Foodathon: It begins!

Last night, we started the actual cooking.  Luiz expressed his desire to really be involved with the baking this year, so he can feel like he's giving out gifts, too.  He loves all our friends and family, and really wants to contribute.  It was sweet, and boy was he handy!  Irv always helps, he's getting to be better in the kitchen than I am, but to have both guys working dilligently at my side really sped things up.

We started with making one test batch of lemon cookies.  I used a new soft sugar cookie recipe, and it was my idea to add lemon essence instead of vanilla, a splash of lemon juice, and roll the cookies in lemony sugar. When I made the first batch, I boggled at the quantity of butter (sure as shit, I predicted it.  4 lbs of butter is NOT going to be enough) but they came out so amazingly good, rich and lightly fragranced with lemon...they are definitely going to be my go-to sugar cookie recipe, and maybe competing with the molasses cookies as my top favorites. They're not so lemony that I even want to call them lemon cookies. They're a subtle buttery sugar cookie with a vague lemon aroma.

Awesome.  Batch 1 of the lemon cookies.  That's the homemade Kahlua in the back.

While those were going, we made all the rum balls. I made and chilled the dough, and the guys rolled, rolled, and rolled...and rolled...and rolled.  These are a no-bake easy as hell crowd pleaser, and I don't think I could have a Christmas without rum balls.

Check out that flurry of motion!

Somewhere in the middle of that, I whipped up the Kahlua, so it'll mellow before I give it out as gifts.  We get a bottle of it every year from the neighbors, and we love it so much, I did some research and figured out how to do it myself.  It's pretty well received by the drinkers among us.  We do homemade Baileys too, but I decided against it this year.  As far as booze goes, at some point, I want to get into infusing liqueurs, and maybe doing some lemoncello in the future.  It's fun.

At this point, I was hitting a wall, but still had some energy left...so we did all the chocolate chip M&M cookies.  Didn't get a pic of them in progress, because I was really stumbling through, but they went fast with the help, and came out excellent.

Those are all done!

I didn't anticipate getting those done, but since they're an annual favorite, making them is like clockwork.  Cue faceplant. I didn't even have the energy to upload the pics, or update this blog.

Tonight, we're doing the fudge, and the other two batches of cookies.  Then, we *should* be all done baking.  Tomorrow, once the fudge is set up, we'll assemble, or we'll start.  If we have extra time tonight, I want to make a batch of macaroons, maybe if they come out awesome enough, I'll throw some in to the buckets.

Ups and Downs

I've been stressing a bit.  I've got bronchitis, and I have zero energy, but I've got this cookie thing to do, and Aunt Lynne's food.  I've been taking care of myself, and trying to rest and store up energy for the bursts it takes for marathon baking/shopping/cooking.  All I really want to do is sleep, though.

I had a bad dream last night, that paired this whole Gawker thing with my cookie stress.  I dreamt that someone hacked into some database on my machine and stole my Triple Ginger Molasses cookie recipe, and that was the only incarnation of said recipe ever. Which is total bullshit, because I have a few copies printed, there's a similar recipe available online that's like mine but with tweaks.  But, in my dream, I logged on using DOS of all things, and accessed my special secret recipe storage, and it was gone, and I knew it was because I'd been "Gawker'd".  Disturbing, because that's my favorite cookie, and I limit myself to making them over the holidays only.  So, something I've been looking forward to for a year got taken away from me, by some scary phantom internet war that I got caught in the crossfire of.

The Gawker thing upset me more than I let on, I think.  I was one of the lucky bunch that had my password and email exposed, and even though I don't use the same password for many things, I used to use one simple pass for all my forum accounts and social stuff.  One for more important stuff, like online shopping, and another even more elaborate one for innernet banking.  Now, I use a program called KeePass, and have like 10 different passwords, all with 15+ characters.  Having my email out there on Piratebay, and my old basic password exposed left me with such a strange feeling.  Like when we had out house broken into, essentially.  My FB account was hacked into immediately, and my Amazon account showed weird stuff.  Everything's fixed and restored now.  There was nothing major, but it's like if someone broke into your house, and just moved shit around.  Drank a beer, ate some leftovers.  You feel somewhat violated, and really questioning "security".  Like, my door locks aren't enough, but thank god they didn't take the TV.  This will be the 4th time this year that my identity was somehow tampered with.  It's been a shitty year as far as that goes. My iTunes account got hacked, and some asshole bought a bunch of shitty pop and hip hop music, to the tune of almost $400.  I stopped all the charges, but I had fees to pay for all the stop-payments.  Then my debit card got compromised twice in a month, once online and once in a store.  Now this. It's enough to make anyone a little paranoid.  

Enough bitching.  Yesterday was an incredibly good day.  I slept very poorly the night before last, and was feeling gross in the morning.  Initially, I wasn't going to go out, but it was Luiz's and my Wednesday, and we had plans.  He was sweet about it, not pressuring me to go out, like we'd planned, but I dragged myself out, just because I'd promised.  I'm so glad I did. We had a lovely morning, and got loads accomplished.  After we got home, Alden's progress report came in the mail...and he's getting As and Bs!  For the first time since like...second grade!  I seriously wept tears of joy.  I showed him, and he cried too.  We all had a crying, snotty hug fest in the kitchen.  It was awesome.  Hopefully he'll remember how overcome he was, and I was, and the guys were, and keep up the momentum.  I was exhausted by evening, but I was on a roll, and started with the baking.  Got way more done than I planned, then crashed into sleep before midnight.  It was a great day.

Foodathon: Shopping

It's done...ish.  Tomorrow we're going to the huge discount liquor store, to get rum for the kahlua and rumballs, but otherwise, we *seem* to be done.  I have to say seem, because you know, it's never accurate.  Inevitably, I will have forgotten some piddly thing, or miscalculated.

The final list of stuff going into buckets:
Chocolate chip M&M cookies
Triple Ginger Molasses cookies
*Soft lemon sugar cookies
Rum balls
*Cappuccino fudge
Cookies and Cream fudge

Homemade Kahlua to a lucky few

*new recipes for this year.  The lemon cookies are standing in for the snickerdoodles, and the cappuccino fudge is standing in for the amaretto and rocky road.

I wanted to also include coconut macaroons, dipped in chocolate, but Irv is hesitant, he thinks lots of people hate coconut.  He's silly.  I'm making one batch anyway, even if I eat them all myself.

So, the shopping haul looks like this:

15 lbs of flour
10 lbs of sugar
12 cans condensed milk
16 lbs of chocolate chips
6 lbs of white chocolate
6 lbs brown sugar
6 jars of molasses
3 lbs of lemons
3 lbs confectioner's sugar
6 boxes of vanilla wafers
4 lbs holiday colored m&ms
4 lbs butter (I know we're gonna run out. I really just know it)
36 eggs
1 gallon of rum
3 lbs raw sugar
misc. amounts of various extracts, powdered ginger, fresh ginger, candied ginger, dark cocoa, espresso powder, regular instant coffee, nutmeg, cinnamon, corn syrup

Also:  27 large and small tins and buckets
500 sheets of white tissue paper
2 rolls of parchment
6 cookie sheets
6 cooling racks
miles and miles of plastic wrap

Should be fun.

Tomorrow, if luck and all that shit is on my side, I will start making doughs.  Tomorrow night is one batch of each dough, just to make sure everything's going well.  I might make up the rum balls all together tomorrow, if time permits.  They need to hang out for a week to mellow.  If time *really* permits, I'll do all the chocolate chip cookies tomorrow.

Jasper's all like "get your shit out of my bed, this sucks"

That was a quick picture, of all of it gathered together in the living room. You don't see most of it, because it's hidden in the bags alongside the cube.  Irv brought more stuff in after I took the pic.  

Foodathon: Meh

Finalized making what I call "the kit" which is really a stapled together booklet of lists and recipes.  I do it with every great cooking feat, planning for parties, multicourse dinners, etc.

Top page is a shopping/ingredient list, this way, I can look at a glance and see that for the four kinds of cookies all require flour, how much etc.  Also on the first page is a final list of what I'm making, exactly.  Second page is a list of how many buckets and who they're going to.  The rest of the packet is the recipes.  Now I have a master list to cook and shop from.  By the end of the holidays, it's normally crusted over with molasses, egg, and sugar.  I still have the ones I used from previous years, but I'm making some changes this year, so I made a whole new thing.

We cleaned out the corner baking cabinet, and began organizing the box.  During the baking session, I keep a huge rubbermaid box in the center of the kitchen holding all my baking supplies, for efficiency's sake.  Nothing halts a good flow like having to hunt for something. I hate that shit, so before I even start, I go through the house hunting up the baking powder, ground ginger, sugars, flour, extracts and toss everything in the box. Really saves time.

Now I have to put together my big shopping list, find all my cookie sheets and cooling racks, buy the gift containers, parchment, and wrapping supplies.

This almost didn't happen today.  I feel like I'm coming down with bronchitis.  I feel mildly shiteous today, but overall I'm fine, if it gets any worse, I'm going to have to postpone or cancel Foodathon all together.

Last Malodor, I promise

So, today I got to see the last girl, Jeanie, and she's still on the Malodor panel, too.  According to her, Jeff said there she made a lot of small mistakes, but now that she knows what to do, she can continue improving and working on things.  Crazy, right?  I make one good mistake, and maybe a few other tiny discrepancies, but nothing Jian or Nima would bat an eyeball at, and I get cut.  He said to Christine that they'd be cutting a lot of people after the new year, and screening for more, which is a minor comfort, if it's true.  Chris said she'd keep me posted.

I think this is still in my mind, because I really felt like my data was good, even if the panel wasn't exactly my favorite thing.  I am really wondering how can I have perfect results in dose, his words-not mine, damn good results in taste (even the smelling part of taste, if that makes sense) and still bomb this enough that I was the only one that got kicked off. Did he go on raw data?  Was he going on longterm data, or just last Tuesday's test? Did he go on some other trend or observation?  I hate this not knowing why feeling.  I hate the feeling of really trying, and coming up short, with no real explanation.

This is fertile ground for the whatifs.  What if he just didn't like me?  What if it was some other reason?  What if he glossed over my mistakes, and I well and truly shitted it up?   Then there's the sense of discomfort I felt moving around people.  Being fat, edging down a hallway moving in and about 4 postage stamp sized rooms with nine other women at the same time, made me really uncomfortable, but I stuck with it, overcoming my awkwardness.  My solution was simply to hang back, and let everyone go ahead of me, so I was most assuredly not blocking anyone or in anyone's way.  What if he observed that, and was like "this girl is a clumsy mess."  Because I felt like a clumsy mess, trying to dodge and weave, and still do my actual job.  Being judged on something besides my raw numbers is enough to send me spinning back to middle school anxiety.

Now that that's all off my chest, I'm going to move on from this. I have a lot of unanswered questions, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.  I'm going to keep my ear to the ground, to see if any more panels come up, like blotters, flavor, skin, or diffusivity.  I still feel like, in spite of this, I'm good at my job, and I still have a lot to offer.

Bad Fit

So, Malodor.  It's over.  Had the one on one interview, today.  The pure "malodor" and the pure "not malodor" jars both came up a little wonky, and by a little, I mean maybe a 6-10 point spread (out of a possible hundred), for my data accuracy.  Of the 24 entries, I could only see one that was really erroneous, and three were sort of off.  I don't think it was an enormous discrepancy, but it was the big screening, and I didn't nail it, period.  With him showing me that, and leaning on how WAY OFF those few things were, while only glancing over my (from what I saw) fairly accurate other entries, I think he was just looking for a reason to cut me.  I think he doesn't realize that because of all the feedback and data analyzing we do on Jian's panel, that I know how to read it probably as well as he does.  He only let me view the raw numbers for a minute, pointing out quickly "this, this, this, this, see here, this thing, and this" and talking fast, using jargon.  Only, I know the jargon, and I can read super fast.

He alluded to the fact that Nima just sort of crammed a bunch of us into the panel before she took off for Loreal, and now he was stuck with sorting us out.  It was crystal clear that there were way too many of us on the panel. Hell, he didn't allude, he said that directly.  It feels political, and I feel like the four of us were sort of used as pawns.  Nima told us, before we left, to really stick it to Jeff if we can.  Jeff's said repeatedly, "if anything went wrong, it's obviously because of Nima."  Animosity much?  Frankly, I dislike both of them, and the less Jeff the better. He's still my boss on Dose, but he's never around for that.

If Maureen and Christine were both perfect, and mine was even a little off, I can see why he'd shed me.  I think Jeanie got cut too, for the same reason.  I feel like it was a bad fit all around.  I complained earlier.  The only thing I'm sad about is the money.  It would have been nice, at least to have it through Christmas break, then do the screening stuff after the new year.  I still have my two regular panels, though Dose and Taste.  Overall, I'm not upset, but the few minutes walking through the building after the meeting, back to the rest of the panel was a little anxious, like having to go back to a group and say "well, it was nice working with you, briefly, I'm not on this panel anymore, so seeya' round" After I walked out the door into the parking lot, everything was entirely fine.  One nice thing was, during the interview, he was like "it's strange, because your data for Dose is dead on. Like, your stuff looks like the control. It's perfect."  So...whatever.  Politics.

On the very far upside, I have my Wednesdays back, and losing them for a month really made me appreciate having a day off, midweek.  It was more important than I'd initially thought, as a day to spend where both Luiz and I have off, together, the one day we can spend with each other alone, normally.  Also, a day to get personal things done.  Or not, sometimes, as any mother/wife knows "weekends" are about the craziest time, so Wednesdays are my quiet mid-week break, in lieu of a real weekend.

WoW Post: Musing on Character Shuffling

So, Cataclysm is in effect, joy.  I've got a dilemma, though.  I have three characters on Twisting Nether, and since the time of our departure, the server has gone from a 2:1 to a 4:1 Horde:Alliance ratio.  On a PvP server, this is disastrous.  I attempted to play some of the new 80+ areas, today, on my 80 hunter, Arachnae. It was a sea of Horde, and maybe 10 Alliance.  I couldn't click anything, do anything, go anywhere, without getting murdered, accidentally or on purpose. The numbers were just so unbalanced.  I'm not exaggerating, by the way, I have screenshots of Ara swimming in a sea of red.  It's almost scary.

Shadow Council is my "new" home, and it's not a PvP server.  I have some choices here.  Choice one, continue on with my main characters there, and try to get them as well geared as the TN "big 3" meaning, Ara, Dawna, and Una.  Hunter, pally and druid, respectively.  Those three are equipped head to toe in purples, but judging by the stuff in the new areas, it more than doubles the stats of the old "epix" so, like with every expansion, stepping in to the new stuff means overhauling all your gear and starting fresh.  My SC chars are well...struggling.  I have one 80, my poor long suffering mage.  Her name used to be Gossamer, she was on AD from around retail, where I got her to 60.  Then I moved her to TN, when Burning Crusade came out, and got her to 70.  Then, when LK came out, I moved her to SC, and just recently got her to 80.  She goes through phases of "I'm doing ok, I have some good gear, and I can hold my own in a fight" to "omg, I just stepped out of the door and I'm dead."  But with just a bit of preservereance, I can get her well geared, I think.  Soloing as a mage is a study in agony, though, when you're gimped.  Then I have my paladin and hunter on SC, and they're 71 and 61, and again, with a little dedication, they can be 80 and moving into the new stuff in a decent amount of time.  I already created my druid worgen, to play the new content, from level one, and I'm really looking forward to that (or a priest.  Still on the fence, but I definitely want to heal).

The second choice is, immediate gratification.  I could transfer one of the "big 3" over to SC, which is a much better environment, and have one of my "old mains" on my new server.  It would cost money, which I'm saving, and would duplicate one of the character classes that's already there.  As in, if I move TN Ara over, with all her awesomeness, why bother to keep playing SC Ara?  I'd probably delete her, and have just the one high level hunter.

Playing on TN is no longer really an option, I don't think. Not right now, at least.  Someone said over General, that the ratio might swing back in favor of Alliance with the Worgen influx, but right now, it's a sad state of affairs.  It's sad, because the last vestiges of OOH are over there, in spirit.  There's still a "guild bank" and we have a guild name, and tabards.

As I mull it over, I think I am going to go do some general account maintenance, and maybe check out the new profession.