It's Wednesday

I just got back from a quick work trip to Chicago this afternoon.  A few of the other people in my group and my boss were going to give a couple presentations to another division at work and at the last minute last week my boss said I was welcome to come if I wanted.  Essentially my lab at Big Fancy University (BFU) has been taking longer to get going than anticipated, so I've found myself scrounging for things to do to keep busy (due to things out of my control, like construction not really being done when they say it is and instruments taking forever to ship and then nobody actually telling me that they've shipped/arrived).  I'm actually going back to Chicago again next week, though as much for my own training as to have something to do.

Last night in my hotel room I caught the end of Miracle on TV.  Seriously it's got to be the best sports movie ever.  It's about the US hockey team at the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid, and unless you've been living under a rock, you know what happened.  You know the US beat the "unbeatable" Russian team and went on to win gold.  But the movie is SO GOOD.  It leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat in total anxious suspense and excitement even though you know they're going to win.  I grew up in a baseball household, I love baseball, and there are loads of great baseball movies (A League of Their Own and 61* are my two favorite baseball movies, but there are loads more really good ones!), but Miracle still takes the prize as the best sports movie ever in my book.

I've got one more resolution to add to last week's list - I'm going to use my cookbooks more.  The vast majority of my cookbooks have only 1-2 recipes that I've made (although some of those I make regularly and/or they're my go-to recipe for a certain thing), which is a shame.  I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Smitten Kitchen's new book for Christmas, and while the book is beautiful enough to own for the pictures alone, it seems ridiculous and kinda tragic (in a shallow, first-world problem sort of way of course) that it should join the pile of rarely used cookbooks.  I've added ingredients for plum & poppy seed muffins to my grocery list.  I'm still browsing possibilities for dinner this weekend... 

We'll see if this spurs me back into blogging.

Days like today I really need a couch.  It's been rainy, windy, and gray all day, and the chairs at my kitchen table (currently the only seating besides my bed) just don't cut it.  However I still find rain fascinating and wonderful a month and a half after leaving Tucson.

This morning I booked a campsite for Assateague Island for this weekend!  Woohoo!

Statistics are unbelievably, painfully boring.  It's taken an extraordinary amount of Cherry Coke Zero (like pre-oral studying quantities) for me to make my way through it.

If you had been walking down my street at approximately 5:00 this morning you would have seen me (though only barely, it was dark still), in a raincoat, hanging out my bedroom window (on the 3rd floor of my building) trying to figure out what was making the murderous-rage-inducing clacking sound.  The culprit was a loose slat of siding/roofing flapping in the wind, that I yanked off the house until a sufficiently large nail to hold it in place can be obtained.  I bought some big nails (I only had little ones for hanging things.) this afternoon and hung out my window some more this evening hopefully fixing the problem.  I couldn't hammer through whatever is behind the slat underneath the problem slat.  There was wood behind the problem slat but further up, but the pre-existing hole in the slat (I have no idea what this thing is made of, it's not wood, not slate, it's easy to put a nail through though.) was bigger than my nails, so I dug out some washers leftover from assembling my Ikea furniture and used those to hold the nail head in front of the slat.  Fingers crossed it doesn't clack on the house whenever it's windy anymore!!

My car payment booklet showed up today.  Sad.  Driving a shiny new car is much more fun than paying for it.

Some idiot managed to hit and knock down a light post down the street.  It's a street with enough traffic that you really can't go very fast.  No clue how they managed to pull it off...

I bought a basket of jalapenos to make green sauce a couple of weeks ago, but well, I only used two in the sauce... So I've been making things with jalapeno... Over the weekend Boyfriend and I made this pizza, and later this week I'm planning to make this pasta and these biscuits.

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The three of you who read this regularly may be wondering why I apparently fell off the face of the planet.  When I last wrote I had just sent my completed dissertation (aside from final revisions) to my committee prior to my defense.  Since then I defended, left Tucson, and slowly worked my way across the country as I moved to Baltimore for a post doc in industry.  It's not that I don't have plenty of material that I could blog about - heck, I took notes throughout the entire drive thinking it could contribute to a fun blog post.  But frankly, I just haven't felt like writing.  I've had plenty of time if I chose to do it.  Maybe getting this post out will motivate me to keep writing, though maybe it won't.  In some ways I miss it, but it's not one of those things that's worth making myself do.  So maybe I'll be back, maybe not, but hopefully.

Purging

I'm a month away from moving (and just over 3 weeks from defending!), so I've started gradually packing up stuff I won't need (mostly books so far) and getting rid of stuff I won't keep.  I'm using a U-box (U-Haul's version of PODS) to move, so I'm only keeping what fits in one 8'x5'x7' box.  Which means I'm getting rid of most of my furniture (Thank goodness. The vast majority of it is second hand/goodwill/hand me down junk.) as well as a lot of my stuff.

I'm hoping that doing some work early will make the week between my defense and leaving less stressful, especially because I'm sure I'll want to spend that time hanging out with people rather than frantically packing and cleaning.  I've already pared down my wardrobe to only the clothes that fit and are in good shape, which means I've donated or sold nearly half my clothes.  Lots of books and movies have made their way to Bookman's, and fortunately I've managed not to buy more than I've traded in so far.  (The dinosaur cookie cutters were an awesome find.  I couldn't pass them up!)  

Last night I was going through some less obvious stuff.  Stuff that seems stupid to move, but not really sell-able or donate-able, and a shame to just throw out.  Like the basket of  yarn.  I'm keeping my knitting needles and such, but I don't really want to move a couple cubic feet of yarn.  Or the stack of gift bags, tissue paper, and wrapping papers.  All perfectly good, but foolish to waste limited space moving.

Other than the stuff I just mentioned, purging is So. Much. Fun.  Seriously, it's wonderful.  And not only because I'm looking forward to getting some decent furniture and clothes that actually fit me.

I'm in full on clean-out-the-pantry mode, too.  I don't think I've ever bought so few groceries in my life.  I have a few more weeks of my produce share, so I still have to eat around that, but rather than making whatever I want from my produce, I'm specifically pairing it with stuff already in my pantry.  The eggplant and zucchini salad that called for pearl barley?  I used the rest of my bulghur and some of my wheat berries.  E and I baked for another classmate's final seminar the other day, and we specifically decided to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and nutmeg maple cookies to use up my E's pumpkin, my chocolate chips, and my maple syrup.  It's almost embarrassing how excited I was to use up my almond flour, almond extract, amaretto, extra chocolate frosting I'd stashed in the freezer, and maraschino cherries making cupcakes for some friends' birthday last weekend.  Angie and I had a blast playing empty-the-pantry in college, though I seem to remember the resulting meals being a whole lot weirder then than they've been so far... (Sadly I still have lots of curry and whole wheat flour.)

(If you know someone in Tucson who wants some yarn, gift wrap materials, or school supplies, let me know!)

Venn Pie-agram!

Nerd alert!  I made this awesome Venn pie-agram for my labmate's birthday a couple of weeks ago.  He uses a LOT of Venn diagrams to describe his research, so ever since I saw this idea online I've been waiting for an opportunity to make him one.

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the empty pie tins, because it took me a bit of thinking to figure out how to cut them.  The instructions I found online completely removed the edges of the middle section, but I wanted to keep them so I could use more pie crust, because who doesn't like pie crust?  Here's a Microsoft paint illustration of the cut I made. :)  I stacked the two pie tins, made one cut through both tins, flipped one over, and hooked them together.  In the second pie picture the top pie is apple with a lattice crust, the bottom is mixed berry with a crumb topping, and the middle is obviously both.  It was the first time I tried making a lattice top crust, and these instructions from Annie's Eats were very helpful.  The pie was a huge hit at school.  The Sri Lankan students especially liked the crust as they seem to generally not care for super sweet things.

Wedding Cake!

Pretty much as soon as I got back from the job interview we hit the ground running on E & J's wedding cake.  I have never made a wedding cake before.  I'm not sure that I ever will again.  To say it was a project would be an understatement, though I will say it was the best wedding cake I've ever tasted.  Most commercial wedding cakes are made at least a week in advance of the wedding and stashed in a fridge.  I'm sorry, week-old cake can only taste so good.


E's mom made the wedding cake layers and meringue layers on Wednesday.  She literally spent the entire day baking.  Thursday morning E and I made the layers for the groom's cake.  Thursday afternoon and evening were spent assembling the each tier of the wedding cake, assembling the groom's cake, and crumb coating everything.  Friday morning and afternoon everything got frosted and the groom's cake was decorated.  Friday evening after the rehearsal dinner the tiers of the wedding cake got stacked and decorated.


The wedding cake had three square tiers - 16", 12", and 8".  Each tier had 2 layers of almond cake, with a layer of either raspberry or apricot preserves, almond meringue, and another layer of preserves between the cake layers.  Frosting was a butter rum flavored swiss meringue buttercream.  The fruit decorations were made from marzipan.


The groom's cake was a 12" square lemon cake, 2 layers, filled with lemon curd, frosted with lemon cream cheese frosting, and decorated with candied lemon slices.  


At one point I carried the fully assembled and decorated groom's cake from E's apartment to J's (they live in the same complex, but different apartments) to store in his fridge, and my arms were TIRED by time I got over there.  That cake was HEAVY.  Considering the groom's cake was the same size as the middle tier of the wedding cake, I can only imagine how heavy the fully assembled wedding cake was.  The almond cake was really dense, and between both cakes we used 132 eggs and 21 pounds of butter.  I'm sure Paula Deen would be proud.


A couple of our bigger/stronger guy friends actually came over to E's Saturday afternoon to move the wedding cake from her fridge in her second floor apartment to the car for transport across town to the wedding venue.  Miraculously transportation was entirely uneventful with no trauma to the cakes or people's nerves.


The wedding was lots of fun, E looked gorgeous, and they're finally married!  Yay!

Lemon cake batter.  Lots of it.

How many brides make their own wedding cake?

One layer of the medium tier, with the layer of raspberry preserves being added  on top of the almond meringue

The medium tier - cake, preserves (you can only see the frosting dam holding them in), meringue, more preserves, the second cake layer, and blobs of frosting for crumb coating

Crumb coated bottom layer

All the wedding cake layers setting up in E's fridge

The finished groom's cake

The finished wedding cake

E's Bachelorette

E's not really a party girl (anymore), so rather than the penis accessory-filled bar night, several of us had brunch at my place and then headed down to the vineyards in Sonoita for some wine tastings.

I made these blueberry muffins (minus the butter & sugar topping as most of us were/are trying to watch our waistlines), this spinach & cheese strata (no pictures, and I didn't taste it because I don't like eggs, rumor has it it was good though), amaretto-soaked chocolate dipped cherries (do some googling, I didn't follow any one set of instructions), and had way too much fun decorating cookies.  I thought the cookies were super cute, and really fun for a bachelorette without being so vulgar.  At the wineries we really liked we ran back in afterwards to offer them cookies (yes, we drove from one vineyard to another with a container of lingerie cookies), and everybody was super entertained by them.

By the way, I totally recommend Wilhelm Family Vineyards down in Sonoita.  We were fortunate enough to find a Living Social deal, but we had a great time there.  The owner/winemaker is super nice and gives a great tour.  And the wine is tasty - almost all of us took a bottle or two home with us.

Amazingly Awesome Cake

My parents and grandfather were in Tucson this weekend for commencement, and I made this caramel chocolate cake from Annie's Eats for Mother's Day.  Holy crap was it delicious.  So, so good.  I wound up not using salt...I know my mom and I both love salted desserts, but I wasn't sure how popular it would be otherwise.  I do think it would be good salted, but it was also incredibly delicious without salt.  I also made this with store-bought caramel...I just can't make caramel to save my life.  I've struggled with it since the first time I tried, and from my three attempts this go-around, I wound up with 1 slightly burnt batch, and 2 crystallized batches... Boo.  The upside is it still tastes fabulous with non-home-made caramel (even if I did catch some flack for it).

At this point I've tried a lot of recipes, and I know I bake pretty well, so it takes a lot to impress me, and I was totally blown away by this cake.  I'd say this is probably in the top three things I've ever made. This cake made such an impression on my grandfather that Little Sister said he was still raving about it when they got home tonight.

Here it is.  Dark chocolate cake, caramel Swiss buttercream filling, fudge-y chocolate frosting.

Goals & Kitchen Goals, Update 2

Ok, starting with the broader goals I made in January:

• I've got 2 1/2 chapters of my dissertation written.  This third chapter could be done within a week if all the other BS to get done would go away.  We'll see if I can muster the motivation to get this draft together anyways.
• I applied for a couple more jobs, one of which sent an auto-reply acknowledging my application from their "Talent Acquisition Team."  Oh my.  No word from anybody yet.
• Still doing a decent job on the vitamins.  I'm glad I came up with one thing I was less likely to fail at. :P

As far as kitchen goals, here's how February turned out:

• Pinto beans - total fail.  I was hoping to make another big pot of pinto beans to polish off what we've got, but it never happened.  Only used up those ones that I cooked in the last couple days of January.
• Whole wheat flour - not too bad.  I still have a bunch left, but I did use a fair amount too.  Mostly in muffins and pancakes.  This whole wheat pancake recipe is tasty - I've tried it with blueberries and with strawberries.
• Drink mixes - great!  Just a handful of EmergenC packets left!
• Sprinkles - all gone!  I used every last sprinkle I had making these cookies for Valentine's Day.

For March, I'm not going to pick any particular items to try to use up because I think I'm going to be out of town for a substantial part of it, and if I am here for recruiting, that's another 4 days of free meals (not that I'm going to do anywhere near as much driving or work!).  The goal for March is going to be to stay on top of my produce and use whatever groceries I already have rather than buying more stuff - lots of substitutions!

Related only because it's food, here's the sausage & kale tart Boyfriend and I made when he was here last weekend.  He thought you should see it.

Goals & Kitchen Goals, Update

So before I get into what kitchen goods I want to whittle down in February, an update on my broader goals and January's kitchen goals.

• The write/defend graduate thing - well, I've written about a chapter and a half.  Well maybe a little more than that.  I'm hoping to have a second chapter knocked out by the end of the week.  But yes, I'm going to have to pick up the pace.
• Finding a job...I've applied for a couple things...and I've done a fair amount of browsing for pertinent postings.  But I need to get some more applications out and find some more (in the sense of quantity and quality) appealing postings.
• Vitamins - I've actually been pretty good about this!  I haven't been taking my vitamin every day, but at least several times per week.  I'll consider this one a success.

I also talked about trying to work my way through my excessive stash of frozen cranberries, curry, rosemary, and cloves during the month of January.  While I haven't polished anything off, I did use more of each of these than I typically would in a month.

• I'm down to one bag of frozen cranberries from 2 1/2 bags.  They've gone into baked oatmeal, muffins, and cookies.  I tried to "health-up" the muffins but subbing a small portion of the flour with whole wheat flour, subbing apple sauce for the vegetable/canola oil, and eliminating the crumb topping (sigh).  I've been wanting to try the vegetable/canola oil substitution for a while.  All the commentary I could find online said that it would change the texture, but that that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.  I do think it made the muffins significantly heavier and denser, but they were still tasty, so I don't think it was a bad substitution.
• While I only used curry a couple of times, twice per month is definitely higher than my average curry consumption rate.  I still have a holy ton of curry though.
• I almost finished a bottle of dried rosemary!  Fortunately winter generally means ample quantities of root vegetables, which are quite amenable to rosemary.  I made mashed potatoes with rosemary as well as roasted miscellaneous root vegetables.
• The only thing I used cloves for this month were these gingerbread cookies that I made in the shape of kangaroos for Australia Day.  If you're looking for a gingerbread cookie recipe, I highly recommend that one from Annie's Eats.  They were delicious, stayed soft at least as long as they existed before being devoured, and got rave reviews from everybody.  (And they used up a bunch of cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg!)

Sadly, we haven't had a chance to make anything with saffron.  Hopefully we'll get to it this month.  Fingers crossed!  Aside from hopefully getting around to cooking with saffron, here's what I'm hoping to focus on this month:

• Pinto beans - last year we accumulated a ton from the CSA and just never used them.  They're dry.  They keep indefinitely.  So we didn't worry about them.  But now we have a ton.  I did already get a head start on this by making this yummy recipe from Simply Recipes last weekend.  We got cilantro in our share, and E had jalapenos from her mom, so it seemed like a good idea.
• Whole wheat flour - I bought it for one particular recipe, but haven't really used it otherwise.  I used a whopping half cup in the cranberry muffins I made last weekend though. :)  I've found a few recipes that particularly call for it - including pizza crust and more muffins.  And I'm going to try to sub in a small portion of the total flour in a recipe for whole wheat more often.
• Drink mixes - random, I know.  But I've got some Gatorade mix (left over from the Grand Canyon trip) and a bunch of EmergenC just sitting around.  It should be used.  Either would certainly be better for me than the Cherry Coke Zero I love so much (though not nearly as tasty :( ).
• Sprinkles - I don't know when, why, or how I got them, but I have them.  We used a bunch for E's advisor's birthday last week, but Valentine's called for cute baked goods, which can easily accommodate cute sprinkles. 

I'll be sure to report back in a month. :)

Goals & Kitchen Goals

I haven't made any official New Year's resolutions, but in the spirit of things, I do have a couple of goals for the year/first half of the year:

• Write my dissertation/defend/graduate
• Find a job
• Actually use the giant bottle of daily multivitamin that is just sitting on my shelf...

Separate from the whole escape-from-grad-school-and-get-a-real-job thing, I have goal to cut back the spice inventory in my kitchen.  Living with roommates I've acquired a TON of spices.  It seems every time somebody has moved out in the past 4 years a ton of stuff gets left behind, and spices are so expensive that I just can't bear to throw them out.  Hence I find myself with stuff I don't know how to use (coriander?) and absurd quantities of things.  Like a pint-size volume of bay leaves? 3 containers of curry powder? 4 containers of cloves?  I love clove, but that's a ton!  So for each month, I'm going to pick a few things that I want to focus on using more.  I don't particularly expect to finish anything within a month (though if I could eliminate some of the multiples I'd be thrilled...), but it'd be nice to make a dent in the massive stockpile.  This month's targets:

• Curry powder - like I just mentioned, I have multiple bottles of curry powder.  For something I generally use about 3 times per year that's crazy.  E and I made this curried spaghetti squash soup this past weekend.  It's pretty good, though we discussed using a higher proportion of lentils and/or adding chick peas to up the protein.
• Rosemary - since discovering that all the shrubbery behind my building is rosemary, I haven't touched the dry stuff in my cupboard.  Time to use it up.  Hopefully we'll get some potatoes from the CSA soon.  And I'll have to get myself a rosemary plant wherever I move, because I'm afraid there's no turning back now that I've had access to as much free, fresh rosemary as I could ever want.
• Frozen cranberries - A while ago I bought bags of frozen cranberries, since they're hard to find outside of the holiday season, but mostly they've just been sitting in my freezer.  Time to make some baked oatmeals and muffins.  Or maybe cookies to bring to group meeting?  Both the cookies and muffins would be perfect because it's citrus season at the CSA!
• Saffron - I swiped saffron from Grandpa's cupboard ages ago, because let's face it, it's not like he has any idea what to do with it (and he's more than happily let me take anything I wanted in terms of kitchen stuff since Grandma died).  Paella is what I immediately think of when it comes to using saffron, but paella is expensive and time-consuming to make, so it doesn't happen often.  But E just got a new cookbook for Christmas that not only looks awesome, but has a handful of saffron-containing recipes.  So we've decided to make one saffron recipe per month for as long as the saffron lasts.  No point in hanging onto the stuff!

P.S. I found a company that sells kits to make your own cookie cutters!  Looks like a means to more weird mascot cookies!

Attention Getter

I made these cranberry-orange muffins for my committee meeting the other day.  It was a short meeting, but a fed and caffeinated committee is usually a happier committee.  After the meeting, my advisor took one with her, mentioning that she really loves cranberries.

Later that day I saw my advisor again at subgroup, and I swear she spent the first 15 minutes raving about some bakery on Broadway.  Seriously.  She went on, and on, and on about this thing they make and that thing they make, and they usually go this day because then they have these cinnamon rolls, and there's this giant case of little cookies, and a giant case of big cookies... It was a bit strange, but actually pretty funny to listen to The Queen go on like this.

Anyways, so the combination of comments made me think of this cranberry "pie" from the Pioneer Woman that I made last year, so I emailed her a link to the recipe.  Literally three (3!) minutes later I had a reply.  Seriously.  She doesn't reply that fast to emails about science or other lab stuff.  Heck, sometimes she doesn't ever reply.  Man.  Maybe I should send a recipe at the beginning of every email when I really need a reply?

Meet Maurice

This is Maurice.  Everybody say, "Hi Maurice!"  He's still dressed.

He weights 19.94 pounds.  He did not actually cost $27.72.  He actually cost $11.76.

I swiped some gloves from lab.  I do not like raw meat.  Especially raw meat with wings and legs that tend to flap around.

Even the turkey-juice covered plastic is pretty gross.

Maurice!  You're indecent!

Bathtime begins.  Gross.  E's version of "helping" me with the turkey is to take lots of photos while laughing a lot.

So gross.

J will find this funny.

Still grossed out.

Do you know how awkward it is to manipulate a heavy, slimy, squishy, flappy bird in a very small sink?

Feathers.  Ick.  Seriously Jennie-O.  Do better.

The neck flap is soooooooo gross.  New profile picture?  Super flattering, right?

Finally got Maurice clean and into the brine bag.

Adding brine.  This is like spa treatment for a turkey.  Seriously, humans pay hundreds of dollars for almost the same thing.

Soaking.

Where Maurice will spend his last 24 hours before being dismembered.

27

Last week I turned 27.  Eep.  To make me feel better about it, E and I made this delicious Neapolitan Cake from Annie's Eats.  Ours wasn't quite as pretty, or, uh...level...as hers, but it was still tasty. :)