Last night I attempted the rugelach again and basically failed miserably. I had minichips this time, and my dough was cold, but somehow all my rolls totally fell apart. The recipe was supposed to make 16 cookies, but mine only made 13, and 7 of those were big piles of goop when I took them out of the oven. I was making them to bring to my parent's house for Rosh Hashana dinner tomorrow night, but I guess that's not going to happen. Or I could bring the 6 good ones, but we'd have to divide each one into 3 pieces if everyone wanted a taste and thats not really polite. Good thing I'm supposed to make a chocolate cake tonight too. And a pecan pie. And a sweet potato casserole. And spiced nuts. You think I'm joking but I'm not!
Another thing. The women's bathroom at my work has three stalls. One of these stalls is currently out of commission. Apparently you can get locked inside and as this is one of my worst fears, I'm not going to mess around with that. Also it's the stall with the toilet that's peeling, so I try to avoid it anyway. But now every time I go to use the facilities, both functioning stalls are occupied and I have to wait my turn. Not optimal! Last time I finally got to use the toilet, I reached for some paper after finishing my business and saw there was poop on it! How does a person get poop on the toilet paper thats still in the dispenser?
Last night I decided I'd make rugelach, which is a cookie-like pastry consisting of dough wrapped around chocolate and nuts or fruit. You spread the filling on a circle of dough (like pizza) and then either roll it up into a log and cut it into inch long pieces or cut pizza slices out and roll them up into crescents. Someone once told me its really hard to make good rugelach, but after looking at a few recipes I thought I could handle it. As usual I was mostly wrong, but thats not a surprise.
So first, I left out the sour cream when I was making the dough. I forget a crucial ingredient almost every time I bake, so this is not surprising. This was especially annoying, though, because its a difficult dough to make, the type that you have to get to just the right consistency and then STOP before overdoing it. Javert calmed me down after I realized my error and then helped me mix in the sour cream with my hands. The dough consistency ended up being okay in the end, but I felt pretty stupid till I tasted the final result.
Second, I couldn't find mini chocolate chips at Fairway. The downtown store has a pretty shabby baking aisle, and although they probably put the minichips somewhere, I really didn't think I needed them. Instead I figured I'd just cut up regular chips. Except that didn't really work--too many chocolate slivers--so I ended up using normal chips. Which I discovered are way too big for rugelach.
I decided to make both crescents and rolls so that I could compare the two. My crescents look terrible. Javert had a momentary lapse of spacial awareness and rolled the first crescent up backwards. Having read the directions, I knew the right way to roll, but still they look like little albino turds flecked with....Anyway, the rolls look better, except that the gigantic chips kept falling out and shoving them back in messed up the roll's shape.
In the end they tasted pretty good, but I'm going to try a couple variations next time I make them (which will be soon, since I froze two pieces of dough). At least they tasted good, right?
Well now. I seem to have taken a very extended holiday. But now I feel like getting back into the swing of things and that includes Ratfoot. So hello again. To nobody, since I'm sure the 4 people who read this blog before have long since stopped checking for updates.
Many things have happened since I last checked in here. Clearly none of them was important enough to write about, however.
So instead, I shall write about the television show Numb3rs. I hate this program. Yet I am absolutely COMPELLED to watch its stupidity. I'm actually totally against the entire concept of the show--You CANNOT solve every problem using math! Not even with the fake math featured on the program. And even if you could I'd still be required to hate the show since I hate math. I don't watch it every week or anything like that, I simply hoard episodes on the fake TIVO until I can't stand passing by them any longer, and then I watch one episode while knitting (which is math related, by the way, so I feel like I've done some sort of math activity and that makes me feel angry yet smart at the same time.) Sometimes my brother comes over and watches with me. My apartment seem to be the meeting place for watching dumb television (this includes Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, and my personal favorite, The Unit).
The main thing is that I pronounce Numb3rs as "Numbthers." Clearly this is how it should be pronounced. You don't put a number inside a word without wanting people to pronounce the number, right? And I've got my brother into doing it also. He's all "Can we watch Numthers tonight" and I'm all "Yes! My powers increase!"
