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I have to buckle down this week and get through some things that I’ve been putting off, so I don’t know how much extra time I’m going to have to bloggity, blog, blog, blog. I’d rather doing something. . .anything. . .else than this massive to-do list. *le sigh* The joys of adulthood. Hope to catch up with you again for Recipe Friday!
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So, on Monday, it was a holiday and a snow day. After the girls had worn themselves out from frolicking in the snow for a full 45 minutes, we were left with the rest of the day stretched out ahead of us.
Our pantry has been looking like it belong to Ol’ Mother Hubbard as of late, but in my infinite wisdom, I managed to keep a few odds and ends on hand in the event of a dessert emergency. Yes, they really do exist. However, given the need to be inside for a good chunk of the day, this was more of a rainy-day/snowy-day/housebound activity emergency. Enter Cake Batter Cookies.
These yummy treats are pretty simple and kid friendly, too. While Mo was busy scrapbooking their snowy adventures at the kitchen table, Co decided she would be my sous chef. I had pre-measured all of the ingredients, which enabled her to just dump things into a bowl and start mixing. Even with the step stool, the top of her puff barely cleared the rim of the bowl. She had the electric mixer in one hand, her other hand grabbing at the counter for purchase, while her eyes were closed in either excitement or slight panic. Our electric mixer is on the older side (I’m hoping for a Kitchen-Aid standing mixer one day), and I don’t think Co has ever held any sort of power tools in her hand. Eventually, the batter came together, each of the girls got one of the beaters to lick and I got to use my cookie baller to get consistently sized cookies on the parchment paper.
One the cookie balls were down, I let Co give them a little squish with the flat of her hand and then adorn them with some pastel sprinkles. As the cookies baked, we added a few drops of blue food coloring to the cream cheese frosting I had in the panty (I was really about to break my arm patting myself on the back for having had all the stuff on hand to do this). By that point, Co’s attention span was all but maxed out, so I finished up the bakery business and promised the girls each their own cookie “sammich” once they were cooled.
Nothing like a little bit of sugar on a snowy day. Happy Friday, ya’ll!
Cake Batter Cookies
www.parents.com/cookie-jar
Ingredients
1 box (18.25oz) yellow cake mix
1 large egg
1/4 c canola oil
1/4 c buttermilk*
Colored Sprinkles
1 can (16 oz) vanilla frosting
Yellow, red, blue, food coloring
* I don’t keep buttermilk on hand, but quick tip to make your own. Add one tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk and stir. Voila! Buttermilk substitute
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper; set aside.
2. Combine the cake mix, egg, il and buttermilk in a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer on medium speed until smooth. Shaped 2-inch mounds of batter into balls and flatten slightly. Place about 2 inches apart on the prepared cookie sheets. Top with sprinkles.
3. Bake until cookies are golden and firm, 8-10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.
4. Divide the frosting among three bowls. Use a few drops of food coloring to tint the frosting the desired shades of pink, blue, and yellow. Sandwich the cookies together with frosting. Makes 30
Uh, more like, makes 18 — my cookies were on the large side.
7:45 am
“Mom! Mom! Can we go play in the snow?”
8:30 am
“Mom! Mom! We want to come in! We want to come in!”
8:31 am
“Mom! Mom! Now what are we gonna do?”
Oy. Happy Snow Day, y’all!
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Yum, yum, yum. I am so in love with sriracha right now, I should be exhaling smoke and farting fire.
Too much?
Anyway, when I find myself in the kitchen, it’s usually way past time to defrost something and everyone wants to be tucking into something other than what I’m about to lay on the skillet, including me. I came across this wing recipe a few weeks ago and actually planned (shocker!) to make it for me and the hubs one night. The girls simply don’t have the intestinal fortitude to handle this level of heat, so I gave them some Shake-and-Bake filled plastic baggies and let them have at it.
I had my wings defrosting in the morning and after lunch, I decided to tackle the marinade. The ingredient list was pretty straightforward; I usually keep everything on hand except the orange marmalade. The sriracha I had was from a jar that I had purchased to make Asian Turkey meatballs ages ago. Evidently, sriracha requires no refridgeration, so this jar traveled with us from Norfolk to RIC and has been residing in the pantry ever since. Aside from the occasional teaspoon or two needed for the meatballs, I haven’t really used it. When it comes to adding heat to my food, I’m more of a Tabasco or Texas Pete kind of girl. I have dallied with some scotch bonnet sauce, courtesy of my in-laws and their delicious Jamaican cuisine, but only in moderation. I like having taste-buds.
I grabbed a bowl from the cabinet, my measuring cups and spoons and got to work. I was like a chemist up in the kitchen, what with all my scooping and pouring, scraping and whisking. The bowl I had chosen seemed more than adequate to hold all the stuff, but halfway through the receipe, I realized the bowl was about 3/4 full. By the time I added the last 1/4 cup of rice vinegar, the bowl was threatening to overflow. I reached for my ziploc bag where the wings were resting and with the moves like Jagger, I dumped the marinade over the chicken. Then, I turned to put the bowl in the sink and I hear. . .
tick. . .tick. . .tick. . .ticka. . .ticka.. . ticka. . .
I turn back around and my ziploc bag has slumped over, leaking marinade all over the counter, which in turn is doing a Jackson Pollock impression on the floor. Thankfully, I grabbed it before the whole thing escaped from the bag, but let me tell you, cleaning up the floor was a beast.
Sriracha, honey, soy sauce and everything else in a nice constellation spattered over linoleum, up the baseboards and cabinets? Not fun. Mr. Clean just shook his head at me when I reached for the Magic Eraser.
Anyway, I marinated the wings for the rest of the day and come dinner time, they were nice and juicy for the oven. I was concerned that they weren’t browning up enough when I peeked in on them at the half-way point, but after I flipped them and let them swim in their own juices for another 35 to 40 minutes, it was perfection.
I will admit, I did chicken out a bit when it came time to go all in with the sriracha. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup. Uh. . .that’s a lot and like I said before, I like my taste buds. I’d rather add more sauce than lose the top layer of skin on the inside of my mouth, so I opted to use only 1/4 cup and believe me, that was plenty hot. The chicken skin was sweet, spicy, and crispy. The meat was tender and juicy, falling right off the bone. I stir fried some broccoli, snow peas, and carrots in a little Trader Joe’s syoza sauce and presto! Dinner was served.
So, after a little less than a year with a pixie cut, I decided to go back to my natural curly ‘do. I’ve been relaxer free (again) since November of 2010 and I’m still trying to figure out my hair.
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| My arsenal of products |
From that appointment on, I have been more pro-active in what I do to my hair. There’s more detangling involved. More parting my hair into quadrants and applying product on tedious section at a time, but I’m beginning to see more of what I want and less of what I don’t. I invested in a Denman brush that I quickly gave to the girls, and a Tangle Teezer, which is fan-freaking-tastic. I got my hands on another set of products called Komaza and thus, adequately armed, jumped back into the natural, curly girl fray. Here’s what happened.
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| It’s rough, I know. |
I washed with Miss Jessie’s Super Slip Sudsy Shampoo. It’s very slippery in your hands, but feels tacky once it’s on your hair. It claims to remove all product build-up and leave your hair manageable, but my hair felt really dried out, even while wet (if that makes sense). I suppose that was a testament to how truly clean my hair was. After the shampoo, I used Komaza’s Califia Leave-In Conditioner and combed it through with my Tangle Teezer. I wrapped a tee-shirt around my head, got out of the shower, and got dressed. Once I was dressed, I unwound the tee-shirt and my hair was very damp. I sectioned it off and then used Komaza’s Califia Moisturizing Cream and finger styled the rest.
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| Squeaky clean. Hair was still pretty wet. Just put in the product. |
By the end of the day, I was still pretty pleased with my hair, though there was some curl shrinkage. I really want a product that is going to be heavy enough to let my curls hang down, but not something that is going to dry them out and cause frizz. And since I’m making requests, I’d also like $10 million a year, every year for the rest of my life. Thanks.
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| End of the day. Dry hair, lots of shrinkage (in my opinion) |
Before a shoot, I spend some time reviewing images from previous shoots to get some ideas and narrow my focus for my next task. What shots really worked? Which ones didn’t? Which poses were spot on? Which ones need some tweaking?
I also spend quality time with my camera, more so than usual. In all of the workshops I’ve attended, in the majority of the books that I’ve read and from the advice I’ve received, the one nugget that is repeated more often than not is to be able to know every button and function on your camera at a moments notice. That’s a daunting task to say the least. There are a lot of buttons. There are a lot of multi-function buttons. And while the perpetual brown-nosing student in me was like, “Oooh! Ooh! I am so going to nail this!”, the thirty-plus mother of two, realistic me was like, “On/Off switch, here. I’m good.”
When other people learn that I’m a photographer (yes, I’m owning that flat out. No more prefacing it with “aspiring”), they often have questions about how to use their cameras. I get a little thrill when I am able to correctly and succinctly answer those questions. While I can say that I did read my owner’s manual (and there are penciled in notes and highlighted passages to prove it), I’m not saying I’ve got the manual memorized. It amazes me how some people purchase these expensive pieces of equipment and in their haste to starting snapping away, don’t even bother to learn some simple functions.
Case in point. Last October, we were at a birthday party for one of the kids in the girls social circle. I didn’t really know anyone there, but gravitated toward a gaggle of Lululemon uniformed suburban hausfraus. Several of them had Canon SLRs slung around their necks, a few had Nikons, and so I waited for a good break in the conversation to talk cameras and introduce myself. After the usual, “Hi, how are you? How do you know So-and-So?”, I asked one of the moms how she was enjoying her camera.
Me: How are you enjoying your camera?
Hausfrau: Oh, it’s really cool, but I wish that it had a playback feature? I mean, what’s the point of spending $1200 on a camera if you can’t even see the pictures right away?
She snaps off a couple of rounds as some kids go scampering by and then turns the camera body for our inspection. The LCD screen on the camera is as blank as the look of disbelief I’m giving her.
Me: Did you check to see that the playback feature was enabled?
Her turn to give me the blank look.
Hausfrau: The what?
Right. I spend a few minutes talking with her about the playback feature on the camera, how to get there, how to customize it to 2 seconds or 10 seconds or whatever, and that the longer the LCD was on, the more her battery would get sucked dry. All of this, I learned from the quickstart guide for my own Nikon. Spitting it out with an air of authority made me a freakin’ Ansel Adams in this crowd.
Several weeks ago, I was at an event with some other moms, most of whom were toting some serious cameras and glass (shop talk for lenses). This one mom had a lens that I had never seen before, so I asked her, what kind of lens it was.
Me: What kind of lens is that you’re shooting with?
Camera Mom: Huh? Oh! This? Oh, I don’t know, my husband gave it to me for Christmas.
Me: Do you mind if I take a peek?
And she hands me her very expensive Canon with her equally expensive lens which I determine to be a 17-300 f/2.8. What that means is. . . Well, let’s just say this is a serious piece of glass that, with some study and know how, will give you phenomenal pictures. So I told her that.
She just smiled and kept taking pictures. At least she had her playback feature enabled.
I know, I must sound like a huge douche-canoe, getting all snarky with people over something that in the grand scheme of things is no big deal. As a matter of fact, the less they know, the better it is for me. I’m the professional! Hire me! I guess, as with most things of value, I like to see them treated with respect and knowledge. I mean, if that were the Hope Diamond around your neck, I’d rather you tuck it into a velvet pouch when you take it off at the end of the day, rather than just drop on your dress next to your smart phone and car keys. Oh, who am I kidding? If you had the Hope Diamond around your neck, it’s highly doubtful you’d be taking it off any time soon. Am I right?
Anyway, I’ve got a shoot coming up, so my camera and I have been spending some time together. I’ve been thumbing though some books, looking for ideas and tricks. I’ve been working quite a bit with black and white. There is something so magnetic and striking about the absence of color. I’ve found some poses I’d like to try and am learning how to get what’s in my head out onto the LCD screen. I need some new models, though; the girls see me coming with the camera and they head off in the other direction.
Thankfully, I got a few good shots before they decided they’d had enough. And they know all about the playback feature, too. The sound of the shutter click mixed in with “Can I see it? Can I see it?” became the soundtrack to our shoot.
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| Shooting into the light |
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| Close-up |
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| I told her to make her neck like a swan |
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| Plotting their global take-over, no doubt |
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| Sisters |
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| Profile |
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| Face Forward |
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