#300!

This is my 300th post. Neato. It's also Father's Day, so happy Father's Day. I also missed Robyn's birthday last week, so happy belated birthday to Robyn. I think that's it for important dates. So, as promised, the cupcake pictures. First, Mason. He did not want his picture taken, so I told him I'd just take one of his cupcake. That's why he's not smiling.

And Ella. She was perfectly happy to pose for me. She had been hitting the frosting pretty hard, in case you can't tell by her face.

Then Tracy spent 30 minutes cleaning up sprinkles. But the cupcakes were delicious!

Another weekend at work, another weirdo

I just say here and watched a woman change her kid's diaper on the seat of the trolley they park out front to attract customers. Um, we do have bathrooms. Just sayin. I'd love to be nosy about this family, they have 2 one-year-old girls, one looks white, the other black. I mean, they could be cousins or something, but I'm curious. But alas, I will not ask. Oh, the grandmother just came in to use the restroom. Hope that trolley seat wasn't too hot for the little girl. It's supposed to be in the 100s today. It was 90 when I got to work at 10:00. Nuts!

So Tony and Cathy and the kids left yesterday. Ella, Mason and I made cupcakes on Thursday night. They helped me measure and pour and everything, then picked colors to dye the cupcakes and helped me decorate them. With sprinkles. Which, in hindsight, was not the best idea. Well, the idea was fine, it was the execution that was the problem. Sprinkles everywhere. Mason went through almost an entire container on 1 cupcake. I got a couple of pictures, I'll have to post them later.

This weekend kicks off our month (or so) of house sitting for Ilya and Mercedes. They're in Spain for a few weeks, so we get to hang out with the kitties. It's a good distraction so we don't have to notice how quiet the house is without guests. Ok, time for my leftover mac and cheese lunch and some more "work."

happy birthday Lindsay!

First, I want to say happy birthday to Lindsay! I've been intending to email her for months, but she beat me to it the other day with a super cute picture of her daughter. I think the only picture I have of her is the one I posted last year, so I guess I won't post it again. Happy birthday though! :)

Next, I want to say hi to Meghan! Meghan lives in Kapolei, Hawaii, and apparently just found out about my blog from Mike. I met Meghan when I went out to visit Mike a couple of years ago when he first got back from Iraq. In fact, you can see Mike sitting with his leg propped up in the reflection in the glass door at the right side of this picture. I bet Meghan loves that I'm posting this picture. Hi Meghan!

I considered posting a picture of Mike's bullet wound here, just for fun, but decided against it. Maybe later. Instead, here are some pictures of another wound of sorts. Mama Kitty is still living at the old museum (we're going to try to bring her over to the new place this coming week) and apparently had an accident of some kind. I think her tail is broken. She isn't moving it at all, but doesn't seem to be in much pain. It had some fur on the end of it last week, but now it's gone from about the halfway point down. It looks like a rat's tail. See?

Gross, huh? In person you can see the individual vertebrae that make up her tail. It's kind of cool in a gross way.

Friday was Kara's last day, so I also took a picture of the cake I made for her. Unfortunately the cake was baked over a fault line, and an earthquake struck before we could eat or photograph it.

Really, I frosted it that morning and it didn't have enough time in the fridge for the frosting to set, so it slid in the car. I did all the piping myself. Not bad, huh? Katie taught me all I know. Which isn't much, but it's more than I knew before. It tasted damn good, that's all that matters. And I have a little tupperware container of frosting left in the fridge that I've been sampling over the past couple of days. Mmm, butter and sugar.

All right, I'm going to go back to watching Alf now. I mean, go make granola. One of the two.

cookies galore

My parents are here! They got in yesterday afternoon, we went out to eat and then headed to a shopping center and played some chess. Because that's what you assume you would do at a shopping center: play chess. My dad won.

Today we spent aaaaaaalll day making cookies! To be more specific, my mom and I made cookies while Alfred watched and drank and my dad played a hunting game on their Wii. We made those peanut butter cookies with a Hershey kiss in the middle, almond cookies with almond frosting, peanut butter oatmeal M&M cookies, peppermint sugar cookies (I started making them in the shape of candy canes but didn't like how they were turning out, so I made the rest as pinwheels and didn't like those either, oh well), cut out sugar cookies, and cut out anise cookies.

We frosted all of the cut outs and decorated the anise ones.

Katie's going to decorate the sugar cut outs when she gets down here. As we learned when making our Easter cookies last year, she's much better at piping than I am.

Now we're *watching* (thank you, mom and Ro) Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Interesting choice of movies to watch with my parents, yes. It's good so far. They're dropping quite a few f-bombs.

I've made a huge mistake

I miss Gob. Also, blogger is pissing me off. I've tried posting this like 4 times and the spacing keeps getting messed up. If it's still messed up this time I'm just leaving it. So that explains any potential weird gaps.

My huge mistake was trying my new coffee liquor with milk, since I finished all of the fat free half and half last night. Yup, delicious. I think I'm going to become an alcoholic.

And now, the return of the baking blog! I haven't baked anything in awhile, my mixer was lonely. I made some of my famous cookies, and of course Alfred's tiramisu. As I mentioned last night, I made the lady fingers from scratch:


I got the genius idea from someone on the allrecipes website to do them like this. I traced the outline of the pan I was using onto the parchment paper, then filled in the circles with the batter and baked them. That way they fit right into the pan and I didn't have to deal with cutting and fitting the little cookies together. Genius, I tell you. Tonight I made the custard filling and had to give up some of my precious coffee liquor, and put it all together.

I'm now an expert in separating eggs. I've separated a total of 15 eggs since last night, and only messed up 1. Yeah, this bitch has 14 eggs in it. Leave it to Alfred to pick a protein-rich, carb-light dessert (he's cutting back on carbs to lose more weight, which has meant I've cut back on carbs a bit too. It totally works. Which sucks. I love carbs.)

I also remembered the story I was going to tell yesterday about going to buy my booze. The guy rang it up and told me the price, but didn't ask for my ID. He didn't ask for it until I gave him my credit card to pay. I asked if he was carding me for my credit card or age, and he said both. But then he said "I'm not stupid, I know how to answer a question like that." So, did I really not get carded? And why does it bother me? I seem to have passed into the next stage of my life. For a long time, I wanted to look older, or at least my age. I actively disliked looking younger. I mean, it wasn't very flattering to be mistaken for Katie when I was 20 and she was 12 (it totally happened, at Tony's wedding.) Then I got to the age where I didn't mind either way. I was happy if someone guessed my age, but just as happy if someone told me I looked younger. Now, it seems I want to look younger. Apparently I'm getting old. Dammit.

I'm legal

Let me preface this post with a warning: I bought a bottle of coffee liquor today and have had 3 glasses of it mixed with fat free half and half. Each successive glass had less and less of the half and half. It was fantastically delicious. Thus, you get to enjoy the elusive "tipsy post."

I bought the liquor for the tiramisu I'm making tomorrow for Alfred's birthday (we're celebrating this weekend with his family). Tonight I made the ladyfingers. Cause I'm hard core like that. At one point I had dueling mixers going. I was using the hand mixer with the egg whites, and the stand mixer with the yolks. It was kind of awesome. Ok, I'm lying. Dueling mixers! It was totally awesome!

So we bought me a car back at the beginning of August. I've been driving it ever since. And I just went today and got it registered. Boo yah! I've been living on the edge, man. I even had to lie about when we bought it. I'm so bad ass. But now I officially own my own car, all by myself. Neato.

Ok, I've been working on this for like 45 minutes and obviously haven't gotten very far. I keep getting distracted by Wipeout, it's funny if you've never seen it. And this sounds rather disjointed, but you know, I think this is the best I can do right now. Sorry, dudes.

our weekend, of course

Good times were had. Saturday we worked like mad outside, we cleaned up the yard, I weeded the brick walkway, and Alfred mowed the front and back yards, so it looks all nice again. I also cleared out part of the garage so my car can fit in there too. Stuff sort of leaked out from around the walls since we sold my Civic. Oh, and I repotted my plant to give it some more space, it's much happier now.

Saturday was also my day to finish watching So You Think You Can Dance. What an awesome finale. I'm kind of sad it's over for another year, I'm totally going through withdrawal.

I made some banana muffins Saturday with the bunch of bananas we forgot to bring with us for our house sitting gig. Alfred had the genius idea to make muffins instead of a loaf so we were able to try different additions. We tried blueberries (which was Alfred's favorite), dried cranberries (my favorite), and chocolate chips. And plain, of course. Pretty good, for banana muffins. I made some of my soon-to-be signature cookies too. They were tasty, if I do say so myself.

We started getting into the Olympics last night at oh, about 10pm. Good timing. We watched 2 world records get broken (in swimming) so that was exciting. Alfred finally turned off the tv and forced us to go to bed. Good thing, cause otherwise I might still be watching. It's strangely addicting. We're watching it again now!

I also just ate literally one bite of a peach, and I can already feel my throat getting tight. Usually it takes a lot more than that to bother me, maybe peaches are more potent than apples. Very weird.

confession

I'm playing hooky today; I didn't go to work. I had told Alfred that I was hoping for some time off before going back to the museum, because last year I didn't have any break when switching jobs and I felt like that would have been nice. So, lovely husband that he is, he made it his mission to make sure I had a couple of days off this week. I get to stay home today and tomorrow, yay! I've even been productive: I cleaned this morning, played some Legend of Zelda (I beat levels 6, 7 and 8 on the second quest, almost done), exercised, and then baked some cookies.

I'm going to send them to Cathy as a belated birthday gift. Her birthday was July 1. I'm a terrible person. Hopefully the cookies make up for it. They're peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip, by the way. I've decided that those are going to be my signature cookie, so I tried out my first recipe today. They came out pretty well, but I think they could be more peanut buttery. I'll be making more, and since I can't eat dozens of cookies on my own (well, I could, but I shouldn't) I may have to send some to others to taste test. Just a warning.

Dinner Saturday night was pretty tasty - gazpacho, which we made from nice fresh veggies from the farmers market, along with some bread and a Bloody Mary.

And just as I was in the middle of writing this, our lamb meat was delivered!

(mis)adventures in cheesecake making

First off, we didn't get home from work last night until 8:45. And then I had to make a cheesecake for Ellery's birthday today. Oh mylanta, as the kids used to say. So Alfred went upstairs to exercise and I got working. I was on the phone with my mom for a few minutes, then she said she'd let me go so I didn't make a mistake with the recipe. (Actually, Mom, I did forget to put sugar in the crust, which I was making while talking to you. But then I just barely had enough sugar for the filling, so if I had put some in the crust I would have been a little short for the filling. So it was ok in the long run.) I got it all made and in the pan, then went to get the foil out of the cupboard (to wrap around the pan to bake it in a water bath, of course) and:


I knocked 2 of the baking dishes that were stacked next to the foil onto the floor, and one of them smashed. And I mean smashed! That shit was everywhere! If you click on the picture you can see it, there were pieces on top of and under the green pan, in between other pans still in the cupboard, I even stepped on one in front of the fridge, which is like 5 feet away. And it only fell like 18 inches! I had to get the vacuum out because there were so many tiny pieces that the broom was missing. It sucks cause I really liked that dish, it had a rubber top and was just really nice. To make myself feel better, I poured the little bit of graham cracker crumbs I had left into the little bit of cheesecake filling that was left in the bowl and ate it. It was yummy. And in the end, this gorgeous creature resulted:


Look how nice and level the top is! The water bath worked its magic, baby. And you can see some of the raspberries that are at the bottom of the cheesecake. Then I worked some magic of my own this morning, and we have this:


Who says I can't decorate cakes? Well, I say that, but I can make a cheesecake look nice! I'll have to take a picture tonight when it's cut, I bet it will look cool with the raspberries at the bottom.

happy (belated) birthday Robyn!

Yesterday was Robyn's birthday. (I have no picture of her to post, since I don't go home anymore. And she hates being in pictures, so even if I had thought of it yesterday I probably wouldn't have had much luck taking one of her then. My b.) Because of her birthday and father's day, we spent the whole day at their house. Alfred got suckered into helping plant (all Robyn wanted for her birthday was plants, so she got a bunch of them) while I was lucky enough to get to hang out inside and cook. Check out this spread!


That's a chocolate birthday cake, a blueberry father's day pie, chicken salad, mashed sweet potatoes, popovers, cole slaw (which I loved, but no one else did), and ribs. I made it all, except the ribs, that's Alfred's domain. Well, and he helped me with stuff once he came back in. But I made most of it! :) The chicken salad and cole slaw even contain homemade mayonnaise. I also made some blueberry cornbread for breakfast, but didn't get a picture of it. It was really yummy though. It worked out well for me: I got to have my fun making things, and not have to be outside working in the heat and humidity!

A close up of the cake, since it's kind of hard to see in the other picture:


As you can see, my decoration skills leave much to be desired. The top came out ok, but the sides, not so much. I was trying to kind of drip it down the side, but gravity wasn't really cooperating. It still tasted really good.

Ok, a close up of the pie, too. I think I actually liked this better than the cake! Shocking, I know. I had a lot of trouble with the crust, but it came out ok. Not great, but ok. But the filling was so damn good it didn't matter.


Come to Florida, I'll bake for you.

Coming up tomorrow: the origin of all the blueberries!

beachy goodness

I downloaded Katie's pictures last night, so here are some more from the weekend to share. First, we had an Iron Chef competition Sunday night. The secret ingredient was roasted red peppers, and we had to make 1 regular dish and 1 dessert. I made garlic focaccia with roasted red peppers and mozzarella, and my dessert was roasted red pepper tarts with meringue. They both turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself, and I won! I was also the only competitor. Here I am contemplating the meaning of life.

I was going to post a picture of Katie's boogie boarding injury, but I couldn't find it just now. I know I saw it this weekend, but it must have been on our camera, which means I copied it to the computer at home and deleted it from our camera. My b. (I don't think I told the story of double nipple ring boy, who we met at the beach Saturday, and who has given us such gramatical gems as "my b" instead of "my bad," and "twisted" which I presume means drunk.) Anyway here are the younguns boogie boarding.

Yesterday we went to the beach. Surprise! Some kid left a shovel and bucket, so we made this sweet sandcastle. In the back is the watchtower, and the castle for the royalty is in the front. Check out the land bridges. That's some amazing construction right there. I made them, in case you couldn't guess. We gave up trying to fill the moat after 1 bucket.


After that we got the brilliant idea to take pictures of our shadows in the sand. It started out with us doing "YMCA" and went from there. Please enjoy my first attempt at a slideshow, with handy subtitles in case you have trouble figuring out our spelling. Just remember as you see the words we chose that we were with 3 19/20 year olds. And me and Alfred. Not the most mature minds.

fun with Katie's friends

Three day weekends are great.

Saturday we went to the beach right by our house. Apparently you can ride horses on the beach. On their way back the girl in the back here had her skirt hiked up around her hips. Classy.

That night we did a power hour, and made pizza and cupcakes. The first picture is of my pseudo-Hostess cupcakes, and for the ones in the second picture I used the Magnolia Bakery recipe. It was seriously the most delicious frosting ever.


Yesterday we went to Daytona. We cruised the beach for awhile, watched some lifeguard training, then drove the car onto the beach and only got stuck in the sand once. The younguns went in the water and rode some mad waves on the boogie boards but it was too damn cold for Alfred and me. Yeah, we're wusses. On the way home we stopped for dinner at Chipotle (Alfred's favorite!) Then last night we had yet another power hour. Behold the wonderous tower of Coors Light. I also enjoy the artistry of the girls in the background. Alfred took several videos of Katie and Christina performing but I think they'd both kill me if I posted that. It's pretty good blackmail material though, so don't piss me off, Katie! :)

exciting night, and Katie's craptastic morning

So, first things first. Last night I made a key lime pie with meringue. It's my first meringue pie, so I hope it's good. It looks good.


I also made a loaf of bread, but it wasn't pretty enough to take a picture of. And we made granola. It's like crack to me. Sweet, crunchy crack.

The other accomplishment: I beat the Legend of Zelda! Yes, I took a picture. We didn't get a picture of the last screen when I won cause it scrolled by before we grabbed the camera. I guess Link and Zelda had to go make out. No, I didn't have a mouse in my pocket, Alfred came downstairs to watch my victory. And offer some tips.


I started the second quest, but it's hard again cause I lost all the cool weapons and power I had from the other game. I'll probably start looking for websites for help/to cheat. Or give up.

And now for the exciting-in-a-bad-way news. Katie called a little after 10 last night: her car had died on her way home from work. So Alfred went to pick her up, and we drove her back there this morning (she got to sit on my lap, since our only car is a 2 seater) so it could get towed.


Turns out the timing belt is shot and with the potential damage she's looking at at least $2000. Not worth it, considering she/we bought it for less than that. So, Katie has no car. Luckily her classes are over, but 2 of her friends were supposed to be flying down next week and all three of them were going to drive back to NY for Katie to spend the summer up there. Not anymore!

The best part is, Katie called me a few minutes ago. Right after she got off the phone with my mom, her phone died. She was right next to a Radio Shack, so she went to try to buy a new charger, but of course they didn't have any. So she had to go buy a phone card, find a phone book, look up the number for the mall she works at, call to get the number for the store she works at, call there, get phone numbers for a couple of her friends, and then try to find someone who was able to pick her up and take her back home. I was just laughing. I mean, what else can you do? It could be worse, she could have broken down in the middle of West Virginia on her drive home. West Virginia sucks.

have I mentioned

that we're turning into hippies? This weekend we made some more jam (strawberry jalapeno and orange marmalade):

and some granola:


as well as our weekly ration of rolls. I feel like we made something else too, but I can't remember. I know a lot of time was spent in the kitchen, anyway. I'm feeling a little scatter brained at the moment. So, for lack of a better post, please enjoy some Fun with Photoshop. If you click on them they look cooler.

A couple of pictures from strawberry picking:


Rosemary and me when we visited a couple of summers ago:


Group picture from the day after our wedding:

I think this one's pretty self-explanatory (original is on the left):

more domesticity

Apparently we couldn't slow back down to our usual leisurely weekend pace after all the excitement of the past couple weeks. Saturday we hit up the farmers market, ran some errands, I cleaned, baked some bread (which didn't rise because I killed the yeast by using water that was too hot), we went for a nice long walk (which resulted in me being sore the rest of the weekend), and got started on some apple butter. Sunday we finished the apple butter (which turned out really well), made some strawberry orange jam (early taste tests indicate success), spent almost 2 hours trying to boil water to seal all those jars of deliciousness, went to the beach, baked some rolls for dinner, and caught up on the last 2 or so weeks of tv. Craziness. A good weekend overall though, and having an extra day off didn't hurt either. I'd have more pictures, but our camera battery died this weekend and the charger and spare were both at the office in the computer case I used as a carry on to go to Minnesota, and I forgot to get the pictures Katie took. My bad.

Completely unrelated... have I ever mentioned my inability to stay awake for our drive to work? Probably twice a week I fall asleep during our morning drive. Today, for example, I passed out for about 15 minutes. It's a nice little nap, but sometimes (like this morning) I end up kind of disoriented and more tired when I wake up. Luckily the AC in our building is fixed, so the cold jolts me back into reality pretty quickly. Until the hypothermia sets in, then I'm out again.

strawberries

It's hard to post when I don't have a computer. I apologize to my legions of fans :)

We went strawberry picking with Ilya and Mercedes on Saturday! It was a perfect day, sunny and warm, and when we finally found the place (it was a bit off the beaten track) we had a lot of fun. Well, at first we were a little confused, it was just a whole bunch of land with no one around, but we finally found someone and figured it out. The set up was cool, this is the entire field of crops that they grow to sell:


Right now it's mostly strawberries. It doesn't look like much, but we were able to pick almost 30 pounds total! We also tried some of the lettuce and other veggies that she had growing. Here's a close up of the planting system. The white boxes are just styrofoam, I think, and they're all stacked so you can fit a whole bunch of plants in a much smaller space than if they were planted in the ground. Plus it's easier to pick the strawberries this way. And, it's all organic!

After we picked the plants clean, the lady (I think her name was Betty Jean, rather fitting I thought) took us over to see the animals. They had chickens, pigs, donkeys, goats, cows, all sorts of stuff. They also grow a big corn maze every year that's open to the public.

Once we got home, we washed, cut, and froze most of the berries. How luscious do they look??


We're going to make jam with them once we get all of the supplies. Alfred bought pectin online so we're waiting for that to get shipped. In the meantime, I made a pie! It looked much prettier before it was baked and juice leaked out in a few places. It was super delicious though.


Yesterday we just hung out at home. It was cloudy and dreary all day. Saturday was so busy that I needed a day to be kind of lazy, so since the weather wasn't as nice I figured we had a good excuse to sit around. And eat pie, of course!

bad luck

I had all sorts of unfortunate things happen yesterday. First, I went to buy plane tickets to go to MN and the prices had gone up by freaking $80 apiece! From the day before! So waiting 24 hours would cost us $160. Sucks. So now I'm not sure when we're going or what's happening, which sucks because we had just finally managed to nail down a date and pick exact flights. Back to the drawing board. So frustrating!

Second, my computer will no longer turn on. It worked fine Monday night, Tuesday evening it won't respond at all. I'm hoping it's coincidence, and not that Alfred is systematically destroying or getting rid of my things when I do something to piss him off. First we sell my car, then my computer breaks. Whatever it was, I'm sorry! :)

Third, (this was technically this morning, but it can still count) I was at my lowest weight in about a year Saturday morning. I've gained 3 pounds since. Not that much, but considering it took almost a month to lose those 3 pounds, it's kind of discouraging.

But luckily I had this last night to cheer me up:


Seriously, the most delicious cake ever. (no wonder I gained 3 pounds, right?) It's a really dense fudgey cake, not a normal fluffy frosting type cake, very rich and chocolatey. You don't need a very big piece. Coming from me, that says a lot. I made some ganache to pour on top, which was really good, and some whipped cream, which was not really necessary but still ok. The recipe for the cake is here if you're interested. I highly recommend it.