Sweetheart rosesI mentioned I got flowered and ballooned at the airport on Thursday. Here are a couple of the roses. I adore the color and sweetheart roses are just so beautiful. I’m also pleased to announce that it’s Saturday and I don’t feel like crap. HURRAY! I downed Emergen-C all week and I really think it helped. I still feel pretty run-down - we probably shouldn’t have hit a late movie last night - but overall I feel good.

Since tonight I’m being taken out for a belated birthday dinner, I decided to make a tasty belated birthday brunch today. Bacon and Swedish pancakes, plus eggs for the Fop. I finally got a splatter screen thing to put on top of the pan while frying things that like to spit like bacon and I’m happy with how much less clean up is necessary. Swedish pancakes are really the most awesome pancakes on the planet, for the record. And apparently eggs scrambled in the bacon pan are also full of awesomeness. Who knew? Well, I certainly didn’t! Eggs and I don’t have what you’d call a good relationship. We only get along when there’s quite a bit of flour or milk involved. And, thanks to the bacon, my cast iron frying pan is almost happily re-seasoned after much neglect. My Swedish pancake pan is seasoned so well it’s non-stick. Ah… breakfast happiness.

tags: , , , , , , ,

By popular and somewhat rabid demand, below is the caramel corn recipe of doom! If you’ve never boiled sugar before, this is an easy recipe, just remember it’s really hot! (No licking the spoon!) But it’s also simple to clean up since sugar dissolves nicely in water. Enjoy!

Aunt Ellie’s Caramel Corn
From Marcia Mullen -> Rachael Emmons -> Carla Emmons -> YOU!

Boil 5 minutes:
1/2 c corn syrup
1 c butter
2 c brown sugar
1 t salt
Add and stir:
1 t baking soda
1 t vanilla
Pour over 7 quarts of popped corn.
Bake 1 hour at 250 degrees stirring every 15 minutes.
Pour out onto cookie sheets or large tray to cool.

Caramel cornNotes:
Time your boiling from when you get pretty good sized bubbles, not just the tiny ones that come up the sides.
Air-popped popcorn is the best choice and will stay fresh the longest!
7 quarts of popcorn makes for very well-coated caramel corn. 9 quarts or more yields a more moderate coating.
Your pan can be heaped a bit with popcorn because it sticks together nicely once the sugar mixture is poured on. (I put half the popcorn in the pan, pour half the sugar over it, stir, add the rest of the popcorn then pour the rest over the pan and stir.) Just stir in slow-motion!
Stir in almonds or almond slivers for yumminess.

tags: , , , ,

That’s right - this week online retailers will be doing just about anything to get our business. I’ve received no fewer than 6 offers to upgrade to 3-day-type shipping for the cost of standard shipping just this morning. Happily, I successfully planned ahead this year and ordered everything I wanted from online places well in advance. Hurray! I still need to spend this evening at the Mall of Doom, but at least I won’t be waiting for packages and hoping they arrive before I have to leave for New England.

Oh wait, I WILL be fretting over packages arriving this week. Why? Because the FedEx delivery in my area at this time of year is completely inept. Saturday, a nice man drove over 2 packages for us that had been mistakenly delivered to his house. This morning, I tracked another package I am expecting only to discover that FedEx thinks it was left at my front door. Wrong. I called the company I ordered from and they quickly marked it as lost and will re-ship it overnight so I should have everything Wednesday. This is not the first year this has happened either and it’s always FedEx. UPS has never been a problem, even though some days they deliver twice (which seems inefficient but I get all my UPS packages on time and at my house so who am I to judge?).

Three batches of little cakes left to do.
Four batches of fudge last week.
Five batches of cookies yesterday.
Six batches of caramel corn Saturday.

No, I am not going to continue to try to make my holiday cooking into a sugar-laden version of the 12 Days of Christmas. Perhaps another year. ;)
But I’ve used seven pounds of butter and about ten pounds of sugar, so I *could* keep going with the 12 Days if I really wanted too.

The Fop took the train down to DC last night to spend a couple days in the actual office. He’ll be back Tuesday night. I’m a little pouty since I’m leaving Thursday afternoon for Christmas so I won’t get to see much of him this week. Of course, it also means I have the bed and the house pretty much to myself. [insert evil grin here] Okay, this just means I get to crank NPR in the morning (oooh, I’m so hardcore) and have popcorn for dinner. But this makes me happy enough that I can stop pouting.

I need to clean out my wonderful car for my holiday road trip too… I’ve been assured that there still will be snow up there when I get there! Still none here, but we’ve got serious wind.

tags: , , , , , , ,

It’s a weekend for holiday cooking which has distracted me from the disgusting weather. The volume of popcorn I made yesterday far surpasses the volume of snow our area has received this year. I made a LOT of caramel corn - 6 batches. I also made cookie dough to bake up today. I’ve got 2 other kinds of cookies on the list to bake too. I’m beginning to think I might be a little insane. Well, I certainly was yesterday as I bopped around my kitchen. I’m a desk-worker though, and as such not accustomed to bopping around my kitchen all day and all night. Last night when I finally stopped and hung out on the couch, my legs, feet and back started to remind me of that. This morning, Advil is my friend. As soon as the coffee kicks in, I’ll be firing up the oven and KitchenAid. … Oh and clean up more of the popcorn bits that are now everywhere in the kitchen and dining room.

Hmm… I think I should just go have more coffee.

tags: , , ,

A winter treeThere’s nothing like a busy week to make Friday arrive startlingly quickly. Between work craziness and cooking experiments, I’m both surprised and relieved that it’s Friday already! By the way, you can use white chocolate bits instead of semi-sweet in Never Fail Fudge with no problems. butterscotch bits don’t melt as nicely though. And don’t use old chocolate chips - they muck up the whole “never fail” part of the recipe.

Unfortunately, I do not have any snow. While there is snow in the forecast this weekend, it is bookended by rain. This positively sucks. However, at least I am assured of some snow next week when I head up north. If nothing else, my dad will put a snowball in the freezer for me if it looks like the snow is going to melt away. I page through my pictures of snow from years ago and get rather homesick. I don’t think I’ve taken any photos this month. It’s been pretty busy, I guess, but it still seems strange.

The primary elections continue to scare and amuse me. Fred Thompson appears to have woken up finally in Wednesday’s debate in Iowa. He’s really quite witty, but maybe he prepped his lines first. Huckabee and Ron Paul are still nutty. But I’m tired of lawyers, which doesn’t leave me a lot of options with either party. I hate the concept of “elect-ability” in our modern, marketing-driven democracy. I also have become wise or cynical enough that I can see the lies inherent in the system. I need to figure out if I need to pick/register for a party in advance in PA to vote in the primaries. Currently I’m registered as an independent - not only does it leave me blissfully unaffiliated, it means I get less junk mail.

In other news, I’m a sucker for the year-end lists in review. NPR had a book list from independent booksellers on Morning Edition. So many lovely books on the list! Which of course, leads me to remind myself that purchasing books does not mean I am purchasing the time to read them. Ah, the folly!

tags: , , , , , , , ,

The house still smells like curry. Yum. Why does it smell like curry? Because last night I made tasty little turkey mini-burgers (not mini-turkey burgers) with curry, ginger, garlic and cumin happiness. I used slightly sweet Hawaiian rolls instead of dinner rolls since a) I couldn’t for the life of me find pre-baked dinner rolls in the grocery store and b) I thought the sweetness might compliment the curry nicely. I was right about the latter too. I tweaked the recipe (ripped, literally, from Bon Appetit) by cutting it in half and dropping the cilantro. I think I will tweak it further by adding a bit of garlic to the ground meat instead of just to the curry mayo.

Saturday was fun and productive on several levels. I did a large grocery shopping trip. I may shop on Saturday morning more often. The customers are nicer. I chatted over rump roast with a lovely little couple. We were trying to find smaller roasts for our small households. Then another older gentleman asked me about cooking pork chops. This is so much better than the usual grocery store experience I have. No one even tried to walk off with my cart! At the checkout, I was reminded why I prefer to bag my own groceries but even that wasn’t so bad. When I got home, the Fop (who woke up feeling not quite well) was off to an event.

For some reason I decided it was time to clean out, purge and organize the major cupboard of food stuffs in the kitchen. I hauled the step stool up from the basement and dove in. An unknown amount of time later, the cupboard of doom was under control. I have a little pile of old crackers to put out for the birds and squirrels (well, mostly the squirrels).

In the grinder this morning is Kenya AA from Armeno. It came out of my French press this morning positively perfect. Some people have good hair days, I have good coffee days. This morning I am sipping divine coffee: rich enough that I know I’m drinking coffee but gentle enough for a Monday morning. There’s not even a hint of bitterness or acidity. I love my coffee and my French press.

Almost a Giant River Otter To our left, we have the elusive Giant River Otter. Actually, they’re not elusive at all! They just move too fast for me to catch uber-cute pictures of them. They also do cute little human things with their hands. The zoo announced that they have more Baby Giant River Otters (say that 3 times fast! it’s fun!) this spring so I’ll be going back to try to catch photos of more than just their backs.

In other weekend news, I got a small snow flurry yesterday much to my great glee. It’s going to warm up later this week so some of the snow we have now might melt. Then again, the snow is packed so solid right now that it might as well be ice. I had a great time (really!) Saturday morning when I finally decided to get the snow and ice off my car. It was actually much easier Saturday than it would have been mid-week. The bottom had iced up so that it all came off my car in big chunks. For my next trick I drove out of the driveway I hadn’t bothered to shovel. I was hoping for some dramatic crunchy of crusty snow or something. Nope, the trusty Subaru drove right on top of the 3-4 inches of packed snow and ice. There are barely tire prints. I’m not sure why this inspires such glee.

Alright, now time for another round of random links. From the open tabs section of my bookmarks:

And last week’s best comic award goes to Chickweed Lane:

Scary how apt it is, no?

And now my coffee is gone, many work e-mails written, some status reports reviewed, and other miscellaneous things have been addressed. Oh, and a couple of out of date applications are now updated. Did you know that Fetch (beloved FTP client of Dartmouth alums of a certain era) now has an OSX widget as well as its standard interface? There are lots of other cool features available, but the widget is shaped like a dog bone. Jim Matthews (the mastermind behind the cute little dog) purchased the source code from Dartmouth after being on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and started his own company. How exciting can an FTP client really be? For those of you not yet in the know, Fetch turns your cursor into a running dog while it’s uploading files. Beat that, Unix command-line ftp-ers!

tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,