On Tuesday we talked about trick-or-treaters and Bill mentioned that he and Robin also ask kids about their costumes. I assume that most all adults do this. It’s a low-level way to make a short connection.
One of my last little groups consisted of a girl in a pink princess dress and a boy in some kind of princely attire. Knowing that I would never see these kids again and knowing that they won’t care a whit about whether I’m crazy or not, I started a conversation:
Me: What a great costume. Are you the Count of Monte Cristo? (knowing full well this kids wouldn’t know what I was talking about.)
Count: No, I’m Prince Philip
Me: Oh, from Sleeping Beauty.
Count: No from Maleficent.
Me: Silence for a bit.
Me: (turning to the girl) Are you a princess?
Count: She’s Sleeping Beauty
Me: more silence
Me: Here we go (handing out the candy)
While I was perfectly willing to be silly about the Count of Monte Cristo, I didn’t think I needed to get into an argument on my front steps with kids about Prince Philip trick-or-treating with Sleeping Beauty but not knowing they were in the same story.
Tell me about a costume you wore as a child (Halloween, school play, whatever…)
This time of year I do actually work at not having too much leftover Halloween candy in the house. Luckily the number of kids that stop at the house has been remarkably consistent the last few years — even during Covid when I packed candy into little bags three weeks before and wore a mask while welcoming kids. This year, based on the number of pieces per bag, I figured I had enough to give each kid two pieces.
I always do relatively high-value candy – this year little Snickers and Reeses PB Cups. I heard a few ads on the radio the week before talking about non-candy ideas that you could implement and I just laughed. It might make adults feel virtuous but what kid ever wants some plastic bauble or deck of cards instead of candy. And while Smartees and Jolly Ranchers are infinitely cheaper, they aren’t as valued when kids are sorting out their bags of goodies at the end of the night.
In past years, I have taken any excess candy to the office – it never lasted long. The force was with me this year; I gave out the last four pieces of candy at 9 p.m. when I was getting ready to turn out the lights and bring in the luminaries. I congratulated myself on giving out all the candies.
YA has foiled my plans. She brought candy HOME – some she had found on sale and some that she picked up at the office. It is good candy – Ghiradelli caramel pumkins and Halloween-colored M&Ms. And she also bought Reeses pumpkins for herself awhile back. Turns out she bought more than one bag, so that is sitting out as well. I’m trying not to walk through the dining room too often. Out of sight, somewhat out of mind.
I have purposely chosen to not write about Halloween today, as it seems to me we have enough horror and fear around us. Instead, I wanted to let Baboons know what I am thankful for right now.
First, I am thankful to all the Baboons for putting up with all the posts I have written over the past several months about moving. I am sure they were getting pretty tedious to read. Moving is over, and now we are getting settled and organized. Not much more needs to be said about it.
I am also thankful for the increased time with our son and his family. We saw them yesterday in Sioux Falls and I got the best smiles from our 3 month old granddaughter.
Thanksgiving is four weeks away, and our son has requested a particular brined turkey ala Alton Brown, homemade French bread, and various other side dishes. Son and family, along with my best friend, will spend Thanksgiving weekend with us. I am so excited to cook in our new kitchen.
Finally, I am thankful that the court hearing Husband was to testify remotely at yesterday was settled on Wednesday afternoon. He had done a parental capacity evaluation on the parent in hot water with a central ND county. Now he is officially done working.
What are you thankful for these days. What are your Thanksgiving plans?
A couple of comments yesterday made me think that I have probably never explained the process of making a Ukrainian egg or “pysanky”. I’ll try to keep it simple!
Larger eggs are easier, although I did a fun series of three teeny eggs a few years ago. A rinse in white vinegar gets any residual grease off the egg. You work with a whole egg, uncooked and not emptied.
Ukrainian egg dying is a little similar to batik. You apply melted wax to the egg and then dip it in dye. You repeat this, from your lightest color to you darkest until you’re done and then melt all the wax off. A very traditional pysanky will be white, yellow, orange, green, red and black but there are plenty of other designs using other shades (blue, purple, pumpkin, brown, etc.) After you are all done with waxing and dyeing, you melt all the wax off the egg (carefully) to reveal your design in all its glory.
There are a few tools for making pysanky. The most critical is called a kistka and it is the tool that you use to melt the beeswax and to apply the wax to the egg. I have two kinds of kistkas. The traditional kistka which is held over a candle to melt the wax and an electric kistka, which keeps the wax cone hot without having to use a candle. Both traditional and electric have a variety of widths, depending on how thick or fine you want your wax lines. I tend to use both during a project. The beeswax has a black additive these days; without it, the wax is hard to see on the egg if you’re using electric – no carbon from a candle flame!
After you’ve melted off the wax, that’s when you add the varnish. This is an important step because it not only makes the egg shiny and pretty but it adds a bit of strength to the shell. If you are making pysanky that are being displayed but are not ornaments, then you are done. Eventually the insides of a Ukrainian egg will dry up and you can hear the dried yolk rattle if you shake them. (If you break one before it’s all dried up – get a clothespin for you nose!) If you are making ornaments, you’ll need to blow them out and add a finding to the top so you can thread it with twine, floss or some sort of string.
The most frequent question I get is how long an egg takes and it depends entirely on the complexity of your design. This year’s egg, if I did one at a time, from beginning to end would take about 75 minutes, but since I’m doing several at one time, that cuts down the time to about 55 minutes each.
Of course, there is plenty more I could say, but I’ll save that for when you ask me!
The egg table is up. And it only took two hours to completely torpedo this year’s design.
Many years ago I started coordinating my holiday crafts to a central theme. In addition to the Ukrainian egg ornaments, I also make the cards as well as kid ornaments and 6×6 decorated calendars. I try to tie all these items together every year. One year I did a snowglobe theme, one year the theme was “branches”. Peppermint, polar bear, gingerbread men, birds have all been done. There are a few themes that get repeated – holiday trees is one of those and also poinsettias.
This year’s theme is Santa. The card, the kid ornament and the calendar were seriously easy but the egg has been difficult. First off, there just weren’t many idea out there to start with and most that I found were painting on eggs, not traditional wax/resist. I had one idea and then when I sketched it out the first time, I realized it would be too hard to get all Santa’s proportions correct on an egg. Then I turned to clipart – a surprisingly good way to generate ideas for Ukrainian egg design. I messed with the idea for a couple of weeks and thought I had a good design.
Suffice it to say that drawing curvy lines in hot wax on an egg isn’t an easy thing to do. Then add fiddling around with mixing different dyes to get Santa’s skin right. Leaving space for his eyes was a pain. But the biggest issue was just too much white and a bit of red then a black background; it was just — blah. And I didn’t like the side border either, although that could have been remedied. I completed two of the design and then abandoned it.
I spent about an hour going through my egg design books and a couple of online places and finally found something that I could alter. There is no actual Santa on the egg, but it has a lot of red and white, with a black background and I was able to add “ho, ho, ho”; that’s as close as we’re going to get. This design is more complicated than the failed Santa image, but much more satisfying. I managed to get three done before I just couldn’t sit on my hard chair any longer – the design is solidified so now I’ll be on a roll starting this morning – after I feed the bad Santas into the garbage disposal!
Have you ever had to abandon what you had initially thought was a good idea?
It’s the time of year that I start to think about hand pies. When I was a kid, Nonny would occasionally make an apple pie (no other kind that I can remember, just apple). Depending on how many scraps she had left over, she would make either cinnamon pinwheels or every now and then “mini pies” (what we called them). I didn’t realize until I was well into my adulthood that the rest of the world calls these hand pies. And they are my favorites!
In my early years of hand pies, I just cut out the hand pies using a knife – triangles, rectangles and even circles. Then several years ago I purchased a set of molds that make a rectangle shape, a “pie” shape and an apple shape. These aren’t actually any easier than just cutting the dough by hand, but they are a lot more fun.
In August I saw an ad online for a cat shape/dog shape set of molds from Sur La Table. They are incredibly cute but way too expensive for an addition to my kitchen equipment that can only be called whimsical. Now that we’re getting close to apple picking (or apple picking up, depending on my knees), I’m thinking about hand pies. So yesterday morning I looked up the cat/dog molds online to see if anyone sold them less expensively than Sur La Table. Nope.. didn’t find them. HOWEVER, thanks to my search, my online world has suddenly been flooded with ads for hand pie molds. There are a lot of different companies out there selling lots of designs.
I’m currently seriously eyeing a holiday set and have looked up some more filling recipes. The three top new contenders are Lemon Cream Cheese & Raspberry Jam, Walnut Cinnamon Sugar and Nutella Hazelnut. In an age of trying to rid myself of stuff, I’m thinking I need my head examined thinking I need more hand pie molds. We’ll see how long I last….
Happy Solstice, Midsommar, or whatever you call the first day of summer! The days are longer now, which I appreciate.
I have heard from two friends lately who have experienced some very long days. One is a college friend who lives way up north in Sweden near the Arctic circle. She posted a photo of her and her husband dropping her brother off last week at the nearby train station at 2:00 am. It was fully bright out. She then mentioned that when she and her husband arrived home at 3:00 am, the sun was starting to rise. It must have not got dark there at all! She and her husband are evangelical ministers. I doubt they will be doing too much carousing at Midsommar festivities, which I understand can get pretty wild.
I also heard from my friend the international pet sitter. Her most recent gig took her and her husband to Dawson City, Yukon, to take care of a Great Pyrenees dog. It was a huge, friendly dog who wanted to sit on her lap. They loved the Yukon. The permafrost makes it impossible to pave the streets. The local liquor store and Drivers License Bureau share the same office space. She took a photo at 10:00 pm and it looked like she took it at noon.
I think the farthest north I have been is Gimli, Manitoba. I like it dark when I sleep, and I don’t think I would adjust well when it would be light all day.
What us the farthest north you have ever been? Any Midsommar celebrating today and tomorrow?
I believe I wrote that we were so busy at church over Easter weekend that we had Easter dinner the weekend before Easter, and we weren’t going to cook Easter weekend. Well, as usual, that was not what happened. I made the header photo, Pizza Rustica, on Good Friday. It is a southern Italian deep dish pie with ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, hot Italian sausage, mortadella, sun dried tomatoes, salami, and seven eggs, encased in a lovely crust. My pie looked just like the header photo. It was absolutely delicious. I highly recommend it.
We are traveling this week (more to come on that). The Grade 12 son of one of my coworkers is going to water the tomato seedlings, bring in the mail, and tend to the cat. He and his mom came on Saturday so we could show him what he needed to do. He intends to go to culinary school, so Husband showed him our cookbook library and I showed him the Pizza Rustica recipe. We loaned him several cookbooks and our pasta maker, since he expressed an interest in making homemade pasta and had used a pasta maker just like ours in school. It is one with a crank handle that is clamped to the counter. Husband calls this part of our “Radical Food Ministry “, getting people to cook from scratch. Husband told him he can borrow any of our cookbooks.
What is your favorite Easter dinner? Who mentored you? Who have you mentored?
YA and I celebrate the lunar new year, although not as robustly as we used to. When she was younger, we did a big house cleaning running up to the new year, put up a lot of decorations and had folks over for a nice dinner of Chinese. I used to cook all that food on my own but over the years, we moved to getting takeaway from our favorite Chinese restaurant. Since the pandemic, we’ve scaled way back on some of this.
It turns out that this coming year is not just Year of the Snake but Year of the Wood Snake. Apparently every 60 years or so, the Year of the Snake aligns with a Yisi year – which corresponds to heavenly stems and branches. Hence Wood Snake.
Folks born during a snake year (1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001,2013 and 2025) are associated with intelligence and resilience. Additional characteristics for a Wood Snake (1905, 1965 and 2025) are wisdom, intuition and renewal. I’ve seen a couple of headlines this week saying that a snake year for shedding negative energy. A good image for a snake, especially as the wood snake is linked with renewal.
According to a feng shui master who has been giving interviews, “The Snake — with a strong fire element, along with some metal and earth elements — is a zodiac sign that can cause significant clashes and conflicts. We need to be mindful of accidents as we approach the Snake Year. The overall atmosphere in the world will become slightly more chaotic.” Personally I don’t think you need a lunar new year prediction to come up with that….
Do you know your Chinese zodiac sign? Any favorite Chinese food this week?
One of the hallmarks of my annual holiday party is the amount of food – it seems like enough to feed an army. I can’t help myself; there are so many things I like and so many things that others like.
Of course, that much food means lots of leftovers. For the most part this isn’t a problem; YA and I happily nosh on party goodies for days afterwards. Most everything lasts a few days and some things (like the sliced cheese) can go longer if they’re wrapped well.
What doesn’t last too long is the leftover crudite. I wanted carrots, peppers and cauliflower this year. YA wanted broccoli and celery. I also had grape tomatoes left over after making the mozzarella skewers, so I added them to the serving plate with the other veggies. I have to say that most years I end up tossing more veggies than I like so this year I really committed to myself that I would figure out a way to not waste so much.
The first up was ramen with veggies in a peanut sauce. This is something we have a lot at our house but usually I make it with frozen vegetables. I chopped up a couple of cups of veggies, sauteed them then added the ramen and the peanut sauce. Quite tasty.
The next day I made a veggie and cheese frittata (extra points for using some of the leftover cheese). Sauteed chopped veggie, added eggs and cheese and a bunch of spices and baked it up. So easy and yummy.
The last of the veggies went into a soup. I was going to add some pasta but YA wanted potato. I ended up putting some of both in. It made a huge pot, which disappeared pretty quickly.
So for the first time ever we managed to get through all the leftovers on our own, including all the crudite, without having to toss anything!
Did you have any leftovers this holiday season that you had to deal with?
Trail Baboon 