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Week: 9
The Challenge/New Experience: Bake bread from scratch.
It’s National Procrastination Week, Dear Reader, and in celebration of that I’ve put off posting about my bread-making adventures for three days — I actually completed this challenge on Sunday.
When I was a kid, my mom used to bake fresh bread on occasion. It was delicious, and it made the whole house smell wonderful. There are a lot of food-related items on my list of New Things for 2010, but this is one I was really looking forward to.
Armed with a great recipe I found on About.com, I set about the task beginning on Saturday with a trip to the store. I had all the ingredients in the pantry already, except yeast, but I had no rolling pin. How did I get through 41 years on earth without ever owning a rolling pin?
My camera battery was pretty low, but I managed to get a few shots. Here’s the dough in the initial kneading stage:
Bread-making is messy. The battery died right after that shot, so I put it on the charger while I finished kneading and while it went through its initial rising phase.
More after the jump.
Continue reading 2010 Challenge, Week #9 – Bake Bread
Oh, my God, you guys! My lightbulb terrarium is totally working! Check out these pictures (click to enlarge):
I have to be honest with you, after the Rock Candy failure I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for this one, but around Day 5, tiny little green sprouts started popping up! I don’t even know how many seeds I tossed in there, probably around 15 or so. I suspect I will have to figure out pretty quickly how to replant them elsewhere. Pretty neat, though! I declare Week #8 a rousing success.
So it’s Lent again. Ash Wednesday was February 17th, and it came up so fast I hadn’t really given much thought to giving anything up this year. I thought I would just skip it this year. And then Danny at work said, “I’m thinking about giving up fast food.”
“Perfect,” I told him. “Let’s do it together, Danny.” Fast food isn’t something I need to prepare to give up — as long as I didn’t have an Egg McMuffin for breakfast (which I hadn’t), it was an easy last-minute choice.
So I’m fast food free right now, since last Wednesday. So far it’s not much of a struggle, catch me in another couple of weeks and I’ll be jonesing for french fries.
I found it was necessary to define “fast food,” because my mother was under the mistaken impression that it included all junk food — that is not the case. Junk food is an umbrella term for all food that is bad for you. Fast food is a much smaller subset. Junk food includes chips, cookies, candy, chocolate, ice cream, pork rinds, etc.
So I have defined Fast Food, for the purposes of Lent, as being any restaurant establishment (particularly a chain or franchise) that has a drive-up window, and any place that delivers. Danny added a rule that fast food is “any place where a ‘combo’ means it comes with fries and a soda,” which leaves Subway available to both of us if we need to get a quick lunch somewhere.
As some of you may recall, last year I gave up swearing for Lent, and I was none too successful. I tried, but failed miserably. Fortunately, I’m not religious at all so there are no consequences for me if I fail. My only consequences is living with my own miserable failure.
Danny, meanwhile, who is actually Catholic and is doing this because it actually means something to him, “accidentally” ate a McChicken sandwich yesterday. He is so going to hell.
I’ve been watching a fair bit of House Hunters recently. It started with my Dad’s recent visit, but truth be told I’ve been a fan of House Hunters for several years. In fact, I saw this whole Housing Bubble fiasco coming a mile away, what with the huge influx of 25-year-olds on House Hunters buying up $450k four-bedroom homes and signing up for ludicrous no-down-payment adjustable ARM mortgages. In fact, if HGTV ever wants to do any kind of a serious show about Real Estate and the bubble, a great start would be following up on some past House Hunters, many of whom I’m sure have had to bail by this time.
But I digress. My point is that I’ve been watching House Hunters quite a lot lately, enough to roll out my favorite activity to accompany TV shows — the drinking game. In the past, I have been known to devise drinking games for The Oscar telecast, and also Star Trek: TNG and Red Dwarf (drinking games co-created by my pal Mish). It’s not the drinking I enjoy, mind you. I enjoy recognizing patterns and then making a game of it.
Here then are my rules for the House Hunters Drinking Game. The show is only a half hour, so you’re not likely to get too drunk from it — although they do frequently show episodes back-to-back, and occasionally in marathons. So Caveat Bivitor*!
- One drink: every time the House Hunter says “I love the open floor plan.”
- One drink: Upon inspection of the closet, the House Hunter says, “Plenty of room for my shoes.”
- On the subject of closets, one drink for this tired old joke: Wife says, “Gee honey, this closet is big enough for my clothes, but where are we going to put your stuff, ha ha ha ha.”
- One drink: “This closet is bigger than our old bedroom!”
- One drink: the House Hunter walks into the closet to prove it’s “walk-in.”
- Two drinks: their partner then shuts the closet door behind them.
- One drink: someone gets into the tub to make sure they’ll fit.
- One drink: granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances (the 21st Century equivalent of formica and avacado green)
- One drink: any mention of “entertaining.” People on House Hunters must throw parties every weekend from the sounds of it, they are always entertaining, and always so concerned that their house is laid out properly for entertaining.
- One drink for each mention of how much space they need.
- Two drinks if you suspect their real problem isn’t that they don’t have enough space, but rather that they have too much crap.
- Two drinks: They end up buying the house that is “a little out of our price range.”
- Two drinks: Their realtor shows up at the fake “housewarming party” at the end (because they HAVE NO FRIENDS, despite how desperate they are to entertain)
- Finish drink: They don’t actually buy a house at the end (rare, but it does happen occasionally)
- Finally, chug-a-lug if you guess the correct house at the end!
Have fun, and play responsibly!
* “Let the drinker beware” **
** Not real Latin.
Week: 8
The Challenge/New Experience: Create a Light Bulb Terrarium
This week’s project is like the rock candy, another “set it and forget it” project — or, as Lily said, a “watching paint dry” project. I did all the work on it yesterday, now I just have to leave it alone and we’ll see what it looks like next week.
Since I first announced my 2010 project, there has been one item on the list that I have been more eager to try out than any of the others — the light bulb terrariurm. I first read about it on Lifehacker and wanted to try it out right away. But I thought it was wasteful to destroy a brand new light bulb, so I decided to wait until one blew out around the house. Finally, it happened last weekend while Dad was here — one of the bulbs in the bathroom burned out. I don’t think I’ve ever been moved to go “Yesss!” when a light bulb burned out before.
Not too many steps to the project. First thing you have to do is hollow out the light bulb — found some good instructional videos on YouTube for that. I was a little worried that I would break the bulb, but I was very careful.
Once the bulb was hollowed out, I cleaned it out — apparently soft-white bulbs have a coating that just wipes away pretty easily (that’s a paper towel inside the bulb in the picture):
And then, fill it with a little soil, a little water, and a few seeds:
Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll see some little sprouts starting to come up. I tossed in a couple of seeds for basil and thyme. I’ll check back with more pictures later in the week.
Well, the rock candy didn’t exactly work. The second attempt seemed to work better, the sugar is crystallizing in the jar like it’s supposed to, but it’s not forming on the stick like it’s supposed to. It’s sort of gathering around the edges of the jar.
I just read Duke’s suggestion that he left in the comments — he asked if I tried seed crystals on the string. I am actually using a stick, but I did wet it and then dip it in sugar before putting it in the jar, which some of recipes I found suggested.
Most recipes did recommend using a string. And a few recommended just as you said, Duke — wet the string, let it dry for a day, and then put it back in. I really wanted it on a stick, so I tried as best I could to make the stick work. It didn’t.
I can’t say I’m heartbroken over this or anything. I have never been a fan of hard sugar candy anyway. If it’s not chocolate, I don’t see the point to it.
It takes up to a week for the crystals to finish forming, so I’ll probably leave it on the counter for another few days, just to see. But now it’s time to move on to Week #8, and I’ve got something pretty fun in store this time. Tune in tomorrow to see how that turns out.
Week: 7
The Challenge/New Experience: Make rock candy
Greetings, Dear Reader. Another week is upon us (they never stop! what’s up with that?), and time to tackle another Thing I’ve Never Done Before. This week I was looking for something kind of easy, a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, because Dad’s been in town and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time futzing around with a project while he was here.
So I settled on making rock candy. I have a vague, dim memory of my sister making rock candy when I was very very young, but I really only remember eating it, not the making process or watching it form. But I knew it was something that you spend a little time on up front, and then let it grow over a couple of days.
I looked around online for a good recipe and found several variations, but finally settled on this one at ehow.com. This particular recipe called for one cup of water to four cups of sugar. Other recipes suggest only three cups of sugar (some only two, in fact).
Of course — you guys know I can’t just follow a recipe as written, right? Because that would be too easy and would lead to an easy win. I wanted to make different colors of rock candy, so I decided to double the recipe and put it in several different mason jars. Mistake. Read on.
Continue reading 2010 Challenge: Week #7 – Make Rock Candy
Greetings, Dear Reader! I’d like to introduce you all to my new Ikea chair, Pöang! For the last several years (five, maybe?), I’ve been using my Dad’s extremely comfy old club chair and ottoman. As much as I have loved it, it’s always been a little too large for the space. Plus, after five years in my home, it’s gotten a little greyed from cigarette smoke, and scratched all to hell by the cats, and become home to myriad of coffee and food stains. So it was time to get it replaced.
Here is Pöang, my new chair and ottoman (click to enlarge):
And there’s Buster behind it there, on the kitties’ new cat jungle gym, with his sharp-focus laser eyes focusing on me — he is pissed that I threw out his favorite chair. So far he is not very fond of Pöang.
My Dad is in town this weekend, so I haven’t had much chance to sit in the new chair yet. Dad’s breaking it in for me. But I’m very pleased with how much better it fits into its little corner, and I’m pleased at how comfy it is. I believe it’s even comfy enough to fall asleep in, which as we all know is the mark of a good chair. The cats are not likely to scratch on it, due to its framing. One downside is that Buster’s white fur will show up very badly on the black fabric. But so far Buster’s refused to sit on it, so maybe that won’t be a problem.
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