Archive for December, 2010

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13 Adventures: #8 Raspberry Chocovine Challenge!

December 18th, 2010 by pladd

After the success of last year’s Chocovine Challenge it was only a matter of time before we tried the same with Chocovine’s new flavor: Raspberry Chocovine!

As per normal Servery Challenge rules: contestants have ten minutes to make a drink that utilizes at least one shot of Raspberry Chocovine and anything else found in the kitchen. Drinks will be judged based on Tastiness, Presentation, and Creativity. Since there are no celebrity guest judges easily accessible in my apartment, a winner is decided through popular vote.

As per normal Patricia Servery Challenge strategy, I decided not to taste Raspberry Chocovine or indeed the drink I made until the actual judging. I figured it would just dash my spirits. GOTTA BELIEVE IN YOURSELF.

The Entries:

Sprinkles!!!!! The only good part about this drink.

Contestant: Patricia
Drink Name: Cozy Winter Dream
Ingredients: Raspberry chocovine, milk, hot chocolate mix, raspberry vodka, whipped cream, sprinkles

Because it is so cold outside, I decided to go with a hot drink. This was a monumentally stupid idea. At first, all I could taste was whipped cream. Then, all I could taste was metal mixed with sugar. But at least it’s colorful!
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13 Adventures: #7 Puzzle!

December 16th, 2010 by pladd

Today I woke up feeling sick; it’s weird how colds can descend on you so quickly. Of course, it might have something to do with the heinous “wintery mix” that’s been going on all night–the worst kind of combination of snow/rain/sleet/ice.

There's no way I'm going outside to get a better picture

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but everything not covered in ice is covered in slush.

So even if I were feeling great, I would probably not be into going outside. As it is, the only thing I feel like doing is lying in bed and demanding soup. But I knew that wasn’t much of an adventure, so I decided to do a puzzle! Okay, that’s not much of an adventure either, but at least I was lying on the dining room floor instead of bed. Plus, it’s not Christmas without a puzzle!

It was only 550 pieces

Yay!

Now for some tea and a restorative nap.

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13 Adventures: #6 Red Velvet Whoopie Pies

December 15th, 2010 by pladd

It seems like red velvet has been a big deal lately; more people I know are baking it in different iterations so I was pretty pleased about a month ago when I found this recipe for Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies. Finally I would jump on this bandwagon! I made them, and they turned out awesome. They were exactly the right consistency–cakey, but not gooey–and the frosting tasted great. I was in love, and vowed to make them again around Christmas time, maybe dyeing the frosting green to be festive.

So, because the YA Book Club Holiday party is today at my house (I always volunteer so that I can stay in pajamas till the last possible moment) I thought it was the perfect time to try!

Unfortunately, I was wrong. This recipe seemed so easy the first time I made it! I have no idea why this time was filled with mistakes. Probably I should have made them a day ahead so that I would not also be trying to vacuum/dust/sweep at the same time. But I haven’t given up on this recipe yet! It produced some passable cookies that I will still be putting out tonight. Okay, so some of them are a little bit crispy… okay, maybe a little bit blackened on the bottoms, and yeah I ran out of powdered sugar so the frosting isn’t as sweet and is a weirder consistency. But I bet no one will notice the difference.
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13 Adventures: #5 Homemade Christmas Tree

December 14th, 2010 by pladd

So Steven buys so much Coke that we have more Coke points than those polar bears. If only we could pay rent in Coke points. If only Coke points gave you anything I actually want. Alas.

In the category of things I don’t actually need, but now have because of Coke points, is a subscription to Cosmo. I have something of a sick fascination with Cosmo because I can’t believe they’re getting away with pretending to be “fun and fearless” while the underlying message of every single thing in their magazine is “Change yourself to be like everyone else.” Change yourself because you’ll never be happy with that haircut/makeup/boyfriend. Change yourself, because your irrational and underlying fears about your life are TRUE. Change yourself, because it’s your job as the woman to “decode” the men in your life, who, by the way, are always strange 1950s/Cave Men archetypes. I’m always surprised at the new angles they find to make women feel bad about themselves.

For instance, my personal favorite part of the January 2011 issue is a chart titled “What Your Ex’s Next Girlfriend Reveals About You”, which lists categories of women he might choose, and then explains what that reveals about you and, most importantly, what about yourself and your dating style it shows you need to improve. From this chart I also realized that Cosmo would categorize me “The Plain Jane” which is defined as someone who wears jeans and a t-shirt and “her idea of a beauty routine is a quick shampoo”. What does that say about the people who choose to date me after Cosmo’s apparent target audience? “His bland choice means that your beauty (and brains) intimidated the hell out of him.” I love how they worked that parenthetical implication that not wearing make up is for stupid girls in there. Anything to sell more sparkely eyeliner.

Anyway, since I am the bland choice, I do not actually want to keep these copies of Cosmo around to cherish for all time so lately I’ve been coming up with ways to recycle them in an artistic manner. I’m used pictures/words from them for collages and things before, but I wanted to do something that would knock a good chunk out of the stack. Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas I want to try involve a glue gun, but then I found this tutorial on how to make a tabletop Christmas tree by folding pages. Yay! Easy enough to accomplish while watching Arrested Development!

Okay, so it's more like a Christmas cone, whatever

This did require folding every page, so it took awhile, but other than that it was super easy.

The covers were a little harder, that's why there's a slight gap in the back

Just in time for my book club’s holiday party tomorrow!

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13 Adventures: #4 Sock Monster

December 13th, 2010 by pladd

I’ve been looking for an excuse to use my beautiful new sewing machine ever since I got it at Thanksgiving! Today at the library I found this cool book:
Stupid Sock Creatures!
I figured I could not go wrong with trying to make a monster out of old socks. After all, I already have the materials and any mistakes would probably add to its charm!

So I got home and rummaged around in my sock drawer till I found two socks I don’t ever wear anymore:

Those are weird, tiny dogs on the ankles. And obv they don't match since my socks never do

This project definitely took way longer than I thought, even though I was following “one of the easiest monsters”. A lot of the instructions were less clear than I would like, and I ended up making a lot of really dumb mistakes towards the end, like attaching things inside out. I think my main problem was that my socks were too thin and stretchy, they were really hard to hand sew, and a lot of hand sewing was required. So this may actually fall apart in a week, we’ll see. However, all the parts I got to use my sewing machine for were awesome!! It has a bunch of cool settings and features that I am just getting used to, since I learned on my mom’s old machine. Here is the finished product:

I have a bunch of purple tulle randomly, so I gave her hair and a scarf!

Here are where those two dogs ended up:

A leg tattoo...

And a tail tattoo!

Classy.

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Posted in Fabric, Things I've Made |

13 Adventures: #3 Servery Challenge: Orange Edition

December 12th, 2010 by pladd

When my parents came up for Thanksgiving, they brought two giant sacks filled with oranges and grapefruit. Even though I feel like I’ve been eating delicious Florida citrus with every meal, we still have so much left. Which is why today’s adventure was a Servery Challenge: Orange Edition in which each dish had to use up oranges.

As might be expected, I just messed around with the basics, and Steven tried to find the fanciest recipe possible. Sure, his took twice as long as mine, but it was also twice as spicy.

Since I am all about pineapple on pizza (although sadly I find Canadian bacon gross), I thought it would be interesting to try orange on pizza! I wasn’t able to find any examples of this online to make sure I wasn’t crazy, but this was an adventure(!) so I was not to be dissuaded. Besides, I know how to make pizza already, so whatever.
The easiest recipe I know is one for this pizza crust/flatbread that I got out of a teen cooking book. I love teen cookbooks because they try to be accommodating, not pretentious, and usually have awesome pictures. I like this recipe because you don’t even have to let the dough rise:

2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup olive oil
3/4 cup milk

Mix together until a dough! Then spread on a flat pan! Top with things! Bake at 425 degrees for 15-22 minutes until done! Cook length will depend on dough’s thinness.

I don’t remember if the original recipe was written in entirely exclamation marks like that, but it should have been. I chose to top my pizza with: two oranges and 1/4 of a red onion, cut up, feta cheese, walnuts, and spinach. It looked like this:

Next time I would probably put the spinach on top after cooking

Steven made a fancy Persian rice dish whose recipe I can’t remember because it was extremely complicated. However, it had a lot of tasty spices, including ginger and curry, and two kinds of nuts: almonds and pistachios. It used up at least 3 oranges! Yay!

The orange peel ended up being almost candied and way tasty!

Competitive cooking is the best kind of cooking!!

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13 Adventures: #2 Trimming the… Stairs

December 11th, 2010 by pladd

For my second adventure, I decided it was time to decorate for Christmas! I think the summer I moved to North Carolina, my mom got kind of weepy and put together this Christmas box of a few Christmas decorations, mostly ornaments that were “mine” and some new ones too. She gave me this big speech about how now I would have to decorate my own house and have Christmas for myself etc. For about a month, I thought this meant I was not allowed to come home for Christmas anymore because Now I Was An Adult or something, which seemed weird. But then I ended up going home for Christmas anyway, so the Christmas box never got opened last year. This year I decided I would use my decorations, especially since we’ll be here till practically Christmas itself! Plus, it would totally count as an adventure without leaving the house and venturing in the freezing rain.

I am not really big on Christmas trees. It feels weird having a tree in the house and the strong smell often makes my allergies freak out. Plus, this one time in Florida, there were fly eggs in our tree and I spent all of Christmas killing forty-seven flies (I counted them as they fought a battle of wits with my fly swatter and lost). Plus, messy and small apartment. So we decided to decorate the stairs!

I wish I had taken a before shot, because then you would see why “let’s decorate the stairs” wasn’t even really a choice we made–it was so obvious that we didn’t even discuss it. When we moved in, the stair banister was ugly and white and large. That very day–before we even had a bed–I decorated it with all of the scarves I own (it looked like a rainbow caterpillar)–and giant light strands were the first thing I bought at Target to further bling it out. And to add light to our dark living room. Anyway, the stairs have always been a crazy work of art, and if anything they look slightly more dignified now.

I had some rope Christmas lights–which I’ve discovered BLINK AT VARYING SPEEDS, you have no idea how happy this makes me–plus the things in my Christmas box. And some scarves I left on because they were the right colors! Here are some badly lit pictures! Read the rest of this entry »

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13 Adventures: #1 Visiting Steven at Work!

December 10th, 2010 by pladd

So I know lately I have been kind of MIA and have broken my WITHOUT FAIL promise yet again (which, let’s face it, has been broken so often it’s pretty much just made of masking tape and hope now). My one excuse is: exams. But now they are over and I am relatively free until flying to Houston for Christmas! I have therefore decided to have an adventure EVERY DAY for the next 13 days!

This is less of an ambitious promise than it sounds, if you know anything about my personal definition of “adventure”. It’s all in how you tell it. I’m pretty sure I could describe a trip to the grocery store in such a way that you would be just waiting for the movie deal. And maybe I will sometime in the next 13 days if I run out of ideas.

Today’s adventure: visiting Steven at work! This isn’t something I do often at all, mostly because I have no time and because it’s an hour away. It’s a very pretty drive though, through the middle of nowhere and over Jordan Lake, which was really calm and clear today. The road snakes through the woods; the speed limit is pretty high but there are lots of turns so I always end up pretending to be The Stig1. Plus, a small amount of snow from last weekend is still hanging around in shady parts:

Not enough for a snowman, but enough to look nice!

Steven’s work is in the tiny–unbelievably tiny–town of Holly Springs, whose main claim to fame is that it also has the closest Sonic to our house. This is Steven’s office!

In Holly Springs, everything tries to look like your great aunt's house, even if it is a web design company!

And here is Steven’s personal office!

Notice the blank screen. I'm pretty sure he only pretends to work.

Then I took him to the only place to eat (besides Sonic) in Holly Springs, My Way Tavern! They have tasty “Cajun Fried Potato Slices”, which turned out to just be fancy potato chips! Things always taste better when they have fancy names.

And Steven always takes forever to decide!

It’s okay, it’s not his 13 Adventures. In fact, whenever I go to a restaurant this week, I’m just going to tell the waiter “BRING ME THE MOST ADVENTUROUS THING!” Definitely the only way to go. I will have to find an adventuring hat to wear tomorrow. What will tomorrow’s adventure be? EVEN I DON’T KNOW YET. I’m that adventurous, you have no idea.

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