August 27, 2010
Recent Baking Adventures: Muffins & No Bake Cookies
Baking is a lot of fun guys. It is a great thing to do with your friends, siblings, or anyone you want to bond with because you can create something, and then eat it together later. If you have nothing to talk about while you’re baking, you can always talk about baking.
Peanut Butter Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins
These muffins are so delicious and they are so easy to make. I made them with the 12-year-old I watched this summer, on my last day of hanging out with her.
Ingredients
We didn’t have them at hand, but I’d recommend adding any of the following things too:
and any other yummy thing you can think of!
Pretty much,
you just mix
everything together.
Stir it and stuff
and then
put it in muffin tins
until it comes out like this.
I guess people would recommend mixing all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, and then combining them.
No Bake Oat Rolled Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
There are so many ways to describe these cookies. Delicious, heavenly, in my freezer, in my belly, in my mouth, all over my shirt and fingers while I’m writing this, friggen awesome, really good, wow, cookies…
These are SO EASY AND FUN TO MAKE. Really you just take any cookie recipe and delete the eggs and baking powder/baking soda. You don’t need to bake these anywhere. That’s why they are no bake cookies.
Here’s the basic recipe:
We actually didn’t have enough butter, so we substituted some olive oil and soy milk. After you get the basic recipe mixed all together, then you get to add whatever you want! It just depends how you want your cookies to taste. Here’s what got added to this batch:
Stir it all together. If you’re adding unsweetened cocoa, you’re going to want to go back and add an equal amount of sugar or honey. You might also need more flour as you add the peanut butter. You want to get it to a consistency at which you can pretty easily mold the dough into balls. When you’ve got everything together, pour oats on a plate, and roll the dough over the oats to add the outer-coating. Oats add a great texture and crunch to these cookies! At the end, just put the cookies in the freezer, and they’ll be all ready and delicious for you to eat in a couple hours or less, depending on how good cold your freezer is.
These are the ingredients we used!
Here’s our batter. Yum.
Oats!
The first cookie!
Because these cookies were made No Parent Style, you can put the dough all over your fingers and eat it, you can be cool like Rachel is right here. Not pictured: me being cool too.
August 17, 2010
Creating Bread
Recently, I made bread. Making bread is really fun and not all that complicated, and in the end it’s delicious! Here is a guide using some photos and some words on HOW I CREATED BREAD WITH MY FRIEND, so maybe you too can enjoy a fun day creating bread with your friend.
You start by putting yeast in a bowl, and adding water and olive oil. We used two packets of yeast.
Then you add some honey and some salt! The salt is not pictured, but you know it’s in there.
Man if you’re me, you might wanna lick the honey that gets stuck on the bottom of the cap. We finished the bottle! We put in about half the bottle.
You let it sit for a little bit (20-30 minutes) and it starts to look like this.
Oh my gosh like this!
Then you beat it up while you add white flour and wheat flour (use both!) and beat it up the whole time.
It’s really fun to hold and squeeze in your hands.
THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID, AT LEAST.
It’s sort of like a baby. Rachel said to me, “Julie, if you drop that bread, I’m gonna freaking kill you or hurt your feelings.”
That really did the trick, so I put the bread back in the bowl.
Put a warm towel over the bowl, and let the bread rise for 20-30 minutes. It will look like this! I was a little scared/intimidated…yeast is alive? And now it’s rising up against us? Oh no.
Take it out of the bowl and put it in a pan you can put in the oven! I wanted to make bread with “dots” which I learned was actually corn meal. You can see the dots on top!
Put dots on the bottom too.
We wanted to put spices in one of the loaves. What you have to do in that situation is put the dough on a clean, floured surface.
Spread some butter and olive oil on the dough.
Then put whatever spices and stuff you want! We put minced onions, rosemary garlic, Italian herbs, and other tasty stuff too.
Roll the dough like this!!!
This is the spices loaf in a pan.
If you want you can put some honey on top of the dough before you bake it!
Aw they’re friends!
Friends inside the oven too!
Mmmm…
So you bake the bread until it’s golden-brown-ish-however-you-like. When it’s done, you might want to cut the bread with a knife!
BREAD UP CLOSE! REAL BREAD.
If you want to eat a sandwich on your fresh, homemade, delicious bread, you could maybe cook some onions!
Oh my god and maybe add some mushrooms.
Oh and maybe snack on some bread while the vegetables are cooking 
Pretty much done!!! We melted some cheese on top too.
Rachel and I were so nice that we offered sandwiches to everyone in my family, and my brother accepted. Wow we are so nice.
Ta da! To make your sandwich extra delicious, you could try adding some hummus and poppyseed dressing. This is what I did!
After your sandwich is done, you might want to go watch How I Met Your Mother with your friend. This is what I did anyway.
To make bread, all you need is:
It’s so simple! We pretty much eye-balled all the measurements, as Rachel had the recipe memorized. You can probably do that too if you want to make bread. Be creative. Rachel is the master behind bread pretty much, and I am the super helper. SUPER HELPER.
August 13, 2010
Randall Munroe Original Drawing (xkcd.com)
The other night I was going through some old papers of mine. I found a bunch of my old comics, and I found a little drawing Randall Munroe of xkcd did for me back at Webcomics Weekend in 2009. I thought it’d be a neat thing to share with you guys!
I had a nice interaction with Randall, and besides getting this drawing done, we had a short discussion. Mostly I remember he advised me to switch my major from math to physics.
August 6, 2010
Someone fainted on me at Five Guys
Today I went rock-climbing with my younger brother. We climbed for about an hour and a half, and then decided to go get food. Usually we’ll climb for longer, but I think for some reason we both weren’t really feeling it. For me, I was pretty tired because I just couldn’t fall asleep last night, and I did a lot of climbing a couple days ago (top-roped two 5.11′s!). And for my brother, he’s not been climbing very much recently, and felt tired. We both did a handful of good climbs before taking off though.
Anyway, in Worcester, there recently opened up a new Five Guys Burgers and Fries place. I’m a vegetarian, and they have a good veggie sandwich (just get a lot of mushrooms) and so being able to eat at a fast-food location is pretty exciting for me. And I love mushrooms and sandwiches. I actually went there yesterday by myself, so this was my second trip in two days. Eating at Five Guys for me is worth about 4 meals (assuming I get french fries) so it’s pretty cool if I’m busy because I can just go there, forget to eat for about a day, and not really worry about it. Awesome!
So me and Seth (Seth is my younger brother!) were sitting down eating, and I had an obstructed view of the counter where people order. There was a crowd of people at the counter, and suddenly I heard a thud, and saw that someone was on the ground. It was a guy surrounded by some friends. People seemed really shocked, but I saw him getting up, so I assumed he was just very outgoing and had been demonstrating some story or joke a bit too openly.
So I went back to eating, when, BAM, a couple minutes later, I felt this body crash into me. It was really quick, messy, and shocking. Bodies are so heavy! This was just a normal guy, and his whole body was just like dead weight in my lap. I was taken completely by surprised, and just remember shouting, “Oh my god oh my god!” I thought I was being attacked at first. I like to think that I like to give people the “benefit of the doubt” but I guess in fact I’m pretty mistrusting.
I’m okay. My head got hit, and I think my elbows too, or at least somewhere else on my upper body. I might have a bruise, as my head thronged for a good 20 minutes after. But more than anything it was just plain scary. I really had a hole in my stomach for the next hour!
The guy was okay I think. He cut his arm falling on either a chair or a table, and hopefully he was able to get to a hospital to figure out what the problem was. I guess I’ve led a pretty boring life so far, because this is probably the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me. I would have stayed to get interviewed (SHOCKING! MAN FALLS NEAR GIRL EATING VEGETABLES!), but I had to get going to help some kids in need of belaying.
Update
This afternoon I was speaking with Carissa and we had a conversation that went something like this:
Carissa: I got a bloody nose today!
Me: I got fainted on today!
Carissa: I know. I WISH someone fainted on me.
Me: What?
Carissa: When I went to Five Guys later with mom I walked in and I was thinking wow I really hope someone faints on me but no one did.
August 3, 2010
Sand Trick
Hi guys, here’s a video of me doing some tricks in sand. If you’re enthralled by my tricks (I’m sure this is likely), you can also check out my Scooter Trick from late June. Enjoy everyone, and please don’t do anything dangerous just because I am, unless you really want to then that’s okay!
June 29, 2010
Scooter Trick
Here is a video shot and narrated by the glamorous Rachel Ravina, featuring the adventurous me successfully completing a trick on the scooter.