wordinista

Note the first:  My husband makes possibly the best guacomole in the world.  I could drown face-down in a bowl of the stuff and die happy. omgsogood.

Note the second:  Was in a bread-bakey mood today, and have decided to try out a recipe I have for challah.  It is in the oven, and the house should be smelling delicious soon.  (If the challah works out, next step is brioche! Which still terrifies me somewhat!) ---Oh, yeah, baby.  Fresh-bread-smell in the house.  Mmmmm :)

Note the third: I keep saying this, and I keep not doing it.  I think it's time to trim ye olde f-list.  If I (a) cannot remember the last time I commented in your journal, (b) cannot remember the last time you commented in my journal, (c) have caught myself skimming your entries without clicking on your LJ-cuts, or (d) cannot remember how I even know you, then you will likely be trimmed.  Let me know if you don't want to be. :)

ETA:  challah bread was not a total crash and burn failure! Slightly overly brown on top, and I totally screwed up the braiding of it, and I am suspecting it ought to have risen higher, but I am eating a piece of it slathered with honey and it tastes good! :D

ETA2: Bread was good, but now I require tea... I think some Earl Gray with bergamot should do the trick nicely.

So, stuff and things are going on, and I decided to scribble some of it down.

( Boiled Cider and Baking Amnesia )( Read more... )


( Thanksgiving! )


( Dragon Age: Origins (LOVE THAT GAME SO MUCH) )

Second round of gingerbread cookies are now baked -- second try went a lot more smoothly than the first, and I tried a few different things, and they worked well, so I'm going to make notes on the original recipe. But the house smells divine, and that's always good.

Now to clean up the mess, make a pot of tea, grab a couple of gingerbread cookies and finish Christmas cards aha, start my Yuletide story canon refresher.

I notice that I seem to start my Yuletide assignment around the same time every year, and so for some reason, I am NOT panicking over not having started the story yet. I actually have an idea! And I'm just doing the quick refresher to get the voices lodged in my head. SO THAT'S SOMETHING.

I'm still working on putting LJ tags in my journal entries -- I got back as far as June, 2005 before I stopped again.

I had a nice little visit with Mom this morning -- actually, Mom accompanied me on my dog walk this morning. For a little while, at least -- I have to walk pretty briskly with the puppers, and at one point, she was like, "Just go on ahead and I'll catch you when you come back." She's so cute. So I got a shower when I got back and then went over to have coffee with her and talk about Stuff and Things. We had thought she'd be able to take in the bridesmaid dress, but after looking at the dress, she's saying I ought to take it to a dress shop, just to be on the safe side. Hopefully a month is long enough to get alterations done. *crosses fingers* (She too was shocked at how huge the dress was on me.)

I didn't get any writing done yesterday (and I forgot that I wanted to wash the dogs today, d'oh -- I like to do that before my shower, because I work up a sweat wrestling with Sydney), so I'm going to make the oatmeal cookies of yesterday's to-do list, and then hunker down and get my 500 words done.

Also, going back through my old LJ entries has brought to mind a lot of awesome memes that haven't gone around a lot recently. I'm thinking about pulling a few of them out of mothballs, since I have a lot of different people on my flist lately, and that would make for a whole different round of madness and replies. WE SHALL SEE.

One of the sprinklers in the front yard is broken, and so now we have a lovely dead patch on the lawn, and the woman our landlord gets to "fix" the sprinkler system is puttering around outside, which means several things for me:

1. She will turn on the sprinkler system in the middle of the afternoon, and never come back to turn it off. Which means that the yard will be a muddy mess, because she does not tell me (a) that she's turning on the sprinklers or (b) how long I should let them run. Nor does she seem to realize that running the sprinklers in the middle of the day actually contributes to burnt grass. Sigh.

2. Anytime I try to let the dogs out for potty, we will all get soaking wet. Double sigh.

3. Darwin and Sydney will run to the window and bark like the hounds of HELL because there's someone in our yard. Triple sigh with a side of headache.

I got such a laugh out of dqbunny's candy-making adventure that I thought it was only fair to give a little back.

Well, I've decided to make a bunch of baked goodies and share them with a few of my friends.  So I went looking through my cookbooks and family recipes and have found a collection of cookies and goodies that either (a) I've always wanted to make or (b) I've made in the past and they've gone over very well or (c) something from my childhood that my grandmother used to make and my mother doesn't make anymore.

So far I've got:

Cinnamon-almond biscotti
Pistachio crescents
Candycane crunch cookies
Almond/Anise sesame cookies (not almond and anise together, of course, but they can be flavored with either almond OR anise)
Scottish shortbread cookies
Snickerdoodles

I figure the biscotti would be the most time consuming, so I started that this morning.  I've got a recipe from my great-aunt, which I begged for after she sent us a batch a few years ago.  Something about the recipe intimidated me then, but I can't tell what it was.  So this is my first try making them.  Everything went very smoothly until I got to the part where it said to handle the dough with buttered hands, and mold dough into three strips per cookie sheet.  The recipe then said:  "Warning: Dough will be sticky."

No shit.

I felt like Brer Rabbit upon meeting the Tar Baby.  Probably looked a bit like him, too.

So the first batch of biscotti is in the oven and the house is starting to smell distinctly cinnamon-y.  Should start on the second batch now, I think.  It's kind of nice, because I've got holiday music going, and the house is decorated, and... I'm starting to get into the spirit of things, I think.  It doesn't hurt that we've got a cold front going through and I've got the windows open.

I really do anticipate getting all of this baking done today.  Especially if I, you know, don't spend a whole lot of time on LJ.

EDIT: 1:00 PM -- Well. Homemade biscotti? Is really ugly. But tastes reallygood

EDIT: 2:07 PM -- Okay, so I've made it through the biscotti, the shortbread dough is chilling in the fridge, and the sesame cookies are in the oven, and I think I'm just about ready to quit for the day. The kitchen is a disaster area, and I'm totally wussing out and getting tired. And I have to stop snacking on the biscotti.