Flashback Fridayish: cooking

I know it's not Friday but I haven't blogged in forever and I've definitely missed some Fridays so I'm going to show you all these photos before I forget I have them.

Growing up my mom didn't do a lot of baking. Jiffy muffins equal homemade as far as I'm concerned. Grandma Sycamore bread is almost like homemade since we know the guy who owns the company... I think his name is Jim or something like that. Anyways, once a year my mom would always make her Braided Swedish Bread. She would make dozens of loaves to give away as Christmas presents to the neighbors. I loved when she made bread because we always got to keep some loaves. I also kind of hated it because I wanted to keep ALL of the loaves. So this past Christmas I decided that I should try to make some bread in my tiny apartment kitchen and since I had no friends I could keep all the bread! I managed to make ruin the first batch by accidentally making bricks instead of something edible. I then made a couple decent (I hope) loaves that I gave as thank you's for the teachers that helped me with my student teaching. (Dang conscience making me give away the bread!) And then while making my own batch this happened:

The last photo is of the massive chunk of dough that somehow jumped out of the mixer while the flour was busy being flung all over my tiny counter space. I don't miss this tiny kitchen. But I do miss that bread.... I might have to break tradition and actually bake some bread in July.

Summer Trip #3 Philly

Wow. You'd think with nothing to do I'd blog more. I don't even have any excuses so here goes.

In May (I know I'm way behind) Brad and I went to Philadelphia. We went to visit my dad. He lives in Philadelphia. If this is news to you then I'm sorry. If you want to know why he lives there, you will have to ask him because honestly I'm not sure. I think I just realized why it took me so long to post about this trip..... SOOO how's about we just going to talk about the trip and not why we went.

I was really excited to go to Philadelphia because the history teacher nerd in me wanted to be able to say I'd seen stuff like this:


and this:

and also this:
And of COURSE we saw this:
You don't know what that is? Oh it's just Ben Franklin's "Privy Pot". That's right. His toilet.

My need to see these things is like the French teachers need to go to France. Which reminds me, I watched 'The Jane Austen Book Club' and loved it. But back to the trip. We ate great food from here:
Can't tell where that is? Here I'll help:
We didn't eat at Geno's. Too many flashing lights.
You mean you don't spend your spare time watching food network so you have no idea what the hype is about Pat's and Geno's? Well they are a big deal. Just believe me.

We went out to Lancaster county where we saw a bunch of this:
But I had to steal this photo from google because those buggies go too fast and managed to escape my ancient cameras terribly slow lens. Also I feel like it's cheating for the Amish to be using leaf blowers. It was interesting to see one man plowing his field using a gas powered tractor that was being pulled by horses. Pretty much everything I thought I knew about the Amish is apparently wrong.

We went to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ben Franklin's house, Reading Terminal Market, Lancaster County, Pat's and Geno's, and Valley Forge. If you want to see more photos of the trip I have them in my facebook album titled Summer '09. If you aren't my friend on facebook then I'm not sure how I'd let you look at the photos so I'm not going to try to figure out how to link to that. At the end of it all of course we did this: