Post-Holiday Update
Jan. 18th, 2020 06:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI am still here. The holidays are well and truly over. I have some updates.
Dad's wife is doing cancer thing again. The drug she was on, the one that was supposed to stop the cancer for six to nine months, has stopped working after two years and a bit. Everyone is very upset about this, but I feel that she did pretty well with the drug. Two years is a lot longer than nine months, so yay. Nobody likes having this pointed out, though.
Mom's husband made cookies for xmas this year. He made sand tarts and moravian spice cookies, which are cookies that I make every year at expert-level competency. He did neither of them particularly well. Rod can't bake for shit and these are not easy cookies. They are somewhat demanding cookies that reward excellence in technique. His efforts were not sufficient to the task.
I would not be so shitty about this (we all of us have things we do less-well that we still enjoy doing and are enthusiastic about) except that these are MY cookies that I make every year, excellently and yet my mom regaled me for forty five minutes on the phone about Rod's Wonderful Cookie Technology and how it was So Superior To How I Did The Cookies and How Amazing These Cookies Would Be. Like as if my cookies weren't good enough? My cookies are fucking outstanding. Besides being kind of pissy about having my technique maligned, I was a bit put out about the length of the regaling. Anyway as it turned out Rod's cookies were not amazing, except if you considered that they were "the same recipe" that I use. (So very, very different. Technique matters A LOT in the kind of cooking I enjoy.)
Rod's Wonderful Cookie Technology, btw, is putting rails on either side of your rolling area so that you have even thickness. He uses room-temperature dough so that it squeezes evenly between the rails. (The dough is meant to be chilled. Squeezing it as his method does fails to produce the layering and thin cripsity-ness of traditional rolling.) *hrmph* I do not feel that my cookies are in need of more evenness. I am an excellent roller. These are my non-training-wheels cookies.
I feel like if you have thickness problems with rolling dough, what you need is not training wheels but practice. Also, his were way too thick. And... chewy. These are supposed to be thin, crispity cookies. They are not chewy. For xmas, I got a large pizza box full of these woefully unsatisfactory cookies, two layers thick. While mom and Rod were there, I ate some cookies in front of them. When they left, I fed the rest to Skoal (a horse), who enjoyed them.
Skoal is not an exacting consumer of cookies.
Progress on the bathroom afghan continues. I'm on the last skein of yarn for that.
I'm taking a Sunday night yoga class for fat and unflexible middle-aged women. It turns out that I am not at all flexible even when measured against my peers. However, it's a useful pause in my week and I kind of enjoy it. I may sign up for another when this one ends.
Dad's wife is doing cancer thing again. The drug she was on, the one that was supposed to stop the cancer for six to nine months, has stopped working after two years and a bit. Everyone is very upset about this, but I feel that she did pretty well with the drug. Two years is a lot longer than nine months, so yay. Nobody likes having this pointed out, though.
Mom's husband made cookies for xmas this year. He made sand tarts and moravian spice cookies, which are cookies that I make every year at expert-level competency. He did neither of them particularly well. Rod can't bake for shit and these are not easy cookies. They are somewhat demanding cookies that reward excellence in technique. His efforts were not sufficient to the task.
I would not be so shitty about this (we all of us have things we do less-well that we still enjoy doing and are enthusiastic about) except that these are MY cookies that I make every year, excellently and yet my mom regaled me for forty five minutes on the phone about Rod's Wonderful Cookie Technology and how it was So Superior To How I Did The Cookies and How Amazing These Cookies Would Be. Like as if my cookies weren't good enough? My cookies are fucking outstanding. Besides being kind of pissy about having my technique maligned, I was a bit put out about the length of the regaling. Anyway as it turned out Rod's cookies were not amazing, except if you considered that they were "the same recipe" that I use. (So very, very different. Technique matters A LOT in the kind of cooking I enjoy.)
Rod's Wonderful Cookie Technology, btw, is putting rails on either side of your rolling area so that you have even thickness. He uses room-temperature dough so that it squeezes evenly between the rails. (The dough is meant to be chilled. Squeezing it as his method does fails to produce the layering and thin cripsity-ness of traditional rolling.) *hrmph* I do not feel that my cookies are in need of more evenness. I am an excellent roller. These are my non-training-wheels cookies.
I feel like if you have thickness problems with rolling dough, what you need is not training wheels but practice. Also, his were way too thick. And... chewy. These are supposed to be thin, crispity cookies. They are not chewy. For xmas, I got a large pizza box full of these woefully unsatisfactory cookies, two layers thick. While mom and Rod were there, I ate some cookies in front of them. When they left, I fed the rest to Skoal (a horse), who enjoyed them.
Skoal is not an exacting consumer of cookies.
Progress on the bathroom afghan continues. I'm on the last skein of yarn for that.
I'm taking a Sunday night yoga class for fat and unflexible middle-aged women. It turns out that I am not at all flexible even when measured against my peers. However, it's a useful pause in my week and I kind of enjoy it. I may sign up for another when this one ends.
