something like this

Remember Valentine’s Day? I know – it was such a long time ago. The memory is still fresh for me because I still have a bit of lingering carpal tunnel from cutting out approximately eight thousand hearts. Don’t get me wrong – I love love love making valentines with the kids. It’s one of my favorite things. In fact, I like doing it so much that I get a little over-invested and consequently never get my own finished. If you’re still waiting for one, it should probably arrive just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day.

For the teachers this year, we decided to make some bags of chocolate cookies.

We made Hershey’s chocolate cookies from an original 1980’s recipe clipped from… ah yes – Seventeen Magazine.

It all began one afternoon when I was hanging out with my friend Cindy, flipping through her Seventeen, and we came across this recipe. She jumped up and said, “Let’s make these!!” and I thought, “You can do that?” I guess I must have started baking a bit at home by then, but I can’t really remember a time when I saw a recipe and thought – “I’m going to make this right now.” I thought she was wild! (Don’t even get me started about the time my friend Meredith decided we should make pecan pie for dessert one night at her house. Just the memory of it still makes me a little lightheaded.) I might have been just the slightest bit timid back then.

So this recipe has been with me since high school, but I don’t break it out very often. Not because I don’t like them. I like them too much. Anyone who knows me could quickly tell you I’m not squeamish about sweets. But these guys – I have to give them all away, pronto, or I will eat them. I will eat every one of them, and it’s embarrassing. 

On Valentine’s day, we started out the day with breakfast at the Dipsea.

This cafe is right on the water, and the morning was grey and rainy – the perfect cozy breakfast stop. It’s also right across the street from the studio where I take ballet, and I was able to hit class after our breakfast. Heaven.

Later in the morning, two of our west coast godchildren came over to play and then sleep over. We had such a great time! One of them had mentioned off-handedly the weekend before that he would like to try chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream made with chocolate instead of vanilla ice cream. Now that’s my kind of wish! Let’s face it – he’s ten, and I’m occasionally concerned that my fairy godmother powers will wane when he becomes a teenager. I’m hoping to stay helpful to him just by sheer love, but it’s always nice when you can grant a tangible wish. I love this egg-free chocolate chip cookie dough from the days when egg was still on Hot Wheels’ no fly list, and it was just the thing to use. We all got to mash up our chocolate ice cream with frozen cookie dough, and it was ahhhmazing.

Is it really possible that I’ve resisted using an n’ in my blog titles for an entire year? Yes it is. I had to check my list of posts, and it’s hard to believe, but true. So watch out, y’all, because this might be the year of the apostrophe. 

ANYway, last weekend was a nice one here. Amy and Andy had our kids over to play on Saturday morning and Tom and I drove into SF to have a breakfast date and a stroll around Chestnut street. We had a lovely breakfast at The Grove, which is this very cozy offbeat kind of place РI love it because they have at least a dozen different types of seating arrangements to choose from. There are traditional small caf̩ tables with chairs, tables with benches, benches built in around a fireplace, and a random odd assortment of reclaimed seating from heaven only knows where. Theater-style seats and wooden blocks and cushy old couches.

I love a place like this because you can tailor your seating to the light, your mood, or even what you’re eating. You know the feeling; sometimes you want your tea in a mug and other times it’s just better in a teacup. Or, you love to eat cereal out of the ceramic bowl your son painted, but your sorbet really needs to go in that vintage cut glass dish you got at the flea market. 

Right. So Saturday we ended up in an ideal sunny corner by the door, and I got the bench seat, which just made my day. Tom was so taken by his perfect toast that he took a picture, which you can see here if you’d like. (Funny thing about that shot is that he seems to have missed his toast and focused on his Vegemite, which yes, he carried with him that morning. That’s devotion.)

After a beautiful breakfast we wandered around Chestnut for a while. We each got some quality time in heaven that morning – Tom in his and I in mine. Seriously – I could spend a week in that place. It’s awesome. After that, we took a walk down by Chrissy Field and watched the crazy surfers out by Fort Point. 

The rest of the weekend was also lovely. Honey had a couple of birthday parties to go to, and we had fun using recycled paper and yarn to wrap up her gifts. Here’s a shot of one of them:

I have this huge foldout mailer from Veer that I’ve been saving because it’s covered with tiny photos from their stock and I love the look of it. We used that and some extra bits of yarn to wrap up this packet. Some party highlights:

- sleepover with swimming and TWO movies

- ’sleep’ part of the over started after 11pm

- art party the next day

- soap making with tiny plastic bug inclusions!

Life is seriously good, and all the girls were completely washed up by about 3pm on Sunday. 

The other weekend’s accomplishment was raisin bread, which I’ve been promising to bake for about a month and a half.

I used the recipe from the King Arthur Cookbook that Mum gave me years ago, and it was GOOD. 

So that’s the weekend wrap-up, brought to you in timely fashion on Wednesday (or Thursday for you Aussies and East Coasters).

Love n’ stuff,

laura

The first thing that happened this morning was I woke up at 6:30 thinking about worker compensation issues. This is good and bad; good because we just hired a cool new employee at Good Dog, and bad because it was 6:30 am on a Saturday and our kids hadn’t woken up yet. There can only be a handful of miraculous events for which the sole appropriate observation is sleeping through them, so you can see I missed a major opportunity today.

Just when things were looking grim for the start of this weekend, Honey popped into our room and asked, “What kind of tea would you like this morning?”

Now, I am fortunate enough to have a few friends who read this blog of mine, and some of them have kids who are younger than ours. It is to them that I say – I have a message for you from the future. Eight is great.

Eight is great. Eight is a number I do not h…wait! There’s more. She popped back a few minutes later and asked if she could please cut up a few pieces of fruit and put them on a platter for me. There were fine chopping and platter hand gestures involved. Feeling very much like the Queen of England, I replied that we would not be at all distressed if she were to slice some fruit for our royal personage.

Here’s what happened next:

Breakfast and knitting in bed. Things are definitely looking up.

Now that’s more like it.

Happy Australia Day, everyone! Here are some Anzacs for you.

Honey stayed home from school Friday with a bad throat and general achy sickness, and I realized that there are, actually, a few good things to say about sick days, particularly if you’re not hugely sick. You get a bonus day with your house and your mother all to yourself. If you’re lucky, you miss a spelling test. AND you get soup.

I was excited about this one because I had some homemade stock in the freezer that I needed to use up, and it ended up tasting just right. Can you possibly go wrong with soup that incorporates ravioli? I think not.

One of my favorite Thanksgivings here in California started with a long bike ride with our great friends Lori and Michael and their son, who is a bit older than Hot Wheels. We feel like we’ve known them all our lives. That Thanksgiving, we decided to each try making a dish that we’d never made before. It ended up being remarkably delicious and fun. (It helps to try this idea with friends who wouldn’t care a bit if your recipe bombed or the soup turned blue. It doesn’t hurt to have a couple of bottles of good wine for backup.)

On Saturday, we all got together and tried it again.

 

Michael made this ridiculously delicious pumpkin and red onion dish with a cilantro/parsley pesto. Phenomenal. We had also roasted some potatoes and sweet potatoes, and the pesto was great on those, too.

 

I made roasted beets with cornbread croutons, citrus vinaigrette, goat cheese and bacon (Tom got the pretend kind), using a recipe from Bon Appetit. That came out well, once the beets were finally finished. They took forever. Fortunately I’d taken my own advice in the wine department.

 

Lori was batting cleanup with her first-ever bundt cake. It was a chocolate cake with dulce de leche sauce. I kid you not. It was a thing of beauty.

At the end of the evening, Lori thought the bundt was a little dry, but that criticism doesn’t quite resonate with my stomach, as I’ve just polished off two pieces this evening. Perhaps I should ask her to make it a bit more dry the next time?

Now that, Ellen, gets categorized under tasty!!

How do you say thank you to friends who let you drop your children off at their homes at 7:30 am because you have an 8 am meeting? Hopefully with bags of orange cranberry scones. ‘Cause that’s all I got this morning. Well, that and my winsome smile.

In our schools, the parents all contribute to one main gift for the teachers at holiday time, but I love to have a little something to go with the notes the kids write to the teachers, aides and librarians. This year my friend Barb and I made chocolate bark with assorted toppings. We melted blocks of semi-sweet chocolate in bowls over boiling water, then poured the chocolate out onto cookie sheets lined with foil. While the chocolate was warm, we scattered the top with dried fruits and chopped nuts.

Our favorite combinations turned out to be dark chocolate sprinkled with hazelnuts and drizzled with stripes of white chocolate, and white chocolate topped with cranberries and pistachios. These looked particularly festive and tasted great. We also made a peppermint bark that was delicious, but we liked that the other two were just a little more unusual.

Barb put hers on these beautiful little cocktail plates to hand out, and I put mine into brown waxed paper bags. At home, I made some gingersnaps and put them into small brown bags as well.

 

Then I took brown paper lunch bags and drew on them with white markers so that they looked a bit like gingerbread houses. One of each of the small treat bags went into each of the larger paper bags. Tie it with a bow and call it happy holidays.

Wow it’s been a while. When I logged in tonight, Wordpress was all, “Wait – who is this? Oh, it’s you. I didn’t know you were still in town.” So I said, “Yeah, well you’re the one who wouldn’t let me upload any images. You’re lucky I came back.” Snap!

Seriously, though – it’s been an eventful couple of weeks.

First, as many of you know already, Honey had a bit of an unpleasant surprise the Friday before last. She’d been complaining of a sore jaw for a couple of days – thought she’d clonked it in her sleep. It didn’t get better so we called her dentist, who saw her despite the fact that her office was closed that day. Amazing. And fortunate, because as it turned out she had two raging infections, and we were hustled off to an oral surgeon who took one look at the x-rays and said he’d take care of her right then, despite the fact that his office was crazy that day. They took out a couple of teeth and a real bully of a cyst. Thank you for good medicine and great healthcare providers. 

It wasn’t pleasant, to say the least, but it’s over. For about 4 days Honey looked like she played for the Bruins, and then she started to feel like herself again. She was flooded with kindness, though. Phone calls from her family around the world. Movies from our neighbors. One friend called to see if she was ok, since she didn’t go to school that day, and about 20 minutes after we hung up, another friend from her class appeared on our doorstep with 2 pints of Haagen Dazs. In the early evening, our neighbor Michael called to see how she was doing, and when I asked Tom how Michael knew what had happened, he replied, “Oh, Mary told him.” Mary is one of our favorite cashiers at Safeway.

I was reminded of two important truths: we are truly surrounded and buoyed by our community, and we’d better not do anything unseemly, because it will be all over town in a heartbeat.

On to a nicer, tastier surprise. One night as I was trying to figure out a new soup to vary up the soft-food diet, I experimented with a potato soup that ended up tasting great!

 

I wish I’d written it down straight away – it was so simple I was positive I’d remember. Duh. 

But, it went something like this:

Saute a little garlic, half an onion and a chopped up leek in some olive oil until soft. Add 4 good sized potatoes, peeled and cubed. Add a carton (4 cups) of vegetable broth) and a can of small white beans. Cook until everything is soft. Puree it in the blender. Add a dash of pepper. Some of us had bacon (smoked, not crispy, finely chopped) and some of us had toasted pumpkin seeds on top. (I happened to have both.) 

 

Here’s what I’m telling you. It was AWESOME. Maybe we were all just super hungry, but everyone loved this soup. Even Hot Wheels, and he’s not a major soup lover.