Peach bread pudding with whiskey hard sauce

Happy Easter! 

No, I'm not a week late. I'm orthodox, I go to an American Orthodox Church here in the bay area and Orthodox Christians are on a different calendar. So that means that our Easter is usually a couple of weeks after most Easters also known as "the Catholic Easter" during the great Lenten fast Orthodox Christians fast from all animal products and liquor alcohol. It's basically means that I spent six weeks of the sober vegan, and yes it was very difficult. It's true that on the weekends I would indulge in some seafood and maybe some beer in moderation of course. Then comes Easter and we celebrate go to church you have a good time and afterwords is the Paschal feast which basically is a lot of meat, dairy, liquor. Lol. My contribution to the feast was bread pudding something simple but with all those wonderful horrible things that we abstain from during the most holy time. My boyfriend had inundated me with bread including a baguette. This bread pudding recipe is a variation of a traditional southern recipe, peach bread pudding with whiskey hard sauce.

Ingredients
3 cups stale French bread, cut in 3/4-inch cubes
2 cups milk
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 cup diced or jar peaches
1 tbsp whiskey or bourbon
Chopped pecans (optional)


With an electric mixer on high speed in a separate bowl, beat eggs and milk with sugar until thick and pale. Stir in the vanilla, ginger and cinnamon to the egg mixture. Add whiskey. Place a layer bread at the bottom of a casserole dish gently pour over a small portion of the egg mixture over the bread topped with walnuts and peaches repeat this layer by layer until you get to the top should reserve about a half a cup of egg mixture to pour on top then wrap and store in the refrigerator until overnight or at least four hours. Bake until firm, or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean, about 35 to 45 minutes. Let it slightly cool in the dish.


Whiskey Sauce:
2 cups heavy cream

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup granulated white sugar

2 tablespoons cornstarch

3/4 cup bourbon or other whiskey

Pinch salt

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

In a 1-quart saucepan set over medium heat, combine the cream, milk, and sugar. Place the cornstarch and 1/4 cup of the bourbon in a small mixing bowl and whisk to blend and make a slurry. Pour the slurry into the cream mixture and bring to a boil. Once the sauce begins to boil, reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Remove the sauce from the heat, add the salt, and stir in the butter and the remaining 1/2 cup of bourbon. Serve warm.

Speed Reading, always a good thing?

When I was a kid I loved to read. That is not so unusual for an only child. I was also a very good reader and read super-fast. By the time I was in 4^th grade, I read on a college level.  Each summer I probably breezed through 4 dozen books.  And I don’t mean 4 dozen Nancy Drew books, though I read a fair share of Nancy Drew (Babysitters club too).  H.G Wells, Robert Heinlein, Charles Dickens, Octavia Butler, the list goes on and on. 

In school when health problems had me out of class, I still had good marks. I would go home and read the assigned reading. In the case of history, I read the whole textbook during the first month of the year.  To this day, I retain information much better when I read it as oppose to someone telling me.  

There are 3 things that helped me become a good reader and one of them is coming back to bite me as an adult. Learning by phonics, studying Latin, and being a speed reader.  It’s hard to describe speed reading to people who don’t.  I don’t read word by word, I just sort of see the whole paragraph all at once and notice things.

Up until recently, I always consider speed reading a plus. That is till I had to start writing more.  Short reports, Medium reports, lots of emails that need to be both technically accurate and straightforward for wide audience.  Writing and proofreading have been tough.  Obviously, engineers aren’t naturally the best writers in the world. I aim to be “the engineer that everyone can understand”. So I’ve been taking some online writing classes to improve. My writing is something that as I do it more, it improves.  No longer do I write sentences such as:

 “There were 3 domestic hot water heaters that heat water to make it hot” <- #truestory -_-

 However, my proofreading skills seemed to going nowhere. Then it hit me, I am speed-reading through my own work.  Of course, I am going to miss the odd missing word, commas, slight spelling errors.  I’m conditioning myself to read my work slower while still maintaining my speed reading skills.  It is a process but I can already tell a difference. In addition, it helps me understand the flow of the sentences and I can draw from that for my own writing.

So to any of my fellow speed readers, to quote a current popular rap song “Slow down, you know you can't catch me. I move too fast on the gas, don't chase me. Slow down. ..This is how we do it in Northern California”

…don’t ask

till next time,

Where did 2014 go?

First site visit at the job Feb 2014

2014 was an interesting year.  Allot of really random things happened and yet I kept saying to myself: "2014 was an awesome year".  Then when I was home over the holidays, celebrating Kwanzaa with my maternal family I realized it was a rough year for me. Lost two aunts to cancer, a relationship ended, Cali grew too much for one of my best friends, another year 3000 miles away from home.  What kept me through?  My job, that job I got at the beginning of 2014 saw me through some rough times.  Even when things were really bad. I remember one month: May one of the worst months of 2014. I was dealing with a breakup and a dying aunt at the same time. But every weekday I woke up and went to work, writing reports, climbing roofs,  checking out water heaters. Most evenings I went to the gym afterwards and that combination of routine really made a difference.

Heading into the crawlspace

The blog suffered in 2014, mainly because my head got bigger than my writing capabilities. I had so many half-finished posts in the draft section.  This year I want to focus on writing in the blog more.  I think that writing more in the blog will help me with one of my resolutions for 2015: improving my writing skills for work.  All those years I thought being an engineer would get me out of needing to write well. I was wrong, lol. My other resolutions is to save more money and eat better to continue getting healthier so I can do better at my job. I love my job, seriously.  And since my job is my primary reason for living 3000 miles from home I want to strive to be the best darn engineer I can be.


Happy New Year


Jasmine DK