Busy at Work Lately

via Serious Eats

Oh dear, pardon me for disappearing from this blog for a few weeks longer than originally expected! Quite a few things came up at the office after my deposition, and I'm only just now coming up for air for a brief moment. Things will be extremely hectic at work for the next three months at a minimum - and maybe for longer than that - so I can't make any promises about how often I'll be able to post in that time window. 

Many apologies, I wish I still had the energy to write blog posts in the late evenings after work, the way I used to earlier in my career. Alas, these days I'm only able to work on the blog over the weekend, and some weekends I'm just too tired. 

The photo above is from the recipe for Lacy Brown Butter and Ricotta Cookies at Serious Eats. Mine didn't turn out quite so lacy-looking. It's apparently a recipe where the finished product can look very different depending on the brand of ricotta used. The 35 cookies estimate when portioning the dough into roughly one tablespoon sized scoops is far off, by the way, I only got something like 19 cookies. For those with small households, I'd suggest baking only a small batch at a time and freezing the rest of the portioned out dough, as I found the texture was best the day they were baked.

I liked, but didn't enthusiastically love, this cookie recipe. It's a good addition to my limited baking repertoire and not very difficult to make. But if one doesn't do the toasted sugar or used vanilla pod upgrades, the flavor is not that nuanced. (Then I used the rest of that 16 ounce tub of ricotta to make a one-third portion of Maialino's ricotta pancakes, which was a good amount for breakfast for two.)

My recent - and first ever - deposition as the first-chair attorney took place in Miami. I was quite nervous about travel and COVID risk before my departure. It turned out fine, though I got a bit of a scratchy throat and sniffles afterwards. I took three at-home COVID tests in the following week - two of them in the days immediately after my very mild symptoms started - and all were negative. 

I found the experience of departing from Miami International Airport rather annoying. The signage about which security checkpoint to use for which gates was practically nonexistent. I also encountered the longest TSA security line I'd ever seen, practically the entire way down the very long terminal and just about ready to start wrapping around again. Then some of the airport employees directed the back section of the line - which I was in - to some other also not well-marked security checkpoint. When I tried to ask if that would get me where I needed to go, the employee did not deign to answer my question. (It did all work out, though, I got through the new checkpoint in barely 20 minutes.)

That's also a long way of saying I should really learn my lesson about getting TSA Precheck, given that domestic business travel is somewhat common for me! When I travel through my main "home" airports - JFK and LGA in New York; SJC in California - it never really looks like having Precheck saves much more than 5 to 10 minutes. It's only when I have business trips that I go through various other airports where it seems like Precheck would save a lot more time, and I swear I'll absolutely get it for my next trip. Then I get home and promptly forget about this promise until my next trip. 

With the sudden sharp downturn of COVID cases in NYC after the Omicron surge, those international business trips I keep mentioning are back on the agenda for March. (The original pre-Omicron plan was to space the trips out starting in late January, but now we're packing them all into March.) I fear this could end up being a logistical nightmare due to COVID-related issues, but I don't really call the shots on when we travel versus when we try to do things remotely. 

I hope that everyone is well! And if anyone has any suggestions for other not-too-difficult cookie recipes I should try, I'm all ears.