The Only Chocolate Pie Recipe

Fresh Yakima Peaches taken on my visit in 2008. Mmmm

I didn't have a picture of the pie I made today, so added this picture of fresh peaches to catch your attention.

First, I have to tell you that I have been trying various chocolate pie recipes all Fall, and some were ok and others adequate. Mom sent one of the best, but my search is over.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/01/mocha-silk-pie/

I didn't add the Kahlua and I didn't make the crust, substituting an off-the-shelf Oreo cookie crust from the Giant Grocery Store, but the pie is so rich, the lighter crust was probably a good thing. Be sure to take a very small slice. Rich and creamy. I will plan to make it again for the March company coming!

Just A Dusting

Does this look familiar? This storm was supposed to go to the South. "We might get a dusting," my tv weatherman, Tom Kierein, said.

It had not started at 8am, when I went out to the gym and for my coffee, and in an abundance of caution, stopped at the grocery store on the way home. Random, light flakes had just started as I was leaving the gym at 9am.

Good thing I picked up those groceries.

It has been snowing all day. We are up to 6" and it is supposed to snow until midnight. Temperature has been below 20 all day so it is a very light snow.

Headline on 1/31 at Washington Post online: "Not Just A Dusting For Sure": A winter storm expected to deliver little more than a dusting Saturday instead spoiled weekend plans and interrupted public transportation as it dumped 8-10 inches of powdery snow through the Washington Region.

Generational Shift

I saw this card stuffed in the Oktoberfest beer stein, which is large enough to hold a six pack of beer in one glass, but for us is a storage unit filled with things too important to throw away, but little used currently.

My Montgomery County Library Card - for years an endless source of pleasure.

But I got a Kindle for Christmas - generational shift. I had finished a book on the train on the way home and at one of the above ground stations, downloaded the next book club book and started reading without even getting up from my bench. No waiting for the library to open. Instant gratification for a reader. Amazing invention!

Swedish Fork

When I was first married - this was decades ago - I was given Mom's second Swedish fork. Who needed two? Mine had a green handle of plastic, and a long neck. At the bottom at an angle of 115 degrees off the perpendicular, was the fork part of the tool with ten thin tines.

It was perfect for making Danish Pastry. Go figure. Danish Pastry perfected, but only by using a Swedish Fork.

Years passed and the weld broke. I was bereft with two useless parts and missing the whole, I looked high and low. I even remember carrying the two parts to show sales clerks what I was looking for. They had never seen anything like it. By this time we lived on the East Coast. This was before Google and the find-everything-Amazon websites and search engines. How hard our lives were when we actually had to go from store to store seeking what we wanted to buy.

I stopped making Danish Pastry.

I gave up searching and then a couple of years later, looked with fresh eyes at the kitchen tool walls. What else would work? I decided to try this gem of a tool, ostensibly labeled a spaghetti spoon. It is made by INOX and is Stainless 18/8 by Edelstahl Rost frei - hard to see the letters any more to know if that is accurate.

Look for the spoon and try this recipe that Aunt Gladys shared with me:

Rack on the middle shelf in the oven and be sure to preheat.

1 cup milk scalded in a saucepan with 1/2 cup melted butter. Stir in 1 cup floor. Beat on the stove top until a ball is formed. Beat a bit more. Set aside. Take out four eggs and add them one at a time until fully mixed in. Without the tined fork, the slithery eggs are hard to co-mingle with the warm ball of dough. Beat away by hand, one slippery egg at a time, until you have a spread out mass that is a light golden batter.

Drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and in dropping conjoin the blobs, aligning them in a perpendicular fence around the inside edge of the cookie sheet. If you have some leftover, build the fence down the middle in the long direction.

Bake 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Then turn the oven down to 400 and bake 20 minutes more.

Frost with white butter frosting - thick or thin depending on your preference - while hot. It drips everywhere. Sprinkle with colored sugar (not as much as Caroline likes to pour on) or finely chopped nuts.

Serve when cooled, although they can be sampled as they cool to test for flavor. Once the pastries are all gone, use a spoon to eat all the drips of frosting covering the cookie sheet in all places that are not filled by a missing pastry.

Now I Know Why

Ever wonder why we have had the big birth babies? No five-pound wonders for this family.

Here is where it started: Jasper Walter Howard, born to Jasper Lilburn (Jess) and Dema Mooers Howard in Hutchinson, Kansas, on August 20th, 1914 and weighing: 9 pounds!

Walt Howard is Neil's dad and Jim's Grandfather.

This blog tonight is in honor of you, Walt, for starting it all. Thank you!

Mothers and Daughters

Here we are in Monterey in November 2009 to celebrate Dorothy's 100th birthday. We were on the way to breakfast down along the Bay when Neil took this picture.

The picture frame I mentioned located above my desk at work has these words etched in wood around the frame:

Mothers and daughters read each other's minds and are best friends.

They know by instinct when something is wrong and share deep secrets.

Their bond is unbreakable.

Safety, warmth, and unconditional love is forever.

So true of us.

My other favorite mother-daughter combo

My Office in Washington, DC

This is what I see when I first arrive at work in the morning, my presentation wall. I have an internal office and I look out across a hall to an external window. My office hall wall is the opaque glass you see on the right. So for conference calls, I close my office door to keep hallway noise from the phone.

At my desk on the first upper shelf, I face my framed picture of my daughter and me taken of us long ago on the West Coast and with all the sayings about mothers and daughters etched around the frame. And I am proud to have my hard hat available on a moment's notice for job site tours.

The quilt only took me 14 hours to make and then I had it machine quilted by a friend. It is a fractured nine-patch in an around the world setting, appropriate for the office because our company is in fifty countries around the world.

Finally, in the narrow closet to the left, I keep the safety vest and safety glasses which I also wear when I am at a working construction site. No flash required by the camera, because it is neon bright, so I won't get run over by any moving construction equipment!

That's Two Out of Three

The second annual Chili Cook Off was held at the church last night. Having won the grand prize for the Chili category last year, this year your dad entered the dessert contest, making Martta's Christmas pear cookies as the entry. The prizes are awarded by a voting mechanism which is the fund raiser. You put a dollar in the coffee can next to the numbered entry (no one is supposed to know who cooked what) and the entry with the most votes (dollars earned toward Summer Work Camp expenses), wins that category.

With this prize, Neil is two for two. Next year we will have to enter the third and last category - the corn bread. Martta has already volunteered to help get the most famous recipe for corn bread in Texas so he can have a chance at a perfect trifecta (three wins for three entries - across all categories).

A Favorite Wallhanging

This is the challenge quilt from 2004-2005 that is hanging over my wing back chair. I did the top row establishing the color scheme, then it was passed to six other quilters in the group. My team assignments were Stars - Jane Howard; 9 Patch - Janice Rothlauf; Pinwheel - Jean Raiford; Square - Marti Chasler; Triangle - Pat Thompson; Paper Piecing - Sue Lauer and final row, Bow Ties - Suzanne Baulsir.





We would take the quilt for one month, and the assignment, come up with a design containing those elements, add it to the quilt and pass it along the next month. It came back to the owner the 8th month.





I am one of the few who finished the quilt, hand quilted, but I still haven't sewn the label on the back. The label is in a folder near by. Some year, I will attach it!


The actual label:





Janice has moved to Kansas. Jean had to leave the group because of medical reasons. Pat Thompson's seven grandchild was born so she turned into a full time babysitter. Sue Lauer moved to North Carolina.

We are down to ten members now so it is easier to host the monthly meetings!

How Many Cousins?

I sent Lisa the story about the Papa gene and she wrote back that she had it too!

"When I was in law school (2nd year), I lived with two women who continue to remain two of my closest friends.

I drove them nuts because I was so tidy and organized around the house.

One weekend when I was out of town, they decided to rearrange things in the house, such as pictures, magazines, etc., to see if I would notice upon my return.

Of course I did - the minute I walked in; my housemates were laughing hysterically.

So I can totally relate to my mom's same experience. I think I inherited the gene as well."

From the ranch in the summer - the cousins got the outside table. From front left and around the table: Eric, Raleigh, Laurie, Martta, Lisa, Jim (with cast) and Andrew. Miss Amy was asleep in her crib or maybe hadn't arrived yet.

So then I wondered, how many of the other cousins inherited the close attention to detail gene from Papa?

Which Cousin Is It?

She was this age when we drove to her house for the Christmas holiday arriving two hours early and just in time for dinner. Her mom was discombobulated because she had expected us by 9pm and had only cooked two pork chops, which could not be spread to feed six adults.

We said, "no problem. We brought wine and sourdough bread. We'll just sit in the Living room and have bread and wine."

Upon arrival, this cousin decided no more dinner for her, so she was released from the high chair and joined us in the living room captivating us with her presence.

We decided to carry out a test of something we had been discussing in the car on the way up.

To begin the test, we switched the places of the Christmas decoration on the lamp table with the one on the long coffee table. In came her mom with the wine, and on auto-pilot switched those decorations right back to their true locations. Too easy we thought.

Next we reversed the location of the two Christmas decorations on the long coffee table, so the candle was now in the middle. Out her mom came with the sliced sour dough bread, and restored the misplaced decorations all in one sweep. We looked at each other and smirked, realizing we had to be much more subtle.

There was a row of five popular magazines on the right side of the coffee table so we reversed the middle one, while keeping them totally aligned and in position, so the title was no longer showing. The next time her mom came to check and see if we were still all right, with no discernible pause, she bent down to fix the titles at the same time starting to say, "Lisa, if you don't stop...."

Her mom was interrupted from carrying out her threat, because we all burst out laughing and told her she definitely got A++ on our test to see if she were the daughter who inherited Papa's close attention to detail that resulted in his national reputation as an excellent diagnostician. I still have an original monograph of his work on fruit orchard spray poisoning.

And the last hint: her sunny smile lighting up her whole face rewarding any adult who came visiting the nightly bath routine, because the bathtub only held the first of eventually eight cousins.

Remember Those Waffles?

We had quilting last night and each of the quilters brought their interpretation of the waffle homework assignment. We arrayed all the work to see what a quilt might look like. The hole in row three is Mimi's missing second square - she ran out of time and will mail it.

We have a point system. I only had 9 points to put in the drawing dish because I had won before Christmas. Barbara hadn't won in a long time and she had 27 points. Five other quilters put in names depending on their numbers. Barbara ended up winning. Now she goes back to zero and will have to build up again. You don't have to "bid" every time, so you can aggregate greater numbers that way also, like taking a bye in Fantasy Football - you just don't play that month.

MLK Holiday

This is how old I was when I first cut my hair. See it sailing unevenly up to the right? I am holding the ball. From the left, sister Janet, me, cousin Mary Marie and sister Judi. Taken near Grandmother's front porch steps. Mary lived in West Valley at the time and we lived out in the country in Cowiche on Apple Acres.

And here is Martta about the same age at Disneyland. She took a one inch chunk out of her bangs in roughly the same location as I had done. I think she has a better picture of the "haircut" in her baby book.

Ham Stew

My turn to cook this week and I have been wanting to try Jim's ham stew to use up some of the left over spiral cut ham Neil got at the grocery store for less than half price.

Jim, you forgot to tell me it more than fills the crock pot when ingredients added sequentially!

I had to carefully lift from the bottom with my teflon spoon so I wouldn't tear the crock pot liner - whomever invented that gets the cooking helper award of the year - just to get the level down below the rim.

I used a can of Progesso Lentil soup instead of a can of Lentils and added sliced mushrooms. Now to wait all day for the happy result tonight.

Chevron Options

I can't use any of the homework strips in Thimbleberry colors to practice making the Chevron block, so I used pastels. This serves two purposes. One, I get to see the actual size if I use this pattern. I see how easy it is to make, oh, and a third reason. At some point this spring I have to host the quilters and come up with the "homework" for the month. If I ask each to do this pattern in pastels (the sample will already be created), then we will have enough to raffle and make a baby blanket for the winner.

So what will this little block look like when it is joined to the other little blocks. A bigger pattern always emerges based on the way you set the little blocks. The first setting shows a fractured square, sort of like how these pictures all play out. I will have to ask Bridget how she got her New York pictures to line up all in a row so well.

Notice I have pivoted two opposing blocks so the little half triangle squares are all in the center or two are on the outside edges

What about a ladder. All the horizontals lining up? And moving to the setting version, that second ladder would be perpendicular, and a Chevron appears pointing to the upper left. Now that is interesting.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

It was 50 degrees when Neil took this picture. Notice the street is dry, but the driveway is wet. That is because he just washed his car. By the time I got home and was parked on the driveway before leaving to turn the car in for the 45,000 mile check up, I slipped on the ice he created with the water. It may be 50 on the back deck in full sun, but the front of the house faces North and it is still c o l d.

I wanted you to see that we still have snow back here but hope it is gone by March !

Maybe a Chevron

How about alterately light and dark, two sets, starting opposite colors, placed face to face and then stitched down the middle. Looks like a Chevron. Not hard to do and much more interesting.

Let me play with this idea. I didn't cut any of the homework strips, but laid them close together and cut the rest of the runners off with cardboard to make the colors look more like the square I am imaging.

Bricks Plus

At least the typing starts on the side again. But, no fair. I stood perpendicular to the bricks tonight to get the picture thinking it would display them horizontally as I was envisioning the layers, but no. Still up and down. Just tilt your head to see it in layers of color like stacks of bricks.

Plain brick setting was b o r i n g.

So how about adding a four patch at the transition of the colors. I could throw these out randomly, even in different colors. Well, let me think on it over night. Somewhat more interesting.

Bricks

Our long term quilting assignment is jelly rolls in Thimbleberry colors. That is short hand for earth tones or prairie colors. We are trading one strip each meeting. We have collected quite a few so far - so many I am trying to decide the layout of a new quilt.

Simplest thing to do would be to sew the long strips together in rows with each row offset by 1/4 the length in brick stacking fashion. Not sure I like the result.

I'll keep thinking on it. We are collecting for several more months.

Still learning with the pictures. so why did the picture turn 90 degrees on uploading and why did the typing start at the top of the entry? It has always started on the right side of the picture before or so far. Well, it is night time and I can't think of solutions readily at this time of day so I'll post this.

Honda Amenities

I would like to extol the virtues of the Honda heated seat -- the "heater seater" feature as I call it.

Most mornings it is dark when I go to work and dark when I come home. We are expecting more flurries tonight.

The first thing I do is turn the heater seater to HI (as shown in the picture), then I leave for the Metro. I get warm buns right away. The engine doesn't warm up until Muddy Branch, when I turn the regular car heater on!

I didn't realize I would like a car feature so much that it would change my paradigm. I don't believe I will be able to buy a car in the future unless it has this feature, so attached am I to getting instantly warm in a freezing car!

Masterlock Mystery Solved

Does this look fuzzy? Well, I don't wear my glasses to the gym, but I always lock my Starbucks card in my locker - with my coat, keys, etc. Looks like my Masterlock. 90% of the lockers do not have such deterrents.

Starts with a seven or a nine, so I went with seven and the combo...didn't open. I figured it started with the other number, nope. Then I remembered Neil's trick - think of it as a date in July. Nope.

Befuddled, another Masterlock came into view. Just to the right and identical. Same relative area as mine. So, I gave it a try. Got it in one. Off to Starbucks. Imponderable thought. Can I remember a single number (83) all through my gym routine. Practical reality, can I see it without glasses? Can you?

How to spend a Saturday

Wake up early on a very cold morning: Grab the sofa quilt, a cup of coffee and read a good book.

The sun is about to come up and will melt some of the snow that fell yesterday, but for now the streets are cold and dry, because it is still 16 outside.

Alternate Universe

We are in the teens tonight. The snow fell overnight, but only a couple of inches, a "dusting". Then the temperature dropped! And we face at least two more days of this frigid Arctic Clipper. Bring out the extra quilts and "think of July".

Fourth of July in Texas, which can be "hotter'n'seven acres of burnin' stumps". Wish we had a little of that tonight.

Jack and Caroline learning water skills one July.

Waffles Anyone?

Well, not what I originally envisioned, but here we are, my quilting homework for this month. The assignment was to sew "waffle" patterned squares in black/white and red. One the inverse of the other. The red background makes the square look so much bigger but the squares are the same size!

More on this assignment later.

Weather Forecast Winter-y Mix

Starting tomorrow night maybe 1-3" of snow.

Got out this photo from December to show you how small an amount that is.

We can power through this knowing it is getting lighter every day and spring is coming!

Did I say I got a Kindle?

So naturally, I had to have a cover and since I had spare time, I chose bright fabric, so I wouldn't lose it, and even quilted the ordinary fabric by machine, a new technique I am stumbling through learning. The pocket is large enough to hold the charging cord when traveling and has a zipper along the long side on top.

Don't know why the picture rotated 90 degrees in uploading, but being a novice blogger will learn to rotate pictures later.

Nothing finer than an omelet

Sunshine, Smucker's Orange Marmelade for the English Muffins, a five star sudoku and a Sunday morning treat by Neil. This will definitely be on the menu for the March trip!

First time for everything

Two feet of snow makes you appreciate Christmas is coming.

Now it is the new year and blogs are the challenge.