Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Apple Slices

Welcome to my newest favorite obsession, um, I mean energy snack.  First let me write out a disclaimer:
 If you are allergic to peanuts, chocolate, apples or messy things, don't bother with this recipe.

If you are not actually ALLERGIC to messy things - but simply don't like them - get over it.  Come on...you'll be the safety of your own kitchen.  There is a sink in there, right?  This won't be anything that a little soap and water (okay, maybe a lot of water) can't get off.  Trust me, the results are worth the "ewwww."

First gather your ingredients.  Use whatever peanut butter brand you like.  The chocolate is up to you as well, but if you want to pretend (I mean, feel confident) that these are super healthy, stick with DARK chocolate.  I prefer Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate but the store was out.  :(
As for the apples, again, you are free to use what you like but I have to caution you.  Red Delicious isn't going to hold up well.  You want a crisp apple.  I first made this recipe with Braeburn - but a friend suggested that I try Fugi and OHMYGOSH that's even better.  Rome and Gala apples would probably be a good fit as well.

Now, melt the chocolate.  If you have a double boiler, great!  Pour the chips in the top, heat your water and stir.  If you do not have a double boiler, you can use a microwave.  According to the rules of chocolate melting, you are supposed to it run the microwave at 50% power for one minute per one ounce of chocolate.  If you are like me, you just froze and said to yourself "that's MATH!!!" but calm down.  It's really easy.  Pour the chips in a microwave safe bowl and turn the microwave on. Even if you can't figure out how to run your microwave at 50% it's okay.  :::note - I'm not saying that I can't figure that out.  If I ever actually read the manual, I'm quite sure that I could manage to make that contraption run at 50%.  I just choose to use full power because I'm a rebel.  Yeah.  That's it.:::  Just stop it every 30 second and stir.  You'll see when it's getting to that just right, smooth consistency.   It's not rocket science.  It's chocolate.  Chocolate is much better than rocket science anyway.  Who needs rockets when we have chocolate? 

Oh -if you are a novice at melting chocolate, you need to learn the golden rule: do not allow water anywhere near your chocolate.  If even a drop gets in, all that yummy, smooth chocolate can "seize."  Trust me, you don't want that.  It's not pretty.  If you love chocolate as much as I do and it seizes, you may cry.  Crying is watery - which is bad for melting chocolate.  See... it's a vicious cycle.

 Next, slice the apple to a thickness of approximately a 1/4 inch.  If you have an apple corer, then keeping the slices round might be fun because then they'll sort of look like cookies.  Cookies are good.   My kitchen is lacking a proper apple corer :::sigh::: so I compensate by cutting the round slices in half and then using a teaspoon to cut out the core.   Once your apple slices are ready, it's time to get a little messy.  Coat half of each slice in chocolate and place the slices on a piece of wax or parchment paper.  When they are all nicely coated (remember, just one side for now) put them in the freezer.  Then go do something else - something that can be done very quickly, because you don't want the slices to actually freeze.  You just want the chocolate to set.  That should only take a few minutes.  Fold some towels.  Wipe the counter down.  Whatever you do, don't even THINK about checking Facebook - or worse, Pintrest.  Those sites will suck you in and the next thing you know, your apples will be frozen solid.

Okay, so the chocolate has set.  Take the apples out and flip them over.  Now get ready for some real mess!  Spread each slice with peanut butter.  If you have a decent icing tip that can handle peanut butter, use that.  Otherwise just spread it on with a butter knife.  Or a spatula.  Or whatever.  It doesn't really matter how the peanut butter gets on the apples.  Just get it on there!  Once the apples are all slathered with peanut butter, they get another chocolate dunk.  Didn't I warn you about this getting messy?
No...don't lick your fingers!  Unless you know that you will be eating all of these apple slices yourself, it's just rude.  And unsanitary.  Stop it!!!

Put the chocolate coated apple slices back into the freezer if you want them to set quickly (and really, at this point, you will want them to set quickly so that you can hurry up and eat them) or in the refrigerator if you aren't in a rush (oh please - who has that kind of will power???)

Once the chocolate sets, you are ready for the last step - which is - take a bite.  Uh huh.  Good, right?  You don't have to thank me.  Just enjoy!  :)

A Slasher Story

Don't be afraid.

The ferocious creature in the picture above is our Ke-Kat. My daughter named him Cookies and Cream, but I don't dare call him that. Seriously, would YOU call that beast Cookies???

To his face???

Let me tell you a bit about how merciless our feline can be. Frogs fear him. I have lost count of the number of headless and nearly headless rodents that Ke-kat has left at our doorstep. Lizards who are brave enough to show their faces here usually leave tail-less, assuming they are fast enough to leave at all. Earlier this afternoon, while I was weeding, a cricket jumped out to scold me for disturbing the grass. That was the last mistake that silly insect ever made.

Ke-kat's fury isn't limited to things that move. Sometimes, he takes pleasure in destroying perfectly innocent items. For example......this used to be our door seal.

I was less than amused when I discovered it slashed. My middle daughter (the future vet) claimed that she could stop him from attacking our door seal by spraying it with vinegar. That seems to work fairly well, but of course the vinegar wears away after a while so we usually keep a spray bottle of it in the cabinet near the door.

Not long ago, we heard Ke-kat ripping at the door seal again. My youngest jumped up and said that she would spray it. Later that afternoon, he was at it again...and once again my youngest said that she'd take care of it. The third time I heard him attacking the door, I reached for the bottle myself wondering whether my little girl was spraying in the right spot.

Uggg.

It was slimy.

At that moment, she walked into the kitchen. I held out the bottle and asked, "What happened to this?"

She shrugged her little shoulders and explained, "We ran out of vinegar so I used cooking oil instead."

:::sigh::: I guess we can count this one as a science lesson right? After all, we discovered that cooking oil isn't a very good cat repellant.

"

I'm Blue

Raynaud’s Phenomenon can be a pain.

Sorry. Maybe I should explain a little bit about what Raynaud’s Phenomenon is before going any further. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Raynaud’s Phenomenon is: “A condition in which cold temperatures or strong emotions cause blood vessel spasms that block blood flow to the fingers, toes, ears and nose.”

No blood flow = pain.

To be honest, until very recently, this condition was more of a discomfort to me than an actual pain. Long before I was told that I had Raynaund's, I knew that I was somehow "different" than almost everyone else around me.
When co-workers complained about the heat, I was sometimes still a little chilly. When they were comfortable, I was pulling on a jacket.
For years I knew that it was weird for me to always NEED socks and tennis shoes on when other girls were showing off pretty pedicured toes in cute sandals. I didn't really understand why - I just knew that when I wore sandals, I was uncomfortable.
Ask most folks what the worst part about living without power after a hurricane is and you'll probably hear a lot about how hot it gets without air conditioning. That didn't really bother me much at all...but not having hot water??? THAT was a serious hardship!

Living with Raynaud's means that something as simple as walking through produce, meat or dairy departments at the grocery store can be a challenge. Mixing spices into ground meat (because I'm cajun and there must be spice in burgers!!!) will bring tears to my eyes. Food gloves help a little bit but not as much as the super warm soapy water in my sink that I use to re-warm my hands during the process. And let's not even mention trying to move things around to find a particular item in a freezer :::shudder:::

Now that I understand a bit more about how my body reacts to cold, it's no longer a mystery why I hurt so much in colder temperatures. When I feel tension creeping in, I can might look up and realize that my ability to tolerate the ceiling fan has reached it's limit. Instead of feeling guilty about "hiding out" in my little office, I am thankful for the warmth here (thanks to the heat that pours from the computer into this little room.)

There is still more for me to learn. I haven't yet had any tests run to determine if I have what is considered Primary or Secondary Raynaud's. If it's Secondary...then it's possible that I may be dealing with another underlying disorder like Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Atherosclerosis, Scleroderma, or Sjögren's syndrome. None of those sound like much fun.

Why am I sharing this with you? It's Raynaud's Awareness Week. We have a ribbon and everything!
The three colors represent the color changes that can occur during an "attack." Typically the skin blanches when the blood flow is initially disrupted due to vessel constriction. I don't usually see that step. Well, I don't see it occur on MY body. I have seen it happen to my husband. Yes, he has Raynaud's as well, but in his case there is a known cause (trauma from an accident while he was serving our country) and his symptoms are confined to one hand. What I've never seen in him is the red. That's the part that I see in my own hands the most often. From just above my knuckles down to my finger tips, my hands flush - and sometimes swell.

The blue (ummm... that part of the ribbon looks purplish to me, but let's pretend that it's blue, okay) is new for me. This winter marks the first time that I've noticed it, but now I can practically predict when it will occur. When I get to the point where I feel cold through and through, I'll fill the tub with hot water and ease into it. The heat does something to help my veins relax enough that blood can begin flowing again. That's when it happens. I turn blue. First it was just parts of my feet. Now I see it happening in my hands as well.

Blue is not my favorite color.

Kermit the Frog once sang a song about how tough it is to be green. Well, Kermit, be thankful that you aren't blue...

Feelings

Forgive me please. I know that it's been a long while. Shall I make a New Year's resolution to write more frequently? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't like making promises - even to myself - that I'm pretty sure I won't be able to keep. All I'm comfortable pledging at this point, is the sincere desire to TRY.

In the meantime, allow me a share a mysterious event. Before I begin, I'm going to have to toss in another apology because the set up for this is going to be overwhelming sticky sweet. Ordinarily, I wouldn't share this type of thing at all because, well, nobody wants to see it. I'm sorry. Just bear with me...and try not to puke or anything.

The above is a note that I placed on my hubby's side of bathroom counter-top a few months ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get over it. The fact that I sometimes do gushy things like that really isn't the point. The interesting stuff is what happened to the note. You see it just stayed on the counter for a long while. I suppose that my sweet hubby couldn't bring himself to just throw it away. Or maybe he just never got around to tossing it.
Certainly I wasn't about to get rid of it!
So it just stayed there.
Oh, I'd move it around when I wiped the counter down, but otherwise, it remained in place. Earlier this week, I noticed a slight change in the note.

A slight modification...

Now, I should point out here (for those who are unaware) that my husband's name is NOT Ama. In fact, there isn't anyone by the name of Ama living in this house (that I know of anyway.) There IS a certain 7 year old named Anna in our family. It also just so happens that our Anna loves finding new and creative ways of expressing her feelings, but when I showed her the note, she refused to take credit for the alteration.

So now I'm puzzled. Who is Ama and why is she/he mad? I guess this is just one of those mysteries in life that will never be answered.

Letting it all Hang Out

School is almost here again. This morning I realized that since we will be busy nearly every other day of this week, today was our best chance at getting back to school clothes shopping done. The fact that it was predicted to rain all day didn't matter. Why shouldn't we shop in the rain? It's not like any of us were going to actually enjoy the experience anyway. Well, except for Anna. She LOVES to shop. Rain, sun, sleet or hail, give her money, she'll find a sale! I'm beginning to question if she is really my child.

Each of my three girls needed certain items. Anna, the barefoot queen of the crew, outgrew her shoes over the summer. Danielle, the artist, pretty much destroyed, with paint, most of her uniform pants last school year. Emily, the very moody 15 year old, needed uniform shirts...and something else.

My son Derek, doesn't really need any back to school clothes this year. His shoes still fit fine and since he is enrolled in a virtual public school, he won't have to wear uniforms. So lucky Derek, did not HAVE to go shopping. Unfortunately his dad had a doctor's appointment and his grandparents were unavailable. Leaving a 10 year old adhd boy home all alone for several hours wasn't an option to me. That meant that he had to come along with the girls. No problem. He brought along his DSi.

At Academy, Little Miss Picky finally settled on a new pair of Sketchers and Emily found uniform shirts. We were on a roll! No pants for Danielle though. Oh well, we on to the next stop. Old Navy was a bust. We headed to Stage. Again nothing - but the saleslady did offer to have the brand and size that my daughter wanted shipped from another store. Great! So now all we had left was Emily's...something else. For THAT we headed to the mall. I almost decided to tell Emily that we would come back for that particular item another day, but she was in such a (rare) good mood that I just couldn't. You have to understand, getting Emily to agree to a shopping trip is just slightly more difficult than it would be to train a rock to sit up and beg for a treat.

The mall parking lot was surprising full for a mid afternoon Monday. We had to park a good distance away from an entrance and then dash through the rain to the doors. It was only after we got inside that I realized that Derek left his DSi behind in the car. I did not want to run back to the car in the mess that the sky was dropping, but I also knew that he was going to need a serious distraction for our next shopping stop. Thinking quickly, I handed him my iPhone and told him that he could play one of the games on it.

There are a decent number of games apps on my phone, including a couple of educational games that I put on there just for him. Naturally he wasn't interested in those. Nope, he had discovered Hanging With Friends earlier this week and was hooked. The first time I let him play the game, I worried about the words he might send, but he surprised me with some well thought out choices. Assured that his eyes would stay mostly on the screen, we walked into a store that I ordinarily would not bring my 10 year old son into. While my fifteen year old tried on...something...my son busied himself with figuring out words that friends left for me and then creating words to send back to them. All was fine.

Until...

Derek started giggling. He was rather pleased with himself for using a five point letter in a triple letter spot. He turned the phone toward me so that I (and the saleslady next to me) could see his brilliant word choice. That's when I discovered that it is not actually possible to drop dead from mortification.

Right there, in the middle of Victoria Secret, my son sent the word NAKED to...not one of my sisters or cousins (who probably would have laughed), not to one of mommy friends (who would have instantly understood)...not even to my MOM (ok, I have no idea of how she would have reacted.) Nope. My son, playing MY game, sent the word NAKED to my high school boyfriend.



:::sigh::: I guess I should be proud that he earned enough points to fill my bonus meter, right?

Teaser Tuesday - The Crystal Cave

Teaser Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current reading

2. Open to a random page

3. Share two (2) sentences from that page

4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE ANY SPOILERS

5. Share the author and title, too, so other TT participants can add it to their TBR lists if they like your teaser.


"Like a drunkard who, as long as there is no wine to be had, thinks himself cured of his craving, I had thought myself cured of the thirst for silence and solitude. But from the first morning of waking on Bryn Myrddin, I knew that this was not merely a refuge, it was my place."




The Crystal Cave (Book one of the Merlin Trilogy) by Mary Stewart

An Eight Cow Wife

Have you heard the story about the eight cow wife? I'll paraphrase it here for those who haven't.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She wasn't a beautiful girl. She wasn't even a pretty girl. At least, she didn't believe that she was. Her self view was reflected in the way she presented herself to the world. She slumped her shoulders when she walked and hung her head whenever she thought someone might be looking in her direction. There was, however, one young man who saw what she didn't. He loved her.

Now in the fishing village where they lived, brides were purchased with cows. Yes, I said cows. It seems ridiculous to me but that's probably because I don't like cows very much. Don't ask me why I don't like cows. Or why my dislike of cows apparently bothers me more than the fact that the fictional dads were selling their daughters... I've gotten far enough off track already. Ahem. So for whatever the reason, cows were the currency for wife shopping on this island. A pretty girl was generally worth two or three cows. An extraordinary girl could earn her father four or even five cows.

The young man in our story offered eight cows to the father of his beloved. EIGHT! It was unheard of! Especially for a girl that no one else in the village felt was worth more than one.

Later, a traveler visited the island and heard all about the foolish transaction the young man had made. It turned out that the traveler had business with the same young man. While they discussed whatever business they had, the young man's wife came in to serve refreshments. The traveler was amazed. She couldn't be the same girl that he'd heard about in the village! The woman before him was striking. The grace and poise that she carried herself radiated accomplishment and dignity. When he questioned the young man about it, the groom replied that he paid eight cows because he wanted an eight cow wife.

The story implies that the respect that you show someone will, in turn, help that person gain self respect. I believe that to be true. Not always of course. There are some people who suck in every ounce of respect you offer and still continue to wallow in shallowness. But this isn't about them. This is about a young man who helped put a broken girl back together.

My self esteem had bottomed out by the time I met my husband, but even so he was able to see something in me that I couldn't. Over time, his love and patience has helped me become the person I am today - someone who knows with every fiber of her being that she is loved. As a father, he has taught our children, by example, that relationships should be based on mutual respect. He has shown that a husband and wife should value each other. He has given them a stable home life that they are able to grow, learn and thrive in.

So on this Father's Day I want to say Thank You to my wonderful husband!