An attempt at positivity

Today I feel like there’s a lot, and also nothing, going on in my life.  Things are a bit confusing here, with visa application issues, a blooming identity crisis, hot, sweaty yoga, and three failed brownie attempts.  That’s right.  I tried again and they’re still not good.  I’m officially blaming Europe.

But instead of going into all of that (don’t worry, I’ll probably “go into” all that in future posts).  For now, I will tell a few good things that I’m grateful for and leave out alllllllll the other stuff.

1) We bought strawberries today, and I’m going to make strawberry shortcake.
2) I got two books from the library that I’m excited to read.
3) My hair is ALMOST long enough for a half-ponytail.  Progress.
4) I’m getting better at meal-planning and food-shopping
5) I’m getting to know my neighbors better, and feeling less nervous around them.
6) My apartment building now has “food waste” and other various recycling bins, which I’m super excited about.
7) I’ve made successful (and exciting!) pita bread twice.  Also, when we made fajitas yesterday for dinner with Quorn filet strips, Andreas said it was one of the best foods he has ever eaten!
8) I did not forget to call my dad on Fathers’ Day
9) I rode a bike in traffic for the first time in my life.
10) My husband is never-endingly understanding and supportive through my meltdowns, sobbing jags, baby fever, and homesickness.

So, although it often feels like it, not everything in my life is stagnant, or complicated, or going awry, and it feels good to focus sometimes on the small good things when complications interrupt.  I’ll end this before I start whinging about the brownies.

It’s not as good as I expected…

One day in the summer when I was still a kid, and my whole family still lived under one roof, my family was, for some reason or another, having ice cream sundaes as a treat!  It never took a lot to get at least the younger kids excited, and my sister, who was probably about five at the time was the most excited of all.  I’m sure as soon as she heard the words “ice cream sundaes” her imagination went into overdrive forming pictures of enormous bowls of seven flavors of ice cream, chocolate, caramel, and strawberry sauces, brownies, bananas, whipped cream, and at least a half a dozen cherries, and when her respectably-sized bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce, sprinkles, and maybe strawberries was set in front of her, her face fell, and when asked what was wrong, she answered ever-so-honestly “It’s not as good as I expected.”  Even now, whenever something doesn’t live up to expectations, we’ll mimic that child-like sigh and say “it’s not as good as I expected.”

Anyway, that seemed to be the theme of yesterday.  Like I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been wanting to make brownies for a while, and I decided to be adventurous and make black bean brownies, seeing as I had black beans, and I wanted brownies.  They smelled lovely baking in the oven, looked nice and moist and chocolatey when sitting on your plate, but then you ate them and…well, they didn’t taste like much, and they still had a strange bean-y texture, in my opinion.  I was pretty disappointed, and held onto them until Andreas got home, but when he proclaimed he didn’t like them either, into the food-garbage, they went.

Then, to make up for lack of excitement, I decided to make homemade gnocchi for dinner!  I tried to follow the recipe, but ended up having to use about four times more flour than the recipe called for.  This may or may not have had to do with the fact that I was lacking a scale, and so, to weigh out half a kilo of potatoes, I put a 500g jar of honey in one hand, and piled the potatoes in the other until they felt about the same.  Anyway, I’ve never had gnocchi before, so I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I got wasn’t quite as good.  They were definitely more edible than the brownies, and even enjoyable after I got used to them, but…I wouldn’t proclaim them a complete success.

So.

After dinner, I decided I was going to make real honest-to-goodness plain-old fudgy, chewy, delicious brownies.  I mixed them up, and put them in the oven with high hopes.  I made sure to check them at least five minutes before the earliest they were supposed to be done, but when I pulled them out, they were blackened around the edge with dark brown spots along the top, and no shiny crackly brownie-top to be seen.

I know they were only brownies.  But after a few failures, I was the personification of crestfallen.  My shoulders drooped, I frowned until I thought my face-skin was about to droop right off my face-bones, and I breathed in a succession of heavy sighs.  Andreas came into the kitchen to see how the brownies turned out, and I told him my series of woes, ending in a crescendo of “and the top isn’t even shiny!” and a sob.  He exercised extreme control in that he didn’t even laugh at pathetic me, crying over a pan of brownies, and just hugged me, the corners of his mouth quivering.

They were edible, but today they’re so hard it’s difficult to cut them, and though I softened one in the microwave and ate it with ice cream and it was fine, I’m still not satisfied.  I wanted brownies.  I wanted GOOD brownies.  I wanted brownies that I wanted to eat another of.  So I am not yet done with brownies for the week, and I’m off to foodgawker to find yet another recipe.

And hopefully, they will be as good as I expect.