Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Cooking update:

Cookies are awesome. Well, some are. It depends on how long they were in the oven. Some batches were in longer depending on how exciting the part of Battlestar Galactica I was watching was.

Veggie fritter thingies are also amazing, though less amazing now that they are no longer hot. I'm sure it will all be appreciated at potluck party today.

Does anybody else stay up until 2:30 making things for a potluck where you know the only reward is to have a few coworkers come up to you and say "oh those _____s are quite lovely."

No? I must be crazy. Then again, not everyone's coworkers are musicians...and everyone knows how much musicians like food.

Monday, June 28, 2010

=D

La la la la la la la la la....

I am in the middle of cooking something that is not cookies while waiting for roommate to arrive home with my cookie sheet.

The cooking of said "not cookies" is another awesome recipe but takes a long time and requires lots of grating and mess, so I decided I deserved a beer. Which, being thirsty, I drank rather quickly.

Don't worry, I waited until all the graty and pointy implements were finished with. Now it's just the frying pan. No problem.

Better go check on it.

Edit: Things are turning out awesomely. I totally deserve another beer.

Correlation vs. Causation

I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm thinking I should have stayed up to make the second batch of cookie dough. Unless it was the midnight snack of cookie dough that kept me awake.


(I made that second batch this morning and it was significantly faster, having learned something from last night. Except I still wore a black shirt...#@*%)

COOKIES!!!

As a fair number of people could tell you, I am not a bad cook. In fact, I am a rather decent cook. I might even be a good one. As a somewhat fewer number of people could tell you, I am a messy cook.

When I am in the midst of a project, the kitchen invariably appears to have had a small flock of geese go through and pull things off shelves, chewing packages and leaving a medley of ingredients...well, somewhere in the kitchen. But of course, I know exactly where they all are (cough cough...really, I do) but no thank you, I don't need any help. No matter how many times one might hear me mutter "Now where did I put that spatula?"

Because I like to cook. I enjoy the insanity that I go through, whirling from counter to counter, checking the recipe then going "meh, let's do something else anyways", mashing and spooning and smashing and beating.

Food processor and electric mixer? I don't think so. We're doing this the hard way.

Because chocolate chip cookies are worth it.

And not just any chocolate chip cookies. These are the Consummate chocolate chip cookies! Of doom.

Someone actually went out and researched chocolate chip cookies. (Tough life, eh?) And experimented combined the elements that seemed to be the most successful. I thought it might be a good idea to try to make them.

Unfortunately, I cheated on the first ingredient. I don't have cake flour or bread flour. I used all-purpose flour. Gasp! The horror! Then I discovered that when sifting the dry ingredients together, the coarse salt called for doesn't actually make it through the sieve. Hmmm.

I threw it in afterwards.

I also discovered that it is a good idea to check the cupboards to see what kinds of bowls are available. Metal salad bowls that are slightly too small are not the best. But when that is all your roommate has, well...yeah maybe I should go buy bowls.

Creaming butter and sugar together in a slightly-too-small bowl is a challenge. It is necessary to either be extremely careful and therefore go slowly, or make a huge mess and get it everywhere. Or in my case, both works.

Tip: Make sure to note which ingredients get put into each bowl. It is not a good idea to sift the dry ingredients into the larger bowl because there are more of them, then cream the butter and sugar in a smaller one when you have to put the dry ingredients in the butter/sugar bowl.

When you're doing it by hand, "Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes." means "BEAT THE HELL OUT OF IT for 20 minutes."

Also "Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds" translates to "Stir very slowly because your bowl is too small and you will get flour EVERYWHERE until it's all mixed together which will take 8-10 minutes."

Very important: When they tell you to add the chocolate pieces, eat some. And when the dough is done, eat some of that too.

Slightly less important: Don't wear a black shirt...



No you don't get to find out how they turn out. At least not yet. The dough is in the fridge, where it will remain for "at least 24 hours" which means I will be baking at midnight tomorrow! YAY!

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Here's hoping for a more educational fin du semaine.

It's only Friday (ok, Saturday morning...) and I've already learned that waxing legs is really not worth the effort. It takes too much time, although I can't really decide whether I'm annoyed that I ran out of Battlestar Galactica episodes before I finished, or if it just would have been a hell of a lot faster had I not been watching BSG in the first place...

In other news, I learned stuff during the week. Like that "Let's go out for a beer. Just one." really means "Let's start by going out for a beer, and finish with getting home at 3am."

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Lessons learned this weekend:

1. When making mojitos, it is beneficial to make the simple syrup BEFORE commencing with the drinking. This prevents sugar from getting all over the kitchen.

2. Also when drinking, it is better to choose snacks that are not orange in colour. Especially when you have beige carpets. People tend to be a lot more careful about their drinks than the snack bowl.

3. When going for a day trip somewhere (especially with musicians) always plan to be on the road an hour later than you thought.

4. When hiking, do not take the least experienced hikers' estimates for trip times. Just because they can walk 10km in 3 hours, does not mean it takes the same amount of time when lots of hills and difficult terrain are involved.

5. Never leave your facebook logged in on someone else's phone.


Actually that's not a hell of a lot. I only learned 2 things each day (1 for friday evening). I shall endeavour to have a more educational weekend next weekend...or some other time.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

If I could train spiders...

Think of the possibilities! Spiders would be so useful if they could be trained.

Obviously the first use that comes to mind for trained spiders is to have them make webs across your windows to keep out bugs. You might need more than one spider, depending on how big your window is. But really, everyone wins. Spider gets bugs, you don't. And unlike most window screens, completely organic! It wouldn't even matter that it would break every time you threw your cat through it, because the spiders would just build it again. Happily! They kind of expect it anyways.

The next best use for trained spiders is to have jumping spiders patrolling the kitchen. I wouldn't have to worry if I left food out, because the spiders would eat any bugs that got in. They could also patrol around my bed. If I lived in a basement they could just patrol the entire place. So long as I could train them to stay OFF the bed. I wonder if a spray bottle would work like with cats.

Then there's the spider silk. Man, get some spiders working on that, and you'd have super strong string, which would be awesome for reed making! Not to mention the million other things we use string for, like venetian blinds and garrotes. You could even teach them a dance so they could weave fabrics. Think of it! 6000 thread count spider silk sheets! Actually that's kind of creepy. Never mind.

But things like uber-strong cables for bridges and space shuttles and stuff would be useful. Engineering, military applications, who knows! It would make so many things possible that I can't even imagine.

Of course, then it would make lots of money and there would be people breeding spiders specifically to make the silk and they would probably live in horrible conditions and just work in tiny spider sweatshops all the time with nobody to stand up for their rights, until some protesters decided to take up the cause and have demonstrations at companies' doors all covered in spiders that would be trained to jump on executives and weave really strong webs across the doors so nobody could get in to work then when public awareness was raised they could take it to parliament to get a spiders' rights' bill passed or something but there would still be all those protesters with attack spiders out there attacking people and someone would get the idea of using poisonous ones and you would have to be really careful walking down the street and IS THAT THE KIND OF WORLD WE WANT TO LIVE IN??

Not really. Now I'm kind of glad it's not possible.

Yes, I'm sober.

Off Topic

Ok, so I give up. I am terrible at blogging and will not post here at all. Ever.

If I make it something like work, which I have.

Having a theme is too organized. I'd rather just write about random crap when I feel like it. But a blog needs a theme. So my theme is random crap. Which is pretty much like every other blog out there. But it's ok. I'm amused.