If the best things in life are free...

..why is this coat $259.99? :-(

new hair color

Looks a little green in the picture since I took it with photo booth at like 12am, but it's really dark brown. I'm super happy with it! :)

my famous brownies

Ok, well they're only famous in my family, but still. It's the one single recipe that I know I make better than my mom, so to me that's something. She can take care of the gourmet chicken recipes and apple pie (seriously, nobody else on the planet should be authorized to make apple pies -- hers put all others to shame) but when it comes to brownies, nobody else in my family even bothers. It's my territory.

I've been making these in some form or another since I was old enough to bake -- the recipe is actually adapted from a kid's cook book I had when I was a child! They might not suit everyone, but these are exactly what I look for in a brownie. They're dense enough to warrant being called "brownie" instead of "cake," but not so dense that they're fudge-like. They're sweet and chocolatey, but it's not like Willy Wonka's factory exploded in your mouth. There's such a thing as too sweet and too chocolatey. And they end up with a really amazing, thin crusty top that I've never been able to duplicate with any other brownie recipe.

Ok, so here's what you'll need!

1/2 c. melted margarine
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
3/4 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat the oven to 350'. Melt the chocolate in the microwave on low heat. Mix the margarine and sugar with a wooden spoon. (I always taste test at this point. Margarine + sugar = yum!) Add vanilla, eggs and melted chocolate. Mix well. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder and salt. Add to the batter and stir well. Oil a 9" square baking pan (note: you can use an 8" pan, but for some reason they come out sooo much better in a 9" pan) Spread batter into the pan, bake for 30 minutes. Once cool, serve and enjoy! (And if you live with hungry siblings, you should stash a few brownies in your room so that they don't eat them all.)

best potatoes ever!

Last week I got I Like You, Amy Sedaris' party planning/cook book that's been on my want list for ages. It's jam-packed with great recipes, funny stories, witty anecdotes and silliness. My favorite part is the recipes (ok, and the silliness.)

She has a lot of meat recipes that I might try with tofu or fake chicken, but, as usual, my first inclination was to skip to the index and look for all recipes with "potato" in the title. I tried the most scrumptious-looking one last night -- Roasted Potatoes in their Jackets.

The recipe is SO simple. Just preheat the oven to 400 degrees and coat the bottom of a roasting pan with olive oil and sea salt. Add your little potatoes (This really only works with little potatoes. The best part is the skin, and if you cut large potatoes into chunks it just wouldn't be the same!) and toss them in the oil/salt combo. Amy doesn't say whether to cover the pan or not, so I covered it for the first 25 minutes to make sure the insides of the potatoes cooked well, then took off the lid for the remaining 20 minutes to let the skins get crispy! The result is so delicious! The insides are like perfect mashed potatoes -- creamy and flavorful without even adding any butter or seasonings. And the skin (the skin!!!!) is salty, a little crunchy and utterly mouth-watering!

The potatoes looked so amazing, but, alas, I made dinner at 10pm so the lighting wasn't exactly suitable for taking photos. Thankfully, there was this pretty cool photo from the cookbook that I could steal instead :)