101 Things You Don't Know About Me - Part III (Finale)

52. I like jewelry, simple things like diamond pendants, diamond or pearl studs, and Holly Yashi earrings.
53. I can do origami. I can’t do balloon animals. I’m not one of those Hobby Lobby crafty people, at all.
54. I make to-do lists. It’s a great feeling of accomplish to finish everything on it and be able to throw the list away.
55. One of the things on my perpetual to-do list is to organize another list.
56. One of the things I’d like to do before I die is have dinner at a restaurant like Chez Panisse.
57. I’d also like to see Hearst Castle. I lived in California most of my life and never went there.
58. Celebrities I’d like to meet include Anthony Bourdain, Rachael Ray, Nigella Lawson, Daniel Radcliffe, Al Pacino, Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito (we’re supposed to be the same height).
59. I’ve met Barry Manilow five times.
60. I’ve also met Franc D’Ambrosio (Phantom of the Opera), Arthur Fiedler (Boston Pops), Gerry Mulligan (sax), Billy Mays (piano), James Callahan (from the movie "Copacabana") and Howie Mandel (during the days of St. Elsewhere).
61. I seldom wear make-up. I had to stop subscribing to "Allure" magazine because I’d always be buying whatever moisturizer or cleanser or lip gloss that was on their "best" list. I could spend hours at Sephora just browsing.
62. I have a keen sense of smell. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not.
63. It infuriates me when I know that absolutely I’m right but someone else insists I’m not.
64. Yet I have horrible self-esteem. I’m not good at taking criticism either.
65. I love good coffee, especially Peet’s. I’d rather have no coffee than bad coffee. I’d rather have plain ole Lipton tea than bad coffee.
66. Dogs and children sense that I have no authority over them (translation: they don’t mind when I tell them to do something).
67. My favorite color is purple.
68. I took piano lessons for over 10 years.
69. I also took drum lessons one summer in junior high.
70. Other odd courses I’ve taken were Blues Piano, Graphic Design, and Massage (Learning Annex is great!).
71. I like watching football. (But I don’t watch it all the time during the season.) The sound of the game going reminds me of family get-togethers when all the uncles & male cousins obsessed about the game while the aunts & girl cousins were in the kitchen.
72. When I was a kid, I had a football, baseball mitt, fire engine, and erector set. I wasn’t exactly a tomboy but didn’t love Barbies (although I had them).
73. If I were brave enough I’d like to get a pixie hair cut (really short), like Natalie Portman (when it was growing out after "V for Vendetta").
74. I like socks with whimsical designs on them.
75. I love chocolate. I once went to a chocolate festival with my friend Debbie. It was the only time in my life where I reached my saturation point with chocolate.
76. At least for now, I don’t plan to color my hair to cover the grey. It’s a family thing, most of my family does dye their hair.
77. There were something like 155 people in my high school class. Most of us knew each others’ names, even if we weren’t friends. Many of us grew up together from kindergarten or grade school.
78. The town I grew up in is 1 square mile.
79. I can be superstitious. I don’t know how much of it is really just being obsessive-compulsive.
80. The older I get, the more confrontational I’ve found that I can be. (Translation: The older I get, the less I tend to put up with s***. I so don’t want to become the old lady with a bug up her bu**.)
81. On the other hand, I’m a rule follower. For example, even if there’s nobody else in a parking lot, I don’t feel comfortable driving up the down aisles, or down the up aisles.
82. One of my favorite movies is "The Good Girl" with Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gylenhaal. I like how it captures some of the minute details of living in Texas. For the same reason, I like "Ten Items Or Less" with Morgan Freeman. It gives you the sense of what someone else’s life is like. Other favorite movies: "Closer," "Sideways," "Pulp Fiction," "The Anniversary Party" and "My Cousin Vinny."
83. When I go shopping, I like to pick a parking spot farther away from the door. I don’t mind the extra walking, plus there’s less coming & going of other cars, and hopefully less chance of someone dinging my car with their door or worse.
84. I just read an issue of "Graphic Design USA" that had a bunch of graphic designers’ favorites. So here are a few of mine. Favorite fine artists: Matisse, Monet, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe. I enjoy museums.
85. Favorite songs: "Imagine" and "Woman" by John Lennon, "Someone to Watch Over Me" (particularly by Sting), San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) by Scott McKenzie, "Sleeps With Butterflies" by Tori Amos.
86. Favorite Barry Manilow songs: "Somewhere In the Night," "Somewhere Down the Road" and "I Write the Songs."
87. Frequently used bookmarks: Netflix, Google, Mindy’s blog about her Peace Corps adventures in Morocco, Virtually 21 and webmail.
88. I’m a local guide junkie. I love those free magazines you pick up when you’re new to the area or on vacation, that have restaurant listings, things to do, etc.
89. Pie is big in my house. We had peach pie instead of cake, at our wedding.
90. My husband and I met on kind of a blind date. We had mutual friends and other coincidental connections.
91. I skipped second grade and also a year of high school Spanish.
92. I prefer being a follower rather than a leader.
93. Yet I’m also a "if you want something done right do it yourself" type person.
94. I clip coupons and scour grocery ads.
95. I don’t sing in the shower or sing along to the radio in the car. I take that back. I do sing along in the car if I’m by myself and it’s a Barry Manilow song, since I know all the words to all the songs.
96. I don’t know how to dance and wish I’d taken ballroom dancing when I was in college (they had a good class in P.E.).
97. I’d like to learn Pilates and see what the fuss is about. I’m not flexible at all. I can’t touch my hands to the floor while standing up, without bending my knees. I can’t even do "downward facing dog" in yoga, I don’t bend that way.
98. I think regional accents add to a person’s personality. It’s intriguing. BTW I don’t go around saying y’all. I did one time when I was trying to explain something on the phone and I thought it would facilitate the other person understanding what I was trying to say, and it worked.
99. I’m always hungry when I go to bed because I read food magazines before I go to sleep.
100. I usually bring snacks with me when I run errands. Things like granola bars (Fiber One chocolate are yummy) or cookies, and water. Having something with me keeps me from stopping at Wendy’s and getting a Baconator (I’ve still never had one).
101. A lot of my clothes are kids size. I can usually find adult clothes like shirts, but trying to find dress clothes is completely frustrating.

Vegetarian Steamed Dumplings

I actually did it, this is New Recipe #5 for the month, the Vegetarian Steamed Dumplings that I mentioned recently. I made half a batch to use up the rest of the wonton wrappers I had from the potstickers. I made a few substitutions, based on what I had in the refrigerator. I used broccoli slaw instead of Napa cabbage, dehydrated red pepper instead of fresh, skipped the egg, and added Sriracha hot sauce and a dash of hot curry powder. I liked the seasoning on this filling better than the potstickers, next time I make those, I’ll sort of mix the two recipes together. Here’s a picture of the filling.


The dumplings were great, they are the kind of food I like, and steaming them made the wrapper more tender than pan frying. I served them with some brown rice, that I cooked with peas, carrots and more broccoli slaw (threw everything in the rice cooker). I got the brown rice from my mother-in-law, she got it from a family friend who buys mass quantities of things just because it’s a good deal. She’s more of a bread person. My family was rice, rice, rice. When I was growing up, we had white rice every night. It wasn’t until I got older that I started to like it.

Surprise good news today was that my neighbor’s dog, Girl, lost 8 pounds since last October. You can see she’s a little chubby, when she came here, she was a stray and was skinny. I took care of her for 3 weeks recently, and she learned that they don’t get breakfast until I came back from running, so she started running with me, in addition to our evening walks. I’m amazed that that’s all it took.

The Birds Are Back In Town

I looked out the window yesterday and the yard was alive with birds. A few weeks ago it seems like they suddenly all came back. The cardinal was trying to intimidate the other robins by flying into the midst of them or coming up on them from behind. The robins could care less. One of the few things I like about living here is that I notice more of the seasons, and the subtle changes of the seasons.

I read in the Wall Street Journal this week that Hydrox cookies are no more. I think they still exist in other forms (such as ingredients for other products). I’m an Oreo girl, although if I had to do a blind taste test, I doubt I’d be able to distinguish one cookie from another. Of course, after I read the article, all I could think about was Oreos. I did an experiment with mini-cheesecakes, making them cookies & creme cheesecakes. For the crust, I used 8 ground up Oreos and 1 tablespoon of melted butter. For the batter, I used 8 ounces of cream cheese, ¼ cup sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla, 1 egg, and crumbled Oreos (about 8). It made 12 cupcake sized cakes, at 350F for 20 minutes. I love cheesecake (my absolute favorite is a plain, fat & tall New York Cheesecake) but if I make a full-sized one, I’m sick of it by the end. These little cakelets are just the right size.

I’m almost done with my "101" list. I’m hoping to finish it by next week.

By the way, I'm the Queen of Origami. The little "boat" is one. I found some glossy paper in a magazine to use for it. I gave a few cakelets to my neighbor and it made for a fancy vessel to carry them in, something they don't have to worry about returning.

Potstickers

The fourth new recipe I’ve tried this month is finally something that’s not a sweet. It’s "Perfect Potstickers" from Alton Brown’s "Good Eats." I’ve made wonton before but never cooked it as a potsticker, always for soup. The filling ingredients were simple to assemble, I added a few extra things like garlic, sesame oil, broccoli slaw (since I had some) and Sriracha hot sauce. I cooked mine a little longer than the recipe calls for, just to make sure the meat was cooked through. The potstickers were good, next time I think I’ll add a little ginger and maybe water chestnuts. What I liked best about them is that the cook is in control of the ingredients. When you buy them at the store, who knows what’s in them. Plus you don't have any unwanted preservatives and MSG. The recipe made just over 30, I froze some for later. (I put them in single layers to freeze first before bagging them up.) That’s another good thing. One afternoon’s work will save time somewhere else down the road. I have about 20 wrappers left. I want to try the vegetarian steamed dumpling recipe from the same show, that has tofu in it.

I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking about my parents lately. They both passed away in recent years. Today it was a teapot I brought out and the wontons that made me think of them. Whenever someone came to visit, they’d serve a pot of tea. And when we were kids, it was always a treat when they made fried wontons. Often we were part of the assembly line in putting them together. The memories seem like they’re getting more and more distant. It’s not that I’m forgetting things, rather that time has passed and things that had seemed recent are now farther in the past. It’s hard to describe in words, the "shift" that has taken place without my noticing it until now.

An acquaintance of mine lost her father last week. She’s back home with her sister, and they’re going through the belongings. That was a bittersweet time for me, when the last parent died, to be in their house. Everywhere I looked seemed to be a memory, often a happy one, yet at the same time I felt sad knowing that this was the last time I’d be there while things were as they had been left.

Baby Bundts

It was cold enough that it snowed today! (See out the window in the photo below.) That was a good excuse to bake something in the oven. Today it was "Baby Bundts" from Nigella Lawson’s "How To Be A Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking." This cookbook has metric measurements so flour, for example, is in grams. I used the kitchen scale I got for Christmas, which made it fun. This is a pretty basic cake recipe, with lemon zest in the batter and lemon juice in the icing. Aren’t the cakes cute? They weren’t as light and fluffy as the caramel cake I made recently, though. I wonder if sifting the flour would help a little.

Most evenings I take my neighbor's’s dogs for a walk. It's my mindclearing stress reliever, I enjoy watching the dogs have so much fun frolicking around. Tonight it was snowing. When it was walk-time, Girl immediately ran inside and didn’t go. Tigger went, but after a short distance I noticed he wasn’t leading like he normally does. When I turned around, he was going back home! His "Dad" says he doesn’t like it when it’s wet. Anyway, the little bit we did walk in the snow was fun. I love that feeling of being inside of a snow globe.

Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie

I’m two for two now with trying new recipes for desserts. This is the Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie from the January 2008 issue of Bon Appetit. It has a chocolate cookie crust (I used chocolate graham crackers instead since that’s what I had), the crust covered with melted bittersweet chocolate, and filled with pudding (made with cocoa and more bittersweet chocolate). The recipe calls for topping the pie with a mixture of creme fraiche and whipping cream. I only used whipped cream since I know hubby wouldn’t like the other mixture.

This is one of the best chocolate pies I’ve ever had. It’s not overly sweet, and very rich. The filling would be good on its own as a parfait or mousse. I had it after lunch and I felt stuffed afterwards. I think if it were eaten after a big dinner, it would be hard to enjoy, as good as it is.

When I go into town tomorrow I’m going to pick up a notebook. I’m going to use it to write down recipes I want to try, from all the magazines I get. Inevitably, I’ll remember something I wanted to try but can’t recall from which magazine it’s from, especially if it’s a few months down the road. I’m hoping it’ll help me be more organized and more ambitious with trying new recipes for dinner. It’s tiring but I try to consolidate all my errands into one trip, since it costs about $5 in gas each time I go somewhere. Tomorrow I have about 6 places on my to-do list, which will take more than a couple hours.

Caramel Cake

Well, here’s new recipe #1 for January. I have a feeling it’s not what "Eating Well" had in mind for healthier eating. I run between carrying an ongoing mental list of things I want to make, and finding something in a magazine and on impulse, wanting to make it right away. The latter is what I made today. It’s the Caramel Cake from the January 2008 issue of Gourmet. I had some buttermilk, cream, and cake flour to use up, and this incorporated all three. This issue of Gourmet, by the way, is dedicated to Southern food. For someone like me, it’s a whole new world of dishes.

The magazine’s description of the cake was that it was simple but the glaze really makes the cake, and people in the test kitchen were going back for seconds and thirds. In some ways, it’s just a yellow cake, but it’s sooo much better than anything you’d get out of a box. It has a rich, pound cake taste, and a fluffy creamed cake texture. The caramel is good in that it doesn’t overpower the subtle flavor of the cake. I think coconut pecan or even chocolate frosting would be good too.

I briefly mentioned lists. I'm big on lists. I currently have several to-do lists, one for higher priority stuff and the other for less important but still need to be done things. I even have one item on an ongoing "things I'll probably procrastinate but need to do someday" list, about updating another list.