food and stuff
Pinky and Kroroboros invited us over for Christmas dinner, so we went, and offered to bring dessert. Pinky requested chocolate, so I hunted through cookbooks and online sites and came up with the America's Test Kitchen classic brownie recipe, which turned out to be not that much harder than a mix, and exponentially better. They're made with unsweetened chocolate, but there's enough sugar that they're not bitter, just very rich and intensely chocolaty.
In part I chose the recipe because I have that particular cookbook because Mom and Dad recommended it. They got into watching the show, and bought the cookbook, and were really happy with it plus its buying guide. And since I couldn't call my mom and be like "How do I make brownies?" I opted for the guidance she'd given me previously. (Note: Mom would have used a mix. Or bought something.)
I've been thinking about Mom a lot lately, which is understandable since it's less than a month to the one-year anniversary of her death. We've picked a weekend for the unveiling--it happens to be the weekend of my brother's birthday, so that's what it is, but it was the only option we had. The following weekend is ECCC, so Morgan's busy; the weekend after that is Norwescon and I'm going this year; then we get into Passover and Easter. And going earlier than that puts us in March with crappy weather.
It's hard. It's feeling harder lately, and I think January is going to be difficult. But I'm hanging in there.
In other news: I broke tooth #24 last week. That's one of the bottom front teeth, for your reference. I knew it needed work but since it wasn't troubling me before it broke, I was leaving it alone pending more restorative work. Well, now it's broken and it hurts when I bite on it. So I have an appointment at 2pm on Wednesday to get a root canal for that one and the one next to it. I'm not sure how salvageable either of these teeth are post root canal but I'll worry about that after the RCs are done.
Writing news: I am having a mathematical problem. I kept the OneNote page where I'd saved my word counts from 2014, both on 1/1/14 and 12/31/14. I took the December '14 numbers and plugged them into a new page of my word count spreadsheet. Then I input the numbers for files from 2015, and compared.
The problem is that there's one file where I have a word count of 11,020 listed in January '14, but I have no numbers on it for December. It doesn't appear in my '15 tracking because I didn't do anything with the file until a few weeks ago. It's possible I stopped writing it early in '14 and didn't pick it up again until this year, but the word count doesn't match. I know where I started from so there's a chunk of words between the 1/1/14 date and the 12/29/15 date I can't account for.
What I've done is just add in the 11,020 words for 2014 and compare to current file size at end of 2015. I'm still fairly certain that somewhere in there I neglected to add this into my tracking, but there's not much else I can do at the moment.
I'll make a longer post about numbers and progress later, but I'm throwing this one out there in case anyone has suggestions.
Either way I didn't make my GYWO count but I got over 2/3 of the way there, so that's something at least. And if I had added in all the co-writing I do with sanders I'd have hit 300k a long time ago, but I'm using GYWO to track my solo writing only.
Other food news: Morgan and I went to Costco yesterday and in the process of spending far too much money we acquired a Zojirushi rice cooker. Everything I have read about rice cookers has said that Zojirushi is the best, and I had bought an Aroma cooker from Amazon but I was never happy with how it made rice so I've been ignoring it and making rice on the stovetop.
But I wanted a rice cooker so I could steam things and make other kinds of rice and who knows what else, and this was a good deal so we bought it. I tried it tonight and I have to say it was actually worth the hype. I made basmati rice, on the 'quick cook' setting, and the rice came out fluffy and tender but it wasn't gummy at all. It wasn't dry. The only complaint I have is that it was bland, but I didn't add bouillon or butter to the rice like I normally do. I also don't think this brand of rice is fantastic, so will be looking for other varieties. If you have a brand of jasmine, basmati, or long-grain rice, please to tell me. I just don't want a 25lb bag of rice in my pantry.
Still, though, this is really yummy rice. Next time I'll add bouillon. And the quick-cook setting made the rice in about the time it would have taken me on the stovetop, maybe less. I'll try it the regular way next time and see if it's any better.
This is the second Zojirushi appliance I have in my kitchen. The first is a variable temp kettle thing that holds up to 5 liters of water, keeps it hot at a preset temp (208, 195, 175, all farenheit) for hours, and doesn't take long to reboil. I always reboil it before I make tea, because proper black tea should be made with boiling water, but it only usually takes a minute. It's also super quiet. I love the thing, and it makes it so convenient to turn it on in the morning and just keep drinking more tea through the day. I bought that thing from a guy at work, and I'm quite pleased with it.
The cons are that it's big and bulky--as you would kind of expect since it holds five liters of water--so it takes up a ton of room. I have it on the island at the moment, and it's doing okay there.
In other food news, we picked up some meat at Costco since we have plenty of room in the freezer. I have a package of chicken breasts--they come two to a sealed bag, and you just rip off a bag and defrost it. I have a similar thing with chicken thighs, and we bought a couple other things. I meant to get ground beef and forgot, but I can get that anywhere. I was going to buy beef for stew but it came in 5lb packages and I don't need that much.
I had meant to make stew on Sunday but never got my act together to get it started; in my defense, I had a migraine. Maybe this weekend, or something. I have a couple different recipes I'm considering but they all involve wine. I know nothing about wine. Morgan and I did buy a (regular size) bottle of merlot at Costco, mostly because the description card said "full-bodied" and the recipe I want to use for stew says "use a full-bodied red".
I do want to cook more, and a lot of recipes call for wine or alcohol. The problem is that everyone says not to cook with something you won't drink, but I don't drink at all and I don't know anything about wine so I don't know what's good, what isn't, and what I should look for. I don't actually want to drink wine, but it would be helpful to know more about it than I do now.
There's a whole post in that, how the world looks very different sometimes when you don't drink. Because I never drank much at all--I never really saw the appeal or enjoyed the taste--I always have to mentally reset when I talk to co-workers about going out for happy hour, or something. People see nothing wrong with having alcohol to celebrate things, or with meals, and I just don't think that way. I'm not saying they're wrong to think so! Wine with dinner is eminently civilized. Wine in beef stew is a marvel. I just don't think about it.
I don't need to spend a ton of money on alcohol, but if anyone has recommendations for good wines to cook with or have handy, I'm all ears. (The one wine I actually know I like is a Riesling from Chateau Ste. Michelle. Mom and I both liked that one.) Morgan prefers red wine but rarely drinks because red wine gives me migraines and he can't get through a whole bottle before it would go bad. But he doesn't know much about it either. :P
Red wine gave my mom headaches, too, from the sulfites. Or so I always thought--someone told me that the sulfite thing is BS, but I'm not convinced of that.
But. Cooking. I want to do more of it. I was so pleased with myself for getting the baking done! I made the brownies, and I made peanut butter cookies that honestly I didn't like the outcome. The batter was delicious, the cookies not so much. Morgan likes them; Pinky said they were tasty but a little dry. They're just not doing it for me. If I make pb cookies again I'll look for a different recipe.
Tattoo stuff! Before A gave me the recommendation for Two Birds Tattoo, I looked in the area for artists who do watercolor tats, because that's what I want for my next one. I found an artist/studio in Lynnwood, about five minutes from my house, at Dragons of Heaven Tattoo. Two Birds came in at spot #9 on the Best of Western WA voting, but Dragons of Heaven is #10.
It's also super close, the artist's portfolio looks amazing, and the reviews on Yelp are almost uniformly positive. So I have a consult with the artist on Saturday. I have a basic idea of what I want the design to look like but not entirely, and I'm wondering if I could make it a little bigger and add some more shading and linework to it.
I think I've talked about this before, but if you missed it--I'm getting a quote and an image tattooed on my left forearm. The quote will be "The only failure is not to write" and the image will be of the pen as it finishes writing the quote. Specifically I want an image similar to this purple pen which I own. For the text, I'm going to write it out myself and use my own handwriting.
I'm wondering if I could add in more, though, some line work and color, maybe a border around the quote. My first tattoo was a total impulse thing, and I don't regret it but I kind of wish I'd gotten something else. The second, of course, were my elephants, and now this one.
I was thinking about appearance on my drive home today, and mulling over how we view ourselves. I've always wanted fun hair, but until this year I stayed to darker, more muted tones in it. Some of that was professional, but some of it was me lacking the courage to dye my hair something that attracts attention because I was a fat chick and didn't want people looking at me.
I'm almost 36 now and I finally have the confidence to have a head of crayon purple hair and go out in public with it. For a long time I wore pretty muted and neutral colors because I didn't want people looking at me. Now I love bright colors.
I'm still a fat chick, but I'm a fat girl with amazing hair, and I have to say, the compliments I keep getting on it are pretty great.
We have an appointment for Buddy to go to the vet Wednesday morning. He'll be staying there all day so they can clean his teeth and do x-rays and extract one dead tooth (no idea if he'll need more than that; s'why the x-rays). We've known about it for a while but the vet said it wasn't super urgent so we put it off until we had paid off the bills from his paw injury. But that's done now, and with Morgan being on vacation this week we made the appointment.
Other than that he's doing fine. He was being a little weird for a few days--very agitated and whiny on and off--but he's better now and back to his usual mellow self. And I'm pretty sure he was super happy Morgan and I were both home for a few days.
Instagram is becoming one of my favorite ways to waste time, speaking of Buddy. All the pretty puppies! Pit bull puppies are some of the cutest things out there, and I'm following a few accounts where they have foster puppies or just new additions to the family, and oh, my, the cute weakens me. I'm getting a few likes for my own photos, so that's kinda cool. I'm over there as writerbecc should you want to find me. I will follow back, but all I post are Buddy pictures.
I have tried to write this post for four days, so I'm giving up and posting now. :P
This entry was originally posted at http://blueraccoon.dreamwidth.org/1361354.html. Please comment there. |
comments
In part I chose the recipe because I have that particular cookbook because Mom and Dad recommended it. They got into watching the show, and bought the cookbook, and were really happy with it plus its buying guide. And since I couldn't call my mom and be like "How do I make brownies?" I opted for the guidance she'd given me previously. (Note: Mom would have used a mix. Or bought something.)
I've been thinking about Mom a lot lately, which is understandable since it's less than a month to the one-year anniversary of her death. We've picked a weekend for the unveiling--it happens to be the weekend of my brother's birthday, so that's what it is, but it was the only option we had. The following weekend is ECCC, so Morgan's busy; the weekend after that is Norwescon and I'm going this year; then we get into Passover and Easter. And going earlier than that puts us in March with crappy weather.
It's hard. It's feeling harder lately, and I think January is going to be difficult. But I'm hanging in there.
In other news: I broke tooth #24 last week. That's one of the bottom front teeth, for your reference. I knew it needed work but since it wasn't troubling me before it broke, I was leaving it alone pending more restorative work. Well, now it's broken and it hurts when I bite on it. So I have an appointment at 2pm on Wednesday to get a root canal for that one and the one next to it. I'm not sure how salvageable either of these teeth are post root canal but I'll worry about that after the RCs are done.
Writing news: I am having a mathematical problem. I kept the OneNote page where I'd saved my word counts from 2014, both on 1/1/14 and 12/31/14. I took the December '14 numbers and plugged them into a new page of my word count spreadsheet. Then I input the numbers for files from 2015, and compared.
The problem is that there's one file where I have a word count of 11,020 listed in January '14, but I have no numbers on it for December. It doesn't appear in my '15 tracking because I didn't do anything with the file until a few weeks ago. It's possible I stopped writing it early in '14 and didn't pick it up again until this year, but the word count doesn't match. I know where I started from so there's a chunk of words between the 1/1/14 date and the 12/29/15 date I can't account for.
What I've done is just add in the 11,020 words for 2014 and compare to current file size at end of 2015. I'm still fairly certain that somewhere in there I neglected to add this into my tracking, but there's not much else I can do at the moment.
I'll make a longer post about numbers and progress later, but I'm throwing this one out there in case anyone has suggestions.
Either way I didn't make my GYWO count but I got over 2/3 of the way there, so that's something at least. And if I had added in all the co-writing I do with sanders I'd have hit 300k a long time ago, but I'm using GYWO to track my solo writing only.
Other food news: Morgan and I went to Costco yesterday and in the process of spending far too much money we acquired a Zojirushi rice cooker. Everything I have read about rice cookers has said that Zojirushi is the best, and I had bought an Aroma cooker from Amazon but I was never happy with how it made rice so I've been ignoring it and making rice on the stovetop.
But I wanted a rice cooker so I could steam things and make other kinds of rice and who knows what else, and this was a good deal so we bought it. I tried it tonight and I have to say it was actually worth the hype. I made basmati rice, on the 'quick cook' setting, and the rice came out fluffy and tender but it wasn't gummy at all. It wasn't dry. The only complaint I have is that it was bland, but I didn't add bouillon or butter to the rice like I normally do. I also don't think this brand of rice is fantastic, so will be looking for other varieties. If you have a brand of jasmine, basmati, or long-grain rice, please to tell me. I just don't want a 25lb bag of rice in my pantry.
Still, though, this is really yummy rice. Next time I'll add bouillon. And the quick-cook setting made the rice in about the time it would have taken me on the stovetop, maybe less. I'll try it the regular way next time and see if it's any better.
This is the second Zojirushi appliance I have in my kitchen. The first is a variable temp kettle thing that holds up to 5 liters of water, keeps it hot at a preset temp (208, 195, 175, all farenheit) for hours, and doesn't take long to reboil. I always reboil it before I make tea, because proper black tea should be made with boiling water, but it only usually takes a minute. It's also super quiet. I love the thing, and it makes it so convenient to turn it on in the morning and just keep drinking more tea through the day. I bought that thing from a guy at work, and I'm quite pleased with it.
The cons are that it's big and bulky--as you would kind of expect since it holds five liters of water--so it takes up a ton of room. I have it on the island at the moment, and it's doing okay there.
In other food news, we picked up some meat at Costco since we have plenty of room in the freezer. I have a package of chicken breasts--they come two to a sealed bag, and you just rip off a bag and defrost it. I have a similar thing with chicken thighs, and we bought a couple other things. I meant to get ground beef and forgot, but I can get that anywhere. I was going to buy beef for stew but it came in 5lb packages and I don't need that much.
I had meant to make stew on Sunday but never got my act together to get it started; in my defense, I had a migraine. Maybe this weekend, or something. I have a couple different recipes I'm considering but they all involve wine. I know nothing about wine. Morgan and I did buy a (regular size) bottle of merlot at Costco, mostly because the description card said "full-bodied" and the recipe I want to use for stew says "use a full-bodied red".
I do want to cook more, and a lot of recipes call for wine or alcohol. The problem is that everyone says not to cook with something you won't drink, but I don't drink at all and I don't know anything about wine so I don't know what's good, what isn't, and what I should look for. I don't actually want to drink wine, but it would be helpful to know more about it than I do now.
There's a whole post in that, how the world looks very different sometimes when you don't drink. Because I never drank much at all--I never really saw the appeal or enjoyed the taste--I always have to mentally reset when I talk to co-workers about going out for happy hour, or something. People see nothing wrong with having alcohol to celebrate things, or with meals, and I just don't think that way. I'm not saying they're wrong to think so! Wine with dinner is eminently civilized. Wine in beef stew is a marvel. I just don't think about it.
I don't need to spend a ton of money on alcohol, but if anyone has recommendations for good wines to cook with or have handy, I'm all ears. (The one wine I actually know I like is a Riesling from Chateau Ste. Michelle. Mom and I both liked that one.) Morgan prefers red wine but rarely drinks because red wine gives me migraines and he can't get through a whole bottle before it would go bad. But he doesn't know much about it either. :P
Red wine gave my mom headaches, too, from the sulfites. Or so I always thought--someone told me that the sulfite thing is BS, but I'm not convinced of that.
But. Cooking. I want to do more of it. I was so pleased with myself for getting the baking done! I made the brownies, and I made peanut butter cookies that honestly I didn't like the outcome. The batter was delicious, the cookies not so much. Morgan likes them; Pinky said they were tasty but a little dry. They're just not doing it for me. If I make pb cookies again I'll look for a different recipe.
Tattoo stuff! Before A gave me the recommendation for Two Birds Tattoo, I looked in the area for artists who do watercolor tats, because that's what I want for my next one. I found an artist/studio in Lynnwood, about five minutes from my house, at Dragons of Heaven Tattoo. Two Birds came in at spot #9 on the Best of Western WA voting, but Dragons of Heaven is #10.
It's also super close, the artist's portfolio looks amazing, and the reviews on Yelp are almost uniformly positive. So I have a consult with the artist on Saturday. I have a basic idea of what I want the design to look like but not entirely, and I'm wondering if I could make it a little bigger and add some more shading and linework to it.
I think I've talked about this before, but if you missed it--I'm getting a quote and an image tattooed on my left forearm. The quote will be "The only failure is not to write" and the image will be of the pen as it finishes writing the quote. Specifically I want an image similar to this purple pen which I own. For the text, I'm going to write it out myself and use my own handwriting.
I'm wondering if I could add in more, though, some line work and color, maybe a border around the quote. My first tattoo was a total impulse thing, and I don't regret it but I kind of wish I'd gotten something else. The second, of course, were my elephants, and now this one.
I was thinking about appearance on my drive home today, and mulling over how we view ourselves. I've always wanted fun hair, but until this year I stayed to darker, more muted tones in it. Some of that was professional, but some of it was me lacking the courage to dye my hair something that attracts attention because I was a fat chick and didn't want people looking at me.
I'm almost 36 now and I finally have the confidence to have a head of crayon purple hair and go out in public with it. For a long time I wore pretty muted and neutral colors because I didn't want people looking at me. Now I love bright colors.
I'm still a fat chick, but I'm a fat girl with amazing hair, and I have to say, the compliments I keep getting on it are pretty great.
We have an appointment for Buddy to go to the vet Wednesday morning. He'll be staying there all day so they can clean his teeth and do x-rays and extract one dead tooth (no idea if he'll need more than that; s'why the x-rays). We've known about it for a while but the vet said it wasn't super urgent so we put it off until we had paid off the bills from his paw injury. But that's done now, and with Morgan being on vacation this week we made the appointment.
Other than that he's doing fine. He was being a little weird for a few days--very agitated and whiny on and off--but he's better now and back to his usual mellow self. And I'm pretty sure he was super happy Morgan and I were both home for a few days.
Instagram is becoming one of my favorite ways to waste time, speaking of Buddy. All the pretty puppies! Pit bull puppies are some of the cutest things out there, and I'm following a few accounts where they have foster puppies or just new additions to the family, and oh, my, the cute weakens me. I'm getting a few likes for my own photos, so that's kinda cool. I'm over there as writerbecc should you want to find me. I will follow back, but all I post are Buddy pictures.
I have tried to write this post for four days, so I'm giving up and posting now. :P
This entry was originally posted at http://blueraccoon.dreamwidth.org/1361354.html. Please comment there. |
comments