Starry Wisdom

Tonight it was time to carve my annual pumpkin. The carving went pretty quick, and I am fairly happy with the results. The biggest problem I had was getting a picture to come out well. I finally decided I had to use a slow shutter speed, which was a problem because I lack a tripod. Stacking a couple of CCNA books on the table worked well enough, however.

Trogdor the Burninator!

If you don’t read this post, at least check out this link website.

I was getting a bagel today and there was a guy there who I thought looked a bit like John Denver. Well, some woman who was there mentioned this to him and he told her that he was indeed a John Denver tribute artist/impersonator, and he was there with his friend who was a Cat Stevens tribute artist/impersonator as well. The guy mentioned his website and that they were having a show somewhere tomorrow night. Weird stuff!

The moral of this story is: Do not judge a book by its cover. The story can be found behind the cut.

So this is the coconut cream pie I made yesterday:

It looks really nice. However it really didn’t taste all that good. The recipe called for unsweetened shredded coconut, but I couldn’t find any at the three stores I went to yesterday, so I punted and used the sweetened stuff. MISTAKE.

The resulting pie was sickeningly sweet. I didn’t realize just how much sugar was already in the coconut, but when I tried a bit plain after the fact I realized that I was a complete idiot for not even trying to reduce the sugar in the recipe. The graham cracker crust was still ok, and the fresh whipped cream was tasty tasty… but the coconut “pudding” middle was just terrible.

I think the worst part is that I don’t know if I will ever bother trying this again. It really wasn’t all that hard to make, but the results were just so phenomenally bad that I don’t know if it will be worth my time to do it right, just in case the recipe itself was bogus. I don’t really think that can be true – I got it from America’s Test Kitchen and the recipes from that show and Cook’s Illustrated magazine have done me no wrong in the past.

Anyway, that’s my exciting culinary misadventure, hope you enjoyed.

I never really posted anything about our trip to Chicago last weekend. I guess it’s kind of late to give a trip report now, so I will just satisfy you all with this weird picture:

That’s a doll made by the father of the girl who owns that house that Erin’s sister lives at. He was an artist and there was a lot of paintings around, many of them having sheep motifs. This doll, though, was the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. It reminds me of the sheephead demon things from Time Bandits

To compentate for that terror, here is a picture of our hamster Nutmeg’s massive hoard: