Just because I think this is funny

This post is not about food but a couple of funny things that happened this morning.

This morning when I got off the train at campus,  I was climbing the stairs (I’m hoping that 5 minutes of stair climbing will counteract the 6 hours I spend sitting at work) when I spotted a little Edmonton would-be gangsta. He had the low hat and chains and his wee insulated boots had images of $100 bills on them.  But the weird part was that the crotch of his jeans was the lowest I have ever seen.  It was actually just below his knees.  I immediately started wondering how he could climb the stairs, because his ensemble looked so binding.  Asking myself this question, you know what went through my head?  “What would Shannon do?”  The answer was easy.  Shannon would push her way through the crowd, get behind little gangsta, and study things from behind.  So that’s what I did.

I don’t know if this kid thought I wanted him or something, but I stared at his butt and legs the whole way up three flights of stairs, studying how he was able to move his legs inside those constricting pants, and I figured out that by cutting them as wide as a skirt, his legs could still move enough within them to get up stairs as well as shuffle down the street. Poor little guy.  He looked so ridiculous.  I just want to say that it was -19 this morning and that the skin on your butt can get frostbite too.

I also want to share something else with you.  Have any of you seen the latest Hugo Chavez news?  CNN got an image of him mixed up with a headline for another news story (a murder headline) on one of their broadcasts.  It only lasted for a few seconds before the anchor caught it and asked the technical team to change it.  Chavez called a news conference right away where he kept showing the clip over and over, saying that CNN should be sued for instigating his murder down in Venezuala.  Every time I think of it I start giggling uncontrollably.  It is so funny.  I vote for Chavez as the funniest dictator ever.

The mission of this blog – now discovered – is to motivate you

I just watched an MSN video clip from NBC’s “Today” show about the worst foods in America, calorically speaking. I already knew a lot of what they said. Some guy from “Men’s Health” has written a book about eating, recycling information that’s been in the news over the past year about the calorie count of popular restaurant foods, and he was on there promoting it. I’ll tell you what was most disturbing to me and got me all worked up so I had to write this before I go to bed. The “food in America” commentators talking about how Americans supposedly view food. Comments like “People just want to get food in the fastest and easiest way possible” and “This mother is too busy to cook” are really very alarming.

Now I want all of you reading this blog to understand that while this is primarily a source of relief for me to unburden myself of my food-related “philosophical musings”, I also hope that maybe some of you will be encouraged to get in the kitchen and cook too. Cooking is extremely important. It’s about nutrition and health, enjoyment, friendship, family, socializing, culture and heritage, creative expression, and demonstrating love and concern for yourself and the people you feed by utilizing all the wonderful variety of foods that God has provided to us to enjoy.

If any of you are still thinking that you can’t cook or are no good at it, put that right out of your head because that simply isn’t true. Everyone can cook and can be good at it with a bit of practice. You simply have to find your style of cooking, your personal cuisine, if you will. If any of you need help with that or suggestions of what to make for dinner I hope you ask me, because I love to talk about food and to hear back from you about your successes and occasional do-overs.

Speaking of do-overs, here is a list of some of the notable disasters I have had in the kitchen, to make you feel better about any problems you may have encountered:

• Last week’s banana walnut pie – still surprised I made that one;
• My sister and I invited a couple of guys from home over for dinner while at BYU. I decided to make honey glazed pork chops, very expensive, and wound up candying them by accident. We had to order pizza;
• This past summer I was going to make Bobby Flay’s sweet potato rolls for a dinner to which we had invited the Crapo family and they were expecting to eat them, after hearing about last year’s bread making project – I forgot to put in the butter and they were inedible;
• I once put cream into a muffin recipe that called for milk because I didn’t have any milk on hand and took the muffins without tasting them over to my then-boyfriend’s family – the muffins, of course, with the high fat content were rancid to the taste;
• A few summers ago I decided it was time to work on my jam-making. I made blackberry jam, for which of course you need apples to provide pectin, since I refuse to use those nasty artificial setting agents. I didn’t listen to my mum and put in eating apple instead of cooking apple, and wound up with jars of jam that had hard bits of apple flecked all through it, which made it unpleasant to eat.

If anyone wants to share their cooking disasters with the rest of us I would love to hear them. In the meantime, listen to my moralizing and try to avoid the restaurant food – go express yourself instead in the kitchen.

I’m tagged

YES! I just handed in my interface paper and I have only one more assignment to do, and I will have finished all my coursework for my degrees! And, since I got my major assignment back from the other class today, it looks like A’s all round. Who is your little genius, girls?

I just checked Jenny’s blog and after reading all her horrifying secrets found out that she had “tagged” me. If I have this right, I’m supposed to write six or seven things that are semi-secret and hopefully embarrassing? The embarrassing part is always easy for me, so I am going to write this but I am not writing any excuses or explanations for any of my items.

1. I love to watch “Perry Mason”.

2. I think having PMS excuses any laziness, emotional hysteria about my appearance, or poor eating choices I might possibly make.

3. Every night before I go to sleep, after my scripture study, I think about making things in order to relax into sleep. Food, quilts, embroidery projects, gardening, how I’ll decorate my house when I have one.

4. Pet commercials gross me out.

5. Very rarely do I have a nightmare that is a heart pounding, wake-yourself-up scary nightmare. My bad dreams are usually about watching someone in trouble and not being able to move but then they end well because I finally move and the person sees me or I wave and say “Hi” or something and then the person is saved.

6. I have always had a thing about men that carry a white handkerchief about their person. Oooh…I just love that.

7. I struggle with being shy in social situations but I have a mantra/ action plan I will share with you: everyone feels as uncomfortable as you do, go make someone else feel comfortable. It gives the illusion that I am at ease. But this doesn’t work that often in Relief Society, sadly.

This was really hard to do. Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything embarrassing that you guys don’t already know, since I feel so free to throw around my opinions and latest musings about life, society, and other things. Now I tag Shannon’s blog.

Banana Walnut Pie

I made this week’s pie this morning while the snow was falling, before getting ready for church. In case anyone doesn’t realize this, I want to be clear that this year-long pie experiment (that means some 50 pies, can you believe it?) will include classic pies, historic/ heritage pies, and some experimental pies that I pretty much know won’t be great but I’m curious to try them — like the cherry custard pie, which still gives me a cloyed sensation in the back of my throat every time I think about it.

This weekend, because I wasn’t seeing anyone I could force to eat pie, I figured it was time for an experiment. At home on the island I have a copy of Tamsin Day-Lewis’ “Tarts with Tops On”. I’ve regarded the whole book with some suspicion and haven’t made any recipes from it (like Nigella Lawson, Tamsin is another author I have to keep on hand as part of my core British collection). This recipe for banana walnut pie is from that book.

I’m inserting a picture here so you can see what it looked like out of the oven. The recipe called for puff pastry, which was a new one to me. The only pie I’ve ever eaten with puff pastry has had chicken in it, but it was all part of the experimentation. I think the pastry did look pretty. The pie filling had sliced bananas and chopped walnuts in a sweet cream cheese flavoured with some lemon. I would have taken a picture and attached it to show you what it looked like inside but it was a curdled mess. You can eat it, but I am not recommending any of you make it. I’m also not sure I’ll be making any more of Tamsin Day-Lewis’ recipes either. If I ever publish a cookbook I promise you all that every recipe will be worth making.

Well, I am thrilled to say it is Sunday night again which means blissful, wonderful relaxation. No work, no cleaning, no studying, and there’s another good movie on tonight on TCM, an old black and white murder mystery. I’ve got nowhere to go, my pyjamas are on already, I have a Christmas embroidery project to work on, and some brownies to eat. Those of you with small screaming children to deal with can go ahead and feel envious. Of course, if I tell you that there will be more snow tonight, the high for tomorrow is supposed to be -16 celcius, and that I’ll be frantically working on finishing my interface paper so I can do my library management final assignment on Tuesday, that possible feeling of envy I am sure will pass.

On the brighter side of pie experimentation, this one gave me some good insights for my pies that I will be creating to enter into a competition some time next summer, because I am so going to try and enter a State Fair if I live in the States then. I’m thinking a lemon flavoured cream cheese custardy filling with a cooked blueberry topping would be good, but it will need something distinctive to make it truly original.

Sudden panic!

I logged on today to see if I got any more searching hits for “osgood pie” because if I get any more I will have to post the recipe out of sheer pity for the random people looking in my blog for one. While I am looking at this, I see a weird link to my blog. Huh? I click on it. My eyes widen, I suck in my breath, my heart starts to beat faster…oh, crap!! My blog has been chosen as a WordPress “Hawt Post” and my stupid picture is attached to my blog for all the world to see!! I only stuck that picture in there because my brain wasn’t working when I set up my profile!

OK, yes, I knew that my blog was in the public domain. But my picture cannot be. I’m going to have to take a picture of an apple or a pie or my big toe or something and stick that in there as my photo. I cannot have people seeing what I look like in photographs because I am the most un-photogenic person I know. Any suggestions of what to have as my photo instead of my face are gladly accepted. Ugh.

It’s time to write my final papers and almost everyone I know is holed up at the library or at home working on their end of term projects. I have a paper to finish this weekend too. Getting the vacuum repaired, teaching Sunday School, and making my pie will be the exciting highlights of this weekend for me. (No, really…it actually is exciting to have my vacuum repaired and working. How sad is that?).

During breaks from writing my interface design paper I ordered a couple of pie cookbooks from Amazon and struggled with the temptation to order more quilt fabric, but did not give in. I had the cookbooks sent to my sister’s place so I won’t get them until Christmas and they won’t distract me from the work I should be doing until then.

I also have been thinking about how I will finish up this year-long pie project next summer. What if I made a couple of pies and entered them into a State Fair competition? Wouldn’t that be fun? Plus it would help me tick off one of my “life experiences” items on my list. It’s right below “audition for a play”. Some of the things are on my list only because I want to see what they feel like and meet the kind of people that do them on a regular basis, not because I want to succeed at them. I’m just mentioning that so none of you think that I secretly want to act. As long as I can overreact to life’s little surprises (like seeing my photo on the internet) I will have all the drama I need.

P.S. The whole monthly challenge thing is off.  My fan base isn’t embracing it as I had hoped, other than Cathy (which makes her my favorite blog audience member).