Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda wants to have cupcakes for her birthday party at school next month, so Mommy decided to do a test run today. They made cupcakes baked in ice cream cones. They were frosted with a marshmallow cream frosting that turned out to be a nightmare to work with. But the final result was still nice.

Today we went down to Leisure World to see the family for Christmas dinner. We brought the tamales that we made, as well as Lucinda, who was quite excited at the prospect of getting lots of presents from her relatives. We ate ourselves into oblivion. It was fun.

You can see all the pictures from the day at http://www.1134.org/gallery/xmas2004

…and sometimes it doesn’t. My experiment with Cochinita Pibil was a mixed bag. The flavor was quite nice, but I used the wrong cut of pork. So it was dry. So next time, I need to use a different cut.

Tomorrow is our office holiday party, and I’m the organizer. So I decided to try out a new recipe. It’s Cochinita Pibil. I’ve had this at Border Grill and it’s good. So I decided to try it myself. I found the annatto seeds and I ground them up to make the achiote paste. So here is the pork marinating, just waiting to be cooked tomorrow. When I write programs I usually start with a single comment at the top that says something like “I hope this works”, so here it is:

/* I hope this works */

This morning, I got up and started making tamales with the meat I cooked last night. This is our first time making home-made tamales. Lucinda and Cathy made some, but I made most of them. I felt like I was getting ethnic, even though none of us here is even remotely Mexican. Note the use of the Chinese bamboo steamer for the tamales. Then, after they were steamed, we had them for lunch just so we could try them out. They were quite good.

We tried another brownie recipe today. This time it’s the Quick & Easy Fudgey Brownies. They are pretty good. Lucinda liked them a lot. But they are still not quite the recipe I’m looking for. I’m still looking for something a bit heavier and darker.

So today was the big Thanksgiving feast. This morning, I started out by baking the olive bread that I made last night. Then it was time to put the turkey in the oven to cook while I made potatoes and rapini. But there was a bit of a crisis when we discovered that the cooking bags had been misfiled, and the bag we had wasn’t ‘Turkey Size’. So I got on my bike and rode up to the grocery store. And they were out of the big cooking bags. But I found some in a carton on the top of the shelf, so the crisis was averted. By 1:00 everything was ready. We snacked a bit on the olive bread before the main meal. Then we all stuffed ourselves. The potatoes au gratin were a big hit.

After dinner, I pulled out the chocolate cake I made yesterday. Who needs pumpkin pie when there’s chocolate cake with mousse frosting?

Getting ready for the Holiday here. Last night, I made herbed olives and cranberry sauce. Today I got out early from work, so I came home and got started in the kitchen. First I made a chocolate cake. The “Deep Dark Chocolate Cake” from the Hershey’s cookbook. Then, while the two layers were cooling, I made the stuffing. After that was done, I made dough for two loaves of Olive Bread. This will be served before dinner with the herbed olives that I made last night.

After all this, the cake rounds were cool enough to frost. So I made a chocolate mousse to use as filling and frosting. Lucinda helped a bit here, as she wanted to get dibs on the bowl when I was done. So now we have bread dough and a cake in the refrigerator, stuffing and olives in our neighbor’s refrigerator, and we’re ready for the Main Event tomorrow.

We tried a new brownie recipe this evening. It was quite good.