Friday, December 22, 2006

Celebrating in Style

This post marks the beginning of the 3rd year for The Sour Dough. I've written 157 posts (excluding this one) for The Sour Dough and my profile has been viewed 590 times since December 22, 2004. To celebrate, I made broiled Georges Bank sea scallops and oven hash for dinner and popped open a bottle of pink champagne to sip while I share a few food related facts about myself you may not know (and after you read these you may wish you hadn't).

-The very first week living in the dorms my freshman year of college, I set off the fire alarm because I used a damaged oven in the floor kitchen to bake a batch of brownies. Three weeks later I was banned from the kitchen for "stinking up the floor with garlic" (I was making spaghetti and sauteed two whole heads of garlic).

- I decorated my first cake at six. It was a two layer yellow cake made in my Easy Bake oven. I served it on pink china at a tea given for a headless GI Joe, two Barbies and one stuffed animal; a horse whose mane and tail I had braided for the occassion. I was dressed in a pink tu-tu, swimming fins, and cowboy hat.

- I was the only Girl Scout in my council to earn every single cooking badge as a Junior, Cadette, and Senior.

- I can't make a flaky pie crust to save my life.

- My all time favourite food is cheese and this, among other things, makes France heaven on Earth for me.

- I have had street vendor food on six continents and none of it has made me sick. The best was the B'Stella I had in Marrakesh. The worst was the pretzel I had a few weeks ago in NYC. The continents are Africa (Cairo and Marrakesh), Asia (Tokyo, Seoul and Kowloon), Australia (Sydney), Europe and North America (too many to list), and South America/Latin America (Belize and Rio). I'm not sure I'll be able to add Antarctica to this list but if I do manage to get there and there is a street vendor, I'll try.

- In that same vein, the two times I've had food poisoning from someplace I ate were here in the United States.

- I have a fondness for freeze dried Raspberry Granola from Richmoor-Natural High Camping Foods. I like to make it with hot water on cold winter days and curl up on the couch in my fluffy red bathrobe and green fuzzy slippers and watch old movies.

- I once brought back two cases of Aero chocolate bars back from a business trip in Canada and spent two hours in customs because they thought I was smuggling something else. I can now get my fix of air bubble filled chocolate by going to the World's Worst Grocery Store but it isn't as much fun.

- Late Feburary makes me crave fresh caught fried smelt and Labatt's Blue.

- When I fix a meal for MBH and I, there is always some portion of it that can be shared with our cat, LB.

- I'm learning CSS, PHP, MySQL, and more than I even want to know about how to set up a website so I can launch breadchick.com in the new year (with GREAT help/patience of MBH).

I feel blessed to be associated with so many of you fine bloggers and count some of you as good friends. So, I'm raising my glass of pink bubbly to you, my readers and fellow bloggers. Here's to spending the next year cooking, reviewing, and chatting about food with you.