A Sugary Update

My Eurocrem craving has been sufficiently placated (for the time being):

I showed my mom around the Asian Market yesterday, and besides getting another package of cookies and that jar of Eurocrem I had been eyeing, I also found a Eurocrem candy bar! I am officially addicted. [:

Also, I made cookies with my friend today! Or rather, I made cookies while he held the cookbook for me. ;) I tried a new recipe from my Nestle cookbook called "Jumbo 3-Chip Cookies"-usually we only have semi-sweet chips at my house, but we had a bag of white chocolate♥ chips in the cupboard, so I decided to combine! The recipe called for milk choc. chips as well, but I think milk chocolate is a bit overrated (plus I didn't feel like buying a bag of them), so I just modified the recipe a bit and they turned out GREAT. They're much bigger than the cookies I usually make (it called for 1/4 cup scoops!!! instead of the usual rounded tablespoonfuls). They turned out just like the cookies from Paradise Bakery & Mrs. Fields'-now I know their secrets! (Use both granulated & brown sugars, less salt, and larger scoops of dough.) Mwaha.

...I blog about sweets a lot, don't I? 0:)

If I were a rich man...I'd buy a lifetime supply of Eurocream-filled cookies.

I have book/movie/music cravings the way people crave certain foods. I have to be in just the right mood to read/watch/listen to something, or else I can't enjoy it. Well, tonight I had a sudden and random desire to watch Fiddler on the Roof, so now I'm watching it while typing this and trying not to burst out into song. ♥

There's this pottery place called As You Wish near my house. Basically it works as follows: you pay a fee to sit at a table, then you choose a blank ceramic piece from their collection (items range from the useful-such as bowls and pen holders-to the decorative-including kittens and mermaids). Then you grab some paint and paintbrushes and get to work! When you're finished, you pay for your piece and leave it with them. They fire it in their kiln, and you go back two days later to pick up your newly-glazed, shiny item! It's a lot of fun.

I prefer to spend money/time on things that won't just sit around collecting dust, so I chose a couple of tiles (to be used as coasters) to paint. At first I was just going to paint one, but as my idea evolved I realized it wasn't going to fit on one tile, haha. It took me at least two hours to paint (arts & crafts + perfectionism = a terrible thing) but it was worth it! I think it turned out really cute. They're not attached, btw; it's just that the full design can only be seen when they're placed side-by-side.

Okay. So there's this grocery store about 10 minutes from my house, creatively called "Asian Market", that sells imported goods-mostly Asian food items (imagine that!) but also some things from Europe. Well, I'd been wanting to go there for quite some time and my friend finally got me to go. As soon as I stepped in the door, I knew: I'd found My Place. Home. Heaven. Whatever you want to call it. Imported goods, far as the eye can see! Edible imported goods!

Well, we were there to get snacks to sneak into the movie theatre (I usually don't condone rule-breaking, but no way am I paying $10 for crappy movie theatre food. If I'm going to eat junk food, it's going to be delicious and cheap, by golly!) So we went straight to the snack food aisles, and I fell in love. After much browsing (and drooling), I laid my eyes on this [above] package, and I knew I'd found the perfect snack. Cookies w/chocolate filling, not made by Nabisco? Heck yes.

But the packaging was nothing compared to the taste of these babies. One bite during the previews and I was hooked. I'm-moving-to-Europe-to-be-closer-to-the-source-of-this-goodness-hooked. The cookie wafers themselves had a nice flavor, but it was the chocolatey cream (Eurocream, which, I found out, is like Nutella but 1,000,000,000,000,000...etc. times better) combined with the crunchy cookie texture that got me. I will never call another cookie delicious again.

Yes, I did just spend most of my blog ranting about imported cookies. ¬_¬;; No regrets...next time I go to the Asian Market I'm buying a jar of Eurocream and as many packages of those cookies as I can afford. They're made in Serbia, btw. Guess the Balkans know how to please the taste buds! Usually I steer clear from pre-made/packaged cookies (I figure if I'm going to take in a ton of calories, they're going to be made by me in my own kitchen where no preservatives are added), but for these I shall definitely make an exception. [/rant]

...Drat, now I want some of those cookies. Well, I have class in the morning so I'd better get some rest.

Adieu!

Oh, the videos I miss out on...

This makes me sad:

That is all.

Friendship on Memorial Day

Friends.

I am so grateful for them. Without them, my life would be utterly dull and glum.

For instance, who else would I have *owned* at Monopoly this afternoon?

For who else would I stay up 'till 2am baking a cheesecake?

Who else could I shake my head at for playing too many video games, yet at the same time borrow a PS2 controller & game from? (I'll always be a gamer at heart.)

Thank You, Lord, for bringing them into my life. (:♥

Happy Memorial Day, by the way! May those who have died fighting for our country rest in peace, and may those who have in the past or are currently serving to protect their countries from harm (no matter where in the world they live/come from) be blessed. [...Amen.]
　

Dogs and Oven Usage

This is Leo. I'm babysitting (dogsitting?) him for my friend while she's in Oklahoma for a week. I am his regular babysitter whenever she goes out of town, so Leo is used to me & my family's house. All right, so that's a bit of an understatement: the dog loves me. He follows me EVERYWHERE. He won't even go to bed until I do. Good thing he's so cute and sweet or else I'd find this extremely annoying. (I'm a cat person and usually don't warm up to dogs too much, but Leo and Fred [my family's dog] are some of the few exceptions.)

In other news...after hanging out at a friend's house all day, watching chick flicks and getting majorly owned at Batman Monopoly (seriously, I mortgaged all of my properties and still went bankrupt...) I went home to the beginnings of rain! ♥

Rain and clouds are my favorite type of weather, probably due to the fact that I don't see them more than a handful of days each year. So I was very cheerful this evening and decided to do some baking (since no one was available to go to the Cheescake Factory & devour overpriced-yet-delicious cheesecake with me). After some thought I settled on a recipe for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies from my trusty Nestle cookbook. I tweaked it a bit (they never add enough cinnamon in their recipes...and there's no such thing as too much cinnamon!) and they turned out pretty good. Want to see?

They taste better than they look, really.

And since I'm on the topic of baking...for Mother's Day a couple weeks ago I decided at the last minute to make breakfast in bed for my mom, and I found a recipe for blueberry buckle (basically coffee cake w/ blueberries in it) online. I had never made coffee cake from scratch before; I'd always relied on the Bisquik box recipe (which is never quite sweet enough for my taste), so I was excited to try this recipe out. Well, let me tell you, it was AMAZINGly delicious. There's nothing like fresh blueberries to spruce up a recipe.

I ate it for breakfast for the next few days...I think I ate more of it than anyone else, hehe...

Beautiful.

...And that is that.

Oh, by the way, I've a sad confession to make: I just now, after over a year of having this blog, realized that I don't have to use the html view when writing my blog post. ¬_¬;; Speak of this to no one...

No sleep + BBC = fun times

2 posts in less than 12 hours?! I couldn't fall asleep, so apparently my muses are on hyperdrive.

But really, I was perusing the BBC's news site and stumbled across an article on England's summer weather (which apparently is typically very wet and cool-one word: ENVY) and I was reminded of the reason I read the BBC in the first place:

"The very notion of cramming Wimbledon, Ascot, Henley, the Lord's Test match, hundreds of church fetes, and thousands of back-garden barbecues into the second half of June is clearly an act of extreme provocation. Is it any wonder that Mother Nature cannot resist?" -http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7561411.stm

Subtle yet clever. Or it could just be that I'm really, really tired. At any rate, I'd have to dig around for quite awhile to find that sort of humour on CNN, MSNBC, and the like.

Anyway...off to sleep for real this time.

Peachy-keen

Aaaaaaah. I'm so terrible at posting here. Even though no one reads this blog, I still feel bad for neglecting it. So, let us begin again...

The spring semester is [finally!!!] over. Unfortunately I didn't do too well in one of my classes so I have to take it over again. :( That's never happened to me before; I've always been a straight-A student. But this semester I kind of fell off the bandwagon I guess. Oh well, I don't mind taking it again if it means I can get a better grade and fix my GPA. Though the thought of sitting through a lab every week again makes me... *twitch*

Anyways, so I'm going to take a summer class (different course) so that I can retake that other class in the fall without overloading my semester.

I saw the new Star Trek movie 2 times in less than a week, even though I am the furthest thing from a trekkie possible. It was well-made: good plot, fast-paced action, great graphics, and best of all a good cast. I haven't enjoyed an action/sci-fi/fantasy/superhero-type movie that much in years.



On Sunday I went to a local peach orchard with my aunt, nana and cousin to [you guessed it) pick peaches. We tried to get there early to avoid the heat as much as possible, though of course this is the Southwest so avoiding the heat is like a fish avoiding water. (At least at this time of year.) Anyway, the peaches were really cheap ($1.75/lb) so we picked about 25 lbs in all.



It was a lot of fun, and afterwards we went to a pancake breakfast (still @ the orchard/farm) and waited in line for about 45 minutes to consume gigantic frisbee-sized pancakes. They were delicious, but we definitely had to share them (Half of one filled me up plenty.)



Then yesterday I went out to breakfast with my cousin @ IHOP and our waiter hadn't come around for awhile, so he told me how one time at a restaurant his waiter left without telling anyone to take over the table. So we finished eating and sat around twiddling our thumbs, looking around, and our waiter still didn't show up. So we finally signaled another waiter and told him our waiter hadn't come around in awhile, and you know what he told us? He went home because he was having back pains. Now, if you leave in the middle of your shift, shouldn't you maybe get someone to take over for you?!? Unbelievable...at least the food was good. -_-

Later he drove me home, and we had to endure a 45-minute drive on the freeway in his car without a/c. In the hottest part of the day. I nearly died. x_x

So that's the latest of my exciting life adventures.

And now, off to bed!