One cup, one spoon, brownie for one

I love Pinterest, but rarely have enough free time to try any of the awesome things I find on there. I found a brownie recipe that was okay, but it just dirtied too many items in the kitchen. So I decided to use my math skills and taste buds to tweak it.

What you need:

  • 1 coffee mug
  • 1 spoon
  • flour
  • sugar
  • cocoa powder
  • vegetable oil or olive oil
  • water or milk
  • microwave

Have you ever noticed when you put water in a spoon, there is that point when it won’t hold any more and it suddenly starts spilling over? That’s how much of everything you want to put in — the max that spoon can handle of water.

How to do it:

  • 4 spoonfuls of sugar
  • 4 spoonfuls of flour
  • 2 spoonfuls of cocoa powder

Stir the dry ingredients together with the spoon.

IMG_1063

Add:

  • 3 spoonfuls of water or milk
  • 2 spoonfuls of oil

Stir the mixture together.

IMG_1065

Microwave for less than 2 minutes (1:30-1:45 range depending on your microwave and how it smells).

I like the recipe because:

  • No unpronounceable ingredients – I know what’s going in there
  • Portion control – It curbs a craving for sweets without having an entire 13″ x 9″ pan of brownies in your home
  • Easy Clean up – There are only 2 items to wash
  • Fast – It takes less than 5 minutes to make if you know where all the ingredients are in your cupboard
  • Memorable – I can remember the ratios really easily (4 flour & sugar, 3 water, 2 oil & cocoa)

Dear spiders, go away

Our winter wonderland melted yesterday and I was amazed how little time it took for the creepy crawlies to wake up.

I don’t have a problem with bugs usually. I leave them alone outside, unless they are damaging the house or could hurt the kids. Inside they are fair game.

I was thinking I’d have to spend my work days staring at this 6-legged bugger, pondering the whereabouts of his equally gigantic siblings, but luckily it snowed again today and he hid.

20130116-201357.jpg

This summer his great-great-something-or-other spun a 20 foot web stretching from a tree at the edge of the driveway to the handrail next to our front door.

And his cousin, a.k.a the eight legged menace, decided to bunker down between our bed frame and wall. At night the menace would come out and take turns biting me and my husband. It bit me on my eyelid a few days before WordPress Buffalo. It felt like five styes and I looked like Popeye the Sailor, or kind of like Rocky, for a few days. Luckily my doctor recognized it as a bite and helped treat it (and clue us into the source of our woes).

Personal lessons learned:
1) Don’t live in the country if you can’t handle big bugs.
2) Bug zapper tennis rackets are great if you don’t want to use sprays, but you need to have the courage to get close enough.
3) Pull the bed frame away from the wall frequently.
3) Must check every box for stowaways before moving.
4) Our cat, Mr. Beau Jangles, is useless as pest control.

I still have yet to figure out what type of spider these are.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

So I was thinking what could I post that meant delicate to me, and then this happened… my favorite blanket, unraveled.

blanket

I don’t know if it snagged on the bed frame or if a knot came untied in the wash; but my grandmother, my γιαγιά – the first Georgia in my life, made it for me.

She taught me how to crochet (the simple stuff). She made elaborate crocheted lace tablecloths in her heyday.

When my memories of her start, I always remember her arthritic fingers dancing wildly around the little hook as she stared at the television and not at her work. The end of the row would come and she’d look down, switch directions, and look back up at the TV. It always ended up perfectly straight and ordered. The art of it brought her a lot of happiness, as did gifting the final product. As she got older, she substituted outside activity and housework for more resting. Crocheting in front of the TV with family around keeping her company was a frequent activity.

Alzheimer’s set in and we could tell by her blankets when she had had mini-strokes on top of the disease. The blankets would start out looking fine, then she’d add rows making the blankets look wobbly. Soon, even the notes about how many chain stitches we’d leave on the table didn’t help her keep count. She would start with something for a twin bed and by the end she was using an entire skein of yarn to just finish one row. We called them “tree skirts for sequoias,” because they wrapped so well in a circle. That was around the same time when she couldn’t remember anything short term.

When Γιαγιά came to visit for a month, my aunt would send her with 3 extended VHS tapes. One tape had 8 hours of Murder She Wrote, another had 8 hours of Columbo, and the last I think was another Murder She Wrote or Father Dowling Mysteries marathon. We’d put the tape in at the beginning of the day and rewind it at night. She watch the same tape the next day, like Lucy in 50 First Dates, and not remember a thing. I learned patience then. I had the dialog on all of the episodes memorized, but I watched them with her religiously and pretended I never knew “who did it” in the whodunit.

The last blanket she made took 8 people to hold and it had 6 corners. We switched her over to dish rags because they couldn’t get away from her as quickly and we were worried she would trip over a blanket and break her hip. The dish rags too started with 24 stitches and ended in the 40s.

She lived an amazing life way into her 90s, 12+ years of it with Alzheimer’s. Even when she didn’t know my name anymore, she was still telling jokes. Georgia ruled!

I’ve had philosophical discussions with people about the “little things in life”. Is it important? Ok, but does it really matter? I’ve tried not to let material things weigh me down, but this bothered me. It was one of the last blankets she made before everything went downhill and one of the few blankets that survived my brother’s “hey I’m 5 and found a pair of scissors” incident. I won’t get all cliché about blanket-life analogies. But, I do hope I can fix it and it doesn’t look like Franken-blankie.