Oh, Gods, tonight's dinner is *spectacular*!!!

I've already told you that I had the summer and year from hell, right? I'm recovering from several months of lots of issues and stress and a nervous exhaustion that is particularly odious. I feel like I need a month or two at a warm seaside resort or something equally Victorian like that.

I decided to make myself a nice dinner, snuggle with my puppers and watch The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I. So I considered the ingredients at home, stopped at the grocery for extras and a bottle of wine (and a small cheesecake), and went to town.

Chicken based Italian sausage (mild), baby spinach, chicken broth, and onion, and some items not pictured: some leftover potatoes from the pantry, some cheese, garlic, cream, salt and pepper. The wine is for drinking during dinner.

Mmmmm.

Bacon on top, too. I'm finishing up my second bowl.I can't wait for the cheesecake.

And you know? I do feel better.

Now, to gather Rex and head off to Panem before I make plans to see the second half of the movie this weekend. Hopefully, it'll help me recover some strength before the crazy of the next holiday.

And a nap. We have to take a nap. Naps are good for you, too.

I may have found the next best thing in pasta....

We went to a family style Italian restaurant for my aunt's birthday today, and due to my food allergy I had to cobble lunch together from bits and bobs. I might have found the best pasta dish ever:

1 plate of perfectly cooked spaghetti (it's wonderful if done right)
1 large platter of caprese salad (mozzarella, tomatoes, basil leaves, salt, pepper and extra virgin olive oil)
a little more salt

Cut up the salad, top it with more olive oil and some excellent balsamic vinegar, nosh. It tastes like summer and heaven and sunshine.

I had half this afternoon, half tonight (even though I wasn't even hungry -- I just needed that balsamic vinegar, tomato and cheese). I'm starting to think of other things I can add to spaghetti when there's good oil and vinegar involved. Although it would also be excellent all on its own -- oil and vinegar and pasta? Awesome.

Oh, my blob. Is this turning into an ersatz food blog?

And we have a winner!!!

I have found my go-to French Toast casserole recipe!

Well, I've innovated it. I had to combine two different recipes to get here, but now I can sleep secure knowing that, should I ever need to serve brunch to people, I know precisely how to put the French Tioast casserole together.

I combined the most fragrant of the custards (let's be honest, with really excellent vanilla, the Pioneer Woman's Baked French Toast has a nice, basic custard base) and the best topper (the caramel on the Skier's French Toast Casserole is...mind-shatteringly fabulous) and made the French Toast Casserole la prima.

Here it is:

Surly Knitter's Super Duper French Toast Casserole

You will need: 9 x 13 baking dish, oven, and a spoon to get it from the bowl into your mouth. You will definitely want to get it there efficiently.

Ingredients

For the caramel:

1/2 cup butter -- one stick, for Americans playing at home

2 Tblsp corn syrup, light or dark

1 cup dark brown sugar, packed

For the custard:

8 whole eggs

2 cups whole milk (2% will suffice)

1/2 cups heavy cream (I used half and half, it works)

3/4 cups sugar

2 tbsp vanilla extract -- buy the best one you can afford; I accidentally bought a $6 bourbon vanilla that's organic and free-trade, and I'd willingly pay that again, even if I only made $6 an hour

One loaf of crusty bread, sourdough or white, dealer's choice. Cut or torn into bite size squares/cubes.

The night before, make the caramel. In a sauce pan on the stove, melt your butter on medium to medium-low heat. When the stick is melted, stir in the corn syrup and dark brown sugar. Stir occasionally and let simmer lightly until the sugar is completely melted into the butter and no crystals remain (it takes a bit, be patient).

Meanwhile, grease your pan. Use butter or spray stuff, it's up to you. When the caramel is ready, pour into the bottom of the pan. It's not going to like the spray stuff or butter that you used very much, so you may have to spread it out with your spoon. Let set aside.

Mix the custard ingredients (I prefer to whip the eggs and sugar together before adding the rest of the ingredients, but last night I put them in as I could get to them and it turned out really well). Spread the bread bits on top of the caramel in the baking dish, using them to spread the caramel a little more. Pour the custard on top of the bread, making sure to get all the top pieces wet (unless you like chewing on broken glass, which is sort of what baked stale bread feels like in the mouth).

Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Next morning, rise, shine, get a cup of joe and preheat your oven to 350 F. Pop the casserole in for 40-45 minutes (checking at the 40 minute mark for done-ness). Bake longer for a drier texture, less time for a more squishy bread pudding experience.

Remove from oven. Nosh. You don't need (nor will you want) maple syrup. Sausage is a good pairing, although bacon is always welcome in my home.

I promise you, this one is the best possible French Toast Casserole. At least, by my reckoning. Here, have some pictures:

 I wasn't home when it came out, and if you could smell it, too, you'd understand why half of it was gone before I even got here.

 Close up of the lovely, lovely custard and goo.

In my bowl, on the way to in my belleh.

You can be sure I'm already on to my second serving. This stuff is excellent.

French Toast Casseroles, or My Search for the Ultimate Truth

Honestly. French toast casserole. You'd think it would be a simple thing to find a good recipe for French toast casserole, wouldn't you? But, no. No, it isn't. I've been testing various ones for the past forever it seems, but none are really satisfactory. This one has too much custard, that one is too bland. This one is too spicy, that one tastes like nuclear waste, and oh, my blob, is it still in my mouth? Spit it out, spit it out!!!

What is it going to take for a girl to find a good French toast casserole recipe!?!?

Poverty, apparently. I'm super poor at the moment, what with various family dramas going on and my decision to pay off my credit cards, so I've decided to make a different French toast casserole every Sunday until I find the best damn French toast casserole on the planet, by gum. Or at least an adequate one. Because eating in is a lot cheaper than eating out, and that was the family tradition for most Sundays. Well, poverty. So they can become rats in my little pain perdu maze. Bwahahahahaaa!

Up tomorrow: The Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Baked French Toast. I chose it for first because...well. No reason, really. But I know some people for whom the Pioneer Woman is, like, a minor goddess, so her recipe can't be all that bad, can it?

Anyway, for the purposes of this experiment, I decided I will have to use the exact same ingredients for each recipe (at least, where they overlap), otherwise it's not a good test of the recipe, is it? I have chosen for my bread a nice, heavy French loaf from my local Earth Fare. To be completely honest, that's the only item I buy there (except if I need Emmentaler cheese -- don't ask me why, but apparently the people in these parts have a thing against good Swiss cheeses), but that's not the fault of their products. It's my location. Upon a time, it was a huge Office Max, and before that a regular grocery store. Earth Fare moves in, I get all excited...and then they cut the inside down by nearly 2/3, and have a produce section approximately the size of my bedroom closet. Whaa...?

Whatever. We have a Fresh Thyme market, too, so screw you, Earth Fare, and your teensy weensy vegetable section at our location. Are we not good enough for your precious fingerling potatoes?

Ahem. Back to the French loaf. It's good eatin' bread, so if anything will make a French toast casserole good, it's this. Same brand of milk, same brand of cream, etc. All the variables must be the same if we are to figure out if there's magic in the mix. Somehow I feel like I should have a lab coat for this....

Next week, I think I may go with Maple French Toast, from Taste of Home magazine. The week after, Brown Sugar and Walnuts, from Mr. Breakfast.com. It has the walnuts, you see. Healthy. Then maybe the completely nutritionally unredeemed Skier's Baked French Toast from Miss Party. Corn syrup, people, it's got corn syrup!!! And rounding out the top five (and hopefully there's a winner in this batch) is the Blueberry Surprise French Toast, by Shop 'N Save, a chain of supermarkets here in the States. I will have to make up a score card and everything, too.

Is it weird that the thought of doing a statistical analysis of French toast casserole recipes sort of excites me?

Why bother with the box?

I made a nice, gooey, cheesy dinner for myself tonight:

That's a cheeseburger macaroni dish. I did not use a box mix. And now that I'm eating it like food is going out of style, I wonder why I ever bothered with box mixes. I have box mixes in the pantry, but I'm finding this version far superior.

It's just a quarter box of rotini, cooked up, mixed with 6 ounces of Velveeta and a handful of cheddar cheese shreds, a little more than one pound of ground beef cooked with some onions (mmmm, maybe half a small white one), some salt, pepper and garlic powder. Chuck in some milk, mush it around until the cheese goes all gooey-awesome sauce, then use mustard and bread and butter pickles chopped up for garnish. Mmm-mmm, good. And it took less time, overall, than the box stuff does. And it's better. In my opinion, which will, alongside $1.25 hard US currency, buy you a cup of coffee at McDonalds.

Perfect for one of those days.

Not that I've had one. Actually, this afternoon was pretty good. I took a nap and had a dream. A dream that both amused and empowered me, and now I'm thinking about how I can turn it into a book. Or possibly performance art. Yes, that statement makes sense, but I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.

I think I'll write it out, first, and then decide what to do with it. Oddly enough, I don't think it will take long -- the nature of the project is simple. Beautifully simple.

And it won't interfere with shawl knitting. I have no interest any longer in any project on my plate aside from that shawl. Don't ask me why; I tend to get in knitting moods like this.Oh, well. Maybe that means I'll actually have a finished shawl of my own one of these days.

Now I'm going back to my dinner and wine and then I'll dish up some chocolate something or other for dessert. I feel like celebrating. Good ideas don't just fall out of the sky like that every day!

Marshmallow Memo

I had a marshmallow making marathon today -- I made three ginormous batches of marshmallows. I wanted to try flavoring them with candy, an option allowed for in the recipe itself. I wanted to make some notes on the changes the candy made to the process so I don't forget.

(Don't worry, it's just a way-cool camera flare, not radioactivity in the sugar. Promise)

OK, notes:

1. Peppermint candies make the mix about a trillion times stickier than regular. Cleaning it off the beaters is a special treat.
2. Cinnamon BB candies (what are they called, actually?) must be ground up in a coffee grinder -- but be aware that coffee will end up in your marshmallows.
3. Actually, grinding up candy in anything (including the blender I used for the peppermints) will produce a rather fine, caustic powder that floats through the air, gets in your hair and clothes and eyes and stings like the dickens. Wear goggles, or at least not contacts. I also think I have sugar lung now.
4. Peppermint melted with sugar will look and smell like Pepto in the pot, but the flavor is too faint to make much impression in the final product -- the whipped in air dilutes it. I think doubling the amount of candy used in the mix might help.
5. Making three batches of marshmallows over the course of one day means that I have to cut all three batches tomorrow and coat them in sugar. If it looked like I was cutting coke last week when I did the half batch, tomorrow's going to be an unholy mess.

And with that, I go to bed. I have to get up early tomorrow to meet with the office manager at my church about the gig. It's a feast day tomorrow, too, so she'll be very busy. I hope I can be concise!

Pretty Bobbles

I'm branching out, y'all. The first thing I did this week in my course of doing new stuff was repair an old pair of earrings. Well, I say old, but I bought them three years ago. However, the hooks had turned to this:

Blech, you can see the dirty copper! Ewww! So I went shopping -- thankfully I got a few good coupons in the mail from my favorite Big Box Retailer of All Things Craftual -- and got some notions (aka, 'findings', which is now my favorite word for craft supplies evar), so the fish hook earring doo-dads could go from the above to this:

See? Shiny. It's amazing, with the old hooks on, the earrings looked dirty and down-market. With the new hooks, they look clean and brand new again. Which just goes to show, a little bit of maintenance can give you a whole new look!

I also got some extras. I have a blue ton of beads in a box which I only just rediscovered the other day. In light of the fact that I'm stone-broke at present, I decided to make a necklace to give a friend for her birthday. So, I tossed some extra things in my card at Big Box Retailer of All Things Craftual:

Wish me luck.

But the beads are totally her color -- red and purple and black -- so I'm hoping it will turn out alright:

Pretty, no? I don't even remember why I bought these.... Oh, well. Lucky me. I don't have to feel too bad that what she's mostly getting for Festivus is marshmallows. Granted, they are my special, hand made marshmallows, in a variety of flavors (provided I can figure out how to chop up the cinnamon candies I found), so they're not just marshmallows, they are Super Excellent and Moist Marshmallows of Joy.

Which makes them (naturally) superior to just about everything I could purchase. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. :-)

I am done with the past week.

My family suffered a bereavement this past weekend. My uncle, my mother's brother, died early on Saturday morning. He had been ill for the past little while, and he made the choice that basically ended his suffering, so I'll guess he preferred to move on rather than linger. I'm glad he's not suffering any longer, and hope he's found happiness in the OtherWhen. He died on what would have been his mother's 99th birthday, so we all believe he got an invitation to the party. Perhaps he was a surprise guest for her?

I've been cooped up in the waiting rooms of the ICU at a local hospital for the past week and a half, so you can imagine how little I've gotten done in the past ten or more days. It's hard to get anything done when you're in the middle of a slew of relations, chattering away like a cage full of monkeys. And for once I've actually got work to do -- my church has engaged my services. They need to rebind the old church registers and have them conserved, and they want me to manage the project. I've got some notes I need to write up and then a conference to arrange with the priest and office manager to see what they think. Then I get to start working on how to accomplish their goals. I'm looking forward to it (it's my kind of fun; yes, I'm that weird) and can't wait to get it up and running.

But I had one big project to get finished today: My book is downloaded at Amazon, title and all, just waiting the 24 hours so Amazon can check it to make sure I'm not a dirty plagiarist. I will provide a link tomorrow -- when it's supposed to appear. I can't believe I've done it and it's too late to stop the thing now. I'm terribly ambivalent, excited and scared and exhilarated all at once.

Wish me luck.

In other news, I did something fun today (aside from spending hours and hours and hours on end trying to get the damn document in Kindle format): I made some lemon-lime marshmallows. Using these:

and the basic vanilla marshmallow recipe from the Brownie Points blog. Juicing a standard lemon and two limes gives you the 1/4 cup and 2 tablespoons of liquid required to bloom your gelatine (I also added in a few little drops to make it the full 2 tablespoons). Boil the sugar, corn syrup and that portion of water, whip the whole together and hey, presto:

a half batch of marshmallows. Actually, this is all that is left over -- I took them to coven tonight and they got predated by the ladies. They're soft and tender and have a really bright, light lemon tang. You can just barely get a hint of the lime. It's like eating soft sunshine.

I like this flavor. Lots.

I'll be making my friends marshmallows for the holidays -- only for their marshmallows, I'll be using hard candy to give them peppermint and cinnamon flavors. My mother wants me to figure out how to make coconut marshmallows, which should be an interesting adventure.

And on top of it all, I managed to get my mother's Christmas Cowl cast on tonight at coven.

I spend a week in the pound and come out swinging. I'm not sure if I'm entirely proud of myself, but it sure doesn't hurt.

Ow.

Just. Ow. I feel like I've been smacked around pretty good, but at least my bleeding's stopped. Considering it was making me sick yesterday, that's not anything small.

Despite the fact that I was not a good girl and had a massive crying jag after the procedure (I blame the sedatives and bleeding, two of my least favorite things), I decided to go ahead and use my birthday money on yarn. Hey, my face is stretched out of shape and bloaty, I feel like I've gone a round or two with Tyson and I wanted new yarn. I think that's a good enough set of reasons!

By the way, this is going to be a huge, long, photo-intense post, so I'm going to put a jump break in here:

Words, Words, Words

I tried an experiment today. Since it was so lovely -- warm without the muggy, soft breezes that felt cool on the skin, blue sky and bright green greens -- I took my laptop and went to the local art museum to write. In the hour before my battery died (well, didn't die, per se, but the computer kept warning me it would fall asleep if I didn't shut down) I managed to write 10 pages. I haven't done that in...years. Days were, back before I started taking my writing too seriously, I could occasionally rip out a story in an hour or two, making my pace about 10 pages per hour. It felt good to be able to lose myself in the writing so well that it just flowed like water. Seriously good. I've been blocked for so long on my fiction that just sitting down on a bench, listening to a lovely fountain, feeling the breeze on my face and just clacking out 10 pages of story felt a bit like...giving birth after a very long, very painful pregnancy.

A load off my mind, literally.


Now, I'd also like to note two things: One: I type like the wind. I've been earning money for over fifteen years in one capacity or another from typing some nonsense or other. I test out at around 90 wpm, but that's testing out. You almost always test slightly slower than you can actually type because you're being cautious when you test. Two: Because I type like the wind, I can almost type as fast as I think, edit, revise a little and come up with a good sentence. It can get stream of consciousness after a while, once I get into my flow.

Now, this doesn't mean I'm writing anything good, necessarily, it just means I'm writing a lot of stuff very fast.  Still and all, I wrote! I've been blocked for ages and yet today I just wrote!

Little Loki seems to be spreading to other aspects of my life, as well. The win oozes out of my knitting bag and onto my laptop.

Plus, I came home tonight and managed to get my work writing quota in. More than, actually. I'm pretty darn proud of myself and my words today. Of course, I've probably used up all my words for the week in one day. God knows I've used enough of them.

In other news, I did not get to much knitting this week. I'm still thinking about putting a shrug on the needles, but now I'm not sure if I want to use the Knit Picks Shamrock or if I want to use some Bernat Chunky Alpaca I've got stashed away:

I just can't decide. Smooshy alpaca or warm wool. Hmmm. I'm spoiled for choice in this.

After I finished working on my last article of the week, I decided I wanted mashed potatoes. I love mashed potatoes and I feel I am severely deficient of mashed potatoes. So I got out the five organic potatoes I had left (of a 3-pound bag), boiled them, mashed them and then buttered and sour creamed them to diet hell.

Mmmmm. Potatoes.

I'm going to go finish my bowl of dairy with a little potato in and then go to bed. It's been a long day.