Artisanrox: Scribbles

The fact that it's not *what* you know but *who* you know that gets you hired at a job. I don't know anyone important, so here's to homelessness!

Calling off of work, a nice hot toddy, Nyquil/Dayquil, homemade chicken soup (it's Jewish penicillin!) and plenty of sleeeeeeeeep.

OMG! Definitely a WACOM Cintiq.21UX direct-on-screen tablet!! *falls over*

Add to that an Optimus Maximus keyboard and I'm in geek heaven!

But until I can afford those things, which is why they are fantasy items, I am seriously considering the Luxeed Dynamic Keyboard for my next geeky typing tool...the black one, that is...so it'll match my spiffy new black tower!

My latest and greatest hobby (at this moment...stay tuned) is taking care of the various berry bushes and canes that are scattered around and in the forest by my house. As I've already posted, there are TONS of blackberry canes EVERYWHERE, and I keep finding more and more and MORE...every time I go out weed-cutting. Yay!

I found one particular bunch of canes that puzzled me...at first I thought it was another edible berry bush, thusly:



So I made myself a cute little registration login at Dave's Garden where I posted about the mystery shrub.

I learned (Thank you, Dave's Garden!!)that the mystery shrub, was, in fact, a quite PROLIFIC weed that happens to have roses growing on it. GRRRRR! In fact there are lots of places on the Internet that says this plant is rather annoying, invasive, and a real downright PITA to deal with.

The next time I left to do some weed-cutting, the more I wanted them to not be around...and the more Multiflora canes I saw. They're *everywhere*!!! They're choking the life out of the various berry bushes around the house.

So it's me against the Multiflora Roses. I'm in the minority here; there's only one of me and HUNDREDS of rose canes.

But now that I know what I'm looking for, I'm ready to do battle! >:o\

Take up skydiving. Because no one cares if you're not sexy at 1000+ feet up, with nothing to stop anyone from splatting the ground at maximum velocity except a silly piece of silk and some string.

Paisley print polar fleece with orange polka-dot gloves and clashing argyle tube socks.

Rrrrar. :oP

"I'll see you when I see you!"...No $*^#, Sherlock!


I have more...actually I have not enough room for them all...lol.

Some of the really good ones I've seen in other Writer's Block answers (sorry for the plagiarism!):

"Smile", especially when I'm miserable. NO.

"[insert famous athelete or pop star] is a hero!" No, they're not, they're good atheletes, or they're at the right place at the right time. The firefighters who dealt with the World Trade Center on 9/11 are heroes. Atheletes and pop stars are NOT heroes.

"[insert obviously creepy, disturbed weirdo's name] is harmless." No, no one is truly harmless.

Sunday, 8/23/09...I had a *BEAUTIFUL* day on the Atlantic Coast. The weather was (near) perfect (because it was REALLY HOT...lol). The hurricane off the coast made the ocean a little rough, though, so swimming was very limited though we arrived at low tide.




We, my mom and I that is, first ate in an outdoor restaraunt area called Flames, where we had also gone the year before. The experience for me was disappointing this time around; their menu, while containing VERY good things I must say, was drastically different and empty compared to the year before.

Last year, I had a really great lamb gyro sandwich, with a refreshingly fruity mixed drink. This year it was pretty much either REALLY expensive steak, or seafood, neither which is to my liking. (I'm a chicken person more than anything....and the expen$ive beef was a 14-oz. steak! WAAAY too much for little ol' me.) I had the fried zucchini sticks, which were actually very good, nice and light, and flounder with almondine sauce, which was OK but I'd never get it again, because I officially DO NOT like flounder. Most importantly, I was brought the wrong drink and didn't even know because our waiter had too many marbles in his mouth to be understood!

No tip for you!

So anyway, we trekked down to the beach to bum around there for a few hours. A VERY nice man handling the beach chairs got me two chairs and an umbrella. So for two LOVELY hours it was sand and sea!!! *hearts float upwards*

Our last stop on the boardwalk was in Steel's Fudge for some of their super Pistachio Fudge and their YUMMY fruit slices. I think we got a bit carried away with so much sugar around us. Who needs Mai Tais when you can have pomegranate fruit slices??

Oh, never mind. Give me the fruit slices AND the Mai Tais.

I was really missing the Slovak egg cheese that my Slovak (duh!) grandmother used to make. It was sweet and so curdy. I remember the cheesecloth hung from the cupboards.

So on Tuesday, 8/18/09, my brief stint of nostalgia totally overwhlemed me, and I broke down and made some, being VERY excited that I actually found a recipe on-line for it!! You can read the recipe at Iarelative.com, but be warned...although the music on the site is very cute, it's really annoying that you can't turn it off.

In case you don't want to constantly listen to the music, or mute your audio (which is what you'll want to do eventually!) here is the recipe. It's sometimes called "Easter Cheese", but since I really don't *do* Easter anymore, I will just call it Egg Cheese or Sirok:

_______________________________________
[...]by Vada Jay Yagersky:

1 1/2 dozen eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 gallon milk
1/2 tsp. salt

Set out eggs and milk until they reach room temperature.
Mix eggs, then add milk, sugar, and salt.
Put on low heat. Cook about an hour until milk forms lumps...you must stir occassionally while cooking.
Pour into a cheese cloth bag, tie, hang, and let drain in a cool place.
Be sure to place a pan beneath to catch dripping milk!
______________________________________


I really didn't follow this recipe exactly either. I just estimated the milk, threw a dozen eggs in it, and lots of sugar and vanilla. It was really good! It came out fluffier than I remember it, but that's because I didn't have any cheesecloth handy. I just let it drip in a large metal sifter, which means it didn't compress as much as it would have were it tied in cheesecloth.

Yummy with blueberries!!!

This is a tie between my father, and the wonderfully incompetent advice I got from the school staff on how to deal with a classroom full of bullies at high school. I can't determine which one's worse.

He used to say, "Don't do [such-and-such], people won't LIKE you..."

...so? you can be the most upright, charitable social butterfly the world as seen, and there will ALWAYS be someone out there that lives to ruin your day.

The school said, "Ignore them." or: "Join some student organizations [I.e., because it's YOUR fault you're being bullied, you aren't in enough activities!]."

Like I said, it's a tie of suckitude.

I would SO totally open up a "cute dessert" type establishment...sort of like Epicute.com meets Ace of Cakes!

I'd love to make adorable little desserts for everyone; have the place looking VERY cute, too. I'm so completely not a girly-girl in regards to anything else, so this might throw a few people who know me way off...LOL.

My mom likes to cook savory things, so having a "dinner and sweets" place that is half hers and half mine would be cool too...a "sugar-and-spice" kind of deal! :o)

So, Sunday, 8/9/09, I ended up attempting yet another culinary feat; I tried to make marble chocolate cupcakes for a fund raiser at work.

As any sensible person would do, I made sure I had all ingredients ahead of time. I always do. It's quite a PITA to go to the store on my days off from work, so I try to think way ahead of the baking date.

I used this White Chocolate cake recipe from Grouprecipes.com (I omitted the egg yolks to keep the batter very white...um...I mean, make the cupcakes healthier...yeah...), and the classic Black Magic cake recipe which can be found on Allrecipes.com.

So, this post already begs a few questions: Why didn't I make the white chocolate icing along with the cake? Why are they the cupcakes that almost weren't? Did they taste good??

Well, the answer to the first two questions is THIS: Two SOMEBODIES ate almost ALL of the white chocolate I bought (at a SUPER DEAL mind you!!), and I didn't know until it was too late. My maternal and paternal units really ripped through that TWO POUNDS of white chocolate I had saved. This are the units that either: 1. Can't have sugar due to diabetes, and 2. Says she doesn't even LIKE white chocolate. DOESN'T...LIKE...white chocolate!!! *rips hair out*

#^$%@!%$!!!! I'm lucky I had a third of a cup of white chocolate left!!!! But...*sigh*...people eating stuff on you right before you need it...such is the scourge of any baking fan's life.

Anyway. The above white chocolate cake recipe worked out really well. I used both a metal muffin pan and silicone muffin baking forms, and had to adjust for both....I found that I had to use a lot less in the metal pan, because the added heat made the muffins poofier than in the silicon.



Aren't they so sweet and innocent in their whiteness? Well, the Black magic cake fixed that right up. Hahahahaaaa!



Not white and innocent for long! *insert maniacal laughter here*!



Makes me feel like there's something to apologize for, just looking at it. :oP



Ahh, smell that chocolately cupcakey goodness. Oh, sorry, you can't smell this, you're looking at this on a computer screen! ^_^



Aaaaaand, the finished product. Folks at work seemed to like these...I like to use my coworkers as experiments when I try something new...they all really don't get it that they're all just my guinea pigs. ^_^

They're dabbed on top with a bit of white chocolate. That is, the rest of the measley amount of white chocolate my parents were so kind enough to leave me.

So, I actually got to forage for some berries in the woods behind our house. The yield isn't too great yet, but there were SO MANY that were getting ripe, I don't think I'll have to worry about not having any for a while.

I actually was smart this time, and I picked up on an important equation:



PLUS



PLUS [proper clothing]


EQUALS


!!!


I don't mean to turn this into an advertisement for Deep Woods OFF!, but holy cow, I spent over an hour cutting back weeds from wild blackberry bushes, literally *SURROUNDED* by very hungry mosquitos. I only got one mosquito bite the whole time. You can see them fly around you, then get disinterested and fly away. Awesome!!!

So, besides that, these, I see, are in fact, NOT black raspberries...they are BLACKBERRIES. Black raspberries are hollow inside; these are not. So now I am sure of the name of what I'm picking. I haven't done this in years, so I never remember which berry they are.

I know they're a bit red yet; they look much more black in real life. You sort of have to get them earlier around here anyway, or the birds will pick up on the payload first!

So I'll be checking these beautiful berries every week, and I'm sure I'll find something VERY cool to do with them, which I will post here.

I have a few online places I always go to that I'd love to donate a couple thousand to. Also, I'd like to donate a whole bunch to the owner of the company I work for...he's having it a bit rough right now and I'd love to help...it's a large company so that'd be the bulk of the money I'd have. That should about cover it. :o)

So today, the last day of my vacation ;_; I made Black Pasta with a Pink Gorgonzola Sauce I found on Allrecipes.com. Because, yanno, I have to find something to do with my black pasta before it mummifies.




It turned out very tasty, but very, very salty. Make sure you use low sodium stock with this. I also wanted a meatless dish, so I tossed the prosciutto and added in mushrooms instead. The trade-up was really good, though as some reviewers mentioned, I'd like to try this with sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts in the future! Yummy.

I didn't think it'd thicken up at first, but it ended up being a great stick-to-yer-ribs sauce, and that's something I always look for, too.

My mother is deathly afraid of the black pasta...LOL. She says it is, quote, "scary", so I made her separate plain spaghetti, and she still liked it...which I never expected because she usually doesn't like things with cheese in them. Argh! She's so contrary. She makes my head spin. But oh well, that's her license...she's a Pisces after all.

The answer to this for me can be nothing else other than Facebook. I was like, "what the heck do I need that for??" And actually it's more reliable than my email as many people get their messages returned as undeliverable for some weird reason. And I found lots and lots of things to be a fan of, and I get lots of invites for groups.

So yeah. Facebook.

I'm still pretty good at not needing Twitter, however!

I just tried clearing a path to our beautiful organic blackberry farm in the woods behind my house. Well, it's not really an official *farm*, persay, it's just some wild berry canes that happen to grow there.




Yummy! Gettin' riper every day!

Of course, I got to spend less than fifteen minutes doing this...because I was working with 80 degree weather and, literally, near 85% humidity. There's no wind. I would have felt better throwing myself into the Atlantic Ocean without an oxygen tank. The water there moves a lot faster than the air here, for sure!

Being soaked from head to toe after less than FIFTEEN minutes, and then getting attacked by a barrage of mosquitos, I finally had to give up and run back inside! Grrrrrrrrr!

And after uploading the picture of the beautiful berry canes, I dropped my stupid digital camera less than 10 inches and now the $%@# thing doesn't stay on. ARGH!

INSTANT UPDATE (I guess this stuff is what Twitter is for...lol): I just checked out this page on Fixya.com that helped me fix my camera (which is a Sony Cybershot DSC-S700)!!! Thank you aplynn09!!!!!! <3

I was sitting at my workplace a few months ago, eating a very nice frozen dinner. It was Amy's Organic Indian Mattar Paneer. And I have to say, it IS pretty good for a frozen dinner.

A coworker noticed, and recommended an Indian restaraunt in Reading, Pennsylvania named Aashiyana.



While the exterior makes it so easy to miss, because it consists of nothing much more than a large window and a small green awning bearing the restauraunt's name, the restaraunt is very clean, and the food was fantastic. I had the Kashmiri Jogan Rosh, which is very tender lamb in a spicy stick-to-yer-ribs yogurt sauce served with Indian bread and Basmati rice. A drink of Mango Lasse (a super-delicious thick, rich mango-yogurt drink) was great on the side...and believe me, you'll need that Mango Lasse to help your mouth deal with all the spiciness of the food!

If you're not familiar with Indian cuisine, and you're clueless on what to order, the owner of the restaraunt is usually there, and she's happy to walk you through the menu and give some good recommendations.

In all, it was great, I'd definitely go again and try something different every time I did. I can't wait to dig into what I brought home. Thankx Roger, Shelley and Charlie!

Deathly Hallows.....great ending to a great series (except the super cheesy epilogue...lol)!!!

Technology entertains me while I'm trying to avoid the family members that piss me off. ^_^