Pumpkin Bars and a cancelled experiment

All in all, today was a disappointing day. I got a call telling me that the Asian brush painting class I was planning on taking this Saturday was cancelled because I was the only person signed up, I had to delay starting on a project at work that has finally gotten moving (after 2 years of prodding people who needed to be involved) in order to work on a project that has nothing to do with my job or the company, and to top it off, the cream cheese frosting on my pumpkin bars was less than impressive. Given, my mom makes some pretty top notch cream cheese frosting, so I have some high standards, but this frosting was runny and tasted more like butter than smooth cream cheese frosting. The bars themselves are good, but the cream cheese frosting leaves something to be desired, so--I'll just keep that part of the recipe out of this. Find your favorite recipe for cream cheese frosting, ask your mom or buy the jarred type at the story to top these off.

Pumpkin Bars
I got in trouble with the people at work who had New Years resolutions with these ones! They're very heavy and rich, but as I heard several times; pumpkin is a vegetable. Ergo, these must be good for you. Right?

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• 1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1- 15 oz can pumpkin
• 2 cups sifted all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Using an electric mixer at medium speed (if available--I didn't use one), beat eggs, sugar, oil and pumpkin together until smooth.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, baking powder, salt and baking soda. Add the dry ingredients to the pumpkin mix and beat on low speed until batter is smooth and thoroughly combined.
4. Spread into a greased 9x13 pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Let cool completely before frosting.
5. Frost with cream cheese frosting. Cut into bars and serve.

Books: The Count of Monte Cristo

My dessert challenge of pumpkin bars for this week is underway, but since they have to cool before I can add the frosting, I doubt I'll be able to taste them until tomorrow. I sense a sugary, pumpkin-y breakfast coming on! I will post my results tomorrow, if I'm not comatose from eating the whole pan...I love pumpkin-flavored anything.

In the meantime, I've picked up one of my favorite all-time books to read, since I haven't read it in probably 2 or 3 years: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It is a huge book and incredibly intimidating at first sight, but absolutely worth it. It has to be that big because it is, quite literally, epic. And no, you can't substitute watching the movie for this one; both have good stories, but the stories are almost completely different.

It's difficult for me to summarize this book, simply because it covers so much territory. It follows the life of Edmond Dantes, who is arrested on the cusp of gaining his perfect life and is left to rot in prison for 14 years before finally escaping, and the story of how he lives after escaping and discovering a huge amount of treasure. It also takes in the lives of the people who he affects either through his gratitude or revenge and touches on politics and history in the time of Napoleon. All in all, it is probably the best story of both revenge and altruistic gratitude that I have ever read.

The Count of Monte Cristo takes patience to finish. Alexandre Dumas was extremely popular in his time (he also wrote The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask) and he didn't have to compete for the attention of people who today would just watch the movie instead; he had the luxury to take his time to show you every little details of Dantes' life and transformation from an idealistic boy into a man who focuses his life on revenge on the people who betrayed him. For the most part, Dantes is a character who you cannot help but identify with even as you feel a little horrified at his capacity for cruelty in pursuit of "justice." And in spite of that, it still has a relatively happy ending.

In short...find one of those weeks when your life is going to be slow; I used to read this book over Christmas vacation at my parents' house, when I was still too wired from college to feel comfortable with just relaxing. And read it. It's good, I promise.

Food Experiments: Malva Pudding

I've been wanting to make malva pudding for a long, long time. It's a dessert that I've only ever eaten in safari camps in Africa, and it's also one of the most rich and delicious desserts I've ever tasted. It's also incredibly hard to find a recipe for, and it seems like there's quite a lot of different names for it and variations on it. The one I made tonight isn't quite what I remember and am searching for, but it's close. Maybe I will top the leftovers tomorrow with some custard sauce to try to get closer...sooner or later, I need to cross this off my bucket list!

Malva pudding is similar to bread pudding, especially in texture, but it has a somewhat sweeter, nuttier taste than any bread pudding I've ever had. To me, it brings back beautiful memories of sitting in thatched, open air huts for dinner, with the smell of a mopane wood fire blowing in and more stars than you could probably see anywhere in the United States waiting just outside. It is the sort of dessert that I think is best appreciated after spending a whole day outside--partially from my nostalgia for the safari days and partially because spending a whole day running around outside before eating this is the only way to stave off the immense guilt that I'm feeling for eating it. In short, my dessert experiments that help those of you with new year's resolutions are over!

Malva Pudding

I would start by serving small portions of this dessert. When finished, it looks like a pretty bland cake, but it is deceptively rich!

Ingredients:

CAKE:

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon apricot jam
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon butter (a generous tablespoon)
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 1/3 cup milk

SAUCE

• 3/4 cup fresh cream
• 7 TB butter
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup hot water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat or whip the sugar and eggs, preferably in a food processor, until thick and lemon colored. Then, add the apricot jelly (or jam) and mix thoroughly.
2. Sieve together the flour, soda and salt. Melt the butter (do not boil!) and add the vinegar. Add this mixture, as well as the milk, to the egg mixture in the processor, alternately with the flour. Beat well.
3. Pour into an oven-proof dish (I used a tall 8x8 ceramic pan), and bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Meanwhile, in a pot, melt together the ingredients for the sauce. When the cake is halfway baked, take it out of oven. Make holes in cake and pour the sauce over the pudding. Return to the oven. When finished, the cake should still be slightly jiggly. (Hint: the softer and more pudding-y parts taste much better than the parts that look completely solid and cooked like cake. Mmm butter sauce!)

Books: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

This book was a birthday present from my roomie that I've been saving to read on my Mexico trip. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery caught my attention both for its name and because it was recommended on Kevin Slowey's blog. (Yes, I still love baseball that much.)

To tell the truth, a week after finishing this book I still don't know how I feel about it. I know that this was a book that I probably would have adored in college. Today, while it still has a lot of aspects that I enjoy, I found it a little bit overdramatic and preachy in its dedication to fine art. Also, it certainly wasn't the light, funny story that I expected from its title.

In a very small nutshell, the book is about two incredibly intelligent and artistic women who, for various reasons, don't want anyone to know about their talents. The writing style was delightful, and the characters of a middle-aged concierge and a 12 year old teenager play a beautiful counterpoint to each other in their views of the world. It is fun to watch these two people grow into their worlds and find their own meaning of life, and even though the storyline in the book is very simple, it's draws you in. Unfortunately, the author uses too much philosophy and preachy rhetoric for my taste to explain their search for meaning. This continuous extolling of art is constant enough to alienate people who may have an everyday appreciation of art rather than a liberal arts major's addiction to it. While a lot of people might appreciate a painting, many of those same people will lose interest after reading about how only intelligent and refined people properly appreciate Dutch still lifes.

All in all, I would recommend this book for anyone with a strong, passionate interest in art and philosophy. For those of you who don't, I would still recommend this book if you really appreciate good characterization and can stand a certain amount of preachiness. For those of you who prefer high action storylines and enjoy reading for entertainment more than abstract thoughts, I would save your time and skip this one.

Food Experiments: Dessert Month and "healthy" strawberry pie

I love food. Going along with that, I love cooking and playing with new ideas.

So, in defiance to everyone else's more intelligent new years plans for being healthy, losing weight and eating well, I'm going to start a food experiment challenge to myself; each month I'll pick a theme and make at least one new experimental recipe each week. To start, I'm going to tackle desserts (and let's all hope and pray that I can survive the wrath of everyone with more healthy resolutions). Because I came up with this plan in the middle of the month and because I really love dessert, I'm going to declare the rest of January and all of February as dessert month.

Yesterday's challenge was to create a birthday dessert for a joint birthday party. The catch? One birthday person was diabetic, and the other was lactose intolerant. Yep. You try to come up with a tasty cake recipe to meet those guidelines! (Really...I wouldn't mind any ideas!)

So instead, I found a recipe for sugar-free strawberry pie. This was super easy and, in spite of being completely sugar free, very delicious. It is also quite healthy, so I'll survive the new year's people for at least another day. According to the website where I found this recipe, if you make this "pie" without a crust, it's only 55 calories for a fourth of the recipe.

Sugar Free Strawberry Pie Recipe
This can be made with or without a crust, depending on your preferences! The original recipe had no crust and obvioiusly had fewer calories, but I put it within a pre-bought shortbread crust.

Ingredients

• 1 small box Jello sugar-free Cook and Serve vanilla pudding
• 1 small box strawberry sugar-free Jello
• 2 cups water
• 12-16. oz sliced strawberries

Instructions

1. Mix pudding mix with water in a saucepan; heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture boils.
2. Remove from heat and add strawberry Jello mix.
3. Let cool to room temperature. (I forgot this step and poured it into the crust still warm...it still tasted fine, although I bet it would have looked nicer if I'd let it cool!)
4. In a glass pie dish, add the sliced strawberries to the bottom (or over the crust if you choose).
5. Pour pudding mix over strawberries. Refrigerate pie at least an hour, until set.

Pictures from Puerto Vallarta

Home from Mexico and I've downloaded my pictures--ones I take out the blurry ones and the repeats, I come up with around 400 photos. Henry keeps encouraging me to take up photography more seriously, learning more about the manual settings and how things work and finding some better equipment (even though I like my point-and-click cameras!) and sometimes I wonder whether it would be a helpful or horrible hobby. I might be able to take fewer pictures, when I look at the number of times I had to take one particular pictures sometimes to get the effect I wanted. Or, I might just go crazy and end up coming home with thousands of pictures...

At any rate, here are a few of my favorites!

This is the view from the balcony of the resort we stayed at.

This is the actual city of Puerto Vallarta as seen from the boardwalk. We stayed in Nuevo Vallarta, which is about a 20 minute cab ride away, but finally went to Puerto Vallarta on Tuesday and Thursday.

Most of our days we spent up in the Sierra Madre Mountains, which look pretty much like this.

Our snorkeling tour went to the Marietas Islands, which is a bird santuary. No one can set foot on the island, but we went snorkeling in the bay here.

The Botanical Gardens up in the mountains was one of my favorite activities (even though we got lost for awhile on the bus and ended up taking a long detour...) and most of my photos are from here.

There was also a great little swimming hole at the Botanical Gardens--unfortunately I didn't know to bring my swimsuit, but I at least went wading! I think this may also be where most of my annoying bug bites are from.

Sadly, on our whale watching tour I didn't get a lot of great pictures--most of them look pretty much like this. Henry was lucky enough to have his camera out during the outdoor adventure and got a great picture of the whale breaching on the way back, which puts this to shame.

Zip Lining Adventures

I went zip lining twice in Puerto Vallarta--once through Los Veranos Canopy tours and once in my outdoor adventure through Vallarta Adventures. Both times were surprisingly completely different (even though they were in the same area) and a lot of fun. Our Los Veranos tour was a Christmas present from my boyfriend's (I'll call him Henry) parents, who were kind enough to open their time share to us. The outdoor adventure was my choice after looking at the Vallarta Adventures website, which I finally talked Henry into at the last minute.

If you've never been zip lining, it's a little scary and a lot exhilerating. You strap yourself in to a fancy harness and helmet that makes everyone look ridiculous, clip yourself onto a big steel cable between a couple of platforms and trees, and jump. Then you zip from platform to platform like that, going as fast as you can depending on the rope they use, the angle and how you are sitting.

Saturday's outdoor adventure started out the zip lining tours, and the course was a lot faster and more adventurous than the last zip lining course I did. It was also through a real jungle, which made it a lot more interesting! We sped pretty quickly from through the first few lines, and then made it a little more interesting using the same gear to rappel down the 30 meter high waterfall. I have to admit that I didn't see most of the view, because every time I looked down I found out that I had tightened up my hand so far that I wasn't moving any more. From looking sideways, though, it was beautiful! We landed about knee deep in a cold mountain pool, and from there jumped on the next zip line to land neck deep in a VERY cold mountain pool. A few more lines further, we clipped ourselves onto a line going straight down and fell straight down, until at the last minute we were caught by the guides belaying us.

At Los Veranos, most of the courses were higher up but slower. The braking mechanism was a little fancier (rather than just pushing down using a glove to slow us down, we had a bar to brake). This let us look around a little more, which was fun. Most fun about this course, though, was that at the end of each line, the guides would take a person across riding tandem to get to the next platform. If you were riding with a guide and didn't need to worry about braking, you got to ride backwards, spinning around and upside down! I was lucky enough to get to do this twice since I was at the end of the line. And to finish off both tours, we had a homerun stretch where we raced. I can't say I'm the best at going fast and racing, but it was still fun!

I would highly recommend both tours to anyone in the area!

Banderas Bay in a Rubber Raft

So, it was a big rubber raft, and with a motor on the boat that was really just a big speedboat. But when we were 75 feet away from a whale surfacing, I was still very aware that I was sitting in a big rubber boat.

Apparently the laws governing whaling force larger boats to remain a good distance away from the whale (100 meters or so) while smaller boats can get within 100 feet. So the "good" whale watching and photo safari tours keep you in a big rubber raft to get closer to an animal around 3 times as long as the boat you're riding in. It's also hard to ignore when you're speeding through the waves--I'm not a little girl, but there were a few times when I flew through the air as we went over a few of the bigger waves.

We saw a pretty decent amount of whales--apparently it's both mating season and birthing season for humpback whales down here, which translates into a lot of time on the surface. I couldn't help but feel bad for the whales, who towards the end of our trip were being chased by 9-12 boats every time they surfaced to try to find a girlfriend. In a four hour trip, I'd say we saw around 20 whales, which is certainly nothing to complain about. None of them compared to our boat ride home from the outdoor adventure tour, though, where a whale jumped completely out of the water. From what we've heard, this is unusual but not unheard of--older and very strong males will leap out instead of smacking their tails to prove how impressive they are to the girls. Worked on me!

This was our last tour for the week--we spent Thursday exploring the boardwalk and old downtown of Puerta Vallarta proper and enjoying the last few moments of sunshine by the pool.

Tomorrow, home to the snow.

Firsts in Puerto Vallarta

3 days in and I've already done a lot of things for the first time!

• See a whale leap completely out of the water
• Rappelling
• Free fall down a rope
• Crossing a rope bridge
• Drink at a swim-up bar
• Taste a pina colada
• Eat at a real Mexican restaurant in Mexico (delicious!)

Off to zip lining again today!

Puerto Vallarta Outdoor Adventure

We have one day of Internet paid for, so an update on the adventures so far...

It's hot. And wonderful! And it makes it even sweeter to check the weather back home and realize that it was about 80 degrees warmer here today. The resort we're staying in is green, lush and beautiful, albeit filled with a lot of very rich, drunk older women who will hit on anyone male within 30 feet. I have a lot of sympathy for the guys working any tour, who have to spend a significant amount of time dancing with and flirting with women three times their age.

We have a final itinerary:

• Friday: Check in and enjoy the pool
• Saturday: Outdoor adventure!!
• Sunday (today): Snorkeling, whale watching and very long boat ride
• Monday: Zip lining
• Tuesday: Dolphin park, botanical gardens or relaxing by the pool
• Wednesday: Whale watching
• Thursday: Botanical gardens or relaxing by the pool
• Friday: Relaxing until our plane leaves

The highlight of this trip so far: the outdoor adventure, hands down. We started out with a boat ride across the bay, switched into a unimog (big open air jeep) to ride halfway up the mountain, and then switched to ride mules. I love riding in both speedboats and open air jeeps; the wind on my face, the views and the rhythm of movement relax me.

I am not fond of mules. Really, I'm not fond of riding anything with four legs, and they aren't enamored of me, either. My mule had two speeds: gallop and stop. If I managed to make him walk at a reasonable speed, he spent most of the time trying to scrape me off against a tree. If he was galloping, I just held on for dear life and tried not to look into the gullys below. I didn't fall off, but I was definitely proud to make it up unscathed!

After the mule ride, the more adventurous part began. We did some ziplining to start down the mountain, which was a lot of fun. We saw some beautiful views of the trees and waterfall. We then progressed to the new experiences for me...rappelling down the waterfall (scary), free falling down a rope into a pool of water, going over the "commando bride" and a steel cable bridge and zip lining directly into pools. I got very wet, and spent a lot of time in the air swinging from cables. This part of the day was probably the biggest "adventure" for me--I don't suppose you can really call anything an adventure unless you're a little bit scared. And hanging from that waterfall (30 meters up on a slippery rock slope) I was definitely scared! I had to be told several times to loosen my grip on the rope if I ever expected to get the bottom. It was very beautiful and definitely exhilarating (especially the plunge into the cold mountain pool at the bottom ) but also absolutely terrifying. Immediately following the rappelling, we switched back to ziplining and landed neck-deep in the same icy water in the next basin of the waterfall. From then onward, I wasn't dry until we made it home--we waded and landed in and jumped into a whole lot of creeks and pools. The bridges ranged from a log suspended with ropes to a single rope under your feet and another one above your head to hold on to, and the guides thoroughly encouraged bouncing on each and every bridge. At the end of the tour, we rode the unimog and the speedboat back to the tour company's office, with a quick break in the middle of the boat ride to watch a whale leap completely out of the water about 30 feet from our rubber raft.

It was a good day.

Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take cameras with us and I wasn't ready to pay the very large fee they wanted for a few blurry pictures, so I am mostly picture-less from that expedition. The pictures I did manage to sneak, along with the rest of them from this trip, will hopefully be posted soon.

Buenos noches!

Next adventure: Puerto Vallarta

Early Friday morning (very, very early), I'll be leaving for a week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico! A short respite from the below-zero temperatures here will be lovely, and we already have plans for a few adventures in between days hiding from the sun in the tiki huts on the beach. I sunburn ridiculously easily (through a window in Ireland in early March--after an hour) and while I am well stocked up on my SPF 100, I'm already planning on needing to hide from the sun for a few days to recover.

On the itinerary:

• Snorkeling in the Marieta Islands
• Zip lining through the jungle
• Visiting the local botanical gardens
• Eating far too much Mexican food and enjoying every bite
• Taking a lot of photos
• Catching up on my reading while hiding from the sun in the aforementioned tiki huts
• Possibly whale watching, hiking to a waterfall, swimming with sea lions or walking the boardwalk

I tried to talk everyone into joining me for the "adventure tour" but for some reason no one else seemed quite as interested as I was in a mule ride through the jungle and rappelling down a cold waterfall. Next time...

So I'll be gone for the next week, but hopefully bringing plenty of stories and pictures back with me!

Book Recommendation: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

I'm not much for history books. I think history is interesting to a point and I like to hear about it, especially when it affects things that are more interesting to me--literature, movies, religions. But I generally have a hard time sticking with books that are strictly historical.

When I bought Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford at Half Price Books, I had a feeling that I was wasting my money on another history book that I would never finish.

On the contrary, I found myself more sucked into the book than I have been to any nonfiction, let alone history, book in quite awhile. The storytelling is compelling, the author relates the history well to modern perspectives and familiar happenings, and the writing is extremely easy and pleasant to read. It begins with the author's own journeys in Mongolia to discover Genghis Khan and covers the known history from Genghis Khan's parents to the time when his empire finally fell apart. It was an interesting perspective that I haven't often heard before, and opened my eyes to the possibility that much of our modern culture and knowledge (and that of the Renaissance period) began with the Mongol conquest and their thirst for knowledge and openness. My only issue with the book is that I feel like the author may have given more importance to the Mongol conquest and its effects on culture than it may deserve, out of his respect for the Mongols. I unfortunately don't know enough about history to make a firm declaration, but it's something I feel might upset some of the more historically-minded people out there.

This book has some valuable knowledge for anyone with any interest in Genghis Khan, the Mongol history or the influence of the East on the development of Western medieval or Renaissance culture of knowledge, and (unlike too many history books) presents it in a fun and interesting way for readers.

New Year's Plans

I hate New Year's resolutions. To me, they seem like plans that you make knowing that you will not follow through after the first month. (Unfortunately in Lakeville, people seem to hold on for three or four months...making January through April at the gym unbearably busy!) So, as a rule, I don't make New Year's resolutions that will not be finished by the end of January.

But, every January, I still make "plans." Somehow, not calling them resolutions makes them a little more palatable to me, and makes me feel more like I will follow through. This year, I should have the opportunity to cross a few things off my bucket list. I'm also hoping at this early stage to have the follow-through (for a change) to finish a few projects.

1. Take a gondola in Venice
2. Plant a garden
3. Learn to make malva pudding
4. See the Sistine Chapel
5. Visit Versailles
6. Really learn programming, enough to be able to create something myself
7. Complete the website for my hometown church and my family's business