Does anyone read my blog anymore?

"A Chik'n in every pot and a pet in every patch of sunlight"

Ask the Florist's Wife: Your Gardening Questions Answered

Q. Dear Florist Wife, what is wrong with my rose bush?

A. Play this music for it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEGH0CuacII

and then ignore it.

Buy your roses from florist.

 

:(

Squirrenny

Are you getting in the mood for Halloween??

Well you have to! It's mandatory!

For Memorial Day we went to West Virginia, to Monongahela National Forest. It is only 2 hours away, who knew? I am endlessly fascinated by the Dolly Sods area, which is a bog on top of a mountain. It also has unexploded WWII mortars, sasquatch, and alpine meadows.

Pictures!

This cat sits on his stoop and then when every time Lenny walks by the cat runs out to greet him/smack him in the face. Lenny finds this VERY EXCITING.

dog crane

winter = definitely not over

winter = not over

virginia beach

We went to Virginia Beach for the weekend. The beach was not crowded. It was Lenny's first time staying in a hotel and he did quite well except for the two times that he wanted to have a pee in the lobby.

On Sunday it was rainy in the morning so we went to the Virginia Aquarium where certain things reminded us of Lenny.


On Monday, before driving back, we went for a hike at The Great Dismal Swamp. Unfortunately the boardwalk trail to the lake was closed and otherwise it is not that exciting to hike since a loop there is just a rectangle of four completely straight roads that run along the ditches. It was swampy though.



There is a set of pictures.

Merry Christmas!

those pineapple cookies

These are a traditional cookie of Christmas in my family, along with peanut butter blossoms and cut-outs. They do not have a name that I know of as we refer to them as "those pineapple cookies." My mother did not believe they could be veganized but in fact the veganized version is still nice and flakey and lighter and less greasy (the old ones left grease spots on napkins) and the dough is quite pleasant to work with. It is totally worth all the fiddliness of making them even when you see your uncle tossing them into his mouth five at a time.



Pineapple Cookies (Vegan)
makes maybe like six dozen or so? I would count them but we already ate a million of them.

1 8oz tub tofutti better-than-cream cheese (I used the yellow, non-hydrogenated one)
1 cup Earth Balance, slightly softened
2 cups flour

Cream together fake cream cheese and fake butter. Add flour and mix until combined. Wrap dough in plastic wrap, flatten into a disc, and chill until cold. Meanwhile make filling:

2 cans crushed pineapple, drained thoroughly
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch

Combine in a saucepan and cook, stirring, until the milkiness turns clear. Cool completely.

Preheat oven to 350.

Roll out the dough to about 1/8" thick and use a sharp knife to cut into about 2" squares. The smaller they are, the cuter, but the more you will get sick of making them. You can mash the trimmings together and roll them out again but I wouldn't do that more than once or twice. Transfer the squares to a cookie sheet (put them close together because they do not puff up much) and use a teaspoon to put a little diagonal line of pineapple on each square. Fold the other two corners up so it is like a little pineapple baby wrapped in a blanket, sealing with a little bit of water.

Bake for 15-16 minutes, just until the little tips are starting to brown.


Santa hopes that you will not forget to supervise your puppy while you are making these cookies.

better peanut butter blossoms

Do you really enjoy cracking your tooth on a big hard waxy chunk of pseudo-chocolate full of nasty cow secretions made by a certain obnoxious company that has been recycling its christmas commercial since 1990 in the middle of your cookie? No, you don't. A nice blob of rich chocolatey ganache is so much better!



The only special thing you need to do is find something to make a thumbprint in the cookie with. You cannot literally use your thumb because you do it when the cookie is hot so you will burn your thumb off. What you want is something cylindrical, about 1/2" in diameter, and fairly flat. I used the handle of a particular potato masher. It seems that certain bottle caps (tamari especially) look about right too. Wrap it in foil so that it does not get dough in its crevices. If this sounds like a pain then just think of what a pain it is to take all the wrappers off those little wax blobs.

Vegan Peanut Butter Blossoms

makes ~ 72

1 cup Earth Balance

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla

2 egg replacers (3 tsp Ener-G whisked with 1/4C hot water)

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1-2 T soymilk

extra sugar for rolling

 ganache:
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (Ghiradelli)
1/4 cup soymilk

Preheat oven to 375.

Soften EB and mix with peanut butter. Add sugars gradually until creamy and well-blended. Beat in egg replacer and vanilla. Stir in flour, baking soda, and salt. Add little splashes of soymilk until you have a cohesive but soft-ish dough. If it is too stiff then it will crack a lot when you make the ganache holes.

Form 1 inch balls and roll in sugar. Bake 13 minutes. Immediately after removing from oven, firmly yet gently press something into the surface of each cookie to make an indentation. Remove to rack and cool.

Make ganache by melting chocolate chips and soymilk in the microwave. It takes about 1-1:30 minutes. Stir until smooth and glossy then use a teaspoon to put a little dollop into each cookie hole. If you are a real over-achiever you could probably pipe it in with a pastry bag.

VOILA!

what is this, buffalo?

I was supposed to drive to Buffalo for Christmas today but then I did not since we are in the midst of a Paralyzing Blizzard.

It is not even windy. Sometimes I think Accuweather is a drama queen. However, everyone here drives their car off the road when there is one inch of snow so the paralysis part could be true.





It is supposed to be 10 more inches by this evening! They better get their one snowplow out. Yesterday I participated in the mad rush on snow shovels at the Home Depot so we are ready.

Lenny sings (and dances)

science!

We did that petco DNA test on Lenny that tells you what breeds your mutt is made of. We swabbed his cheek with a mascara brush and mailed it to A Lab. This is what came back:



Ha ha, just kidding.



Huh.

??

I think it is problematic because certain breeds are not profiled yet and some of those might be Lenny breeds. Like foxhound. He does like the snow though. Clearly that comes from the malamute. That and the one blue eye.

This is what I do at work now. It is not vegan of me. Also I have not dissected anything in six years and getting all the trachea off makes my head explode.