pavlovcat's Journal

Secret Santa
Dec 15 2009 08:13

*runs around in circles squealing*

I got my prezzie last night!  It was perfect!  (picture in my gallery)

Thank you Secret Santa!

Having a Happy Monday so far
Dec 14 2009 08:37

Things to be happy for:

1. My boss approved overtime for me this week.  Yay!  Extra money, which I am in dire need of.
2. With all the fun I've been having Christmas shopping this past week I managed to NOT overdraw my bank account.  I only have $5 in it, but yay again!
3. I am wearing my new green sweater and I feel purdy.
4. I finally got my house clean this weekend (picture in my gallery of my Christmas mantle and a very disgruntled Big Sexy waiting for me to be done making cookies so I would pet him).
5. I came to work this morning and there was a prezzie on my desk.  Yay more!
6. I got an unexpected tin of cookies from a fellow chatter on Friday.  Nom yay!

Dear Canadian Postal Service,
Dec 08 2009 14:36

You are a smelly pirate hooker.  Clearly, one week should be long enough for packages to get from a border state to a bunch of Canadian cities also near the border. 

*worries I didn't have the right postage or something*

*worries that Canadian postal workers are sitting around their igloos drinking Molson and eating my goodies*

Prezzie!
Dec 08 2009 08:53

I got a happy surprise from a certain Princess Thunderstick when I got home last night.     

Thank you, SSS!  Now I can happily shovel my sidewalk all winter without throwing my back out.

I come from the land of ice and snow...
Dec 04 2009 10:37

Memorandum

To: MDOT
From: Pavlovkitteh
Re: Your extreme suckage

Last night marked the first snow of winter here in West Michigan.  Big, fat flakes of pristine white were drifting down from the sky last night as I drove home.  The naked branches of late fall became draped in their winter finery.  It was a beautiful start to the season.

You know what is not beautiful?  The *@$&)#% roads!  That's what's not beautiful.  It's the first snowfall of the year.  Are you out of money already?  Are you using an army of homeless people armed with salt shakers to de-ice the roads and it's taking them time to find their rhythm or something?  What is wrong with you people?!

The article that appeared in the news yesterday detailed how prepared you were.  Was this actually referring to the fact that all your employees had lubed up their Toro's at home?

I resent the hell out of all of you.

Sincerely,

Pavlovkitteh

So excited!
Dec 01 2009 09:12

All my important Christmas baking is DONE!  I made:

• 17 rolls of almond banket
• 2 batchs of fudge that I turned into candy coated fudge balls
• 2 panettone
• 64 polish rugelach with dried cherries and pecans
• A batch of lemon poppyseed cookies
• A pan of maple macadamia nut bars
• A pan of almond bars (to use up the leftover almond filling from my banket)

I have seven goodie packages ready to mail out going to Iraq and Canada and practically everywhere in between.

I have eight goodie bags ready to give to neighbors.

And three final goodie bags for friends and family, not to mention the platter of stuff I brought to work and the stuff I shared with my parents and brother.

I ended up with lots of little leftovers - Heath candy bits, Andes mints, dried cherries, and macadamia nuts - so I made a double batch of a basic cookie recipe, split it into three parts and mixed the Heath bits in one, the mints in another and the cherries, nuts and some white chocolate in the last one. 

I'll bake those tonight, but they aren't "official" Christmas cookies.  Just a way to use up all the ingredients sitting around.  Not sure what I'll do with those yet.  Freeze some, eat some, bring some to work maybe.

I'm so glad I have all this done on December 1st!  YAY!

Some of you need to be on the look out for prezzies. 

Secret Santa
Nov 23 2009 14:14

Okay, so I have a lot of info in my profile about likes and dislikes, but in case I got a secret santa person who doesn't know me very well, here's the scoop.

I collect pottery bowls and wooden spoons/spatulas and dangly silver earrings.

I love baking with an unholy passion.  Any baking gadgets or tools or funky ingredients would make me happy, even if I have them already since I bake so much I regularly have every single thing in use in my kitchen.

I like to garden (veggie and perennial) and read and knit and embroider.  Someday I would like to learn how to quilt.

I listen to a lot of different stuff when I work out, but when I'm at work I like to listen to Michael Buble and Enya and Harry Connick Jr and mellow stuff like that.

My favorite colors are pretty much every green you can think of and reds.

I love Christmas, but I don't actually have very many Christmas decorations because I'm always broke at the holidays.

I'm always working on projects around my house and like tools.  (Please do not send me your cousin Smitty who plays World of Warcraft 23 hours a day and plays with himself for the other hour.  I do not mean that kind of tool.)

Okay.  I think that's a pretty good overview.

 Edit:  I can't believe I almost forgot my unhealthy obsession with office supplies!  I luff pens and stationery and post-its and a variety of other officey type things.

Blessings in disguise
Nov 15 2009 15:32

I'm still sick.  Just a really nasty cold - I can't remember when I've had one this bad.  But I'm starting to get over it.  I was able to sleep flat last night and didn't wake up once.  Yay me.

The really great thing was that, sitting at home with nothing to do but cough, sneeze and blow my nose, I was able to get my last three windows of the year done.  YAY!  I never would've gotten them done and reinstalled this weekend if I hadn't been sick. 

I can't believe I actually got 10 windows done this year.  That was my goal, but I'm not super good at follow through with my goals.  I will have some touch ups and stuff to do in the spring and still have to polyurethane the interior trim, but that's easy stuff. 

Not sure if I put pics of my windows up before, but if not there are some before/during/after shots in my gallery. 

Understanding the battlefield
Nov 10 2009 11:33

It is not about the food.  I need to stop making it about the food.

It's about discipline, self-control.  It's about making mature decisions regarding the health of my body.  It's about developing perseverance as I work toward a goal I have had since I was 10 and which I have never met. 

This is not about the food.  Because when I let it be about the food, the food wins.  Because the food is frickin' delicious.

This is about me.

So maybe my technique needs a little work...
Nov 01 2009 15:33

I decided to make danish this weekend to break in my new granite counters.  This story perfectly illustrates the difference between my hypothetical chat pastries and real life.

Saturday I made the pastry, pastry cream (so easy and so evil!) and remonce (almond cream filling).  That went great.  The actual making of the pastry itself - a cross between a yeast bread and a puff pastry - also seemed to go wonderfully.  And then came assembly and final rise on Sunday, which was one WTF moment after another.

I rolled out the dough to a 6x17 inch rectangle, cut it in half lengthwise, spread the remonce on one half and sandwiched it with the other half of dough and then rolled it back out to the 6x17 size.  At which point all the remonce smooshed out onto the counters. 

Aw hell no, was my response to that.  I wasn't going to let the almondy goodness go to waste.  So I peeled off the top layer of dough, re-spread the remonce and then tried to be more careful rolling it back out.  Heh.  Okay.  So only 1/2 the remonce ended up on the counter this time and that was mainly due to the fact that I stopped rolling it out before it reached the right size. 

By this time, pretty much every surface in my immediate vicinity was covered in remonce.  So I moved the rolled out dough onto a piece of waxed paper and put it in the fridge since I had handled it too much and it was now quite soft.  I then cleaned the counter and prepared to twist and shape the dough.  Only to discover that the dough was now firmly adhered to the wax paper.  This is bad.  Puff pastry needs all its layers intact in order to puff.  Keeping the layers intact is sorta difficult when half the layers remain on the wax paper so that I have to scrap it off and try to mash it back with the remaining dough.

Finally got it shaped and covered it with saran wrap and put it in a warm oven to rise, per the recipe.  Went out to run errands.  Came back to find the butter had leaked out of the pastry.  Not a good sign since the layers of butter are what make it puff, but they looked great otherwise.  So I took them out, started filling them with pastry cream and homemade apricot jam.  Didn't have enough apricot jam, so half of them ended up pastry cream only.

And then I preheated the oven.  And then the oven started smoking.  And smoking.  And also smoking.  Apparently the butter that had leaked out had dripped onto the floor of the oven underneath the baking stone, so I hadn't seen it.  Now the smoke detectors are going off and I come to the sad realization that there's no way I can bake these danish in my smoking oven.

So I call my brother who I know for a fact is over at my parents' house to ask him to preheat the oven there because I now have to do an across town trek with my poor, pathetic pastry before they self-destruct.  Brother won't answer his cell phone or my parents' land line.  Evil brother.

Grab the pans of pastry and put them carefully in my car and crank the air conditioner so I don't lose even more butter.  Take the first corner and a tupperware container goes flying across the back seat and lands on the danish.  Now they are all mushed and misshapen.  Arrive at my parents' house to find my brother sitting in the dining room eating breakfast at 3:00 p.m. because he just woke up after a Halloween bender.  Evil brother.

Preheat the oven.  Put the pans of pastry in the freezer to try and maintain some of the puff.  Finally pop them in the oven. 

There was no puff.

Don't get me wrong, they're delicious and the pastry is very tender.  But there is no puff.

After two failed attempts, puff pastry has become my nemesis.  I will now be forced to make it regularly until I get it right.  Which means I will be unable to eat anything except lettuce in order to compensate for the enormous amount of butter I will be consuming in my quest for the perfect puff pastry.

Picture of finished product in my gallery.