Not To Be Trusted With Knives

So it appears that I did, in fact, turn 35 today. And the world did not, in fact, end. Surprising, I know. And I suppose you are all wondering how I celebrated the big day. Well, first off was Bethmas Eve dinner. Since I live in the boonies and I didn’t want to drive all the way to Vancouver (where all my favourite restaurants are) given how limited my time is these days and how much driving to Vancouver I’m doing this month¹, I had to decide on somewhere out this way. There’s a good Greek restaurant near my place, but we’ve been there a few time recently and I didn’t feel like going to the brew pub, and that’s pretty much all I know for restaurants out here. So I decided to try The Keg. Everyone keeps telling me that it’s really good and my sister assured me that it’s good “even though it’s a chain restaurant”², so it was off to the Keg for a peppercorn encrusted steak and garlic mashed potatoes. I have to admit – pretty delicious! And since it was my birthday³, I got a free dessert! Already, my birthday was starting off awesome and it wasn’t even my birthday yet!

Now, for my actual birthday, there were two things that I wanted to do. And, as I mentioned, both of these things were on my list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. And those things were:

17. visit a shooting range and shoot a gun!
92. make Dark & Stormy cupcakes

Shooting Guns

Just before Christmas, there was a Social Shopper⁴ deal for the shooting range in PoCo that I keep hearing about on the radio⁵. The deal was pretty good – $29 got you on the range and you got a 9mm gun and 50 rounds of ammo to do some shooting⁶ and knowing that this item was on my 101 list, I convinced Devon to get this deal with me. So after a glorious morning of sleeping in (something I won’t get to do on any other day in this entire month!) and lounging around drinking coffee, we were off to PoCo for some shooting! After signing a waiver saying that “hey, shooting ranges are dangerous!” and that my heirs can’t sue the shooting range if I get injured or die⁷, we got our ear muffs and safety glasses and headed into the range. The instructor told us all the rules⁸, showed up how to work the guns and then we got to do some shooting! The instructor had to watch us each shoot a round individually, to make sure we were doing it right, and then we could both shoot the rest of our bullets while the instructor watched. I made Devon go first, because I’m a big chicken, and I have to say it was kinda scary to watch. You always hear that it is surprising how much recoil there is on a gun when you shoot it but, holy crap, it’s a surprising how my recoil there is on a gun when you shoot it! Also, the bullet casing fly every which way – bouncing off the wall, off you, off the instructor – just everywhere! Once I tried it myself, though, it wasn’t so bad – you can feel that the recoil is big, but it somehow doesn’t look as big when you are shooting as when you are watching someone else shoot. And I didn’t see where any of my casings flew, because I was intently staring at my target. Why did I need to stare so intently at my target? Because, naturally, I chose a zombie target!

Me and the target I used for the first time I ever shot a gun! I feel much more prepared for the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

I practised aiming for the head because, as everyone knows, you’ve got to destroy the brain when it comes to zombies. Headshots. Double tap. It’s elementary stuff.

My target on the left, Devon’s on the right. Out of the 50 rounds, I got 30 hits and he got 27. Not bad for a first go!

Baking Cupcakes

After we finished at the shooting range, it was back to my place for some lunch and to bake some cupcakes. You see, I long ago discovered this recipe for Dark N’ Stormy cupcakes, based on the Caribbean drink of the same name. The drink is a delicious concoction of lime juice, ginger beer, and black rum. The cupcake has a bottom layer that is essentially a gingerbread-flavoured cupcake⁹, a top layer that is a rum and lemon rind flavoured white cupcake, and then the whole thing  is topped with a rum cream cheese icing and some candied ginger on top¹⁰

Cupcake verdict: Delicious!

In the evening, Devon went off to Irish Gaelic class, and my friend Kim came over for tea and cupcakes! She also graciously helped me take down my Christmas tree, which I hadn’t yet had time to do this month and figured that I wouldn’t have time to do it until sometime next week if I didn’t get it done tonight. And now, I’m finishing up this blog posting and then heading to bed! Because apparently shooting guns and baking cupcakes is tiring work!

Happy Bethmas, everyone!

1. For the record, it’s 14 trips to Vancouver in the 31 days of January [↩]
2. As she knows how much I dislike most chain restaurants. I mean, there are a few good ones – I like White Spot veggies burgers, for example, and recently tried Red Robin and found that their burgers don’t taste like chain restaurant at all. [↩]
3. Well, birthday eve, but who’s counting? [↩]
4. i.e., Groupon-type thingy [↩]
5. Yes, apparently I am a slave to advertising, apparently. [↩]
6. In comparison, the range fee – i.e., just stepping on the range – costs $30! [↩]
7. Which would be a very sucky way to spend one’s birthday [↩]
8. Very sensible things like “always point the gun towards the range” and “don’t put your finger on the trigger except when you are all set up and ready to shoot.” [↩]
9. Molasses, sugar, fresh ginger, cloves, etc. [↩]
10. It’s also supposed to have a rum sauce poured over the cupcake before you ice it, but being brilliant such as I am, Devon made the rum sauce while the cupcakes were baking, and then he had to go off to Irish Gaelic class, so we quickly iced a warm cupcake for him to take, sans rum sauce. And then I let the cupcakes cool and then iced them, completely forgetting to poke holes in the cupcakes and pour the rum sauce on! So I just drizzled rum sauce on before I ate it and that saved the day! [↩]

Tags: 35, Bethmas, birthday

So now that I’m waking from my food coma of Christmas feasting, I seem to remember that I have a blog that I’ve been neglecting. But I have to say that I’ve been having a lovely time doing absolutely nothing on my holidays. Well, I shouldn’t say I’ve done *nothing*, because I’ve done a lot of eating. And drinking tea and coffee and lattes and Lions Winter Ale. I also went for a nice run yesterday – and it’s super hilly here on the Island, so I totally earned all the eating and drinking. Plus, I started reading a book, just for fun, which is something that I know I won’t get to do once school starts.

I was also pretty spoiled. In addition to the USA Pan that my sister gave me pre-Christmas¹ so that I’d have it in time for my Christmas baking, I got a set of Lagostina cutlery², earrings, a skull-and-cross bone necklace, a Lululemon gift card, a purse full of make-up and nail polish³, and my niece made a penguin-shaped eraser for me to use for my homework. And Sarah and Dave sent me two awesome books. Like I said – spoiled!

Over the next few days I’ll be doing my usual year-in-review and goals-for-the-new-year type postings. But for now, I’m off to drink a cup a tea!

1. Omg, I totally thought I’d blogged about the USA Pan, but it appears that I haven’t! I must rectify that posthaste! [↩]
2. So that I can throw lavish dinner parties once I move back to civilization. Also, so that I can have more than three knives. [↩]
3. That one is from my mom, of course! [↩]

Tags: Christmas, holidays, lazing, spoiled

I’m freaking exhausted from a day of Christmas baking, so today’s posting on my Christmas-baking-while-chatting-online-with-my-family-who-was-also-baking is going to be mostly photos and short on words. I’m too tired for typing words.

Meringue Snowflake

Chocolate Mice

For the record, here’s what everyone baked:

Beth

• shortbread cookies
• meringue snowflakes
• chocolate mice (white and dark chocolate)

Mom

• cranberry nut clusters
• chocolate lollipops
• reindeer cupcakes with Madeline
• butter tarts
• Muskoka tarts
• whipped shortbread

Nancy

• peanut butter fudge
• rocky road drops
• pecan pumpkin cookies
• pumpkins pie squares
• oat butter brittle
• key lime cheesecake squares
• blue cheese walnut crackers

Daniel¹

• lemon squares
• graham cracker cupcakes
• thumbprint cookies
• banana chocolate loaf

1. Nancy’s friend Daniel; not to be mistaken for Dr. Dan [↩]

Tags: baking, Christmas, Christmas 2011, Christmas baking, Cyber Cookies, Cyber Cookies '11, family, food, Nerdery

As I’m sure you know, I’m a coffee-holic. So I thought I’d share the follow two coffee tidbits with you.

First, ThinkGeek has a grown-your-own-coffee-plant kit! Seriously, it comes with everything you need to grow coffee plants on your window sill. How cool would it be to drink coffee that you grew yourself? Sadly, they don’t ship this product outside of the U.S. =(

Second, did you know that people drink coffee made out of cat poo? True story. Apparently coffee berries get wonderfully fermented while traveling down the digestive tract of civet cats and then people pick the coffee beans out of their poo and roast it and then charge a crazy amount of money for this coffee. Did I mentioned that this coffee is made from pooed out coffee beans? I think I’ll stick to my regular feces-free coffee, thank you very much.

Tags: cat poo coffee, coffee, food

Speaking of baking, I baked a cake for my work Christmas potluck on Friday. I had seen this fancy looking snowflake cake in a little free Kraft recipe magazine I’d picked up at the grocery store. The recipe itself sounded horrible - it’s all use-every-Kraft-ingredient-under-the sun. Like Cool Whip and Jello Pudding mixed together for the icing and Kraft jam in the middle. Barftastic. But it looked so pretty, so I decided to make a cake that was delicious and then decorate all pretty-like with snowflakes.

First of all, I knew that I had to make the snowflakes, that were made out of white chocolate, at least a day in advance as they needed chilling time. So I set out to make them one night and, stupidly, followed the instructions on the box for melting the white chocolate in the microwave. Which resulted in this pile of burntness:

For the record, that brown bit in the middle isn’t regular chocolate – it’s white chocolate that got burnt all to hell by following the instructions! Happily, I’d bought extra white chocolate since I figured that the snowflakes would be finicky to make and I wanted to have extra on hand. And I don’t generally have white chocolate in my house because white chocolate is the devil – a disgrace to the word “chocolate”¹, so I only use it when I’m making something that needs to be white. Like snowflakes. Or eyeballs.

Anyway, once I had some non-burnt melted white chocolate, I piped it in the shape of snowflakes using some templates² I’d drawn out and put underneath some wax paper:

The first bunch didn’t turn out that well, as the chocolate was runnier than I thought it would be, so flakes that looked lovely at first ended up looking like a pile of mush as the chocolate spread out before it hardened. So I made some more and got them into the fridge faster and I ended up with some good ones, which I put into a Tupperware container. But, being the worrywart that I am, the next night I made a few more just to be sure I’d have enough of the perfect ones – I figured it would be better to have too many than too few and I knew there was a chance that I might break some, because they are pretty fragile!

I baked the cakes the night before and set out to decorate them when I got home from work, but before I had to leave for the party. I made a chocolate ganache to put in the middle of the two cake layers³ and then some buttercream icing to cover the whole thing. But as I went into the fridge to get something as I was making this stuff, I knocked the Tupperware with the majority of the snowflakes onto the floor, shattering every last one in the box! Thank the FSM that I’d made the extras, which were still sitting on the cookie sheets in the fridge!

So I had to use those few flakes from the last batch, which weren’t all my best ones and were disproportionately big ones, whereas I wanted to have good mix of different sizes. I also noticed as I decorated the cake that my buttercream icing was so very white that it made the white chocolate snowflakes look yellow. Thus, it was not my best work, but at least it tasted good!

1. Technically, it is not actually chocolate. It’s cocoa butter and sugar and evil. [↩]
2. Which I will also use as templates for making meringue snowflakes. Because I am all about efficiency [↩]
3. Ganache, for the uninitiated, is a French word that translates to “the easiest thing in the world to make, but boy does it sound fancy!” [↩]

Tags: baking, food, snowflake cake

After a year’s hiatus¹, the Snow family Cyber Cookies is back!

For the uninitiated, Cyber Cookies is where I bake “with” my family with a little assistance from our webcams! That’s right – I bake in my kitchen in BC and my family bakes in my sister’s kitchen in Ontario and then it’s kind of like we are baking together except that we don’t get to try each other’s baked goods. So, not quite as good as baking in person, but it’s the best I can do!

I still have to decide on what I want to bake, but so far I thinking making some of the following items:

• shortbread – this is for sure, because I bake the world’s best shortbread
• gingerbread
• sugar cookies
• peanut butter chocolate unsurprise cookies²
• coconut squares
• fudge
• meringue snowflakes
• chocolate mice

Cyber Cookies ’11.
Friday, December 23, 2011.
Toronto & Surrey.

You know you are jealous

Except for the Surrey part. No one is jealous of that.

1. The hiatus was because I was actually in Ontario last Christmas, so I could bake with my family in person. [↩]
2. I call them “unsurprise” cookies because the name of the recipe was originally “peanut butter chocolate surprise cookies,” but the surprise was supposed to be that there is peanut butter surprise but (a) it’s not very surprising, since peanut butter is in the name of the cookie and (b) if someone has a peanut allergy, there’s going to be one hell of a terrible surprise. [↩]

Tags: baking, Christman, Cyber Cookies, Cyber Cookies '11, events, family, food

That’s how much time I have left until I’m off for the holidays. Ten business days. And in those ten business days, I have:

• four teleconferences
• two webinars
• a 1.5 day workshop
• 18 hours of meetings
• and I have to go to Vancouver three times¹.

1. Happily, my friend Lianna is letting me stay over at her place one of those days since I have to be there two days in a row, which saves me driving all the way back to Surrey at the end of one day only to have to drive all the way back to Vancouver the next morning [↩]

Tags: holidays, rampant narcissism

From the unvegetarian blogger who brought you My First Turkey, comes My First Steak.

Ok, so this isn’t the first steak I’ve eaten since becoming an unvegetarian, but it is the first one that I’ve cooked! In fact, now that I think about it, it might be the first steak I’ve ever cooked, period¹.

So yes, I cooked a steak. I was out and about running errands yesterday and happened to be not too far from Prime Beef, the butcher shop where I bought my Thanksgiving turkey². And I decided to buy a steak³.

Here is the steak in all its pre-cooked glory:

And here it is in its sizzling goodness:

And here it is on my dinner plate shortly before making its way to my belly:

Verdict: delicious.

1. Given that I became a vegetarian when I was a young, starving student, I’m guessing that in my meat eating days of yore I was never able to afford something so costly as a steak! [↩]
2. Aside: I made turkey pot pie with some of the leftover turkey that I had in the freezer. It was freaking delicious! [↩]
3. This sudden desire for steak may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Devon was out with his buddies at their annual dinner at Gotham steakhouse, causing me to have steak on the brain [↩]

Tags: food, meet, stake, unvegetarian

I’m going after item #25 on my 101 list: ”bake at least one thing per month for 12 months in a row, without baking the same thing two months in a row.” Last month I made the skull cupcakes and since this month is nearly over, I decided to do an easy one: banana chocolate chip muffins¹. I have a long history of baking banana bread, because banana bread is freaking delicious. I used to use a recipe from an Edith Bunker cookbook that my mom has, but recently Sarah shared this recipe with me and it’s even more delicious! I think it’s the addition of yogurt – makes it so moist! I added chocolate chips, because chocolate chips make banana bread 125% more delicious. And I decided to make muffins instead of bread because then you don’t even have to slice it. Because slicing is totally for suckers.

So, there you have it. Two months down, ten to go!

1. I did bake scones this month, but they were craptastic, so I decided that they didn’t count. Incidentally, if anyone has a good scone recipe, let me know! [↩]

Tags: 101 in 1001, baking, banana bread, banana muffins, food, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011

I had my annual eye exam yesterday and, happily, everything is exactly the same as it was a year ago. In fact, I just read over my blog posting from last year’s eye exam and I could pretty much copy and paste it and it would be accurate for this year’s exam – my optometrist did all the same tests and said all the same things: my vision is still great, more than two years after my last laser eye surgery, my retinal latticing is still there, but hasn’t changed and she doesn’t really expect it too, but is keeping an eye on just in case. And I took another photo of my dilated pupils:

My optometrist showed me the pictures she took of my retinas, where you can just  make out  my retinal latticing – it’s slightly worse in the left eye than the right eye. Oddly, my right eye is also better in terms of vision – it’s 20/20, whereas my left eye is slightly less than 20/20 – even though the retinal latticing and the vision are in no way related. Fortunately, I’m right eye dominant, so if one eye has to be weaker, it’s good that it’s the left.

In related news, since my optometrist’s office is in my old ‘hood on the west side, I popped into Stong’s grocery store to see if they had any of my favourite coffee, as I’m running low. The last few times I’ve been there they didn’t have it in whole bean form, only in ground form, but since I’m running low I figured it was better than nothing. However, to my surprise, they not only had it in whole bean form, but it was on sale for $3 off! And they also had the decaf coffee I like¹ on sale for $3 off! Needless to say, I stocked up on as many bags of coffee as I could get. Translation: I spent an unholy amount on coffee beans today, but I save $27 (!) and now have coffee supplies to last me well into next year!

1. I use it half and half with the regular stuff so as to cut down on the amount of caffeine I consume. [↩]

Tags: coffee, eyes, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo2011, optometrist, rampant consumerism, rampant narcissism, retina, retinal latticing, vision