cookies!

Baking, delicious!

And ingredients can be

Faked, if need be.  *grin*

So Georgia and I met our neighbors, finally.  We noticed their wireless network a few days ago; ours is "Next to 666," and theirs is "Yes_it's_666."  :)  Anyway, we whipped up a batch of orange chocolate chunk cookies for them.

Ingredients:

1 cup shortening

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

zest of one orange

juice of same orange

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups AP flour

1/2 cup of crushed chocolate anything (we used M&Ms and Hershey bars)

some salt

some vanilla

some baking soda

These cookies go through the standard cookie-mixing steps: creaming the shortening and sugars, adding flour in stages, blah blah blah.  They bake for a really long time, though.  The recipe calls for the oven to be at 300, and it took a good 25 minutes for them to come out.  Maybe we just make bigger cookies than most folks, though.  ;)

Anyway, we took these to our neighbour.  He is evidently from Russia.  He opened the door, beer in hand.

"We're your neighbors!  We made cookies for you!"

"Is this for real?"

It was pretty funny.  I hope his daughter is around sometime, or that she at least likes the cookies.

learning

As I keep going

I pick up new things to ease

All things I'm doing.

There's a zone.  It exists for everything.  As this week progressed, I found myself getting more and more stressed about the mounds of math homework and programming homework and social commitments piling up.  But then I found it.  And suddenly, my work was done!  I had time to kill!  It was amazing!  :)

So last night I went over and chilled with Nick and Chris, and we had a dinner party.  I got to wear my Rodeo Drive dress, which was pretty awesome.  We made a really delicious recipe out of a book Chris had:

Mahi-mahi and Fennel

1 1/2 lbs. Mahi-mahi

2 fennel bulbs

4 julienned carrots

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup milk

2 tbsp. bread crumbs

1 tsp. butter (I think)

1/2 cup grated manchego cheese (or any hard cheese)

Prep the fennel bulbs by cutting off the stalks and peeling the outer layer off.  Wash them.  Cut out the core, and chop it into quarters.  Julienne these.  Boil the fennel and carrots in a pot for 8-10 minutes.

Wash the mahi-mahi and cut it into 6 pieces.  Put a little olive oil in the bottom of a pan and saute them until nicely cooked.  Pour the cooked carrots and fennel into the bottom of a baking dish, and lay the fish on top.  In a sauce pan, combine milk, flour, and 1/4 cup of chopped fennel leaves (the frilly part) and reduce it to a nice sauce.  Pour this over the fish.  Combine the bread crumbs, cheese, and butter in another bowl and put a little pat on each fillet.  Bake it at 375 for 10 minutes.

Yum!

Anyway, that was great.  I hadn't tried to make anything elaborate since the sushi experiment last weekend (it's hard to find time during the week...), so it was nice to do something to keep my skillz fresh.  :P  We also had fruit salad (featuring delicious asian pears from home!) and bruschetta con fungi (one of Nick's friends brought this; it was toasted Italian bread with some creamy mushroom stuff on top).  And German chocolate cake.

Today was good, too.  I got a new bike!  It was only $80 at the IU parking enforcement bike auction.  It's a pretty nice bike, too.  It needs a new seat and a new chain, but those aren't hard to come by.  I may even just take the ones from my bike that I moved to Venus's bike.  :o

Also today was parkour!  Only 4 people showed up for this one, but it was still fun.  I'm developing my sense of balance (important!), and I managed to pull myself up a wall for the first time!!!  It was only, like, 7 feet high or something, but that's a start, eh?  I guess the jumping technique eluded me last week, but this week I did okay with it.  It's important to jump from a little way away from the wall, and it's also important to first focus on connecting with your foot and THEN focus on grabbing the top and pulling.  I was trying to do it in the wrong order before.

I also practiced, and was miserably bad at, QMing (haha, I used a parkour term!  QM=quadripedal motion) along a railing near Sycamore.  But that's the balance development I was talking about.  It was good times.  And I'm really excited that the guys are all being so patient with me... heh...

Anyhoo, this afternoon is going to be crammed with homework working.  I hope that I don't totally dumb out on any of my problems for calc (I was working on one for Modern Algebra last week, and it looked damn near impossible because I failed to realize that I + A = I - (-A)), but we'll see.  This assignment looks like a lot of busy work.  Blech.