Another post about food to pass my time.  If you’d like an easy but tasty meal idea for tonight’s dinner, head on over to The Crying Chef.  A new recipe for meatloaf awaits you.  Up next, pumpkin bread for the holidays.

I had some time to add another recipe to The Crying Chef.  This one is for Mexican Fiesta, AKA taco salad.  If you need a quick but tasty meal tonight, I suggest it.  It’s really good!  I wouldn’t eat it if it wasn’t.  🙂

For those of you who don’t know me too well, I absolutely love Cookie Monster.  And it is not because we share a birthday or anything.  I didn’t even know we did until I wrote a paper on him in high school.  Yes, I wrote a paper on Cookie Monster.  The teacher said I could write about anyone famous.  She didn’t say the famous person had to be of the flesh!

Several years ago, my mom got me a Cookie Monster cookie cake for my birthday.  It was so pretty, I had a hard time eating it.  Well, that and the icing was super sweet. I think it was the most awesome cake I have ever had.  I’ve got a picture of it on my other computer.  I’ll try to post a picture of it later.

If anyone wants to make my year though, just send me a dozen of these cupcakes on November 2nd.  It would be the sweetest birthday present ever!  I’ll be waiting patiently for your delivery.  🙂

The Noms say it all.

When Phil and I lived in Fuyang, we really wanted some syrup to go with the pancakes we were trying to make.  Our attempts at making the syrup ourselves never produced Butterworth results.  So, we did the next best thing – we asked my mom to send us a bottle of maple extract to help give our concoction some maple flare.  We didn’t ask for a bottle of syrup because it would have made the box weigh too much and a heavy box sent to China isn’t cheap.  Sending just the syrup probably wouldn’t have cost that much, but our wish list always seemed to grow when we found out someone was going to be sending us some western goodies.  🙂

The extract did help with the taste of the syrup, but we could never get the consistency we wanted.  Eventually, we gave up and decided we would just have to wait until we returned back home to get the good stuf.  When it came time to move to Shenyang, we packed it up with all of our other stuff.  We weren’t about to scarifice any of our western goods.

A week after we got to Shenyang, we were told we would be moving again.  Phil and I weren’t particularly pleased that we would be uprooting ourselves again, but we repacked all of our goods up anyway, including our maple extract, and headed to the beautiful city of Xiamen.

In Xiamen, we unpacked everything and refused to pack again unless we were traveling or moving back home.  And for the next three months our maple extract sat quietly on our shelf, unused.  When it came time for us to go back to the States, we offered up all of our western goods to our dear friends, Patty, Eddie, and their daughter Elisa.  We knew they could get some good use out it. Elisa swore it was Christmas when we brought all of our stuff over to them.  🙂

Well, up until a few days ago, I would have thought that our maple extract had finally run out of gas and found a permanent home in a landfill in China or some other needy westerner’s cabinet.  Interestingly enough though, neither happened.

Instead, our maple extract jumped on a plane back to the States stashed away in a suitcase – destination Miami – when Patty and her family decided to leave China.  After a short stay there, it decided that it wanted to do some more traveling, and hopped on the next flight to Colombia – the country, not the city where I live.  For the next four weeks our maple extract took in the sights and then decided it wanted to settle down for a spell – somewhere else.  So, off it trotted to the airport and booked passage to Argentina, where for  at this moment in time, it still resides.  At least until Phil and I travel to Argentina next November, pick it up, and bring it back to the States with us.  🙂

I don’t know how many miles our little maple extract has traveled, I just know it’s a lot.  Perhaps, there is a section in the Guinness World Records that it would qualify for.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17yBGdWHJRY[/youtube]
Well, as promised, I cooked my fudge cookies this past weekend and had Phil film me. This is my first attempt at a “cooking show”, so bare with me and don’t laugh too hard. All the thanks goes to Phil. He filmed and edited the entire thing. I hope you enjoy watching it. Oh, and even though the cookies look like little piles of poo, they taste like anything but. Heh. Now get in your kitchen and try making it for yourself! I will try to think of something else to cook for you guys soon.

Your eyes have not deceived you. You read the title of this post right. This Maniac is indeed going to start, or at least attempt to start her own cooking show. No, my unemployment has not made me go mad. I was mad way before I became jobless. : ) So, why you ask? Well, it’s simple. I’ve got this fancy new camera that I haven’t used at all lately, and a bunch of yummy recipes that I think people would like to munch on. Plus, Phil volunteered to be my camera man. Well, actually, I begged, and he finally agreed. So, if you throw all of those wonderful reasons together, you’ll get the same answer I did. Why not? That’s more of a question than an answer, but you understand.

I hope to film my very first episode this weekend after I help Phil move into his new apartment, but I am not going to promise anything. I think I will start with what I know best – cookies and other types of sweets. I’m a mean, green, baking machine, baby! If things go well, I may venture into dinners and what not. I guess only time will tell. So, stay tuned. Soon, I will be showing you all how to make one of my favorite quick treats – fudge cookies. My mouth is salivating just thinking about them. They are so good that they are impossible to keep in my house. My brother keeps eating them all.