This morning I woke up at a fairly reasonable time for a Sunday, got dressed and ready to run errands, took two steps out of my back door and went right back in. A few minutes later I was in my robe with a bowl of cereal and the remote. When it's as gloomy as it was today, I really don't want to leave the house, but I'm absolutely incapable of spending more than an hour on the couch. I get restless. So I looked around and decided that it will be a day for odd chores. I installed the two pull out drawers I bought for my pantry and reorganized everything, I sorted through my stack of magazines and threw out the ones that were already "juiced" of all the recipes/articles that interested me and I finally cleaned everything that has been piling on my dining room table for weeks. Lunch: poached salmon with whole wheat mac n'cheese on the side. Hey, don't judge me, it's what was lying around and it's pretty healthy, right? I spent the rest of the day puttering around. Picking up this, sorting that, throwing extras out and cleaning/unpacking the various things I have lying around in bags waiting patiently for me to get to them. It was only 7pm when I realized that I'm tired of cleaning and I need to make a little mess to balance things out, so I pulled out the recipe I've been meaning to make for a while now: Froot Loop cupcakes:
I first saw the recipe for these on Flickr and the picture led me to The Crepes of Wrath blog, which in turn led me to Gastronomy for the original recipe (really just a half sized version of the one on the first blog). I didn't have any oranges, but I did have about 3 dozen lemons so they're lemon flavored cupcakes, and since they looked a bit on the plain side I added "milk" in the form of a simple glaze, so the cupcakes now look like overfilled cereal bowls.
As for why I have 3 dozen lemons, they were pushed at me by my parents. My father was sent on a routine run to the grocery store and he saw several packages of pretty lemons on the clearance rack. So while they were not on his list, since to him lemons equal lemon cake, he bought all of them. When I came by to visit my parents my dad jumped up and said "I have lemons for you!" and with a sly look on his face followed that up with "You know....for the cake?". To which my mother chimed in from the kitchen, "All I want is a jar of Lemon Curd, please. A big one." So while I have a ton of lemons, it seems that they're all spoken for. Though that will be a task for a different day.
My next thought was that I never did go grocery shopping, which was on the agenda when I stepped out of the house this morning, so I began scouring the cupboards for ideas. I'm trying to keep to a budget and one of the main expenses that were cut was the daily lunch outings, but everything in the fridge looked boring. I went online and found an email from King Arthur Flour, a wonderful source for baking tools, recipes and inspiration. They were advertising their cooking classes, which are unfortunately several states away from me, but they also featured one of the recipes that they were going to teach: Sesame Semolina Lunettas and they looked fairly easy. I happened to have had a bag of semolina on hand, so I decided to bake two loaves. One to make sandwiches for work and the other to bring to my parent's house along with the slew of lemon products they ordered. A few hours later, my house smelled amazing and while I didn't shape the bread into the Lunetta shapes, the loaves I ended up with looked and tasted great. I'm definitely going to be baking more bread in the future. It makes lunch a lot more exciting and it makes the whole house smell amazing!
Just look at that crumb! I've never really been able to make bread, so I'm very happy with how this came out. The recipe is definitely a keeper.
In the evening my little sister, who drove back to school a few hours away, after visiting this afternoon, IM'd me to ask about the snow. It snowed? I spent such a nice day inside that I didn't even notice!
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