Shiny

It has "mood lighting", this new kitchen range of mine. It looks cool, but I can't quite imagine what it's useful for. I think it's funny.

You know what's not funny? Having the ability to cook things. That's not funny at all. I finally have a range where the pancakes don't run to one side of the griddle all the time, the burners always light and the oven keeps a constant temperature. In fact, the ovens WORK!

You might remember this pitiful hulk of a range from my previous post about its untimely demise...or you might not. I spent far too much energy fretting about how much I liked my black oven and how I wasn't going to be able to get another one. I guess that's the sign of someone who's truly got nothing better to do. Turns out a stainless oven is just fine.

It's shiny, it heats fast, the granite counters on either side look great, despite the installers having to shave an inch off each side to get the new range in. I can make an awful lot of cookies at once in the big oven...at least I could, if I had that many cookie sheets.

I'm looking forward to many tasty years together.

Wrapping Up

Gosh, summer seems to last forever around here and yet be painfully short at the same time. I don't remember summers being like this when I was a kid. They seemed to stretch out forever. I was usually ready to go back to school. And I wasn't signed up for several camps with built in entertainment either. Somehow, I managed to entertain myself without turning on the TV all the time. I wonder how that happened.

So, the last couple of weeks of summer finally arrived with August. I was excited to take Smunch to baseball camp at the San Jose Giants' Municipal Stadium. He'd declared that he liked neither of the baseball camps he'd been to in previous summers, so I thought this one might be good for a change...and it would be a blast for him to get to play on the big field with stands and a PA system. Meanwhile, I sent Mam to cooking school for half a day each day. It didn't really give me a lot of time and it turned into even less time when Smunch got sick after just one day of baseball camp.

He made it to the first day and the last day and missed everything in between. What a bummer! Still, he was looking like a pro on the last day, when they got to play games and be announced over the PA system.He really enjoyed the camp. Hard to tell if that's because he missed two days or because it was a better experience for him. They gave us an evaluation of his skills. It fairly glowed with praise and said he stood out in his group. Maybe that was the big difference. In other camps he didn't stand out. But it turns out that many of the boys in San Jose had only played for a season or two. Smunch just finished his fifth. No matter. He had a good time. That's all that counts for me!

And although I took no pictures of Mam in her cute little cooking apron, she had a blast baking every morning. She even started asking to help in the kitchen all the time. Once in a while, I can even come up with something for her to do and that's pretty darned cute. Worth every penny, that camp.

The same week saw the end of swimming lessons for the summer. I feel like I can finally say with some confidence that the kids can swim. They may not look pretty doing it, but given a fall into a pool, they're not just going to give up and drown.And I was perversely pleased that the brother/sister pair they had lessons with was far more misbehaved and obnoxious than they were. After this summer, they've been taught all the strokes, they just need some polishing. O.K., so they still look like they're drowning if they're attempting to swim butterfly, but still... Smunch's freestyle was looking great and Mam's backstroke is coming along nicely The evening after Mam's last day of camp (Friday, where Smunch was done on Thursday), we took our last summer trip to AT&T Park. Smunch was not thrilled with the choice of games we'd made.The biggest fan in the world does not like to see his team lose and he figured that a game against the Phillies was a likely loss.

Mam, on the other hand, was thrilled that we decided to take her to a game this season.And although she enjoyed a hot dog and some cotton candy, she mostly reminded me why we don't take her to games. She's a real pain. Crawling on the ground, asking to go home, being bored out of her mind.

Of course, by the time the sixth inning rolled around, Smunch was asking to go home too. This almost never happens, but Jonathan Sanchez was pitching and doing a poor job of it. They were losing 8-2. We made him stick around a little longer. And what a great idea that was! The only redeeming value to the game, in the end, was getting to see a bench-clearing scrum initiated by Sanchez hitting Shane Victorino with a pitch and Victorino making like he was going to charge the mound.This lasted quite some time and was the most amusing part of an eventual 9-2 loss.

One more family vacation and then summer is just about over. Thank goodness. The fighting and boredom are both unbearable. Then again, so is homework...

Cookin'

I'm really not this kind of mom. I believe that part of parenting should be teaching your kids how to live independently and I understand that part of that might be teaching them to cook.But I'm not the kind of mom who wants my kids help me cook dinner. I'm all about efficiency and cooking dinner with kid help has got to be one of the most inefficient processes in the whole world.

So, you can imagine why Daddy would have picked up the camera upon seeing me teaching the kids to make turkey tacos. I figured it's easy and the kids were bugging me...and they'd bug me less if they were helping me. Of course, they weren't all that helpful. In all my years of cooking, I forgot that it actually requires practice to brown ground meat properly...making sure it's not in giant hard-to-cook clumps and that you're not flinging it out of the frying pan.There were tears (on Mam's part) and frustration (on all of our parts), but they helped make the whole dinner. And maybe, just maybe, they ate just a little more for their part in the process.

First Graders with Knives

Last week, my last classroom duty was to go in and help the kids wrap up their unit on apples by peeling and cutting up their apples into apple crisp. This seemed like something that was right up my alley...and I had a lot of fun doing it. The teacher has some cool apple peeler/corers. The peel comes off in one long piece, so each kid had to measure their peel against him/herself and say whether it was shorter or longer than they are. Cute.Then came the tricky part of trying to guide five six-year-olds through dicing apples up with fairly blunt knives.Each of them got to cut up apples, measure, pour sprinkle. Admittedly, I finished the cutting butter into the dry mixture part. The kids were pretty pleased with the finished product, although Smunch doesn't look strictly pleased. And, uh, I don't know what's going on with those two on the left. For a couple of six-year-olds it looks a little racy, don't you think?Of course, they all looked very, very pleased when a few of the parents returned from cooking these apple crisps at home. Their teacher brought ice cream and even Mam got to enjoy some...

Cinnamon Rolls

I'm not about to start a foodie blog or anything, but I'm going to take a minute here and say, I made the best cinnamon rolls for Easter! Oh, er, I mean Mam and I made the best cinnamon rolls.
Cinnamon rolls being sort of a yeasty kind of thing, I had to start them before the ballgame yesterday. And Mam helped. She watched the mixer very carefully and offered to taste the dough at just about every stage.
We'd already planned a meal of waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, but Smuch announced a few days ago that we had to have "those swirly things". Um, right. Of course. We hardly ever have those swirly things and I think I've only tried to make them once in Smunch's lifetime. They didn't turn out great. But these? Awesome!

Oh yeah, and the waffles were kinda good too.