You never know 'til you try

Are you on PInterest?  I am, and it's a huge time suck for me.  It's a website where you can store links to anything that you might ever want to come back to, and you can browse links that others have stored to get even more ideas.  Looking to decorate a room?  Create a board for that, and post links to ideas that you find inside.  Then poke around at other people's office ideas and see where it takes you.  Like to read?  Create a Library Board for books you want to read someday.  Do you like to cook?  Create a recipe board, then watch it grow... this one's the big one for me.  I don't often post external recipe links, but I routinely go there for ideas.

PInterest is where I found this link, for "Birds Nests"  The picture looked so cool, I had to give them a try.

Except, the comments in the PInterest link gave a slightly different recipe than the original link. I ended up doing a little of both, and frankly, I think they'd have been better if I'd followed my intuition and tried something else on my own.

One recipe said: Bird Nests! 3/4 C chocolate chips, 3/4 C butterscotch chips, 1 C peanut butter, 3/4 chow mein noodles. Form in muffin cups!

The other (Credit goes HERE) said

Birds’ Nests - Servings: 12 

Ingredients
1 tablespoon of unsalted butter, for greasing the muffin pan
6 ounces (1/2 bag) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
6 ounces (1/2 bag) of butterscotch chips
1 cup creamy peanut butter
6 ounces (1/2 of a large bag) of chow mein noodles
36 mini Cadbury eggs 

Instructions
1. Generously grease the wells of a muffin pan with the butter (this will help later when you are taking out the chilled nests).
2. In a large microwave-proof bowl, heat the chocolate and butterscotch chips in 30 second intervals until thoroughly melted, stirring after each increment.**It only took me two 30-second intervals.
3. Once melted, add the peanut butter to the chocolate/butterscotch mixture, mixing well until smooth and completely combined.
4. Carefully add the chow mein noodles, stirring with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula, until completely coated.
5. Using a large spoon, mold the mixture into the wells of your muffin tin, indenting the tops slightly with the back of the spoon.
6. Chill the nests until hardened, about 1 hour or so.
7. Once chilled, gently remove the nests from the muffin tin.***I used a butter knife as a lever to pop them out-this seemed to work.
8. Place three eggs (or colored jelly beans!) on the tops of each nest.

Here's the thing, though... I don't like chow mein noodles. The first recipe says to use 3/4 of a cup, but I ended up using about 2 1/2 cups, just to fill them in.... too many for my taste.

I also don't like messy food, which includes chocolatey things that melt in your hand before you can eat them.   I think these need more stuffing, so that they'd be less melty. I think that I should have used at least a cup each (maybe more) of coconut, peanuts and stick-pretzels instead of chow mein noodles.

The recipe itself was really easy.  Melt the chips and peanut butter, add the solids and dump them into greased muffin tins.  Where it because complicated was making the indent in the "nest", because the chocolate was still pretty liquid at that point.  I made indents, but they filled themselves in pdq.   So, I had to wait 15 minutes for them to cool in the fridge and then go back and muck about in them with the end of a spoon.  It was messy.  And maybe not so successful.  

If I was more patient, I might have waited until the whole mess had cooled quite a bit, then made freehand nests on a cookie sheet to avoid the flat edges on the sides from the muffin tins.

Whoever photographed the Bird's Nests from the other site did a better job  They hid the sides by shooting directly over top. (Good photography tip!)  Their's look like birds nests.  Mine?  Well, they kind of look more like cow patties to me.

FYI - Another photography suggestion would be to not take a bite out of the sample, until you had finished taking the pictures.

Boys Confuse Me

There's a group of us that meet most Wednesday nights for dinner.  One of the guys from the group was at a car rental shop earlier to rent a car.  Being the single guy that he is, he chatted up the girl behind the counter and ended up inviting her along for our weekly chat and chew.  She arrived a few minutes after us, ended up sitting beside me and joined the other girls and I as we joked around and gabbed.

At the end of the night we all got up, paid our bill and left.  The one guy who had invited this girl to join us was the first to leave.  He walked away without acknowledging her.  In fact, he didn't talk to her at all - or make eye contact, that I saw - even once all night.  Granted, I am admittedly at least a little bit socially inept, but I'm a little bit perplexed about why he bothered to ask her along.

Nothing to talk about here

Have you ever noticed how blog entries ebb and flow?  Sometimes, I've got so much to say that I have to consciously withhold information, lest I overwhelm.  Other days, I can hardly come up with anything worth mentioning.  This would be one of those days.

• A friend of mine does aesthetics out of her home, and I usually go to her for whatever I need done.  I cheated on her a week or so ago, and went to get a pedicure at a nearby shop.  There, the lady cut the nail on my big toe too short, and I've been in pain ever since.  I know without a doubt that when I tell my friend this, she'll say it serves me right.
• I cashed in a gift certificate recently and ordered "The Inconvenient Truth" book.  It just arrived, covered in mark down and sale stickers, which I've been unable to remove.  In fact, when I pulled the one sticker off, it tore the cover. As unreasonable as it may be, my nose is seriously out of joint over this.  The book is now damaged, before I've even had a chance to read it.  And why would a Mail Order company need to slather its products in price tags???
• I went to a birthday party on the weekend for a friend's two year old.  She made a beautiful farm-yard themed birthday cake for him, using fondant and chocolate figurines that looked better than some of the professional cakes I've seen.  When it came time to blow out the candles, the birthday boy didn't show much interest, so each of the many two year olds in attendance took turns to blow (aka spit) them out.  Not wanting to be a stick in the mud, I waited until they were cutting from the far side of the cake before I took my piece, and then planned to only eat the unexposed parts.  However, shortly after I sat down, the little girl beside me (who spat out way more cake than she swallowed) needed to be changed.  Her mom took her out of the high chair, held her up over the table, and shook all of the regurgitated food off of her lap and onto my plate before she laughed and walked away.  That may have been the first time in my life when I sat with a piece of cake in front of me for a good half hour, and felt absolutely no desire to eat it.
• I'ma gonna crawl back into my hole now.

Neither a Filing Cabinet nor a Microwave Cart

Two items that I'm looking to replace after the flood are a filing cabinet and a rolling microwave cart.  The microwave cart was actually used as a make-shift printer holder from my college days.  The filing cabinet was  stored in the basement due to its lack of.... aesthetic appeal.   That meant I hardly ever used it, and my filing got way behind.

Right now, I am in need of both a place to store the printer and a place to keep my files.  I don't have to buy exactly the same as what was damaged, but I kind of sort of have to show how they are related.  And, I'm trying to stay within the amount that insurance is willing to pay.

I've been looking for a cupboard of sorts that would be big enough to hold a printer or upright files.  I wanted it for the window nook in the library, so it had to be a specific height and size.  I haven't been having a lot of luck.  Anything that fits the criteria tends to be out of my budget.

I found this today.  It's too small to hold upright files, and much too small for the printer; but I think it looks pretty good.  

It squeaked in at at just below the amount that I had budgeted.  I got a discount, because there was a wee little chip in one of the corners under a drawer.  The little piece wasn't even quite chipped off, so I got out the wood glue when I brought it home.  When the glue dries, nobody will ever be able to tell.

The price tags are still on it, so I guess it's not a done deal yet, but I think it'll probably stay.  Now I just need to decide if I'm going to try to pass it off as a microwave cart or a filing cabinet.

Nap Time

The other day, Cotton begged and begged to go out for a "walk".  Every time I turned around, he was running for the door or doing his funny little hoppy dance that he does when he wants to head out.  Finally, I put on the sling, popped him inside and then took the dogs out.  We were out for an hour, but it was maybe only 5 minutes before this happened:

The Dude fell asleep.

And he stayed asleep until about 10 minutes after we got home.

Forts

If you build forts, they will come.

 In one form or another.

Things I know to be true

Days when your dog steals and consumes both a bar of soap and a bowl of brussel sprouts may seem frustrating, but they don't hold a candle to what you'll experience over the next 24 hours.

Tallulah Belle Poodle has done more than her fair share of contribution towards global warming today.