Chop Suey

I thought I would have more time to blog this last week, but student projects dictate my life right now.  We celebrated M’s birthday last weekend (though his birthday was actually during the week), and I tried a new recipe.  He doesn’t really have a sweet tooth (and I resent everyone who doesn’t), but if he does eat sweets, he enjoys peanut-butter-flavored goodies.  Since my friend Marina’s peanut butter cup pie got such raves at the AFA Annual Chili Cookoff, I decided to try that.

Have I mentioned before that I do not enjoy cooking/baking or anything else that takes place in the kitchen?  Have I also mentioned that I get stressed over anything new or unknown to me?  All that is to say that I don’t particularly enjoy the process of trying new recipes the first time or debuting my efforts at a party (even a small informal one).  There were a lot of phases to this recipe.

I screwed up right off the bat with the crust, which was painfully easy and wouldn’t have happened at all, had I read through the entire recipe carefully first.  Instead of using two cups of chocolate cookies (as called for), I processed the cookies first and used two cups of chocolate cookie crumbs.  I realized when I mixed in the vegan butter that I had made a huge error and had far, far too many cookie crumbs for the butter.  Since I’m cheap and refuse to waste cookie crumbs or Earth Balance, I just tried to manually adjust by removing about half the bread crumbs and adding in a little extra E.B.  It did not work very well, leaving us with an extremely crumbly crust that didn’t hold together well.  It tasted fine, and the taste of the finished pie as a whole was out of this world, but I was extremely irritated with myself for the screw up.

Most of my kitchen encounters end with some type of disaster—either a giant spill or a significant wound.  This time I went with the significant wound.  I was washing dishes between each phase of pie prep, as each layer needs time to cool and set.  While washing the food processor, the blade sliced through my thumb quite deeply, and it proceeded to bleed off and on for the next 2-3 days.  It’s finally sealed up and healing now. 

All that said, I really enjoyed the pie, though.  It was fantastic, and I will probably make it again.  It’s actually even healthy-ish as far as a dessert goes.   Beside the cookie crumb crust, it’s made from tofu, peanut butter, and some semi-sweet chocolate chips, with no added sugar.  It’s still very high calorie due to the tofu and peanut butter, but at least it’s not empty calories—there is some nutritional value there.  That made it easier for me to enjoy, since the guilt of consuming nutritionally devoid calories now takes away from my nomming pleasure.

The week brought some challenges, first with one of Daisy’s severe “episodes”.  We are still not totally sure what’s going on with her.  We’ve discussed it at length with our vet, and based on what we’ve described to him, our working theory is seizures.  If that’s the case, our only option would be to put her on preventive meds, which are very hard on her liver, so we are putting that off as long as possible.  Her episode occurred on Tuesday night, and she was still very shakey and unsteady on Weds morning.  The little spark in her eyes is gone when she’s suffering the post-episode phase; her tail droops; her ears droop; she is very confused, afraid, and clingy.  I had a very hard time leaving her home on Weds., because though she has Jezi and Chloe with her, and she loves them, she is very insecure when she can’t be with us when she has these episodes.  My Weds. morning class is a once-a-week class, though, so I didn’t feel like I could just cancel it and lose that time so late in the semester.  She did fine while we were gone—we hope she slept most of the time.  By Thurs. night, she seemed back to her normal spazzy, goofy self.

Additionally, I came home from classes this week to do my afternoon chores and found Vivi (guinea pig) dead.  She had been fine with no indications of illness, discomfort, or anything unusual.  She was fairly old for a piggy, but still. L  We’re fairly certain, based on where she was, etc., that it was quite sudden and she didn’t suffer.  Those little critters just don’t live long enough, and it’s so hard to take when they go.

L & I finished up Mark Danielewski's newest book, The Fifty Year Sword.  I LOVE House of Leaves (also by him) and consider it one of the top five fiction books ever.  TFYS is also unique and done in his "experimental fiction" style, but it was a short as HoL is long.  It was interesting, and I will probably read it again on my own, as I catch a lot more while reading independently that when I'm reading aloud and trying to keep track of voices and such.  It was good fiction, but somewhat disappointing in that I was hoping for another book I love passionately and need to reread every few years.  If I can ever get HoL back from Dej, I will read it again.  It's time.

We've switched back to this ancient, brittle compilation of creepy stories that we've been working through.  I got this book used--either at an AAUW sale or at a used book exchange (can't remember which)--when I was a teen and just loved it.  Dej also read through it and loved it, and now I'm sharing it with L.  We all really like the dark, thriller type of stories, and this compilation is full of the classics.  It was my first exposure to my all-time favorite short story in the world, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Today's cuteness is provided by the photos of Oliver (the most perfect cat ever) and of Poppy bird (front and center and now almost 14 months old) along with her parents, Hurley and Darwin.  They've remained very much a family unit, spending their time with each other, and often including Hurley's sister, Hazel.  I love their family togetherness.