In Which I Prove I'm Not Imaginary

Meet Gayle! She and I became friends through my blog years ago, even though she's not a book blogger herself... she's a reader and a book blog reader and... a most awesome photographer! So we've passed a few letters back and forth, some cards maybe, became Facebook friends (where I can see her awesome pictures!) and have,  you know, been internet friends all these years.

But her kids have given her a hard time and said, "Hey mom, about that imaginary friend you have...." So the other day, she was in town and dropped by the library where I was working, and managed to find me even though I was running around and not being easy to find, and guess what? I'm not imaginary after all! Yay! How awesome is that!?

I'm so glad she made the effort to stop by even though there wasn't really time to talk or anything, it was fun to meet and say hi and see her cute kids. Maybe we'll get another chance another day down the road!

Other random stuff that's been going on that lets me know all is not in my imagination:

** I posted these cookies my daughter made for book club on Instagram and it got more likes than this awesome sunset picture that also happened this week.

** Everyone has wanted the cookie recipe so if you want it too, here's the link: peanut butter chocolate chip nutella cookies.

** I'm busy making a video/slideshow for my parent's 50th wedding celebration which will be happening next week. I guess we are also making one of our own family's endeavors to share at the reunion with my brothers and sisters too. It's been all pictures and movies this week!

** Last week we went to the city's summer celebration parade and the cannon that led off the parade exploded just after it passed us and burned three kids. That was pretty terrible. I think they are doing okay, but I'd like to know for sure!

** We are trying to get more garden planted. I've assigned that to my 19 year old. He's doing pretty good with it. Keep your fingers crossed that they actually grow now!

** I've decided if I really want to write more, I've got to stop committing to reviewing books! And having deadlines and such for reading. It's staring to make me a little crazy.

** The World Cup has passed me by many years before and I've never even noticed. This year though, it seems to be on a bit at our house! I guess that's what happens when you suddenly have a new son-in-law (and a new daughter-in-law too for that matter) that loves soccer, eh? But I'm not sure who to root for.. the USA or the cool other teams with those cool nice looking cool soccer playing cool guys! :)

** We went to two movies this past week... I shared my thoughts about The Fault in our Stars here.. .and got wow, such an overwhelming reaction from all of you!! (You all must be TFIOS'ed out.) And this week I'll tell you about that Dragon movie where I'll wonder how they can make cartoon boys so freaking cute.

Well, I guess that's it from here. Life goes on. The next big event is this weekend, as I said, and then maybe, just maybe there'll be a little excitement lull? We'll see.

Garbage Can Root Beer!

It's a long standing tradition in my extended family to make homemade root beer... in a garbage can... for our reunions. It's quite the fun project and always so yummy too! So whenever I get the opportunity to make it for some other event, I jump at the chance!

I had just such a chance this past weekend at a church picnic party and thought I'd document the fun so you too can make garbage can root beer some day!

First of all, I always forget the amounts of stuff, and I'm not totally sure that the recipe on the back of the root beer extract is what we've always done, but I found this ingredient list at All Recipes, which is what I ended up using. If you don't want to make a HUGE batch of this stuff and just want a "normal" bit, then make it in a 5 gallon jug instead of a garbage can!

Here's a list of the both ways:

For a Five Gallon Jug

6 cups of sugar
3 1/3 gallons cold water
1 2-oz bottle of root beer extract
4 lbs dry ice

 
For a 20 Gallon Garbage Can
(times the above by FIVE!)

30 cups of sugar (15 lbs of sugar!)
16 2/3 gallons of cold water (give or take a bit!)
5 2-oz bottles of root beer extract
20 lbs of dry ice

So here's what you do.

First, buy a new plastic 20 gallon garbage can! And if you plan to make this often, you of course keep it handy and store it garbage free.

Fill the can up with water about half way and then add the sugar and extract. Stir with some sort of long implement (we tried using a hot dog roasting stick this last time, but I wouldn't recommend stirring with a fork. Doesn't work too well!)

Or, if you aren't bugged by it, stick your arm in and stir the sugar so it doesn't settle too much at the bottom!

Fill the can with the rest of the water, which you'll want not all the way to the top, thus, about 17 gallons as listed above.

Then, the fun part! Carefully and safely drop in the dry ice. Let it bubble and fizz for about an hour. It's during this step that I hope the sugar truly gets stirred up, because it's pretty impossible otherwise! (Be sure to not put the lid on, that would be explosive!)

After an hour, taste it to test the fizz level. If it passes, you are done! If not, let it percolate a bit more. To serve it, we transfer the root beer with a gallon pitcher to the 5 gallon cooler, so people can easily fill their glasses.

And then, bottoms up!

This amount served well over 100 very thirsty people the other night, and we had a good couple of gallons left over.

Seriously, this is one of the best summer treats ever!

Oh, and if you are at a big gathering, I would keep your eye on on the can during the actual picnic, or at least put a note on it declaring it NOT garbage, or you just might end up with a picnic plate thrown right in!

Also, if you happen to have some vanilla ice cream handy, well, you know what that means! Floats!

Making Markus Zusak's Crescent Cookies

Last night was book club and as always I enjoy trying to find something fun and different to serve for food. Sometimes I try to be creative and make something that connects to the book. Sometimes I'm just lazy and make whatever is easiest.

This time, as I was planning for the evening, I remembered that years ago I ended up with a book called The Book Club Cook Book. (I was probably supposed to do a review of  it, so consider this post that review. It has TONS of awesome books, authors, recipes and ideas!) And then I remembered that it has a recipe submitted by none other than Mr. Markus Zusak himself! It's paired off with The Book Thief, of course, but since these cookies really are the author's specialty (and not something specific to The Book Thief) and since we were discussing his other well-known book, I Am the Messenger, I decided that they would work just fine for our evening too!

Anyway, it was quite the ambitious adventure and so I thought I'd share the experience.

First, these are called Vanilla Kipferls, or to English-ize them up a a bit... Crescent Cookies. Mr. Z's family makes them at Christmastime as they are a tradition passed down from his German and Austrian parents. The key ingredient is hazelnut meal.... something I don't see commonly on our grocery shelves!

So, the first thing I did was to track that down. When I googled it, I found that Bob's Red Mill brand makes it, and I'd remembered seeing some of those specialty flours on the shelf, so I went to that store and had a look. The flour section didn't have it, but YAY! The health food aisle did! And it was $15 dollars for less than one pound! Awesome!

Then I could see that I needed one or two whole vanilla beans. I had never bought one, or even seen one before! I googled, and they looked like long dried up tuberous things! I had no idea where to look. I looked in spices, in produce, in beans. Nothing. So I asked Twitter! And a IRL neighbor of mine happened to see it and told me she'd seen them in the grocery store right by my house.

So I went to look, and only found them after asking a cashier who then tracked down the guy who actually has that section of the store memorized. It was in the spice section by the way, and there were two beans in a little spice jar... for $12. Awesome!

Now, it was time to make them!  Here are the ingredients (because I know you are going to also want to try this at home!)

For the cookie bit:
1 3/4 cups flour (the normal all purpose kind!)
1 1/2 cups hazelnut meal (it only used about half of my little tiny package!)
2/3 cup granulated sugar
14 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature

Cut the butter into 1 inch cubes and add to all the dry ingredients, and then mix it... by hand WITH your hand! for 8 to 10 min. And believe me, this part took awhile. Those are some long 10 minutes! (Someone at book club suggested using a mixer would add air which would help it to meld together. Perhaps?)

Then you form them into the crescent shapes, which sounds easy enough, but it was hard since the dough was very dry and crumbly and felt like trying to mold very dry sand into a shape. Here's the instructions from the book: Pinch off small pieces of dough and mold gently between your palms to form 3 inch ropes. thicker in the i middle and tapered at the ends. Fashion each piece into a crescent shape and place onto prepared, greased cookie sheets, leaving a generous 1/3 inch in between, because they will spread a bit while cooking.

I loved the word fashion. That is where I got hung up in my experience. Oh boy. It took awhile and lots of patience! (I ended up just molding the shape right onto the cookie sheet and smooshing the heck out of it. My first ones are a little round and my last ones were a little flatter. And if you google images of this cookie, you can see what they are REALLY supposed to look like. I can see this is something that would take some practice! Hopefully it's not just me!)

So then you bake those for 15 to 20 min. in a 350 degree oven and take them out just as they are turning brown. I waited a bit too long for one of my batches I think!

While they are cooking you make the vanilla sugar that's to be sprinkled on them afterwards.

For the vanilla sugar bit:
1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1 to 2 whole vanilla beans

Put the sugar in a food processing bowl, cut up the beans (crosswise) into 1 inch pieces, and add to the sugar. With a stainless steel blade, process until the beans are blended into the sugar, for about 15 seconds. Strain the residue of the beans out, then sift the sugar onto the still slightly warm cookies. Oh wow, it smells so good about now! (Note: I think I was unduly cautious about the sprinkling of the sugar... I think if I were to do it again, I would be much much MUCH more generous!)

And there you have it! Markus Zusak's Christmas Crescent Cookies!

They were really yummy by the way.

Besides that, it was a fun endeavor!

What fun things have you tried making for book club? Let me know if you decide to give these cookies a go!

Utah Book Blogger Party... It's a Wrap!

Hey! So we had a party last Friday night and people came! I'm always amazed! We had lots of fun, playing a "guess the character" game, and a silly book swap, and eating all sorts of desserts, (some even healthy ones,) and just talking and meeting new and old people, bloggers and authors alike.

Here are a few pictures we managed to take and/or steal:

Let the party start!
Here we are playing "guess the character." Can you see the sticker there on
Kami's (Kami's Library Thoughts) back?
(at least I think that's Kami?)
And look! There's Natasha from Maw Books! With her beautiful baby!
I also see Penelope, from The Reading Fever, right there in the center.
On the right, I think that is Melanie, Diana's friend (Book Adventures) and
I also see just a bit of Heather from The Secret Adventures of WriterGirl.

Waiting for the swapping to start!
There's me in the purple, next to Kami and Penelope.
I also see Emily (Emily's Reading Room) on the right,
and Kathy from Read This Instead in the chair.
You'll find those with their backs to us down below,
except for Enna from Squeaky Books, who you will not find
anywhere in these pictures.. except I can see her here... can you?!

The whole crowd.

We covered the books for swapping and played the LEFT RIGHT game.
See story below.

We had desserts!

Oh wait! Here's Enna!
She brought a mask, but ended up tangled instead.
Penelope is hoping to untangle her here.

Kami and Emily,
they've been buddies since 3rd grade!

The three with there backs to us in the picture above:
Jessica from Books: A True Story
(Hey and I have an interview with her this week! Come back to see!)
Jenny from Alternate Readality and
Jessica from The Bluestocking Society

Melanie, who says she is a reader not a blogger,
and her friend Diana from Book Adventures

More of the circle!
I think during the swap game?

Hey and look!
It's me and Jenny! :)

Here are some of our author friends:
Nichole Giles
Chersti Nieveen
Jenn Johansson
Sara Raasch
Natalie Whipple
and not pictured
Julia King
Heather Moore

I brought these and they turned out pretty good!
Chocolate Macaroon Squares
(That link goes to the recipe for those interested,
which I actually found in a Nestle book I had.
But I left out the pecans!)

And finally, I thought I'd include this story I wrote for the book swap LEFT RIGHT game... you  know.. that's where you pass your book/present every time LEFT or RIGHT is mentioned? Yeah... that one. It got a little crazy and let me just say, we bloggers and authors had a little LEFT RIGHT issue going on!

But anyway, I thought some of you may get a kick out of this, so here's the story, which I call.....

 OUR BOOK BLOGGING STORY:

Once upon a time, a few people in Utah started blogging about books. At first, they thought they were the only ones! But then one day, a couple of them went to an author event. While there, they stood RIGHT by each other in line to see James Dashner! Even though he wasn’t there because he LEFT to get stuff from his car! But he came RIGHT back and signed things and afterwards, they went RIGHT home to WRITE about the event RIGHT away on their blogs.

Then one said to the other, “Gasp! You were RIGHT by me the whole time and we didn’t know it? We LEFT without saying a thing to each other? We need to fix that! So how about we have a party RIGHT away?”

Several months later, they gathered all the other ten bloggers in Utah and had their first party. And guess who was there? You are RIGHT! James Dashner himself! He talked about a new book he had coming up soon, it was called The Maze Runner. He said, “It’s about this kid who knows RIGHT from the start that he LEFT his memory behind! And now he is stuck in a maze. And all he wants to do is get RIGHT out. So one day, he becomes the runner, and gets out there in that maze and he turns RIGHT, then LEFT, then RIGHT, then RIGHT again, then RIGHT again, and then LEFT, and LEFT and RIGHT. Whew. Finally, he.... well, I can’t tell you because that would give it RIGHT away!”

A few months later, a few more people started blogging so we had another party. It was a crazy day! It was so hot and remember? The city had an event in the park... we knew the bloggers were RIGHT there but we couldn’t get to them because the road was blocked! So we LEFT and went up and RIGHT around the whole park and back down and finally all found each other.

This time we had several more authors join us. We asked them RIGHT away, “So, what’s your book about?” One said, “mine is about a boy who LEFT the family that took care of him and then comes back, quite changed. Grace knew him almost RIGHT away and RIGHT away she was loving him all over again. But wait, is this a good RIGHT thing? Or not?” What book is it? RIGHT!!! The Dark Divine! by Bree Despain

The other said her book was so very serious... about a boy who LEFT all his friends... yep, you are RIGHT, he died. And they all talk about him and have memories of him. Which one of them is RIGHT in their thoughts they have? You are RIGHT! They all are!  What book is it? RIGHT! The Way He Lived. by Emily Wing Smith.

Finally, the other author said her book was about aliens, and that’s all I can tell you because that book never came out. Instead, a few years later, we got to read her book about a girl who LEFT her family, but then came back, (but not RIGHT back) and has six months to make everything RIGHT again before she LEFT again to go be in the Everneath with a very scary dude. Opps, I gave that title RIGHT away! Sorry Brodi Ashton!

Then we had a couple of parties at Golden Corral where we were nearly RIGHT on top of each other because now it’s so crowded with all our bloggers and authors and WRITE-rs! At those parties, we brought books to swap and everyone LEFT their books on the table where RIGHT away there was a mad rush to get the popular ARCs. We also LEFT our fancy blogger cards, and we LEFT our email addresses and Twitter names with each other. Yes we LEFT the place with lots of new blogger friends, and went RIGHT home and got on Twitter RIGHT away to share pictures and stories with each other.

Now, there are so many bloggers, it has LEFT our spreadsheet in the dust and we can’t keep it all RIGHT anymore! But at least, now when we go to the book festivals, and author signings and launch parties, we know each other RIGHT away, whether we are standing RIGHT by each other or way over LEFT across the way... now we can say hi and talk books to our hearts content and everything is RIGHT with the book blogging world!

*********************

Ah, yes... we had fun! Thanks to all of you who came! To those that didn't, we'll see you next time!

Pinterest Challenge Update: Cowgirl Cookies

So I had hopes to do more this week on the Pin It Do It Challenge than just the one project, but there was no time for quilting, which was the other project I've been working on. Maybe this weekend?

Source: bakerella.com via Suey on Pinterest

Anyway, I did the Cowgirl Cookie gift jars for little Mother's Day presents. Here's the link to the original post complete with instructions.

These look easy, do they not? But I had issues. I did two of them and had one wide mouth jar and one regular. Well, I ran out of room! Even though I was packing it as tight as I could as per the instructions! In the wide mouth jar, I managed to squeeze in the last sugar layer... barely! (No room at all for the pecans!) But there was no hope for the other one as you can see here:

Needed to fit in a half cup white sugar,
and all that was left was the brim.

So I dumped it out, found another wide mouth jar, and started over again. What a pain. Anyway, in the end they turned out pretty cute, don't you think? Well, at least I think so. Not sure what the moms thought when they got them. It was sort of a luke warm reaction. Oh, well.

I did make the cookies too... and they were YUMMY! Forgot to take a picture though.

Oh, and P.S..... if you want different colors of M and M's on off season... Zurchers has them! (Is Zurchers a Utah place or country wide? I've no idea!) But they are expensive! Sheesh.

I was going to make something for book club from Pinterest, but ended up going with good old standbys.

I'll be back next week to let you know if and/or what I manage to fit in this week crafty-wise!

Pinterest Challenge Update: Two Projects Done!

This week I really got in the mood to work on some crafty projects and then it just sort of took over. I've been missing this part of my creative life, and so I've really enjoyed trying to get it back again, using Trish's Pinterest Challenge as an excuse.

Source: designspongeonline.com via Suey on Pinterest

The first project we did was the Calendar Journal. I first saw this when Kailana of The Written World posted about it here. You can also find out about it here on the original post. The idea is to take index cards and date them for each day of the year, then use old postcards to divide them into months. Then each day you write something you did that day, labeling it by the year. So after many years, your index cards will be full of stuff you did on that particular day for all those years. Make sense?

Anyway, I thought it would be a good project to do with the girls, and they agreed! But I must say, we took the idea and totally changed it up. Here's what we ended up doing:

We decided we wanted more permanent sturdy containers for the cards, so we went to Hobby Lobby and ended up with these tin boxes with handles, which we then painted and sticker-ed up. Then, we got stacks of both white and colored index cards (which we didn't cut in half as suggested in the original instructions) and divvied them up between us. Then, instead of using postcards, we decided to create our own month dividers. My 13 year old daughter created them using google images and photoshop. I just picked a handful of pictures from our files and got them printed. Then we laminated them. Also, instead of using a date stamp for all the index cards, we just sat and hand wrote the dates on them all while we watched TV one night!

The supplies: white tin box, stickers and stacks of cards.
Cost: Tin boxes: $6.50
Stickers: $3.00
Cards: $3.00
Printing of photo dividers: $2.00

Here's Toto painting her box.

This is how the cards fit into the box... perfect!

Toto's finished box.

Toto creating her monthly dividers on Photoshop.

Here she is writing the dates on the crads.

JJ finally joined us and is putting stickers on hers. She didn't paint it.

Here's my finished box, vintage style.

JJ and Toto show off their boxes.

JJ's finished box.

Here's what our divider cards look like... Toto has the monthly themed ones,
I just have random fun pictures. JJ has yet to make hers.

Here's what it looks like with the dividers and a couple of example cards.

We had a great time doing this together, and I hope we can all keep up with writing our one thing down each day, for years to come!
___________________________________________________

Source: annies-eats.com via Suey on Pinterest

The second thing I did from my Pinterest board was make this for dinner one night. It's called Black Bean Lasagna, and the family enjoyed it, but they did say, "It tastes very healthy." So you can take that however you'd like! (Here's the original link to the recipe.)

The casserole in progress... bean mixture, canned tomatoes, grated cheese, lasagna noodles and salsa.

What it looked like all put together before cooking....

.... and after cooking.

I currently have projects three and four in progress, so I'll save those to report on when they are done! But one of them has to do with quilting! Wahoo! I can't wait to show you!

How's your crafty projects coming along?