superficial digital flexors and brownies

This afternoon I helped Leah and her lab partner, Katie, study for their first big anatomy test. The anatomy lab is this giant, sterile-looking room with metal desks and plastered animal skeletons (did you know that all four-legged animal skeletons look like dinosaurs? they do). It stinks of formaldehyde and sanitizing solution in there, and it was really busy - there had to be like a hundred white-coated students cramming for the exam, buzzing around their preservative-dripping, peeled-apart dogs.  I think to be sensitive to me, we stayed away from the stumpy carcasses (the dissected dogs have their legs removed for easier storage)  and looked at a horse skeleton.  I had a stack of prepared note cards and was quizzing Leah and Katie on muscle attachments - each card took a few minutes because they had to go back and forth with the "are you sure?" and the "lemme check the book" and then the "ohhh, the supracondylar crest! i thought it was the distal palmar epicondyle tubercle!" and etc. It seems like an amazing amount of information and I admire them and wish them luck, but I didn't stay long because I was a rare combination of too grossed out and too bored.

articulated skeleton of a horse

So I waited for the repulsion to subside and then I made these brownies - I think my greatest toaster-oven-baking success so far. I've been substituting rum for vanilla extract in all of these recipes, by the way, because the rum here is like $5.  I also think adding the teeniest bit of cinnamon to cocoa-based things makes it taste chocolatier, like how instant espresso powder is sometimes called for in a chocolate recipe (but I just...I just can't buy instant espresso powder).

brownies in our cheeks make us strong and happy