Tonight I had brownies and soy milk instead of dinner. If you'd had my day you might have done the same.

Also, they were delicious, gooey brownies make from scratch. M. - not an unbiased audience - was appreciative.

( Delicious pictures behind cut. )

I've been sitting on this icon for a while, and I still don't like the text, but I can redo it later. I have a reason to use it!

( Beef Stew, V2.0. Okay, Beef and Vegetable Stew. )

The beef was, indeed, meltingly tender, and boosting the spices was a really good idea. (Some day, I am likely to throw vegetables, potatoes, beef and curry mix into a pot to see what happens.) I didn't add any salt above the salt in the beef broth, which really wasn't enough. I didn't think so, M. really didn't think so - M. made puppy eyes at the cookpot all night, so I did all the work and we both had beef stew for lunch. I will bribe her to take me to the store one bitterly cold January night with the magic phrase "but M., stew beef is on sale!" - so next time I may unbend enough to add a whole teaspoon of salt for flavor. I may also ask M. to donate her wine stash - untouched for many months and counting - to the beef stew cause.

I am sitting, barefoot, under a fan which is whipping cool air with the bay-and-beef draft from the beef stew simmering on the electric burner. Tonight I ate leftover stir fry, but tomorrow's lunch will be eaten with a spoon.

Usually September rolls in with humid, sticky afternoons and warm nights, but this year school started and the weather broke barely hours apart. I like it; I am about the only person at work who is rejoicing.

I am on the countdown to my fall class - intro to medical genetics - and to vacation! I am going to have so much fun in S. F.: less than three weeks to go.

Quick stew conclusions: om nom nom nom, but needs more salt. Writeup to follow.

By six minutes and twenty-two seconds into the first episode of Leverage I was already a little in love with Parker and Alec. I know, you're all shocked.

This morning M. took a personal day - I renewed my vow to never date long distance before catching the late bus - and tonight I made pancakes, which we ate with M.'s vanilla soy ice cream and caramel topping. Except for the part where I didn't do a bit of laundry, or get any GRE studying accomplished, or pack my lunch, and stayed up past my bedtime, a successful evening.

Five words from charlie_ego: ( apocalypse, biology, cooking, graphics, Butler (the last is time-dependent... I just got a whole bunch of Octavia Butler books from the library and thought of you :) ) )

If anyone wants to play, the rules are out there.

If you think I've been ignoring you this week, you are absolutely right: I am house-sitting, and spent last night navigating someone else's kitchen to create a fruit cobbler for a work bake-off.

Via epicurious, Blackberry Peach Cobbler with modifications.

( Snapshot and recipe behind cut. )

The original recipe had a heavier topping, but someone suggested the topping I used in comments, and many people raved about it. If I do this again, lemon juice is going in the fruit to brighten the flavor, but that's about all I'd change. This was... cobbler. I'd make it again, but I'd rather eat the fruit with biscuits on the side.

I think I accidentally reinvented the pan-seared chicken breast tonight. If only all my cooking experiments turned out so juicy and delicious! (Hint to future me: set to 5 / exact middle of your lame electric stove, stop poking at it until it's brown. Go chop vegetables or question your roommates' TV choices or something. Then flip it. Yes, it's going to take more than five minutes for each side, get over your instant gratification complex.) I also did something with the chicken skillet, shallots, bean sprouts, garlic, ginger, broccoli, zucchini, and soy sauce which was okay, except for the zucchini, which soaked up the ginger and soy deliciousness. I want to pick out just the zucchini and eat it until I figure out why it worked so well. Tomorrow, proper write, probably with pictures.

Game night: check. Apparently I can too feed seven, but I need to remember by table really only seats six.

The electronics plague is back. My cell battery hiccuped Saturday, and I believe I've destroyed the baby laptop's third A/C adapter in 3 1/2 years. I break laptop adapters with depressing regularity; I blame HP's engineering. (I continue to ignore the misappropriation of a desktop replacement as an actively mobile device.) I was thinking it might be time to order a second cheap knockoff A/C adapter, but then Windows stopped booting, and when I unplugged it and put in the recovery disk, magically sensed the disk and booted from the hard drive, just as I was settling in for an evening of sandwich with troubleshooting. Neither of these should have had an impact, but lo: the baby laptop booted. The issues with all things plugged in make me think the baby laptop has a death wish, but if it'll hang on until Windows 7 is out of beta, I will swallow all my usual griping and just buy something.

Between game night on Friday, socializing in Baltimore on Sunday, meeting C. in Crystal City on Monday night (which was really cool, except for the part where I got totally lost finding her hotel), and work scheduling and work baby showers with cookies, I am way behind on my reading lists, so if there's anything that applied to me in particular, please point me at it.

The important point of all this is my continued quest for the perfect butterscotch walnut cookie.

( Recipe as of last tonight: )

I think I'm either overbeating the butter, or the eggs, or need to drop the cooking temp another 25 degrees. The butter-sugar temp may also be an issue; it may need to be cooled more before adding everything else. Or maybe sifting the dry ingredients really does make a difference.

What M. did not say is that we were getting enough free sushi to feed three people. Neither of us wants to eat ever again.

( Pictures! )

Today I learned that soy chai latte is actually pretty awesome, so now I too can blow $5 and 200 calories at Starbucks. If I can find a pastry that won't try to kill me with butter*, I might actually start hanging out at coffeehouses!

*Dramatic license. "Distress my GI tract in ways you don't want to discuss at the dinner table" is much less snappy.

Roommate M. called about half an hour ago to apologize for her attitude this morning and say she had sushi to split. Since I don't recall her having an attitude this morning - in the cinematic retelling of my life, Act 2009 Scene 02 June AM will be filmed with vaseline on the lens and maybe some rotoscoping in post-processing to emphasize my complete lack of opinion about anything but breakfast and caffeine - I am calling this a culinary win.

Meatloaf for lunch wasn't bad, but by definition was greasier than I like. Someone suggested trying ground turkey, which sounds interesting. I'm really there for the spicing; the exact meat can be tweaked with (relative) impunity. Mmm, fresh parsley.

Tonight's dinner: ( Meatloaf! ) I thought this was heavy, but I think meatloaf is supposed to be. The onions and green peppers need the sort of fine-chop TLC the parsley got; possibly they also need to be sauteed first. Finally, next time I do this, different sauce, with more heat. Ketchup covers many sins, but it's not spicy, and it's not a sauce.

It's official: I am banned from making triple chocolate cookies (with all of one serving instant coffee spread across just under 50 cookies) without the following controls:

1.) Finish baking before 1 PM
2.) All cookies in the freezer or out of the house before 3 PM

I am two for two on making these cookies, eating 3 - 5, and being hyper until one in the morning. Everyone at work is right: these are dynamite cookies. They're dynamite because you're wired while metabolizing that much sugar.

I realized today that I need to learn the polite way to tell people their music is artistically questionable and disruptive to my concentration. Whoever thought up smooth jazz and the soprano saxophone has much to answer for.

Less than a week until I'm on vacation! I need to call dad and arrange to steal his dSLR. Maybe by telling him it's an excuse to return his DS9 DVDs. Yep.

Cold, bottled unsweetened green tea is not disgusting. "Disgusting" is your first taste of Manischewitz wine during the sedar. Unsweetened green tea is just bitter and a total waste of $1.20, and only really drinkable with honey and soy milk. (And by "with", I mean 1-to-1.) So I'm not doing that again.

This is the first really hot weekend of the year: 93 F yesterday, and on track to match that today. Hence the cold tea. This is great weather, if you have nowhere to go and a cold drink on hand. If either of those conditions are not met, this is, in my opinion, not great weather. If both of those conditions are violated, it is lousy, sweaty, nasty weather. Can it please be October now?

Oh! I am traveling in May! I fly into Chicago on Tuesday, May 20th, and will be exploring the Windy City's summery charms until norabombay and I drive to WisCon on Friday. (I was a lot more excited about WisCon before RaceFail. Now I am reserving the right to sit by a pool with something more than water in my glass Sunday afternoon.) We roll out of Dairyland Monday morning-ish; I fly out of Chicago Tuesday morning. Because I am a genius, I padded my leave request (turned in before the end of February, thanks much) and will have eleven uninterrupted days off work. Chicago and Madison people: meetup? The only hard point so far is the Monday night Cubs-Pirates game.

I regret to say that I ate cheap lunchmeat turkey. I have discovered exactly what mushy cardboard tastes like, and regret not keeping tabasco in the house. Fortunately I had K's leftover pork chop with raspberry chili sauce, mashed potatoes, and spinach to warm my belly on this rainy day. Real food is awesome.

I gave my presentation last night and it went... pretty well, I guess. I actually got a "good job!" from the professor. Now, if only he'd give a rubric with a grade on it (for anything), I'd be a lot more reassured about my class standing. Tuition reimbursement doesn't kick in until I pass!

I could do a bedtime story about double-sided tape, shared reagents, and the tragedy of the commons in lab work, but anyone who's ever shared one small, critical item between three or more people knows how this one goes.

The Hugo nominees are out. I am trying to figure out how to congratulate all the nominees while also observing that only four of the 20 nominees in the four standard fiction categories are not men. Because yay, Hugo nomination: awesome; however, significant problems within the community are highlighted in the ballot. I am especially tickled by Y: the Last Man: Whys and Wherefores making the graphic novel cut, because I finally read it earlier this month and, other than massive tragic spoiler, I thought it was awesome and a fitting end to the series.

Ha ha ha, guess what? Computer people say I broke the baby laptop's software but good! As in, won't get to the command prompt or autoboot from the CD drive good. I foresee time and money spent to fix this.

Note to self: no, no one wants you to chapter-by-chapter blog Regenesis. It would not be entertaining. Half of your comments would be, "Jesus God, Ari. You are not now and never will be the Holy Ghost!" and an \o/ + /o\ tally for Justin and Jordan fights. The other half would be canon-tracking against the rest of the canon and bad ideas in the margins.

I am not a happy music camper. The last playlist I made had issues: one, it was backwards. After I flipped the order, it sucked only a little. I'm fixing it. Two, I need more music in the vein of Are You Out There and The Mountain. Any recs?

Today I made french toast, and wow, was it ever soggy. Here's what I did:

( Recipe for the curious )

I think I've got the heat too low, but I'm not ruling out other options.

How do you get tea stains off your cups? I dumped my favorite cup in the sink with pork marinade, and I can't tell if the soap, vinegar, oil, spices, or alchemical combination did a number on the stains.

The last time I made my favorite butterscotch walnut cookies, they came out flatter than pancakes. Adding twice as much flour as usual soaked up the grease, but messed with the flavor. I blame that evening's pouring rain, and also the brown sugar, and possibly the butter. The batch before that - made with margarine - turned out fantastic. Obviously, I need to set up a controlled experiment. Yum, cookie experiment! For reference:

( Butterscotch walnut cookies )

Having navigated Christmas dinner, I'm getting ambitious: since it's dough and assorted toppings, homemade pizza might actually be free of

Wow, it's truth on the internet! I'm third-gen American, and I still think, "how are you?" is supposed to be answered honestly. Bluntly, even.

Dear summer: thank you for giving me peaches and fresh corn. Also, thank you for going away. Sincerely, the loyal opposition.

Tonight's cooking experiment: baked pork chops with crushed garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. 350 F, 15 minutes, flipped at 10 minutes. I used a regrettably heavy hand with the spices, so it may be salvage-or-toss time. K. recommended making pork chops into pork-pasta salad, which might actually work. The side dishes - couscous and tomato-ish salad - came out nicely. The couscous just got olive oil and basil. The salad was one cucumber, seeds removed; a green pepper, a red pepper, half a vidalia onion, and several heirloom tomatoes, with a little olive oil and basil and a lemon squeezed over everything. I think I will have a light lunch tomorrow (couscous and salad), or maybe I will declare Culinary Oops Day and see who I can sweet-talk into a sushi run.

September is apparently my month for good intentions. I'm trying to cook, I'm trying to exercise (not 90 degrees every day! I can bike more than five minutes without dying! Awesome!) and I'm trying be mindful of that whole lactose intolerance thing*. Fortunately, Nabisco has removed every remnant of unprocessed ingredients from Oreos, so now they're milk free, hah! That's one junk food snack back on the list.

*Lactase: there are limits, and I still get dehydrated even when the pills are in the right bag and I remember to look for them. Finally, they're kind of expensive on the per diem.

I finally ate my pork chop of dubious character while listening to C-SPAN radio (what's the difference between NPR and C-SPAN? Not that much, when the boombox is on top of the fridge), and decided it's a good day to be me: not in a hurricane recovery zone, secure job, income exceeding expenditures. Health care! If the banks don't collapse under me and my fellow Americans, because some of my fellow Americans are thoughtless people who vote sub-par hooting primates underqualified individuals into national office, I'm going to hang on until the upturn. There's a lot of people who don't have that confidence right now. I was going somewhere with that, but it's, um, really late, so I'll just plug the Red Cross and your local food bank and remind people that when you vote for out of touch and underqualified people, you're voting for recessions.

Yeah, no rage there. Cough.

SATUDAY MORNING: To really stupid rumors (mightygodking) I bring really basic medical stats. Nail Palin on her political record; if she is raising her grandchild for her daughter, I really don't care that much. (I am waiting with bated breath for some Palin political scandal, because hi, Alaska: home of corruption worthy of the Mayors Daley; stooping to personal attacks makes me ask for people to stop being on my side.) Sunday ETA: huh. Just - what Scalzi said.

SUNDAY EVENING: Did an overnight trip to dad's. Dad just got back from looking at houses in Tucson; he and Second Wife made an offer on a short-sale. Second Wife was doing nothing I wanted any part of, so I didn't see much of her or her dogs. Or the horsies. (If you ever need to be convinced of the fundamental stupidity of a horse, try loading it into a horse trailer. If you ever need evidence of my willingness to judge you by your hobbies, watch my reaction to you trying to move your horse.) So I let dad use me as an excuse to try an Indian restaurant - so much pain there - saw the house-shopping pics, and dad's kitchen garden - why aren't the store cucumbers this snazzy? Why? - we chilled with soccer on HD, and eventually I took the hour and a half back home on car, bus and metro, loaded up with foodie things dad dumped on me.

TODAY: Cooking. Grocery runs. Baking. Food prep. My oven is running hot. Not on, cookie-making machine! Go over-fry my chicken, or something else I only marginally care about!

FOR MANY, MANY DAYS: book log. Er, July's. Watch this space for a special July/August book log double edition!

This week I watched insurance-mandated Work Safety Video #4 and final (yay!). About the time that the hapless phenol-spilling researcher got hustled under the safety shower and had his shirt stripped off him by his lab buddy, I realized that biology was the perfect setting for a really torrid Harlequin novel. Who cares if you've got second-degree chemical burns, you're forced by safety protocols to lose some layers! (Seriously. The sodden pants went the way of the shirt.)

This was not helped by the "how (not) to handle flammables" sequence. One of my coworkers invoked man-hugging as Lab Buddy helped Hapless Researcher smother the flames from Hapless's smoking lab coat, and possibly I snickered. Seriously: Harlequin tropes versus burns. No contest.

A "restaurant week" dinner and one drink was $60 including tip at Poste. Perky K. and I split: for appetizers, arugula salad with figs and vinaigrette, and deep-fried squash blossoms; halibut and bass entrees; chocolate pot de creme and blueberry shortcake for dessert. For drinks I got sangria and K. got something with lemon and basil. We also got an unexpected plate of mini-desserts: tiny, nutty almond meringues, slices of chocolate brownie, and gooseberry blossoms dipped in white chocolate. The food was excellent, and the drinks satisfying. I have to admit: I'm used to serve-yourself service. The attentiveness of the waiters, especially as we were sitting down and getting through the opening "hi how are you and here's your birthday present" pleasantries bordered on over-solicitousness. That and the inexplicably distant bathrooms - out to the hotel and up a floor - were the only flaws in an excellent dining experience. With that said, $60 is a lot of money for one meal. I might do restaurant week again next August, but I'm not doing anything like this before then.

And then we tried to walk off dinner and I wound up buying jeans. I justify this by wearing my jeans to destruction, patching them back into rotation, then wearing them until the patches rip.

Tomorrow I'm doing the restaurant week thing and going to Poste with Perky K. I am wearing a skirt and strappy black sandals, so someone better appreciate the non-denim lengths I've gone to. (Things I love about my job #57: "well, you're cleaning your workspace with bleach solution" dress code! This leaves me with very little motivation to upgrade my clothes.)

Pursuant to shirts, this weekend I walked into Macy's looking for a camisole-type thingie and walked out with... a blue v-neck t-shirt. Yes, I know: you are all shocked by this break from tradition.

Also, shopping appeal: I'm breaking down and buying a digital camera. I'm soliciting opinions. HOWEVER, comma, I am on a budget. I'm looking in the $200 - $250 range, with an absolute limit of three hundred fifty dollars ($350) for the camera and basic accessories (second battery, larger memory card, etc). I really would like a digital SLR, but it's not happening this year. CNET has a real crush on the Canon Powershot series; does anyone else have nice or nasty things to say as I reach for the sales papers? I want instant gratification at high resolution, but I'll settle for decent warmup and shot-to-shot time, good picture quality, 7+ mpix, and an optical viewfinder.