Hey Elena, what happened to your chin?: "Hilarious" "gag" answers!

- I cut myself shaving!

- I was misbehavin' and my man popped me one to put me in my place. (This gag ghostwritten by doting boyfriend)

- I did not look out for ice under the new-fallen snow. My feet lost the ground (mid-fall, a brief moment of clarity: "My reflexes have failed me.") - and my chin found it again.

I mentally regarded my condition, and determined I was fit enough to keep walking. The cold numbed and hid the aches I would later feel.

I physically regarded my chin, and a hand that came away bloody convinced me to turn home again.

Ha ha! Oh, me.

Welcome Sammie!

Just before winter break, we adopted a cat. He is Sammie, 5 years old, handsome of face and sassy of character. His interests include chasing balls of tinfoil around, hitting the 'nip, putting his butt in C's face, and wet food days.

Meow-lo!

When we first brought him home, he was very shy and spent most of his time under the bed. C. and I left for winter break barely knowing him, and we arranged for friends to check on him and the rats every few days. I felt guilty for making him think we had abandoned him. His previous owner had left him too - but, she had left everything and everyone, by passing away.

When we came home, Sammie was a new cat: friendly, chatty, cuddling in C's lap and following me around the house, apparently so glad that we had returned to him. He is a classically-trained actor, it turns out - recognize the role? That was a nuanced performance of Kevin from Home Alone. Kudos also to our friends for their cameos as the Wet Bandits.

If you have doubts about our Sammie being an actor, please look no further than this exclusive promotional still from his new feature film, The Curious Case of Benjisammie Button.

Cookie factory

I decided that it wasn't enough for me to just like food, and to also like DIY - I must combine them! So I'm cooking and baking a lot these days. I have made three types of cookies recently, and here they are...

Ginger Pennies
These are fun bite-sized ginger cookies that you make by piping out a trillion little dots of dough. Really, I got 545 cookies out of this recipe. The texture kind of varied from sheet to sheet, but I liked the ones that were completely dry through the middle. I put some of the um... moister ones back in the oven for a few minutes, and that helped their deliciousness level riiiise!

Here is a picture of the ridiculous cookie operation.

Chewy Molasses-Spice Cookies
I used brown sugar instead of regular sugar, and I melted the butter down before mixing in the sugar because I didn't have a food processor to cream it all together... so the dough turned out wet and liquidy, and the idea of rolling it into balls was basically nonsense. So I just threw some sugar down on the cookie sheet and threw some more sugar on top of the blobs of dough I spooned out. Hey presto, though, the turned out pretty alright. I mean, I ate five of them in one sitting. A couple of times. They're gone now.

[Picture of my distended cookie gut goes here]

I need to take a break from talking about cookies to tell you that between that batch and the next one, C. bought a food processor! We were spurred to action by this BoingBoing post about potato latkes. I like making hashbrowns for breakfast (or basically any time - I love the potato), but whenever I did before, I always felt like I was in the beginning of kitchen utensil infomercials - "Are you tired of shredding potatoes - the OLD FASHIONED WAY?" and everything would be in black and white with some blurry, crooked camera angles, and I'd be struggling with a potato and a grater and there would be shreds of potato all over the counter and in my hair and I'd be crying and my fingers would be bloody nubs.

Anyway, we're movin' on up - we got a potato ricer, and a food processor plus some neato blades. Instead of squeezing shredded potato through some cloth, I can just use the ricer! And the food processor is AMAZING. Yesterday when it arrived, we were really excited and decided to try something in there right away, so I cut an apple in half and we stuck it in there and turned it on... and it DISAPPEARED. And in its place was a neat little stack of sliced apples. It reminded me of THESE KNIVES! "It FELL through that onion, man."

NY Times Chocolate Chip Cookies
I read about this recipe on some blogs, like NotMartha (who is not only in Seattle, but also in the SOUTH END aka my part of town), and decided to try when C. requested my next cookies have chocolate chips. I mixed the whole recipe up in the new food processor, and made one half with dark and one half with milk chocolate. Have not actually baked these yet, the dough is currently chillin' (LITERALLY, HEY-O!) in the refrigerator. I don't like this business of chilling the dough for 24+ hours... when I make cookies, I want some now, not tomorrow! Hey, right now it is tomorrow though, so maybe I will go do some baking.

Patience, dough... your time will come.