Termites and Chicken

No photo today, for obvious reasons.

Last night we discovered termites in our bathroom. Yuck. I won't get into details but someone is coming out on Monday to look into it. I actually felt a little sorry for the things. They don't move very fast, like all the other bugs in our house, and they are cutely social. Then I sprayed eco-friendly bug killer on them and went to bed (on the other side of the room).

On a more positive note, I saw something online about Tyson donating 100 pounds of chicken per commenter on their blog to SF Bay Area food banks up to 200,000 pounds. That's a lot of chicken! I'd encourage anyone with a moment to make a comment. When I checked they were only up to 475 or so comments (they need 2,000 to donate the full amount). Spread the word!

Night.

Barbecue Festival

Last Sunday I went to my first ever barbecue festival. It was LA's first so I didn't expect the kind of showing that you see on the food network, but I was still excited.

The festival was in a section of the parking lot next to the Santa Monica Pier and there were vendors from around LA as well as Texas and Missouri. Mark and I tried almost all of them.

There was beef brisket, pork sausage, St. Louis style ribs, baby back ribs, macaroni and cheese, beans and, of course, white bread.

Truth be told, the only really good barbecue was from a place in Venice called Baby Blues Barbecue. Maybe their proximity helped, but now I'm eager to try the actual establishment.

It being LA, there were cupcakes too. Not just any cupcakes, these were voted best cupcakes of 2008 (in LA by gosh knows who). Regardless, it was still worth a try and they were super cute. By the time I got to desert they only had pink velvet left with a vanilla bean frosting. It was pretty good. The cupcake itself had a strangely moist consistency. Course, as I love strangely moist things, I enjoyed it.

Cookie Competition

Last week my work had its summer picnic at the Hollywood Bowl. We had a picnic dinner follows by a concert by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and the LA Philharmonic.


As part of the festivities someone decided there should be an earth friendly cookie competition. I took this as an opportunity to bake and then get rid of the bounty... because otherwise very unhealthy things would happen. So in order to be REALLY competitive I decided to make a test batch using as many organic ingredients as I could get my overspending hands on (see picture).

The cookies turned out pretty good but they were a little salty and I was worried that chocolate chip cookies would be too boring. I sent the cookies off with Mark to his work and tried again. Cue the lemon ginger shortbread (well sort of) cookies. These were fun to make because I've never tried to make shortbread before (or anything with this much butter). As you can see, they spread into MASSIVE cookies but I thought they were pretty good.


Unfortunately I still didn't get a prize in the cookie competition as I was beat out by "carbon neutral" chocolate peanut butter oat cookies, lemon bars and someone else who made two batches (chocolate chip almond and baklava). Oh well. The leftovers went back to Mark's work and they liked them so much they told Mark I was a keeper (duh).