Seamus

We have a new habit.  This weekend, Marcus and I are going out of town to attend my cousin's baby shower in Memphis.  My mom agreed to take care of Seamus (and Neville, but Seamus is higher maintenance, being a dog) for us while we were gone.  Believe it or not, since we've had him. . . (August of '08 when he was just a tiny puppy.  Let's break for picture.)

Awww!  Look at how cute and tiny he was!

Anyway, I was saying, since we've had him, we've only left town once without him, when we went to Nashville for another cousin's wedding.  We boarded him, and thought that went really well.  However, when we went to pick him up, there was a dog crying somewhere in the back.  Marcus made a comment that that dog must be heartbroken, and the lady at the front informed us that that was OUR heartbroken dog, and that he had been crying like that all weekend.  Never again!  

Since then, we haven't left town except to go see Alex and Elizabeth in Auburn, and we took him with us those two or three times.  The first time went great because it was April and still relatively comfortable outside, and we were limited to all outdoor activities.  The second (and maybe third?  I don't remember) time, it was July or something and outdoor activities were miserable.  We considered then that it'd be a good idea to get someone to keep him at our house anytime we wanted to leave town instead of toting him with us.  This has been hard for me, because I love him and I'm happier when he's with me, and I miss him when we're apart.  Alas, some things have to be done.  

He's kennel trained, but is prone to barking and crying if life isn't completely perfect.  He eventually gets over it, but not without a lot of noise and stress on the other sleepers in the house.  I could be surprised, but I'd be willing to bet a great deal that whoever kept him, if his routine was followed, would not get much sleep.  

On to the new habit:  we're letting him sleep out in the living room.  He still seems to be kennel trained, because I open up the door and he goes right in and lays down.  I don't shut it behind him, and then I go in my room and go to bed myself.  He seems fine with this arrangement.  A minute or so after I've gone in my room, I hear his tenative footsteps on the hardwood floors, and listen as he gets settled.  I think he thinks he's getting away with something, which is fine with me as long as he knows to be sneaky, and therefore, behaves himself.  

We decided it was a good idea to go ahead and start this new habit this week, so that my mom has an easier time with him next weekend.

Last night, as I sat in bed and read with him at the foot of the bed, he looked at me knowingly and I thought, even if it isn't any good, that I ought to occasionally try and record his thoughts.  It's not going to be profound or meaningful (or at least I doubt it will be) like Don Miller's Lucy Blogs, but I thought I owe it to him to at least try to decipher his thoughts.  He looks at me with so much trust and with heavy thoughts behind his brown eyes.  His little tan eyebrows express such feeling that there has to be more than raw animal instinct going on in his head contrary to what many people believe.

Rombauer V. Crocker: Round One (and K.O., Rombauer wins!)

We won't talk about what just happened in my kitchen.  Okay, maybe we will a little bit.  I had a serious icing mishap.  Mishap is too kind a word, really.  I'm baring the shame in sharing this in hopes that someone who knows will stumble upon it and explain to me exactly what on earth I did wrong. (Sorry, Laura, this post will be boring since I just sent you the same story in an email! lol)

It all started when I decided homemade (Betty Crocker Cookbook recipe) caramel icing would be really fantastic on top of a Joy of Cooking recipe Fudge Sour Cream Cake.  I don't know if the two recipes got into a brawl while I was joining them . . . maybe Betty and Irma are bitter rivals, or what happened, but the outcome was disastrous!  (Irma said, "A CURSE ON THE CROCKER HOUSE!" and arranged for her recipes to reject any of Betty's. )

I made the icing exactly according to the instructions: I melted the butter, I added the brown sugar, I melted it into the butter and brought it to a boil, I let it boil for 2 minutes, I added the milk, I returned it to a boil, and then I removed it from the heat to cool.  After it cooled, I added the pound of confectioners sugar gradually, and beat the mixture while the saucepan sat in a bowl of cold water (what the heck?!) and made a huge, filmy mess of water and over spray of powdered sugar on the counters and stove top.  The finished product looked like icing, it tasted like icing, and for all intents and purposes, it was icing.

As I began to spread it onto the cake, I quickly realized that it had made a drastic and terrible transformation from lovely caramel icing into something very akin in texture to sugar cookie dough.  The "icing" would not stick to the cake.  It was like the cake had put on a protective icing-proof shield or something.  The "icing" rolled up, tore, crumbled, and certainly wouldn't think of spreading.  I picked up a few of the crumbles off the plate and put them back on top of the cake.  When I did this, I realized that the icing-dough responded a little better to my warm hands than the cold metal knife I was using before.  I washed my hands and slapped the rest of the icing onto the cake and manually formed the icing with my fingers to fit around the top layer of this two-layer cake, as the stuff wouldn't stretch any further than the top layer.

It looks truly ridiculous -- like I forced the top layer of my cake to wear a stretched-out wad of cookie dough as a tracksuit -- but it tastes incredible.  Oh well.  I won't be using that icing recipe again!

Check it out. . . this was the best I could do.

Hummingbird Cake - not as gruesome as it sounds.

This is the first Sunday I've stayed home from church since November when we started attending FUMC.  I have a good reasons, though:

1. I haven't had a very good night's sleep in about a week (loosely translated: I'm normally a narcoleptic as soon as I get in bed, and lately I've been more like a normal person), and I needed one morning to sleep as late as I wanted.  "As late as I want," evidently, means 8:20 am.

2. I'm filthy, and even if I wanted to sleep in and also go to church (thereby omitting the shower step), I couldn't because I'm in that awkward time where I took a shower on Friday night because I had to work on Saturday morning and didn't want to have to wake up too early to do that.  Saturday I was "clean" all day, but now it's Sunday and I'm back on track for my normal morning showers, but I technically haven't had a shower since Friday.  Anyway, omitting the shower for this morning would be totally unacceptable.

3. Today we are celebrating my wonderful Mama's birthday (which is actually on Tuesday), and I have the distinct honor of baking her cake for this party.  I want to do the best job I can, and also take my time and learn while doing.

This brings us to the purpose of today's blog entry.  Hummingbird Cake.  I'm not sure why it's called that, except maybe because it's so insanely sweet.  I've actually never been a huge fan of it, but that's why we don't eat it on my birthday.  It has crushed pineapple and bananas baked into the cake, and it's slathered with a serious overabundance of cream cheese icing.  I'm sure I'll eat it and scrutinize my skills (or lack thereof) when I normally would have passed on a serving.  However, until I get so confident in my cake-baking skills that I know without a shadow of a doubt that it's edible, I can't allow other people to be my blind guinea pigs.

I'm baking it in a stone 9x13 baking dish, which is a first for me, so we'll see how it turns out.

Here's the before picture:

There's a lot of Wal-Mart represented in this picture, as well as Pampered Chef.  Those lovely glass measuring cups in the background are actually Mom Diehl's, and don't have anything to do with the baking process of this particular cake.  I'll be giving those back today at the birthday party.  :-)

Anyway, I hope I can update this entry in a little while with successful during- and after-pictures.  In the mean time, have a lovely Sunday!

Shalom. :-)

P.S. Don't worry, I'm going to take a shower before I bake the cake!

Update: Sometime after Sunday's birthday party.

Here are pictures!  The cake was a total success.  It looked decent, and it tasted great!  Even I enjoyed it and had a second piece.  Here are the aforementioned during- and after-pictures:

Morning dreams are always so vivid.

I had an interesting dream this morning.  I'll try to remember as many bizarre little details as I can.

I was at some kind of house party and I think I was in Hopewell, though I didn't really know anyone at this party.  The person throwing the party was making pizza for everyone, but instead of making the pizza and baking it all at once, they were making the pizza, cutting it into slices, and serving it up uncooked, so that the guests had to heat up their own pizza.  Everyone seemed fine with this except for me.

I decided that I had better things to do, so I went into the laundry room of this house, pulled the door to, stripped off my clothes, and proceeded to shave my legs.  The shaving cream was avocado green.  While I was shaving, I realized I was hurting myself really badly.  I looked at the blade to see what was wrong, and there was no blade, but the absence of the blade was very sharp.  I put a new blade on and kept shaving.

While I was shaving, there was a woman talking to me through the laundry room door.  She asked for my credit card, and I started to look for it.  I finally asked her why she needed my credit card, and she told me that she wanted to sell me a bag of popcorn.  She showed me the bag of popcorn through the crack in the door, and the bag wasn't much bigger than a credit card.  It was TINY!  I pretended that I couldn't find my credit card and kept shaving.

I was having a hard time shaving my bikini area and I couldn't figure out why, so I moved onto the rest of my legs.  I had a hard time shaving them, too, but I realized that was because I was wearing multiple layers of pantyhose.  I removed a layer and tried to shave, and realized that there were still more pantyhose in the way.  I think I removed 3 or 4 layers of pantyhose before I got down to skin.  The reason I was having a hard time shaving my bikini area was because my razor was actually a bare-floor attachment to a canister vacuum cleaner, and the blade was about a foot long.

And then I woke up.

Thursday: in which I've started baking.

First of all, I'm in exploration mode.  This is okay.  I'm allowing myself to take the risk that this may be a phase, but I'm going to explore it as thoroughly as I can until the phase is gone.  If it doesn't go, or if I don't allow it to go,  excellent.  If it does, then on to the next and I hope I can find as much enjoyment in whatever may be next as I find in this endeavor so far.  I'm learning to bake.

I was speaking to my therapist (sounds so much nicer than shrink, don't you think?) and complaining about how unfulfilling my job is.  I complained about how it isn't me, and how I never would have wanted to be where I am now, career-wise, and I'm not pleased with how I've allowed it to go on this long in the name of a paycheck.

My therapist asked me to tell her what I enjoy doing.  I immediately tried to tell her that anything that I enjoy couldn't really be a job.  She told me not to tell her what I thought I could make into a career, but rather just tell her what I simply enjoy.  She prompted, "Do you enjoy photography?" and I told her that I like to take pictures, but not really as a focused hobby.  Then, she asked if I like to bake. Yes!  Yes, I do!  She reminded me that I'm still in my 20s, I don't have any children, and basically the world is my oyster.  I can allow myself to pursue hobbies without worrying about whether or not they are a phase.
And here we are.

Do you ever notice that when you hear of something for the first time, or you get an idea, or you want something to happen very much, that all you see are "signs" so-to-speak pointing to that idea?  Since I decided that I'd teach myself to bake, I've been bombarded.  It's probably just because it's a very pleasant, whimsical hobby with delicious rewards, and it's fairly popular, but that's okay.

The following is a list of the bombardment I've experienced in the past week:

- Publix has a bakery and I thought it'd be pretty neat to work there, but I'm in no way ready for that yet (skill wise) and since I haven't been to culinary school, I'd have to start out as a baker-trainee, and I'm willing to bet the hourly rate isn't what I need it to be.  Anyway, I saw a Publix baker deliver King Cakes to Belk at the mall the other day, and then at home that same night I saw a Publix bakery advertisement on TV.

- On Saturday when I was eating Lasagna with my family, my mom pointed out that Meme's Joy of Cooking cookbook was sitting on the shelf, unclaimed, and asked if I wanted it, to which I replied, "Uh, yeah!" I thumbed through the pastry section it this evening while waiting for my cake to bake, and it's very comprehensive and exciting and daunting and I could not be more thrilled to have it!

- Last night, we watched It's Complicated with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin.  (HILARIOUS movie, by the way.) In the movie, Meryl Streep's character Jane owns a bake shop somewhere in Northern California, which is two of mine and Marcus's dreams put together: Northern California in some form or other, and owning a bake shop!  Entrepreneurship has always been one of Marcus's goals, but not so much mine--however I could be convinced if it was a bake shop.  I swooned at her life (even if she is in her 50s experiencing it) and noted the added bombardment.

I've enjoyed baking since I've been married, but have only really realized that it could be something I'd like to explore deeper in the past year and a half or so, when we became involved in a small group at the church we were attending.  Each person (or couple) would bring a dish, and I always tried to sign up for desserts.  I looked for impressive recipes (except when I was lazy and made dump cake because it was easy and so popular), and felt satisfied and rewarded when people ate what I worked hard to make and enjoyed it.

Eureka! (I hope.)

So now, I'm sitting here wrapping this up.  I'm about to bust out the Kindle and read and wait for the cake to finish chilling in the fridge.  I'm making a Tres Leches cake, and after baking the cake, I poured three milks and rum (Where has the rum gone?  Why, it's in my cake!) into the cake after pricking it all over with a fork (seems so destructive, doesn't it?) and then put the cake in the fridge to chill before I ice it.  I have a good two hours to go for the cake's fridge time, and it's 9:15, but I couldn't be happier.  Cake, check.  Book, check.  Tea?  Not yet, but what a good idea!

Goodnight!

The first beautiful Saturday of a new decade

So, it took eight years, but I think I'm finally adjusted to the weather in South Alabama.  Today is January 29th, and the high was somewhere between 65-70 degrees.  I'm definitely okay with that.  Here are some pictures to document our first pretty Saturday of 2011.

Orange Street Pier, Fairhope

White Street Pier, Fairhope

View to the South from White Street Pier

My handsome boys - Seamus wanted to wander around because there was some interesting seagull poop to investigate, and Marcus had to kind of hold him still.

Cut Marcus's head off because I couldn't see, but Seamus is looking dashing!

Walking on Mobile Street

Now we're home for a few minutes before we head back out.  Marcus is going to a wedding with his mom, and I'm going to Papa's to visit with family and eat some good food.  I hope everyone else's Saturday is as pleasant as mine!

Last night, I ate a southwestern chicken burrito wrapped in a green spinach tortilla.

I didn't plan for this to be my next post--my next post was going to be a publicizable version of my list mentioned in the last post.  However, this dream was just too weird not to share, so without further ado ...

I'm not sure where I began.  I had Rapunzel hair (except it was still the same color--not blond), and there was a 3-year-old with me, and the 3-year-old was me.  I was talking to my 3-year-old self, and she was getting frustrated because I wasn't taking her seriously.

Skip to the next scene.  Someone had sent me to the grocery store to get a pumpkin because it was "Forest Day."  When I walked into Winn-Dixie, which was nothing more than an indoor produce stand, the cashier cheerfully wished me a happy Forest Day.  I was confused, but not worried about it enough to ask what exactly Forest Day is celebrating.  I found a beautiful pumpkin, and when I was walking to the register, I realized the reason the pumpkin was so beautiful and perfect was because it wasn't a real pumpkin, but a ceramic candy dish.  I bought it anyway, and left Winn-Dixie.

I was driving a big, giant pickup truck, and I was in downtown Fairhope.  I saw some baby ducks in the road, but I figured they'd fly away before I reached them, even though they were really too young to fly.  I couldn't reach the pedals in the truck because I had embodied my three-year-old self while driving.  I eventually lowered myself down low enough to hit the brakes, but it was too late.  I had run over two baby ducks.

Flash forward to the next scene.  I'm not sure whether I'm three years old or twenty-six, but I'm in a tiny cargo plane with my parents, who are telling me all about the next time they'll go on vacation.  My dad is at the wheel, and my mom is in the seat behind him.  The airplane is stopped and there is grass outside the open door.

I kept trying to interject something, and no one would let me talk.  I finally decided to give up and let them just keep talking, except I did throw a miniature fit (that only I noticed).  I was going to tell my mom about how I had these new panties, and I had them folded in my hand.  I decided to just toss the panties out the door of the plane, but when I did that, the panties fell and fell and fell.  What I thought was grass was actually the tops of trees from miles and miles up off the ground.  The distance was so great that really we probably would have needed oxygen masks and whatever other necessary gear in order to have the door open in a plane at that altitude.

My dad circled the plane around and my stomach dropped as I tried not to fall out of the open door.  He looked at me knowingly, barrel-rolled the airplane, and the door slammed shut.  If I wasn't so terrified, I would have mentioned that the view of the trees and mountains was really breathtaking.  There was also a princess castle sticking up beyond everything, which is case for me being my three-year-old self during at least part of the airplane scene.

Queue alarm clock.