Kristen Does It All

Last weekend, our youngest had friends over, and was stung by a bee in our basement. At the time, he said it was a hornet, but I didn't investigate too thoroughly. I went into "mom-mode" and went for the go-to sting remedy in my house:  baking soda paste. I grew up in barn-framed wooden house, and my bedroom was cohost to wasps every summer. They were a regular feature. Dad would foam the cracks each time, but the wasps were happy and cozy. I had stings pretty often, and thankfully, was no stranger to the baking soda paste. So B got a 7 a.m. blob of baking soda on his back and resumed his regular Saturday morning activities - sleeping.

Let me tell you about the time I tried to bake pretzel rolls using the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction . Their recipes are generally excellent. They taste great, instructions make sense, and they are clearly well tested. I, of course, can never do anything simple when it could be complicated.  The Plan:  Make Bigger Rolls Now, generally speaking, the recipe for pretzels is pretty similar to the recipe for pizza crust. The ingredients and methodology are similar, up until the point where you start forming them into their final shape. With pizza crust, I pretty much adapt the recipe on the fly by changing one key starting factor:  the amount of water. ¾ cup of water = 1 pizza crust. 1-½ cup of water = 2 pizza crusts. I figured pretzel rolls would be similar. Increase the amount of water by 20 percent, adjust other ingredients accordingly, and I would be able to transform our pretzel rolls from dinner-sized to sandwich-sized, which was the primary objective. Pretzel san...

Our county fair is so, so small. Every year, we go to the Great Frederick Fair (if you’ve never been, you should. It’s worth it.) Whole buildings full of entries for judging, from arts, crafts, textiles, produce, farm products, and more. The Loudoun County Fair is not that. The fairgrounds has one building it sets aside for the Blue Ribbon Showcase, with one room dedicated to exhibits. Each category fits on one table, with maybe 2 to 20 entries per category. The photography categories have the most entries every year, followed closely by the jams and jellies, and cakes. Ribbons for First Place and Best of Division!

We bought our house in 2019, in June. The previous owners were retirees and were selling after their mobility challenges meant living in a 2 story single family home just got to be too much. When we moved in, we saw evidence that a lot of care had been taken of the outside of the home to keep things very aesthetic and symmetrical…neatly sculpted shrubs that were perfectly full and round, including three giant holly trees and three giant azaleas. Thus the scene is set for my battle. Bloom, azalea, damn it!  I waited, with bated breath. They say that you need to wait a full 12 months to watch the landscaping traverse a full orbit around the sun. Are there hidden gems, perennials that will make an appearance in the summer? The fall? The winter? Will the trees blossom and bloom in the spring, or show signs of blight and powdery mildew? 

I order groceries online all the time, and inevitably when I buy ginger, I get too much. The website asks for a quantity (1) and the shopper inevitably believes I mean “1 pound of ginger” rather than “1 piece of ginger.” [Don’t even get me started about substitutions. No, powdered ground ginger is not an appropriate substitution.] So, I sometimes have a lot of ginger.  I usually peel it, slice it up, and freeze it. It’s pretty easy to defrost a slice, and either mince it or chop it for whatever recipe I’m making.  Our March Book Club selection was The Ministry of Time by Kalaine Bradley . In it, the main character is British-Cambodian, and cooks several dishes she remembers from her childhood, including a Cambodian rice pudding. Now, my book club is the best book club for several reasons - one, we really do read the book. Two, we really do talk about the book. And three, we make food based on ideas in the book and have a giant pot luck. So I decided to make a rice pudding with...