Tuesday, October 13, 2009

No Habla Español

When I lived in Miami, I was able to learn a little bit of Spanish. I definitely did better than the people that didn't speak Spanish regularly, but I definitely wasn't able to communicate at all in Spanish. I could say the words and connect a few words together but I could really talk to anyone on a normal basis.

I really wish that I pursued the language a bit. It is so much more common than French and definitely more alive than Latin. I don't know why I didn't study it in high school nor college.

Spanish is definitely a big factor in living in Tucson. I want to learn Spanish so that I can communicate better in this city. Yesterday Andy and I stopped by this hot dog stand for dinner, and we ran into a big obstacle. The people that ran the stand did not speak English at all except a few words here and there. We pretty much had to point at what we wanted and hoped that it was good. Although we couldn't say clearly what we wanted, the food we got was great.

I think it was called hot dog de hungaro. It didn't have bacon or anything. It was a hot dog with baked beans and lots of toppings. That's one of the things I've discovered and loved in Tucson, the cheap hot dogs with lots of toppings. :)

Saturday, October 3, 2009

New Baking Recipes

I tried out out a couple of different recipes this week. Both of which are from bakerella.com.

The first one I tried was a brownie with cookie bites. I don't have pictures from it because I took it to work. Andy doesn't really like brownies and it turned out really rich. I think I made some new friends at work by bringing in treats, which is always a good thing. I think I've also made some enemies into not-so-bad enemies. I'm glad I can try things out now and they won't go bad before it's been eatten up, which is super nice.

The second recipe I tried was a cheesecake. I've made cheesecake before but it was from the back of a Nestle bag. The recipe from bakerella was much better. It had more cream cheese and it didn't include any chocolate chips, which made the cheesecake part stand out rather than the chocolate. The crust was regular graham cracker:



This was my first time making a crust from graham crackers. The most tricky part of this was blending enough to make a crust. It tasted really good. The rest of the cheesecake was really good too. This can be clearly seen here in the half eatten one :).



I've made a pumpkin pie last month already, but I'm probably going to try it again. It probably won't be done till sometime in November. I may try making the pumpkin pie bites that are the front page feature of bakerella.com.