Snow, food, books, etc

It's so strange; the last few winters Jersey has been the recipient of quite a lot of snow. I would have loved this when I was in school!
Here's Wednesday's snow. It was 10am delayed opening that day.


How much snow? This much:




So, on Thursday night I made two eggs scrambled and french toast made with wheat bread. Easy and yummy, though the cinnamon sort of plummeted out of the container and onto one of the slices.


Tonight I made "Chicken Fried Rice" from the "Cook This, Not That!" cookbook.

So I really wasn't thinking about the whole "rice" issue. The recipe called for 2 cups cooked whole grain rice in the ingredients list.

First, I think it's sneaky for cookbooks to put cooked items in the ingredients list. This bit me in the a** a few years ago when a recipe called for cooked pasta in the ingredients...when it was time to throw the pasta in, I did and then ha ha, realized it was supposed to have already been cooked.  Oh, crunchy entree.

So I cooked the rice first, BUT I put 2 cups of uncooked rice into the pot to start--when it was time to put the cooked rice in, I'm thinking, wow, this looks like a LOT of rice and I couldn't fit it all in the pan, but kept on cooking til the end (I think this is analogous to sewing a wavy hem--I realize it's wavy and kept going--it took a few years to get myself to STOP when I realize something's going wrong).   THEN I looked at the box. 2 cups uncooked rice = 10 cups cooked rice. ohhhhh....I had to add more (lower sodium) soy sauce to my dish because that tablespoon got soaked up in all that rice.  But it was good dinner and plenty o' leftovers! 

I saw a bit of "Worst Cooks in America" on Food Network the other weekend. I feel like those cooks. And tonight I could sort of hear Chef Anne screaming in my ear to be more aggressive with my chopping, ha ha.

Here are 9 of the 10 items I have checked out of the Princeton Public Library.


I love the library.

I highly recommend "Food Rules". Easy read, common sense guide to eating.  As the author says, it boils (ha ha!) down to "Eat Food.  Mostly Plants.  Not too much."  I think one of my favorite rules is not eating anything your great-grandparents wouldn't recognize (it means it's overly processed).   Also, not eating unless you're hungry enough to eat an entire apple (to eliminate grazing). 

I just started "Are You My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved My Life". Love it so far.

I've read bits and pieces of "Full Catastrophe Living." I like it so much I bought a copy so that I can annotate it. I think this book will play a big role in the elimination/reduction of my back pain.  

"Heat", written by someone who worked for Chef Mario Batali, is an audiobook that I can listen to during my commute. I currently am listening to "Half Empty" by David Rakoff on my commutes (not pictured). I already listened to "Wherever You Go, There You Are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but took out the book for good measure.

I actually sewed today for about 45 minutes! I'm hoping to do some more sewing tomorrow and finish the Vogue shirt. But now I have to finish my "homework" for the week (I'm doing the "Pain Free For Life:  The 6 week cure for chronic pain without surgery or drugs" program which has half an hour of homework per day, for 6 weeks.  I'm doing homework 5 nights out of 7.  Today is homework day number 10.)

Like I mentioned before, I'm doing less sewing to concentrate more on my back.  The time I spent cooking and doing homework, I would have spent on sewing.  It's well worth it.

Good night!

Cupcakes for the Upgrade; Are you going to SPR weekend Chicago?

This weekend we upgraded software package we use for tracking grants. There are four parts to my job; testing for the upgrade is one of them (documentation, training, and running the help desk for the software in question are the others).  The first release took 18 months; the second 7; this one took a little over 3 months.

I like to celebrate our releases with my coworkers, as many of them help me test. Here's how we celebrated yesterday:

The "picture" is from microsoft.com's free clipart.   I searched for cupcake, then selected "photo" as the type, and the image above was perfect.  I use a program called Snag-It to do annotated screenshots, and I used it to add the text to the invite.  Very easy.  I use microsoft's photos all the time for the covers of the documentation and for my training slides.  I try to add some humor; the last round I had my "small rodent" series (think squirrels, chipmunks); this time it's tropical islands, beaches, and palm trees.  It's a way for me to use my creative self in my work life.

So anyway, I bought 24 cupcakes from House of Cupcakes.  I wish you could smell them; they smell SO GOOD.






I had fun selecting them. Unfortunately, there were 11 left over.  Many are on a diet for new year's resolutions. :(    One of my resolutions is to eat better, but I'm not eliminating a daily treat! 

Hey, SPR weekend is Chicago this year!  Are you going??

Does the equivalent of Pattern Review exist for cookbook receipes?

I didn't do any sewing this weekend, but I did some sewing related things...
...cut out vogue 8534 in navy fabric (the bow shirt), this time in size 16. I can always take it in...

I think the navy color will give it that nice sailor vibe.

Bought a longer lipped ruler with Christmas money.   The 18" one got tons of use but is too short. This 24" one should do the trick.   Lipped rulers are great because they "hook on" to your cutting mat and don't move while you cut with your rotary cutter.


I also bought the revised edition of the Singer Photo Guide to Sewing. This one seems much more expanded compared to the version I already own.  The lapped zipper instructions and pix are exactly the same as the edition I own, but it looks like instructions for lots of other things I'm interested in have been added.  Yeah!

I haven't reviewed 2010 goals nor written my 2011 sewing goals, but one goal is to do less sewing so I can devote more time to improving my health to get rid of my back pain. Along those lines, a goal is to cook once a week (to those of you who read this blog and cook tirelessly for your families every day, this idea of cooking once a week is probably giving you a nice laugh!  Cooking for one does last for days though.) I don't know how long I will keep up this part of the resolution, but, we'll see. Here's last week's dish, cheddar potato soup. This is a TNT recipe that I used to make quite a lot a few years ago.  It's from a book I got for college graduation called "Help!  My Apartment Has a Kitchen!"  It's vegetarian.


This week, I took out a cookbook from the library called "Skinny B*tch" and I thought it was adorable and cute and whatnot. The recipe I tried is corn chowder. Here's the result:

It doesn't look anything like corn chowder to me. While I'm a novice at these things, I think there's a mistake in the recipe. It calls for 4 cups of vegetable broth, and I think it meant 2. (Also funny was the conversion to metric: it listed 4 cups as 960 liters instead of milliliters!)      As it stands, this has way too much liquid.  Tomorrow night I plan on straining it to get the potatoes, corn, and celery out, then throw a little of the liquid on top.  Also, this dish is vegan!  Antoinette, my first vegan dish!  It uses almond milk instead of real milk.

The huge amt of liquid got me wondering--is there a site out there like sewing pattern review, for cookbook recipes?   I would definitely use it if such a thing exists. (I googled and found allrecipes.com, but it didn't seem to cover cookbook recipes?  Just recipes members contribute, and then everyone else reviews them?) Also, while many recipes in the book had pix, this one did not.  It's the equivalent of a pattern only having drawings and not a real photo. 

Oh, and it snowed again, but not much accumulation:


and Elvis turned 76. Did you wish him a happy birthday? Sure you did!  This photo is from 2005, with Ron Short, my favorite Elvis impersonator.  He is so nice!


My great-aunt Iris turned 95 on New Year's Day. Here's me, my Dad, and Iris at her surprise party:


Good night!