I'm just going to give myself a 5 star awesome rating for today

Wrapping things in plastic makes me feel like Dexter. I spent a lot of time wrapping and re-wrapping the pain au chocolat dough this weekend. As per usual, a multi-day baking adventure, with a totally delightful and oh-so-pretty result.

But will they transport me back to breakfast in Santorini?

I tried to do my taxes yesterday. I have to file in 3 states. I don't know what crazy person invented the tax code, but it is mind boggling to me that I owe Delaware $100 but get money back from Ohio. Pennsylvania and I are apparently square. But this post is not about taxes. It is about temperature measuring. I finally buckled under pressure and bought a Thermapen. These things are like the fanciest pants thermometer in the world; foodies love them, nuclear physicists love them (I assume they have to measure reactors and things), sides of beef love them. They also cost $89. They don't go on sale. So it came in the mail on Thursday, from England via the distributor in Utah. I have been trying to decide what it's maiden voyage will be, after measuring the ambient temperature in my apartment and the temperature of my fingertips; both hovered at 68 degrees. I may or may not have mentioned that I recently bought two pounds of yeast at Costco because (a) it seemed like a good value and (b) one of my goals for 2012 is to increase the amount of baking I do with yeast. It is always important to measure the temperature of water used to proof yeast so I decided I would kill two birds with one stone and make a yeast bread recipe this morning. I am carefully ignoring the voice in my head that is reminding me that I have never measured the temperature of the liquid used to proof yeast in my life, other than by sticking my finger in and seeing if it felt lukewarm. This method, although inexact, has largely been successful. So I decided to make pain au chocolat. I've been on a French bread making kick recently and made brioche a few weekends ago (without the thermometer, the horror)! I did some googling and the Jacques Torres recipe seems to be popular. The best part? His recipe calls for cold water to proof the yeast. No thermometer required. Of course. I'm going to do it anyway. I might even take some pictures.

The Container Store: Love it or Hate it?

I believe it is possible people at the Container Store can be divided into two distinct groups; those whose anxiety is reduced by the storage options, or those whose anxiety is increased by the storage options. I fall into the latter category. There are things in there that I cannot even conceive of what their purpose is. Do I really need boot fillers to keep my boots in shape? Really? Or things to hold my flip flops together? The food storage container section sent me into a panic attack, literally floor to ceiling tupperware. You might ask yourself, Self, why is Nicole in the Container Store if it causes so much distress? And I would say, well, there are certain weird things I like to be hyper-organized about. When I bake cookies, I like for them to be evenly placed in rows on the cooling racks, and when I put them away, I store them in pairs back to back. So they don't feel lonely. I also have been dreaming of reorganizing my spices into those cute little stainless steel containers. Plus all my spices are in a drawer because my cabinets are too tall for me to see the spices on the shelves, and I was forced to use a sharpie marker to write the type of each spice on its lid. So messy.

I spent a productive day at work today making some labels, and then I drove to the Container Store in our BIG SNOWSTORM and picked up my spice canisters. The guy asked if I was using them for "clips." As though I need 36 small containers for paper clips? I threw away some spices that were perhaps from Stah Mahket in Boston (which marks them as no newer than oh, 2001 or so, because it turned into a Shaw's before 2003). I found some weird crystals in my coriander, and discovered I had no less than three jars of allspice. So yeah, now everything's all pretty and nice and four canisters fit across in the drawer perfectly like my drawers had just been waiting for me to turn all obsessive and tidy up the spices.

The best part about this? Now I won't know when my spices expire, so I can feel free to keep the Chinese 5 Spice Powder that I never use for another 10 years, and not feel like I'm ruining my (something you might use Chinese 5 Spice Powder in).

The month of December in brief

Heavens to Betsy! A 31 day lag. I tried to write approximately 12 Christmas posts which all sounded trite. The gist of them: give back to others during the holiday season (and all throughout the year, really). I have a lot to be grateful for, when many others are struggling and that is never more noticeable than during the holidays.

Since my last post, my sister turned 29 + 1 and that brought me back to the east coast for the first time since I left. Now, I have never lived in NYC, but lots of friends (and one sister) have, and I have been there many times. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had chosen NYC like all the other VC grads, instead of Boston after college, but we will never know... So I have really been enjoying Cincinnati and not been too east-coast-homesick, but when I flew into NYC, it pulled at my heartstrings and I felt a pang of jealousy for all those people who got to stay on the coast. We toured NBC Studios and the page told us some tales about Dr. Oz and his talk show, including the swab he did of the bottom of a lady's purse that was germier than a NYC toilet and had 2 different strains of Hepatitis on it. Later that night/early the next morning I was strolling down the sidewalk and slipped on a laminated menu on the sidewalk. All I thought as my bum hit the sidewalk was, eww, I wonder if I am as a germy as the purse now. And then I was kind of ready to leave the big city and head back to my Midwestern semi-suburban life...

Christmas came and went, my brother and I sustained a well-deserved loss in the annual gingerbread house decorating contest. The Christmas craft project was successful, and the sweatshop was much more productive and efficient than in years prior. Keep an eye out for the link to the Etsy shop! We saw the house where The Christmas Story was filmed, on a street full of houses with leg lamps in the window. We had a snowball fight, and made a snow lady, and went for a lovely, if not freezing cold walk in the Metroparks.

And then I tore myself away from my home (the DSM-V is rumored to have adult separation anxiety as a diagnosis and I will proudly be first in line for that one), made the drive back to Cincinnati, slept for 3 hours, and made a 6 am flight to Albuquerque (which I have practiced spelling) to see a friend from grad school and celebrate the New Year.

I love green chiles. I have always loved green chiles. I should move to New Mexico because they have a lot of them there. We had breakfast at Frontier, famous for many things including their green chile hash browns. I literally could have eaten a bucket full of them but was trying not to appear to be a huge fatty, and because I knew I would eat well over the next few days. My friend and her boyfriend have an impeccably well stocked kitchen. She has traded out her Kitchen Aid mixer (over which we bonded when I stayed with her during grad school interviews) for a Cuisinart stand mixer, which I will forgive, but what I cannot forgive is the assertion that Thomas Keller's chocolate chip cookies are better than my Rolo Chocolate Chip Cookies. Thomas Keller should stick to French Bistro cooking and leave the lowly chocolate chip cookie to me. We had a spa day, visited the Albuquerque Costco, ate grilled pizza, went to Sante Fe, ate blue corn enchiladas at Maria's, stopped in the heroin capital of the US for a bathroom break, and arrived in Taos at twilight on New Year's Eve. My friend made me sleep in the garage. We woke up at 7.30 am to go skiing at Angel Fire. I had not been skiing since my very early 20s. I am not sporty. I worry about injury on a daily basis. I asked the ski technicians if they had a padded suit I could wear. I jokingly complained about skiing and head injuries and broken legs. One guy, who looked like he hadn't showered or slept in days, said, "Are you familiar with the power of the mind?" I said, "I am," and wondered what piece of stoner wisdom was coming my way, and he said, "It's really powerful." Why yes, sir, yes it is. I donned my helmet and rode the chair lift up, got off the lift, stood on the precipice, and skied down the mountain. And loved it.

And so, with the mountains of New Mexico as my inspiration, 2012 will be a year without complaints and fear. I will do the things I think I cannot do, I will learn from them, and I will confront the voice in my head that tells me it will be okay to put it off til tomorrow. The irony of the fact that I was supposed to take a Pure Barre class at 12 and it is 12.31 and I am typing this does not escape my notice. I will totally go to a class tomorrow.

Only a match made in heaven if somebody kills me first

When I started this blog, I mentally made a promise to myself to try not to be mean spirited or to talk about dating. This post might be a little bit of both. I live in a very nice looking condo. However, it has walls made out of tissue paper and floors made out of something else that has really good noise conduction/really bad sound insulation. My downstairs neighbor and I have a significant difference of opinion on how loud he should be. I asked nicely once, and passive aggressively twice, and he basically told me he had no intention of being considerate and neighborly and turning his music/sound system/chasing his dog around and making weird noises down. I think he plays Call of Duty on Tuesdays and Thursdays (with the headset), turns his hip hop music on at 9 am (he wants to be a "balla, shot calla, 20 inches rims on my Impala") on the weekends, and apparently my tiny request that he turn the bass down a tad has "ruined his enjoyment" of football. I contemplated multiple options of revenge and retribution. I gallop and stomp around in my heels. I pondered poisoned baked goods, but such a waste of baked goods for such a meanie. He has old lady perfume as an air freshener or incense or something and it wafts through our shared duct work and inexplicably under my kitchen sink. It makes me want to keep the heat off and wear three sweaters. And earmuffs to block out the noise. It makes me literally crazy. The other thing that makes me crazy is internet dating. Dr. Neil Clark Warren's personality algorithm matching system is all kinds of broken. Because I got matched up with my downstairs neighbor. True story.

Walking in a winter wonder...cake

I don't often think about my baking in food blogging terms, with words like luscious swoops of snowy whipped cream that make you think of the magic of Christmas, and the time of year when you believe that every wish you ever make can come true as long as there's a light snow falling and the twinkles of Christmas lights on a woodsy fir tree... and words along those lines. But I baked this cake this weekend for a holiday party and that is exactly what I thought. It is like a Christmas candy land cake. And I totally forgot to have a bite of it at the party. I did check in on it at one point to see how it was doing (i.e., see whether people were gobbling it up and providing me with validation) and the top two layers had sort of slid off the bottom two layers (whipped cream frosting does not provide a lot of structural support). I believe my reading public will be proud to know that instead of trying to prop the cake back up again and looking like a crazy person, I just went and had another glass of wine.

The recipe: Devil's Food Cake with Peppermint Frosting
The only thing I did differently was to ditch the marshmallow frosting, because it is a colossal pain, and doubled the white chocolate cream frosting instead. I don't regret that change for a minute. And my arms thank me for not hand whisking egg whites for 15 minutes.

Turkey, traffic, and textiles

Last Thanksgiving, I drove from Philly into NYC via the Lincoln Tunnel, picked up my sister on the Upper West Side, drove back through the Lincoln Tunnel, and we continued on our way to Ohio. Lots of traffic, but I don't mind the Lincoln Tunnel, despite the lack of organization to the merge. I foolishly believed that upon moving to Ohio and leaving behind the most congested portion of the 95 corridor, my Thanksgiving travel would be a breeze. The drive between Cincinnati and Cleveland looks really innocuous; bucolic farmland, Columbus to break things up in the middle, outlet malls, truck stop after truck stop after truck stop, flat and generally pretty boring. And totally unpredictably crazy, stop-and-go, Lincoln Tunnelish traffic.

I had the best intentions of blogging Thanksgiving dinner, which obviously did not pan out because I spent half the day chopping root vegetables. The essence:
Successful turkey! Not dry, cooked all of the way through, tasted good. Science and methodical recipe research do pay off.
We made lamb tongues, a popular Syrian dish around the holidays. They don't taste like chicken.
My favorite pie crust recipe
I made French macarons that looked pretty and tasted better, despite all the drama on the blogs that they are très impossible!
I bought a mandoline (the slicer, not the instrument) and attractively and creatively sliced an apple, since we were all out of root vegetables.
I knitted 2 1/2 hats.

I was and am thankful for many people and things this Thanksgiving holiday, except for the rain and traffic that prevented me from getting back to Cincinnati in time to have knitted 3 hats.