Happy fall!

I baked sourdough bread. A few times, even, since my last blog post. It’s always turned out well, except it’s not sour, just bread-y. Good, crispy outside and fluffy inside, though.

My sourdough starter. It seemed to be going very well.

Sourdough bread, round 1. Fresh out of the oven.

Sourdough grilled cheese and tomato basil soup

So, my sourdough isn’t sour, but it is made of dough. And it makes a damn good grilled cheese.

In other baking adventures, I made apple pie. Unlike every other time I’ve made apple pie, this time I made the crust from scratch. It was terrifying and time-consuming, but I did it. It turned out perfectly golden and flaky and buttery. Mmm. My coworkers seemed to enjoy the warm apple pie I brought to the newsroom.

Mmm, apple pie. Delicious.

In somewhat related baking news, I went to a community soup dinner thing where you get a locally made ceramic bowl to eat your soup in, and then take home. Here’s my bowl (made by a lovely middle-aged lady who was taking dinner tickets at the door):

 

I liked the blue/teal/green color of it, and the swirls around the rim.

So, being the classy grown-up I am, I brought it home and broke it in. With Disney Princess Spaghettios:

 

Spaghettios!

In non-food related news, I ended up not getting another job. I put my name in at 2 nearby businesses but never heard back from either. I’m okay with that. I enjoy being able to sleep until 11 a.m. (or later). And I’m not broke (yet), so there’s no rush to find another source of income. Once ski season rolls around, I may need to find a few extra bucks to cover things like ski rentals and accessories.

I’m still trying to finish reading all the books I’d started, but alas, NetFlix and Hulu have a pretty firm grasp on my entertainment time. I’m still working my way through Mad Men and The Wire on NetFlix, along with rewatching all of Battlestar Galactica. If you haven’t seen Battlestar, I highly recommend doing the free one-month NetFlix deal and watching at least the miniseries and the first season. It’s available for instant watch, so you could even go watch it right now!

Back to the real world, they were doing construction on main street for the past few months here, and when I got home from work the other night I snapped this photo (on my awesome Droid Incredible):

 

Bright light!

So bright! They had all these super-duper stadium-like lights illuminating the road where they were doing paving work. The lights sometimes shone right into my apartment. But this night, they were shining right down the street I park on. It was just a cool effect with the light and the dust from the paving.

Alright, back to baking, since that’s where I’ve been investing my time. Lately, I’ve made peanut butter cup cookies (chocolate dough with peanut butter chips), almond sugar cookies (switch out the vanilla for almond extract), and today I’m making s’mores cookies. I made s’mores cookies for a friend’s birthday back in college when his birthday camping trip got rained out, and they were a big hit. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

Sourdough and snow

I haven’t had many adventures. Sorry. So, I’m embarking on a baking adventure. I’m going to attempt to make sourdough bread.

In order to do that, I first have to attempt to make a sourdough starter. This should take about a week.

I’m following a recipe from here, even though I’m sure I could find a more credible source, I asked Google for a sourdough starter recipe and selected “I’m feeling lucky” and got this, so we’ll see if I have any luck.

I’ve combined a cup of warm water and a cup of flour into a rinsed out peanut butter jar. I’ll update later this week about how it’s going.

In other news:

I checked out books from the library. I’ve read the first half of “Room with a View” and hope to finish it by the end of the weekend, since it isn’t very long. I also checked out the sequel to “How I Paid for College,” which was one of my favorite books while in high school. Instead of reading, though, I’ve been watching more episodes of Mad Men, and I watched the first 3 episodes of The Wire, season one.

The weather here is insanely perfect every day. My bike tires are flat, so I haven’t done much outside, but hopefully this week I can find someplace to pump up my tires and get back out on the trails.

I’m looking forward to winter. I love snow. More than that, I just love winter. Winter has always proved to be a good season for me. Every time I’ve fallen in love, it’s been in the winter. I got word of my awesome internship two winters ago. I went to Europe three winters ago. I throw great holiday parties in the winter. Let’s hope this winter doesn’t let me down.

How I’m spending my time

Now that life is far less exciting, since I’m settled into this city and not finding many adventures, I’ll just outline how I spend my time:

1) Watching things on NetFlix. I got through all the episodes of Weeds available, and watched Julie & Julia, since I had read the book but not seen the movie.I’ve also been watching MadMen, but I have to get those DVDs mailed, so it’s going slowly. I think I just finished season 1.

2) Reading. Mostly on NYTimes.com, whether it’s something I’m interested in, or not. But I also went to the library and checked out two books, and I’m about a third of the way through the shorter of the two.

3) Baking. I had my first experience with phyllo dough when I tried to make spinach-feta triangle thingies. They turned out okay. Could’ve used more feta, but the dough turned out fine (even though I didn’t read the directions on the box before handling it, which was a mistake). And I made these chocolate cookies with a well full of caramel in them. They turned out pretty tasty too, though I’m not sure why they aren’t as amazing as I’d imagined.

4) Boy. Boy came to visit, it was wonderful, then he left, and things went back to being bland. We talk online a lot, which also helps pass the time. How many more months until he graduates? That’s a lot of time to help pass.

5) Worrying. I worry a lot. Always have. It’s a family trait, I think, that we all look like worriers, and some of us worry more than others. So, I spend much of my day lying in bed worrying, sitting on the couch worrying, eating and worrying. I need another job.

6) Procrastinating. It’s true, what they say, that the busier you are the better you are at getting things done on time. But I mailed my rent check before the 1st of the month, and paid my utility bill, and those are the important things to be on time about, right?

I put in my name for another job during the day. Just something else to do with my time. It probably won’t pan out, and I hadn’t planned on putting my name in until the girl in front of my in line asked if they were hiring. But it would be a fun, mindless job where I’d get to meet lots of people.

Three months until it really starts snowing here. I can’t wait.

Catching up

I’ve had tough time coming up with a blog-worthy topic. Alas, I’m stumped, so I’ll just have to do a run-of-the-mill update on my life.

• I got Colorado license plates. They are those ones with the green mountains. Colorado offers like, 25 different license plate options, but I picked the basic ones, in part because they were the cheapest, but also because I’m not part of any of the groups sponsoring the other license plates.
• My birthday is next week. The Boy is coming. I hope this year’s birthday will be much better than last year’s, which was lonely and anti-climatic, especially considering it was my 21st. The Boy will be here in less than a week! Exciting. I remember when the countdown to the visit was in the 70s.
• I’ve started watching Mad Men. I’d about six episodes into the first season. I like it so far, but I’m not obsessed with it yet, like everyone else seems to be.

I can watch Mad Men because I got a NetFlix subscription (the free 1-month trial). It’s gone really well. So far, I’ve watched:

• The Men Who Stare at Goats
• Paper Heart
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Skins (a British teen drama series), every episode (2 seasons worth)
• Mad Men (episodes 1-6, season 1)
• Madeline (the children’s cartoon), 1 episode (Madeline at the Louvre)

It’s been a good way to spend my time.

I’ve also read a lot in the past few weeks. I’ve read (or am reading):

• Time is Soft There
• Prep
• Gilead (I’m about 2/3rds of the way through. I know he’ll die in the end, so I’ve put off finishing it)
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (I just started this today, but it’s been on my reading list since last summer)

I enjoyed all the books and movies. I started trying to put a rating system using stars next to each one, but realized I’d given them all 4 or 5 stars, so it really wasn’t all that helpful. I’d recommend all of them.

What else should I be reading? What else should I be watching?

100 people

When I moved into my new apartment, I asked you all (you people reading my blog) for some decorating suggestions. I combined some of the ideas I heard in this project that takes up a good 7 feet of my wall.

It’s called 100 people. As I looked for ways to make my apartment my own, I was increasingly lonely, and decided what better way to decorate than with people.

I don’t know why I picked 100. There were many times during the project that I cursed myself for picking 100 instead of 50 or 20, which would have made the whole process go much quicker.

But I knew there were at least 100 people who had helped me become the person I am. Best friends, boyfriends, teachers, co-workers. By the time I finished making the list, I had well more than 100 names.

The biggest challenge was finding pictures of each of the 100 people.

There are people who didn’t make it into the final project because I couldn’t find a picture of them. Luckily, I made the project in such as way that I can trade out photos. If I come across a photo of someone who’s missing, I can eliminate someone else and throw a new picture in. Right now, I think there are fewer than 100 photos up, since I took some off to switch them out with other people or to find better pictures.

The 100 people are organized chronologically and by influence. The photos themselves are not chronological (that is, a photo from my senior year of someone I spent a lot of time with my freshmen year is going to be in the 2006-2007 area, not the 2010 area).

The idea of influence is rather… loose, since I had to alternate horizontal and vertical photos, and moved people around a lot as I put it together. (For example, my boyfriend is not in the top row because his photo was vertical and that row needed a horizontal one on top. Based on the influence idea, he belongs in the top row, at least much more so than his brother who’s up there now.) There are also photos with more than one person in it, and so the same person can appear in a few different places on the wall. And there are a few pictures of people from pre-high school (such as family) and so those just got scattered across the bottom rows. All these problems and ideas I got to tackle putting this together.

The project is hung on the wall using binder clips, fishing line and a chain. I only put three small nails in the wall for the whole thing, which should help in not pissing off the landlord.

The project starts in my early high school years and ends at graduation. It’ll evolve to include my experiences here, but probably not until I move again.

A few reflections on the wall (and my life):

• My friends are pretty evenly split between men and women
• Almost 10 percent of my wall is “grown-ups” such as teachers and mentors
• My sophomore year of college I hardly made any friends.
• My junior year of college was a lot of fun.
• My senior year of college I made a ton of friends.
• All of my friends are awesome, even the ones I haven’t talked to in years.

In other news, I can’t find digital copies of almost any photos from high school. Prom, graduation, homecoming, theater… I’ll hunt around for it some more, but it’s not on the hard drive of this laptop or my last one, and I can’t find the CD I swear I burned them to. Anyone from high school reading this, do you still have the CDs I burned for everyone senior year with lots of photos?

The next step (part of the whole plan for the project) is to write information about each person on the back of the photo. For example, from above, that’s my friend Tina, so I might write Tina’s full name, how we met, when the picture was taken, maybe her birthday or phone number or something. The information for each person will be different. Whatever it is I feel is important and might be useful or entertaining someday.

So, that’s my “art” project of sorts. It took me about two weeks after I moved in to put it together.

Storms

This city has great thunderstorms. I hear they don’t usually happen as frequently as they have the past few weeks, but I’m glad they’re happening. The storms tend to develop just as I’m going on to or off of my dinner break. The power even went out in the newsroom during one storm a couple weeks ago. The storm this week ripped up trees at the golf course. Intense.

There’s another kind of storm newsrooms both love and hate. Storms of breaking news. Story after story, all developing simultaneously, usually far too close to deadline for comfort. We had one of those days this week. This storm was full of bad news after bad news. It began after most of the reporting staff had left. We missed deadline by half an hour, but we got two stories out to the community that they care about and most wouldn’t know about until the next morning when they picked up the paper. It’s a storm of adrenaline and stress, and it’s why we become journalists, whether we admit it or not.

There were some emotional storms this past week or two, too. Most of those have passed. Things seem to be getting better, both at home and at work.

I didn’t adventure much this week. I’ll try to do something exciting in the next few days (like see Inception), and tell you all about it. And maybe even get around to blogging about that rodeo from the Fourth of July. We’ll see.

Hot Air Balloon Rodeo

This morning, at a disgustingly early hour of 6 o’clock, I went to see a 30-year city tradition called the Hot Air Balloon Rodeo. Forty-some hot air balloons launching from a field on the edge of town and doing tricks for points (just like in a rodeo). I took a lot of pictures. Here’s the best of them, enjoy:

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In order to get to the field, you were required to either park in a city lot and take the bus, or bike or walk a good mile or two. I took the bus (it was 6 a.m., after all). I was impressed at how efficiently the city transported about 3,000 people to and from the field between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m.

Cooking adventures

I promise I’ll post stories, photos and video about the rodeo and fireworks from the past weekend soon. I’ve been too busy in the kitchen. In the past week or two, I’ve made the following:

• Cinnamon rolls
• Pizza (including making the dough for the crust from scratch)
• Minestrone
• Brownies
• Peanut butter cookies
• Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies
• Chocolate chip cookies
• “Pillow” cookies

So, as you can see, I’ve been busy. And certainly getting my 2000 calories a day, at least.

I tend to bake when I’m stressed out about something. During college, I noted that my tendency to bake more than once a week increased as midterms/projects/finals approached. The first month at a new job is always stressful, so that might explain why I’m so eager to bake delicious things. As for the minestrone, well, I figured I should try to make something healthy, something I could eat for a meal instead of a snack. And my desire to make minestrone quadrupled while I was in the grocery store searching for the cans of beans to make the soup and I encountered a group of 20-somethings debating which kind of Lunchables to buy for this week. I may not eat well, but I at least don’t eat Lunchables.

I know what you really care about is pictures, so here’s a look at what my kitchen and I can do (with some links to the recipes, that I roughly followed):

Most of my recipes came either from Justin or from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Justin sent me a link to this cinnamon roll recipe and it sat in my browser for a good while before I finally gave in and made them. I screwed up the glaze, but everything else turned out great, and they didn't dry out, as promised. I ate them over the course of about a week and a half, maybe two weeks.

This pizza dough recipe came from the Better Homes and Gardens cook book. It was very simple, and I still messed it up by forgetting to add the olive oil, so it was a little dry and flavorless, but it did the job.

This is my spinach and cheese pizza on homemade crust. It wasn't the greatest pizza I'd ever had, but it was edible.

This is a side view of the pizza crust after it's baked. You can see it's pretty dense, but it didn't burn and it's done all the way through.

So much soup. This recipe also came from the Better Homes and Garden cookbook. It's basically a mix of lots of canned things, plus fresh spinach and pasta. It's yummy, filling, almost healthy and could serve probably a dozen people. Unfortunatly, I didn't have a pot large enough to cook it in, so at one point I used a second pot to keep some of the base (vegetable broth, tomato paste) warm while the beans, vegetables and pasta simmered.

And now onto the sweet things:

Mmmm. Cocoa goodness. This recipe called for basically using a double boiler to melt the butter and sugar together with the cocoa. It worked well. The batter was delicious and the baked brownies were good, too. Unfortunately, I failed to grease the pan (the recipe calls to line it with tinfoil, which I did, but it didn't say to grease the foil and I didn't really think of it), so the brownies were all stuck to the foil and crumbly.

This mistake in brownie making led to the next baking adventure, which is going to take some explaining. Justin found this recipe for “pillow cookies.” What are pillow cookies, you ask? Well, it’s basically a cookie with a brownie inside of it. Here’s how it works:

Step one: Make cookie dough (I tried this with both chocolate chip cookie dough and sugar cookie dough and found the sugar cookie dough to work better). Put little bowls of the cookie dough onto a cookie sheet. Fill the little bowls with brownie pieces (already baked).

Step two: Cover the brownie pieces with another piece of cookie dough and connect the edges. Make sure each cookie has plenty of room to expand. Also, in the case of sugar cookies, feel free to sprinkle more sugar over the top.

Step three: Bake. It's hard to figure out how much time and at what temperature, since you can combine recipes, but I baked mine for about 10 minutes at about 350 degrees.

Step four: Let cool. Admire their pillow-y-ness.

Step five: Eat. Om nom nom.

Here’s the same concept but with chocolate chip cookie dough:

Here's the chocolate chip cookie dough pillow cookies before they're baked. I made these larger, and gave them much more room on the cookie sheet. As you can see on the one on the right, I put a lot more brownie in these, and so it took a lot of dough to surround it.

This shows those same four cookies now that they've baked. They tasted fine, but the sugar cookies definitly felt more like pillows.

While I was at the grocery store, I was looking to buy some amaretto to add to the brownies (I have no idea if that would taste good but it sounded interesting). I failed to find amaretto, but I did find grenadine, which is also red and in a bottle, so I bought that. I mixed it with some Club Soda, so now I can have Shirley Temples all the time.

It's basically pure corn syrup and red dye. But for some reason, it's quite refreshing.

Those are my cooking adventures for now. I’m out of butter and eggs, so it’ll be a few days until I dive into baking again. Have any quirky recipes I should attempt?

Holiday weekend adventures, part two: Roller-ski racing and parade

This Fourth of July weekend, I had adventures. I watched ski jumping, went to an art fair, watched a roller-ski race and parade, and then went to my very first rodeo before finishing the weekend with Fourth of July fireworks. This is part two of the weekend, the roller-ski race and parade.

Roller-ski racing, what’s that? It’s like rollerblading and cross-country skiing combined. Exhibit A:

See? It’s like rollerblades with the wheels set far apart, and ski poles. This year’s race was more challenging because half the road had been repaved with cement (it was been asphalt, which rides smoother and the ski poles dig into easier).

I even got a little bit of video to show you how they move while they race (since it’s hard to explain):

While it might seem silly, the competitors are pretty intense. The times from the race were combined with their ski jumping standings to determine the weekend’s winner. Here are some competitors looking intense:

These are the Olympic athletes and wanna-be Olympic athletes that ski-jumped Saturday and Sunday. Anyway. So the race finished, then the parade started. I’m just going to post the pictures from the parade with details in the caption space. Here goes:

The paper ran a feature on these three guys, the parade's grand marshals. They are ranchers in the county. They seemed cool enough, and had fantastic control over their horses (One of the three guys, all related, is considered a legit horse whisperer)

The Tea Party float was interesting. There are a lot of candidates running in the August election here on the tea party platform. The announcer made fun of them, though, after being super supportive of the republicans' float, so that was funny. I'm all for the get-out-and-vote message of most of the political floats in this town's parade.

There are things about this city I will never understand. The mix of ski resort and ranching town is one. The gymnastics group in the parade did their tricks in leotards and cowboy boots. That seems dangerous.

No parade is complete without a DeLorean.

Are those guys carrying a car? Why yes, yes they are. It's the Rugby team. They picked the car up and then did a 360 degree turn.

It was a smart car, but it still had all it's parts. It drove to the spot in front of the judging table where they picked it up, and then once they set it back down it drove the rest of the way. It might have even still had the driver in the car when they picked it up.

This was the car driving down the parade route after the rugby team lifted it up and spun it around.

If you ever doubted the appeal of recycling, think about the fact that there are high school girls in bikini tops and jean shorts singing the recycle song and cheering.

And last but not least, the F-16 flyover:

Holiday weekend adventures, part one: Ski jumping

This Fourth of July weekend, I had adventures. I watched ski jumping, went to an art fair, watched a roller-ski race and parade, and then went to my very first rodeo before finishing the weekend with Fourth of July fireworks. This is part one of the weekend, the story of ski jumping.

Saturday morning I watched ski jumping. In July, you ask? Why yes, silly you, there are ski jumping competitions in summer, how else do you think winter Olympians stay on top of their game? The ski jumping track is covered in green plastic, and then sprayed with water every so often to make it frictionless with as little friction as possible. This is the track:

It’s at least 150 meters long. The blue line is 50 meters and the red line is 65 or 70, I believe. At the bottom, the skiers end up in the grass, basically in the middle of the crowd, where they strip off their gear (read: clothes) much to the horror (or enjoyment?) of the mothers and fathers with their little children.

And here is a skier:

As you can see, the green plastic is cut into little strips and then set like shingles to make a smooth surface. This is the crispest picture I have of a ski jumper, but this skier is pretty terrible.

Here are two better jumpers, with blurrier pictures:

These two guys (I think these were both guys. The girls jumped later, once I back back on the ground) have much more air, and much better posture, than ski jumper #1. I learned a lot about ski jumping while listening to the announcer, who was quite entertaining. He kept updating the crowd about the score of the Germany-Argentina game during the morning, which was nice.

In order to get those picture of the ski jumpers, I hiked up this hill to this little spot for spectators. I’m impressed no one got a sprained ankle while I was there; the hike was brutal, steep, and the “grass-cut path” was very dried out and slick. Once you got to the spot, you had to somehow keep your balance while standing sideways on a hill. Most people clung to the side of the track for dear life (including me).

So that was ski jumping. I left with a little more knowledge of winter sports and a little more sunburn than when I arrived. A few of the skiers had Olympic medals from Vancouver, and I was super close to them, so that was nifty. I even got to take a 4-second video on my digital camera to show just how close the spectators are to the ski jumpers.