something like this

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.

Hot Wheels took in birthday treats for his preschool classmates on Friday. Check out the awesome cars Mum and Dad sent to him in his birthday package. He thought they were so cool he was dying to put them on the cupcakes. They’re such fabulous candies – stylish vintage form, beautiful matte colors, great packaging. We’re sold.

After school, the kids’ best friends came back to our house to play for the afternoon, and then we all had dinner at their house that evening.

These guys have known each other all their lives. We met their parents in Lamaze class before the girls were born. The girls are 10 days apart and the boys, by an amazing and fortunate coincidence, are 6 days apart. They’re really good set.

I have to admit this picture of the girls together just brings a lump to my throat.

Is it possible that this dude is 5? (Let me amend that… this is him when he was a baby. He turned 5 today.)

He’s having an awesome birthday so far, filled with lego and vehicles and books and, you guessed it – a hot wheels ramp. He’d been hoping for one for such a long time. So today is a thoroughly good day.

On Tuesday, school was out for the holiday, and we went for a beautiful bike ride up at Samuel P. Taylor park with Joan and the girls. 

We had a great ride, complete with picnic lunch and sketching down by the river.

Honey took the shot of the hay. She was going bonkers over the horses on the hill.

It was a great day for food, too! See this nice pumpkin?

Look at all those beautiful seeds. Let’s say you had all those gorgeous seeds, plus the seeds from two other carving pumpkins and a squash. What would you do with such bounty? You’d toast them nicely in the oven, wouldn’t you? Until they were perfectly crunchy and salty and oh-so-good. Well I meant to do that, last week, but instead of toasting them to perfection, I burned the life out of them. After all that goopy scooping and picking and washing, we sat down to dinner right in the same room with all those seeds and I completely forgot them. Doh!

All wasn’t lost, though, because then I just cooked that sweet pumpkin with some butter and brown sugar until it was mushy. Then on Tuesday morning I used it to make Pumpkin Bread.

I followed this recipe from Epicurious, which was easy and so, so yummy. We had it that night with white bean soup. The ideal cozy end to a fall day.

It might not have made the top of the news hour for all of you, but the Silver Bandits played their final games of the year on Saturday. They did really well, making it all the way to the championship game before coming in second in their most injury-prone game of the season. I know at least three girls hobbled off the field crying, and we lost count of the times we all cringed on the sidelines, saying, “That’s gotta hurt.” Honey ended up being one of the wounded after she tripped over a defender’s foot and then the same foot happened to kick her in the chest. Oops.

Sometimes getting hurt can be such a shock. She was astounded that it hurt so much and that she just couldn’t seem to catch her breath. I was talking to my friend Denise afterwards and she was telling me that she still remembers the first time she got the wind knocked out of her. She said she was playing with her brothers in the basement when it happened, and when she panicked, “I can’t breathe!” her brother just said, “Oh, you just got the wind knocked out of you.” She said, “The WHAT?!?!” with this tone of voice that said, “You knew about this? This happens to people?!?!” It’s absolutely appalling.

And what was Hot Wheels doing during all this drama and commotion? He was curled up in a blanket right alongside the field, fast asleep. People were walking and yelling all around him and he was completely conked out. 

The team was a bit disappointed to lose in the final game, but they had a terrific season. They treated each other with such kindness, too. Any time one of their players got hurt or was having trouble, her teammates would all check in to make sure she was ok. The coaches were a perfect blend of challenge and encouragement and the players all improved individually and as a unit. Plus there was a party on Saturday night at Denise’s house. What more could a team ask?

Well there had to be a thank you for the coaches, of course. A great excuse to make some nice big cookies.

The best part about this recipe is that although it seems to involve surprising amounts of ingredients, it’s really a double batch. So there was plenty left over to roll up and freeze for a rainy day.

At the end, we just put the cookies in bags with a note for each coach. Done.

It’s a rainy Halloween here so far – very gusty and moody, though, so it feels appropriate. Hopefully we won’t be soggy trick-or-treaters tonight!

Last night we had a fun Halloween-eve dinner with some great friends. It was a perfect night for lighting candles and roasting potatoes. So fun. For dessert, we made cupcakes:

We just made chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting and crumbled cookies on the top, but the piece de resistance… caramel earthworms. Honey made them and she even got into the little ridges to make them more realistic.

Of course I didn’t think to take a shot of them until the tail end of dinner in bad lighting, but you get the idea. They were deliciously disgusting. 

Hope everyone has fun tonight!!

More soccer games this weekend. The Silver Bandits are in the tournament, so they had to play two games on Saturday. My daughter was appalled. Two games in one day? What, were they trying to kill them?!

Both games were close, and the teams well matched. They won the first and then tied the next in the final seconds of the game. Before their second game my daughter’s team experienced their first pre-game psych. The other team had a chant they took to with great vigor. I didn’t recognize it, but I can tell you it did make promises along the lines of ‘we will crush you to the ground.’ Very exciting and certainly new territory for the U9 games I’ve been attending. (Turns out that team took the chant a bit literally as they were all elbows and shoves, so I’m thinking they might need to rework some of the verbiage for a more sportsmanlike game.)

After the game, my daughter (I’m just going to call her Honey for now) was a little down. I said, “They were a tough team, weren’t they?” and she replied in a confidential tone, “Yes they were. And Mummie – before the game, they were saying some not very nice things about us, and we could hear them.” 

On Sunday our great friends came over to dinner. We made butternut squash soup and served it out of a pumpkin. I thought Honey was going to have a heart attack, she was so excited. We served the soup with pasta, chicken, roasted tiny cubes of zucchini and parsnip, and toasted pumpkin seeds. The idea was that you could put any or all of the fillings in the soup, or have the soup plain with the pasta on the side. I like meals you can tailor a bit to suit your appetite. Joan made a beautiful salad with pomegranate seeds and these fantastic little green pumpkin seeds. It was delicious. 

Now we’re only a couple days away from Halloween and am I finished with the snowflake fairy costume? I think you know the answer to that.

Let’s take this one in reverse order, title-wise. Yesterday morning I was at the grocery store, and I just did not hit it off with the clerk in the checkout line. I wasn’t at my neighborhood store, where all the cashiers know us and we have a nice discussion each time we meet. We talk about our families and jobs and movies we’ve seen lately – all the good stuff.

[Right here we should insert a headphones-wearing UN translator to put the above sentences into language my east coast relatives can understand. If you start chatting up your cashier in New England, you run the risk of getting that 'well, she's just not right in her head' look, so this is all gobbledygook to them.]

Back to business. The cashier yesterday was simply not a friendly sort, so after my initial pleasantries I kept quiet. As I was entering my credit card, she was sending the groceries down the belt. There was a big crunch, and we both looked down to see all the food piling up on a container of strawberries that had popped open, sending berries rolling. The clerk said, “Oh. We can get you a new thing of strawberries.” But then I paused for a heartbeat, and She Had My Number. Could it possibly have been the two 4.5 year old boys I had in the front of my unwieldy truck cart, who were saying, “Lauwa! Say squiefelsmish!” over and over? It could. So she looked at me and said, “Well, you have to wash them anyway.”

Snap! However, as I mentioned above – she had my number. I didn’t have time for her to call for someone on break out back to trudge over to produce and pick out a box of strawberries for us. But we were not through, aggressive clerk and I. I went to bag the groceries and she turned the belt on again and I was suddenly in an I Love Lucy candy conveyor belt situation. Fortunately you can turn the belt off from the end, which I did. She turned it back on. I turned it off. She turned it on. It was hysterical. She couldn’t bear to have the groceries pile up at her end, and I couldn’t keep up at mine! Why did I buy so much fruit?! Why the loose potatoes, and no boxes of cereal or tissues? Squiefelsmish!

All in all, pretty entertaining, although I had a couple of decidedly east coast thoughts about the situation. 

Now it’s time for a photo.

These are the apple muffins I baked for Hot Wheels’ snack day at preschool. I tried a new recipe that I found over at The Crepes of Wrath. How great is that name? Check out the site, and the recipe. You will not be disappointed. Just thinking about that site makes me hungry. The muffins are delicious, and they lead to an ridiculously obvious morality tale.

Last night, due to conditions primarily but not entirely her fault, our daughter did not finish her homework. (gasp) With utmost sincerity she vowed to do it quickly in the morning before school, and against my better judgement, I let her. This is a bewildering statement, since my cardinal rule is no homework in the morning. What, exactly, was I thinking?

Here we find out what I was thinking. In a move that neatly illustrates two common proverbs, namely ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ AND ‘the apple never falls far from the tree,’ I went out into the kitchen and decided it would be fine to bake the snack muffins in the morning. 

Suffice it to say, things didn’t work out quite as we planned this morning. She discovered that at the breakfast table, she is sleepy and her little brother is loud. I discovered that just because the recipe says 30-35 minutes doesn’t mean I should not check them at my usual 20 minutes. (They turned out ok, but it was really a bad plan all around.) 

And the obvious moral of the tale? Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.

Hot Wheels has a deep and abiding love for coconut, and a deep and distrustful approach towards dinner. This week I thought we should make coconut soup together and take advantage of two great strategies for encouraging kids to eat; start with foods/flavors they love and get them to cook with you. (Of course it’s even better if they can grow them with you, but those pesky coconuts prefer warm tropical climates. Come to think of it… we might have to move.)

Originally I was picturing a milky Thai coconut soup, but then I found this recipe on a site called The World’s Healthiest Foods, and it looked like a wonderful blend. It’s actually a Carrot Coconut soup and it has such nice flavorings – ginger and curry and coconut – a perfect early fall soup. YUM. We all liked it. I threw in some chicken at the end for the kids, and for Tom some tofu. I added minced serrano chiles and basil to the grownup bowls as well. I’ve been working on getting the kids to love shredded basil, since I think it basically should go on or in every dish I make, but they’re still skeptical.

We made gingersnaps yesterday, and frankly they were a little melodramatic.

You should have seen the list of demands – the organic sugar, the extra dark molasses, the stark lighting – and they pitched a fit when we didn’t have the right stylist for them. (It was just me, and they were so totally not impressed.)

But even with all their attitude, somehow I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that they really just looked like munchkins.