It's almost over....

Christmas, New Year's, 2010 ... the whole shebang.

In case any of my two followers were wondering, my Thanksgiving meal went just fine. Pomegranate sauce needed ... tweaking, but on the whole it turned out quite prettily, if I say so myself.

Classes are finally done with (till next year), and I'm working away on my art while I can. Penguins are popular, from the looks of it, so I'm going all out with that. Shameless promotion of my two newest designs here:

Mardi Gras Penguin by Spiderwebs
See other Penguin Buttons

Fairy Princess Penguin Invitation by Spiderwebs
Make personalized invitations on Zazzle

Normally it'll put related items in that link, so apparently the tags "fairy princess penguin" don't come up together often on Zazzle?

Anyhow, I'm collecting penguins now as part of a fun little Squidoo project of mine called 365 Days of Penguins. I'm going for a new penguin every day (well, 7 per week since I'm too lazy to update daily), which given the glut of penguin designs in recent times shouldn't be impossible. There's really no point or purpose to the whole thing, but it makes me feel as if I'm doing something constructive.

I haven't any gifts for anyone yet, though two are supposed to be arriving in the mail from ThinkGeek any day now. Yes, I buy people presents from ThinkGeek. Because I like ThinkGeek. And we always buy presents for other people based on what we like.

And, that's about it. Work's good, didn't fail college yet, no major baking disasters. It's An Uneventful Life.

Until next time, then. Good night, sleep tight - a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Wish me luck

Tomorrow it begins. On Tuesday I make the gingersnaps. On Wednesday I make the cheesecake. On Thursday I make the quail.

The Thanksgiving menu thus far is sweet-potato cheesecake with a gingersnap crust (this is what's known as "using up ingredients that were on sale"), baked sweet dumpling squash, mashed potatoes with some sort of gravy (if I can find something to make gravy out of), and roasted quail with a pomegranate sauce.

Nope, I haven't made the quail or the cheescake before. Yes, I do have a backup plan: Lots and lots of chocolate that was on sale at Walgreens. I'll get back to you in a few days and let you know if I needed it.

Who Dunnit

Worst blog title ever. Acknowledged, accepted, moving on.

Let me just start by saying the Ames Public Library is awesome. Not big on study materials, that's what the Parks Library is for, but if you're looking for fun stuff that you weren't actually looking for in the first place, this is where you want to be. I've spent way too much time in the cookbooks section, the foreign films selection always leaves me impressed, and then there are the TV series.

Don't let me near the TV series.

Every other day when I get off from work, I go straight to the TV section and see if there's anything that catches my eye. There are a lot of popular BBC programs, as well as popular American series, miniseries, and vast amounts of titles I'm pretty sure most people (myself included) have never heard of.

I have about six TV stations, so this little browsing session is how I ended up watching Life on Mars, Psych, Dexter, Little Britain, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Wonderfalls, and the miniseries Fortysomething, Alice, Lost in Austen, Tin Man and Rose Red. I've also looked back on old faves like Veronica Mars, Friends, Quantum Leap and Star Trek. I watch a lot of television.

Most recently, I stumbled across series one of the 2005 version of Dr. Who. I knew shamefully little about the show other than that it involved a sonic screwdriver and a phantom tollbooth - eh, I mean police box. I'll mention now that I only ended up watching through series 2. It's one of those shows you have to take a break from between sittings or else you get overly-upset about changes.

Series one had me pleasantly surprised. It didn't look particularly polished, and I wasn't a huge fan of Rose (her character never did quite grow on me like the others), but it hardly mattered. From the scene with the historic "iPod" in The End of the World, I was pretty much hooked. I hadn't really expected a funny show, but there it was. It was quite a pity when it became clear that there would be no more Doctor #9 in subsequent series, and I wasn't quite sure about David Tennant at first, but goodness - now there's an actor who can just shout nonsense at the screen and still be worth watching. He has just shouted nonsense at the screen, for that matter, and those have been some of the best scenes.

The whole show could just shout nonsense, really - it's one of those lovely programs that runs off pure energy and enthusiasm much of the time. From Eccleston's impossibly ear-splitting grin to Tennant's hectic exuberance and everything in-between (even K-9 sounds impressively cheery for a tin dog), I found it hard to watch without smiling. It looks as if Billie Piper has the same trouble sometimes. And it's not just the purely humorous moments: I can watch the ninth Doctor's triumphant "Just this once - everybody lives!" and the tenth's rather one-sided conversation with Satan over and over, and it puts a grin on my face every time. It's quite possible that I'm easily amused like that, but I do love to be amused.

I don't like quite so much to be saddened, but there has to be a counterbalance for all that mad bouncing around. Doomsday ... ah, Doomsday, that was some acting there. Tennant makes some odd faces, but in my opinion he's best at that sort of glassy-eyed shock and sorrow, and unfortunately he got to show it off quite a bit throughout his run as the tenth Doctor.

Of course, what I love is that just when a series is about to end on a note that might bum you out for the rest of the year, something's thrown in to offset it. Series one's "something," for me, was the new Doctor remarking on his new teeth. Series two had a brilliant little 14-second conversation in which the Doctor's contribution was saying "what?!" four different ways.

It'll be a while before I return to this show, and with the way I get attached to characters I may just skip straight to series 5 before finishing 3 and 4 (I think I'll be able to enjoy the newest Doctor more if I don't follow the tenth too long). It's one of the most enjoyable shows I've stumbled on in a while though, and I'm going to be making annoying references to it for some time now.

Vultures!

On my way home from the library I was whining to myself about not having brought a camera (there are always photo opportunities when you put a bunch of volunteers in charge of dress-up materials), when I saw some crows circling overhead, gathering in a big cloud to roost like I'd seen so many times on campus.
Except for the fact that these weren't crows, they were vultures.
I'd never seen that many vultures in town before, but from the huge amounts of feathers scattered over three blocks, they gathered there somewhat often.
It was several blocks home still, and 90 unpleasant degrees, but I managed to walk-jog-walk-pause-jog home for the camera, splash cold water all over my face, grab a tangerine from the fridge to eat on the way, and then walk-jog-walk-eat-walk-pause-jog-eat-walk back to the vultures' tree.

Some interesting discoveries:

• Turkey vultures resemble turkeys not only in appearance, but in their aroma when dozens of them are clustered in one place.
• Vultures in droves seem to attract mosquitoes in droves.
• Citrus, at least in the quantities available in a tangerine peel, does not ward off mosquitoes.
• My camera's zoom capabilities are only slightly better than those of Shawn's binoculars in the pilot episode of Psych.

These discoveries made for a somewhat lackluster photo experience, but at least I got a few in flight:






Interestingly, in my hurry to free up a little space for these pictures prior to my mad dash back, I managed to delete *all* the other pictures in my camera instead of one.
Well, now I know what that button does.
Serves me right for not moving them to the computer sooner.

Does anyone know how to build an ark?

Well, it's wet out. There's also a heat index of 105 and I've somehow lost my camera, so unfortunately I don't get to take pictures of this one.

We're in the middle of the worst flood in this area in nearly 20 years. During the last flood I lived smack in the middle of the flood plane, and had the great fun of helping my mother put everything on top of the furniture and watching people canoe past the building. The water didn't make it in that year, but with yesterday's flooding several feet higher in some areas, I'm thankful that I no longer live in the flood-prone part of the city. Good luck to all who do - I've been there, and it isn't fun.

The community is currently under a Boil Water Advisory due to several breaks in the mains. Hopefully everything will be back up and running by week's end, and the storms forecast for Friday won't come to much.

As a bit of reference, here's a picture of the minor flooding we were getting BEFORE it rained on Tuesday:

When you give a girl a cookbook ....

...She will ask for another cookbook. And then she will make a lot of food that doesn't look quite like it was supposed to, and then she will vow never to cook again.

The chocolate-chile cake tasted fine, but there was a bit of a ... layered thing going on. Here's a nice picture where you can't see that.


The coconut meringues were a bit too big, took longer to cook and are still a tad soft. But hey, meringues is meringues. Still good.
Forgot to take a picture of the paella. The shrimp and scallops were wonderfully tender; the whole thing needed a little salt, and the chicken wings didn't cook through, but it took less doctoring than the flan. I don't know who had the bright idea to make caramel with water, but it ... doesn't work splendidly well. At least not when you follow the directions. I now have Flan Topped With Crunchy Sugar Wafer instead of Flan Topped With Caramel, but ah, c'est la vie.

Today: Wash dishes.

Here comes Peter Cottontail....

It's not easy, as it turns out, to fit a whole cut-up fryer rabbit into a smallish Dutch oven, and it's even more difficult to get the thing to cook evenly. It's also a fantastic mess to eat once it's done.
Maybe it's easier when you know what amount is being referred to when the recipe specifies only, "the wine" (it CAN'T be the whole bottle, even though that's implied in the ingredients, as it would take far longer than specified to cook down enough for the cream sauce), and you don't have to fret over balancing enough wine to keep the rabbit in liquid, and not so much you get wine soup.


It turned out alright, I'll likely end up donating most of the sauce to someone who likes Riesling-flavored cream sauce, but it looks pretty enough. No pictures of the finished product, I was getting a bit mad at the sauce and all by then.


In other news, I went all around campus taking pictures of people's staplers. That was interesting enough.

Froggy

Latest design from Zazzle. :)

Happy Birthday to Me

Apparently I needed to try limes, so naturally I decided to ... make a pie.
Fun thing to do on your birthday, right?
Managed to make a graham cracker crust without eating half of it
Got a sufficient amount of lime zest to whisk into the egg yolk without sneezing into the food (lime zest is ... zesty), and whisked and whisked and whisked until "very fluffy."

Whisked in the condensed milk - it was oddly beautiful swirling it into the egg yolk, though I couldn't really get a picture while holding the camera with my neck

PIE.
I was informed that it needed meringue, and the pie left me with three egg whites, so after about three years of beating egg whites (at least I'd realized by then I probably shouldn't use the wire whisk) ... PIE.



Is good.

Clever Title Including the Word "Goat"

So, I was looking for goat meat sold locally.
I found exactly one place, the downtown farmer's market. They didn't have any at the time, but it was a start.
Miraculously, they have a website and keep it updated, so when I finally remembered to check back I learned that they not only had goat back in stock, but they were also having a bit of a craft event where you could make paper flowers, and an old friend would be in charge of it.
So that settled it, off to get my goat.

A bit pricey, more than beef but less than lamb.
I made a forum post asking what to do with it, since about all I ever make with lamb is stew or meatballs.
Most of the suggestions were goat curry, which I'll have to do next time, but I finally decided I didn't have the cash to get all the ingredients I was missing.

I decided I'd try goat tagine, since the meat would need to be cooked a while to soften up. All the recipes had prunes or dates. I do not care for prunes or dates. I wondered if I could substitute dried apricots, which I had on hand.
I searched "lamb tagine" instead of "goat tagine," and to my surprise, there was a recipe using apricots, right near the top of the page. I had all but two ingredients, so I ran off to get them and started cooking.

Browning the meat:

Adding the cilantro (I love cilantro so):

Dried apricots and golden raisins:
The recipe, from foodnetwork.com, had way too little liquid for my taste - a few extra cups of chicken broth fixed that

The finished product, with a hastily-made jumble of couscous and roasted red bell pepper.
So good. I love food.

Ice cream

Have you ever had Ben & Jerry's Mud Pie ice cream?

How about Milk & Cookies?

No?

DO IT.

Now.

Food, food, food....

I don't know why I try the Apricot Foldovers, the dough always drives me batty. Pie crust gives me enough trouble when it's *not* full of shredded cheese.

They were tasty, though:


The tiramisu was ... well, tiramisu, so it was divine:

Now I've got a cheesecake to eat my way through. Mmm. There's chocolate ganache between the filling and the crust. I had to use crushed walnuts in the crust instead of pecans, but you just can't ruin cheesecake.

It needs to get warmer out so I can stop baking.

Dragon's done!

Gaw, that took forever.

I was really going well for a while there....

...Then I got bored and stopped writing.
Not busy, my "busy" involves being on the computer most of the time anyway.

Anyhow.
Little cat, little cat is at the shelter - they're not very full, kitty should be able to stay a while.
Pity this place is no-pets, she looked pretty good in the recliner.

She's not out in the cold, though. She was only a kitten, she had ice in her fur the second time I found her and brought her in ... poor baby, how tiny must she have been a month ago when I first started seeing pawprints in the snow?

Okay. Other news.
Once more I insisted on making a recipe I cannot make. Apricot turnovers. Delicious, but stupid - when you put a cup of cheese in pie dough, weird things happen. They worked out, more or less, but only after a lot of muttering and threatening to just turn the whole batch into Cheez-its instead of bothering with this whole apricot filling nonsense.
But did I mention they're delicious?
Even when they're a boiling mess of sludgy apricot magma oozing through cheesy fissures in a far-from-triangular glob of crust.

Made more chicken Parmesan to reassure myself that the basics of cooking food (dip this, mix that, put in pan, stick in oven) have not been lost to me.

Tomorrow is tiramisu. I have a feeling I may have to make more chicken Parmesan soon.

Little cat, little cat....

So, for about two hours last night I had a cat.
It was nice.

I had just finished an incredibly productive night of tweeting a running commentary on Friday the 13th (I SO did not know Kevin Bacon was in that), when I heard meowing.
I'd heard this voice before, from a stray out in the carport, but aside from eating the bits of pot roast I'd thrown out for her she'd kept her distance.
Plus, you know, she'd been outside.
This was close.
And getting closer. I looked out the peephole and there she was, coming up the stairs. We don't make a habit here of leaving front doors open when it's 9 degrees out, so someone must've taken pity and let her in the building.
I did likewise, opening the door and uttering the universal invitation for cats - "tk tk tk, c'mere."
She looked me over for a moment, then oozed her way in, purring nonstop to make sure I didn't change my mind. It worked.

No collar, but she clearly wasn't feral, not in the skittish and wild sense. She looked young, acted young - when I held her she pressed up against my chest and let me squeeze her down into a little ball of fluff between my arms like kittens do.

She didn't let me out of her sight, though she was certainly out of mine several times - she'd be walking around me, rubbing against my legs, and then suddenly she was gone and she'd reappear behind a piece of furniture on the other side of the room. How do they *do* that?

All I had on hand was Puppy Chow and the chicken I'd baked a few hours ago, so she got that.
Now, Ed hearts Puppy Chow, but kitty did not heart Ed.
She didn't actually seem to notice her at first, since tortoises don't have fur, or make sounds, or really even give off body heat...But then ...
"Holy ****, it moved!!!"
I wish it had been bright enough in the room to take a video, her reactions were priceless.

"Wait, weren't you supposed to be feeding me?"


"Is it ... dead?"


She finally just ran out of the kitchen, so Ed had to be banished to the bathtub for the night.

Kitty drank a ton of water, ran around a bit, drank more, ate some chicken, ALWAYS purring.
This building doesn't technically allow pets (Ed doesn't shed or make sounds so she's easy enough to hide), so I decided I'd better get her back outside before she got too comfy.
(WAY too late for that, by the way)
Gave her a grand tour of the laundry room, walked around the halls a bit, tried to get her to go outside but she just looked at me as if I were off my rocker. Took her back inside. Remembered she couldn't stay.
I got her to go outside by walking out ahead, pretending I'd stay out there, but I finally just picked her up because the snow's well over a foot deep in places. We walked around the building a few times, with me hoping she'd get tired of me and jump out of my arms at some point like a good kitty, but she just held on for dear life the whole time. It was late, it was windy, it was cold, I set her down in the carport. I'd seen her hiding under the cars before, I hoped it was warm. At least there wasn't snow there.

Of course, she just followed me back to the door. She actually ran ahead of me if I started speeding up.
I snuck in and closed the door in front of her. She stared at me through the glass and waited for the door to open.

I had nothing that would help her, nothing besides the food and water I'd already given her, so I just tossed some more food in a cardboard box with a blanket. I went back outside and she was gone, walked around the building again with no sight of her, so I put the box in a warmer-looking place near a wall.
She was sitting on the sidewalk and watching me.
I came closer, but she ran. I sat down, and she came up. I picked her up and put her in the box. She found the food, ate, wolfing it down and looking up every second like she wanted to follow but had to finish eating first. I went home. If she was still there in the morning, I'd take her to a shelter, though her odds probably wouldn't be much better there. She'd been hanging conspicuously around the area for weeks, after all; no worried owner had come to collect. She probably did alright on handouts and pity. Still, if she was there ....

The box was there this morning, no kitty, no food. Too cold and windy for pawprints to follow.

I hope she's warm.

Happy Valentine's Day

Please enjoy this heart crudely made from red sprinkles and Mocha-Frosted Chocolate Drops:

Best cookies ever, by the way. Make some

Vengeance

I decided to restore my faith in my ability to fry things by making something very simple and not very fried.

Mmm, chicken Parmesan.
Looks like a mess, tastes oh-so-good.




Take that, stupid quail eggs.

Quail Fail

Soooo, it's one of those nights.

When I decided to wrap weird cheese batter around quail's eggs and fry them, I knew there was a good chance something was going to go wrong.

Oh, but how.

The recipe wasn't entirely clear on the consistency required of the batter, and since I was making 1/3 of a recipe it took a little doing to divvy up the eggs. Now, if it'd been earlier, say 5:00 PM instead of 8:00 PM, I might've just used my common sense and said, "no way that stuff's gonna stick to an egg no matter what you do with it." As it was, though, I just grabbed another handful of Doritos and said, "it'll set up."

At 9:00 PM, once it had properly chilled for an hour, I took a look at it. Actually seemed sloppier than before, which is entirely possible given it was mostly liquid and breadcrumbs.

And oh yeah, I was supposed to dip the eggs in this glop, dip the glop-eggs in egg white (hah! Egg soup, what fun!) and then chill another 20 minutes.

Hadn't read that far.

I knew this stuff wasn't going to end up like anything resembling something you'd want to eat no matter what, so I decided the chill time could stand to go down by 10 minutes. Heated the oil, dropped the first revolting dumpling into the oil. Oil wasn't *quite* hot enough, ended up with a grease ball.
The second one actually turned out pretty well.
The rest looked like this:
(The whites are torn up a bit from my prodding at them to see if they were even cooked)
They used to be so pretty....

Moral of the story: Do not fry food after 9 PM. Just don't do it. And when you do, for the love of God don't eat it. And when you do, have plenty of orange juice on hand to wash it down.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get some more Doritos.

Welcome to the blog of someone who hates writing blogs

I do. Can't stand it. Otherwise I'd have many more posts than I do now.
I don't like writing at all, really, keeping track of things, talking to people.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of people.
That's why I'm going to set my goals small. I currently have on person following this blog. For the rest of this month (next time I'm choosing a longer month), I am going to see if I can bring that number up to 10.
I have no idea how to go about this. I have:

22 followers on Twitter (one of these is Philadelphia Cream Cheese, who started following me after I tweeted about cream cheese recipes for half an hour)
7 Facebook friends (two of whom are actually raccoons)
14 LiveJournal friends (all of whom I neglect woefully)

I just don't get how some people pile on the Friends. Let's face it - most of 'em aren't all that interesting.
Maybe it's that attitude right there that's causing me problems ....
Well, that and the fact that I never actually write anything.

Since the attitude isn't changing any time soon, let's work on the writing.
I know I'm capable of it. I managed a proper 50k-word NaNoWriMo novel, even though it's 50k + words of absolute drivel. I write huge blocks of text when I'm not paying attention. It's this consistency thing that gets me. Every day? There are people who update blogs, tweet on Twitter, TALK TO PEOPLE every single day?
Good God, how do they do it?

So. I'm putting my gecko in charge of Giving Me A Disapproving Look When I Start Slacking.
He's great at it. Look:

Ed is in charge of Giving Me Something To Write About When I Can't Think Of Anything Clever.
I mean, LOOK at her:
Bless her speshul little heart, she just walked around trying to eat those squash seeds off her face for the longest time till I took them and threw them out.

So. To sum up: Me write things. Me make frendz. Me NOT ignore frendz.
Wish me luck?

Ahhh, quiet.

It's a beautiful, quiet Saturday. For the first time in a long time I'm just going to spread all my paper out on the floor and finish these drawings I've been putting off. A Harpy for Dreiks on deviantART, a gecko-dragon and a tortoise-dragon because it just needs to be done, and some fanart as a break between the other three.

Wish me luck!

I need a new camera

I was out taking pictures in the gorgeous weather yesterday, and it really hit me just how bad this camera is.
I mean, I love it and all, I'd be sunk if I didn't have it - but it really doesn't take the best pictures. I'm not just inept (not *just* inept), it apparently takes fairly poor-quality pictures even for a cheapish digital.
I definitely don't have the funds for anything good at the moment, but I'm doing my research for if and when the day ever comes. Anyone have a good, fairly inexpensive camera they'd recommend?