subject just for a second. Like, Olga's mom from Russia makes these awesome little meat pie things. You know, and they, they're a pain to make. You got to make the dough. You got to cut out all the little squares, blah, blah, blah. And then one day at the store, Olga saw, um,

25:00wonton wrappers. Same thing. Oh, she's like, now she makes the same things, but she uses wonton wrappers. Wow. So much easier. All you got to do is now make, anyway, high progress. Okay. So we need to do the wonton on to this pasta. One on one. All right. And then. Imagine how got off track again. Are you going? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm going to buy it. Hurry. I am. I'm feeling the need. Take a breath. Don't do it. Hold on to yourself there. Two cans of cream of chicken soup. And then, uh, we're thinking one to two tablespoons of salt. Again, you have to do that a little bit on your own taste. Yeah, I would recommend there. Y'all, um, start off with one. Yeah. Or even, even less than that. Yeah. And go to your taste. And even if you make it, people can add salt to it if they want to. Right. You know, you can't take salt out of it. That's for sure. That's true. If you put too much in, you're just stuck. And then we talked about four cans of water.

26:02Yeah, yeah. It's going to depend because I'm using the bigger. And I need to make this for the band. This is true. And the thing with the, uh, like what about us? Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Did you pay extra? What's your name, Mummy? See if you're on the $100 list. No. Yeah, the Reims noodles too. Once this, what I recommend, if you make this, make this the day before. Okay. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. And then just let it pop it in the fridge after it's done. And just let it sit. Yeah. Now you'll find as you start eating this down to the egg noodles, well, um, you know, you might want to add a little, always add just a little bit of water. Maybe I don't have a cup, a cup of water to it, whenever I go to, to heat them back up again. Oh, okay. I don't know. The flavor just, you know, um, getting kind of started to get hungry. And that's, I'm having bad thoughts, Cheryl. I'm kind of like thinking, I don't want to share this with anybody.

27:03Would it's me, you and Tim, just take this to the back. Yeah. They can, they can, they'll all follow us, you know. They're just like, okay, then I'm going to sacrifice you and Tim. I'm taking mine to the back. You guys talked it right? Exactly. We'll be your decoy. Be banging on the, I mean, we're soup. Like, no soup for you. Like, I'm sure he'll save us, um, not, not likely. But anyway, so here, so this is the interesting thing. So we, we, we got our four cups of water and then the package of frozen noodles. Can you talk about egg noodles? Yes. Can you talk about that? Yeah. They are, um, egg noodles are really nothing more than eggs and flour and a little salt. All mixed together. Okay. Rolled out and then cut into slices. Okay. I mean, you roll out the, you know, once you get the, the batter made with the noodles, the noodle batter, you roll it out and you let the, let it kind of dry for a little bit. Sprinkle some flour on it.

28:03You take each thing, each thing you've rolled out and you roll it up into a big roll. Mm-hmm. And then like that big roll, you just slice those noodles down, slice it down in the noodles. Then you pull open all the noodles up again, string them all out and let them dry some more. Wow. But, and then you get your broth going, which we're making right now. Right. We'll be making the broth here just as soon as our chicken's about done. I'm checking on it right now. And then you add the noodles to the broth and let them cook. For, you know, you let them boil for a while. Right. Maybe 30, 40 minutes and then put, put them back down to a simmer and just let them simmer for a couple hours. Oh, and then stick them in the fridge and just let them sit. That's the hardest part. I was gonna say. Stepping away from the noodles. Oh. Touch the food. It's for tomorrow. It's like when we make those brownies. You can't eat them for an hour. Yeah. And everybody's like, are you sure? Are you positive? Maybe. And then it's like, I'll just take a little picture right here on the edge. All right. So I've never seen these frozen noodles, but I will check for them. They make noodles.

29:04If you can't find noodles, sometimes you can find what do they call them? Dumplings. They're about a, maybe an inch wide. So what I'll do with those is take those and cut those down into thirds. Oh. Or an hour half, either one, but I think they're about an, maybe they're about an inch and a half wide. But I cut them down, you know, into noodles. And they're in the frozen area. Okay. Okay. So that's we're gonna use one whole packet and please people. If you don't have the frozen noodles, you could just use regular egg noodles. No, but these, these egg noodles are, you'll definitely want to find these egg noodles. Yes. So let's, we should check these out. And then we've got our boneless, and let's chicken breasts, which you are, we are steaming right now. They're boiling away. So what I'm gonna do, wait, I'm just stabbing them with a fork in one end and kind of flipping them, because they're still frozen on top. Mm-hmm. That dude's frozen.

30:05So I'm just kind of seeing through my fork y'all, touching. Okay, that one's coming along pretty good. Let me turn him over. I had my bowl here. I'm already yank these out and they're not done yet. So, yeah, that's all right. I mean, they'll get there. They'll get there. Yeah. And they're cooking like this, you know, with the breasts and in this water, it's gonna help keep them from drying out. They were getting some nice good chicken juices in here. And you just basically have enough water to sort of cover the chicken breasts? Not even cover on the chicken. Really? I just, I just put a cup of, cup of water in. Okay, okay. And then just, it's steaming, it's boiling in the bottom. And it's helping to create, you know, I've got the lid on. So, it's creating kind of some hot in the pot. And it's just helping to kind of cook the breasts through, kind of steaming boil, poach them, if you will. Yeah. Okay, so they'll be kind of plumpy too. And then when they're done, what we'll do is we'll pop them out. All right. I'll put them in my, in one of my poy-ficked bowls. Put it under the sink there and run some cool water on, cool them off.

31:07Then we just shred them up, shred them, cut them, whatever. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Hey, let's take five real quick, or maybe two, or maybe just one and a half. And we'll be right back on cooking in the dark. We'll finish up this chicken noodle soup. And our cupcake is still baking. We'll be right back. Now, more of the show with your host, Dale Campbell and Cheryl Cummings. All right, y'all. We are back. Our timers is about ready to go off for our cupcake. And we get this chicken here while that's going. I just want to check, when we're just going to check the cupcake, when it goes off, I want to put through the old clean test. I mean, by that is we're going to just put a toothpick down in it. And if it comes out clean, it's done. If it doesn't come out clean, it's not done. Still need some baking. Still need to cook.

32:07So I'm going to pull the chicken out. Oh, yeah, the chicken's done. What I'm doing is just sticking it with a fork. I love that. Just chicken fork in it. Is it done? Yeah, it's done. And what I can do is I'm sticking it right in the middle of the breast. And the fork just goes in really easily. Before, I could tell they were frozen because I mean, they were frozen. I couldn't stab them. These I'm just stabbing and pulling right out. Okay, so we're going to set our chicken over here to the side. Kind of let it just cool for a second. Sit there and be cool. Just chill. I'm going to add in onions and carrots that we just cut and diced up. We're just going to dump it right in on top of the water that was cooking. That we were using the kind of cook and steam. The chicken. I'm using the flexible chopping mats. I just blifted up both edges of that mat. I'm taking it over to my pot, tilting it and just dumping in all the onions and the

33:07carrots I just diced up. The carrots I didn't diced I just sliced. But I'm going to use about two, three carrots. Just cut them down. Just sliced them down. Pop them in there. In our pot, we have our onions and our carrots. I'm just going to take in my time. We're going to let those cook this a little bit. We're reaching in here. I'm going to grab a box of chicken broth and two cans of cream of chicken soup. Okay, dump it in the broth. Now, if you're dumping in this box of broth, if you want, you can poke a hole in the bottom of it. You know, it'll create an open it up to let it just flow right on through. We're just letting it bubble through. Squeeze it a little bit. Add it our broth. We'll open up our cans. The can of soups is a little over 10 ounces. So we're going to add about three cups of water. That's 24 ounces. So two and a half, three cans is going to be about two and a half, three cups.

34:10Okay, doing roughly, you know, three cups is 24 ounces, eight ounces per cup for everybody needs their toes. I need my toes. No, I definitely need my toes. All right, plop. Just dumping in our two cans of chicken noodle soup. Cream of chicken, I'm sorry, not chicken noodle. We're making chicken noodle soup. Okay, right now, except for adding some salt. And a little white pepper. Oh, we didn't mention the white pepper. Now, I like the white pepper. There's a restaurant we go to and they've got kind of a spicy broth. So I like not a lot. We don't need a lot of white pepper because it doesn't take much. I'm adding one more can. I add cans of water using the soup cans because it helps to kind of get anything that was left in the can out, you know what I mean? Can't waste any cream of chicken soup.

35:11So in our pot now, we've got the two cans of cream of chicken soup, a 24 ounce box of chicken broth, four cans of water, which is about 40 ounces, which is about five cups. Okay, stir it all around, stir, stir, stir. Now, right here, we can do many things. Tell us. You don't even have to put chicken in this right now. If you have some vegetables, you've sliced up. You know, say some zucchini, some squash. Maybe you've got some of that diced up. Throw it in here. Now, the chicken, we're going to shred that, throw the chicken in here. Then we're going to add that bag of noodles. Now, let's say you want to go another way. Maybe you want to get your topping microwave out and all this is all going on. You make some rice. Just go ahead and dump some rice in here. That's your own. Pre-cooked rice. It won't suck up as much of the water. Right. You know, mmm, good. What's also good is just putting the rice in a bowl and putting this just the broth over the top of the rice. Mmm, good.

36:12I like it. Dump links. Now, if you don't want to mess with making a homemade dumpling, but once you do, oh my gosh, it's two cups of flour. One and one half teaspoons of salt. Right. One tablespoon of baking powder. Boom, blow it up. Powder. You need the blow up. Right. One tablespoon of baking powder. Two tablespoons of vegetable oil. And then about a cup of water. Or you can, you know, lukewarm. You want to room temperature. But you can also use milk. Milk will make it a little richer. If you want to make it a little richer yet, add an egg. If it's, if you want to make the batter a little thinner, add a little more milk or water. If you need a little thicker add just a little more flour. But then once you get that mixed up, you just take those by spoonfuls. They're not even spoonfuls. Just half spoonfuls. Just little, little pieces and just drop them into this broth once it gets to boiling. Oh my gosh, yum. And now I'm telling you what. I'm taking back the offer to be your deco. You're on your own. In fact, Charles, like, I planned this right. I can snatch that pot and be gone in the pool all the way for you.

37:15No one's quite hitting. Leave him out there to deal with him angry. All right. I'll just turn the band loose on him. All right. So we've got, I've got this all stirred up. I'm going to add now the salt. I use sea salt, y'all. Or kosher salt, either one. I don't use iodized salt anymore. It's about one. Okay, I've decided probably about, yeah, about a tablespoon. I added about roughly about three teaspoons. Okay. Stir that up a little bit. You don't want it too salty, but you want a little, you know, a little salty in it. Let's see what we got here. I'm going to taste the broth. See where we're at. All right, Tim. Take her out and I'll share this with you. Just not very nice. Encouraging my husband to like, yeah, but he has to live with me. So not happening. You'll do it. Okay. I got to volunteer in the front row. Okay. So now I'm adding just about a teaspoon of white pepper.

38:16Okay. Not a lot. If you want to, if you don't want to add it, that's cool too. If you, I'm, but you might try, even if, might try adding just a, you know, a half a teaspoon at first. You know, try it out. Check it out. You might like it. You may not. That's why it's cold cooking in the dark. We don't know what it is, but it's going to be good. All right. So now from here, what I'm going to do is put the lid back on the pot. Put the lid on. Turn the heat down to about medium. And with the lid on that pot, it won't be long for it to boil. And when that happens, we're going to be ready. There's our bag of noodles ready to rock. Okay. We're going to turn our attention real quick. We're letting our chicken cool real fast. I've got me a toothpick. Where's that toothpick? Boy, get it out of your teeth. Give it here. He doesn't really mean that.

39:16Never. Who wants a piece of this cake? Oh, the things I have to do to keep people out of my food. Oh, yeah, I think we're done. That side came out clean. And it did like I thought it would, Cheryl. Okay. That side, oh, that side. Let me check again. It did come up above the top of the pan. Oh, cool. Like I thought it would. Nice. Okay. So let me turn the oven off. I just slid it back into the oven real fast. Okay, y'all in the front row, we're going to be a little bit of heat coming your way. We turn the oven off. I'm going to just crack this door, Cheryl. Let some of this heat out of this oven. So it doesn't keep baking the cake. Now, we have to let this cool for about 10 minutes. And then we'll pop it out. And in the meantime, what I'm going to do is cut off the thick part, you know, the part that overgrown, the overbake,

40:16each the overbaker. Perfect. Y'all don't mind waiting for the soup, huh? Soup's almost done anyway. Get my grips mitts here. I'm going to pop this out. I'm going to take out everything. Cookie sheet. Everything. I'm going to need that, I think. Over here, I put out a cooling grid on the counter. I'm just going to set this pan on top of that cooling grid. Well, if that dude sit here in the cool, you got to let him cool about 10 minutes. Okay. And then we'll be able to mess with him. Close that oven door so we don't run into it. That might leave a mark. How did you burn your arm? Well, you don't want it now. I was in the desert storm. I was a cook. Oh. All right, I just cut open the bag of noodles here and we're just going to dump them right in the old pot. All right. Now, if you pop them in, get them while they're,

41:19you want them still frozen going in, okay? If they've been sitting out and they've kind of fought a little bit, you want to make sure they're not stuck together. You know, one big old heap of, heap of flowered bliss. Now, we've tossed them in the pan, stir them up and turn our attention to the chicken. As soon as I hit this hot broth, they already started kind of breaking up. And can you tell because you sort of, you're using your spoon to check over it? Yeah, I put the wooden spoon in just kind of, you just want to kind of stir the pot around a little bit. And doing that, you can kind of feel, you can feel them, they're all broken up and kind of meander and around doing their own thing. So what I'm going to do with the chicken y'all, so I'm just going to start tearing it down into pieces. Just pulling the breast apart, tearing it down into roughly bite-sized pieces. Oh, that's a big boy piece, sir. Let me tear him down a little bit more. But it breaks apart pretty easily. I mean, if you prefer to cut it, slice it up, do that too. I just kind of like getting my hands on it,

42:20that way I can feel it. Plus, I like the look of it. Again, here we are talking about the aesthetics. I like the look of it in there, being shredded as opposed to cut. I mean, shredded to me makes it look more homemade. I don't know why, but just me. Not made in a machine. Okay, so our noodles are noodling. Man, I'm so excited about that cupcake. I ordered, before we got a show coming up, you know, Valentine's, so I ordered a heart candy mold. And some red candy melts. And then a red velvet cake flavoring. You're setting up some high expectations there. I'm looking forward to those. Some candy that tastes like red velvet cake. Okay. And it's shaped like a heart. Yeah, it's amazing. I might even hit Candace up for a kiss. Down to our last press, again, just pulling apart, y'all. They kind of just crumble.

43:20You know, Cheryl, you ever pulled chicken apart? Yeah, yeah. Like the breasts like this. Yeah. Fies are a little harder because of the dark meat. Mm-hmm. At our grocery, we have bags. These are in the frozen area, but we have bags of frozen, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. And you can get a big bag. They have like an eight pound bag, I think, or maybe a two pound and a four pound. Anyway, they're so great. Right. I like just throwing them in a skillet, putting a little salt, pepper on them, maybe a little dobo seasoning, or celery salt, whatever, garlic, you know. And do like we just did in a skillet, put a little water in the bottom, and just let them cook. And then pull them out. If you want to, you can throw them in an oven to brown them up a little bit. But a lot of them, we just pull them out and throw it down with whatever our, that's our main course right there. All right, we've got our chicken nicely shredded. I'm just kind of digging through it. That's a piece. It's kind of weird how you can kind of feel through stuff, and you can kind of, I don't know, I guess you get a mindset of what you're looking for, a certain size. When you feel something that's bigger than what you, you think it should be,

44:24it's easy to just define it. Huh, we're so amazing. Okay, enough of that nonsense. Let's go on. Well, heck, we're almost done here, folks. We are. We're going to add the chicken. The soup is almost done. The cupcake is done. And like bad news, we're going to let this come up to a, a boil. And then once it comes up to a boil, we're going to just let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Then we're going to put it in the fridge and we'll eat it tomorrow. Now, we'll be right back on cooking in the dark. Y'all, we're going to, I'm going to mess with this cupcake while we're on break. And we'll come back on the other side, cooking in the dark. Don't go anywhere. Now with more of the show. Here's Cheryl Cummings and Dale Campbell. Okay, welcome back to more cooking in the dark. Yeah, I got bad news, man.

45:25The cupcake isn't going to cupcake. We didn't put enough batter in. So it is going to take two cake mixes. And I would recommend filling the batter full on both cups. It did bake up and it cooked up in the middle, but it didn't rise as much as I thought it would rise. So we're going to have like a mushroom looking cupcake. It's still good. I said, nobody is like, I'm not eating it. They're just. Yeah. So yeah, what I'll do is I'll slap a little icing on this and we'll cut it up into chunks and just throw it out there as two pieces. But yeah, man, okay. So I'll figure this out. We'll get it going. This is so cool though. Just two cake mixes. The directions that came, well, what directions? There weren't really any directions on how much cake mix to use, you know? Right. So anyway, live and learn to experiment. That's what we're all about. It's fun. Hey, let's talk chicken noodle soup because that is not an experiment. That is damn delicious. And best of all, it's ready. Oh my gosh. Are you ready? So you go ahead and start reading. I'm going to get out. I'm going to cut up some chives if anybody wants those. Put a little sour cream out. Some Greek yogurt. If you all want to use that, we'll put that out. So you know, some people like to do terrible things of their soup.

46:28It's all right. All right. So here we go. We need the first few ingredients before you get to the chicken and add all that stuff. I mean, the broth and the water and the soup is pretty much the base. The base broth. Right. Delicious. So we started off with one one onion by the tennis ball size and that was diced. One large box of chicken broth by 24 ounces. Two cans of cream of chicken soup. One to two tablespoons of salt. That's to your taste. Four cups of water. A package of frozen egg noodles. Two cups diced carrots. That's optional. And we use three boneless skinless chicken breasts. And the one to two teaspoons of white pepper. Yes, optional. And we didn't use them, but mushrooms are also optional. You have to have your mushrooms in there. I don't know how to get it too. Chicken and mushroom soup. I like chicken and mushroom and carrot and onion and pea pods. I'm in. Roll the broccoli in there.

47:28Oh, man. It's all good. You all want you to get with that base. All right, y'all. Hey, for Cheryl and Tim, we will see y'all next week on Cooking in the Dark. Cooking in the Dark is a presentation of Blind Mice Megamall at www.blindmicemegalmall.com. Cooking in the Dark was produced by THC Productions. Oh, yeah.