The mission? To find the colors of the rainbow, even though the sky was a very wintry gray.
And now, in a decidedly non-rainbow order of colors, here is what we found:
(Take a quick click on each picture to see it better.)
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the Crumb Factory |
We went for a pretty chilly little scavenger hunt the other day. The mission? To find the colors of the rainbow, even though the sky was a very wintry gray. Surprisingly, we found what we looking for. I am not sure I would have taken the time to notice all the colors of the rainbow had the kids not been with me on my walk. And now, in a decidedly non-rainbow order of colors, here is what we found: (Take a quick click on each picture to see it better.) Happy Fall!
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We took the kids pottery painting today, something we had never done before. And now that I think about it, I can't quite believe that the kids have not experienced the fun of painting their very own plaster object before. Does it sound like I am making fun? Because I am not. I love (love) those paint your own pottery places. I love them so much that I could have sat there all day, alone, painting one piece after another, never getting bored. My wish is for someone to pay me to sit there and paint. I want that to be my job. Anyway, the kids had a great time. And they paint the way they live, which is fascinating. There's the kid who narrated his every move. "Now I'm going to use the little brush and paint blue here. No here. Here and here." I think we can also call him the indecisive one. Then there's the kid who painted with such a serious look on his face that I stopped him midway through to ask if he needed to use the bathroom. He looked like he was holding it in. Next we had the little girl who sang her way through painting her mini cookie jar. She's a little bit like Janice from the Muppets. You know the one, long straight hair, who moves her head in a Stevie Wonder kind of way all the time because she hears music in her head. And then the little one. Who, I think, thought we were there for her favorite activity: finger painting. A paintbrush did not even come near her dirty little hands after the first three minutes of painting. It was awesome. I can't wait to pick up their creations and add them to our painted pottery collection. Yeah, we have a collection, although as the years go by and the kids get older and more prone to holding their own plates, that collection gets smaller and smaller. Josh and I began our collection around the time we got engaged. We visited Our Name is Mud in NYC an obscene number of times and spent more than an obscene amount of money there, creating a set of dishes for our newly married life. Cute, right? Except for the fact that the company discontinued the plates we were making (square ones with a rim, if you really really know) halfway through the set. At the end of the day(s), we left with four or five dinner plates, four soup bowls, three serving pieces and a napkin holder. Not quite service for eight, but you know, paper plates are good too. Fun for all. And I say all, because Josh got to take a nap in the car while we were all painting. Wishing you a very special Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah!
And if you're not celebrating - Happy Sunday! We built a different succah this year. I love this one, it's neat, it's easy to put together as evidenced by the photo below and it stands up straight as a succah should. But I do kind of miss the slightly lopsided and extra-heavy succah we have an home, the one my kids painted. I'm going to have to figure out how to reconcile my love of going away to the country for holidays with my love of my homemade-ish succah that is way too big to pack into the van and bring upstate. Okay. I think I'm reconciled. I looked at this year's succah pictures thus far, and I have to say, being able to build a succah, any succah, on a deck right off the dining room beats any nostalgia I feel for our other succah. And so for my brother, who has an awesome succah of his own this year, I say, behold, the building* of the First Annual Presidential Sukkah. And now behold, the first bug in the First Annual Presidential Succah. Notice I don't say first annual bug. He's not welcome to come back next year. *I only say the 'building of'. We don't have any actual 'sitting in' pictures yet. It needs to stop raining for more than three minutes first. Chag Samayach and Happy Succot!
This is what greeted me when I came down to the kitchen this morning. Almost scared the pajamas off of me, but the baby was so proud of herself, feeding tea biscuits to the monkey's nose. And her little game kept her busy while we baked a little while later. You see, 'tis the season for pumpkins. And since Josh was gone for so long at shul this morning, we made pumpkin muffins. And mini muffins. And a pumpkin bread. All from one recipe. Does it get better than that? Not from one 15 ounce can of pumpkin, that's for sure. The first time I tasted anything pumpkin related, I was in California for my uncle's wedding. In 1987. All the other kids were running around but my Bobby Toby and I were sitting at the kiddie table, inhaling pumpkin muffins. My Bobby Toby is no longer with us but for years, we had tried to recreate the same delicious muffins we had had in 1987. And we couldn't. I think my Bobby's problem was that she didn't bother to look for a recipe, she just winged it. I, on the other hand, was always trying to make a "healthy" pumpkin muffin, following different recipes, with flax seed and whole wheat flour. Then I pulled out my old pumpkin bread recipe that I always tried to play around with and instead of using weird ingreidents, I just replaced some of the sugar with less sugar and switched the margarine for oil. Instead of using the three cups of sugar that the recipe listed, I used two. Still awful, I know. But one taste of these muffins and I was back in California with my Bobby Toby, wearing my burgundy colored crushed velvet dress with white tights and shiny black mary-janes. And a matching velvet headband with a bow. Stuffing muffins into my mouth. Memories. These are deliciously unhealthy and definitely a once-in-a-blue-moon treat. Today must be a blue moon kinda day. Here is the recipe, with my modifications: 1 15ounce can of pureed pumpkin, not pie filling 2 cups sugar 1 cup water or soy milk 1 cup oil 4 eggs 3 and 1/2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking soda 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease whatever pans you'd like to use. I used one loaf pan, one muffin pan with 12 spaces, and one mini muffin pan with 24 spaces. In a bowl of a standing mixer (or by hand), mix the sugar, soy milk or water, oil, eggs and pumpkin. Add the dry ingredients and mix until combined. Pour half the batter into the loaf. Start baking the loaf pan right away because that pan takes the longest, at about 50 minutes, but start checking it at 30 minutes to be sure the top isn't burning. I tented my loaf pan with foil at the 35 minute mark and left it like that until it was done, about 15 minutes later. Then pour the batter into the mini muffin tin and bake that on the other rack. These take the shortest, coming in at about 11 minutes. Next fill the regular sized muffin pan, move it to side and wash the dirty bowl and spoons. By now the mini muffins should be done and the regular sized muffins can go in. The regular sized ones took about 18 minutes to bake. Let cool and eat. Or store in a Ziploc bag on the counter. Or wrap in foil and stick in a labeled freezer bag and freeze. All good options. And just think how lucky we are to have freezer bags to keep the food we work so hard on from getting freezer burn. There were no dedicated freezer bags in 1987. That's why we had to eat all those muffins. We were really just doing a service to the hostess. If you like what you've read, please leave a comment!
It's amazing what you can accomplish during a one hour naptime. Here is our succah before: And here is our succah after. I'm about halfway through, but I don't know if I will remember to take another picture later on. The only problem I can forsee is that I decorated before the kids brought home this year's stash from school. We'll have to shift things around when they bring home their bags of decorations tomorrow, but at least, for now, I am ahead of the game. Thanks for reading! And if you liked what you saw, please leave a comment!
The morning after - Yom Kippur, that is. The day dawns completely anew when you can wake up and brush your teeth. Such a simple thing, yet it's probably the one thing that makes you human enough in the morning to engage with other humans. You can wear pajamas all day and stick a baseball cap on your mop of unwashed hair and you will still have friends. But don't brush your teeth, and forget it. Nobody will talk to you. So I guess that brushing teeth is really the first beautiful mitzvah (or good deed) one can do, bein adam l'chaveiro*, after Yom Kippur. Sunday was a busy day. By 9am, we had four batches of challah dough rising on the counter. We should be good for challah until the week after Succot. I feel good just saying that. And I also feel good because the last dish that I used to prepare for Yom Kippur was washed by 9:30am which meant that we were full steam ahead to Succot by 9:35am. The two main accomplishments yesterday were the baking of the challah and the baking for the teachers. I only baked enough challah for the first three days of Succot. The rest of the dough was shaped, frozen and slipped into freezer bags to be baked at a later date. I have never done that before. I usually bake all the dough and freeze baked challah but it was so hot out yesterday and I refuse to turn the air conditioner on in October so one batch in the oven was enough. And besides, there was a lot of cake baking to do and not that much time. To bake the frozen challah next week, I believe all I have to do it take them out of the freezer, let them defrost a little and bake, possibly for a little longer than usual. I just hope they don't lose their shape while they are defrosting. I guess we'll find out next week. On to the baking. Several years ago - when I only had one child in school - I thought it would be a nice idea to bake something for the teachers before Rosh Hashanah, something like an apple pie. That year there were three teachers. The following year, with two kids in school, the number of teachers jumped to six, but still manageable. Last year, we baked before Succot and gave out treats to nine teachers, making pumpkin bread, a big hit. This year, I have three kids in school. Care to guess how many teachers there are? You won't be able to and I know that because I counted the number of teachers seven times before allowing myself to understand that there are 14 wonderful people who teach my children. Fourteen. What to do? And what to bake? After agonizing (really, I agonized) I decided to go with an chocolate-chocolate-chip-applesauce cake. It's a quick and easy recipe and did not involve peeling any apples or opening any sharp cans of pumpkin as recipes of years past required. This recipe comes from the mom of the girl who was one of my besties in elementary school. We have been out of touch for ages and recently reconnected. Her mom used to make this all the time and my friend was sweet enough to share the recipe. I have no idea what the real name of the cake is, so we'll go with Old-Time-Bestie's-Applesauce-Cake. Here it is: 1 stick margarine 1 3/4 c sugar 1 lb applesauce 2 c flour 2 eggs 3 T cocoa 6 oz choc chops 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1 1/2 tsp baking soda Cream the margarine and sugar. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. If you are baking one cake, pour the batter into a 9x13 inch pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. If you are me and baking 14 cakes, you will make the recipe five times and divide the batter among 15 pans (the pans came in sets of three). The pans were rectangles, about 7"x4", possible a drop smaller, but I don't think so. Bake the pans for 30 minutes each, testing the cake after 25 minutes. Not sure why but some pans were done faster than others but I'm pretty sure that's a function of my oven and not a function of the recipe. Allow the pans to cool, cover them and come back tomorrow to see how we wrapped them all up. *Literally, between man and his friend. Thanks for reading! And if you liked what you saw, please leave a comment!
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September 2018
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