Simple Recipes

One cheap Walmart ringbinder = $3
Stickers from Michaels = $4
Cardstock = $1
Printed nameplates = 25¢
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Cooking experiences happen twice a week, and those recipes deemed INCREDIBLE will be printed up and glued into the cookbooks.

So far we've made cookies (Dorie Greenspan's Espresso Chocolate Cookies), brownies, focaccia, an apple pie, and chocolate chip cookies (seeing a theme here yet).

Funny how the simplest things go so far.

In Which I Almost Burn Down The House

Warning: This post originally aired in 2009. All fires are now extinguished.

It was the Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend; wherein we celebrate, much as Americans do (but we do it earlier), with family and friends and many of us roast Very Large Items like turkeys or geese, and create many a side dish of potatoes or yams (no marshmallows please, I don't care what Nigella says about this) and other roastable products (maple-roasted parsnips anyone?).

So, this being our first house and all, we're having fun creating our own family traditions around all the holidays. This Thanksgiving the kids covered the front steps with mini gourds, white pumpkins, and giant Cinderella pumpkins, grown in the garden; they dipped leaves in beeswax, fragrant additions to the Seasonal Table; they made candle holders with colourful writhing dragons on them, surrounded with black paper, to remind us all of Michaelmas (which is often re-represented by St George fighting the dragon); and finally they brought in armloads of Michaelmas daisies and all the leftover flowers we have in the garden to float in bowls of coloured water with lighted candles. It was all very beautiful. Ethereal. Glowing. Warm. We invited some friends over, we set a turkey in the oven, I made bread and dug up potatoes and peeled many a parsnip.

It was the Yorkshire puddings that foxed me. If only I had put a cookie sheet under the muffin tins I would have been okay. The fire alarm wouldn't have gone off if I'd done that.

But I didn't.

Oh no.

I had to go and douse the muffin tins with generous amounts of oil, then set them in an already (sheila coughs self-consciously) oily oven and no it WASN'T filthy contrary to what Richard the Clean says, without anything underneath them to catch all the dripping oil. And let's face it, I was feeling pretty generous by this juncture of the day, filled with much bonhomie towards my friends and neighbours (and no, I was not drinking - not then at any rate) and it might have been about then that I thought "A giant Yorkshire pudding is much much better than a teeny tiny one, isn't it! I will FILL those muffin cups with batter! They will be giant puddingy puffs!" Sounded reasonable at the time...

So I used what one might call a glad hand with the filling of the muffin cups. All two and a half dozen of them.

Sadly, the oil oozed out all over the floor of the oven after I'd filled them with the pudding batter and slid them in the oven to bake. Not that I noticed, because at that point that I was standing outside on the deck, thinking "Gosh it's hot in that pokey little kitchen, think I'll just have a glass of wine out here in the nice cold air."

It was when I peeked in the window that I noticed the flames.

I dashed in, followed closely by Max (when Large Items are roasted he follows me very closely, because he likes Large Roasted Items and frequently accuses me of trying to starve him by not roasting them often enough for his liking). I gaped. I tried to quell the rising panic in my stomach. I opened the oven for a peek, then shut it. It was filled with flames. Really filled. I don't think I'd ever seen it like that. And it might have been then that I thought "OMG this is a PROPANE OVEN - we're all going to blow up!" But, being the stalwart Jane Austen heroine that I am, I did not shriek out loud. I did not even panic. And I did not faint into a heap on the floor. Instead, I calmly turned off the oven, and shrieked "RICHAAAAAARD!"

Now, accounts vary as to what I said after that. I thought I said "Richard - the oven is on fire and we are all about to die come and do something before that happens" Richard thought I said "I've put the fire out but it's still on fire!" And, since he didn't do anything right away, we both think I then said "RICHARD GET IN HERE RIGHT THIS SECOND THE KITCHEN IS ON FIRE!"

And we might be right. I think I did say that.

Fortunately that got him into the kitchen pretty quick. In fact, it got everyone into the kitchen. I remember wondering why everyone would come into a place that was about to blow up. And realizing that I couldn't very well cut and run with them all standing there, about to blow up with MY stove. It wouldn't look very good. But Richard took matters in hand and started doing something. "Get the Yorkshire puddings out of the oven!" he shouted tersely,  "Shut the oven door! Quick!"

So we did.

The fire went out.

Richard said "Why don't you ever clean that stupid oven? Look at all that oil!"

Our dinner guests said "Wow, it's exciting over here."

I said "I need a drink. Stop talking about cleaning the bloody oven, Richard, and get me a drink."

Max said "Will the Yorkshire puddings be alright? Will we still be able to eat them?"

And you know, they were. And we did.

Things To Do With Strawberries & Monsoons

Make strawberry vinegar! Simply described: steep slightly mashed strawberries in apple cider vinegar for a few days, then strain through a fine mesh (shown here, in a brand new vintage knee high from my very own sock drawer). Slowly heat, adding sugar, then boil briefly and remove the scum that forms. Seal or bottle.

The resulting vinegar is incredible: sweet and sour and shockingly fruity. You'll wonder why you never made it before. At least, I did. My only regret is that I made it with the last of my strawberries, so there's no chance of making more this season.

Here's a harvest basket shot. Purely gratuitous. There's something about the blend of green and brown that makes me feel very happy about having a garden, especially right before dinner, even though it's been raining, humid, wet, sticky, buggy, overcast, damp...well, you get the picture. I have so many plastic tarps slung round the garden it's getting hard to arrange tasteful photo ops.

This shot occurred between a thunderstorm and a monsoon. Don't let anyone tell you I am not wildly resourceful. I also work swiftly.

Wacky Christmas Gift Ideas

Look, it's a K-Tel sunset!

That's what I think every time I see a shaft of sunlight piercing the sky, particularly if it's early morning shafts or end of the day shafts. They have an unearthly radiance about them that screams I AM GOD LOOK AT ME. In a nice way, of course (I always picture God as a kindly old man with nice manners). I realize this sounds weird, but there it is. Every time I think: "that looks like a religious record cover."

Everyone seems to be blogging about their favourite gift ideas right now, and as I was trying to pilfer some ideas get inspiration I came across some, well, I'll use the politest word I can - odd ideas. First off, this came in my Twelve Days of Cookies email from the American Food Network (you can sign up for it here). Every day I get a Christmas cookie recipe from a famous TV cook. The recipes have names like Throw Down Blondies and Paula's Snowflakes and they all seem to involve triple amounts of everything. While I've never actually made any of these cookies I can't seem to resist reading about them. There is something rather compelling about all that excess.

Anyhow, I noticed in one of the sidebars that someone named Bobby Deen had a recipe up for Double Chocolate-Walnut Meringue Cookies. While my first thought was that any adult with the name Bobby Deen should really be singing religious tunes instead of baking (with my photo as his album cover) I couldn't help but be ever so slightly scandalized that he called his items meringue cookies when anyone could see that they were macarons. As in French macarons - more specifically Parisian macarons. Google the word - and if you see a hit from Ladurée click on it. Oh heck, let me make it easier...click on this link here. See what I mean? It's not a meringue cookie, it's a macaron, although in a pinch I will accept the term macaroon; I don't want to give the idea that I am a zealot about this, but this recipe makes me bristle with indignation. If we're not careful they'll be doing things like changing the name of Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone to something like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Oh wait, they already did.

Next up: Fruit necklaces: $35 each. Someone has taken slices of real fruit (in this case a starfruit) and dipped them in glitter resin. These are part of the Holiday Gifts Under $50 series. I don't know about you, but wearing a piece of dried fruit around my neck sounds weird. I worry slightly that a bird might come and start pecking at me, or that someone will mistake me for a weird survivalist who carries emergency rations around with them.

Mr & Mrs Muse salt and pepper shakers: For the person unclear on the concept of the muse, evidently, because instead of a statue of a naked Greek goddess or two, this set consists of two smooth white heads, one moustachioed (evidently the Mr.) and one with lips (and the Mrs.) They will, we are told, keep our table "fun" and "playful." It's also $48. Hmmm. I don't know about you, but this screams fun and playful to me. Not.

Here's another in the Bad Idea File: Word Appetizer Dishes. "If you are what you eat" the ad announces, "then you should act how you serve." So, for $25, you too can act SHARE, LAUGH, and PARTY. Just don't ask me how to accomplish this. The idea of having serving dishes that say things like PARTY worries me somewhat. I am uncomfortably reminded of those wooden signs several of my outlying relatives have sitting on their cupboards, signs announcing things like FAMILY and LAUGHTER and LOVE LIVES HERE. I would, I can confidently say, visibly cringe if anyone bought me either these dishes or one of those wooden signs. Some of us thrive on cheese, some of thrive on irony. Give me irony every time.

Finally (I can only handle so much distressing consumerism at a time), there is the 3-in-1 Breakfast Maker. Yes, Gentle Reader, such a thing really does exist. It's here. It will make coffee, toast and fry and egg, all in one handy, space-saving unit. It's cheap and it looks it: $43.99. Gosh, can we elevate the art of cooking any higher? Given this object, I think not.

Now, I have to go. In the time it took to write this I have another Food Network cookie email, and I really must check it out.

You Know What They Say—

When life hands you lemons, make marmalade out of them.

(I like to twist up these sayings a bit)

Here lie the fruits of my 2 year old lemon trees, along with a couple of sour mandarins from the sour mandarin tree I acquired in the summer. There were enough lemons to make 5 pints of marmalade. If you come to visit I'll be happy to dispense toast and marmalade.

Struggles With Strawberries

It started with this: a deluge of strawberries. An avalanche - a surplus - an overabundance - an excess - a plethora.

A glut, even.

This happy state of affairs comes from not doing what I should have done last year (and the year before), which was pruning off the suckers the plants sent out. And because I am unable to dispose of a plant once it's in the garden (unless it's a weed), I did something rather unadvisable: I left them to multiply all over the garden.

This is great when you're going from 20 plants to 40 plants; this is not great when you're going from 150 plants to 300, which is more in line with what we've got going on out back. People come over and tell me "Wow, you really DO have too many strawberries."

This is me with my strawberries.







We picked them once; we picked them twice; we even picked them three and four times. But they keep coming. The kids have started to hide when I say "Hey, guys, can you help me —?" The freezer is filling up with strawberries in various states of mush and slice; there are 15 quarts of jam on the pantry shelves. We all have Strawberry Arm, too: a condition resulting from too much time immersing one's arms amongst strawberry leaves, resulting in a mild, itchy rash-like condition stretching from the wrist to the elbow (don't know if you'll find it in medical terminology dictionaries, but it DOES exist, trust me).

So I've started to do something I don't normally do: I'm trying variations of recipes.

We had strawberry shortcakes, with whipped cream and heaps of sliced berries. Our shortcakes ranged from hard and biscuit-like to soft and spongey.

We had meringues and fool, which are so good you might actually die of delight, according to Dominic. This dessert involves individual meringues baked in the shape of a giant Kiss, then side-dressed with a gently folded mixture of whipped cream and the foam you get when you skim (strawberry) jam.

We ate them in smoothies. We ate them by themselves. We even watched the squirrel nesting in the pine tree carry them off. No one stirred at this point. We were all relieved to see someone else picking them, I think.

Then I had a brain-wave, brought on in part by the lack of sun this summer: I would make strawberry popsicles.

These are easy, provided you have popsicle molds. Simply purée the berries, add some sweetener (I used icing sugar), maybe some yogurt (tried both ways, prefer it without), then pour them into the molds to freeze.

You will end up with this, a glistening, glittering, shimmering mass of glowing ruby redness.

It tastes good too.

What My Chocolate Icing Does To People

It really IS that good...

Either that or I paid my kids to lay like that while I took photos of them...

Who would do THAT?

Me?

Never...

Trust me.

Have A Holly Jolly Cookie

We had some friends over today, and we decorated cookies: trees and gingerbread men. You might not be able to tell from this angle, but these cookies were 7" high. I would have had pictures of the gingerbread men but they were all in such a state of disarray when I brought the camera in I didn't think I could present them properly. Poor men.

These trees are FDPG's. She took the longest time to decorate, the longest time to choose her colours, the longest time to squeeze the icing, and the longest time to eat her cookies.

Judicious. That's my FDPG. Judicious.

Pancake Pen

I was in Seattle last week, on my annual American Shoppapaloosa, when this funny plastic item caught my eye. I glanced, checked the price, then replaced it in the bin with its siblings because it seemed horribly a little overpriced. Later that day I happened to be in another store in another area (same chain) and spotted it again. This time it seemed a wildly excellent deal and something I was in desperate need of. I could envisage a zillion uses for it, too.

So I bought it.

And yes, the blog post title is its real name. It is really and truly called a Pancake Pen. It even comes with - wait for it: instructions.




When I came home I used it immediately. Here you have my newly patented Snowman Circle Pancake Combination. I made big circles, small circles, and middle size circles so we could have DIY Goldilocks snowmen. Big hit with the small set.

It is, I am relieved to report because I hate to think I might have wasted even the smallest amount of cash on a squeezie bottle, given how cheap I am, an extremely well-designed piece of plastic. It poured. It didn't drip. It didn't clog. It even made some nifty (and recognizable) D's and K's. And whaddaya know but FDPG and Dominic were THRILLED to see it filled and put into immediate use, even though it was only mere hours before the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows premiere (to which we had tickets).

So there we were, eating DIY snowmen right before the Harry Potter premiere.

And if you'd been listening to a certain local FM radio station last Friday, oh, say about 11am, you would have heard FDPG in all her chatty glory telling the unsuspecting DJ (via some poor fellow dressed in cloak and wizard's hat shivering in the cold) every single thing she thought about the last 6 Harry Potter films.

Garden Thursday

I was out working in the garden for the first time since I injured my back and gosh it felt good. My back is still a little sore (I think I tore something) but I hate watching weeds and grass smother my paths and plants. And watching the tomatoes topple over and turn into crawling things drives me mad, especially when I can't wade in there and stake them before their stems take to those new bendy shapes. Plus the raspberries were in a heap on the ground where the slugs and ants would be able to eat the berries without any trouble whatsoever. I do not willingly feed slugs or ants.

The shasta daisies were in a similar heap but then, they always seem to flop on the ground after a week or two aloft. They are the most relaxed of plants, perhaps a bit too relaxed. I generally end up staking them in secret and mysterious ways (who likes to see my green plastic string snaking all over the place?) but even then they manage to look apathetic about being staked.

I am slowly uprooting the pansies. They really fade when the summer heats up, but the last couple of years, what with us being more permanent about our abodes, I've been cropping them back and leaving them in flats in a shady place. They spend the hot part of the summer growing and come fall I can replant them. Now I have some mixed lettuces in this basket. Or is that letti?


Here is a great combination of bright colours: peeking yarrow (Red Velvet), woolly speedwell (Blue Carpet), some Anise-Hyssop (Honey Bee Blue)and goldenrod.

These plants are the most incredible bee magnet. I suspect the goldenrod of having Super Plant Powers: there was one clump last year and this year there are at least four.



One of the sweet peas I bought this year. I think it's called Blue Foam but since I lost the seed packet somewhere in the Busy Busy Baby Snake Bed and I'm not going to dig around in there to find it even if you cry and beg me. You're going to have to suffer through my disaster of a memory bank, which is really warped from too much Horrible Histories viewing. I have a secret, well, fine, it's not all that secret, crush on one of the actors in the Horrible Histories so when the kids say "Can we watch a Horrible Histories?" I generally answer "Sure!" with far too much alacrity.

Wait, how did this topic come up? I don't get the connection at all. Oh right, snakes. Snakes in the garden.

???



Okay, moving on...

Here are some crocosmia - Lucifer. These particular ones are taller than me. I like the arching angle the flower head has.







Lysimachia clethroides: Gooseneck loosestrife. You can see by the sweep of the flower head why it's called "gooseneck." This plant is a little on the invasive side but it's so lovely and robust in the hot sun that I don't mind. I just haul out a few stalks here and there and we're both happy. Besides, white is such a great colour in a perennial border - it frames everything else so cleanly and brightly.



This is a poppy - a Breadseed poppy. I bought them because they seemed a bit of a novelty but now I'm wondering how the seeds differ from other poppy seeds. The flower is pretty but otherwise unremarkable. I prefer the more dramatic raggedy red ones. I'd even prefer the blue one I bought last year but it seems to have died on me again, the silly thing. A pox on wimpy poppies!












This time of year is always so dramatically lush. Here's a combination of potatoes, bulb fennel and second year parsley in the very back. I've had to really work on the watering in the section of the yard, because the soil is so heavy. I've mulched it with straw but it still dries to rock when I'm not looking.













A Louisebonne pear. This poor old tree has really suffered in my garden: first I planted it near the neighbour's juniper bush (host to rust) which promptly infected the tree with rust. The leaves were covered in horrible orange blotches. Then they all fell off. So did the three teeny little pears that were attached to some of those leafy places. I took one of the blotchy orange leaves into the garden centre and they all chortled rather rudely. "Who told you to plant a pear?" they asked me incredulously. "That's the WORST kind of fruit tree to grow here. Rust is everywhere! I bet your neighbours all have juniper hedges, don't they?" I felt too foolish to admit that I hadn't actually looked to see if anyone had junipers (who wants a shrub when they could have fruit trees and vegetable patches and flowers?), or that I'd only bought it so I could hang a partridge in it come December and give our Christmas habits some extra levity, so I took the spray bottle of stupid-lame-organic-rust-inhibitor and slunk away. Then I got home and felt even more foolish because there weren't any leaves left to spray. Sob.

That fall I moved it down the slope a bit but that area was too shady and it looked on the edge of its expiry date. This spring I moved it to the end of the brick vegetable garden, where it seems to still have a touch of rust but nothing quite as dramatic as last year's case. And there are, wonder of wonders, some pears on it. There is one there. Plump as a pear.

Look! Peas! Hanging very greenly, don't you think? I like me a pea that can hang so very, err, greenly.

(stop it before you get rude, Sheila)







Finally, we have a tomatillo. I like growing these - no one ever seems to know what they are or what you can do with them and they look like weird mutant vegetables with that hollow green husk. I also like how the light shines through them.

They are, unlike myself, extremely photogenic. I have tomatillo envy, methinks.










Here was one of my other projects today. The twins are gearing up for their birthday. They've decided on a Cupcake Extravaganza. That's right, I'm making enough cupcakes to populate a small country. And that's not all: we're going to attempt LEGO heads and bricks on these cupcakes, as well as model pea pods and whole carrots from the garden, and maybe a few sunflowers too (a la Hello Cupcake!). There might even be fondant involved. And sanding sugar. Not to mention a number of trips to the Martha Stewart website, because, as we all know, Martha has probably done it before. Plus, she includes a lot of pictures in her tutorials...

In the spirit of the venture I made a chocolate layer cake this afternoon. I know, it has nothing to do with fondant, cupcakes, or models of peas and carrots, or even an icing sunflower, but it's a sort of test drive for my baking skills. Right?

Right.

Making Ice Cream Sandwiches

I posted a sort of tutorial on my food blog today. Yeah, right, like anyone really needs to read a tutorial about squishing ice cream between cookies...

Garden Thursday

This is pretty much what's going on around here right now: strawberries. Strawberries and World Cup madness. Yes, I admit, I scorn every other sport but soccer. Why, you ask? Do you really need to ask? Good looking, trim, fit, lithe, long-haired men in shorts and tight t-shirts running around looking all Mediterranean and intense and sporty?

Say no more.

Other than that of course we're picking strawberries. And eating them. And making jam. I made 15 pints tonight. I used to experiment with strawberry recipes (Eton Mess, tortes, pies, tartes) but my kids are still young enough that all they really like is a) jam, and b) fresh berries, and c) strawberry shortcake. And maybe some more jam. So that's pretty much all we do with them. Every so often I go a little nutty and make a cobbler.

This is definitely the time of the year when Garden Tableaux are worth bothering about: the growth is lush, everything is fresh and new, and any old pot looks atmospheric shoved up against an old stump.

Witness this tableau. Le Tableau Vert. (that means This looks really cool, don't you think? in French)

Does your garlic look like this? Well, then, that's a good sign. It means that it's doing what it should be doing: ripening. The first time I grew garlic and it did this my initial thought was "$#&@! What the h$** did I do wrong?" I even dug up half of it, to see what was going on under the ground. That's when I belatedly realized that everything was going as it should be. I might have tried to bury it again, foolishly. I know I felt pretty dorky.

Now I can nod sagely and say, in response to my friends' "ACK! THAT PLANT IS DYING!" "Have you never seen garlic grow from beginning to end? This is, my friend, the circle of life."

Ha. No, of course I don't say this. Well, not usually. I'm a little more circumspect. Dignified. Usually.




A new lewisia. Orange! Rare! (oops, I'm sounding like the LEGO maniacs in this house, now, aren't I? "this is a really rare piece!") It fell off the back of a lorry. Couldn't very well leave it there, now, could I?





Here is Sandy's clematis. I'd link you to her blog but she hardly ever blogs anymore.

Ahem.








I've got big plans right now to fell some tree tops and make myself a 4-legged arbour, like one I saw in a garden magazine the other day. I've got a Cabernet Sauvignon grape that I plan to grow up one side of it, and I'm going to move my David Austen The Fairy rose over to the other side, because it was languishing a bit against the pine tree. Actually, I lie: I forgot about it as it languished against the pine until the other day when I was repositioning my soaker hoses and discovered it languishing rather sadly. It was not pleased with me. So I hauled it out of that spot and stuck it where my new arbour will eventually be. As soon as I get Richard to help me, that is. Don't tell him - I need to break these things to him slowly. He has this bizarre idea that his weekends are for relaxing. Ha! Who does that?





By the way, if you're looking for a pretty little creeper for your paths, try this Blue Star Creeper. It's not quite as robust as the usual Irish and Scots mosses, but it's extraordinarily charming. I would have had significantly more if I hadn't though it was a weed a few months ago, and tugged most of it away from these pavers.

Yes, just call me Gardeneri Lame-olei.










Oh, and my lovely little Rosamundi is in full bloom. It's low growing and slow growing, but the bloom is quite arresting. At least, it arrests me. And that bumble bee stuck in the middle there looks rather arrested, too, don't you think? Must have been Pink Flower Day.

Or White Flower Day...?




Finally, a shot of a planter with some petunias in it. Petunias, especially these little multifloras, are quite the workhorse and they usually have some pretty crazy colours on them. That tall spiky thing is a Dracaena. They say they are perennial but I've never had one to overwinter so I'll let you know just HOW perennial they really are another day.

May The Cookies Be With You

It all started here. I saw Bakerella's post about these new products at Williams-Sonoma (the horrendously expensive but way cool kitchen store) and immediately started madly obsessing musing about how I was going to get a package of these into my Cookie Cutter Collection. Yes, I do have a cookie cutter collection and yes, it is insanely large and involves way too many obscure designs but I am completely irrational about it fairly extensive.

But the reason I was prepared to pay $20 for 4 little Star Wars cookie cutters was this: my kids love the entire Star Wars oeuvre: movies, LEGO, light sabres, Halloween costumes (please don't ask if I made two brown Jedi robes with matching undercoats and wide belts for the boys for Halloween because I won't admit to it). And the idea of making a batch of cookies, a batch of royal icing in shades of green, brown, black, white, and red, then spending several hours hunched over the counter with way too many bags of icing decorating those little cookies so that they exactly resembled...

Wait.

Did I really just say that?

Anyhow, I saw that box, gnashed my teeth when I saw that it was too late to enter the draw for a free set (but let's face it, I never win those blog contests), and immediately phoned my mum, aka the Cross Border Shopping Queen, to tell her that we needed to drive down to Seattle, where the nearest American Williams-Sonoma was, so I could buy a box of Star Wars cookie cutters.

After listening to her guffaw loudly for a few minutes, I hung up and decided on another tactic. I would subtly encourage Richard to consider another trip down to Seattle. So what if we'd just been there? Surely there would be an academic conference or something nearby that he could go to why I quickly dashed to this store? Sadly, that didn't work either. "What do you want from that ridiculously expensive store now?" was his response. "We are not going down there for a box of silly cookie cutters." He might have accompanied those words with a withering look or three but I didn't let that stop me. Silly cookie cutters indeed. We'll see who gets a Darth Vader cookie, won't we? And then, wonder of wonders, my friend announced a trip. A trip to Seattle. It was fate. So what if she didn't live anywhere near me. She would have to drive right by a Williams-Sonoma store at some point in that trip, right? Sure she would! And we have Canada Post to connect us, right? So what if it sometimes take a month within the same city? Anyhow, I gave her some links to really fun places to take her kids, all of which involved a huge and totally out of the way detour past the Williams-Sonoma store.

Of, for goodness sakes, I am just kidding. I would never be so crass.

Of course not. Never. Not me. No way.

(Sheila coughs self-consciously then looks away)

Fortunately she is an extremely reasonable and kind to irrational people who pester her about cookie cutters person. She agreed to mail me a box. Look! Darth Vader! Boba Fett! Stormtrooper! Yoda! There they are, reclining enticingly on my counter, along with a batch of sugar cookie dough. To heighten the experience I even used the recipe that came with the cookie cutters. It was enough to make one giddy.



Here is the cookie dough after I'd rolled it out and pressed the cutters into it. These are actually quite sensible cutters: if you dust them with flour they don't stick a bit.

Luke, I am your father.

Cookie dough, I am.

Look, sir, droid cookies!

In the interests of not ending up with a mass of smooshy Darth Vaders and Stormtroopers, I put each tray of cookies into the freezer for 5 minutes before baking. I don't know if this made a difference or not, but look...

Here's how they turned out.

And there's FDPG's hand, snaking in to steal the first Boba Fett. Our friends came over shortly afterward. Thankfully they came before I was forced to consider the aspect of royal icing.

And all the cookies disappeared.












Cookie, I am.
Good, I am.
Earless, I am.





Getting deaf, I am.
Disappearing, I am.
Delicious, I am.






Silly, I am.

Happy Birthday!

It's the birthday of one of the kids in this house. The tallest one. The one who is obsessed with Star Wars Lego. He is officially a teenager.

Look - I even made him a Clone Trooper helmet cake for his party today. Last year it was a hamburger replica - this year it's a helmet replica. He wanted it standing up but I said no. My powers of cake making and decorating are tired right after Christmas, and the idea of making a standing up helmet cake sounded entirely too strenuous. 












All week now I've had a clip from Max's Dragon Shirt in my head when I think of him being a teen (mostly because I read this one to Max 4 zillion times when he was little)...it's the part when Max has lost his sister in a big department store and thinks he's spotted her, but in fact it's someone else: "It was a teenager. Max screamed." Every single time I'd read that bit I would punctuate that line with a little shriek and my Max would laugh delightedly. Even now we've been known to say, a propos of nothing: "It was a teenager! Max screamed!" although Max doesn't laugh with quite the same appreciation (he's too cool now). But it still amuses us all.

Happy Birthday Max! Lucky number thirteen. All year long.

In Which I Wax Eloquent About Consumerism

I went south for a few days, on a little apres-birthday jaunt. I even crossed a border into a foreign country - the one directly south of us Canucks. I was hoping to get a little Christmas shopping in, and maybe, just maybe visit a certain Lego store, but, if you ask me that in front of my kids, do know that I will emphatically deny it (they don't read my blog so I can say these things here). And yes, I do that realize there is an online Lego service here in Canada; let's just say that it's not all that enticing to the wallet, when all is said and done. Why didn't I buy stock in Lego 10 years ago?

It's always exciting crossing into the States; not only do I have to explain why I'm not going right on the exact day of my birthday (gasp! the scandal of it all), but I also have to explain how I got the grand old age I am without holding a job title I'm able to spit out in 5 words or less.

"Stay at home parent?" the border guard always asks me (in what I almost always belatedly realize is a rhetorical remark): "So, where are your kids?" And then he/she usually peers very closely at me, until I am tempted to ask if I appear blurry.

Sigh.

Anyhow, once I'd got past those charming, perceptive guards of the border, I was able to shed the bonds of motherhood and really get into the spirit of Discount American Consumerism.

We went to Ross (which exists in Canada in as Winners). I have a thing for nutcrackers (as long as they don't look like athletes or idiots) and I bought a lovely package of them in varying guises: chimney sweep, snowman, jester, Father Christmas, but it was only when I got back to the motel room that I noticed one was Mr America. Forgive me, Gentle American Reader, but the Mr America Nutcracker is not my favourite. The red white and blue flag thing is not a good look - it makes him look a bit washed out. Besides, if I have to listen to FDPG tell me that there are only 23 stars on this flag which HAS to be wrong but why did they make this nutcracker if they knew it was wrong someone should have seen that one shouldn't they where was this thing made? one more time I might scream.

We went to Trader Joe's. I've always had a soft spot for Trader Joe's, it's cheap and cheerful and reminds me of an old hippie store, with all it's economy sushi, goat cheese, sprouted breads, and organic salads. Besides, where else could you buy candies with "natural acai flavour"? I mean, who else but a hippie would think acai berries belong in candy? Ugh. (note to friends: don't be giving me any acai berries for Christmas - ickola)
Nevertheless, I bought a package of these for each of my kids. They come in a cool little tin and they are luridly purple. No one noticed the acai taste at all. Must have been all that sugar.



And with this new craze every store seems to have for selling its own shopping bag (even our library has shopping bags, although they market them as Book Bags) I see Trader Joe's, as is its wont, has upped the ante with cooler shopping bags. They are almost frame-able they are so beautiful. Look at this little number reposing in my kitchen. I love it. And yes, I might marry it I love it so much, Mr Richard Smartie Pants.

And now I see that they've got retro packaging. This baby might just make it onto one of my home made wall signs once we've consumed the contents. Cheap chocolate pudding always looks way cooler in retro packaging - and that is the brilliance that is Trader Joe's: putting (sometimes slightly inferior) alternative products in way cool packaging.

Here is another example: the Almost Oreo. The Christmas Almost Oreo. It has crushed candy canes in the filling. And a gaily striped box without. What's even better: it's cheaper than Oreos. Which made me purchase 2 boxes. So what if it isn't quite as minty as the Christmas Oreo?

Ahem. Yes, I AM a sucker for advertising. Besides, the kids loved them.






I even went to a kitchen store I'd heard of many times on the TV show Friends: it's called Williams Sonoma. It's a vastly over-priced place, where you can purchase small packages of hot chocolate for $20 and teeny tiny little bags of pasta for $18, not to mention horrendously priced dishes, and aprons for $50, but you can also buy way cool baking implements like this one you see on the left. It's called a Backyard Bug Dish. Yes children, with this thing you CAN eat bugs. What's better, they will even taste good. Hardly any crunchy bits, either. The oven temperatures have something to do with that, I think. Melts everything.

See? I baked some here. In chocolate cake batter. Mmmmmm. Chocolate bees. Chocolate butterflies. Chocolate ladybugs. Mmmmm. I can see birthday parties and tea parties in your future, cake tin.