It has been roughly 15 months since my last post. If anybody is actually following this blog, I apologize for disappearing. There are lots of reasons for not updating but they all boil down to the same idea: life happened. My job got very busy, I moved, traveled to other countries, got a lung infection that knocked me out for 3 months, my father got meningitis, my sister had a baby, I got called for jury duty, my sister had a baby, and various other stuff. Unfortunately the jury duty was not for anything even remotely resembling My Cousin Vinny.
When I am stressed out or low on time and/or energy, I end up baking the same set of trusted recipes over and over again. Last month I decided that it was time to start trying new recipes again so I signed up for a cupcake potluck with the theme of "Summer Cupcakes". This summer has been very bad in the Bay Area: for all intents and purposes, we are out of water. There are large wildfires all over the state and the Pacific Northwest, to the point where sometimes the air looks like the smog back in LA in the 1970's. We are supposed to get a massive El Nino this winter but I'm not putting any faith in the weather predictions. I did not make "on fire without any water" cupcakes but I was tempted to.
My new kitchen is large but old and very run down, so there's no counter space and very little storage space. The oven is so old and disgusting that I have to remove the battery in the smoke detector every time I turn it on since it produces enough smoke to set the stupid thing off. I've cleaned the oven numerous times but nothing can remove the build up due to 40 years of use. I get a real sense of accomplishment when I produce anything from this oven that looks good, tempered with some serious frustration about how gross and difficult to use it is.
