Cake Balls and "Fondue"

I finally got the cake balls taken care of.... and the cake with fondant (or, "fondue" as Robert prefers to call it, for some reason... )

Some of them fell apart.... don't mind them, they're loser cakeballs anyway. Aaaannnnd the Fondant cake.

It was actually pretty easy to work with. I think it turned out really cute.

I got lazy mixing the purple for the dots, and gave up. so it looks kind of swirly....

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I Lied!

Yes, obviously there are no pictures of cake, or cake pops, or anything of the sort.
I did make the cake, and I will make the cake balls (probably today), but when I'll get around to pulling the pictures off of my camera is anyone's guess.
Just.... to let you know.

Right now I am not wanting to be in bankruptcy but determined to survive it nonetheless. I made orange sweet rolls this morning (not from scratch), to bring to Abbey, but she's taking a sleep day, for which I cannot fault her. Read More......

Stay Tuned

Later today I will, hopefully, be posting "fun with fondant" and "The DL attempts Bakerella's cake pops."
For now, be satisfied with this: improved recipe for Lemon Drops for those of us who can't stand the taste of alcohol. But still like to drink it anyway.

Lemon Drops (Makes 2)

2-4 oz. fresh squeezed lemon juice (depending on how sour you want it. Ours were REALLY sour and I used 4 oz, or a little less than two lemons. Please note: When squeezing lemon juice, do not hold the lemon directly over the glass and then inadvertantly drop it into the juice. It splashes everywhere.)

1 oz triple sec

3 oz vodka

2-3 T sugar

Pour all of this into a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard 40-50 times to get the sugar incorporated. Then pour into martini glasses (rimmed with sugar if you're not lazy like me.) top with some club soda to make it fizzy.

Yum!

Please note: This picture is NOT what mine looked like...unfortunately. This picture was taken by a professional much better than myself! Read More......

Fall Schedule

Monday-Wednesday-Friday
8:00 Conflicts of Law
9:10 Successions
10:20 Jurisprudence

Monday-Wednesday
4:30-6:00 Mineral Rights

Tuesday-Thursday
3:00-4:30 European Union I

I'm particularly fond of the fact that I have no class until 3:00 PM on Tuesday and Thursday. This means that I can sleep as late as I want, but unfortunately also that those days will be absolutely 100% unproductive. Read More......

Presents!

...Going out in the mail soon to special people. Law School Koozies. We're so classy here in Louisiana. In this picture you can also see my chunky fingers and the brick wall of our apartment. Read More......

Tom Yum

It embarrasses me to admit it, but I don't make Tom Yum soup from scratch (Actually, I'm not sure if anyone does? I didn't bother to look it up.) I use a paste, which is available in a jar in most oriental food markets (especially if they're Thai markets. Korean markets usually don't have it.)

The recipe, once you have acquired the paste, is very simple: add paste to water (usually like 2 T to 3 cups water, but I start small and adjust up.), add shrimp or chicken or mushrooms if you so choose, and garnish with green onions. Again, if you want to. Or just eat it as broth with nothing in it.

And now I have to get ready for Bankruptcy class, followed by driving my poor half-operational car to the shop, followed by a very nice (and well-deserved, thank you) nap. At some point, someone should probably clean the sink of dishes, too. Hmm.

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Absence makes the Heart grow Fonder...

It has been a while. I apologize-- this last week was absolutely hectic. Between having to find a ride to school every day (the car thing), two doctor's appointments, and working a lot on research for my professor, I haven't had a whole lot of free time.

The state of the apartment can attest to that. Menu for the week! (Take note: It isn't exactly the healthiest menu in the world. I'll have to compensate by eating more low-cal things for lunch.)

Baked Potato Soup in a bread bowl (made with 2% cheese, light sour cream, chicken broth, and 1% milk-- but still, not healthy)

Hamburgers and....something. I have potato chips, but I didn't buy those. They'd be those fat free things anyway, which is fine by me--they taste the same.

Chicken Broccoli and Rice Au gratin-- using one of those packaged rice mixes. I got it for $1 at albertsons-- on sale-- but of course, I noticed yesterday that Wal-mart had it on sale for $.98. Darn.

Lemon Chicken and Pesto Pasta with Feta cheese. New Recipe that I've modified a little bit.

Hamburger Helper--Beef Stroganoff. Really, I need some help every once in a while. I'm not perfect, despite the fact that I'd kind of like all of you to believe I am.

Thai curry and Tom Yum Soup with Steamed White Rice. I haven't decided what kind of Curry yet-- I bought masaman and Karee paste at the store, and I think I might have yellow sour floating around somewhere.

**Note on the Tom Yum Soup: BEST. SOUP. EVER. 3 cups of the stuff has like 90 calories-- half of which is fat, but oh well. You can add mushrooms, shrimp, chicken, green onions, whatever.

Also, I bought three lemons for the lemon chicken, but it only calls for the zest, so I'm trying to think of something to do with the lemon juice. I'm thinking Lemon drops? The kind with Vodka, not the kiddie candy...

Speaking of finding a use for leftovers, I made a Banana cake yesterday, which tastes pretty good. I think next time I might add nuts and not mix it quite so much (it was kind of chewy, since the extra stirring created gluten and made it a little bread-like.)...and I won't add quite so much vanilla to the cream cheese frosting. And maybe substitute coconut milk for the milk in the recipe. Basically change the recipe completely until I'm satisfied.

Not much to say on the school front, except that I'm frantically trying to get some assignments from my professor done with so I can send them to him in London before he gets fed up with waiting and fires me. And I should probably start outlining for final exams, NOT something I'm looking forward to.

..And my computer has started doing very weird things whenever I hit the volume button. I should probably investigate that. Yet something else that has broken! Hooray!! Does anyone have like $10k so we can fix everything that's breaking/broken in our apartment? Anyone? Read More......

Chili Cornbread Bake

.4 pounds extra lean (96/4) ground beef: at 3.99 a pound: $1.60
1 package of chili seasoning mix: $1.25 (Far too expensive, but I'm lazy. Next time I'll use my own spices)
Chili Beans: $.63
Corn muffin mix: $.48
1 can of tomato sauce that I bought in bulk from Sams a long time ago: $.50 ? Who knows.
4 oz shredded cheddar cheese (1/2 a package at 3/$5) $.83
1/3 cup of 1% milk: $.10
1 egg: $.12 (?)

Total: $6.01 after taxes.

Basically, prepare the chili according to package instructions, reserving some of the tomato sauce because it'll be too thin otherwise. Then put it in a corningware dish, put some cheese on top. Prepare the cornbread according to package instructions, and pour over the chili. Then sprinkle on some more cheese. Then bake at 375 until done. It's quite good. To make it healthier: (1) reduce or cut out the cheese entirely, (2) make it meatless, (3) use egg beaters, (4) and/or use skim milk. Read More......

Curse you, Morton Salt girl...

...yes, when it rains, it pours. In the last week, the following has happened to the mechanical things we own:

Update 3/9/2009 3:13 PM ... the deluge continues ...

-- My laptop bag broke, so now I have to use Hubby's bag.
--Hubby has lost a crown, which we now have to get fixed.


1) My car has, once again, decided to be difficult. And by difficult, I mean messing up completely. I have to have someone look at it because I don't want to spend $100 to tow it to the repair shop, but at the same time don't think I should drive it. It also needs an oil change.

2) The x-box is making strange sounds and may soon break.

3) ditto for my laptop computer, which is incidentally also held together by electrical tape owing to the screws inexplicably falling out of the case and getting lost, and my inability to find a single person in town who sells laptop screws.

4) Hubby still doesn't have a new phone.

5) Hubby's car needs an oil change and a tire rotation, and is also pulling quite badly to the right, which may or may not be fixed by a rotation and balance.

6) Our television goes green at random, and in order to hear it properly when watching a movie you have to turn the volume all the way up. ...even then, though, you still can't really hear, so we've taken to using the subtitles function.

YAY modern technology-- enabling us to have all this stuff that breaks and we can't afford to fix.
Things that still work (For a splash of good news): my brand-new phone (it had better), our matching MP3 players, the Wii, the refrigerator, and all of our kitchen appliances. Except the coffee maker, which Hubby says cannot make coffee to his picky specifications. The DVD player works, but it's so old at this point we might as well put it in the "could go at any time" category.

Oh, and something made a very strange, disturbing noise-of-breaking the other day, which both Hubby and I heard, but... we couldn't figure out what it was. Hmm. Read More......

Budget FAIL

Well, I'd post a reckoning of how much our dinner cost last night, except that I didn't cook last night. I had a final exam yesterday afternoon in Constitutional Rights Litigation, and decided I'd earned a "treat."


...We went to buffalo wild wings and actually got off cheaper than we normally do. Upon discussion, we both decided that the reasonable way to go from now on seems to be getting an appetizer and one entree and splitting it. There's always too much food anyway.



Tonight is Barbeque Beef Casserole, which consists of
1/2 pound of extra lean ground beef: $2.02
one package of cheap cornbread mix: $1 maybe? Again, I don't have my receipts.
two slices of 2% cheddar cheese: $.60? Maybe less. I don't remember how much we paid for the package.
milk and eggs for the cornbread: another .50. I don't remember.
4 T barbecue sauce: $.25

Along with salad greens, fresh spinach, olive oil, and red wine vinaigrette for a salad. I don't remember how much I paid for these things, but I think the salad greens were $1.50. We might use half, so $.75.

So, total is maybe $5.50. I promise, next week I'll keep the receipts. Read More......

Well

So I abandoned Mint.com and switched to Quicken Online

for the simple reason that Mint wouldn't upload my bank account. So... I'm using Quicken, and absolutely shocked at where our money is being wasted spent. If you don't have a finance managing website, or software, or something, you should get one. It will make you realize just how lazy and/or reckless you just may be in your spending habits.

I had been reading a blog by a guy on CNN who was living a month on "food stamps". (AKA assigning himself the maximum monetary allowance for one person). So, basically he was living on $176 a month for one person. At first I thought, "wow, that's crazy, he's making REAL sacrifices to show how less priviledged people live." And then, today I saw just how much my husband and I spend in a month on groceries. I'm too embarrassed to tell you the actual number, but it was high. Way high. And I've been thinking to myself, Hey-- you can probably do better. A whole lot better. So I've been looking up cheaper recipes and searching for way to improve our food budget without hurting-- and hopefully helping-- the health quotient of what we've been buying. As a result, I've decided to analyze the things we cook for dinner at night to see what it cost and how we could improve-- both health-wise and budget-wise.

So, here goes. I apologize in advance because I threw away my receipts from the store this week. So I'm just estimating from what I can remember.

Tuesday March 3: One-half pound extra-lean ground beef: $4.08 for a one-pound package, so $2.02 for a half-pound; one box of Kraft Macaroni thick 'n creamy: $1.75ish? (Here, I probably could have bought store brand but I couldnt' find the thick 'n creamy style and I like that better.); one-half cup of milk: maybe $.15? I don't know how much milk is a gallon, but we buy it in quarts or half-gallons which are more expensive by volume. If we don't, though, the milk goes bad before we drink it; Two tablespoons of margarine-- Again, a quarter? maybe? No clue, honestly; half of a cantaloupe at 2/$3.00, so $.75.

Today's Dinner Total: $4.92. I don't think that's so bad, really, for two people. We didn't have any vegetables, though, so in theory I could have thrown in another buck or two for broccoli or salad.

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My New Toy

Since I've been using my sister's spare phone for the last two months, I decided it was time to get something new (and pretty.) I got this from radio shack for an incredible $30 for extending my AT&T contract. It's touch screen, with a 2.0 Megapixel camera that I haven't really had a chance to test out yet, but which looks pretty good. Next is to find a way to get hubby one of these, the Samsung Rugby a837. It's built to military specifications, which is great considering he has to do things like wade through thigh-high mud and take measurements from 100 feet up on an oil refining tower. Although I'm not sure even that phone would survive a 100 foot fall. All of the testing, though, says it could survive a helluvalot. Which is good for someone with a habit of breaking phones. Plus he's been working his butt off to get me through law school at an awful job and he deserves a treat. Read More......