Fly on the Wall, October 2014

Welcome to a Fly on the Wall group post. Today 13 bloggers are inviting you to catch a glimpse of what you’d see if you were a fly on the wall in our homes. Come on in and buzz around my house.

A fly on the wall would have seen me learning a heart stopping lesson about trusting these aging eyes.
Of course I wear neither my contacts nor my glasses when I shower.
One morning, half asleep, I stuck my hand in the shower to turn the water on and jumped back, screaming, at the sight of the big spider on the shower floor.
I ran into the bedroom and tried to breathe.
I was home alone so I went back into the bathroom and the thing hadn’t moved at all. And it was a little weird looking too. Maybe it was dead. I forced myself to look closer.
Nope, it wasn’t dead. It was a piece of thread.

Ever have this happen to you?
College Boy was coming home and I decided to bake for him and his friends. I spent the day working in the kitchen and was heading upstairs when I saw that I had a huge bruise on my arm.
Of course these things don’t hurt until you’re aware of them, then suddenly once you can see it, you also can feel it.
I was feeling sorry for myself and doing my best not to accidentally bang that arm on anything for the rest of the afternoon.
So imagine my surprise when I finally figured out that it was actually chocolate and washed it right off. Guess it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it did.

PurDude had texted me one day and said he was going to call that day for a video chat. I waited and waited but he never called.
The next afternoon he called.
PurDude: Sorry I didn’t call last night, Mom, I was stuck at Walmat all night.
Me: What do you mean you were stuck at Walmart all night?
PurDude: Well, I took the bus to Walmart with some friends. After we shopped we got a sub from the sub shop in the store. We didn’t realize that the busses would stop running.
Me: OK, what did you do?
PurDude: We called a cab. They said it would take 40 minutes but it never came. We kept calling but it took hours to finally get a cab.
Me: Well, I guess you learned to check the bus schedule.
PurDude: No, we learned to call for a cab earlier.

Imagine my surprise and excitement when I saw this notification in my Twitter feed:

Imagine my disappointment when I clicked on his profile and found that it’s another person with the same name.

PurDude added Google Analytics to my blog before he left for college. Google Analytics is just plain wrong and I can prove it, but that’s another story for another time.
I got an email from them about information I can find right in my blogger account so I’m not sure why they sent it, but one of their little nuggets was about the search terms people typed into Google that ultimately took them to my blog. One of them was “depantsed her son.”
Just for the record, I have never depantsed my son, either one. I certainly never wrote about it and I don’t really even think it’s a word. I may have to sue for defamation of character.

Angry Owls

Hubs  cannot do an errand without calling me at least once. This is the start of a normal phone conversation for Hubs and I:

Cell phone rings and I answer: Hello?

Hubs: You answered your phone!

Me: I always answer my phone, why is it that you’re always so surprised.

Hubs: Well, sometimes it takes a few rings.

Me: Sometimes I’m busy, but I always answer my phone.

Hubs: Ok, next time I won’t be surprised.

Next time my cell phone rings:

Me: Hello?

Hubs: You answered your phone!

Friday night after dinner I see hubs searching the kitchen, clearly on a mission. He looks on the counter, in the pantry, and has both the fridge and the freezer open.

Me: Can I help you, what are you looking for?

Hubs: Didn’t you bake anything?

Yes, folks, with PurDude gone and College Boy in and out, I haven’t been baking quite as much. Apparently Hubs will need an adjustment period.

I have to admit that I have a bit of a mean streak. But I laugh EVERY night when this happens:

After dinner I do the dishes and hubs pulls the trash bag out of the trash compactor and puts it into the can in the garage. Then he goes and gets another bag (we just use regular large plastic trash bags in the compactor) out of the pantry to put into the compactor.

He cannot open those large plastic trash bags. Every night he tries to separate one side, turns the bag and tries the next. He attempts each side twice, then throws the bag onto the counter for me to open and stomps away. Every night.

And every night I laugh.

I’ve been making lots of Halloween recipes and I used to just love seeing the looks on my boys and their friends’ faces as they walked in the house and saw what I had made. Just as important, I really miss PurDude, he was my best taste tester.

So Halloween baking is less “boo” and more “boo hoo.”

But because misery loves company (or because I’m just plain mean), I’ve been sending PurDude pictures of all the treats he hasn’t been taste testing.

Wish I could say it makes me feel better but . . . nope.

I was in a war with a giant spider. He had made his web from one of my chairs on the deck off the kitchen to the drain pipe on the house. Every day I went outside with a broom and knocked the web down and every day he’d build it back. Until finally one day it was gone. Winning!

Went upstairs to my bedroom to open the window next to my bed. And there, in a huge web going from the house by my window to the roof line was the giant spider. I quickly shut the window and pulled the shade.

Well played, spider, well played.

Now click on the links below for a peek into some other homes:

The Rowdy Baker

Just A Little Nutty

The Momisodes

Spatulas on Parade

The Sadder But Wiser Girl

Follow me home
Dinosaur Superhero Mommy 

Stacy Sews and Schools

Menopausal Mother

Battered Hope

Someone Else's Genius

Crumpets and Bollocks

Angry Owls

                                                                          ©www.BakingInATornado.com
 
Printable Recipe
 
Ingredients:
Pretzel chips
Milk duds
Mini marshmallows
Mini M&Ms
Twizzlers
¼ cup chocolate chips
 
Directions:
*Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
*Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
*Cut each milk dud into 3 pieces. Cut each mini marshmallow in half. Cut twizzlers into approximately ¾ inch pieces and slice each piece in half lengthwise.
*Place half of your pretzel chips, flat side up, on the baking sheet. Place a piece of the milk dud at the top and one on each of the sides, not covering the pretzel holes.
*Place a second pretzel chip on top of the milk duds, lining it up with the bottom one.
*Bake for 4 minutes. Remove from oven, leave on the parchment.
*Melt chocolate chips on a microwave safe plate in the microwave until melted and smooth. Spread over the plate so it forms a thin layer on the plate.
*For each pretzel “sandwich”, dip the bottom only of two marshmallow halves in the chocolate and place, chocolate side down, on the two top holes of the pretzels (to make eyes).
*Dip mini M&Ms in the chocolate and press onto each marshmallow (to finish the eye).
*For each owl, dip 2 pieces of twizzler into the chocolate and form a “V” between the eyes.
*Place the baking sheet in the fridge to allow the chocolate to harden.

October Fly on the Wall

Welcome to a Fly on the Wall group post. Today 12 bloggers are inviting you to catch a glimpse of what you’d see if you were a fly on the wall in our homes. Come on in and buzz around my house.

When you’re done, click on the links below for a peek into some other homes:
Baking In A Tornado
Just a Little Nutty
Follow me home . . .
Stacy Sews and Schools
The Sadder But Wiser Girl
Menopausal Mother
Moore Organized Mayhem
Spatulas on Parade
The Rowdy Baker
Trashy Blog
Dates 2 Diapers
Sorry kid, Your Mom Doesn't Play Well With Others


About 6 years ago our neighborhood was having a problem with someone driving over our lawns at night and doing damage. This went on for a few weeks. One night when my husband was out of town and the kids were in bed, I heard a crash. I went out front and found our basketball hoop, which had been cemented into the ground, ripped out and laying on its side.

Police and CSI came, the kid was found and arrested and before he went to court he and his dad replaced our basketball hoop.

Last month we had our roof replaced. On the roofers’ last day at the house they rang the doorbell to tell me that they had an accident. I bet the odds are astronomical that this could happen more than once:

I live with three intelligent grown men. One day this past month I could be heard asking them a question that not one of them could answer: “Why is it that absolutely nothing comes out of the dryer more wrinkled than a wrinkle-free shirt?”

My son is a lifeguard. He works at an indoor pool so he’s working year round. A few weeks ago he came home from work wearing his lifeguard bathing suit, a wrist band, 6 strands of Mardi Gras beads and an eye-patch. I haven’t a clue and I was afraid to ask.

A couple of our electrical outlets weren’t working and I had to call an electrician and make an appointment for him to come out. The woman in the office asked what time I wanted him to come and explained that she couldn’t guarantee an exact time but would give me a 2 hour window. I asked for around 10:00 am and she said “sure, he’ll be there between 10:00 am and 3:30 pm”. Two hour window? This must be some new kind of math or something.

So the electrician came out to check the outlets that didn’t work. I didn’t want to embarrass myself so I checked the fuse box before he came to be sure none of the fuses had tripped.

The electrician comes out, checks the garage outlet, the outlet in the front garden and the one on the back deck and sees that they don’t work. He walks into my laundry room, presses the “reset” button on the outlet in there and is finished within 60 seconds of arriving.

And again, so as not to embarrass myself, when my family came home I made up a whole long involved story of the hour the electrician spent here getting all the outlets working again. I think I even made up a few “technical” terms too.

Chocolate Pizza with Spiced Cream Cheese Frosting

The Cicadas were really loud this year and generally I just tune them out, but at the end of last month I had a headache and they were driving me crazy.

Me: “Those cicadas are making my headache worse”.

Son: “They can’t be making it worse”.

Me: “Well they are. I had a slight headache and now my head is splitting”.

Son: “Now you know how I feel when you sing.”

After dinner my son clears the table and takes out the trash. My husband wipes down the table and, if I’ve used the grill, cleans the grill. I fill and run the dishwasher. One night my husband comes to dinner and does a little happy dance.

Me: “Oh, you love my chicken parmesan”.

Him: “No, I love that you don’t make it on the grill”.

And here was another fun conversation:
Me: "Can you please go out back and pull the weeds."
Hubs (indignantly): "Stop asking me that, I already did."
Me: "Then what's this growing in the swingset, a beanstalk?"

It seems that I tell one of these stories about my younger son every month, but they happen all the time and it’s best for my mental health that I just keep telling them and try to laugh. So here’s the latest:

I go into my son’s bathroom and his trash can is full to the brim and about to spill onto the floor. I decide not to take it down to the kitchen to empty into the main trash, but I’m steaming mad. He’s a senior in High School, he can tell when a trash can is full.

So he comes home from school and I angrily say “go into your bathroom and look at the trash can.” And he leaves. And he doesn’t come back. And, being concrete and literal, I’m sure that he did actually go into his bathroom and look at the trash can. Kill me now.

When I’m in the living room, if my son is really bothering me and I want to get rid of him, I turn on “The Big Bang Theory”.

I get it, I love the show.

He doesn’t get it at all, he lives the show.

Chocolate Pizza with Spiced Cream Cheese Frosting

                                   ©www.BakingInATornado.com

                                                                                                                                                       
Printable Recipe
 
Ingredients, chocolate pizza:
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 stick butter
1 stick margarine
3 eggs
¾ tsp vanilla
2 cups sugar
1 cup flour
 
Ingredients, frosting:
1/2 stick butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
4 drops of red and 16 drops of yellow food coloring.
½ tsp vanilla
¾ tsp Pumpkin pie spice
1 TBSP milk
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
 
Ingredients, decorations:
Gummy worms
Halloween sprinkles
1 strand peeled off of a Twizzler peel ‘n eat
2 Vanilla wafers
2 M & Ms
1 Hershey’s Kiss
 
Directions:
*Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a large round pizza pan (without holes in it).
*Melt together the unsweetened chocolate, margarine and butter in microwave. Stir until completely smooth.
*Stir in the vanilla. Once incorporated, stir in the sugar, then the eggs and last the flour.
*Bake for 15-18 minutes until the center is set. Allow to cool completely.
 
Frosting:
*Beat the cream cheese and butter until smooth. Beat in the food coloring, vanilla and pumpkin pie spice. 
*Carefully, starting off at your lowest speed, beat in the powdered sugar. If it’s too stiff, add the milk. If it’s too loose, add a little more powdered sugar.
*Carefully spread the frosting onto your chocolate pizza.
*Decorate with sprinkles to outline the face, gummy worms as hair, cookies and M & Ms as eyes, twizzler as a mouth and kiss as a nose.
*Store in the refrigerator and bring to room temperature before serving.

Mommy or Mummy

NOTE: This post was originally published on 10-30-2012 on Scary Mommy.


Do you wonder if you’re not just a mommy but a mummy? If you were a mummy, would you know it? Would it feel any different? Because lately I HAVE been feeling different, decidedly not myself. Let’s see: lack of sleep, doing things I always swore I’d never do when I had kids, wearing ratty old clothes that someone has apparently used as a napkin. Yup, I’m a mummy. Are you? I’ve developed an amazingly accurate test to help you determine just that. Take it if you dare:

#1: Do you stand in the shower wondering why your legs look no different after you shaved them and realize you never took the cap off of the razor?

#2: Do you, two hours later, wonder why you still have a splitting headache, then realize that there is a direct correlation between the efficacy of the medication and whether or not you’ve actually taken it? Leaving it on the counter appears to have no value.

#3: Do you find that you don’t want to go to the bathroom for fear of losing valuable caffeine?

#4: Would you, for a few minutes peace, wake your kids up and send them off hoping that they get all the way to school before they realize it’s Saturday?

#5: Have you done a recipe search “by ingredients” and wondered why there are no recipes using Valium?

#6: Have you ever “forgotten” that you grounded your child just so she/he’ll get the BLEEP out of the house?

#7: Do you find yourself unable to see the downside to robbing a bank? If you get away, you’ve got lots of money you can use to, well, get away. If you get caught, when in jail you get to approve (and deny) visitors.

#8: Have you ever used this phrase “go ask your father, and don’t you dare tell him I told you to.”

#9: After going out for a rare “Mom’s night out” have you ever found yourself sitting in the car in the driveway because you’re not going into that house until you’re positive the kids are sleeping?

#10: Do you ever tell your little ones it’s bed time 2 hours early because, what the heck, they can’t tell time?

Now count up how many times you’ve said “been there, done that” to the above and check your score:

Zero: Try again and tell the truth this time.

One: Did you think it was the kids who were making you feel ancient?

Two: I bet you’ve started walking around the house half asleep at night.

Three: You are obviously comatose. When you wake up you could be a mummy.

Four: Start buying lots of sheets, it’s fall now and you’ll want a new wardrobe.

Five and above: Answer the door, UPS is delivering your sarcophagus.

Go on, admit it, I’ve got you thinking. Now you need to let me know, what signs have you seen that you may be a mummy?

I’ll be back to check on your answers, and while you’re sharing I’ll be in the kitchen making my kids’ favorite cookies:

Mummy Cookies

Click on this link to my original post for the recipe for Mummy Cookies.

From Eewww to Boo

This is my second Halloween blogging. And although I’m having fun playing with new recipes again this year, the truth is that there are many great recipes from years past that I’m making too. Each of my kids have their favorites and they’d be let down if I didn’t make them again.

So I thought that I’d bring those favorite recipes of Halloweens past to one blog post. A sort of compilation of Oooh, Eewww, and Boo.

Before you look through them, let me just apologize for the (lack of) quality of the pictures. I’m not a photographer in the best of circumstances but the camera I had then may have qualified as the worst of circumstances. The state of my earlier pictures were equipment failure. Unfortunately the state of my more current pictures is operator error.

Below are pictures of Halloween recipes I posted last year. Under each one is a link back to my original post where you’ll find the recipe. Let me know which ones you try. I just love when people make my recipes and then post a picture of it on my facebook page. If you’d like to do that, post your picture here: Baking In A Tornado on Facebook.

 

"Candy Corn" Poppers

Meringue Bones

Candy "Pumpkins"

Rice Krispie "Jack-O-Lanterns"

Spider Cookies

Bloody Eyeballs

Edible Band-Aids

Witch's Fingers

Candy Filled Witch's Hats

Black Cat Cookies

Orange Eyed Mice

Yellow Eyed Mice

Be sure to check back here. I’ll be publishing new Halloween posts and recipes through the rest of October.

Happy Baking.

Boo Boos and Bandaids

I’m sick. DO NOT ring my doorbell unless you don’t mind my answering with a tissue sticking out of my left nostril. It seems someone put a faucet where my nose belongs. It’s been running and I’m raw from wiping it so I’ve resorted to shoving a tissue up there. I don’t care, it works.

People downplay colds, but they’re really quite debilitating. It’s hard to get anything done when you can’t breathe, smell, or taste, and you feel like someone shoved a pumpkin in your head. It’s getting a little crowded in there, something’s gotta go and I don’t yet know whether it’ll be the pumpkin or my brain.

Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean that any of my responsibilities go away. I still have things that need to get done and I have to tell you there is nothing better than having a cold when you’re trying to get your grocery shopping done quickly.  Just go into a crowded aisle and start coughing up a lung. Those Moms scatter faster than a speed skater on ice.  You have the aisle to yourself, and if you do this in each aisle you’ll be out of there in no time.  Now sneezing is OK, go ahead if you have to but take my word for it, coughing is the way to go.

I remember when I first got married I thought I had the kindest husband in the world.  I was sick and going to do the laundry and he stopped me. “You’re sick, relax, you don’t have to do the laundry”. WOW. I was impressed.  After a full day at work he was going to do the laundry. Silly me. What he actually meant was that the laundry would still be there when I felt better.

So not the kindest husband in the world, but he’s got me to deal with and I’m not exactly sympathetic either.  When Older Son was 5, he was at a birthday party just a mile away from our house.  Younger Son and I were in the house and Husband was trimming a tree with an electric trimmer saw thingy. Husband and electric trimmer saw thingies do not belong in the same sentence let alone the same yard. He cut his finger and was gushing blood, but it was time to pick Older Son up at the birthday party and I didn’t want to leave him stranded.  I put Husband into the bathroom with instructions to put pressure on the wound while holding his hand over the sink and not to bleed on my floor. 
  

 Edible (gross!) Bandaids for the BooBoos

When they were little, I went for daily 4 mile walks around our neighborhood pushing the boys in a double stroller singing a song of our phone number and address that I had made up for them. Husband was looking a little white so I put Younger Son (who was 4) in the bathroom with the phone and told him that if daddy went to sleep and fell on the floor to call 911 and sing them our address.

I was only gone maybe 10 minutes and when I got home I immediately dropped Husband off at Urgent Care so although I’m maybe not the most sympathetic person in the world, it’s not like he’s still sitting in the bathroom bleeding out.

 Bloody Eyeballs

So yes, I’m sick.  And yes, I’ll get over it.  After all there’s so much more Halloween fun to be had.  But if you want a little advice, let me just say that for the next week or so, don’t ring my doorbell . . . and stay out of my grocery store. 

Printable Recipes

Bandaids:
                                           ©www.BakingInATornado.com

Ingredients:
Square, round and rectangular crackers

Marshmallows, cut into pieces

Food-writing gel (red, green, yellow)

Directions:
*Mold pieces of marshmallows to the approximate size you want for your “gauze” and put onto middle of cracker.

*Put cracker into microwave for about 15 seconds to make the marshmallow pliable.

*Manipulate marshmallow (I use a wet knife) to the size and shape you want.

*Decorate with food writing gel, then move the gel around with a knife to make it look smeared.

Bloody Eyeballs
                                      www.BakingInATornado.com

Ingredients:
½ cup semisweet chocolate chips, melted

4 oz cream cheese, softened

1 pkg dark chocolate fudge stripe cookies cookies (can use oreos)

White bark candy coating

Gummy life savers

Mini M&Ms

Red food-writing gel

Directions:
*Place cookies in food processor and process until the consistency of graham cracker crumbs. 

*Mix cookie crumbs with melted chocolate and cream cheese until it forms a dough ball. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 1 – 1 ½ hours. 

*Stick mini M&Ms into the holes of the gummy life savers.

*Roll the cookie crumb dough into round balls for the eyeballs and form into an oval shape, pinching off one end a bit for the face.

*Melt some white bark and stir until smooth.  Use a bowl with some depth as you will be dunking the cookie balls into the bowl.

*Dunk the cookie balls into the melted bark.  An easy way to dunk them is to put a toothpick into the ball and dunk holding the toothpick.  Put onto wax paper to set and immediately take out the toothpick and attach a gummy candy to the top (do this while still wet so it sticks).

*Once dry, add the red veins with red food-writing gel.