Liberty, Liberty, Liberty! Liberty is Hear By Granted For All Hands!

And on our left is the rare Georgia Door Handle Frog! This here is my bakin' post. Mainly this will be about the Bake Off / Cook Off that my unit had. And that I baked 3 desserts for. The picture on your left is the recipe I used for cookies. I also baked some lemon bars and Kathy's Trifle. In addition to all of the desserts, I also made some Cuban Pulled Pork... mmmm... pulled pork.Well, The night before the cook off was pretty busy. I needed to make 2 deserts, finish the Trifle and start the pork. We actually started the Trifle on Wednesday. Unfortunately, he Trifle calls for a Blamage, which Kathy buys from a British store. And to have ordered the Blamage packet, the cook off would have been over by the time it arrived. That and shipping was going to cost more than the actual Blamage.

What you see on the right is what I used for the desserts. One thing to help the time go by...music. You can check out what I was listening to here. But moving on. I was able to successfully bake all 3 desserts in a row with out going crazy. Which I think was a first. It took two days to complete all of the dishes (well, technically 3 because of the pork).

The first thing to be finished was the trifle. During that time, I need to read through a recipe a few times before actually starting it. Good thing Cait showed up to help otherwise the shipped cream wouldn't have gotten added. Speaking of whipped cream, when topping the trifle, you should always use the tubs of whipped cream instead of the cans This is because the stuff from the tubs holds up a lot better then the canned version. Moving on. Up next, the cookies! They are small chocolate cookies rolled in powdered sugar. They are delicious! And while the dough was firming up in the fridge, time to start on the lemon bars. For that, you start with the crust.

You can see the flour mixture as its falling from the sifter! As you can see, there was a lot of sifting going on. That bowl in the picture actually contained a lot more flour and other ingredients still waiting to be sifted. Which leads me to my next point. I need a bigger sifter. If you want to buy one for me, I won't complain. The scent that the dough gave off... a little bit of heaven. Once the dough was formed and placed into the containers, time to bake the crust. While this was baking, I filled a bowl with some powdered sugar and grabbed the nice and firm cookie dough from the fridge. You roll the dough into little balls, cover in the sugar and place on a baking sheet. I was able to fit 18 on to each baking sheet.

By the time that I had finished laying all the the dough out, my crust for the lemon bars was done. Time to swap. Crust comes out and cookies go in. Now lets make some curd! You can't have lemon bars with out the lemon, and I used the juice from 3 lemons to give these a nice lemony flavor. Everything about them turned out good, except for the color. And I think was due to the fact that I left out the lemon zest. Oh well.

After I made the curd... you know, curd sounds kinda gross. From now on, it shall be called the "lemon mixture." Now, as I was saying, after I made the lemon mixture (and the crusts had cooled down a bit), I poured the mixture over the crusts and did another swap. This time cookies put and lemon bars in. You can see the cookies above and the lemon bars on the right. See how the lemon bars aren't that yellow? I'm pretty sure that's due to no lemon zest. I might be wrong. If you know, please let me know. Once all of the baking was done, time to clean up catch some sleep. The next day (Friday), I was able to come home after muster and finish getting everything ready. We let the pork slow cook over night. That was a wonderful smell to wake up to.

We loaded up the car with everything and headed off to the base. In this picture, you can see me leaning over the trifle. It was pretty delicious. There were not enough actual slow cooker dishes that wasn't pulled pork to actually have its own category. So they combined the slow cooker and meat categories together. The cook off was a big hit though. We raised over $200 for the morale fund! I'm expecting some very nice Christmas prize at the Christmas party this year. Time to declare the winners. I actually won! In the meat category of all things.And what did I win you ask? I won a day of special liberty! That's pretty exciting. Our deserts didn't get any votes except from Cait and I. Oh well. I had fun cooking. And that's what matters. And now I leave you with what I looked like when I was dancing while baking. Enjoy!

- Brent

Strangeness, Silliness, and Pictures

Well all, I think this post is along the lines of needing to get in the habit of posting more often. As you can see, Savannah has her own ballerina outfit. We even found a princess wand to go with it. She loves it. She had a lot of fun the other day running around the house in it. The wand though, is sometimes used as a weapon. It seems that anything we hand her will be considered a weapon that can and will be used against us. Its okay though, she seems to understand more and more that things we hand her are not weapons. On that, it seems that most things we hand her also end up in her mouth. But she's starting to get over that. She's done pretty well on stoping bad habits on her own (for the most part).

On another front, my unit has formally announced the Cook Off / Bake Off. There are 4 categories. Meat, Casserol, Slow Cooker, and Dessert. I've got things for all but the slow cooker category. Although if you do cook a meat dish in a slow cooker (i.e. pulled pork) it will be entered in the meat category. I've got about 10 ideas for the dessert category (but are we suprised?). I've got to narrow that down to about 3. Hopefully, I'll be able to at least take the dessert category. And what are the prizes you ask? Well, the cook of the best dish in each category wins a day of special liberty (that's a day off when I choose for those who don't know) and the overall winner (the best from the final 4) gets to park in the XO's parking spot for 3 days. As you can see from the picture, Savannah is trying to select a baking pan for me to use. She's always trying to help out. As i've said before, I'll keep you posted on the contest. Recipes will be posted after everything is said and done.

Another thing we did was to install a swing on the front porch for Savannah. It was a bit tricky to figure out how we were going to do it, but Cait same up with a pretty good idea. I drilled a hole in 2 rafters and screwed a big eyelet screw into the holes, strung a chain between them and hooked the swing up to the chain. Pretty ingenious. Although I have figured out a way to help make the swing a bit more...stable. But I'm not to worried about it. Savannah loves it and it remains pretty cool through out the day. Everytime Savannah sees the swing she wants to..well...swing. Of course with the weather we've been having, whenever she goes outside the first two words out of her mouth are "hot" and "icky." Shortly after that, she's saying "inside" bringing swing-time to a close. Of course almost a soon as sh'e inside, she wants to go out back into the pool.

Here's another thing that we got for the little one. She now has more vehicles than Cait and I combined. It's kinda sad. We even re-arranged the living room so that her "new" car would have room to manevure. She loves her car. She'll put her sippy cup and a couple of possesions in the tray in back, climb in the car, wave good by and back up into some furnature. It's pretty funny. I suppose she thinks she's running away, but can't seem to get very far. She has fun though. It's just another tool for Hurricane Toddler to use while working on destroying the house. One more thing, I've made the 4th of July album available on Picasa. You can find that here. I've also created a Google profile found here. Well, I think that's it for this post. I leave you with this video from Improv Everywhere.

- Brent