For more Wordless Wednesday posts and info, go here.

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For more Wordless Wednesday posts and info, go here.

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For more Wordless Wednesday posts & information, go here.

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But I haven’t…

Instead I’m making and eating itty bitty little cakes. Cakes that fit in the palm of a hand. Cakes that can be eaten in just a few bites. Cakes that make you feel like a giant. I’ll post some pictures on Flickr tomorrow when the boyfriend is at work and I can use hog our bandwidth.

In addition to that, I’ve been preoccupied with preliminary cleaning and packing for the move. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things I don’t need and I plan to get rid of a bunch more…I’ve dropped things off at every thrift store in town.

I’m actually down to just one computer now instead of the three I had just a few days ago. I sold my Windows desktop to one of the restaurants for $100 and I gave my Windows notebook to my mom. I’m down to just my MacBook and couldn’t be happier about that.

I’ve got baked goods to blog about…but not tonight. Tonight I’ve got a pile of magazines to go through and recycle and a trifle to assemble.

Oh, I almost forgot. I have a new email address linked to this site…it’s melissa at melissamckelveydotcom

Pretty hard to remember, huh?

More soon.

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made from scratch croissant, originally uploaded by meliass.

I have a huge gash in my right pinkie (from a stupid splash guard in the bar at work that’s made of relatively thin and apparently very sharp metal) and it makes typing rather difficult for me as I do type correctly with all of my fingers. So…no real blog entry for another couple of days.

I’ll post more about the croissant pictured here soon. I’ll probably have a good story or two to tell by that point as well.

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie

I think the bartender in me came out in this set of photos. That and I was going to see the Sex & the City movie that evening…so I might have had Cosmpolitans and martinis on the brain. I came up with the martini idea the night before when I couldn’t sleep because of all the cookie dough and cookies I’d eaten at 11:30 at night.

These are peanut butter chocolate chip cookies…made because of a late night request from the boyfriend. I worked a double shift and got home and he wanted dessert. The strawberry jam bars on the counter apparently weren’t good enough. Nor were the fresh strawberries and Cool Whip in the fridge. He wanted cookies. After triple checking to make sure he wasn’t going to be asleep before I finished baking them, I relented and made the cookies.

The recipe for these is from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours. I checked it out from the library and kind of wanted to buy it…and miraculously it was marked down to $12.99 when I looked at amazon.com‘s bargain books last week. So I own it now. If it’s still on sale at amazon, buy it! (Whoa, I just tried to find the link to the cookbook on amazon and their site is mysteriously unavailable. Weird.)

I didn’t change the recipe at all other than to add a handful of peanut butter chips in addition to the semi-sweet chocolate chips. I did purposely underbake the cookies because we like them better that way.

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Meme Mosaic…Flickr Game

I never do memes…but because this one was flickr related, I couldn’t resist. Go to the link of the picture above to see my actual answers to the questions listed below

Flickr game:

the rules:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

the questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

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Oy…I’ve got to get better about posting a little something more often than once a week. My excuse for this week: I was out of town for the weekend. Lame, huh?

I dragged my rear out of bed 2 Saturdays ago to go to the Williamsburg Farmer’s Market…since it’s still early in the season for lots of fresh produce, I came away with only basil and strawberries. The basil was turned into the pesto pictured above. I’ll be making more as the summer goes on…if only I could have my own basil plants right now. I made the bread pictured above as well…Sally Lunn bread from the Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. The bread was nearly a failure due to some yeast I managed to kill…but I did a little internet research and attempted to re-yeast the dough with some live yeast. It mostly worked…the bread was only a tiny bit denser than it should have been. I’ll be making it again soon as it made a great breakfast (and late night snack) for me all week.

I grilled/smoked/barbecued these pieces of pork the same day I went to the Farmer’s Market…really, I spent that whole weekend cooking. I had nowhere to go and nothing on my agenda other than cooking. It was rather fantastic.

So, the pork…I rubbed it with a mixture of brown sugar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder, chili powder and some other spices I can’t recall. Then I smoked it over charcoal and hickory chips for 5 hours or so. I didn’t expect the charcoal to last through the entire cooking process and I was prepared to move the pork to the oven…but I didn’t have to do so. I’ll be making some ribs this way the next time I have a whole day off with no need to leave the house.

Cookies! Oatmeal cookies! With butterscotch chips! And maple syrup! Yum. The last oatmeal cookies I made were a little overdone and crunchy. These were not. They were moist and chewy and wonderful. Enough said.

Cherry Streusel Coffee Cake…from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook (another book I kind of want right now). This used the last jar of Morello cherries I had from Trader Joe’s. I guess that means I’m going to have to go soon…because I love those cherries. I added a bit of amaretto and almond extract to the cake batter…and slivered almonds to the streusel. In case you haven’t noticed it, I love the flavor of almonds in my baked goods and I’m a bit heavy handed with my use of amaretto. This cake wasn’t as good as the Campton Place Coffee Cake from Desserts by the Yard but it was still more than decent.

I have a fair number of pictures I need to post to Flickr…when I get around to that, I’ll post a bit here as well. I’d post some pictures now but the boyfriend is doing real work on the internet so I can’t hog all of our bandwidth uploading food pictures

We went to George Washington National Forest camping over the weekend with friends…I’ll have some pictures of that eventually as well…but not today. It was fun but we spent too much time in the car and practically no time outdoors during the day (and the weather was perfect). Kind of sad, huh?

I went strawberry picking last week with a couple of work friends. I picked 3 gallons of them…and I now have 16 jars of jam sitting on my counter…plus plenty of sliced strawberries in the freezer. I can’t wait for blueberry picking and peach picking and whatever other kind of picking I can do this summer. I’d never canned anything before and it wasn’t really that hard so I’ll be doing it again. I kind of feel like my mother…but in an okay sort of way. More about the strawberries and jam soon…with pictures.

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I’ve intended to post for the last several days. Clearly I got sidetracked somewhere along the line…

Pictured above are some wheat dinner rolls I made last week. They’re an adaptation of Baking Illustrated‘s Parker House Rolls recipe. I’ll get the recipe for these on this site soon. I think I’m going to spend a bit of time tonight catching up on recipe stuff both in the database program and on this site.

Anyway, these turned out fantastic. While making these, I did something I’ve never done before but will be doing again. I marked up my cookbook with pencil. I made a couple of changes to the ingredients and realized that writing in my cookbook was the easiest way to write down my alterations. I felt a little guilty doing it.

Now to catch up on some of my other cooking…

This is one of the cherry almond tarts I made last week. I soaked the cherries in amaretto and baked them in an almond shortbread crust with more of the crust crumbled on top.

Campton Place Coffee Cake from Desserts by the Yard…the first coffee cake I’ve ever made that I was genuinely happy with in the end. I’ll post this recipe soon as well. I keep saying that, huh?

These are vegan carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream frosting. These are also my first for-profit baked goods. A coworker asked me if I could bake a batch of cupcakes for his newly-vegan ex-girlfriend. So I did…and I made myself a batch as well. I wanted to make caramel buttercream frosting but vegan caramel sauce isn’t so easy to make…I tried and failed and opted for the orange buttercream.

This is my S’mores Tart. I came up with this one on my own after toasting marshmallow around the campfire last month. It has a very buttery graham cracker crust, a chocolate chess pie filling and is topped with a marshmallow fluff meringue that I hand torched. Rich and decadent. The boyfriend got a little testy because I gave 3 pieces of it away…recipe forthcoming.

Other than the cooking, life is pretty boring. Work is good. We’re busy…which means I make money. That’s always good.

The boyfriend and I went to Charlottesville to visit friends (the boyfriend’s friends from high school and one of their boyfriends) last weekend. We spent the afternoon at a wine festival in the country outside of Charlottesville. None of us consumed too much wine so there aren’t any fun stories to tell…

…but here are some of us laughing at a very drunk woman after she decided to ride on the children’s wagon thing that circled the festival.

So that I’m not leaving anyone out of my blog entry, here’s a picture of Krista and I…Krista took all the other pictures at the festival so this is the only one she’s actually in…

At the festival, I learned that I kind of like some Virginia chardonnays…as long as they’re void of any oaky taste. This surprised me as I really don’t like chardonnays in general. They’re my least favorite white by a long shot. My hatred for Virginia red wine was reiterated by numerous tastings of yucky cabernet francs. I bought no wine but I did get some fantastic bacon and garlic cheese at the festival…that I forgot was in the fridge until just this second. I chose the bacon and garlic flavor over the other excellent choices because it was the one the boyfriend was least likely to devour in a day or two.

The rest of the trip to Charlottesville was good…I got to play on a Wii for the first time. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would and was pretty decent at it right away. This kind of shocked me. If I were to buy a gaming system (which I wouldn’t), I’d want a Wii. We also walked around UVA for a while…which I’d never really done before…and after the walk, I don’t really understand why people want to live in the rooms on the Lawn. They’re kind of dumpy…but I guess people live there for the honor of doing so…not for the walk to the bathrooms. Other than that, we did a fair amount of playing games and sitting in bars…fun and lazy!

Let’s see…other things to talk about?

The boyfriend’s house is still in slow progress. They didn’t do much in the last couple of weeks but apparently started the framing yesterday.

I’m pretty excited about my Flickr stats…I’ve had 50,000 individual views to my photos. I get excited about the little things, huh?

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snowy white owl bowl
Originally uploaded by meliass.

My sister Tasha started making birds for her pottery. They’re fantastic. She gave me this white owl as I was ooohing and aahing over the bird bowls and she’d just so happened to make a white one that looks like Hedwig.

Thanks to the boyfriend for deciding the owl’s home should be near my Harry Potter books.

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