Things that are awesome

1. I received a (two week early) birthday present from my BFF Kat in the post today. I would take a photo of it for you, but....... Anyway, it's a bag from Mushy Wear and I love it!! It's the perfect size for uni notebooks without looking like a boring book bag.
2. We heard from the insurance company today, and I should have a replacement camera within a week!! I'm super-excited about it. It looks like it's going to be the next model up from my old camera, which comes with more megapixels, higher ISO capability, and full video. It's still an entry level model, but a brand new camera is not to be sneezed at! I'll make sure to take photos of my awesome new bag when the camera turns up :)
3. THE DALEKS ARE COMING BACK IN SERIES 7. And not just the Daleks. ALL the Daleks.
4. Discount Easter eggs at the supermarket.

That last one has nothing to do with anything else. It's just awesome. Wouldn't you agree, David Tennant?

I rather thought you would!

What's been awesome for you recently?
K xx

2011 in review

Confession: I just wrote "2001 in review" in the title line. Eventually, Brain, you're going to have to get used to writing a 1 rather than a 0...

Anyway. Here we are at the end of 2011. I honestly can't believe how fast this year has gone!! Christmas Day in Melbourne brought massive thunderstorms:

A shit ton of Doctor Who themed presents:

(In case you can't tell, that's the complete series 1-4 boxset, the complete specials box set, the 2010 Christmas special, the Doctor Who equivalent of Where's Wally, and a box of fruit flavoured Dalek shaped candy. WIN)

And an ice cream maker.

It's been quite the eventful year. I've written over 200 posts here, along with two guest posts.

January brought the dreaded Summernats car festival and me talking about being afraid of butterflies. It also brought the start of my cookbook challenge.

In February, I joined Twitter. I honestly can't believe it was less than a year ago. I also ploughed my way through five cookbook challenge recipes.

March featured me having to talk to a group of small children at work, reaching 150 posts, and being a bridesmaid for Em and Matt. I also went to see Red Riding Hood at the movies, and wished to God I hadn't.

April started off my participation in the 30 Days of Books challenge. It ended with me turning 28.

May started with ninjabread men. (That post brings me a truly disturbing amount of traffic) I also booked my trip to the US.

June? June was a big one. For starters, the gallery opened. (And if anyone wants any ACTUAL information on it, just flick me an email!) I also reached 200 posts, saw X-Men First Class in gold class, posted more random crap about myself than anyone ever wanted to know, and wrote a love letter to the BBC.

In July, I finally left Canberra and moved back to Melbourne. I also finished the 30 Days of Books challenge. And to fill the challenge void in my life, I decided I needed to do a Day Zero list.

August saw me head to Chicago for the 20SB Summit. It was amazing. As was meeting Sweeney, Lor and Penny.

September was spent hanging out with the bestest friends a girl could ever ask for, and visiting Colorado, Washington DC, New York and Boston. And an unexpected 24 hour stop over in Los Angeles. (Okay, most of those posts were written in October. That's totally not the point)

October saw the start of my Movie Mondays series. It also featured me crying a lot, when we had to have my beloved Domino put to sleep.

In November, I participated in National Blog Posting Month, and bored you all senseless wrote many wonderful posts about nothing. I also started the 30 Day Photography Challenge, which I honestly haven't forgotten about. I also took advantage of my unemployment to cross a few more things off the cookbook challenge list, and wrote a GIF-filled love letter to Doctor Who.

And that brings us to December, and the launch of Dessert Day with the lovely Deidre!

It's been a year filled with ups and downs, but also a lot of wonderful memories. So roll on 2012 - I can't wait to see what you've got to throw at me.

Source Also? I really hope you're right, Tennant.

I'm off to the beach with a bunch of friends for New Year's Eve. It's meant to be insanely hot, so it's definitely the place to be!

Who's doing something exciting for New Year's? And how's 2011 treated you?

K xx

30 Days of Books - Day 17

Well, who enjoyed the great Blogger-pocalypse of 2011? O.o Yeah, me neither... Has anyone ever had to buy a birthday present for a nearly six year old girl who can't read yet and hates pink? (Next weekend is Little Miss A's 6th birthday) Holy HELL... I went on an epic quest for ideas after work last night, and when I had a couple, I phoned my mum to test run them. She vetoed all of them (*sigh*), and then we had the following conversation:

Mum: Just think about what you would have wanted at the same age and work from that!
Me: Um...for my sixth birthday, I got the complete works of Laura Ingalls Wilder and my ears pierced... I don't think that's much help here.
Mum: Oh yeah... How about an iPod Shuffle?

Yeah, no... I wound up buying her a whole lot of crafty stuff and a bag of pirate gold (iron pyrite, obviously). Hopefully something amongst it all will be a success... Things will be so much easier when I move back to Melbourne and can remind her that I'm awesome because I let her eat macaroni cheese and cupcakes for dinner... *sigh*

Day 17 - Favourite quote(s) from your favourite book(s)

Yeesh. For some reason, I found this one surprisingly difficult. Quotes from movies and TV shows stick with me much better than quotes from books. Seriously. I can probably give you a quote from pretty much every Buffy episode ever off the top of my head, but books? Not so much. Anyway, I looked up some of my favourite books on Wikiquote flicked through a couple of my favourite books and came up with the following:

"The pen is mightier than the sword...if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp." Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

"The truth isn't easily pinned to the page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find." Terry Pratchett, Sorcery

"The person, gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

And finally, something that's insanely long, but makes me laugh until I cry every time I read it:

"Under the sink, my mother kept an enormous collection of jars, including one known as the toity jar. 'Toity' in our house was the term for a pee, and throughout my early years the toity jar was called into service whenever a need to leave the house inconveniently coincided with a sudden need by someone - and when I say 'someone', I mean of course the youngest child: me - to pee.

'Oh, you'll just have to go in the toity jar then,' my mother would say with just a hint of exasperation and a worried glance at the kitchen clock. It took me a long time to realize that the toity jar was not always - or even - the same jar twice. In so far as I thought about it at all, I suppose I guessed that the toity jar was routinely discarded and replaced with a fresh jar - we had hundreds after all.

So you may imagine my consternation, succeeded by varying degrees of dismay, when I went to the fridge one evening for a second helping of halved peaches and realized that we were all eating from a jar that had, only days before, held my urine. I recognized the jar at one because it had a Z-shaped strip of label adhering to it that uncannily recalled the mark of Zorro - a fact that I had cheerfully remarked upon as I had filled the jar with my precious bodily nectars, not that anyone had listed of course. Now here is was holding our dessert peaches. I couldn't have been more surprised if I had just been handed a packet of photos showing my mother in flagrante with, let's say, the guys at the gas station.

'Mom,' I said, coming to the dining-room doorway and holding up my find, 'this is the toity jar.'
'No honey,' she replied smoothly without looking up. 'The toity jar's a special jar.'
'What's the toity jar?' asked my father with an amused air, spooning peach into his mouth.
'It's the jar I toity in,' I explained. 'And this is it.'
'Billy toities in a jar?' said my father, with very slight difficulty, as he was no longer eating the peach half he had just taken in, but resting it on his tongue pending receipt of further information concerning its recent history.
'Just occasionally,' my mother said.
My father's mystification was now nearly total, but his mouth was so full of unswallowed peach juice that he could not meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn't just go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question in the circumstances.
'Well, sometimes we're in a hurry,' my mother went on, a touch uncomfortably. 'So I keep a jar under the sink - a special jar.'
I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars - as many as I could carry. 'I'm pretty sure I've used all these too,' I announced.
'That can't be right,' my mother said, but there was a kind of question mark hanging off the edge of it. Then she added, perhaps a touch self-destructively: 'Anyway, I always rinse all jars thoroughly before reuse.'
My father rose and walked to the kitchen, inclined over the waste bin and allowed the peach half to fall into it, along with about half a litre of goo. 'Perhaps a toity jar's not such a good idea,' he suggested." Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

God, I wish I could write like that...

K xx

Day 01 - The best book you read last year

Day 02 - A book you've read more than 3 times

Day 03 - Your favourite series

Day 04 - Your favourite book of your favourite series

Day 05 - A book that makes you happy

Day 06 - A book that makes you sad

Day 07 - Most underrated book

Day 08 - Most overrated book

Day 09 - A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving

Day 10 - Favourite classic book

Day 11 - A book you hated

Day 12 - A book you used to love but don't any more

Day 13 - Your favourite writer

Day 14 - Favourite book of your favourite writer

Day 15 - Favourite male character

Day 16 - Favourite female character

Day 17 - Favourite quote from your favourite book

Day 18 - A book that disappointed you

Day 19 - Favourite book turned into a movie

Day 20 - Favourite romance book

Day 21 - Favourite book from your childhood

Day 22 - Favourite book you own

Day 23 - A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven't

Day 24 - A book you wish more people would've read

Day 25 - A character you can relate to the most

Day 26 - A book that changed your opinion about something

Day 27 - The most surprising plot twist or ending

Day 28 - Favourite title

Day 29 - A book everyone hated but you liked

Day 30 - Your favourite book of all time

Challenge recipe 11: NINJAbread men

Yes, you read that right. Ninjabread men. My lovely high school bestie Cas got me these for my birthday:

How FREAKING AMAZEBALLS are they?????? Oh, and the "Lady Catherine's" tape Cas added
 is in reference to  Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

So I thought it would be a prime opportunity to christen Stephanie Alexander with a batch of gingerbread. I've never actually made gingerbread before, only gingerbread cake. So it was a double first! Triple first, if you include making and using royal icing.

Anyway, here's the book:

And here's what you'll need:

According to the recipe, you start by putting 85g of softened unsalted butter into the bowl of your posh mixer with the paddle attachment in place. Or, if you're me, you put 85g of softened unsalted butter in a mixing bowl and get out your $30 electric beater from Target. (One day, Cobalt Blue Kitchenaid. One day, you will be mine. MIIIIIIIINE, I TELLS YA!!!!! *shakes fist*) Ahem.

Here's 85g of softened unsalted butter:

Add to that 90g of brown sugar. And because I love you all, I put the brown sugar into a cup measure so you don't have to weigh out 90g. Because that's just stupid. Anyway, it's about 1/3 cup of brown sugar:

Then add 1/4 cup of golden syrup. Mmmm, golden syrup. For my little North Americans, I think you can use treacle as a substitute? But I'm not 100% sure, so you might want to Google that shit before you do.

Cream it all together with your $700 Cobalt Blue Kitchenaid  *sigh* electric beater:

Looks like peanut butter, but tastes SO much better! 

Next, separate an egg:

Stick the white in the fridge - you'll need it later on. Dump the yolk in the bowl:

And it in. When that's done, sift 235g of plain flour into a separate bowl. Again, because I love you, I put it into a measuring cup. It comes out at around 1 1/4 cups:

Add 1/4 teaspoon of salt:

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda:

1 teaspoon of ground ginger:

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon:

1/4 teaspoon of freshly ground nutmeg out of a jar:

1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves:

1/4 teaspoon of white pepper (which I think looks something like cigarette ash... Mmmm, tasty!):

And 1/4 teaspoon of ground allspice:

Stir it all together with a spoon:

Then gradually mix it in using your $700 Cobalt Blue Kitchenaid on low speed electric beater on whatever the hell speed you like:

Spoon the dough onto a piece of Glad Wrap/cling film/Saran Wrap, and press into a rectangular shape:

Wrap it up, and refrigerate it overnight for like three or four hours. Then take it out of the fridge and let it soften for an hour about 10 minutes. Roll out the dough between two sheets of plastic film until it's about 5mm thick. You will have a rectangle of about 26cm x 30cm circle of random dimensions cos you're shit at using a rolling pin:

Slip the rectangle onto a baking tray and chill for an hour Get out your handy dandy ninja cookie cutters, because this freaking recipe is taking long enough to make as it is. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C, and go crazy with the cookie cutters:

Then put them on a tray lined with baking paper (also, pretend that there's a photo here of the uncooked ninjas on the tray. I completely forgot to take one) and bake for 10-12 minutes. While they're in the oven, put the remaining dough bits into the fridge. Take the ninjabread men off the tray pretty much as soon as they come out of the oven, and stick them on a cooling rack.

Continue to roll out the remaining dough and cut out ninjas until you've got no dough left. Here's some baked ninjas:

Once they're cool, start making the royal icing. It's pretty simple - 1/2 cup of icing sugar:

And the egg white you saved from earlier:

Beat the living shit out of it with your electric beater. Basically, you're making really sugary meringue, so you need it to be pretty stiff.

When it's done, add food colouring if you want. I tried to make it red, but it just turned out pink. Eh. Whatevs. You could use a piping bag, but I've become rather a fan of using zip lock bags with one corner snipped off. Saves on the clean up! #scoreoneforlaziness

Pipe ninja costumes onto your ninjabread men. If you wanted to go all out, you could pipe all the way around the edge in a different colour and then flood the whole thing with icing before doing the decoration in a different colour. But pfff, this recipe had already taken up seven hours of my life!

Allow the icing to set for an hour before putting into storage containers to cart them to work.

The verdict? They were a hell of a lot of work. But let's face it - they look pretty freaking amazing. And they were delicious - quite a bit spicier than normal gingerbread, and not quite as sweet. I'm kind of curious whether the extra refrigeration time adds anything to the dough or if it just makes it easier to work with. Next time I make ninjabread men, I might try another recipe for comparative purposes. Or I might just try the whole flood icing thing to see just how awesome I can get them to look!

Anyway, the final verdict was courtesy of my work peeps. A sure sign of a good recipe? Taking 18 ninjabread men to work and coming home with none, having only eaten one yourself!!

K xx

30 Days of Books - Day 7

I went to work this morning with every intention of going to a Step class at 5.30. Which meant I had to leave work at 4.30 to get there in time. When I looked at the clock and it was 4.45, I wasn't all that devastated. Because honestly, I HATE Body Step. So I came home with the intention of doing a circuit at home. But then my housemate, D, said that she was about to leave for a Body Jam class if I wanted to go with her. It cost me $20 because it was at a different gym, but it was totally worth it. Because it was AWESOME.

Anyway, let's get on with the books!

Day 7 - Most underrated book

Okay, I'm choosing to interpret this as "A book I think everyone should read". I'd have to go with this one:

Source

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, by Henry Hitchings. I'm reading it at the moment - it was an early birthday present from the lovely Kat. And it's fascinating - did you know that the word 'coriander' comes from the Greek for 'bedbug'? Apparently the smell of crushed bugs is much the same as the smell of coriander. I KNEW there was a reason I hated coriander.

It's also amazing/disgusting just how many English words originated in a word related to testicles. Avocado? From the Nahuatl for testicle. Musk? From the Sanskrit for scrotum. I officially can't eat musk sticks ever again *shudder* (God, I can't WAIT to see the Google searches that lead to this post...)

It's filled with lots of stuff NOT related to balls too - it starts with Roman times, moving through the Anglo-Saxon era and the Norman invasion through to exploration in the Americas, India, the Far East, and my own dear Australia, before finishing with the late twentieth century. It's pretty cool to see how words from other languages have been mangled by English, especially stuff from Arabic and Persian. And, indeed, how words from English have been transformed when being absorbed by other languages.

It's a great reminder that language isn't static - it's constantly growing and changing and reforming itself. And I can but hope that, one of these days, words like 'wibble' and 'arsebiscuits' will be both in common use and in the dictionary ;)

(Incidentally, if you're getting sick of me wibbling on about books, stick around - there's a recipe for homemade lasagna coming up at some point this week!)

K xx

Day 01 - The best book you read last year
Day 02 - A book you've read more than 3 times
Day 03 - Your favourite series
Day 04 - Your favourite book of your favourite series
Day 05 - A book that makes you happy
Day 06 - A book that makes you sad
Day 07 - Most underrated book
Day 08 - Most overrated book
Day 09 - A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 10 - Favourite classic book
Day 11 - A book you hated
Day 12 - A book you used to love but don't any more
Day 13 - Your favourite writer
Day 14 - Favourite book of your favourite writer
Day 15 - Favourite male character
Day 16 - Favourite female character
Day 17 - Favourite quote from your favourite book
Day 18 - A book that disappointed you
Day 19 - Favourite book turned into a movie
Day 20 - Favourite romance book
Day 21 - Favourite book from your childhood
Day 22 - Favourite book you own
Day 23 - A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven't
Day 24 - A book you wish more people would've read
Day 25 - A character you can relate to the most
Day 26 - A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 - The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 - Favourite title
Day 29 - A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 - Your favourite book of all time

Challenge recipe 8: Sour cream pancakes

Well, happy Shrove Tuesday to you all! Today marks one of the three times a year that I acknowledge organised religion (the other two being "eat your body weight in chocolate" day and "get lots of presents" day). I had fajitas for dinner (after Katie tortured me last week with pictures of fajitas), and then whipped up a batch of Pioneer Woman's sour cream pancakes. I'll admit, I was ridiculously excited to finally break in this book. Nessa gave it to me for my birthday last year, but I've never been brave enough to embrace the vast quantities of butter that her recipes usually require.

Anywhowantspancakes, here's the book:

And here's what you'll need. Pretty simple, huh?

Start by putting 7 tablespoons of plain flour into a medium mixing bowl:

Add 1 tablespoon of caster sugar:

1 teaspoon of baking soda:

And 1/2 teaspoon of salt:

Then add 1 cup of sour cream (I used light sour cream. Obviously):

Gently mix it all together until just combined:

Meanwhile, dump two eggs into a separate bowl:

Whisk them:

And then add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Not essence. Essence is sent by the devil:

Add the egg mixture to the sour cream mixture:

And stir gently until combined:

Then heat a frying pan over medium heat. Add a tablespoon of butter and let it melt:

Once it's really good and hot, add 1/4 cup measures of batter to the pan:

I cooked them two at a time. They need about one and a half minutes on the first side:

Then flip them over and give them another 45 seconds on the other side. And if you can flip them without flinging the batter everywhere, that'd be great. (I can't flip pancakes to save my life. As you can see...)

Serve with a mountain of maple syrup and enjoy!

The verdict? They're light and fluffy and pretty damned easy. And delicious when smothered in real maple syrup. After the first batch, I switched to cooking them in spray oil - it was easier, and I didn't have any salt reduced butter, so the first couple were quite salty. But once I switched the canola oil, it was much better. Stupid supermarket for not having salt reduced butter... *glares*

Anyway, happy Shrove Tuesday - who's joining me in ignoring the whole Lent thing?? ;)

K xx