Chili Bunnies

I had people over for Killer Bunnies, chili and bread last night and tried making the No Knead Bread and it was at least as wonderful as Peter described. In fact, it strongly reminded me of my absolute favorite bread from Berkeley -- the Acme Bread company's Sweet Batard. mmmm bread.

The chili was also successful. I put in some soy protein fake ground meat instead of getting real meat, and no one even noticed.

It feels really cold here today. Probably time to start wearing my long coat to walk to work instead of just a jacket.

I finished knitting my gigantic knitting project. 10 balls of discount blue varigated yarn and now I have a blanket that is a good couch size. mmm blanket. Now I'll have to come up with something else to do while watching Gilmore Girls on dvd.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

I made pumpkin cheesecake for a bake off today at the halloween party at work. It went over super well and I won a $50 certificate for some bbq place (ick). so I traded with someone who won a $20 certificate for starbucks (yum). The recipe is below. If I ever do it again, I would make more crust, and come up with a better way to crush the gingersnaps. The cake was so extremely rich and huge it serves a lot more than 10. The real problem was slicing it thin enough. A pretty slice was enough to kill a small creature from creamcheese overdose. It really really did take 4 packets of cream cheese. I thought that was a typo at first.

For serving, I made some whipped cream and put pecans on top. It was sort of overcooked, but people liked it.

Ingredients
CRUST:
- 1.5 cup crushed ginger snaps
- 4 tablespoons butter, melted

FILLING:
- 2 pounds cream cheese (softened to room temperature)
- 15 ounces pumpkin, packed solid
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 4 tablespoons bourbon
- 5 eggs

Container: 9" springform pan
Servings: 10
Prep Time: 45 minutes
Cook Time: 1.5 hours

Directions
Crust
* Preheat oven to 350F. Generously butter inside of pan.
* In a small bowl, combine gingersnap crumbs and melted butter. Press this mixture into the bottom of the springform pan and around the sides if you have enough. Bake for 10 minutes.
* Remove crust from oven and allow to cool completely while you run around trying to get the rest of it together.

Pie
* Mix flour and spices, and set aside.
* Beat cream cheese in a large bowl on medium speed until smooth.
* Add sugar to cream cheese and beat an additional 1 minute on medium speed.
* Blend pumpkin, vanilla and bourbon into the flour mixture.
* When pumpkin mixture is completely blended, mix in to cream cheese mixture.
* Beat in eggs, one at a time, on low speed. Beat just enough to blend each egg.
* Pour pumpkin mixture into completely cooled crust.
* Fill a 9x13 pan half full of water, and place this pan on the bottom rack of the oven. The moisture should help prevent cracking of the cheesecake.
* Place the cheesecake on the middle rack and back for 1 hour and 35 minutes. Do not open the oven door during the first hour of baking.
* After baking, turn oven off, open door and leave cheesecake in oven for 30 minutes to cool slowly.
* Then remove cheesecake to a wire rack and cool for another 30 minutes.
* Cover and chill for a long time (4 hours - overnight) in the refrigerator.

Melt the Belt

I'm having people over again tomorrow to play Killer Bunnies, and am excited about using the crockpot again. Tomorrow it will be corn chowder. And I made Cranberry Pumpkin Bread tonight, which sounds wonderful, but actually ended up sort of weird. Way too much orange zesting, and maybe cranberry and pumpkin shouldn't've gone together to start with.

And having chunky brown sugar that won't meld with the other dry ingredients didn't help much either. Oh well.

At least I finally got motivated to make my apt cleaner. The kitchen counters are awesome. The inside of the microwave, sparkling. The bathroom counters are gleamy, and the bathroom floor is no longer covered with hair (huge improvement). I made my bed with autumn sheets, and shook out my placemats and wiped down the table.

Then it was time to vacuum. Sadly, vacumming did not last very long, because I melted the vacuum cleaner belt into a smelly black mess that stuck to my fingers and stunk up my clean bedroom.

So, unless I find a new vacuum cleaner belt and get it installed without serious injury before people come over tomorrow, the actual rooms they will actually see will have sadly neglected looking carpet that is distinctly lacking in pretty vacuum lines in the carpet.

I guess that's how it goes some times.

Blendy Drinks recap

Blendy drinks went well last night. I think that if you have some fruit, ice and rum, it's hard to go wrong.

Specific successes included:

• Blackberry Lemonade
  1 can frozen lemonade concentrate
  Frozen blackberries
  rum and some more rum - at least 1/2 C
  some sugar
  ice
  limes to garnish
  That will make two blenderfuls. It didn't taste of alcohol, but you could smell it. A lot of my drinks turned out like that
• The Pillowfight
  Vanilla ice cream
  Frozen strawberries
  Malibu
  Vodka
  Ice
  strawberry vodka is even better in this. This is the first of three milkshake like creations. They make Splenda icecream now!
• The Hummingbird
  Vanilla ice cream
  lots of PeachTree
  Malibu
  some amaretto
  Milk
  Ice
  This was made by some other people trying to recreate something they'd had in Jamaica at a beach shack. It would've been even more amazing with some real fruit in it.
• Mudslide without a recipe
  Vanilla ice cream
  Baileys
  Kahlua
  Milk
  Ice
  Chocolate syrup
  Amaretto
  I just looked up a recipe and apparently some vodka should've been included. Oh well. A little Kahlua goes a long way if people are sensitive to the coffee flavor.

It was a good night. Besides those, we also blended some Pina Colada from a can, and Mango Margaritas from a mix. I made iced teas as well - minty, lemony, and with some Good Earth Sweet & Spicy. My worries about running out of food or mixers means that now I have a freakish amount of juice to get through before it goes bad. and a freezer full of ice.

My new blender survived very well for a $20 investment. it made claims about having a design to assist with blendering ice, and it seemed to do quite well. We had one blender fatality, which made me feel bad. Someone volunteered their blender, and then it died :( At least they were the ones pressing the buttons when the dying happened.

Iced Tea and Blendy Drinks

I'm excited because I'm hosting an "Iced Tea and Blendy Drinks" party tomorrow night. I don't imagine it will be as memorable as the "Couchwarming and Exotic Fruit" party, but two-pronged parties are generally better than spear-like parties.

Hopefully, we will be able to recreate the strawberry milkshake-like drink that one of my coworkers wants to cristen "The Pillowfight". If we make it well and if I remember some ratios and/or ingredients, I'll try to say more about that later.

It's pretty warm here, but it makes it nice for standing out on the balcony at night.

I continue to feel like I'm waiting to go home to california crossed with feeling like I want to settle here more firmly.

Work goes well. I sometimes feel like I might be at a level above "competent" with this whole programming thing, and that's a thrill.

Zumba (pronounced "stupid")

I went to an exercise class just now that was supposed to be all cool and dancy, but I was greatly hindered by my mostly complete inability to dance, and then surprosed to learn that I have forgotten how to gallop. Why was galloping in a dancy class? Who knows. except that this style of exercising, which is called Zumba (pronounced "stupid"), features skinny Brazil-looking women on the original website, and maybe they gallop in place, or in a tiny circle, more often in South America.

I'll probably go again. Especially since exercise is good, and there was a part where we got to "jump, jump" like in that stupid song from a long time ago. and while I may continue to be no good at dancing forever, I can at least still jump up and down mostly on rhythm -- unless i get into it, and then immediately lose the beat and have to stand around confused for a while.

I made a nifty macro thing in Excel today as a helper tool for the proposal writing process that we go through quarterly. It was So Much More Fun! than the awful Excel stuff I was doing a long time ago when I was in grad school. I think it was because no one told me to do it, and then people appreciated it after it was done. Yay!

Oh! And there was a Weakerthans concert last night! That was super awesome. The had the New Amsterdams opening for them, and my new music-guy crush is on the slightly punky, yet oh so presentable, lead singer of the New Amsterdams.

Also also, Netflix apparently is having a run on "The Fox and the Hound" so instead of getting my bizzarro animal combo of "The Fox and the Hound" and "12 Monkeys", I'm getting "12 Monkeys" and "Brazil"... and disc2 of season2 of Gilmore Girls. Like, OMG! Did you know that Lorelei has like totally called off the engagement! Dude!