Brownie Waffles

As I mentioned the other day, we are staying at my grandmother's house right now, and our motorhome is parked about 35 miles away. Which means that (1) I am cooking in a kitchen that is currently full of both my dishes and my grandmother's, so I don't have a lot of room; (2) I have to use an electric stove/oven, something I haven't done in about 18 years; and (3) said electric oven takes about an hour to preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. So for the last two weeks, cooking has consisted largely of sandwiches, frozen dinners and microwaved hot dogs.

But tonight I had a sweet tooth, and went digging in our "pantry" (which currently is a stack of plastic bins) looking for something to fix. I found a brownie mix and was seriously considering turning the oven on, until my husband mentioned the waffle iron. We have previously experimented with muffin mixes in the waffle iron (I can tell you that corn muffin mix, blueberry muffin mix, and mixed berry muffin mix all work wonderfully, mixed per package directions and cooked in the waffle iron), and he came up with the idea a few months ago to cook brownies the same way. At the time of his initial suggestion, I had doubts about success, so I hit the internet looking to see if anyone had tried it before. I found a few sites that said it was doable, and what I remembered tonight was that most of them said to mix per package directions for regular brownies. So that's what I did.

Unfortunately, my brownie waffles were a total failure. I poured the batter onto the waffle iron the same as I have for all other waffles. At first, all seemed well, but then after about 30 or 40 seconds, hot liquid brownie batter came pouring out the sides. And I don't mean trickling, either. It was pouring out fast. And when the waffle iron indicated that they were done, they were stuck to the iron pretty tight, despite having oiled the plates thoroughly. And when I tried to pull them loose, they crumbled.

So, what to do with brownie batter when they absolutely failed as waffles and the oven would take an hour to heat? Pour it in a microwaveable dish and nuke it for about 10 minutes! The end result was a batch of perfectly edible, though not fantastic brownies.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

You may have noticed I haven't been around much lately. I'm sorry about that, but we've had a series of unfortunate events that have kept me first offline and then busy for a while.

For just over 4 years, my husband and I lived in a 21 foot, 1973 Class C motorhome with our two cats. We traveled around the country, staying anywhere from a week to 5 months in one place before moving on to another place. It suited our purposes fairly well, but it was a little small, and being almost 35 years old, we were a little concerned about it breaking down. We'd also discovered that it didn't like mountains very much.

While we were staying at my mother-in-law's earlier this summer, we had the opportunity to buy a Class A motorhome that was 9 foot longer and 9 years newer. We looked it over and decided that we really liked it, and it seemed to be in really good shape. We asked the guy that was selling it how the engine performed. He said that he had just bought it a few months earlier so that he and his family could take a trip to California from Missouri - it was cheaper to buy a used one than rent one.  He said that it handled the mountains beautifully and that they didn't have any trouble with the winds, either.

So we bought it. We drove it about 20 miles to my mother-in-law's house, where we parked it and moved all of our stuff into it. We stayed there for another 2 1/2 months, then, on Monday September 15, we left on our way to Florida, with stops planned in Columbia, MO and St. Louis, MO. On that Monday, we drove a little over 200 miles to Columbia with absolutely no problem. We stayed at a campground for 2 nights, then headed out on Wednesday. We drove about 3 miles to the gas station, filled up the tank, and got onto the interstate highway. Within 2 miles of getting on the interstate, we started hearing a rattle coming from the engine. We pulled off at the next exit and looked everything over, but we couldn't find anything wrong. We drove on a little farther down the interstate, and the rattling got worse. We tried stopping at a Freightliner repair shop, but nobody there knew anything about gas engines. We tried driving to Kingdom City to try to find a shop, but before we got there, something broke loose and started knocking hard. We pulled off and called a shop, and a guy came out to look at it. We started the engine and he promptly said it sounded like we'd either broken a rod or a piston. We asked how much it would be to fix it, he told us to call the shop. We called the shop, and the boss said that he couldn't give an estimate without seeing it first. So we arranged to have it towed (by another company) to the shop, where the boss listened to the engine, said the same thing that his underling had said, then said that they don't rebuild engines and don't know anyone that does. They could replace it with a new engine for only $9,000, which is more than we paid for the whole rig!

Besides, he might as well have said $2 million, because we didn't have $9,000 and didn't have any way to get it. I joked about setting up at the interstate exit with a sign reading "Will work for Chevy 454 big block" - that at least had a chance. We made a few phone calls to relatives, and after going through a dozen or so ideas, we came to the conclusion that we were just going to have to sell the rig for scrap, because we couldn't figure out any place to park it until we could get a new engine or rebuild the existing one. We spent the night in the parking lot of the shop, figuring it would be the last time we would sleep in that bed. The next day, my parents came out and drove us to Uhaul, then helped us pack and load all of our belongings on a rental truck. Meanwhile, we couldn't find anyone that wanted the motorhome, even for scrap. We drove away with our belongings, unsure what was going to happen to our home.

By the time we got to St. Louis, with several more phone calls made along the way, we came up with a tentative plan. We parked the truck that evening in my mother's driveway, slept at my brother's, then made more phone calls the next morning. The end result was: We had the motorhome towed about 150 miles, to a piece of land owned by my mother's cousin. We are staying at my grandmother's house; she is 96 years old living in a nursing home and not expected to return home. We will be doing maintenance on the house getting it ready for eventual sale. And I am looking for work, so we can have some regular income, while my husband works on building an internet business and rebuilding the motorhome's engine.

So now I'm looking for work in a time of high unemployment, with so-so mass transit and a bicycle as my transportation with winter rapidly approaching. Which is why I haven't been around much, and why posts on here may be a little sparse in the next few weeks. Once I find a job and we settle into a routine, I should be able to find time for more frequent (or at least more regular) posting.