if you don't build it, they will still come

and in turn, it appears that if i don't take photos for long enough, they too will still eventually come to me.

lately i've been hearing from various people that gmail has been experiencing a few glitches in the way of e-mail addresses overlapping, and messages intended for one person instead reaching another with a similar address- for example, random.photos@gmail.com vs. randomphotos@gmail.com. so this happened to me today, and i have become the recipient of a plethora of flirty photos from what looks to have been an interesting girls' night out. here are a couple of photos of my e-mail twin.

simplicity

i seem to have temporarily abandoned my intended combination of arts. it isn't that i haven't been cooking... it's more like the food turns out so well that i eat it before i remember to pull out the camera. delicious new couscous recipe, ropa vieja, sopa azteca, yucca con arroz y frijoles... the list goes on and on. but i felt it was a loss to not write at all simply because there was no visual media to go along with it. in addition, i was getting tired of seeing the cornbread nipplets, delicious though they were.

today was my first day at the new job. i've been excited and anxious about all the newness going on recently, but by the end of the day, something clicked, and things felt right and good. so although the weather today was gloomy and chilly, i felt happy and tickled by the time i got home and so tonight i post my happy pigeon man photo, quite possibly the gentlest soul in Marina del Rey.

muffin bits

Behold, the misguided results of my first attempt at making cornbread from scratch. Perhaps a little too much baking powder and too little space in the mini muffin tins caused the innocent batter to roam down toward the red light district. I present to you my unintentionally formed, cornbread nipples.

prepubescent:


maturing:


fully titillated:


Taste-wise they were pretty good. a bit dry, but I think this might have been because they were in such small muffin tins. A larger baking dish might have produced a more manly chested, moister bread.

l'amour

will you be my snowheart?

Flat + Bread ≠ Naan.

I've been playing around with baking flat breads since my renewed cravings for Indian food led me to explore the wonderful world of 'naan'. I have the bread part down, and I have the flat part down. How they make it so soft and pliable though... this is still a mystery to me despite dear Manjula's teachings.

She makes it look so simple... and really, making simple bread isn't hard at all, but it just doesn't quite make it to the naan stage. ::crinkles nose:: I even have a stone tile in my oven so that the heat bakes the dough evenly. Instead of naan though, it just bakes itself into... regular bread, no matter how I mold it. (nyuk nyuk!) It still turns out delicious, and goes great with spaghetti sauce, Nutella, plain, or with any other spread, but the result was unintended, and thus a 'naan' factor.

So before fully losing myself in ridiculous bread puns, I took a little break from the naan attempts, and decided to experiment a bit with some cheesy types of bread. My favorite so far is this lovely little bun, stuffed and topped with Gruyère. About 10 minutes in the oven, and it's a cheesylicious masterpiece.

Incidentally, it's hard to find a dish that will hold a bun just right for display... a basket might have been more suitable, and the white background to deal with the flash... well, I used a white plastic cutting board instead of something a little more reflective. I might have to step it up a little perhaps. I'm also having difficulties photographing my food before eating it. Admittedly, I ate about three of these before I decided to photograph this lovely nugget. Melted cheese just makes everything so groovy... ::swoon::