Backyard View

My friend Chris Gilmore takes amazing photos, and what's even more amazing is that she takes them with a very ordinary camera! This is one of her recent shots of Lake Victoria.

Can you believe that I used to live in a town that was right on this lake? In fact, two of the houses I lived in had lake views, and one actually abutted the lake in the backyard - that's right, my back fence was on the beach!

Gorgeous as this is, let's remember that there is bilharzia in the lake, as well as massive troops of lake flies hidden in there, just waiting to rise out and swarm the neighborhood. But I still miss it!

Cute, but wiggly

Have you taken any pictures of small children recently? Ai yai yai! For Andrew's birthday, I wanted to take a few pictures of the kids for him. He loves pictures and doesn't get as many chances as I do to take them of Zarya and Jerod, so I thought it would be a (cheap, easy) sweet gift. Well, I can't deny that it was cheap, but easy?! What planet of immobile, yet cheerful, babies/toddlers was my brain visiting?

I finally ended up with a decent ONE, but here is an example of about 50 that happened along the way...

At least on this outtake, Zarya was being helpful and prevented him from totally taking off for another room or something!

They both sat still! And smiled!

Ginger Lime Cookies

Ginger Lime ones are on the left

Want to make some Ginger Lime Cookies with the recipe I made up? Try them, you'll like them (okay, provided you like both ginger and lime, that is)! The Indiana County Fair judges might or might not have liked ginger and lime, since they got 3rd place.

3 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 Tbls ginger powder

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 inches fresh ginger

1 egg

1 tablespoon milk

1 tsp lime zest

Powdered sugar, for rolling out dough

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted

1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Directions

Mix together flour, baking powder, salt and ginger powder. Set aside.

Put the fresh ginger and sugar in a food processor and pulverize them.

Place butter and sugar/ginger in large bowl and beat. Add egg, milk, and lime zest and beat to combine. Gradually add flour mixture. Wrap the dough in cling wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Sprinkle surface where you will roll out dough with powdered sugar. Place dough on the surface, cover dough with the cling wrap, and press it down with your hands (the cling wrap keeps the dough from sticking to your hands). Re-sprinkle more powdered sugar underneath the dough if need be. Still with the cling wrap over teh dough, use a rolling pin to roll out dough to 1/4-inch thick. Move the dough around and check underneath frequently to make sure it is not sticking. Cut into desired shape, place at least 1-inch apart on greased baking sheet, parchment, or silicone baking mat, and bake for about 9 minutes or until cookies are just beginning to turn brown around the edges. Immediately remove to wire racks for cooling.

Mix powdered sugar and lime juice and ice cooled cookies.

Cookies for the County Fair

In an effort to justify my cookie baking habits, I decided to once again enter two cookie entries in the Indiana County Fair. I spent more time than I think it appropriate to admit preparing for my big baking day. 

First, there was the whole matter of choosing what kinds of cookies to enter, then the recipe search, taste tests, recipe tweaking, practice runs, and big day production. But hey, it was great fun and delicious! And this year I did learn something - make sample batches in half-recipe amounts, which only generate half as many calories to have lounging around the house, begging to be consumed.

Bakers can only enter one product per category, which is a good rule, but a frustrating one for me. I prefer to make drop cookies, and I wanted to enter two kinds of cookies. Therefore I had to figure out a different kind of cookie for my second entry. This year I opted to try a rolled cookie, which is hardly my forte. I can't remember the last time I made rolled cookies, to be honest! But I wasn't up for experimenting with filled or refrigerator or sugar-free or spritz ones, the other cookie categories.

Many months ago I had volunteered to help make cookies for a friend's son's wedding. I did a lot of internet browsing to look for a cookie recipe that was wedding-worthy, and found Guyanese Lime Nutmeg Cookies. They are kind of like lime snickerdoodles. They turned out fabulously that time, as did my trial run a few months later. Choosing them as one of my fair entries was an easy decision.

Recipe number two, however, took a lot more work. Andrew had suggested once that I try to make ginger lime cookies, and I set about working on those. Well, let me tell you, there are not (that I found, and I really tried) any rolled ginger-lime cookie recipes out there! Necessity is the mother of invention, so invent I did. After four attempts that didn't turn out quite right, but each one got a bit closer in some way, I am happy to say that attempt number five, which was the one I had to enter in the fair, turned out excellently! I wanted to replicate the flavor of a Stoney Tangawizi soda with a lime glaze, and I think I got it.

A friend in town is also a bit obsessed with fair cookies, and she and I had a lot of fun discussing entry options during the year, and then e-mailing and texting each other while baking. That made the whole experience that much more fun. We'll find out how we did after an interminably long two-day wait!

My enthusiastic helper

Every heard of a silicone baking mat? This is why you should use them! Cookie on the left, no mat, cookie on the right, mat. Go buy yourself a Silpat now. Silpat on Amazon

The finished products! Ginger-Lime on the left, Guyanese Lime Nutmeg on the right.

Northwest Vacation

We went on vacation! We flew from Pittsburgh to Seattle, and had one night and a two Sunday morning church services in Olympia. Then we journeyed down to Oregon where we spent a week with Andrew's family. After that we went up to Priest Lake, Idaho, for another week, this time with a whole pack of people - my parents, my sister and her husband and two kids and his parents, and our near and dear family friends and their four kids! Ai yai yai! Then the kiddos and I went back to Olympia for a week at my parents' house (Andrew had to return to PA after the week in ID). That third week finally felt like my week off - two grandparents to two kids is a great ratio, and it left me rather free at long last!

Here are a few highlights among many, many great moments.

Zarya had some awesome bedhead every morning

 Jerod would like his dinner now, please. He often sat at the head of the table where all 18 of us were, and this is his family patriarch expression.

 Neither of our kids liked Priest Lake all that much, to my great disappointment. They grudgingly agreed to let me push them around in this little boat, but when they discovered that they didn't get wet while in it, we found a successful compromise.

 Andrew went on a hike one day. I guess it was a decent view at the top!

 There were some good male bonding moments. Nothing like a little elbow in the gut to say, "I love you, Baba."

Bob and Jerry

Jerry and Zar

Before I start this blog post, I'd like to make sure it's clear that the names Bob and Jerry are perfectly fine names and I know some great people with those names.

As I think I've mentioned before on here, Andrew goes by Baba, the Swahili word for father, with our kids. Of course we lived in Tanzania when he decided to be Baba instead of Dad or Father (does anyone actually call their father Father?), where it was a bit more common than it is here in Western PA, but I think he'd have chosen it anyway. We like being a little unique. I'm Mama, which is both Swahili and English, so that was a straightforward choice.

Sometimes Zarya calls me Mom instead of Mama, usually after being around other kids and hearing them call their mothers by that. Although it's not my preference, it's not a big deal, and sometimes I don't really notice, because the two sound pretty similar.

What we do notice, however, is when Baba becomes Bob. I guess Zarya figured out the Mama/Mom connection, heard other kids call their fathers Dad or Daddy, and so created Bob out of Baba. It was just occasional at first, but it's like she thinks it's just too much effort to get out two syllables of Baba and now prefers to keep it short and sweet, Bob. A few times I've even heard her call him Bobby... We're going to be out in public someday and she's going to yell across the room, "Hey Bob!" just like she does at home. Eventually this Bob business will get to the point when other adults assume his name is Bob and that he's her step-dad and she calls him by his first name.

He tries to call her Zar every time she calls him Bob, as in, "Hey Bob!" followed by, "Yes, Zar?" She gets mad and insists that her name is Zarya, and seems to miss the point as he explains that his is Baba.

And if having Bob around weren't enough, Jerod has become Jerry recently, too. Andrew and I never, ever call him Jerry. Nothing against the name Jerry, but that's not what I'd like to call my baby boy. I'm hoping that he sticks with Jerod. If he wants to be cooler and go by Jer at some point in his future, fine. But not Jerry. Zarya, however, seems to think Jerry is a great name and calls him that quite regularly, and she never consulted me on the matter of his nickname. Crazy toddler!

Popcorn and smoothies

First of all, I will not apologize for my recent lack of blog posts. I am sorry that I have not been able to write any for a while, but I'm not sorry for having chosen spending time working on Bible translation, making dinners/cleaning the house/etc., hanging out with my husband, or taking care of my children instead of being at my computer.

But, it's Saturday afternoon and the kids are both asleep and the baby food is cooking away on the stove, so I've got a few minutes.

I had a revelation a few weeks ago. It was the same one I'd had a few years ago, so you think I'd have remembered it and wouldn't have had to figure out the same thing twice, but I guess I'm a little slow sometimes. I realized that the same meal every week was stressful for me. It occurred to me that if we just had popcorn and smoothies, which we all love, is pretty quick to make, and not too bad for you healthwise (I'm not saying it's amazing, but it's not awful), for that meal every week, life would be a whole lot better on those days.

It used to be Tuesday dinners that worked me up. Back in Musoma, I had Bible study late in the afternoon on Tuesdays. By the time I got home at nearly 7:00pm, Andrew had been taking care of Zarya on his own for almost three hours, he and I were both hungry, Zarya needed her bath and to be put to bed, and making dinner (or trying to make sure we always had leftovers on hand) was just stressful. I loved Bible study, but on the way home every week I could feel myself tensing up and bracing for this low-blood-sugar racing around trying to do everything at once stressful evening.

Then I discovered the relief of a planned popcorn and smoothies night. We had that combo for lunch or dinner sometimes, but not on any sort of schedule. But as soon I figured out that if we had popcorn and smoothies every Tuesday evening, all of that dinner stress disappeared. Okay, so we were still in Musoma where nothing is really stress-free, because sometimes there was no electricity for running the blender to make the smoothies and the stores periodically ran out of our preferred kind of popcorn, but most of the time the plan worked well.

Skip ahead a year: we're now in Pennsylvania and have two kids. What's stressful about life here, you might wonder. Well, let me tell you, and you might agree with me - Sunday lunch! Seriously, we get home from church and we're all hungry and want lunch NOW, and naptime is the looming deadline, so we really do need to eat lunch soon so we can get the kids down for their naps on time so we don't all dissolve into puddles of hungry exhaustion after having all of that fun at Sunday school/church. Andrew tends to prefer different kinds of lunch foods than what Zarya and I eat Monday through Friday, so figuring out something we could all eat and get it together quickly stressed me out.

Voila - popcorn and smoothies! We had been having popcorn and smoothies for Sunday dinners in PA, but when I figured out a few weeks ago that moving my emergency meal to being Sunday lunch, well, life got a whole lot better. We now come home from church and Zarya and I make the smoothies and Andrew makes the popcorn (for the world's best popcorn, please see the Whirley Pop - http://www.amazon.com/Wabash-Valley-Farms-25008-Whirley-Pop/dp/B00004SU35/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1434824414&sr=1-1&keywords=whirley+pop) and then we sit on the couch and enjoy ourselves.

So, maybe popcorn and smoothies isn't your family's thing, but I bet you know some meal that is your well-liked, quick go-to meal. Should you find yourself getting stressed out regularly by some meal each week, do yourself a favor and plan your easy meal in advance!