New/Old Obsessions

Things that I have lately been obsessed with out of nowhere.

The Ellen Degeneres Show: I laugh. I cry. I eat breakfast. I blow dry my hair. It's a good time.

Magazines: There is something really satisfying about flipping through a magazine and looking at chopped up fragments of lipstick and women with exactly the right method of smoky eyes. This is something I did a lot more in high school and stopped doing for a while...I guess when I started making my own money and tried to save more of it. At which, by the way, I have drastically failed. I will be able to do literally nothing this summer other than work.

Another weird new thing: I kind of miss high school. Not so much waking up early, but sort of the feeling that we were all suffering through the same crap together, the fact that I would definitely see a couple people I liked every day, the ability to not pay attention during class (I barely remember what that feels like, as I am interested in all my classes, so I pay attention in all of them, but my brain is constantly exhausted. Even by the art classes. Actually, mostly by the art classes.). I miss the time when it was normal not to have your license, that it was taken for granted that your parents would drive you around.  I miss practicing putting on makeup from those makeup kits you got when you were like 12 for Christmas that had the most ridiculous colors in them. I miss knowing my friends were all at home, living at most 10 or 15 minutes away, rather than across states or oceans. It's not that I don't have friends here. It's just that I don't have access to the same variety of people, who all know me as something different. It feels like I'm stuck as the same person most of the time, because all my friends are from the same place.

Anyway. Just some recent thoughts.

I'm back...

a. ...in black
b. ...to blogging
c. ...and I'm 21
d. ...with Matt Damon

OK. So I thought I would wait to blog again until I had new goals to post about. Baking, cooking, sewing, horseback riding, I don't know what I expected. 

But I don't really have any new goals. Or, I do, but I guess they don't fall under one coherent heading. So I guess instead of listing goals, I will explain my current situation.

I am graduating without any knowledge of what I will be doing next year. This makes me feel scared, excited, anxious, lost, and calm. Zoloft may be right for me.

I do have some ideas about things I would like to do while I take time off from my academic career - I have an inkling it isn't really over - when I'm home after graduation. Other than, of course, travel, which I want to do a lot of but cannot as of yet afford.
1. Take classes at Jo-Ann fabrics. I have been wanting to be able to make my own clothes forEVER, or at least to be able to embellish them a bit. Also I think they do jewelry-making classes, which is something I did for fun for a bit when I was in high school. It was a phase somewhere between collage-ing and making those friendship bracelets out of embroidery thread.
2. Take dance classes/yoga. I lump these two goals together because I should really do both. Among other physical activities. Like weight lifting, swimming, and running. Sadly, I do none of these things regularly enough. (Ok, I admit I'm not that sad about not running regularly. But at least I know I should. My freakishly high metabolism will not last forever.)
3. Paint and write. These go together too. They are, respectively, my minor and major here at college, and I hope I will continue doing them when I go home on a regular enough basis to maybe start trying to sell myself as an artist and/or author.
4. Get a part time job. I am oddly not worried about this. Maybe because I will be living with my parents, but also maybe because I am not setting my sights that high and I have a pretty good resume for coffee-house-type work.
5. Get my driver's license. Let's not talk about it. I know I need it, you know I need it. I hate driving, but it's a necessity. Especially if I really want to achieve goal #4. And have friends. And basically, live. I think my parents might pay for me to take a class. There are pros and cons to this. If there are 16-year-olds in my class, that could be a slightly embarrassing con. The pros, however, are a long list that include not having to drive with my parents, not having to drive with my parents, and not having to drive with my parents. I love my parents, I just don't like driving with them. Something about being in a small, contained space where I have control over whether we live or die doesn't seem to sit well with them. They use my full name a lot. And laugh at me. While I turn the color of a Katy in the sun. (Red.)

Anyway. I guess these are silly things to post about NOW, while I am still at school and cannot achieve these goals, but now they are at least recorded for posterity. Or clarity. Or parity. Or scarcity.

Ahem.


I guess I could talk about my artwork here. I am taking advanced painting and sculpture II. I had a hard time getting into sculpture stuff, but I think I have found my niche. It involves playing with wax. Basically I make something out of wax that will have sand poured on it. Sand hardens --> stone. Stone is mold. Somebody will pour liquid metal into this mold. Wax will melt out (I almost typed Max will welt out) and then metal will solidify. Mold is broken. Voila, art. This is called the lost wax process. I think that is a silly name. I did not lose the wax, I purposefully sent it away.

It seems funny to me that you spend so much time in this process working with the wax, but then you are left with this cold metal thing that wasn't what you were working with at all, but is what you were envisioning the whole time, and meanwhile your warm, friendly wax (or Max) is "lost" and forgotten.

But I digress.
(I love that phrase. It makes me feel like Dumbledore.)

As far as painting goes, it's pretty self-explanatory. Brushes, paint, canvas, water, palette knife, and palette. Hopefully if all the above tools are applied in the correct ways and used at the right times, beauty will ensue. If not, you can say it's abstract. Or conceptual. (Conceptual art, to me, is like an inside joke. When I'm on the inside, it can be funny or not funny. When I'm on the outside, screw you. I don't know where I'm going with that anymore. But inside jokes were the worst thing ever in middle school, right? I think they were invented for the twelve-year-old female.)

I am currently working on a relief and another thing for sculpture which is like circular and leafy and I am using a knife to carve it out of the wax, which is not like candle wax by the way. I will take pictures if/when they are finished, if/when I am still blogging. For painting, I just started this one that is like a fantasy landscape. Theres a tree in the foreground with lanterns hanging from the branches and one big lantern-shaped house-ish thing hanging from a bigger branch. There may be fairies involved. I don't know yet. There are fairies in some of my previous stuff. I like them a lot.

Okay, bloggy world, that is all I can think of that is appropriate to post. Not that I'm thinking about anything inappropriate that I can't post. Ha.

Bye!

Cooking Goal End Date

Okay, so today is October 12th. Unfortunately, I did not make as many new dinner recipes as I had intended to. However, I HAVE been cooking meals. Just, you know, making a lot of things that I already knew how to cook.

I think this happened because the reward for baking something new is so much bigger (i.e. the insane deliciousness factor, plus your friends love you more and hang out with you to eat it) than the reward for making dinner. Plus by the time I make dinner, I'm pretty hungry and I just wanna eat asap. Whereas when I make dessert, I...just feel like eating chocolate, basically.

My next goal: A very delicious carrot cake for Rebecca's birthday. Rebecca is one of my roommates, and her birthday is this Saturday. Classes have been INSANE the last week or 2 (another reason I haven't cooked too many original dinners) so buying the ingredients may be difficult, let alone cooking the actual cake. But I asked her this week what her favorite cake was and that's what she said (no dirty joke intended). So, that's what I'm making. And it'll be delicious, damnit.

Dinner #3: Breakfast for Dinner

Okay. So tonight I decided to try something new to surprise Mike with when he comes over for dinner. Partly because I was a bit of a dork to him, and partly because it's fun. Also partly because I'm hungry. So..

my own version of the garbage plate!

Okay, the garbage plate is a delicacy in Rochester, according to my roommate Rebecca. It consists of macaroni and cheese, french fries, hamburger meat, and a whole lot of other things that are bad for you...One recipe I found:

1st layer: Home Fries and Macaroni/mayo (very slippery macaroni and mayonnaise) a little celery and carrots in the macaroni (very little). No unusual taste with the macaroni, just like all the take out fillers we've ever had. The home fries are crisp and delicious just like homemade.

2nd Layer: Two hamburger patties medium well done covered with melted cheese, a mustard horseradish sauce, and then covered with chili hot sauce. The mustard horseradish sauce is delicious - more horsey than mustard in flavor. The hot sauce is like every ground beef hot sauce you can imagine. Typical and very good. Not too hot, very zesty and rich.

Typical Garbage Plate:

MY version, on the other hand, was kind of a breakfast-dinner. It was scrambled eggs with a bunch of different kinds of cheese, green peppers, toast, garlic, mixed spices, and turkey meat (I don't know how to cook red meat because my mom doesn't eat it, hence never taught me how to cook it. I assume it's about the same, but now I like turkey meat and I'm kinda in the habit.)

It was delicious and a triumph.

Dinner #2 and Dessert #4

I have officially achieved my dessert goal with my fourth new recipe in a month. Ended with a classic:

Triple Chocolate Brownies:
2 tbsp unsalted butter + more for greasing
4 squares (4 oz) semi-sweet chocolate (We - Mike helped me - approximated this to be something like 1 cup, I think. I don't remember exactly, but whatever, the chocolate-y-er, the better)
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup sugar
2 lg eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt (Apparently this recipe is big on fractions.)
1 cup milk (ha. Semi-sweet all the way.) chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (Again, ha.)


Place oven rack in middle position, preheat to 350. Line an 8- or 9-inch square pan with aluminum foil, making sure two ends of the foil overhang the pan by about 2 in. so you can easily lift the brownies out of the pan later. (Okay, I messed up here and told Mike to grease the pan before I read the instruction, and that worked too.) Lightly rub bottom and sides of foil with butter. Set aside.
Combine chocolate, water, and butter in medium, heavy pot (that will fit all the ingredients) over low heat, stirring occasionally. When chocolate is just melted, turn off heat and add cocoa. Stir until combined and set aside to cool.
Add sugar, egg, vanilla, and stir until well blended. Add flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir until no flour shows. Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts, if using. 
Scrape batter into pan and bake for 20-25 minutes or until top feels firm and brownies pull away from sides of pan. Remove from oven and cool on rack for 15 min (or until you can't wait any longer and all your roommates are whining). Cut into 25 squares (or like 10) and serve. Store in airtight container or wrapped in foil or plastic wrap (unless it all disappears in the next 24 hours. In that case, you are fully entitles to leave it on the stove like I did).



I made brownies because Rebecca's boyfriend was here and my other roommate, Jessie, announced that we should have brownies. Those two reasons were enough for me. I borrowed another roommate's 9in square pan, and this was the beautiful and mouth-watering result. And yes, there is a chocolate chip heart on top.

Once again, my book-o-chocolate desserts did not fail me. They came out very chocolatey and delicious and I wondered, not for the first time, what I will do with myself once my metabolism slows down. (I am a very lucky person in that category. And I do mean lucky. I don't really exercise. Well, I do right now because I am taking a gym class. And I might keep doing it. But I have exercised sporadically, at best, for the first 20 years of my life. So the fact that I still weigh basically what I did in eighth grad is kind of astounding. Especially when you look at the crap I eat.)

Which brings me to Dinner #2. By the way, I have no idea why I thought I would cook dinner more often than dessert. I mean, I cook dinner a lot, but they are very rarely new, adventurous dinners. Also, Mike cooks for me sometimes, which is cool. Unfortunately, I saved this post as a draft and I now have no memory of what I cooked for this meal, although I'm pretty sure it involved pasta and frozen veggies and wasn't very good. Frozen veggies suck. Anyway, I have been too busy and important to blog lately. I do apologize. This will have to end.

Dessert #2: Chocolate chip banana cake

I know I said chocolate chip scones, but it turned out my recipe resource did NOT send me the recipe (yet. Fingers crossed.) so I had to bake something else for my detoxing purposes. One of my roommates had four bananas that were no longer, shall we say, in their prime. SO I looked up a recipe for banana cake and substituted the nuts (not my favorite thing) for chocolate chips (definitely my favorite thing) and left off the frosting. I practically filled my one cooking pan and it came out DELICIOUS!!!!

 [I know the picture's not that beautiful, it's just kind of brown with chocolate chip dots in it. You'll have to take my word for it that the inside was perfect and moist and the outside was just the right amount of crunchy and not burnt at all.]

Recipe: 
2/3 cup pecans or walnuts (Do not like. Did not use.)
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to rm temp., more for greasing
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 bananas
3 lg. eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour + 2 tsp for dusting
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp buttermilk (I literally just use butter and milk, because what IS buttermilk, anyway?)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract


Oven rack in middle. Preheat to 350. Do stuff to the nuts. Generously rub the bottom and sides of a 9 cup bundt pan with butter (clearly, I used a 9 x 13 inch pan, because...well, that's all I have here at school). Add 2 tsp flour and swirl around, coating buttered surfaces. Set aside.
Put butter and sugars in large bowl, beat with electric mixer (/wooden spoon) until smooth and creamy. Cut bananas in chunks, add to butter-sugar mixture and mix until well incorporated (this part is fun). Add eggs, one at a time, and mix until well incorporated (This part is slimy). Add flour, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and vanilla and mix until blended. Do not mix battter too much, or cake will be tough. Stir in pecans or walnuts by hand (or chocolate chips, if you are me). 
Spoon evenly into pan, bake 50-55 min or until top is firm and brown and toothpick (or fork) comes out clean. Let cool. Obviously.


I am seriously scoring this semester in the recipes I use/mess with. I am also getting mad good at the actual baking part of baking. I am much better at telling by looking when things are done. And (knock on wood) I haven't burnt a single thing yet! Why, you ask, do I consider this such a huge accomplishment when I've only made two desserts? Good point, fair reader.



...


because I've made THREE!

The banana cake was all but gone within a day after I made it (which I did on Friday, by the way) and then on Sunday my a cappella group went apple picking to bond with our new members. My boyfriend and roommates and I bonded particularly well with one of the girls (for some reason that came out sounding dirty. I swear it's not.), who came back to the apartment with us and collaborated in making....



APPLE CRISP!

Unfortunately, I cannot convey smell through my camera. But if I could, your mouths would be watering. All gazillion of you who read this. Ha. Ha ha. Anyway.

More on the smell: I haven't anticipated anything coming out of the oven this much since I was a kid, back when time slowed down colossally when your mom made cookies and you had missed licking the spoon because she forgot to give it to you and washed the bowl and you would have done many scary things, like walk around in the basement without lights on, to make the cookies bake faster...but I digress.

The cool thing about the apple crisp coming out so well was that we sort of made up the recipe. I mean, I found this one online:

EASY APPLE CRISP 

6 to 8 med. apples, peeled and sliced
1 c. sugar
1 c. flour
1 egg
6 tbsp. softened butter
Cinnamon sprinkle

Slice apples in bottom of 13x9x2 inch pan (ungreased). In bowl, mix sugar, flour, egg and butter until crumbly. Sprinkle on top, covering sliced apples. Lightly garnish with cinnamon sprinkle (if desired). Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour (until golden brown).

but then we realized that it doesn't call for either brown sugar or vanilla, both of which we felt were crucial. So I halved the sugar and made it half brown and half regular, and added about a teaspoon of vanilla. Also, one of my roommates has oats. A lot of oats. So we dumped in some of those too. And I was pretty liberal with the instruction "cinnamon sprinkle." All in all, deliciosity ensued.

Hell Week --> Chocolate Chip Scones

Usually a "hell week" is a week before a play, musical, concert - anything where there are rehearsals every night and you go home a) having forgotten that there is life off the stage and b) wondering how you can stand five more seconds of the people involved.

I just had an insane week with basically my life, and enough of it involved performance that I feel it is appropriate to call it a hell week of sorts. In the past seven days, I have been to three rehearsals, three rounds of auditions (The oldies a cappella group I'm in held auditions, I didn't have to audition for anything.), and (including tonight) three shows. While none of these things are inherently stressful activities, they took up SOO MUCH TIME.

Time during which, if I had not been rehearsing and whatnot, I could have been writing that paper that was due today that I instead wrote in bits and pieces every time I had a spare minute. I could have been painting for my art class. I could have read something for fun. Hell, I could have read my History homework. I could have been SLEEPING.

Consequently, I have been feeling like merde all week. (I don't normally swear in French. I just thought it might be classier than putting "shit." Which I have now done anyway.) SOO after show number 3 tonight I plan to get some cooking therapy. Which I'm sure will turn into eating therapy for Mike and my roommates.

I think that if my ex-boss (we broke up on good terms) facebooks me the recipe tonight, I might get to make....
...
..
drumroll please....

CHOCOLATE CHIP SCONES! 

I'm not sure yet, and if I do, there's no guarantee they will look like that ^. But in the past, when I used to make them at Thanks A Latte, my old job (hence, ex-boss and knowledge of said recipe) they looked better. So this could be a great idea, both in stress-level-lowering and in the deliciosity factor. And after this, I swear I will attempt to make something that does not have "chip" in the title.

I make no guarantees on whether it has "chocolate."