OmegaMom

This year, OmegaDad made sure to have some little gingerbread houses for OmegaDotter to do all by herself, because she gets tired of having to follow daddy’s directions.  She wants to let her creativity reign; he wants to rein in her creativity (in this case only!), because he always has A Vision for his holiday gingerbread creation.  Anyway, he made four tiny little gingerbread cottages for the dotter to decorate, while he immersed himself in his pagoda-on-the-hills creation.

I helped the dotter, but only as directed.  What she said, went.  So here’s the overall view from above:

You have four gingerbread cottages with green and red tiling; a car on the road, two pine trees (one decorated), a little pond, and Santa and an elf making snow angels.  You can’t see them, but each of the cottages has a wreath made of chewing gum.  Chewed chewing gum.

This is a close-up from the side of the front scene, in which you can see the decorated tree much better, plus the candy-cane fencing:

Santa, being so eager to run out and make snow angels, had dropped his bag off at the entry to the village:

While all this was going on, OmegaDad was sculpting his Santa of fondant:

Santa was going to be skiing down one of the hills, so he had to be on skis.

The finished product has ski poles, and the hands are wrapped around the ski poles, which is why Santa is handless in these pics.

So here is the grand product, the pagoda on the hill.  Note there are no ninjas.  I do not know what happened to the planned-upon ninjas, they just sort of vanished.  Maybe they are so sneaky that they are invisible, but they’re really there?!  Note the lovely, smooth, glass-like lake.  See Santa skiing downhill?  He was originally up higher, but…he skied further down the hill, and OmegaDad decided that this was the spot Santa needed to be at.

The night scene:

In the back of the pagoda hill, there is another tree and another panda:

A close-up of the pagoda and its Christmas tree:

The pagoda, alas, started tilting early on.  At this point, it is the Leaning Pagoda of Alaska, and OmegaDad and I figure that sometime soon, when the dotter is bouncing around, it will fall and go boom.

You might think this is a very sparse, little decorated gingerbread scene, and thus not very much work.  I assure you, it was a lot of work.  Three huge batches of rice krispie treats.  Many, many, many batches of fondant and royal icing.  The pagoda itself is made of stacked circles of rice krispie treats with gingerbread roofs made by coating the outside of pot-pie tins with carefully draped gingerbread.  The trees are made of fondant, rolled out, cut into graduated circles, then carefully given points by pressing with the pointy part of a heart-shaped cookie cutter.  And on and on.  OmegaDad’s creations are always fun, and always a lot of work, and always (though it may not seem like it) a lot of work.  Please applaud his project!

(I note that, even after lo these many gingerbread projects being featured on the blog, I did not have a “Gingerbread” category.  That has been rectified.)

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

It’s the end of Thanksgiving Day.  We’ve had our turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and beets and pumpkin pie.  We played in the snow and built a snowman.  OmegaDotter and I dressed up for dinner.

I’m thankful that this year is almost over.

I’m thankful that I have an amazing, thoughtful, creative, loving, smart, funny guy like OmegaDad.

I’m thankful that I have a talented, creative, smart, funny, silly, beautiful girl like OmegaDotter.

I’m thankful that I had GrannyJ for as long as I had her.  And Jean.  And my dad, and my oldest brother.

I’m thankful that I still have family members who I love and cherish.

I’m thankful that we’re warm and safe and reasonably happy.

Happy Thanksgiving to y’all.  I’ll show you OmegaDotter’s Thanksgiving speech—which she delivered before we started eating—tomorrow.

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

OmegaDad hauled the dotter and me out to pick various berries in the yard–he plans to make rose-hip and rhubarb jelly, and maybe tart it up with cranberries.

While we were out there, I came upon some pretty mushrooms and fungus:

The dotter and OmegaDad in the midst of foliage:

The takings - cranberries:

And rose hips:

Rose hips are chock-a-block full of pectin, but they’re not very tasty.  Fairly bland, as a matter of fact.  So hopefully the rhubarb and cranberries will make the end result more interesting.

As the majority noted, it was, indeed, Pippi in the dotter’s picture.  (Lauri–No, I wasn’t trying to get very deep!  ;-)  Just wanted to see if people who didn’t know beforehand could recognize the subject of the picture.)  I am torn at this point between the idea of sending the dotter off to take some “art lessons” so she can learn about perspective and shading and various techniques, and the fear that the same thing could kill her creativity.  If someone were to squish that outpouring of creativity, I think I’d get…violent.

Today we thinned out the beets.  We had two sizes–itty bitty embryonic beets, and almost-beet-sized beets.  We ate the mess of embryonic beets, cooked with their greens, and it was yummy.  Tomorrow or the next day, we will eat the almost-beet-sized beets.

Sunday, OmegaDad made homemade peach ice cream, brownies, and bread.  Saturday, he brought home two pints of the best blueberries I’ve had in ages.  It’s been a few days of eatin’ around here!

ETA:  Oh!  I forgot!  Today was the anniversary of the first moon landing.  I don’t remember it very well, but do remember watching it at my grandmother’s house down in Jacksonville.  We were telling the dotter about it, and she kept asking, “He was the first man ever to walk on the moon?!  EVER?!”  Then she asked who was the first woman to walk on the moon.  We said no woman has ever walked on the moon.  Now she wants to be the first.  Anyway, in honor of this occasion (warning:  language, but quite appropriately inappropriate!):

While getting ideas for science projects, I chanced upon a mention somewhere on the Intertubes of using [some item] to dissolve an eggshell while leaving the remainder of the egg intact.  I mentioned this in passing to OmegaDad, with [some item] replaced by “baking soda”.  He scoffed at the baking soda, but thought vinegar might do.  He thought it was a really nifty idea.

He and the dotter set up two mason jars on the kitchen counter, one filled with vinegar, the other with Dr Pepper (there is no period after the “r”), thinking that soda pop might be just as acidic, and dumped two uncooked eggs, shells intact, into the jars.

This evening, I was called into the kitchen by a very excited dotter.  “Omigosh, you have to see it!  Come see the egg, mommy!  It’s all squishy!”  So I wandered into the kitchen and found OmegaDad rinsing the remainder of the shell off the egg that had sat in the vinegar…and then we played with it.  It was very pearlescent, not as fragile as I thought it might be, and very cool.

Here’s OmegaDad squeezing the egg:

Then we grabbed my itty bitty book light (not the type of trademark fame, but even itty-bittier), turned it on, placed it next to the egg membrane, and turned off the kitchen light:

Does that, or does that not, seem like something that belongs in a fantasy novel?!  “G’kark held the glowing orb in his hands with breathless awe, waiting for the Gzrk to respond to his silent call…”

OmegaDad and OmegaDotter took turns bouncing it:

Then we poked a hole in it, which was like poking a hole in a water balloon.  I have it up on YouTube, but YouTube keeps telling me it’s still being processed.  Harrumph.  I will try again in a few hours, and edit this post then.

The whole family is entranced; it is so very interesting. The dotter is going to check out water (our control), vinegar, Dr Pepper, Pepsi, Coca Cola, and orange juice. The write-ups all say cola drinks should do it; however, the Dr Pepper we tried doesn’t seem to have done anything.

• Ms. Vinegar Martinis asked me what kind of floofy drinks I like.  I admit a horrendous fondness for piña coladas, blended with ice, whipped cream on top, a maraschino cherry, and a little umbrella.  Another floofy drink I like–a hangover (har!) from when I was a wild-n-crazy young 20s-ish gal living in gay-town Chicago–is the Golden Cadillac.  Flavored margaritas, such as peach or mango, get a thumbs-up from me, as well.

  When we were living in Small Mountain University Town, on hot summer days, I would take the dotter off to the local outdoor swimming pool.  After an afternoon in the sun, we would stop at Baskin-Robbins.  One day, I noticed they had a flavor called Coco-Nutty.  Nom nom nom.  The next time we visited, I combined it with a scoop of lemon sherbert.  Nom nom nom, squared.  It was the ice-cream equivalent of the piña colada, and became my staple there.

• Noreen asked what the elementary school Sock Hop was like.  Let’s see…First off, the dotter’s elementary school has a new music teacher, Mr. L., who looks like he just got out of college from getting his music education degree.  He is, IMO, quite kewl; at the Christmas concert, for instance, he had forty fourth- and fifth-graders all playing in time and in tune on recorders.  Nothing too fancy, but it was quite an accomplishment.  Anyway, he seems to be the driving force for many newer musical adventures at the elementary school front.

  The Sock Hop featured all the lady school teachers in poodle skirts.  Oh, yes!  And a few of the girls.  My fave ’50s dress-up, though, was the stocky young man in the fourth (?) grade who had greased his hair, was wearing a muscle Tee, blue jeans, and a black leather jacket.

  When we arrived, the music blasting out was 80s rock-and-roll.  OmegaDad and I eyed each other dubiously; this was not sock hop material to us.  However, soon enough the DJ (Mr. L.) was rolling out fifties and sixties faves, requiring serious Twist and Swing action.

  There were hot dogs and chips, and a malt shop featuring root beer floats.  All in all, grand fun.

• Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa:  Shortly after we returned Buffy, our formerly broody hen, to Le Grand Coop, we had to remove Angie, our Brahma, due to the other hens pecking her legs bloody.  So Angie has been in our garage for a few weeks, recuperating.  Yesterday morning we returned her to the coop.

  I had thought the peckage was the result of Angie molting, and thought nothing of checking up on her.

  OmegaDad checks the chickens late at night, before bedtime.  I was reading in the dotter’s bedroom, finishing off Godel, Escher, Bach, when I heard OmegaDad muttering, “Shit!  Shit!” outside the room.  When I emerged a few minutes later, I found him downstairs in the office, on the computer.

  “So what was all the muttering about?” I asked.

  The sad tale came out:  He had forgotten that Angie had been returned to the coop, so had not checked during the day.  When he got out there, he discovered her beaten and bloody; the other hens had pecked out all her leg feathers again, and pulled out almost all the feathers at the base of her tail.  I went out to the garage to view our poor beat-up hen, and it was just gross; she looked like ground beef.  :-(  And I felt terrible, because I hadn’t thought anything of it, and felt like it was my fault she got beat up.  Anyway, Angie is back in the garage, recuperating again, and if we can’t figure out a way to get her back into the coop without the other hens savaging her again, we are going to have to find a new home for her.

• Unka Bill grumps about the PINKage of modern-day small girls.  I totally agree.  In fact, when the dotter was a wee one, she had very little–if any!–pink attire.  She wore cute little yellow outfits, and green outfits, and denim onesies, leggings in a variety of colors, cute little dresses in bright colors.  Alas, in the past two years, she has been quite firm in what she wants to wear.  The Borg has assimilated her.  All I can say is that most girls emerge from the PINK phase at some point in time…I hope the dotter goes Goth, or Emo, because she looks mighty fine in black.
• When the weather got cold, OmegaDad retreated from the ongoing construction around the north forty, and took to experimenting with baking.  We now have homemade bread on a regular basis, and homemade cakes, and (today) homemade brownies.  Our bank account has thrived as a result, but so has my weight.  I am eagerly awaiting the return of spring, not just for the sunshine and warmth, but so that OmegaDad will return to construction and stop feeding us luscious baked goods.  All the blue jeans I purchased early last fall, which were too big on me then, are now fitting quite snugly.  This is Not Good.

Later gators.

When I was growing up, one of the things that I learned to look forwards to during the summer was when OmegaGranny would buy a whole bunch of beets and beet greens, cook them up, and serve plain with butter.

Mmmmmm.

Now, probably most of you are going, “Eh?  Beets?” and thinking of that ghastly monstrosity perpetrated upon humanity called “pickled beets”.  I can handle a slice or two of pickled beets at best.  But, believe me, beets and greens are just plain good.

When OmegaDad and I were newly together, on one shopping expedition I saw a nice display of bunches of beets, and demanded he purchase and cook same.  His response was, “Eh?  Beets?”, and he was, indeed, thinking of pickled beets, which had been his only exposure to the plant before meeting me.  So we bought them, took them home, and I prepared them the proper way:  Boiling the beet roots for an hour, peeling them, chopping into small cubes, setting aside, washing the greens and slicing them, then tossing them into a tiny bit of boiling water for all of two or three minutes, draining the greens, then mixing them with the cubed beet roots and serving with butter.

He saw the light.  Sort of.  Beets are still not his most favorite of fresh veggies, but since he knows I looooove beets, he keeps an eye out.

OmegaDad requested, earlier this week, that I email him and remind him to put the Farmers Market into his calendar so he would remember that it’s open on Fridays only a couple of blocks from his office.  Since today was sunny and beautiful (YES!  It was up to 70F today!  ::OmegaMom pumps her fist in a victory move:: ) and since he was oh-so-tired of dealing with the mess a coworker had made of his nice clean data in the database, he skipped out of work early, headed off to the market, and returned home with the lusciousness above.

And lusciousness it truly was.  The beets were sweet and crisp, the greens slightly tart and acidic, and the butter complemented it all.

The dotter?

OmegaMom beams in delight:  This child is my dotter!  Woot!

The dotter eyed the beets and greens dubiously when served.  But she is well aware that the rule in the house is “one or two bites of everything on your plate”, and since she has decided that her great dream is to become a chef, she has taken to being much more open to new and strange food items.  So she tasted the beets.

At first she carefully pulled the beet cubes out from the greens and ate only those (eagerly).  But I urged her to try the greens as well.

She wanted seconds.  Of a vegetable.  And when I told OmegaDad that I could eat a dinner of just beets served that way with biscuits, she said, enthusiastically, “A whole big plateful!  Yum, yum!”

(We are hoping that our veggie garden actually produces beets; we have two types growing.  The moose did not get the beet plants.  Oh!  Oh!  And our decimated broccoli?  That were shorn?  They are fighting back, and we now have baby broccoli florets growing!)

On the menu tomorrow are those beautiful fresh green beans.

(Kate, over at High Altitude Gardening, is trying to identify a flowering plant in her garden.  If you’ve got some gardening know-how, go take a look and see if you can help.)

There are a few culinary disasters in my past that still make me wince, like the time I made a birthday cake for my mom using baking powder instead of baking soda (or was it vice versa?).  Another time relates to biscuits.

The No Exit Cafe in Rogers Park was a semi-hippy/semi-Bohemian kind of place, where people played chess or Go while sitting around, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and listening to folksy acoustic music played by women with long curling hair parted in the middle and held back by tie-dyed scarves folded into headbands.  My cousin K. was very fond of the No Exit, and for a period made a point of hauling me there along with him and his latest girlfriend.  For some reason, that Thanksgiving I was not doing a family do, and K. invited me to join in a community Thanksgiving meal at the No Exit.

In my innocence, I figured that I’d bring biscuits, because, well, hey:  biscuits.  Plain.  Simple.  Easy.  Right?

The cooks in my audience are howling with laughter now.

Of course, it turns out that biscuits–plain, simple, easy biscuits–are distressingly easy to make badly.  There are females in many families who are spoken of by descendents in reverential whispers when it comes to biscuits, because they know The Biscuit Secret. 

I did not know The Biscuit Secret:  my contribution to the feast was a bowl full of beautiful golden hockey pucks:  hard, rocky, flavorless.

Sigh.

That was enough to make me swear off making biscuits forever.

Perhaps I have learned by this time to never take something I’ve made for the first time to a potluck or gathering…

A few years ago, OmegaDad announced to me that he was on a quest to learn to make biscuits.  I wished him well, but was dubious.  His first batch was very similar to my original batch.  But he persevered, making an occasional biscuit batch now and then.

Tonight we had “breakfast for dinner”.  Bacon, scrambled eggs, biscuits, butter, apricot preserves.  Notably not a “healthy” dinner; I could feel my arteries slamming shut as I chowed down. 

The bacon was perfectly crispy, falling into bite-sized pieces with the merest crunch of one’s teeth.

The scrambled eggs–which are one of the things I do cook very well–were light and fluffy and gently seasoned with Italian seasoning.

And the biscuits–ahhhh, the biscuits.

Each biscuit had, on one side, a dainty little split beginning.  I would insert a fork at the split, and the biscuit would fall open like a flower, with a faint puff of steam rising into the air.  A little pat of butter, and then a tablespoon of apricot preserves, and I would open my mouth to a little bite of heaven.

OmegaDad’s biscuits, these days, are a piece of culinary artwork.  Delicate, fluffy, delicious, they are meltingly wonderful, and I can’t stop at one.  They are comfort food at its peak, and I hope that the dotter will be able to pass on to her children and grandchildren that she learned how to make biscuits from her father, who had the Best Biscuits Ever.