Summer Baking

 

Now that it's more or less fall here in L.A, I wanted to round-up the best desserts I made over the past summer.

1. Peach pie*

I know I'm bragging here, but this was the best pie I've ever made and one of the best I've had.  I used the full five-hour Baking Illustrated recipe.  Some of their recipes are needlessly complicated (I'm thinking here of their Dutch apple pie recipe, where they add a lot of time-consuming extra steps that actually make the pie worse) but this time, it was really worth doing it the hard way.  I think one of the key things was using potato starch as a thickener instead of the usual tapioca, the consistency was really good.

2. Smores bars
By contrast, these are incredibly easy, and great for summer because they don't require baking.  It's just a Rice Krispy treat only made with Golden Grahams, marshmallows, and chocolate chips, perfect for parties and bake sales.  The recipe I linked to suggests dark chocolate chips but I prefer milk chocolate - I love dark chocolate but it overpowers these bars and besides, milk chocolate comes closer to the classic original Smores.

3. Pink lemonade bars
I loved these bars from Smitten Kitchen - the pink color comes from pureed raspberries.

4. Coconut thumbprint cookies with salted caramel centers
I made these for Hot Dish and they were a big hit.  I made the first batch way too big, though, they are very rich and a little goes a long way.

Now on to fall!  Tonight I'm making pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

* Page 193.  I'm too lazy to type it all out but if you want the recipe let me know and I can scan it for you.

The Borrowed Chicken

We have a chicken! Just temporarily. 

Our garden has been experiencing a grasshopper infestation.  They have done major damage to the grapes and blueberries, in particular, though pretty much every plant has been affected.  We've tried everything to control the grasshopper population, from sprays to netting, but experts agree that the only thing that really works is the presence of a duck or chicken*. 

So we got a chicken. Dev bought her for $10 from Peking Poultry in Chinatown.  We named her Lenore (Dev used to have chickens named Lindsay, Lolita, Loretta, and Lulu).

Our plan is to keep her in our yard for a few days to clear out the bugs and then situate her in a permanent home with our friend Luke who keeps chickens in his yard.

Meanwhile we destroyed all the grasshoppers' eggs by aggressively weeding and tilling their nesting area, so hopefully we won't have this problem again next year**.

Predictably, Dev is already attached to the chicken and wants to keep her long-term, but I'm afraid that with the dogs, a permanent chicken isn't really possible.  I will say, she's a very friendly, outgoing chicken, surprisingly unafraid of people, and the kids love seeing her in the yard.  Could we build a safe enclosure for her behind the garage and keep her? Maybe . . .

* Well, praying mantises work, too, and we do have a few naturally-occuring ones, but if you buy new praying mantis eggs from a garden store they can take up to two months to hatch and we wanted a solution now.

** Most farmers and gardeners suggest you basically wait out the current grasshopper season (since it's all but impossible to kill them even with strong pesticides) and work on killing their eggs so they don't come back in the spring.  But I couldn't bear to stand by and watch the grapes get eaten and we're at least a month away from the consistently cooler temperatures that will kill off the grasshoppers.

The County Fair

Another great year at the L.A. County Fair - Arthur is now the same age that Beatrice was when she first went to the fair.

 

We stayed the whole day and did it all, from goat-milking to pig (and turkey) racing to award-winning quilts and vegetables.  There was even a parade.

Novelty turkey racing

Beatrice milking a goat

Beatrice declared her favorites to be the stunt dog show and the rabbits.  She also admired the entries in the cake decorating contest.

Beatrice pets one of the stunt dogs after the show

Highlights for Arthur included the petting pen (where he held his own despite a goat-to-child ratio of 5-1) and the giant plate of chili cheese fries he shared with Dev.

 

 

Personally, I'm in it for the barbecued corn.

Know Thyself

Summer: Do you want to have a slumber party with Arthur tonight?
Beatrice: No.
Summer: Why?
Beatrice: Arthur will be upset because he won't have a pillow.
Summer: Why won't he have a pillow?
Beatrice: Because I'll take his pillow.
Summer: What if you don't take it?
Beatrice: But I know I will.

This Year's Halloween Invitations

 

Another year, another Halloween invitation!

This year's party is divination-themed, so the invitations are miniature crystal balls.

The crystal balls (large clear marbles) are set in a velvet jewelry box.

The invitation is printed on a strip of paper wound around the ball.

Then I added some gold star confetti inside the box. 

I sealed the boxes with a gold seal (stars, bees, fleur de lis, or other cryptic symbols) and then wrapped them in silky black fabric with silver stars.

The exterior box is lined in silver glitter paper, filled with yet more confetti, and tied up with gold or silver ribbon.

Only 32 days until the party...

All About Olivia

It was almost a year ago now that Beatrice first fell in love with the cartoon pig Olivia.  As part of our Christmas activity advent calender I took Beatrice to a bookstore and told her she could pick out any Christmas book she wanted.  She picked Olivia Claus (in which Olivia loses her beloved stuffed toy on Christmas Eve and imagines herself as a Santa who delivers missing toys to the children who lost them).  After reading it to her at least a hundred times, I bought a second Olivia book just so I could have something new to read. 

Flash forward to today and we have about a dozen Olivia books, from Olivia Plants a Garden to Olivia Leads a Parade.  I haven't bought her any Olivia toys* (yet) but she does have a set of Olivia temporary tattoos.  And of course, after having been vigilantly anti-TV for the first three years of Beatrice's life, I relented and downloaded two seasons of the "Olivia" cartoon show. 

The arc of every Olivia story is the same: Olivia encounters some problem in real life; she retreats into her imagination to picture some far-out solution; she applies a version of that solution to real life and it saves the day.  Almost all the problems are external (ie., a freak sunny day ruins her chances to win a snowman-building contest) and there's almost no interpersonal conflict between any of the characters.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, Beatrice insists on being called Olivia and even renamed all of her relatives, friends, and pets after their Olivia counterparts.  She quotes long passages from the books and television episodes and "Olivia" is one of only a few words she can sight-read.

This picture always makes me laugh.

So anyway, I was thinking about the "messages" of Olivia and whether or not they were good ones when it occurred to me that Olivia's character is pretty much non-stop preschool wish fulfillment.  Most characters in cartoons have some flaw (a smart but nerdy teacher's pet, a nice but dumb sidekick) but Olivia is just an entirely perfect girl.  She's good at every single thing she tries, from mountain climbing to turkey calling (really).  She's the smartest kid in her class but also the best liked and most popular; she can be sort of bossy and a know-it-all but whenever she gives her friends advice they immediately thank her and do what she suggests.  She's generous with her brothers, obedient to authority figures, and never gets in trouble.  Her parents and teacher are sometimes mildly exasperated with her but overall she's adored by every child and adult she knows.

This was amusingly confirmed the other day when Beatrice said, unprompted, "I'm Olivia.  I'm smart and funny and nice and good and Mr. Richard likes me and everyone likes me."  Who doesn't want that?

Needless to say, she's already decided to be Olivia for Halloween - luckily there's a cute store-bought costume already available so that makes my job easy.  She also wants an Olivia party for her birthday and (of course) I already have some ideas for that, too.

* One nice thing about Olivia is that there are only a few licensed toys that are only available online so at least you aren't bombarded with them at every store.

Beatrice Loves Soccer

Today Beatrice had her first day of soccer through the Burbank Parks and Recreation department; she'll be going Friday evenings at 5pm at Jordan Middle School.  Not surprisingly, she absolutely loves it (as she has loved ballet, gymnastics, art, swimming, music, and every other thing she has ever tried - her new preschool teacher Mr. Richard recently commented that she is "extremely enthusiastic").

Beatrice makes a goal

We arrived a few minutes early for B's first lesson while another class was still winding up.  Before I could stop her, B ran out onto the field shouting, "THIS IS SPORTS!" 

"This is sports!"

We finally got her a little more focused, and by the end she was doing pretty well.

The entire way home all she talked about goals, dribbling, Coach Jason, and how there are "no hands in soccer."

Dev went out on the field to help Beatrice (B is in the beginner class which includes parental involvement; when she turns 3.5 she'll be out on the field on her own).  

 

 

 

Meanwhile Arthur and I had fun watching and photographing from the sidelines. 

 

Beatrice leads Arthur around the soccer field 

Personally, I just like being outside on fall evenings.  And because I usually make crockpot meals on Fridays, when we got home at 6pm we already had dinner waiting for us.

B was very impressed by her "Kidz Love Soccer" hand stamp