A blogging slackface...

...that is what I am, a blogging slackface.

You can ask my sister.  She can attest to that.

You see, I keep thinking of things to blog about.  I have had numerous occasions where my husband has put his foot in his mouth: "I love your bum, it's nice and jiggly", or "I can't roll you over, you are too heavy".

And I have had some good cooking experiences and some bad cooking experiences.  But, I have just been putting it off.  I like blogging, though, so I thought I would write a new post today.

First, I shall start with the bad one (I will try to upload photos when I get my camera hooked up to my computer).

#1 - The Pannycake incident

A couple of Sunday nights ago I decided that we should have pancakes for supper.  I was tired and hungry, and didn't feel like cooking a lot.  But I also decided that I should try a new pancake recipe. I perused the web, focusing primarily on my two favourite food blogs: PW and annies-eats.net. 

And finally, I found one!  PW had a recipe for the Perfect Pancakes!  Perfect Pancakes, I thought, how can I screw these up?  I have cooked much more challenging things, and these will be the best pancakes I have ever tasted! 

Boy, was I ever wrong.

I was so excited to have pancakes, I heated up my griddle, and started pouring things into my mixing bowl.  I thought I did it perfectly.  But instead of looking like Pioneer Woman's batter:

Pioneer Woman's batter - her picture, not mine - please don't sue me.

it kind of looked like this:

Again, not my picture - I don't know whose picture this is - please don't sue me. I had to fix the exhaust in my car, I have zero  monies for you to sue me.

This picture doesn't even do it justice though.  It was just awful and lumpy and expanded and risen, and everything you don't want in pancake batter (I took a picture of how awful it was, I will try to update it later).

But, since I didn't have anything else to have for supper, I plopped that batter/dough stuff onto the griddle and hoped for the best. Well, it was far from Perfect Pancakes, and it was far from the best pancakes.  To be honest, I would have been better using a mix.  My dear husband pretended to like one, but as soon as I said I wasn't going to dare stuffing another one of those gross things in my mouth, I think I heard a sigh of relief from him. 

They turned out kind of like biscuit, pancake, thick, needs 2 cups of maple syrup to taste remotely good type things.  And maple syrup is expensive, y'all.

I will also try to update a picture of those gross pannycakes later.

I think the issue with it was that there should only be 3 tsp of baking powder in the recipe, BUT I might just be deflecting because of my embarassment at failing at making pancakes.

#2 - The Cookies
So this weekend I decided we should make some valentine cookies.  I was also going to make whoopie pies, bread, and all sorts of other delectable treats - but the cookies are the only ones that ended up taking place.  Maybe I will talk about my dissapointed with the other things later, but for now it is COOKIE TIME!

Dave reluctantly helped me make these cookies.  Dave doesn't have a very large sweet tooth.  He complains when things are too rich and he didn't want me to get him any candy or chocolate to put in his stocking at Christmas (I thought this was very selfish, and so I filled his stocking with candy anyways - because we both know that I get to eat half of his candy and if he doesn't get any candy at all I lose out!).  I think the man is ludicrous.  But anyways, he ended up helping me make these cookies.  Surprise, surprise it is another PW recipe.  I chose this one because it looked simple, I had all the ingredients at my parents house (where we were), and I like chocolate AND Valentine's Day.

Again - not the cookies I made.  These are PW's.  I made the same kind of cookies.  Stop threatening to sue me for stealing her pictures!  All credit goes to her!

I don't have any pictures of the ones I made, and I didn't adjust the recipe at all, so I will make this long story short.  They turned out fantastically!  Even hubby likes them.  We decided last night (2 days after making them) that they are not too hard, not too soft, and not too sweet, but not too not sweet.  They were a hit!  I didn't decorate them as nicely as PW did (I actually didn't decorate them at all) but they were great!  If you want a quick, yummy, cookie to make - try these ones!

#3 - Friday night supper

Thanks to my wonderful parents, I got Friday off!  Hubby wasn't scheduled to work Friday (only Saturday), so when he got off work on Thursday night (at 10:00!), we made the trip down to Saint John to my parents house.  We ended up arriving at about midnight.  Friday morning I woke up to help get my sister off to school (although she did a great job doing everything herself), and then I got to sleep in.  But since I had all day to do pretty much nothing, I decided that I would at least make a good supper.  I told my husband that he could choose between taco salad (one of my absolute favourite meals) or a new recipe I had found on Annie's Eats. 

He chose the new recipe, of course. So, I made a quick trip to the grocery store and then set out to make Crispy Baked Chicken with Teriyaki sauce.  Let me preface with the fact that I don't normally like home crispy baked chicken.  It doesn't seem legit to me.  To be honest, chicken is really only crispy in my mind when it is deep fried (but that kind of makes me feel sick).  But I made it anyways.  Because I am cheap, poor, and I don't drink, I didn't use the alcohol that it called for in the teriyaki sauce.  I substituted the sake for rice vinegar, and the mirin for apple juice, and I added some orange zest to the sauce as well, and then I took a whiff of my concoction and almost threw up.  Literally, it smelled kind of like vomit.  I persisted and finished making the recipe, and outfitted the table with lots of other prepackaged sauces to dip the meat in (plum, sweet and sour, etc).

When we sat down to eat, I forwarned my dinner guests (husband and younger sister) about my worries about what I had done to the sauce, and told them to approach with caution - but my younger sister (who is a picky eater) was courageous and tried it and said "this is actually really good Amy".  And then my husband tried it and agreed, and so finally I built up the courage and tried it myself and they were right!  It was phenomenal.  My husband even took the leftovers to work the next day and told me to keep making it!

(He also told me the crispy part of the chicken tasted like shake and bake, which I think was a compliment).

Anyways - those are my adventures for today.  I plan on cooking something for Valentine's day Supper tonight, so if I work up the energy I will take some photos and post them for you!

Have a great valentine's day - I hope you get lots of loving! (in a completely PG appropriate way of course)