Evee turns 2!

For posterity’s sake, I thought it would be nice to put a brief description of Evee’s 2nd birthday party up here. We threw her a My Little Pony themed party at my brother’s house in Cleveland. Last year we only had friends at her party in Ithaca, so this year we decided to concentrate on having family there. Of course, most of the foursome made it (thanks Ash and KJ! We missed you Hayl!) and are considered family 🙂 The party started off exactly like Evee’s 1st birthday party, with the star of the show napping instead of greeting guests:

It’s my party, I can nap if I want to.

Josh and I tried to keep to our tradition of making her main gifts. We built this barn together and I painted it. This was built using scrap wood that we bought for <$2 at our local reuse center, and a couple of hinges and screws. Half of the barn roof opens on 2 sets of hinges so clumsy fingers can get inside the barn to play with the animals. As always, I’m so happy to find that we can come up with much higher quality toys for much less than the cost of a new toy by building it ourselves. We bought a tub of plastic farm animals for inside and a few well-sized My Little Pony figurines. She was in seventh heaven 🙂

A simple, sturdy barn made by Mom and Dad

I also crocheted her a cute little Doctor’s kit bag to replace the crappy plastic one that came with the Doctor’s kit she received for Christmas. The plastic one became completely unusable after she stepped on it a few times, but I imagine this one will last her a while!

The talented Miss (not-Miss-for-long) Ashley created her My Little Pony themed birthday cake from scratch, and it was definitely the hit of the party. Two layers of chocolate cake with chocolate ganache between them, and yummy homemade frosting made for a delicious birthday treat! She also made some awesome rainbow cupcakes using more of that chocolate ganache as frosting 🙂

The gorgeous, homemade cake 🙂

Evee had a wonderful time opening gifts, eating cake and playing with her cousins Lily and Ryan. Josh and I bought her a twin bed to transition into from the crib, and the My Little Pony plushies and bedding made it into a toddler paradise. After the transition, she went from never sleeping through the night to now sleeping through the night more than 50% of the time (with only one wake-up on nights that she does get up). So it was a happy birthday for me, too!

Toddler squee 🙂

Keepin’ it real on Valentine’s Day

At 16 weeks pregnant and caring for a toddler, I’m not really full of energy these days. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get Evee excited about Valentine’s Day! So here are some Do’s and Don’ts about keeping it real on Valentine’s Day without making yourself crazy:

• DON’T be afraid to buy those store-bought valentines! Kids love seeing their favorite characters, so if you don’t have the mojo to hand craft valentines (I sure didn’t) they are hardly going to be disappointed.
• DO be realistic about any creating / crafting you want to do for the holiday, and if you need supplies, buy them the week before. We literally just stuck My Little Pony valentines to a plastic baggy with a heart-shaped rice krispy treat inside. Rice krispy treats take, what, 5 minutes to make? Add another 5-10 minutes if you want to futz around with a heart-shaped cookie cutter (or just cut them into squares because the kids are going to be so busy wolfing them down they will have no idea that the treats have a special shape). BTW, toddlers are excellent at rice krispy treat preparation – or at least at devouring marshmallows, licking the stirring spoon and commenting loudly on every part of the process.

Rice Krispy Treats are a no-fuss way to turn valentines into a toddler win!

• DON’T wait until 8:30pm the night before (i.e. 30 minutes before bedtime) before remembering you’ve got to make valentines for the next day. Or actually, since your valentines are going to be so low-key, it’s actually ok to do this 😉
• DO get your child super excited about whatever you’re doing and let them participate in the activities / valentine construction. They will be WAY more excited to give out valentines that they had a hand in creating!
• DON’T post pictures of 30 gorgeous, homemade valentines that there is no way your preschooler could have possibly helped make on Facebook, bragging about how it took you 4 nights of work while battling a stomach flu. It’s ok to be proud of your accomplishments but you don’t want to cross enemy lines into the pinterest-mommy-battle-arena.

Now this is the face of a girl who is excited to bring her valentines to daycare!

Other than that, we prepped for the holiday by making some gorgeous dried pasta necklaces a few nights before. Evee clumsily used a paintbrush to smear acrylic on dried noodles. She also got acrylic all over herself, but since we only let naked toddlers use paint, clean-up took about 2 minutes. We went out to dinner with some friends, and by the time we got back, the paint was dry and the noodles were ready to string into necklaces! Then we all got to strut around like gorgeous rockstars in our new jewelry all night. Even Princess Daddy sported a pasta necklace. This was an easy, quick hit.

This yarn might as well be holding the goddamned hope diamond, for as proud as Evee was to wear it.

Last but not least, we have an awesome Valentine’s Day date night planned with the whole foursome at Americana Vineyards. You can’t beat that!!!

Luxembourg Weihnachtsstollen (okay, really it’s German… either way, it’s delicious)

In 2007, I spent a semester at my university’s campus in Luxembourg.  Another American student, Anna, and I spent a couple months living in a homestay with a very wonderful woman.  Mme Neuser lived alone in a house whose backyard abutted the train station, and I think she took great joy in having the bedrooms of her grown children filled once again with young people.

Here is Anna and Mme Neuser at the breakfast table in her kitchen.  Mme Neuser spoiled us when it came to breakfast; she was an early riser, and somehow managed to judge by the sounds of us getting ready upstairs when to time everything so that she was pouring our tea and warm toast popped up from the toaster just as we came down the stairs.  She would then put out a decadent breakfast spread: Nutella and blackcurrant jam for the toast, little cheeses, and all sorts of goodies…  Did I mention we were spoiled?

In early December, two amazing things happened to me in that house.  St. Nicholas left candy for me outside my door on Dec. 6th, and Mme Neuser’s Weihnachtsstollen appeared at the breakfast table.

I knew right away that if I learned anything from my time abroad, it was going to be to learn how to make this divine Christmas bread.

Getting the recipe was actually a pretty complicated process.  Mme Neuser was primarily francophone, although it was generally easier to communicate with her limited English than my extremely limited French.  So although she could write out the recipe for me (in German, of course), she could not translate it for me.  For that I took it to one of the administrators at my campus, a Luxembourgoise woman who was amazing enough to not only translate it, but to recognize which ingredients I might have difficulty finding back in America and spent a significant amount of time explaining what some of them were to me, even going so far as to recommend that I scout them out in the grocery store so that I would know exactly what I was looking for when I attempted the recipe at home.  This was an absolutely invaluable tip; it helped me not only ID the ingredients but to pin down the precise amounts for things like “a packet of baking powder” or “one bottle of lemon extract.”

Once translated, I then had to convert the units for everything from the European-style weight-based measurements to the American-style volume measurements.  (Thank goodness for the internet!)  I’ve managed to make this Stollen a couple of times now, so without further adieu, here is the recipe for Mme Neuser’s Christmas Bread, as closely interpreted as I can manage it.  (I’ll follow the actual recipe up with notes on finding the ingredients and making it.)

Ingredients

(Weight-based or Euro-style measurements in parentheses)

• 4 cups (500 gr) flour
• 2 1/2 tsp (1 packet/11 gr) baking powder
• 1 cup (200 gr) sugar
• 1 Tbsp (1 packet/7.5 gr) vanilla sugar, OR 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• 4 1/2 – 5 1/2 Tbsp (~60-80 mL) almond extract
• 1 1/2 Tbsp (20 mL) lemon extract
• 1/8 tsp (2 dashes) cardamom
• 1/8 tsp (2 dashes) nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp (2 dashes) cinnamon
• 2 eggs
• 5 1/2 Tbsp (75 gr) unsalted butter
• 1 container (8 oz) fromage blanc
• 1 3/4 cups (250 gr) raisins, soaked in rum overnight then drained (these will inflate to ~2 cups after soaking)
• (4 1/2 -) 5 1/2 Tbsp (~60-80 ml) rum extract OR rum reserved from draining raisins
• 2 cups (250 gr) candied fruit
• 2 – 2 1/4 cups (250 gr) chopped hazelnuts
• Zest of 1 lemon
• Zest of 1 orange
• 1 box (7 oz) marzipan

For the topping:

• 3.5 Tbsp (50 gr) melted unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup (50 gr) powdered sugar

Directions

• Mix flour and baking powder in a very large bowl.
• Make a depression the center, and add all other ingredients except the marzipan.
• Mix and knead until smooth.  (That’s right; get involved!)
• Form dough into a flattish oval shape.  Place marzipan in the middle of the oval, and fold it up to be roughly loaf-shaped with the marzipan in the center.
• Place on a baking sheet and bake at 285F (140C) for up to 75 minutes, or until a light golden brown.
• While hot, cover with melted butter and then powdered sugar.
• Once Stollen is cool, wrap in tin foil.  It can keep for up to 5-6 weeks.

So it is fairly easy to make once you’ve tracked down all the ingredients.  Where I live in Connecticut, I can actually make this with just one trip to my regular Stop & Shop.  But if your local grocery store doesn’t carry everything, most ingredients can be found at a place like Whole Foods or other specialty grocery, and I’ve tried to include potential substitutions above even if you can’t find everything.

Now, some more detailed notes on ingredients and potential substitutions:

First up, vanilla sugar.

Here are two examples of packets of vanilla sugar; they contain approximately the same amount.  The one on the right is the very last packet from a supply that I bought at the grocery store in Luxembourg and then hoarded away because I wasn’t sure I would ever encounter such a thing again.  On the left is one I found in the States; maybe at Whole Foods.  So it does exist, though I wouldn’t count on finding it.  There are two options if this isn’t available: first, just substitute vanilla extract.  There is so little vanilla sugar in such a large loaf that it probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway.  The second option, which I hope to do someday just because it sounds cool (even if it won’t really taste any different than using regular vanilla extract), is to make your own, by storing some sugar in a small container with a real vanilla bean for a long time.

Next up, the extracts.  Now, almond extract isn’t tricky because it’s hard to find–it should be located in any baking aisle–but simply because of the vast quantities involved here.  I’ve included a range in my list of ingredients above, but Mme Neuser’s recipe calls for the upper end of the range, 5 1/2 Tablespoons.  Which is an awful lot of those tiny little bottles, which cost about $5 a pop.  Every time I make this I think I must’ve done the conversion wrong and check my math on it about twenty bajillion times.  So this is one area I tend to skimp a little on (though I sort of hate myself for not going all out).  4 1/2 Tablespoons of almond extract is exactly two of those little 1 oz. bottles.  One of these days I’m going to plan ahead and buy some almond extract in bulk, and that year, I’ll put the full amount in my Stollen.

I’ve also found it impossible to find rum extract.  I’ve found imitation, but I’d personally rather substitute real rum (even if the concentration is off) than use the fake stuff.  I’ve done this substitution two different ways; sometimes I try to keep the amount of liquid the same, and other times I put quite a bit more rum in to try to maintain the flavor that the extract would provide.  Both worked, so this is a matter of personal preference.

This is what a container of fromage blanc looks like.  (It’s wäisse kéis in German; both translate literally as “white cheese”.)  The preponderance of fancy cheese aisles makes this a lot easier to find than even a few years ago; my Stop & Shop carries it, but if your regular grocery store doesn’t carry it, it can be found at Whole Foods.  Alternatively, I’ve read that you can make a substitute by combining equal parts yogurt and cottage cheese.

Everything in the bowl, prior to mixing!

The final ingredient, marzipan, isn’t that unusual, but it sure is a lot more familiar to Europeans than Americans.  It comes in a foil tube inside a box, like so:

Once you remove it from the foil, you have to roll & squish it a bit (like a play-dough snake) to lengthen it to the size of your loaf.

Putting it in the center…

And all rolled up, ready to bake!

Mmmm, powdered sugar everywhere.

So there you go, Weihnachtsstollen or Christmas bread.  I love this so much, and hope to continue making it year after year, with warm thoughts of a woman who spoiled me as if I were her own grandchild.

Baking with a toddler

I don’t have the energy for a long thoughtful blog post today, but I have a short message I would like to share as a tip for parents (and future parents) of toddlers: Let them help. Toddlers are so eager to learn and to expand their roll as full members of the community that they are desperate to help you with all tasks and chores. While their skills are less-than-fully-developed, and their eagerness is disastrously over the top, I have found that it’s best to let them roll up their sleeves and pitch in.

Christmas time is generally a time of crafting and cooking overload, so it’s the perfect opportunity for your toddler to make a mess of whatever projects you’ve set out to do. I’ll share our crafting endeavours at a later date, but today I’d like to give you a glimpse of the mama-toddler-cooking-partnership.

Mixing
I’ll measure out a cup of flour, and Evee will dump it in the bowl. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Maybe she’ll dump it in the bowl. Maybe she’ll dump it on the floor. Or on her head. Or drink out of the measuring cup as though it’s a bowl of soup. Get over it. And at our house, we salvage as much as we can off the floor or shake it out of her hair directly into the bowl, add a pinch or two to make up for our lost flour, and keep mixing. To those who actually eat our baked goods: you have been warned. Cleanliness is no longer a factor for the mama-toddler-baking-team.

Sampling the dough
Or as Evee says “Try! Try!” This is the absolute most important step in any baking project. The contents of the bowl must be tried at every and all steps. Raw flour will be consumed in mass quantities. Pure salt must be tasted. Chocolate chips, naturally, must be sampled with the fervor befitting an unpopular monarch’s official taster.

Assembly
Evee makes the most even, round and well spaced cookie balls imaginable. She will not slow you down at all. And she never goes back to the “sampling the dough” stage when we are ready for the assembly stage. I’ll admit that she’s helping make a pretty nice criss-cross pattern on these peanut butter cookies:

Sprinkles
Ah, sprinkles. The arch nemesis of toddler parents striving for sane holiday traditions. The levels of disaster, mess and pure sugar consumption in the previous baking steps are nothing compared to adding sprinkles to sugar cookies. My only advice here is to have a drink to loosen up your inhibitions before tackling sprinkles. I’m still pulling sprinkles out of my boots a week after we baked these cookies.

But man, we look great baking these with our brand new Christmas aprons hand made by the lovely and talented fellow blogger, A!

Happy Holidays everyone 🙂

Building a Play Kitchen

For my daughter’s first birthday, my husband and I decided to build her a play kitchen. As maybe noted from earlier posts, we tend to shy away from materialism, which includes the excessive accumulation of toys that seems to come along with modern day gift giving. However, gifts that are home-made are the ultimate exception to our rule, so we try to make gifts as often as we can in this family. A play kitchen seemed like the perfect gift for Evee, since she loves “helping” us in our own kitchen by stacking empty bowls, “unloading” the dishwasher and whisking invisible eggs.

So to build her a play kitchen without breaking the bank, we shopped around for old furniture at the shops around town and settled on an old oak upper kitchen cabinet and two simple 2-shelf bookshelves. These two pieces cost $10 total, and saved us more than $50 in new wood that we would have to buy to build the kitchen from scratch. Upcycling old furniture also means keeping it out of the landfill, and reducing the raw materials and energy that gets dumped into manufacturing new items.

The bookshelves didn’t need any surface work except a bit of paint to spruce them up, but the cabinet had seen better days and needed stripped, sanded, painted and finished.

Two identical bookshelves like this one would make the refrigerator

Sanding the cabinet which will be used for a sink and stove

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some reassembly was required to turn these pieces into the kitchen we envisioned. We disassembled one of the two bookshelves and reattached the long pieces to the other bookshelf to create the back and the front doors of the refrigerator / freezer. For the kitchen cabinet, we pulled off one cabinet door to make a divider between the right and left sides, distinguishing the oven from the area under the sink. We cut down the other cabinet door and re-hinged it to make an oven door. We also bought a small piece of scrap wood and added a shelf to the cabinet to serve as the oven floor. Finally, using a scrap piece of plyboard from a used housewares / building supply shop, we created a back panel behind the sink and stove to serve as a kitchen “wall”. In all, we ended up using an electric chop saw, cordless drill and power sander to speed up the work, but all of this could be done by hand if you don’t happen to have any of these tools.

Using leftover paint from painting the walls of our home, we painted the kitchen set blue, yellow and gray. We accessorized the kitchen with a handles, knobs and a real faucet bought from an architectural salvage shop. An old aluminum bowl served as the kitchen sink and four round wooden disks from Michael’s were painted and screwed into the cabinet to serve as burners. An old picture frame and a scrap piece of wood for a shelf were mounted to the kitchen “wall”. The window and sink curtains came from a spare curtain and scarf we had tucked away in the closet, which I re-hemmed with my sewing machine.

Evee’s play kitchen

Finally, we encouraged a few kitchen-themed gifts from family members for her birthday to fully outfit Evee’s play kitchen. The whole project cost about $50, which is much cheaper and nicer than any plastic kitchen you could buy from Fisher Price. The secret to finding all of the pieces you need to build and accessorize this kind of project is to give yourself at least a few weeks to routinely visit thrift shops, salvage shops and watch craigslist. The chances of finding all of the materials you need for the right price are very slim if you plan to do all of your shopping in a single weekend. I was really pleased with the end result, and it is hands-down Evee’s favorite thing to play with. I imagine this play kitchen will entertain her, and our future children for a long time.

Foursome celebrates St. Pat’s Day

Driving from Washington D.C., Connecticut and upstate NY, we held a foursome reunion last weekend on the beautiful coast of New Jersey to see KJ’s new home town. It’s always great getting together, and I always wish we did it more frequently. Alas, distance and circumstance and blah, blah, blah make traveling hard. But there’s something very fulfilling about getting together with the people who have known and loved you for a lifetime.

The gang’s all here!

This trip included a very special event: A’s very first trip to the beach! As you can see, the sub-Arctic blasts delivered by the wandering jet stream this winter did not lead to resort-like conditions, but we still managed some beach walking, shell collecting and general antics to celebrate A’s first taste of the salty Atlantic. Next time, bring your suits ladies, because we’re going in!

A’s first trip to the beach

Anyways, I feel really grateful that you ladies have made it such a priority to get together, especially now that Evee is born. It seems like the three of you are so careful to see her every few months so you can keep up with her rapid growth and development. In the meantime, the three of you have made excellent aunts to my daughter (and the boys have done pretty well in the uncle department, too!)

KJ reads Evee new books

Hayl plays Evee songs on the ukulele

A teaches Evee to make silly sounds

We’re so lucky to have you in our lives. And happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The Season of Giving

In the past few weeks, my husband and I carted our 8-month old daughter Evee and our 50 lb dog Nana around the midwest to participate in three different family Christmases. Let me first say that every day I get older, I realize to a greater extent how important family is. It is with great pleasure (and only a modicum of suffering) that we drive thousands of miles each year to keep these bonds strong and the effort is always rewarded many times over.

However, as my first child, and the first grandchild on my husband’s side, Evee is experiencing a bit of the traditional spoiling that comes with family visits. And at Christmas time, that is no small statement. Despite a month of pleading for mercy and warnings about space restrictions in our modest Subaru Forester, our family and friends have managed to gift quantities of toys and clothes fit for a queen to our daughter. To the disappointment and chagrin of some of our gift-givers, we were forced to abandon gifts in three separate homes due to lack of space in the car. Despite these abandoned treasures, we made it home with the following load of toys:

The alphabet mat on the floor was our gift, and has already saved her a few bumped heads! Our darling daughter Evee is standing in the background holding onto a bench in the entryway that serves as her current toy chest. This chest was already filled with age-appropriate toys before we left on our holiday pilgrimage. I pride myself to be a budding minimalist who regards consumerism with deserved suspicion, so I am at war with myself (and my household, since my husband and daughter have been happily playing) over this influx of goods.

When Christmas was approaching, I considered various gift-giving strategies including limiting children to three gifts (from mom, dad and Santa), or gifting “something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read” or making a tradition of only giving homemade gifts. By Dec. 25, I hadn’t made any solid decisions and I made Evee a small gift and bought her a handful of items. Now I realize that limiting gifts from parents / santa will not make much of a dent in the haul when all other gift-givers are considered!

Despite the increased carbon footprint that can now be attributed to my daughter, it is heartwarming to see this expression of love from family and friends. And there was evidence of general knowledge of my conservation-minded lifestyle in the hand-me-down toys gifted by my brother’s family and the awesome crocheted block from H! These are the strategies I used in preparation for the gift-giving season:

• Warn family and friends that not much is needed or that there is not much space for gifts
• Encourage homemade gifts (because these mean the most anyways!)
• Encourage fellow parents to wrap up gently used toys – Evee doesn’t mind that her cousins already had a go at those blocks and books!
• Request gift-givers to steer away from plastics. These toys are made to be disposable, so they have a larger carbon footprint and often don’t hold up for future children.
• Down-size gift-giving to the children in the family because what adult really needs another calendar or scented lotion kit?
• Store a portion of the new toys away for a rainy day when your child could benefit from something fresh to play with. At least for infants, toys seem to work best on a rotating basis to eliminate boredom.

I can’t really determine how well these tactics worked since I don’t have any alternative Christmases with children to compare this to, however, I’m guessing that this helped a bit. I’m always looking for ideas on how to minimize and conserve, and how to get the most joy and meaning out of life without falling into any (and all!) of the myriad pitfalls established by our modern, fast-paced society. If you have any ideas for next Christmas or any of the events in between, let me know!

A New Year

So.. First post on our blog. I was hoping that one of you lovely ladies would start so I could write by example, but I’m not even sure everyone signed up yet. I’m a novice at blogging, so you’ll have to bear with me as I figure this out.

So far, 2014 isn’t terrible. Obviously, there hasn’t been very many days to make a strong impression, but I think.. I hope.. it will be a better year than the last one. I was told to join this blog and share with my closest friends what I have been up to. Over the holidays, I baked a lot of things. Some old recipes, some new.. I really liked the Hot Buttered Rum Cookies. They were better than I thought they would be and simple to make. Tommy and I made hot mulled wine (gluwine) for our family parties. It was a hit and so dangerous to drink due to the spices overpowering the alcohol bite from the wine. I may have had 3 or 4 glasses. 🙂

Honestly, I don’t do much but stress over my thesis. I’m so ready to be done with it. I never want to talk about this project ever again. I’m constantly stressed over editing and finding a job.. it really makes me wonder if I chose the right path. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working in a field that makes me feel so awful. I’m hoping that once I find work, it won’t feel this way.

Anyway, I won’t leave my very first post on a sad note.. so I will end it with this: Tommy went nuts buying sale games on Steam and now we have WAY too many distractions in the house. So many games, so little time.

Hopefully this inspires you ladies to post too!

Love all around. -A