#34 Make a Kick Bum Pie for the Pie Party

Anyone who knows me knows that I like chocolate chip cookies more than most things, so when, during my two week long hunt for pie recipes in anticipation for my friend Stephanie from work's pie party turned up a real live, no kidding CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE PIE RECIPE, I was sold on sight. Look at this decadent monstrosity (gain 10lbs just doing so):



I would have been crazy to not pluck this gem from amongst the field of miscellaneous fruit (gag) and fruit combination (gag gag) pies. I mean I will eat your fruit pies, I just don't want to make one. Fruit pies just aren't, well, they are not tasty by nature. You have to put some real chef-grease toward a fruit pie to make it tasty - but chocolate chip cookie pie - that's un-mess-upable, right? Steph proof pie. Also, I already had most of the ingredients. Fate.

This pie was not only incredibly easy to make, but also outrageously delicious (as were all the pies at the party - mango, peach, pepper quiche, apple and coconut creme alike). I promise you will not be disappointed if you make this pie. I know you want to. Here's how!

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE PIE
(from Bakerella)

Step 1: Thaw frozen pie crust (because you're using frozen pie crust. you're making chocolate chip cookie pie, you obviously don't care about The Rules of Dessert. stop worrying about the haters and thaw that frozen pie crust). FYI when you purchase frozen pie crust, it comes in an aluminum pan. It says "remove crust from packaging". They (apparently) don't mean the aluminium pan. If you remove it from the pan, when it thaws, it will crack. Trust me.

Step 2: Beat two eggs (until foamy) in a bowl (with the electric mixer you once again had to borrow from your friend's roommate, because you don't own an electric mixer). Then beat in: 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Then beat in 1 1/2 sticks of butter (gross, I know, just do it).



Step 3: Stir in 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips and 1 cup of chopped pecans. Spoon dough into (thawed) pie crust. Bake at 325 for about an hour.



Step 4: After cooling serve warm and with vanilla ice cream.



I know. Your thighs hate me, but your mouth loves it. Ignore the confliction and dive in. I think I'm going to make this again for Thanksgiving. Cause this pie definitely kicked bum! Check!

Extra Credit Reading: Ear Worms

or Why Songs Get Stuck In Your Head

Short article abut ear worms, how to get songs out of your head, and why on earth they get stuck there in the first place.

Extra Credit Reading: Music Enhances Happiness

Cheerful Music Can Make Everyone Around You Look Happy

A great reason to crank those happy tunes in your headphones a little louder and have an awesomer Friday than you expected to have 5 hours ago (ok, 1 hour ago if you're me) when you could barely drag yourself out of bed.

#37: Friday Mix Tape #1

From me, to you - the very first installment of the Friday Mix Tape (check)!

01 Atmosphere - Get Fly


02 No Age - Life Prowler
I am so into this whole entire album right now. So good.


03 Matt & Kim - Block After Block
The first track off their (amazing, energetic, make me dance my pants off) 2010 album Sidewalks


04 We Were Promised Jetpacks - Moving Clocks Run Slow


05 Wavves - Linus Spacehead


06 Future Islands - Long Flight
I hated this song at first, but it grew on me and is now stuck in my head a lot.


07 The Joy Formidable - Whirring
Totally stoked to be seeing them at Great Scott tomorrow night - tickets are still available, you should join!


I'll happily email you any / all mp3s you feel you need so you can get down at your own digression, just say the word ("please!")

Until next week..

#36 Make Encouraging Banner Wall Art

Bummin' around the house tonight.. no school (work!) for me tomorrow and nada to do tonight, save for catching up on my DVR and eating pad thai and heaps of edamame delivered straight from Spice & Rice, so I thought it would be the perfect time to bust into my Cabinet O' Art Supplies and start an encouraging banner.

Now, when I envisioned making said banner, I pictured myself gathering all the scraps of fabric I have, finally learning how to use my grandmother's sewing machine (making this a double check kind of night) and making a really beautiful banner, worthy of hanging in my living room amongst my other treasures. But, then I got real with myself and decided that that would take 7748923749 hours of google work ("how to use sewing machine" "sewing machine user manual" "encouraging messages" "inspiration quotes" etc etc) and would likely not end up happening tonight. Instead, I grabbed my trusty scissors, glue and construction paper and thought of the first great quote I could. ...."EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE, OR NOTHING IS!" Perfect. I don't even know who said it, but it has stuck with me (apparently), so I went with it. (If you want to know you can google it).



Finished product, hanging in the place where nothing hung before, and where nothing was likely to hang anytime soon (despite my best efforts to find just the right thing!):



Taken on my blackberry, because I'm lazy bones, so excuse the poor lighting.

So now I'm just sitting here, soaking up the inspiration. It's not hand sewn, or super fancy or anything, but it's done! Maybe I'll add making a nicer version to the list? I think so. Maybe just a nice big one that says SMILE for the next round. Anyhow, check!

Add to the List...

33. Let Will take me snowboarding
34. Make a kick bum pie for the Pie Party I'm attending on Saturday night
35. Acquire bulldog

36. Make an encouraging banner to hang in my apartment (stolen from Miranda July's project Learning to Love You More)

37. Start blogging Friday mixtapes (unabashedly stealing this idea from Mighty Girl's blog) (I like this much better than "Follow Friday" or any of the other weekly posts I've seen around town)
38. Make my own map of Boston's MBTA to display (my walls are in serious need of more things on them.. I've got so many more walls in this apartment than my last one!) (Inspired by the New York Times' Your Life, Your Map project)

#4 Get Good at Making Soup (Part 2)

Mmmmmm, so I promised directions on Soup 2 last night, and I think while I am devouring a large tasty breakfast of it (because I awoke from the dead at 11:00am... my life rules), I will deliver! So here is Part 2 of my mission to try my hand at making soup (for Part 1 of this adventure, click here).

Okay

Soup #2
Peanut and Squash Soup (also from myrecipes)

Step 1: Heat enough peanut oil to coat the bottom of your soup pot. Add one butternut squash, peeled and cubed, (MAN IS IT EFFING HARD TO PEEL AND CUBE A BUTTERNUT SQUASH, try and pawn this task off on some unknowing passerby, TRUST ME), half an onion, chopped, 6 cloves minced garlic, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/4 tsp coriander and saute until onion is tenderish (appx 5 minutes).



Also here's some proof of what a pain in the bum butternut squash is:



I needed not one, but THREE utensils to tackle this guy. When I read "peel the squash" I went and grabbed my apple peeler and started to peel away. Don't do that, because I pretty severely damaged my peeler (sheesh, aren't you lucky you have me around to make these mistakes for you). So I grabbed a serrated knife, sawed the squash into quarters, and then used it to peel away the outside layer (total pain in bum, again, and be super careful not to hack off any fingers). Then I cubed it, using the dullest butcher's knife ever known to mankind, because I bought it from Walmart like 4 years ago when I had no foreseeable interest in chopping things ever.

Then you have to scoop out all the inside guts and seeds, with a melon baller, preferably. Or a simple kitchen spoon if you're a simple Rookie like myself (seriously, dead chefs across the globe probably turn over in their graves when I attack a recipe).



So, yes, that part sucked. It probably will suck less for you, because you're not me, and I did it, so you can do it too. And, it definitely satiated any desire I had to carve a pumpkin and make pumpkin seeds this year, because that is like FOUR times as much work. Ay-yi. Okay

Step 2: Add 4 cups of chicken broth, 3/4 cup smooth peanutbutter (I accidentally bought chunky (seriously, I told you, not Supermarket Sweep contestant material even remotely), which worked fine, but I imagine smooth would be... better), 2 tbsp tomato paste, and 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper. Boil. Then simmer, uncovered for 10 minutes, or until squash is squishy enough to eat.

Step 3: Toss in some cilantro and voila!



And now I have enough soup to eat every meal for a week!

#4 Get Good at Making Soup

It is 1:01am, and I have just finished making not one, but TWO glorious batches of soup! Yup, Steph the TaskMaster came out to play today - I went to the gym, grocery shopped, went to a two hour training for work in Newton, and cleaned the house a little bit. I never get that much done in one day, ever! Of course, I owe my productivity completely to the fact that it was Field Trip Day at work, which meant that instead of working 1:30-6:00, I worked 8:00-1:00 (and got to see Under the Sea in IMAX 3D at the Aquarium, which was, despite having a crying Kindergartener in my lap for all 45 minutes of it, pretty sweet). But anyway, I was feeling totally (and unusually) driven when I got home tonight, and decided to embark on my soup-making mission full force.

These soups are both really simple and quick to make (and I am pretty sure they are tasty, but won't have a second opinion until tomorrow, but... you can trust me I think, right?) so I am about to cover both soup recipes in detail, because I think you should make them both. SO PAY ATTENTION. TAKE NOTES. Are you ready? Good, here I go.

Soup #1
Hot and Sour Soup with Shrimp (from myrecipes)

Step 1: Combine 3 cups of chicken broth, 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms, 1 tbsp soy sauce and 1 small can of sliced bamboo shoots. Boil. Then, reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

Looks like this:



Step 2: Run 1 1/2 lbs of medium, frozen, de-veined, ezpeel shrimp (mouthful!) under cold water to defrost and peel away skin / creepy crawly legs / tail. Chop 8oz of drained, firm tofu into cubes.





After Step 1 has simmered for 5 minutes, add shrimp, tofu, 2 1/2 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tsp of white pepper. Boil. Cook for 2 minutes, or until shrimpys are cooked (you'll know because they'll turn pink!)

Step 3: In a bowl, stir together 2 tbsp water and 1 tbsp corn starch. Add to pot, whisking constantly for 1 minute.

Step 4: Beat one egg white in a bowl (actually you should've done this earlier guys, sorry). Drizzle slowly into pot, stirring constantly. Then remove from heat. Add 1/4 tsp chili oil (a little goes a long way) and a handful of chopped green onions.

And... you're done! See, told you that was easy! The hardest part was shopping for ingredients and that's only because I am a complete loser when it comes to finding stuff in the grocery store (so don't ever ask me to go on Supermarket Sweep with you just because I am outlandishly heroic at every other television game show, because I won't even let you set yourself up for failure like that, I'll just say no. Consider yourself warned.). The soup:



I'll post the other soup tomorrow. It is (drum roll) Peanut and Squash Soup, which sounds both disgusting and like my two favorite things ran into one another, bumped heads and accidentally fell into a pot of boiling chicken broth - but, I promise, it's tasty.

I think I said that I needed to make like 5 soups to consider this item completed... and that I've only posted one so far. But, I'm giving this a CHECK anyhow, because I am in charge here and can do that and it turns out that soups are actually pretttttty easy to make, and I'm already like the bomb.com at it. Go me!

#5 Write Love Letters

On the list this reads "Write love letters to all the important people in my life." Well, there are a lot of you, and I'm busy, so I decided to start with the most important one - my Memere, who just bought me a brand new car two weeks ago.

For those of you that didn't know, this brand new car has since been rear ended by some jerk-off hipster jerk-off, and is still in the process of being mended back to newness, which has made me pretty upset. My Memere has been really supportive, sending me positive notes (and checks, thank-you Memere!) like the "Don't be upset over this, just get it fixed and enjoy" one I opened this morning that made me decide today was the day to sit down and write her a nice, thoughtful thank-you letter. Thank-you letters always seem like a chore when I set out to do them, but once I started writing I realized 1) that I had a lot to tell her (like how I am planning on making some deliciously tasty soups in the near future, because we sort of have an inside joke (what are we 13??) about soup ever since she came to visit and my mom and dad WOULDN'T FEED HER WHEN SHE WAS HUNGRY AND SHE HAD TO EAT CANNED SOUP) and 2) that it felt really, really great to tell someone I love how much I love them and to imagine how happy she'd be when she opened a letter from her granddaughter. Cool! I will put it in the mail on my way to work today.



A goofy photo of me holding said note, for your time. (Which reminds me that I need to add "get a haircut" to the list).

So partial check or whatever to this item on the list. Maybe I will get around to the rest of the important people in my life sometime soon. Maybe you'll have to buy me a car first. We shall see.

#18 Make a Kickass Halloween Costume

Man, I love Halloween. Except, I kiiiiiiind of hate how good some people are at costumes. Mainly because I am not one of those people. For the past three Halloweens, I have been a kitty, because one year, on the day of a Halloween party, I found a cute tail, ears, face paint and pair of black gloves at a Halloween store and ever since it's been sitting in my closet, easily accessible when I realize that YET AGAIN it is Halloween and I don't have a costume.

I vowed things would be different this year. Then, a few weeks ago my lovely friend Tricia posted this photo and I was inspired - "ah ha!" I said, " This year I will be a bat!" Looks simple enough, right?



Of course I waited until the last minute to figure out that I have no idea how to make bat ears (I don't even have a picture of the first version of my bat ears, which I wore to school, but trust me, they only vaguely incarnated bat, at best) and that the fabric I had planned to make my wings out of was NO WHERE TO BE FOUND. I sorted that all out after a quick trip to the Garment District (at 11:30... the Thursday before Halloween weekend, SO FUN) where I found a black dress to construct my bat wings out of. My attempt at safety pinning the wings to my black dress was mediocre at best, so my wings were a little droopy at school, but luckily before I headed to Alanna's party Will helped me adjust and re-safety pin my wings and made me better bat ears! While I cried because I could't get my bat fangs to stay on my teeth (i ended up ditching them) and spilt beer all over myself and got black face paint everywhere. I suck haha. Anyway, here's the only surviving photo of my bat costume:



...brought to you by photobooth, as are the rest of the pictures, because I sucked at taking photos this weekend, which also means I have no photos of Will in his upgraded giraffe costume! He made this giraffe head piece out of foam at work on Friday (totally impressive and crafty, right?) and wore it over the giraffe tshirt I made for him two years ago. Voila:




(giraffe pattern on back as well! and the mask we were totally bummed to have lost in his apartment fire)

So, yes, anyway - bat costume, kind of a failure. But I tried! You can't say I didn't try. But Saturday when I went out I decided to bring back the kitty costume, because it's just so easy and reliable and easy and cute. I did see like 5 or 20 other cats while we were out, but whatever, who cares. And I had the best make up, for sure. Cause I'm a pro now, in this 3rd year of kittydom. I've got the face paint skills locked down:



Overall, a totally successful Halloween. Maybe my costume wasn't "kickass" per se, but whatever. I tried. Chuuuuhhhhh-eck.