Fill in the blank. No posts. No tarot. No finished knits. No sleep. No life.

Why haven’t I blogged? I’ve barely had enough of a life to stretch it 24 hours a day, let alone find something halfway interesting to write about and post here. Unlike A, whose life is one dramatic moment after another, always interesting (even if it is in a stab-my-eyes-out-please sort of way), mine is pretty much just flatlining.

I am pretty much flatlining. I have a stack of books to read. Haven’t. I have a trunkload of yarn to knit. Haven’t. I have a freezer full of things to cook. Haven’t. A list of things to do. Haven’t.

What have I been doing? Laying in bed, one day for eleven freaking hours. I take winter hibernation seriously around here, I guess - or I would, if I was actually sleeping all that time I’ve spent lounging around. The problem is that I’m not sleeping, actually, or at least, not slepeing well. Makes me pretty apathetic all around.

So last night, I got off my ass and cleaned up some (because my house is a wreck; no motivation to do laundry, let alone breathtaking things like switch my vacuum cleaner on…) and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

In case anyone out there doesn’t have a single chocolate chip recipe in the world, here’s my grandmother’s. I always double the recipe, because you can never have too many chocolate chip cookies, or even too much dough in the fridge to eat out of hand. But do what you want.

Rosemary’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1 C shortening (Crisco!)
1/2 C white sugar
1 C brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 C + 4 Tbsp flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
some chocolate chips

Cream shortening & white sugar. Add the other ingredients one at a time, mixing well in between. Stir in chocolate chips at the end. Warning: I always put in [way] too many chips. Don’t overload, or the dough may have trouble sticking together.

Drop spoonfuls onto cookie sheet. I’ve never needed to grease mine, but do what makes you and your cookie sheets comfortable. Bake approximately 10-12 minutes or until golden on the bottoms. Let cook a few minutes before removing from the pan.

Makes good dunkers.

Cookies to be made:

Almond crescents (kiflins)
Cry Babies (soft frosted drops of molasses heaven)
Raisin Puffs (soft puffy raisin cookies)
Peanut Butter cookies? Maybe.
Something new?

I need to bake, anyway. I need to get rid of some of these EGGS.

I’m getting 14-16 a day these days. What the hell?

So night before last (that’d be Sunday night) A. came over and thought she’d utilize my kitchen, mixer, ingredients, and “expertise” to make a coffee cake for my mother’s (belated) birthday. Now, A. is no Martha in the kitchen, and to be honest, she’s lucky to boil eggs without disaster, but everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right?

Well, after searching the internet for ages at work searching for a recipe, she came up with what is probably the world’s only coffee cake recipe that requires one of the few kitchen gadgets I do not have - a pastry cutter. It’s called Brown Sugar Crumb Cake, and you can get this recipe (with its rather unappetizing photo - holy god, could it look any more ick?) here. Now, the last recipe I made from about.com was a complete disaster. Let’s say sugar cookies that tasted like pure flour, okay? So I was skeptical from the start - I mean, bad photo, and About.com ‘certified’.

But, it sounded good. I mean, how can you go wrong with an ingredient list that doesn’t have much more than a lot of brown sugar and butter?

Hahaha.

“How could you go wrong?” is the sort of thoughtless thing Murphy (of the “Murphy’s Law” fame) catches you thinking and giggles madly at. Because what went wrong? Oh, just about everything.

The problems started when it became apparent that A was not exactly sure what “packed” meant in relation to “two cups brown sugar, packed”. She is, granted, a novice baker, and we got that straightened out. Then the lack of a pastry cutter (which we remedied thanks to a trip to my mother’s to borrow hers). Then… well, it’s possibly that A measured out a tablespoon of baking soda and powder, but neither of us think that’s likely. (Well, she denies it vehemently, but she also denied doing anything wrong that time she totally ripped up the directions to the tacos and added like, a lake’s worth too much water, and she also denied doing anything wrong (”You’re just skeptical, Katie!”) the time she dumped two packets of seasoning for our Rice-a-Roni into one dish, which, by the way, tasted like a giant mouthful of salt, and I do give her kudos for choking down several bites in an attempt to prove just how ‘wrong’ I was at being completely sickened at the first bite. So, make what you will of her denial, folks.)

But seriously, I watched the baking soda and baking powder measuring, and I didn’t seem too alarmed by the size of the spoon she was using, so I think she’s telling the truth this time around. Honest. ;-) Well, then… you see, there’s this line in the directions, which I did not read, because hell, A. is an English genius, I didn’t expect to have trouble with her reading them - carrying them out, perhaps, but not reading them, and it says:

Reserve 1 scant cup of crumbs and set aside. Combine remaining ingredients and whisk until smooth; stir into the remaining crumbs in bowl.

She read it line by line. “Reserve 1 scant cup of crumbs and set aside.” And after a minor discussion on what was meant by ’scant’, she removes some crumbs and sets them aside.

Then she reads: “Combine remaining ingredients and whisk until smooth.”

Did you see that? I didn’t, because i didn’t read the instructions. Read like she read it to me, it sounded like they wanted us to add the rest of the damned ingredients and mix it all up until smooth. She thought so, too. So that’s what we did. We did not combine the remaining ingredients separately. We mixed it all up together with the crumbs we had not reserved, and… mixed it smooth. This, ladies and gents, may have been a big problem.

Then she read: “Stir into the remaining crumbs.”

Yep. You bet. We stirred in the remaining - the reserved crumbs, even as we asked: “I thought there should’ve been a topping!” And even as I (and mind you, I’m no master baker either, but I’m not a novice) thought: “Funny that we did all that bloody work with the pastry cutter just to mix it all smooth like this and then add in the rest just like so… what a waste!” Did anyone re-read the instructions? Nope.

Would’ve been too late anyway.

The batter, by the way, tasted great. A. left some in the pan and ate a bunch by the spatula-ful. You think I’m kidding. I kid not.

So, that done, she poured it into a newly greased and floured pan, and popped it in the oven, while I, relieved that it was over, checked my email and told my online pals that we’d just finished mixing up our coffee cake. Thirty minutes later, D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R!!!!

A. opens the oven door to check on the bloody thing, and smoke pours out of the oven, and she starts freaking, going: “K! We have a big big problem!” I was a bit concerned that the oven was on fire, I must admit, but she assured me it wasn’t. Instead, it was…

Yeah. Picture that, in my oven, except worse, because at the time this photo was taken, a whole lot of that goo had spilled all over the damned place. For a couple minutes, we just sat there looking at it, alarmed and baffled and distressed and not at all sure what to do. Finally, A. grabbed my spiffy halloween mitt and another one, and hauled the giant mass to the dump.

And I was left pouring salt all over everything in the oven to quell the smoking. It now looks the Nevada Salt flats have just been hit by a giant asteroid.

And the house? Smelled like burnt coffee cake for hours.

Now… if you want my honest opinion, we farked the whole damned thing up from the start, and I should’ve vetoed the recipe the moment I realized you needed a bleeding pastry cutter, which is usually outside my culinary skillset, or at least read through the directions completely so I’d have a clue what was coming…. But I think the real problem lay in that the directions called for one 8×8 pan, and even all mixed up together wrong, I think it needed TWO 8×8 pans. I think A. filled it too full (I do recall her saying how heavy the pan was, several times, as she put it in the oven.), because after all, it said to only use one 8×8 pan, and we baked away. A, of course, insists she did not fill it too full, but you read the above examples of her denials, yes? Even if she didn’t fill it too full, clearly, it was too full (for whatever reason) by the time we yanked its scary ass from the oven. No denying that.

Well anyway, it could’ve been anything - measuring wrong, or whipping the batter up far too much, or adding the extra crumbs in instead of on top (but honestly, it all had to fit in the same pan anyway, right?), or being too full in the pan and needing two instead of the one it called for, or hell, it could’ve just been a terrible recipe. I don’t know.

But damn it all, I want to try again.

But maybe in A’s kitchen this time, eh?

Someone actually enjoyed the recipe for Friendship Bread starter that I posted.

That gives me a supremely warm, fuzzy feeling inside for no good reason at all.

Speaking of… I fed my starter a day late this week. Again. Oh well. It seems to be thriving, nonetheless. Hardy stuff, that yeast.

I spent my nights off baking and cleaning and being a good little martha stewart, plotting this year’s garden and longing for chickens, sheep, and goats. First I baked a lovely roast chicken, complete with gravy, stuffing, and mashed potatoes whipped up in my fancy KitchenAid mixer. Then I went on to bake a little loaf of white bread - very good, and very simple, especially when using the mixer.

Then, last night (Saturday night to all you non-night owls), I baked up four loaves of Amish friendship bread from my starter, sealed off one starter package in the freezer to bake up for later, and left the final one lying on the counter to be mushed for another 9 days.

If you don’t know already, Amish Friendship Bread is made from a starter. You mush this bag of starter mix for about ten days, adding some more yeast-food stuff twice along the way, and on day ten, you bake your bread. You also get like, a bunch of excess starter, so you’re supposed to package it up and give it away to your friends so they can do the same. See? Friendship?

Well, it doesn’t usually work like that. See, nobody wants the stuff, because then they have to mush the darned bag for ten days, and find more friends to give it to, and pretty soon, your whole town is saturated in friendship starter, and everyone hates you. This has happened so often in my town that nobody will even take any starter from me when I ask.

But it just so happens that I didn’t have any - nor did I know anyone who had any - when I wanted some friendship bread, which is a moist quickbread not unlike banana bread or spice cake, so I dug up a recipe for starter and began growing it.

It’s simple.

Amish Friendship Bread Starter
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Pour all ingredients into a gallon size ziplock bag (make sure it’s a sturdy one, nothing cheap) and mush it together, and leave it on the counter (no need to refridgerate). Mush it every day (like, just a couple minutes to keep it mixing together) and add ingredients as follows:

Day 1: You just made the starter this day. Mush it.
Day 2: Mush mush.
Day 3: Carry on the mushing.
Day 4: Mush it some more!
Day 5: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush!
Day 6: Mush!
Day 7: Keep mushing.
Day 8: Mush it some more.
Day 9: And… some more.
Day 10: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush together, then…. Carry on making the bread as follows.

Get some ziploc bags. Put 1 cup of starter into each of 3 bags, seal, and date. You will be giving these away, or keeping them for yourself, or freezing them for later use. You should have approximately 1-1.5 cups of starter left with which you can make your bread. If you have more starter than this, continue to seal it up into bags until you only have 1-1.5 cups left. (The excess starter thing happened to me once. Dunno how….)

Put your starter (1-1.5 cups worth) into your mixing bowl. (Either a big stand mixer or a little hand mixer, or just a spoon and some arm power work fine.) Then add:

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 large package (or 2 small packages) of instant vanilla pudding mix
Any nuts, raisins, dates, whatever you’d like, in 1/2 - 1 cup amounts. (I use… none. We don’t like that stuff.)

Preheat oven to 325. Mix everything up, pour into two greased 9×5 inch loaf pans. (I used that new Crisco spray, loved it way more than Pam!) Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar if you’d like (I usually do.) Then bake for approximately 60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted. Let cool for a wee bit, and then pop out of pans and let cool on a wire rack.

Eat. Enjoy.

You can freeze the starter mixture on day 10 if you’d like, or if you can’t find any suckers to pawn it off to. When you’re ready to make more bread, just take it out, let thaw for a day, and make the bread. There are other recipes/variations for bread out there on the internet. Next time around, I’ll be making some lemon flavored bread, with lemon extract and lemon pudding instead. We’ll see how that goes. :)

So I decided to make myself a cake on Valentine’s Day - and not just any old cake, but a Red Devil’s Food cake, which I’ve loved for years, but have never actually made. My mother or grandmother or someone always did the making, and I just did the eating. But this year, for my birthday (which actually isn’t until late March) I decided I wanted one. And I figured that asking for such a complicated cake (it’s layered) wouldn’t get me very far, so I expected I’d have to make it myself. But it /is/ a complicated cake, so I wanted to try it out first. Give myself a practice run at it, so to speak.

And a good thing I did, because the cake was a disaster. Oh, it tastes good. A little on the dry side, but it’s definitately good. But… well, look:

And that’s the good side - the side that hasn’t crumbled to pieces, the side that actually looks /okay/. The thing fell in the middle, and then the top slid nearly off the bottom when I went to take this picture (and gosh, it’s so dark in the background, and I don’t know why!), and I didn’t get enough frosting in the middle, and I had a helluva time getting the cakes out of the pans and properly stacked on top of each other.

But it is good. And the frosting? To DIE for. I’ll post the whole recipe up later tonight.

But for now, I’ve got a few more pics to share - like this beautiful package of goodies from my secret pal, Stephani - who was such a wonderful secret pal all through SP9! I was thrilled to know her and to have been spoiled by her! Everything in the photo EXCEPT the little heart dish was from Stephani.

A book on coffees and treats (soo many good things in here to make!) and some coffee flavored chocolatey things that spilled all over the box and made everything smell coffeeish, and the cutest little cup and saucer… actually, there’s two saucers, and there WAS two cups, but one got busted in the mail *sniffsniff*… and some uberdark chocolate that I’m tempted to shave up and make some real hot chocolate, and of course, the YARN. Holy cow, do I love this yarn:

It’s cotton. SOFT cotton. Sooo delicious. Patagonia’s Nature Cotton or something like that. I’m at work and can’t possibly look, but it’s gorgeous and soft and… it smells like coffee! *laugh*

And last but not least, something I made up a couple weeks ago - some flannel pillowcases, wintery themed! I love the material, and wish I’d had enough money at the time to buy much more of this, for a blanket or quilt.

Okay, so one of my 101 Things in 1001 Days goals is to try 1 new recipe a month. I’ve done that, but I haven’t logged any of them. but this year - yay for 2007! - I will.

This month’s recipe came late. I may have tried a new recipe earlier in the month, but I can’t recall it. But this one’s definitely new.

Cheesy Chicken Rice Casserole!

Ingredients:

• 1.5 C rice - I used long grain white
• 1 C cooked chicken (I just used a can of it since I had that on hand)
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 1/2 large jar of Cheese Whiz

Cook the rice according to package directions. Mix in chicken, soup, and cheese whiz. Pour into casserole dish. Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes.

It was good, if a little plain. I even topped it with crushed up potato chips, but next time, I’d use something with more… zing, or crunch, or… something. Maybe some italian seasoned breadcrumbs. Or maybe I’d toss in a little chili powder. Or bacon. Something.

My rating? 5 out of 10 stars. Good comfort food, but it needs some dressing up.

I have been working soooo much lately. I haven’t had my full 3 days off [My ‘weekends’ are 3 days off every 6 days on. Well, nights, really.] in nearly 3 weeks now. This last ‘weekend’, I didn’t get any days off, so I’ve now been working for 12 days straight, with 3 more to go. I’m starting to feel like I live here at the office. My house is a wreck, I can’t sleep for the heat, and I’m starting to need more than a cuppa tea to keep me going at night.

So knitting has been slow, and slow has everything else. I have Clue 1 completed in the Mystery Stole, and have half of Clue 2 done. As in, one of the two sections. Since I only have one ball of yarn wound at this point (need to drag in some unhappy helper to aid me in winding another ball), I decided to just move onto half of Clue 3 instead of cutting the yarn and doing Clue 2 on the other side. It’s looking gorgeous, but I don’t feel yet like taking another photo.

I’ve recently gone on a tea ordering fest! I ordered 5 teas from Adagio - which are soooo wonderful! I ordered just 5 little sample tins, which are each $2, and I’m terribly happy with all of them. Tried the Irish Breakfast tea tonight, which is incredibly yummy. Will have to get more.

By the way, if you’re interested in trying some of Adagio’s teas, let me know, and I’ll send you a $5 gift certificate by email! :) I can give out an unlimited number of these to first-time buyers, so feel free to beg even if I don’t know you. I like to be nice. Honest.

Then I ordered 5 teas from The Tea Table, which is a company in Colorado that produces a billion teas. Huge variety here. They also have free samples - you can order up to 5 with every order (as long as you don’t abuse the system by making multiple small orders to get a billion samples at once), and the samples contain enough tea for around 3 cups! Perfect! From here, I also got some paper filters, and a real “tea spoon” - for measuring the amount of loose tea for a perfect cup. Lovely! I’m happy with their teas, too!

I sent off my YA package, and it’s been recieved by Bev! She tells me she loves it all! I hope she really does. I tried to send her an email saying “you’re welcome” about a dozen times, but it kept coming up with errors for some reason. So I tried sending one to myself, and had the same issue. But the email to myself went through othewise, so I fear she’s gotten about a dozen of the exact same message from me. Eeep.

Other than that, I’ve done very little lately, except begin making wonderful food for myself, like tacos based on a taco bell recipe (very good, if a little spicier than I like), and oh! the best mac n cheese ever. It’s the Down Home Mac and Cheese recipe from All Recipes. Wonderful. The Italian seasoned bread crumbs added a lot! Even A, who hates homemade mac and cheese ( is she crazy? ) loved it.

So I am now the proud owner of THREE cats. Yes, three. First came my lil’ bitch, Felony, who came to me five years ago. She’s a black kitty with yellow eyes, and it’s terribly difficult to get a good picture of her. She’s not camera shy… she’s just not very photogenic, handsome as she may be.

Then came Sebastian, almost three years ago. He’s a handsome black and white longhaired giant, 13.5 pounds of fur and jiggliness. He’s really a sweetheart - tender and affectionate (to me - he’s rather jittery around strangers) and never too sulky or snotty.

And then, last night, at 2am, A rushed inside with the gray furball that used to be my grandmother’s cat. Since she went in the nursing home for a week to regain her strength after her fall, she discovered that she no longer coughs like crazy, and has determined that she’s allergic to her cat. A adopted the cat - but a day later, A discovered that she, too, was allergic to her. She broke out in hives all over her arms where she petted the creature.

Tsuki, as I’ve named her, is a Persian - and mind you, I’m not a big Persian fan, but she is rather sweet and shy. A picture of her:

That darned Persian face always looks so grumpy! *lol* But I love her eyes - copper and intense. She and Sebastian have been having little hissy fits. Literally. And staring matches. But she’s not really afraid of the other kitties. Just people. She’s been exploring the house inch by inch, and she’s taken up residence under my bed.

Inspired by all the kittiness, I whipped up a little catnip mouse toy with leftover gray yarn from the kitty hat I knit Tina. According to Sebastian, and Tsuki, who both play-tested it, it gets an A+ rating.

On a whim of hunger, I also whipped up a batch of lemon poppyseed muffins (from a mix) this morning before bed, and this utterly beautiful loaf of cinnamon raisin bread in my breadmaker!

It’s one of the few perfect loaves I’ve made! No collapsing anywhere! And it tastes oh-so-good. It’s a mix, too, but that’s just cuz I’m trying to use them up before the yeast goes bad. (Nothing like yeast failure to ruin your day!) My next cinnamon raisin bread will be from scratch. *crosses fingers*

Speaking of cooking… I bought (another whim) the Mary Jane’s Farm catalog/magazine on sale at the store - the food issue, all about recipes made with her special Farmgirl Budget Mix. The Budget Mix is a (somewhat expensive) mix of organic flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and it’s the base mix for dozens of recipes from cookies to crackers to scones to pizzas, to hotpocket-y items. Kinda like Bisquick, but not. I looked all day for a comparable recipe, but all the baking mix recipes I found have some form of oily stuff added (shortening, usually) and I doubt such a mix would work well with the recipes that have been formed to fit with a mix that *doesn’t* have shortening already added. So I may have to buy this stuff yet. I’m not really a very adventurous cook. Neither is anyone in my family. Altogether, the mix comes out to something like $1.30 or something a serving, which isn’t /too/ terrible, I guess.

Checked on my Knitpicks order. It’s been shipped, and is expected to arrive something like the 11th. *sigh* That’s 4 days after the Mystery Stole Part 1 is released, and I’ll never have the time with company coming to catch up. But oh well. I’ll just be a slow-late knitter, I guess! :) I’m excited anyway!