Service for One

Not to brag or anything, but I’m a pretty good cook/baker. Not a perfect one—I’ve certainly had my share of flops (like the rolls at Standard’s Conference a week ago)—and not even a great one, but I know my way around a kitchen. So why is it that I cook/bake only two or three times a month? It’s that whole cooking for one thing. It’s just not worth the planning, the effort, the mess.

I know some people who cook and then eat the leftovers the rest of the week, but I can’t stomach most leftovers—not even for lunch the next day unless I can eat them cold. I just don’t like that burning-your-tongue-hot-spots-mixed-with-just-out-of-the-fridge-cold conglomeration you get when you warm things up in the microwave. Or that slightly-stale-and-too-crunchy-on-the-edges amalgam that comes out when you warm things in the oven. I don’t like freezer meals (either homemade or store bought) for the same reason.

So, what’s a girl to do? Cold cereal is a staple on my list. It’s a perfect dinner for the time and energy impaired. Pancakes from a mix (you can cut it down so you only make two and they’re ready in under ten minutes) are another great option. Vanilla Yogurt with fruit in it (blueberries and bananas are a favorite) make a tasty treat. Toast with strawberry jam is also an easy fix. So basically, I eat breakfast twice a day.

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And when that craving for something sweet hits, I’ve found these handy little single-serving delights (they come in flavors of chocolate too, I just happened to choose lemon at the store tonight):

They take less then five minutes to prepare and cook and are surprisingly “warm” and “delight[ful]” as promised on the packaging. And, there is no danger of eating an entire panful of brownies at the end :)

Well, all I really wanted to say is that these are a pretty good option for you people of low number out there. There rest was just a really long introduction.

Centerpieces

This post is mostly to show Mary (who also serves in YW) an idea we concocted.  However, I thought there might be others who work with the Youth who might find it useful as well. 

We recently had Standard’s Conference with the youth in our ward.  The Young Women were in charge of decorating for dinner.  I wanted something simple, but fun and original.  Mom came up with the idea of using postcard-size Mormon Ads.  I thought of making them into blocks and after brainstorming for awhile, decided on using Kleenex boxes as a base.  I wrapped them in silver wrapping paper and then taped the cards onto the side.  We put three on a table like so:

They were well liked and provided entertainment before and during dinner.    The fly in the ointment, however, is that they took much longer to assemble than I had intended. 

What Have You Read?

With Jared and Sandy, I’ll take the bait.
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible - (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X )
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( X)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X )
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( X)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - (X)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ( )
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (X)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Inferno - Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (X)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (X)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

Sad to say, I’ve only read 55.  I have partially read five others but didn’t count them.  The COMPLETE works of Shakespeare?  I’ve read most of them.  This is an interesting compilation of titles.  I may even be tempted to use it as a reading list except I don’t think I will ever make it all the way through Watership Down.