Baking Adventures

By now my loyal readers know that I love to cook and they have probably read about my various cooking adventures. Even though I love to experiment with cooking, one of the things I haven't done much of is baking. The first, little apartment I lived in had a very small and very old stove/oven. The oven seemed to take forever to get going, and it would take about two hours to make a simple baked potato. Now that I've been living in apartments with a real oven, I've been able to use it more often. I've used it for baking pastas and roasting vegetables, but it's only recently when I've tried my hand at baking.

I've made Baklava Bars and I'm at the point where I've more or less perfected those. One of the things I love about the Baklava Bar recipe is that it uses sugar cookie mix as a short cut. The recipe requires a few different stages, but it is still fairly easy.

I love banana bread but while looking online for banana bread recipes, I stumbled across a recipe for Chocolate Chip–Banana Muffins. This recipe also uses a handy shortcut, Bisquick mix, and is super easy to make. I've made it two times already, and everything has turned out great.

And recently I've tried to make another one of my favorites, corn bread. A few weeks ago I tried to make corn bread muffins from a box of Jiffy Mix. That did not turn out as great as I wanted it to. For one, it didn't make many muffins. After I ate one, I had an unusual feeling and taste in my mouth, and when I took a second look at the box I saw that lard was one of the ingredients. And, maybe I did something wrong, but those muffins seemed a bit dry and gritty; when I tried to put butter on the muffin, it crumbled in my hand. So today I tried to make corn bread from scratch. I had a recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook and there was also a recipe on the canister of cornmeal. The recipes are more or less the same with the exception that one uses butter and the other uses vegetable oil. I made it with the oil this time and it turned out really good. It looks like corn bread, smells like corn bread, feels like corn bread, and tastes like corn bread. Yay! Next time I'm going to try it with the butter to see if it tastes different and see which I like better.

New Car Battery + A Free Pint of Ice Cream = Win-Win

I woke up today and had planned and expected to spend most of the morning taking care of my car after the battery died over the weekend. I sent an e-mail to my boss to let her know that I would probably be in late, then I called a towing company to see what kinds of services they offered. Their website said that the had a battery replacement service, meaning they would just come out to your car and install a new battery. But they said that service was offered to AAA customers—note to self, sign up for AAA—and that if I paid it out of pocket it would be really expensive. So I naturally didn't go for that service, but they did come out to my apartment to jump my car so that I could at least drive it to a shop.

I took my car to a shop that I've been to before for some minor fixes. The guys at the shop were surprised that I still had the original battery in my car; they said most car batteries last only about five years. My car is a 2001 Toyota, so the battery had a good life of ten years. It took only about fifteen minutes to replace the battery, and I was on my way to work. As it turned out, I arrived at work at about the same time when everyone else normally shows up. (I'm usually at work a little before 8:00, so 9:00 is "late" for me, but normal for everyone else.)

So now my car is running just fine. Again, I'm glad that this problem happened over the weekend while I was at home. I'm glad I didn't end up stranded somewhere late at night or something like that. And I'm really grateful that this happened before the weather starts to turn bad for the winter. At least now I know that I have a new, strong battery to get me through the winter. So it's a blessing all around.

And the best part of the whole thing is that I got a free pint of ice cream from the auto shop. That might sound strange, but they are located right next door to an ice cream factory, and I suppose the shop gets a lot of ice cream from the ice cream place (the shop has a freezer full of ice cream next to their counter). Whenever you spend $100 or more at the shop, you get a free pint of ice cream. Because I spent $108, I picked a pint of espresso chocolate chip ice cream. Yay!

Photo Editing - Wedding

For my next photo editing experiment I decided to play with a photo that I took at my friend's wedding. The aisle that she walked down was covered with red and pink flower petals, so I decided to take advantage of that burst of color.

Original photo in color

b/w + red, Lomo-ish

b/w + red, boost, vignette

Photo Editing - Flower

Another photo editing experiment. This is just a photo of a flower that I took while on a hike. The original is good, but I wanted to "warm" it up a bit and I also created a blurred effect around the flower.

Photo Editing - Sunset

Here is another photo editing experiment with a tree and sunset. It's a little more subtle and not as dramatic a change as my edited photos of the Flatirons, but I still think it has a cool look to it. The edited photo has an interesting effect where it looks like sunbeams are shooting out of the clouds.

Photo Editing - Flatirons

Because I couldn't go out shopping yesterday, I decided to spend my day playing around with a new photo editor. I found something online called Picnik and you upload your photo to their site and you edit it online. All of the basic editing features—and there are several of them—are free, but you can also upgrade your features by paying a small monthly fee. So far I've just been playing with the basic features, and I really like them. I'm holding off on upgrading to the premium edition until I decide that I really want it, and, more importantly, decided that I will use it enough to justify the cost. Here are a few of my photos that I've edited.

Neglect

Well, I suppose that it's been obvious that I've been neglecting the blog for the past month. And, once again, it's sad to say that I've been neglecting it because I've been really busy over the past month. It's really a shame, too, because I've had so many brilliant and profound things to say over the past few weeks. But, alas, I've been leaving my loyal readers hanging.

As I mentioned, I've been busy and work is the primary cause. This happens to be our really busy time of year, as opposed to the regular busy times of year. But this is when we are at our busiest as we try to finish projects before the end of the year. That would be much easier if we didn't have a bunch of new projects coming in at the same time. But I really can't complain—actually I could complain, but I won't because being busy and overworked is much better than being unemployed. In a nutshell, things at work are busy but still good.

In other news, I've had my first "major" car problem this morning. I was planning on going out to do some shopping, but when I turned the ignition all I got was a lot of clicking noises. The dashboard lights and radio turned on, but the engine wouldn't turn over. I suspect the problem might be with the battery or the starter, but I've e-mailed my co-worker's husband, who is a mechanic and owns an auto shop, to see what he might think it is. So I'm not too worried about it yet until I know what's really wrong, but it's just an inconvenience and an unexpected expense that I never like to deal with. Fortunately it happened on a weekend while I was at home and not while I was out and about. And, in other ways, this probably saved me from spending money that I don't need to spend. Maybe the universe is telling me that I don't need to buy a bundt pan or an electric hand mixer, or, as one of my lovely friends said, maybe this is the universe's way of telling me that I should stay home for a week and not go anywhere, including work.