Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Greasy Butter

I didn't think that I could make fudge by myself. From what I can imagine it only takes 10 extra seconds of a pot on the burner without being stirred to burn a whole batch of melted chocolate and sugar. And maybe I was kind of exaggerating to get Handsome Husband to help me. But really. Melting chocolate and I have had our disagreements and I have come to the conclusion that the best way to melt some chocolate chips is in some pyrex placed in the oven. Fail proof.

While I added the ingredients to our cannon of awesomeness Steven buttered the pan for when our decadent treat would be done. Not just buttered. Slathered. We could have made some rice krispie treats with how much butter was in that pan by the time he was done. I didn't worry about it much since our fudge was going to be hot and therefore melt the chunks of butter still remaining and maybe absorb some of it.

Fudge doesn't absorb butter. It dispenses it. When we went to open up our creation later today there was butter film all along the top sides of our fudge making it look more like it had been dipped in bacon grease than anything else. I wouldn't let Steven take something that looked disgusting and tasted questionable so we sliced off the sides so that it looked gorgeous. Really. The texture on the inside looked good. It wasn't until you got it into your mouth and compared it to the peanut butter fudge I made later by myself that you could definitely tell a difference.

Call me Fudge

And by calling me fudge, you will need to address me by Mistress Fudge. That's right. I have conquered that massive amount of stirring that makes fudge melt in your mouth without the sugar crystals. Took a couple of tries, but what's awesomeness without some failure?

The first batch, you know, the infamous oreo and white chocolate. That stuff never set up. Not on the table, not in the fridge, not in the freezer. Not in a box, nor with a fox. Not in a house nor with a mouse. That fudge was not going to set. You've read my cure.

The second batch was a tad grainy on top. I thought the whole thing was ruined when Handsome Husband was stirring and it was 13 seconds before the timer went off and the bottom was starting to scorch a little, no matter the amount of stirring done. I thought it was ruined again when we were pouring it into the pan and it was falling out kind of thick and when we started getting the last bit out it was definitely sandy looking. Chocolate covered sand. Ewwww. I let Steven cut into it the next day so that he could take our small disaster to work. And what do you know? Miraculously there was not a grain of sand in that whole block of fudge except what we had scraped on top. And after you cut a few squares out of that block and don't see all the sand together in one spot, it actually doesn't look too shabby. It was a wonderful miracle and I insisted on taking back my consent of taking the whole 3 lbs to work and only let him take 2 1/2.

Today I have been baking A LOT. I tried a peanut butter recipe this morning and after much research on fudge making tips and a few insider tips from 'real' people (by real people, I mean people you talk on the phone with rather than a web search) I was ready to conquer the fudge making world. It worked. I am now the mistress of fudge and by forcing my hand I can create complex sugars to break down to smooth, melt in your mouth creme. Not too moist, not too dry. Just right.

I've found a pretty awesome peppermint cookie recipe that will now join the tradition of making Christmas sugar cookies and gingerbread houses. Yes, it's that good. The lady I got it from had a story about how she invented it to use up the extra candy canes laying around the house after Santa put a dozen or more on the tree. I think it's good enough to use for a New Years cookie to use up the candy canes and to go buy candy canes all for the sake of the recipe for before Christmas.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Sleep While You Can

I didn't even know it was possible for someone to sleep so much and not be in a Sleeping Beauty or Snow White comma. I've got this super power right now that let's me sleep for any amount of time in whichever part of the day I happen to be. Pretty neat-o, hu? I know.

Everyone says to sleep while you can 'cause there's no way to get it back after the baby comes. Good advice, but I know from pure experience at college that you can't 'save up sleep' which is really too bad. So I guess what they mean is enjoy sleeping while you can. Enjoyment is something that can be saved up and looked back on with fond memories.

I can't believe that she's going to be here in one month. Her baking is over and it's time to start testing. Kind of like poking a toothpick in a cake. Yes, you know what I am talking about. Checking for dilation. The part I have been dreading the most out of this whole experience. And you know what? It wasn't even really that bad. It's been worse thinking about it than when it was happening. Thank goodness for good doctors.

It seems that no matter how much sleep I get during the day, I have the hardest time ever making it past 9:00 before my body is shut down to go to sleep. Working closing shifts these past couple of weeks has been a killer, especially since we don't even close until 10:30. Late. But, on the bright side, only two more weeks and then I get to spend some time on myself, for myself. Which will probably translate into cleaning and decorating. Which I am fine with. I just wish I didn't have to sleep so much!

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Epic fail to Epic win

Last week I had friends. We're still friends, but last week I got to hang out with them. And it was really a lot of fun. Ok. That sounds like something a first grader would say. Perhaps because, like a first grader, for the past year and a half I haven't really hung out with any friends and I am just starting to get back in the groove. Just starting out on an adventure of having my first play dates all over again.

We had a mini baking party where there were some amazing gingerbread cupcakes made, what was supposed to be some amazing fudge and topped off with dipping pretzels into chocolate which I never thought could be so relaxing.

I've never made fudge before and was excited to try it. I've been having a craving for something overwhelmingly sweet and there's nothing like a couple squares of fudge to cure all sugar cravings. I got my ingredients written down and headed on my way to the local grocer where half my total came because of the high-quality baking ingredients I desperately needed. There was no way I was going to let some cheap chocolate chips ruin my what-was-going-to-be-awesome fudge. I had heard this was key.

We got everything into the pan and started cooking and I was advised that it's best to stir only one way when making fudge instead of my usual back and forth, side to side and figure eight stirring that I use to make awesome scotcheroos. I panicked. Instead of going in and stirring to the right, which would make total sense, I started in from the left. I didn't know I was so partial to one way of stirring over another but I knew after the third stroke that I was going the wrong way. Luckily, Morgan is left-handed and she quickly took over and did an awesome job of stirring for the required amount of time of which I thought was 3 minutes after it started to boil. Not so much we learned later, but I was bound to follow that recipe to the second. Dumb recipe. It's not always good to trust what you find on pinterest.

By the time we were ready to pour our amazingness into the casserole dish we found an interesting development. A mountain of marshmallow cream was carefully designed in the bottom middle of our pot. All that stirring in one direction had formed a perfectly sized Mt. Rainier. We didn't bother about it but had a good laugh about our abundant surprise.

When the fudge was still wobbling in the dish after 2 hours I was a little concerned but there wasn't much I could do about it but take it home. We ladled some in to a ziplock baggie for Morgan to take with her and Shelli let me take her pan home for the fudge to finish settling. Because it would settle. Because we had used the finest ingredients and because we had followed the recipe to the second.

The next morning I was too nervous to check in on our creation so it sat in the fridge, undisturbed. When I got home and tried cutting it into squares and it just ran together again as soon as I took the knife out I knew I needed another plan of action. So I froze it. Only, I guess fudge doesn't freeze. That stuff still couldn't be cut into squares after being in the freezer for a couple of hours. I put it back in the fridge and awaited a miracle. This is where the epic fail turns into an epic win.

I had my little brother in the kitchen the next morning digging through my fridge for some breakfast when he found the fudge and naturally wanted to taste it. He pulled it out and looked at it. "How come all the cookies are just on one side?" I had to explain to him that when we ladled Morgan's portion out that everything had slid to fill the empty space, leaving the crumbled cookies that I had put on top on only one half. The whole thing looked like a piece out of the land before time movies. The part in the first one about the great divide.

He pulled out a piece and rolled it in a ball before popping it in his mouth and declared that the concoction would taste better on ice cream. Him rolling the stuff into a ball though gave me a brilliant idea. I had been seeing a lot of truffles and cake pops around lately and so balls dipped in chocolate was currently on my mind. It was the most pliable way I could think of how to get that stuff into a mouth without a spoon. We spent the morning rolling balls and dipping them in melted chocolate. John rolled and I dipped and by the end we didn't have such a disastrous project. In fact, it could have passed as planned.

I put the best looking ones into a baggie for Shelli and her husband and the rest I piled into a tupperware to take to work. The break room table is common ground for kitchen experiments and epic fails. Sugar is sugar and after working 2 hours serving the public between breaks, anything is welcome.

Well. They were a win. No one could tell that it was a fudge fail. The texture was great due to Morgan's excellent stirring and the hard chocolate kept the runny gooiness in check. I did learn some basic fudge making tips that I am going to try the next time I get the courage up to cook something on the stove other than dinner and overall, things could have been much worse. I would call this one a win.

Pregnancy Brain

That pregnancy brain they talk about? It's no joke. Seriously. I can promise you, sometimes I think that a few minutes here and there of my day are missing because there are some things that I can honestly not remember. For instance, remember in the last post I made where I was freaking out about that framing order? Well, I must have become delusional in the few moments I was putting together her one order that had nothing wrong with it because of the fact of getting the messages that her chosen mat was out of stock and then a few days later that her chosen frame out of stock. Turns out I wasn't missing artwork at all. I had totally forgotten putting together her first frame. Not that I forgot that I did it, But the math didn't add up in my head that she originally had three posters and after I did one she would have two left and bam... I was freaking out because there weren't three posters in the folder. Weird? Yes, definitely.

And that isn't the only thing I totally spaced out on. Sometimes I put my keys or an important paper down and then I can't find them. Which doesn't surprise me until I find them in an unexpected place, because, let's be honest, I didn't even know that I had misplaced them to begin with. Some weird things can happen when you're about to have a baby.

Which is the other reason why I am up so early again. Seems like being woken up by a bladder that needs to be emptied opens up a whole lot of other problems and I am sitting here with the worst stomach ache ever. Contractions you say? No. I say food poisoning. Buffets have never been my favorite and that will stand true until I turn 60 and get senior discounts and don't have to pay so much for bad food. Too bad that by that time I won't want to risk paying discounts for what could make me sick.

I thought I had it all out of my system by 12 yesterday afternoon and gorged on some jo-jos and chicken strips. Apparently I need to drink more sprite to kill the bug that is resting in the bottom of my stomach, waiting to turn anything I put in my mouth into yucky gas and some runny poo. Gross. What a terrible life that would be, to make people so uncomfortable.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Christmas?

The tiredness has hit me again. One month left until our little girl is here and I am exhausted just thinking about getting our little home ready for some green and red joy. We've had our tree up for three weeks now and it's only got half the lights it needs... still. And it doesn't even seem that long, which is the scariest part. When your poor tree can be up for almost a month without being fully decorated there is a problem. The situation is that our tree last year was quite a bit smaller than this one and therefore there are not enough lights to go around. And guess who hasn't had the funds nor the energy to go get some more? Yup. This girl right here. The one sitting on the couch in her sweats and sweatpants who got up two hours ago and is already ready for a nap.

Handsome Husband turns the lights on every night and every morning because, let's face it, even with the tree only half lit, it's still gorgeous. I can't get myself to add the decorations, though, without it being fully lit. So it's just a bit of green in our living room sprinkled with some bulbs but it still lightens up a dark room.

I've got our Christmas box of decorations up out of the basement and there's only one box, but it's enough to fill our little home, if we had the room for it. I tell you... decorations take up a lot of shelf room that we don't really have. Handsome Husband says that he likes having all of our 'books' out for people to see 'cause they say something about us. Well, our books consist of old text books and a lot of missionary material packed into unattractive binders. Not exactly the statement I would like to make. So what if those college years were good and the mission days were the best of Steven's life, no need to broadcast the past all over the place. We need to pick up the pace with some children's books.

Now the decorations sit in the middle of the living room floor, waiting for me to get some adrenaline to find homes for them. The tree remains undecorated and I haven't found the energy to bake up some holiday goodies. This could remain to be an uneventful Christmas season. Only time will tell.

Friday, December 9, 2011

'Cause I'm Awesome

Really. I seriously am. It's 4 a.m. and I've already been up for two hours. One bathroom trip combined with downing some tums and enough water to sustain an ancient civilization.

I couldn't get work off my mind. Sounds pathetic. Sounds like I am a workaholic. Sounds like I have no life but to go over every measurement I have made within the past 24 hours, creating lovely designs for people's artwork. Designs that they want by Christmas and there is no room for error in case needs be a re-order. But seriously. It's a big deal. I can't believe over the past 10 months that I have found something that I love so much.

When my student-teaching ended in November I was more than a little relieved. The students were awesome and there were only two classes out of six that I dreaded because they tended to have the most social 8th graders in them. Being so social, they were also the poorest in their academic success making it hard to keep them focused on anything more than who was crushing on who. These two classes also had the lowest reading levels in them. Which I found interesting. Reading is so important to an education that it shows up as missing in all kinds of subjects. You can be crappy at math and no one knows it except in math class. Can't sound out a word correctly and you've got problems in more than just English.

Mostly I was relieved to not have to make lesson plans anymore. Which I found fairly interesting as I started subbing that middle school is definitely it's own lesson criteria. Elementary lessons are from a number of books, pages photo copied and handed out to the class. By the time high school rolls around handouts aren't as popular 'cause it costs two trees and a couple of branches to print papers for 150 students a day. Books are used alongside notebook paper that had better have the annoying spiral bits peeled off before being handed in. But in middle school you've gotta come up with your own criteria. No book tells you how to teach a 8th grader. No book says, "This is what they ought to know and this how to make sure they know it." Nope. A lot of it you have to come up with on your own. I used a handout from a book twice in the four months that I taught. The rest was dreamed up in Microsoft Word, including grammar sheets, questions about the current novel and health activities that were supposed to make kids aware of what was going on around them.

If there is anything I believe, I believe that there is an amount of time allotted to everything and if that time is too short than you're taking too long. I could have spent hours making lesson plans. To keep things under control I did my health lesson plans at night after getting home from school and I did my English lesson plans in my prep hour. Therefore nothing could take more than a hour to get together because I had to make dinner in the evening and in the morning, class started at 9:10 whether I had my copies made or not. I admit, it was a little stressful, but I don't look back and regret spending too much time making things just perfect, which easily could have become a problem.

After playing the subbing game for a couple of months I needed something a little more substantial. Believe me, there's nothing better for a little ego-pat than teaching a group of third graders. They love you to death and make pictures for you to hang on your fridge during their free time. Sometimes a girl just needs something a little more steady in her life than constantly checking the sub website for openings or waiting for a call that may not come until 8 a.m. the next morning and you are needed in the school at 8:40.

I spent a whole day filling out job applications online. It's certainly tedious and there has never been a time when I have filled out more online resumes and questionaires except when applying for college. I applied to all the places that I loved to shop and I definitely could not be more happy than where I am right now. If I had gotten what I had thought I had wanted I could be picking up dressing rooms day after day and folding and re-folding clothes on display. It would not be something that I would especially love, but how could I have really known? I'd never worked in retail before.

Instead I get to work with people and colors and see all kinds of artwork. It's the best thing ever and I am going to have a really hard time leaving when this baby comes. Like every job there are good days and there are better days, but unlike every job, there aren't too many horrible, no good days where I want to toss it to the wind and go home early. It's too much fun. If I am not designing a frame combination with a customer than I am assembling an order. It's like crafting all day. Which isn't so good 'cause when I get home the last thing I want to do is pull out some paper or a glue gun, but it really is fun. And when you spend 8 hours away from home you may as well love what you are doing.

And because I am awesome at what I do, I have a hard time accepting that I may have messed up. Even when it's not my fault. Which makes it even worse 'cause there's no way that I can fix it. Like an order that gets a notice that the mat is out of stock. Or a frame is out of stock. It's messy business having a customer come in and have to choose something different because usually the first choice is never as good as the second. And the reason I can't get this one order out of my head is because this nice lady placed three orders and two out of the three have come back with notices that the above has happened. At different times. And then I may have deleted the wrong order when I went to re-order her second best choice. And I also may have not have ordered the right size for the piece that I thought it was and the worst part, I may have misplaced a piece of artwork while we were shuffling things around, trying to match the blue in the flowers to a second blue mat 'cause the first became out of stock. And now I am worried that it got tossed whilst in a cardboard sleeve where it was supposed to be protected. And that is why, after a bathroom trip and all my water and a couple of tums I am still awake, raking my brain for any kind of consolation that everything is just fine.


Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The Nativity

There's a family in our ward that has an ancient barn snuggled up beside their equally ancient brick house. All three stories and balcony of it. Life was different then. And this barn is no joke. It's got the room for the animals who may need some extra shelter and hay besides. Every year since people have ridden around in horse-drawn carriages they've had a family home evening based on the true Christmas story. The one where there's a virgin mother who gives birth to a baby who will save the world under the watch of a carpenter. It almost sounds too spectacular to be true, but I know with all my heart that it is. A jolly fella with rosy red cheeks and a pile of white beard that visits all the homes in the world in one night has nothing on the Christ Child. Although, that itself is a pretty amazing story.

I took rent money over to our little landlady and she was telling me how back in the day when people had animals as more than pretty pets that Mary would ride in on a horse and the shepherds would have real sheep with them as they made their way from the fields to the baby's side. Her nativity watching days were long over she said as she told me to dress warmly but that it had been quite the event.

Handsome Husband and I piled on the sweatshirts and jackets, complete with scarves, gloves and hats. It was a cold night but when we entered the barn and found a spot in the hay loft that wasn't too high up we got cozy together under the quilt we had brought. Next year we'll have a little girl with us and we'll bring thermoses of warm apple cider and some candy canes to share with those around us. This year was our 'pre-run' I told Steven.

The story started out as it always does, in a city called Nazareth where a beautiful maiden was betrothed to a handsome carpenter. However, it wasn't your usual story rehearsed straight out of the scriptures. This story was set up for little ones to understand the graveness of Mary being with child without having been married and the journey ahead of them to be counted and taxed and the amazingness that was Christ, the child come to save the world from sin and how it was that he was born in a stable.

Perhaps even if I never get the full Christmas spirit complete with the red and green decorations I can at least know the true reason for this blessed season and make it a memorable one for someone else.


Friday, December 2, 2011

High Winds

The wind tearing at the swamp cooler cover and knocking the screen doors around woke me up three times in the night. When the cell alarm went off I took 10 minutes to get ready. There's not much you can ready when the power is out. Lucky for me we had a date the night before so I was still looking glamorous and could scramble out of bed and throw some clothes on. And by glamorous I mean I didn't have greasy hair and it wasn't kinked in any funny way. My face was another factor that sometimes I just don't care too much about so long as the smudges are wiped up.

I left a hour early for work. It normally takes a good, solid thirty minutes to get there, but I knew there were going to be some traffic problems with the wind and that I would probably have to go 60 instead of my normal 80.

The traffic lights were out, which means there were a dozen or so vehicles stopped at the four-way intersection treating it like a stop sign. This also meant that there was no power for breakfast and with no milk in the fridge I was starving for some breakfast. Handsome Husband agreed to drive ahead of me to his work and then we would stop by for some standard American breakfast loaded with grease. En route to the freeway we had to turn around once due to fallen trees.

Legacy, the resident highway that semi trucks are not allowed on except on special occasions was packed with cars going 30 mph. It runs along 1-15 for a little bit right where we enter the freeway and it was a little mind blowing to see that many people on it since it is regularly avoided because of the slower speed limit. And then to see all the semis on the freeway lined up, combined with a few tipped looking like huge caterpillars upside down, their wheels sticking up in the air like numerous legs. If that's not intimidating, I don't know what is.

I couldn't get myself to push harder than 40 mph and found myself in the slow lane not even being passed. The fastest anyone was going was maybe 50. 8:00 on a workday morning, this is completely unheard of. I was shaking and trembling and didn't even know how truly terrified I was until I pulled off at the Centerville exit, only 5 miles from home. We found a desolate town. No one had power and there was no way we were finding any breakfast, anywhere. The restaurants had the manager's car parked in the drive-thru to keep people from entering. I was crying by this point and was having a hard time staying focused on anything but the wind beating on my little car, causing it to weave here and there.

We drove to Les Schwab where the power was also out and traded places. I couldn't talk on the phone at this point so Handsome Husband called up my work and told them there was no way I was coming in today and we turned around and he took me back home. The only daunting thing about this was that he would come home for lunch and then I would have to drive the car back so that he could bring the jeep back home later that night. I was almost tempted to just hang out with the guys the whole day to avoid any more driving.

Not being in the driver's seat put me at ease. As much ease as can be found when you look out and see destruction all around you. We took the frontage road and there were branches on houses, trees that had lifted up and fallen, taking chunks of grass with them. One yard was completely torn up and hanging by the tree's roots. A ravine had collected 15 or more garbage cans that had been blown away from their homes and there was a warning on the radio to avoid 400 in Centerville due to all of the trampolines out on the road.

Steven dropped me off at home to a cold house where there was nothing but crackers to eat that didn't take some re-heating or baking of some kind. I pulled on some sweats and two sweatshirts and a blanket and curled up on the couch where there was the most light and read for a couple of hours before falling back asleep, despite the wind tearing at everything in sight of the window. I definitely would have preferred to be at work but later when I heard about 1-15 northbound closures due to the overturned semis I was grateful that Steven had taken things into his own hands and called me in as not available.

And thus Handsome Husband found me curled up on the couch when he got home for lunch. The power had come on sometime while I was sleeping but he reported that it was still out at Les Schwab but they were all hanging out there waiting for it to come back on. We headed out into the elements again and he remarked at how weird it was that it still so windy in Farmington because the wind was basically done in Centerville. Weird or not, it was nice not to be thrown all over the road once we got on the freeway.

There was no one on the freeway. Everything was shut down in town. It was all kind of creepy. I guess power zaps everything. On my way home I took yet another route seeing another semi tipped on the frontage road. It was a more residential street but one that happens to go from one city to the other, the old highway. There were construction workers out all over the place cutting up fallen trees and brushing limbs out of the street. I didn't see any trees on cars or houses, but there were plenty that came within feet. I was glad to get home and wait out the rest of the wind that was still banging our doors and pushing on the windows. It was a lonely day at home accompanied only by the outside forces but I was safe, besides the wind blowing our fence in.