When Tom is gone I like to bake.

Success: Peanut Butter cookies for Dad, taken verbatim from 500 Cookies. Have I talked about this book before? I got it from my friend Toria for my birthday–she and Rach also got me 500 Pies and Tarts a couple of years back–and they’re both so totally cute and user-friendly and full of inspiration. Yum. Anyway, these were so good that when I took extras to work yesterday they MYSTERIOUSLY disappeared off the counter in five seconds while I brought the broken fax machine downstairs to the garbage. (Ok, also: so my job is sometimes really boring, so I have to make up little projects for myself, and this week I decided that every day I was going to take one of the old, obsolete, broken pieces of office equipment that are scattered all around in all the storage closets and on top of random filing cabinets and bring them to their final resting place. It is Thursday and I am not nearly done. In a related story, my office is dusty. In another related story, apparently I could have saved myself the hundred grand and not gone to college after all.)

Moral of the story: I like PB cookies because you get to smash ’em down with a fork. 

Jury’s still out: cheesy beer bread. Okay, it’s so pretty, right? And the top is all crispy and cheesy and I really wanted to like it, but I used a LongTrail because all we had in the fridge was LongTrail or Corona, and in the end it just tasted kind of…bitter? I don’t know. A little too beery, in any case.  It was, however, DELICIOUS with lots of butter on it. Anyway, sliced and frozen for the next time we have soup for dinner. AND the whole thing was worth it because when you add the beer to the flour the yeast causes this instant explode-y chemical reaction. I love science. I think they should teach science using baking in school. I wonder who I talk to about that.

Moral of the story: Beer. Better drunk than eaten. (Drunk? Is that right? I think it is, but saying it out loud makes me feel…well, drunk, frankly.)