Thanks to my friend Mary, I’ve learned that you try to undercook brownies, so I did on this batch I made this morning. Dropping the cooking time from 30-35 minutes to about 28 minutes gives a nice, chewy texture. Also, if 1/2 teaspoon of Chipotle power is too much, try dropping it to 3/8 teaspoon. I did that today and it gives just the right taste.
In any case, some of the brownies were “fallen soldiers,” so that means I got to taste-test a few 
Merry Christmas!
So there’s this awesome cook / master of decoupage named Lydia Reichardt who runs a little BLOG called Lydia’s Cozy Corner which features all sorts of awesomely awesome food and arts/crafts stuff. I met this amazing talent through Brittany (childhood friends), and she features a bunch of entries which are step-by-step How-To’s for us who need a little more than text to follow. In that vein, I found a great recipe for Chocolate Chipotle Brownies that I wanted to try. Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I took pictures and such. So, Lydia? I hope I didn’t embarrass myself too badly…
So, before I start: Chipotle… peppers? With brownies? Yeah. See… a lot of South American cultures mixed chocolate with spicy peppers to create some wonderful concoctions. Since I love spice and I love brownies, I figured this was a no brainer. There. The back-story to show you I’m not completely insane. Anyway… we need to look at the ingredient list:
Cool. Now, heat the oven up to 325 degrees (that’s fahrenheit, kids… you Europeans should do the calculations your damn selves). The recipe states to now line an 8″ square baking pan with foil for easy cooking/removal of brownies, but I had a better idea…
I don’t know if any of you have seen this type of pan before, but ya know when you get a center-cut brownie? There’s no crispy edges? Yeah… this pan guarantees at least 2 crispy edges (if you cut 12, equal-sized brownies) per brownie. Awesome, no? I also got myself a double-boiler top, forgetting that I had a decent-sized metal bowl I could have McGyver’d into a double-boiler. Eh… now I have the tools for the job.
In any case, I like to get everything ready ahead of time, so I laid out my butter, chocolate, and I combined some of my dry material (brown sugar, cinnamon, chipotle, and salt) into a container for easy dumping:
Before you ask, no… I don’t lay everything out so nicely and neatly every time I cook. I needed some decent pictures for you. Quit yer bitchin!
So, now the recipe asks me to heat up some water in a pot to simmering (I assume that a rolicking boil is just too hot, but I’m a guy… what do I know?), and then start to melt the butter and chocolate inside the double-boiler.
It doesn’t take too long to get things moving and, as someone who has tried to melt chocolate & butterscotch chips in a saucepan before, using something like this is SOOOOO much easier. I couldn’t believe that chocolate could scorch and taste so burned… it can. Trust me. In any case… the right tool for the job. Got it:
Okay… now that the butter and chocolate have been sufficiently melted (but not burned), it’s time to remove it from the heat and whisk in the dry stuff I set aside earlier:
I mixed everything in, and then I started adding the eggs:
Add them 1 at a time, whisking them into the mixture, and, when all 3 have been added, add the vanilla to the mix. Whisk for another 2 minutes, until the batter is smooth, and then add the flour and mix until everything is blended together in a gorgeous, gooey mess. Of course, now is the part a lot of people love: adding the chocolate chips!
Drop ‘em in, and mix everything together. Notice the artistic shot of the chocolate chips falling into the mixture. I am that damned good. Seriously. Okay… we’ve added almost every ingredient (sharp-eyed people don’t see the confectioner’s sugar playing a role. Just wait), so it’s time to pour the chocolatey-gooey stuff into my brownie pan of doom.
If you’re using a square pan, make sure to tilt the pan to get the mixture in every corner of the thing. SinceI am using the labyrinthian brownie pan, I used a spatula-type thing to make sure it was equally distributed:
Bake this thing! Look at 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick stuck into the center of the brownie pan comes out with only a few “moist crumbs” attached. I think I might have overcooked mine juuust a bit, but it was okay:
Now, let it cool, and start using that confectioner’s sugar to sprinkle over the top. When you’ve done that, start cutting that bad boy!
Since I am using my department as guinea pigs, I managed to make it look as pretty as a straight-man could, and I put them in a nice container to bring to work. Feel free to plate them as you deem necessary.
Now… I would HIGHLY recommend going to the site I got the recipe from and using those instructions as they are written MUCH clearer than mine. I was trying to be informational AND funny, but sometimes that doesn’t work. The last thing I want is someone to get violently ill from me forgetting an ingredient. It was a fun little experiment and I had a brownie (obviously) after I cut them up. It was good, but I think, maybe, a little dry. Then again, what do I know? In any case, the chipotle taste (smoky and spicy) does really give you a cool aftertaste, something you’d never really expect from a brownie. I would recommend giving it a try… just once. Never stick with the old, tried-and-true without taking a chance on something fun, right?
So… how’d I do?
I make no secret of the fact that I watch much television. I have a wealth of pointless trivia locked in my head from shows living in bygone eras, and I’ll probably continue to watch television until it dies or I die. That being said, I have a reputation (with 2 friends, at least) of picking new shows to watch which soon fall prey to the Grim Reaper of Cancellation. While it’s actually not been that true lately, it was for a long time. This little entry isn’t about my talent for picking losers, however… No, this one is about what happens when a show just becomes too bad to watch.
If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you’ll know that our adaptive unconscious allows us to make educated, snap-decisions about things which might usually require hours or more of intense thought. For example, if we cross the street and a truck is bearing down on us, we have a bunch of options. Our adaptive unconscious, the reason why we actually survived in the wild for so long, tells us “Schmuck! Get the hell out the way!” and we jump to the side without really thinking about it. I have sort of done the same thing with my media-habits. Within a minute or two (usually a commercial length), I can tell whether I give a damn or not. Those that I do, I watch. Those I don’t are relegated to the scrap-heap of ignorance.
So what happens when I pick a show based on a commercial, say “I’m giving this a shot,” and it gets bad? Well… in the case of NBC’s Knight Rider remake, I watched the television-movie / backdoor pilot, watched a few of the episodes, and then deleted it from my FauxVo. Why? It was God-awful! It was actually pretty easy for me to do this because I wasn’t emotionally invested. Same thing happened to the equally-horrible 90210 on The CW (if you’re wondering, I blame Jal. We used to watch all that crap and then discuss it). These were two shows which, while promising due to ties from the past, fizzled and died in my eyes. I tossed them aside, and won’t watch them again.
Now… there are certain shows that are pretty good in the first season (or two… or three) and then die. What happens then? Up until this year, I basically said “I’ve put energy into watching these, I’m going to keep watching them.” This year, however, has been pretty hectic for me. Now I find myself DVRing a lot of shows, and staying up watching the replays. It’s gotten to the point that there’s too much else to do, so I can’t bring myself to watch the crappy episodes anymore, so I made the decision to delete the backlog AND the season pass on the box. The two shows that just got bad / boring? CSI: Miami (bad) and Without a Trace (boring).
I love CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: NY because, well… they’re good and I like the actors. CSI: Miami has gotten sooooooo bad and David Caruso has gotten soooooo annoying that he’s bled off onto the rest of his castmates. I learned to hate the character of Delko. I learned to hate the character of Wolfe. I even learned to hate Calleigh (and that sucks because she’s hot and shows decent cleavage). I never once liked the character of Boa Vista. Caruso’s Caine just got more and more cartoonish, so I can’t bring myself to waste another 43 minutes of my life watching his dead delivery of lines, acting like everything is of such dire, dramatic importance. Oh, and if he doesn’t like his sunglasses, why use them? If you took a shot every time he took the things off and put them back on? You’d be dead of alcohol poisoning within the hour.
Without a Trace is a show that steadily got worse over the years. It survived numerous day/time changes, but this season I basically look at it like “Why do I care?” The characters seem to be sleeping their way through each case and each case is yet another variation on a theme (can’t complain about that too much… it IS a missing-persons procedural, after all!). I honestly can’t tell you when I realized that I was bored to tears with this show, but lately I have been dreading watching it. Finally, I snapped after a “case” where a female doctor went missing. I was sitting on the couch, mired in complete apathy. I can’t remember how it ended, but I’m pretty sure I deleted it.
There’s definitely shows out there that are too boring to live, but I stuck with them for a long time. I hate to say it, but I am feeling Lost is getting there too. The only saving grace for that show is that I know it is ending soon, so it would be a shame to bow out of the race with the finish line in sight. Oh, one show I wish I stopped watching WELL before it was done? The Sopranos. The first season or two was fantastic. Everything after it bored me to tears.
Ah well… I know there’s gonna be more bad shows that I’m going to make the mistake of watching for a bit. At least now I know that I don’t have to force myself to choke down every episode!
I wrote a quickie about 10 minutes ago, but my mind has unclenched, and I think I can do a much better job now.
We live in a world where people idolize and emulate others. Be they parents, older siblings, friends, or, most likely, some form of celebrity, we tend to copy fashions and mannerisms to become the very best person we can, not realizing that we aren’t becoming the best person we can be, but the worst copy of someone we think is worth it. Our society tells us that, just because people are being captured by cameras every day, they are worthy of our idealizing. Unfortunately, as with many things, our minds don’t think about who we are copying, but only that If they are important enough to be followed by a throng of photographers, they must be worth it!
With that in mind, we also have people who we may not idolize, but adore; we don’t try to emulate them, but there is just something that we feel connects us to them (whether it’s creepy-stalker or just a normal affinity). Those people are the epitome of accessibility, and we feel as close to them as we might to an everyday friend. Those people who live in the spotlight are featured in many, many photographs which capture split-seconds of their lives to be immortalized forever. It is through those photographs that we remember and picture them.
Bettie Page, the undisputed pin-up queen of the 1950s, died Thursday night, 9 days after suffering a debilitating heart-attack. Those people who think of Bettie Page do not now, or will they ever, picture an 85 year old woman. We will never see the gray hair and wrinkles. We won’t imagine her in a hospital bed. We will picture her like people picture Kurt Cobain or John Kennedy: through the lens of a camera. There was no aging for Bettie Page, just like Kennedy will forever be young and waving to the crowds of Americans. As a matter of fact, Bettie Page tried her damnest to keep herself out of the public eye because she specifically wanted people to remember her as she was.
She inspired legions of women to be strong and sexy. She is practically the patron saint for rollergirls and Suicide Girls alike (and, before you start sputtering… they aren’t girls who commit suicide). For guys like me, she was larger than life and was able to reach out of the television or magazine, across the decades, and capture our imaginations. From the first picture I saw of her (winking, wearing only a Santa hat, hanging a Christmas ball on a tree), I was smitten. I am not embarrassed to say it; I am willing to bet that there are many men from the oldest to today’s teens who are just as enamored as I was.
In any case, Bettie Page has passed on from her 85 year old life, but still remains perfectly twenties in countless pictures. There’s not going to be an image of a sick, frail, grey-haired woman in a hospital bed that people will remember and eulogize… it’s going to be any one of those scads of pictures that was Bettie. Sometimes letting go of the past is good, but sometimes it is exactly what we shouldn’t do to honor someone’s memory.
I won’t lie… I don’t think I’ve had an original idea. Face it… neither have you. All of our thoughts seem to exist in the ether, a shared consciousness from which we can draw what we need, and then we leave the rest be for another time. Every television show, movie, book, song, poem, et cetera… they’re all variations on the same theme. Some people call this the “monomyth” whereas others call it the “Ur-Story,” but in essence, it means that we all try to lend our own spin to the same tale.
I bring all of this up because I see the infectious idea of BLOGging reaching far into the world. I first wrote a journal entry way back on May 8th, 2002. I originally started just ranting about things that pissed me off (my… how far have I come?), but on April 7th, 2004 (at the urging of several people), I ended up just chronicling the daily minutia of my life. Depending on which anniversary you wish to recognize, I’ve been at this endeavor for either 6+ or 4+ years; either way… that’s a lot of words I’ve written.
When I first started, not many people I knew actually BLOGged. Not to be obnoxious and arrogant, but I think I started a lot of people down that path. Some of us had our doubts in the beginning (Why on Earth would someone want to actually read about my day?), but we persevered. Now, I see people who have been inspired by people who have been inspired by me starting BLOGs. Scary, eh?
So why do we BLOG? Why are we all drinking from the Kool-Aid trough of conformity? Are we arrogant? Do we think people actually hang on every word or syllable coming from our fast fingers? I don’t actually know… but I still do it when the muse decides to hit me just right. It really is catharsis for me. I can honestly say that, in the 6 years I’ve written my take on the world on the internet, there have been 2 posts I’ve written which are no longer out there for public consumption. I made those decisions after careful deliberation and thoughts of my “fans” crying hypocrisy, but, in all eventuality, this is my BLOG and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. You’re not going to walk into someone’s home and start rearranging furniture, are you? No. In any case, I do my best to stay true to my BLOGging ideal: Say whatever the hell I want, however the hell I want and try not to cause anyone to kill themselves over it.
Sure, the vacuum of air created by those of us who have become too busy or too beaten down is filled every minute with another pseudo-intellectual hack trying to purport themselves as worthy of your time, or, worse yet, the void is crammed full of kids telling us about their drunken sexploits; those of us who care (who really do care) will always come back for more though. I’m not referring to myself as an originator… not at all. I’m merely yet another thread of the collective unconscious trying to get noticed. That being said, however, I do feel that I’ve got a lot to say and it’s got a lot of substance to it. I’ve tried my best to get away from the “Hey, I woke up and had a great dream. Then I had an awesome breakfast” type entries. Sure, I’ll be more than happy to share narratives, but only if they serve a point. I’m sure Kim & Karen are happy to see the “old” me come back because, as they’ve both said, “happy Bill was boring.”
So… in conclusion (which is trite, cliched, and hackneyed… I know), to all you newbies to the BLOGosphere out there? Don’t stop doing what you’re doing, but take it from me: You’re not changing the world. You’re a variation on a theme… just like me and the people who inspired me. Don’t get all self-important and you just might gain some valuable perspective.