Zarya - age two can be great

Some days having a two-year-old is just the best. You get to play outside with crazy cuteness like picture number one, and if you succeed in playing enough, you can create the effect of picture number two (notice the undone puzzle and scattered toys - she was supposed to be having 30 minutes of quiet play time in her room, but opted for an hour long snooze in her bean bag instead. Fine with me!).

The Hidden Thrills of Spell-checking

I'm on day twelve of spell-checking a massive amount of Ikizu translation. It's not the most exciting job, but I have a secret passion for finding those little accidents that have slipped through the cracks. You know, when an extra vowel has snuck into a word, when the prefix for the perfective got confused with the extremely similar one for the past tense - exciting stuff like that.

This evening as I was (quite successfully) combining watching The Voice with spell-checking, I laughed when I saw a list of four words next to each other. I showed Andrew my screen and joked, "Think any of these might be wrong?" (If you missed the intonation there, it was the pattern that meant, "Can you believe the mistakes I find? There's no way all four of these words are correct!")

See what I mean?

abhahirɨ
abhahiri
abhahiiri
abhahɨɨrɨ

But guess what? I checked them all, and they are all right! And we're not just talking a little tweak of a different suffix on the same root, but like totally, completely different words! How exciting is that late in the evening of day 12 of spell-checking?

In respective order, they mean:

he should take them
angel
relative
he gave them

COOL!. I love Ikizu.

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."