Thursday, April 30, 2015

Brownie Lesson

Usually food posts go on my food blog, Blue Plate Special.    This is a little more than that.



These are not just brownies.  They're a lesson in cause-and-effect, and chemistry.

Will came home from school a few weeks ago, telling us about an assignment.  He had to write a recipe for something, and he'd written one for brownies.  And he wanted to take the recipe to the next level...he wanted to make them with Dad.  Dad is the primary (I am hardly even the secondary!) baker of the household.  So they made it a Wednesday "Guys Night" project while I was at knitting group.

The first step is to melt butter for fifteen minutes.  Hmmmmm, even I as the "secondary baker" know that if you melt butter for 15 minutes, you aren't going to have butter anymore.  You are going to have a scorched mess and a sad kid whose brownies have already taken a death blow in the very first step.  So with a little tweaking (i.e. more cocoa, balance of ingredients) a pan of brownies materialized.

Surprisingly, they weren't too bad.  Not the fudge-y, chocolate treat you usually have, but they rose in the pan and had some chocolate flavor.  And my little scientist wants to keep tweaking the recipe, until it is worthy of The Notebook.  The Notebook is a small notebook that I received as a shower gift, in it we copy any recipes that we really, really liked.  We put a lot in it the first five years of marriage, now we're a bit more discriminate on what goes into the all-important Notebook.  What Will doesn't know, though,  is that his recipe is already Notebook-worthy.  Just not in the way that he thinks, but in terms of preciousness.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Six Flags!

We were looking for something fun to do with the boys this past weekend since Monday was a holiday and (GASP) Daddy had the day off!  I haven't been out to Six Flags since right before it was Six Flags, so that was.....17 years ago?  (I'm suddenly fighting off the urge to sob uncontrollably.)

Monday's weather looked nasty from the news, so we opted for a beautiful sunny Sunday instead.  After a breakfast at Cracker Barrel we drove out to the park, expecting crowds.  There weren't any!  There was only one ride that had a wait, and everything else was just a couple of minutes.  Sean and I won superhero capes while playing carnival games, we ate junk food like french fries and funnel cakes and even had ice cream for lunch.  Basically, it was the kind of day that little boys dream about.  No arguments, no fussing, and the only crying was when Sean wasn't tall enough for two of the rides.  (Which is understandable.)  We ended up having such a great day, we upgraded our tickets to season passes!  Can't wait to go a few more times and next time, we can experience their waterpark.  Looking forward to making memories.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Friday Fun

The boys and I are usually together on Friday nights, while their dad plays volleyball.  They have "Guys Night" on Wednesdays so on Fridays we have the "Friday Night Fun Club."  Corny I know, but they enjoy it.  Some nights we put on elaborate stuffed animal scenes.   Some nights we snuggle in my bed and read from The Hobbit or Pokémon or perhaps the "Field Guide of Marvel Superheroes."  Tonight was a movie and Mom's choice.   So we went with an old classic:  Home Alone.  Some observations:
-Sean had the cop (Joe Pesci) pegged as the villian right away.
-the boys wonder why the bandits don't give up on chasing little Kevin after all the traps.  Still, they think it's great fun, and laugh like hyenas every time someone falls down the stairs or gets hit in the head with a paint can. 
-having a different perspective now that I'm an adult, I wonder just how in the hell these guys aren't dead, much less chasing down the kid!
And lastly....how in the hell is this movie 25 years old????  I remember going with my friends and sniggering at every mishap like it was yesterday!

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Pass the Mug

I'm always a little shocked at just how much one can accomplish when properly caffeinated.  And with a month like this one, I'm definitely needing 2-3 cups per day!  Work stuff, kid stuff, Easter,  April vacation, hosting a potluck, karate, housing conference next month, soccer starting up....OY!  It all manages to get done, doesn't it....even without the caffeine.  Though it's much better (and less crabby) with it than without.  May your coffee cup be bottomless and your thoughts less cluttered, my friends.