More and more, I’ve found

More and more, I’ve found myself measuring my maturity by the cooking feats I’m willing to tackle. I’m in a baking phase right now that’s carried me through attempts at chocolate mousse cheesecake, homemade brownies (note: try different recipe than one on box of baker’s chocolate), hamentashen, pizza, calzones, and most recently lemon bars. My mom makes fantastic lemon bars around Christmas and I’ve always assumed they required a certain finesse that I just didn’t possess. It turns out the recipe is almost embarrassingly easy, and I made my first batch this weekend, to rave reviews. Whenever there’s a particularly good success in the kitchen, J and I always say, “Another one for the café!” “The café,” of course, being the imaginary café that I keep thinking I will open someday, and which always sounds better in the hypothetical than it does when we’re sitting in an actual café with the day-to-day business and the taking out of the trash going on around us.

The lemon bars accompanied us to an apartment warming party for my coworker, where I got to meet my very first real bloggers, of the sort I read but don’t actually “know” in the flesh and blood kind of way. It was actually more exciting than one would expect (also alcohol was involved), and I must have fulfilled some sort of rock star impulse in Krissa by yelping, “Oh, I read your blog!” when she walked through the door. Stuart was there as well, and it was probably as close to meeting stars of reality television as it gets for me, with the me knowing lots of stuff about their lives, while simultaneously being a total stranger.

Okay, this entry is feeling like this: sentence sentence sentence. Story link sentence. I apologize. It is Monday and Liz is off the coffee. Did I tell you that? It is sort of a long story, and I am allowed tea, which is fine for most mornings, if it happens to be a morning where Max doesn’t wake up early to scoop coins out of the change jar and fling them across the room to chase.

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