Adventures in cookies

Friday, April 25, 2008

The Donne concert this evening!!! I'm excited, even though I woke up with a stuffy nose. Boyfriend has a cold, and despite my best efforts not to get it (these were made up of me screeching "Get your germs away from me!!!" every time he came withing a few feet of me), I have. Shit. I hope it's just a stuffy nose. If it gets any worse I'm screwed. Plus I hate singing with decongestants and all that in my system......grrr....

Yesterday afternoon, Mom and I baked. We made a batch of koulourakia, which is one of my favorite cookies. Orthodox Easter is Sunday, and the annual barbecue extravaganza is at her house this year. We wanted to make my Nouna's (godmother's) recipe, but we only have the rough proportions, since she took the exact ones to her grave in July (Eonia i mnimi aftis). We had to call one of her friends, another epicly old Greek lady, to find out the right ingredients.

Koulourakia are simple butter cookies with just a hint of orange or lemon zest. Some people claim that they should have sesame seeds on them, but I think that's heresy. Anyway, they're supposed to be perfect little twists, like this:


Mine, however, did not. Some were just misshapen little lumps, some looked like preschool attempts at play-dough. One, looked like this:
Heh. Heh heh......what does this look like to y'all??

Off to get ready for the gig, and contemplate whether to go to the gym....

Snuffle snuffle

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Just call me Snuffy the Snot Factory......This cold is sucking is a major way....

Last night was the first weeknight in ages that didn't have a rehearsal. I managed to stay in my pajamas and bathrobe all day, since I had absolutely no energy. The downside of this is that our fridge is nearly bare, so at some point I realized that dinner would be complicated. I alerted Boyfriend, who came home with some canned soup, which he fortified with barley. He also whipped up a batch of cornbread (from the Trader Joe's mix....not half bad actually). We had a lazy evening watching a movie (The Breakfast Club, which he had never seen) and reading.

I'm going to need more evenings like that in the next couple of weeks, to recover from the month of basically not ever seeing him. I was starting to feel really crappy that because of rehearsals, Boyfriend was really just a lump that I was sleeping next to, but never spending time with.....oops, ended a sentence with a preposition....

Anyway, I realize that sometimes the schedule will be like that. If I end up doing operas more often, I'll have to try to space them out with concert work, which is usually less rehearsal-heavy.

I complain about not getting enough opera work, then I complain about the schedule when I do....great....I guess I was generally displeased with the rehearsal schedule for this opera, which I felt to be excessive and completely inefficient and mismanaged. That is not a good combination.

So, the Breakfast Club. I hadn't seen it since high school, and I never loved it or anything, but this time around, I was really struck by how offensive it is. I can't figure out if that's on purpose, and that the writer was trying to point out how crappy teenagers can be, or if people really thought rape jokes would be funny.....I have to say, though, that I did like Molly Ringwald's outfit. It would only look good on a twig like her, but still.

I hope everyone enjoys the weekend. Love!