polite calendar dance

I just read this post at Simply Stated, RealSimple magazine's blog. This resonated with me so strongly! Toffi and I just had a reeeeeally long, serious ... ehm ... discussion about this very topic last night. I'm one of those people who says what she means and means what she says. Toffi is a bit more casual with language, and it sometimes leads to huge misunderstandings. Which category do you fall into?

cooking and baking cheat sheet

This isn't really about anything; I just thought I'd share. We have a big shelf of all sorts of cookbooks in our kitchen, and although I have my standard references (The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Spoon), I use a variety of books for the dishes I prepare. Some of the books are American, others are German. While I can approximate a lot of measurement conversions in my head, it's really annoying to have to do lots of mental math while following a complicated recipe, and whipping out a calculator doesn't necessarily make things any easier. You see, in the U.S., we measure mostly in cups, by volume, while in Germany, ingredients are measured in grams, by weight. So not only are you converting from U.S. to metric measurements, but you're also converting volume to weight for everything other than liquids. And don't even get me started with converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I've memorized a lot of equivalents, but I have never been able to remember the damn formula. So part of making cooking and baking more pleasant experiences has been to create a conversion table for quick reference. So here's my little reference card, put together over the years*:

* Yes, it really did take me years. My old conversion table included all sorts of temperature and measurement increments that are pretty much never used in cooking, rendering them useless visual clutter. So this is really the streamlined version of the table I first made about 4 years ago.