Thursday, August 23, 2007

McDonald's Iced Coffee Blows

I just wanted to confirm this for people thinking about lining up. It does, in fact, blow chunks. One account said that theirs was 2/3 syrupy milk, 1/3 ice with a dash of coffee. Mine was bad coffee with cream and vanilla syrup poured over half-melted ice. It was luke-warm coffee flavored water. Blech.

I tried one because I had a coupon. Save yourself from this and pay the extra dollar at your local coffee shop.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Fancy First Week Dinner

So the first week of school has come and gone. We're moving on to the second week. At the end of the first week, you're usually exhausted. Less from the actual workload and more from the excitement, nervousness, and all the rushing around. All I really wanted Friday night was a nice meal. Something kind of fancy, something I might not make on a regular basis. But really, anything that wasn't pizza would do.

I found some low-key fancy recipes online and went to town.
1. I think I've made a chicken recipe every time I've cooked for nearly the last year.
2. Twice baked potatoes are the shit. Seriously.

I made chicken piccata. It was alright. I mean, it was tasty and real food, but I might not make it again. Possibly because something made it smell like burnt plastic. The twice stuffed potatoes on the other hand, those are now a staple. I had no idea how easy they were to prepare. Jeez, bake potato, mix with tasty stuff, rewarm. That's it. Mine didn't look pretty or anything, but they tasted divine. Dee-vine. They were probably the first thing I've eaten as a leftover in a long time. They were breakfast actually.

Anyway, I forgot to take a picture of the chicken in the pan- and they were very pretty too. I didn't have quite enough food to fill up my plate. This was the only picture I could get because I was about to fall on my food.



They look like twins.

I hope to get around to more cooking on the weekends, because I've mostly been subsisting on peanut butter and honey sandwiches for the last two weeks. And tuna salad. And pizza. Eww... pizza. That shows you how much I've consumed recently. Enough to be disgusted by it. I'll do more and better later, but I've got to run and finish up my school things before class. Bye.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Recipes and Memories

I was going to post my favorite fudge recipe today, but the fudge I made was sub-par as were the pictures. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do it. But this is something else that I've been playing around with.



A few weeks ago, I found a cookie tin full of clipped recipes at a thrift shop. It wasn't just full; it was jam packed. For roughly 33 cents, it was a steal and found a nice home on top of my junk. Yet the more I rifled through it, the more I realized that this was something even more special than I originally thought. The lady who horded these recipes (because it's cooking, so yeah, it's a chick. This story is sexist.) put much more than ingredient lists in this tin. Paradoxically, it almost makes me uncomfortable, but feel very comforted at the same time.

She clipped everything. Recipes from newspapers, fliers, soup labels, flour sacks, recipe cards. Some were handwritten on receipts, note paper, and even on the back of personal checks. I really hope she changed her account. Or she's dead, though I'm not exactly cheering for that option. Some have dates- 80s, 90s- and all are aged. But it's not just the recipes.

There were several stamp pages filled with half-peeling proof-of-purchases. Glaring statements that she was working for something to fill her life and home. There are even booklets of something that may be old food stamps. I'm almost terrified to check those and verify if they are because I feel that there's something almost heartbreaking there, in her tin of bare bones recipes and stamp books.




I have an old blank album that sat on my shelf for a few years. It's got a Christmas bear on it, but that doesn't matter. I spent a few hours carefully arranging and taping them in- double-sided tape and as little as possible so as not to ruin the paper. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. Maybe it'll just sit on my bookcase for a while. Maybe I'll ending up giving it away. Either way, it felt like burying the dead. Doing my best to give her little tin respect. Maybe I'm being overly melodramatic, but there it is.

Here are some of the pages.


















Maybe it's a sign that it fits so well on my cookbook shelf.