Dulce de Leche Deliciousness

I had a hankering to bake something on Tuesday night, but nothing came to mind. I flipped through my Dorie Greenspan book waiting for something to jump out at me. I was in the mood for cookies, and when I saw this recipe and remembered a jar of dulce de leche in my cupboard that I purchased a couple months ago at the Mexican food store in the city, I was sold.

These have the texture of molasses cookies, chewy in the middle and crispy around the edges, so it almost feels like you are biting into a big caramel. Delicious, and so easy! One thing I would recommend is to bake them either on a silicone baking mat (I got one over Christmas and love it) or else parchment paper as the bottoms are very sticky coming out of the oven. Dorie suggests sandwiching two of the cookies with more dulce de leche but I found that they were sweet enough on their own.

Dulce De Leche Duos from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup (8 oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup store-bought dulce de leche
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 large eggs

Line a baking sheet (or two) with parchment or silicone mats. Preheat the oven to 350* F (180* C). Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.
Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
Working with a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, or a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter at medium speed until soft. Add the 3/4 cup dulce de leche and both sugars and continue to beat until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Don't be concerned if the mixture looks a little curdled - it will smooth out when the flour mixture goes in. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the dry ingredients, mixing only until they disappear into the batter.
Spoon the dough onto the baking sheets, using a heaping teaspoon of dough for each cookies and leaving 2 inches between them.Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, rotating the pans from front to back at the midway point. The cookies should be honey brown with a light sugar crust, but they will still be soft, so remove the sheets from the oven but don't touch the cookies for another minute or two. Then, using a wide metal spatula, transfer the cookies to a rack to cool to room temperature. Repeat with the remaining dough, making sure you cool the baking sheets before spooning dough onto them.

Dropbox Discovery

Backie came home all excited the other night about his new discovery, a program called Dropbox, and I have to admit that it's pretty cool and useful, particularly if you are someone who uses more than one computer on a regular basis (eg. work and home, like us). It's basically a very simple and user-friendly way to transfer and share files. After you sign up, you're allocated 2 GB. You just drag and drop your files into a designated folder on your computer, and it automatically uploads and syncs to their servers in the background. Next time you turn on your other computer(s), whatever changes you made automatically sync to the Dropbox folder on that computer. No more emailing myself stuff or forgetting my memory stick at work. You can also have a shared folder with other people who use Dropbox (for working on projects, etc). If you put images in the Photos folder inside your Dropbox, an automatic gallery with URL is created so you can email the link and share. There's also a web interface so you can access your files from any computer with internet. It's intuitive, useful, and best of all, free!

A prayer for you, Mr. President

My dear friend Heidi posted a prayer for Obama, and I couldn't say it any better than she does...

Bed and Babies, Part 2

I posted a couple months ago about the young child who lives below us who wakes up screaming hysterically multiple times a night. Unfortunately the situation has not improved - Backie was woken up 3 times during the night last night and can barely get off the couch after work today he is so tired, so we decided to go and talk to the parents.

As I said, they are both very nice so we didn't want to attack or antagonize them at all. Sofia, the wife, was home and after we explained to her the situation, she basically said that she has no idea why Amalia wakes up all the time during the night. "We're tired too," were her exact words. "She's not hungry, not needing a diaper change, nothing...just wants to be cuddled. We don't know either why she's crying."

Sigh. The situation is worse for Backie than me, since he is a much lighter sleeper, but I've been kept up later and roused earlier than I care to be by the little one as well. We just don't know what to do. I'm sure our time will come eventually to have a screaming baby of our own...but until then we should be able to get some sleep!

Nothing is Gone Forever...

Over at the Wayback Machine, you can look up pretty much any URL and see what the page looked like at a given date in the past. "Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago." My first website I built at MHC was even on there!

Everyone's happy!

I got a new computer, and kitty got a new box!

Backie cut a little cat-hole in it so that he can play. It's particularly funny when we toss a ping pong ball inside - he can't stand anything else being in there and dives in to quickly bat it out. Then he sits in the "doorway" to guard against further ping-pong ball attacks... like so.

Goodbye, Green Form...

...hello, online form. As of today, all citizens of countries in the US Visa Waiver Program (both my nationalities qualify) must fill out this online registration form at least three days before entry into the US. Try not to get smacked in the face by the enormous warning dialog box that pops up when you access the site, informing you of the 1,209,647 things that are illegal to do if you know how to locate the United States on a map. Also, try not to be surprised at customs by the brand new machines that now want all 10 of your fingerprints instead of just your two index fingers, in addition to your photo. I've lost count of how many bleary-eyed, jet-lagged pictures of me the DHS must have in their computers.

Oy, what's next? DNA samples?

Island Paradise: Tobago

As I wrote below, we celebrated New Year's Eve at the Hilton poolside. Rebekah had made appointments for both of us back in October to get our hair done. This is customary - New Year's Eve is a big deal here and everyone at the party was extremely dressed up, some girls in ball gowns.

Early on in the evening:

A rather blurry picture of all the girls in the group we went with:

A view of the party:

Closer to midnight (or maybe after!), in a very celebratory mood...look at Backie's grin!

The next morning we left around lunchtime for Tobago. It's a 20-minute flight, 30 km, from Port of Spain to Crown Point (Columbus Point), where most of the touristy hotels are located.

Mark and Rebekah had taken care of all the reservations for us for our 5 days in Tobago. We spent the first two nights at one of those touristy hotel/resorts called Tropikist, mostly lying by the pool and relaxing. On Saturday morning, the two of them left us and flew back to Trinidad to attend a wedding, and we continued on to our next location - a small fisherman's village along the northern coast named Castara. There, we stayed at a little hotel called The Naturalist (no nudity!) which, although quite basic, was clean and had a friendly manager. We stayed in a room named Anchovy. :)

Here's a view of the hotel's cafe, and Backie on the beach enjoying the waves...apart from a few other hotel guests and some fishermen, the beach was mostly deserted. This was the case all over Tobago - it has really not been spoiled by tourism at all, and we were impressed by how clean and non-commercial everything was.

A good chunk of Tobago's interior is the oldest protected forest reserve in the Western Hemisphere, and Sunday morning we decided to go for a rainforest hike. Our guide, David, was a gentle man in his late 40's who picked us up at the hotel bright and early at 7 am and drove us inland to Gilpin Trail. Here's Backie at the edge of the forest wearing the rubber boots we borrowed (an absolute necessity!).

We hiked into the forest for about 45 minutes, David pointing out various birds, plants, and flowers along the way. One highlight was seeing a hummingbird's nest. It's the twigs and grass wrapped around the palm leaf in the center of the picture. It didn't look like much of a nest to me, but after David cautioned us to be quiet and we waited a few minutes, surely enough the hummingbird came back with some grass in her beak and twisted it around the leaf. Then, she was curious and flew over to inspect us! She was only a few feet away and hovered in front of us for a few seconds before going back to her nest. It was amazing!

Another highlight was the enormous clumps of bamboo - I have never seen such huge bamboo before, and had no idea that it grew in the Caribbean.

Backie and David on the trail:

And, our goal, a small waterfall deep in the forest where we rested for a few minutes and splashed our faces before turning around.

Beaches are great, but they can get boring after a while, so on Monday we decided to venture out. We rented a car from the hotel and spent the day driving around the island. First stop was Scarborough, the largest town in Tobago, where we had doubles for breakfast, looked around town, and had a rest in the botanical garden. Above Scarborough are the ruins of Fort King George and a beautiful panorama of the southern coast.

After Scarborough we drove east along the coast to Argyle Falls, the largest waterfalls in Tobago, and dipped our toes in the cool pond at their base.

The day was especially challenging for Backie, since Tobagonians drive on the left side of the road, a new driving experience for him. The roads around the island are narrow and precipitous at times, with landslides covering parts of the lanes and oncoming cars hurtling around sharp bends. We had a few close calls but made it back to Castara safely at the end of the day! Yesterday morning, while we were soaking up a few last hours on the beach before flying back to Trinidad, I saw a commotion down the beach. One of the fishermen shimmied up a palm tree with a machete and lowered bunches of coconuts down to his friends. Everyone on the beach went to watch him and then to ask for a coconut, which the fishermen hacked open so that we could drink the water inside and gave us for free. Whenever I've had coconut before there has only been a few drops of white milk inside, but these fresh green coconuts had enough water to satisfy anyone's thirst. The water did not taste like coconut at all, and it was very refreshing. Apparently it's very healthy, with lots of vitamins and minerals. I stuck a straw through the hole and slurped till it was all gone!

We fly back home tomorrow, first to JFK with Caribbean Airlines and then from JFK to Zurich with Swiss, arriving home around 1:30 pm on Friday with a weekend to recover before school starts again Monday. It has been a wonderful three weeks away but now I'm ready to unpack, pick up the kitty, put the suitcases away, and sleep in my own bed. We expect to be back in the Caribbean fairly soon though - Mark and Rebekah are getting married in Barbados sometime this year and Backie is a groomsman!

See you back in Zurich!

To Tobago We Go!

Happy New Year's Day! We celebrated at a huge party at the poolside of the Port of Spain Hilton. There were about 800 people there and it was a really fun time. As of 1:30 am there were even some breakfast stands serving doubles and bake and shark!

We're hopping on a 15-minute flight over to Tobago this afternoon for 5 days. Tobago is the more touristy island with more to see and do (Trinidad is beautiful too but isn't really set up well for tourists). We'll stay at an all-inclusive hotel for three nights with Mark and Rebekah, and then Backie and I will move to another smaller hotel in another part of the island for the remaining two nights while they attend a wedding. We'll meet back up in Trinidad on the 6th. Backie doesn't want to bring his laptop over to Tobago, so I'll update if I can find a computer somewhere. Otherwise I'll just have to blast you with a ton of pictures when we get back!