Monthly Archives: April 2012

Dinosaur Cookies

Over the last two nights Danielle and I have made some pretty awesome (at least to look at) cookies. Dinosaurs-who-eat-children cookies! It’s actually three dinosaur shaped sugar cookies glued together with icing. The center one has a hole cut in it to hold the contents of the dinosaur’s stomach. In this case, upon CH’s suggestion, sour patch kids — since everyone knows dinosaurs eat children! Roar!

Adapted from this guide.

Make some colored blobs of dough.

Carefully make a block of dough in stripes. Freeze it overnight.

Slice it into sheets. Then bake it.

Quickly, before the cookies cool and they get hard to cut, use a dinosaur cookie cutter on them. Also, a circle to cut out their stomachs. Carefully assemble them with royal icing. Two whole dino cookies + one with a cut out stomach in the middle

Fill their bellies with sourpatch kids.

Let them sit for 30 minutes to dry before standing them up. It might be helpful to flatten them gently since the dinosaurs probably aren’t perfectly flat but be careful not to break them.

Miners Lettuce

I always thought they looked like mini land lily pads… Maybe for faeries?

But, anyway, now that I’m grown up, I’ve figured out that the faerie lily pads of my childhood are edible. And rather tasty. And easy to find. Which makes them perfect for the newbie forager, such as myself.

Foraging for noms

We got Half Dome permits for July… So I’m on a mission to be less out of breath while hiking. The result is semi-regular Sunday morning hikes currently made more interesting by foraging for things I can eat, particularly miner’s lettuce which I happen to really like.

But most interesting is looking for wild mushrooms — but not for eating, that seems like a terrible idea. We found the mushroom above in the shadow of a redwood. It’s by far the most interesting looking mushroom I’ve ever seen in its natural habitat… And maybe one of the most poisonous? Who knows.

This is why I get no work done…

This dog sits in the cube next to mine and it’s adorable! Unfortunately, since this dog started coming to work this week, my productivity has vastly declined and all I want to do is pet it.

Nerd Dog

Moogle, a couple weeks ago, trying to sneak in some Reddit browsing while I stepped away from my computer.

Micro 4/3rds!

I got a new camera! An Olympus EPL-1, Micro 4/3rds. It was a “demo” camera off EBay (via Slickdeals) for $200 which I think is a pretty good deal. My beloved Nikon D7000 isn’t going anywhere, but often times it’s just too big and heavy to throw into my bag, especially if I’m carrying a laptop or two.

There’s a picture from the first bunch I took with the new camera today —

Black Cod?

This weekend I bought a piece of fish labelled as “black cod” from Monteray Market (Fish market?) in Berkeley. I cooked it up in a little soy, black bean paste and sesame oil… But I was surprised to find that my fish reminded me a lot of Patagonian Toothfish/Chilean Sea Bass, which I try to avoid eating. It was fatty, slightly flakey and mild flavored. My dad got suspicious and pointed out that maybe “black cod” was a name for a scarier sounding fish, the same way Patagonian Toothfishes are marketed as “Chilean Seabass.” Wikipedia tells me that there is a black cod — complete with anti-freeze proteins in its blood. But also, that “black cod” is sometimes applied to sablefish, and Wikipedia even adds that sablefish is similar to Chilean Seabass. Now I’m wondering, which fish did I eat?

Carrying Things

It’s Moogle carrying around a chew toy as he tries to find a place to ‘bury’ it in the house.

Buddha’s Hand

I’m not sure why this fruit is named Buddha’s Hand and not… lets say… Cthulu fruit or monster’s hand, but it is. It’s also delicious. I adopted this one from work, it was part of a display of avocados at the end of day on Friday and it was starting to feel a wee bit squishy, as citrus tends to as they enter old age. So this Buddha’s hand was adopted.

Then candied. Nom. The fruit is all skin and pith, no actual ‘flesh’ — but the pith, unlike most citrus, isn’t bitter. I cut up the whole fruit, cooked it in 2 cups sugar/2 cups water, then let it out to dry. It didn’t quite crystalize as I’d hoped, but it’s still a great candied citrus flavor. Additionally, the sugar syrup it was cooked in is delicious — slightly tart, mostly fruity citrus. I’m looking forward to mixing it with some soda water for some Buddha’s Hand sodas. I drink weird things.

raccoon*

adventures of a cosmic procyonid