YUMMY. I started with THIS recipe, which I don’t remember how I found originally, and then I fucked with it til it was awesome.

Couscous and Feta Cakes

Ingredients
* 1 cup uncooked couscous
* 4 teaspoons olive oil, divided (for the cooking)
* 1/2 can artichoke hearts, chopped
* 1 cup minced red bell pepper
* 1/2 cup minced green bell pepper
* 2 garlic cloves, minced
* 1 cup (4 ounces) crumbled feta cheese
* 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 2 eggs
* salt
* pepper

1. Cook couscous. Don’t know how? Boil water, toss in couscous, turn it off and cover while you’re chopping stuff. When you’re done, it is too.
2. Throw garlic, peppers, and artichokes in a pan and saute for a few minutes.
3. Dump everything in a bowl and mix all together.
4. Heat pan and oil to medium heat.
5. Grab a handful and mush into something resembling small thick pancakes. Good luck, they’re kinda fragile.
6. Cook about 3 minutes, flip and cook the other side. You want them to have some browning going on.
7. Dump on plate and stuff face.

OM NOM NOM.

It all started at 6 o’clock that night, when I innocently decided that cookies sure would be swell later, and hey, why not put out that butter to soften?

The butter, which was then completely abandoned and ignored until 9 pm that same night, when the urge came over me.

You know the urge I’m talking about. I know you do.

Cookie dough, it whispers into your ear, and you can practically taste the creamy, possibly salmonella containing deliciousness.

The urge lead me into the kitchen, where I got out my mixer, Bertha, dumped in the butter, pulled out the sugar, and got the first nasty surprise of the night.

We were out of white sugar.

Ok. This wasn’t a crisis. I merely googled “brown sugar chocolate chip cookies” and came across a recipe that sounded promising.

Don’t ask me which one. As you will soon see, there is very little of the original recipe (may it rest in crumbly pieces) left.

I added the carefully measured 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar (using a 1/3 cup measuring cup, because I fail at so many many kitchen tasks including both measurement and dishes), turned on the mixer, and turned to the fridge.

To discover a distinct lack of eggs.

Um.

Ok, no problem! I have…I have..soy flour! And soy flour can be used as an egg substitute! Excellent! …Unfortunately, soy flour makes the dough taste really nasty, but I am GOING to make these cookies, dangit. I mentally rename the recipe “Come Hell or High Water Cookies.”

I successfully add vanilla and flour without anything more than a couple of floury handprints on Brandus’ backside, so the discovery that I’m almost completely out of chocolate chips gets nothing but a snarl.

And guess what?

My soy flour substituted, brown sugar mis-measured, low chocolate chip cookies are AWESOME.

My favorite shot from the St Patrick’s Day Festival last weekend.

Voldemort, Brandus, and a rent-a-kid.

When I was in college, a hypnotist came to do a show. For a change, I wasn’t backstage (I was a theater geek, and we got pulled into all kinds of backstage crew), and attended with a few friends. It was designed to be funny, and the hypnotist pulled a whole bunch of people up on stage and assigned them various weird things to do – cluck like chickens whenever he said a specific phrase, look for their own butts in different seats, etc – the usual hilarious things you would do to people while they were hypnotized.

My personal favorite was a guy he told had lost his brain. The hypnotist put a bright neon nerf brain down on the ground, pointed at it and said, “there’s your brain!” Poor dude spent a good five minutes trying to shove his brain back into his head through his forehead while the audience shrieked with laughter. At one point, the hypnotist removed the brain so he could move on with his show, and poor brainless guy went and found it and continued trying to shove it into his head.

I kind feel like poor brainless guy recently. Hopelessly trying to find my brain and shove it back into my head.

I have no reason to feel this way, really, but by the end of the work day, my poor little nerf brain is rolling around somewhere on the floor and I’m lucky to be able to locate my car in the parking lot and point food towards my mouth before shoving the child into pjs and falling into my own bed.

I think I need more caffeine.