Cookie Monster's Favorite Candy Corn

I've been wanting to make some more pastel cookies for a while, but haven't felt like there was time to complete them - they take rather more work than most sorts of cookies, and they have to chill for quite a while to make the dough stiff enough to work. It's good to pop the dough you're not working with back into the fridge, to keep it chilled, too. I decided it had been long enough and I'd make some cookies even if it kept me up late, and it has. The problem is, pastel cookies are best when made into interesting shapes, and I didn't have a good idea of what to make. I could make something like checkerboard cookies, but that seems kind of dull. Here's a picture of my first idea for something season-appropriate:

As you can see, this idea didn't work out so well, as you might not guess what the cookies are supposed to be if I don't tell you. No, they are not pork chops. These are my attempt at pumpkin pie slices, as seen from the side. Yes, I know. Needs whipped cream.
The Highly Capable Mrs. had a good idea that would work with the dough I'd already colored if I just colored another part of it yellow - Candy Corn! She's brilliant, why didn't I think of that? I put the idea into practice immediately.
Here's a picture of the cookie making in progress. It's a lot like working with Play-Doh, but a heck of a lot tastier.

And here's the finished product. Don't these look yummy?

You should try some. Go on, try some!

Pretzel Logic

Kids from our son's school had their annual skating outing at Skate King today, and I tagged along to encourage the boy to do more than eye the video games, and possibly actually get out on the floor in skates. I don't think I've been on roller skates in most of a decade, but it was not especially demanding. We did a few loops, slowly, then he wanted a snack. We'd gotten a little fruit punch and popcorn when he noticed another kid had a soft pretzel from the concession counter. I opined aloud, we do not need more snacks, and besides, maybe we could make some of those at home. Naturally, that became a must-do activity according to the younger set, who insisted we get started not long after our return. The Formidable Mrs. found a recipe for giant soft pretzels online, and we got the bread machine started before dinner. An hour and a half later, the dough was ready, so we rolled out long ropes, twisted them into shape, then boiled them for about fifteen seconds in water with baking soda. They looked a bit like this after boiling:

When we had them all boiled and ready to bake, we popped them in the oven for about ten minutes, until they were nicely browned. We hauled them out then brushed them with a little water and sprinkled on some kosher salt, because it's just not a giant pretzel without those big salt crystals. The end result looked something like this:

It was a bit of a mess to clean up afterward for a mere eight pretzels (we remembered to take another picture after eating a couple), but also pretty cool to make our own, and they were quite tasty. I'm still intending to make my own bagels one of these days. It can't be that different.

The Flavor of Childhood

I like pizza. I don't like all pizza equally well, but the basic idea can be executed in a lot of different ways and still turn out fine. Pizza made with focaccia is pretty good, the sort I remember from San Francisco, probably at Boudin's. Deep dish style stuff is fine. Limp pizza doesn't do as much for me, the sort turned out at Pagliacci or Pizza Schmizza (a favorite with the junior member of our household) or the execrable Chuck E Cheese. But it's still pizza, and I'll eat it unless it's been contaminated with some unpalatable topping or other.

The pizza ideal, though, is tough to come by. My favorite is the pizza I had at Shakey's when I was a child growing up in Boise. My memories of the place are probably faulty, but I remember the door and windows had those multicolored round glass panes like bottle bottoms, and didn't admit a lot of light to the interior. The kitchen where the dough was tossed was behind glass, and there was a raised platform and a rail where we could stand and watch them twirl the pizzas and then brush on the thick sauce with a fat mop brush and sprinkle cheese all over and deal out the toppings like so many cards before sliding them into the giant oven with the peel that had a handle as long as a broomstick. The other entertainment was a movie projector playing Our Gang or Little Rascals shorts on a continuous loop. The pizza parlor was halfway across town, and I don't recall going that often, but I liked it when we did, even if I had to peel off the tomato slices that Mom liked on the Canadian bacon pizza.

The pizza had a crisp, crackery crust, and a sauce so viscous that it was almost solid, like tomato paste, with a hint of spice, in a thin layer under the cheese and toppings. Perfection! Sadly, the Shakey's chain was never especially well run, and I understand they changed hands several times in the Eighties and Nineties, losing lots of franchisees in the process. I discovered one in Bellevue when we'd been living in the area for a couple of years, but not long afterward they changed their pizza recipe to something with a thicker crust and a runnier sauce and not nearly as good, making it no longer worth seeking out in preference to the mediocre Round Table or Pizza Hut stuff. Then they closed, and a Mongolian Barbecue place opened in the building which was worth going to again, but I missed the pizza place.

When we went to vacation at Cannon Beach, Oregon the first time, the hotel we stayed in had a pizza place right next door, Fultano's. Naturally, we tried it, and it was the first time I'd had a pizza comparable to the old Shakey's recipe in quite some time. It became a favorite spot, along with the great beach, and added to the vacation draw of Cannon Beach. We've been back every year or two ever since.

We made some pizza at home a couple of weeks ago, and I made up some sauce based on a couple of recipes I found online, roughly equal parts tomato paste and tomato sauce, with some garlic and oregano and minced onion and salt and pepper, and left to simmer on the stove for a while. I was thinking about the paste-like sauce on Shakey's pizza and wondering how to recreate it. The result was pretty good, if I do say so myself. A while later I thought to see if maybe someone else liked Shakey's style pizza and perhaps had a recipe or two to share online. That's when I discovered that the greater Seattle area was still home to a couple of Shakey's franchises, which I thought had all dried up and blown away at least a decade ago. The nearest one was in Renton, a couple of miles east of Ikea. Not exactly close, but not out of the realm of possibility if traffic wasn't too bad.

Wednesday, the Formidable Mrs. had a dinner event for work, leaving me and the boy to our own devices. I packed him up in the van and we hit the road for Renton.
I'd looked up the location on Google's street view, and had a good idea of what I was looking for. It's your basic hole in the wall strip mall location, not a distinctive building with those multicolored glass panes, but you can't have everything. We got there in about twenty-five minutes in lightening traffic, and ordered up a large pie and some mojo potatoes to go. While they cooked it up we made a quick stop at the golden arches next door for the boy who was not as enamored of the pizza idea as I was, then came back to pick up our finished pizza and hit the road for home. Total time away, door to door, was about an hour and ten minutes. Impatient to try it, I shoveled some in my mouth while driving, which may not have been the most attentive thing to do, but there were no accidents, and it was so worth it. They had the original recipe going again, thin crust, paste-like sauce, and all. I stuffed myself with half of a large pizza, and found the belly distension a little uncomfortable afterward, but my mouth was not complaining.

I'm sure my wife is dreading being dragged for miles down south so that I can relive a little of my childhood in a vinyl and formica strip mall eatery, but it's a lot closer than Oregon. Sadly, there's no beach.

Crimp My Ride

My dad isn't going to like this post, so I apologize in advance, Dad.

Whenever I am reminded that my dad traded in a '64 Chevy Chevelle Malibu SS

for a '72 Vega Panel wagon (ours was green, but this was the best picture I could find online)

I wonder what the attraction was, other than maybe it would be nice to have a working transmission, and it must have been cheap.

Of course, I wasn't into cars much as a kid (or as an adult, for that matter), and I wouldn't have known what to do with what was later regarded as a minor classic car if I'd had one. I drive a seventeen-year-old Japanese subcompact (like I stole it!), after all. On the other hand, the stories are too rich not to share. The Vega was the original mixed bag for me and my brother and sister; it got us where we wanted to go, but the cost in effort and aggravation was ridiculous. It taught me far more about what goes on under the hood than I really cared to know, and it's been the source of endless tales of automotive misadventure ever since.

I actually like the Vega panel wagon's looks, it was relatively cool for the time and the econo-box class, with styling echoes from the Camaro:

The next year they gave it an ugly grilled nose and it wasn't nearly as pretty. Looks were one thing, but the problems under the hood were quite another.

The Vega's engine sucked so hard that weather maps would have a low pressure system marked on them wherever we drove it. The aluminum block just wasn't hard enough to keep cylinder wear from making the thing burn oil in no time at all. I started driving the beast when I first got my licence in 1978, while I was in high school, and by then it had maybe 60K miles on it, which was considered past the upper limit for most Vega engines of that vintage. I wasn't going to let that stop me, though. It ran on about the same mix of gasoline to motor oil as a lawn mower. If it didn't have enough high-viscosity stuff in it, it'd smoke worse than a bingo nun with a three-pack habit. I kept a case of Valvoline SAE 50 in the back along with a pour spout and ran through the stuff like it was ginger ale.

After a while the 50 weight wasn't enough and I started pouring in STP or Motor Honey. I got a little behind on the oil one time and actually got pulled over by a state trooper who pointed at the blue cloud I'd left rising over the road, as far back as I could see, and he told me to get out and walk the rest of the way unless I could fix it. No ticket, just a warning. I walked across the street to a service station and picked up a two dollar bottle of motor gunk and that did the trick for the next few miles.

Naturally, the spark plugs got fouled in a hurry on that kind of diet, so I was unshipping them and cleaning and regapping them on a regular basis - the socket set slid around in back with the empty motor oil cans. Every once in a while the engine would go from firing on four cylinders to three, and I knew I'd need to fix it when I got home. Once it got down to two cylinders, and I had to pull over and fix it right there, 'cause it couldn't do more than about 25 mph and was rattling like a stepped-on snake.

This was the car that I and at least a couple of my siblings learned to drive in, and it got all the abuse that you'd expect from inexperienced drivers. It had a three-speed stick, and we destroyed the clutch at least twice, including once while I was in rush hour traffic on an arterial and barely managed to coast it from an inside lane over to the side of the road between some passing cars. My sister managed to kill second gear one time, and we drove it like that for a while after, just revving it really high in first then lugging it in third. My brother and I got reasonably adept at fixing it, including unshipping the tranny and replacing bits, but they got harder to come by in the '80s. I snapped the clutch cable on it once on a freeway onramp, which in the days before cell phones meant I needed to hike a ways, but fortunately a cop showed up before I'd gotten a hundred yards. Officer Friendly put in a call to my dad, who came out and in a virtuoso effort managed to drive the thing five miles back home just manhandling the gears, and getting some lucky timing on stoplights.

My brother drove it while I was away at college or driving the other car we inherited, and he managed to get the thing past 100K miles before it gave up the ghost completely. I think it died in a grocery store parking lot, and we hauled it home behind the van with our tow strap, which had seen a bit of use in that capacity by then. I called around to a few yards, and one of them offered us twenty bucks for it over the phone if we had the title. We figured what the hey and towed it over there, and got a bit of an argument when we arrived, from someone who loudly asked his colleagues what idiot made the mistake on the phone and for a while assured us they could offer little more than a plugged nickel, but I managed to talk them out of the twenty, since it probably had half that in gas in the tank anyway. And that was the end of the Vega, but the stories live on.

And the next car my dad got? An '82 Chevette Diesel. Oh, my.

The Propagation of Memes in Cyberspace

You know those bits where you post a random picture, list your favorite whatever, tag somebody else to do it? Yeah, those. I don't do those. Except sometimes.

Here, for example, is the sixth photo from the sixth folder, sorted back to front; it's the Extremely Capable Mrs. along with our boy on snowshoes last month:

And here's the list of 25 random things about 25 random things I didn't post on Facebook:

1. The random beauty of "25 Random Things"
2. Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook
3. 25 Random Things About 25 Random Things on Facebook
4. Is that '25 Things' meme driving Facebook growth?
5. 25 Random Tips for the Busy Facebook User
6. Ah, Yes, More About Me? Here Are ‘25 Random Things’
7. 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You
8. 25 More Things I Didn't Want to Know About You
9. '25 Random Things' Lists Are Last Vestige of American Literacy
10. Have You Heard of This Facebook '25 Things' Thing?
11. We Never Do Random Things. Until We Do.
12. Facebook friends share '25 Things' with the world
13. Millions expose themselves online with '25 random things'
14. 25 Things--The modern day chain letter
15. Facebook fad gets personal
16. 25 Things Articles Arriving as Fast as 25 Things Lists
17. 25 Random Things Meme Is a Boon for Facebook
18. Deconstructing “Random Things About Me”
19. Facebook Mystery: Who Created “25 Random Things About Me”?
20. Facebook members make their innermost thoughts public
21. Facebook users spark craze for 25 Random Things lists
22. 25 things I don't want to know about you
23. Facebook's '25 Things' are life stories in miniature
24. The value in Facebook's new craze
25. 25 random things about Donny & Marie

I'm sure I'd be sorry I asked if I asked if you were sorry you asked. Sorry.

What I Did On My Winter Vacation

Back in November or so when Sam booked our vacation to the mountains of central Washington for a "snow getaway" we had no idea that we were in for a humongous heaping helping of the stuff right at home. We didn't need a snow break so much anymore, but it was nice to get out of the house and enjoy a trip with our friends the Sathers to a little place in Plain, Washington called the Black Forest Lodge. It was a little over two hours by car, and more than comfortable enough once we arrived. They had snow on the ground, but it had been rained on and was hard as ice, so good for sledding, not so much for snowmen and igloos. But we've done that.


We did a bit of horse-drawn sleigh riding out in the countryside at the Red Tail Ranch,

accompanied by the ranch dog, reportedly part coyote.

We wandered into the big city of Leavenworth (well, compared to Plain, anyway) and did some sledding,

as well as some lunch, where Max showed us how he lost a tooth,

but no fear, the tooth fairy still managed to find us.
We tried out the snowshoes in town,

and watched some fireworks in the afternoon - in the winter, the fireworks can start at six o'clock.

We did a bit more trekking in the snowshoes in a park on our way back home.

Max mainly was interested in the hot chocolate part of snowshoeing.

We got back and things were pretty much just as we'd left them, and the cat greeted us enthusiastically until we fed her. That's what we did on our winter vacation.

Inventing Candy Cane Cookies

Most things that are invented aren't really completely new things that have never been seen before. Most of them are variations on something someone has already done. Just like my candy cane cookies, here. I remember having something like these once, but the details have completely escaped me, so I decided I'd reinvent them.



I made these last night, since we don't have enough cookies around here already, and it's not like people keep giving us more - oh, wait, we do, and they do. Well, I felt like making more cookies, okay? I started with some recipe for pastel cookies I found in a cookbook, but I altered it pretty thoroughly.

Candy Cane Cookies

1 cup butter
1 1/3 cups fine granulated sugar
1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
4 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 1/4 cups flour
food coloring
optional: other flavorings, such as peppermint extract, and colored decorators' sugar or crushed peppermint candies.

Cream the butter and the sugar thoroughly. Mix in the eggs and milk. Add the vanilla. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder together in a bowl, then mix a bit at a time into the wet ingredients.

Take the dough and divide it into two parts. Take one part and mix in some food coloring (red or green look traditional) and optionally some flavoring such as 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract. Chill dough covered in the refrigerator for two hours.

Take some chilled dough in roughly equal parts of each color, and roll into fat rods of equal length, then stick the rods together and roll out the combined rod to about 3/8" (1cm) diameter. Pinch off about 5-6" (120 - 150cm) and twist (rolling the ends about the center clockwise seems to work well). Roll or dust in colored sugar or crushed candy and form into a candy cane shape or a ring and place on a baking sheet.

Bake at 350° F (175° C) for 10 - 12 minutes. The cookies should not be noticeably browned. Leave the baked cookies on the cookie sheet for a couple of minutes to cool before transferring to a cooling rack - the cookies can be fragile. Makes about four dozen.

Now, I skipped the peppermint part because I'm no fan of mint, and I don't have any extract handy anyway, but other flavorings ought to work just fine. Some of the pastel cookie recipes I've seen online actually incorporate Jell-O or Kool-aid so any old flavoring will probably work. I liked plain vanilla pretty well. Tastes like a sweet butter cookie. Yum.

How We Make an Igloo

I'm feeling the effects of a cold, with aches and sniffles and occasional sneezing, but that didn't stop us from heading outside this afternoon to try our hand at making some spare shelter.


Ingredients: Snow, shovel, plastic storage bin. Check.

Fill bin with snow, slide out block. Repeat.

Stack up the blocks in the traditional igloo shape.

Check for fit.

Shape blocks as needed to fit the curvature and let them hold each other up. It works!

Enjoy your new igloo!