Cheesecake photos!

No, *literal* cheesecake, silly! I made this recipe today from one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and while I like the cookbook, this is one tricky cheesecake. It has about eleven steps - mix the crust, bake for eight minutes at one temperature, meanwhile mixing ridiculous amounts of cream cheese and eggs (all room temperature!) together with sugar and the zest of two lemons... meanwhile, I had cool-ish cream cheese, cold eggs, couldn't find the right attachment for the upright mixer so I ended up using the bread hook, and while I did have real lemons, I could only find fake vanilla, which is practically a crime against this cheesecake.

Then you need to bake it at one temperature for one time, change temperatures and bake for another 75 minutes, then (and I swear, I am not making this up) turn the oven off and leave it open and let the cheesecake rest in the oven for 30 minutes, then on the counter for 2 hours, then in the refrigerator... I may have conflated some of those steps after turning off the heat. I ended up grateful I hadn't needed to teach the cheescake how to read before buying it a car.

But the resulting cheesecake? Very, very yum. Just really amazingly yum. Grace posed for a picture with the designated birthday-china cake plate; Peter insisted on adding a candle and would have put in thirty-odd more if he'd had the chance. And they ate, and birthday fun was had by all.

Winter, the gift that keeps on giving, and giving, and giving...

So it snowed again! What a surprise! Peter wanted to sled - not, he was quick to inform me, to sled *down any hills* but to have me pull him around the yard in the sled. I like sledding, even low-impact sledding, and so we did a couple circles of the house and took pictures of what we saw.





The trees are covered in snow, which even in February is lovely and peaceful.



We got several inches, but nowhere near the 6-9 inches forecast for our area. This isn't the "good" birdbath, that we bought on clearance at the hardware store and assembled on the front porch, this is the "other" birdbath that we picked up out of someone else's trash and unsuccessfully spray painted green and silver. It's now rusty with splotches of green and silver paint. Maybe in the spring we could make it a shallow planter for pansies.



Peter sees Mama!

Mama's work, coffee, and Warhol

Today we finally had a chance to visit Mom's office and classroom, and wander around the campus a bit, and along the way drink coffee at the local coffee place and take in a really cool exhibit at the (affiliated but not-so-local) art museum.



The kids had fun running around campus and seeing the various buildings where I drink coffee and talk endlessly about my favorite dead people, for which I get paid pretty well, when you stop to think about it. We met one of my students, and had a good talk with Grace about what it means to go to college and what we'll do to help her choose one and what it's like to live on a campus.




The art exibit (which, see more here: http://www.luc.edu/luma/exhibitions.html#warhol) was really amazing - who knew that Andy Warhol was channeling his inner three-year-old? The installation consists of big rectangular mylar balloons, which float around in an otherwise empty room and which you can bat and play with and, we were told, cannot stomp on or jump on. Peter was wild about it, and kept his behavior just this side of gentle. He's never had so much fun at a museum, and I recommend it highly. Grace loved the installation and was very interested in the other exhibits at the museum. The photo exhibit in the next room includes lots of black and white photos of Warhol putting the whole thing together and some odds and ends of memorabilia from the original installation. There are also some of Warhol's prints of pop-culture images, in some cases covered in glitter, which also are very appealing to the small set. Although I'd originally assumed it was on the same campus as my classes, it's actually downtown, but it made for a fun day with lots of stops. Through the course of the day Peter had much more than his share of sugar and crashed in the car on the way home.

Wednesdays with Peter

Peter's class has only one day of school this week, to allow for parent/teacher conferences (which, if I may brag, involved the feedback "delightful," and "very bright," and "plays so well with the other kids," and "tells amazing stories.") Yesterday we did a lot of dashing around (post office! oh, damn, I forgot the papers I was going to mail. conference! drive an hour. slip into library [sans Peter] to copy the elusive missing page from the article I copied last week! meeting! pick Peter up! drive an hour. pick Grace up! make dinner! rush to dance! come home! eat dinner! rush to scrapbooking [yes, really: more on this later]!) Today has been calmer, by comparison, but we've had some classic Peter moments.

Classic moment the first: it turns out Peter is more computer-savvy than I am. We read about www.starfall.com somewhere and then I let the kids try it out, and while I expected Grace to navigate around easily, which she could, I did not anticipate that *Peter* has mad mousing skills. People, he's still three. I've been using a computer for - oh, about twenty years, and he's actually much more comfortable and enthusiastic than I am. At least when I am replaced by the younger generation, it will be about merit, right? He can design all sorts of cute snowmen and flowers and you have to come an appreciate his hard creative work, and this goes on for as long as you'll let him sit there. This is why we can never get a Wii.

Classic moment the second: I took him shopping for shoes (for me, of course. Those of you who have seen or can imagine my closet, please shut up about the not needing new shoes, mkay?) He is, frankly, excellent at it. He's excited by the numbers in the shoes, he's convinced that you must read each number aloud (thus an innocent pair of size-7 sandals becomes "Seven Seven!" said really loudly), and he loves, *loves,* high heels. I was looking for a sensible pair of black sandals that might transition from church to home to the grocery store, and he was choosing 3-inch strappy champagne-colored heels with bows and rhinestones. "Dey are size Nine Nine! Dey will fit you! And dey are TAP SHOES! Dey are so beautiful." If I failed to appreciate his genius, he sometimes had to emphasize his point by trying them on himself. He'd slip off his snowboots and attempt (with some success) to prance around in a cute pair of red patent peep-toe wedges, and I would make appreciative noises about his footwear. If he decides to be a drag queen in a modest 2000 seat Vegas venue - we'll know who to blame, right?

Classic moment the third: curled up with him on the couch, reading about dinosaurs. It doesn't get much better than that.

Belatedly, will you be my Valentine?

The kids and I finally made our traditional Valentine's dessert, made tradtitional by the fact that it fits nicely into the little ramikins we bought at Target for $1 a few years ago. Plus it's chocolate, and it's fairly easy to make. A year or two ago I left out the flour by accident, and it was very fudgy and yummy, but if you make the recipie properly it's cakey and yummy with this liquid chocolate inside. My small bakers in training enjoyed it immensely.




Molten Chocolate Cakes

Preheat oven to 450. Butter four 3/4 c. custard cups (or six smaller ramikens). Place on baking sheet.

4 squares of semi-sweet baking chocolate
1/2 c. (1 stick) butter
1 c. powdered sugar
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
6 T. flour

Heat chocolate and butter in microwave until butter is melted. Stir with whisk until chocolate is melted. Stir in sugar until well blended; blend in eggs and yolks with whisk. Stir in flour. Divide batter between custard cups.

Bake 13-14 minutes until sides are firm but centers are soft. Let stand one minute. If you're not serving in the cute Valentine ramikens, run a knife along the edge to loosen, then invert onto dessert plates. Serve immediately.

Do this at home!

We collect rocks, in the summer, when we go to the lake in Montana, and then our enablers are sweet enough to ship them to us. So I have a nice collection of beautiful, smooth rocks that bring back the great memories of sitting on the beach and picking them out with the kids. Plus there's that wierd Heraclitus [of "you never step into the same river twice" fame] experience of throwing rocks into the water and recognizing that you've totally altered the universe (the details, if not the structure) and it's never going to be the same afterwards and then plunk! you can throw another rock and do it again. It's this beautiful balance of change and sameness.



Ahem. Anyway. We like rocks. We give them as gifts, sometimes, and right now we have a nice little collection of them surrounding a candle in front of this amazing Ansel Adams print I bought for like $10 at this cool garden store in Kentucky and it had a banged-up frame but I repainted it with a color intended to invoke the wrought-iron benches in Paris, and the whole effect is a little like a modern altar to nature.





And, um, anyway, when I saw the kids with their heads together doing something intense and intricate with the rocks on the couch, I thought they were making cairns, but as I got closer I could tell that something else was going on; there was some intense discussion about whether the "little ones" would want a "soft spot" or a "hard spot" and finally I realized that some of the rocks were babies and some of them were stacked together to make a house for said babies. They finally decided that the babies needed a soft spot, and lots of little rock babies were very happy for quite some time.

It's still winter! Oh, joy.

So our usual Valentine's Day fun of chocolate yum in heart-shaped ramikins will likely have to wait until a later date, since I'm working tonight, although I did dig out the ramikins and the recipie in case Mike is struck with the urge to do slightly complicated dessert-making while juggling the kids. [And then I can put them away and not have to bother with them again for a year, those cute heart-shaped ramikins that get in my way while I'm looking for pasta in the cupboard!] Our Valentine's fun has included making 20 Valentines by hand for Grace's class (sweatshop style) and assembling 10 more for Peter's class, plus I'm planning to take chocolate to my students as a sort of consolation prize, although now that I think about it, the newly-married student whose wife's "aunt" just "died" requiring him to "miss class for the funeral" may have been clearing his schedule for dinner and a movie, or whatever the young marrieds do these days.




We've also been having some good, clean outdoor fun in the snow, although Peter keeps dragging his bike out and abandoning it in the snow, so after the childhood experience of multiple crushed trikes and the adult experience of one crushed trike, I'm a little obsessive about carrying the dang thing back into the garage.

Finally, the kitchen: why the hell should roasting vegetables require this many cutting boards and other assorted cookware?! Yet, oooohhhh... pretty colors!

Self- and mama-portraits with the cell phone...

... by Peter. These crack me up.

Urban wanderings or Our Wacky Adventure

So I went running this morning, having been lured by yesterday's forty degree temperatures into thinking it would be a nice day to run. However, it was thirty degrees this morning, and there was a nice layer of ice over every surface outside. So I really worked at it, and ran alongside the sidewalk in the crunchy snow, but then I'd hit a driveway that was iced over and I'd have to delicately pick my way across it before starting to run again. I kept picturing Bambi doing his ice-skating thing and desperately not wanting to be him:


After that we wrangled the kids to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, which we (well, I) have been wanting to go to for months now. I ran into a dad I know from preschool a while back, and he had on a MCP t-shirt, so to make conversation I said, "Oh, I've been meaning to go there. Is it any good?" And he paused, and said nicely, "My wife works there. It's actually got a world-class collection." I told her the story later on and she laughed. So we tried to go on Mother's Day, but it was closed, and we just hadn't gotten back to it until today. The exhibit there right now is a collection of photographs intended to honor and invoke the Woody Guthrie song "This Land is Your Land," which he apparently intended as a sort of antidote to overly sentimental patriotic claptrap. My favorite photo was a huge billboard, handmade, in Texas that said in enormous letters "Never Hillary" [sic]. There was also a very cool set of photos of an illegal gathering of fireworks enthusiasts blowing things up. Mike looked at one photo and said, "Wow, look at that anvil!" and sure enough, there were various guys running from the explosion they'd just sent off, and then way up in the sky there was an anvil, apparently still on the way up.

Then we did more mundane urban things like eat lunch and go to Costco, where there were so many lovely begonias that one basket of them just made their way into our cart along with the assorted other stuff (Easter dress! Salmon! Beer! Coffee! Organic milk! Pears!) You know you've chosen a pretty plant when people in line next to you admire it and ask you which part of the store you found it it. (My response: "Thanks! I got it over there! [gesturing wildly toward the back of the store.] I'm going to plant them in the spring! It was only $12.79!")

More winter baking

We made chocolate chip cookies tonight, and had the foresight to avoid the most tragic of our Sorry-Ass Tiny Little First World Problems (SATLFWP): cookies too big to fit in the cookie jar.



Peter has to be discouraged from eating the raw cookie dough, but otherwise the kids have matured into good little cookie helpers. They measure, mix, offer opinions and instructions, and count the cookies as I put them onto the cookie sheet.




They came out perfectly and we stacked them in the jar. Here's the recipie, with thanks to Gloria:

1 c. softenend butter or shortening
3/4 c. brown sugar
3/4 c. white sugar
1 t. vanilla
1/2 t. water
2 eggs
2 c. flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
1 12-oz package of chocolate chips

Beat butter, sugar, vanilla, water and eggs until light and fluffy. Add flour, soda, salt. Blend into butter mixture; add chocolate chips. Drop onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for ten minutes.

Supah Tuesday

So we're part of the Super Tuesday primary frenzy, and it's kind of fun. The kids and I had a good talk about voting and why Mommy is voting for Barack Obama - I explained that he knew the war was a bad idea right from the beginning, and Grace said very seriously, "I knew that too. The first time I heard about it, I just knew that it was a bad idea." From the mouth of babes.






After taking Grace to school, I took Peter to vote with me - Mike went this morning on his way to work but I couldn't squeeze it in before getting Grace out the door. Peter was very reluctant to come until he had the bright idea of riding his bike. We're across the street from our polling place, so it seemed like a fine idea to me too. We went, we stood in line, the polling place volunteers cooed over him and gave him a voting sticker, we voted, which was a case study in multi-tasking, and then we came home. We're hoping Obama does well today; if he gets the Democratic nomination I'm going to buy a t-shirt for Peter like the one above, only in his size - I've wanted one since Obama became a senator, back when the teeny one would have fit my big kid.

Misty flatlands

The trees across the street are shrouded in fog - it feels very peaceful and isolated.






So today, as Peter observed, is very misty. We had a nice talk about mist and fog, and came home and played outside, because it's about 40 degrees. I shoveled the walk again, pointlessly, while Grace built a snowman and Peter rode his bike through the slush.

More suburban wierdness

In keeping with the (admittedly broad) gardenish theme of the blog, I'd intended to post pictures of the aftermath of a nice snowstorm we had on Friday. The powers that be at Grace's school informed us by automated call at 5:38 am that it was a snow day, and so we stayed home, mostly, and wrote our dissertation, played cards, watched TV, and ate when we felt like it. I have a few nice pictures of the post-shoveling state of our front walk, and an amusing anecdote about the snowblower (just pretend you're doing magnetic poetry with the following words and you'll get the gist: snowblower, newspaper, clogged, stop, fix, burn, arm, cut, hand, set aflame, snow, extinguish, stupid f****** snowblower.) There was a neighborly exchange between me and the neighbor's middle-aged son, who told me I shouldn't go running before shoveling my walk and then post-run while I was shoveling stopped his car to lean out the window and point out that he'd been right, but all in a funny and jovial way.

However, I managed to get pictures of the above (mama in her winter running gear, cute outdoor kids, before-and-after shots of the sidewalk) only on the internal memory of the digital camera, and I can't upload them to the computer or transfer them to the memory card, so you'll have to imagine all that. (Imagine me doing a hell of a lot of shoveling during the period when the remaining newspaper clogging the snowblower was being set on fire.)

So, instead, I'll tell the amusing tale of how we were put on lockdown in our local Super Target as police fanned the area looking for the guy who shot up the nearby Lane Bryant. Huzzah. While we were cruising through the bread aisle, the store manager announced that no one could enter or leave the store because of a "police issue." We were perfectly safe, and finished up our grocery shopping and then waited a few minutes in an increasingly nervous but totally polite and obedient crowd of Target shoppers. We held out the Target Starbucks as our last-ditch option for food and drink, if necessary, but it didn't come to that. It was as close as I've been to very large guns in quite a while - a dozen years ago when I took a trip to Italy I got pretty used to seeing 18 year olds standing around the piazza with huge machine guns, but in Target it's a little jarring. The police asked nicely if anyone had seen anything suspicious, like "someone fleeing," but no on had. They gathered up everybody at the front of the store, searched the place, and then let us all out. We deduced that we must not fit the profile of their suspect and made our way back to the car.

This is all made slightly wierder by the fact that it's the second murder outside the Target since we've lived here. It's enough to turn a girl to Peapod.