March 27, 2010

Recent Adventures in the Kitchen

Category: Cooking, Safe for All Readers — Tags: , , – Angel @ 7:54 pm

My desire to cook (and more often to bake) new things comes in waves. Lately, we’ve been trying to menu plan. We literally take a calendar on Google and enter what we’re having for lunch and dinner every day; then it sends us daily reminders in our email so we don’t forget whether we’re cooking, eating leftovers, or going out for that particular meal.

It’s a pretty handy system; the only problem is we get lazy and go for a few weeks without menu planning before we realize how stressed we (and more honestly, I) get without planning menus ahead of time and how much more tempted we are to go out to eat when we haven’t planned anything out.

In our times of planning, I’ve come across some great new recipes. You have to understand, I grew up without cooking anything, except spaghetti and macaroni and cheese. Everything else, I made in a toaster or a microwave. My parents had a few meals that they liked to cook, but I guess I never got around to learning how to make those meals. And other than that, we just weren’t the kind of family that sits around cooking together.

Even now, when we have a big family get-together, the smoke alarm usually goes off several times before the cooking has finished.

So keeping my genetic tendency to dislike cooking in mind, I’m pretty proud of my recent accomplishments (even though they actually are baking, which I enjoy a lot more than cooking.) Here’s a photographic journey:

Homemade bread!

Perfect sandwich bread, made with organic flour

Homemade organic stuffed crust pizza!

What are your favorite things to make in the kitchen?

March 12, 2010

Testing Out Our New Camcorder!

Category: Communication, Safe for All Readers — Angel @ 1:12 pm

We’ve decided if we’re going to become serious about this blogging thing (and we are, we promise! We’re just busy and we have to blog a lot for work, so it takes some motivating kicks in the behind to get us to post here. Perhaps some motivating comments would work too :)

Anyway, as I was saying, if we’re going to become serious bloggers, we figured we needed a legit camera to post video and pictures for our adoring fans. After much deliberation and viewing youtube video examples of camera work, we went with the Sanyo Xacti VPC-FH1A.

We’re still figuring out how to use it well, but in the mean time, enjoy our very amateur camera work. Hopefully it will give us the motivating kicks we need to update more often. But comments definitely help too.

Without further ado, here’s our first video. A few weeks ago, we went to Taneka’s apartment to celebrate her birthday (and the birthday of a girl named Tene, who we had never met before but turned out to be pretty cool). This is most of the crew playing “Big Booty” (with comments in the background from the peanut gallery aka Brian).