Yummm....

We're on a cooking kick here. We decided to start the new year off in a more organized fashion and we've been doing the "Grocery Bag" feature from Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazine. This is a really great feature, we are having a lot of success with it, and I'm discovering that cooking can be fun and easy. Anyways, one of these was to make chicken pot pies. Rather than the traditional "pie" method, this recipe called for putting a layer of puff pastry on top for just an upper crust.


Well it turns out puff pastry sheets only come in a pack of two. So, not wanting to waste the 2nd sheet, or let it fall to the back of the fridge to be lost forever. I jumped on puffpastry.com in a rare-I-must-bake-something-right-this-minute mood. That spontentatiy really limits what you can make, since most puff pastry recipes require some specialized filling, which was not immediately available in my house. This was one of those baking-now-or-never emergencies, so it could have very easily failed. But, puffpastry.com came through with this result:

They are called peanut butter cups. It takes less time than the recipe implies, I didn't really measure, just threw in some chocolate chips instead of baking chocolate and skipped out on the marshmallows (I can't remember the last time I had marshmallows of any sort in my house).


I sprayed the pans with PAM before putting in the pastry, and they popped right out. I only have 12 muffin tins, so I made four giant cups with my ramekins:

So, yummy....

Techy wonderfulness

Alright, despite my inner geek being...well a geek. I sometimes come a little late to the tech game. Wireless internet in my own home is one of these examples. My mother in law was there before we were. Not that I didn't want it, not that I didn't think it was cool. I was just kind of lazy on the whole subject. Then MIL gave up on hers and her router ended up in our house, so we hooked it up. This was around last Christmas. I liked it. Internet from two computers at one time made life for the two of us easier. The she decided she wanted to try it again, so at Eastertime we gave the router back, and a few weeks later bought our own. All was good again. Then one day it just stopped working. Just like that. No more wireless internet. I tried everything, nothing worked. I talked to some friends who said that has been known to happen with the particular brand of router we had and that we probably should just get a better one....this was in June. Laziness again took over. Well, my parents just went wireless in their house and I was once again inspired. I decided to dust off the old router and see what I could do. An evening or so later I was back online. I always figured that the the problems before were a PC/Mac conflict, we use both in this house alternatively, and it just seemed that if you set the firewall settings for one the other would go wonky. So this time, I wired the router directly in the the Mac (it's an iMac anyways...so it stays in one place...it doesn't need to be wireless), and went wireless on the PC laptop. So far so good, it's working great. I'm blogging from my couch.

Why does this matter...why am I blogging about it. Because the really cool part is: I just printed from my couch too! I never did this before and it's been a question in my folks new wireless system, they have three computers and they'd like them all to be able to print to the same printers. My brother in law is setting up the system and asked if I knew, I didn't and my inner geek was shamed into trying. So I did, and it worked. Really simply. So if anyone else wants to try this, here's all I did. A key point I think is that my printer is hardwired to my mac, so it just prints regularly. I enabled printer sharing on the mac...under system preferences. Downloaded Bonjour for Windows from that apple site on to my PC, installed it and then clicked on the Bonjour Printer Wizard icon it made on my desktop. It found the printer that is hooked to my mac. I followed the prompts and voila. I can print wirelessly! I'm home alone and I felt that I needed to share my joy.

I'll post about Rhinebeck later.

All in a day's work...

I have been feeling very restless and unmotivated at work lately. Maybe because I'm in this weird limbo on a lot of projects waiting for responses from a lot of people and I don't feel like I'm going to get the papers out as soon as I had hoped, it's the way it is sometimes, but it can get disheartening to feel like you're standing still.

But, today, we had a full no plans weekend day. So we stayed at home and made some amazing accomplishments. I finished a knitting project that will be a birthday gift for someone, and this:

became this:
Not bad for a day's work.

And the best part. I FINALLY got to make use of my new hatchback.

It's amazing how finishing one thing can help motivate you to do another. I'm not dreading Monday quite so much now :)