Lesbian Gingerbread - A Chocolatey and Nostalgic MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
501

So, I’m guessin’ you won’t be openin’ up a caterin’ bidness when you retire? :smiley:

This reminds me of the times (multiple, multiple times) I have made either cheese crisps and/or cheese straws for various receptions and whatnots. Many, many, many of what seemed to be millions each time. Each time tellin’ myself I ain’t doin’ this again, only to do it again. Of course I will be doin’ it again, in June. Reason to follow.

This mornin’ at church our Priest made the announcement I knew was comin’. He’s retiring at the end of June. Joy. Search for new Priest. Oh and we will be doin’ one big humongous retirement reception for him on June 21st. Guess what I get to make! Yep, bazillions of cheese straws. Or maybe cheese crisps. I did ask to be informed which in the near future cause either one may be made ahead of time and frozen. Cheese straws are especially amenable to freezing ahead of time. Just thaw a bit and bake. It’d be even easier if they’d just let me make a big ol’ thing of baked beans, but I guess baked beans don’t exactly qualify as reception type munchin’, do they. So anyways, it was a kinda happy/sad time at church this morning.

We ate BK for lunch. Sometimes ya just gotta.

rigs how’s that paper comin’ young lady? Don’t think I’ve forgotten. I expect to see you post that it’s done finally. Why must everything with you be such a struggle. Don’t look at me like that!

Think maybe I’ll cruise the board for a bit and then have a little nappy poo. I bolded nappy so as not to confuse rigs. :stuck_out_tongue:

ETA: Look! First on page 11!!!

502

Trust me, that was never something I’d consider. I watched my mom do it for years, and never once did I see anything about it that appealed.

The meatballs are in the freezer. I’m going to go clean the kitchen. Yeah, I know, I was gonna do that before. I’m gonna do that now. Hush.

503

I was so busy this past week that I have hardly had time to read the MMP, let alone post to it, though the lesbian gingerbread recipe sounds tasty. I have been packing my house, prepping for work (finding all my certification papers and so forth), and going to long needed dentist/doctors appointments since I had the time to do so.

Tomorrow I have a 7 A.M. flight to Reno for my first day of work and new employee orientation. and then I have scheduled field work for air sampling for the rest of the week. I’m off to a running start and I haven’t even got there yet. I am so excited.

504

Attention Mumper Bakers! I have a quick question. I just made sourdough biscuits and once again they came out crumbly. I think I narrowed down what I did wrong:

  1. Misread the recipe (1/3 cup of shortning, oops. Quick triple the batch)
  2. Worked the dough too much (see above)
  3. No cooking instructions on the card. Herein lies the question.

I baked the first batch at 450 for twelve minutes. That didn’t work, so I did the next two batches at 425 for ten minutes. That worked okay, but still crumbly. What’s the best temperature for sourdough biscuits? Anyone? Bueller?

505

I’ve never made sourdough biscuits before, but here’s a site with about one million recipes for them. The temps range between 350 and 425.

Back from gardening at church and am about to head out to the garden again for a little while.

Back later with comments…

GT

506

It’s important when using shortening in biscuits not to break it up too much; crumbs the size of peas is ideal. Much smaller than that and the biscuits end up crumbly, not flaky.

Papa Tigs has decided to torture me today. He’s got some heavenly Filipino stew in the crockpot – not adobo this time, but caldereta – and even though it’s at least 5 hours till dinnertime, the fragrance has already filled the house and is so heavenly that it’s purely 100% torture to sit here and smell it and have to wait. I want it NOW, dammit! He’s really too good a cook sometimes.

We’ve only had one brief hard rain shower thus far, although the humidity is rapidly approaching oppressive – in other words, up to New Orleans normal, except the sun’s not shining – and that one shower hit just as Papa Tigs and the idiots had climbed in the car to return home from a play trip at the schoolyard. His timing was perfect. I honestly thought they would get soaked, but apparently the Idiots tired out faster than I thought they would, so they were all done just at the right moment. Papa Tigs is just a very lucky person in general; he has lucky things happen to him all the time, not just when he’s gambling. I keep wishing it would rub off on me, but if it hasn’t after 12 years of marriage, I fear that means it’s just not going to, alas.

snowbunny, are you at work today? If not, give me a buzz. Or give me a buzz when you get home this evening. I know there was something I was going to tell you. What I can’t remember right now, but presumably by the time you call I’ll have remembered it. Or not. :smiley:

Back to my thrilling and exciting transcript. <yawn> I have to admit, this is the first time I’ve ever had to type the name of the city Skopje in my life. And hopefully the last. That is not an easy combination to wrap one’s fingers around.

507

Just got home after going out last night. Need nap. And a shower. I hate waking up and having to put on what you were wearing last night. :: groggily searches for Tylenol ::

508

OK, this is too scary not to share. Teriyaki? I think not… <shudder>

509

Yesterday available light and I hosted a giant Passover seder for like 14 people. Today we are still working on cleanup. Next time we may have to press people into service. Also, homemade latkes are very good, but a pain in the ass, and their superiority over latkes from a mix is diminished when you have to make them in advance and leave them sitting around during the first part of the seder.

510

Ew gags that is NOT terriyaki.

Mom just made bread, which is yummy… I might try to make cinnamon rolls this afternoon, if I feel adventurous. I need to pop over to the grocery store though because I forgot stuff last night.

511

Gee, thanks a panstload there FCM, I just HAD to go click on that link and now my tummy is all queasy and shit. Damn, that is FOUL! The whole POINT of teriyaki, and Japanese style food prep in general is to CUT DOWN ON THE FAT and that is 180 degrees and about fifteen parsecs removed from healthy cookin’. Gah! Sorry your meatballs didn’t cooperate–time to get out the tiny catapult and play target practice with a dog!

Soooo, I got a new laptop! I know it seems incongruous in a thread where I complain about being unable to afford a doctor or dentist that I should say such a thing, but as far as I can see I could’ve spent the same five hundred bucks on a dentist and have nothing to show but a hole in my mouth and the near complete inability to chew my food from here on out–or I coulda spent it at a doctor’s office and ended up with the same antibiotic I already have but a whole bunch poorer otherwise. So anyway, now that I’m all done being defensive, I’m excited!

My current lappie is about three years old and is actually still going like a champ aside from one small issue–it has these cheesy hinges that have cracked so I can’t close the thing all the way lest the hinge deform enough that my screen won’t light up. Not helpful. Besides, I need it to keep bidness stuff going and I need my laptop to be MOBILE, dammit! (Oops, more defensiveness creeping in!) So I found this one on sale at Best Buy–AMD Turion 1.9Ghz 64bit dual processor (TL-58,) 2 GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD RW, n-Vidia GeForce 7000M graphics (uses up to 335MB of shared memory!), high def Conexant 221 audio with Altec Lansing speakers, just a nice little upgrade from my current one. Best part was that I ordered it online last night for in store pickup at my local BB, priced at 550 bucks. Then, when I went to pick it up they didn’t have it waiting for me so they knocked another 20 bucks off! Nice… So this one ended up being 70 bucks LESS than my last laptop–damn, I love the way computers just get cheaper…

The thing shipped with Vista Home Premium on it but I’ll be scrubbing that and going back to XP64 Pro ASAP–which of course means that I’ll be doing the Endless Driver Hunt From Hell™ for the next little while, joy. At least I can use Old Lappie to hunt for drivers for New Lappie if I get stuck. From what I’m seeing, though, the biggest issue is going to be a 64bit sound driver. Everything else is pretty standard–the touchpad is from the same maker as the current one so the same driver might work fine for the new one. If anybody has had any luck finding sound drivers for the Conexant 221 I’d be happy to know where they can be found.

Yikes, I geeked–sorry, I’ll clean that up directly!

LVG, safe flight and good luck on your new job, yay you!

Haze, if you sleep at home you never have that problem, missy. Just sayin’!

Dotty, the cute baby pic link sent me to a signup page, what’s up wid dat?

{{{Pie, beebs}}}

kai, I have a bazillion of those little animals, I was so disappointed when they stopped giving them out!

512

My *real * teriyaki chickie is in the fridge, cooling down before going into the freezer. Most of the dishes are done - one pan is still soaking. Critters have been fed. I need food, and I’m too pooped from cooking to want to cook more. Pizza has a certain appeal.

Who am I kidding - almost anything I don’t have to cook has appeal.

It’s raining again, as it has on and off all day. There were even a few thunderboomers, one which upset Bernie. I thought about the **MamaTigs ** Idiots. :smiley:

Must figure out the supper thing…

513

Ok, ick! And I’ll eat most anything. That sounds nasty.

I see rigs hasn’t been in for a while. I must have put the fear of Og in her. :smiley: She’s just workin’ away on that paper, I just know it!

Speakin’ of supsup, I reckon I need to think on that too. Then again I could go back and read that shudder recipe shudder again. After that I prolly wouldn’t want to eat. Hmmmmm… The Really Gross Recipe Diet… that might have marketing and money potential! :smiley:

514

Shared memory is not to be applauded, although it’s pretty common on laptops due to limited space. Basically, if you run anything graphics-intensive, the computer has to split the main memory between the graphics and everything else, and performance goes down the tubes.

515

They have golden syrup at my grocery store, in the British section. Yay! I’ll be able to make authentic Lesbian Gingerbread sometime soon.

I’m all cleaned up after gardening, walked over to CVS and the grocery store as my cool down and am now off to din din at a friend’s.

I don’t have to work tomorrow, so I’m all relaxed and stuff.

Back after a while…

GT

516

Oh Jebus, that chicken recipe is going to give me nightmares to rival the one I had yesterday. I started re-reading The Dante Club because I recommended it in another thread. Less than 30 pages in and I’ve already had a dream about being eaten alive by blowflies. I’m not one to nightmare much, so that should give you some indication of the creepiness of the book. Still, I think that chicken recipe is worse.

Last night was my final day at work, and as I was prepping the papers my boss’s boss came up and asked me if I wanted to stay on for another three days. Seems he messed up the paperwork for starting my replacement, and he thought it’d be easier to fudge the paperwork to keep me on longer than it would be to fudge the paperwork to fix her start date. I could use the money but I turned him down anyway, because at this point I could use the days off more. It’s my last two weeks as an undergrad and I’d kind of like to enjoy them, rather than stumbling around as a sleep-deprived zombie.

My BFF/roomie and I have plans to hang out and celebrate my newly-unemployed status tonight by playing video games until the wee hours of the morning, so I really have to go do all the room-cleaning that I neglected to do yesterday. At least I have the anticipation of hours and hours of getting my butt kicked at Tony Hawk and Tekken Tag to motivate me. If I can talk her into playing Guitar Hero, she will be the one getting her butt kicked because I’ve been playing it way more than her. :smiley:

517

Kitchen is clean. I still don’t know what to do about supper. **FCD ** isn’t hungry. Maybe I’ll make a grilled cheese or something. I dunno…

Apologies to all for linking to that recipe - I should have included a more strongly-worded warning. Maybe that’s what killed my appetite? There ya go - *The *FCM ** Diet - read that recipe and you won’t want to eat at all! :smiley: You’re welcome.

518

:stuck_out_tongue: I say to you. :stuck_out_tongue:

Gah. I really need to get off this sofa and start doing stuff.

I wasn’t that drunk last night until the very end, where people insisted on buying me shots. I very nearly was sick. But otherwise we had a fine time; went to a Korean restaurant, where my clueless white friends enjoyed a fine Korean meal, then had some drinks and somehow got into an argument over the definition of faith. My brother, who joined us, commented that my friends and I always make him feel like he’s sitting in class. Afterwards we went to a bar and hung out a bit more - I think my brother was drunker than I was, for some reason, but I got him into a cab and sent him off home, then spent the night in a bed other than my own.

All right. I’ve had my coffee and my Tylenol; now I need a shower and then get some work done before dinner.

519

And… My day has taken a turn for the worse all because I read the mail.

First of all, I stopped at my P.O. box on my way home from shopping and TVLand. Waiting for me there was a letter from a certain authority because I was reported to them by a certain former employee! Yes, I’m being vague because I don’t want anymore trouble than I’ve already got. Needless to say, this has been ongoing for quite sometime and I am so ready for it to be over with. :mad:

Second, when I got home and was going through my mail I noticed a letter from my parents’ bankruptcy attorney. The specific letter wasn’t a big deal, but what it represents is. We’ve still never gotten my father’s AMEX crap taken care of. And when the bankruptcy closes, as far as I know, the AMEX debt will be mine. I really have no idea what to do about it and neither do I have the funds to contact a lawyer.

I’m going to go hide under the covers and sulk for awhile if anyone needs me. :frowning:

520

I am exhausted. I have worked outside for the past 6 hours straight. If you think for one minute I’m going to continue work on the Paper, you’re not a smart person. I did get the shelves built for the back deck, all the pots out, 3 perennials planted, some weeding (I’d say major, but the weeds here laugh at me), I also burned out the dead brush from my Siberian iris and pampas grass-so much quicker than hacking away at it. Yes, I had 2 buckets of water with me and I watched the blaze(s) the whole time. I even went out later and checked on them and will do so once more–no embers, no smoldering bits leftover. I also crawled around in the crawlspace (damn good name for that area, btw) and discovered something: we had put on old carpet strip down so that we wouldn’t be crawling on concrete. Well, this is still nice and soft and it was nice and quiet in there and the kids were all not home, but The Husband didn’t take me up on my offer to crawl up into my space, so to speak. :rolleyes:

I am now clean and very tired. Too tired to even eat.