A Piece of Cake

Perhaps the new movie "Julie and Julia" that's coming out soon has influenced me, but I've been in the mood to cook lately! One night last week I decided to try a new tilapia recipe, which is strange for me because I don't even like fish. We had been taking a nutrition class at school, though, and I was feeling like I should be eating fish instead of just the old standby: chicken, beef, repeat.

Luckily, I loved the fish! It was a pan-fried spicy tilapia, and it tastes delicious and only took about 15 minutes from getting out ingredients to putting the first savory bite into my mouth. This recipe, like most of my current favorites, comes out of the Better Homes and Gardens Bridal Edition Cookbook. My mom gave me this cookbook at one of my bridal showers and it has been a lifesaver for me in the first year of being the "head chef."
After my foray into fish, I decided to do a little baking. My parents and Jeffrey's grandmother were coming to visit us for a couple of days last week, so I thought I'd make a cherry pie to eat with them. The idea struck me that it would be a great idea to make the top crust of the pie extra cute by using my cookie gun attachment that looks like a flower to make little daisy shapes to cover the top of the pie.

It was only after I had crammed all the dough into the cookie gun that I realized that the consistency of the dough would not, in fact, work in the cookie gun. Instead, the cookie gun just pushed the dough out in a big blob and gave me four more things to clean up after I was done cooking the pie.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had a little cookie cutter in the shape of a star that might work for the top of my pie. I used that instead and I think the pie turned out to be pretty cute!
I know for sure that my dad liked it...he literally licked his plate clean the night that we had it for dessert, and the next morning he had cherry pie and Dr. Pepper for breakfast. (Clearly, he did not have a nutrition class recently.)

The baking continued as I decided to try making a cake with fondant icing for my friend Maegan for her birthday. I made a white cake with raspberry filling, crumb-coated it with homemade butter cream icing, and covered and decorated it with fondant. Typically I don't even eat fondant icing, but I found a recipe online for a marshmallow fondant that sounded too good to pass up. In the end, I loved how the cake turned out, and I even enjoyed the fondant. I think everyone else liked it, too, although no one exactly licked the plate, so I couldn't be sure!

In other events, Jeffrey and I have decided (in our never-ending quest to become the cheapest couple in America) to stop drying our clothes in the dryer. Jeffrey prefers that many of his clothes be hung to dry anyway, and many shirts of mine have been ruined by the dryer when certain people don't check the labels to see if they are supposed to be hung or laid flat to dry. I bought a clothesline at the store last week and we decided to see if our new plan made much of a difference on our electricity bill. When we told our parents about this, they responded by telling us that we're crazy.

While we were at school on Thursday, Mom washed all the sheets and our clothes. So nice of her, right? You know what she did, though--she used the dryer. We found out when we came home from school that afternoon and found the following note and three dollars on our kitchen table: