Creation: Polka Dot Band

Tessa's little outfit was screaming for a new hair hoo-be-doo, so Mama came through so she could look adorable for our trip to the grocery store.

Halloween 09 - Parties and PeaPods

Ted came up with our family costume, which I thought was pretty remarkable considering the man hates dressing up. However, since we just stuck things on his normal clothes, he was pretty okay with it. Besides, we won "Best Couple Costume" and Tessa won "Best Overall Costume" at the party we went to. There weren't any other kids participating, so it was kind of a gimme, but she really was a cute little bugger.

Fabulous dancing from the men on the runway, but when it was the women's turn, I remarked how the only way to top theirs was to "get slutty." We made efforts, but they were lackluster compared to the men.

This is our neighbor, C. When the music turns on, he apparently gets dirty. I voted for him for best dancing. You don't have to ask why.

Squeakers was fascinated with these leaves all night, and I'm so glad I got a shot of her devilish concentration.

These are our new favorite neighbors, C&A. My mom and sister used to be, but since we moved away, we've had to improvise. The game was "Donuts on a String", and the spouses played against the other spouses, trying to eat as much of the hanging donut as possible without letting it fall on the ground. These guys lost because they were too busy posing.

We tried on a few different costume ideas before settling on the pea pod idea. Couldn't resist this one.

AND, the food. There are some talented women out here with a lot of time on their hands. These were chocolate mice with caramel tails,

peanut butter pumpkins,

my contribution: almond shortbread witch finger cookies with bloody guts dipping sauce,
severed hand punch,

and the winning dish, freaky-looking white chocolate-dipped Oreo eyeballs. These looked gross and tasted awesome. Perfect combination.

We're totally demanding a repeat invitation next year. Thanks, Doreen and Matt!

A feeling of accomplishment

I know this is going to be no big deal for a lot of you, but for several weeks now I've been working my way up the ladder and today, I reached a goal. I jogged for a whole mile without stopping. Considering that three months ago I was unable to move out of bed due to a back injury and two months ago I couldn't sit in a padded church pew without excruciating pain, I think today's accomplishment calls for a celebration. Now where's that chocolate??

Of course, goals are always easier to reach when you've got this to look at:





I have a feeling I'm going to love the next two autumns in Durham even more.

What's Cookin: Chocolates

This is what the winner received in the mail a couple weeks ago, although she reported it probably looked better on my end than it did on hers. I just happened to mail it during a not-uncommon October heatwave in Southern California. Not all of them melted, thankfully, and I believe she said she ate them all anyway. If you recall, this is the same girl who licked her knitted stocking clean after her dad lit a fire just underneath them for Christmas, not realizing there was chocolate in each one. For this story alone, Valerie, you are a bosom friend.



Here's a run-through of my first attempt at making chocolates.

Behold, the peanutty centers of the PB balls. I just love the name. I dipped these in semisweet and then milk chocolate. Next time I think I'll do just milk and reduce the powdered sugar in the filling, as they were a bit more crumbly than I'd like.



Next were the ganache truffles. I did some dark chocolate and some chocolate raspberry, but the method was pretty much the same. Melt the chocolate with warm cream, whisk until smooth, add any flavoring, then refrigerate. When cold enough, roll away. I think I let these get a little TOO cold, because the ganache broke my small Pampered Chef ice cream/cookie scoop. I'm still ticked about that one. But I guess you don't get great without a lot of mistakes, blah blah blah.



The rolling:



And the finished rough-looking balls. These are called truffles because when rolled in cocoa (which I did with just the dark chocolate), they resemble the mushroomy truffles that pigs find. The name now includes all sorts of chocolates that have a chocolate and cream base, but most are now dipped (which I did to the chocolate raspberry ones). And this particular pig is very good at finding these kinds of truffles, thank you.

These last ones were a favorite for Ted and some wonderfully obliging taste-testing neighbors, C&A. Melted caramel topped clusters of cashews and dried cranberries,

then were topped with melted milk chocolate.

Ted and I tried a similar confection after the chocolate exhibit at the Raleigh Natural Science Museum and loved them. The creator dubbed them "Bog Frogs" - a play on turtles and the fact that they contain cranberries, I imagine. We just called them scrumdiddlyumptious, and I was certainly not disappointed with my knock-off. Until next time, chocolate lovers!

We have a winner!

I didn't make any predictions about how many people would leave a comment to get some free chocolate, but because I'm curious, I compared the number of comments for the chocolate post with the number for the post about boob nicknames. Despite passionate declarations of love for the food of the gods, based on the number of comments, women are even more obsessed with their ta-tas. Go figure.

To make sure there was no bias whatsoever, all the names of the commenters were put into a pot, and I gave Ted the honor of drawing with his eyes closed. And the name on the piece of paper........

VALERIE BUNKER!!! She told me a little story about how her dad lit a fire in their fireplace one Christmas morning, then later realized there was chocolate in the stockings. Oh no! Her sisters lamented over the brown goop, but as they turned to Valerie, they noticed she was face deep in her own stocking, licking the contents right out of the fabric. I cracked up because the same thing happened to me one Christmas, and this is why we are friends.

Congratulations, Valerie! You deserve some chocolate, and hopefully this batch won't be melted when you receive it. There aren't any fires going on right now in SoCal, are there?

Stay tuned for pictures of my chocolate-making experience! And thank you all for admitting your crippling weaknesses! I feel like I have soul sisters all over the place.

1/12 of the way through

The GIVEAWAY is still going on until midnight tonight! Leave a comment! Winner is posted tomorrow!

Celebrations are in order because Ted is officially through the first twelfth of his law school semesters. Am I seriously counting in twelfths? H yes.

He's having a long-term affair with this building, but he doesn't know I know.

You wouldn't guess it from this picture, but Tessa barely recognizes him anymore. She shrieks her head off whenever he tries to hold her now. And I'm kidding. She does make sure I'm nearby though. It's kinda cute. For me.

Couldn't resist this one. The constantly changing sky makes for some incredible scenery day in and day out.

As far as "how he's doing", there's really no way to tell until he takes his finals in December. The entire class grade is based only on the final, so I won't see him at all after Thanksgiving. Two good signs, though, are that he understands everything he's reading and the information actually blows his skirt up. So that's good!

You should read this post; it's regarding essential nutrition

I married a wonderful man, but I think we can both agree that we disagree on more than a few things. Vacationing is one of them.

We weren't married long before I started noticing (like, on our honeymoon) how fixated he can get on things I just considered as passing fancies. For instance, we went to one of the most beautiful places on earth (Cancun and its environs), where I wanted to sit on beaches with books and ride Vespas and drink watermelon juice (life-changing) and do "other stuff" for the majority of the time. But noooooooo.... SOMEONE grew up visiting "national parks" and appreciating things like "historic sites" and "ancient ruins." Blah. Which meant I was being dragged along.

So since then, I have tended to shy away whenever Ted has approached me with the ol' "wanna go to a museum?" line (and trust me, it has been uttered often). This last time, though, was the biggest and best exception to my usual half-hearted consent. The museum in Raleigh had an exhibit on CHOCOLATE. I practically dragged him out of the apartment.

See how excited we all are to be there? It was a win-win. Ted got to go to his little museum and I got to drool on myself.

The exhibit was put together very well, but it wasn't very hands-on for the amount of children they had going through there. I didn't care about that very much, since Tessa's main activity was drooling right next to me. And considering how much I already knew about chocolate, like the fact that it's brown and to die for, I was surprised to find out how much I didn't know. Here's a quick run-through of fun facts.

• Cacao trees thrive in tropical climates (which I knew), but have to be planted underneath a taller tree because they need the shade (which I didn't).
• West Africa, specifically the Cote d'Ivoire, is the largest grower of cacao trees. I thought that title was taken by Central and South America, but I was WRONG!
• Cocoa beans used to be the Aztecs' form of money.
• The first use of actual chocolate was as a drink, but it wasn't like our hot chocolate or chocolate milk of today. The beans are quite bitter, so they would roast them and add chilies and spices and throw it back.
• Once chocolate became a European import, people went crazy for it (obviously). However, it was so expensive that only royalty and the very rich could afford it. In fact, it was often enjoyed while lying naked in bed. Funny. That's my favorite method, too.

The above image was displayed at the museum, but there was no name or artist, so I had all these grand plans to reproduce it in our living room to give you an idea of what it looked like, complete with the overturned chair. But I'm glad I found it online instead, because my nipples don't look nearly that good.

Besides the multiple videos of huge vats of molten chocolate getting conched and tempered and mixed and formed (think the opening montage of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the original. Best opening sequence in a movie EVER), my favorite part of the display were the old advertisements from some of the first major manufacturers, namely Hershey, Ghirardelli, and Cadbury (pronounced "CAD-bree"). I've included some samples. Make sure you read all the fine print.

"You NEED a Baby Ruth! It offers dextrose, for crying out loud! You don't want to fall asleep on the road, do you???"

"More sustaining than meat", huh? What would happen if you had BOTH?

Ahhh... someone already though of it for me. Two of my favorite foods, combined. And it was pretty tasty!

Tessa was a gem the whole time because she is a fellow foodie. Toward the end of the tour, we spotted these little ottomans one could sit on while watching videos of people talking about how much they loved chocolate. They offered the perfect photo-op. Can someone please tell me where I can buy one of these? I need one. Or four.

The end of the tour spit us out into a chocolate shop (fitting!) because naturally, we're going to want to eat chocolate after looking at it for over an hour. I wonder if Jesus Himself would have been able to resist such temptation.

They had all sorts of scrumptious treats, so we selected wisely. In case you're wondering if cashews and dried cranberries enrobed in caramel and dipped in chocolate are good, um, they are. They even had kids' books on display, so I flipped through a few of them and Ted and I had a conversation that went like this:

me: We need these.

Ted: Need?

me: For Tessa.

Ted: So she can get as addicted as you?

me: Are you kidding me? I grew up never knowing the fine heritage of my favorite food group. Do you want her to grow up as ignorant and potentially hooked as I did? Maybe if she learns about it from a young age, she won't crave it. Knowledge is power, sweetie.

Ted: That was the biggest load of crap. Whatever. You can get them.

me: I was going to anyway.

See? Compromise is the name of the game in a marriage. So next time he wants to haul me off to some explore-our-wilderness-and-gain-an-appreciation-for-it-already state park, all he has to do is stuff a Reese's in his pants and I'm good to go.

AND NOW, ON TO THE GOOD STUFF.

I know how hard it must have been to read through that entire post with no food of the gods to partake of. So I'm going to have my very first giveaway.

It's been about 10 years since I've made truffles or chocolates, but I've been wanting some ever since I found out there isn't a See's candy within a 100-mile radius of me. What's a girl to do?!? Well, make her own, of course, and one of you will get to benefit as well.

I will overnight a box of homemade chocolates to a name drawn from the pool of individuals who comment on this post, telling me what chocolate does for you. You can leave comments until Friday, Oct 9 at midnight (Pacific time). I'll announce the winner on the blog, and she (or he) should have the chocolate by the following Tuesday morning.

So leave a comment, and be creative!