Winter weekend

It hasn't been a very snowy Winter in the Midwest, so it was very exciting when we finally got hit with some snow on Thursday night.  It's been snowing off & on since then.  I thought I would share a few pictures from our recent snowy adventures.

The Bachsters couldn't wait to go outside and play in the snow on Friday morning.  They only had a one-hour delay at school, but that was enough time to get bundled up and explore:

 
Of course, Ranger has to get in on the action.  This morning the whole Bach family was outside in the backyard playing and that dog just went berserk!  It must be cabin fever.... or maybe puppy fever.

The Bachsters really wanted to go to a local sledding hill.  Here's a shot of all 3 of them, going down the hill (sideways!):

DD really wanted to try out the snowboard she got from Santa.  And after some practice, she was snowboarding down the hill like a pro:

When we got home & everyone was warming up and all the boots & mittens were drying, I went back outside to explore the backyard with my macro lens:

I made homemade pumpkin bread last night, thinking it would be a yummy treat to munch on over the cold weekend.  And I was right - we devoured the first of two loaves right away.  It's one of my favorite recipes, found in the Baking Handbook by Martha Stewart.  (you can click here to read the Book Nook post about this cookbook):

Homemade pumpkin bread and hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows.....what a perfect way to end a cold, snowy day.  Maybe we'll do it all over again tomorrow!

Hope you are having a great winter weekend!

-Cheryl 

Homemade ice cream - a sad tale of longing

For the holidays, I had the brilliant idea of making my parents & brothers homemade ice cream as Christmas gifts.  I had a brand new ice cream maker that I received for my birthday, and I always love making homemade gifts.  Of course, I figured this venture would take lots and lots of experimentation, which I couldn't wait to start!

The first recipes I tried made some of the best ice cream I've ever had - they are from an old article in Fine Cooking Magazine (August/September 1995, recipes and article by Andrew Hingston).  My first attempt at ice cream greatness was the caramel ice cream with toasted almonds.  You cook an ice cream base, add homemade caramel sauce, cool it, churn it in your ice cream maker and add toasted blanched almonds.  Here is the concoction in the early stages of the process - you must use a candy thermometer because it's very temperature-specific:

This recipe was outstanding!  I think next time I make it, I might try it without the almonds, although their toasted flavor really added a lot to overall experience.  Maybe I'll omit the almonds and add some more salt, for a sweet & salty ice cream.  But it really is just perfect as is!

Well, as I mentioned, experimentation was key here, because I would surely hate to give my family sub-par homemade ice cream for holiday gifts!  So, I figured now that I had one winner, I needed to get a few more for variety (for the sake of my family, of course)!

The next recipe I tried from the article was the hazelnut-mocha ice cream.  But I made some changes right from the start.  I didn't make it with the hazelnuts because I wanted to try to re-create my favorite store-bought ice cream: Ben & Jerry's Phish Food (=chocolate ice cream, marshmallow swirls, caramel swirls & little chocolate fish....yum).  So, I made the mocha ice cream (although Phish Food is not mocha, it's chocolate - I'm not sure how I missed that detail), found a great recipe for the marshmallow swirly stuff from Martha, of course and made another batch of the caramel sauce, which is so yummy you could just sit there & eat it straight out of the bowl (please don't ask me how I know this).  I also chopped up chunks of milk chocolate & swirled them in as the ice cream was churning.  Here are the all the flavors and sauces, awaiting their late-night assembly:

 
It really made a truly delicious ice cream.  But, just as with the caramel ice cream, I learned some things along the way & vowed to make a few changes.  I decided to make chocolate ice cream, not mocha, for an authentic Phish Food taste.  Also, I wasn't crazy about the milk chocolate chunks....I think next time I'll try it with semisweet or bittersweet chocolate for some distinction.  Otherwise, it was divine and it did not last long in the Bach house!

At this point, you might be wondering why I have titled this post a sad tale of longing.  So far, everything's good, right?  Well, I am sad to say that it all went downhill right from this point.  See, I realized that I needed a chocolate ice cream.  So, instead of tweaking the absolutely perfect mocha recipe I had, I decided to try a different cookbook, one that seemed very promising.  So, I tried a new recipe for a milk chocolate ice cream and it was....terrible!  It never actually froze and was sort of like eating dense, cold chocolate pudding or cold hot fudge.  It was the strangest ice cream ever, and I was so grateful that I had only borrowed this cookbook from the library and not purchased it without trying any of the recipes.

However, in my excitement over this new cookbook, and my absolute determination to make the best ice cream for my family for their gifts (this is what I kept telling myself, at least), I had already purchased the ingredients to make a homemade lemon frozen yogurt from the cookbook.  Not wanting to waste all the yogurt, cream, lemons, cheesecloth, etc. that I had invested in, and hoping that the food-like-substance that was the chocolate ice cream recipe was merely a fluke, I plodded on. 

And, sadly, the container to the ice cream maker decided to not freeze.  So the lemon yogurt, which was a very lengthy recipe, never actually froze properly because the canister wasn't thoroughly frozen (but we did eat it all anyway, after just letting the recipe sit in the freezer for a day - it became an icy yogurty lemony thingy).  You know that saying about Hell freezing over? It's been replaced by my ice cream canister freezing over......it's never going to happen!

My ice cream maker left me hanging, with a couple of delicious recipes that I would love to make again and again.  It taunts me every time I open my freezer - I see the canister just sitting there in its sloshy state, surrounded by frozen peas and bags of ice. 

And as for my homemade gifts for my family?  Gift certificates for everyone!

A sad tale, indeed!

-Cheryl 

Book Nook - The Orchid Thief

The Orchid Thief written by Susan Orlean:



On New Year's Eve, DH, two of his sisters, our brother-in-law, and myself all sat around our kitchen table to play a game of Monopoly while the Bachsters watched a movie.  Somewhere in the corners of my brain, I remembered hearing an interesting fact about the creator of the game, Charles Darrow - that he did something interesting with the fortune he had made.  All evening, I tried to remember just what it was, but maybe I was too distracted by the spread of munchies and sweets, or the fact that my thimble was loosing big time or maybe it was the fact that I had one glass too many of champagne (hey, it was New's Year's!), I didn't remember the elusive information until the next day.  He spent his fortune on orchids!

And I got this little bit of trivia from The Orchid Thief, written by Susan Orlean.  I thought this was going to be a very different kind of book, just based on what I gathered from reading the back cover.  The book says it's about this guy named John Laroche, who is inexplicably handsome despite the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has terrible posture.  Laroche is going through a trial for being caught (along with a couple of Seminole Indian accomplices) trying to steal rare wild orchids from Southern Florida's Fakahatchee Strand.  I was expecting a story about Laroche, who this unusual character is, and the circumstances that led up to his situation.

And the book does go there, but it also takes us to very unexpected places, like some faraway jungle with competing orchid hunters; a Seminole tribe pow-wow, getting lost in the Fakahatchee while searching for the evasive ghost orchid; driving with Laroche, who sometimes only steers with one knee; inside the story of Chief Osceola and his missing head; the Victorians and their love for orchids and insistence that they are not appropriate for women; and numerous characters and personalities in the plant world, including John Laroche, who are absolutely obsessed.

And that's pretty much what the book is - lots of stories and unusual facts about plants and orchids and the people that love them.  On the periphery is the story of John Laroche, his trial and his fickle obsessions.  All keenly observed and written with wit and intelligence by Orlean.

Interestingly, the movie Adaptation is based on the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, who tried to bring this story to the big screen.  Orlean is played by Meryl Streep.  I haven't seen the movie, but I wonder if it's as quirky as the book.  That's a good word to describe it, because it's all about quirky plants and the quirky people who love them.  People like John Laroche.  Or Charles Darrow.

I'll have to remember that the next time I play Monopoly.

-Cheryl   

Art week - art class exhibit

This Fall, our oldest DD took a 10-week Saturday morning art class at the Columbus College of Art and Design (DH joked that she should get college credit for the class.....she's 8).  I ended up waiting for her in an adjacent room for most of her classes, so I got to listen in, too.  I have only positive things to say about it - the teachers were great, the instruction perfect for 2nd graders, the projects all were varied and fun.  I loved that in each class, a different art technique was discussed, and they taught the students about a famous artist who used that particular style.  DD really enjoyed the class and she has given me the ok to share some of her artwork with you!

I think this watercolor painting is my favorite.  That week, they discussed Grant Wood and his stylistic way of painting.  And here is a picture of the artist herself with her masterpiece:

The focus of the next project was drawing with Sharpies, combined with watercolors.  This painting has been sold to her Aunt - DD is happy to tell everyone that she's now a professional artist!

One week, the class discussed The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.  This torn-paper collage is meant to invoke the same look as the story.  DD said she made her person with a dollar bill, because they are going shopping:

DD especially loves to draw, so I think she really enjoyed the class on drawing a cartoon-lion:

At the last class of the semester, the kids learned about kinetic art.  DD was thrilled to show her brother & sister and classmates at school how to create a pecking crow out of a square of black construction paper.  In addition, they also made these cool birds with movement, thanks to the pennies on the wings:

Now, I think we need to invest in some frames for all this amazing art!

-Cheryl

Art Week - a visit to the Columbus Museum of Art

When the Bachsters were on break from school for the holidays, we all went to the Columbus Museum of Art for an afternoon of artsy-entertainment.  We've been meaning to check out the museum all Fall, and I'm so glad that we finally had a good excuse to go!

The first thing we did is have a long discussion that you are to only look at the art - no touching!  And if there are any ropes keeping you a certain distance from the wall - stay behind them.  And remember don't touch anything!

 Fortunately, our Bachsters are good listeners and didn't touch anything, but we spotted a little boy touching one of the paintings for a few moments before his Dad caught sight of him!  Touching anything in this exhibit might have had disastrous consequences:

They wavy-shapes were made of glass and were supposed to represent gondolas from the artist's home city of Venice, Italy.  The effect was more like gentle waves, I thought.

We had some chats about portrait art before the advent of photography, and discussed why there's nudity in art (to some giggles and pointing).  We also tried to point out the age of some of the work ("this painting is over 400 years old!").  And as much as the Bachsters liked perusing through the different galleries, they really enjoyed the creative space just for kids, where they ran around, making their own forts out of cloth, snakes with clay and assembling crazy wooden animals:

I hope we can visit CMA again soon for more creative inspiration!

-Cheryl

Book Nook - Let's Make Some Great Art

Let's Make Some Great Art by Marion Deuchar:



This is one of the gifts our DD received for Christmas from us - we thought she would like it because she loves to draw and she's taking an art class, so it's just her thing.  Over her holiday break from school, she complained of being bored, so I suggested she get out her art book, which kept her busy for hours!

I know coloring books can be fun for kids, but I've always disliked that there is no real creativity involved.  The kids pick the color, are usually praised for staying in the lines, and that's all there is to it.  I don't buy these kinds of books for our kids, but rather give them plain, white copy paper whenever they want - a clean, empty slate for them to decide what to make.  I love the open-ended nature of plain white paper and so do they, because we go through a lot.

This book, Let's Make Some Great Art, is also a very open-ended approach to creating art.  The author gives you some ideas and starting points, but that's it.  The rest is up to the artist.  Our DD loves drawing her own comics, so it's no surprise that she found the "make up your own comic strip" spread and did that first.  Only the title is provided by the author ("The Missing Leg") and then 13 big boxes of different shapes follow, for your own comic.  Our DD did a story about a zombie!

There's a lot of different types of art projects in the book, besides just drawing.  One page gives you instructions on how to do a color experiment (involving a mirror, a glass bowl, paper, scissors, tape & a flashlight).  Another page shows you how to make a cool paper mobile.  There are a few pages with creative art using your fingerprints.  There are lots of activities using shapes and lines in unique ways.

I also love that the author incorporates some art history into the book.  There's a page on Jackson Pollock, for instance - some facts about the artist and an example of his style of work.  Then, there's a project on how to "make your own Jackson Pollock."  Some other artists (and projects inspired by) featured are Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee & Henri Matisse, to name a few.  There's a page on how the ancient Egyptians produced the color purple (many, many snails were crushed).  There's a few pages instructing the artist to draw on a plinth (draw something modern on this plinth, draw something made of glass, etc.).  What's a plinth?  This might be the first time a young artist is introduced to the item/word, all in a fun way.

And that's how the book goes - tons of fun projects (and facts) about art.  Anyone, adult or child, who loves to make art would enjoy this book.  In fact, our other DD already wants this book for herself, so I think we'll be purchasing it again (and then probably again for Little Dude). 

Stop back later this week to see some art projects that DD did in her art class this Fall!

-Cheryl   

Happy New Year

It's New Year's Day and that can mean only one thing in the Bach household......creme brulee!  Oh yes, it's a little tradition (or maybe better stated, excuse) to have creme brulee on New Year's Day (here's last year's post on the topic). 

Wishing you a very Happy 2012!  I think this is going to be a great year!

-Cheryl