Stop the Pweachahs!

Conversation in the car:

Alice: "Mom, pweachahs are really, really bad."

Me: "Preachers?"

A: "YES! You know, pweachahs? They go out and kill animals?"

M: "Really? Preachers do that?"

A: "YES! They kill animals and then just take their horn or something."

M: "OH! You mean POACHERS, not preachers."

A: "That's what I said. Pweachahs is just a different word for poachers."

M: "Um.... Not really. You're really talking about poachers. A preacher is something very, very different."

A: "Okay. Can I send part of my allowance to stop the poachers? Can you look up where to send it?"

M: "Um... Okay."

A: "Do poachers trap skunks?"

M: "I don't think so - usually they hunt animals that are rare like rhinos or eagles."

A: "Phew! Good, because I love skunks. We should still stop them, though."


A little while later, coming out of the grocery store:

Woman standing by the door soliciting donations: "Donate to help stop child abuse?"

Me: "Not today."

Alice, very innocently: "I'm saving my money to help stop the poachers. Those are the REALLY bad people."

Thank God she didn't say preachers.


So, Alice is indeed saving her money to help stop the poachers. She's putting part of her allowance aside every week and when she's got $10, we'll find someplace to send it. Tim and I introduced the concept of matching funds to her. We told her we'd match whatever she decided to send. This is quite exciting to her. She said that it makes her feel very grown up.

Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies, Converted

I have a friend who is a true foodie. She enters recipe contests and wins them. She's got a new blog where she is taking on the challenge of feeding her family of 5 on $75 a week.

Today she posted a recipe for these:


Oh. My.

It was good timing because I "needed" to make cookies today. Her recipe was a good candidate for a gluten free makeover, so I tried them.

Oh. My.

There is a reason she does well in recipe contests. These are amazing. Its a good thing I have quartet rehearsal tonight with three guys who like cookies because these are dangerous.

When I look at converting a cookie recipe, there are a few clues as to how easy it is going to be. If I want to be virtually guaranteed of success the first time (i.e. I'm feeling lazy), I look for these characteristics:

1. A cup of flour or less in the recipe. Why? Because if it doesn't have much flour to begin with that means the cookie is not depending so much on gluten for its structure. It also means that its not depending on wheat for taste (think shortbread).

2. Bar cookies are a good bet, because they are contained in a pan with sides. My baking flops tend to be spectacular messes that run off the side of the pan and make the whole house fill with smoke. Most of the time they taste pretty good, they just have no structure. Bar cookies have four solid walls of built in structure.

3. Clues in the recipe that point to good structure. If a recipe instructs me to flatten a cookie with my hand or a fork it is a good sign that most likely it is not a dough that will flatten out on its own (and run all over my oven.).

This particular recipe met two of my three criteria for an easy conversion so I went for it. Actually, I felt so confident about it that I doubled the recipe. As you can see, it worked really well. For the flour I measured by weight and substituted part Pamela's mix and part coconut flour.

Sweet Success

My family LOVES pumpkin. They ask for pumpkin pie in July. Last year there was a pumpkin shortage which was a crisis in this house. Last weekend I did my "big shop" where I hit the warehouse store and spend about 1/2 of my monthly grocery / household budget. They had canned pumpkin. The excitement this produced in Alice and Tim was similar to the time when they walked around the store singing a made up song about ham, another passion they share.

We came home with enough canned pumpkin to last an average family 3 or 4 years. My family is not average. I predict that pumpkin will not make it to Thanksgiving.

I made this a few days later:

pumpkin bread with dried cranberries and walnuts

I got three loaves out of the recipe, which I doubled to use the entire 30 oz can of pumpkin. I took one loaf to a friend who thanked me the next day but said, "That was gluten bread, right?"

THAT is the ULTIMATE compliment.

I think my new found success in gluten free baking has to do with the purchase of a digital food scale. You see, a cup of rice flour, a cup of sorghum flour, a cup of Pamela's mix, and a cup of all-purpose wheat flour all have different weights. Substituting cup for cup does not always work out. If you measure by weight you have a much better chance of getting it right the first time.

For reference, a cup of all purpose flour weighs 125 grams, or about 4-3/8 oz.

Pumpkin Bread (single loaf recipe)

250 grams of flour (I used Pamela's Baking Mix and a little bit of almond flour.)
1 tea. baking soda (1/2 tea if using Pamela's)
1 tea. baking powder (1/2 tea if using Pamela's)
1 tea. cinnamon
1/2 tea. salt
1/2 tea. nutmeg
1 (15 oz) can of pumpkin
1 cup sugar (I always cut the sugar a bit, I probably used about 3/4 cup)
8 Tbs butter, melted (I used half butter, half oil and cut it down a bit)
2 eggs
2 tea. vanilla
1 cup toasted nuts, chopped (opt)
1 cup dried cranberries
If you are using gluten free flours that do NOT include xanthan gum, you will have to add some when you mix the dry ingredients, probably 1 teaspoon.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix the wet ingredients in a different bowl. Combine the two. Add anything optional. Pour into a greased loaf pan, bake at 350 for 45 to 55 minutes until it is done when tested with a toothpick.

Love Letters to my Daughter

This month has been tough on Alice. We always have a little bit of a rocky transition to the start of the symphony season. As a "lonely only" she is spoiled in terms of enjoying undivided parental attention. Summers are especially luxurious because I am off of work for three months. Usually we ease into the season - a few rehearsals here, a few concerts there... It's never easy for Tim and Alice when my work starts in the fall, but it's usually more of an annoyance to them.

This year has been very, very different. It's the symphony's 75th anniversary season. We kicked things off about a week earlier than usual with rehearsals for Amadeus, a collaboration we did with a local theater. The schedule for Amadeus was pretty intense. I was gone most evenings, some days I was gone all afternoon and evening. This week hasn't been much better. Last night and tonight are our gala concert. From Tuesday through Sat we were / are scheduled for six rehearsals and two concerts. Its a lot.

It is great to be busy. The symphony is doing very well, which is something to be extremely grateful for in this economy. The schedule has taken a toll on my family, though. Last night as we lay in bed talking, I mused that Tim and I had only seen each other a total of about 5 minutes in 48 hours. He leaves for work just as Alice and I are getting up and I leave for rehearsal as soon as he gets home. He's stayed up a few nights waiting for me, but at some point you just have to get some sleep!

Poor Alice is not doing well with the sudden shift of schedule. She is about as flexible as a rock anyway, and this has turned her little world upside down. I see her a lot more than I see Tim, but it is a far cry from the luxury of summer. On more than one occasion I have had to pry her off of me as I've left for the theater. "Tell them you quit" has become one of her favorite phrases.

I started leaving her notes in her lunch box. Just short, stupid, silly things like "Roses are red, blueberries are blue, cookies are sweet, now go eat your sandwich!" She LOVES it. She carries them with her the rest of the day. Then she started writing me notes that I would find on my nightstand when I came home from rehearsal:

This is just a sampling. She is prolific in all things artsy, this included. Tim says that she writes them every night after he tucks her in because she misses me the most then. I love them, but having so many little cards and post-its floating around was making me a little bit crazy. They are not something that can be thrown out or recycled easily because if she found out it would greatly offend her. (And I can understand that because if someone threw out a love note that I had just written to them I would be sad and offended too.)

So I came up with a solution:

It is not a Bible. It's a blank book for us to write back and forth in. She writes in it and puts it by my bed, I write back and put it by her bed.

So far she is loving it. I am too. I am hoping this is something we can do for many years.

Spencer's Angels

Alice is very perceptive and very bright. She is also a worrier. Because of this we've told her, in an age-appropriate way, about why I've been seeing the doctor so much lately. Honestly, I don't think we could have kept it from her. A few pregnancies back, when things were so early we had not told anyone (and had been very careful not to talk about it in front of her) she kissed my tummy and said, "hello baby!" A few weeks later, the morning after I miscarried, she said, "Mommy, why did the baby come say goodbye?" It gave me chills.

We have never told her about a pregnancy but she has known about all the losses. In our thinking it was less stressful for her to understand on a basic level what was going on than to see Mom and Dad upset, Mom going to the doctor all the time and Alice having no idea what was happening. Each time we told her that we were sad because we thought that she was going to have a brother or sister but the baby went to heaven instead.

This actually gave her solace when we had to put our cat to sleep last fall. It was her first tangible brush with death and she was devastated. She drew a picture of Spencer with wings sitting on Jesus's lap with little tiny angels flying around his head. She said that she was sad but the angel babies could have a turn playing with the cat.

So, she understands at least a little bit what is going on. Yesterday, though, we had an interesting conversation:

"Mom, why is the doctor trying to MAKE you have a baby?"

"Um.... Well... Actually, the doctor isn't MAKING me have a baby, Daddy and I WANT to have another kid in our family because you're so great." (I could see where this was heading and I wanted to try to head things off with flattery.)

At this point Alice looked like I had slapped her. The looks that crossed that child's face were incredible: betrayal, horror, disbelief...

"You don't want a sibling?" (BAD question, Mom!)

"If I have a brother or sister then I won't get all the attention!"

Which is exactly why we want to have another child. Well, one of the reasons, anyway...