Housewife Tutorials: Lemonies (Lemon Brownies)

Most people who know me know that I adore baking. In college, I made several different baked goods each week, and it was great because there was always an abundance of starving college kids around to eat them. Nowadays, however, there are far fewer people around to share my goodies with, and since getting diabetes is on nobody's to-do list, I don't bake half as much as I used to.

Thursday nights are date nights in our house, because I usually have Thursdays off. We alternate weeks in who plans the date, and this week is my week. I decided that it would be cute and fun to have a picnic! Where we live, there is nowhere to have a picnic that doesn't requiring obtaining a permit first. This is the dumbest thing I've ever encountered, but I jumped through these town-mandated hoops anyway. Nothing is going to put a damper on my date night!

My boyfriend loves lemon and brownies separately, and I've had the idea in my mind for some time to surprise him with lemon brownies. So in addition to all of our other cutesy picnic food, I decided to look for a recipe for lemon brownies. I thought it would be a difficult task, and that I would have to combine several different recipes with my own expertise to create this lemony holy grail. Not the case. It turns out that there are tons of recipes for lemonies out there! I looked through a few and decided on the one that I thought would be the best. The original post can be found here: http://www.jennycancook.com/recipes/lemon-brownies/.
However, I will post my own account of the baking process, as well as my own adaptations, in this post.

First thing's first- gather all of your baking ingredients, listed below.

• Lemonies:
• 
  
• 1 cup all-purpose or whole wheat pastry flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup plain Greek yogurt
• 3 Tablespoons canola oil
• zest of 2 lemons
• 2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
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• 
  
• Glaze:
  zest of 1 lemon
• 1 rounded cup powdered sugar
• about 2 to 4 Tablespoons lemon juice
• 
  
• 
  
• Before you can do much else, you'll need to zest your lemons. You can use a fancy lemon zester, or the zesting side of a 4-sided grater, but I prefer to use a steak knife. It works just as well as a zester, and it's much easier to clean. Just be careful not to cut yourself. Cuts + lemon = no bueno. 
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• Preheat your oven to 350° F.

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• Next, put all of your ingredients into a bowl. Yup, that's right, no "combining dry ingredients in one bowl and beating together wet ingredients in another." The simplicity of this recipe is unmatched by most.
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• Then you stir it all up by hand until smooth (about 30 seconds). Get out all those lumps and bumps. If you wouldn't want them on your thighs, then you don't want them in your batter.
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• Spread your beautiful yellow batter in a greased 8x8-inch pan and bake for about 20 minutes, depending on your oven. While you're waiting, you can do a load of laundry, respond to emails, send your kid to a time-out, go out and get the mail, or be like me and write a blog post about your kitchen endeavors.
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• When they're done, let the lemonies cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes.
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• While lemonies are cooling, stir the glaze ingredients together in a bowl, adding the juice  gradually until the glaze is spreadable. This may or may not take all of the lemon juice. It most likely will not, so it's important to add the juice gradually and mix up the glaze thoroughly before adding more. Another important part of this step is to make sure that, if you send a man out to pick up powdered sugar, he actually knows what it is. As cute a he is, my boyfriend was unaware that different types of sugar existed, and rather than asking, he just bought plain white sugar. So back to the store I went. 
• 
  
• Once the lemonies have cooled a bit, spread the glaze on them while they're still warm, resisting the urge to eat all of the glaze before it makes it onto the lemonies! Now just try to eat one before your family gobbles them all up first!

Below, you will find photos of my process. I certainly hope that these lemonies are as delicious as they smell and look!


Zesting away!:

Mixing up the batter: 

Beautiful lemony batter:

The glaze!: 

In case you don't know what powdered sugar looks like...;):

All done!!:

The Cost of Raising Minimum Wage

While gettin' my sweat on at the gym the other day, I saw a news report about fast food workers pushing to raise minimum wage to $15/hour. The idea of this is appalling on so many levels. I understand that minimum wage is not a livable wage, but that's kind of the point. Minimum wage jobs exist for people with no job experience, education, or marketable skills-- i.e. high school kids. The current job market is tough, which is why we should all prepare ourselves for success as much as possible.

Minimum wage jobs were not designed to be lifelong careers. They are an entry point into the workforce for people with little to no skills. They exist to teach the basic skills needed for a lifetime of work. A person should learn a trade or get an education in a specific field before expecting to make more than $10/hour. At the very least, a person should aspire to move up to a management position within their current company as a means of gaining more experience and a higher salary. There is something that today's society seems to forgotten, and that is that the purpose of work is to EARN money. Money is a limited resource, and a valuable commodity. It should not be given freely or without effort.

I have two bachelors degrees, and there are months when I make less than the average minimum wage worker. While I technically make a decent hourly wage, I am guaranteed to be paid only about half the hours per month that a typical shift worker would get. When on reserve (an on-call only status), I have no control over how much I work and never know ahead of time how many hours I will work that month. In the months where I don't "break" (go over) guarantee by working more hours than my minimum guarantee, that's all I get. When you do the math, I end up making somewhere around the minimum hourly wage (between 7 and 9 dollars per hour).

I don't have a ton of extra cash for superfluous spending, but I get by. In a previous post, I explained my personal methods for living cheap and making ends meet. I am buried in student loans, and also owe a substantial chunk of cash to my parents for money they've loaned me over the past few years. I chip away at these debts a little at a time, whenever I can spare a little money, and this is how it will be for the foreseeable future. I may not be wealthy, but at least I'm educated and employed. I have acquired job experience and marketable skills, and am working toward a brighter financial future for myself. I am not able to buy all of the things that I want, but I am able to buy all of the things that I need. It's not a perfect life that I lead, but it's one of a hardworking American.

Raising the minimum wage would inspire even more laziness and sense of entitlement than is already present in our society. Do we really want an even less educated and hardworking nation? What ever happened to ambition? Yes, people need to eat. No, not everyone needs an iPhone, or even a smartphone. I didn't have a smartphone until about seven months ago, because I couldn't afford one before then. I also know people who still don't have one. Sure, it's a great convenience and nice to have, but it's certainly not a necessity.

If we raise minimum wage by such a substantial amount, then we are further crippling our nation's future. The low wages aren't the problem; it's the attitude of today's American that is to blame. People need to remember the purpose of minimum wage jobs, and act accordingly. Additionally, if the minimum wage goes up, the wages of people with skill and education should go up by the same amount. To offset these wages, the cost of goods will also rise, and this cycle will continue. The more logical approach would be for minimum wage to stay at a minimum, and spend this country's tax dollars fostering a desire for hard work and career advancement in today's youth.

Niagara Falls

This is a picture of Niagara Falls that I took from the air last weekend. Enjoy!

More Love = Higher Productivity

I don't care who you are or what you say to the contrary, everyone loves a compliment. Whether it's related to your appearance, a skill that you have, or your work ethic, positive feedback is always great to hear. I recently received an email from Management in positive regards to my own work performance, and it completely made my day. It got me to thinking, corporations should really put a larger focus on thanking their employees for their hard work, and noticing when they do something above and beyond the call of duty.

All too often in our society, we focus on the negative. Employers, families, and friends are quick to point out our shortcomings, yet rarely provide us with compliments. Of course, this is a vast generalization. There are many people in my life who provide me with positive reinforcement, as I'm sure there are in yours. However, it is human nature to nitpick the bad and not acknowledge the good.

I think that employers should make a conscious effort to provide employees with a higher quantity of positive feedback. In doing this, I have no doubt that the average employee would be much more eager to bend over backwards for the company. Why would anyone who feels underappreciated want to meet, much less exceed, expectations? By recognizing the hard work that your employees put in for you every day, it provides encouragement for them to keep up the good work.

The best form of encouragement is obviously monetary, but other small tokens of a company's appreciation work as well. Even something as simple as saying, "hey, I noticed you've been putting a lot of effort into that X presentation. I had a chance to take a look at it the other day and it seems like it's coming along great! Keep up the good work!" will make a big difference to your employees. People are much more likely to bring their A-game when they feel that their efforts are appreciated.

This one little task is a free and easy tool to help increase productivity at any company. So why wouldn't a company want to implement this strategy?! They would be crazy not to.

So if you're in a management position at your company, make it your goal to offer at least one compliment to an employee today. After all, all any of us really wants is a little love!

P.S. This works with parents and children too (to some degree...), so show your babies some love!!