this is weird

I had on CNN in the background and there was a commercial for... Kazakhstan. The country. In Central Asia. Opining on what a wonderful, modern place it is. It wasn't even suggesting we all pack our suitcases and come visit or anything. It was just saying, yeah, Kazakhstan's cool.

Okay.

I kept waiting for it to be some kind of parody or something, but it wasn't.

Has anyone else seen this? I swear to god, if I ingested any psychoactive drugs this afternoon, it was by accident.

In other news, I came home this afternoon to (besides very odd advertising on CNN) a very warm, comfortable house. Then I realized that was because my son put the thermostat on 68 while I was at work. Oh, we are gonna have a talk about this later. It ain't gonna be 68 in here this winter unless he gets a job to pay my electric bill. Grr.

Finally, did I tell you about my experimental banana bread last week? I can't remember. Anyway, it didn't come out very well, but I'm trying again tonight. After I run to the store, which I should be doing instead of typing to you all. Long, long time readers will remember my historic inability to make zucchini bread, even though I tried for many summers in a row with a plethora of different recipes. Banana bread seems to be going down the same route. But yet I persist. Just like, um, Kazakhstan! Yeah, that's it...Kazakhstan!

xoxo

in case you were up all night worrying n' stuff

According to the kind people at Slate who put up a widget for those of us in Gawker Nation to check whether our email addresses were on the list the hackers released as being hacked, mine was not. So, between that and all my frantic password changing and credit card info deleting I did last night, I guess evil people on the interwebs aren't buying shit with my semi-hard earned money even as we speak.

In other news, we had our holiday departmental lunch today, which was somewhat of a comedown in the festivity league, considering a bunch of people didn't make it. So it was a very small and intimate gathering of my boss, our other surviving full time doc, Townie Girl, Girl With No Catchy Nickname, and me. I ate a boatload of Chinese food and two cookies and now, two hours after the fact, I am still so stuffed, I'm thinking I can't go to the gym after work or I will puke. The very expensive (sigh) cookies I made were a big hit***, proving that the recipe was indeed idiot-proof. And with a little more online shopping today, I am officially done with the Xmas gift-procuring, other than picking up a few scratch tickets and Evil Kitty's Cosmic Catnip. (We figure if she's gonna stroke out any day now, she should go out in a drug-induced haze, is all I'm saying.)

Oh! And I curled my hair again today and it did not come out as good as yesterday. I think it works better when your hair is a little dirty. Nevertheless, I have my hair in an updo (festive!) and I am wearing my ridiculous tunic/shirt/dress that looks like a wedding cake (festive!) so the lack of festivity in that luncheon cannot be attributed to me. Again, all I'm saying.

I hope you all are having yourselves a festive Monday full of good hair, cookies, and a lack of internet crime. If not, Tuesday's another day.

xoxo

***I have enough leftover graham crackers, chocolate and butterscotch chips, nuts, and coconut to make another pan of cookies, so you want some, you just speak up. Or else I'll just be throwing the stale baking supplies away three years from now in a cabinet-cleaning binge. You know how it goes.

to reiterate

For those of you who don't read the comments (i.e. everyone), let me just say again that not only did frying my turkey not involve any visits to the ED or calls to the fire department, it also resulted in the most delicious turkey EVAH! How could I have doubted myself and/or all those people who gave this contraption five stars on amazon? It did take 45 minutes to drain and clean the damn thing, but even so, it was *still* worth it.

Other highlights of the day included being hustled at Scrabble. The Benevolent L: "Oh, okay, I'll play, but I'm not good at games, and you've got a much bigger vocabulary than me," followed by "Oh! I won? Really?" D enjoyed Scrabble with us as well, and lemme tell you, getting him to socialize and actually have fun? That made my day, above and beyond all the other pleasures. Oh, and we also watched Winter's Bone, an excellent movie that is not really up there in "uplifting holiday entertainment" but I guess it does make you thankful that you're not growing up in the Ozarks with a father who cooks crank and then goes missing and a mother who's so mentally ill she's almost catatonic, that you don't have an uncle named "Teardrop", and that you don't need to shoot and skin squirrels for dinner. So there is that! And the young actress who plays the lead is just transcendent. Highly recommended.

Hope you all are enjoying spending today digesting and/or contributing to WalMart's profits or something, whilst I work (boo!).

xoxo

tuezday randomosity

Hey, kids. Ubaldo6. All I'm sayin'.

Now, on to other matters. Remember last summer when I had The Best Cheap Red Wine I Ever Tasted in My Life in the North End and research proved that it was from Paso Robles? And that I'd probably never find it again in Massachusetts? Well, I went into the nice wine store by Marcy's office today and they had a whole bunch of Paso Robles wines. (Well, three. That's a bunch, isn't it?) Anyway, I didn't find the super-delicious wine, but I bought a different one to try. And I thought you should know. Because my inability to find the liquors of my choice probably haunts y'all day and night. Admit it.

Also? Yesterday? I got home from work fairly late, so as soon as I came in I started cooking. And--I'm sure you remember *this* from last summer's blog entries too, because I know you all take notes--my stove has started doing that thing again where if I use too many burners at once or heat the oven too high, it shorts out and I need to go flip the breaker off and on, which I totally don't know if it's an electrical problem or a stove problem, because when my electrician was here it hadn't been doing it for months so I didn't ask him to look at it, and if it does turn out to be the stove, I'll be pissed because that stove is only like 6 years old and I still think of it as "my new stove", and holy shit is this a run-on sentence. Anyway, because of the annoying stove problem I was only cooking pasta on it and meanwhile steaming broccoli in the microwave. Plus I had shrimp defrosting under cold water in the sink. It was all much more complicated than it had to be. So, about to give my multi-tasking a big FAIL, I said to D, hey, wanna help me make dinner? To my shock and awe, he immediately said "sure!" He then peeled all the shrimp after I showed him how to do one. You gotta understand, since he's been sick he's been very, very reluctant to try to do new things. He's terribly concerned he'll make a mistake. I can't tell you how surprised I was that he jumped right in with something he'd never done before. It's one of those incremental progress things that sneak up on me, I guess.

Finally, you know how when you go out shopping with a mental picture of what it is you're hoping to find, you never see anything even close and you get frustrated and you buy nothing? Yeah.

No, this is finally. I don't have Napoli in my lineup tonight and he's killing Lester. Goddamn it.

xoxo

good evening!

1.) So, this whole weekend was a big cooking FAIL. I already told you about yesterday's salmon texture problem. Well, today I inadvertently had this piece of beef brisket (don't ask) that I would not have intentionally bought, but since I had it, and it had a sticker on it that said "pot roast", and I was planning to be home for a few hours doing my taxes, I thought, "Okay! Make pot roast!" As you do. I do not know what I did or failed to do, but that was one tough piece o' meat. Usually I would use, like, chuck for pot roast and it turns out all fatty and falling-apart tender and yummy. This, not so much. But the natives chowed it all down, so I guess I am the only one who was dissatisfied.

2.) But it was a very lovely day today, so after the cooking fail and the taxes win, I went for a nice walk down to the beach. And once again I wanted to run. However I had not planned ahead, and thus was not wearing my new sports bra, so running was a FAIL too. I lasted less than three minutes before my bra strap was falling off my shoulder and my boobs felt like they were about to break free in a horrific wardrobe malfunction. (How do I know it was less than three minutes? Because I was walking along thinking I wanna run. Should I run? Even though I'm not dressed for it? But I wanna... and then I got to "Breed" in the fast and aggressive bottom section of my workout 2 playlist, and it made my mind up for me. But I couldn't make it through the whole song without my underwear thwarting me.) So I returned to walking. This is what poor planning leads to. Learn from my mistakes.

xoxo

learn from my experience

Oh, I am full of the advice and helpful tips this weekend.

Today's bit of wisdom? Should you be baking and realize that, goddammit, you are out of regular vegetable oil, do not, repeat, do not, just say fuck it and substitute the olive oil, which you have plenty of. Mediterranean brownies for everybody!

Sigh. In the words of Morgan Earp (and you know I've been waiting to use this): "I ain't shown myself to advantage, I am fully fuckin' aware."

xoxo

the present Santa didn't bring

When my mom died, we gave away some of her clothes and such and threw away some others, and I appropriated the things I wanted (the famous Calphalon wok!), but we didn't really do a whole cleanout of everything. It was a bad year and my dad and I were both overwhelmed.

I kinda sorta realized today that the reason that huge box tucked away in one of the closets that said KitchenAid on it was so heavy was that it in fact contained a never-used 5 quart professional series mixer in Imperial Gray. Never used. Are you kidding me? Where did it come from? Did we buy it for her for some occasion or other? Why did she never use it? (The answer to that one is actually easy. I'm sure she was saving it for when her other mixer broke. Which, let that be a lesson to you. Use your shit and don't save it, or you may die before it ever comes out of the box.)

So, yeah, I regifted it to myself for Christmas. Ho ho ho.

Feliz Navidad, blog readers. I hope Santa brings you whatever would be your equivalent of an Imperial Gray KitchenAid on the awesomeness scale.

xoxo

chem question

(You know I like to put these questions forth to you, my lovely blog readers, because I trust your intelligence and knowledge implicitly, right?)

As I was discussing with tripleindemnity, I am thinking about making cranberry sauce from scratch for Thanksgiving. Why is another great question, because my family likes the crap in the can, but again, that's neither here nor there. My real question is thus:

I looked up how to do this in How to Cook Everything, my fall-back resource for instructions and recipes for basic things that I don't know how to do or make. It said to use 1 1/2 cups sugar, or 2 cups sugar if you want it thicker. So am I right to deduce from this that there is something in the chemical properties of the sugar that makes the sauce gel, and that it would be impossible to substitute splenda for some or all of it?

xoxo

cake!

I made a Double Chocolate Gooey Butter cake last night--Paula Deen recipe--and can I just say? Best. Cake. Evah.

Of course, nothing made with two sticks of butter, a package of cream cheese, and 2/3 of a box of powdered sugar can be, by definition, bad. Add in chocolate and, you know. (I'll note that the actual recipe calls for a whole box of sugar, but that's too too even for me.) It's chocolate cheesecake on crack. It's diabetes on a plate. It's an extra three miles.

It's good.

xoxo