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We have green tomatoes on the vine. Repeat. We have green tomatoes on the vine.

This is all one tomato plant, except for a little basil at the bottom. It’s a freakin’ tomato tree!

Baby green pepper . . . .

And the mini sunflowers are making me very happy!

Don’t forget to Pick a Pie!!!!! (Chocolate turtle pie is winning. Does this reflect the will of the people?)

Posted in Green | 2 Comments »

We have more pies to test. In fact, we have more pie candidates than we have room in our clothes. So while all of the candidates sound delicious (and they know it’s an honor just to be nominated) it is time to get down to business. We can’t test ALL of these pies.

I plan to make at least these four pies:

1. Classic chocolate pie
2. Chocolate mousse chiffon pie
3. Chocolate malted pie
4. TK’s Chocolate pie

The first three are from the aptly titled PIE. And the last one is from reader Turtleknits, who swears it is the best chocolate pie she ever tasted. But after choosing those four – to my mind – essential pies, there are so many candidates left!

So think about your ideal chocolate pie, your ideal make-you-happy-enough-to-snuff-the-Crazy pie. And then vote! I think we’ll be all patriotic about the voting too, and keep the poll going until the Fourth of July. Vote early, vote often!* The winner will be made and tested right here before your very eyes.

*I know it’s not as exciting as Finny’s Adopt a Crop, but Pick a Pie ain’t bad.

Posted in Blather, Creativity | 4 Comments »

That looks promising, doesn’t it?

Our next test pie is the Hershey Bar Pie from Pie Every Day, and is similar to this recipe for Hershey’s Chocolate Pie on the official Hershey site. In her book, Pat Willard dubs this a comfort pie – perfect and easy after a long day.

It’s easy, but it’s ugly too.

The premise is simple – melt 12 ounces (yes 12!) of Hershey bar with marshmallows and milk. Fold in whipped cream and pour into graham cracker crust, and chill. Kind of like making Rice Krispie treats without the crunch. Sort of.

Testing this pie was hampered by the absence of the college kid, so only two scores were collected in our extraordinarily unscientific method. S’ok. Here are the results:

Appearance – 3
Texture - 3
Chocolatey Taste – 4
Crust – 4.5
Overall Taste and Goodness – 4

The graham cracker crust is definitely a winner, as is the chocolatey taste. I will say for my part, though, that I am not a huge Hershey’s fan. The chocolate has a slightly burnt milk taste to it, and it’s not my go-to chocolate. And this pie is sticky, in texture and flavor. I love marshmallows, but the whole taste of this pie is just too sticky-ey. Still, the Hershey Pie has edged out the Moo-less Pie for the Number Two slot. Despite how easy it is, though, I think we have to keep looking. Crazy Pie needs to be easy, yes, but it also has to make the Crazy go away. How can the Crazy slide away, what with all the stickiness?

Posted in Blather, Creativity | 3 Comments »

Twin boys call for twin sweaters!

Pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann (link is to the wiki on Ravelry)
Yarn: Berroco Comfort, blue (9707) and green (9714), 2 skeins for each sweater
Needles: US 9
Chest circumference: ~23 inches
Started: May 28, 2009
Finished: June 2, 2009

By now, you know how much I love the Baby Surprise Jackets. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s fun. And the kids love ‘em! Well, some of the recipients have been unsuspecting infants, but you get my point.

The Dynamic Duo (M and S) turn one year old in August. So I figured I would get a jump on birthday knitting. But then I read on their mama’s blog that they weigh 19 pounds (and that was a few weeks ago)! I posed a purely hypothetical question to the mama: what is the chest circumference of a 19 pound baby? She said about 19-inches. Yikes! If there is any hope of these guys wearing the sweaters, I had to kick it into high gear.

Not that I’m complaining (see fast and easy, above). This pattern is always a lot of fun, and the soft/washable Comfort yarn is nice to work with. I went just slightly funky on the buttons: deep red on the blue sweater, and mismatched green on the green sweater.

Then I popped them in the mail, and voila! A very early birthday! As you can see from the first photo, the sweaters are roomy and even these fast growing guys should be able to wear them for awhile.

Posted in Creativity, Loved Ones | 3 Comments »

I have a rule about what I post on this blog: don’t post anything that you would not say into a microphone before an audience of 1,000 people. For the most part, I stick by that rule. If I have a bad day, I don’t usually explain the details of why. I try not to complain about the irritants of daily life, and I certainly don’t express all of the thoughts and feelings and stories that I share with my dear friends and family. Because of this rule, I have rarely spoken about why I do not have children and how I feel about it.

My friends are all along the fertility/infertility spectrum. I have friends who got pregnant by accident, on a whim, by mistake. One friend got pregnant the first month she tried. Another needed multiple fertility treatments. My friends have had miscarriages, healthy babies who arrived on time, babies who were born but never breathed. They have birthed naturally, with epidurals, by c-section. I have watched as each of these women walked her path towards or away from motherhood. I have seen my friends grow as mothers as their children grow as people. I have done my best to support them in loss, in choice, in frustration, in triumph.

From the core of my soul, I believe that motherhood is sacred. I believe there is no more important station in this life than that of parent.

But I am not a mother, and I never will be. My “infertility” is not the result of a malfunctioning reproductive system. Nor am I childless by choice. I am not a parent because of CFS.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is like a rope knotted tightly around my life. I need someone else to do so many of the routine things – grocery shopping, errands, driving, cleaning, laundry – that you probably take for granted. If I can’t drive a car to get to my own doctor appointments, how could I possibly take on the day-to-day work of raising a child? But that alone is not the reason I don’t have children. Help can be hired or given by others. We would need a lot of help, maybe even full-time help, but that’s not the real reason.

Dealing with CFS is a test every single day. Living – as opposed to surviving – with this illness requires emotional and spiritual strength on a scale I cannot describe. Time and again, we have reached into the well, clung to spiritual lifelines, to endure and overcome what CFS has done to us. I imagine the feeling is the same for parents. Being fully responsible for the total well-being and development of another person who cannot yet fend for him/herself is daunting, difficult, exhausting, challenging – I know because I’ve watched my friends find their own strengths as parents.

We are not parents because CFS has already stretched us to our limits, and beyond. We know that parenting is beyond our capability. For years we have hoped that something would change, so that then we could add a child to the mix. The truth is that we cannot. We cannot step onto the sacred path of parenthood because CFS has erected a road block that we cannot overcome.

While some of my friends have struggled with infertility and overcome barriers to birthing their children, none of them faced blocks to becoming parents. Even if an ovary or uterus would not cooperate, my friends could adopt. There are many ways to become a parent. To me, “mother” is an emotional and spiritual title, not merely a biological one. Giving birth is a sacred experience, but I don’t see it as a prerequisite to the more sacred journey of motherhood, of parenting.

My dearest, most personal wish is to be a mother. But adoption is no more of an option for me than getting pregnant. I cannot parent any child. I do not choose to be childless any more than I choose to rely on a cleaning service or grocery delivery. I don’t want to be in this place, or do these things. But it is reality, and I have no control over it. CFS forces these decisions on us: grocery delivery or take out pizza every night. Those are the options, but it’s not really an option at all.

My friends have chosen to be parents, or they have chosen not to be, and the power is in the choice. But no amount of hired help or technology can open this choice to me. CFS is a thirsty tap root, never satiated and burrowing ever deeper into my life. I pray for a miracle, and I believe they can happen. Something would have to give or open or close or move or change, but not just a little bit. The road block is so large that we cannot climb over or around it. Something would have to blast part of it out of the way. It could happen. But I’ve been holding my breath for almost 15 years now, and time moves ever forward.

Posted in Beliefs, Health, Loved Ones | 7 Comments »

How do you distinguish between weird and funny? Especially when you mean funny, as in “not funny ha-ha, funny queer.” A recipe for “Funny Cake” in one of my cookbooks was just different enough for me to think “Huh.” *eyebrow raise*

It’s called a cake, but is made in a pie crust. But the cakey part is on top. Huh.

You start off making a syrup, which is the least syrupy syrup I’ve ever seen. It’s cocoa powder and sugar and hot milk, but it has none of the viscosity you would expect in a syrup. That goes in the bottom of the pie crust. You heard me: the bottom.

Then you are supposed to spread the cake batter on top, not mixing the two. But the syrup was so unsyrupy that any batter spreading would result in mixing. So I dolloped.

I thought this recipe would result in a kind of impossible pie, where the top and bottom layers switch places during cooking. Nope. The cake stays on top, and makes for one ugly pie.

But how does it taste? Average scores (scale of 1 to 5, higher is better):
Appearance – 2.9
Texture – 2.9
Chocolatey Taste – 2.3
Crust - 2.7
Overall Taste and Goodness – 2.9

Most testers thought the pie was too dry, there was not enough chocolate, and too much orange flavor in the cake. One wisenheimer wrote:

The cake/pie combo lead to an unsettling dichotomy of pie and cake culminating in a culinary dissonance that is rather . . . well . . . odd. Goes well with milk, therefore it is more of a cake with pie-like features than a pie with cake-like features. It is cakepie.

Which reminds me of that old Fig Newtons commercial, “It’s not a cookie! It’s fruit and cake!” Except in this case, “It’s not a pie! It’s pie and cake!” But however you slice it, this pie scored the lowest of our three test cases so far.

Posted in Beliefs, Blather, Creativity, Green | 7 Comments »

Cort Johnson has written another great blog post, this time about the fiasco (and that’s the nicest word for it) that is the CDC’s patient registry project for CFS.

And remember, written comments on the CDC’s five-year strategic plan for the CFS program are due June 30th. I’ll post my comments tomorrow, so you can read and/or borrow from them.

Posted in Beliefs, Health | 1 Comment »

Another week, another farm share! This week, we are every shade of green with Napa cabbage, snow peas, spinach, candy onions, lettuce, and broccoli. I shredded the cabbage for coleslaw (which I’m not entirely sure anyone else will eat), and turned the spinach into spinach salad with bacon. Aw, yeah!

I’m thinking the snow peas may end up in risotto (with non-CSA carrots and green beans?), and the broccoli will be steamed and eaten as a regular plain veggie. The only non-green thing we should have had in the share are beets, but Mr. Tumblyday is allergic and traded them for more onions. *pouty face*

Posted in Green, Health | 2 Comments »

When on a Quest, it is inevitable that things get a little weird at some point. Maybe it’s the laser focus on the object of the Quest, or just typical life, but somewhere along the way you end up telling a grizzled one-eyed man what your favorite color is just so you can cross the bridge. Or you follow a very strange recipe for pie.

The very strange recipe came from Alton Brown, and that is the only reason I even tried it. The main ingredient in this chocolate pie? Tofu. But I was willing to trust AB, even though combining tofu and chocolate is really weird. I figured risk-taking is part of the Quest for Crazy Pie. Needless to say, however, that I did not tell my testers what the pie was made of until they ate it.

The recipe itself is easy, and if you used a purchased crumb crust it would be lightning quick. I did have to make one change to the original. AB melts the chocolate with coffee liqueur. Since we don’t consume any alcohol, I had to find a substitution. If I was baking, I would simply use coffee in place of the liqeuer. But when you melt chocolate, even the tiniest bit of water can make the whole thing seize up and I have no idea if that would happen with coffee. To be safe, I used heavy cream instead.

How did the tofu chocolate pie fare with my testers? There was high praise for the pie’s appearance. The chocolate taste was good too, but Mr. Tumblyday kept insisting that there was something a little “off.” To my surprise, he ate a whole slice and was not disturbed when I revealed the tofu “issue.” The college kid wanted a topping on the pie, but otherwise loved it and was very happy to take leftovers home. My parents both rated the pie very well, although my mother noticed the “bitter after taste,” like Mr. T and me.

Average scores** (a higher number is better) were:
Appearance – 3.58
Texture – 4.165
Chocolatey taste – 4.08
Crust – 4.165
Overall Taste and Goodness – 3.44

Bottom line? I did not expect to like this pie. If you need to avoid dairy (but can handle liqeuer) then I think this is the chocolate pie for you. This is also the fastest pie to make (so far). Collectively, we rated most factors as average or above average. My parents shocked me by saying they would eat the pie for breakfast, just like the college kid. Maybe that was the protein in the tofu talking.

A note on scores: I neglected to explain our rating scale in the last test report. We are using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 = yuck and 5 = best ever. We also neglected to rate for crust in the first test! I’ve corrected this, as well as the averages from the first test to reflect the current scale.

Posted in Blather, Creativity | 2 Comments »

27 boxes of toys in my yard,
27 boxes of toys!
Take one down,
open and count,
26 boxes of toys in my yard!

25 boxes of toys in my yard,
25 boxes of toys!
Oh my God,
where will they go?
27 boxes of toys in my HOUSE!

The shipment of sample toys arrived Saturday, and they are SO INCREDIBLY AWESOME! The main supply is at the warehouse, and coming to a store near you soon. Keep an eye on Dreamland Toyworks for more info.

I am so proud of my husband, it’s crazy.

Posted in Blather, Creativity, Loved Ones | 4 Comments »