I killed the Easter Bunny.

Heh.  That will suck you in, won’t it?  It’s almost as good as a title that says SEX! and nothing else.

If you were looking for macabre holiday scenes, this may or may not suit your fancy.  HRH got four chocolate Easter bunnies for Easter.  She is four years old, and is allowed one treat per day.  Since she went to two Easter egg hunts and was given three Easter baskets, she had a startling amount of candy left over from Easter.  So I was sitting around trying to think of something I could do with all of this… stuff.  I mean, something other than 2 am candy binges.  Lets face it: this is where I was headed.

I have been wanting for some time to start experimenting with making my own recipes.  Not adapting other people’s recipes  but actually developing my own.  In order to do this, especially in baking, you have to have some idea about how the different elements in a recipe interact with each other.  Google is very helpful in locating sites that help you to understand the different components of a recipe.  I also found the book Ratios by Michael Buhlman to be very helpful:

Aha! It’s not food! It’s MATH!!

So this AM, I wandered off to make something that I have been dying to make for some time now:  peanut butter chocolate chip muffins.

I started with basic quick bread ratios, because I hate cake-like muffins.  I cut back on the butter and added peanut butter and oil, based on what I understood to be the basic chemical reactions in the base recipe.  It was looking pretty darn good.

But seriously. I was nervous. I’ve never made up my own recipe before.

This is also a very good use for what hubby calls “that weird oily peanut butter.”  This is commonly called “Natural Peanut Butter with no sugar.”  The insidiusness of sugar in every food item that we buy really grates on my nerves.  I decided that when HRH was born, I was not going to train her palate to expect everything to taste sweet.  There are three places where it is tremendously difficult to buy products with no added sugar or artificial sweetener.

Peanut butter.

Yogurt.

Fruit snacks.

When you shop for any one of these products, read the ingredients.  Even the “natural” ones.  Try to find ones without some kind of sugar or no-calorie sweetener.  It.  Is.  Hard.

Of course, the up side to this peanut butter is that I don’t have to buy it too much because no one likes to eat it but me.  When I have the perfect combination of money and time, I will wander into Earthfare and use the peanut-grinding machine, but since I do most of my grocery shopping online at 10 pm, this will do.  Because I stand by my assertion that we expect too much of our food to taste sweet.

Anyhoo,  I was now ready for the chocolate chips.  So I brought out the bunny.  I felt a little bit bad about it at first.  Almost…  sacrilegious.

Run, bunny! Run!!

But someone is eating this bunny.  Somehow, someway.  This bunny is getting eaten.

Well. Into the eternal fire I go, I suppose.

If I made this with actual chips, I would double the amount.  I only had one bunny that was made out of milk chocolate.  I was too afraid of what the other bunnies were made out of to cook them in the oven.  Chocolate flavored plastic?

Just for a little bit of humor on the side, and because I’m having trouble staying on topic in this post, this is what happens when your husband does the dishes, knows nothing about cooking, and scrapes stuck-on mini-frittatas out of your muffin tins with a fork:

I greased those bad boys within an inch of their life.

(This seems to be a lot of death imagery for a post about muffins.)

Well, I have to say that they came out quite well.

Mmmm. Peanuty buttery chocolately chippy goodness. Okay that went a little too far.

HRH went out with her grandma and cousin, and we packed up a few muffins and sent them along.  Her cousin said to “tell your mom she is a pretty good cook,” so that made me feel pretty darn pleased with myself.  I may post the recipe here, but not right now because I don’t think my self esteem is ready for people to tell me that they don’t like it.  Just let me bask for a while, OK?

In non-death related news, my herbs.  They grow.

Hello cilantro, parsley, rosemary and sage! Welcome to my porch!!

The good news is that I am capable of not killing a plant.  If you didn’t read this post then you are probably saying “Duh.  Any idiot can grow herbs.”  Well, not this idiot.  This is big news, and it is four decades in the making, so please act impressed.

Burger lies and frozen tulips

Guess what?  If your mother-in-law turns the temperature down on your fridge so that everything freezes, including the tulip bulbs you are incubating because you hope to force them indoors?  Those tulips may still sprout.

I KNOW, RIGHT????

I’m as shocked as you are.

There’s a metaphor about life here, don’t you think?  Something like…  even when you are frozen solid and feel like you can’t possibly “bloom” any more, just let the sun warm you, and you will find that you are capable of growing into a beautiful flower again.

Sigh.

Well, that’s not going to fit into this next little bit, though, which is that some of the bulbs did not sprout at all.  A friend of mine tried to force some indoors as well, and she told me that hers stopped growing, she believes because they developed mildew or mold.

Most instructions on forcing any type of bulb indoors will talk about being very careful not to let the bulb actually sit in the water for just this reason.  You can buy special vases for this, which I imagine would prevent this kind of thing from happening, but that’s just not who I am.  Buy a special vase indeed.  Why would I buy a special vase when I can makeshift something from things I have right around the house?

I mean, really. How precious do I need to be?

So of course, I did it my way, and when I checked the bulbs today, some had indeed grown moldy.

Eww. No beautiful blooms here.  These were thrown away.

So I gently emptied the vases, washed them out, cleaned the rocks, brushed off the bulbs that had a tiny bit of mold on them, and threw away the ones that were clearly rotten.  Then I reassembled the vases, being careful to let the water only ‘just’ touch the roots.  I hope that this helps.  I truly have no idea what I am doing, so it is very possible that they may all shrivel up and die.  But I figured that leaving them to rot in their own puddle of mold would not be a significantly better option for them.

Look at me, talking about my bulbs like they are people and whatnot.

In other surprises, earlier this week I was frantically readying for work because of the commuting nightmare that this one-car family calls our life.  I left without eating (making) dinner, so I ran through a drive through on my way to the office.  I really hate fast food,  but this made me laugh so long and so loudly that I had to share it.

McDonalds is the easiest one to get in and out of on my way to work, and it is also the only one on the route that appears to be routinely mopped and swept, so I went there.  When I go to McDonalds, I regularly order a McDouble and a medium unsweetened tea.  When you order the drink, you have to say “medium UN-SWEET-ENED tea,” because no one believes that you actually want unsweetened tea.  Even with the drawn pronunciation, you will still get sweet tea 50% of the time.  It’s like they are saying, “No.  You don’t want that.  I know what you really want.  You want sweet tea.  Here’s some sweet tea.”  This is the south, after all.

But when I was looking at the menu, I noticed that there was both a Double Cheeseburger, and a McDouble.  The Double Cheeseburger is 30 cents more, so I decided to go out on a limb and order it, to find out the difference.  Surely there’s a difference, right?

This is the picture of the Double Cheeseburger, as advertised by McDonalds themselves:

Looks pretty decent.

This is what greeted me when I opened my Mickey D’s bag:

Another interesting note. This burger is not supposed to have bacon. Was this a surprise? Like the “toy” in the happy meal?

Where are the patties? That’s what I said too.

There cannot be a single person on the face of the earth who thinks that these two burgers are supposed to be the same thing.  I mean, really.  It was so absurdly compact that I had to measure it.  How do you get TWO patties, condiments, and a bun to be less than 1.5 inches high?

I was still mystified as to the source of the extra 30 cents.  This burger actually seemed smaller than the McDoubles I have had in the past.  I read the descriptions on the McDonalds menu, and I was still at a loss.  Once again, Google saves the day.  Thanks to Fast Food Geek, I now know it’s one slice of cheese.

If you order the Double Cheeseburger, you are paying 30 cents for one slice of cheese.  Also those are 1.6 ounce beef patties.  That’s 1/10 of a pound.  Before cooking.  That’s not a burger.  That’s a meatball.  The size difference?  All in my head.

I think I have just talked myself out of ever going back.

What’s the word? Herbicide?

I wanted to make an easter egg tree this year.

marthastewart.com

I  became obsessed with making an egg tree for some reason.  Well, actually, I know the reason; it’s because I have two speeds: idle and manic.  And you know, originally I had these ideas that I would spray the branches white, maybe throw some glittery stuff in there.  You know, the whole crap craft spectrum.

I tried at first to blow out the eggs and then dye them, which I discussed in another post.  Blowing out the eggs involves poking a hole in both ends, and blowing through one end to push the eggy contents out of the hole on the other side.  Y’all, you can pass out from that.  It’s not really as easy as some sites make it seem.  Of course, if we have learned nothing from Pinterest, it is that no craft  is as easy as it seems.

Plus, they are hollow.  So when you try to dye them, guess what?  They float.  You have to mash them down into the dye.  Guess what happens then?  They fill up with the dye-water.  They will then take no less than five years to completely dry out, and stop dripping.  Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but really, only a slight one.

And then, good luck stringing them.  That’s where I gave up.  I strung three of them, and then threw in the towel.  Literally.  I literally threw a towel.

So after HRH has her egg hunt at school, I took her leftover plastic eggs, poked holes in them, strung them, and hung them on the tree.  They were much easier to string, seeing as how they come apart in the middle and all.  HRH was able to help me with these, and in retrospect, we would probably just decorate a set of these in the future.

She helped me hunt down some branches, which we stuck into some styrofoam that I had pressed into a flower pot.  Then we hung the eggs by pieces of string to which we had tied beads on the bottom.

It was whimsical.

Ya’ll, I was happy with this. I can’t explain it, I just was.

There was something about how not-cute and kind of spidery this was that made it really appeal to me , and I have now grown to love it.  I think it’s my Charlie Brown Christmas tree, only for Easter.

In other news, my mother in law randomly turned the temperature up on my fridge this week when she was babysitting, which in turn, froze my tulip bulbs that I was planning to force indoors this spring.  I have since taken them out, but we will see if they sprout.  I don’t hold out a lot of hope.

And in other MIL news, she knocked two of my herb pots off of the balcony when she was “helping” HRH water them, and left them spilled out on the ground below.  So the two missing pots were a mystery for a while after I got home from work, before HRH told me where they were, and I went down to get them.  Heh.  Rosemary and dill took the literal plunge (victims of herbicide?), so I will shortly be germinating new seeds for those two.  Parsley, cilantro and sage are making me proud.  Basil is being kind of a slacker, but maybe he just witnessed the “Rosemary and Dill Incident” and is having post traumatic stress disorder.  Maybe he thinks he might be next.

 

Don’t read this. It’s not interesting.

HRH has developed this affectation for an adorable cartoon series that is based on the character Eloise in a series of books written in the 1950′s.

I cannot stress to you enough that I believe this character was modeled after HRH herself.

I think they were spying on us. Well, if it hadn’t happened three years before she was born. But still. It’s eerie.

The cute factor on this show is, like, 95 on a scale of 1-10.

Now, I have this terrible time remembering people’s names.  I mean, really, really terrible.  But I also have an uncanny ability to recognize people’s faces.  No matter how long it has been, or how much they have aged, I can recognize someone from their expressions, mannerisms, and voice.  This drives my husband insane because, which I can remember them, I never remember their actual name, so we end up having a conversation that goes something like this:

Me: Hey, honey.  That’s that guy.

Hubby: What guy?

Me:  You know.  The one from the other movie.  Who shot the one girl in the head.

Hubby:  What?  What movie are you talking about?

Me:  You know the movie that had that one scene with that guy.  He was bald, and he shot that one girl in the dining room?  You know.

Hubby: I have no idea what you are talking about.

Me: You KNOW.  The guy!   He was the one who dressed up like a woman in that one movie with the girl who sang and I saw it in the movie theater and on stage in the same year?  Remember?  It was the year I was totally into jogging.

Hubby:  Are you talking about Hairspray?  John Travolta?  From Paris with Love?

Me:  YEAH!  Is that the one we saw when we were at your mom’s that one time?

Hubby: Yeah.  That’s the one.

So that’s how those conversations usually go.  And I must say, he has gotten very good at knowing who I am talking about from the tiniest of clues that are similar to, “You know.  The girl.  She had the hat?”

But I am never wrong about who it is, or the fact that we know them.  Once we figure out who the hell I am talking about.

So we were watching the Little Miss Christmas episode of the adorable, but very short-lived series Me, Eloise when we had several days of torrential rainstorms last weekend.  When we were watching it, something about this movie was really bothering me.  That feeling of familiarity started creeping over me.  Yes, I know its a cartoon, but it really wasn’t long before I figured out for myself what it was.  I was recognizing someone.  Someone in the cartoon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpyAnlOd8n0

I had to scamper off and look this up on IMDB because, while I was reasonably certain I was right, it was the first time I had ever recognized someone through a cartoon.  There it was:

“James McDermott…. lead character designer”

Where else had I seen Mr. McDermott?  Or rather, his work?

It wasn’t the actors I was recognizing. It was the artist’s character design.

This, specifically, was what tipped me off:

<<crickets chirp>>

Okay, its maybe not that interesting to anyone but me.

Crappy pie and crazy weekends

We had tremendous rainstorms this weekend, and that left HRH trapped in the house with us. Saturday AM commenced one of the longest weekends that ever transpired. There’s not a while lot to do indoors and her primary playmates are me and the hubby. Needless to say, there was a lot of exasperation up in here.

I didn’t do much this weekend, either, other than clean the house. My mania seems to have settled into a quiet routine of binge eating. Since they both kind of serve the same purpose, psychologically, manic activity and bingeing are interchangeable to me. So, well, things are stressful now. That is true. My coping skills leave a lot to be desired.

I had a graham cracker crust that I bought for something else and ended up not using it, so I was going to make one of those banoffee pies, or whatever, but I burned the condensed milk because I absolutely could not make myself boil the can intact, even though there seem to be entire cultures who have been doing so for decades.

So I decided to scrap the dulce de leche and make a caramel banana custard pie, but my custard separated, and my caramel drizzle scorched.  So after wasting two bananas and six eggs, I threw the whole damn thing in the trash, which is what I should have done from the start.  I have no pictures (that I am willing to post) because it was just so very terrible.  I don’t know what would possess me to make a pie when I am stress eating like a loon, except that it is probably the stress eating that made me want to make the pie in the first place.

If I had succeeded in making it, I probably would have eaten 1/3 of it at 9 pm that night, so it really is just as well that it went in the garbage.

It was just one of those weekends.

Electrified Accomplished

So tonight I kept telling my husband that I needed the key to the mailbox, and he kept telling me he didn’t know where it was, and I’m all “You were the last person to unlock the door,” and he’s calling out this litany of things we did between Friday and now. Not even counting the fact that he had the schedule completely wrong, he really should know by now not to question me about stuff because I am right 99% of the time. So if I say you were the last person to have that key ring you can spend 20 minutes trying to prove me wrong, or you can just accept your fate and start looking for the key.

So after all of that nonsense, he finally starts looking for the key, and I’m all “You unlocked the door when I brought you home yesterday, so it’s probably in your pirate costume.” (Yes, that’s right, pirate costume, so shut up.) After 15 minutes of NOT looking in his pirate junk (heh) he finally concedes to my victory and says he is going to the car to look in his pirate junk (heh).

Ten minutes later, he comes in with the mail, and I’m like “Why did you go get the mail? I wanted the key!” and he’s all “I thought I was helping! I thought you wanted the mail!”

So I have to heavy-sigh in that way that I know I need to stop doing because it makes him nuts. He always says “Maybe you should sigh at me!” in that really sarcastic tone, and I’ve done it so much that HRH now sighs in exasperation as well. So I say “No, I wanted to walk to the mailbox.” (This being my “something else” I wanted to do in lieu of manic activity, though he doesn’t know about that because he didn’t read my post from yesterday.) And he’s all “Why would you want to walk to the mailbox?” and I’m all “Yeah. Exactly.”

So I ate a second piece of pizza and went to bed without doing work that I really needed to do. Now it’s thundering and lightning, and I want to go outside more than ever, but I know he’ll get upset at me for being out in a storm, and nag me about being struck by lightning, even though it’s not that common, hence the meaning of the phrase, “more likely to be struck by lightning.”

PS I went out anyway, and it was a torrential downpour. I couldn’t even walk out in the rain without getting completely soaked, so I stood on the porch and watched the lightning streak across the blackness. It sounded like the sky was coming apart.  I did manage to capture the view off my back porch once when the lightning cut through the sky behind the trees, and yes I took it with my phone, and so yes, its not a great picture but I saw it in person so I don’t care.

I think this was the “something else” that I needed tonight.   More than a walk to the mailbox,

This is not healthy.

I totally forgot to tell you that when I germinated the seeds for my herb garden, a couple of them (basil and … thyme I think?) sprouted ridiculously fast, and actually grew roots into the paper towel.

Creepy penetrating roots are creepy

I don’t know why this creeped me out, except that it reminded me of parasitic alien tentacles for some reason.  I googled this problem to try and figure out what I should do, and found very little helpful advice, only admonishments to watch your seeds so they don’t grow into the towel.  (Thanks for that.)

I think this is the overzealous basil?

In the absence of better advice, I reasoned that the paper towels were organic, so why not just plant them, paper towel and all?  This is what I did.  So far, they have not died, and appear to be growing, albeit not as well as parsley and cilantro, but pretty well considering they are effectively paper towel centaurs.  Unlike that traitorous dill, which shriveled and died when I potted it, or the rosemary, that germinated and then disappeared in the pot.  Stupid ungrateful herbs.  Now I have to grow those two all over again, and I liked them so much!

My anxiety was pretty high this weekend, and that translated to a constant and perpetual stream of motion.  Our school was on spring break last week, so I took two vacation days at the end of the week.  Thursday I spent making the shamrock whoopee pies for HRH’s class, and on Friday I went to brunch with mom at a really neat café in town that serves sweet potato biscuits.  I have made these at home before (Paula Deen’s recipe, of course), and I love them.  They are a nice alternative to the unsurprising doughy mass of a regular biscuit.

When I was not out, I was at home trying to dye eggs with HRH for our Easter egg tree, or make cupcakes for our St. Patrick’s Day dinner at a friend’s house.  I made dark chocolate cupcakes, and frosted them with the same frosting that went in the middle of the whoopee pies, with a slightly altered cream cheese to butter ratio.  With a bit more cream cheese and a bit less butter, this frosting was off the hook.

I also made a custard to fill the center of the cupcakes.  Y’all, that custard makes me weak in the knees.  It’s so good that you can just eat it as a regular pudding and it’s just fine. By now, I was starting to feel a little burned out by my frenzy of activities.  So I gave a bit of the custard to HRH, packaged it up, and frosted the cupcakes intact.  I just didn’t have anything else in me.

I didn’t care to get sprinkles, so I just colored regular sugar and sprinkled it. It wasn’t a sprinkles kind of weekend.

I can’t think of one thing I wouldn’t put that frosting on.  Pancakes?  Sandwiches?  Pork roast?  The cat?

The egg coloring was a complete disaster.  We are definitely going to have to start over on those.  I really wanted to blow out the eggs for the tree rather than boil them. The idea of rotting boiled eggs hanging on sticks in my dining room was not tripping my trigger.  Also, I didn’t want to waste the eggs.  It was a tremendous mess, and they were incredibly difficult to dye, mostly due to the fact that that they float very persistently.  Also, I would not say that HRH had very much fun “helping” me because it was hard for her to handle them.  We are going to have to come up with a better plan.

I was completely drained by Saturday afternoon.  It dawned on me that I was being somewhat manic, and that it was probably because I was so stressed.  I made a concerted effect to slow myself down, and that effort was, for the most part, pretty effective.  But the next time this manic thing hits, I need to find something else to do, something outside of the house, some alternatives to  manic-crafting or manic-cooking.  It’s fun and I like the end results, but I don’t feel very good about the process, and that is primarily what makes me think it might not be entirely healthy.

So in the spirit of this resolve, tomorrow I am going to try to get out of my head and the house (or work) for a day and do something different.  Let’s meet back here tomorrow and see how it goes, shall we?