First let me say that my purpose in chronicling the sometimes-rocky path we’re traversing in our efforts to renovate the downstairs isn’t necessarily to be entertaining, as I’m well aware that perhaps not everyone is as fascinated as we are with this whole process. Most of this saga falls into the “lessons learned” category, although, as our favorite author on home remodeling/renovation, David Owen, says, in any home improvement project you learn what you need to know as you go along, so that by the time you’re finished you know what you’re doing—but by then it’s too late. The project is done. If you’re a professional, then of course every mistake you make helps you not to make that same one on the next job. But for those of us who are simply trying to do a one-time item, it can get a little discouraging to realize that we’ll probably never use our hard-won knowledge again.
failure
Lessons from the World’s Ugliest Muffins.
Pretty bad, huh? I’ve posted about these muffins before and have used my new recipe card app to write out what I did the time before this. They came out pretty well in that version but still didn’t have the rise I wanted, so I tried yet another combination of leavening with the awful result you see here. They tasted fine, but boy! People had to be pretty hardy to risk eating one. I made four dozen of these things for the Easter breakfast at our church Sunday and only brought home about a dozen, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still and all, though!
Planning to Fail
As I’ve mentioned about a million times, we’re selling our house. (See it on Zillow here, but don’t be put off by the gazillion pictures. Our realtor just added pictures instead of replacing them.) One little thing you can do to make your visitors feel welcome is to put out a dish of candy. (A dish of poison, in other words.) So there I was last Friday at Office Depot buying some more signs to put up for our open houses, plural, over the weekend, and decided to buy a bag of individually-wrapped candies to put out. Now, let’s see—there were those beautiful Hershey’s mini chocolate bars, really good stuff in classy gold and silver wrappers. I considered those. And then I saw a bag of those little Reese’s peanut-butter cups.Not the regular-size ones. The little ones, the ones that have exactly the right ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.. The same exact ones that used to cost two cents apiece back when I was in college, so a dozen of them came out to exactly a quarter since there was a penny tax. Yes, those. (They cost a lot more than two cents now, let me tell you.) I used to buy a dozen and eat them all at once. The only thing better than a mini peanut-butter cup is something called a Peanut Butter Smoothie, which a company called Boyer’s still makes and which is indescribably delicious. Wonderful as chocolate and peanut butter is, butterscotch and peanut butter is even more so. They didn’t have the smoothies very often, but when they did, boy, did I take advantage of them! (If I wanted them today I’d have to order them online, so that’s at least somewhat of a safeguard. The picture is from a candy company website.)