You Should Invite Me To Dinner

Because if you do I will bring,

Chocolate Caramel Frozen Parfaits

These were so so very good this weekend! I brought them to Kristin and Michael's house for dessert on Saturday night.They turned out exactly like the picture and tasted like frozen chocolate mousse.

I even made the homemade chocolate sauce and real whipped cream as an accompaniment.

However, foodie over zealousness prevails in this recipe as well. There are not that many ingredients in the recipe, and yet.... and yet, it uses so many bowls....At one point it says "melt x in a small saucepan" and  then it goes on to say, "In another small saucepan, heat up x"  What? How many small saucepans do they think I have. The answer, is that I have 1!! Just like I have only 1 bowl to my kitchenaid stand mixer yet the recipe has you mix up the custard for 10 min and then "in another bowl" beat the whipped cream...Those extra bowls are like $40, I don't think so.....

Overall, except for all of the dishwashing, it was a pretty easy and impressive dessert.

Homemade Cherry Liquer

This past July we went cherry picking and I mixed up some Cherry liquer using this Crabapple Liquer recipe.

I meant to let it sit for a while and then strain it and bottle it for Christmas presents.   I never got around to it. (Sorry friends!) So tonight, 7 months after starting it, I strained and bottled it.  It's pretty delicious. You don't need to wait 7 months to enjoy something like this, usually 30 days is sufficient. 

I never know when to post these kinds of posts-When I making it, when I'm done or when you could logically make something similar. Because really, it does you very little good to read about this now if  you want to make something like this. If you are planning on coming over soon for a drink then this information may be worth it to you now.... 

Next time around I'll post it as a reminder when I make it.

It's a gorgeous ruby red and tastes a little like port. The crabapple one did not taste like port. It was a sweeter and more syurpy. Just like the Crabapple Liquer, I'll probably drink this as a cocktail mixed with sparkling water. Bridget would make martinis out of it. I had a some tonight in a glass straight and it was nice having a little July sunshine on a cold winter night in Janurary.

Genesee Country Village & Museum Pioneer Experience Surprise!

Back when I lived like a pioneer, the museum had a photographer take photos of us.  I've never seen any of them, but have a large number of my own (non-professional of course.)

This morning I was browsing the museum website and stumbled on myself cooking over an open fire! That was a fun little surprise.

If you look at the picture please notice how nice my fire looks. None of my personal pictures show my fire like this!  The dutch oven they are referring to in the description is holding pumpkin and apple soup for our dinner on Friday night. To the right of the dutch oven is a pot of water that stays by the fire all day so that you have warm water when you need it. Of course you need to first carry the water with a yoke and buckets to get it to that pot!  Luckily, the water source is uphill so you walk downhill when your buckets are full!

What I am doing in the picture is heating an iron ladle full of water to clean the dishes with as utensils and wooden kitchen instruments needed to have boiling water poured over them after scrubbing them in the wash basin. Notice how I am holding it with 2 hands. This is because it takes a little while for the water to heat to boiling and an iron ladle tends to get heavy! 

I like how it says women would have had little time to fuss in the kitchen as there is too much work to be done elsewhere. While this is true, my own experience was a lot of fussing in the kitchen, mostly due to the fact that there were so many visitors that it literally took me all day to cook 4 items in that fireplace.

What a nice little reminder for me today of my experience!

Zipper Anxiety

As practice for kindergarten,my girl's teacher had all the kids line up in the hall today and whoever could put their coat on and zip it up would get a sticker.

My daughter, like most children her age, gets inordinately excited over getting a sticker. My cynical side wants to take her aside and assure her she can buy herself as many sticker as she wants when she gets older, but I know that's not the point. The point is to get your coat on. And ZIP it...

I knew there was going to be trouble as zipping isn't something she's mastered yet.

She gets the coat on. And tries to zip it

No luck.

She tries some more. Children all around her are all zipped up and proudly wearing stickers on their coats. A small boy who called me "A little old" a few weeks back, tells me: "She's can't do it."

Thanks Captain Obvious.....

I can see this really start to bother her. I'm standing against the wall opposite her in the hallway and trying not to burn holes in her coat with my laser-like stare.  My hands are practically tingling with the need to zip her jacket.

She's struggling. I watch. I think I started sweating.....

I try and use my powers of telekinesis to will the darn thing to zip, but to no avail.... 

She faces the wall and starts to cry. Her teacher tells her that she'll do it again on Wed so she'll get another chance. This does not make her feel better.

I go over, bend down and ask if she'd like to work on it a little more.

Now she's pretty stubborn and sometimes when she can't do something she completely gives up so I wasn't sure how this was going to work out. 

She literally took a deep breath and dove back into the task. I was so proud of her.

After many anxiety inducing tries, she FINALLY gets it all zipped up. I finally exhale the breath I've been holding. Other mommies and her teacher make a big deal out of this. She gets the sticker. I go over to her.  She buries her head in my shoulder and whispers,

""Now I have another problem, I've very embarrassed."

The cynical side of me wants to tell her that there will be way bigger things for her to feel embarrassed over in her lifetime,  but I know that's not the point. I can't even tell her it's no big deal because she's embarrassed and really, that's how she feels.....

Good lord, THESE are the things people forget to tell you about parenting. That some day you will be standing in the pre-school hallway and will be unable to do anything about your child's struggles or embarrasment. You will WATCH  and pray she gets it.  Because IF you help her, you really aren't helping her and she still won't get the sticker. And then you will reflect on how this is merely the beginning of this process for you and for her.

This will overwhelm you a little.  This is why people forget to tell you these things.

I wonder if her teacher was training me today more than she was making sure my girl could zip up for next year.

Next year I may look for a coat with buttons.

Indian Night

This weekend we had Indian night.

At one time, my husband dated an Indian girl and as a result, developed a great love of Indian food & culture. In fact, on one of our first dates he took me to my first Indian restaurant. He ate the entire meal with his hands while I shot sidelong glances at the other diners, none of whom were using their digits like utensils. The whole thing was a little bizarre. Luckily, the waitress was suitably impressed enough for me to figure out that this was completely acceptable. Knowing my penchant for authenticity you would think I would have been more impressed by this than I was.  I was just happy when they came around with hot towels at the end of the meal....

But I digress.

Saturday, my husband took our daughter to the Indian market where they came back with a myriad of Indian fare from homemade samosas to Indian snack food, Indian beer, mango juice and mango ice cream for dessert. They also bought incense, henna tattoos and bindis (sparkly ones!) for our foreheads. We made black gram lentil curry (from a package) and Beef Vindaloo, from scratch!  The beef was crazy good and not too spicy, even my daughter liked it. It was served over rice with a side of chapati bread, which one could use to scoop up the food with. I still opted for a fork....

We let our daughter wear the Sari that we have. She looked so cute all wrapped up! I actually wore the skirt of the sari with a tee shirt and Indian scarf. We both wore the bindis but apparently I put them too high on our foreheads (I think perhaps a slavic woman's 3rd eye may be located higher up.) We also listened to Bollywood faves on Pandora as a musical accompaniment!

Craigslist Creepies

In addition to selling various things on eBay and books on Amazon, I will occasionally sell items on Craigslist that are too big to ship or don't translate well to eBay.

On Craigslist it is exceptionally fast and easy to list something and it's free. It's a lot less formal and I don't go crazy with description nor do I have to weigh it and package it. (I always include a picture though) I've sold almost everything I ever listed (Although I only really list things I think are going to sell. Maybe I've sold 15 or 20 things this way.)

This afternoon I listed something. And this evening I got the following email:

"I'll be by tomorrow at 12 to pick it up." 

That was the entire email. No asking if I still had it. No name. Cryptic email address. No asking for directions (which are not on my ad, neither is my email address.)

12 noon? 12 Midnight?

To someone who is afraid of killers this sounds oddly close to:

"I'll be by tomorrow at 12 to hack you into a million pieces."

Needless to say, I'm just going to ignore this person. If you can't give me your name then I certainly can't give you directions to where I live. Additionally, I never have people come over to pick things up when it's just myself and my daughter at home. I always make them wait until my husband is home. And even then I meet most people at the door for a quick exchange of money and stuff. I have let 2 people into my home but they were both pregnant women buying baby stuff and I felt like I could have taken either one of them....

Gardening Miscalculation

I like to think of myself as an ok gardener.

I'm no expert by any stretch, but I get by. I know when to prune things and how to grow a halfway decent vegetable garden. I know the names of many flowers and have perfected herb growing such that I usually enjoy fresh herbs all year long. (Ok. don't be too impressed with that, herbs are the easiest things to grow ever.) At this time of year I'm used to picking fresh herbs out  from under the snow and using them. (The more hardy types like thyme, parsley, sage, etc...)
This winter this is not the case. Back in the spring I moved the herb garden to a lovely little patch next to the driveway. Deer don't eat herbs so I could not see taking up valuable fenced space. And they were all mixed in and among the veggies. Why not, I reasoned, group them all together. It was very green this summer and really prolific.


What I failed to take into consideration is the fact that this garden is EXACTLY where the snowplow guy pushes the snow every year. So rather than having a few inches of snow covering them, there is 4 feet of snow. And even I'm not going to shovel out my herbs from a depth of 4 feet. And it's that dirty parking lot snow. It's completely gross.

What gets me is how come I didn't think of this? I've been gardening more than 10 years now. How come when I was moving those plants this never occurred to me? All summer long when I would take my coffee out in the morning or sit out in the evening with a glass of wine, how come this never crossed my mind? Even this fall when I was picking herbs to dry BECAUSE OF THE COMING WINTER and then writing the check to pay the snowplow guy, I never made the connection.  My god, look at the picture, look at all those herbs. Look at the DRIVEWAY.....

I'm actually marveling at my obtuseness on this one.

I guess no matter how good or how long you do something, there is always something to still be learned.....