OK, Julie...

Here you go...my favorite cookbooks.

1. Happy in the Kitchen, Michel Richard (mine's signed...*swoon*)
2. Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook
3. Barefoot Contessa Family Style, Ina Garten
4. Chesapeake Bay Cooking, John Shields
5. Tide & Thyme, Annapolis Junior League
6. Barefoot Contessa Parties, Ina Garten
7. Cooking Light Complete Cookbook
8. The Congressional Club Cookbook
9. Weight Watchers New Complete Recipes (seriously...yummy!)
10. Honest Pretzels, Mollie Katzen

I want to get a copy of Home Cooking with a French Accent by Michel Richard, but it's out of print and kind of hard to find one that's not beaten to bits. And Roland Mesnier has a book out I'd love, called Dessert University. 

My favorite websites for recipes...

• allrecipes.com
• cookinglight.com (but I hate hate HATE the new search engine)
• foodtv.com
• cooks.com

I also subscribe to a few cooking magazines--Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Cooking Light, along with Real Simple, which has some good stuff in it. I used to subscribe to Every Day with Rachael Ray, but I'm kind of over her. In fact, I'm sick of her. Go 'way, Perkyhead.

The thing is, I very rarely cook a recipe as it's written anymore. I'm starting to know what an ingredient will do to a recipe and what I can add in or leave out, and I tinker and play as I go. Which is way fun. :)

So there you have it.

Fly By

Two things--I'm swamped with work.

First, I bought bath towels from Lands End maybe three or four years ago. Lately, I noticed they were fading. And last night, one tore across a seam as I hung it up. So I called Lands End this morning and told them I was disappointed in the towels and surprised they hadn't held up better over a relatively short period of time (our old towels were a good 7 years old when we replaced them, and had been washed and dried in ancient machines--we have the HE machines now that are much more gentle). The lady at LE was super nice, and I'll get all new towels and washcloths next week, with a postage-paid return label for the old ones. This despite not having an order number or receipt or any kind of record of the purchase. 

This is why I'll spend more for Lands End and LL Bean. How can you beat that? I could have gotten cheaper towels at the store, but I'd have had to buy new ones when they faded or ripped, costing me more in the long run. Customers for life, people. This is how you get them.

Second, the muffin recipe. I found the original recipe on allrecipes.com and doctored it up a bit. 

Corn Muffins

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

3/4 cup sugar (I think you could go down to 1/2 cup)

3/4 cup cornmeal

1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

2 eggs

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 cup milk, divided

Combine dry ingredients. Add eggs, butter, and 1/2 cup of milk. Beat for 1 minute. Add remaining milk and beat until just blended. Fill paper-lined muffin cups 3/4 full. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

I combined the dry stuff the night before, beat it all with the wet stuff and popped them in the oven in the morning, and we had a really easy, warm breakfast. They were great as-is, too, with no butter spread on them.

Enjoy!

More Randomness

We're on about day five of trying to eat more natural foods and less processed crap. I'm seeing a bid difference in DS already, which is encouraging. I'm also, however, starting to wonder if we're not also dealing with some mild sensory issues. And whether that's worth a call to the pediatrician or not, being that he's seven. He claps his hands over his ears whenever a car or truck goes by, saying it's too loud. He "flaps wings" when he gets excited about something--it's a behavior that vanished when he was about 2 and is now back. And he seems utterly incapable of controlling himself sometimes, physically (in a bouncing around kind of way) and with what's becoming constant yelling and loudness. I'm really not sure if this is nothing or something. Ugh.

I decided this morning that when I'm Supreme Ruler of the World, all U.S. presidential candidates will be required to have at least two years of active duty military service on their resumes. And from here on out, I'm not voting for anyone without it. Party notwithstanding. It seems like a basic prerequisite for the commander in chief. I mean when you think about it, handing off orders to our soldiers is one of the few powers a president really has.

Whichever cell service has the "please enjoy the music while your party is reached" is really irritating. Just FYI. 

I finally found both a corn muffin recipe and a pizza dough recipe that I really like. These make me happy. :) Now, if I could find an everyday bread recipe that worked well, I'd be a totally happy camper. At least in the carbs department.

True story: we had our sidewalk (street to the front door) torn out and replaced last week. This made the porch inaccessible for a few days. We have a mail slot thru the front door. Because the mail carrier couldn't get to it, I put a box in the lawn that had U.S. MAIL written on it in black Sharpie (in neat, large, all capital, letters on a white background), and then a sign on the storm door that said BOX FOR MAIL IN YARD in the same marker. Saturday, I walked into the yard at the same moment that the mail carrier--an older Asian man--jumped off my porch. Onto the damp concrete walk, that was ringed by yellow construction tape and orange cones. I stared at him, wide-eyed. He pointed to the box in the yard and with a heavy accent asked, "What does that say?" Which proves, once and for all, that my street really is some kind of remedial program for illiterate mail carriers. It also explains a lot about why I miss a lot of mail. Good lord, man, get yourself some Hooked on Phonics if this is your chosen career path!

Is anybody else nervous about these Chinese Olympics? I really have a bad feeling...

Make Me Happy

The house thing...I'm over it. I just needed a few days to be mad. What will be will be, yes? Let go and let God and all like that.

Despite the past week, I am a pretty even-keeled person. Most of the time. With lots that makes me happy: my kids, mint chip ice cream, a good book, my daily perusal of people.com, the WDCL, baking something yummy and warm, and the article in tomorrow's Post magazine about the sommelier at a downtown restaurant who's a metalhead. Good stuff.

Today we took the kids to a big field and shot off our model rockets. Lots of screaming, lots of jumping up and down, lots of smoke and whistling and BOOMing. Fun stuff. I recommend it.

Happy weekend!

Moi?

DH thinks I'm having anger issues.

I'll admit, this house thing has me a teensy bit fired up. I'm an old house person, same way I'm a dog person, and the thought that Douchebag could sell his family home--the one they bought in the 1950s--to some developer to tear down is kind of pissing me off.

(I'm also having pottymouth issues. Apologies all around. But it wouldn't be much of a blog if I didn't talk like I talk, you know?)

This morning, I got up at 5:30 to walk. The walk turned into a run. People, I have not run voluntarily since college. There generally has to be a very large person with a very imposing weapon chasing me at a good clip to get me to run. But I got myself so fired up and so upset and so agitated that running, pounding on the pavement and sweating and gasping for breath, was a fantastic release. It felt really good, until my lungs threatened to collapse and my knees gave out. 

The iPod was blasting--Kiss, AC/DC, Poison, Scorpions, Aerosmith, Buckcherry, Billy Squier, Guns N Roses. That felt good too. Angry music. Angry, pounding music for my good and pissed off run. 

I kind of fell through my back door at the end, looking like something an animal'd been chewing on and smelling even worse, I'm sure. I gulped down a glass of water, kicked off my purty pink workout shoes, and soaked in the air conditioning.

At that moment, DH came in, ready to head out for a business trip.

"I've been thinking," he said.

"Uh huh," I snorted. It was, after all, 6 in the morning.

"Maybe he's not a typical developer. Maybe he'll renovate it and keep all the original features we liked, and maybe in a year he'll sell it and it'll look amazing."

I stared. "This is Montgomery County," I said. "Have the two of you met? 'Save old houses and big trees' ranks just below 'introduce resistant strain of Polio into the elementary schools' on the overall priority list."

He nodded.

"I know," he said. "But maybe, just maybe, this guy has an appreciation for old houses. We can hope, anyway."

"You keep hoping that," I said. "I'm going to hope he has a serious lack of appreciation for the term 'load-bearing' and the damn thing falls down on him."

Maybe I should drink more.

Tidbits

So I spent the morning shopping around for a wi-fi signal booster. Our FIOS modem is in our basement, and my new office is in an addition to our house. That means the signal has to go upstairs, and through a wall with three layers--plaster atop cinder blocks atop brick--to get to my computer. And that doesn't work so well. But I found this site and made its cardboard-and-foil booster and plopped it onto my Actiontec router. And dayumn! Four bars! FOUR BARS! Anywhere in the house! And I was ready to spend $90! Rock on. *giggle*

I'm still waiting for Verizon to decide if I can upgrade my wireless account now or if I have to wait until September when my two-year contract is up. What an archaic, idiotic system we've created in cell phones. Stoopid.

It's been a food bonanza around here this week. Much stress. Much frustration. Many pounds. Somebody talk me off the ledge. Stop eating!

We've been practicing keeping our house clean and shiny. Just in case it has to go on the market soon. We're, um, not very good at it. LOL! But we're trying. At least, I'm trying. Not experiencing so much buy-in from the short people running around. If we ever do find a house and we actually ever do get a contract ratified, it's going to get ugly around here. Polly Pocket and her ilk may be evicted. 

I got a speeding ticket from one of those farking cameras the other day. What a rip that is. No points, tho, so I haven't decided if I'm telling DH or not. He has a long, proud record of camera-issued tickets. I'd hate to make him feel less talented.

We've been having issues with DS spazzing out, for lack of a better term, lately. I started tracking it and can pretty much say it's thanks to sugar and high-frutcose corn syrup (and no, I can't spell that. Sue me.). We've been watching his diet much more closely this week ("we" being "I", thanks) and I actually have noticed a difference. He's much more even-keeled when he eats more natural foods without all the fancy-schmancy sweeteners and with as little sugar as possible. My copy of "Sugar Busters for Kids" arrived today. We'll see how much we can do with it.

We lost a house this week. I cried a bunch when it happened, mostly because it went to a developer who's going to rip it down, and it's a beautiful 1930s masterpiece that just needs some TLC. And then I got really POd and emailed its owner to beg, one last time, to let us save it. He was a real douchebag about it (I'm into "douchebag" this week. Sorry. It'll pass.), which, oddly, made me feel better. Bad karma, I guess. Anyway, I then found out that two pairs of shoes I've loved for awhile were on sale at LL Bean, so I ordered both. And then I felt much better. Pathetic, really, but my feet are going to look sweet. Despite being crammed into the World's Smallest Closet. ;)

Anybody want to join me in a campaign to get Sandra Lee's skinny butt booted off Food Network? Good Lord, she is just horrible.

Until tomorrow, my sweets...

Brilliant.

And not just because I like the new Pilot.