Here comes the sun…

We have definitely turned the corner from Winter and begun Spring in earnest. Oh, there’s still a pile of snow on the front lawn that’s now as high as my chest, but the days have been warm, the ground wet more than cold, and the air ripe with the promise of green growing things to come.

This morning, I woke early and made my way downstairs to make muffins, and this is the sight that greeted me out the patio door:

Clear blue skies and a gorgeous ball of light making everything bright. The kitchen and the attached eating area we call the sun room were filled with sunshine (the sun room is aptly named, after all) and my heart hummed with happiness while I made up the batter and popped trays of muffins into the oven.

Soon, the muffin jar was filled to overflowing and the house was filled with the most delicious aroma. It was so tempting, that smell. And that sunshine, too.

Who could resist all that goodness in one place? Not me!

A cup of tea, some organic cane sugar flavoured with little bits of lemon, and mini muffins in three varieties. It was a most delicious way to start the day.

 

Delicious autumn

There’s something about autumn that inspires a flurry of baking. Maybe it’s the fact that the apples are plentiful and need preserving. Or maybe it’s a prelude to the long hibernation of winter. Whatever the reason, there’s an absolute deliciousness to the season.

This year marks the first year in several years’ tradition now that The Man We Call Dad did not take the kids apple picking. It didn’t bother me that they didn’t go — we’ve been busy with all sorts of other fun things, not the least of which has been long, lazy moments devouring chapter after chapter of Kevin Hearne’s Hounded together.

At least, it didn’t bother me until we went to my sister-in-law’s for Thanksgiving dinner and she happily showed off cupboards full of canning jars filled with apples in various forms, including an absolutely delicious apple pie filling.

Just that fast, I was bothered.

Really bothered.

In fact, I was positively nostalgic for the year The Man We Call Dad went just a little overboard on the apple picking and brought me home 80 pounds of apples.

So nostalgic that when we arrived at the grocery store to pick up a few essentials like milk and cheddar cheese, pita bread, and ice cream, I was pleased beyond measure to find the annual autumn bins of pumpkins and apples.

They’re huge, those bins. You could get lost in there if you aren’t careful. But they are filled with most fragrant, sweet, juicy MacIntosh apples you’ve ever seen.

Lots of them.

So we brought a few home and I immediately put them to good use:

Isn’t autumn delicious?

Yummylicious

There are definite advantages to having a son who is fascinated by the Netflix show Chef’s Table. Here’s one of them:

Pork chops in sour orange sauce with a side of sweet maple-glazed veggies paired with a salad fresh from our garden with balsamic vinegrette dressing, plated to look pretty, just like they do on the show.

He may have lots more to learn in the kitchen, but man oh man are my tastebuds loving this young man’s cooking!

New toys

When our kids were little, the family room was full of toys. Thomas train sets, Rescue Heroes, toy fire engines and dump trucks, teddies, and dollies, and so much more.

Despite being determined not to fill our house to the brim with toys, we had a lot of toys. And yet, whenever there was a holiday, or a birthday (or a rainy Tuesday in July, let’s be honest here), a new toy or two would make its way into our home, much to the kids’ delight. Mine too, truth be told, since nothing makes Mama happier than when the people she loves most in the world are happy.

Often times, the toys served a dual purpose. Board games that taught math skills and money handling. Playmobil that taught careers and adventure loving and opened the door for many a conversation on values, behaviours, and life in general. Musical instrucments for noisy play that set the foundation for the wonderful musicians they have become. Those wonderful science kits from the Young Scientists’ Club. And the LEGOs…Oh, how we love those!

Over the years, the toys changed. Some have stayed constant – the Playmobil sets, the science kits, and of course the LEGO blocks. Others were around for a very short time indeed — well loved at the time, but not for long, like Rescue Heroes, play kitchen, and Pokemon cards.

Lately, the nature of our toys has changed. Imaginative play is slowly being replaced by sports and books and video games. Craft kits have been replaced by drawing lessons thanks to Craftsy and YouTube. But most surprising of all has been the latest obsession: baking.

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that I bake a lot. Cakes and cookies, squares and brownies…the kitchen is one of my favourite places to spend time.

As a result, I have quite a few toys in my kitchen, though there are a few still on my wishlist. Most recently though, we added three new toys to our stock of kitchen things: A meat slicer, a dehydrator…and this:

We came across it at Canadian Tire and both kids instantly started chattering away in that very earnest and somewhat frantic and wildly pleading way they haven’t used since they were rather a lot younger. It was clear in an instant that this was to be one of those toys that would see a thousand hours of use in just a few short days, and then quite possibly, having been used to exhaustion, be then soundly ignored for weeks, and then months, and maybe even years.

But they were so excited at the possibility of owning such a thing, explaining how the band teacher for years has done something similar, and how awesome it is, and how they could do it all by themselves, and it would be AWESOME!!!!!!! (Though I’m not sure there are enough exclamation marks in the entire world to express exactly how awesome, so you’ll have to use your imagination.)

So we bought it. (It was on sale, after all.) And it was put to use almost immediately, much to their delight.

To my delight, too, since they are now of an age where they can be completely independent in the kitchen, trustworthy with sharp edges and hot surfaces, and confident that they can follow a recipe.

So what is our new toy? It’s a cake pop maker.

They’ve already made at least two dozen cake pops, and they have plans for more, though we have run out of sticks. And sprinkles. (Oh, the horrors of not having enough sticks and sprinkles!)

The way I see it, though, is that a cakepop without a stick and covered with a little bit of sugar glaze or powdered icing sugar is rather remarkably similar to a Timbit, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities, as far as I’m concerned. Though I will have to figure out how they get the jam in the middle of the raspberry jam ones.

I think, when the kids have decided they’ve had enough of this particular kitchen toy, I just might have to play with it myself.

Strawberry season

It’s official: Our own little strawberry season has drawn to a close. The last of the berries have been picked and there are no more to be had.

You wouldn’t think this would bother me much, given as how I don’t like un-jammed strawberries, but I am curiously sad.

The Man We Call Dad adores strawberries, as does our dear friend B (who knows exactly who he is, and reads this blog, and probably is wondering why I’m teasing him with pictures of strawberries he won’t get to eat, seeing as how he lives on the far west end of town and we live in the east).

We had a surprisingly quick strawberry season this year. Last year, the berries came a few at a time over several weeks, not enough at once to contemplate making jam.

This year, they came fast and furious, cupfuls at a time, and completely finished a mere week after they first started to blush. And once again, not enough to make jam.

But little by little, our strawberry patch grows. I have hopes that someday in the not so distant future, there will be enough strawberries for eating and jam making, and both The Man We Call Dad and I will be able to enjoy sweet berry treats from our very own backyard.

In the meantime, I have been blessed with an abundance of fruit in our weekly CSA box and with the help of a well-loved book on preserving, have done up some mango chutney, and now with a little canning done and a batch of chocolate chip cookies cooling on racks in preparation for an end of year party for the grade 8’s, all feels right in the world.

 

What’s cooling on my kitchen counter

They’re called “toffee squares,” they smell like pure sugary caramel goodness, and they contain a full cup of butter.

The base layer is a mixture of butter, flour, and brown sugar. The middle is sweetened condensed milk, corn syrup, butter, and vanilla. And because that isn’t sweet enough, they’re then drizzled with semi-sweet chocolate.

I can’t wait to try them!

Base:
Cream together half a cup of brown sugar and half a cup of butter. Beat until fluffy. Gradually beat in 1-1/2 cups of flour. Press the mixture into a pan lined in parchment paper and bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes until golden.

Filling:
Melt half a cup of butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Mix in one 300 mL can of sweetened condensed milk and 2 tablespoons of corn syrup. Stir constantly for 5 minutes or until bubbly. Remove from heat and add 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Assembly:
Pour filling over base and let cool completely. Drizzle melted semi-sweet chocolate on top.

A mouthful of cookies

This weekend was a cookie weekend.  The Man We Call Dad bought two whole bags of Oreo cookies. Two bags, not one. Two, because he knows from long experience that Oreos are a particular weakness of mine and I tend to eat them four at a time.  And because he knows the kids have learned from my fine example and see nothing wrong with devouring pairs of Oreos multiple times a day.

Usually, he buys a single bag and stashes it away in the pantry, trusting that when he comes back a few hours later, there will be cookies in there. A reasonable assumption, no?

And then he assumes, having had a single cookie, or maybe two, that when he puts the bag back in the pantry, there will be cookies in there tomorrow, too.

Which there totally would be, if the pantry had a lock on it.

Which it doesn’t.

And if I didn’t adore Oreos as much as I do.

And if I didn’t say “Sure, and get me some too!” every time a child said “May I please have an Oreo?”

But they do, and I do, and no, the pantry does not have a lock on it, and yet The Man We Call Dad still finds himself puzzled by the empty bag of Oreos on day two.

So this weekend, he bought not one but two bags of Oreos in the hopes of getting more than just a few for himself. To help with this plan, I baked a few cookies, too.  Two dozen chocolate chip, two dozen peanut butter (from the best recipe ever), and a dozen mint chocolate chip for good measure.

Yes, you read that right. We now have five dozen homemade cookies and 2 bags of Oreos in the house.

Or rather, on Sunday we did. But right at this moment… Well, there are rather fewer, shall we say, and let’s leave it at that.

Turkey learning

Did you know that you can learn a lot from a turkey? It’s true. Turkeys are, after all, so very different from people and yet so very much the same. This afternoon, shortly after lunch, B and I set out to see what we could learn with the help of one of my favourite cookbooks, Commonsense Kitchen: 600 Recipes Plus Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life, and an 11 pound turkey.

It was supposed to be a cooking lesson. A new recipe for roast turkey that involved stuffing the bird with apples rolled in salt and pepper and rosemary. I’ve had my eye on that recipe for a while and with fresh young turkeys on sale a while back, I promptly bought two, stuck one in the freezer, and cooked up the other… completely forgetting to try the new recipe and not make the usual bread-based stuffing in all its variations that we usually do. This weekend, with the second turkey waiting oh-so-patiently in the freezer, I knew just what I had to do.

I had to teach my kids how to cook a turkey.

As any plan is wont to do when you have your heart set on it, this one went awry right from the beginning. K, usually an eager cook, had no desire to join me in the kitchen. But that’s not where the plan went most sideways on me.

B was keen enough to help, but she wanted to bake muffins, not make a turkey. I quickly talked her into baking one large and several small cheesecakes instead, and so we did.

But that’s not where the plan went most sideways on me either.

With the cheesecakes baking in the oven, it was time to tackle the turkey. We plopped it in the sink to unwrap it and take the giblets and neck out, and that is where everything took a left turn from “cooking lesson” aaalllllllll the way over into anatomy and physiology. You might want to stop reading right about now if you are prone to squeamishness.

“I remember what’s in the bag! There’s stuff in the bag! Like guts, right? The liver and kidneys and stuff?” my happy little girl asked, eyes sparkling with the joy of knowing.

Right.

Out came the liver and kidneys and heart, slippery and slimy, dark reddish in colour and oh so fascinating when you consider that it is merely a smaller version of what you, yourself have inside of you. They were examined closely, turned this way and that, and we talked at length about the different roles your organs play inside your body.

Next up was the neck with its long strips of muscle surrounding numerous vertebrae. We had to pull off one of the vertebrae to better examine it, of course. And then we had to look and see where the channels might be for the blood vessels and arteries, and lo and behold we found the spinal cord right where it was supposed to be, and so we examined that, too.

This Mama tried to steer us back towards the job at hand — getting a turkey in the oven on time for dinner with friends this evening. We rinsed the turkey and rubbed the skin with apple cider vinegar and a combination of spices. And noticed the little holes in the skin where the feathers were attached. And noticed how stretchy the skin is, and how it is attached to a layer of fat which is attached to the muscle underneath, and just that fast we were back into our discussion of anatomy while the poor bird lay waiting… and waiting… and waiting…

By now I had figured out that there was no way we were going to get through the rest of the job without discussing every other possible thing we could see, so we tipped the turkey up and examined the insides where we had a clear view of the rib cage and the spine. That done, we were finally on our way to filling the bird with spiced apples and getting it in the roasting pan.

It was fun, in an odd way, to have such a hands-on anatomy lesson with a curious little girl. She wasn’t squeamish at all after the initial moment of “Eww, slimy!” and she eagerly explored internal organs and skeletal structure and musculature with her fingers as we worked and chatted. We traced the path the ribs took. We felt the bumpy knobs of the vertebrae. We talked about how we had, in effect, only half a leg and the funny knobby bone at the end was where the kneecap goes in humans.  I had figured she might balk at some point. Holding the heart, maybe. Or the liver. But no, not my girl. Fascinated by everything she saw and full of questions.

When we finally got the bird in the pan, I realized that I had forgotten to tuck back the wings, so I quickly twisted the tips around to tuck them under the back where they wouldn’t burn.

“Mom! That’s the wing, isn’t it?”

(To get the full effect, just imagine an outraged 9 year old in a ladybug-spotted apron pointing at the pan with one finger while holding the other arm tight to her chest.)

“And you just… bent it backwards?”

She bent her own arm into an awkward pose behind her back to illustrate what she was thinking and all I could do was answer “Yes, yes I did.”

“Ewwww! That’s so gross!” she cried, and just that fast she couldn’t get out of the kitchen fast enough.

Holding its guts in her hand? No problem. Rubbing spices into its skin? Easy peasy. Separating vertebrae from the neck and examining them an inch from your nose? Too cool.

But gently tucking the wings behind the back? 

Gross.

Go figure.

Dinner tonight should be interesting.

 

 

Muffins in the morning

There were muffins in the morning yesterday. There are often muffins in the morning around here, if you want to know the truth. Fast to mix up, only 20 minutes in the baking, they fill the house with that marvelous rich scent of vanilla and chocolate and flour and cinnamon, and are oh so delicious for breakfast when they are still warm from the oven. Muffins are a frequent occurrence around here.

Especially in the morning.

I have taken to getting up early in the mornings. I have blogged before about living with unpredictable chronic pain and how my day effectively ends at 2 p.m. whether or not I am ready for it to be over (and whether or not there are still things left to accomplish in the day). Early in the morning, the house is still and quiet. The sun has not yet started peeking through the windows. The birds are still quietly nestled in their nests and the neighbours… well, some of the neighbours are up. I can see their lights through their windows. Most, though, lie sleeping in houses filled with darkness and warmth.

Best of all, early in the morning, once I have run through a quick stretch and a not-so-quick bit of physiotherapy, I feel fine.

Oh, not fine fine, for this pebble I carry with me is still there as it always, always is. But I have discovered that I can add several useful hours to my day without making my end-of-day end any sooner. I can get up at 7 and function well until 2 when my body tires and my brain gets fuzzy and my pain levels climb to the point of exhausted frustration. Or, I can get up at 5 and function well until that very same 2 o’clock finish line.

So I have taken to getting up early in the mornings. I check my email. I read the news headlines. I feed the birds and the fish. I get an hour or two of work accomplished before I need to wake the kids. On weekends, I knit, or sew, or read for a bit while savouring the peace that has settled over the house like a loving blanket.

And I bake muffins.

Muffins I hardly ever get to eat, I should mention, since I have an almost teenaged boy in the house. Who loves muffins. And thinks nothing of eating two of them in a row, plus putting one in his lunch box and having another as an after school snack and maybe, if I let him, one for dessert after dinner, too.

And then, late at night, well over an hour after he’s been tucked in and chatted with and kissed and hugged and hugged some more, his lanky frame appears around the corner with his hair tousled from his pillow and his skin prickling with the sudden change from warm bed to cool air.

“Mom?” he says, as if neither of us know what’s coming next. “I’m hungry. Can I have a muffin?”

 

Triple Chocolate Extra Pepperminty Peppermint Bark

You know, I had every intention of taking a ton of great photos and close ups of every step of making our Triple Chocolate Extra Pepperminty Peppermint Bark, but it just didn’t happen. I have no excuse. The camera was right there. Yet somehow I took a grand total of 2 photos of the entire process.

It’s a good thing it isn’t a very complicated process.

The first step is to gather your ingredients. I’m not specifying quantities because this is a super flexible recipe. You can do this with a single chocolate bar of each type and have enough bark for one or two people to share, or you can buy an entire truckload of chocolate and send the entire neighbourhood into a sugar high that lasts for days.

Ingredients

Dark chocolate
Milk chocolateWhite chocolate
Peppermint flavoured candy canes
Peppermint extract for chocolate (not water based)

Grab a cutting board and a good chef’s knife and roughly chop each of the types of chocolate into chunks for easier melting. Make sure you keep each pile separate from the other – you will want to wipe down your knife and cutting board between chocolates.

You will also want to push the bowls of chopped chocolate to the far back of the counter to keep little fingers from eating it all before it can be turned into peppermint bark.

(You may also want to give yourself a stern talking to so that you don’t eat all the chocolate yourself before it can be turned into peppermint bark.)

Next, drop the unwrapped candy canes in a zipper baggie, then wrap that in a tea towel. Lay it on a sturdy cutting board and use something heavy like a meat tenderizer or a small hammer to smash it repeatedly until you have crushed candy canes. The kids like doing this part. If you are more sane and less inclined to like loud banging noises in the kitchen, you can chop the candy canes with your sturdy chef knife until they are in fine enough pieces, but be aware that whacking them with a meat tenderizer is waaaaaaaaay more fun.

Next, line a cookie sheet or three (depending on how much chocolate you are melting) with waxed paper.

Melt the dark chocolate in the microwave on half power for 30 seconds at a time, stirring in between, until it is silky smooth. Add in several drops of peppermint extract and stir well to mix. Taste test – it should taste rich and pepperminty, but not overwhelmingly so. I have a photo of this part:

Pour a glob of melted dark chocolate in the middle of the wax paper and quickly spread it out over the cookie sheet. It will start to cool rapidly and become harder to spread, but don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth, just mostly even in thickness.  You will be adding 2 more layers of chocolate, so really just a few millimeters thick is sufficient.

I have a photo of this step, too:

Stick this pan in the freezer to harden it quickly and keep it cold.

Next, melt your milk chocolate, but do not add peppermint flavour. Working quickly so as not to melt the now-frozen dark chocolate, spread the milk chocolate over the dark chocolate in a thin layer and stick it back in the freezer.

Now it is time to melt the white chocolate. Again, we do not add peppermint flavour to this; however, we will be adding crushed candy cane bits to the top while the chocolate is still warm and soft, so you will want to have those handy as the chocolate starts to set up fairly rapidly.

Melt the white chocolate until it is smooth and spread it over the dark and milk chocolate layers. You will need to work quickly and not go too thin here as the heat from the melted white chocolate will melt the milk chocolate slightly and it will start to mix together and look muddled and murky. Once the white chocolate has been spread out, immediately sprinkle crushed candy cane bits over the top. Gently press any larger pieces into the chocolate so they do not fall out. Return the pan to the freezer until it sets up quite hard.

Take the now frozen tray out of the freezer. You have a choice here – you can calmly and rationally put the sheet of frozen chocolate on your cutting board and cut it into pieces, or you can pick up the waxed paper layer and start smashing it on the counter and hammering it with the flat side of your meat tenderizer until it shatters into random pieces. (And send bits flying across your floor. Not that I know that from personal experience. Ahem.)

And there you have it –  Triple Chocolate Extra Pepperminty Peppermint Bark.

Which I do not have a photo of, except for what you saw yesterday.

I guess I’m going to have to make some more.