Lately I’ve been receiving insane amounts of spam in my comments. Both spam-my track- and pingbacks (what’s the difference by the way, does anyone know?) and spam comments. The comments aren’t always as bad, at least they ‘tell me something nice’ and often have some sort of connection to the post I’ve made. But the rest of it is really starting to annoy me.
No, I don’t need any medication from you, thank you, and neither do my readers, especially if you’re selling things as something different (I keep reading comments about a really strong painkiller, which I actually used after a surgery myself, advertised as an antidepressant.) Moral of the story, don’t buy your medicin of the internet, it’s not safe and plain wrong!
Anyways, I’ve tried installing other anti-spam-plugins. A number of different ones so far. I’ve got a captcha on here, I’ve got some other stuff, but the spam keeps coming. Sometimes 60 comments in one night at 1 post.
It’s starting to seriously bug me. So here’s a question for you my dear readers. How do you deal with spam?
Yes, I called what I baked a thing. It’s true! I can’t help it.
It’s because I haven’t made up a name for what I baked yet. It was slightly more dense and chewy than a cake, but way more cakey than brownies. It was like a really really thick cookie, but still the structure wasn’t the same.
I don’t know what it was. And I don’t have a recipe.
Please don’t go away now! I know, I’m evil, baking without a recipe. But it was an experiment. A test. With some leftover chocolate from when I decorated my in-laws’bonbons. Which they loved by the way, my mom-in-law sent me an e-mail reitterating just that.
The thing is, I made butternut squash soup yesterday. And wanted to bake bread to serve alongside. But then I realized I still had bread, which wasn’t stale yet, but would become stale quickly. So I opted out of baking bread and instead baked something chocolatey.
In the end we didn’t eat any bread, by the way.
I looked up some interesting recipes, but I didn’t have enough of the chocolate for any of the recipes I found. So I figured I’d wing it. That’s just what I do.
I’m baking without recipe more and more these day. Just trial and error and figureing out what density of batter works to make something tasty. And I just don’t worry about what it should be called.
So I grabbed some butter, sugar and vanilla sugar. I melted half the leftover white and dark chocolates. I mixed them together and added 2 eggs. Then I figured I should add another egg, just because I could. I added flour, just AP flour, and then figured a little salf-raising flour would be good to, to get a tiny little rise in there. Yes, I could’ve just added a tiny amount of baking powder, but I figured this would work too.
I chopped up the rest of the leftover chocolate and mixed the batter. It was just slightly too thick and dry for my liking, so I added some vegetable oil and a little scoop of cocoa powder for taste. I felt (And tasted, raw eggs don’t scare me) the batter and thought it would work.
I put the batter in a dish and placed it in a fairly hot oven, medium-hot if you will, about 170 degrees celcius on convection. Then I waited until it looked done and tested it.
The skewer came out dry, so I took the ‘thing’out, placed it on the counter to cook a bit. Cut it into pieces, had L take a picture and tried a piece.
It was really really good!
It somewhat made me wish I’d written down the exact recipe.
So the moral of the story is, be like me, just try stuff, you won’t be disappointed. Then right alongside that, don’t be like me, please actually write down or measure what you do so you can reproduce it again later on. The End!
I can hardly believe that it’s 4 weeks ago today that we actually moved. Time surely flies by.
It feels like yesterday that we first went to look at the house, then took care of all the paperwork, then closed on the house, worked on it and moved.
I guess it can’t have been yesterday, as there’s no way you can do all that in a day. A week though, that’s more like it. Not a month since we’ve moved.
The house is nowhere near done. We still have more stuff to move in from storage (we wanted to wait with that until most boxes were cleared out), we still have some painting to do (mainly hallways). Art needs so be hung (And figured out, what goes where). We’ve still got ways to go b efore it’s finished, but we’ve made good progress.
We have lights everywhere. The closet is fully functional and clothes are unpacked. The kitchen only really needs a bigger table. The second fridge works like a charm. My great-grandma’s closet has found it’s place (And is filled with glasses and bottles of wine and liquor). The admin-room and the crafts room have been painted and shelving systems and cupboards have been put up. Most of my crafts-stuff has found a home even.
And most important, we have a name plate on our door.
L claimed that the name plate didn’t have anything to do with owning the house. And I’m sure legally he’s right, but emotionally, that’s when the house was really, utterly, completely ours.
We’ve found our routines, I’ve started cooking again. We’re able to keep our kitchen looking nice, just because there’s room to place things. Sure, I still want my nice grocers cupboard, at some point, because it looks pretty and it would give me the opportunity to spread some things out even more. But it’s not a necessity, because everything has it’s place.
What’s funny is how you keep finding new things you really enjoy or appreciate. The lazy-suzan-cabinets I have, for instance. In the old place I had a cupboard that just went around the corner and you’d have to sit on the floor and remove half the contents before you could reach something. Now the corners have a turning system, which works wonderfully. I have 2 of them, one keeps my pots and pans, the other keeps containers for leftovers and baking stuff (pie pans, cake pans, muffin tines, a turntable, you name it.
I’d figured it’d be nice not to have to reach behind things, but I never realized just how much I would love that system.
Another thing I love is the bathtub. That’s one I knew I loved though. We didn’t have a tub at the old place. Heck, I haven’t had a real tub in any of the houses or apartments I’ve liven in in Holland, not since birth. But I do so love soaking in a bathtub. And I’ve done so quite a few times already. The sauna isn’t used as much as the tub, but then again I didn’t expect it to be used extremely often. So far we’ve used it twice, and I anticipate us using it about once a month. And that’s fine. It’s nice to have a sauna, really nice, but I really don’t need to sit in it every day.
All in all, 4 weeks later, you could say we’ve done a lot. Especially considering we both have full time jobs, so there’s no time to work on the house during the week. Slowly but surely we’ve found (And are still finding) our new routines. And most importantly, slowly but surely it’s growing from ‘our new house’ to ‘our home’.
As Dorothy has told millions and millions of viewers, “there’s no place like home”.
I’ve found mine!
I completely forgot about NaBloPoMo, National (or should it be InterNational – I think bloggers world-wide are participating by now.) Blog Posting Month. The idea is that you update your blog every day for a month.
Last year I heard about it in November. And for some odd reason I though it WAS November, as a dedicated month. Apparently it’s whichever month you choose to participate. I don’t really feel like postponing this another month or two though, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with the fact that my month started on the second!
I guess I’ll need to start carrying my camera around everywhere. To make sure I don’t leave you without images.
For now the message that I’m participating (or trying to) should just do. And since this is a food blog, I’ll leave you with the information that I just ate broccoli soup with bacon and cheese for lunch. It was pretty tasty, but a little too watery for my liking. Next time I go to that specific spot, I’ll stick with my usual, Thai chicken soup.
Last Sunday we celebrated my in-laws’ 45 wedding anniversary. Some day I hope we get to celebrate our 45th anniversary (not wedding, as the chances for that are slim – not merely the likelihood, but sheer age restrictions are present here!, but the us-being-a-couple-anniversary is hopefully doable.)
And if we get to do that, I would totally love to receive the gift we gave them!
Okay, yeah, so I’m a foodie. And L is an eat-ie. L’s mom is Italian (as in born and raised in Milan with summers in Tuscany), so she’s used to wonderful food.
We say “love goes through the stomach”, and they’ve been lovingly married for 45 years.
What’s a better gift than the gift of food???
We went with the 45 theme. If you’re doing several different gifts, you better find a theme in there. You don’t want people to think you just randomly went to the store and grabbed some groceries and packed them.
- 45 pieces of home-made ravioloni (napoletana and funghi é speck),
- 45 Leonidas bonbons, (great! chocolates),
- 45 glasses of wine (or well- a number of still-closed bottles) and
- 45 saucages, from the mini-mini half-a-bite-kind to bigger, full salami’s.
The idea was primo, secondo, dessert – a full dinner, or at least, that’s how we explained it.
And we added napkins, wrapped pretty with a big bow. Just for completeness, and the fun of it!
The reason behind this themed food gift is that we really didn’t know what to get them. What do you buy people who already have a house full of stuff, travel to Italy regularly, already have a season pass to the opera, and have their own life completely figured out. We had a hard time figuring it out. We’d been wrecking our brains for weeks, months even. Until we came up with the 45 thing.
So I bought the chocolates, and these chocolates – bonbons – are wonderful on their own. Leonidas is a Belgian brand. They make really high quality chocolate. Their chocolate is made fresh regularly – daily I’d say. I bought them in one of their own stores, which also means you know they haven’t just been transferred from a box that’s been lying around there forever.
While I was picking out the chocolates, I noticed they had some blocks of their high quality chocolate, ready to be melted. I obviously had to, needed to, get creative.
I bought 6 extra chocolates, to test, plus a block of extra dark and a block of white chocolate. When I got home I melted the chocolate and piped the number 45 on the 6 test chocolates. Half way through I changed my tip, to get a thinner line, which I could control a little better. After those 6 chocolates, I felt fully comfortable to pipe them as a gift.
The end result… 45 bonbons bearing the number 45. I love getting creative with edible stuff, especially if it’s chocolate! And expecially when I know it’ll actually mean something to someone.
My in-laws were excited about the gifts. They obviously asked L where he ordered the chocolates. He (Somewhat proudly) announced ‘from Valerie’.
This confused his parents at first -couldn’t I have told L where I’d bought or ordered them-, until we actually mentioned that I physically decorated them.
The whole unwrapping of gifts was hilarious. They hadn’t completely figured out the theme yet, when they started finding sausages in the packages. I can totally imagine how strange that must be.
Hmmm, another sausage. Yes, we like sausage, but why another. Oh, another package, these are small sausages. What the heck, why do these darned kids think we eat that much sausage. Oh, napkins, cute, oh wine, great, we like wine, and chocolates, good choice… What the heck, another sausage!
All in all we had a very nice evening, and I can’t wait until someone makes chocolates like these from me! (And if you feel inclined to do so, hazelnut, praliné creme are my favorite!)
Networks
