Seattle!

As demanded by familial obligation, we are in Seattle this week visiting relatives. This means lots of interesting food; we've not been in the city twelve hours and already we've found amazing Thai food and gummi candy shaped like lips. 

I also got to hear Grandma Winter's story about how she poured water all over someone who was rude to her, a story that, while I've never heard it before, hardly surprises me. This is, after all, the same Grandma Winter who routinely intimidated entire police stations by knitting. (Yes, really. Go ahead and ask Robin Winter if you doubt me).

Weird thing about being this far north: the days are far longer than expected, and it is really green. As most of this spring has consisted of panic over fires, this is a welcome change. I regret on this trip that I cannot go and explore the city of Seattle proper....but all things in their time. In the present, there is Thai food. 

Even if I am a little scared to try the lips.

Also we have an awesome hotel room...

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! 

Food, glorious food!

I have been rather ill behaved of late with sporadic posting, but I have an excellent excuse for that, which is midterms. Yay midterms! Also getting things in on time to the publisher, which is just as much of a thing. 

This weekend, facing two imminent midterms and writing-related-work, I kind of...froze. I sat there in front of my computer and decided that not only could I not take another moment of trying to memorize exactly what Romanus IV was doing in 1011 (answer, getting his butt handed to him by Alp Arselan at the Battle of Manzikert because he had left his reinforcements in the hands of an uncle of the child-emperor he was determined to depose), but if I had to puzzle over the exact weight of my main character again I would either scream or crawl under the bed and never come out.

So seizing my tolerant housemate by the arm, I went to the grocery store and then raided the cookbook shelf (my parents, convinced that I would starve without suitable instruction, have given me more cookbooks for my apartment than most people see in a lifetime). 

I then proceeded to go through all of the dozen eggs I'd just bought. The products of this were rewarding, to say the least. 

I must confess, though, I did not make this first one. These are the tolerant housemate's lemon bars, which may have won the award as the best lemon bars ever, even over my mother's! (Sorry mom!)

We baked them in a pie dish, since we do not actually own a small, deep sided pan suitable for lemon bars, brownies, or other such delights (a thing that must be remedied soon. I got another dozen eggs on Tuesday). 

These are cinnamon chocolate chip muffins. Though the flavor was lovely, I have somehow mastered the technique of making the tops of the muffins perfectly tender and their bottoms something akin to cardboard. I blame the fact that I left the wet ingredients in the fridge and the butter congealed and made the dough a funny texture. Moving on. 

 Here are the lemon bars, freed from the wax paper and the pie dish. In future, the wax paper will be omitted. It was...difficult. 

This last one, I cannot take much credit for, as it came from a box. It's an almond sweet bread--think a giant cinnamon roll except with crushed almonds and almond icing. The tolerant housemate loathes almonds, but I love them. (So does my main character in Weather, one of the few things we agree on!) I also added caramel to the center, which was a success, though it did make the bread ooze a little in the oven. 

So now, dear reader, you know how I retained my sanity this weekend. After all the baking, I went back to studying and working on other projects quite happily. It might have been something to do with the lemon bar I was munching. 

Things to do rather than fret

I've just sent in the first draft of Weather to the editor, and of course I'm now sitting down and realizing all the things I want to fix in it (and would be absolutely mortified for other people to find!). But that's not very useful so I've been doing homework to take my mind off of fretting. 

And lab work. I spent most of this morning in the laboratory with a handlens and huge quantities of enormous bullfrog tadpoles, examining mouthparts and trying to determine the extent of bleaching to said mouthparts. The lab I work in is a lot of fun, as the professor who runs it will turn up every so often with a mess of salamanders or toads and there are turtles absolutely everywhere all the time. I started out working with insects in my first lab, and sea urchins in my second and it's a delight to meet actual vertebrates while doing research. I'm only handling dead critters at this point, though. 

I had lab meeting soon after that, which was full of math but still interesting. I snuck out early when it hit the awkward silence stage as everyone stared at the paper and tried to think up comments about it or made a last minute attempt on the hummus before all of it disappeared. The lab meetings are very well provided for in the food department. 

Then there was home and homework and last minute dinners because we'd expected to go shopping and get dinner out and then didn't (long story). So in the end, I distracted myself fairly well from worrying about whether my manuscript is a complete embarrassment. 

Well, until now. 

Stuff it, I'm going to go play video games.