Sunday, 31 July 2011. Or, “The Day we Macaroned to Victory”

I’d like to own that my first macaron attempt looked like this:

<<shudder>>.

Today would be different. Give me macarons or give me death!

It started like this:

Because of this:

Lookin’ good!:

Except Batch 1 did this:

Ookie. (at least it made feet):

So the team mobilised:

as Ivan made fresh pasta (baking is hard work):

Andrea set the table (*gorgeous* place!):

I pondered Batch 2′s cracks (verdict: underbaked):

and we rallied around the VICTORY frosting, either moving too fast to be caught on film or *after* a bottle of vinho verde… (spoiler: it was a *really* good wine…):

loverly!:

With the miracle of Batch 3… (perfeito!):

…and some of the darkest chocolate cupcakes (oh! And a little bubbly? Don’t mind if I do…), we’re foreshadowing triumph:

Andrea piped for Canada:

(and, actually, she hoped it was for the pleasure of Brazil):

Our efforts begat fabulosity:

and Ivan, as the representative of Team Brazil, declared it a win:

With that, I proclaim the month of July CLOSED. On a high note!

What are your August plans? I’m going to Machu Picchu. And the gym. But not in that order.

Thursday was a religious holiday in SP—Corpus Christi, in this case. That likely means something to the mostly-Catholic people of SP, but for we secular kids it meant that Wednesday night we watched foo-chee-bow (er, “football”) on TV and drank wine, slept in on Thursday (OK, I do *every* day—plus naps), and spent the rest of the day achieving one of the things on our list. So, pretty normal. This is all like a soothing balm to my dear departing Type A soul, as I learn to come down and not care so much about the details, lest I go quietly mad.

Our 1 thing? We drove and drove and drove on an abortive mission that led us to a mall that I was pretty sure that I, in my patched jeans and 8-year-old sandals, was probably too déclassé to enter… to buy a cookie sheet. I’ve started to notice something—my due diligence sucked, because Brazil is actually expensive. I was seduced by a currency that’s .61 Brazilian real to the Canadian dollar… when in fact food can be pricey and (some) goods are, too. Like anything imported…

Marcella has a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in the kitchen. Just one. She says it’s “in case of emergency”. I think that emergency *might* be “I won the lottery and want to splurge!!“, because this can cost her the equivalent of CAD$4.

Marcella also has a love that is deep and true… for Special K. I half thought I should buy her a cow when we were in Berlin, what with the amount of milk she went through for the sake of her beloved… But there’s no Special K in Brazil, so Marcella has found the next best thing:

Ondilège cereal is Casino brand—as in, the same brand in the Parisian grocery stores—and this one box will set you back 15,00 reals. Or, CAD$9.15. For breakfast cereal.

I don’t really have words.

But that might also be because of the throbbing pain in my finger for the last 24 hours… remember when Kath wrote about her thesis, and provided a clip of Pinky and the Brain? I’m not plagiarising her, or anything, but the play on words was just way too tempting.

Here’s pinky:

and here’s its brains:

How awesome is that? This is why Marcella and I are friends: an equal love of ridiculous kitchen items. Like ice cube trays… that produce brain ice cubes, redefining the phrase “brain freeze”. Heh.

So, here’s me using my head:

Stop me if you’ve heard *this* one before, but I WAS BAKING… and multitasking: I was also trying to make and eat lunch. Being too lazy (and without the counter space) to pull out the toaster, I tried to toast my bread over the gas stove… and had I known that the kitchen hid a pair of these:

I *might* not have been so inclined to use two forks as pincers… and then to grab the tines of the fork to reposition the bread mid-way through the laziest operation ever…

Who does that? WHO grabs hot metal?!?

Ouch.

After I’d gone through three brains, my water-logged finger still showed the signs of one and a half tines. Yarg.

I *can* say that that was the best damned toast I had EVER had, and the cookies weren’t bad either. I used this recipe from one of my favourite food porn websites—The Traveler’s Lunchbox—but added espresso instead of vanilla extract, reduced the sugar and added a mashed banana to try to recapture some of the lost moisture when I was without *actual* brown sugar.

This recipe is brill for two reasons: you melt the butter (so you don’t have to plan ahead for room temperature butter), and then you freeze the cookie dough balls, and can thereafter bake only as many as you want to have at a time.

See how it’s glossier than “normal” creamed-sugar-and-butter cookie dough?

And then, frozen:

I wrapped them up in threes, and we baked six of them for dessert:

and in the end, they were a bit less pretty than they might have been, had I actually used brown sugar—they just sorta looked like they could use a couple of hours in the sun, you know? But they were baked to happiness, and I wasn’t going to overdo it for the sake of aesthetics. The banana flavour was very faint and, I think, a nice way to decrease the sugars… but I bet these are inSANE when the recipe’s followed to a T.

Well! Two days, one solid achievement… and today (Saturday), we went to TWO food markets, so tomorrow’s post will be filled with some weird and wonderful—whenever I felt OK about bringing my camera out. Stay tuned!

It’s another sunny day, 26°C down here in winter solstice land… and I’m playing it low-key again. Behold, the view from the upstairs window: you can see high rises back there, undesirable lodgings in the centre, and the Mediterranean-esque design of Marcella’s apartment complex. It’s really lovely!

Now, I’m still inside today because Brazilian speed and relationship to linear time are both exactly the opposite of my usual approach to life—when we were in Freiburg, I regularly had to abandon Marcella (a slow walker to my intense scurrying) when we had classes or other schedules to keep: she does “late”, I don’t. But since I haven’t got a schedule right now, I accept that it might take a few days for us to get me ready to make my into the wide world. Until that happens, I’m setting myself some personal goals.

1. shower. I know my fear of the water is excessive, but that GI reaction to the Typhoid pills is in *such* recent memory… and I really can’t go back down that road!!
2. have a mini-indoor-workout (brought my resistance bands and jump rope, *and* there are stairs!).
3. crack open my Portuguese book.

Also on my list—though it’s Marcella-dependent—is to bake some chocolate chip cookies. Because how else do you say “thanks for the trip, the lodging, and the babysitting” to someone than with a KitchenAid? 

Dear Costco, I LOVE you when you have KitchenAids on sale.

Conveniently, this is also doubling as my bedside table for now:

And it didn’t cost me a cent to carry this down. I was allowed two pieces of luggage. This was one:

He’s a beast, but he also unzips into two bags. To make sure I’d have plenty of room to carry home the clothes I plan on buying, AND to make sure I could carry the mixer as my #2 bag and not be overweight…

I only packed the bottom half. How’s THAT for killer packing in the face of the three-month trip!? I’m pretty proud of this. (And my carry-on was biggish, if I’m honest. While Continental Airlines SUCKS for inflight entertainment, I really love that when I was checking in Vancouver they said “is your bag heavy?” I said, “no more than normal.” AND THEY TOOK MY WORD FOR IT. )

But I won’t be breaking Bessie out for the cookies, however, because the art to making cookies with butter that *don’t* lie down flat is not to over-beat the butter… so the cookie dough will be man-handled, and will, Inch’Allah, rise, thanks to a couple more Canadian imports:

Although I now know I should have brought a few other things—like pure vanilla extract (there’s only artificial here), and brown sugar. There was some demerara available, but Marcella thinks this is the closest they’ve got:

Hey man, why’d you whitewash your sugar?

There are also no chocolate chips. So I got a big Hershey’s bar to cut down. But I had a piece of it—and it’s only really Hershey’s in name, you know?

So for now, until Marcella comes home and tells me where the measuring cups and spoons are (and the cookie sheet, so long as we’re parsing, here…), I’m in a holding pattern. So I’ve been reading historical fiction on my happy little Kindle, and hanging out… just me and the inmates!

The view from the balcony…

and the view from the upstairs side window…

I don’t think I’ve been this close to barbed wire that wasn’t on a farm… but if I’m honest, the only thing that makes me feel unsafe right now is my total inability to communicate with the world around me. So, with that, I’m off to hit #1 and #3 in short order!

Fact: I am 70 years, to the day, younger than Katharine Hepburn.

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Even if she was “box office poison” for a time, I’ve always thought she was pretty cool—classic, classY, and she wore trousers before it was common. I dig me a little non-conformism.

To celebrate us, yesterday began with a parfait, proceeded with a dose of crazy, and ended with a smile. I had to work in the evening, but this had a silver lining: because this month there’s a metric tonne of “Dr S, the talking head”, it means a little perk— I’m babysitting this:

It’s for work purposes, so I’m schlepping it all over town, but at night when I come home and dump out all my possessions on the table (seriously—what’s with the mess? Pills, camera, Swiss army knife, nail file, watch, cheque book, books ‘n’ books ‘n’ books,  STAPLER?!? You can’t imagine what the rest of the table looks like…!), I come down by washing dishes. True. Sad, but true. And now, I can do it with a little company:

Well HELLO, Mr Darcy! Thanks for stopping by!

I have bemoaned my white walls for four years—like living an asylum, not helped by the fact that half the time I’m part nuts—but now, I’m LOVING them! Can you tell that Mr Darcy is almost life-size, projected on my kitchen wall? I’ve been making my way through the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice; I’ve also done life-size yoga in my living room, and had movie night in bed once or twice… (though by yoga and “movie night”, I really mean I did *5 minutes* of yoga and then had to rush to work, and I put a film on to talk me to *sleep*. )

Still: SO FUN. I don’t have a TV (and don’t really want one), but this way I get to look at something bigger than my little Mac. And shouldn’t Colin Firth *always* be larger-than-life?

So, since I had to work tonight, I rushed together a batch of cupcakes (no pic—nothing special, either) and left my kitchen in an absolute shambles. But: today was a good day, so when I returned to the shambles at the end of it all, I also had this to make me smile:

My friend and colleague, Jacqueline, took me to lunch today, and gave me SO MANY FLOWERS that I couldn’t fit them in my vase—only my soup pot. How fabulous is that?!   It became a LOOOONG lunch, however, because I’m a cheap drunk: I ordered a 6 oz glass of wine at 1.30. I didn’t finish it, and I still wasn’t able to drive myself home again until 4. Oops. I’d like to blame the fact that the BC drunk driving laws are the most stringent in the country, but really: I’m just that easy.

And because of that, I made the world’s FASTEST batch of vanilla vanilla cupcakes, and left this disaster all around my lovely flowers as I bolted off to work:

This doesn’t tell you that there were muffin tins by the front door (to cool in the cross breeze), a cooling rack in the freezer (’cause the cross breeze wasn’t cool enough), and the frosting paraphernalia on the floor, since there was no other flat space available as far as the eye could see.

It was a good day.

And now, I have a question for you:

my mom sent me a cheque and I’m wondering how to spend it—I’m thinking about a Kobo, a Kindle, or an iPad. I want a digital reader for travelling purposes, and I have a Mac and an iPhone so I fear that the iPad is iOverkill: what do you think?

Also: my promise of cake to come earlier this week wasn’t referring to my hasty cupcakes today—instead, I’m making a big deal, but my local grocery has stopped selling whipping cream and only has whipped cream (what the what?!?), so it’s tabled until Saturday night. It’s still coming!

So Kate: to you, to me, and to an affinity for the bull.

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