and things went downhill from there

Also, I hope everyone has a good new year. May 2022 suck less than 2020 and 2021.

Today on "Cooking With plonq": We decided to start out the new year with waffles because that sounded like a reasonable choice.

These are the fancy, yeast-leavened ones that I make on occasion. I changed a few things up this time, but they turned out very good in spite of my efforts.
Here is how you make them the "plonq" way.

1. Add some yeast to warm water with a bit of sugar in it. Let it sit long enough that it's obvious that it's not doing anything other than smell mildly yeasty. While that's failing...

2. Melt some butter in the microwave and measure out two cups of milk (divide it between two measuring cups so that you have room to mix the melted butter into one of them). In the larger cup, stir in a couple tablespoons of sugar, some salt (don't measure - you know how much a teaspoon looks like), and some vanilla (even though the recipe doesn't call for it).

2a. Turn on the oven and warm it up to about 40°c, then turn it off and put the bowl of stagnant yeast into it to try and kick-start the process.

3. Pour the melted butter into the milk and stir. Don't bother to warm up the milk first so that you end up with a measuring cup of cold milk with blobs of coagulated butter floating around in it.

4. Nuke the milk for about a minute to warm it up. Check on the yeast to confirm your suspicions that it's still hasn't activated. Pour the tepid milk and butter into the bowl, stir it together and put it all back in the warm oven.

5. Go sit at your computer for about ten minutes and reassess your desire to make waffles. Stupid waffles. Who starts the new year with waffles? Contemplate on the fact that you accidentally used salted butter, and also added salt, so it's probably your fault if the yeast is dead.

5a. Check on the bowl in the oven. Yup, it's a bowl of sweet, vaguely yeasty-smelling liquid with congealed butter floating on top.

6. Toss the bowl into the microwave for exactly 53 seconds. Eh - feels warm...ish now. And the butter has softened again. Nuke the milk you'd been reserving, and pour it in along with another teaspoon or so of fresh yeast. Put it back in the oven.

7. Go back to your computer and spend another ten minutes or so browsing nothing in particular and trying to come up what a plausible-sounding conspiracy to feed your wife in the morning to explain how you could fail so badly at an otherwise simple recipe.

9. Check on the ... holy yeast explosion. You have angered the yeast and it is trying to escape from the bowl. If you don't get it back under control it might come after you as you sleep. If you'd put the lid on the bowl, it would have been blasted free with enough force to paint it to the top of the oven.

10. Whisk in the flour and cover the bowl with a lid. Leave it on the stove to ferment overnight.

11. The next morning, whisk some baking soda into a couple of eggs and stir that into the now-tamed yeast beast.

12. Make waffles.

We bought a waffle maker yesterday. We have tossed around the idea of getting one for some time, but we noticed they were 1/3 off yesterday, so we decided to make the move. I don't know what it says about my life when I consider buying a waffle maker to be excitement, but I guess that is a good thing on some level. As soon as I am done posting this I am going to go wash the waffle plates in it so that we can hook it up and make some waffles.

Mmmm... waffles.

It has turned out to be a slightly expensive weekend for us overall. My UPS has been acting more like a surge protector than a UPS for months now, albeit a surge protector which occasionally drops power for no reason and howls like its just witnessed the opening of the gates to Hell.

One of my tasks for today (other than raking leaves this afternoon) is to hook up the new UPS, and maybe disassemble and clean both of our desktop computers as well. atara's has been running a little warm, so I suspect it has some dust and hair build-up inside.

The other thing we bought this weekend was a beer advent calendar.


Twenty four days of international beer. Each unique beer comes with instructions on how to chill and serve it. We are the kind who typically chug it straight from the bottle, but I guess we can make an exception for this particlular two-four.