Recipe for the Best Shower

I love showering, but I very rarely take a long shower. The water waste is just too much for this New Mexican’s heart. Yes, even though I live in the Pacific Northwest now (and I don’t know if I will ever be dry again). Clean, fresh, temperature-controlled water on demand is a hell of a luxury on its own. I can enjoy it in under five minutes and feel delighted.

But I won’t deny, there’s something glorious about a long, hot shower. So, on rare occasion, I take one. And today? Today I finally figured out what might be the best shower ever. Better than that? It’s repeatable. A must for any good scientifically-trained person trying to find “the best.”

Ingredients

Music from Tegan and Sara
Music from Enslaved

Almost blisteringly hot water

An appropriate plastic glass.… Continue reading →

Beer and Are There Four Kinds of Peppercorns?

Or, at least, that is what I told the nice folks over on the Brew Happy Podcast. Black, green, white, and the not-really-a-peppercorn-but-tastes-similarly pink. Also, it looks like I was wrong and there’s other kinds of peppercorns out there! I shall have to investigate further!

I got a last-minute invite to be on the show, so I’m glad it came together. It was a lot of fun, but you can probably tell I was very nervous (especially at the beginning) when you listen to it. Also SPOILER ALERT we never did quite get to it, but if I just had one “pizza beer” (which is INCONCEIVABLE to me) in Portland, Oregon it would likely be Occidental Kölsch.

Anyway, go check it out.Continue reading →

#CookiesAndBeer

It started innocently enough. I was sitting down to assess some of the cookie recipes I’d recently been entrusted with, and I’d cracked a cold, low ABV beer to help me in my analyses. I figured I’d tweet about it too, with a jokey hashtag, #CookiesAndBeerWithTasha.

Well, some of my delightful twitter friends saw it and started tweeting back at me. It was a blast. Goofing around. Discussing cookies. And beer. It was so much fun we decided we should schedule it again.

That’s how I came to be attempting to host a Twitter chat, #CookiesAndBeer, last Tuesday.

My original plan was to bake “Italian Filled Cookies” during #CookiesAndBeer, as it was the recipe I most tweeted about during the jokey chat. It seemed complex, fun, and nothing I’d ever made before.… Continue reading →

Freezers, Bachelors and Food

Once upon a time, I was a totally normal person. I was in college. I went to my classes. I came home. I went out with friends. I ate at El Cam to study late at night. My freezer was very full of frozen veggies and microwave meals and such.

Ok. Maybe not totally normal. I suppose most college students’ freezers look a bit more like The Bachelor Cook’s freezer than my old college freezer. Booze and ice and air. I’m pretty sure you just can’t see that she’s got booze in there.

Anyway. My roommates and I always kept a reasonably well stocked fridge and freezer. And I was always a little frustrated at how little one can get into an above-fridge freezer. So you can imagine my delight when my late great-grandmother gave me her old upright.… Continue reading →