secret anniversary trip

Before we begin, I should clarify. The title is perhaps unclear, but it is the trip which is secret, not the anniversary.

So, it's a secret trip for our anniversary. Yesterday was our 5th wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I've been planning a secret trip for this weekend. Technically, Sharayah knows there is a trip, she just doesn't know where we're going or anything we'll be doing when we get there. I have her word that she won't read this blog until we get back, so I can give a rough outline of the plans.

We're going up to the Lancaster, PA area. The main reason to go there was that Sharayah mentioned some time ago that there is some kind of pretzel factory there that she wanted to visit with me. We'll be heading there first and hopefully getting to do a tour and make our own pretzel. Then we'll be headed to the hotel to drop stuff off and check in. After that we'll be going to eat at a local pizza place I picked out (Sharayah had a rare craving for pizza yesterday, and I do not waste such opportunities). Finally, we're going to a double-header baseball game between the Lancaster Barnstormers and the York Revolution. No, it's not minor league baseball. It's a completely separate professional baseball league which I didn't know about until a few days ago. I got us front row seats at 3rd base (easier to do in this league than in the real pros, I imagine).

Tomorrow, we'll be visiting various amish or just farm-type places and exploring the Lancaster area until it's time to come home.

It should be a good time. Don't spoil the surprise.

tasty non-disaster

Prepare to be blown away. Not only am I going to blight our blog with this mind-boggling "recipe," but you get to experience it through both bullet-pointed and boringly-numbered lists! Blogging at its finest.

Ingredients*

• Flour - 2 cups, 3 handfuls, and the remnants collected from the 12 sq. inches of lightly powdered counter space. 
• Baking powder - Somewhere between 1 and 2 teaspoons.
• Salt - 1.5 turns of the salt grinder
• Honey - 3 knives worth, maybe 2 if your knife is extra long or your honey isn't crystallized. 
• Eggs - 2.
• Butter - Whatever glop of butter you have left over from a stick of butter
• Bananas - A bunch [meaning "a bunching" of bananas and not necessarily "a lot" of bananas, as a small bunch of 3 would probably work just as well as a large bunch of 10].
• Walnuts - More than 3 handfuls but less than 7.
• Potato - 3 chunks that were left on the cutting board from other meal preparations and mixed in with the mushing of the bananas.
• Paprika - However much you dump in while you're under the impression that it is cinnamon.
• Cinnamon - 1 pinch, 2 pinch... oh, just use it all.

Instructions

1. Sploosh all the dry stuff together.
1. You may need to account for vigorous splooshing [that's where the powder goes all "ploosh!"] with another handful or so of flour or more counter scraping/scrounging. 
2. Too much baking powder can be disastrous to the taste buds. Hence, to get the right amount, hold a teaspoon over your bowl of dry ingredients and attempt to pour/shake the baking powder into the tiny teaspoon. Baking powder will land directly in the bowl and in the spoon. Do not fear! Just pour/shake until you fill the teaspoon and dump confidently! The baking powder in the spoon will perfectly join with the baking powder in the bowl for  the ideal amount of baking powder overall.
2. Gloop all the wet stuff together.
1. A little eggshell never hurt anyone, right?
2. If your glop of butter is more than 0.5 sticks, don't use it all. 
3. Two-handed banana mushing gives soo much more satisfaction than one-handed banana mushing or, hamster forbid, potato-masher banana mushing.
3. Make everything go together in one big happy bowl. 
1. For  less clean-up, dump the dry stuff into the wet stuff.
2. For more clean-up, dump the wet stuff into the dry stuff.
3. If you just really get a hankering for clean-up, dump the wet stuff and the dry stuff into an entirely new bowl. 
4. Mix until the dry stuff has lost its identity as dry stuff and successfully turns into wet stuff.
5. Pour into some kind of baking container and bake away!
1. Temperature.
1. For a temperature knob, turn it as far clockwise as your wrist comfortably goes.
2. For a temperature button, hold down the up arrow for 3 seconds.
2. Time.
1. Once you start smelling tasty smells, wait 15 minutes.
2. Check for burning.
3. Maybe poke it with a fork?
6. Eat.

There you have it. A recipe for a potentially tasty non-disaster. If all recipes were written in my noggin's style of loopy ambiguity, I believe meal preparation would be much more exciting.

Revolutionizing the culinary world one nearly charred meal at a time.

I cannot be held responsible for the results of this "recipe."

*If/when bad things happen in your kitchen because of the super [non]specific proportions of ingredients, my apologies. But really, you'll have no one to blame but your own hands and their obvious difference in size in comparison to mine.