Pineapple downs and ups

If you want to feel good about your own cooking skills, please, read on. 

Today, since it is my oh-so-important b-date coming up, I decided to make some pineapple cupcakes (recipe here). The recipe sounded amazing. Low calorie recipe with a lot of fruit! To be exact, it has two 20 oz cans of pineapple in 24 cupcakes, which is slightly less than 2 oz of pineapple per cupcake. I think I did really well in the recipe reading and comprehension. I did excelled in ingredient shopping. 

Then, I made the cupcake dough and exceeded my own expectations. Only, the dough was enough for 23, not 24 cupcakes. I felt pretty confident, given that I had made cupcakes only once before...

Perhaps I shouldn't have.

The cupcakes turned out to be alright. Except.... a bit sticky and chewy and totally didn't rise. 

I felt a little less confident after tasting them, but still courageous enough to whip my first-ever frosting. Now, the pineapple frosting recipe here called for a VERY WELL DRAINED crushed pineapple. I swear, I really tried very very very hard. I may have even gotten a small muscle going from pressing the crushed pineapple. I mixed cream cheese, marshmallow fluff (very tasty by the way) and the pineapple.

The result, needless to say, was very liquid.

I panicked a little bit. I thought maybe it's because the cream cheese is too lumpy so I took a hand mixer and began whipping. Even with having pineapple 'frosting' flying all over the kitchen counter and the mixer speed in the red zone, the mixture was even more liquid to my surprise (next time I need to remember that more mixing means more liquid stuff). I thought perhaps mixing in more cream cheese-y substance would help. Although I was planning to eat my sour cream with salsa and chips, it had to be sacrificed for the frosting. 

With.no.success.

I have never seen a frosting this liquid in my entire life. I thought of boiling it, but then I realized that perhaps there is a reason why very few, if any, recipes call for boiled cream cheese. Then I thought of the all-mighty thickening agent - Mr. Corn Starch. Even he was of no help, even after at least 3 or 4 tablespoons. I may have put in even 5 or 6 tablespoons because after a while, I was just pouring that thing into the liquid frosting hoping that at least some of it 'sticks'. It did not. I was the only thing sticking in our kitchen. I was sticking to everything. But the frosting on my fingers tasted good and I really didn't want to throw it away (I admit thought that this was an already sunk cost).

Then I got an idea!

The liquid frosting very much reminded me of the mixture I poured into a cheesecake once. Now that I had used all of anything that could have been put into this thing, I thought baking it may be the last option. I have never been so thankful for a 24/7-open grocery store. I quickly drove there and bought a crumble crust and a Duncan Hines Cream Cheese Frosting - I think that will have to do for now, besides, it contains "real" cream cheese, right? Back at home, I popped some eggs and baking powder and sugar into the dough, poured it in the crust and put it in the oven. Then I waited, cleaning the kitchen in the mean time...

20 minutes... a liquid cake

30 minutes... still a liquid cake

45 minutes... a less liquid cake (was a bit brown on the top though)

60 minutes... FINALLY! The pineapple cheesecake was done. I have not tasted it yet, but it looks good. To sum up the results of my evening pineapple adventures: I now have 23 Duncan Hines cream-cheese-frosted cupcakes in addition to their BIG sibling - the pineapple cheesecake.

PS: To recap the cheesecake ingredients: Cream cheese, crushed pineapple, marshmallow fluff, sour cream, corn starch, eggs, baking powder, sugar, and a generic graham cracked crust.

Calm my Anxious Heart Chp. 1

Contentment is a state of the heart, not a state of affairs. 
                                                                    - Linda Dillow

Reading about Ella and the apostle Paul, it makes me wonder, how does God see our complaining? Does it make him angry or sad? 


I have always felt like complaining was kind of like saying to God, 'Thank you (for where you put me), but no thank you (I don't like it here).' without the 'Thank you' in it. And based on that, people who complain a lot have always made me angry... especially the ones who do have food, home, family, job/school, etc... But maybe that is not the best reaction.

How should we react to those for whom a day without some 'good complaining' would not be a good day?

I think that this has always been on my mind as I definitely know more Merediths than Ellas. On the other hand, it seems to me that complaining may very well be a very cultural thing. I have noticed that my Chinese friends and classmates and roommate never complain. Even when they are going through some really harsh times.

What is it about the Western world that we complain so much, yet in other countries, people don't?


I must agree with LD in that the desire to have control over my own life had made me anxious in the past and comes back to my life here and there. I think graduate school has cured me of that very quickly. I still don't know how I was able to pass the first year or my classes last semester. The material, homework, workload and all were impossible. And I was very depressed and anxious at first. Then I realized that from time to time, it is good to remember that it was God who sent me here and that He sure knew what he was doing. And that perhaps he really wanted to teach me that I cannot do things, that only He can. I became content with my bad grades, old apartment, and impossible homework questions. As LD says, the bridge of trust was built, or at least some of its pillars. I think there are still many areas of my life in which I do not trust God

Do you have your own story of building trust in God? 


I have been also thinking about the story of the two monks. Either I did not understand it, or if it is what it is, then I don't really agree with the message it carries. It seems to me that the only difference was that the one was praying specifically while the other one was not.


Is praying for specific things bad? Like praying that someone would be healed? Or should we just pray that God does whatever to this sick person, for example? Or was it bad that the first monk was asking for small things? Would the first monk be not praying if he didn't trust that God would hear him?

Bicycling

Well, it has been decided (or at least I think so) that Atlanta, GA is the

most bicycle-friendly city

I have ever been to. There is a lot of sunshine here, no snow, warm and long falls and springs. Ideal for bicycling. AND... now my boyfriend who understand bicycles lives here too. So, I have decided to start saving for a bicycle. I am not sure, though, how much it will cost, or which one I should get (Any ideas?).

I want a comfortable seat though and good breaks (and a pink pony)! Ha!

Therefore, lately I have been scavenging my apartment and closets for things that I no longer need and I have found some old college textbooks - money well spent/saved! Amazon buyers, be prepared to shop, hopefully before March comes around.

True Dedication

²⁴ And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ²⁵ God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

So, I buy cage-free eggs (and meat from outside-living animals). I guess some people would find it crazy. Why spend extra 40 cents on 12 eggs? Well, because I would rather not eat an egg produced by some suffering poor bird, who ate c%$p all of her life and never saw the sunlight.

I was particularly happy to find eggs from Amish farms lately at our local farmers market.

To all those who think that people who buy cage-free eggs are crazy, our actions are perfectly rational. My satisfaction from knowing I eat from happy chickens is actually more than those 40 cents so both sides end up better off.

But, to end my aimless talking, here is a story that I wanted to share originally. This man is staying in the radiation-contaminated zone in Japan to take care of some of the thousands abandoned animals after all the people evacuated. The only man living in the forbidden zone. Many of the animals have died of hunger. This awesome man is feeding the ones still alive, the dogs, cats, and others. I have a great respect for him. He is literally giving up his life for these animals (because he will likely die early due to all the radiation). He lives with no electricity, eating only rice and canned food. Oh, and he has an ostrich!

My 40 cents don't compare to his 20 years of life.

Stop Those Credit Card Offers

Lately, I have been getting way too many credit card offers. While this may be sign of my credit score building up, I do not appreciate having to tear up each and every offer into pieces. Time is precious. Maybe I am overreacting, but I would not want someone opening an account in my name... So, I was really happy to find this website of the FTC. It has instructions on how to unsubscribe from the offers of credit cards and insurance using the OptOutPrescreen.com website. You should give it a try! :)

How to cut your hiking supplies' weight in half?

My aunt and I are going on a two week long hiking trip in a couple of days. We will be hiking along the coast of Southwest England, through the wilderness. And we will be carrying everything with us (except for a tent and a sleeping bag).

Since I am not a good hiker at all, I am concerned about the weight on my back quite a lot. Before I would put anything on my packing list, I always weighted several items on my kitchen scale and decided to take only the lightest of things. To my surprise, the weight was still ending up at 12 kg (more then 20 lbs) and that was quite scary. For two months I was thinking of the tiresome travel with these 12 kilograms of 'stuff'.

Tonight, I made a great discovery! I realized that in the 'Grand total' weight, I also included the subtotals... Yes! I am that bad! I don't care though because this has just cut my hiking weight to only little over 6 kilograms. And that is much better than 12 :)

Climbing up a growing mountain

I have never been a fan of rock climbing and whenever anyone starts talking about it, all of my insides usually start twisting inside of me. It's called 'fear of heights' or acrophobia. Here though, I would like to mention one of my class experiences.

It is good that my professors are very smart. Learning from the smart and knowledgeable people, though it doesn't necessarily 'make' the student knowledgeable, does add something to the knowledge of the student. Certainly, it adds more insight to the lecture and makes it more interesting. Sometimes a professor's intelligence may seem counterproductive especially when the knowledge 'gap' between the student and the professor is very large.

In one of my classes, Statistics and Probability, our professor is Essie, an Iranian genius. He is a wonderful man, with a voice worth using for the recording of children's bedtime stories, good sense of humor, and a great attitude towards econometrics and his students. However, it seems that he was not given the ability to 'come down' to his students in terms of the material he is teaching. And so, much of his lectures are filled with 'random' formulas appearing on the dry-erase board. The formulas have no names (or at least no names that could be comprehensibly written down in my notes for future reference). They are long and complex, something you cannot Google... They come from some unknown spot in the textbook.

However, knowing that we are using the textbook and that the professor 'is' referring to is (but I can't really confirm that), I decided to study the textbook beginning with chapter one onwards. The pace of my studying is very slow - 2 or 3 subchapters per day (including assigned exercises) while Essie is moving at a pace of about 8 subchapters per lecture. And so, this whole process of me studying feels like I am climbing an ever-growing mountain, which is growing at a faster pace than I am able to climb at. I am sure I could even come up with an equation for this :).

For now, I will just keep climbing and hope that one day I will be so intelligent and will be able to catch up with the mountain. I have to by the time our core exams come anyways...