Orange Cranberry Scones

I am down to a small handful of cereal (plus crumbs), and one packet of dinosaur egg oatmeal (to be saved for emergencies, or cold weather). The yogurt is gone. I had pancakes, toast, and scrambled eggs at various points over the weekend. Needless to say, the breakfast options for this morning were very few, indeed. So I was quite lucky to run across a recipe for scones before my hunger zapped my capacity for all rational thought. (Sneaking crumbles of dough as I made the scones also helped stave off said hunger.)

Admittedly, that first recipe, that brilliant beacon of an idea to the half-starved (or thereabouts) called for unholy amounts of butter. You know how I am about butter. Yet Fate would not allow me to despair! It just so happened that, while checking my favorite food blogs, I saw a link that took me to another link that took me... to scones. Scones with not 1/3 cup of butter... but three little tablespoons. I rejoiced! (Or mostly, my stomach growled in approval.)

I was a little bit skeptical about using a mix of whole wheat and white flour, just because whole wheat sometimes makes things... not as delicious (compare a partially whole wheat flour pizza crust to an all-white flour crust, for instance). But I trusted my recipe in the end, and got ten beautiful scones because of it – scones you wouldn't have any idea were lightened up, because they tasted so good.

Plus, I got to drink the leftover, fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is always my favorite part. And, now I have something to eat tomorrow morning before my eight AM discussion section.

Low Fat Banana Bread

Have you ever experienced something that you could only define as a moment? Something that seems to exist out of time itself, a separate, stolen entity just for you? In the movies, these moments are generally in slow motion with a soundtrack of soft soprano vocals or silence. You can see the exact second when everything begins to still, yet come alive. Perhaps scenes like those seems dumb, and highly unrealistic. It's all well and good to be artistic with your editing program, but moments like that don't seem to exist in real life.

Maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that I had a moment earlier this week, or maybe you won't. And maybe you'll think I'm silly when I tell you that that moment involved banana bread. Maybe it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. I don't know. All I know is that for me, it was magical. Simple, fleeting, but magical.

I had the banana bread in the oven. It had been baking for at least twenty minutes, and so the smell of it had begun to leak from the oven and spread into the kitchen, and from the kitchen, to the living room. There were only traces of it, though, as if you could only sense it there if you knew to search for it.

I was patient but restless. Still apron-clad, I paced about the living room, waiting, searching for small tasks I could do to pass the time. Then all of a sudden, I came to walk beneath the whirling ceiling fan, and I stopped. First, the cool air gently met me; next, I inhaled. The scent of the banana bread was somehow stronger here, as though it were spiraling down toward me from the fan blades themselves. I just stood there for my moment, looking up, breathing in. It was quiet. Everything seemed to slow. I felt that, if I spread out my arms, I could somehow gather the scent, the air itself, to me, and we would simply exist forever in this column of time. And then I smiled.

Rosemary Crackers

Thursday night is my night to cook for my roommates. I peruse food blogs the week or weekend prior, hungrily scrounging for something to feed them. Nothing is too elaborate or too simple; I'm willing to try anything.

Tonight, I made a double batch of Garlic Soup, based on this recipe, a salad (with added pears and thawed, once-frozen strawberries that, combined with balsamic vinegar and olive oil made a kind of sweet vinaigrette), and Rosemary Crackers.

The soup turned out pretty well (it uses French bread to make it creamier, instead of using a lot of cream), and the salad was delicious (we ate the entire thing). The pictures didn't turn out so wonderful, since it was already dark, and my camera sadly couldn't work its magic.

Maybe it's just because I baked them earlier in the day, when I could set them on my windowsill in full sunlight, but I feel that the Rosemary Crackers were something special. So that's what I'm going to share tonight.