Friday Rants

It's pouring with rain outside. It's lovely. It's good rain, not the scary freezing stuff that makes it hard to drive. It's also Friday which means I'm done at work for a whole week after this. Finally, it's less than a week until Christmas. All these things should mean Captain Monkeypants is ready to wax poetically about the beauty of the holidays, the soothiness of the rain, the twinkly lights of the beautifully decorated houses she's seen.

However, I'm actually in a mood to rant. Maybe it's because I'm tired. I went to bed too late and I woke up too early. That's my excuse anyway. It also may have something to do with the fact that while fudge may seem like a nice easy way out of a cookie exchange, preparing ten bags with a dozen pieces in it is a sticky and time consuming way to spend the evening.

I was already in a bad mood when I sat down to put the fudge in the pretty cellophane bags I had ready for it. Mostly, it was because of online retailers. Correct me if I'm wrong but we are in a bad way with our economy, right? Which means businesses are failing left, right and center? So, hypothetically speaking, as a business, wouldn't NOW be the time that you would be paying a little more attention to your business practices and customers so that you don't go under with the rest of the victims of this horrible economic environment?

It would seem not. I started Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I did a lot of it online this year, thinking it would save time and money. Well, it hasn't done either. I ordered two items within two days each other in the first week of December. Neither has arrived. You're probably thinking, that's ok, there's a week until Christmas.

Except there's not. One of the items needs to be rerouted to California. I'm still waiting for that. I paid for regular shipping, they decided to send it media mail. I am not happy about this. The other company did the same but they didn't even ship it until ten days AFTER I had ordered it. Seriously, online stores, do you really want to screw your customers now? I know how to leave feedback and, trust me, I will.

So, last night, I packed my boxes full of gifts for my Los Angeles friends but there's a big gift missing. This does not make me happy.

This morning, I'm already crabby. I shouldn't listen to the radio in the mornings. Have you heard the new McDonalds ad campaign? I think they're trying to be clever and start a trend. They're trying to get people to say they're "Nug Nuts", meaning they're nuts for chicken nuggets. "Nug Nuts" sounds stupid. It sounds like some overpriced advertising company sat in a roomful of desperate marketing people and said "Hey, let's come up with a catchphrase."

You can't manufacture a catchphrase. They're organic things that grow out of a natural ease of saying them. They're clever or funny. "Nug Nuts" is not funny. It's desperate.

The thing that is amusing about that is I'm a HUGE fan of calling people "NumbNuts" which sounds a lot like "Nug Nuts." To me, "Numb nuts" is just hilarious. It sounds funny and it makes me giggle to say it. "Sugar Tits" also makes me giggle. I thank Danny DeVito and Mel Gibson respectively for those insults. They're fun to say.

"Nug Nuts," however, is not fun.

Speaking, of commercials, there's another one that irritates me. It's for the X-box 360. Have you seen them? Basically, the commercial starts with a family sitting on the couch in a living room watching Netflix. Then the camera pans and moves out and the scenery rotates and you're looking in the back of someone's skull. I don't get it. Also, it's vile. Why do you have a family watching Netflix in the back of your head? I get the whole 360 degree rotation thing and the tie in to the X-Box 360 because I'm not THAT bad at maths but why are we looking at the back of someone's head. STOP IT. I don't want to see that.

In other advertising rants, I'm still irritated by the jewelry commercial in which the guy gets up in the night, gets the pretty necklace for his wife, lays it over her throat while she's sleeping and the first thing she does in the morning is reach for her throat and find it. I get that it's supposed to be romantic and sweet but let's be realistic for a moment. First of all, ladies, is the first thing YOU do is reach for your throat in the morning? Not me- I look at the bloody clock to see what time it is. Secondly, he didn't do up the clasp so even on the stillest of sleepers, the necklace wouldn't stay in position. And I AM the stillest of sleepers, seriously. I've had friends check to see if I still have a pulse in the morning because I don't move while I'm sleeping.

That necklace would be lost somewhere in that bed. Couldn't he do something more romantic like give it to her with her coffee and toast? For me, toast=love. A man that makes me toast AND gives me a necklace at the same time? That's true love. I'm still waiting for that.

Ok, I know, I know, I'm getting wordy. And I'm ranting. I haven't had a rant in a while. Now that I have a nice working iPod, I can't complain about that anymore. So I have to find other things. Bear with me; ranting is the same as venting, it's therapeutic.

Yet it is Friday which means things can't be that bad. I'm heading home for the holidays on Saturday evening which means I can relax, eat too much and not worry about work for a while. There's a lot of good to be found in that. I'll be blogging at least some of next week and I promise to be in a better mood. Hey, at least I'm not ranting about Stephanie Meyer again.

Have a great weekend.

In the Kitchen with Captain Monkeypants, The Sequel

It's a week until Christmas, can you believe that? I'm having a hard time realizing it, actually. I've been shopping for a while- I start looking for gifts early so that I'm not pinched for funds or time by the holiday. Of course, this doesn't mean I don't still have last-minute stuff to do. I do a lot of online shopping. Unfortunately, this can be a bit of a nuisance. I'm still waiting for two gifts to arrive. Even though there's a week until Christmas, I have to put one of those missing gifts in a box to ship to California. I was hoping to do that this week. Actually, I HAVE to do that this week, missing gift or not. I'm heading to my parents for the whole of next week and this means I won't be able to get my mail while I'm gone.

Still, aside from that, the holidays are sliding nicely into place. Last night was the Great Fudge Making Event of 2008. I cheated- my friend over at RadLincCrafts forwarded me a recipe for easy fudge because she's awesome. It's a website by engineers with really easy ways of baking and cooking. You can look at it here. Rather than have to do scary stuff with sugar crystalization and all that, I just melted chocolate chips, bunged some condensed milk and butter in there and melted it all. Voila, fudge! It looks like fudge. It even tastes like fudge. I put some peppermint extract in there along with some creme de menthe chocolate chips, sprinkled it with crushed peppermints and, well, it sort of looks like I knew what I was doing. I even used a pizza cutter to score the fudge. I even know what scoring the fudge is. Although when I put it like that, it feels like I should add "That's what she said" to the end of that sentence.

However, I now have something that looks like fudge in my fridge. It tasted pretty decent. I'm shocked. I also even baked sausage rolls. These are a British savory snack that are remarkably easy to make and are always a hit at parties. They consist of...sausage meat and pastry. They're quite tasty, if I do say so myself. My only calamity there was realizing I lacked a rolling pin. Naturally, this realization couldn't occur when, you know, I could do something about it. Also, given our recent ice-storm, running out to Walmart isn't as easy as normal. So I improvised. I used a bottle of wine.

Surprisingly enough, the wine bottle made a great rolling pin. I was very careful not to relive the Great Wine Disaster of 2008. I made sausage rolls. It was nifty. I even had a couple because, well, frankly, it is, as my grandmother used to say, "cook's privilege."

I had a bit of leftover puff pastry so I decided to get creative. Why waste good pastry? So I had a bit of ham in the fridge and I used that in place of sausage meat. I put a bit of mustard between the ham and the pastry and you know what? It tasted like one of those fancy hor d'ourves thingies you get at parties. HA HA! Captain Monkeypants baked!

If it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, I'm not. Trust me. The fact that I managed to emerge from baking in my kitchen with no fire, no burnings and a complete set of edible goods is a little frightening, actually. I didn't break anything. I even got to use my meat cleaver to cut the sausage rolls. It's a bit excessive but I imagined I was Dexter and it was sort of fun.

Not that I have Dexter fantasies because that would just be weird.

However, this morning, contrary to normal happenings, the sausage rolls still look like sausage rolls and the fudge is still looking like fudge.

Now that the scary Cookie Exchange is taken care of, I can now look forward to Christmas. With a week to go, I have to squeeze in a lot of traditions. I still have to watch "Love Actually." I still need to have a mince pie. I need to finish shopping. I need to just enjoy the fact that it's Christmas and sit by the glow of my tree and take it all in. It's the small things that make me love this season most, the warmth, the lights, the snow, the food, the family and the friends.

I love Christmas.

Happy Thursday

The Great Cookie Exchange of 2008

So, today is one of those blogging days in which I have no intended topic nor do I have any clue what I'm going to blog about. Which means I probably won't have much of a point. For which I apologize.

I'm not feeling as gloomy today as I did yesterday which is definitely better, at least. My stray from yesterday found me again. He actually knocked on my door and found me. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't mind giving someone a ride but I don't like being hunted down. I also suspect he might be the owner of the alarm clock that goes off for hours and beeps. I can hear it through the floor. In every room. The reason I suspect this is that he's a student and he informed me he'd just got home 20 minutes ago from working all night on a project. I wasn't going to ask about his all-night project because, well, he's a student and there's such a thing as too much information. However, he told me it was a finals project though and he had been out at least twice this week and got in 20 minutes before he had to leave for school again. The incessantly beeping alarm clock finally stops about 20 minutes before I walk out the door, as though someone got home and realized he forgot to shut off his alarm. Yes, I'm very good at putting two and two together. It's as far as I got in maths and still managed to get an "A". If I'm right in my suspicions, that alarm clock will not be bothering me much longer because I will be Having Words with my stray. I'm a very wordy person as people like to inform me. It never sounds like much a compliment, unfortunately.

In other news, I made a monumental error late last week. I stupidly agreed to be part of a cookie exchange. Yes, Captain Monkeypants decided to get in the community spirit and participate in a festive event. Captain Monkeypants has since realized it was not one of her brighter moments in life. It seemed like such a nice idea: People bake a dozen cookies to give to everyone participating along with the recipe. In exchange, you get a dozen cookies back. Like a chain letter. With cookies. Nice, huh? What a nice idea, you give, you take, it's all good.

Except that it's not. It's not good at all. I thought they'd be about five of us participating. Sixty cookies is a lot but it's manageable. (See, look, my math skills are rearing their head again! Who knew?!). I could bake sixty cookies. Then, after I'd foolishly agreed to bake my cookies, I discover that there are ten people participating, not including me. That's ten dozen cookies. That's 120 cookies.

Now, if you're a baker or, at least, you like to bake, I'm sure you're thinking: "That's not that many! It's doable."

No. It's not. Trust me. Did I mention that I don't bake?I'm of the opinion that you're either good at baking or good at cooking. You might be able to do both but most people are stronger in one area than the other. Me? I'm not a baker. I'm a cook. I make soup. I can make good cabbage with juniper berries. I even make good potato pancakes. But that's not baking. When I try to bake, I end up with nasty little items that rarely resemble that which it should. My chocolate chip cookies turn into chocolate chip bullets. My cakes don't rise and, instead, turn into cookies that don't taste right because they were supposed to be CAKE. It's like the baked goods know it's me baking and they laugh in my face by morphing into something completely different. Some people blame their oven. Some people blame their pans. Not me. I blame me. I have no illusions. I'm ok with saying I'm a lousy baker.

The problem is, I think I like to bake. I like to have all those nifty little kitchen-looking things around that are part of baking. I like to put things in bowls. And that's usually when I realize what I'm actually doing and I want to stop but it's too late. That's why I thought the cookie exchange was a good idea. I thought, "Ooh! What a cute tradition! I want to play! I want to play!" And then as it inevitable does, reality set in. I can pinpoint the exact moment when reality hit: It was when someone said I had to bake 120 cookies.

I tried to get out of it yesterday. We were asked to say what type of cookies we were baking. I offered up my secret "Air Cookie" recipe- they're calorie free and taste exactly how you want a cookie to taste. They make no mess. Oh, and they're invisible. Apparently, being sarcastic also does not help you get out of a cookie exchange. I'm still in.

So now, I have to bake 120 cookies. I'm terrified. I did think of buying cake mix and doing something with it until I realized that cake mix is also not a success in my hands. No amount of frosting or icing can turn it into a cake; instead, it looks like a lopsided ski-slope. I'm thinking of making fudge. Yes, it involves stirring a lot but then you put it in a pan and you cut it and then you have fudge. 120 pieces of fudge is MUCH easier than cookies. Just because I actually don't like fudge doesn't mean I can't make it. Ok, so it's not a cookie but if I call it Cookie Fudge, then that counts. No one said it actually had to be cookies.

I'm going to find a loophole. I just need time. I have to keep reminding myself of Douglas Adam's famous words: "DON'T PANIC!". But it's 120 cookies. There's no running away from that. Eeek, gads. What have I done?

Happy Wednesday