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…
Jessica 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.
Jessica 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 Jessica 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 Jessica 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 websitesbut 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!