Saturday 22 October 2011

Keeper

Many a times, I tend to complain about the hubby and certain actions he commits and makes me question what I was thinking the day we wedded.  Other times, I am head over heels and am so thankful for the man that I have in my life.

I'm having one of the good times.

So my lover is a firefighter.  Unlike many other married couples, where they sleep together every night in the same bed, I get that every other day.  See, because their occupation consists of them saving other people's lives and to be on call whenever a "stranger danger" type deal happens.  Their occupation requires that they reside at their job place for at least 24 hours.  Which means, my husband goes to work at 7am in the morning, and does not return until 8am the next morning.  Yay me.

So anyways, today is the man's off day.  Being that it is normal for the wife to cook the husband dinner after a long day's work, every other morning I tend to my breakfast cooking duties for my hungry firefighter.

Today's an exception and I got lucky.    Being that it's my day off and it's a Saturday, I like to take advantage of that and sleep in and be lazy all morning.  It's only right.  And because my husband is so amazing, he made it happen.  What made it even better was that I didn't ask him to make breakfast, he did it on his own.

What was awesome was that he actually came home with a bag full of groceries and became iron chef.  He fried bacon, sausages, toasted bread, cooked eggs, and grilled some mushrooms and created a full english breakfast.  Fatty Girl is H.A.P.P.Y!


Today's technique that he used to create such a wonderful breakfast was move his tongs to the sound of loud music.  Whatever works for him, and if loud music helps him create such delish dishes like this...

...then more power to him.

Anyways, after seeing him set the table full of condiments and napkins placed pretty under silverware, I realized what a good guy I got....now if only he would just stop being annoying.....

Friday 21 October 2011

How to make an amateur look Professional

You gotta love lazy money hungry Americans!  Reals!  If it weren't for those 2 factors, illiterate cooking people, like me would never be able to bake or cook good looking and tasting food.

See, I have a past. Me and food never got along in the kitchen.   It was like an Ike and Tina relationship. Someone always left physically hurt.  And most of the time, I played the part of Tina.  Actually....make it  ALL the time.  But after I entered married world, my cooking has improved....but never really stayed consistent.  But I found that cooking with a handicap, AKA, using gadgets or concoctions that made cooking a lot more possible, my kitchen skills have thus improved.


So yeah, thanks to the Americans that are lazy and money hungry, I was able to make these yummy puppies, post it on Facebook, and look like I knew what I was doing::

Brownies with buried chocolate skeletons.  Sounds enticing doesn't it?  Tastes pretty damn good too.  


Knowing my cooking past,  I obviously did not make all this from scratch.  Because if I did, it WOULD look like scratch.  Chicken scratch....and possibly not only look but taste like shit as well.  FO' reals.  I mean, yeah, I am an artsy fartsy type of chick who loves nothing more but to create things from nothing with my hands and shizz like so, but when it comes to cooking,  all that creativity suddenly decides that it don't know me no more, and I am just weak sauce.  No pun intended.

Let me explain how I was able to pretend that I knew what the hell I was doing.

For the good tasting brownies, the magic that created those chocolate flufflies was Betty Crocker.  Nuff said.

Now for the good looks

Being that I work at the arts and crafts center on base now, my eyes have been opened to even more types of possibilities in creativity.  One being baking and making candy and stuff.

One of the most popular things that we sell, and seems to be hot shit right now are candy molds.  What they look like is this::



And what you do is this:



Pretty spiffy, I think.  Also, looks pretty harmless as well...


And this is the packaging cover.  The selling point.  THIS picture right here not only made me "ooooh" and "aaaah" with delight, but it gave me ideas.  Ideas which were way over my head and  out of my league.  But because there was an, "everything in the store is 50% off" sale, I continued with my optimism and said, "what the hell, let's try it."



So I made it.....and above was the outcome.  Although the concept was really easy, Amy, being Amy, still made major boo boos during the process.  After successfully warming up the chocolate in the microwave, pretending I was on Martha Stewart status, I mixed the melted chocolate with a silicone spatula, poured the chocolate into a squeeze bag thingy, and copied the instructions.


This was the turn of events to follow my Martha Stewart mode:  I burned my hand from the hot chocolate in the bag, some black stuff popped out of the spout ( I have no idea where it came from),  I somehow burned something, because something smelled like it was burning, green chocolate started to infest our kitchen counters, broken skeleton limbs, and this.....


I simply gave up took the easy way out.  After creating 2 skeleton brownies, I simply took the remainder of the chocolate and just smeared them on top of the brownies.

I'm useless....but I'm trying, and being that this was my first time at using these candy molds, and considering the baggage in my cooking past, I think I did ok.  Also...I got a bit better at my smearing technique.

Once again, thank you America for helping this amateur pretend that she is a professional in something way out of her league.  My self esteem has been lifted because of you.



Tuesday 18 October 2011

Who needs coffee in the morning....

...When you have song like this to wake you up!
Please feel free to play this video whilst reading this blog...it makes it a lot more enjoyable.
Anyways, pretty ironically I woke up with the Folger's jingle in my head...therefore subliminally making me want coffee to liven up my still sleeping brain. Well....due to the fact that it was muy early, I have lazy tendencies, and I just plain didn't feel like it, I passed on that vote and decided to let a good shower do the trick. So I proceeded with my shower ritual. Turn on my Ipod in my room and peel off my sleepy time outfit. As I was sloooowlyyyyy pulling off my clothing layers, this song popped on. "The A Team" by Ed Sheeran. And you know what? I kid you not, my brain suddenly woke up, I felt like a fuzzy little kitten, and I was ready for a new day.
One of the things that I've always loved about England was the music. Ever since the days of 80's Brit pop, the land of the Queen got me. No matter what the music was about, it always had a happy beat. Like take this song for example, I had no idea that this song was about a woman addicted to cocaine until I watched the video. I thought it was a weh weh love song about what he loved about the woman he was jocking or something like that. It just sounded like a tune that would be about something as corny as such. I should have known better than that. The Brits are whitty and cool ass people that would never succumb to things cornbeef like that. They're too posh and hip for that type of beef.
So anyways, I suggest whenever you feel that extra umph in the morning, put some British in your music cup. It's way better than Folger's.

Monday 17 October 2011

Yes....

...I am still alive.  I just wanted to confirm that I am still kicking and breathing and that I do apologize for my long leave of absence.  I blame it on the 2 year anni trip that I took with the hubby back in August.  Because ever since then, my mind didn't feel like going into blogging mode.

Now, that I am  with sickness, stuck on the couch, doing nothing,  and I have the chance to channel my inner blogger, here I am, and here is my blog.

I must warn you however, this blog will not consist of anything with any steady content, rather, it's going to be a bit of cliff notes from the past few months that I went MIA.
With that said...here's what happened::

Me and the hubby celebrated our 2 years of happiness in Fes, Morocco.  There, we saw the beautiful and poo-poo (quite literally) smelling  tanneries, one of the many wonders I wanted to lay my eyes on.  This place is where they put extensive amounts of labor like


this

to make beautiful products like this.  
At this one tannery/leather shop, me and the main squeeze not only sprinkled some of our monetary greens in exchange for leather goodies like so, but because me and the man love meeting new people, the workers at the shop hooked it up with free leather shizz and created a friendship so meaningful, that we departed with sincere hugs and super kind words.  I will never forget Morocco.



After looking through pictures to post on the blog....I realized that there was so much more to talk about with Morocco....so please be prepared to read a blog about this beautiful place in the near future, although it's been so 3 months ago.  I like to bring things back into fashion.

The second part of our anni trip consisted of  a wonderful place called Amsterdam and a sick stomach poisoned with a fig. I will explain more in the latter Morocco blog.

Anywho...part 2 of the trip - Amsterdam.  Despite that fig messing up my insides, it did not mess up my good times mode over there.

We got to see the infamous Red Light district and all the naked prostitutes and perves that it holds.  I really wanted to take a picture of one of the women that posed behind windows like a lingerie mannequin in a shopping mall, but I was seriously scared that pimps were going to come up to me,  break my camera and then Bitch slap me after that.  I didn't feel like crying on this trip.  The redlight district also caused my mouth to hang everytime I saw a nasty perverted man enter the glass room that was soon hidden by a red curtain. All kinds of nasty thoughts ran through my head which made me shiver with disgust, but wanted to see what went on.  It was one of those kind of moments.  I also had to make sure that I didn't leave my mouth open too long.  Who knew what kind of diseases were floating around the air.


Then comes the 3rd part ::

Brugge
Not only did this place consist of the beautiful Cathedral that starred in the movie "In Brugge," but it produced all kinds of chocolate and hip increasing edibles.  I will be going back....after I lose the 5 pounds I gained from it.

One of the things that  me and my hubby have been doing quite frequently these past few months were being Carboot whores.  So much so, we got a bag especially for this Sunday Occasion:
And of course, we bought that bag at a carboot.  
One of the main reasons of our whoring around is to constantly update my PRETTYrubbish store.....

....aaaand also because we are penny pinching cheapies.  Hey....there's nothing wrong with that, plus, it's amazing what kinds of treasures you can find...and under retail price!

And then another thing that has been occupying my life is of course, the job force.  Although at the beginning of the past 3 months, I was working 2 jobs, one onbase, and another off base.  I am happy to day that I have quit the one off base.  Being a workaholic wasn't a blast in a glass, and I smile a lot more now.

A couple weeks ago, I just came back from the beautiful Bay Area, which I will forever call home.
I spent my time with my friends por vida, 
discovered that Gay clubs are the place to be, watched my beautiful cousin get locked dow- er I mean married :p
Eat the best tasting Tacos on a Tuesday, and just laughed, talked, caught up, and just be in the presence of most of the people I love and cherish.  

And now I'm all caught up with this blog up in herrrre and that was my past 3 months in a nutshell.  Hope you enjoyed catching up with me as much as I did sharing, see you on the next blog!

PEACE!