Pretty Things on my Table

I have some pictures of pretty things to share. First are these beautiful flowers that I got two weeks ago when my friends came over for book club. They started out a little bit brighter and a little bit taller. I've only changed the water twice and trimmed them once. Pretty good for $5 worth of flowers, huh? They're so fluffy and fat, I love them.

There are also these..

Oh man. Man oh man. They are cream-filled coffee cake cupcakes and I've eaten approximately a million of them. I made a batch on Wednesday and then couldn't stop eating them, so I sent them to work with Rob to get rid of them. Well, I couldn't stand it and I had to make more last night. Coffee cake is one of my favorites, not too sweet, not too fussy, perfect with coffee (duh). I made these trying to copy the TastyKake Koffee Kakes (I hate that they spell everything with K's. It's like Kwik Mart. How annoying.)
I used to write recipes on Fridays on here. Do you want the recipe for these?

Coffee Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Filling
Cupcakes:
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter (softened)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup sour cream or plain yogurt (I used yogurt. Come on, you're going to eat ten of them, make 'em a little healthier)
2 tbsp buttermilk

Topping:
1/4 cup light-brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (maybe a little more)
2 tbsp butter

Filling:
4oz cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
4-5 tbsp butter (softened)
1 cup 10x sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
milk (as needed to obtain a nice texture)

Here's what you do:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Make batter as follows: Mix butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and egg. Mix well. Mix all dry ingredients together and add to the butter mixture slowly, alternating with the sour cream and buttermilk. Scrape the bowl often to keep all the goodness in. Mix everything well. Divide equally between 12 muffin tins. It doesn't look like a lot, but it will make it. They won't be huge cupcakes.
Mix all ingredients for the topping together and blend using a fork or a pastry knife. Try to make the mixture crumby in texture. Pour the topping on top of the batter in the greased (did I say greased before? Grease them.) muffin tins (don't worry about being neat) and put them in the oven for around 15 minutes. Or golden brown.
I bake at high elevation, so I would always be cautious of my temperature or time guidelines.
When the cupcakes are out and cooled a little bit, mix together the icing ingredients until it's smooth and delicious. Add enough milk to keep it smooth, but don't let it get runny.
This is the tricky part. Getting the icing inside the cupcakes took a little creativity. I'm sure you could do it with a knife and a baster or something. Or a turkey injector. I used a cookie press with an icing attachment. I shoved the nozzle down into the cupcake and filled it with icing until the top kind of domed up. When you take the nozzle out, the icing sort of wells up through the hole and makes the perfect little white dot on top like a Tasty Kake. Incidentally, I think putting icing in the middle of cupcakes and watching it erupt out is an excellent way to illustrate the pressures of vulcanism and magma chambers under a stratovolcano. Just sayin'.
That's it! Eat them up with a glass of milk or cup of coffee. Yum!!

Meet Tolstoy

We have a new little friend that lives with us. This is Tolstoy, the African Dwarf Frog. He lives in the aquarium where the late Bart, Mr. Fishie, Lucky, Dusty, and Ned used to live. I went to the pet store to get more fish (they call me the Fish Killa') when we saw these little guys swimming around. They are really cool because they basically act just like fish. They are entirely aquatic and don't need any land to rest on. I don't get it either, but apparently all they need to do is come up to the surface to breathe once in a while. He mostly hides under his little sherd (like he's doing in the photo) but sometimes he swims around or hops on the bottom. Every now and then it will really seem like poor Tolstoy is dead because he'll just float at the top or along the bottom with all his little limbs splayed out and not move for a long, long time. We looked it up and it turns out that this weird behavior is entirely normal for Dwarf Frogs. They call it their "Zen Pose". Isn't that adorable? He's just chillin'.
We feed him Frog Chow, which he doesn't seem to ever eat. We assume he's eating because he isn't dead, but we may have to try out the dried bloodworms (ew ew ew ew ew) if he continues to be so picky.
We're thinking of getting Tolstoy a bigger house so we can get him better hidey holes and a heater. And fish friends.

coooooookies

I made some cookies today for my favorite husband. He really likes peanut butter cookies, but the creative Blythe women have encouraged me to branch out and make different stuff. Well, only slightly different in this case. Instead of our usual peanut butter cookies, I made these with brown sugar and chocolate chips (I know. I'm a daredevil). Do you want the recipe? It was really really easy:Wednesday Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies:
1 cup creamy peanut butter (I used Peter Pan, but usually I like the more peanutty store brand for cookies)
1/2 cup brown sugar packed
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg slightly beaten
teensy handful of flour (maybe 1/4 cup)
1 cup chocolate chips (plus 1/2 cup for snacking)

I mixed the peanut butter with the sugars and the vanilla and then added the egg. It was seeming a little shiny and peanut buttery, so I added the small amount of flour until it seemed more doughy. I wouldn't add much, but I think just a little flour makes a cakier cookie. When I liked the look of the dough, I added the chips and drop them in large spoonfuls on a cookie sheet with a silpat. I think Peanut butter cookies smell weird when they cook, and the Silpat seems to help with that. I smooshed the dough balls with my favorite cookie fork* in a criss- cross pattern (of course) and then baked them at 375 for 10-ish minutes.
I cooled them on a rack and then ate them all. Ok, that's not true, I shared with Rob. Afterall, they were for him.

*I have big love for this particular fork. It is very narrow and has extraordinarily long tines. It's silver and has a semi-fancy handle. I got it at a thrift store, so it is the only one like it. It is so perfect for making cookies and for beating eggs and squooshing the edges of pie crust, etc. I would be so sad if I ever lost it. Do you have any funny tools like that? Anything that seems really ordinary but is indispensible for what you like to do?

I'm back

I'm back from a very long hiatus from blogland. I have lots of new things to tell you about and lots of fun things to look forward to. I promise to try and blog often now that I am home. I missed my blog when I was in Mule Creek and when I was away on GeoJourney. It has been kind of hard to make the decision to come back after such a long gap. What do I talk about? Where do I pick back up? I have decided that I am just going to blog as if I never left. I don't want to talk about the last few months, so we're going to move on. New Stuff. It's December now, so there will be lots of holiday stuff to post and lots of travel pictures to share. So, if you're still out there, I'm back and I'm ready to blog.

Run!!!

Mule Creek

We're back! What a wonderful field season this has been. We've been excavating the 3-up site in the gorgeous Mule Creek, NM since June. Rob and I, along with Katherine Dungan, Brett Hill and four students from Hendrix College in Arkansas. The site is a 2-3 story pueblo that was occupied from about AD750 to AD1450. It hasn't been excavated before so most of our efforts this summer were in mapping all the features we could find (trying to establish the boundaries of each part of the pueblo) and finding pottery and other artifacts that could be used to date the site.
I was the cook for the fieldschool which means that I didn't go to the site everyday. I'm reading for my exams, so this gave me a chance to read all day, and then cook dinner in the evenings. It was great not having to be apart from Rob. Also, it gave me a chance to meet the wonderful neighbors in tiny Mule Creek. We made some great friends there and have more stories to tell than I can possibly fit in a blog post.
This is the view from "Cell phone point". If we communicated with you this summer, it was from this spot. It's basically a pull-off on the side of the road through the National Forest almost at the state line where locals found they could get a tiny cell signal. If you pulled off the road here and stood on one foot and said the alphabet backwards, you could get one, sometimes two bars of service!

Most mornings in Mule Creek I went for long walks with Becky, Nina or both. This was one of our destinations, "The Spring". It was about 1.5 miles from the ranch house and is where our drinking water came from. It's a beautiful little spot that was filled with the biggest bullfrogs you ever saw. Sometimes I would bring my reading out here for the day. If you think office noise can be distracting, try bullfrogs!
I couldn't get enough of the view. Everywhere you looked at every time of day, some part of the fields were spectacular. This was from an evening walk I took with Kelsey. As we walked, the whole world suddenly turned pink and our path turned silver. We must have taken 6 billion pictures.
The sunsets (and sunrises!) were jaw-dropping. This is our version of a 70's album cover. If you look closely, you can see everyone from the fieldschool except poor Katherine. She was taking advantage of a break in the monsoon to take a solar shower. Isn't the sky cool? Mule Creek is the only place I've found in the west that really feels like it could be a home. I like Tucson, but I think we've always known we couldn't live here forever. I could live in Mule Creek forever...
...except for these little jerks! These are called vinegaroons. They are Jurassic little bastards that are in the scorpion family and smell just like vinegar. Nina caught two (!) in her garage and brought them over in a jar to show me. Like a dummy, I stuck my face right in the jar when she mentioned their scent. I nearly fainted. I didn't expect their horrible smell to be so strong!
After threatening everyone in camp with a Vinegaroon in their tent, we set them free far far far from the house. I never ever want to see these in the wild again. It's like spiders, scorpions, and the predator all rolled into one.

So, that's Mule Creek story, volume one. There are so many stories to tell, I will have to do it in installments. It is great to be back, and I'm so glad to be talking to you on a regular basis now.

web crack

Darn you Ravelry! I had plans this week. Important things to do. Ravelry, do you know how impossibly long my bibliographies are? Do you realize that we have just a few weeks to get through them? Now I have to play around and search through your wonderful patterns and laugh at people's mountainous stashes. I was sewing before this! Sewing. It takes about an hour and a half to make something satisfying when you sew. When you knit, that's like your cast-on row.
This is one of the sundresses. It's made of thin thin linen with blue palm-y looking designs. The fabric reminded me of my wonderful time living in South Carolina. I doubled up the linen so I wouldn't have to wear a slip. Nothing spoils a sundress like a slip.
Dirtiest mirror ever? Don't care. Must play with Ravelry.

Also, I'm getting my hair cut today at lunch. My hairdresser is like a genie. She makes magic happen on top of my head. Today I'm going to ask her to make my hair longer.