My Life. Sort of.

I'm a full time student at a junior college. It's a horrid place and I will probably mention it quite a bit. This is my second year there and I have very few good experiences there. But I digress.
In my Communications 2 class, better known to the rest of the world as English Literature, we read, er, were supposed to read, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. I forgot to read it, but the professor brought in the movie and barely questioned us about the actual play.
She started to talk about Oscar Wilde and the Victorian era and I was like 'Oh dear God. This is going to be awful. Two classes of froufrou Victorian snobbishness. Greeaattt.' But then the opening credits came on with some fantastic music and the name Colin Firth. If someone else besides my completely oblivious to classic literature including Jane Austen friend had been there, I would have spazzed.  But no one knew who Colin Firth was, is, so my inner self was flailing like a mad person. Colin Firth, ~swooon~

   

But - my life does not revolve around classic literature and lovely men such as Colin Firth. But instead around food and kittens! Let's do food first, shall we?

The first food blogger I ever found was Heather Baird of Sprinkle Bakes. All of the things she makes are absolutely divine. Well, y'know, really tasty and pretty. I attempted, and did pretty well on her recipe for Pumpkin Cheese Danishes. OhMyGod. They were delicious.

This was the first time I had ever used puff pastry.  I now know that you should not let it sit out for too long, because instead of being the nice fold-able square of dough, you have a huge, sticky mass of dough that won't come apart. Yeah, don't judge me. As always, mine didn't turn out exactly like the picture, but sort of resembled the same sort of shape that I was going for. 

Don't they look delicious? They were, I had like, three in the two days that they were around the house. I also made my great-grandfather's Brunswick stew. It doesn't look all that appetizing, but it's soo good. Especially when it gets cold. Which is why I made it. We finally had a cold snap here in central Florida. Perfect weather for warm food. 

Like I said. It doesn't look like something anyone would ever want to eat, but it's delicious. Every time. And today was a culinary adventure as well. Sort of. I only made the one thing, but it was my first time trying something new, alone, with just a mere paragraph of instruction. This too, was delicious.

Garlic Parmesan chicken drumsticks from Simply Scratch. My family loved it, even my little sister, who only eats her seasoned chicken when everything on it has been rinsed off. My mother rinses her chicken, sigh.

Onto the next order of business. KITTENS! In my house there were two dogs and two cats. The oldest of all of our little domestic creatures is my cat. The queen of sass, Lucki. She's fat and old and perfectly prissy. And then there was Hershey, the chocolate lab mix that my older sister got on Valentine's day when she was in middle school. He died last February. It's the only time I have ever seen my dad cry. Misty is one of my older sister's charity cases. She has them in the forms of dogs and men. Misty barks at everything: the door opening, the oven timer going off, everything. She's a Jack Russel Terrier, she's supposed to do that. That is what her owner tells me. All I see is a rat like dog that poops everywhere and barks too much. And then there was Trixie. A calico cat that my granny found and sort of nursed back to health. We took her in because my granny lives in a condo and had just gotten new flooring. Trixie disappeared two weeks ago. Trixie was my little ten year old sister's cat. Ten year old's aren't ready for a loss yet. So my older brother brought home a little gray tabby today. He's the most adorable little fuzzball ever.
The first thing he did in her room was lay on her hats, so she wanted to name him after a hat. After tossing out Fedora and Stetson, she decided to call him Shako. Don't know what a shako is? Let me show you.

That. Is a shako. I wore one when I was in the high school marching band. They're not that comfortable and I don't wish the harm on anyone else with these beasts. But that's what my little sister named her new kitten after. A marching band hat.

And that. Is our new kitten. Isn't he adorable? Misty likes him, my cat hissed at him. Grouchy old woman. 

I suppose that I've taken up a lot of space now. And I didn't even cover Halloween! Next time, then.

Kitchen Time.

I'll admit it, I am a food blog thief. But nothing on here will be said without due note. I use Stumble Upon to find my wonderful bloggers. It often tells me that I have gone through all of the baking blogs listed on the site, it lies. I've done a few things lately, only misplacing the original creator once, so it will not be displayed. But what I did make, oh yum.

The first was homemade Strawberry Pop-Tarts, from Franish Nonspeaker. The only problem that I encountered was the unexpected amount of time it took me. But then again, I started at nine o'clock at night. The results:

 So the preserves leaked out and got a little burnt, the dog like the bits that I took off and they tasted absolutely wonderful. The icing was too thin, but was still tasted.

And then I made these absolutely fantastic Brown Sugar Cookies with Maple Icing from Brooke McLay. OMGod, these were so amazing. They were loved by my entire family and came out perfectly. You won't see the terrible icing job I did on the first batch, because I ate them before anyone saw. 

 

I followed the recipe for the icing to a tee and it was so difficult to work with. I used an extra half tablespoon of milk and it came out like this, but not the glaze0like icing in Brooke McLay's picture. No matter, my family loved them. I even made one for my little sister that resembled a fudge round, it had so much icing on it.

First and foremost. . .

This is for my own personal sanity, because I need a place where I can talk about anything without getting in trouble with anyone I know. Unless they find this, which would be terrible. 

If you have found this, people that I know, you must understand that everyone needs to vent and my hand is starting to hurt from hand writing all of this. You must have done something to be either praised or censured, so don't complain, it's not my fault. 

Maybe people will read this, maybe they won't. But either way, it's cool, cause nothing really flows in my life and there will be quite a bit of rantings. So if you bypass this nonsense, I completely understand.