Ordered Checks Lately?

Yeah, I am a wasteful cow. I don't use the free checks from the bank. I get the cute ones off the internets or out of those ads you get with your junk mail. Yes, I feel its very important to express my personal style to those who enter my payment information at the Gas Company. YES! Express me checks, express me. Tell those data entry slaves JUST who I am.

Last time I got "pin-ups", many moons ago I had "moo cow" checks before that it was "happy faces". I am a very complicated person, just ask the Gas Co chick, she knows me thanks to those oh so expressive checks.

Today I got an email reminding me it was time to reorder. HOW DID THEY KNOW? I pop on the website and two clicks later I am at my shopping cart already filled with exactly what I ordered last time. SO thoughtful! But now pin-up girls no longer express who I truly am so I decided to browse the new designs. Have any of you done this recently? Good gravy!
First of all I am not sure what kind of devil pact the check place has with Nashville but you can pretty much have any country stars face smiling up at you every time you write out that pesky check for your heart pills. If you are unable to pick just ONE country star, don't you worry your pretty little head! The check place came up with the "country music" check just for YOU! Now everyone will know that your love of country music is very broad, indeed.

In that same vein, if you are unable to select your fave vehicle from their list of TWENTY (I bet me being a devoted Chevy girl would just blow Ms. Gas Company's MIND! Whoo baby!), you can just go ahead and select the "hot rods" checks. Don't you worry, the Gas Lady will TOTALLY get you.

You can find every hobby from bowling to hunting, Xtreme sports to scrapbooking all right there. Don't forget those adorable country kittens and that oh so wacky Lucy! Who doesn't LOVE her?
You can choose from a narrow variety of generic professions: hair stylist, teacher and nurse. There are checks that also vaguely imply a career. I am referring to the "Real Estate" checks as well as the "Medical" and "Law Enforcement" checks (for rent-a-cops? Mall police?). In this category see also "Good Hair Day".

Then there are those random checks that are tailor made for those who just cannot commit to much of anything. "All polished" has 15 bottles of mauve nail polish, all the same color. Nothing more closely represents my life than 15 bottles of the exact same nail polish. But in all fairness I guess this could also fall into the implied career category. "Denim" is my hands down favorite this the non committal category. Appearing on these is the image of approximately 1/4th of a pocket from the ass of a pair of mom jeans. Where have these checks been all my life?

Hey! Have you met "Jillian'? I sure haven't but I know I want her on my checks!!! She's a vision in lavender, that one!

Maybe I should purchase the Reese's or Hershey's kisses checks? Would the Gas Co lady pause and think, Oh that wacky lady, she likes chocolate just like me! Or would she read between the lines and see it as a tiny cry for help with my food addictions? Help me gas lady, you are the only one I can turn to. Thank God for these checks, I am finally able to express all the hurt inside.

Sometimes I really wish the Gas lady knew my more spiritual side... Oh My God, there is a check for that! Mystic Maidens!!! Makes me feel more peaceful just saying that. Featured on these babies is a 97 foot tall Native American woman blowing marigolds the size of Hummers from her softly cupped palms into the clouds. Ahhhh

Despite my love of fancy checks, I am a fairly practical person. The Christmas checks (any of the FOUR varieties they offer) simply do not jive with my brain. I get that you like the holidays. You like buying shit with holiday theme checks during the holiday season. Awesome. As long as I don't have to stand in the check out line behind you, we are golden. But why on Earth would you buy 400 Christmas checks?? When you order online there is a minimum order of 400! Thats FOUR HUNDRED Christmas checks. So useful the rest of the year! In July the Gas Lady will stop caring that you LOVE Christmas enough to order checks expressing this, she will just think you are an idiot for ordering an entire box of them. UNLESS you are on of those crazy fuckers who can move from book of checks to book of checks OUT OF NUMERICAL ORDER and be ok with that. In which case you are a sinner and all the Christmas checks in the world aren't going to save you from burning in hell as you very rightly deserve.

I am going to go write the check place right now. I am going to tell them they MUST stop selling Christmas checks to prevent this out of order travesty and they need to make a check that better represents me. I want one with a girl hanging out of her car giving the finger, the next image needs to have a drunk girl passed out next to an empty booze bottle and a laptop. I also want a check representing a spray painted wall proclaiming "I hate people" and finally a check with bright red lettering on it that says "I HATE PAYING YOU PEOPLE MY HARD EARNED MONEY". Mostly for the IRS and the late fees at the video store.
Who's with me?

End of an era

Or at least a really nice year.
Our coffee shop is closing. We go there so often we call it the Winchester.
If you don’t get the reference go rent Shaun of the Dead. You’ll thank me.

Its actually called Coffee Plantation but the name isn’t all that important, is it? Its the place that matters, who and what is inside, not a sign over the door.

The Winchester.

I went today. I go on Fridays.
English Breakfast tea, 3 Splendas with room for cream and a bran muffin. They know. Shawn and Dana. They hand me them without asking. Get my tea going when I walk in the door.

Best cup of tea in town.
Today I went to say good bye.

End of really nice year.

Countless quiet Sunday breakfasts.
English Breakfast tea, 3 Splendas with room for cream and a bran muffin.

We didn’t see any family on Easter Sunday. At all.
We hung out at the Winchester with our coffee shop peeps. It’s a Sunday ritual, kinda like church, or as close as I will probably ever get again.
Refreshing, hear some new music. Get a different perspective on life.

Sign of the times...

Our video store closed last week. Small businesses are hurting.
At least our Hi-Fi Video outlasted the Hollywood Video up the street.

"And tomorrow it will be something really depressing...like a Baby Gap..."

We have walked in and our video store guy was playing his guitar. He played in a band, just like our coffee shop guy.
Well our coffee chop guy IS a band.

You will probably never see an employee of Hollywood Video playing guitar while at work.
Small businesses.

How many will survive these next 2 years?
How many will try to open?

Living the American Dream...even if it doesn’t work you can be free to attempt it. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of a good cup of tea.
The American Dream... which seems only meaningful to immigrants anymore.
Video store guy came here from Vietnam, the owners of the coffee shop are from Korea.

Are we taking it for granted? Of course we are.
Its what we do as Americans, its part of our culture.

I am eating my muffin very slowly and savoring my tea.

I gave my coffee shop guy a hug this morning. Told him we were going to miss him.

Sign of the times.
End of a pretty good year.

Cupcakes and a blog in one day?

Turns out, its not possible. Not with a raging migraine anyway...

So instead of cupcakes and a blog I had cupcakes and a bitch of a throbbing headache yesterday. But getting back to those cupcakes....

I made Peanut Butter Cup cupcakes.

I got a chocolate cupcake recipe from allrecipes.com and made a few tweaks so that they would bake evenly with the pb cup stuck inside. I also wanted the pb cup to maintain its integrity during the baking process so I refrigerated them until just before covering them with batter.

For whatever reason the butter (which was way room temp) refused to cream no matter how much I beat it with my mixer (or my bare hands) it just pilled up. grrr So I had bits of it in the batter and it came out and leaked all over. When I pulled out the cupcakes they were literally dripping with butter and there was a pool of butter in each of the muffin cups.

The cupcakes had good texture and flavor and despite the butter making a run for the border, they were plenty moist. They didn't rise a whole lot and they were pretty dense but I think the damp winter season was too much for my can of baking powder so I will be picking up a new one of those before I make anything else.


They look good enough to eat, huh? And don't forget the surprise inside =D















You just can't have a naked cupcake! What would the neighbors say??
Back to allrecipes.com for a peanut butter frosting that would compliment the pb cup. Having been burned by no-cook powdered sugar frostings before I was cautious but I also had two boxes of C&H icing sugar I wanted to use up so I went for it. Instead of 2 full cups of powdered sugar I used 1 and 1/4 cups so the peanut butter taste would be the first and last thing you could taste, not the powdered sugar.

A few people bitched that this version of PB frosting was too stiff to spread but I had zero issues with it and it was, indeed, fluffy stuff.
I was excited to load up my pastry bag with a plain tip and pipe it on! Sadly the end result wasn't quite what I had hoped.














Wow, chocolate cupcakes with turd frosting? Tee, you shouldn't have.

Blah, lets try something else...





Thank goodness for offset spatulas! No more poo-cakes!

I finished them off with some chopped peanut butter cups. I like to garnish to give people a hint of whats inside.



For plating I piped some of the extra frosting onto a few PB cups with a star tip, cause I'm fancy like that.


They tasted pretty good but I am too hard on my baking to be anykind of a judge.
The almond extract in the cake recipe was a bit overwhelming and it clashed with a peanut butter. If I make these again I will omit the almond extract and just add more vanilla.
This recipe would be perfect for making a chocolate cake with a cherry filling and chocolate ganache topping as that would compliment the fruit perfectly.

But I would make these again, with more tweaking, of course. I just can't help myself!

Ralph's, what are you trying to say?

According to stickers plastered all over food products at my local grocery, Great Meals Start At Ralph's.














Over capitalization aside, I can see their point.

While bright orange circles with crap grammar are not my particular cup of marketing tea, I appreciate the inexpensive and eye catching style that Ralph's has chosen to use to appeal to the everyman that shops there. Great Meals Start At Ralph's. It makes sense, purchase ingredients there, use them to make a great meal. Be it the beginning to a simple picnic or a fairly complex holiday meal, it can all be purchased from Ralph's, cause Great Meals Start There.

I get marketing, I really do. I love marketing. I am a complete packaging whore and will buy pretty much anything in a purple bottle, box or can. I love when companies re-brand themselves. I love to look at the styles of print and colors and try to figure out who they are, or are attempting to, sell to and what image they are trying to put forth.


Sadly sometimes marketing confuses me. I am not stupid but sometimes the marketing simply doesn't fit the product. But haven't we all seen commercials that don't make sens,? ones that may be mildly entertaining but have nothing at all to do with what they are trying to sell? I read in a business journal once that this was a recent rend in marketing; attempting to market products with a weird ad just to confuse the consumer. The thinking behind this was that if a person was confused about an ad they saw, at least they would be thinking about it, or even better, discussing it with someone.

While its possible that some test audiences were polled and a very expensive marketing account was involved with those Orange Stickers, I don't think they were exactly clear to their store lackeys as to where to put the stickers exactly.

Recently my roomie went to Ralph's to pick up on some staples. He inadvertently brought home The Magic Marketing Sticker:













On the toilet paper.

Pardon me, but I don't like to think about what goes into my Great Meals when I am using my Quilted Northern. And really I don't think the marketing team behind the Ralph's grocery stores really wanted those things associated in my head either.
Great Meals Start At Ralph's and apparently somebody at Ralph's wants us to know that Ralph's is there for us when our Great Meals come to their Very End too.

Irvine Farmers Market

Last Saturday I took a trip to Irvine to the Farmers market at UCI.
Not too many of the varieties of fruits and veggies, really surprised me. What did strike me is how truly lucky we are to live in southern California. Here it is, the middle of January and I was outside in shirt sleeves on a gorgeous day.





Here in So Cal we have access to fairly good quality produce year round. Although those artichokes and tomatoes looked a bit shady ;) I think I'll wait a few more months.




















Irvine has a significant Asian population and there were lots of varieties of Asian produce. The one I had never seen before was a variety of broccoli that was in loose leaf bunches and had these tiny bright yellow flowers on the ends. Of course my picture of those didn't come out. At a different table full of Asian produce there were these:
















They were not labeled. Right next to the mystery produce were these. These were marked Bok Choy.


























Further down the same table they had these cool. purple yams. I had heard of these but never seen them in raw form like this. They had sliced one open so you could see the inside.



























Right next to the purple yams were these beautiful sharkfin squash. They looked like winter melons to me but I am going to take the word of the vendor.
Sitting behind the bin of fresh ginger there in the background they had a HUGE melon/squash. You can't really tell from the pic but this melon was more than three feet long!
















It was massive!!


What did strike me was that there were lots of people selling lots of non-food items. One lady was selling jewelry and another was selling hand made bedroom slippers!

There were people selling local honey and tamales from Carlsbad. Also two tables selling home made breads and a few varieties of baked goods. This surprised me and I had to go look. Many of the breads were in plastic bags filled with condensation. I'm sure the general public would be excited to see this, but the baker in me just thought "Ick!"

Half a dozen vendors were all grouped at one end selling fresh flowers and plants and small trees. Beautiful!
























So what I took most from this is that I am spoiled to live here and I have been exposed to most of these types of produce all of my life and we are very lucky to be able to get most of it year round. I can't wait to go back in a few weeks ansee what new items they have to offer.

Blog for Choice

Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe V Wade.
From wiki: According to the Roe decision, most laws against abortion in the United States violated a constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
They were right 35 years ago and they are still right today. It should be my choice to have a baby or not. People who do not know me or my circumstances should have no say in what I should do if I become pregnant.
My friend Angela made a great point this morning in her blog. She wrote that being pro choice does not mean you are pro abortion. I personally do not believe in using abortion as a form of birth control, although I have known someone who did. In my head I see those right to lifers screaming about saving all of the unborn, but honestly, would you rather she be able to keep getting pregnant over and over and that the governement should force her to have all of those children? Do you think someone whose heart has been so hardened by the life they have lived that forcing a child into their lives would improve the quality of it? What about the child's quality of life?
I remember reading a letter-to-the-editor in one of my teen magazines probably 20 years ago now. It was from a 19 year old girl. In it she wrote that she wished her mother had aborted her. Think about that. She truly wished she had never been born. She wasn't just having a bad day or a bad week. She had never known happiness, or love.
Her mother gave birth to her in a bathroom and had stuck her in a trash bag and threw her away. She wrote 'unfortunately' someone found her. She was rejected by her mother, bounced from grandparents who openly told her she was unwanted into foster care system which felt no need to make her feel loved, just give her the basics of food, clothes and shelter. She was now out of the system attempting to piece together a life from nothing. She had never been loved or wanted or cared for in any meaningful way. She thought of suicide daily.
I think about her often, especially when Roe v Wade is being threatened. She is surely not the only person to be raised as unwanted, to be living a half a life in our good Christian society.
So to those who came before me who had the emotional fortitude to forge a new trail all those years ago, to those who fought for my right to choose, I will be forever grateful.

I made it

Thank God. How would you ever have survived without me.