Rename?

I am having short term memory loss, cause I don’t know if I mentioned it, but Avan went home Friday!! And Jen S. sent me a photo showing me how disgustingly hawt she is ten days after popping out a baby. Meaning: She looks like I do right now, except I didn’t just have a baby.

I so need to work out.

Anyway, before I start rambling on about insignificant things (cause I am so good at that!!) I am going to get to my point.

(What was it? Oh yeah!!)

NAME CHANGE!!

It all started with Jenna when she changed her blog name from “the (mis)adventures of jenna” to “how I became awesome”.

Now I wanna change my name.

What can I say? I am a sheep.

Baaa.

I think the name of my blog “Grace My My Feet, Faith My Eyes” is a tad long. I took it from a song by the Christian band Caedmon’s Call. I could relate to the words of that song when I was first moving out of my mother’s house three and a half years ago. The words are still pertinent, but as I have been writing in this blog, is has taken on less of a spiritual nature and more of a mishmash of spiritual posts, whiny posts, egotistical posts, self-depricating posts, whiny posts, and always random posts.  There are also a lot of whiny posts. I’m looking for a snappy new name to better fit my blog’s lack of diverse content. I sent a message to my cell phone contacts to solicit some suggestions. I had a lot of suggestions of “I don’t know” or “the Musings of” or “Ramblings of”. Those are dandy, but oh-so-common out here in the Blogosphere. I want something that will stand out.

My friend Andrew gave me a decent response. “Bouncy Blonde Bible” or something like that. I laughed, because it was similar to my idea of “Babblings of a Bouncy Blonde.” I e-mailed Jenna some ideas, and she liked my idea of “Setting Off The Fireball”. This weekend I have been toying with “A Shot In the Dark”. I am still extremely undecided.

So, I am asking for your help!

Respond with any ideas you may have. Ready. Set. GO!

And, when you are done, please donate to Junior Achievement, I still have that contest going!

Friedrich’s Rocks My Socks

I don’t know if I have mentioned it enough, but I love Friedrich’s Coffee. I mentioned it in these posts, so that’s about three. Well, this post will make four.

Why do I love this coffee so much? Let’s go over a few key reasons.

One: Atmosphere

When I am back in Iowa, I love to sit for hours in a Friedrich’s shop. Each location has so much character. When you buy a bag of coffee from this company, each bag tells a story of their character Friedrich and his voyages around the world. You can also find those adventures on the website. The shop locations showcase art depicting the stories, and let me tell you, the shops are not short on character. Here is the one I used to frequent on 86th Ave in Urbandale depicted in photos:

And:

I mean, this place has big comfy chairs and free Wifi. What’s not to loveThere there is the coffee itself. Oh my word. They have so many selections that you can take home or have shipped, which is what I do often. My favorites are their Scandanavian blend, which is srong, slightly acidic, and great with a verysweet desert, the dark roast which is great with breakfast, or my favorite of all time Snickeroo. This is a very light coffee flavored with cinnamon and hazelnut. It is sweet and light, and tastes amazing with just a touch of milk. It may be possibly the greatest flavorted light roast ever.

Another thing about this coffee’s flavor: it’s amazing. It’s a small company, so it’s not roasted en masse like Starbucks. Rather, Friedrich’s purchases their beans from small growers than roasts them in Des Moines.  Friedrich’s, being a Christian owned company, use their purchasing contacts as third-world evangelism opportunities. In short, I love buying a locally owned, excellent quality, micro roasted coffee that supports the spread of the Gospel.

So for those reasons, besides just having an awesome history, I support Friendrich’s Coffee. If you are a coffee snob, you will delight in the freshness and quality of this particular shop. And if you donate to Junior Achievementm you will have a chance to win my beloved Snickeroo.

Junior Achievement

So you all have read my blatherings about Junior Achievement. I’ll start off by discussing what JA is, and then explain about our interoffice auction.

Junior Achievement is a program dedicated to teaching financial literacy to children in both public and private schools. Volunteers go into the classroom and discuss topics such as free enterprise, business, economics, how money actually works, and simple financial necessities such as budgeting, not spending more than what we make, etc. You can read about their goals in their own words here.

I think a program like Junior Achievement is so important, especially in our current economic climate. People, we are at a negative savings rate in our nation. Our personal and national debt ratio is climbing, and people are getting to the point where they are unable to pay back their bills. We have outspent what we make, and buy what we cannot afford on credit. Our culture has taught us we can have whatever we want, and we need it right now. We don’t understand what it is to work for what we want, or to prolong our desires until we can afford to have them. Not only is this program teaching kids in low income schools about our economic system, but it is teaching them financial self-discipline. The programs are free to the schools. But of course, nothing is ever free.

That’s where our office auction came in. We donated items from home, made gift baskets, donated baked goods or services for people in our office to buy. For example, two co-workers donated their covered parking spots, while another co-worker donated her handmade jewelry. I donated the two loaves of banana bread and two certificates to clean our office kitchen when it was the winner’s turn to clean them. In fact, my services brought in $50 per certificate for Junior Achievement, and I already fulfilled my first cleaning obligation yesterday! From our auction, we raised $1,500 for JA. That averages out to about $100/per employee spent. My company is participating in a Bowl-A-Thon in February to help raise money for JA’s classroom materials. I am participating in the Bowl-A-Thon, so I am asking for your help. I already spent $111 of my own money at the auction (dude I wanted that jewelry) but don’t mind asking for outside donations. Pitney Bowes will match dollar-for-dollar on what I raise for JA. So readers, please help me beat the pants off the other banks competing against us JA receive more funds by clicking here and going to my bowler donation website. If you can only give $5, cool. That $5 will turn into $10 because of the company matching. Double the impact. Maybe we can help prevent a future occurance of our current economic mess with a donation to programs like JA. Education helps produce results; lets make a positive impact on the generation we are currently education.

And seriously guys, I want to win. And I promise to bowl decently. Jesse can attest to the fact that I am not half bad. Plus, I will send a nifty prize to one of the donors. Yeah, I am making it a contest. If you’re not anonymous, I see who donates. I will take all the names, put it in a hat, then e-mail you and tell you what you won. The contest will go until February 18. What’s the prize? Um, maybe some of the best coffee ever from Friedrich’s Coffee of Des Moines? The stuff I plan to rave about tomorrow? Yeah. Coffee!! Or, if you don’t drink coffee, your favorite hot chocolate. Or, if you are allergic to chocolate, a cookbook selected by my friend Casey. So you get the idea. The prize is flexible. Just go donate now. And I will keep pestering you about donating. So the sooner you do it, the less I will pester…. maybe.

Go. Donate. Now.

Please?

Baking With Emily

Last night I started on something I have not done in forever, and something I think is one of the most fun ways to pass your time.

Baking.

Yes, friends, you may not know this about me, but I thoroughly enjoy baking, I am not a huge cooking fan, but baking, well, sign me up! The best present my mom bought me this year was my very own hand mixer. It even bought the coffee grinder she bought me. Even as much as I adore whole bean coffee roasted by small companies (especially Friedrich’s), well, let me tell you, that hand mixer made me pleased as punch. The only thing that may be able to trump the hand mixer is a shiny red KitchenAid stand mixer. Previous pleas on this blog did not produce that item as a birthday present or Christmas gift, so I will spare you all now and let you know why I was baking, so here we go, and whew don’t I ramble!!! See, I wasn’t baking for pleasure; I was baking for charity. The one in particular I was baking for is Junior Achievement. More about them later or tomorrow, whichever comes first in my blogging world. At work, we were holding an internal auction to raise funds for Junior Achievement. Rather than donate gift cards and non-returnable Christmas gifts, I went the home-grown route and decided to donate bake goods and manual labor; home made banana bread and chocolate chip cookies on the baked goods side; two opportunities for me to clean the company break room when it was the bid winner’s turn to do so (which turned out to be a wildly successful fund-raising item!!) So last night I got in touch with my Inner Baker, and well, she was really rusty.
How rusty, you ask?
Try destroying a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Yes.
One of the most basic recipes on the planet.
I ruined it.
When I have made it a thousand times. More about my shame in a minute…

Here are the photos of my baking efforts. If I had an amazing camera like Casey or an amazing photographer for a husband like Jenna, I may have documented my baking process step by step like they do. But all I have is my webcam. So, here are the cookies I made:

And then the cookie-brownies: (story following)

And finally, the bread. Which turned out perfectly.

I don’t know if I mentioned, but I was really happy with  witwith the banana bread.

So, the story behind the cookies….

When I first started the recipe, I was doubling it. Jenni  R called me, and we began to discuss Avan. (The little guy is still in the hospital, and Jenny S, his mom was released today.)  As Jenny and I chatted, I absentmindedly sifted flour. I looked at the recipe thought to myself, Wow, that’s a lot of flour, and realized, Mylanta, that makes six dozen cookies!! If I do more, it’s like tweleve dozen!! Dutifully, I began to scoop flour out. I thinkI lost count of how much flour I had actually started with though…. when I finally mixed all the ingredients together, the mixture was not the consistency of cookie dough. To compensate, I began to add more shortening and brown sugar, and then another egg. Satisfied with the new consistency, I began to roll out the cookies. Once they came out of the oven… well, they tasted dry. Like a chocolate chip sand dollar, to be more specific.  I had more of this awful mixture. How could I fix it?

Sugar!! Milk!! I plopped some milk into the mixing bowl, and then added some more brown sugar. The more I mixed, the more I realized it looked like brownie batter. In a flash of brilliance, I put the mixture in a brownie pan and stuck it in the oven. I then got to work on my banana bread recipe. This morning, I warily tested the cookies in the brownie pan. They were moist… and tasteless. Needless to say, all I took took to the auction today were my two loaves of banana bread.

Lesson: Don’t talk on the phone while baking, because you can destroy a recipe children know by heart.