The Average Blogger

A Couple Great Weekends

I promise that I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly posting. But I'm also trying to up my presence on Twitter, finish the book, get the yard in good shape, keep the house from falling down, monitor the Young Prince, and avoid getting fired.  This adds up to a lot of plates spinning. 

And on the weekends, we have, again, been more in the mode of Doing than Recording.  For the anniversary of V-E Day, we blew off the kid's swim lesson and went to the Smithsonian's "Fly In to Victory Day,"  watched a movie about D-Day that the kid liked but probably didn't retain much of, then went out and looked at airplanes.  Photos can be seen here. (Unlabeled, as usual. I aim to make it a retirement project to give them all names and descriptions. Sort of like I meant to blog every week this year.) 

Unfortunately, in blowing off the swim lesson, we also missed a memo that the following Saturday would be a meet of some kind in Woodbridge. So he missed that since we didn't know, but I think he and his dad had a lovely time anyway.  I spent the day at a symposium about Reconstruction and After the War, where I met some lovely people and got a couple good insights for the book.  When that was over, I met the lads for dinner and then the YP and I went to see the Avengers at a "real" Imax theater, which he enjoyed immensely. 

He's been doing so well, lately.  Part of the deal of going to the movie on Saturday involved him having to finish 2 books and write five pages of his novel.  He met all deadlines with grace and very little complaint. I'm not sure how his actual classwork is going, but what I do know about seems to be moving smoothly.  We will face a challenge to that on June 16—I won (or lost, depending on your outlook) the chaperone lottery for the sixth-grade trip to Gettysburg.  This entails getting up at 5:30 a.m. to be at school by 6. I hope I am rested enough not to be cranky.  The good news is I do not get carsick, so this will be a good chance for me to either chat with a seat mate or retreat into the Outlander series and put a great big dent in that. 

Before that rolls around, however, we have Memorial Day. The outing for Saturday is a trip to the Brentsville Jail, where they are giving a tour of the reconstruction, then the usual errands and obligations (and an apology to the swim team). Sunday we are going to a baseball game. The plan for the holiday is to sit in bed and do nothing, but I imagine some yard work will creep in. We are close to getting the flower bed completely graveled and it looks much better this way.  The weeds still pop up like mad, but I am now equipped with weed killer and went to town on it yesterday. I forgot to look at it this morning to see how it turned out. Perhaps pictures of that will follow at some point. 

The only downside to a holiday is the dent it puts in my diet.  My fitness app thingie tells me I've lost 8 lbs since January. This is nice. It is also somewhat interesting to me, in that Exercise has played very little role, and I don't think Eating Less has been as significant as What I Eat. The new elliptical has been put into use (though not enough)  and while those stints have been good for my general sense of well-being and feeling accomplished,  the needle on the scale does not seem to be terribly affected by it. 

What has made a significant (and—believe me —utterly surprising) difference is subscribing to Blue Apron.  Three meals a week, Not Your Average Blogger and I joyfully bicker as we wash lettuce and pick tarragon leaves off stems and prepare what we have received. This means our plates are seeing a lot more things like beets and spinach and red onions and a lot less protein and starch. I’m not ready to proselytize for them, but I was a little shocked to eat a 700-calorie dinner after dark one night and not PAY FOR IT WITH GRIEF the next morning, you know?

 

I was talking to my weight loss pal about it  last week, and she was not surprised—said she’s done well on things like NutriSystem and Jenny Craig, but the problem is you don’t view that as a lifestyle change so much as a temporary means to an end.  Once you go back to the “real” world, you lose the parameters/serving sizes/discipline and the weight comes back. I guess Blue Apron is a kind of halfway house to those?  But since I didn’t go into it as a weight loss plan so much as a “WTF kind of food is THAT? Let’s try it!” plan, it feels less like brainwashing.  :)  So I'm not sure what we'll be eating for the three-day weekend aside from ballpark hot dogs, but there will have to be some effort to counterbalance that. 

 

Have a good holiday, everyone! 

Places We Eat -- or Don't

The Red Flame next to the Algonquin is an excellent coffee shop. Very dive-y.

Renaissance at 52nd and 9th has awesome breakfast.

At Morton's, the mashed potatoes serve two.

At Shula's -- do not get the twice-baked potato unless you really like garlic and onion.

 In Gettysburg -- the Perkins is on 30, heading toward York.

If I Were 16 Again -- I'd Be Very Surprised and Confused

And I'd invest in Microsoft.

When I was in high school, I lived in rural Florida.  And let me tell you, having seen that there was more to the world  during my grade-school and middle-school years, I could not WAIT to get out of rural Florida.

One of my big problems with rural Florida was that it was ... well, rural. There were fire ants. There were snakes. There were swamps. And, there was agriculture. I lived in the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World. Every February there was a big Strawberry Festival, and every year I lived there I was in marching band, which meant I had to march in a parade and work the pie booth at the fair. Every year I lived there I watched girls my age with big hair and shiny teeth compete to be festival royalty, and every year I lived there I took part in the Friday night high-schoolers-run-amok-amid-the-carnival rides mayhem. 

Except, see, I hate strawberries. I hate beauty contests, and I was not a fan of country music, which was usually the other big draw to this event. I was 16, I was worldly, I was amused by the hickness of it all. 

I was, in short, a bit of an ass.

Please note, this is not to say I think anyone who works a farm or lives in a town of less than 1500 is a hick. Not so. I have great appreciation for agriculture and I have a certain amount of disdain for yuppies who think that because they grow herbs in their windowbox, all agribusiness everywhere is EEEEVIL. But that's another post. Maybe tomorrow. 

So, yeah. Anti-fruit, anti-fair, anti-home crafts.

Fast forward 20 years or so; I meet my husband. And his family. And one of the great things about his mom is she churns out jelly that is amazing. Every time we go back to visit we come home with at least six jars of jelly and three jars of this dreadful salad dressing that Not Your Average Blogger adores. (Really, dreadful. It's like vinegar-scented Sterno.)

Well, as I posted a while back, NYAB's mom died last year, and I decided I'd take a stab at picking up the jelly-making tradition.  Since March, I've made a bunch of different flavors, and the only dismal failure was when I tried to use grape juice out of a jar instead of finding Concord grapes to smush and boil and put through the process. 

I'd bug him occasionally -- is this how your mom's tasted? Better? Worse? What am I doing right/wrong/differently? And his answer was always, "It's good. It's fine. It's ... OK, this batch miiiiight be a leeeeetle bit better than I remember Mom's. But it's close."

Last week, the county fair kicked off and after some deliberation, I entered a jar of strawberry jelly in the preserves competition. I mean, hey, I thought it was good -- it had a nice jewel tone, it tasted good, it set up nicely, even the Young Prince would eat it. But I know how these fair things go. There are kerjillions of entries, and people who have been doing it longer than NYAB's mom participate. Still, what the hell, right?

So the entry window was from 2-9 p.m. last Thursday. That morning I made NeighborGirl write a legible label for me in her prettiest writing. I stuck that on the jar, and the jar into my purse. I had to work, but figured even as late as I leave the office, we'd still make it to the fairgrounds by 9 p.m.  We left at 6 p.m. -- and hit rain, and traffic, and flash floods and glarrrgh.  

We got there at 8. I filled out my form, handed in my jar, looked at all the other jewel tone jars sitting on the shelf that got there before I did, and went home.  On the way home I'm reading the details to NYAB, and tell him the prizes are $6, $4, and $3.  For junior participants, they are $3, $2 and $1. NYAB finds this intensely amusing and we both sort of wonder why they don't just give ribbons and bragging rights and be done with it.

Judging was Friday. I was working.

Saturday, the Young Prince and I baked all day to participate in the chocolate contest. NYAB observed at some point over the weekend that it would have been his parents' wedding anniversary. We joked about going to visit them at the Grand Canyon, and I told him we couldn't because the YP had to enter his brownies.

So it wasn't until Sunday that we went back to the fair.  And while I'm standing there filling out forms for the YP's brownies and my Aunt Shirley's chocolate lush (subbing in chocolate cake for the angel food in the linked recipe), NYAB and the YP wander off to get out of the way. I'm almost done when the YP runs back up to me.

"Mom! I have something VERY IMPORTANT to show you."  
"Well, OK, can you wait til I'm done writing this stuff down?"
"But you won, Mom! You won!"
"I did?! Well, how about that!"

I hand off my forms to the chocolate lady and thank her profusely for her patience, then push past a few people to where NYAB is waiting.
"I hear I won. Guess I get my $6?"
"Better. You got best of show. That's gotta be worth $7, right?"

Wait. What?

Yeah. 

 

So, hello, I'm AB, and I'm a hick. But I still hate strawberries in their whole form. And you'll notice that the "premium won" line isn't filled in, so I don't know what that's about either.  My father raised the very good point that perhaps I should devote my time and efforts to something a bit more lucrative -- but hey! Now I can sell my jelly under a 'best of show' label! 

I do hope NYAB's mom is pleased and liked her anniversary gift, if her spirit is roaming around paying attention. I'm dead sorry I never asked her for pointers while she was around to give them.

One last note: Neither the YP nor I won anything for our chocolate endeavors. This puts him at 0 for 1 and me at 0 for 2. But I think the fix was in.  You try those recipes and tell me what you think!

Any Forward Gear Will Do

It was a good weekend. The kid and I made some kickass brownies loaded with various Reese's products that weighed about 1 lb a bite.  I don't know if they'll win at the fair, but they were certainly popular with taste testers  in the neighborhood and the office.

I was not as successful. I used leftover raspberry juice to make a cake that came out quite purple, but not very raspberry tasting.  The layers also fell to pieces when I took them out of the pans, so it was a sad bit of mess that was not improved in the least with purple-but-not-raspberry-ish frosting. Oh, well. Berry stuff isn't really my bag, anyway. 

The YP also played his first rounds of golf on an honest-to-god golf course, and he apparently was absolutely brilliant in his performance -- both in hitting the ball and in behaving himself.  Not Your Average Blogger is ready to take him out again at the next possible opportunity.

In a fit of I don't know what-ness, I also got him a new camera. This way he won't spend his time and our various summer trips begging to take pictures with mine, or pestering NYAB to use the iPhone to take video.  Now we just have to get him to take pictures of things other than street signs, the car stereo knobs, and his action figures.

In other news, we signed him up for obedience school -- my euphemism for this.  I'll be interested to see how it all shakes out.

Last Thursday we went for the "intake session,"  which was basically a therapist asking us a zillion questions and then asking him a bunch of questions in our absence and based on all that determining which sort of assistance she thinks would benefit him.  Most of the questions were pretty straightforward: List his strengths. List his weaknesses. What does he do well? What does he intensely dislike? Is he a picky eater? La, la, la. 

And then she goes, "Mom: What do you and the YP do for fun?"  FUN? Me? I'm his mother, not his circus clown!  Uhhh, I let him play before I yell at him to put all his crap away? I let him lick the spoon after he watches me bake cookies that he's not allowed to eat until his class shares them? I suckity suck suck!   I bumbled out something about how most of our fun is me dragging him around to various places to see things, try stuff, do something new.  And that more of our fun tends to be competitive: Who can sing louder? Who can pull the most weeds in a minute? Etc.

It was pretty depressing to realize that I do not feel like I do anything fun with this kid.  The lady went on to ask NYAB the same thing and it was all, "Play golf! Play baseball in the front yard! Read bedtime stories! Watch movies!"

Then she kicked us into the lobby and took Thomas in for his interview. And I proceeded to hate on myself and NYAB laughed at me and said I was fine, I'd just outsourced "Fun" to be his domain. Urgh. I felt like I ought to go back in and defend myself, better articulate what occurred to me as  I was sitting in the hallway: That we don't DO fun, we DO work, but we HAVE fun doing it. Like, we have dance contests while cleaning up his room, or we have gross-out conversations about what we could put in those school cookies to make people barf.   

I decided that would just seem even sadder, so I didn't bother to revisit.

What was worse was, she called us back in after talking to the YP and told us she asked him the same questions, and he cited "playing board games" as one of his fun activities. We do not play boardgames.  He does this with the babysitter when we're not home -- NeighborGirl is a much better loser than NYAB or myself, and she defuses the sore loser in Thomas rather than make fun of him like I do.

In the non-news department, she also said she noticed that he doesn't/can't sit still. Very fidgety and twitchy and leg-jiggly. She suggested .... more exercise! Surprise! (Side note here: We have started making him run the last .65 miles to our house when we are driving him home from places. His record so far has been six minutes and 45 seconds. I don't know how that stacks up with other kids, but clearly we need to enroll him in some kind of running activity if he can run for that long without stopping or wanting to die.)  

I'm happy with the exercise idea and will do my damndest to get more into/out of him going forward. But I do wonder how that will work when he's back in school and expected to sit in his seat from noon-4, however.  The therapist said the effect could be cumulative -- he'd sleep better and possibly wake up earlier, giving him a chance to run off some more steam before catching the bus.  Worth a shot, I suppose. I did start laughing when she said that, because the last couple weeks of school I kept harping at NYAB to make the kid run to the bus stop, and he groused that it would eat into their talking time. And after all that Unhappy NotFun Mom, it was small comfort to be right on some count.

So after we left, I asked Thomas what he and the lady talked about, and he said, "Well, she asked me what I do for fun in the afternoons, so I told her the stuff I do with NG." 

Ah ha. OK, so he answered a question he was not asked, or that he misunderstood. But he was clear on what he meant. I said, "Oh. Well, did she ask about what you do with Dad?"

And the kid goes, "Yeah, I told her we play golf and baseball."

I said, "And did she ask about what you do with me?"

The answer: "No, she didn't ask about you, she asked about the afternoons." 

I pushed one notch further and said, "Oh. Well, OK, what do we do that's fun together?"

And the kid is all, "Huh? I have no idea. I don't think there is anything."
 
JB just laughed and laughed. Then he reminded the kid that I share music with him and that if it weren't for me, he wouldn't know Dr. Who exists. 

Which I guess is true. But I tell you what. I'm looking into mother-son swordfighting lessons. 

Meanwhile, the group thang starts this Thursday.   More details as they emerge, unless they turn out to be mundane and more of the same. Heh.

Stuff To Do

The kid is going like gangbusters with golf. He seems to be having a lot of fun,and from what Not Your Average Blogger has observed over the past two days, the kid is actually listening and learning new skills.  I'm happy beyond words about this.

We are also two months away from the county fair.  Y'all might recall that last year I entered the chocolate contest -- and lost.  No matter. I'm trying again this year, and I think that thanks to a few tweaks on a recipe from my dearly departed Aunt Shirley, I might have a better shot this year.

I'm also entering my jelly -- maybe multiple jellies -- if I can figure out the farking rules.

And some photographs, if I take any good ones between now and then. 

Plus! There are junior contests. So I'm getting the kid in on this too, though I might just be setting him up for failure. But seriously, he takes fantastic pictures when he's paying attention and not just goofing around, so why not enter 'em?  And he's shown some interest in ditzing around in the kitchen, why not throw some chocolate at him and see what he does?

And as part of his writing practice for the summer, he will enter an essay contest. 75 words or less on "a grandparent."  I can't wait to see what he comes up with -- and how much he will howl over having to do a practice version and a real version, plus having to write neatly.

Life is infinitely more entertaining with some fun goals in mind.

All I Do Is Garden, Eat and Make Little Sharks.

No, wait. That's not right. Except for the eating part. My lord.

Yesterday, I got another year older.  My father took great joy in pointing out that in another year I will need to change the age reference in my tagline.  Whatever.  I figure my place at the top of the bell curve is safe anyway!

It was a highly eventful day. I got to work at 5 a.m. and trained someone in how to do my job, with far fewer pitfalls than might have occurred.  Best Boss Ever kept me talking a half-hour past the time I was supposed to leave, a chat rife with excellent anecdotes but a little thin on resolutions. Still, I managed to pick up the kid from his friend's house at the appointed hour, get the car's oil changed and plant a bunch of flowers in one of my entirely too numerous flower beds.

This recess we've been trying assorted local eateries. We give back to our community, people! Monday night was cashew chicken for me, "triple delight" for Not Your Average Blogger, and a heap of rice and three bites of beef-on-a-stick for the Young Prince at a Chinese place next to the grocery store. It was quite enjoyable. The service was fast, the food was good, I was stuffed and we had leftovers. The kid was pretty atrocious, but at least some of that was my fault for making him order something he didn't want.

Last night we went to a bar/diner/grill kind of place. I ordered a New York strip, the YP ordered a burger and NYAB ordered breakfast. The waitress was very nice and kept our glasses filled, but the food took For.Ev.Ver to arrive.  When it did, they clearly got the order wrong, because what I got was not a strip at all. It was huge, man. It was a New York slab. It was good. The only complaint was with NYAB's sausage, which had to be the blandest, most watery stuff I've ever tasted. Again, full. Again, leftovers. 

Then we went home, where I was fed butter pecan ice cream cake. Which was delightful, but after which I was unpleasantly stuffed.

Today is Tums for breakfast and lunch.  Tonight is our favorite not-quite-local-but-on-our-commute pizza place on the way home from seeing the Terra Cotta Army at the National Geographic Museum.   I'm not sure what tomorrow has in store. Research is pending. 

Domesticity

When I was a comparative slip of a lass, I attended high school in Plant City, Florida. Plant City was famed for being the "winter strawberry capital of the world," and every year they hold a huge festival with concerts and rides and berries upon berries. As a member of the marching band, it was required that I put in some number of hours manning the strawberry pie booth.

I don't like strawberries. I don't like the seeds, I don't like the squish. I will eat artificially strawberry flavored whatever, but real ones? No.

Couple this with the fact that I was an only child, in a household of 3, where if I saw fruit at all, it came out of a can, and I was completely bewildered why anyone would buy an entire flat of strawberries at one go.

I have concluded they all must have been making jelly.

Not Your Average Blogger's mom made fabulous jelly.  We finished the last jar of it a little while back. Sad.

So I figured I might as well take a stab at carrying on the tradition, right? I checked out six books from the library. I read everything I could get my hands on. I found out jam is easy, jelly is hard.  But ... well. Seeds. Squish. Jelly it must be.

Well. Now I know why I like jelly. It is so far removed from actual fruit as to be almost completely unrelated.

After doing my homework, and thanks to Mom and Dad, I got all kinds of nifty jelly-making apparatus for my birthday. I got a canner bath and rack. I got a jar gripper and a lid magnet and some other items. I got another book.

I found a recipe in one of the library books. It was very thorough and incredibly detailed and seemed reasonably idiot-proof. So I went with that.

First, it told me to get 5 quarts of strawberries. Except strawberries are sold in pounds. So that was interesting.

Hulled and chopped.

Mashed.

Then the recipe said to heat them in an 8-qt pan with a cup of water. Well, I had a 6-quart and a 12-quart. I went with the smaller.

When the berries finally did boil, they made a lot of foam. That needs to be skimmed off.

Ew.

Then it said to strain through a seive to get juice from pulp. Large and small. The problem is, the small gunks up the sieve. So I had to dump in little amounts and run through the sieve, then rinse out the sieve and start over. It took five or six cycles to run through the whole potful.

Once the big hunks are done, the juice needs to be strained through cloth. Twice. And more scum skimmed off. And again, the pulp clogs up the process. I used two of three juice bags to get through all the juice, and even doing it that way I had to wiggle the bags around to get to unclogged pieces of cloth.

It said that for truly clear and gorgeous jelly, you should strain it through a coffee filter.  Know what? Screw that. I dropped in a quarter cup and watched it for five minutes and barely any went through.

So after two strains, I put it in a big bowl and refrigerated overnight, to allow sediment to settle. Next morning I measured out the amount I needed.

And strained it one more time. Now, the recipe I was looking at wanted 4 cups of juice and 7 cups of sugar. It also called for two packets of liquid pectin.  Well, I had powdered. So I blew off the original recipe and looked at the recipe in the pectin box. 3-3/4 c juice, 4 cups sugar. Sold!

Juice.

While all this jelly measuring and straining and sugar measuring is going on, you are also supposed to be sterilizing the jars and lids. (I got a shmancy lid holder -- you can see it off to the right in the photo above.)

I had a problem with the jars. I put them in the rack and lowered the rack into the water, and -- duh, the empty jars all immediately tipped over and fell out and rolled around. Harumph. While I was bringing the juice to its first boil, I fished all the jars out.

Pectin.

Boil, stirring constantly. It poofs up right damn quick, so you have to have the sugar RIGHT THERE and be stirring the whole time.

ADD LOTS OF SUGAR.

Stir til sugar dissolves and boil again. It looks virtually the same as the first boil.

Then there is more scum to skim off.

Once everything is all hot and bothered, the jars are out and the jelly is ready, ladle into jars.

Add lids. (Side note. There are five small cans of Dr. Pepper in this shot. They have been in my house for a week. I am doing quite well getting that monkey off my back, thanks to the wonders of Starbucks and Chik-Fil-A iced tea. Now, on with the show.)

Screw on tops. Tightly.

Put in boiling water bath for 5 minutes. I don't know if I was more careful, or having the jars full helped, but none fell over that time.

Take out, let cool.

Five of my six jars sealed correctly, which makes me happy. Now I am waiting to see if this stuff sets up. It's been three hours, and I've been advised not to even bother checking it until tomorrow.
 The jar that didn't seal is in the fridge. Thomas had some of the leftover jelly from the pan on a sandwich and declared it good.  So at the very least, we'll have strawberry sauce for ice cream, I suppose.

Discipline Your Image

"We use the buddy system. No more flying solo. You need somebody watching your back at all times. Second off, you're gonna learn to discipline your image. You think I got where I am today because I dressed like Peter Pan over here?"

So, the weekend started with a plan -- an ambition, a reasonably attainable goal, if you will.  And with a cohort.

I was lamenting to a friend that I need more competition to get myself motivated to do stuff. Get off my ass and go to the gym, run faster or longer if I do manage to get to the gym, eat better, whatever.  Commiseration ensued.

And a plan was hatched for gradual substitution of bad habits with good ones. Or at least, better ones.  In my case, this means weaning myself off the sugarbomb soda and eventually dialing it back to iced tea or water or what have you.

(I'm guessing tea.  I don't know why, but I can't get onto the Water is Awesome! Drink It All Day! wagon.  And I don't do hot beverages, so coffee is a non-starter.) 

For sundry reasons, my friend backed out before anything got off the ground. Which I guess makes the competitive part of me glad (I win!), but is sort of disappointing in that the goad is gone. (I lose.)

So, I'm still going to move forward with my plan -- drink a regular amount and chart it, then drink one less a day, and one less and one less and so on until I'm completely converted. I have no idea if it will work better than the "just drop it all at once and get the hell over yourself" method. I would imagine the blood sugar headaches will be held at bay a bit better.

All this noise led to some woolgathering on this morning's commute.  I remember dieting when I lived alone -- and it was much, much easier than now, when I live with two males blessed with metabolisms that could eat Manhattan and not gain an ounce. (Or if they do gain, they don't care.)  It was definitely easier to get up and move around when I was single and had dogs to walk, plus I was a flunkie whose job consisted of 8 hours and out. (And I was already thinner and more energetic, cough cough.)

But it was also harder to justify a lot of those changes, as I didn't really have anyone to make them for besides myself. I was dieting to wear cute clothes, not to stay alive for family, so I'd skip meals one week and then I'd go to the other extreme and binge at Burger King the next.  I drank a fair amount. I don't now, primarily because Not Your Average Blogger abstains, but also because I'm responsible for more than just two dogs who could pretty much fend for themselves.

(I had a similar thing with psychotropic drugs, way back in the day. At a certain juncture in my narrative, I couldn't really see any point in not partaking every weekend. Why not? It was cheap, it was easy, it didn't make me sick, and I knew about how much time was going to be burned on the experience. Then I graduated and got my own place and it occurred to me that if my house burned down it would be a problem if I wasn't sure whether the walls were really melting or not. So much for that.)

I don't miss drugs at all, strange to say.  I never smoked, so I can't speak to that.  As for alcohol ... I don't miss the hangovers. I only occasionally miss the numbness and euphoria. And every so often I will drink socially up to the point where I realize I'm about to embarrass myself. These days, I tend to stop and excuse myself before that happens, rather than after. At least, I think.

But I do sort of wonder if I'm a different person than I was and I am fooling myself thinking I'm pretty much the same, just a bit more boring.  And I wonder if forgoing my other vices will make me even more boring.  Being a fat sugar-holic isn't a very interesting vice to begin with, so I am thinking not.  Still. I know smokers who quit and then turn into sanctimonious blowhards who disdainfully sniff about how annoying smokers are. And people who go into therapy and then insist everyone should try it. Will that happen to me? Will I become a tea hound who rails against the sins of corn syrup?

Maybe I should cut back by one every other day.

Show Us Your Mother, Riff...

Sunday was the big day.  I’ll spare you the suspense: I didn’t win a ribbon. Except for maybe first place for Most Embarrassed Parent Ever.

I’ve been working on the bacon-chocolate cookie recipe for a while now.  For the past two weeks I took in samples to the office and subjected co-workers to my experiments. I think I got it down just right in the last batch – a good mix of super-crunchy bacon with a moist chewy chocolate cookie that got the salty-sweet thing well-balanced. 

The name? Depending on the audience they are Pigs in the Mud or they are BacOMGs.  The name “BaConfections” was also suggested, but unfortunately when you say that out loud it sounds too much like “Bake Infections,” and what with swine flu and all, that was just sort of ew.

So I figured I had a decent submission for the chocolate bake-off. It tasted good, it had good texture, it was reasonably creative.  And chocolate-y, dear lord, yes. 28 oz of chocolate, plus another half-cup of unsweetened cocoa.

Now mind you, the last time I entered a baking contest, I was 22.  I entered a contest looking for lemon submissions that required a whole dessert plus one serving plated.  I entered something called sunny-side-up cake, which was basically angel-food cake with a hole hacked out of the center and replaced with lemon custard. That lost too.  At least partly because it never occurred to me that you’d just hack out the middle of the cake on the plate, so I tried my utmost to cut up the whole cake, insert a custard center, and then replace the top.  It was not horrible, but it certainly didn’t win ANY points for presentation. 

Not so this time. I mean, cookies are cookies.  Nothing to it. They look good. They look like cookies.

I baked them Saturday night. Batted the hovering Not Your Average Blogger away from the bacon. Swatted the Young Prince away from the chocolate chips. Got all three dozen cookies baked and cooled and set. Wrapped them in individual Cello bags.  Taped them up. They were very pretty. 

Sunday morning I got up, did the ironing, cleaned the kitchen, fiddled around.  Went and got NeighborGirl around 1:15, and off we all went to the fair. It was happily uncomplicated to find the right gate and building, and there wasn’t a huge crowd, which was nice. I filled out my entry forms, left the stuff on a cardboard platter, and then we took off and entertained ourselves wandering around other parts of the fair. We went from the baking booth to the barns, where we saw the baby goats and the giant pigs and the miniature horses. We went to the midway where the YP had a screaming nervous breakdown and got kicked off one of those rides that is basically a bunch of cars going around a circular track with some centrifugal force thrown in. We stopped on our way back to the baking contest and I finally notched off the last of the deep-fried desserts I had yet to try – a deep-fried Twinkie.  It was quite good.  Though having tried them all, I rather think the deep-fried Snickers are best. 

We got back to the bake-off around 3, when the judging was going on.  Since I had no idea how this worked, I wanted to see what the process was.  NYAB and the YP lasted about 10 minutes before I gave NYAB my BlackBerry and told him that when it said 4:00, he should come back.   That left me and NeighborGirl to sort of people-watch, gape, and chortle.

Lord, was there ever a lot to chortle at.  I swear, I kept expecting Christopher Guest to yell “Cut!” and tell the various characters, “No, no, let the fat roll over your yoga pants show a little more,” or “Hey, you, try to look a little more keyed up!”

First of all, there was the hall itself.  All the chocolate submissions were dished out on top of these glass cabinets, but inside the cabinets were winners of other contests – and it looked like some of them had been there for, ahem, a while.  Mint leaves shriveled and gray-green. Pineapple upside-down cake that looked like it came from Morrison’s Cafeteria.  Etc., etc.

Then there was the milling-around area for the current contest participants. For some reason, the poor woman trying to run this show apparently had made it her mission in life to leave no dead air between the time of the entry deadline and the winners being announced. I’m not clear on whether she was with the Red Cross, which would receive all the proceeds, or if she was involved with the fair, or what, but she sure did do a lot of talking. To further facilitate waiting, there were a bunch of folding chairs set up in five or six rows, all facing a counter with the prize baskets and a big portable easel.  Why an easel? Because they were running a sort of strange little Jeopardy game that alternated questions about community safety (“What is one method to stop bleeding?”) and chocolate (“Is fermentation part of the chocolate making process?”) NeighborGirl and I spent a little bit of time making fun of this (“Pour salt in the wound!” “I do all my best binge drinking with chocolate!”) and then we wandered around and looked at winners of other contests.  There sure are a lot of blue ribbons at county fairs.  We couldn’t really figure it out.  We’d be looking at “quilts, category 12A” and there were at least five blue ribbons.  Very confusing.

Finally, 4 p.m. rolled around.  Our nervous emcee woman – who I kid you not, was like a dwarfish and more nervous version of Jennifer Coolidge – introduced all the judges, and when she was done, some other woman came over and announced there was some kind of problem and they needed all the judges to come back.  Off they all trundled.  NYAB and the YP came back, and we “donated” $4 to the Red Cross to get two plates of samples of the various other entries.  There was some good stuff, there was some bad stuff.

So there we are. Five minutes pass.  Ten. Twenty.  Because we’ve been there forever, we’ve scored three of the folding chairs in the back row. We’ve finished the chocolate,  NeighborGirl and I are snarking away under our breath about whatever catches our eye, and the YP is on my lap being very annoying and squirmy and not resigned to waiting. 

And Jennifer Coolidge has NOT SHUT UP the entire time.

All of a sudden, in the middle of a story about her first experience at the county fair was winning a blue ribbon for a jar of preserved green beans, out of absolutely nowhere, my darling son, sitting on my lap, fiddling with a pair of binoculars made out of toilet paper tubes, sits bolt upright and shouts out, in his best and loudest Rocky Horror voice, “BO-RRRING!!!”

(This, it turns out, was only to be expected.  Rocky Horror was on TV last weekend. We taught him how to do the Time Warp dance.  He lost interest after 45 minutes.  I didn't really think anything but the dance had stuck in his brain.  Serves us all right.)

I clap my hand over his mouth, but it is too late.  I look around again for Christopher Guest and wish I could sink through the floor. I can feel my face flushing about 1569 shades of red as I howl, “YOUNG PRINCE! Shame on you!”

Even though, of course, not five minutes previous I had been grousing to NeighborGirl that it would probably be less irksome if she’d just, you know, let us wait in peace and quiet.

(NeighborGirl and NYAB were no help whatsoever, let me add.  Both of them were laughing so hard they had tears streaming down their faces.  Of course, if the kid has been on NYAB’s lap, that is exactly what I would have done too.) 

Emcee Lady was very nice about it, “Oh, yes, I know, I’m so boring!  Just a few more minutes honey!” And to me, “It’s ok! I know he’s a little boy! They just do that!”  Argh, argh, argh.  NYAB finally composes himself and takes the YP out of the room for a talking to, and Emcee Lady wraps up her anecdote with, “So does anyone else have any INTERESTING stories?”  Ugh, ugh, ugh.

NYAB and the YP return, and I tell the YP he must apologize to Emcee Lady.  He says, “I know. Daddy already told me that. I will tell her I am sorry and I didn’t mean she was boring.”

So off he went, and apparently did a reasonably good job of it, as she smiled and patted his head and – he reported later – told him she understood and she was sorry he had to wait so long. 

Finally, around 4:30 or so, the winners were announced. The third-place adult winner was one of the judges for the youth category, and the grand prize winner had the same last name and was off manning the cash register for the Red Cross “donations.”  I don’t remember for sure, but I’m pretty sure one of the youth winners had the same last name too.  I say the fix was in.  Heh.

But here’s what I do know: Cake beats out cookies, cheesecake trumps cake, and ganache apparently tops everything.  So I’m all set to try again next year!

I Know What's Going On

My brain went in odd directions this weekend. I spent a lot of time freaking out and/or being irritated about work-related things and then on three separate occasions decided to screw all that and focus on better and more useful endeavors. (It really worked, as you can tell, since I had to disengage three times.)

I took advantage of Virginia's "tax free" weekend and got the kid all outfitted for school with new shirts and long pants that end closer to his ankles than his knees and the 5 things that we hadn't yet bought on his school supply list.  I'm amused to report he chose a GI Joe backpack for this year, though he has yet to see the movie and given other friends' reviews probably won't see it any time soon. I'm also amused to report that I am pleased at the realization that my first-grader is sharp and funny and perceptive, albeit combative -- and yet a tiny bit sad that he no longer bears any similarity at all with the jolly and easygoing baby who was completely awed by any and every new thing to come his way. On the other hand, if he were six and still acting two, I'd probably be sad about that. So what do I know?

I figured out what to get my grandparents for their 60th wedding anniversary.  I will tell you how it is received. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who will think it is anything other than a little bit off.

I am going to see most of the Illinois contingent in a couple weeks. Due to a series of last-minute maneuvering by the siblings of Not Your Average Blogger, he is saving vacation time to be with them in October. Apparently they've decided to take his parents' and brother's ashes up to the Grand Canyon rim and toss 'em into the abyss. Since the Young Prince will be in school, NYAB will be going solo.  And since we actually used most of our time off this year and need to save some for Christmas, NYAB  will not be accompanying me on our usual Annual Midwest Tour.  Instead, the kid and I are flying to Winchester and then driving home in my grandmother's Camaro, which I'm very excited to be getting because it is pretty, and which NYAB is less thrilled about but OK with because it will give us a third quasi-reliable vehicle to use for our commutes.

So last night, my father informed me that the tribal elders held a council and it was decided that a frumpy middle-aged woman and her blathery soon-to-be-first-grader were at great risk traveling alone halfway across the country in a quasi-reliable antique car, and that he had been tasked to accompany us as a bodyguard. I am not sure how you'd classify my reaction -- maybe "patronizing"?? I know the words, "well, if it makes YOU feel better" came out of my mouth at one point. One thing my reaction definitely lacked was gratitude, which I feel sort of guilty about in hindsight. I am just tickled to pieces by this in so many ways.  I can't figure out if it means that my family has gotten really old and paranoid, or if they think I'm that flighty and foolish, or if they don't realize that I've got a cellphone and a lot of anger to carry us through adversity or what.  Regardless, I have to confess that I find it incredibly sweet and touching that they actually care if we get dead.  And I'm grateful.

I'm not sure what this means for the various side trips I had planned -- wanted to go see a friend's new baby, wanted to reconnect with some other friends I haven't seen in 25 years, etc. -- but it seems unkind to drag my father along on this stuff, so it might have to wait a while.  I suppose the car isn't really the best choice for such jaunts either, so I may just chuck it all and head back home directly.

I have plenty of time to decide, however.  Today I take the kid to find out if he's a plague carrier, and next Sunday I find out if my deep-dark-chocolate-with-chocolate-chips-and-bacon cookies are prize-winners at the county fair.  I still need a name for those suckers.  Smokehouse Sweeties? Cocoa Bellies? Anyone? Names with "Pig" in them will not be considered.