The battle of the brownie

I had high hopes of coming to you today with a fantastic brownie recipe. I was pretty excited about it. Much to the dismay of the entire southeast, there was a rather large winter storm coming up the coast and I was going to stay in Friday night and make brownies. However, when I got right about here:

I realized that we only had one egg in the house. Who runs out of eggs?

I refused to go out in the 'blizzard' to get eggs (even though it wasn't that bad, but I've heard people down here drive like the world is 4 minutes from ending when it snows, so I refused to leave the house). I improvised, and while the results were quite tasty, they weren't really share- with-the-online-community good.

Taste = 9

Structure, appearance, ease of eating = 3.5

Turns out yogurt, baking soda, and oil will get the job done, but sometimes you just need an egg (or 4).

Anyway, all was not lost. It was the annual Valentines day weekend pizza cookoff in our house. I'll give you a moment while you reflect on how cheesy this is, no pun intended. Ok, sorry, that was bad even for me.

Pizza is a very specific thing for a lot of people and sparks a lot of heated debates, so I won't bore you with the exact details of how and why I made the pizza they way I did, but I will say that I've tried about 10 different types of crust techniques and I really enjoy what the Breadman breadmaker does it with it. It's been hit and miss with stand mixer approach (great taste, poor texture, or vice versa) and even the Alton Brown method, which normally requires a large time investment- but at least works, has let me down before. This stuff seems solid.

On a more personal note, we're not really boxes of candy, inflatable balloons, and stuffed animal type of people. Kudos to those that are, though. Let's face it, you keep an entire seasonal market of merchandisers alive. We're pizza cook-off kind of people, but in an attempt to be more valentines-day-like, I rented Love Happens. Turns out this wasn't so much of a love story as it was a story about coping with death, which is not very valentines-day-like at all. In the future, I think we'll both be fine with sticking to the pizza. The movie was good though, Jennifer Aniston rarely lets me down; it just happened to be cry in your pizza sad. Which was unfortunate, because it was quite good and didn't really need the extra salt.