Tuesday Tidbits

I've been in the throes of domestic goddess-hood for the past few weeks, and have had many good intentions of photographing the bounty of my kitchen, for blogging purposes....but got too bogged down in clean-up (and eating!) to remember. So please imagine, if you will: cupcakes, soups, bread, pies, scones, stews, stir-fries, and a ham twice the size of Mr.Q's head. (Thank Bob I'm brilliant at Tetris, or my freezer wouldn't be able to contain all the leftovers!) There has also been Life Outside the Kitchen: parties, coffee dates, movie double-dates, and of course, work.

Lots of baking & cooking = time for introspection, while stirring, kneading, beating, pouring, timing, and washing up. Some truths about Life, the Universe, and Everything have been either discovered or re-affirmed...

• Raspberry jam in chocolate cupcakes is a brilliant idea, in theory. In practice, it sinks to the bottom & sticks to the paper during baking. If one's goal is a Martha Stewart cupcake, one has failed. If, however, one loves an excuse to lick the crumbs off the paper liner, this becomes an unqualified success!
• Tin-foil tiaras are even more fun at 39 than they were at 9. And somewhere in the intervening years, I have lost any inhibitions about wearing one in public. Under the right circumstances. (Publicly weilding a giant wooden spoon as a "sceptre" at the same time will undoubtedly generate comments of a...saucy...nature.)
•  A pastry mat is a brilliant thing for rolling out pie crusts. For kneading bread: not so much.
•  I like knitting.
•  A lot.
•  I have a lot of yarn.
• Grammar is cool. And I am an unashamed grammar geek.
• Listening to a guy on the bus try to explain to his friend the difference between "Let's eat, Grandpa!" and "Let's eat Grandpa!" is probably a lot funnier to English teachers and grammar geeks than to most other people. (Punctuation saves lives!)
• Murphy's law in action: if you change the bedding, and use the last set of clean sheets to do so (because the dryer's broken, and you just haven't had room to hang the clean sheets to dry in your wee apartment yet) - this is the day you will come home again and find that a cat has vomited on your clean sheets. And your pillows.
•  A phone call from the doctor's office reminding you that it's time for your date with the stainless steel duck lips of doom is never going to generate feelings of warm fuzziness.
• Weather that's finally cold enough to wear wool socks, however, does generate feelings of warm fuzziness, both figurative and literal.
• Snow is pretty! And watching people from hot climates watch the first snowfall of the season - and it was a perfect snowfall: great, huge, fluffy flakes - is highly entertaining.
• Those great huge fluffly flakes bring out an irresistable urge to catch them on my tongue. Never mind that I'm in public. I wish they really did taste like white chocolate, though!