Things That Move on Their Own in Everyday Ramblings

Photobucket is holding my photos to share under a dysfunctional wall of ads until I give them a subscription so no thanks.

I am moving to Smugmug for the photos I want to share. I like the interface better and it looks like they actually have customer service. I will still have to pay to have an ad free experience and that means I will need to let something else go but I don’t want to post here if I can’t share my photos.

Even though this place is called Prosebox and is supposed to be a bit more about writing than digital bling, everybody knows posts with photos get more attention.

This is the part of the Park Blocks that runs through the Portland State campus obviously showing it is Christmas break as there are no people. I love these trees. The big one is an elm.

Kes came up on Tuesday and we started a new holiday tradition, a much less expensive one than going out to a high-end restaurant and eating our way through too much rich (but delicious) food.

We went to the grocery first and then made cookie dough, this time the Gingery Brownie Crinkle Cookies from the New York Times special section on fancy holiday cookies. Kes was impressed because in the last two months I have assembled all the basics for enjoyable cookie making.

I had measured out everything I could beforehand in my prep bowls. (I had to hide the butter from the cats while we went to the store, as I do not have a kitchen door.)

The one mistake we made because we were running a little late to have lunch with Mrs. Sherlock is we put the dough in the refrigerator. (Don’t do that if you make these yummy cookies because they become super hard to form).

We had a nice lunch (the place was packed so it was a little longer than we expected) and then came home and made the Mark Bittman Bread Pudding recipe also from the Times app.

One of my students had found the recipe for me the week before when we were chatting before class. See, yoga is useful for all sorts of things. :)

We had purchased this lovely brioche that was sweet so we put in less than half the sugar, a bit more milk and an extra egg, and some cinnamon and oh my gosh, it was beautiful and tasted as good as any bread pudding I have ever had anywhere.

The cookies are almost overwhelming when they are warm as they have three kinds of chocolate (Kes stabbed herself under a nail with a chocolate chip when we were forming the cookies because the dough was too hard to work with at that point using the cookie scoop.) but I took them to class last night and ate a bunch when I came home and they are perfect the next day.

btw, using the scoop gives them a better texture than forming balls with one’s hands…learn by doing…

If I were to purchase anything else, and now that I am on a budget I need to be super careful, it would be one of those oven mitt fabric type cloth contraptions you wrap the dish in. Somebody at the potluck last week had one and it was garnering a lot of attention. I’ll be making more cookies to take with me next week for a visit with some neighbors and there are for sure potlucks sprinkled throughout my future.

We put the bread pudding dish in a slightly bigger casserole dish and covered it in tin foil (with steam holes) and wrapped a dishtowel around it and put it in heavy cloth grocery bag in the back well behind the driver’s seat in Kes’s car. It got to her place still warm.

My guess is we will make an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie next year but the bread pudding is a keeper.

Kes and Most Honorable are having a Nepalese colleague of his over for dinner tonight for the first time and when planning the meal (knowing they were vegetarian) asked what food limitations they had and they said this beautiful thing…they don’t eat anything that moves on its’ own accord.

As I eat less and less meat I may get there some day.

Last updated December 19, 2019