Russo-riffic

Happy Thursday! I think I should do some writing after this, because I'm noticing my typing is not all it used to be. I keep hitting random things and generally misspelling things in quite a shocking manner. It must be related to the brain thing I'm sure I have where I'm starting not to be able to speak properly anymore. Must be.

Last weekend I baked cookies. And do you know why! Because I took them to Pasadena to share with Beth and then on to Azusa to share with Sam and Gareth! Sam was in Evita at school, which was wonderful. The kids are seniors now, how the time flies. (Beth is still a senior. :<)

Spent the night at Beth's place, which was great because she is in walking distance of both Pasadena's Famima!!s. In fact, we went to both on Saturday. Pasadena is like a polite, small scale version of LA, and I wish I lived there. One day, one day.

I made maple cookies for them, which is my go-to guy for falltime snacks. I'll make you some. I ended up flipping through the trusty Betty Crocker book for additional autumnal treats, and I bookmarked so many things. Holidays, beware!

The other day, for instance, I was going to make a pumpkin bread. But the only can of pumpkin we had was way too big, so I was going to go to the store to buy a more manageable one. What the heck, I thought, if I'm going to the store, I should pick up stuff for dinner. It's my day off!

So I flicked through Betty's yellowed pages and settled on a "quick and easy" hamburger stroganoff. I took to the internet to figure out what culture stroganoff came from, and what sort of side dishes were appropriate. Long story short, I also made latkes (potato pancakes), "Russian potato salad," Russian tea and Russian tea cakes.

They were all some of the best things I've ever made. Particularly I recommend to you the potato salad, because it was surprisingly delicious and also very simple. It's like regular potato salad only it's got cucumbers and pickles and carrots (boiled) and ham. Next time I'll try it with a sausage product. And it was also good with just a dash of mustard.

Russian tea cakes aka Mexican wedding cakes are also simple and simply amazing. I'm sure you're all familiar with them at least visually--they are round and covered in powered sugar. I plan on making color-coded flavors for Christmastime. Like minty green ones and so forth.

Geeze, I'm starting to think I should have a foodie blog instead of this, huh.

But I never did make that pumpkin bread. Today, though, I made us walk out to Big Wave Dave's Pumpkin Patch (which transforms into Big Wave Dave's Christmas trees after Thanksgiving). They'd mailed us a coupon for a free pumpkin, so how could we not! The free one he said was good eating pumpkin, so perhaps we'll get that bread yet.

I've run out of tv-on-dvd, so I watched two movies today. I didn't love them. I think the problem with me and movies is that I don't love movies. It has to be a very specific sort of movie for me to even enjoy it. I go into every movie expecting it to be terrific, and when it's just average, I'm usually disappointed. If it's not terrific, I feel like I'm wasting my time--unless it's so bad it's great. But mostly they're average, and that saddens me.

APPALOOSA is not average, but it's not so bad to be great. It's just regular bad.

I don't think I'm going to review HEROES for you anymore. It's...not worth anyone's time. :/

FLASHFORWARD continues to irritate me. My biggest UGH--NO moment this week (which unfortunately lasted for most of the episode) was when the German guy said in his flash forward he was having breakfast. Except that the flash.......oh my. Now I'm going to apologize to the show, and then gripe about the same thing again. Except the flash forward happened at 11 AM Pacific Standard Time, so it wouldn't be morning in Germany-----except everyone in LA's flashes were at night. So I suppose the time frame they saw could be 9AM German time, and like midnight LA time. EXCEPT the other one was on a beach in Hawaii during the day, and it wouldn't be afternoon in Hawaii if it were midnight in LA. SO THERE. AND. It couldn't even be all the same day, because 8PM in Hawaii and 9AM German would be two separate days, not April 29th. But I guess they think that LA and Germany have the same day, as the agents in both places were carrying on phone conversations with each other at the same time of day. And if you think that was a lot of words on one subject, just imagine all the other little things I have words for. It irritates me.

Well that's enough griping for today. Come over some time and I'll make you dinner.

-Steph