Holiday baking

This past Saturday was the Annual Liquid Lunch/Dirty Santa party that we (the group of wimmins I hang out with) have every year to celebrate the season.  We generally meet at our favorite watering hole (Heroes on Hwy 21) and eat, drink, act merry, and try to scam the best gift out of the gift swap.  Lots of the ladies bring little goodie bags or treats for everyone as well.  This year, the lovely Lisa McCord brought a rum cake.  It was ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY the most awesome rum cake I have ever had.  As we were completely WRECKING that cake, we repeatedly asked Lisa to make sure to send us the recipe for it.  She obliged us, which in turn, enables me to share with you:

1 Duncan Hines Butter Recipe Cake Mix

1 box of instant vanilla pudding mix

½ cup of veg. Oil

½ cup of water

½ cup of rum (I used dark and actually did less water and more rum)

4 large eggs

¼ cup of chopped pecans

Mix first 5 ingredients and then add eggs 1 at a time until blended.

Spray bunt pan with baking spray and sprinkle the pecans in the bottom, pour cake mix in pan and bake at 350 deg for about 45 minutes.

Glaze:

  

1 stick of butter

1 cup of sugar

¼ cup of water

¼ cup of rum (again, I used dark and added more rum)

Cook above ingredients to a boil and pour over cake as soon as it comes out of the oven.  Let the glaze soak into the cake and then turn cake out on to plate and enjoy!!

Someone made the comment: I bet it would be even more awesome if you replaced ALL the water with rum…I quickly hit the REPLY TO ALL with this dire warning:

No! For the love of God, NO!!! Don’t you remember the peanut butter rum cookie debacle of 2009?And felt compelled to share the following story with my friends (The following is from an old email that went out to a few of my friends and co-workers):

Me: Gah! What is that SMELL????

Jeff: Okay, there’s something I need to tell you…



These types of discussions never end well.



I swear to God…my life is a sitcom. Last night, I took a good ol' Ambien and went to bed around midnight (I haven't slept well this whole week with everything going on.)
Jeff was still up watching TV, having a rum & coke. Something on the TV makes him decide that what he really needs (RIGHT NOW!!!) is some peanut butter cookies. Sadly, we do not have any in the pantry…so he looks up a recipe on the internet for something simple...finds one that's basically Bisquick, peanut butter, brown sugar and water. "Water?" he thinks. "Water sucks. You know what's better than water....rum." So he makes a batch of peanut butter cookie dough substituting rum for water. He said that everything was fine until he cracked the oven door to look at them. They went "whoosh" & caught fire. It's a wonder he didn't burn the house down. We have a new rule...no more drunk baking without supervision after midnight. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. Luckily, he is bald, so at least his HEAD didn’t catch on fire along with the cookies (which incidentally did not look much like cookies…more like biscuits…burnt biscuits…that reeked of rum).

Anyway, without further ado…BEHOLD! Jeff’s peanut butter-rum cookies!!! At least he plated them nicely:

My House is a Zoo

...and the newest family member is A MONKEY.

You guys have met Maxx:

Well, that was Maxx a few weeks ago.  This is Maxx now:

So yeah...he's grown some.  He has also gotten exponentially more rotten.  I was on a business trip last week.  I left on a red-eye Monday morning...Monday afternoon, the hubby came home to this:

That's about half a box of Puffs (with lotion) strewn about my kitchen.  Eviscerating facial tissues is obviously a very happy, fun time...

Unfortunately, it wasn't a happy, fun time that lasted, so Maxx moved on to other things.  Such as:

Knocking the junk-bowl off the counter and going through its contents.  I hope I'm not the only one out there with a junk bowl...it's a location that we keep all sorts of flotsam around the house in...hair ties, chapstick, handcream, approximately 78-zillion bobby pins, lip gloss, etc.
Usually, the household inhabitants wait a full 24-hours when I'm out of town to go completely feral.  Maxx set a new record for under 12 hours.

Jeff cleaned up his mess, and tried to kitten-proof the kitchen to keep the chaos at bay.  However, Maxx made one last bid for anarchy by jimmying open the door to the pantry and helping himself to some 12-grain baked goodness:

This cat may be the end of him.

I had barely posted this when I heard  a suspicious noise in the foyer...I walked in there and saw:

That's an old-fashioned pencil sharpener that I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW we owned...complete with pencil shavings.  I don't know where the little turd found it.
In his defense, though, the stinker is as sweet as pie:

"I helps you blog."

Genetics

This year, I have perhaps over-shared my daughter’s cheering season on Facebook a tich too much…but I figure, “Hey, it’s not like holding a gun to anyone’s head & making them look.”  I mean, no one has rolled their eyes at me and TOLD me to cut it out with all the pom-poms already, but I’m not oblivious to the fact that every week I post a good 20-30 pictures of her…doing basically the same things (jumping, clapping, kicking) in a rotation of about 5 different uniforms.  But in much the same way as I was when she was a baby…I find myself UNABLE to not show her off. (She was the prettiest baby EVER, and I have the pictures to prove it.)

Luckily, I have wonderful friends who put up with me & patiently look at all eleventy billion photos.  I even have some who seem to enjoy them, and will occasionally comment.  One comment that I’ve heard A LOT this year, and that really surprised me was, “She looks so much like you!”  Because, really, her whole life, I thought she took after Jeff.   I have illustrative proof of this as well:

That’s Jeff on the left & his mini-me on the right…both at around age 5 or 6.

However the other week, even my mother…who ALWAYS used to comment on how much the kiddo looked like my husband (she used to joke, “Who knew Jeff would look so cute in a dress!”) told me that she’s been looking more & more like me as she’s gotten older.  Some of this can be attributed to the fact that her coloring has darkened, I’m sure.



But the whole thing does remind me of an article I read years and years ago about how children resembled their fathers more when they are babies…so they wouldn’t eat them or something.  I mean, biologically, if you just pushed the little pot-roast out of your veryown body, you KNOW you’re the mom…and you’re certain that you’re genetically invested.  The father, on the other hand, needs some reassurance when the little monkey has been up 23 hours straight with colic.

So I guess I’m just wondering if this shift in “resemblance” is another survival mechanism as she’s well into her teen years?  Now that the whole “carried-her-around-in-my-body-for-9-months” thing threatens to be overwhelmed by the “if-I-have-to-tell-her-one-more-time-to-clean-her-room-so-help-me-GOD!” thing…am I needing a reminder (evolutionarily-speaking) that she’s my genetic legacy?

Oh! My epiglottis!

I stayed home from work today to go to the doctor.  I had what I thought was strep throat.  I started having a sore throat Tuesday…by Wednesday evening; I had gross, oozy looking ulcer things on the back of my throat and my uvula.  Very un-cool.  I went to the local doc-in-a-box, had a blood draw and strep swab.  The doctor declared strep-negative & said it was a viral infection.  He gave me a steroid shot, an antibiotic (afraid that the oozy pustules might get a bacterial infection) and prescription for “Magic Mouthwash.” True story.

My lovely daughter, home for fall break, offered to drop the prescription off for me.  I was a little jazzed about getting something that was forreal called “Magic Mouthwash” to be honest with you.  I was thinking it was probably made from rainbows and fairy dust or something.  Last month, I went to a managers’ meeting in Kentucky and this pub we went to had a drink called a “Pixie Stick.” It was purple and awesome and could kick your butt in record time (haven’t had Everclear in 25 years, probably, but funny how you can still pick up the taste of it in anything.) I was hoping that “Magic Mouthwash” was going to be something like that…powerful, yet whimsical (and might stain my tongue an unholy color).

The first pharmacy the child went to said that they didn’t have all of the “ingredients” for my concoction, but directed her to a nearby store that did.  She dropped off the Rx and was told to come back in about an hour and a half to pick it up.  She got way-laid at her orthodontist appointment, so I headed over to pick up my “Magic Mouthwash” myself.

“Magic Mouthwash” does not taste magical.  At all.  It tastes like a combination of Cepastat, Maalox, and monkey spit (I assume.)  And that’s because IT IS.  Wikipedia states that “The most popular formulation of magic mouthwash contains viscous lidocaine as a topical anestetic, diphenhydramine as an anti-inflammatory and Maalox (no lie) to help coat the tissues in the mouth.”  I’m guessing that “diphenhydramine” is the Latin word for “monkey spit.”  It does numb the mouth though…AFTER you get a full 5 seconds of wanting to rip your own tongue out and then rinse your mouth with bleach.  The numbing lasts for quite awhile too.  I’m afraid that nothing is going to taste right for the next week, though.  Can someone please bring me some Everclear?

Pretty Fly for a White Girl

So, the other day, the child and I are out and about, goofing off…and something happens (don’t remember…it could have been anything) that causes Daughter to roll her eyes at me in a way indicating that I am perhaps the LAMEST person on the planet. To which I replied…”Nu-uh, honey…I am SO fly.”

She just looked at me and said, “You’re what?”

“I’m FLY.”

“Do you mean fie?  Because that’s what people say, Mom.  Not fly, fie.”

“No they don’t. The saying is “fly,” as in the Fly Girls.”

“Who?”

“The Fly Girls? From In Living Color? Jennifer Lopez?  J-Lo? You don’t know who the Fly Girls are?”

“Must’ve been some old show…”

I’m thinking that she is somehow tragically mistaken…like how she thought that her Papaw saying “10-4” as an affirmative was kind of code that the two of them had and was not known by the rest of the world.  So, I go to my old stand-by Urbandictionary.com.

And although “fly” is there as “cool, in style,” “fie” is also in there…apparently it is a shortened version of “fine.”

This public service announcement was brought to you by Mothers Who Are Old and Lame.

Scratch my itch...or not

Every year about this time, Jeff gets this flaky patch on his back.  It’s like seasonal-related-super-duper-localized eczema.  I’ve known him since he was 16, and it’s been the same thing every year…the spot is about the size of a quarter and it’s on his left scapula (shoulder blade). (God, why did I say scapula if I was just going to put shoulder blade in parenthesis?) It appears in the fall, and he battles it all winter.  Over the course of the cooler seasons, he will ask me to scratch his flaky-itchy-spot eleventy-jillion times. His itchy scapula-rot made its annual appearance yesterday, and it reminded me of an amusing Jeff-story…

So Jeff has a best friend, Brad.  Back in the days before Brad settled down & got married & had kids, he used to hang around the house quite a bit, particularly on the weekends.  He’d come over, watch TV or play video games with Jeff…and then inevitably, he’d call for a Wal-mart run.  Brad didn’t like to do his weekly dog food/shampoo/detergent/whatever-stocking when it was crowded…but he also didn’t like doing it alone.  It wasn’t unusual on your average Saturday night at 11:17 p.m. to see the two of them pulling into the local Wally-World parking lot.  If I caught them before they left the house, I’d send Jeff with a list of whatever I needed too, so I didn’t mind in the least.  Did I mention that the two of them could bicker like an old married couple?  They’d come home from a Wal-mart trip, and Jeff would joke that he was sure everyone working 3^rd shift there thought he & Brad were a “couple.” (To quote the Seinfeld episode…”not that there’s anything wrong with that.”)

Well, it so happened one year when Jeff’s eczema (or whatever it is) flared up…he was having an AWFUL time with it, and decided to resort to actually treating it.  Unfortunately, for two weeks running, every time I was in Wal-mart, they were out of Cortizone cream, and nothing else seemed to be helping.  Cue the weekly boys-night-out to the store…

Jeff decided since he was already in the store, he’d see if they’d gotten any more Cortizone in…and as he rounded the corner into the Health and Beauty section, he saw a nice, middle-aged woman stocking the shelves.  As a matter-of-fact, in her hand was the red box with the very visible yellow “10% Cort…” on it.  Jeff, being the theatrical guy he his…runs up to her, takes both her hands, looks into her eyes and said fervently, “Oh, thank GOD!!! You have no idea how much I need this!” while Brad waits patiently at the end of the aisle.  With a bewildered look on her face, the nice stocking-room lady slowly and carefully handed Jeff the cream and told him to “Have a good night.”  The guys finished up their shopping and headed to the register.  It wasn’t until Jeff handed his purchase to the cashier that he stopped to fully read the box:

Yes, that says exactly what you think it does.

Short, but horrible

Once upon a time, the world was new and the words "chemise" and "mossy oak" existed far, far away from one another.  Sadly, that age of innocence and purity has passed.  Now we have this unholy union:

What the hell, people?  Is there really a market for camo lingerie?  WHY?  I don't even get it.