I was sitting at my desk, working away, when my sweetie got back from the store. Being the heckuva guy I am, I offered to help carry supplies up to the apartment. I hauled a box up the stairs that contained, among other things, nine pounds of semi-sweet chocolate, ten pounds of sugar, twenty pounds of flour, and various dried fruit (including 4.5 pounds of raisins). Also included on this shopping trip was a few pounds of butter and some other yummy supplies.
Soon all this will be cookies!
Yep, there’s going to be some baking going on!
The light of my life is currently making a list of the other things she will be needing, from other stores, to complete the cookie frenzy. Also note the new cookie press. She broke her other two.
There are times I just have to sit back and appreciate what a lucky guy I am.
I just used up the last of my cookie ingredients. I’ve got a secret test going down right now, trying to balance red chile and chocolate. So far, mixed results. But that might be cause by putting three variants in the same cooling area.
I picked up a new cookie press last year. The old one was still working fine (a big aluminum one circa 1960), but the design of the new one interested me. Instead of turning a knob on top and guesstimating the right amount of dough, the new one is operated by a trigger — click, and you have exactly the right amount of dough, and you don’t do any of that twisting that can be so hard on the hands (yes, I seem to be inheriting the family arthritis). You can fill an entire cookie sheet in about 30 seconds.
The drawback of the new cookie press is that its capacity is about a third that of the big aluminum jobbie, so it has to be loaded three times as often. That’s a pain.
I’d love to be able to find one of the old ones, the new ones just aren’t sturdy enough and, as you so rightly point out, don’t have nearly the capacity that a decent cookie press should. I grabbed this one at the last minute as I remembered my juice-glass-flattened dough blobs from last year when both of my cookie presses broke in the same evening, and I really don’t expect it to be much better than they were, but I think in January I’ll take the time to do some hunting and see if I can find one that is everything a cookie press can be.
If I find it, I will let you know…
I bet ebay would be a place to look for a vintage cookie press. I know I’ve seen them in antique stores in Albuquerque.
Mine had an interesting origin — it came with a house Pat and I rented a long time ago. The previous tenant was an older woman who had gone into a nursing home. Her son lived in the house for a while, until the landlord evicted him for not paying the rent and for creating a disturbance among the neighbors (it was a quadruplex). When he left, he took the drapes and carpets, but he left some seriously broken-down furniture, the world’s ugliest painting, and a lot of kitchen stuff, including the cookie press. The landlord didn’t want any of it, so he said we could have it all.
Now I’m trying to imagine the world’s ugliest painting.
So am I. Details, please? Did it have a lot of orange in it?
TG, you are psychic. It was a mock-Picasso rendering of a jester, primarily in various sorts of orange, but with some brown, some yellow, some purple. Somehow, the purple reminded me of vomit, even though I’ve never seen purple vomit. Unlike Picasso, this artist had smudgy, blurred lines, and everything just ran together in the most nauseating way.
We had it out on the front stoop, along with the broken furniture, in preparation to haul it to the dump. A repo man, who had come all the way from Albuquerque (we lived in Los Alamos at the time) in a fruitless attempt to repossess the previous tenant’s son’s car, saw the painting and liked it and asked if he could have it. We said yes.
AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAWESOME!!! Nothing turns a painting bad like orange done wrong. I’m glad you were able to find a home for it.
Do you have a Tuesday Mornings in your neighborhood? The other place to get lost in would be a restaurant supply company. A surprising amount of commercial grade equipment is available that works in home kitchens, and the prices are hard to beat (rhymes with $5 half-sheet pans, $20 heavy gauge sauciers, every kind of spatula know to man, and 500 foot rolls of parchment). Oh yeah, fun places.
Yeah, that’s actually what I need to NOT do more than just about anything else, we have the Chinese Puzzle Kitchen as it is ;)
Hey!…wha?…Hey!…sumgum….Stupid RSS feed. THar’s entries! I didn’t know there was activity on the blog. Hmmmm.
Hm… I was fiddling with the RSS feed a few weeks ago; not really sure anymore where I left off. I’d installed some thingie that was supposed to make something better in some way. Then I was testing it… and the rest is a blank.
It looks like I’ve been monitoring the old feed, however, and checking now I see that the new feed is missing some episodes. My first guess is that its missing the ones that I created with my remote blog editor. Thanks for calling this to my attention.
Is there a bonus for clicking “Sweet!” in the corner of this post?
Sweeting and episode is a way of telling the bloggcomm that you liked it for whatever reason. If enough people think an episode is sweet, it will be listed in the sidebar.
Yes, ‘sweet’ is now a verb.
This episode is inherently full of sweetness because it involves my sweetie buying several pounds of sugar and chocolate.
Sweeet.
SHATNER ALERT! Those of you in the Pacific time zone have a chance to catch something … ummm … special. Conan O’Brien has on occasion had Shatner on to read Sarah Palin material as poetry with a string bass and bongo drums in the background. This time around … there’s a twist. (For those of you who seldom turn on the TV, it’s on NBC, following the local late news).