Easter Plans

Okay, so in an unprecedented act of planning ahead, I have officially (well, mostly) planned my Easter menu FOUR DAYS before Easter dinner is to be served.

This is incredible, especially if you remember that on Christmas, Peter had to drive around (at around noon, mind you, cutting it pretty close) looking for some store - any store - to be open and selling Christmas turkeys. I can honestly say that the Jews saved our Christmas dinner!

Easter Menu 2010

BREAKFAST
Hot Cross Buns (duh!)

DINNER

Soup:
Fresh Pea Soup

Meat:
Lamb (recipe so far undetermined)
Spiral Sliced Ham

Vegetables:
Thomas Keller's Homemade Creamed Corn
Raw Asparagus Salad
Stuffed Onions
Classic Green Bean Casserole
Shaved Carrot Ribbons Salad
Hasselback Potatoes

Extras:
Bunny Cake (no, it's not made of bunny.)
Tour de Deviled Eggs

And these adorable little chicks!

I Hate Paris in the Springtime

Springtime is like adolescence. No one enjoys adolescence.

Once the novelty of winter wears off, the snow gets slushy and all your cute sweaters and coats stop fitting because your pregnant belly is too unwieldy (oh wait, is that just me?) you're left just aching for those first few warm days of the new season. What you wouldn’t give for a little green in the garden. How you yearn for just one colorful flower, for the freedom of short sleeves and sitting on the back patio.

Then, all at once, a whole week of glorious weather opens up a world that you thought you’d forgotten. On your daily hike you see *gasp* a real live fern! Even the grossness of the season’s first tick stuck deep in the dog’s fur is made pleasanter by the subtle promise it holds of a whole summer’s worth of outdoor adventures.

Beware, though, this spring tease.

The following week will startle you out of your happy fantasies of gurgling brooks and daffodils.

It will get cold again. Quite cold.

And then it never. Stops. Raining.

(For the record, I've never been to Paris in the springtime or otherwise, so I really can't speak with much authority on the issue.)

Social Commentary from the Grocery Line

First of all, it was the express lane and that woman must have had 120 items. The sign says 12 ITEMS OR LESS for a reason.

Secondly, call me judgmental, but she didn't need all that food. She was, in my estimation, about 5'6" and around 250 pounds. Maybe 275. In spandex.

There are many, many reasons for people to be overweight -- I get that. Lack of nutritional education, eating disorders, depression, some sort of disability inhibiting exercise. Heck, we all can think of a bad day that ended in too much comfort food. It doesn't make it ok, but it makes it understandable.

Spandex, though? There's no excuse.

Here’s what really got on my nerves though: there was a little girl (offspring?) hanging off the front of her grocery cart, perhaps 5 years old and quite cute. She was cheerful and babbling on about some nonsense in the way that 5 year olds are prone to do. Despite how cute she was, I can understand the babbling getting a bit old and, if I were the adult in charge, I may even resort to the smile-and-nod routine for a few minutes.

Or even half an hour.

In such cases, no stones would be thrown by me.

However, this woman was not resorting to the smile-and-nod routine. She leaned heavily against her too-full cart with her back to the child, reading an US Weekly and listening to an IPod. Every once in a while the little girl would come around to the front of the cart and tug on her mother’s shirt, at which point the woman would turn and say, “WHAT?!” at that irritating I-have-headphones-in-and-therefore-can’t-gauge-my-indoor-voice volume.

Finally registering on the fact that her mother was far more interested in celebrity gossip than whatever cutie-patootie had to say, the little girl pointed to the cover and said “I like her shoes.”
For those of you (P, this is for you) who don’t know, Suri is the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. US Weekly thinks she might be growing up too fast, or so I gathered.

In response to this child’s innocent ploy for her mother’s attention, the mother ripped the earphones out of her ears and threw the unpurchased magazine back into the rack next to the Bubblicious and Almond Joys.

“NO!” she shouted, “those are supposed to be play-clothes! That is totally, completely inappropriate! NO. You do not like those shoes! They’ve dressed her up like a GROWN WOMAN. IT IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE.”

Never before have I witnessed the word “inappropriate” being used with quite so much unintended dramatic irony.

And for the record, I think Suri looks cute. Especially in those shoes.


Q: Is dramatic irony always unintentional? If it is, does that make "unintended dramatic irony" redundant? Was my majoring in English a total failure? And while we're on the subject, why am I a 25 year old college graduate still unable to spell the word "exercise" without the help of a dictionary?
A: It's past my bedtime.

Homemade Junk Food, Pretty Delicious III

In my final edition of this week's Homemade Junk Food, I offer you the most scrumptious cupcake you've ever eaten in your entire life. Seriously. It's life changing. This cupcake will not just knock your socks off, it'll knock the paint off your toenails right along with 'em.

Inspired by the ubiquitous Hostess Cupcake of convenience store fame, HC and I decided that surely, surely, we are each more hostess than the supposed "best selling snack cake in history". We are the hostesses with the mostesses.

At least, that's what we were determined to prove.

Here's the recipe from the blog Bake At 350.

*NB: As you can see, this recipe calls for a separate recipe for the filling and the little white swirly icing on the top. While I did follow these instructions, looking back on it, there was enough extra filling that it would have been more expeditious just to use the leftover filling as the decorative white icing as well.

For the Cupcakes
1 & 1/4 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
1 & 1/4 cups granulated sugar
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, lightly beaten

For the Filling
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla exrtact
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1 cup marshmallow creme

For the Ganache
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

For the Icing

1 stick unsalted butter
1 & 1/2 - 2 tablespoons milk
2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 350. Place paper liners in muffin tin for about 20 cupcakes.

Prepare the cupcakes: Bring the sugar and 1 cup water to a boil in a saucepan, stirring until the sugar dissolves, about 3 minutes. Pour into a large bowl; add the chocolate and butter and let sit, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate is melted and the mixture has cooled slightly. Stir in the vanilla.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a bowl.

Using a mixer, beat the eggs into the chocolate, then mix in the dry ingredients.

Divide the batter evenly between the prepared pans (about 1/4 cup batter per cupcake) and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool in the pans for about 25 minutes, then transfer cupcakes to a rack to cool completely.

(They will sink in the middle...they'll puff up when filled later)

For the filling: Using a mixer, cream the butter until light and fluffy. Beat in 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar. Add the vanilla and 1 tablespoon heavy cream; beat until smooth. Beat in the remaining 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar and 2 tablespoons heavy cream in batches, alternating after each addition. Beat in the marshmallow creme; set aside or refrigerate.

Once cupcakes are completely cooled, cut little inverted cones out of the tops of the cupcakes, only descending about halfway through the cupcake itself.

Above is a picture of the little cone turned upside down on top of the hollowed out cupcake.

Then, put the filling in an icing bag with a wide tip or a ziplock bag with a corner cut off, and fill the hollowed out parts of with the marshmallow cream. Break of the point of the cones you cut out, to make room for the filling, and replace the tops to cover the filling up. Some marshmallow cream may squeeze out if you overfilled them, but just clean it off with a butter knife (or you fingers), eat the extra, and call it even.

For the ganache: Place the chocolate in a stainless-steel bowl. Heat the cream and 1 tablespoon butter until just boiling, then pour over the chocolate; let stand for 5 minutes. Whisk until smooth. Add 2 teaspoons vanilla; let stand until cool but still glossy and liquid.

Spoon a little ganache on each cupcake and lightly spread with an offset spatula or a knife. Chill for at least 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the icing: Using a mixer, beat the remaining 1 stick butter, 1/4 teaspoon vanilla, the milk and confectioners’ sugar until smooth, adding more milk if needed. Spoon into a pastry bag with a small tip (I just used a ziplock with the corner cut off) pipe onto the cupcakes to decorate.

Now eat'em! You can't tell me those aren't 10,000 times better than the artificially flavored variety. As I said in my Pretzel Dog post, I don't even like Hostess Cupcakes, really.

But these -- these are heavenly.

Homemade Junk Food, Pretty Delicious II

HC and I have been pretty busy with the boys gone, and as you may have gathered, part of our business has been in the kitchen.

One of our several homemade junkfood tasks was Spaghetti O's. In terms of a review, HC loves them and is working through the several tons that our recipe produced. I think they're alright, but taste a lot like the canned version, which, while it was our inspiration, isn't exactly one of my favorite foods (excluding that week about a month ago when Chef Boyardee was all I could think about. I blame pregnancy hormones).

Below you'll find the original recipe, but then if you read the process you can see that I ended up making quite a few additions for flavor.

HOMEMADE SPAGHETTI O'S

6 cups canned tomato sauce
3-4 cups water
2-3 teaspoons garlic powder (depending on how garlicky you like it)
1 lb bag anelletti (ring shaped pasta- you could use any small pasta- alphabet or stars would be fun!)
1-1 1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (fresh shredded is best!)
1/4-1/2 cup milk
2 tbs butter
salt, to taste

1. Combine tomato sauce, water and garlic powder in a large pot. Bring to a boil.
2. When the tomato mixture is boiling, add the pasta to the pot. Cook, stirring frequently (the pasta is tiny, so it's easy to stick to the bottom) for about 20 minutes, or until the pasta is soft.
3. Stir in cheese until melted. Add milk, butter and salt to taste.



Okay, first, I can't abide raw garlic in my kitchen right now (again, I blame hormones), so I used a couple shakes of McCormick's Garlic Powder. Word to the wise: that stuff is potent. A little goes a loooong way.

Secondly, once those little pasta rings start softening, you have to watch them carefully: See how they all stack up on the edge? They're suicidal little suckers. They'll leap right off. You have to keep knocking them back into the pot. Animating pasta with suicidal screeches when they drop on the hot burner, optional.

This is me stirring the cheese. I ended up adding extra, because I wanted a little more kick. Following the recipe exactly, they really do turn out a lot like the can (although I had to add quite a bit of salt). For those of us who want to kick it up a notch, try the following: onion powder, chili powder, basil, ground black pepper, and possibly even some Tabasco.
Just taste is as you go along, watch out for the jumpers, and be creative! They're pretty hard to mess up.


Next up: Hostess Cupcakes!

Homemade Junk Food, Pretty Delicious

I don't even really like Hostess Cupcakes.

I wasn't born with a sweet tooth (I was lucky, I guess, just getting stuck with a fat tooth. You know, a hankering for all things butter and bacon...) and my Mamma didn't buy much junk food.

She bought it so rarely, in fact, that I often tried to finagle my Dad into getting it for me. He was a sucker for treats, as long as they were treats he liked to eat, too. Symphony chocolate bars? Absolutely. Fanta? Not so much.

When I was in fourth grade my family took a vacation to Sweden where we got to stay in a great apartment in Stockholm owned by close friends of my parents who were in the Swedish parliament. The whole Sweden experience was totally awesome -- except the breakfast.

While my Mamma hadn't served us anything very processed for breakfast at home, I was used to a steady diet of brown-sugared cream of wheat, pancakes, eggs, or King Vitamin breakfast cereal. "Muesli" was not on the menu. Nor was it welcome, especially since my Dad referred to it affectionately as "bird droppings and sawdust." Yeah, that nickname pretty much sealed the deal for me. Also, I was still in my I'm-afraid-of-fish phase so gravlax was totally out. After a couple days of me refusing to eat breakfast, my frustrated father finally marched me down the nearest cobblestone street to a corner store.

"What do you want to eat?" he demanded.

No fool, I saw my opportunity. "Count Chocula."

He had never heard it, and wandered, lost, up and down the foreign aisles for a while. I will never forget the look of exasperation on my father's face -- or puzzlement on the poor Swedish clerk's -- as he tried to explain his search. Priceless.

For the record, I first tasted Count Chocula after I was married and buying my own groceries. It was delicious.

Much to my bemusement, I now balk at purchasing junk food for my family. I walk, freely, up and down the aisles of the grocery store staring at the vast sea of processed foods and all I can think of is, "Maybe I should get another bag of radishes. Those went really fast on the last crudites platter." It's a curse.

That is not to say that I'm a health food nut; on the contrary, I'm happy to try my hand at just about anything the kids can think of to eat. That's the key though -- homemade is healthier, even when it's not a terribly healthy dish to begin with. At least it's fairly free of corn syrup, preservatives, false coloring and other three-eyed-fish producing chemicals.

With that in mind, I present the following recipes:

1. Pretzel Dogs
2. Spaghetti-O's
3. Hostess Cupcakes

The recipes themselves along with much prettier pictures than mine are found if you click through the links to the underlying articles, but the changes I made to them can be found as I describe the process. The Spaghetti O's and Cupcakes are going to get separate blog entries, because I made a lot of changes to the one and there are a lot of stages to the other.

And no, I didn't make the "dogs" from scratch. Just the pretzels.

Given protein's natural superiority on the dinner table hierarchy, let's begin with the pretzels. I have one word for you:

Deliciousness. Galore.

Okay, that's two words for you, but I could wax poetic on these suckers all night long.

I followed the recipe exactly, except for the actual rolling of the dough out into the long pieces you're supposed to use to make the pretzel shapes and twirl around the hot dogs. The instructions say "pencil thin, or thinner" but miner were about the thickness of my index finger. My fingers are pretty narrow, but not nearly as narrow as a pencil. And you know what? They were perfect. Next time, I may even make them thicker, since that would make them even softer than they already were.

HC and I proved not very talented in the pretzel-shaping department, so we got a little creative. Here's pretty much how we progressed (digressed? regressed?):

Basic Pretzel Shapes and Dogs:
That one in the middle there was a frustrated first attempt. We like to think it looked like a person curled up in the fetal position face down. Don't worry, we didn't cook them too deeply brown.

Creative Use of Too-Long Pretzel Arms: Butterfly
That one next to it that's mostly cut off was just a rope.

Let's Get These Things Over With: Spiral and Bracelets
It's rude to play with your food...but what about wearing it?

After they come out of the oven you paint them with melted butter and sprinkle salt on top. The texture was perfect. They were amazing. Also, if you don't like cleaning gunked-up cookie sheets, parchment paper is a godsend.
Oh also, another change I made was to take them out of the oven much earlier than the recipe calls for: with a good ten minutes left to go, I took a peek and they were on the verge of over-browning. Luckily my ninja reflexes kicked in and saved the pretzel day.

Seriously, these things are extremely delicious. I've only ever had one pretzel dog from the mall and it was ok.

These, however, are heavenly.

NEXT UP: Spaghetti O's!

Floored.

Tomorrow will be a cooking blog.

Today? Today is a complaining blog.

I hate interior design. This is a serious problem for me, since I purchased a house built in the 1960s and promptly spent a fortune remodeling it. With no designer. I sucked it up for the first year, when I told myself I could get it all set and never touch it again. Great idea, except that it wasn't all finished by the end of the first year.

But my brain was.

So here I am, almost three years later, having moved on to puppies and gardens and producing offspring, when I realize that half of my house is still only painted with primer. Why is it still painted with primer? Because I'm secretly masochistic. When I do notice that things around the house need to be done (which is surprisingly often given how slowly I seem to be progressing) I think the following series of thoughts:

1. Lydia, that looks terrible.
2. You should call Dan Dan the Handyman and have him take care of it.
3. Calling Dan will require you to make some decisions (paint color, landscaping themes, actually *purchasing* furniture).
4. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making the decisions, you may as well just do the job yourself and save the money. It can't be that hard.
5. If you don't just call Dan and make it happen you're never EVER going to make those decisions.
6. Ooooh is that RIGHT? You're not the boss of me, I can do what I want!

Yes, I do occasionally tell myself I'm not the boss of me. And if I'm not really sure who is.

Possibly P. Except I get cranky when he tells me what to do. Which doesn't mean he's not the boss, but...

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I go back to ignoring the decisions in question.

Until I can seriously no longer ignore them. Like now.

A year ago, my basement flooded, which is a pretty stinkin' big deal since it's fully finished and houses both my teenagers. It was awful and disgusting (yes, it was that kind of flooding) and I'd rather not revisit those memories. When all was said and done, the cork flooring that I spent what felt like years deciding on when we created that space out of nothing, was damaged. Not badly damaged, but damaged.

I filed and insurance claim, reminded myself that the most damaged area was in the bedroom of a 17 year old slob monkey, and didn't think another thing about it.

EXACTLY A YEAR LATER, literally, to the day, my basement flooded again. This time, the in-floor radiant heating broke and leaked up through the cement under flooring, totally saturating all the cork.

I can't ignore the damage anymore. It haunts me. The gaping ravines between the tiles where they've swelled and released again, taunt me. They giggle at my silly attempts to be "different" and eco-friendly with my cork choice. I can't even tell them to put a cork in it because...well, it would be rather redundant.

So now I have to choose flooring for the downstairs all over again *sob*. I so hate choosing permanent things for my house.

There are so many things to consider: will I like it in the end? Will anyone else like it? Will it break the bank? How will it effect resale? Am I going crazy?

Don't answer that last one.

My choices at this point are some kind of tile, or some kind of hardwood that is raised off the floor with pressure treated wood underneath to keep it relatively dry for future flooding. The idea of having tile in the three bedrooms down there seems so ... cold. Also, I've never seen tile in a pretty bedroom unless it's Mediterranean style or something, which my house is most definitely not. The wood would (wood would wood would) be nice, but I'm sorta worried about it getting messed up in another flood despite being an inch off the ground.

Either way, deciding on a style and color may very well defeat me.