Because of a hectic work schedule the past few days, I haven’t had time to do anything blog-worthy.  Usually, I have only one after-hours work related telephone call per week, but this week I had four: 8:00 pm Tuesday, 8:00 pm Wednesday, and 3:00 am and 10:00 pm Friday.  This effectively wipes out time for doing anything after work.

Of course, I’m thankful for the opportunity to still be able to do my job from the United States, so these after-hours calls are just a minor inconvenience.

Saturday afternoon I had a little time free time so I did some baking: almond biscotti for Tawn’s mother and oatmeal-raisin cookies for general eating.  The biscotti were originally going to also have dried cranberries in them but of course I forgot to put them in!  Actually, I had a few memory mis-fires. 

When I was making the cookies, I decided to mix butter and shortening but instead of using half the normal amount for each, I used the full 1 cup each.  After I had mixed together all the ingredients I looked at the dough and quickly realized that something was wrong – there were very few oats when usually the oats are the majority ingredient. 

Retracing my steps, I saw my error and added the necessary dry ingredients to effectively double the recipe.  Whoops!

Above: A jar of biscotti for Khun Nui.

Last night Tawn and I met Brian and his friend Sean for dinner.  We went to Oishi Grand Buffet, which has very good quality food, but I think at 1000 baht per head (we received a 15% discount thanks to Brian’s HSBC bank card, so 850 per head) it is still a steep price.  The big challenge I have with buffets is that I don’t usually eat a lot of food at any one sitting.  I’d rather do the four or five small meals throughout the day than eat a ton at any one time.