Plum pudding is rarely made with plums. The word "plum" refers to any dried fruit, typically raisins.
 
Posts from the Past

Though I only write about food or books here on Baking and Books, in a past blogging life I wrote about anything that popped into my head. This morning I received an email telling me my old domain was about to expire, so I thought it would be fun to pull a few of ye’ old blog entries out, share them here on my new site. There were over 500 entries on my old blog but these were my favorites.

Death in the Afternoon - July 2006
As I was working out this afternoon I suddenly felt a sharp pain on the little toe of my right foot. I looked down, only to discover that I had been bitten by a rather large (ok, huge) wasp. What did I do? I freaked out. As it rose in the air (obviously plotting where to bite me next) I jumped away and sprinted to the other side of the room. I breathed easy for a millisecond before realizing that the mischievous little bugger was following me. Aaa! I ran right, he flew right, I ran left, he flew left. I’m sure that, were my ears capable of hearing high-pitched bug voices, I would have heard him laughing his ass off. “Look at her run! Ahahahaa!!”

This went on for about two minutes (ok, five) when I finally realized that I was being chased around my apartment by something smaller than my pinkie finger. Good lord, I thought. Am I really this pathetic? Apparently so, but no longer! This wasp had met his match.

So as I sprinted across the apartment for the umpteenth time (Oreo following close behind, she thought this was a fabulous new game) I hatched a plan. I’d left a towel next to the exercise bike and I could throw it on the wasp mid-flight, thus pinning him to the ground. It was perfect! On my next pass I quickly grabbed the towel, then did a Matrix-like mid-air 180-spin and launched it at him. I wish I’d caught the whole thing on film, because really my moves were quite impressive.

The only problem was the wasp. Yes my clever trap had forced him to the ground, but he had already figured out how to escape and was crawling up from underneath the towel. Eeek! What to do? I didn’t want to get closer because what if he was faking his slow progress? What if he was just waiting for me to try and flip the towel over again, waiting for the perfect moment to launch himself at my face? I certainly wasn’t going to fall for that old ruse.

Thinking quickly, I ran into the bedroom and grabbed the first two pieces of clothing I saw: a t-shirt and one of my bras. Yes, these would do. I made it back to the living room just as my foe managed to make it to the top of the towel, and then I tossed the clothes on top of him. First the shirt, then the bra for good measure! Take that! Ha!

My nemesis trapped, I was now faced with a conundrum. What should I do with him? I couldn’t leave things as they were, because sooner or later he’d escape. I could have opened the window and tried to toss him outside, but this presented two problems: First, how could I get him out of my clothes, then outside, without tossing my clothes out the window with him? Second, I wondered if his waspy little friends are lurking nearby, just waiting for an opening. After all, I had no idea how he got inside. Maybe they’d built a villainous little nest on the roof, just outside my apartment. How did I know?

I also had to consider that nature of the thing I had captured. It was obviously evil, why else would it bite a poor gal like myself while she was working out? And on her toe! Clearly evil, and I wasn’t about to release something like that back into the world. Maybe he’d bite a child next and then how would I feel? Guilty, that’s how I’d feel. Mr. Wasp had to die. The sentence: death by drowning.

I realize it might have been more humane to just smoosh him outright, but I didn’t want to have wasp guts smeared all over my clothes, and as we already discussed, removing him from said clothing presented a problem of its own. So I rolled the towel, shirt and bra into a little ball, then ran into the bathroom, placed it in the sink and turned the water on. I felt kinda bad as I imagined his horror when the water seeped through the cloth, but I was over it by the time the sink was full. My swollen toe, now two times the size of it’s twin, helped me along in that regard. The bastard got what he deserved I tell you! I have no regrets.

Tell Me, I Must Know - June 2006
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you become that or did you end up taking a different route? Me, I wanted to be a secret agent. I don’t know if this was strange or not, but my six-year-old self envisioned a whole slew of dangerous adventures where I completed super-scary missions without getting caught. (Unlike 007 who is always detected, pfft.) You can imagine the kind of mischief this led to around the house, my having an overactive imagination and all. Poor mom.

As for whether I achieved my childhood dream: well, obviously I couldn’t tell you if I had, could I? Who knows. Maybe this whole time you thought you were reading the blog of a graduate student when in reality I’m a spy. A dangerous spy. And all my posts have been written in some exotic location while taking a break from all the perilous things I do. Maybe there’s a bad guy hot on my trail right now. Maybe I’m writing this entry with my trusty gun at my side.

// Edit: My Mom has informed me that when I wasn’t pretending to be a spy I also dreamed of becoming ‘She-Ra Princess of Power.’ And look, she has proof:


Shera
The similarities are uncanny.

  • If you could have any super power, what would you want it to be?

If you stop and take this question seriously, it’s actually pretty hard to answer. At least, that’s been my experience. Do I want to be invisible? Read minds? Have amazing healing powers? Fly? Oh! The possibilites! If I had to choose right this instant I would want the ability to morph into whomever and whatever I want. Not like Mystique from X-Men, but like Odo from ‘Deep Space Nine.’ Then I could almost have all the other cool powers. I could practically be invisible if I changed into a chair. And I could certainly fly if I became a bird. As for reading minds and healing quickly, that would depend on the nature of shape-shifting, which, I have to admit, I’m not too familiar with. For instance, if I changed into someone with the ability to read minds, would I also be able to read minds? That is the question.

I asked my brother what kind of super-ability he’d want and you know what his answer was?

    “I’d I want to be a mutant with the super power of becoming a pigeon.”
    “What? Why?” I asked.
    “Because whenever I didn’t like someone I could turn into a pigeon, then fly overhead and poop on them.”

And there you have it folks. Clear evidence that I’m not the only strange one in the family.

The Doggy Days of Our Lives - June 2006
Oreo has always loved watching dogs on television (’Dogs with Jobs‘ anyone?) but yesterday she discovered what I think must be the doggy version of a soap opera. Namely, a National Geographic special about wolves. It had everything: the messed up family, the betrayal, the murder, the romance!

That is to say, the alpha male really didn’t like Bruno, our hero, and after a huge, nasty fight Bruno was forced to leave the pack, defeated and hungry. Betrayed by his own father! Oreo was quite upset about this, whining and looking at me as if to say “Can’t you do something?”

Alone, Bruno wandered in the wilderness, eventually making friends with an old wolf named Ranger who tried to teach him the ‘ways of the wolf.’ Oreo loved watching Bruno learn how to fish in a stream, and when the two wolves celebrated their friendship by running through the woods I think she wanted to run with them. Her tail was wagging, her front paws were prancing, it was the cutest thing ever.

But then Big Bad Daddy caught up with them and Ranger was killed. Murder! Oreo growled when this happened, then barked at the television for good measure. “You jerks!” she seemed to yell, “Can’t you let them fish in peace?!”

Not long afterwards, Bruno met a lone she-wolf (whose evil mother had forced her out of her own pack. Hiss!) She was beautiful and brave, the perfect match for our solitary hero with the haunted past. Fate had brought them together. Fate! So they fell in love and started a wee pack of their own. Awww, the romance. This set Oreo’s tail a-wagging.

When the show ended I think Oreo was emotionally spent because she decided to take a nap. But the next time she walked by the television she paused - looking at it, then at me - as if to say, “Can you believe how messed up that family was?” I know Oreo. I know. Here, have a biscuit.


There Were Reasons - February 2006
Scenes from my life. Or, why I didn’t blog this week:

On Sunday night I forgot to put the coffee pot in the coffee machine, which was set to turn on automatically at 7 AM Monday morning. As a result, when I stumbled into the kitchen at approximately 7:15 AM I was surprised by a lake of freshly brewed coffee that began on the counter and ended just short of the living room carpet. I didn’t realize this, however, until I stepped into the kitchen, slipped on the coffee and landed on my butt.

In retrospect, I should have been able to avoid this since the first sound I heard upon waking was Oreo noisily lapping liquid. In my groggy state I had assumed she was drinking water, but no, she was drinking my coffee. And instead of waking me up with Lassie style barks to tell me that kitchen was drowning she plopped herself down in the middle of the growing puddle and began licking the floor. Once I had recovered from my slippery fall I looked over and saw that I now had a multicolored lab, with Oreo’s bottom half covered in varying shades of coffee brown. I had one very hyper dog on my hands the rest of the day, and after her now mandatory bath Oreo did her best to expend her energy. She jumped on and off the couch for about fifteen minutes, spun in circles, ran back and forth across the apartment, and then, she ate my brand new running shoes. Well, ate is the wrong word. Assaulted is more appropriate.

With a morning like that I was stressed out most of Monday, but hey, Tuesday was a new day right? Time to start over, time to begin things on the right foot. I remembered to put the coffee pot in the coffee maker. Good. I had my cup of coffee in the morning. Good. But then I decided to take a shower. Normally this isn’t a big adventure, but on this particular morning the shower spout had, unbeknownst to me, become twisted so the nozzle actually pointed out into the bathroom instead of in the shower. (We have one of those removable shower heads that’s attached to a long hose.) So I walked into the bathroom, turned on the water to warm it up, got undressed, and then, without looking, switched the water to the shower nozzle.

Yowee! What a surprise! All the cold water trapped inside the hose came bursting into the bathroom, landed on my back, and shocked me so severely that I swiftly stood up and banged my head against the top of the shower door. The force of this impact then propelled me backwards, causing me to trip against the toilet and land, bum first, on the hard tile floor. I’ll spare you the profanities that spewed out of my mouth as I climbed to my feet and fought my way to the shower, hands in front of me and eyes closed, as I tried to make it past the steaming spray of water that was attacking me. Oh yes, and did I mention that when I tripped on the toilet I also broke the toilet seat? The whole thing split in two.

So Tuesday wasn’t so good either, but Wed would be better. Right?

I made it out the door on Wed without anything traumatic happening. Work went well for the most part. But then snack time arrived and one of my 5th graders decided to jam a Swedish fish up his nose. I have no idea why or when he did this, all I know is that I was answering a student’s question when the background of giggling and talking turned into: “Aaaaaa!!!!!” What’s going on? Who’s getting beat up? I wondered. Then I saw all the students gathering around T, who had a wide-eyed panicked look in his eyes and was holding his nose in an odd fashion. “What did you do?” I asked, to which he responded by pointing at his nose.”Mah, mah, nohse,” he said, sounding kind of funny because, well, he had a huge piece of candy in his face, “I cahn get e ought.”

I’ll let you imagine the rest of my day from here, and please, don’t forget to include my talk with his irate parents after school. Just for the record: teachers, as a rule, don’t usually encourage kids to stick inanimate (or animate) objects in any body orifice. If your child does do this we didn’t give him the idea and believe me, if we had any inkling he was going to try this we would have stopped him. Mkay?

I was up most of Wednesday night after having a nightmare about my husband selling me to Mike Tyson for potatoes. Somehow I’m sure this was connected to my stress from the day, but I can’t quite figure out how. At any rate, every time I fell back asleep the dream resumed where it left so I decided to just watch TV until the morning.

Aside from being incredibly tired and downing 5 cups of coffee to keep up with the kids, Thursday was uneventful. But then I got home and found a letter from a creditor claiming we owed the phone company almost $500 for an account we closed more than 4 years ago. I spent almost 2 hours on the phone with them trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Conclusion? Even though we paid our phone bill while living at the old address, unless we can find canceled checks or a bill stub proving it we have to fork over the dough. We spent hours going through our files but did they go back far enough? No, our records stop the month before the time period we needed to prove we paid our bills. Of course. Of course!

On Friday I turned on my computer only to find that nothing on the desktop was working. After rebooting four times I finally got FireFox to open, at which point my speakers started talking to me. I kid you not. It sounded like my computer was a CB radio. I could hear two unknown people having a heavily accented conversation about God only knows what. I hastily shut down my computer and didn’t turn it on again until this morning. Thankfully a night of watching SciFi’s Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica - plus eating strawberry pancakes for breakfast today - restored my vitality. Enough, at least, for me to sit down and tell you where the heck I’ve been. I hope you’ll understand if most of my energy this week went into cursing the fates and contemplating protective amulets. Or something.

Wanted: Nipples of Venus - January 2006
The other day I finished reading Chocolat , and ever since I’ve been haunted by this passage:

    “In glass bells and dishes lie the chocolates, the pralines, Venus’s nipples, truffles, mendiants, candied fruits, hazelnut clusters, chocolate seashells, candied rose petals, sugared violets… they gleam darkly, like sunken treasure…and in the middle a magnificent centerpiece. A gingerbread house, walls of chocolate-coated pain d’epices with the detail piped on in silver and gold icing, roof tiles of florentines studded with crystalized fruits, strange vines of icing and chocolate growing up the walls, and marzipan birds singing in chocolate trees…”

Nipples of VenusReading this transported me to a little chocolate shop in a far away French village. I imagined walking through the front door as the little service bell rang. I saw myself walking up to the glimmering counter and ordering a small cup of hot chocolate, which I would slowly eat with, you guessed it, several Nipples of Venus (and perhaps a pain au chocolat.)

In reality I’ve never tried these sinful sounding confections, but Roman chestnuts in brandied sugar sound too good to pass up. I first heard about them in Amadeus, when Salieri tempted Constanze with a plateful of “Capezzoli di Venere,” but since then I’d forgotten they existed. Now that I’ve been reminded, however, I’m completely obsessed with finding them. I must try Venus’s Nipples! Sadly, my two attempts at finding a chocolate shop that sells them have come off rather badly. The phone calls went something like this:

    “Hi, I’m trying to find a chocolate shop that sells Nipples of Venus, do you guys carry them?”
    “What? We are NOT that kind of store Maam!”
    “No, no, you misunderstood me. I’m talking about edible nipples, you know, ones made out of sugar…”
    Click

So the search continues. Sigh.


I Wouldn’t Give You TP - January 2006
Well it was back to work this morning and I think all the parents fed their kids pure sugar before dropping them off for class. They were bouncing off the walls, crawling under tables, rolling on the floor - I finally had to do a five minute push-up competition to get some of their energy out. It was boys vs girls and surprisingly the girls won all three rounds. I don’t think I was ever able to do 15 push-ups in a row? Part of the boys problem was that they kept laughing, which, obviously, makes doing push-ups rather difficult. It was fun to watch though. :)

For snack I brought in a fresh loaf of Challah; a kind of honey bread that’s quite delicious. Most of the kids happily munched away on it - they really don’t care what I bring in so long at it’s tasty! But, then there was one:

    “I don’t want to eat Challah it’s gross!”
    “No its not, it’s really good. You’ll like it. Look all your friends are eating it and they’re happy.”
    “Nooooooooooooooooo! It tastes like toilet paper!”
    “Oh yea? How do you know what toilet paper tastes like?”
    … silence for a moment …
    “Um. Ok. I’ll try it.”

Just for the record, he wants me to bring some to class again.

Tell The Truth - Are you Santapaws? - November 2005
Tell the truth: How many of you are going to buy presents for your pet this year? I know Oreo’s only conception of the holiday season is that it’s a time where there’s lots of delicious table scraps to be had, but I’m still going to get her something for every night of Chanukah. I think I’ll start of with some peanut butter biscuits and work my way up to plush toys that makes noises I’m sure will drive me nuts by February. I can’t help it. Even though Oreo can’t anticipate her gifts the way a child can I still love watching her play with her toys and chew on her bones. Last night she was gnawing the hell out of a new rawhide, tail wagging the whole time, and I just had to stop and smile. How priceless is that?

My Nana has often laughed at me for investing so much energy in Oreo. “Ay mija!” she says, “I can bl’ieve you buy that perro of yours dog food. I tel’ you, jus mixz up some rice an beans, throw in a tortilla - that’s all a dog needs.” She practically fell over laughing when Oreo got her first toybox. And when I started taking her to doggie daycare? Forget about it. But hey, it was a practical decision tailored to life in the Big City. I had my reasons!

And as it turns out I’m not completely nuts. (See Nana?) According to a recent article in Health magazine, 154 million owners will spend $2.6 billion on pet gifts this holiday season with the average gift coming in at about 17 dollars. 62% of us (and by saying ‘us’ I’m admitting I do this) include their pets’ names when signing greeting cards. Though in reality I’m a little cooler than that because I have a paw shaped ink stamp that Oreo uses to make her X.

All that said, picking new toys for your dog is not easy. There are so many toys, chews, beds, collars, etc, out there it’s enough to make your head spin. Type “pet toys” into the search engine at Amazon.com and you’ll receive over 20,000 results! That is why, helpful blogger that I am, I’ve put together a little list for you. Yes, it is 100% dog oriented and for that I do apologize to all you wonderful cat owners. I would have made a list for you to, but I don’t have a cat and have no idea what goes on in those complicated little heads of theirs. Plus, I think browsing through tons of cat toys would have made Oreo suspicious.

So, without further ado, I present to you The 2005 Holiday Dog Gift Guide:

= Oreo tested, Ari approved

Dear Oreo - April 2005
Dear Oreo,

I don’t know what it means in doggie language, but in human-speak when I’m fluffing out the nice clean sheets it’s not an invitation to jump on the bed. Nor is it an invitation to burrow under the blankets and start rolling around until you’re tangled and helpless. Just thought you’d like to know.

Love,
Mommy

P.S. Stop sitting giving me guilt inducing puppy dog looks.
 
 
 
Unless otherwise noted all photos & content are © 2006-2008 BakingandBooks.com (Ariela Pelaia)