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May. 26th, 2006 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAgenda for the evening!
Bake bread. (Working on this. It's white bread because I don't have any more fucking whole wheat flour. How did that happen? This, in a house with three damn choices of ground grain product!! Maybe if I used a grocery list...)
Bake raspberry cobbler thing for dinner. Really, this is not entirely unhealthy. It sounds unhealthy, but it's not really a desert (get it?) of nutritional value. It's raspberries (fruit! organic fruit!) with a little flour and sugar baked underneath the thing I would use for strawberry shortcake if I were having that instead. It'll be served hot, with milk (milk is good!) on top. The reason I'm not having raw raspberries on the side like I would be doing if I were having stawberry shortcake is that these are frozen raspberries from last year -- the canes rather enthusiastically made like a gallon of berries and that was more than I really wanted to eat so I froze 'em for later. It's now later. Anyway, having been frozen, they look a little limp when they're thawed out. Cooking them underneath the biscuit dough stuff makes 'em look better AND turns the bottom of the biscuit dough purple. It's a win-win solution.
**********************
Here's how to make proper shortcake biscuit dough for those benighted souls who eat that horrible spongecake shit which is cold, tasteless, uninspired, and totally not suited to being turned into lukewarm pap with a suitable application of ice-cold milk:
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Stir the above with a fork until well mixed. Then, cut in 1 stick butter using a pastry blender or a fork or (I'm trying to be modern) using the pulse feature on some sort of expensive, counter-eating gadget like a food processor. The mix should resemble cornmeal without very many big hunks of butter. It will taste better and have fewer calories if you use a fork or a pastry blender, though.
Make a well in the middle of the dry stuff and pour in 3/4 cup of milk. Stir quickly with a fork and kind of spread (iIt will resist. Do the best you can) the stuff out in an 8x8 baking pan (if not doing the "cobbler" option) or in a slightly larger ovensafe pan on top of your fruit-sugar-flour mix. (I generally use a generous 2 cups fruit, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 Tbsp of flour. Fruit could be peaches, berries, sour cherries. Don't be an ass and go try using something like watermelon or pineapple and then come back and bitch at me because your cobbler fucking sucked. Use a proper fruit.)
Bake in oven at 375 until the biscuity part is done. It will be brown on the tips.
**********************
Plan activities for Amsterdam. I am going to Amsterdam from June 8 (the plane leaves Philadelphia then) to June 19 (the plane comes back to Philadelphia then). The activity planning thing has been very helpful. I have already learned a bunch of stuff.
1. Amsterdam is a port city on a bay or estuary or whatever that connects to the North Sea. As if that weren't enough, the city's got all these semicircular canals in it to make it wetter and more difficult to drive in. Not sure what's up with that, but there are a lot of canals and I didn't know that so I'm mentioning it as a point of interest.
2. Rotterdam is not very far from Amsterdam. Most of The Netherlands is not very far from Amsterdam. The whole country is pretty dinky, about twice as big as New Jersey (Thanks, CIA World Factbook! P.S. I'm not a terrorist.) Amsterdam, itself, is not a huge, gigantic city.
3. The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. They have a Queen, Beatrix, and an heir, Willem-Alexander, who is just shy of forty years old and still not king. :)
4. The Netherlands used to be bigger until that-which-is-currently-Belgium seceded. Belgium is south of The Netherlands. Germany (There used to be two Germanies but now there is only one. Children, listen to me: There is something very old-making about the realization that countries have died in your lifetime. Also, I'm not making it up about the two Germanies. They split the country clean in half after WWII and put a wall in the middle of Berlin, with armed guards and barbed wire. For real.) is on the right hand side. The North Sea is on the other sides.
5. Amsterdam apparently has pretty decent Indonesian food despite not being part of Indonesia.
6. Amsterdam has some really swell museums featuring the works of painter people whose names are known even to not-very-artsy folks like me. Amsterdam also has Famous Painting(tm) XIV Girl With a Pearl Earring (by Vermeer) which the Amsterdamned Netherlanders are very proud of having as it's on every damn web page that even mentions the cultural events to be found in their fair city. I don't know why they're so impressed with that painting, but I shall visit it in person because it's a Famous Painting(tm). I just don't get the fixation -- Famous Painting(tm) IX (Rembrandt's The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch) and Famous Painting(tm) III (Van Gogh's Still Life Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers) are also displayed in person in Amsterdam. It's not like Famous Painting(tm) XIV is their only Famous Painting(tm).
(A word about Famous Paintings (tm): I am the authority for what constitutes a Famous Painting(tm). If I've heard of the painting, it gets a number and an entry in the catalog of Famous Paintings(tm). Paintings that I have not heard of are, ipso facto, not famous. Someone's got to make these decisions, after all.)
7. Van Gogh apparently hung out in Amsterdam, or at least his relatives did. Amsterdam has a whole bunch of his stuff, largest collection in the whole entire world, and it's not even two miles from the drugs-n-whores. Only a completely stoned loser would miss out on the Van Gogh viewing opportunities in Amsterdam.
8. There's a branch of the Hermitage in Amsterdam. I didn't know this. I mean, yeah, I knew the Hermitage was a huge honkin' museum thingie inthe Soviet Union Russia (again with the dead countries! Fuckin' commies, making me feel old...) and all, but I didn't think it was so big that it sprawled outside of the actual country. Apparently it does. Currently they're doing Filigree of the Tsars. I can do that. Sounds like the sort of fiddly time-consuming artwork I'd enjoy looking at.
Bake bread. (Working on this. It's white bread because I don't have any more fucking whole wheat flour. How did that happen? This, in a house with three damn choices of ground grain product!! Maybe if I used a grocery list...)
Bake raspberry cobbler thing for dinner. Really, this is not entirely unhealthy. It sounds unhealthy, but it's not really a desert (get it?) of nutritional value. It's raspberries (fruit! organic fruit!) with a little flour and sugar baked underneath the thing I would use for strawberry shortcake if I were having that instead. It'll be served hot, with milk (milk is good!) on top. The reason I'm not having raw raspberries on the side like I would be doing if I were having stawberry shortcake is that these are frozen raspberries from last year -- the canes rather enthusiastically made like a gallon of berries and that was more than I really wanted to eat so I froze 'em for later. It's now later. Anyway, having been frozen, they look a little limp when they're thawed out. Cooking them underneath the biscuit dough stuff makes 'em look better AND turns the bottom of the biscuit dough purple. It's a win-win solution.
**********************
Here's how to make proper shortcake biscuit dough for those benighted souls who eat that horrible spongecake shit which is cold, tasteless, uninspired, and totally not suited to being turned into lukewarm pap with a suitable application of ice-cold milk:
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Stir the above with a fork until well mixed. Then, cut in 1 stick butter using a pastry blender or a fork or (I'm trying to be modern) using the pulse feature on some sort of expensive, counter-eating gadget like a food processor. The mix should resemble cornmeal without very many big hunks of butter. It will taste better and have fewer calories if you use a fork or a pastry blender, though.
Make a well in the middle of the dry stuff and pour in 3/4 cup of milk. Stir quickly with a fork and kind of spread (iIt will resist. Do the best you can) the stuff out in an 8x8 baking pan (if not doing the "cobbler" option) or in a slightly larger ovensafe pan on top of your fruit-sugar-flour mix. (I generally use a generous 2 cups fruit, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 Tbsp of flour. Fruit could be peaches, berries, sour cherries. Don't be an ass and go try using something like watermelon or pineapple and then come back and bitch at me because your cobbler fucking sucked. Use a proper fruit.)
Bake in oven at 375 until the biscuity part is done. It will be brown on the tips.
**********************
Plan activities for Amsterdam. I am going to Amsterdam from June 8 (the plane leaves Philadelphia then) to June 19 (the plane comes back to Philadelphia then). The activity planning thing has been very helpful. I have already learned a bunch of stuff.
1. Amsterdam is a port city on a bay or estuary or whatever that connects to the North Sea. As if that weren't enough, the city's got all these semicircular canals in it to make it wetter and more difficult to drive in. Not sure what's up with that, but there are a lot of canals and I didn't know that so I'm mentioning it as a point of interest.
2. Rotterdam is not very far from Amsterdam. Most of The Netherlands is not very far from Amsterdam. The whole country is pretty dinky, about twice as big as New Jersey (Thanks, CIA World Factbook! P.S. I'm not a terrorist.) Amsterdam, itself, is not a huge, gigantic city.
3. The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. They have a Queen, Beatrix, and an heir, Willem-Alexander, who is just shy of forty years old and still not king. :)
4. The Netherlands used to be bigger until that-which-is-currently-Belgium seceded. Belgium is south of The Netherlands. Germany (There used to be two Germanies but now there is only one. Children, listen to me: There is something very old-making about the realization that countries have died in your lifetime. Also, I'm not making it up about the two Germanies. They split the country clean in half after WWII and put a wall in the middle of Berlin, with armed guards and barbed wire. For real.) is on the right hand side. The North Sea is on the other sides.
5. Amsterdam apparently has pretty decent Indonesian food despite not being part of Indonesia.
6. Amsterdam has some really swell museums featuring the works of painter people whose names are known even to not-very-artsy folks like me. Amsterdam also has Famous Painting(tm) XIV Girl With a Pearl Earring (by Vermeer) which the Amsterdamned Netherlanders are very proud of having as it's on every damn web page that even mentions the cultural events to be found in their fair city. I don't know why they're so impressed with that painting, but I shall visit it in person because it's a Famous Painting(tm). I just don't get the fixation -- Famous Painting(tm) IX (Rembrandt's The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch) and Famous Painting(tm) III (Van Gogh's Still Life Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers) are also displayed in person in Amsterdam. It's not like Famous Painting(tm) XIV is their only Famous Painting(tm).
(A word about Famous Paintings (tm): I am the authority for what constitutes a Famous Painting(tm). If I've heard of the painting, it gets a number and an entry in the catalog of Famous Paintings(tm). Paintings that I have not heard of are, ipso facto, not famous. Someone's got to make these decisions, after all.)
7. Van Gogh apparently hung out in Amsterdam, or at least his relatives did. Amsterdam has a whole bunch of his stuff, largest collection in the whole entire world, and it's not even two miles from the drugs-n-whores. Only a completely stoned loser would miss out on the Van Gogh viewing opportunities in Amsterdam.
8. There's a branch of the Hermitage in Amsterdam. I didn't know this. I mean, yeah, I knew the Hermitage was a huge honkin' museum thingie in
