Summer Hours

19 Jun 2012 4 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World Tags: , , , ,

It’s June.  School is over. Sports are over. It’s getting really hot. This is the start of a long, lazy summer for my kids.  There will be camp and travel in their future – but not yet.  My daughter is babysitting a little, and my son gave it a shot with an iced tea stand (a full 1/2 hour, he made $2) but other than that – they have nothing to do.  I am completely jealous.  I’m on conference calls and doing paperwork while watching them putz around.  You know putzing right? It’s like puttering or being idle.  I know we should give them some summer reading and math projects – they should be practicing piano everyday (sorry Ms. Tatyana) – and I know we should encourage them to keep their minds active and engaged. But we don’t.  We let them stay up late and sleep in.  That’s why on a perfectly good early afternoon – you can still find them snoozing.  Come back after lunch – they’ll be ready for the day.

Notice the sun beaming in through the windows, not that they notice.

In here somewhere is my firstborn.  The more time she spends sleeping  is the less time she spends texting.

And here’s the hooligan. The more he sleeps in  - the less he’s terrorizing your neighborhood.

Best Boyfriend Ever

18 Jun 2012 8 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World

I don’t mean my boyfriend since, you know, my husband wouldn’t approve.

My sister’s man surprised her yesterday with a hot air balloon ride for her birthday.  How cool is that?  He told me about the surprise the night before and I acted all happy and excited, when deep down I was yelling,”NO!! PLEASE! SHE’S MY ONLY SISTER!!!”.  Thank goodness he’s more balanced and adventurous than I am, because he knocked it out of the park.  Actually, he knocked it off of the ground. She loved it. She wasn’t afraid for her life at all.  She didn’t even cry, falling to her knees kissing the dirt and thanking god for gravity….not that I would have done that – no I’d still be passed out from fear.

Anyway – here’s her amazing photos from the heavens. While you’re looking at the shots in the clouds please remember that she’s standing in what looks like a wicker picnic basket – not inside a plane with a seat belt watching a movie.  I won’t lie – I was sweating a little looking at these pictures.  Thank god I’m not her boyfriend. She’d never leave the house if I was.

Look at that tiny little box that was holding her life….

Away they go.  At this point I would have stopped trying to jump out and just started crying.

I’d be speaking in tongues at this point.

Look at this beautiful picture – I’m in awe.  If a girl screams in a hot air balloon and you didn’t hear it, did she really scream? Just kidding. She didn’t scream.  She was loving it.

This is the shot where I need you all to remember that she’s in an open box, no harness, no nothin’.  All hail the newly minted 29 year old.

Chocolate It’s Bananas! Bread Pudding

17 Jun 2012 1 Comment

by wifemothereventplanner in Cooking! Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I told you guys I had too many bananas.  Ok – after this we’ll be banana free for a bit.  Hope you try this and hope you forgive me for not retyping the ingredients.  (Recipe can be found in the Flour Bakery Cookbook – again).  This is the first time I made this recipe but I’m a chocolate pudding risk taker.

 

Cube the bread and put in a wide, shallow pan.  I used a loaf of day old bread from the local bakery but any old bread would do.

 

In a separate bowl whisk together the eggs, sugar and baking soda.

 

 

Heat the half&half to scalding but not to a boil.  So basically a thin skin will start forming but no bubbles.  Although I saw a couple of bubbles but nobody’s perfect.  If you are perfect, you’ll start heating the half&half before cubing the bread and whipping the egg mixture, being 100% efficient with your time.  Or you can be like me and wait by the stove staring down the liquid as if you’re eyes had super scalding power.

Anyhoo – once it’s at the scalding hot stage – pour it onto the chocolate chips – which you’ve combined in yet another bowl.  I promise you, this is the last “another” bowl you’ll need.

 

Start stirring slowing after pouring and you’ll see the chips magically dissolve leaving a big fat pot of chocolate half&half.  You can just stop here and have that for desert if you’d like.  No one will know.

 

Once the chocolate has fully dissolved, slowly, carefully, pour the egg mixture in – all the while whisking as you go (and then try taking a picture at the same time. I’m just sayin’).

If the odds are in your favor and you don’t have chocolate egg curdles – pour the mixture onto the cubes of bread.  The book calls for pouring the liquid through a sieve first but I pretended not to read that part.

Then add the bananas.  You can either slice the bananas in or in my case, squeeze the overripe goop onto the pan and mix in.  Tasty.

Then into a 300 degree oven for a 1.5 hours.

 

Once done – add your choice of topping – chocolate sauce, whipped cream, ice cream…. take a wild guess what I picked.

Bad Movie Streak

15 Jun 2012 7 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in I need to tell you about this right now Tags: , , , ,

Ugh.  UGH. I love movies. My husband loves movies.  When we were young and wild and free, we went to a movie every Friday night. We still make it out of the house –  but we also “on demand” a lot.  When Oscar time comes around – it’s a personal mission to watch everything nominated.  And we are not movie snobs.  We like a big budget Tom Cruise movie as much as a small, independent Sarah Polly flick.

It’s this spirit of openness and non-discrimination that hastotally messed us up.  We’ve seen crap movie after crap movie.  Sometimes we get duped by reviews (damn you Rotten Tomato), sometimes we get duped by cute faces (by we I mean me), and sometimes we should have just known better.

Here’s some recent failures:

  • Prometheus: WTF. I love Michael Fessbender, Noomi Rapaci, and Luther himself – Idris Elba, but WTF.  I have no freakin’ idea what the movie was about.  I know, I know – it’s a prequel to Alien.  Still have no clue – none.  Listen, I can easily follow the plots in Game of Thrones, The Wire and the new Dallas, so it’s not me.  Is it?
  • Man on a Ledge: Should’ve known better
  • Contraband: Ditto. Although come on Marky Mark – after The Departed and The Fighter I expect more.
  • The Vow: it makes The Notebook look like Shakespeare
  • One for the Money: just because it’s on HBO doesn’t mean you should watch it.
  • The Hangover II:  Bradley Cooper is insanely good-looking.  Freakishly handsome.  It’s almost painful how sexy he is. Movie still sucked.

Oh well.  I have some high hopes for the next few weeks – and if that doesn’t work – there’s always reality TV to keep me warm at night.

Girls, Chicks, Broads and Lovely Ladies

14 Jun 2012 6 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World

This post could also be called, “ode to women”.  I’ve been thinking about all the gals in my life.  ’Cause I’m all wise and mature.  Not really.  I’m just surrounded by all these forces of nature and I’m so thankful.  Some of them are oldie but goodie friends, some are family, and some are new gal pals.  Who’d have thunk it? So in no particular order or rationale – here’s some scoop on some of them:

  • My “Army of Aunts” – how come no one ever told me growing up that the world, my world, is held together by aunts? Old, young, married, single – they make my family tick.  My husband would agree.  We both grew up surrounded by formidable aunts that helped raise us.  Now that we have kids, our sisters, cousins, friends have become aunts to them. Aunts rule – do not mess with an aunt.
  • Girls, Girls, Girls – my daughter is funny.  Like really funny.  Her friends are funny too.  Maybe I’ve forgotten – but I do not remember having a personality until well into my 20s.  Oh there’s drama – there’s always drama. But there’s also kindness. Smart, beautiful, kind and funny.  I wonder if they would have been friends with me in 8th grade?
  • Friends without judgement.  I have girlfriends that I’ve known for decades that I call…I dunno…almost never.  But when I do call them – or Facebook them – it’s all good.  There’s no where-have-you-been-for-the-past-year? Thank goodness for that – because I do love them and miss them and need them, I’m just drowning in life over here.
  • Just arrived, brand spankin’ new friends – they may have come from work or they may be your kid’s best friend’s mom – who cares! They rock.  My son and my daughter have brought many kick-ass women into my life.  And guess what people, when we are together we do not talk about the kids.  We talk about jobs, politics, remodeling, our husbands….and we drink. It’s magical.
  • Then there are women I speak to everyday, my lifeline, my Bat signal.  The conversations are sometimes quick, sometimes hurried, and always interrupted. They know my daily issues at work, and my daily issues at home and they have their own issues – thank the lord.

I love me some men.  But without women in my life I’d be a goner.

 

Good God

13 Jun 2012 7 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday I overheard a conversation that my son had with one of his pals – eavesdropping, it’s like a hobby of mine.

They were talking about a statue of the Indian god Ganesh that I have in my living room.  Admittedly, I know more about Jesus than Ganesh, but I do know that Ganesh is the god of “good luck” or something like that.  Truth be told – I bought the thing to make my mother happy when she visits.

Good luck god in-house – check!

Here’s the conversation piece….

I also have a beautiful Gaelic cross right next to it.  Am I trying to make a deep, thoughtful statement on how we should all get along? Nope. I just thought it was cool. Yes I’m shallow and vapid – but at least I’m honest!

Anyway, my son was explaining to his pal that we are Indian.  He said,” but not “Natural American” like from Plymouth, from the country India in China.” Then his pal asked,”what’s it called?” And my son said,”it’s called Greta.”

I blame myself.  I blame our school system’s lack of focus on Geography, and I also blame my husband – He and I went to Catholic school our whole lives (why did I go to a Catholic school when I’m not Catholic? Because there are no Hindu schools, and my father believed any religion is better than no religion).

When my daughter was born we decided that he was right, and that we wanted to pass on both religions to our children.  But we were delusional. Our hearts were in the right place – but we were fooling ourselves. The only thing we’ll be passing on is a half-hearted, lax approach to a higher power.  Let’s face it, we’ve schooled them better on The Beatles than we have on God.

We don’t go to church-except on food related holidays, we don’t go to temple-although the few times we’ve gone it’s been fun to see my burly Irish Ukrainian husband try to sit criss-cross apple sauce for 2 hours.

Thank goodness that Hinduism is very forgiving – and fellow Catholics don’t point and laugh when we show up once a year to sing carols.  And we do believe in God/Ganesh/Greta – really we do – but I don’t see us changing our ways anytime soon.

Pray for us – we need it!

It’s Bananas! Bread

12 Jun 2012 9 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Cooking! Tags: , , , , , , , ,

If you open my freezer at any given hour in any given day in any given week you’ll find over ripe, frozen bananas.  I haven’t thrown a banana out in years.  Just so you know that I’m not talking about a yellow banana with some brown spots…here’s what I speak of….

 

I have been trying banana bread recipes for years – sometimes they rock, sometimes not so much.  Last Christmas I was given a fantastic cookbook called Flour (thank you Ty!).  The author owns a bakery by the same name in Boston.  I’ve never been to heaven, but I’m guessing it tastes like their chocolate croissants (that recipe is in the book too but it’s actually easier and faster to fly to Boston and eat one there).  I digress.  You only need 3 bananas for the bread but I had close to 20 frozen (i’m bananas too) so I decided to double the recipe (i could have tripled it but then that would really be bananas – sorry). As with everything I cook – I tweaked a bit from the book.  We like to go heavy on the cinnamon and vanilla in our house so I doubled that amount, I didn’t have walnuts so I used pecans, I didn’t have any creme fraiche so I used sour cream and I threw in some chocolate chips at the end for the hell of it.  Here’s what you need for the bread….

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (or if you’re me, 1 tablespoon)

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup canola oil

3 very very very ripe bananas

2 tablespoons creme fraiche (or sour cream if you’re not fancy)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (1 tablespoon for us!)

3/4 cup nuts

First you’ll need to sift all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, cinnamon, baking soda)

Then in a bowl whip together the eggs and sugar (is it throwing you off that the pictures show twice the amount of stuff listed? no? good.)

 

Then whip that baby on medium speed for at least 5 minutes (if you are doing by hand it’ll be closer to 10 – which will explain why I chose to NOT do this by hand). Once it’s nice and fluffy – turn the mixer or your hand on low and slowly add the oil.  Mash up the bananas and roughly chop the pecans (or your choice o’ nuts).  I put mine in a ziploc and wack them with a mallet.  It does the job and releases stress.

   

Put the banana mush into the wet ingredients and then combine with the dry

 

Stir just enough to mix together

At this point in the recipe I remembered to preheat the oven to 325.  Feel free to do that in the beginning if you want to do things the right way.  Pour into your desired cookware.  Since I was making enough to feed a village I used 5 mini loaf pans.  Disposable, foil pans that don’t need to be buttered – not good for the environment but oh-so-good for the lazy baker.

For laughs – I did a couple of loaves with semi-sweet chips, two others with just pecans, and one with both.

  

 

Then it goes into your nicely preheated oven for an hour.  Yep – a whole hour.  Don’t be tempted to take it out early or else you’ll have some extra goo in the middle of the loaf.  Goo.  That’s a professional baking word.  These need to rest for another hour after they come out.

And, truth be told, they taste much better on day 2.

That’s 9:47 am on a Sunday in case you were curious.  At 10:47, when these babies were done, so was I.

I didn’t do another productive thing all day! Wasn’t this enough?

and this

No more teachers, no more books…

11 Jun 2012 6 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in I need to tell you about this right now Tags: , , , , ,

My kids are done with school.  I now have a 3rd grader and a freshman in high school.  Excuse me while I go cry in a corner.

How did these two babies

turn into mini people…sob sob sob

Coconut chicken ala Coconut

10 Jun 2012 8 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World Tags: , , , , , , ,

Cooking posts are hard.  Maybe just hard for me, since millions of cooking blogs do it everyday.  I bow down to them.  Maybe one of my tens of readers will make this and love it.  If you do, and you don’t. Please keep it to yourself. I just spent an entire day making what usually takes me a good 10 minutes.

Coconut Chicken  - the cast

4 skinless, boneless chicken thighs

1 can coconut milk

1 lime

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 tablespoon of salt

1 large onion, red pepper and green pepper (I had some frozen fire roasted ones that I used)

1 chicken bouillon cube

3 tablespoons of tomato paste

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoon of garlic powder

Handful of cilantro

Generously douse the chicken in the juice of one lime and then sprinkle the chicken with salt and garlic powder

Heat the olive oil on a high heat

 

Add the chicken and sear both sides – don’t worry about cooking all the way through

Once it’s seared, take the chicken out and let it rest.  Add the peppers, bouillon cube, bay leaves and tomato paste

 

Stir it around to pick up all the chicken bits on the bottom of the pan

My onions and peppers were precooked – but you’ll need a good 5 minutes to cook them down. Then add the full can of coconut milk and bring to a boil. Be sure to shake the can first – if you don’t – you’ll get some funky clear liquid  with white goo on the bottom. Been there. Done that.

Add that patient chicken back in the pan with all the juices, put a lid on it, and turn the heat to low

  

While the chicken cooks with the sauce for 5 minutes, chop up way too much cilantro – you’ll only use 1 tablespoon of that heap.  Add it to the chicken and keep the rest, there may be some salsa that needs it during the week.

Serve it up with some homemade white rice.

I keep mine in Golden China to-go containers. What?

More is More

09 Jun 2012 4 Comments

by wifemothereventplanner in Brave New World Tags: , , , ,

So I’m still in the midst of going through my stuff to figure out what to put out at the yard sale. Yes, I’m still talking about the yard sale. It’s like stressing me out man. Gird your loins – tomorrow’s post may be about yard sales too!

So as I’m searching for stuff (oh the irony…shouldn’t I be tripping over stuff to get rid of, isn’t that why one signs-up for a yard sale? ok, maybe it’s not irony, maybe it’s just stupidity), I find some of my old silver bracelets. They remind me of a funny store. Funny for me to tell and you to hear. Not so funny for my husband who thought it was a gift and now it’s a funny story. We must all sacrifice to the blog gods.

When we were first dating, way back when, his gift giving was,in a word, sucky. Full disclosure on my part – so was mine. Except mine was sucky because I had no money, ever. My parents had dropped me off at college with $5 and a smile. This guy always had a job and so he always had cash (that and his good looks were hard to ignore). The first gift giving we did was at Christmas. I gave him…nothing. He gave me a beautiful pair of Onyx and silver earrings. I was floored. They were amazing. They were also the last good gift I’d get for years.

I hear him out there in the universe objecting, fist in air, outraged. Need I remind him of the beautiful bracelet shaped box I got for my birthday with a PEN inside. A pen. Who knew a 23-year-old could retire from no job. Or the pair of shoes I got in the wrong size? Note to all you single men out there – unless you’re prince charming, don’t get your gal shoes.

Then came my favorite attempt of all time. I call it – The Great Silver Dump of 1995. He asked what I’d like for Christmas. I said I’d love any kind of silver jewelry. I was hoping he’d pick out a ring, a bracelet, a necklace that he thought was perfect for me. Something that would remind me of him every time I wore it.

What I got was 4 silver bracelets, 2 rings, 3 pairs of earrings and 1 necklace. 10 boxes of silver jewelry. It was like he robbed a store. I just kept opening box after box after box. It was hysterical. I wore every single piece for years (and years) (and years), until I lost them or broke them or displaced them.

Here’s 3 of the bracelets from my bounty that survived. They will not be at the yard sale.

and because I know you’re nosey like me – here’s the jewelry box I found them in. It was a gift to my mother from my grandmother. It was either given to me by my mother, or I saw it at my mom’s and decided to take it. One of those things happened. Who can remember details.

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