January 30, 2023

A little midwinter food porn: frosted buttermilk brownies. 😋 (NB: Half of this is going in the freezer if I can make room.)

 

January 26, 2023

#OldSchool

 

January 25, 2023

Call

 

 

and response

 

😁

January 20, 2023

I went to a large queer meetup tonight at a Pgh bar I've been to a few times. In the past, I was pretty comfortable at such things as long as I knew at least 1-2 people, and I'd been looking forward to tonight, but I felt really overwhelmed and left after about 90 minutes with (what I presume was) a stress headache. I'm coming to recognize what a toll the isolation of the pandemic took on me, but I don't really know what to do about it beyond continuing to reacclimate myself to being in crowds. 

January 19, 2023

A new pie with an interesting-ish origin story. I baked a pumpkin pie back in early December, and had a cup-plus of filling that didn't fit into the pie shell. So I froze it. Late last week, I bought a butternut squash, and boiled and mashed a bit of it to make up the difference for this pie. I blended the old and new filling and baked the hybrid monster last night. Since a cup-plus of squash cubes turned into a half cup of mashed squash, and the recipe I was working with was for two cups of pumpkin/squash, I had some interesting conversions to calculate. Most notably, what does 1/4 of 1/8 -- 1/32 -- tsp of ground cloves look like? My best guesstimate was a generous pinch. Anyway, the finished product certainly smelled tasty when it emerged from the oven.

January 15, 2023

That moment when you see your calves exposed in the afternoon sunlight, and realize it really has been that long since you shaved. (Photo suppressed to protect the entire universe.) 

January 14, 2023

I recently ordered a record from a seller in Quebec (Amon Düül II's Wolf City for those keeping score at home), and it arrived yesterday in a spacious box. Great, I thought to myself, plenty of padding to withstand the vagaries of international shipping. I didn't realize what kind of box it was until I opened it...

  

January 12, 2023

My lil contraband green guys, Spike and Shoot, have new digs in the living room above the oregano jungle. I'll have to transplant them again into an even bigger pot at some point, but this one will do for a while. NB: The Aubrey Jr. twins in the kitchen seemed to take the loss of their neighbors in stride. When I asked them how they felt about the move, they replied in unison, "Feed us."

 

January 8, 2023

#Oldschool prep last night for the Georgian beef stew called kharcho that I made (Georgia the nation in the Caucasus Mountains, not the U.S. swing state), or, when you need spiced walnut paste and don't have a food processor adequate to the task. (Rubber chicken wine bottle stopper sold separately.)

 

January 7, 2023

While the House GOP was finishing the overture of their Chaos Clown Symphony last night, I baked a Swedish cardamom cake. Ftr why is it that almost every bundt cake I've ever made has heart stopping amounts of butter and sugar in them?

 

January 4, 2023

So, Exploding Kittens...

I won the game at a yankee swap at a holiday party in Boston before my sis and I drove up to Maine. The name sold me. The description of the game on the box as "a highly-strategic, kitty-powered version of Russian roulette" is true as far as it goes, but it's so much other than that. I figured scanning some of my favorite *ahem* cards from the deck would best convey what I mean. They're in no particular order because how -- and why -- TF would you try to impose any sort of order on these??? I'll add that high-pitched "pew pews" and "be free, little buddy" became running jokes over the holiday. (I don't recall my mom ever saying either, but she definitely laughed with us.)