Cream Puffs and Hobbits

Today, my mother (the estimable Robin Winter) decided to teach me how to make cream puffs. Unfortunately, no photographs remain of this endeavor  as we were much too preoccupied with chucking the flour into the boiling water and butter and stirring it madly to take pictures. 

The first batch turned out terribly. Due to my father's long running battle against cholesterol, we have used a sort of egg that consists only of egg whites in a box, and this and the dough for cream puffs do not coexist. As a result, we wound up with flat cream puffs the first time around and had to run down to the corner store (a rather funky little place full of foods labeled in Cyrillic and German) and get a dozen eggs.

These did the trick, and we've now got a whole bunch of cream puffs, though three fewer than we made. The first two of these we ate. The third...

"He did it!"

Yeah, we should have learned not to do that by now. 

And while we were doing this, we were watching The Hobbit. Now, I'd seen it in theaters  but my mother hadn't, so I fear her recollection of the film will be broken up by timings for cream puffs (Wargs! "oh wait no time to turn the oven down to 350!") It's a lot of fun, but I have rather mixed feelings about it. 

As a Lord of the Rings fan since about the age of ten, I'm very fond of all the books and the appendices, and oh boy did the writers do their research. It's lovely to be so immersed in that world. But...well, I don't like cliffhanging scenes and sometimes it seems that practicality was sacrificed for the sake of the Wow-Factor--some of the action scenes grew tedious because it was all about people swinging on bridges and falling improbable distances. My impulse with those was to sit there and look at the shiny world that'd been created and wait for the plot to reappear. 

As per my earlier remark, the bad parts outweigh the good, and I'll happily line up for the next premier anyway. But there were a few points where the baking was a nice break from the movie! 

The Unintentional Hiatus

Well, that was rather longer than I planned to go without updating! Unfortunately, school had other ideas. I wound up working in another lab, and it's been spectacular fun. The housemates and I had many nice breakfasts (must upload pictures at some point!) and had many panicked evenings of studying. I also got that nasty coughing cold that's been going around and gave it to the Tolerant Housemate, who has cursed me many times as a result. Said coughing cold has refused to move out, which has done just wonders for my productivity. (Sarcastic? Me?)

But now I'm finished with finals, have bade farewell to the housemates, and am relaxing at home with good food and a lot of cats. 

By a lot of cats, I mean three. But they're all rather high-maintenance and very people-oriented (read, demanding) and so sometimes it seems like we have even more cats than we do. 

The cats. 

After living elsewhere for several months, it's rather an adjustment not to be able to leave food out on the counter! Even peapods aren't safe. Neither is cilantro or anything green and leafy. The black cat will even eat cake, and last New Years, got into someone's spilled champagne, and drank enough he was sick under the table. We've had to be very careful with him and alcohol since.

In novel-related news, I'm just about done with the first round of edits. Release date still seems to be May 1st, so here's hoping that doesn't change!