This is probably the last chance I'll get to blog before I leave town tomorrow morning, so a few quick updates:
#1 - Chicken Pot Pie - the R.C. said it was a very good example of chicken soup but not at all like a pot pie. Must try again. Next time, I'll use cream.
#2 - J (in comments) is winning the crazystakes since his people are weirder than mine at the moment.
#3 - You know what I miss about my job? I miss the ability to tell people to get away from me when they tried to "help."
I don't seem to be able to stop these agencies or their clients from demanding additions, deletions, and random minor changes that not only don't fit into my overall strategy but have no strategic purpose of their own.
"I want more business" is not a strategy, people. It's not even a goal. It's what you wish upon a star.
Goals are things like, "X number of leads a month" that are measurable. How this works is, you tell me your goals, then you leave me the heck alone except when I ask you to do something to your website and then you email me later that same day to tell me it's done.
Is that so hard? Do what I tell you when tell you to do it and we'll do just fine.
One client sent me a casual note this morning, asking if it wasn't about time I billed him again. I responded, pointing out that he hasn't paid the invoice we sent three weeks ago yet. Sheesh.
I've sorted my laundry and dug out a suitcase. (I need to do the former so I can put it in the latter.) I've also plugged in my various electronic gizmos so that they'll all be fully charged tomorrow. I dug around the enormous mess (okay, one small pile of papers) until I found all that cash I pulled out of the bank for the trip and the various reservations and shuttle pages I printed. Can't print my boarding pass for three hours.
Guess I have time to do some work.
I'm struggling with writing at the moment--have committed to loading up 2-3 more "wiki" articles before I leave town and I'm not coming up with the right casual-but-professional tone. The articles I've loaded so far have varied from the beige-and-boring to manic enthusiasm.
I might be more committed if, like some of the other MLH, I was hoping this work would get me public attention and draw clients but the truth is that I'm getting new accounts as fast as I can absorb them at the moment and until I get better at balancing all of them, I don't really need mobs of new people contacting me.
Embarrassingly, one or two people have already mentioned seeing my first couple of efforts. Really must do better in the future.
Sigh. It wasn't such a bad, little job, you know? Regular paycheck, benefits, they paid for the coffee.
Be good while I'm gone!
Today's culinary experiment--chicken pot pie.
I don't know why this recipe attracted me--I don't even like chicken pot pie. I took no liberties with the recipe, aside from skipping the crust since it adds a billion unnecessary calories.
It's in the oven now. Excitement!
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P.S. Clients? Still mostly crazy although two show indications of developing sanity.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)Empanadas!
I tried again, this time maintaining a strict focus on the cuisine in question. Success!
The successful recipe, for anyone still reading, is to lightly saute some onion until translucent--the recipe called for butter but I substituted a spritz of Pam--then fry your hamburger in the pan until brown. Add salt & pepper to taste, toss in your other spices (I used a tsp each of paprika and cumin and a few hearty shakes of crushed red pepper and stir it all up on medium-low heat until the spice have a chance to get acquainted with the beef--say, five minutes.
Spritz the sheet of foil on your cookie sheet.
Lay out egg roll wrappers, spoon ingredients onto half, staying 1/4" - 1/'2" from the edge, fold over the edges, wetting the inside rims with water to make them stick together--press firmly or use a spoon or a fork to seal--carefully, so as not to poke a hole in your dough. Place wrapper on foil, spritz top so it will brown, cook at 350-375 until wrapper is crispy. Say, ten or fifteen minutes, depending on how hot your oven cooks.
Eat.
I feel very brave. Next time I'm going to get creative with a tiny bit of cheese or olives.
The egg roll wrappers are still just too big. Next time, I'll also try halving or even quartering them.
I also joined the legion of the Ladies Who Lunch this week--going out for lunch for only the second time since I commenced my new career.
I met the R.C.. at Elways, so named for the football guy, yes. He put his name on it and for ten years I staunchly resisted passing through the doors--my silent protest at having half the city named after a guy who was apparently very good at football, a pasttime I find paralyzingly boring, and whose name I was already tired of long before the end of the last century.
I think, in retrospect, I'm glad about that.
I mean, if I'd know ten years ago how absolutely delicious the food was, I'd probably weigh 200 lbs by now.
Spicy steak chili. Lip-lickin' good.
I'm not talking about work stuff because all my clients are still crazy.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:38 PM | Comments (6)Sometimes, it might feel good to cuss a bit.
I don't usually swear--it's so white-trash to have four-letter words pouring out of your mouth under any circumstances and at my age it would be doubly inappropriate.
The Piggyback Corral was back in my inbox this morning--asking in all innocence if I saw a reason why they shouldn't delete the X-thing that was no longer working well. I saw a bazillion--but I contented myself with pointing out one--that the X-things are where the locations' business comes from so deleting the X-things means eliminating the lead flow.
So. You know. Don't do that. It would be bad.
An email back-and-forth ensued, where they generously offered to pay me to teach the newbie how to do it all. They offered to pay me for an hour.
They really didn't understand or respect what I did, did they?
I mean, is it me, or does this offer pretty much confirm that?
One of the 'Nuts is also in my in-box, asking me to call them about taking over management. I haven't done it yet--but have decided it's worth making the phone call. I mean, they thought my fees were too high back when I was offering them a special deal, right after I left. I can't wait to hear what they think of what today's 'list' prices are.
The Playground Monitor thing turns out, I'm happy to say, to be intermittent and largely virtual. Maybe one web meeting a month and maybe traveling once a year. I can live with that.
Another behind-the-scenes thing I can't talk about is happening and the advance prep is taking up a fair share of my brain this week. Suffice to say that top of this weekend's to-do list is writing articles. It's been a long time since I wrote to order and I've never written anything that might pass for a "professional" article.
I'm a tad concerned. My syntax is idiosyncratic (and how impressed are you that I spelled that right on the first try?), my punctuation intermittent, my vocabulary pretentious, and my attitude flippant. Doesn't seem to bode well, does it?
(Which, for some irrational reason, reminds me that I promised Gidget a month ago that I'd go do some work on our company website. Must really try to be more productive.)
It's 2:24. What with one thing and another, I have not yet even started the to-do list that faced me at 8:00 this morning. Maybe if I dig in now, I can get at least one thing checked off in the next three hours.
I need to start working more hours each day, that's all. If I take my contacts out, I'll bet I could keep going another two or three hours before my eyes blazed red from monitor burnout.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:24 PM | Comments (4)Sometimes I do a lot in between posts, but by the time I get around to blogging, it's all stale and not worth the effort it would take to type about it.
Recap of the last few days, beyond the already-blogged cooking thing:
Snow.
Some more snow.
A little more snow.
Even for Denver, 15" is a lot of snow, and that was what we had before the 2 inches we got last night. It's still coming down, too.
It feels like every time I almost have making a 2 mile walk down as part of my daily routine (I plan to work up to 4), we get snow and it's so treacherous underfoot that going even a single mile takes half an hour or more. Sheesh.
In the middle of a chat-meeting at the moment. Should probably be paying more attention to it.
Latest client nibble--so far, this one has the potential to be the craziest yet. He's sent me three or four long, almost incoherent emails so far, each of which has been as much about his hobby as his business. I dunno. I demanded a premium (for me) fee, to offset the crazy I feel coming and he said, "okay" so either I'm still underpricing my services (I've doubled my fees since I went solo full-time) or--or, I don't know what.
Webstrainer is being flattering again. Apparently, from the worldwide list of 40-50 of Mother's Little Helpers in my specialty, I and four others have been "nominated" for a further honor, which will hereinafter be referred to as Playground Monitor. Should this come to fruition, it involves a meeting in ten days that I hope is virtual since otherwise it will make my second scheduled trip to CA this month.
I don't know why they're picking me. My group of MLH includes people who are younger and more knowledgeable and at least as articulate in our field. People who are already much better known to the community at large.
Where, I ask, where was this career field when I was 30 or 40 and young enough to really take advantage of what seems to be my affinity for it? I coulda' been a contender!
Also, a Webstrainer-affiliated site that I donate some time and expertise to, helping non-profits solve their problems, has sent me yet another "Congratulations, you're exceptional!" email but they're not fooling me and I don't have any more time to dedicate to giving away my expertise than I'm already giving them, so they might as well not suck up to me.
Or, maybe I would, if I were better organized.
Bored of that topic now.
Yes, I'm going to California the end of this month. My annual pilgrimage to meet up with a group of friends I rarely get a chance to "talk" to, even online, the rest of the year.
It's chancy, I know, spending the money on this kind of trip at this point in my financial 'life' but part of why I decided on this new lifestyle was to give me time to live my life, and part of my life that I really love is this annual trip.
I'm not active in the hobby that originally drew me to these people any more, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy seeing them and talking to them. (And, to be honest, I just love the little town where the gatherings are held. When I win the lottery, I might move there, assuming it's one of those lotteries with a $200million payout.)
Must go finish my meeting and then do some work.
Posted by AnneZook at 09:58 AM | Comments (4)I haven't been amazingly adventurous on the Food Front recently, but one thing I did do was to sign up for a session at Whole Foods across the street.
The topic was Argentinian Empanadas and I'm a huge pig for good empanadas, so the R.C. and I braved the threat of a major (even "epic") storm forecast and toddled over to take a look.
An empanada, for those who don't know, is a pastry filled with tasty (pre-cooked) fillings of various varieties and fried or baked.
Mmmm.
We learned to make the dough and to fix the fillings, getting to taste two variations with recipes for both, along with links to websites offering other filling recipes. Well worth the price--which was nothing.
Me, being me, I came home resolved to DIY so I could try a few things for myself. (Experimental cooking is hobby of mine. Thankfully, the fact that I'm a lousy cook means little of what I make winds up on my butt. Most of it goes in the trash.)
First, dough.
The traditional recipe calls for heaping helpings of lard. Our chef provided us with an alternative recipe using only butter, instead.
#1 - I am astonishingly lazy.
#2 - Making dough didn't strike me as "part of the fun" to be had.
#3 - Nor do I own a food processor, the gadget needed to make the dough in two minutes or less.
#4 - Nor do I have the patience to make the dough and let it "rest" in the refrigerator before I continue playing cooking. Who's in charge here, anyhow? Me or a sack of flour?
Also, I am no longer allowed to eat things where one of the first three ingredients is "X sticks of butter."
To save time and fat calories, then, I decided to substitute egg roll wrappers for the homemade dough. It would change the final result a trifle but each wrapper (made of soy) is 100 calories and no fat. Healthier!
I had both chicken and "'salad size" shrimp on hand, so when lunchtime approached today, I decided to try them both.
I sauteed a bit of onion in two pans, then diced and cooked the meats (in the different pans). Removing the meat from the pan(s), I added some diced veggies (not an ideal mix--just what I had on-hand which was green beans, baby carrots, and sweet corn) and pan-seared them in the small amount of liquid leftover from cooking the meats. I added, variously, salt, pepper, ginger, garlic, and a very small amount of hoisin or oyster sauce to each pan and hotted it all up again. (I know--weird sauces for an "Argentinian" recipe. I blame the egg roll wrappers--once I got started cooking I was thinking "egg rolls" instead of "empanadas.")
While the fillings cooled a bit, I sprayed a piece of tinfoil with some cooking spray.
I laid out two egg roll wrappers and put about 3 tablespoons of filling in each. The empanada recipes call for 1-2 tbsp of filling but egg roll wrappers are larger, so I added a bit more under the theory that I was only going to be eating half of each initially anyhow. As it turned out, even 3 tbsp was not quite enough since when it came time to roll, I had more wrapper than filling, but whatever.
I rolled and wrapped the fillings, placed them on the tinfoil, sprayed the rolls with some more cooking spray, and poked them into the oven.
In about 6-1/2 minutes, I should know if any of it is edible or not.
It's very exciting!
Still. Next time, I think I'll stick with "approved" recipes from people who know what they're doing the first time I try something new.
Also, there are a lot of vegetarian empanada recipes I want to try, along with some sweet versions and, as long as I have a stock of egg roll wrappers now anyhow, I'm thinking that homemade eggrolls, without the frying, would be a tasty thing to be able to make for myself.
2 minutes and 20 seconds!
How's your life?
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Don't Do This At Home:
Ugh. Forgetting, in the middle of cooking, what cuisine you're experimenting with is not a good idea.
Also, too complicated. Too many flavors going on. I see, now, why all the empanada filling recipes I see online are so simple. One main ingredient, one accent, and a couple of spices.
I think I have some hamburger in the freezer. I'll try again, in a few days, but focusing this time.
I'm happy to report that the egg roll wrappers were a success. They crisped up nicely. If nothing else, I can congratulate myself on having eaten only 100 calories of processed soy at lunch instead of half a stick of butter, a cup of white flour, and however much oil those ingredients were able to soak up during the frying process.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:15 PM | Comments (3)