It's Friday eve

Heh. Though I don't "celebrate" it the way some college students do. (I remember years ago, at a meeting on campus, a woman from another department - someone older than I am but who I think maybe went to a Baptist college, so that might explain it - said "Did you know the students call today 'Thirsty Thursday' and they go out and drink?" and I have to admit I chuckled a little because I remember students doing that when I was in college, but they just called it "the start of the weekend." I never did myself, because I often had important Friday classes, I didn't drink any way, and I hated being in crowds, especially drunk crowds. But yeah.)

But I am having a little pre-weekend celebration.

I wore my new shoes today:




This is another pair of those cloth "Hot Chocolates" shoes. At full price, they are a bit high for what you get, but if you watch carefully, they do sometimes have good sales. (These were on sale, and I had a $5 off coupon, so I got them for a bit less than $40). This was a pair I had had my eye on because that color and that design is pretty much me.

I'm thinking also they might be cute in the winter with socks and slacks. Well, on dry days at least - I suspect these don't hold up too well in the wet, and I am just not into the whole galoshes-over-shoes thing.

I am also using my newly-fixed oven to bake a batch of "2-ish ingredient English muffins". I had clipped the recipe out of The Week (and thrown out the rest of the magazine after I read it) but after cleaning house this afternoon, I couldn't find it, and I fear I may have swept it up into the trash with some other old papers. But a little targeted Google searching turned the linked recipe up, which is fundamentally the same one (The Week reprints a lot of things from here and there, so I'm not too surprised. This may even be where they sourced it from)

I did run a little short of yogurt (the full tub, I guess, is just over two cups, and I had taken out a serving for my lunch Wednesday) so I had to add in a little milk.

The dough is sticky, or maybe I just tend to be a little lax about "knead on a floured board" because I don't have a proper kneading board right now. (I should get one, I could run down to Kopper Kettle some time for that). I'm hoping they're good because they're certainly simple to make, and they also said it could serve as pizza dough and....I realized I could also make English Muffin pizzas, which were greatly loved by me as a child (and as not so much of a child...) but commercial English muffins are quite high in salt, so I have to avoid them now....but it would be nice to make Piglet's Pizza Muffins again:



I know, it's kind of hilarious I still have that old cookbook but I really do love it, and it's one of the ones that taught me not just to cook, but that it was okay to experiment - a lot of the recipes came with several variant forms and it was also suggested that you could play around a little on your own with ingredients, and I think that's a valuable thing to learn for a person who's going to cook.

(There was some discussion here and there about a column in the New York Times - I have used up my free allotment for the month so I won't link it - but by the author of Smitten Kitchen, basically saying "if you live in NYC, don't cook, it's cheaper to do carry out" and while I get that for some people carry out is a way of life (small kitchen, long work hours, etc.), I can't do it. Not here. Not enough options, and the food is too high in salt and calories to be eaten regularly. Once in a great while, I might get a pasta dish from Roma's or even some chicken fingers somewhere, but that's not more than once a month - I usually cook, even if it's just simple things like heating up vegetables or making the bean burgers I like.

I guess her point was "you don't always have to cook, see, I'm a food blogger and I don't always cook" but it did get lost a little bit in the "oh, life in NYC is hard and groceries are expensive, so go and outsource your cooking to someone else" and it does come off a little....I don't know, big-city centric? I mean, shopping here is hard some times, and I dearly wish there were smaller-quantity packs of some things. But yeah, not all of us can rely on dumplings from Chinatown....

One thing I will note about the internet, there's no shortage of people who think they know you well enough to tell you how to live your life for you...)



And here they are:

They don't look like much. I hope they are good....


They're good, but not OH MY GOSH good. Not better than the baking powder biscuits from the Farm Journal recipe, and not that much easier. They are a tiny bit tough and hard on the outside with is a problem with my dental issues. (They may soften up after cooling and being kept in a bag)