I am an ADULT!

     Kind of.  Most of the time.  I work a decent job that's actually in my field (I train parrots!  They're adorable!).  My house is mostly clean most of the time.  I eat a lot of salad.  I work on my thesis.  To balance being an adult, I like to do small ridiculous things on a daily basis.  Sometimes (everyday) I will look at pictures of baby animals.  Sometimes I eat a bag of Peachios.  Yesterday, I danced around the apartment to "Gangnam Style."  Seriously, you can't be an adult all of the time.

     Here's a pic of the bf and me visiting my work.  That parrot is a blue and gold macaw named Dewey.  He is four years old and his interests include hanging upside down, nibbling on things, and being held like a baby.

     I do generally cook like an adult.  Especially since I have someone that appreciates my cooking and will also notice if I eat the same pot of soup for two weeks and call me out on how gross that is.  I've taken to experimenting with DIY food stuff.  Some of it has gone great.  Some of it needs more experimentation.  My sourdough starter started out fantastic!  Lots of bubbles and a nice sour smell meant that I had some pretty high expectations.  When I actually used my starter, I was less than impressed.  Here are a couple of pictures to demonstrate.

     See?!  That starter looks fantastic!  Look at it all bubbly and overflowing!  Other starters are so jealous of my starter!

     Here is how it baked up.  I am very disappoint...  Sourdough starter is on the back burner and I shall return to it later.

     Other experiments have gone a lot better.  I've gotten pretty good at making my own Greek yogurt and now have a cheap healthy breakfast food that goes great with honey, berries, and chocolate granola.  I have managed to master the art of a long-rise bread baked in a Dutch oven.  Seriously, this bread is easy and delicious.  There are websites everywhere for this recipe so I'm not going to type out all of the steps.  Here is someone else's blog that has it all written down. http://simplysogood.blogspot.com/2010/03/crusty-bread.html  Tada!  Pretty tasty.  For reference, my bread looks like that.  IT IS DELICIOUS.  

     I have made this bread a couple of times now and use it for everything.  Last week we used a few pieces to make French toast and IT WAS DELICIOUS.  This morning we popped it in the toaster, slathered it with butter, and shook some cinnamon sugar on it.  IT WAS DELICIOUS.  Incidentally, I ate my homemade cinnamon toast along with the aforementioned homemade Greek yogurt.  I am Betty Crocker.  I should also point out that the butter was also homemade.  The process is so easy that I'll actually type out the instructions.  1.  Let heavy cream sit out in an open mason jar for 12 hours so that it can sour.

                    2.  Put a lid on the jar and shake it until it turns into butter.

                    3.  Rinse and salt butter.

     We call it wizard butter.  A friend of my bf's sent him this video of an old dude making this butter and this dude looks like a wizard.  Here's the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oropJD0CUxI
     Tonight, the homemade bread and wizard butter was turned into garlic bread.  I just buttered slices of bread with wizard butter, shook on some garlic power, grated on some parmesan, and baked it until it looked like garlic bread.  It paired nicely with the Italian wedding soup I made using our Dutch oven.
     I love our Dutch oven.  It is big and a pretty green color and gets used several times a month for various soups and bread.  Short story of how we acquired said Dutch oven:  before I even moved down to Texas, bf and I were visiting his parents.  The subject of Dutch ovens came up and his mom was all of a sudden all "OH!" and then walked off and came back with a brand new Dutch oven which we now have.  It was amazing.

     Anyway, we had Italian wedding soup and garlic bread for dinner and I forgot to take a picture to post here.  Here is the soup recipe! http://allrecipes.com/recipe/italian-wedding-soup/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=italian%20wedding%20soup&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Home%20Page  It's pretty tasty and meatballs are always a good time.  Tomorrow, I'll make more garlic bread and set the food up all pretty so I can take a picture and post it here.  You all will know that I'm just posting pics of leftovers, but I'm pretty sure most of the people that read this blog are friends and family so I don't need to impress you anyway.  For the one or two other people that read it, I'm sorry.  I don't aim very high.

   To wrap everything up, we got all fancy and drank red wine with our dinner which actually paired great with the soup and with dessert.  It's a sweet red from California called LaDiDa.  For being less than $5 it is surprisingly tasty.  Dessert was chocolate "mousse" (melted dark chocolate with sugar whipped into heavy whipping cream until thick and topped with whipped cream).  So fancy!  So adult!

*Note-Waste not, want not!  To make Greek yogurt you have to drain off the whey.  Since whey is packed full of protein and other good things and since I'm hyper frugal, I cannot justify dumping it down the sink.  Therefore, whey waters my basil plant (the Texas sun has killed all my other herbs) and has started making its way into baked goods.  The bread I'm eating was made with leftover whey from last week's yogurt.

**Update:  For a long time, my camera was stuck on zoom and I thought it was broken.  In an attempt to fix the camera, I accidentally delete all the pictures.  So, no soup pictures.  I am sad.  Luckily, my tech savvy bf took a look and fixed it in about 5 minutes.  Yeah, it was just on the wrong setting.