The Avett Brothers

This is one reason I love these guys so much: they pulled this gem out at the Tuesday concert.



I lost my voice Tuesday evening, and still don't have it back.

[insert title here]

There is no continuity here, so consider yourself warned. I do not apologize.

Look, something shiny!

Etsy

1.This cold I've had for two weeks? I don't think it's going anywhere: While talking to one of my little toddlers at work the other day, he sneezed. While my mouth was open. He sneezed in my mouth.  

2. I finally got a Pinterest account!

3. Two of Andrew's buddies have birthdays this week, so they're coming over for dinner on Wednesday. We bought a duck (we wanted a goose, but that sucker was $70!), and I'm working on my pie crust for a chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Mmmm!

4. Tomorrow night? Drew will be here. Oh, and the Avett Brothers. Yup. We'll be there.

Image via The Avett Brothers

Mallow Mania!

Did you know that a marsh mallow is actually a plant? The Althaea officinalis is, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, indigenous to Africa, and thanks to an ancient remedy for sore throats made from its roots, we now have delicious floats in our steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

Image via Wikipedia

Thank you, pretty flower!

I have wanted to make my own mallows for a good while , after learning that, in fact, this is possible, and that my grandmother made her own marshmallows all the years she and my grandfather lived in Brazil, when my mother was very small. Andrew's weekend absence on a church men's retreat provided the perfect canvas for my amateur culinary art splatters.

(Before I proceed, I must warn you that I planned to take pictures of the process, but as it is a rather time-sensitive ordeal, and Andrew wasn't around to help ... there are none. I shall borrow some from The Mighty Internets.)

My favorite cookbook, Baked, from the rather well-known Brooklyn bakery of the same name (check them and their sweet cookbook out here), contains dozens of yummies I'm dying to try, but today, it was mallows. 

They seem fairly straight-forward, as home-made candies go, only requiring six ingredients: gelatin, sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, salt, and confectioner's sugar. Simple, right? The book calls for gelatin in sheets, but after some research, I discovered this can only be purchased in gourmet bakery shops or online, so I furthered my research to find out how to substitute regular gelatin for the sheets. It's the same stuff, right?  

You're supposed to put the gelatin sheets in cold water to sit while you get the actual candy part going (the corn syrup and sugar and such) -- I measured out my gelatin crystals, poured the cold water over them, and promptly realized I had no way of separating the cold water from the gelatin. You see, you're supposed to just pull the sheets out and melt them. I had a bowl full of cold water, ice cubes, and millions of tiny little gelatin crystals.  Whoops.

Pressing on (what else could I do?), I mixed my sugar and corn syrup and left it on the stove to reach the proper temperature, and went on a mad search for something to strain the gelatin with. A sieve was, of course, way too porous, and a paper towel too flimsy. I finally settled on a dish towel that resembled cheesecloth, and crossed my fingers as I held it one-handed over a colander and slowly poured my gelatin-infested water over top.

It worked! Plenty of crystals still oozed through, but I had a nice big glob of gelatin stuck to the towel, and another smaller glob in the colander. Breathing a sigh of relief, I put the emancipated gelatin back into its Pyrex bowl, and melted it over a pot of steaming water on the stove.

The melted gelatin went into the mixer bowl with some additional corn syrup, then the melted corn syrup and sugar were added, and the KitchenAid mixed happily away for five minutes, which transformed the mixture into something amazingly resembling raw marshmallow ...


Image via Let Her Bake Cake

Just like that! In went the vanilla and salt for one minute on high, then the whole lot was poured into a greased 9x13 pan, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and left to sit for an agonizing six hours.

Filled with all sorts of doubts regarding potential failures, mostly connected to The Gelatin Incident, I washed four loads of laundry, read some of Great Expectations, and generally wished time away until I could know if I was, indeed, bionic woman enough to successfully make my own marshmallows.

Six hours later, I dusted my counter top with confectioner's sugar, ran a knife around the edge of my pan, and slowly, wondrously, pulled one giant 9x13 marshmallow out of the pan. It weighed a ton.


Image via Inspired Nest

I meticulously marked one-inch increments along the edge, and triumphantly sliced that giant mallow into over 90 smaller mallows, which were rolled in more confectioner's sugar, and stored nicely in a Tupperware, where they should keep at least a week -- if they last that long.

They are fantastic: sweet, but not sickening, the vanilla flavor is pleasantly strong, the texture springy and light, and they melted almost instantly in our hot chocolate.

I did take a nice picture of the completed mallows, but the file is being ornery, so you'll just have to take my word for it that my mallows do, in fact, look like this:



Image via This Week for Dinner

I have eaten one at least every time I've walked into the kitchen.

As the recipe I used is from a published book, I hesitate to detail it online, but a simple Google search will provide you dozens of recipes for mallows.

You can also buy the Baked marshmallows (or cookbook) online here.

Happy Mallow-ing!

Germs are Not for Sharing

You know what happens when you hang out with fifteen toddlers all day, wiping noses, changing diapers, preventing bites, and in general both loving on them and trying to keep the chaos to a minumum?

You get sneezed and coughed on daily, that's what happens.

Image via: http://preparednesspro.wordpress.com, illustration by Marieka Heilen

Which is why I'm at home sick today.

Wednesday Night Shakespeare

Now that I'm in transition between my former part-time job, and my current full-time job, I am now working full-time, and instead of an hour for lunch, my break is the fifteen minutes in my car between Job A and Job B, in which I cram my peanut butter sandwich in between shifting gears. I'm thankful to be working full time, but I will be even more thankful when those 40 hours are in the same place.

It makes the days long, and I now understand why my house was never consistently clean growing up, the lesson learned by every other adult. I don't want to clean my house when I've been working all day.

But, last night, Andrew planned for us to pack a picnic supper and a couple blankets, and we drove off to Sinkland Farms, where we paid $15, sat on our blankets, ate our sandwiches and pretzels, and watched an open air performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," as performed by New River Valley Open Air Shakespeare.

Images via http://openairshakespearenrv.wordpress.com/

Working hard makes those quiet moments so much more enjoyable. Life lesson number fifty-two, I suppose.

all kinds of different

For some reason, every time I've begun to write this blog (which has spanned over several days), immediately that song from "Toy Story" jumps into my head -- when Buzz is taking over Woody's place. Strange things are happ'nen' to me... 

But really, strange things aren't happening to me. Just different. Such as . . .

It is cold here in Blacksburg. Fall was suddenly over in a torrential gust of freezing cold wind. I cannot feel my fingers, and I'm pretty sure I saw some snow yesterday.

Two weeks ago, I realized I desperately needed a haircut. After a few hours searching the all-knowing internet for salons nearby with good reputations, I braved a walk-in. Naturally, having picked one of the top salons in town, they were booked solid. All week. So I made an appoinment for Tuesday of this week. Tuesday morning, I had a job interview that ran 45 minutes over my hair appointment time. I was too embarassed to call and reschedule, so I tried for a walk-in at another highly recommended place the next morning. Success! I now have much shorter hair, zero split ends, more vibrant curls, and ... bangs!

And, the best change of all? The job I interviewed for? Bam! it's mine! 

I've been working part-time at a Christian school here in Blacksburg, working as a PE teacher and as the director of their after-school program. It's been a hard job, but I enjoy the kids; especially some of the ones in Aftercare. But, being a poor newlywed married to a medical student, full-time was needed. So, I've been applying and interviewing here and there, and today, I began part-time at my new job! I'll switch to full-time as soon as my school finds a replacement for me.

What is my new job, you ask? Well, I'm just as surprised as you are. It's here, at the Adventure Club Center. God continues to throw me curveballs, but this one I like. I never considered working in childcare, even with three summers of camp experience. I've wanted an administrative job, period. So God put me in a school, teaching PE (did I mention I'm not an athelete?), and playing freeze tag with elementary school kids. And I've been applying for full-time jobs, mostly administrative.

But ... God has again surprised me. I am now working at a daycare, of all places. With the toddlers (I'm going to get so good at changing diapers...), of all ages. And, here's the best part: I love it.

Waffles

My dad's mother died before when my dad was a young twenty-something, before he was married. I've heard so many stories about Mildred, about the extraordinary godly woman she was, how she helped shape my family into one that served the Lord, how well she loved people.

You can see Mildred circled.

For a wedding gift, my grandfather gave me Mildred's cookbook. It's just an old Betty Crocker cookbook, but it was hers, and it has her handwriting in it. The most used recipe is obviously the waffles; the inside front cover is marked with "waffles, page 196", and she taped an entirely modified version over the original recipe over the page.

We've been eating waffles most lazy Saturday mornings like today.