Taking a break from blogging, baking, and living a normal life

To the 1 and 1/2 people who may actually read this blog over the course of a month, just wanted to let you know that I am making the executive decision to stop blogging for a little while. Things are getting crazy around these parts: movers are coming tomorrow, things are being sent to Hawaii, children are clawing each others' eyes out, and other exciting developments which mean more work for everyone are happening as well. Plus, my main reason for beginning blogging in the first place (Tuesdays with Dorie) is becoming impossible to keep up with since my main goal these days is to get rid of food and esoteric baking items, rather than accumulate more. How strange to be packing up right before Christmas when normally, in any house of mine, there would be a maelestrom of cookies, butter and sprinkles creating a virtual weather pattern in my kitchen. Not this year.



I may blog sporadically over the next few weeks and months, but we won't actually be settled in Hawaii until (fingers crossed it won't be later than this...) mid-late January. I will resume regular TWD baking insanity at that time. :)

No TWD this week...

I really wanted to make the Thanksgiving Twofer Pie, and I thought I'd have the time, but as usual I overestimated my motivation, and underestimated how much we would have going on with traveling, the upcoming move, etc. It has been a crazy week and we are leaving tomorrow to visit with relatives until Sunday - might try to make the Twofer pie when I return! I have all the ingredients and really need to get rid of everything that's been languising in the pantry since I don't want to cart all of it to Hawaii....

easy and yummy

I had bookmarked this recipe from the Frantic Home Cook blog (hilarious!): http://frantichomecook.com/food-recipes/guilty-pleasures/peanut-butter-popcorn-is-sweet-salty-goodness/ a long time ago and then I forgot all about it. We have a black hole on our favorites tab where good links seem to go to die - it's labeled "food" and I add so many things to it that I wind up being overwhelmed when I look at all the great links, and never actually revisit most of them. But this one, I did revisit. And it was as easy and yummy as it looked. On Friday night, Noah's school showed Kung Fu Panda in the gym as a PTA sponsored "family night," which amounted to one big, insane playdate during which a movie was shown. We brought a large tub of this popcorn and I think I may need to apologize for how many cavities it caused in god knows how many childrens' mouths.

This would be a great treat to make and send off as Christmas presentage. It would ship very well, and seems to age well - not like those cookies that arrive all broken, stale and disappointing!

My food equivalent, in terms of photogenic qualities: rice pudding

I am not a photogenic person. My husband often accuses me of making freakish and/or frightening faces in family pictures, only to realize that none are intentional. I just don't translate very well to film. I think I am okay-looking enough in real life, but pictures are another story. It's just one of those things.

Rice pudding, it turns out, is much like me in this respect. Looks fine in real life, looks like something one might feed to prisoners in photographs. Jared actually made some very disparaging remarks about the rice pudding's appearance in these pictures and I had to cover the pudding's ears, so it wouldn't be hurt and cry. Something about the chocolate one looking like something belonging to Muhsu the dog, or some such nonsense!

So, bear that in mind with these photos!




For fun, I decided to make Black and White Rice Pudding, as Dorie suggested. The only variations I made to the recipe were to add a dash of cinnamon and to pretty much spill the vanilla while pouring it into the vanilla half of the pudding, thus resulting in a somewhat alcoholic/cinnamon-y tasting version. I also used too much chocolate on the chocolate half, which caused the chocolate rice pudding to be a tad firmer than one might have desired. I tend to overdo many things. If 1.5 ounces of chocolate is good, wouldn't 3 ounces be better!? Well, actually, the answer to that is a definite no. Adding more chocolate changed the chocolate pudding from having the nice creamy texture the vanilla half had, to being scoopable like mashed potatoes. Still tasted great, but the texture was off.

Although I have never been enamored with rice pudding, I like it and think it's nice in a sort of ambivalent kind of way. I ate my share and enjoyed it, but haven't gone back for seconds. The kids gave it 2 thumbs up, but I later realized that what Anya really loved about the rice pudding - the "white one" - was actually the Ready Whip I had topped it with. Noah declared both the chocolate and the vanilla ones the "best dessert ever." It was another fun adventure in the kitchen, and I am glad to have tried this recipe. Many thanks to Isabelle, of Les Gourmandises d'Isa, whose version of this dessert is so much prettier than mine it makes me blush. This was a great choice and I enjoyed it! To see many how many other Tuesdays with Dorie participants fared, check out the blog: Tuesdays with Dorie - a great place to discover the joys baking, chatting about baking, and foodie blog reading...

what I'm up against

Or, a few alternate titles could be - this is why I've been pretty addicted to Zoloft at times, or this is why I'm not an advocate for dog ownership, or better yet, how to obtain all the fibers needed to make a sweater without ever leaving home. No matter how you title this post, it is about desperation. I am in a situation where I can't win, and I can't get out, and I am having the pants beat off of me by someone whose IQ is less than 10. Now let me give me a real description of the above picture - this is a Swiffer which was used to Swiffer floors that had been Swiffered no less than 2 days ago. And this Swiffer was used only in one average sized room. And did I mention, we are a one pet household?

So, here's the story. Boy meets girl, boy and girl get married, boy and girl move away from family, try and fail to get pregnant, and buy a very cute puppy as a panacea. Boy and girl finally get pregnant, have a few kids, still have very cute puppy, but now puppy is older, leaks fluids from the ass region, tends to leave stray turds here and there about the house and sheds like fur is going out of style. And now add one anxiety problem in said girl to the mix, and you have our house in a nutshell. For her part, Mushu, my shedding beast, is a GOOD dog. I honestly feel convinced that I am going to hell for trash talking her, because she is a sweet, endearing animal who means well, even as she sheds her body weight in hair all over the house.

So, now, meet the duo who help me on my mission to remove fur and restore order. These are the only thing that stands between Mushu and the entire house being carpeted in three feet of dog hair:

Oreck 1 and Oreck 2

Please note Mushu peacefully sleeping in the background. Though she sleeps in one spot 90% of the day, by some miracle, her hair is able to circulate throughout the entire house, coating even the most obscure and remote surfaces. I have found her hair inside the pockets of my jeans, I have found her fur on Jared's head, I have had her hair embedded in the skin of my feet (her fur is almost sharp for some reason).

Now meet Mushu. You can see why I love her. For one, she has caramel colored spots on her head and triangular ears. The fact that they are triangular is endearing. When she is nervous, she holds them out to the sides, a move which we call "Mushu Ears Akimbo."

I already said that this post was about desperation, so what you will see in the next picture is the physical manifestation of that feeling. I am at wits end, and so I've decided to go straight to the source rather than spending hours vacuuming rugs and floors on a daily basis. It may be wrong, it may be disturbing, but somehow I think it's also the first time the dog and I have bonded within recent memory.

Amazingly, the dog who has always nipped, barked at and chased the vacuum cleaner as if it is a rabid squirrel come to attack her, ENJOYS being vacuumed. She sits patiently, wagging her tail, while I vacuum away at every part of her body. So far, I haven't seem a big difference in the amount of fur on the floors, but I am hoping that if I continue, at some point, there will be a change. At least we are trying, and I have the vacuum cleaner bag full of white fur to prove it.

digital scrapbooking is rocking my world

[click to enlarge]

There was a brief moment, when I thought maybe I might just miss the paper component of traditional scrapbooking, but that moment passed and was totally usurped by my complete love affair with digital scrapbooking. I decided to make the switch when the official Hawaii orders came in, and I knew that we would be forced (kicking and screaming all the way) to downsize into a 3 bedroom, 1700 sq.ft. home upon arrival. I have been spoiled with square footage for the past few years, and downsizing is no easy feat when you are genetically blessed with the furry packrat animal gene. But that wasn't my only reason for crossing over to digital scrapbooking. Here are some of the others:

• zero mess, zero waste
• lots of free stuff
• the ability to "put away" the scrapbooking by simply closing a window on my computer
• more cool graphic effects that I'd be way too lazy to duplicate with paper
• the chance to reconfigure a layout many times without needing glue remover
• the fact that it doesn't take over the dining room table
• amount of space required to store scrapbooking supplies
• costly paper scrapbooking embellishments which can be had for free with digital
• the fact that it drives my husband crazy that we have wasted countless dollars on paper scrapbooking supplies.

Ahhhhh, the acrid smell of money wasted. But guess what? I can make that smell vanish because I plan on unloading my paper scrapbooking stuff to some unsuspecting fool on Craigslist. Ahhhh, Craigslist. How I love thee.

The baking project that never ends - kugelhopf!

Anya's kugelhopf pan in her play kitchen, because every 3-year old needs a kugelhopf pan.... according to Ikea.

Thank you very much to Landa, of The All-Purpose Girl, who chose kugelhopf as this week's TWD recipe. If you are reading this, you should definitely check out her blog, because it a.) has the recipe, and b/) has much nicer pictures than my blog! I was using a manual-focusing lens today since I didn't have a chance to swap lenses, and the kids were totally and completely in my hair, plus we just had a lot going on... so there you have it, my excuse for bad pictures!

At any rate, in an ironic turn of events, I realized this morning that while I personally do not own a kugelhopf pan, my daughter does. An Ikea one, as a matter of fact, which came with a set of other child sized baking pans and tools which she received as a Christmas present a few years ago. I find it humorous that not only is her play kitchen capable of rivaling my own kitchen in size, it also possesses a more varied set of equipment. At any rate, I have a mini-bundt cake pan (top that one, Anya!) and that's what I used because though I'd have nabbed Anya's Ikea pan in a heartbeat, it wasn't big enough for one, and knowing my luck, isn't food-safe either.

The recipe itself was an adventure. For one, my Kitchenaid died recently. It had been dying and in uncertain health ever since I bought it, about 7 years ago, but then it shoved off for good about a week ago. I think I am the one person to have had a Kitchenaid that instead of being a reliable workhorse, was a whiny, complaining, bitchy, noisy, inconsistent wimp. But there you have it. So, I made the dough partly by hand-mixing and partly with my bread machine set on the dough function.

Amazingly, after totally writing the dough off since it seemed so battery and unlikely to rise, I came home from a 3-hour grocery shopping and errand-running excursion to find that the dough I'd left on the counter with little hope, had risen like a champ. Maybe it I just give up on other baking projects, they too, will miraculously work out? Are there little baking elves that step in when this happens? I can't figure it out.

When all was said and done, and the kugelhopfs were buttered, sugared and placed before Noah and Anya, they looked pretty tasty. The kids and I devoured two of them while they were still quite hot, and Anya tried to grab one off the counter later, too. I would take that as a vote of confidence, but Anya isn't exactly discriminating when it comes to bread.

Altogether a tasty and fun baking project! Though I wouldn't have chosen this recipe myself, I enjoyed making and eating it, and it gave me some confidence with making bread which has a much more sticky, battery sort of dough. Thanks again, Landa!