July 12, 2011
Ask me where I was standing when I took this photo. No, seriously. Ask me.
Oh, I just happened to be standing outside the back door of the rental house in Sea Ranch where we spent the last four days and every day we were there was just as beautiful as the day before. Did I say beautiful? I meant to say s-t-u-n-n-i-n-g!
For four days this was the view I had from the couch that I only left to walk on the ocean bluff, soak in the outdoor jacuzzi under the stars, make another meal, go to bed and . . .
. . . and to take photos.
My activity level was only matched by the sea lions.
At least someone was breathing and moving at the same time.
It really was nice to spend a few days away relaxing, reading, blogging, and starring out at the ocean, the blue sky, and the stars, but it’s equally nice to be back home again. The view isn’t as breathtaking but the couch is just as comfortable.
Posted in Day Trips/Weekend Escapes, Travel 2 Comments »
July 11, 2011
I love the name of this blog. The Passionate Plate: Savoring Life in Small Bites. Admit it. It’s awesome. You wish you had thought of it first but you didn’t so move on and don’t cry in your soup over it.
When I started up this blog, that’s really what I was doing…savoring every little bit of life. There was my rather radical last push at weight loss through fasting that had me moving through the world in a normal size body for the first time in my life and the double-whammy corrective surgeries that removed about 15 pounds of sagging skin, the residue outer coating from a lifetime of morbid obesity. There were little snippets of new adventures out on the hiking trail (me…hiking….go figure), in the kitchen creating healthy food (there’s a first time for everything!) and impending travel plans to Italy and all the unbridled obsessive compulsive excitement that came along with it.
And then the hard edges of life happened. My mom died two weeks after my final surgery when I was still being held together with suture tape and a prayer. Two days later my brother Randy was diagnosed with ALS. Fast forward four months and my mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and for five months until her death the rest of the life was put on hold. Travel plans were cancelled. Thoughtfully prepared healthy meals were replaced by fast, easy food thrown together at the end of emotionally and physically exhausting days. Day hikes, beach weekends, and and strolling through the farmer’s market were traded in for caregiving, doctor’s appointments, hospice arrangements, and end of life conversations. And when, after five months my mother-in-law died and we were still fresh in grieving her death our attention turned to my brother Randy and the lightening fast progression of his ALS. At that point life was no longer measured by weeks or months but by the short periods of time between the 600 air miles traveled to be with my brother and if I savored anything during those months from my mother-in-laws’ passing to the death of my brother it was savoring how precious life is in the moment. Knowing the time I had with my brilliant, handsome, and charmingly quirky brother was coming to a foreseeable end, I sucked the marrow out of the bones of every minute we had together. No minute was insignificant. Every second mattered. I knew it then when he was still here. I know all the more now that he’s gone.
During all the months that have made up the last three years, blogging plummeted to the bottom of my priority list while every meaningful relationship I have skyrocketed to the top. There were the months spent supporting my spouse as she cared for her mom, followed by months of spending every minute I could with my brother, and recently over the past two months life has been all about grieving his passing. Looking back, the only writing I’ve done through these months that’s worth anything at all are the words I scrawled together when writing the obituaries for my mom, my mother-in-law, and my brother. They were actually words that came easy even if they were the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. [Note to my surviving family members: No, I will not write your obituary if I out live you. Write your own or begin now to recruit one of your off-spring for the task. I'll correct the typos but that's all your getting from me because I've reached my obit quota.]
So here I am once again, getting back into some normal flow of life when life has seemed anything but normal and to get myself rooted back into ordinary life I’m going to make another run at blogging about this and that. Mostly this. Sometimes that. We’ll see where it takes us.
Posted in Healthy Eating, Our Families, Weight Loss 9 Comments »
March 25, 2011
I’ve been away from blogging for a while and least any of you had concluded I’d won the lottery and moved to a remote private island with white sandy beaches, blue sparking water and no internet access I thought I should update you on what’s really been happening. Cookies are what’s happening. Beach? No. Kitchen? Yes.
Sweet Hope Cookies, the non-profit venture I began this year to provide a little sweet incentive for cookie lovers to make donations for ALS research and patient care has raised more than 2000 dollars for the ALS Association since Valentines. Yes, I’m thrilled and deeply, deeply grateful that so many people I know have an insatiable sugar addiction.
Until SweetHopeCookies.com is in place, you can find SHC on Facebook or on our donation/order page hosted by the ALS Association, Oregon-Chapter here.
In the meantime, here are photos of the cookies I’ve made over the past few months to serve as photographic proof of why I’ve been a wee bit too pre-occupied to blog regularly. Mea culpa.
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Posted in Sweet Hope Cookies 5 Comments »
January 27, 2011
For the past three days I’ve been in the kitchen. In those three days I’ve mixed, rolled, cut, baked and decorated six batches of cookie dough. Actually it was eight batches of cookie dough in total if I count the double batch I had to make to replace the cookies I sent careening across the floor when the full force of my body weight moving in a forward motion collided with a non-moving four-tier stack of baked cookies that were cooling. That’s the way the cookie crumbles indeed! More like disintegrates. And no, I didn’t take a picture for your entertainment value but only because I’ve found it next to impossible to hold a camera still when screaming.
So I know it was only a couple weeks ago when I said I was going to take a couple months off from baking but….well….don’t good intentions count for anything anymore?! I really had meant to refrain from being alone with only my standing mixer, a silo of sugar, and enough cubes of butter to grease a pig farm, but then I had an idea. And this is where everyone who knows how I am mutter a collective “She had an idea? Uh-oh.” Get it out of your system. I’ll wait.
So here’s the idea. Take the thing I love doing (baking) and use it to raise money to fight the thing I hate the most (ALS), and so that’s what I’ve decided to do and that’s why I’ve been in the kitchen all week. I’m starting up a little venture called “Sweet Hope Cookies.” I’ll be taking LOCAL orders to make home made, hand decorated cookies for any occasion (and you already know I have at least one cookie cutter for just about any day of the year and then some) and 100% of the proceeds will be donated to The ALS Association. I’m donating my time and vats of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs so that all the money that comes in will go toward advancing medical research and to providing immediate support to those living with ALS by making additional resources available for their physical and emotional care. What I’ve come to learn over the last year is that there are a thousand and one gadgets, devices, medications, and treatments not covered by insurance that are desperately needed by an ALS patient and their family to cope with the progressive physical losses that end up up transforming even the most basic day to day tasks into a personal Mt. Everest. Watching the progression of ALS in the life of my brother has been devastating to all of us who love him but even in the most overwhelming moments there’s a sense of profound gratitude that at the very least Randy has the means to access all the equipment and supplies he needs to maintain as much comfort and independence as one can have possibly hold onto when living with such a horrific disease. There are far too many ALS patients who don’t have the means to get everything they need as they need it and so my hope is that I can sell enough cookies to make even one small piece of equipment available to another ALS patient so that their Mt. Everest might be a little less steep even for a short while.
So that’s why I’m back in the kitchen already and why I hope enough orders come in that I end up remaining in the kitchen for a very long time. To get Sweet Hope Cookies up and running I made up a number of same Valentine’s Day cookie boxes that I’ll be showing to the folks at church this Sunday that will hopefully generate some orders. I have all the photos online here.
Posted in Cookies 5 Comments »
January 17, 2011
I have one weakness. I should probably clarify that statement. What I mean to say is that I have one weakness which I’m willing to publicly acknowledge. The others I leave for you to guess and I encourage you to have fun with that in your free time. Anyway, here’s my weakness. I have a thing for sprinkles, jimmies, sanding sugar and luster dust. How could I not? Look at how shiny and pretty they are. What is not to love about them?
Knowing full well this might well ignite my sister’s unreasonable assertions that I tend toward being, I believe the word she uses is obsessive, (an assertion she continues to reiterate in the comments section of this blog as well as directly to my face) I admit without hesitation that I like to organize my sprinkles, arranging them occasionally by variety and other times by color. Is that over the top? Let me ask you, is it over the top for a woman to arrange her rings, necklaces, and earrings in separate compartments in her jewelry box rather than throwing them all willy-nilly and loose into a shoebox? If that’s acceptable behavior for her then why shouldn’t I have the same liberty to do the same with my cookie ornamentation without taking grief for it? Must I continue to rail against injustice in the world even in this?
And by the way, I realize that the use of the term willy-nilly is another indication of my advancing years along with hot flashes and the Carpenters Greatest Hits on my iTunes playlist.
Anyway, I love me some sprinkles. Sanding sugar is oh so sparkly, nonpareils perfect tiny balls of rainbowy goodness and don’t even get me started on disco dust. How can you not be inexplicably drawn to glittery candy dust that’s labeled, “non-toxic, not intended for consumption.”
So yes, I have a bit of an obsession with sugary cookie bobbles, cookie cutters, cookie dough and cookie icing, but all obsessions pale to this; my obsessive following of blogs by an amazing plethora of über cookie decorators. If you want to see who inspires me and whose cookies I primitively copy and learn from, here they are, in no particular order of praise-worthiness:
These are the blogs I follow every day (thank goodness they don’t all post everyday or there would be no time left for me to make my own cookies!) and there’s the awesome Cookies R Us forum and the great video tutorials at the University of Cookie and Karen’s Cookies and all the cookie cutter and cookie supply online stores and . . .
Okay. Maybe I’m a little obsessive. Just a smidge. But let’s just keep that between you and me. There’s no need to tell my sister.
Posted in Cookies 4 Comments »
January 15, 2011
Call me a quitter if you must but I’m giving up on my idea to post photos of all the food I eat everyday for a week. UNCLE!!! Nice idea but frankly it’s just too boring. Like I need to tell you. I realized it was a pretty lame idea when I got to thinking about the simple fact that I basically eat the same food everyday. For more than five years I ate the exact same thing for breakfast every single morning and realistically I could eat the same breakfast and lunch everyday and maybe switch dinner up with three or four different options and be perfectly content. I love variety and trying new things when it comes to cooking and baking for others but for myself, I’m happy with same-o same-o. So the food photo journaling might have been helpful for me in terms of being a hedge against snacking (and it was) but in terms of good fodder for my blog, not so much.
So maybe this will be more interesting . . .
A couple months I stumbled my way onto some incredible decorated cookie blogs and and have developed a major passion for developing my own skill. I made some cookies the other day to practice some of the tips and techniques I’ve been accumulating in my blog reading and thought you might be interested. Hey, compared to my food photo journaling, I could post photos of paint drying that would be more exciting.
Dana and I love our little home but it admittedly is short on storage space which explains why my cookie cutter collection is currently residing under our dining room table. All fine and good unless we decide to host a dinner party.
As of three months ago, I only had a couple dozen cookie cutters that I’d inherited from my grandma. Now I have nine plastic bins with a large order of cookie cutters yet to be delivered, and I should probably add that the outstanding order is also my final order. At least that’s the assurance I’ve given to Dana. Only time and my cookie decorating addiction will tell.
I’ve always done things the same way in the kitchen whether I’m cooking or baking. It doesn’t matter if I’m making a pot of soup or baking forty gingerbread houses. I begin by gathering all the ingredients. Here are all the ingredients for Bridget’s Lemon Cut Out Cookies and Pam’s Black Cocoa Cut Out Sugar Cookies. I followed both recipes exactly with the exception of adding a splash of lemon extract to Bridget’s recipe and both cookies were amazing, sturdy buttery texture and great flavors.
The next thing I do is measure out everything at once. Mise en place. Everything in place and ready to go. Like I said, I’ve always cooked and baked this way. Call it obsessive if you will but I prefer taking the time to set things up at once for a couple reasons. First of all it prevents me from making as many careless mistakes in measuring or in forgetting an ingredient altogether, but primarily it helps keep the kitchen chaos and mess under control. Once I’ve prepared my mise en place and before I begin cooking or baking, I return all the bins and cartons of extra food stuff to where they’re stored, put anything I’ve used to prepare and measure the food (measuring spoons and cups, lemon zester, baker’s scraper…) into the dishwasher, and clean up any little spills from the floor or work surface. When I bake more than one thing at a time, such as today with the two cookie doughs, I just make sure to keep the sets of prepared ingredients apart from one another. As an added note, the plastic containers with the lids are food containers I buy at Smart and Final in lots of 50 each. They’re intended as single use for restaurants but I use them multiple times for a number of storage needs in the kitchen and they stand up to both the dishwasher and the microwave. I especially love them to use when melting candy coating or candy bark in the microwave because they don’t get hot like glass and overheat the chocolate.
While the cookie dough is chilling in the fridge I get everything ready for rolling and cutting. I don’t have one large unbroken working surface so I use this one corner of the kitchen and then put a rack across the kitchen sink so I place my baking sheets there and pick up a little more space. I also put all the bits and bobs I need for cutting the cookies (cutters, toothpicks, knife on a tray so the loose scraps of flour and dough that gets stuck on the cutters is contained and easy to clean. I always bake my cookies on parchment paper and that brown bundle of paper just above the cookie trays is about 30 year old parchment paper I found at my grandma’s a couple years ago. It makes me happy using it.
And now it’s all about just rolling and cutting.
I’ve been rolling my cookies to a thickness of about 1/4 inch (top cookie) but have been frustrated with breakage when I’d arrange more than one layer on a platter so this time I made them thicker (bottom cookie) and baked them at a lower temperature for a longer time. That seems to have done the trick and so far, not one broken cookie to show for it.
One of my favorite baking tools are my stacking (and collapsible for storage) cooling racks. I originally bought them for my annual gingerbread house baking marathon but anytime I bake more than a couple sheets of cookies, I set them up to save on counter space. I use them for trays of cookies that are cooling and to stack iced cookies that are drying.
Okay, this probably sounds and is obsessive but this week I traced every cookie cutter in my collection and have a file box with all the patterns organized by category. If I’m going to be decorating a cookie shape for the first time (and because I’m just beginning, it’s pretty much a given it’s a new shape to me), I make a copy of the pattern on our printer and then sketch out the design and make a list of the colors of icing I need to prepare.
Now I’m ready to get decorating. The dining room table is covered with a plastic tablecloth, I have my first set of cookies laid out on my turntable, icing is waiting in plastic containers (yet to be put into piping bags), any sprinkles or sanding sugars I’ll be using have been selected, and the patterns are close by as is a container for trash and a container with water for dropping in mixing spoons and little spatulas I use in filling piping bags. And just in case you noticed….the bottle of Vodka isn’t for drinking! It’s used for adhering luster dust onto the glaze. Seriously. I’m not making that up.
I didn’t take any photos of the actual decorating process because I have two hands and both of them were needed for decorating. I really had intended to take a photograph occasionally while I was doing the icing but once I start squeezing the icing bags my total focus goes into what I’m doing and I simply forgot about taking pictures. My bad.
So keeping in mind that these are practice cookies, here they are for your perusal.
These two Newfoundlands were made in tribute to my sister-in-law and brother’s dogs, Bernie and Otis.
And now it’s on to cookies that represent our family dairy; the white barns with blue trim and milk bottles with our logo. I used my sparkly new KopyKake projector for copying the logo onto each cookie. I love me my KopyKake!
See. Weren’t those more fun to look at than scrambled egg whites and sliced apples?
Oh, and just to keep it real and keep it honest, I had ONE bite of a lemon cookie and TWO bites of a chocolate cookie. Period.
Posted in Cookies, Food Foto Journal 9 Comments »
January 14, 2011
Because I’ve been up since 1:00 a.m. last night after a whopping 2 hours of sleep…
Because Dana and I spent the morning in San Francisco at the deYoung Museum drooling over original paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cėzanne, and Vincent van Gogh…
Because I’ve been hunched over the dining room table icing cookies since we got home…
Because my food has been boring and without incident today…
Because no one’s weekend depends on it…
And because I’m just so tired I could cry if one of our cats so much as looked at me sideways…
I’m forgoing my foodbox photo tonight. Instead I’m going to eat a pomelo, put on my jammies and stare at the TV with mind-numbing abandon.
Go and do ye likewise.
FYI, after Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone, my favorite painting at the exhibit today was Rest by Vilhelm Hammershoi. It made me cry.
Enjoy.
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Posted in Day Trips/Weekend Escapes, Our Town No Comments »
January 13, 2011
While my food most certainly could have been better today, as in three smaller meals instead of two big ones, I’m grateful for it nonetheless because I also baked two large batches of cookies to decorate this weekend and no cookie dough, not a smidge or a nibble crossed these lips. Both recipes were ones I hadn’t made before and so the temptation to taste was definitely there but not only is one nibble of cookie dough a slippery slope for me but I recently learned that tasting the cookie dough can be misleading as to the final taste. This past Christmas I made a pistachio-lime cookie dough that ended up being so tart the sweet was completely lost. When Dana took a bite and agreed I thought I might as well hurl the entire lump into the garbage but at the last minute decided to go ahead and bake up the cookies anyway to use as blank canvas in practicing my cookie decorating. As it turned out the tart from the lemon mellowed in the baking process and the flavor was wonderfully unique. So maybe after the cookies are all decorated I’ll eat one of the mini dog boned shaped ones. Maybe or maybe not. If I do, you’ll know because you’ll have the photographic evidence of “da crime.”
Today was a day off from the gym so aside from being on my feet in the kitchen for a good part of the afternoon, I was a slug. I wonder if menopausal hot flashes burns extra calories. One can have their dreams.
Posted in Food Foto Journal, Healthy Eating No Comments »
January 12, 2011
Our next door neighbors are going to spend a few days in wine country and so I baked a batch of the world’s easiest, yummiest, peanut butter cookies ever and if it matters to anyone, they’re gluten-free. Four ingredients tossed together that take 25 minutes from start to finish before you’re sitting down to warm cookies and milk. And I say YOU because I didn’t eat any to which my food photo for the day will bear witness. I also made a batch of red velvet cake balls dipped in pink chocolate and sprinkled with nonpareils, and nary a morsel of one of those bad boys either.
Here’s a raw cookie dough shot from today but the photo of the baked cookie is from Thanksgiving when I gobbled up one two three some for the first time at the Joshua Grindle Inn, Mendocino, CA. 
Among the many luxury items and attention to detail hospitality that makes the Joshua Grindle Inn the best place to stay in Mendocino County are the fresh-baked afternoon goodies the innkeepers (and our friends) Charles and Cindy, put out in the parlor every afternoon. I should mention that as it turns out the parlor is in the room immediately next to the suite where Dana and I usually stay which means the glass connister of fresh-baked yum-yums is less than 3.2 feet from the door to our room. You know what they say…..location is everything!
Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Cookies
2 cups peanut butter (no sugar added)
1 cup white sugar
1 cup Splenda
2 eggs
Directions: Preheat oven to 350 with the rack in the center. Toss all the ingredients into a bowl and mix by hand just until combined. Use a cookie scoop or a couple tablespoons to put cookies on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes. Eat. Share. Thank me. Thank Cindy.
As it turned out I was about 1/2 cup short of peanut butter today so I replaced it with 1/2 cup almond butter, and mini chocolate chips wouldn’t be such a bad idea either (are they ever?) as shown in the last photo.
Now, back to where in the world is Waldo what in the world did Anita eat today . . . I’ve been a tad under the weather today and my interest in food wasn’t a top priority; an event that occurs less frequently than a full ellipse of the sun. Anyway, that’s why my food box for today looks tragically pathetic, but do enjoy anyway.
Posted in Apron Adventures, Cookies, Fitness and Exercise, Food Foto Journal, Healthy Eating No Comments »
January 11, 2011
Here’s my food photo for . . .
No. Wait. That’s not the right photo. Something must be wrong with my Flickr account. Let me try one . . .more . . .
Ignore the photo! I did NOT eat the Tootsie Rolls! I double pinky swear! Wait. Here it is . . .
Whew. See. I told you. I only shucked peeled skinned unwrapped the Tootsie Rolls today but I didn’t eat a single chewy sweet roll of yum-yum and you know why? Because I have incredible self-control? Nope. I didn’t eat one because I didn’t want to photograph one and stick into my food box for the day. Pride. Ego. Honesty. Whatever the reason, it worked. Anyway, I’ll show you later in the week what the Tootsie Rolls are all about but for now here is my honest-to-goodness food montage for the day. On the exercise front I have nada to report as it was a day for appointments and chores, however don’t you think there’s some kind of intense caloric burn in candy shucking?
Posted in Fitness and Exercise, Food Foto Journal, Healthy Eating, Maintaining Weight No Comments »
