Author: girl

6th coffee date : blondies

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This week we made blondies (p. 218), a cookie bar that I’d never made and rarely eat. For the 5 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, we used Icelandic chocolate, sold as part of the ‘sustainable Iceland’ project (I’m guessing that means ‘helping Iceland have an economy so it can sustain its existence as a nation’ and not necessarily a particularly environmental goal). I’m glad I picked it, because it sure was tasty.

Blondies, I’ve discovered, are made by spreading chocolate chip cookie dough in a jelly roll pan, baking, and then cutting into bars. The recipe admonishes, ‘Do not overbake!’ Well, we slightly overbaked them (if my partner keeps picking bar cookies, a possibility that never crossed my mind before embarking on this project, I’m thinking we would do well to invest in a standard sized jelly roll pan to replace our slightly too-large one). And then let them cool overnight, erroneously putting them in the category of brownies and lemon bars, which the book recommends leaving to cool overnight. It being the dead of winter, and our house being only slightly more humid than the desert, they were, shall we say, not as chewy as one might like this morning. Still yummy! Just not really that chewy at all.

Besides these user errors, the recipe was pretty standard. Butter, eggs, two kinds of sugar, vanilla, nuts, chocolate. Mix together, spread in a pan, bake. As with the sugar cookies, there was nothing about this recipe that would make me recommend ditching your favorite blondie recipe (if you’re a person who has a favorite blondie recipe distinct from your favorite chocolate chip recipe) and replacing it with this one.

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 2
match to expectations: 2
“the cookie itself”: 2.5

6th coffee date : blondies

cold weather woes

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Having spent so many years in places where winter starts on November 1st, it’s still somewhat shocking to me to have winter come in with a vengeance in February. I’ve already adjusted to the idea that winter is mild, it’s in the 30s, blah blah blah and then, wham! Suddenly my hair is standing on end from static electricity, I’m slathering on body butter like there’s no tomorrow, and I can’t work in the basement for longer than an hour or so without starting to chatter. I’ve taken to wearing my silk long johns in the house, along with slippers and the standard several layers of wool, because (as I’m sure is the case everywhere) natural gas rates are still going up up up. I haven’t quite gotten to the hat stage, but if I had some of those oh-so-punk-rock fingerless gloves, I wouldn’t be above putting them on.

Along with all of this comes the inevitable sinus infection. This year’s isn’t so bad, but it’s dragging and I’d really rather just not have any more head congestion. Enter my nemesis: the Neti pot. I have been (strongly) encouraged by my acupuncturist to use the Neti pot to clear out my sinuses and prevent a lingering low grade infection. And, I have used it before, and it’s not unbearable (8 years of competitive swimming left me with a chronic shoulder injury and the ability to control the flow of air through my nose in pretty much any way you might come up with). It’s just not that fun, and it’s a pretty ignoble endeavor, bending over a sink to pour salt water into your nostril. Yeah. Not to mention kind of messy.

But, in the interest of remaining off of antibiotics, I will get out the little pot, polish it up, and follow the recommendation of the person I pay for such advice.

Right after I put on another sweater.

cold weather woes

too many cops for one block, literally

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Block full of cops.

Today I returned, at 4:30pm, from running an errand to discover police cars zooming through my neighborhood, sirens blaring. I figured there had been an accident on the main road (there was, more on this in a minute), but as I turned onto my (dead-end) block, I only got halfway to my house before three cop cars were piled up at the intersection behind me. Cops jumped out to stop, question, handcuff, and plunk in the back of one of the (now four) Hyattsville PD cruisers, a kid who had been just minutes before walking down the other side of the street talking on his cell phone.

By the time I got to my house (in the middle of the block), four more cruisers had zoomed down to the cul de sac (P.G. County, Maryland / National Capitol Park Police, Riverdale Park, and our own University Park unit), and had two more people sitting on the sidewalk. They were shortly joined by four more Riverdale Park cars (2 of them canine units, leading me to believe they were looking for dealers in the park at the end of our block) and our town police chief (arriving in a plain white sedan). At this point, the 11 cop cars from 5 jurisdictions (something I got used to seeing in DC, but didn’t expect to find out here in the ‘burbs) were completely filling the street, sandwiched in around the handful of resident cars parked on the block.

The cops didn’t seem to be doing much more than milling around; no guns were out, no megaphones were squawking, no hordes of people were being frog-marched from the park. So, I made myself dinner, and when I looked outside again around 5:05pm, there had appeared in front of my house an ambulance (thank you, Hyattsville volunteer FD), a tow-truck pulling a smashed car, and an also-smashed black pickup truck. Bearing in mind that I live on a dead-end street, I was at this point dying to know what the heck was going on, and also convinced that no one would believe me unless I documented the scene (which I did, although only on film, as my digital camera is still broken; otherwise, I’d be sharing the photos now). Once outside, I finally got the story from a guy walking back up the block, who was not a cop, and who seemed only too happy to tell me what was going on.

What was going on: a car had been jacked (I’m guessing in the park over in Riverdale, since the park police were the jurisdiction farthest from us), driven away with the owner still inside (through Riverdale Park and Hyattsville, no doubt ‘at high speed’), and had slammed into another car (at the major intersection on the corner of our town, 2 blocks away from my house), driving that car up onto the side of the road (most likely the smashee being the car on the tow truck, and the smasher being the black pickup).

The carjackers then made the strategic error of turning into our town in an attempt to get away. Any taxi driver who’s dropped off in here, or any college student trying to get back to campus from Target, could have told them this was a doomed choice. Finding themselves in a morass of dead-end blocks, they ditched the car a couple of blocks down from ours (leaving the owner with it), and ‘fled on foot’ through the park, ending up at the end of our block where they were stopped and held until the owners of the two cars could come over and identify them. The guy who told me all this was the husband of the woman in the smashed car, who lives on the block behind us (more data to support the assertion that most accidents happen within a mile of home, as she was only 2 blocks from her house when she was run off the road). By 5:20pm, all the cop cars had driven off (one by one, carefully extricating themselves from the wedge formation they had created on the block).

My timing couldn’t have been better on this, in terms of getting to see most of the action but not getting hit by either carjackers or police officers zooming around my block like maniacs. When I passed the intersection, I figured there had been an accident as I saw a car at the side of the road (the smashee, as it turns out) and a cop car with lights flashing. Not 10 minutes later, there was the full pile-up on our street.

I can’t wait to read the write-up for this in next month’s town newsletter.

too many cops for one block, literally

basement workshop

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After many delays, I invested time today in getting the basement really set up for working with glass. Over the six months—it’s hard to believe it’s been that long—since I took the mosaic-making workshop in Ann Arbor, I’ve slowly accumulated the necessary supplies and tools. I now have two work tables (one made from two sawhorses and a door, and one a converted sideboard), shelves, a selection of stained glass, grout, primer, plywood, a jigsaw, storage containers, two kinds of adhesive, safety goggles, and the necessary tools for actually cutting the glass itself. Most importantly, I have the space, as we’ve worked hard to get the non-mosaic related stuff in the basement organized and stored and distantly as possible from the space where the little shards of glass are likely to be flying around.

In a happy coincidence, a friend from college who lives in town has also recently learned to make mosaics, so he and I have had two successful play dates so far. The process is simple: he comes over, we both sit in the basement and work on our individual projects, and everything gets stored on my aforementioned shelves. Today I was able to have everything organized and set out when he arrived, so we both made quite a bit of progress on the pieces themselves. He’s been generous enough to allow me to use the vitreous glass tiles that he bought as a lot on eBay, so we’ve had fun exploring the colors and exclaiming over the sheer volume of tiles he’s acquired. I imagine that I won’t work with tiles exclusively; on my current piece (an exciting 9×9 inch square) I plan to used stained glass for the background after working the foreground in tile.

This evening, after our play date was over, I spent some further time gluing my tiny pieces of tile to the board so that I could feel accomplished before heading to bed (I like to lay out relatively large sections, swap pieces in and out, generally fiddle around with the tesserae, and then glue them down all at once when I’m satisfied with the final result). Having just started today, I’ve completed maybe a quarter of the surface (so, if you’re following along at home, that would be a 3×3 inch square…in 5 hours of work), and the last thing I did before cleaning up was do the edge tiles, so that they can set up overnight. Which means that with only 15 more hours of work, I’ll be ready to agonize over the grout color and find out if I remember how to apply it!

It’s really amazing how much time even small works take, which I suppose is why they cost quite a bit as art pieces. If I were figuring my time at my adjunct teaching rate (let’s not even consider an attorney rate), I’d be looking at a $400 trivet, before even thinking about the cost of supplies and the nebulous calculation of the market value of my creativity itself. Of course, I hope I was a better sociology professor after 8 years than I am a mosaic artist after 6 months! Check back with me in a half dozen years or so.

basement workshop

5th cookie date : janhagels

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Last night we got back on track with our regular Thursday cookie date, and made janhagels (p. 304). These were, in my opinion, the best cookies yet. As advertised, they were almond-flavored dough, covered with sliced almonds, cinnamon and sugar. Delicious! I have an affinity for European style cookies, the type that are basically butter, sugar, and nuts in a variety of forms. So, I was excited to try these, and rewarded by mouth-watering cookies at the end of the night.

The recipe was designated at the easiest level, and we both found it to be so. After a few weeks of shoring up our baking weaknesses, we decided to play to our strengths this time around (partly because we were both a little drained from last week’s mild flu), and I’m sure that contributed to our evaluation of relative difficulty. In practical terms, this meant that I did all the things by hand (measured, combined, separated the egg, buttered the jelly roll pan) and my partner used the electric mixer. Besides going faster, I enjoyed the process more this way (I’m not, shall we say, at ease in activities I’m not good at). I need to work on my slicing technique—the size of the resulting diamonds varied widely—but this time we did better getting the dough into the jelly roll pan (we used our hands, which worked well as the dough consistency was closer to rolled than to drop). We slightly overbaked the cookies, but only slightly (relying on our oven’s history of taking slightly longer than average with baking, I neglected to check them before the designated time). The result was a more browned edge, which approximated toffee in some places. Delicious!

At this point, you’re probably wondering what we’re doing with all of these cookies, or imagining that we’re on the ‘gain 5 pounds a week’ plan for 2007. We eat a few on the night we make them, and then half of what remains goes to work with my partner (so his coworkers can gain 5 pounds each week), and the other half is kept at the house for the guys who come over to game on Sunday afternoons (so they can gain 5 pounds each week). From the half that stays at the house, I usually also set aside a few for our neighbors down the block (I’m not sure whether they appreciate this or curse us and our cookie-making).

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 2
match to expectations: 4
‘the cookie itself’: 4.5

5th cookie date : janhagels