Potpourri

Belgium was great - had a good time and some great food. And, at the Brussels airport, found the navy blue dress I had been seeking. Score!

Since I've returned, life's been a lot of running around. Lots of work stuff going on, started rehearsals for a new production, some friends got married. The Guitar Hero and I got rid of a lot of stuff and he rearranged the living room so I know longer feel like our living room is overwhelmed by superflous pieces of furniture. I'm kinda of a clean and simple lines type of gal when it comes to home decor.

Tomorrow evening I'm having some friends over for a girls' night in and clothes swap and baked up this delicious apple cake. Yum yum. Go bake some yourself.

The weather's turned cold and rainy and will most likely stay that way for the next six months so I'm returning to my hermit habits of staying in and cooking and watching Dexter and huddling under afghans. If needed, you'll know where to find me.

Best chocolate chip cookies ever

So a couple weeks back the web was all over this article in the New York Times and people were baking up a storm. One of my favorite internet cooks, Orangette, put her stamp on the recipe and I thought, hmm, I need to see if it lives up to the hype.

Thursday afternoon I finally got around to mixing up a batch of dough. Last night (24 hours later) I baked four cookies. And they were good. Damn good. This morning (some 40 hours later) I baked the rest and we tried one for breakfast. OH MY GOD. These are the best chocolate cookies ever. The Guitar Hero agrees - he claims it was the best cookie he's ever eaten in his thirty-odd years on this planet.

This is what they look like just out of the oven:


And here's a close up of one fine specimen:


My two cents to the recipe:
- I followed Orangette's recipe and just used one type of flour (in my case, plain old all-purpose flour).
- As I am out of chocolate chips and will be till the next trip to the States or a well-meaning care package arrives, I chopped a couple of bars of dark chocolate (60% cocoa, Herrenschockolade for the German speakers). Worked just as well as chips would have.
- I should have skipped using a mixer as our cheap-ass piece of shit didn't do a great job of making the butter and sugar creamy. Had to use old-fashioned arm power. If I had a Kitchen-Aid (cough, birthday present, cough), I'm sure my poor little arms would have been spared.
- I halved the recipe as I didn't have enough flour, sugar or brown sugar (see care package above). My half recipe made 21 good-size cookies, so I'm thinking the 24 the full recipe makes must be some big-ass cookies. Like as big as my not-very-small ass.
- Follow Orangette's tip to let the dough warm up for 30 minutes before scooping. Mine was very hard just out of the fridge. Also, my dough was very crumbly, which I first thought would equal messed-up cookies, but everything turned out fine (see above pics).
- Sea salt, sea salt, sea salt, I think I love you.
- Wait the full 36 hours before baking. It is totally worth it as the cookies do indeed develop a caramelly flavor while sitting in the fridge. They honestly taste like something you would pay money for. In a good way.

In short: bake the damn cookies already. Your taste buds will thank you for it.

I'm so boring

I've been lazier than lazier on posting lately. I've been swamped at work and by the time I get home, I just need to zone out. I haven't been particularly creative and feel rather boring at the moment. Poor lil me!

Things of interest, perhaps, for you dear readers:

- Germany's Next Top Model: Which candidate amongst this year's group of crybabies is the most annoying and deserving of a massive ass-kicking? IMHO, Gisele, closely followed by Sarah and Boo-hoo-hoo-I-posed-for-Penthouse-girl (I think that's her real name).
- This pico de gallo fucking rocks.
- I'm in need of a big tote bag, and think this one or this one, which Wardrobe Oxygen gave a thumbs-up to, would suit the bill. What do you think?
- I haven't put up any new pictures on my flickr page because that would require me to actually upload them from my camera to the computer. By the time I get around to it, there are going to be something like 2 months of outfits for me to sort and date. Yeah, don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
- I think I may have broken our new red coffee machine. The steam function doesn't work and it made unhealthy sounds the last time I used it. Thank god we got it on the cheap. Perhaps because it's no longer being manufactured.
- I taught the Guitar Hero the insult from my childhood "Up your nose with a rubber hose!" If I remember correctly, one retort was "Down your pants with a pound of ants!" Anyone remember that one or is my memory completely screwed up?

Yeah, as you can see, the creativity and interestingness* is just overflowing here.



* Should be a word.

Vacation holiday

5 days to go til we're off to Kansas for two weeks.
It'll be Thanksgiving time when we get there and I think we're going to try out brining a turkey for the family dinner.
It's gonna rock!

What's up doc?

About a billion weeks ago I promised an update of what's going on here. The biggest news is that I've started a new job. I won't go into much detail due to a) doocing reasons and b) boring my reader(s) reasons, but here's the lowdown: it's in the same area I was working in before, i.e., international relations, it's a step up on the ole career ladder and it's a permanent position. Woo hoo! No more nail-biting come contract renewal time. So far I'm liking it; my supervisor's great and actually entrusts me with responsibility, confirming my sneaking suspicion that I am, in fact, a grown-up.

In other news, the Guitar Hero and I saw The Who in concert last week and it fucking rocked. They played for two hours straight, playing all of my favorites as if the playlist was designed by me. A part of why the concert was so great was that the average audience age was 45. 45 year old Who audience members simply don't get sloppily drunk, push through the crowd rudely or act cooler-as-thou, making for a happy concert experience for crowd-hater Cocoa Puffs. I did not have the need to kill any obnoxious jackasses and that lifted the concert up to best concert ever status.

This weekend the Guitar Hero's in Berlin on bizness and hanging with Mr. Highsteaks so I'm chilling with Friskie and hiding from the mountain of ironing that's threatening to overtake the bedroom. As a part of my procrastination measures I've baked scones and chocolate chip banana bread and straightened the kitchen. I even vacuumed, for crying out loud. Alas, there are a number of items on Mt. Wrinkly that would like to be worn next week so off on the expedition I go.

Innernets cookin'

As I mentioned a few posts ago, the cooking hormones have kicked in again. And even though I have shelves full of cookbooks (seriously, around 50 of them are taking up precious bookshelf space), I've been wandering the net looking for simple but delicious recipes. So far, I've tried out these three:
- chick pea salad. Perfect because it only calls for 4 ingredients. Making it takes all of five minutes.
- cold sesame noodles. Maybe not perfect, but damn good. Simplest peanut sauce recipe I've come across. BTW, I used vegetable broth instead of chicken, and I added carrots and dropped the scallions (not a huge fan of the onion family).
- maple breakfast loaf. Perfect because I always have the ingredients (in one form or another) on hand. Also perfect because it doesn't have eggs, which I hardly ever have in the house. Have I mentioned my egg aversion?

Here a few others I have bookmarked for future cooking runs:
- biscuit muffins - biscuits but without the pesky rolling-out part
- tuna pasta salad - I think I'd make it with the edamame. Could be good in a laptop lunchbox.
- eggrolls - not what I would categorize under simple, but it sounds delicious. Maybe I can con the Guitar Hero into taking over head chef responsiblity for this one.

And this one could be good, but I wonder if I would actually go to the trouble of making them. I think gorging on regular potato chips once in awhile is perfectly acceptable.