So, this morning I wake up (at daybreak, it seems) and I decide to go for round 2 of “Nat needs to learn how to cook”.  I go into the kitchen and I see that I still have a half a container of fresh Blueberries that I bought at the Farmer’s Market.  I decide then that I need to use them this morning.  Initally, I go straight for the Bisquick and figure that I will just put the blueberries in a batch of bisquick and make instant pancakes.  WRONG.

I then remember that I bought our old roommate a waffle iron for Christmas 2 years ago that is still here in the box (never opened).  I think about it for about 5 minutes and then I decide to wipe the dust off of the box and tear it open.  At this point,  I am still going to use the Bisquick, but instead of skillet pancakes, I will make instant waffles.  I open the instruction manual (becuase of course I have NEVER used or seen a waffle iron used up close) and discover that they have recipes in it.  I look at the basic blueberry waffle recipe and decide right then that i am going to make the darn things from scratch.  Who needs Bisquick?

Round 2 of cooking goes pretty well (in my opinion).  Made from scratch waffles are easy and quasi-quick. No biggie.  I did get a little over-zealous toward the end and when i was adding the blueberries to the waffle iron, I decide to toss some banana slices on, too.  Banana/Blueberry waffles sounded good, too.  Well, small snag in that plan.  The bananas did not sink into the batter very well and when I went open the lid, the whole banana peices were melted and stuck to the lid rather than baked into the waffles.  Now I know.  This cookin’ from scratch business is not too bad (so far).

I will let you know how round 3 goes. bye for now.

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I never go to see movies in the theater, but this week I saw 2 and I wanted to take the time to let you know what I thought about them in case my readers (that’s you) were in the mood to go to the theater.

Earlier this week, my roommate got free passes to the preview of the movie “Julie and Julia” that comes out in August.  It is based on the book of the same name by Julie Powell.  Julie is stuck in a dead end job and a rut in her life.  She loves to cook and she decides to take Julia Child’s cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and cook 524 recipes in 365 days.  She starts a blog for the whole process and it rejuvenates her life completely.  The movie was stunning.  It splits between Julie’s project and Julia’s adventure actually writing the cookbook.  Julia Child is portrayed by Meryl Streep and Julie by Amy Adams.  Meryl Streep was amazing as Julia Child!  I give it 2 thumbs up.  It is probably classified a “chick flick”, but there were a good amount of men in the audience that seemed to be enjoying it.  Check it out.

Then, today we decided to go see the matinee showing of the newest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I blogged  recently about how I excited I was about it’s release.  It was worth the wait!  I might go out on a limb and say that it was one of my favorites of the Harry Potter movies.  It was great.  I am might be wearing rose colored glasses, because I love the whole series so much, but I think that even if you are not an avid HP fan, you can enjoy this movie, too.  It has some sad stuff going on, but I also found myself laughing quite a bit.  Give it chance.  I think that you will enjoy it, too.

Well, I hope that this post has helped you lean towards these movies if you want to get out of the house to see a flick.

bye for now

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Today I decided to do something that I had never done before.  I decided to bake (from scratch).  My recipe of choice was a Peach Cobbler, because I bought beautiful peaches at Pepper Place over the weekend.  I chose a recipe that I watched on Food Network last weekend, because of course they made it look like child’s play.  Well, this child didn’t want to play about half way through it.

In the beginning, the experience was going really well.  The filling turned out AMAZING.  I was pumped.  Then, it came to the dough (which from now on I will refer to as the bane of my existence).  I was moving right along:  adding a cup of this, a dash of that and so forth.  When it came time to knead the dough and form it, it went downhill!  It was sticky and uncooperative!  I finally decided that it was too warm and I stuck in the freezer thinking that maybe if I cooled it down, it would act right.  After a few minutes, I put flour on my hands, the board and the dough.  It helped my sticky problem enough to form something near what it was supposed to be (at least enough for me to drape it on the filling and be done with it).

Well, the creation is in the oven now.  We will have to see how it turns out, but I am not expecting too much.  This will definitely NOT be the last time that I bake.  I will get this down (hopefully soon).

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