Gift Idea

 Now that it is November, the Christmas holiday decorations are in full bloom.  There are certain stores that I am just avoiding to avoid the glitter.  Part of the holiday season, means finding gifts for loved ones and family. I am going to share with you the gift that keeps on giving.

A gift that will not only provide emotions but create memories. 

A gift of a potentially haunted object.

It doesn’t matter where you live, thrift store and antique store are a staple. Anything you buy at thrift store or antique market has the potential to have memories attached to it. What is a haunting but a memory of a person or event? 

This gift is simple:

1. Find an object that speaks to you. 
2. Write about a potential history of the item
3. Gift the item to someone

You want an example?  Absolutely.  

 

The Dog:

When I was a young girl, my mother had a dog named Riley. Riley was a sheepdog mixed with terrier. My mother loved this dog, and took this dog with us when we moved across country.  Riley was sweet as can be, but epileptic. There wasn’t any sort of trigger to what would cause an epileptic episode for Riley, so all of us learned how to take care of him when he would start to shake and drool.  This statue is a memory of the epileptic dog of my childhood. 

If I were to gift this statue to my mother, it doesn’t matter how ugly it is or that the eyes look like they are trying to escape its face. Adding a little story to the statue would guarantee that she would keep this monstrosity forever and ever, because it is now haunted with a memory.  

Love Notes

 Often things are not as bad as they seem.  

It is all a matter of perspective. I was reminded of this when I tried a recipe out of The Baking with Kim Joy cookbook. Kim Joy was a contestant on The Great British Bake-off who makes ridiculously cute eats. Most of them are almost too cute to want to eat.  I was gifted her cookbook recipe for Christmas and used Mother’s Day as an excuse to try something out of. 

This is what  I was trying to make.

This is what they looked like coming out of the oven.

This is what they looked liked iced.

The entire time making them I was nervous. I am admittedly more of a cook than a baker. Baking is really precise with measurements and if you don’t follow it exactly then the chemical reactions in the bake will be off and it won’t turn out right.  Cooking is more forgiving. If you screw too terribly cover it in cheese or gravy.  Many things have been fixed with cheese, gravy or both. (This is where my theory on the creation of Poutine is pretty sound.) 

While I agonized over how imperfect the bake was and how Paul Hollywood would hate it, I forgot something very important.  These treats were not for Paul Hollywood. They were for my mother in law. My mother in law didn’t see how shaky my icing was, or how imperfect the envelopes were shaped. She saw how much effort my husband and I put into making them for her. We did everything from making the jelly from scratch to rolling the short bread to keeping the cats from tasting them.  It was an adventure that I was able to have with my husband for a beloved member of the family that appreciated our efforts.  

Sometimes you have to step back take a breathe and give yourself a break.  It is about perspective and the hardest  view to change is your own.  Often things are not as bad as they seem. 

Cemetery Picnic

What do you pack for a picnic at a cemetery?

Okay.  I should probably back up. For Mother’s Day, I took my mother to a cemetery for a picnic. This is not a hint to my mother that she has one foot in the grave and not a me being dramatic and exaggerating the truth.  The truth is, I did take my mother to a cemetery.  The cemetery in question is about an hour away and is the cemetery that hold the remains of the first generation of our family in America.  Pretty exciting stuff if you are interested in family history/ genealogy.  Since the cemetery is about an hour a way, it makes sense to bring a picnic and refreshment, which bring me back to my original question. 

What do you pack for a picnic at a cemetery?

Do you go full funeral meal and bring cold salads and finger food? Do you liven it up and play off a Halloween theme? Do keep it to traditional picnic food? These questions rolled around in my head, until I did a mash up of all three.

Cemetery Picnic Menu

Chicken Salad on Onion Rolls with Cheese and Tomato

Deviled Eggs

Marinated Mushrooms

Mozzarella and Tomato

Strawberries

Dirt Cups. (Chocolate Pudding with crushed Oreo’s and Gummy Worms)

What would you pack for your picnic?

Filling the Bag

My mother gave me a box of zippers. I have been practicing by making zipper bags. After about a dozen bags, I needed to come up with a purpose for the bags. I cannot keep giving away the random bags. 

I decided to make some of the bags into a To Go Kit. Or as my husband has called it a The Girl Kit. (In truth my husband did back peddle beautifully and renamed it The Non Gender Specific Kit.)

The idea behind the kit is to keep it in the car and use it when needed. It isn’t a first aid kit.  

Here is what is in the kit so far:

1. Hand Sanitizer
2. Allen Wrench (hex key)
3. Bands Aids
4. Alcohol Wipes
5. Lint Roller
6. Floss
7. Tooth Paste
8. Bobby Pins
9. Sunblock
10. Hand Lotion
11. Face Mask
12. Magnifying glass
13. Nail File
14. Sole Savers
15. Hot Chocolate
16. Vanity Kit (cotton balls and cotton swabs)
17. Pads/ Tampons
18. Face Mask
19. Shampoo
20. Makeup wipe
21. Safety Pins 

Other than a cup of tea, is there anything that you think is missing in this kit?  

Tomato Soup Resolutions

 Nobody wants to hear about New Years Resolutions. A resolution is a personal thing and if you made one, it is something personal to you and not anyone else.   I have a few attainable resolutions that I have made this year.  They aren’t anything major, but if asked I’ll share all of them.  Today I have one that I want to talk about and it is going to be quite a journey.  I want to write about the journey and to do so, I need to share the goal. 

I want to make the best tomato soup.  

I know.  It isn’t what anyone was expecting. I don’t even know if it what I was expecting when I was thinking about resolutions, but then outside influences happened.  My husband is a unique outside influence, because he doesn’t even try to influence anything other than my music choices. We were watching a food documentary and talking about favorite foods and comfort foods and the goal came to me out of the wild blue yonder. 

When I was a wee young lass (think around age 8), my mother and I would eat tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches together. It was our thing when I was a kid, because no one else in the house liked tomato soup.  At the time I didn’t like tomato soup. I just wanted to hang out with my mom and I loved grilled cheese sandwiches.  I learned swiftly that cheese and tomato are secret best friends.

I am an adult now, and I love tomato soup.  It is the go to soup that my husband and I can agree on and is a nostalgic sort of comfort food. If I am making soup, it is in the top the requested.  Until recently, I have never made tomato soup from scratch. It has always been a name brand canned soup.  Recently I have made my first attempts into learning the art of tomato soup and for a soup that some think of as a side step away from ketchup, it is not an easy soup to make. 

The first step in the journey was to do research.  I have a plethora of cookbooks, but the one I used as the basis of my first attempt was Ski Town Soup.  (If you recall I may have blogged about a chili I made when I was going through a cookbook challenge. The chili was magnificent.) This cookbook held half a dozen variations of tomato soup from notable ski resorts.  I was able to flip through and compare the different ingredients and preparations with ease and come up with a game plan for my first attempt.

 

First attempt consisted of roasting tomatoes in the oven and then peeling them. While the tomatoes were roasting with rosemary and thyme, diced carrots and onion were sweating it out together in a sauce pan.   After the tomatoes were done being roasted they were peeled, chopped and cooked with the carrots and onion. After simmering together, chicken broth and basil was was added and all of it spent quality time in a blender until it was an odd tomato smoothie.  After blender time, cream was added to the soup to make it a creamy tomato.  Salt and pepper were added through out the process.  Everything was heated through and served with grilled cheeses sandwiches.  The end result wasn’t terrible, but certainly not the best. 

The ratio of carrots used in comparison to tomatoes, made it seem more like a carrot soup. (Who knew carrots were that mighty?) I like the roasted tomatoes. I think they brought out a nice flavor, even if peeling skins off hot tomatoes is an act of madness. I was a nice soup, but not the best tomato soup.  Additional  experiments will commence.  If you have any suggestions on processes/ ingredients to tweak let me know.  There is no wrong path to take to get to the best tomato soup.

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Calico Ghost Town

Sit right back and you will hear a tale. A tale of a fateful trip. It started...  Okay, that may be the beginning of Gilligan’s Island and my trip wasn’t fateful, but like most of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island it was at the very least interesting.  

In fact the adventure that I am thinking about is no where near boating or water and take place in Calico Ghost Town.  When I was a young lass, my mother took me camping at Calico Ghost Town and I distinctly remember the Camp Ground Keeper warning us to never wander into any of the mines, because our bodies might not be found and to always dump your shoes before putting them on, because scorpions liked to hide in them.  Needless to say, we only camped there once and the place left a lasting impression on me, because anytime I am in the desert, I constantly think about scorpions and death by scorpions sting.

 

Now, lets fast forward at least a decade and the urge to go back to Calico Ghost Town strikes me.  I have a love for caves, and what is a mine but a man made cave?  Or at least that is the thought running through my head when I cajole my dear father into a drive to the desert.  When we get there, the town is nothing like I remembered.  Which was wonderful. It was one of my favorite things ever, a roadside attraction with a historical flair. Yes, there were mines, but there was so much more.  The town catered to tourists of a family nature, and there were enough activities to keep young children entertained while receiving a brief history of mining and life on a new frontier.  Pretty much everything my dad could roll his eyes at and humor me on was there, whether that was to dress up in old times clothes for pictures or to ride a train that pointed out the history of mining and the area or walk through the Mystery Shack.  

While most would say that it doesn’t do any good to go down memory lane, sometimes it is just what is needed.  I appreciate the time I went as a small child and the fear of scorpions it provided, but I also appreciate go back and seeing how things can change in a positive way an created new memories.

Opossum Lake

It is Mother’s Day, so it would only make sense to talk about a time my mother may have tried to murder me. Or this is a story about me exaggerating the events of a Sunday morning. 

My mother loves to read murder mystery and detective novels.  When I was a surely teenager I remember us both burning through Sue Grafton  and Mary Higgins Clark novels. After reading so many novels there becomes a check list of things that look suspicious when they happen in real life.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The birds were chirping and there a was that relaxed feeling in the air. This in itself should be suspicious, because only cliched mysteries start with, “It was a dark and stormy night...”.  On that beautiful Sunday morn, my mother drove me out to a remote spot in the woods by a lake.  Yes, this is where all the warning bells should be going off. There is a reason why there are so many horror movies with grisly murders that happen near lakes and in the woods.  It is really easy to “lose” a body in the woods and is not exactly easy to comb a lake.  Check off another box on the murder list.

Arriving at the destination my mother casually mentioned that the lake was recently refilled and stocked with fish.  Is there a more menacing name for a lake than Opossum Lake?  Literally, opossums play dead.  If we were in a murder mystery, the killer would play dead and then strike.  The refilled lake in some of the off shoots there are at least a dozen or more feet deep there are trees that have poke out of the water like grave markers.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to picture a body tied to at the base of the tree.  I am sure this is at least three more check boxes on the murder list. 

Mentioning of the concern for bodies under the water and I am reminded that fish have just been stocked.  Fish eat everything.  Any evidence of my presence would be quickly remove by nature if worse came to worse.  More items for the murder list.  How does our hero escape this dastardly plot of  mayhem?  Easy I talk my way out of it. With careful consideration and the knowledge that I was in charge of putting her in a home when she becomes old and infirm, she let me live another day.  It was a close call, or at lease it was by this account of the story.

By now, my mother is reading this and rolling her eyes.  The non murder themed sequence of events, is that it was a beautiful day and we went kayaking in the newly refilled lake, where I spent half the time worrying about tipping the kayak and drowning by being tree that was poking out of the water and her laughing at me for being ridiculous.   So, it wouldn’t have been a murder, but more of an accidental death that didn’t happen.  I am sure my mother is now wondering if she dropped me too many times as a child if a simple day of kayaking turned into an attempted murder.  

Happy Mother’s Day!

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

I should probably call this Thai Chicken Noodle Soup or Not My Mother’s Chicken Noodle Soup, but both of those seemed like really long titles for a recipe this delicious.  (Mom- If you are reading this, your Chicken Corn Soup is awesome and also great comfort food.)

This recipe originated from my husbands work.  They have a healthy eating section to encourage positive life choices and this recipe sounded good to him, so he forwarded it to me. I took what I liked out of the recipe and molded it into something heartier that makes a good meal by itself or an excellent part of a soup and sandwich meal.

Ingredients:

1 large sweet potato

1 tablespoon of olive oil

2 tablespoons water

1 Onion diced

1 tablespoon dried ginger or 2 inches  of fresh ginger rood thinly sliced

2 tablespoon curry powder or 1 tablespoon red curry paste

1 (15 ounce) can unsweetened coconut milk

3 cups of vegetable broth

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1/2 cup fresh chopped cilantro

1 cup edamame 

3/4 cup riced cauliflower & sweet potato mix 

2 cooked chicken breasts chunked in bite size pieces(I use rotisserie to save time)

1 small packet of Thai vermicelli rice noodles

Directions:

1. Wrap sweet potato in cling form wrap and microwave for 7 minutes.  This should cook the potato all the way through.  Put the potato in the freezer to bring down temperature for handling later.
2. In a pot for noodles, fill will water and put on the heat to boil noodles.  A watched pot never boils, so move on to step 3 as the water heats. 
3. In a large soup pot, heat olive oil over medium heat.  Add the onion and ginger; cook until onions are tender and translucent. This should take about 5 minutes. Add the curry and water and stir together with onion ginger mix for about a minute.  Once everything is blended, add the unsweetened coconut milk and vegetable broth to make the soup broth.  It should smell amazing.  Bring soup broth to a boil and then let it simmer while you work on step 4.
4. Take the potato out of the freezer. It should be cool to the touch but not frozen. Remove the skin from the potato and dice into small pieces and put in the broth. If the potato is not cool, it will mush when you attempt this step.  IF the potato is still super warm, put it back in the freezer and work on other steps. 
5. Add the chunked cooked chicken into the broth along with the edamame and riced cauliflower/sweet potato mix.  Stir the the pot every now and then to verify that it nothing has settled to the bottom of the pot.  
6. The water for the noodles should be boiling.  Add noodles to the the pot and stir.  You want to make sure that nothing sticks together. Rice noodles cook quickly.  Once they are done cooking, you will want to rinse the noodles in cold water to stop the cooking process.  Once the noodles are cooked and cool to the touch, refrain from eating them from the bowl and put them in the soup broth. IF the sweet potato is still in the freezer cooling down, take it out of the freezer and it should be fine to dice and put in the soup. 
7. Stir all the ingredients together and let simmer for at least five minutes. You want the potato to gain some of the curry flavor.  IF the noodles seem to overwhelm the soup, it is okay to add half a cup of water. 
8. Add salt, lemon juice, cilantro and sesame oil to the soup.  Stir to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie letting the ingredients incorporate in to the broth and then serve.

This is a hearty chicken noodle soup that is full of flavor and sneaks in a couple of vegetables while providing comfort that only a chicken soup can provide.  

The 3 R’s

Happy New Year!

It is the new year and time for resolutions, reflections and relevance. 

You might be thinking, why relevance. Or your could be like, hey that is some great alliteration, but seriously why relevance?  That is and excellent question.

Several years back I was chatting with my mother in law about my best friend that lived out of state and she asked me, “How do you stay relevant?”  I know it sounds like a mean question, but it wasn’t intended to be that way. 

I have been best friends with this person since grade school and we have spent most of our time living in separate states. We grew up, got married moved to two different states and adapted to adult life, needless to say it would have been really easy to become a footnote in each other’s life, however we prevailed. 

The answer I gave, was that it was all about want and communication.  It has been several years since I was asked that and I still believe it is all about want and communication.  If you don’t have the want to communicate and put forth the effort,  then you will never be relevant. I think that there is nothing worse than being a footnote in someone’s life when they are relevant to yours.   

My unsolicited New Years recommends is to reflect on your relationships and be relevant to those that are relevant to you. 

Nightmare Fuel

When I was a kid, I loved to go with my mother to garage sales. It is fascinating to see items that depart from peoples homes. Now that I am older, my love for weird finds at garage sales has transferred over to antique markets.  The wonderful thing about antique markets is the plethora of nightmare fuel a person can find. So much nightmare fuel that I have started to break it down into two categories of which is more terrifying.  Night now it is a toss up on which is more terrifying: Mannequin heads or old portraits. 

Which is the better nightmare fuel?  

                                                               

I think it all comes down to the eyes.  Do they follow you? Do they want to consume your soul? It is a toss up. 

Mother and Royal Tea

I wanted to write a mothers day post, and then time got away from me.  So this is sort of a Mother's day post, or at least a post involving my mom.  That counts, right?

My mother and I don't agree on things. Not all things, obviously. Just the important things, such as whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza or if pears are really just a bland wet fruit rolled in sand. The fruit paired with meat argument has been going on for at least twenty years, and I don't see an end in sight.

However, there are some things that we do agree one.  One of those things is the Kate Pearl Tea Room. We can agree that we enjoyed our Royal Tea to a high degree. (Okay, that rhymed in my head and I couldn't quit giggling as I typed it.)  My mother and I met up with GAT and her mother for tea and socializing.  I absolutely loved that we were encouraged to dress for the part.  It isn't too often that I can play adult dress up, and seeing ladies in dresses and hats certainly sets the atmosphere.

Kate Pearl Tea Room is not my first foray into tea rooms.  I have been to several and the results have always varied.  The Royal Tea boasts of Appetizer, Scones with Clotted Cream and Spreads, Soup, Salad, Fluted Fruit Beverage, Tea Sandwich, Savories, Assorted Sweets and Sorbet on the website, and in person there is no way that a person could even be close to hungry by the end of tea.  The unlimited tea, excellent company, good eats and wonderful atmosphere has the Royal Tea on the list of things that I would want to do again.

The gift shop was stocked with a wide variety of tea, and several that made their way home with me.  I love the look of tea in jars. I reminds me of an apothecary and that tea heals the soul. In addition to Tea, they had a variety of tea companions, such as spoons, books, and stationary.  All things that I need when relaxing with a cup of tea.  If you every get the opportunity, I would highly recommend to check out Kate Pearl Tea Room.

Curse You Bundt Pan!

Curse You Bundt Pan!


It is my mother in laws birthday, and we are doing brunch at my house.  My husband and I just finished binge watching the first season with Noel Fielding as one of the co hosts of The Great British Bakeoff and we were feeling lofty about our baking abilities. (Depending on where you are from, I have no idea which season that really is.)  We had the brilliant idea of doing a lovely lemon and blueberry pound cake served with a Quiche Lorraine. All of it to be served with a white wine sangria.  It sounds super classy, delicious and relatively easy.

Jon and I decided to do the cake a day ahead so that we didn't have to rush this morning.  The recipe is one I found on Pinterest, and sounded easy enough.  Make the cake, put it in the pan, bake, cook and take it out of the pan, cool and icing.  I was good all the way to take the cake out of the pan.
In fact I think the cake decided that it would rather live in the bundt cake pan then ever see the light of day in one piece.  The sole bright side, is that despite it being an utter shape disaster, it was a magnificent  flavor masterpiece.  It tasted like blueberries and lemons.  Total flavor win, when something tastes the way it is expected.

Once we finally retrieved all of the cake bits from the nefarious bundt pan that is the bane of baking existence (or it is in my house).  Oh the swear words that came up, and then it evolved into our best impressions of common judge comments.  We had to come up with a Plan B to go with the quiche.  To the mighty internet we searched, and discovered that cake ruined by unruly bundt is a thing and that breakfast trifle is going to be a thing. Or at least a thing that we are serving for brunch. 

This set back could easily have ruined my day and weekend. I don't often utterly fail so hard at baking. I think the lesson learned is that baking is hard.  When life gives you lemons and your cake doesn't turn out, you just have to make the best out of what you have.  Trifles are amazing. The quiche is delightful and so is Sangria.  Happy Birthday Joanne!


For those interested, this is where I got the Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake Recipe:  Grandbaby Cakes

Unusual Advice Source

You can get advice from all sorts of places. Some people ask friends, family or even write their question down for a newspaper personality to answer.  About a month ago, I was with my mother in law and aunt in law at a John Edwards show and received some really good advice. 

For those that are not familiar with John Edwards, he used to be a television medium on the show Crossing Over.  (He speaks with the dead. Or maybe the dead speak with him. I am not 100% sure how this works. I am hoping it isn’t like 6th Sense sort of stuff.) If you were to look him up you would find a bunch of YouTube videos and a South Park episode dedicated to him.

I should probably clarify that this is not the usual source type I would go to for advice. My belief level is closer to Dana Scully than it is to Fox Murder on this. However, I digress.  As I sat there in the crowd of people, hoping that John Edwards focus would not rotate to my corner pocket of the room, I was to pick out some really good advice he was giving to the room full of grief stricken people.  

Here is the advice I was able to take home with me.

1. The best way to defuse a situation with another person on a difference of opinion is to acknowledge the situation and then walk away.  The best phrase to use is, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It acknowledges the opinion but doesn’t agree or disagree with the opinion, thus making the person feel listened to and taking the wind out of their sails. 
2. Just because you ask a question, does not mean you will get the answer you want. To solve any problem, you have to be open to all possible answers, even the answers you don’t want to hear. 
3. It is okay to give yourself time to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, but the important part is to do it.  It isn’t just people, it can be a change in situation that can shock the senses, and sometimes a person just needs time to digest. Allow yourself to adjust to new situations and people. 

While I might not recommend a medium as a source to answer all of life’s questions, it is important to recognize that when you receive good advice, it doesn’t really matter the source.  I think the key is to be open to new ideas that challenge the current pattern of thinking.   What do you think?