It’s COOKIE PORN!

Because I am a poor little thing, instead of buying the book, I waited patiently for the library to begin carrying Martha Stewart’s Cookies.  And today, oh glorious day, the library got it in, and I have a copy of the book in my hot little hands.

I had a look through most of the book, though I tapered off towards the end in favour of an afternoon nap. Still, I’ve busted out my sticky-tabs to note what cookies I can make with what ingredients I currently have (or think I have) at my parents’ house.  Once my mother’s finished at the stove, I think I’ll try my hand at making a batch of snickerdoodles, assuming it isn’t too late in the evening for baking.

The photos, as the title of this posting blatantly states, are flat-out cookie porn.  For example, see the cookies on the cover?  Yep, I know what you’re thinking about doing with that dollop of chocolate oozing out of that cookie on the side.  Mm-hmm, do your parents know how filthy your mind is?

Martha Stewart: Cookie-smut peddler.

On the whole, the recipes for the cookies seem easy enough to make and bake, although I bet it would be easier if I had a stand mixer, as seemingly every recipe assumes you have.  Bleh.  One of the original ideas for a blog title was “The Budget Baker,” seeing as how I didn’t really have a stand mixer, and was afraid of my hand mixer for the longest time after my first attempt at using it (I flung sugared butter everywhere).  But, well, I don’t really skimp too much when it comes to ingredients, and the term “budget” might have connotations that I might’ve not intended.  Perhaps “broke-ass” would’ve been a better term.  Certainly not Martha-approved, that’s for sure.  I still have a penchant for mixing batter with forks if I’m not using one of my pastry blenders.  It’s just easier to clean than the hand mixer, which I only break out if I have to get dominatrix-style on some egg whites or something.

I love baking, but I’m not such a big fan of cleaning.

Anyway, beginning Tuesday or Wednesday next week, I should be able to have full reign over my very own kitchen empire!  I can have my ingredients organised the way I want them, and not have to worry about my mother rearranging my stuff so I can’t find it!  There will be a kitchen with a crazy side-opening oven that will be allll miiiiiine!

Well, until my roommate moves in with me.  Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure how often Clark cooks.  I know he can grill.  In fact, one of the stipulations of the apartment that we’re moving into was that he had to have a place to grill.  One of our mutual agreements was to make sure the place also came with an oven “big enough to fit a baby in.”  Those were Clark’s words, but I wholly concur.  In other words, no dinky stoves that were absconded from the Barbie Beachouse.

We’re serious.

The Great Orlando Beer Festival

Man, I love beer. I can’t drink a lot of it in one sitting, but beer is what I choose to drink at a bar, and the bars I choose to drink at tend to have good beer. If they don’t, well, then I guess I’m drinking water.

So, imagine my excitement when I found out that on this Saturday, the first annual Great Orlando Beer Festival will be happening from 2 pm until 7 pm downtown in the lot for the Club at Firestone. At $25 a ticket for advance tickets, it’s not cheap, but there will be unlimited beer samples. UNLIMITED! Okay, really the limit is what you can intake which, in my case, might be around the $25 mark. Judging by the list of breweries participating at the event, it’ll be money well-spent. Flying Dog Brewery, for example, puts out excellent beer I’m well-acquainted with from bringing it over to friends’ houses. Our very own Orlando Brewing will also be involved, as well as Red Hook, Lagunitas, Otter Creek Brewing, Rogue and more. Food will be available for purchase, as well as a live band, but really, it’s all about the beer.

Sadly, I’ve asked around and it looks like a handful of my best beer-lovin’ friends will be working. If you’re lucky enough not to fall into that category, it’s $35 to enter the day of the event and $25 if you buy early, so if you think you’d like to attend, get your tickets Friday and save yourself ten bucks. If you’re the designated driver, you get in for $10, and can get free non-alcoholic beverages. You can buy the tickets online, or you can visit one of three locations where they will be selling tickets for the festival:

• Redlight Redlight - 535 W. New England Avenue, Winter Park (near Park Avenue)
• Underground Bluz - 12261 University Boulevard, Orlando (near UCF)
• Orlando Brewing - 1301 Atlanta Avenue, Orlando (near AMTRAK station)

If you’re seriously broke, but still want a piece of the action, you may still be able to volunteer to work at the festival. Some free schwag, like a t-shirt, may be your reward. If you happen to be pouring a beer for me, I don’t like that much head on mine, thanks.

For directions to this wonderful brouhaha (or… brewhaha?!), you can click here for a Mapquest map and some written directions, or simply GoogleMap “42 West Concord Street, Orlando 32801,” which can give you a good idea of the what and the where. Also, the website says you can park in the Courthouse parking lot, but there’s also parking on the street along Orange Avenue and along some of its side streets. The metered parking is waived during the weekends, unless there’s been a change in policy, so you should be good to go.

The event is meant to be “a celebration of craft beers,” which is a fantastic way to get people introduced to microbreweries across this great country, as well as a handful of popular tasty beers that people enjoy, such as Guinness and Blue Moon. A portion of the proceeds are earmarked to help out our local Habitat for Humanity, which goes to show: drinking good beer leads to good things.

You can ruminate on what drinking bad beer will get you on your own.

Tales of excessive utensils

My mother has eight wooden spoons.  For whatever mysterious reason, she has accumulated eight wooden spoons, and they’re all kept in a drawer with a multitude of other utensils, perhaps even another wooden spoon I didn’t count.

I am amazed at the amount of kitchen utensils my mother has managed to collect over the years, and yet, she seems to have only one silicon spatula to flip over pancakes.  Since it’s all kept in a drawer, a bit of a dig is involved to find the right utensil needed–gigantic wooden chopsticks, one of a number of wooden spoons, a wooden spatula or three, a potato-masher, etc.

The new place I’ll be living at has ample drawer space for Clark and I.  I don’t have nearly the number of kitchen items my mother has, but I actually have one or two duplicates of things, if I remember rightly.  Much of my stuff is either sharing space with my parents’ stuff or in boxes, so I can’t remember exactly what I have.  However, I do have a rather excessive amount of pastry blenders, because I used to keep one at my old apartment, and another at the apartment of my former boyfriend, and this keeping of two sets went on with a few other things, like silicon spatulas and mixing bowls.  I gave some of these extras away to my friend Mike when I moved out of the apartment on Lakeview, but not the pastry blender, which then was taken to my parents’ place.  Yesterday, when I took my mother to Michael’s, I got sucked into the display they had for Wilton baking products.  When I walked away, I had a stack of items consisting of measuring cups, a liquid measuring cup, a “baker’s blade” and another damn pastry blender.

I haven’t used the “baker’s blade,” which seems to be a fancy way of saying a bench scraper, nor the new pastry blender, but I’ve used both the measuring cups and the liquid cup today for pancakes and for the failed attempt at thumbprint cookies I’ve made–failed because I squished the cookies when I shouldn’t have, and I don’t think I cooked the jam all the way through so that they’d harden properly when added to the tops of the cookies.  Bah!  In any case, I don’t think I should buy any more utensils until I’ve moved into the new duplex, so that way I can have all my things together and accounted for, and to see what I might need, if anything.  I won’t need wooden spoons, though, as I think I might relieve my mother of the army that she has.

Hamburger America: the book AND dvd!

I pestered my local library to start carrying Hamburger America, the book, and they got a copy, which I have now checked out. When I took a look at the cover, there’s a sticker the library put on that says “1 disc included.” Do you know what that disc was?

That’s right, Hamburger America, the movie!

So, you realise I have to share the film with as many people as possible, yeah? I’ve already made my parents watch it, and I thought my father was going to have a heart attack merely watching Solly’s butterburgers being made. “Oh my God, that’s BUTTER?!” he freaks while watching a woman slab on a hefty dollop of butter onto a bun before mushing it down onto a burger.

Potential food rule: Butter makes everything better. This rule may have to be tested out on a butterburger of my own with a veggie patty. Yes, I’m game enough, but I don’t know if I’d want quite as much butter as Solly’s Grille tops theirs with. Seriously, the camera zooms in on these burgers, and you can see the golden liquid dripping on the sides! The film even shows a patron sopping up some of the butter with half of his burger. It should also be mentioned Solly’s Grille is right across the street from a medical center treating heart diseases. Surprisingly, though, the owner of Solly’s Grille mentions two men in their 90s who’d been coming to Solly’s Grill for decades, and seem to be doing just fine.

Potential food theory: Butter makes you live longer.

I can imagine cardiologists cringing at the thought of a butterburger, but I’ll bet a few of those people that work at the nearby heart care center make dashes across the street to get their butterburger fixes.

Eventually, I’ll have to break down and buy this book, so I can have the book and dvd on hand for future reference and edification, as well as to share it with people who aren’t yet my friends, but someday will be (aw!). Yesterday I began reading the book, and currently I’m in the Louisiana section, where Port of Call in New Orleans is listed. There is only one place listed in Florida, Le Tub of Hollywood. In America, it seems the best states for burgers, according to George Motz, are California (9 entries), Oklahoma (7 entries), Ohio (6 entries), Connecticut (5 entries) and Texas (8 entries).

If you want to know more about Hamburger America or George Motz, the brainchild behind the projects, go to the website: HamburgerAmerica.com. Motz has a blog where you can catch up on what’s current–at the moment, the most recent entry is on the book tour he’s doing. If you live in Orange County in Florida, you’ll be happy to know that the Orange County Library System has two copies of Hamburger America, both of which are currently checked out–one by yours truly. Don’t worry, I’ll be returning mine shortly once I’ve finished reading it and have made a few of my friends watch the dvd. If you can’t wait, though, you can buy it online through Shop OCLS, with Amazon.com, or get a used copy with Abebooks.

Norman Rockwell exhibit

Lacking anything else to do, and having seen a gigantihuge poster for the event on the side of the building, I went to the Orlando Museum of Art today and had a look at the Norman Rockwell Exhibit they currently have going on. Officially titled American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell, the exhibit features some of Rockwell’s original paintings, in addition to a large collection of magazine covers from The Saturday Evening Post, with whom he was an illustrator with for over forty years. There’s also a brief documentary on Norman Rockwell at the beginning of the exhibit, which I’d encourage attendees to watch, because I found it quite informative, especially when it discussed and showed Rockwell’s technique in creating his works. I didn’t realise it, but he employed actual people to pose for his paintings, and when the camera became more widespread, he would use photographs of people with costumes and props, including himself.

Americans are more familiar with his Post illustrations, but I was surprised to learn late in his career Rockwell focused on more of the tumultuous contemporary issues that characterised the 1960s. One of the works on exhibit at OMA that exemplifies this is Murder in Mississippi, a powerful painting depicting the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. The little picture on this page is nothing in comparison to seeing the work in person, which is just steps away from another Rockwell piece I remember from my history books entitled The Problem We All Live With. Work such as this show that Norman Rockwell was not only an ingenious illustrator, but a true American artist.

The Norman Rockwell exhibit will be continuing until the 26th of this month, and the Orlando Museum of Art will be open extended hours until then: 10 am to 5 pm Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday from 11 am until 5 pm. If you have a college student ID, admission is $9. Otherwise, it’s $12 for the regular adult admission.

I was feeling particularly peppy and sprung for the college student year membership for $30. Hey, as long as I’m still paying loans, I should still be eligible for a student discount, right? It’s not like they took my student ID from me when they mailed me my diploma. Besides, I want to see the upcoming exhibition, The World of William Joyce, which begins on the 18th of this month. William Joyce is the guy who did Rolie Polie Olie, as well as other children’s books. Sometime last year, I missed out on an exhibit at the OMA featuring children’s book illustration, but I won’t miss out on this one, thanks to my spankin’ new membership. It’ll be going on until August 31st this year, so I won’t have an excuse, especially since I will be moving into a new place not too far from the museum starting in June!