Alton Brown Can Suck It

I made it through week 1 of Fall quarter! I submitted my first CS111 (Operating Systems) project last night. Granted this was the easiest lab that we'll get but I'm proud of myself for finishing it a day early. If I could only learn to focus and debug my program at the apartment WITH my roommates around I would have finished it 5 days early.

It's amazing. I probably dicked around with my code for at least 3 hours on Wednesday night at my desk. But A and E were around and I kept getting distracted by conversations in the background even with my headphones on. AGH!

Trust me. It's impossible to not turn around and chime in when you hear "vagina dentata" and "hair clip" in the same sentence.

I ended up getting frustrated with myself not being able to fix my bug and going to sleep. Next morning I went to school 30 minutes early so I could walk with A and E to campus. Spent 25 minutes in the library and fixed the function that I was working on the night before.

And that happens all the time. My productivity decreases exponentially with the increasing awesomeness of my roommates.

Quite possibly our second favorite thing to do, after distracting each other from getting real work done, is to cook. A has been telling us all about this No Pan Pear Pie recipe and we wanted to try it out. Let me first tell you that I've never made an Alton Brown recipe successfully. That is not to say that he doesn't make delicious food, it's just that I NEVER have everything that he calls for and I'm not as accurate with temperatures as I think he assumes we should be when we follow his recipe. A waffle recipe requires all-pupose, whole-wheat flour and buttermilk at room temperature, mind you.

For this No Pan Pear Preposterous Pastry Pie (ahhhh alliteration) A and I were expected to use a SPRAY bottle to moisten our crust. We were also supposed to put a frozen cookie sheet on our dough when it got a little too warm. Of course we neglected to do either and just sprinkled apple juice concentrated with our fingers (freezing them off). It was a crumbly mess. I've never made such horrible dough. If I was working on it myself I would've given up and started over. A convinced me to keep sprinkling moisture on the crust as she finally shenagled the crust in a circle-resembling shape.

Here is A working on getting the filling to stay inside and plugging up holes with her hands as I'm laughing at her.

Did I mention the filling contained a butt-load of balsamic vinegar, we needed butter separated in 3 different batches each at different temperatures and the crust had corn meal?

I admit, the filling tasted much better than other pie filling that I've made before. But, you know, I think it's due to A being there keeping me and my sugar doubling tendencies in line, not this particular recipe.

The final product. This was Wednesday night. By Friday lunch-time it was gone (along with 1/2 gallon of Costco vanilla ice-cream).

♥ kick-ass time in the kitchen badmouthing Alton Brown.