Waking up is hard to do.

This morning I was really struggling to wake up. It was one of those mornings when you feel like the sunlight in your room must, must be moonlight. I just couldn't get my eyes open. Then I started getting subliminal messages from my clock radio (set to the news in the mornings)

6:15

".....can't do it alone. Need the assistance of China, India,.."

so I hit snooze.

6:23

"...the entire G20 is going to have to cooperate on this...."

Well. There's hardly room in my house for the entire G20.

snooze.

6:31

"...responsible for the financial meltdown..."

Whoa whoa whoa!

You're right, clock. I guess I should get up and go to work. Sigh. How about some nice music tomorrow morning, ok?

Birthday Camping

I had a sort of big birthday last week. To celebrate, I wanted to invent a time machine. But that didn't work out. The next thing on my list was CAMPING! I know, I know. I don't seem like someone who enjoys camping. Or living outdoors for months at a time. Or sleeping on the ground. But I really do.

Rob obliged and took me to the Chiricahua mountains for a lovely weekend. We brought along our new favorite toy, "The Mansion". The mansion is the largest tent ever. We luv it. We have both spent a lot of time camping and backpacking in teeny tiny tents, and we have a great time, but now that I've hit the big 3-0, we felt it was time for...a different kind of camping.
Mansion camping. This sucker is sooooo big you could easily fit four people inside along with their stuff. We figured we should just admit to ourselves that we mostly car camp, and we should embrace it. Chairs, tableclothes, cards, frisbees, giant coolers, and The Mansion.
We grilled out a birthday dinner of spicy chicken tacos.
And I played in the creek some.
When we got home, Rob baked(!) this gorgeous birthday cake. This is his first cake ever. Isn't it perfect? It tasted every bit as good as it looks.

Post for Emily

Not Emily Post, this Emily!

Emi has decided to take up baking and I'm sure she's going to be excellent at it. She recently asked about recommendations for baking gear. I was putting together an email for her about all of my favorites, but I decided to put it on here instead. So here you go, Emi, here's what my

perfect dream kitchen would contain:

For cookies and almost all other baking needs:

I like a heavy aluminum half-sheet. I get all worried about the non-stick stuff that comes on a lot of cookie sheets, so I prefer this plain, non-treated kind. Besides, most cookies don't need greased sheets anyway. If you need to make your pan non-stick (for candy or biscuits, etc.) you could use a silpat:

These silicon baking sheets prevent things from sticking, but they are essentially made of woven glass, not scary chemicals, so I think they're probably safer. Plus, they make cookies cook really evenly and they turn out fluffy and perfect. I also use my silpat to roll out bread dough and pastry. Speaking of pastry, I'm sure it's familiarity with what my mom taught me to use, but I don't think there's a better kitchen tool than the pastry knife:

I use mine for pastry (duh), for making crumbs for apple pie and struesel, for mashing small amounts of mashed potatoes and for crushing up basil before I put it in the blender when I make pesto.

For cakes, which I cannot stop making entirely too often, I use my beloved mixer. It is a Sunbeam Mixmaster. While I would dearly love a pale blue Kitchen Aid, my Mixmaster kicks a lot of ass. It's a powerful mixer and it never ever shoots dough across the kitchen and it never ever gets clogged up beaters. I especially love that I have a mixer that is the same brand and the same design as the one my mom has and the one my grandmom used. Can't beat that!

My cake pans are really cool, but I couldn't find pictures of them. They are 9" dark metal (think calphalon dark) and have silicon handles so you can hold them almost right out of the oven. I'm suggesting these pans for Emily:

They are the same heavy aluminum as the half sheet. I think I would buy the 8" diameter instead for a couple of reasons. First, I think that a smaller pan yields a taller cake, and I think that looks better than a wider cake. Second, I'm not sure if it is my oven or the elevation here in Tucson, but I find that the edges burn less and the cake cooks more evenly in a deeper pan.

In case you're worried about your own oven, get one of these:

For bread, roasts, and soups with fry starts, I love love love these enameled cast iron dutch ovens:

Emily totally called it on these, Lodge makes the nicest and prettiest version. They are heavy and seem to last a long time, I've had a lodge pan since I first went to college and it looks brand new.

The last thing I can think of that I really use a lot is a metal spatula.

It is perfect for icing (which I absolutely suck at) but I also use it for picking up fragile things off of baking pans (fiddly brownies, candy, etc.). You could also use it for fish in a frying pan, since it's nice and long.

Oh, and there's also my silver fork. I couldn't make a thing if it weren't for my favorite silver fork.

I hope this helps Emily! You know, even though all this stuff is cool, and I would love to have a whole kitchen full of perfect tools, you can make delicious awesome looking food without any of it.

The most important thing I use when I bake is experience. If it weren't for my mom letting me bake with her for so long, I wouldn't know how to do anything. She's the best baker there is. Maybe she has some gear suggestions?

Countdown

I forgot to mention earlier how excited we are here for football season....
We created a countdown on the chalkboard in the kitchen. Every day for the next twelve (looooong) days, we will cross off one gator tail until the happy morning of September 5th. It's Game Day eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve!

Baking

Well well well. It seems like once again, all I blog about is food.

This weekend I decided it was high time to make some more tiny cakes. I whipped up some plain old buttery, rich yellow cake in my tiny cake pans that I bought for Kacy's shower last year.

Then I baked them all together on a tray. I let them cool and then was free to experiment. Each cake has three layers, so there was plenty of room for icing and flavoring. On the first one, I spread lemon curd between the layers (oh how I love lemon curd) and then iced it with cream cheese vanilla icing. I decorated it with my favorite little fake daisies. Annnnd, I might have eaten a slice for breakfast. shhh.The other cake was for Rob. In between the layers is blackberry preserves. Then I mixed the preserves with the cream cheese icing and iced the whole cake with the purpleish mixture. I stuck it in the fridge for a while to set, then I iced over that with normal, non berry icing.

Of course I covered it with sprinkles. Rob hearts sprinkles more than cake.

I can't get enough of tiny cakes. I wish I lived back east so I could hand deliver one to my lovely niece who just had her first birthday!!! Happy Birthday sweetie!

This is a little candle holder that I made for her for her birthday. Well, it's like the one that I made her. The real one is hopefully on a USPS plane speeding its way toward her right now.

Return from Obscurity

Ahhh. I'm home. Home home home. It has been a really long field season this year. We left for Mule Creek in late May, and here I am, finally reunited with my dear computer on August 18.
I have hiked more than 60 miles, driven 15000 miles, seen a moose, a marmot, a bear, a ringtail, bighorn sheep, and lots of pronghorn. I've been to 26 states and 34 national parks and monuments.
I have been nearly killed by rain, lightning, wind, raccoons, and one giant spider in Louisiana.

Now that I am back, I plan to enjoy:
1. a bed. and a pillow. and a roof
2. showering in bare feet
3. using the bathroom in bare feet
4. not waiting in line for breakfast/lunch/dinner
5. getting up after dawn

and most importantly, the company of my awesome husband, our friends, and all of you.

I'm BACK!!!!!

Mischief Managed

All of yesterday's projects were total successes!

The chocolate chocolate chip cookies are outrageously good. They are going to be added to next year's cookie party for sure. I'm currently eating them for breakfast because R. isn't up yet and I can't get in trouble. hee hee.

The trickier project was the new chalkboard in the kitchen. This was much harder than I thought it would be. I planned to just yank it down and spray paint it a few times, but R. made sure we did it right.
He was very careful about how we took it down, so we didn't hurt the wall or the board. pah!. Oh, you know what? There's nothing at all under the board. I fully expected a hole or an old utility box, or at least a portal to another dimension, but there was nothing! I guess somebody put it up so they wouldn't have to drill holes in the adobe to hang the towel bar. Now I feel kind of bad that I've been making fun of it for so long.
I sanded the board and took out all the old nails and screws. Then I spackled all the holes and sanded it again. Then I put on the first coat of chalkboard paint and actually waited to put on the next two. My patience and maturity are astounding.
After four coats, it's very smooth and looks just like a real chalkboard. I can't write on it yet. Sigh. It has to cure for a whole 24 hours. Tonight at exactly 9:16 I'm going to write all over it. Yay!

I'm up to something

I have big ambitious plans for today. The first involves this really awkward corner in my kitchen. It's right by the stove. Some genius patched some kind of problem with the wall with a giant piece of wood that sticks out about an inch. It used to be sort of off white and dingy, but I painted it bright orange to make it blend in. That sounds kind of funny. You generally don't paint things bright orange to make them more subtle. Anyway, it's very ugly and very weird. There are all kinds of nail holes and screws in it. There are two towel bars right on top of eachother- everything about it sucks.
So, I'm thinking about making it into a chalkboard! I bought the chalkboard paint, now all I have to do is take down the huge scary piece of wood, sand it, and remove the dozens of tiny nails and screws. I can't wait. We can write our menu on it, or write recipes on it while we cook, or keep the shopping list up there. I can hardly make it worse, right? I mean, it's a giant orange eyesore now, the worst that can happen is I make it a giant black eyesore.


The other thing I have up my sleeve for the afternoon is this:


hell yes.

What is this?

Dear Ashley,
I'm very sorry that you've been stuck eating cupcakes for so long. Here's a new post just for you.

I bought this at the antique store the other day. I'm very excited about it and I can't wait to use it....except for one little thing. I don't know what it is!

It's a flower-shaped tube with little metal caps on both ends.



I don't generally buy stuff just because it's flower shaped or anything, but this was only a dollar and I saw big potential. I suspect that it is a kitchen utensil, so I'm pretty sure it's food-safe (I washed it about eighty times). My first thought was molded jello- that you could slice up and have little flower-shaped chunks of jello. Well, ok, that wasn't really my first thought. My first plan for it is probably not very practical (or possible). I want to bake cake in it. Chocolate cake, that I will slice up and then ice. Ooo! Or brownies that could be sliced with blobs of ice-cream on them!

On the boring side of experimentation, we could just freeze ice or juice in it and then float it in a pitcher of iced tea or something. Or punch. More awesome (and less likely) options include molding ice cream and then refreezing it . Wouldn't little flower-shaped ice cream cakes be delicious and pretty? You could potentially also use this like a big cookie cutter. You could make a sandwich, and then jam this into it, cutting out a flower-shaped sandwich and then move on to the next sandwich, filling the tube with a stack of pretty sandwiches. Unfortunately, I think only me and Katie would appreciate such fussy sandwiches. It kind of makes me want to find someone to throw a shower for!
What else could I use this for? Does anybody know what this thing is actually supposed to be? Aunt Joan? Ever seen anything like this? The store also had star shapes and heart shapes, so if this works, I'm going back to get more. Normally, I would have been all over the star shape, but I'm playing it safe with no tight corners. It's very hard to get a failed attempt at molded cake out of little star points.

Mom's cupckes

Thank you everyone for the sweet comments about the last post. They were so sweet, they made me want to make all of you a treat. So here you go.
Chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing and dark chocolate drizzles


and there's enough for everyone...

An Airman winks at me everyday

I live near an Air Force Base. Usually this fact has absolutely no impact on my life whatsoever. It simply means that sometimes we have to pause in our conversations as jets go roaring overhead in twos or fours, screaming their way back to the base. Sometimes it means that we see F-22's taking off before us at the airport right along side all the commercial and commuter planes. Mostly, though, it does not affect me. I don't even live close enough to the base to see cute Airmen in the grocery store or anything.
I do have one little connection with the flyers of Davis Monthan though, that I think is so special.

Every morning, one of them winks at me.

This requires a little explaining probably. You see, on my street, all of the houses face exactly north or south. That means that everyone's side windows face exactly east or west. In my house, my bedroom and bathroom have east facing windows. When the sun rises, it fills this side of the house with bright bright sunlight, while the other rooms still look like night. It is no fun in the summer when the sun rises straight in your face at 5:30 in the morning, but in the winter, it's so much nicer. You start to get a pinky glow at 6:30 and by seven, the window is all sparkly. I especially like the sparkly window effect in the bathroom, where the window is textured and frosty. The sunrise through that window turns the whole pane into one big diamond. It gets even better when the shower has been going because then the air is all sparkly too with the tiny water droplets. So, when I'm good and can manage to get in the shower around 7 or 7:30, I spend most of the time staring at the gorgeous window. This is what I was doing when I first saw the wink.

I was looking at the window with perfect indifference to the time or the soap dripping down my face when for a split second the sparkles stopped and the room turned dark. It happened in less than a blink, so I thought that maybe I imagined it. Afterall, I am not a morning person, and I probably had been staring too long. But it happened again the next day. And again. It happens almost every day.

By some magic trick of timing and light, at the same moment I am staring at the diamond window, a plane flies overhead on its way to the base and blocks out my light. The shadow from a fighter plane must be very small and must move very fast, but it crosses exactly over my house early every morning when I am looking at the sunrise. When I first realized that it must be a plane blocking my window, I started thinking about the person flying that plane.
He probably got up much earlier than I did because he is already on his way home. Home safe at the base. He is seeing the same rising sun that I am, but probably saw it much earlier from that height. He's thinking of breakfast, or a nap, or worrying about the landing, or thinking about a deployment. 3,000 feet above me, my airman has no idea that I see him. That I think about him every morning. That I pray for him to make it safely back to Davis Monthan.

I sometimes wonder if he feels eyes on him as he comes in to land. If he knows that I care. I have never actually met anyone who lives or works at the base, but my pilot has brought the war to me in a way that no news broadcast or political speech ever could. When I hear of war casualties I immediately think of my pilot, high above Tucson, alone in the cockpit, thinking that no one notices. I notice. I care. And I'm winking right back.

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Even though it is possible that this is a greeting card holiday that puts undue pressure on men to buy expensive jewelry or flowers or candy, I still enjoy a designated day of lovin'. Me and my Valentine have been taking it easy today. He competed in a racquetball tournament this morning and then we went back to the zoo this afternoon. Tonight we're going to make a lovely little feast out of pork loin, garlic-y pasta, and asparagus. yum. Maybe I will take some pictures of the cooking and share them tomorrow. I did a teeny bit of hearty (har har) crafting. I made these using the pattern on Martha Stewart's website last week. They took no time at all.
One of them is stuffed with homegrown catnip and a jingle bell. We quickly had to take that one away from its fat little recipient this morning. Orbit got really high and worked up. He wouldn't stop meowing and then he bit me. Very out of character. No more drugs for Orbit. Remember the last time we had to take the catnip away?

My sweetheart did bring home flowers and chocolate. I love them! The flowers are the hugest bunch of bright yellow chrysanthemums (with an "e") and a red heart full of truffles. The best!

Don't they smell nice?

I bought my Valentine a little gift to let him know how hot I think he is.

This isn't as random as it seems. He really likes Tabasco.

Popcorn ceiling

Check out this sky over Tucson the other day. Wow. We decided this might be God's cotton candy machine.

Dolls

Over the weekend I was going through the crafty shelves and I ran across this poor little dollhouse doll. She's really pretty, but she was wearing a super poufy polyester blue dress with lots and lots of lace. She's such a cool porcelain doll and is in perfect scale for a dollhouse, but the dress had to go. So I made her this one.


It's nothing special, but she seems way more comfortable. The doll also had a lace headband glued to her head, which I peeled off. Now all she needs is a dollhouse to live in.

The most important part of any doll is her shoes...
This is another little doll that I don't think I've shared before. She's a wooden clothespin with a little wooden knob glued on for a head. Her arms are pipe cleaners. She isn't the right scale, but I still like her.
It's tough to take pictures of tiny dolls, even though they stand perfectly still. Here I was trying to take a picture of her little red bow painted on the side of her head.

Anyway, they were two small projects that were easy and satisfied my strange need to make teeny tiny things. Is that an inherited trait? I kind of think so.

Go Cardinals!

Well. I have been a diehard Arizona Cardinals fan since at least...this morning. To celebrate our team's Super Bowl appearance Rob and I had a cookout today with some good friends.
We grilled out hotdogs, burgers, brats, and italian sausage andhad all kinds of other yummy football food.

We had Kelly, Sam, Liz, Lauren, Anna, AJ, and Katherine over to watch. We had a great time watching the game and watching the commercials.
Unfortunatley we lost. It was a great game though and we were ahead briefly in the fourth quarter. I'm strangely disappointed for somebody who has been cheering for the team as long as I have.
Go team! Go Arizona! We're going to have a great season next year, for sure.

Trip to the Zoo

Rob and I took a trip to the Reid Park Zoo this afternoon. We've been meaning to go for a long time. I have a thing for otters and as soon as we heard that the zoo has an otter exhibit, it was on the top of our to-do list.
It turns out our little Tucson zoo is completely awesome! There are way more animals there than we expected and the habitats are really nice. Some of them are smallish, but they are all laid out well and the zoo is really good about shade. I don't know how they did it but most of the habitats face east so they're much cooler and many of the viewing spots are shaded or in little tunnels so the visitors stay cool and still get a great view of all the animals. It is much more intimate than other zoos I've been to. It may not be as big or swanky, but the animals seem healthy and they were all visible.

Here I am in the aviary:


And here is our new friend:




The giraffe enclosure was fairly large, but this guy was hanging out right next to the sidewalk so that everyone could admire his pretty spots. And his weird tongue. He got so close he managed to lick the camera of a guy next to us. Nice!

We are definitely going to come back. They're building a new elephant habitat, so we look forward to seeing what that looks like. This trip we walked around the whole zoo and tried to see everything, but we've decided that next time we're going to pick out an animal or two to watch the whole time. Or maybe we'll just do one area. They have the zoo divided by continent of origin, so it would be easy to spend a lot of time looking at the South American animals or the African ones. Or just the otters. I'd be happy spending the day with the otters.

If you live in Tucson, we highly recommend the zoo, our hidden gem right in the middle of town. If you're not from Tucson, come visit and we'll take you there.

Pretty Things on my Table

I have some pictures of pretty things to share. First are these beautiful flowers that I got two weeks ago when my friends came over for book club. They started out a little bit brighter and a little bit taller. I've only changed the water twice and trimmed them once. Pretty good for $5 worth of flowers, huh? They're so fluffy and fat, I love them.

There are also these..

Oh man. Man oh man. They are cream-filled coffee cake cupcakes and I've eaten approximately a million of them. I made a batch on Wednesday and then couldn't stop eating them, so I sent them to work with Rob to get rid of them. Well, I couldn't stand it and I had to make more last night. Coffee cake is one of my favorites, not too sweet, not too fussy, perfect with coffee (duh). I made these trying to copy the TastyKake Koffee Kakes (I hate that they spell everything with K's. It's like Kwik Mart. How annoying.)
I used to write recipes on Fridays on here. Do you want the recipe for these?

Coffee Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Filling
Cupcakes:
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter (softened)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup sour cream or plain yogurt (I used yogurt. Come on, you're going to eat ten of them, make 'em a little healthier)
2 tbsp buttermilk

Topping:
1/4 cup light-brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon (maybe a little more)
2 tbsp butter

Filling:
4oz cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
4-5 tbsp butter (softened)
1 cup 10x sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
milk (as needed to obtain a nice texture)

Here's what you do:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Make batter as follows: Mix butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and egg. Mix well. Mix all dry ingredients together and add to the butter mixture slowly, alternating with the sour cream and buttermilk. Scrape the bowl often to keep all the goodness in. Mix everything well. Divide equally between 12 muffin tins. It doesn't look like a lot, but it will make it. They won't be huge cupcakes.
Mix all ingredients for the topping together and blend using a fork or a pastry knife. Try to make the mixture crumby in texture. Pour the topping on top of the batter in the greased (did I say greased before? Grease them.) muffin tins (don't worry about being neat) and put them in the oven for around 15 minutes. Or golden brown.
I bake at high elevation, so I would always be cautious of my temperature or time guidelines.
When the cupcakes are out and cooled a little bit, mix together the icing ingredients until it's smooth and delicious. Add enough milk to keep it smooth, but don't let it get runny.
This is the tricky part. Getting the icing inside the cupcakes took a little creativity. I'm sure you could do it with a knife and a baster or something. Or a turkey injector. I used a cookie press with an icing attachment. I shoved the nozzle down into the cupcake and filled it with icing until the top kind of domed up. When you take the nozzle out, the icing sort of wells up through the hole and makes the perfect little white dot on top like a Tasty Kake. Incidentally, I think putting icing in the middle of cupcakes and watching it erupt out is an excellent way to illustrate the pressures of vulcanism and magma chambers under a stratovolcano. Just sayin'.
That's it! Eat them up with a glass of milk or cup of coffee. Yum!!