Project: Bathroom Fan

Our house is weird. It's an old house, with a slightly-less-old addition, and it's got a whole lot of quirks we're still figuring out. The addition was mostly done by the old owners, by which I mean the work was done by them, and these folks were not exactly licensed professional contractors. So we keep coming across little surprises, which is both frustrating and entertaining. We got a home inspection when we bought the place, so nothing is dangerously wrong. Just several "WTF" moments as we're trying to fix things.

Our heat is "Hydronic" baseboard heat, which, according to Dave, is supposed to be awesome and efficient. I just find it effective and loud - the baseboard heaters start clicking and pinging every time the heat switches on, which is annoying, but they heat the place up quickly and that is extremely important for someone like myself who could probably get frostbite on my toes in June. The heaters, though, are mostly on outdoor walls. Or, at least, on walls that were outdoor walls before the addition was put on, which leaves us with a kitchen and several bathrooms without any heat. They accounted for this problem by putting combination light/fan/heaters in the bigger bathrooms, and wall heaters in the small ones. The kitchen is open enough that the heat from other rooms manages to warm it up fairly well, except that the floor always stays cold, and I will put in a heated floor someday, mark my words. Anyway, the heater in the main bathroom died the first time I tried to use it, which was, of course, on a cold day.

At first, Dave tried to fix it. So he carefully took apart the old fan to see what could be salvaged. Unfortunately, nothing could. A new fan was ordered online, and we waited. Of course, at this point, there is a big round hole in my bathroom, and I can stare up into the attic every time I pee. Ever taken a shower and been worried about bats coming down from the attic to freak you out? I have! No, there are no bats in the attic. That we know of.

We had to cut power to the bathroom so Dave could work on it without getting zapped, but that turned out to be easier said than done. The breaker labeled "hall bathroom" cut power to everything except that fan. So I stood by the exposed wires with a multimeter while Dave stood at each of the breaker boxes (we have three) and flipped switches. We set our phones to walkie talkies so we didn't have to yell, and since we were doing this anyway, I decided to turn on all the lights upstairs and run around with a nightlight to test plugs, so I could find out what all those unlabeled breakers controlled. So he'd flip a switch, and I'd test the wires with the multimeter, then zip from room to room checking what lights were off and which plugs were dead. After forty minutes of this adventure, we determined that neither the breaker box in the laundry room or in the family room contains the breaker for the fan. We found the breakers for lights in the master bathroom, plugs in three bedrooms, and the fridge and dryer, but it turns out that the breaker for the hall bathroom fan was in the third breaker box, in the garage. Beside the ones for the garage door openers, the pool lights, and the workbench plugs. We laughed. A LOT. And Dave has vowed to track that old owner down and have him committed.

The next day, I came home to a brand new, functioning, bathroom heater. It's great, and not just because it keeps the bats out of the bathroom. It warms the room up quicker than I expected, and isn't any louder than a small hair dryer. It's going to be nice to have shiver-free showers for the rest of the winter!

This morning, I took a shower, and completely forgot to use the heater. I am brilliant.

What's for Dessert: Pumpkin Bread Pudding (and Maple Whiskey Cream Sauce)

For Thanksgiving (American-style) this year, I was assigned the task of bringing dessert. Not yet feeling a mastery of pie crusts, I was at a loss for interesting and tasty ideas. Until the Food Network rescued me. I was watching a special Thanksgiving episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay, in which the Pioneer Woman challenges him to a five-course Thanksgiving dinner cook-off. I've been following her blog for a few months now, which is why I was interested in watching in the first place. On the show, Bobby Flay made a pumpkin bread pudding for dessert, and it looked incredible. So I thought I'd give it a shot. I put the recipe together over a couple of days to save myself some stress.

A couple of days ago, I made pumpkin bread using my friend Tasha's recipe. It really is the best pumpkin bread I've ever had, so even if you're not going to make the whole bread pudding thing, at least give this bread a try. And read her blog sometime - she's got some great recipes on there. Lucky for me this recipe makes two loaves, because we couldn't help ourselves from slicing into one of them that night when it was still warm from the oven. I think I'll be making mini-loaves to give away to co-workers for Christmas this year. Plus extra for me.


Last night, I made the Pioneer Woman's Maple Whiskey Cream Sauce. I had to ask Dave to pick up some bourbon for me, because it's not generally something I'd have in the house because we're not big drinkers (especially not bourbon or whiskey). Actually, I asked him to bring me a bottle of Colonel Kwik-e-Mart's Kentucky Bourbon, but he couldn't find it and brought me Maker's Mark instead. I considered leaving the booze out, but she raves so much about it on her blog that I decided to stick to the recipe, at least the first time. It turned out so incredibly good. It took ages to thicken up and I gave up and decided to let it cool in the fridge while it was still fairly liquid, but when I pulled it out today to use, it was exactly the right consistency. I stirred it to check, and then I used the spoon to see that it had exactly the right flavor, too. I want this sauce on everything now!

This morning I got up early and cut up the bread into little cubes and toasted them in the oven while I was watching the Macy's parade. Then I followed the directions from Bobby Flay's Food Network site, skipping the sauces and substituting my own fabulous fresh pumpkin bread. I tweaked the recipe a little, using 1.5 cups of light cream and 1.5 cups of 1% milk, instead of the 2 cups heavy cream and 1 cup whole milk he calls for. It just seemed too heavy for me. And since I don't have fancy-schmancy real vanilla beans lying around, I dumped in a tablespoon or so of vanilla extract.


I served it tonight at Thanksgiving dinner, with a drizzle of the sauce and a blob of whipped cream. Fantastic. Really. My mother-in-law has decreed that this shall be a new Thanksgiving tradition, so you know it's got to be good. We split up the remaining bread pudding (and sauce) so everyone could bring some home! I give full and grateful credit to Tasha, Bobby Flay, and The Pioneer Woman... I just assembled it all!

GPS perils

The scene: Baltimore. Driving home.

It's about midnight, and we're leaving the underground parking garage. Dave says he's pretty sure he knows how to get home but since we get turned around so often in that Inner Harbor area we may as well turn on Garmy (our Garmin GPS), just to help get us back to the highway. As usual, she takes a few minutes to locate suitable satellites for navigation, so we're driving slowly in the direction we think we need to go, while we wait for her. Then she speaks! In 0.2 miles, turn left! Hooray! Electronic guidance! We turn. She says to stay on this road, then turn left again. I'm a little tipsy from the good wine at dinner, but I'm pretty sure that's taking us away from 395, which is what we wanted. So I poke at the little "next" button so I see what her plans are for us, and it just gets weirder. She's having us make a bunch of turns on streets I don't recognize, and it doesn't look like she remembers that 95 exists.

I mention this to my chauffeur, and he suggests that perhaps we have not entered the right destination. I check, and yes, I've hit "home". It's possible that we've set somewhere else as "home" by accident, so I start from scratch and type in our whole address, and ask her to please recalculate. By now, we're somehow on 83 and going the wrong way entirely, and I'm starting to freak out.

She recalculates, asking us to "please drive to highlighed route". But... we're on a route, why aren't you calculating from where we are? It's your job, stupid machine! Recalculate, damn you! Our little car icon is clearly on 83, but the pink line of our calculated route is off to the right on a service road. She seems incapable of understanding and accepting that we were on 83. So Dave calmly (he's always calm, I don't know how he does it) takes us off at the next exit, and Garmy starts with her dozens of turns on strange streets. Why doesn't she want us to take the highway? Why does she keep making us take these stupid little streets all the way to Columbia? It makes no sense! Hyperventilating! Stabbing angrily at Garmy's buttons! Tantrum beginning!

Then I hear the lightbulb go "ping" over Dave's head.

He instructs me to go to "settings", where I could probably improve the situation by taking Garmy out of pedestrian mode. Which he had set her to when we were walking to the restaurant. And forgotten about.

I guess she was trying to protect her pedestrians by keeping us off 95. Stupid computers, doing exactly what we program them to.

In other news, I now know that I can walk home from Baltimore.

Kittens and their adorable destructive powers

As I type this, I have a Horton smooshed up against my butt as he tries to subtly push me off my chair so he can sleep properly sprawled across it.

But when I first got up this morning, he was fast asleep in one of his other favorite spots, the fluffy bathmat in the Kermit bathroom. For those of you not in the know, our hall bathroom has a green tub and has been christened the Kermit bathroom, or sometimes the Frog Room. But I digress. Horton was sleeping thusly:

Which of course got my "awww" instinct activated, making me reach out to pet him. Just try and tell me you don't want to pet him. You'd be a liar. After a moment or two of contented purring and vicious biting (simultaneously, as usual), he rushed off to the hallway to suck on his teddy bear, leaving me to notice the art project he'd been working on overnight.



This is why I never bother to buy the expensive paper towels.

Symphony of Lights

Tonight we met up with some folks to celebrate a friend's birthday by going to see the Symphony of Lights in Columbia. It's an immense display of Christmas lights along a mile-long pathway in a park, and you drive through it and marvel at the pretty colors. It's a big annual event and the proceeds go to Howard County Hospital. We actually got to walk through it because it's the opening weekend and we were part of the "Dazzle Dash" - yesterday they had a race, and today was just a walk, but we still got to wear numbers pinned to us like marathoners. It was a lot of fun! We've driven past it dozens of times in the years I've been living here, but we've never actually gone to look at the lights. Walking through was nice because we were up close. Some of the displays even move!

It was cold and my feet are tired, but it was a good night for a good cause - doubly good, if you include the birthday!

They were playing happy Christmas music during the pre-walk festivities, and I ended up frantically calling my Dad. Why? So I could tell him that Christmas has officially started and I win because I heard Feliz Navidad first. It's a silly thing that started a few years ago, where whoever hears the song first on the radio or at the mall "wins" and calls the other to tell them. Sadly, anticlimactic this year because Dad couldn't hear the song in the background noise and so was a little confused when I called to tell him I won. Oh well, when he got it, he laughed, so it's all good.

May the Christmas season begin!

What's for Dinner: Baked Potato Soup

When I first came across this recipe, it called for actually baking the potatoes and scooping them out to use in the soup. While I'm sure it gives the soup an extra kick of authentic "baked potato" flavor, who has time to bake a bunch of potatoes, only to gut them and turn them into soup?


Baked Potato Soup

3lbs potatoes
1 medium onion, diced
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
4 cups chicken broth (one of those recloseable boxes)
1 cup cream or half-and-half or whole milk
1/2 tsp thyme
3 cups shredded cheddar cheese, plus some for garnish
Note: the sharper the better, as is always the case with cheddar cheese
1 cup sour cream, plus extra for dolloping on top later
Bacon bits or bacon salt (optional)


First you boil up the potatoes so you can mash them. They cook faster if you cut them into smaller chunks. When you can stick a fork through the pieces, drain them and dump them in a big bowl and mash them roughly. You want to leave them chunky, for texture. I normally don't even use my potato masher, I just go at them with a fork. Don't add butter or cream or anything.

Next, fry up the onion with the butter in a big soup pot until the onions are soft, then whisk in the flour and let it brown a bit while you keep frantically whisking it. Then, still whisking, start adding chicken broth slowly. Start by only adding about 2 cups, then add the cream and the thyme and let it heat up until it gets frothy from the cream boiling, then turn down the heat. Stir in the mashed potatoes and blend them gently into the soup. Don't whisk them in or you'll break up all the chunks and it won't be as good. At this point, if the soup is too thick, add more broth to thin it out. I dumped the whole box in this time figuring I'd be fine, and ended up with a really thin soup, so I stopped and cooked up 3 more big potatoes to mash and add to it. Since this takes a lot longer, I recommend starting with less broth at the beginning and adding more as needed.

When it's time to serve, stir in the cheese so it melts - if you use normal cheddar you'll have an orange tint to the soup. Then you can stir in the sour cream.


When you serve this it's fun to add a blob of sour cream and a bit of cheese to the bowl, making it look all restaurant-fancy. I also cooked up bacon for bacon bits the first few times I made this, but I since discovered Bacon Salt in all its glory, and now I sprinkle that over the soup instead. I suppose you could use chives instead, if that's your thing.

Sunrise

I had to work a couple of Saturdays and Sundays this month - more than usual because a coworker went on maternity leave and left us with a dozen weekend shifts unmanned. It's not so bad, because there are enough of us that we each had to pick up one extra day and we were covered. Also, her baby is adorable and so I forgive her for wanting to stay home and be with it and stuff. Normally, when nobody is having babies, I work every seventh weekend.

I don't enjoy my working weekends and holidays because they're always day shifts, meaning I need to be there (and preferably awake) by 7am. So I need to be up by 5:30am. Compare this to the normal noon start to my shift, and my alarm clock's usual setting of 9am. It wouldn't be so bad if I was able to get some sleep the night before, but I'm a nocturnal creature and I usually have to take an over-the-counter sleeping pill to help knock me out early enough. Otherwise my internal clock doesn't hit "bedtime" until midnight at the earliest. Of course, the side effect of this is a groggy morning and blinky drive to work during which I am thankful I'm nearly alone on the road.

Despite my sleepiness, my journey to work these past two weekends has not been grumpy, because I drive east and my timing has been just right to catch the sunrise. I know that a sunrise looks essentially the same as a sunset, but it feels different. There's something very calming about seeing the light return to the sky, and watching the clouds go from pink to peach to butter to blue.

I totally slept in this morning, though.

What's for Dinner: Jen's Spaghetti Sauce

Let me first say that my Mom makes the best spaghetti sauce in the world. Anyone on either side of my family would shove aside any other family member to get to it. As is usual with Mom recipes, there are no measurements. I learned to copy this recipe by watching her closely and figuring out what a "half a palmful of thyme" means. The scientist in me does not like this sort of measurement - what if you have tiny hands? Luckily, my hands are carbon copies of my mother's, so our measurements work out great. I suspect this is also a sneaky way of ensuring that nobody else but us ever gets this recipe exactly right, so everyone has to keep coming to us for the world's best spaghetti. I can only hope that I have a daughter who inherits my hands, or the secret of the sauce dies with me. And in fairness to Mom - I tweaked it and made my own version. I will try to write out a recipe so you can try to make it, but please know that it's a very "fuzzy" recipe that never comes out the same way twice.

And yeah, I'm bragging about my fabulous sauce because I love it to death, but I know it's not everyone's favorite. It's not made with fresh garden tomatoes or anything, and I know that fancy pro chefs would cringe at it. But it tastes so damn good to me that I frankly don't care. I could eat this three or four times a week for months and never get sick of it. Provided there was garlic bread available to soak up the extra sauce, of course.

Jen's Spaghetti Sauce

3-4 sweet italian sausages
1/2 pound extra lean ground beef (this is really flexible - add more if you like it meatier, less if you don't, but DO get the extra-lean because you're getting plenty of fat from the sausages)
5 cloves of garlic
2 28-oz cans of tomato sauce or tomato puree
(have an extra one on hand in case you find the sauce too thick after you add the meat)
Big palmful of oregano
Palmful of basil
Half palmful of thyme
Generous amount fresh ground black pepper


First I snip the sausages into pieces with scissors. I cut them fairly small, ending up with 8 pieces from each sausage. I fry them up until they have a nice brown crust. They don't need to be cooked all the way through at this point, because you're going to simmer them in the sauce for a while later. I put them aside to drain on paper towels, then brown the ground beef. I make sure to season the beef well with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, I've dumped the cans of sauce into a big pot and added my spices. I use a garlic press for the garlic, but I suppose you could chop it fine if you prefer. Now, the spice measurements are tricky. I basically cup my palm and pour a whole bunch of oregano into my hand from my huge Costco-sized jar. Dump that in, and then do the same with slightly less basil, and then half as much thyme. This is also where you'll want to pull out your pepper grinder and grind some coarse pepper into the mix. As much as you think you'll like - it's never the same twice, which is part of the fun!

I set the heat on low for the sauce and then dump in all the fat-drained meat and stir it all in. That simmers for at least an hour, but I usually leave it for about two on the lowest heat that keeps it gently bubbling. Oh, and keep the lid on unless you want a red-spotted kitchen. A splatter screen works well too. After about an hour I taste it and make adjustments. If it's too acidic, I am not ashamed to say that I add a little sugar. It doesn't usually need it, but I found last time that when I used puree instead of sauce, it was more acidic for some reason. Maybe it was a different brand that made the difference, I'm not sure. Let your tastebuds guide you.


When I'm finally starving and going crazy with the super smell of my kitchen and desperate to eat, I check the sausage chunks by pulling one out and cutting it in half. If it's still pink in the middle, it's got to keep cooking.

I know it's "spaghetti" sauce, but I don't think we've ever had it with actual spaghetti noodles. This needs a big noodle. I love it with rigatoni, but penne or rotini do pretty well too. Anything with ridges or spirals to really hold the sauce. You will also need pasta bowls. Big ones. Oh, and some wine.


This recipe obviously makes a ton of sauce, because my mother could only teach me to cook for a vast crowd. So, have some tupperwares handy to freeze the extras. It freezes very well and keeps for at least 4 months in the freezer... we've never had it last longer because we eat it before then.

Great day

I just had a great day off. Well, except for the horrible migraine (with bonus nausea) that sent me back to bed for an hour this afternoon. The Advil worked pretty quickly and the cats were merciful and left me alone for a while, so I was able to rest in the dark until the pounding stopped.

I got the kitchen cleaned up, down to washing the floor and the sink. I got some dishes and laundry done, and tidied the bathrooms and bedroom. I can see the floor and the counters now, which is a huge improvement. Granted, when it came to papers and receipts, I mostly just made nice piles instead of going through everything and filing it away, but at least the piles make me look slightly more organized. I got a few things crossed off my very long to-do list and then I went to the mall.

I was only going to the mall for a quick errand, not even for myself, but once I was there I couldn't help myself. It was as close to deserted as the Columbia Mall ever gets, so I wandered around and popped into a bunch of stores. I think I walked the length of the mall three times. I scored a great pair of pants from the sale rack at The Limited, which means I can now toss my old pair I've been wearing long past its prime. I was on the hunt for some comfy/cute brown shoes to wear for work, but I didn't have as much luck there. It was still fun to try on shoes, though - I'm such a girl. I checked out nail polish colors at Sephora, went into Bath & Body Works to sniff their new scents (meh), and found a watch I liked at Fossil and will be asking Santa for. I went to Occitane and used the demo of their shea butter hand cream, which is the best hand cream in the whole world, and considered buying the foot cream because I could probably use it. But I'll wait for the after-Christmas sales, because I cannot justify spending $20+ on a small tube of shea butter cream for my feet. I stopped in at Starbucks for a mocha and lamented for a moment that they no longer make the Espresso Truffle I loved so much last year, but I stopped lamenting when I got a sip of my mocha, because it was delicious. There was Christmas music playing everywhere and they were setting up the big tree in the center of the mall, and people seemed to be in a good mood all over the place. It was great!

Then I went to the library to return my half dozen books and pick up a half dozen more. I am so weird in the library. I get all impulsive and start grabbing every book I think might be interesting. Oh, that looks good. Oooh, I like that author, is that new? And one of these... and this one... and as usual I end up leaving with more books than I am likely to be able to read in the time allotted, but I can renew them all online if I need to. Which I will.

Should I start doing book reviews on my blog? There's no way I'd find time to do them all, but maybe for the ones I really enjoy...

Love this song!

I want to share this song with as many people as possible. It's not generally a style I'm attracted to, but her voice almost literally gives me chills. I can only find a live version from YouTube to share, but I recommend finding the album version on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you like to pick up music.