Snow Day

When I saw the weather forecast for Tuesday, I was pretty sure the school(s) would call a snow day. Instead of railing against yet another break in my already shaky December schedule, I decided to embrace it the way I used to when I had an outside-of-the-house job and a snow day could mean a day off for everyone. While grocery shopping Monday, I laid in supplies of cookie ingredients and construction paper. I made plans for puzzles, games, movies, and projects. I visualized every snow day for the last 11 years happening all in one day. While things didn't quite transpire the way I'd envisioned, we had a pretty good—and productive—day.

While the kids would once have raced outside to play in the snow first thing, they are now of an age where they would rather sleep in late (M) or get on the computer first thing. I decided to ignore E and Z's screening and get busy on a project of my own, the supplies for which I bought last holiday season: festive placemats for everyday use during the Christmas season.

Even though our table is well-loved, I like to try to protect what's left of its finish with placemats or tablecloths. I also like to have a nice, attractive table to sit at (this condition does not last long, with homework, bills, mail, crumbs, and various other messes piling up as quickly as I can clear it). I've been so pleased with the bright, festive, machine-washable placemats I made last year that I decided to replicate them, down to the rickrack, in festive reds and greens. So far, I'm quite pleased.

When I finished my project, I rousted two boys off their screens and outside onto their skis, which was a much easier effort than I expected (could it be that they actually like this new activity and might even go out and do it voluntarily some day? Dare I hope?). The anticipated rain had not yet begun, and we had an inch or so of fresh fluff on top of Sunday's snow—not quite enough to shield our skis from gravel in the driveway, so we went off-road into our neighbor's field and then around one loop of our trail in the woods. Z, after laboriously climbing one narrow hill through the trees turned around and skied down it, then repeated the whole process two more times. Fun!

Back inside, we worked on some holiday projects—E made a paper chain to go around part of the living room (to extend one he had begun last week) and Z and I made Scandinavian-style woven paper hearts. Unfortunately I picked a design with five strips, rather than two or three, so the weaving was hard-going, but Z and I each managed to finish one each. The cool thing about both of these projects? They were the boys' ideas, no coercion necessary!

In the afternoon, we settled in for a movie during which I worked on making Christmas ornaments.

We didn't get out a puzzle or play games or go sledding, and I didn't get around to mixing cookie dough until the evening, while I was reheating a dinner of leftovers (that's my idea of cooking—mix cookie dough rather than dinner). But I did get a batch of saffron St. Lucia Day buns made for Wednesday's breakfast (and I managed to not burn them for the first time ever). All-in-all, a pretty good snow day.

Weekend Things ~ The Morning After

Back when I was working for The Man, I hated Mondays. I'd wake up Sunday morning, thinking "Ugh, I have to go to work tomorrow." I was destined to be one of those people that die of a heart attack on Sunday night after a lifetime of back-to-work stress. Now that I work for me, Monday is my favorite day. I look forward to reclaiming the peace of a silent house, a reprieve from the "get off your screen" wars. I'm more convinced than ever that the 40-hour work week is inhumane. I'm willing to concede that some people enjoy their jobs and like to work, but even so Mon-Fri, 9-5 is too much. Bring on the national minimum income, I say. This Monday morning, after everyone left for school and the peaceful lull descended, I looked around my house and noticed the signs of a weekend well-spent, though it was a weekend in which the camera didn't come out very much.


The kitchen table: I swear I spent the whole weekend eating: a belated Lunar New Year celebration Saturday with friends (egg rolls, stir fry, tofu, a vaguely Southeast Asian dessert of tropical fruit and coconut milk) and then on Sunday I went on The Table Tour (a walk—not enough snow for skiing or snow-shoeing—around the Arboretum, from table of food to table of food). After two days of eating to repletion I needed to start the day with a bit of a cleanse.



Also on the table: The boys were recently gifted a collection of foreign money, and they spent some time sorting through all the coins Sunday after dinner.

The boys' room: I spent Saturday morning helping the boys deep-clean their room—vacuuming under beds, dusting behind dressers, washing windows. I helped M finish cleaning his closet. He's been working on it for a couple of months. It's been like an archaeology dig, uncovering the layers of M past (I feel like there's an essay in there somewhere). But he'd come to a standstill with one-and-a-half shelves of mementos, bric-a-brac, and dust waiting to be resolved. I held up each item and he decided whether it was to trash, keep, pass on, or store. 

The other side of the closet, however, is a bit of a disaster (despite E's and my efforts on that front a couple of months ago), but I ran out of energy on cleaning before I could tackle that.

My room: Draped over a chair is the result of a little Sunday afternoon sewing—finally making progress on a quilt for Z (thanks to my reading deprivation, I'm forced to find other ways to spend my time).

A shelf in the kitchen: We have a problem in our house which came into sharp relief with the cleaning out M's closet—of a ton of science kits and craft and art kits and kids that spend too much time on screen, not doing projects. So Sunday afternoon, I dragged E and Z off their screens and put them to work making crystals.

My desk: And then E and I started making paper boomerangs. He ran out of time to finish his, but here's where mine landed after a fling around the room.

The living room floor: In another attempt to keep boys off of screens, we've been trying to play more board games around here. When I was a kid, my sister and I played cards and games all the time, but not so these guys, unless there's an adult around directing the activities. We played Pictionary with our friends Saturday night and Taboo—E's favorite—Sunday evening.



The kitchen counter: M has been very into baking lately. He's reached the stage of baking confidence that I don't need to help out except with the occasional bit of advice and making sure we have all the necessary ingredients on hand. One weekend he made chocolate chip cookies three different times. Last week he made chocolate cake and brownies. And Sunday evening he mixed up a batch of banana- chocolate chip muffins.



The sofa: I usually write my morning pages in bed, but when C leaves early for work, like this morning, I get up to help motivate the twins to get out the door, and then curl up in a blanket on the couch to write my Morning Pages. After I finished my breakfast, I came back to this nice scene of morning productivity.

Christmas Cookies 2016

I had big plans to mix up all of my Christmas cookie dough over thanksgiving weekend and then freeze it to bring out, cut, and bake over the next few weeks. That didn't happen Thanksgiving weakened, or the weekend after either, nor the one after that. All last week, I got butter out of the fridge to soften, only to put it back after I ran out of time or eggs or sugar. Finally, Thursday, I went on an epic mixing spree, and whipped up five batches of dough (the secret is to start with the lightest cookie—sugar—and end with the darkest—chocolate gingerbread—so you only have to watch the mixing bowl and paddle once, when you're done. In addition to my three staple Christmas cookies— the aforementioned sugar and chocolate gingerbread and spekulatius—I made two new kinds: chocolate sables, which are my all-time favorite cookie and which I made for the first time last month, and heidesand, which I just rediscovered after more than two decades.

My high school best friend's parents were from Germany, and a generation older than most high schoolers' parents. Her dad was a chemistry professor (retired, possibly?) and her mom did some translating work on the side of keeping a spectacular house. Inside the She was a stickler for rules and details—inside the medicine cabinet were labeled hooks for each person's toothbrush, including one for me; the juice jug in the fridge had a table that said "for breakfast only" and at that meal you were allowed only a tiny glassful. They weren't what I'd call rich, because they did not engage in conspicuous consumption, but they must have had money and they spend it well. They lived in a modest-sized house but it was beautifully proportioned and tastefully decorated; they were thrifty in their food expenditures (her mom bought generic, which mine never did, even at our poorest) but always served multiple dishes at breakfast and dessert after dinner; they drove sturdy but older cars (Subaru and toyota), but travelled to Europe and had a cabin in the mountains. They were intellectual and sophisticated in a way few people I knew at that time were—they listened to classical music, discussed politics, had extensive vocabularies (the first time I heard the word "turbid," was when her brother used it to describe the iced tea). They took me on my first trips to the ballet and the ski slope. I housesat for them when the bicycled around Europe after their children's high school graduation (my friend had a twin brother).

One year around Christmastime, my friend's mother invited me to their house for tea and cookies. Among the many beautiful and delicious cookies arrayed on the tray, were humble brown rounds. They didn't look like much, but they had a buttery, melt-in-your-mouth taste and a sandy texture. Mrs. Stickler told us the German name of the cookie and that it translated to "sandy moor." She also said they gained their sandy texture from browned butter.


My friend and went to colleges on different coasts and over the years we grew apart and out of touch, the way people do, especially back in the days before email and Facebook. I haven't heard from her in many years. I don't know if her parents, who were as old when we were in high school as my parents are now, are even still alive. But I've never forgotten those cookies, and now and then have tried to find a cookie called "sandy moor," with no luck.

Finally, this year, it occurred to me to enlist the internet. I tried Google translating "sandy moor." I tried searching "traditional German Christmas cookies." I finally got a hit with "German browned-butter cookies," which led me to this website, with a recipe for Heidesand—or "heath sand"—cookies. As I read the description and history of the cookies, tears poured down my face. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I missed my friend, and her family, who had opened up my world a bit. Perhaps I missed that time in life when mothers baked cookies and had tea parties. Perhaps I just really love browned butter, sugar, and salt.

I made a double batch, so certain was I that these cookies would transport me back to a time when I was 17. The browned butter came off without a hitch, and the dough came out every bit as crumbly and hard to work as the recipe said it would. I managed to work it into logs by scooping handfuls of dough crumbs into ziplock bags and mashing and rolling them into submission.

The next day I took the logs out of the fridge and attempted to slice them, upon which the disintegrated back into crumbs. I let them warm up a bit and tried again, with a larger, sharper knife, which helped some, though many slices lost chunks on their way to the cookie sheet. The recipe recommends rolling the edge of the cookie slices in pearl sugar. I didn't have any pearl sugar, but I did have some naturally colored red and green sugar, but it refused to stick to the cookies, no matter what I tried (I was tempted to lick the edges to make it stick, but don't worry, I didn't).

They aren't the prettiest cookies on the tray, but they are good, buttery and a little sandy. They're a little tough and don't quite have that melt-in-the mouth quality of Mrs. Stickler's. I think I might have overworked the dough, and sliced them a bit thick. The ones that I managed to stick a little sugar to are better; the sugar adds another texture layer of crunch and just a tiny bit extra sweetness to a not-too-sweet cookie. They're definitely going to become a regular member of the Christmas cookie line-up, though I might try some other recipes, to see if I can hit that perfect sandy sweet spot.

I realized that both the Heidesand and the sables are types of shortbread, and that I really love shortbread. Butter + sugar + flour + salt = yum! I'm thinking maybe I should write a cookbook of nothing but shortbread. I looked online and found that there's one (but only one) out there already (and appears to be out of print), plus a murder mystery and a romance with the word "shortbread" in the title. So maybe, after I finish up a couple of other book ideas, that will be my next project.

Not-Quite-Perfect Peppermint Bark

For a few years now, I've been working on perfecting my peppermint bark recipe, with the twinned goals of deliciousness and minimal labor. I thought I had the formula just right this time:

• 2 bars Green & Black's white chocolate
• 2 bars Green & Black's mint chocolate 
• small package Annie's chocolate bunny grahams
• a couple of scoops of tiny peppermint candies from the candy store

Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems when assembling my ingredients:

• The grocery store did not have G&B's white chocolate, so I had to buy the much more expensive bars at the health food store.
• I accidentally bought dark chocolate rather than mint chocolate
• I couldn't find chocolate bunny grahams anywhere and had to settle for Newman's Own chocolate alphabet cookies, which contain palm oil and left me feeling guilty about the rain forests
• the peppermint candies from the candy store were not as tiny as I had remembered

Undeterred by these setbacks, I forged ahead. My first time-saving plan was to break up the first bar of white chocolate and melt it on the pan in the oven. I pictured the pieces getting all soft and gooey, and easily spread with a spatula. Unfortunately, they turned brown and crunchy and not at all melty.

Not willing to waste that pricey bar of white chocolate,  I transferred the brown chunks to a hot water bath and added a couple scoops of coconut oil to help smooth out the mixture as it melted.


I then smashed up a couple tablespoons of the not-quite-small-enough-to-use-whole peppermint candies and added them to the white chocolate to help disguise the brown color, and spread it all on a sheet of parchment and placed the pan outside in the cold to firm up.

I then placed both chocolate bars in a hot water bath and Z helped me bash up the cookies, right in the bag (with a small hole to let out air) with a hammer. I added several drops of mint flavor to the melted chocolate (a step I could have skipped had I bought the mint bars) as well as the cookie crumbs, spread the whole mixture over the first layer of light brown white chocolate, and placed the tray back outside.

Then I melted the last bar of white chocolate (in a hot water bath, having learned my lesson), added a few more spoonfuls of crushed peppermints, and spread it over the hardened chocolate layer. Over the top, I sprinkled more mint candies, not bothering to smash those up, which I think might have been a mistake, because the final result is a lot for the teeth to handle.

I placed the tray outside one last time for a few minutes and then transferred it to the refrigerator while we all went to go see Fantastic Beasts. When we got home, I broke the bark into hunks and squirreled it away for holiday season munching.

And the best part about the bark being not-quite-perfect? We'll have to eat it all ourselves, in the privacy of our home, where no one else can see the brown layer, or break a tooth on the over-large peppermint bits, or notice how the chocolate cookies end up a little more soggy and less crunchy than the bunny grahams would have.

Weekend Things ~ Before

I wish I'd gotten around to writing this post Monday or Tuesday, when I still felt the magic in the world. Maybe it's now more important than ever to find beauty in tiny things, in little moments. Or maybe it's stupid and self-indulgent. I don't really know, but back when tiny things mattered, here are a few from my weekend.

I did some exploring for mushrooms.





I brought my field guide and my camera into the woods.



But these specimens proved trickier than the ones I saw last week.







I even brought a few inside to try spore prints, in an admittedly haphazard way. And then I let them all go when they started to turn slimy, before I'd done the really hard work of keying out.



We didn't have much of a garden this year, being gone all summer, but C planted a few carrot seeds before we left and I harvested them Saturday. They were small, having never been thinned, and hairy, having been left in the ground too long, but they were beautiful (and tasty roasted).



I stole a little daylight knitting time. I'd started a project on tiny needles with fine-as-cobwebs yarn and wasn't getting too far in the evenings, in the dim light, in front of the TV. After a few minutes of knitting in a patch of sun, I was able to get into the rhythm of the pattern enough that I could knit all through 3 hours of Sunday night PBS-watching and am well on my way to an ultra-soft cashmere hat. I'm not sure if gray is my color, but I don't think I care.



Finally, I made a batch of cookies for a picnic at friends' Sunday. They're chocolate sables from The Standard Baking Company (if you have not been to The Standard on Commercial St. in Portland, drop everything and go there now). They're my absolute favorite cookie in the world, but even though I've had their cookbook for a couple of years now, this is the first time I baked them. They're a rich, chocolatey shortbread with a faintly sandy texture that I adore. And they weren't difficult to make, at all, although my dough logs (they're like an icebox cookie) were not exactly round, and the baking time was a little fussy (too long and they start to burn, though you can't tell because of the dark color; too short and they don't hold together).



Every time I took a bite of one of these cookies, I felt happy to be alive. I mean that, really and truly. Unfortunately, I finished the last of them Tuesday morning. I think I need to make another batch, stat.

Birthday Week Success

We survived another Birthday Season (aka, Second Christmas).



We took E and Z out for Mexican food on Tuesday night (their actual birthday), where they got sombreros and a very gringo birthday song to go with their fried ice cream and sopapillas.

Wednesday and Thursday were just normal days (i.e. baseball games).  And then Friday, M's birthday, we had grandparents over for pizza and ice cream (M requested Ben and Jerry's and no cake. Easy peasy). After the grands left and the brothers went to bed, M and I watched The Terminator, as a kind of rite of passage. I've been so excited to watch that movie with him. Now I can't wait to see #2 and 3.

Then Saturday more baseball and Sunday E and Z's party. I told them I would bake a cake and get ice cream, but that they were in charge of the activities. They had seven friends over and there was a lot of running around outside. They wanted to have a Nerf gun battle, which I tried to divert into a squirt gun battle (i.e., outside). The squirt guns didn't get much use, but the Nerf war started close enough to the end of the party that it was over before anything broke. E wanted to have blackberry vanilla cake, and I found a recipe online that uses blackberry jam (of course I can't find it now, but I see several dozen other blackberry jam bundt cakes, and now I want to try them all). The frosting is jam + powdered sugar...brilliant and easy and delicious and I'll never try to fold berries into buttercream again. There wasn't even an iota of objection to it being purple.

I found that I took Birthday Season much more in stride than I used to. In years past, it was cause of month's-long stress and anxiety. I guess I've calmed down over the years. Or lowered my expectations. Or maybe it comes of having kids old enough to write and distribute their own invitations and organize the party activities without me having to be cruise director. I think 11 is going to be a good year (and 15, too, of course).

Valentine's Weekend

I had a gloriously long weekend, with the holiday Monday and a sick kid on Friday (I should caveat that having a sick kid is not actually glorious, but he wasn't that very sick, just coughing so much that his teacher asked him to kindly stay home).

I used to have a four-day weekend every week. I forgot how great that was. What an idiot I was to give it up!

With the extra time, I was able to get started on a household project I've been meaning to get to for months--more on that next week.

I also got out for a nice long walk in the woods every day, sometimes with companions, and sometimes alone.

I made these cookies and sent out Valentine's cards (this year's card--the reflection of a pink crabapple tree in a heart-shaped puddle--only showed up on Saturday. I was feeling very irritated with the photo-card company for taking two weeks to get my cards to me, while at the same time feeling very first-world-problem-guilty, especially after my complaint email to customer service was answered by someone in India).

E, Z, and I carried on our tradition of making a Valentine's Day gingerbread house (okay, not much of a tradition since the last one we made, as far as I can tell from scanning ye olde blogge, was in 2011). This was from a kit I got for $1.75 post-Christmas. So we started with graham cracker houses and have progressed to the kit--someday we may even make one from scratch (though the kit seems to be the cheapest and easiest way to make one).

C and I had an old-people's Valentine's Day date--we went out to breakfast and then to the garden center to buy a new bird feeder (a festive Valentine's Day red one).

It's taken the birds a while to get used to it, but I think they're coming around.