Baking for dummies.

Today's post is brought to you by the letter E. For Eminem, of course. I cannot stop listening to this: Eminem + Village People = Sheer Genius. Thanks to Matt for sending this along!

So the big news is that I made cookies yesterday that were neither burnt nor hard. I don't usually mind my hard cookies - I love a good crunch. But it would be nice to know I could properly cook cookies should the need arise. I went for simple and just followed the recipe on the back of the Toll House chocolate chips bag. Ok, I didn't totally follow it. I couldn't bring myself to use all that butter and I subbed half of it out for applesauce.

Someone, please tell me: Are cookies supposed to still be smooshy when you take them out? It drives me crazy that cookie recipes give a cooking time range (which is it? 9 or 11 minutes?!) then don't say what to look for other than "golden brown." My cookies were golden brown but also smooshy, so I took them out. Maybe I'm an idiot, but no one ever taught me to cook. Anyway, they were super thin (perhaps due to the butter/applesauce sub) but hardened up a bit and in the end were super chewy and crumbly and delicious.

I finally went to the grocery store yesterday (procrastinated Sunday due to rain, Monday due to snow) so today I had the fixins to make tzatziki, which I've been craving for ages. I think I've mentioned a few times that the two things I really miss are gyros and reubens, but when it comes down to it, it's the accoutrement that I miss, not the meat. So I woke up this morning and put together this tzatziki, using fat free Greek yogurt. I didn't think I needed an entire 16 oz so I only used 8 oz of yogurt, but I used the full amounts of everything else (except garlic, duh!). I planned to make veggie gyros for lunch, but Brad wasn't able to come home so I pushed it to dinner.

After some debate, Brad and I decided I should cook the peppers and warm up the pitas for half hot, half cold gyros. I sauteed green peppers for Brad, red for me, and threw in a few handfuls of black olives at the end. Into the pitas went feta, cucumbers, and romaine. The hot peppers and olives. Slather oodles of tzatziki, grab a heaping spoonful of rice with lemon and butter, and you've got a super yummy and filling fakie Greek dinner.

I could not, however, convince Brad to do Ouzo shots with me. Wuss.

Unrelatedly, I keep forgetting to show you the most hilarious thing I antiqued while Lisa was here a few weeks ago.

Oh will you??

Luckily it was only $4 because that was going home w/ me no matter what the cost. And... it totally works!

Thanks for holding my tea bag.

Giggle.