happy halloween!

lieutenant commander nicole hopes everyone had a great halloween*:

*this pic is from my phone, which does a nice job, but is no iphone. as a side-note, i think my photography skills are not as crappy as i think they are. this is because i took a lot of pics with other people's cameras (opc - yeah, you know me?) last night, and they were pretty darn good. this is good news. i think i'll ask for a decent camera for the holidays. but i digress.

mostly i went out on the town with some friends, but there was some pre-partying before-hand at an apartment.

nosh readers, i'm ashamed to admit that i was just too busy/lazy to make fancy treats for this portion of the evening. i resorted to my beloved no-pudge brownies with some reeses pieces thrown in (yes, this is a paradox - with the fat free and the candy mixing - but its best to just let it go).

yet, its fair to say i was preoccupied when i was making them. i opened the box, took out the white bag containing the dry mix, opened it, and dumped it out....back into the box:

about a second after i did it, i paused. i blinked. and stared. and then laughed at myself. until i cried. and then i gave the box a dunce cap...

this is what the final brownies looked like - i actually don't think this mix is meant to have add-ons. i did two batches (and i used the same pan for each, so they were in the oven at different times), and both took way too long to cook, and were a huge pain to get out of the pan. fyi.

**

and, since this is a food blog and so this technically fits, i'll share that two friends and i won $75 worth of free drinks because we had awesome costumes and were fabulous dancers to a really fun band playing last night. never mind the fact that i can't drink alcohol right now for medical reasons and that we gave most of it away. winners drink coke with a cherry in it!