Food Transformed

Food that looks like what it isn’t is incredibly fun to make. Eating the creation can be an odd experience – I mean, biting into something that looks like a meatball but tastes like chocolate can be a shock – but the decorating and viewing process is the real point of the exercise.

I’ve passed my love of weird looking food to our son, Eric, and he’s already bought me two cookbooks featuring outlandish cupcakes. He loves the challenge of making cupcakes that look like they should be served on April Fool's Day. The results of our experiments can be seen in the photos on the left. If you haven’t guessed, that is our attempts at spaghetti and meatballs, a scarecrow and apples.

We once tried making popcorn-like cupcakes, but we quickly ran out of enthusiasm for cutting several hundred marshmallows into quarters and gluing them together with frosting. Even we have our limits.

For those brave enough to eat our creations, the cupcakes piled high with more frosting than cake are sugar highs just waiting to happen.

 The Boy Scout mother-son bake off is being held in early December this year and we’re ready to show our decorating talents. Eric has decided our project should be reindeer cupcakes surrounded by holly leaves painted with green icing.

Oh deer/dear! Hope the Boy Scouts like frosting...lots of frosting.

The Natural Way of Getting Clean

Our dog cannot hold her licker. No, I don’t mean liquor; I mean licker, as in tongue.

For some reason, Kiki, our Shibu Inu, thinks it’s a sin not to pay back every pat she gets with a lick. One or two licks are fine, but sometimes I want to breathe in her nice furry smell, and instead, I get my face plastered with dog breath.

Is she just giving me a kiss or are am I really that dirty?

Dressing in the morning can be really complicated when I decide to wear lotion on my legs. While I’m struggling to get a leg into my slacks, Kiki is licking off the burnt vanilla scented lotion. That can’t be good for her. I end up hopping around the rug, trying to get away from her, while trying hard not to fall on our cat, Lilly, who has decided that she, too, needs attention and has stationed herself in the middle of the action.

The up side of all this licking is that Kiki and Lilly have the cleanest ears around. Kiki will thoroughly clean Lilly’s ears until it’s obvious Lilly is concerned her brains are about to be sucked out of her tiny skull and she quickly scoots away. She will eventually reciprocate and Kiki seems to appreciate the attention. I’ve never seen animals with such clean ears.

The rest of the family will stay with the old fashioned method of using cotton swabs for cleaning ears.

There are certain types of cleanliness we can live without.

We Can See Clearly Now, But What Do You See?

As new contact wearers, my son, Eric, and I are now getting mailings to buy contact-related products. Our favorite solicitation was for contacts designed to complement a Halloween outfit.

Dead X eyes, zebra eyes, spiral eyes, Manga eyes…no Halloween outfit would be complete without them.

Eric really wants to buy the red contact lenses to wear to school. I would never allow that, but if I did, I’m sure the school would have something to say about the disruption Eric would cause wearing those lenses. That would mean he only would be able to wear them at home, and I’d have to spend each evening trying to have a sane conversation with my son while he looks back at me with red demon eyes. I no more want to see Eric run around the house looking like the spawn of Satan than he wants to see me wearing dead X eyes.

If I had money to burn and could be assured of the safety of patterned lenses, I’d go for cat eyes. I always loved the way Madam Hooch looked in the Harry Potter movies, and I think I could almost get by with that one in social situations.

But why stop there? Imagine the fun of having contacts that matched each outfit. I adore gemstones, so diamond eyes would be just right for a night on the town. A nice paisley would look good with my fall clothes. Holly and red berries would work for Christmas. Perhaps some nice dragon eyes for a night on the town.

It’s just possible that some day we’ll be able to run off designs for contact lenses right off our own computer printers. Just imagine. I could have a photo of Eric on one eyeball and a photo of my husband, Chuck, on the other. Or, for my more playful days, one of our dog, Kiki, and one of our cat, Lilli. For earth day, I could have pictures of our green Chinese water dragon, Norbert, on my eyes.

I can see the possibilities.



You Want What?

Our teenager, Eric, was ravenous, but having difficulties finding the appropriate words to describe what it was he wanted to eat for dinner that night.

“Oh you know,” he said. “That bristly chunky meat stuff that we had before that was dipped in a brown sauce thing.”

Chuck and I were understandably flummoxed.

Eric told us to wait a moment as he ran outside into the drizzling rain.

“The food I’ve been thinking of looks like this,” he said, as he walked back into the house holding up a square piece of wet wood he had plucked from the mulched area in our front yard.

Now, here’s the scary part. Chuck and I immediately knew what he was talking about. I’m concerned what that says about our cooking skills that a piece of wood looks like dinner.

“Ah,” we answered in unison, “You want beef sirloin tips in gravy.”

What was once a classy dish served over egg noodles will now be forever known in our household as wet bark.

Bet you can’t wait to have dinner at our house.

Leave a Message

I adored receiving letters. They were gifts that would arrive for no apparent reason other than the fact someone was thinking of you. As a girl, I’d pour over every word trying to determine whether there were any hidden meanings. I’d then carefully craft my reply – sometimes soaking the paper in tea and then burning the edges of the paper to make it look antique, other times putting a red wax seal on the envelope. The type of stationary and envelopes I used depended on the formality of the reply, age or gender of recipient or my mood for the day.

When those days passed and letter writing became too much effort for mankind, I found that magazines and catalogs were an OK, although not as exciting, substitute for mail. Magazines and catalog subscriptions were more a gift I sent myself, but it was at least more exciting than a bill.

Now I’m glad to say that I’m hearing from people all over the world.

E-mail keeps me in touch with current and former co-workers, as I learn which projects are due or which restaurant will be this month’s meeting place, respectively. LinkedIn lets me know where my former co-workers are employed. Facebook fills me in on to what games my long ago classmates are playing and which relatives are visiting the doctor again.

Now that I have an iPhone, messaging is keeping me in touch with my brother, who lets me know when he’s stuck at an airport bored out of his mind. My husband knows I’m as close as a phone call and leaves me messages asking me to stop by the store on the way home or tell him what I’d like for dinner.

The only drawback to all this wonderful reaching out is that I don’t feel as though I learn as much about people. When I do actually talk to people in person and they ask me about a mutual acquaintance, I’m amazed how little I do know.

“Well, she got hold of me on LinkedIn, but she didn’t answer questions about her job, and her title was vague. But she sounded upbeat!”

A lot of the time, if you ask more than one question, the responder only answers one. Lack of time, perhaps?

Still, it beats not knowing how your loved ones and not so loved ones are more or less doing.

I, however, am still into long messages. You won’t get any burnt edges or wax seals on my replies, but my heart will still be in my answer.

I’ll probably even answer more than one of your questions.

People of My Age

Learning to play the guitar is one of those things I always figured I’d do after I won the lottery. Seeing that I don’t play the lottery, I finally realized I could be waiting a long time before the day would come for lessons. So, when a slot with a guitar teacher opened at the same time my son was taking trumpet lessons, I took the plunge.

Two years later, I am not quite ready for my public debut. Classical guitar is hard. Still, I’m not ready to give up. One day I will wake up, play a tune passably well and be on my way.

My guitar teacher once pointed out that, “People of your age usually give up by now” because they are so busy. True, life gets hectic and practicing occasionally takes a back seat when you have a family and a career.

What my young teacher doesn’t know yet is that one thing “people of my age” have on their side is tons of patience.

And that’s good news for me and my future as a passable guitar player.

The Obit Obligation

My grandparents, now long gone from this earth, used to lament that their week was planned by obits. They had to read the obituary notices in their small town to see who they knew had passed, and therefore, whose funeral they would be attending. It was hard to imagine what it would be like to open the paper each day and read about another friend who had passed away.

Now my parents are going through this, but their obit notices have taken on a broader scope. They receive e-mails and phone calls form all across the world. In a day and half, they learned of six deaths – all of people their age or younger. One poor former high school classmate lost his wife, daughter and father in one month.

I’ve lived in this town long enough to feel the need to occasionally check out the obit notices to make sure no one I know is listed there. It’s an odd feeling. However, if I learn about someone’s passing, it’s usually through a phone call or bounced e-mail.

Not too long ago, I tried to figure out why the e-mail address of a former colleague of mine had bounced. His home phone was disconnected, but his voice mail for his cell phone still worked. I checked the website where he works and found out that he had passed away.

Now if a friend doesn’t answer my calls or e-mails promptly, I find myself checking the online obit files. Of course, I don’t tell them that when they do finally get in touch. Some things are better left unsaid.

The Passage Rites of Boys

I was taken by surprise when tears started to well up in my eyes as I watched my son, Eric, graduate from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. High school-age boys from his new troop were tying his new scarf around his neck, and it hit me that this is an honor I had always had in the past. It was the parents that helped usher their children to the next level. It occurred to me that this must be what a Bar Mitzvah is like – the realization that your little boy is growing up.

That realization hit home even more when Eric earned tenderfoot, second class, first class and Star honors. Two years ago, he was new to the troop and didn’t know how to fit in. He hung on me and was embarrassed when he was the only one to not earn a badge. Now he has earned some top honors and a slew of badges. Instead of telling me that he wasn’t going to plan on getting Eagle rank because it was hard to get, he’s now saying that he should be able to achieve that rank by the time he’s 15.

My 14-year-old suddenly has goals and confidence. I am one proud mom and his dad is beaming from ear to ear.

The Rules of Acting Like an Adult

There are a lot of rules governing adulthood. Or at least it seems that way when you’re a teenager. For my son Eric’s 14th birthday celebration, he wanted an adult celebration – nothing childish. Trying to decipher what that meant was the hard part.

According to Eric, adults don’t have theme parties. Well, that’s a bummer. I rather like theme parties.

However, when all was said and done, water balloons and water gun fights were definitely on the adult list. The table laden with candy where everyone could gather to exchange gossip also was a must.

Can’t think of many adults who would argue with that plan.