I’m a witch every year for Halloween. That’s not because I have an amazing witch’s costume- I don’t. I throw something together hastily, usually the day of. Though I do daydream about one day sewing myself a victorian sort of witch costume with a high collar and severe pointed shoulders and long tight sleeves and a rigid black skirt with a bustle. I want to be a witch because I really want to be a witch. I love the idea of growing crazy herbs in the garden and drying them in the sun and having jars of them lined up on a rickety shelf in the kitchen that I can use to make potions to cure headaches or indigestion or to bring luck or mend heartaches. It is, shall we say, a life goal of mine. I mention this now because I’m writing this the night of a blood moon/supermoon/lunar eclipse and it feels like it’d be a great time to be a witch. I’m still just a regular non-witch though, so I’m blogging about muffins instead of doing some sort of dark sage-scented ritual to welcome fall. Maybe next year! Here’s what we ate this week.

Miso Sweet Potato and Broccoli Bowl. Looks good, huh? Crispy broccoli,  tender sweet potato, a creamy sauce made with ginger and tahini and miso and all things delicious, starchy stuff at the bottom. Well I hated every bite because there were worms in the sweet potato, and even though I cut off the offending portion with an extra inch or two just to be sure, I couldn’t stop picturing them wiggling around, spilling onto the cutting board as I ate. This is not a very witchy attitude. It’s decidedly bratty and I don’t like that I’m so afraid of eating bugs but this is where we are. Sorry if I put you off trying this dish. If you are bold and brave and don’t care about tiny worms, it is truly a delicious weeknight dinner.

Kale Salad with Cilantro Lime Dressing and Black Bean Flautas. On Tuesdays we go to a place called My Gym in the afternoon for Henry’s parkour class. And oh does he love it! The guy leading the class is called Coach Kurt and Henry idolizes him- last week Henry wore his new Jake and the Neverland Pirates shirt and on the way to class he said “I wonder if the Coach with like my new shirt?” and I thought (didn’t say), um, there’s no way he’s going to notice that. But then we got there and Coach Kurt said how much he liked Henry’s shirt as soon as he saw him! He’s really good with kids. Anyway, while Henry takes the class, George and I go on the other side of the building to the active play room, which has all the same equipment (bars and mats and trampolines, and things to climb) as the class room, but also has a dozen aggressive children fighting over it, while the parents recline against the walls and dick around on their cell phones. I love kids. At least, I like to think I love kids. But every week at this place there’s one or two that I can’t stand. This week it was a skinny blonde girl, with a Ramona Quimby haircut. She was 5 or 6. She ended up on the bars at the same time as George and claimed them for herself, so George moved over to a rainbow ladder thing. She followed him over there and climbed up at the same time as him. He tried to wave her away and the little punk dug her nails into his hand! I asked her to please keep her hands off of him and we moved over to the ball pit, where George played while I idly fixed a yellow ball that had been crushed. That girl must have been watching me because she came over as soon as I had tossed the yellow ball back into the pit, grabbed it, and held it up to my face and re-crushed it while laughing maniacally. To sum up, I think I have a new nemesis, and she’s six.

We stayed till the place closed and then I rushed home to start dinner. This one came together really quickly and was delicious! I think I’ve heard bad things about the blogger who posted this salad dressing (appropriating recipes that aren’t hers without credit? I made that up, I really don’t remember what, if anything she’s been accused of and it’s probably really shitty of me to type that out without knowing for sure) but it was damn delicious! So kudos to you lady, or to whomever you stole this recipe from! Oh, I’m wicked.

Apple Muffins. Did you click on the link for that terrible blogger last week? The one who wrote the blog post about crafting with felt and made her character count by typing things like, you guuuyyyyyssss, these are sooooo cuuuuuttttteeeee! Well, these muffins are so good that I had the urge to start this paragraph in the same way. I’ll resist and instead say, you guys, these muffins are really good. I ran out of cupcake liners, even though I just bought a box of 100 three weeks ago (the first step is acknowledging you have a problem), but it didn’t matter! The muffins with the liners were softer on the edges, but the ones without them acquired an almost cookie-like exterior! To paraphrase the SNL taco town skit: “cookies?! now that’s what I call a muffin!” These are simple, moist, sweet, easy, and crowd pleasing. I brought them to a pool party and they were universally adored. The batter is super thick, but don’t let that worry you. It will all turn out alright in the end. Here’s the recipe, with huge thanks to my puzzle friend Jenn for sharing it with me!

Apple Muffins
Preheat oven to 350. Grease muffin tins. Combine 3 c. finely chopped apples with 1 c. white sugar, and 1 c. brown sugar. Then add 1 T cinnamon, 1 t salt, and 2 t baking soda. Mix well. Add 1 c. oil, 3 eggs, and 2 t vanilla. Then mix in 3 1/2 c. flour. Fill muffin tins 2/3 full. Bake 25-30 minutes.

Butternut Squash and Cider Soup, Corn Cakes with Basil Honey Butter, Pot Roasted Collards. I wanted to make a special dinner to celebrate the autumnal equinox and this is what I settled on. The squash soup because it’s the color of autumn sunshine (can I say that without sounding ridiculous?) and I just adore it. It’s as smooth as velvet and has a lovely clean flavor. You start the soup by cooking onions and garlic in water. Which I found to be personally offensive, because what’s wrong with butter? But it really does make a beautiful soup! The corn cakes because corn is harvest-y. I had no actual (fresh) corn on hand, nor bacon, nor scallions, nor unclaimed cheddar, so I just followed the bare bones ingredients of the recipe and tossed in finely chopped red and green bell pepper. They were still delicious. All the more so with a basil honey butter on top, which was Henry’s idea, and which he pounded himself with my mortar and pestle. The collards because I wanted something green. I have blogged about them before because I tried them with mustard greens, which it turns out are disgusting. Here’s the recipe again with collards, which was aces. We celebrated the equinox by making a fire in the backyard. Henry and George loved throwing dried grass into it, which burned magnificently, though every now and then they’d throw in clump that still had some green to it, and then the fire would churn out a thick yellow smoke that smelled reminiscent of pot. Then we made up a song about acorns on your fingers and we all thought it was pretty good, and each recorded our own version in the voice memo app on my phone. If you’ll forgive me for the additional sappiness (I think comparing the soup to autumn sunshine was my first strike) there is a lovely blessing that I learned about in a book called The Creative Family that I read before dinner and wanted to share with you, because I think it’s so nice, and perfect to read at the changing of seasons:

Blessings on the blossom,
Blessings on the root,
Blessings on the leaf and stem,
Blessings on the fruit.

For the golden corn and the apples on the trees,
For the butter and the honey for our tea,
For fruits and nuts and berries that grow beside the way,
For birds and bees and flowers, we give our thanks today.
Blessings on our meal and our family.

Cheez-Its. My mom got me that cookbook I wanted for my birthday! Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. It is such a fun read. The whole thing is enjoyable, funny, and poignant. And inspiring! I want to make all the things. Henry and George helped me make these cheez its. They were easy, truly easy, and did not taste like cheez-its but were still delicious in their own way. The dough got too hot and stuck to the counter when we rolled it out, and Henry insisted on placing each one on the sheet pan so they were stretched and squished a bit, and then the boys themselves poked the holes in the center of each cracker. They didn’t end up liking the taste of them, so I mostly ate this batch myself, but I was happy to do it. Her book is set up to explore what is worth making from scratch- to save money or because it tastes a lot better, and what is not, a project that was inspired by her learning that Uncrustables were a thing. She writes about the money pit that is owning chickens, a theory I wholeheartedly endorse unless you are my mountain man brother-in-law Javi. She writes about how her food-snobbery stopped her from enjoying her mom’s semi-homemade recipes, and then how she learns to embrace the role of mass-produced stuff in connecting her to the recipes of her mom and grandma. It’s all so relatable for me and I just loved it.

Flour Tortillas. Also from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. We were out of flour tortillas, Andy’s favorite, and I was stranded without a car because mine was in the shop for a million recalls that have stacked up on it while I did nothing, but I had my new book so we made our own and it was fun and easy and I hope to not buy them anymore!

Picadillo Oaxaqueno. I bought a package of ground pork from the farmers market for no reason. I spent all week searching my favorite food sites for ground pork recipes and didn’t see anything I wanted to make, so I said to hell with it and made another ground pork taco dinner. This one is from Rick Bayless’ Authentic Mexican cookbook, and was good but too vinegar-y. For my money the coconut lime pork from last week was way better.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins. I went off-book with another muffin recipe, not from my crowd-sourced list of muffins to try, but from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter again. I made these gluten free for a potluck, and they’re naturally dairy free and they’re the best pumpkin muffins I’ve ever had. I am thrilled to have a recipe for them, and it’s one of those recipes that you want to make again as soon as you’ve finished off the first batch. In fact, I’m bringing them to another potluck tomorrow. I am somehow involved in a lot of pot-lucked activities. I hate to link to the recipe as typed up here- the blogger replaces all the oil with applesauce, the eggs with flaxseed, and the sugar with brown rice syrup, but it’s the only place I could find the recipe online and she at least has the decency to share what the original ingredient list contained.

Yesterday my sister Helen threw me a birthday lunch! No boys or babies allowed. It was glorious. Helen had beautiful heaps of my favorite foods, and we sat around and ate them and worked on our own craft projects and laughed. It’s such a fun feeling to have all your best friends in one place and see them enjoy each other. I’d say I was blessed if I wasn’t already dangerously into the red zone of too much sappy shit in this post. I loved every second of it.

(NB: if you find yourself in need of some chalkboard art, Helen sells it. Original and custom stuff. She does beautiful work).

I walked straight in and popped 4 of those lindt truffles in my mouth. Fun fact: my sister owns 1000 novelty cookie jars.

You will never in your life meet someone who does better things with bacon than my sister. This is her latest improvisation: bacon, cheddar, potato chip, strawberry-jalapeno jam. They were all gone within seconds. A second batch met the same fate.

She went to the Barton Creek farmers’ market to buy my very favorite breads! An olive batard and regular and poppy seed baguettes from Baguette et Chocolat. With a crock of butter, I spent a lot of time next to this bowl of bread.

Another farmers’ market find. This one, a truly artisan loaf of butternut and walnut bread. It was beautiful.

Pile o’ cheese! The goat cheese on the bread with more of that strawberry jalapeno jam was mighty fine. I also ate the shit out of that ramekin full of alouette.

Oh how I loved this! From an Indian food vendor at the farmers’ market- this is fried spinach in a chickpea flour batter, served with an Indian-style tomato sauce.

Helen slow roasted a pork shoulder overnight in a riff on our friend Abbie’s cochinita pibil recipe, and served it with pickled onions, beans, and all the fixings. It was my favorite thing at the party and that is saying something. Thank you for your love and generosity, sister of my life! I sure do love you.

French Toast. This morning I woke up to find that I had accidentally left a loaf of bread out on the counter overnight instead of freezing it, so I decided to make french toast. I opened the windows while the bread soaked up the custard because it’s starting to feel really nice and almost cool in the mornings. I set the plates, maple syrup, and butter on the table next to the gorgeous flowers Amanda and Christy brought to my birthday lunch, and moved aside the bright watercolor pictures the boys had painted the day before. Everything was feeling so lovely and serene.  Then Andy walked in to find George sitting on the table, stick of butter in hand, and Henry licking the outside of the maple syrup bottle to “eat the maple candy” that had crusted around the cap. And for some reason it suddenly smelled like cat pee. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry though, huh? See you next week!

Last night, after the kids were asleep, I came out and worked on a craft project with the new basket of glorious craft supplies I was gifted for my birthday, and then I pored over two new books about crafting with felt, and then I went to bed. I played my usual 20 minutes of pre-sleep candy crush (this is an embarrassing secret that I’m sharing with you. don’t tell anyone I play candy crush every night before bed), and then remembered that I ought to have written a blog post. I had completely and utterly forgotten it was a thing. I think it’s a testament to a very lovely birthday weekend- I had so much fun and my head was so full of ideas for fun things to do with my presents that I didn’t spare a thought for the blog. But I’m here now! Here’s what the week looked like.

Matzo Ball Soup, Latkes.  It doesn’t make sense to eat these things for Rosh Hashanah- you’re supposed to have a round loaf of challah and apples and honey to celebrate the New Year. But I didn’t have time to make challah and I’ll eat whatever I want to and leave me alone. Kidding! I’m not kidding. I’m suddenly grumpy, and I’m not sure why. I cut into a sweet potato for dinner and little maggoty worms wriggled out onto my cutting board so that really bummed me out (you’ll see that dinner next week- spoiler: yes, we did eat that sweet potato! the (hopefully) non-maggoty portion) and maybe they’re to blame for my attitude. Anyway, I digress. I make matzo balls from the manischewitz box. I’ve made them from scratch before and it tastes exactly the same so, so what, who cares! The box tells you to boil the matzo balls in water and that’s just about the worst advice on the back of any box (and that’s saying something considering that watergate salad is a thing, and it’s made with cool whip and dear God, the horror) it has to be boiled in really good, fatty chicken stock so the balls absorb all that chicken-y flavor. Then it’s delicious. Latkes don’t need me to pimp them here, they’re the greatest things in the world. We had apples and honey for a sweet new year too.

Kale-y Joes. These are a sneaky Jessica Seinfeld-way to get your kids to eat a bunch of kale. Except if they’re sleuth-y they’ll probably notice the kale and be skeptical, as Henry did and was. But then he ate it anyway and loved it. So did George, for a bite or two! I had to do a hybrid of the linked recipe and this other one because I didn’t have enough tomato paste. I think if you brown ground beef and mix it with anything tomato-y plus brown sugar you’re going to end up with something delicious and sloppy. I had Billy Madison running through my head the whole time I was making these but I won’t type the line here because I think probably every other person who has written a blog post about sloppy joes has done that bit and I want desperately to seem unique. I brought up unoriginal blog posts so I could segue into sharing this link with you, which I stumbled across this week, and I think is a serious contender for the worst blog post ever written. Scroll down slowly, soak it all in.

Gluten Free and Dairy Free Brownies with Sea Salt. I’ve made this recipe with gluten free flour before just by subbing Cup4Cup for the all purpose. It’s the only trick up my gluten free-sleeve. Anyway, it works out just great. But I wanted to try to make them dairy free too by replacing the butter with coconut oil. After mixing up the batter I was prepared to call the attempt an unmitigated disaster. The batter seemed to thoroughly reject the coconut oil. I wrestled a thick, modeling clay-like mass of  dough into the pan as coconut oil wept from it like a slick clear discharge from an open wound. Baking only exacerbated the problem. When I checked on the brownies at the 20 minute mark they were submerged under a layer of oil. Since I had nothing to lose, I decided to keep baking them to see what would happen. It took probably another 15 minutes, but the brownies did reabsorb the oil and damn if they aren’t actually pretty good! The longer time in the oven made the edges a little too hard, but I liked em fine anyway. So, you know. If you have to eat gluten and dairy free brownies these are a thing that could work for you.

Black Beans with Feta, Red Onion, Cilantro, and Lime. Ever since I read this article, which, fair warning, spends a not-insignificant amount of time talking about farting, I haven’t soaked my black beans before cooking. Not because of benefits vis-a-vis farts, but because they taste better that way. These taste so good in fact, that my children, who normally prefer to alternate lunches of plain buttered noodles and squeeze-y yogurts plus handfuls of gummies, both ate big bowl fulls, with very little adornment. I really loved eating this too, and felt the swell of pride I always do when I manage to eat a meal without a huge pile of bread included. Also, I think that’s glitter that’s scattered in the top left corner of the picture, but who can say? Full disclosure: the kids had second lunches an hour later of plain buttered noodles.

Coconut-Lime Pork Tacos with Black Beans and Avocado. I cooked the aforementioned black beans for this dinner, WHICH IS AMAZING. If you happen to have a can of coconut milk, pineapple juice, and ground pork in your fridge it should absolutely be the answer to the ‘what’s for dinner?’ question. Nobody’s got all three of those things on hand, but you should add them to your list and try this. The spices and coconut milk make it feel special, but for picky eaters it tastes close enough to the traditional ground beef tacos to make the cut. This makes a pretty huge pan-full of food and I think Henry ate close to half of it.

Ginger Nuts. Isn’t that an adorable name for a muffin? There’re no nuts involved so I don’t know why they get a nod. This is a fun muffin! The batter is so luxurious and they bake up beautifully. For some reason the recipe made 24 instead of the 12 it purports to. The whole recipe feels fun and old-fashioned- you get to dissolve baking soda in boiling water! Doesn’t that sound positively 19th century? They taste sophisticated- not very sweet. In fact, they might be close enough to the not-sweet-enough side of ‘not very sweet’ that I think I might want to toss a handful of chocolate chips in the batter next time, or maybe sprinkle the muffins with big crunchy sparkles of turbinado sugar before baking them. Thank you to my friend, Sax, the woman of a thousand talents, for sharing the recipe!

Ginger Nuts
from Yankee Magazine, December 1996.

1/2 c butter
2 eggs, beaten
1 c molasses
2 1/2 c flour
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger [I up both of the spices]
1 tsp salt
3/4 c boiling water with 2 tsp baking soda dissolved in it

Preheat oven to 375F. Grease a 12-cup muffin tin.
Soften butter, add eggs and molasses. Stir together flour, sugar, spices, and salt, and combine with wet ingredients. Pour water and baking soda mixture in last, stirring slowly. Put immediately into tins and bake 20 to 25 minutes.

Sax says they’re best hot out of the oven, and that they freeze well.

Vegetarian Bahn Mi. These have sriracha butter, and crispy mushrooms, and pickled carrots, and avocado, and if all that is sounding pretty good, I should tell you that these sandwiches also sport big slabs of flabby, flavorless tofu. I really love and trust this blogger so I’m willing to bet the tofu problem occurred on my end. Not enough marinade? Not cooked long enough? Or maybe I just hate tofu. Whatever the reason, the tofu had me really wishing that there was a big pile of crispy pork on the sandwich instead, and I count that as a failing for a vegetarian bahn mi. I like the idea so much though, so someday I’m gonna try again, but this time weight the tofu for a day or two like in this recipe and then maybe try slicing and basting it with a sugary lemongrass concoction, and then broiling the slices. I like a crispy, salty, and caramelized protein on bahn mi and I’m not sure if tofu can be any of those things, but I’d like to try.

Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce, Sack Full of Garlic Bread. Andy and I went on our first date sixteen years ago, on the day before my 16th birthday, and we usually do something to celebrate that anniversary. This year, Andy bought me a field hoe, and a new hose, and a package of Ho Hos. Excluding the ho hos, these were all things that I desperately wanted, and was so happy to receive, even if it meant accepting a ho-themed gift from my darling husband. I wanted to make Andy a special dinner, but the day ended up being one of those tremendously exhausting sorts where Henry wanted to play another rousing hour-long game of feed-the-turtle-puppet right before dinnertime and George wouldn’t unclamp his mouth from my nipple. You guys are probably sick of me talking about my boobs all the time. So I made this sauce, which I had been craving since mentioning it in last week’s post anyway, and found all the ends of bread loaves in the freezer and paved them with garlic butter and wrapped them all up in foil and put them in the oven. The resulting foil bag of garlic bread garbage didn’t look good but tasted awesome. The red-sauce and garlic bread bit was romantic, I reasoned, because Andy and I said “I love you” to each other for the first time after a date in the big city in which we enjoyed a dinner at the now-shuttered Spaghetti Warehouse. I still have the little Italian flag they stuck into our dessert. Did you know I was such a sap?

Gnocchi a la Parisienne with Summer Vegetables, Bruschetta. I got to spend my birthday doing exactly what I wanted- cooking an elaborate and time-consuming meal for myself (and my family! I shared, you guys). And my sister helped me, which was really fun because babies (really nice ones!) have made it hard for us to do that recently, and she’s my favorite person to cook with. I thought and thought about what I wanted to make, and settled on this gnocchi because I love it dearly, and it takes forever, which would usually make me feel guilty, but not on my birthday. It’s the same dough you’d use to make eclairs and profiteroles, except you mix in comte and dijon mustard and lots of lovely herbs. Then you pipe the gnocchi into simmering water, and then you crisp them up in brown butter and toss them with gently warmed squash and tomatoes and nicoise olives, and then you pour more brown butter on top. It’s spectacular, every bite. We ate every last bit and then mopped up the pan sauce with our grilled bread.

Raspberry Pavlova. My birthday dessert! Isn’t it lovely? A pavlova is just a giant meringue, crackly on the outside and marshmallow-y in the middle. When you top it with whipped cream and berries you’ll have one of the all-time best combinations of flavors and textures. Another fine quality in pavlovas is that they don’t last at all. You have to eat them all up, in one sitting, lest they turn to mush. So we all had seconds and I had thirds and didn’t regret a single morsel of it. I’ve got so much love and gratitude in my heart for my friends and family- thank you for making my birthday such a very happy occasion ❤ See you next week!

We’ve been celebrating George this week! He’s two now! This kid is an undeniable delight and I squeeze my teeth together really hard when I think about him. That’s a thing I do when something’s cute- is that weird or do you do it too? Some things I have loved about George recently:

George, gesturing: “Um. Your Boob. Can I touch your boob?”
Me: “No.”
George: “I want milk.”
Me: 😐

Singing the Jake and the Neverland Pirates theme song: “Yo ho babies, away!”

Also inspired by JatNP, George says “pixie dust, away!” to anything he’d like to banish- “pixie dust, away, car!” “pixie dust, away, cat!”. I know it seems like we watch a lot of Jake the Neverland Pirates, but that’s because we do. It is the only show we watch now.

He’s so charming, and pleasant. When you asked him what he was excited about for his birthday, he’d say “blowing out the candlesticks.” And all week he kept saying, “It’s almost my birthday?!” So when he woke up the morning of his birthday, I said, “George, today is your birthday!”  And he promptly burst into tears and said “Leave me alone, mama!” Which was unexpected. I think I got in his face when he hadn’t woken up yet. Or my early morning enthusiasm was obnoxious. Either way, fair! He ended up having a great birthday in spite of my general uncouth-ness.

Here are a few photos of the things I cooked this week, plus four hundred pictures of George’s stick-themed birthday party.

Martha Stewart’s One Pan Pasta. Ok, so this recipe made all the rounds last year and garnered as big a buzz as a recipe can get online IMO- it got written up on smitten kitchen, and got the “genius recipe” label on food52. In spite of that, and in spite of my deep and passionate love for all things pasta, I had no desire to try it. I just didn’t think the ingredients sounded like they would turn into anything all that great when you cooked them all together. But then my friend Amanda, who has impeccable taste, said that’s she’d made it recently and it was amazing, so I had to try it. Well, I did, and I didn’t love it. It’s good! Don’t get me wrong- it tastes nice, and the sauce that’s made from the tomatoes bursting and the garlic and onion softening, and the starch reducing in the small amount of water is smooth and velvety. But I like the marcella hazan (genius) tomato sauce about a hundred times more. That recipe takes longer but is easier even than this one pan-trick, because you just put three things in a pot and walk away and then walk back and put it on top of pasta. I’m by far in the minority in my lukewarm review of this one pan pasta- people are nuts for it. Maybe I did it wrong, or maybe my grocery store grape tomatoes made it less-than transcendent. You should probably try it if you haven’t because lots of people who are smarter than me think it’s rad.

Yes, I’m sorry: More Pita Pizzas. I had to make myself not buy more pita bread at the store this week, because if it’s in the house now I’m going to turn it into pizza, and I’ve already made a huge dent in my supposed-to-be-for-winter canned crushed tomatoes in this lust for a quick-fix pie. Andy and George had matching pizzas. Just cheese because I forgot to buy pepperoni. Henry put everything I offered on his, including sliced up breakfast sausage links. Mine had tomato and arugula and sliced shallot, because I ran out of onion. I think probably no one cares what toppings I put on my pizza (“Oh! Shallot, you say!”) but I typed it and there’s no going back now.

These Lemon Muffins. Muffin Test #2 in my quest for new favorite muffin recipes, crowd-sourced from my facebook friends! These were delicious! Style points to the recipe writer for being funny, and for making a good muffin recipe. Negative points for writing the recipe in paragraph format without an ingredient list, cuz then I have to read more to get from here to lemon muffins. But I’ll be making these again for sure- Andy just loved them. The kids really did too.  You poke holes in them and pour in a little lemon sugar syrup when they’re still warm and Henry enjoyed trying to mop up as much of the syrup puddles with his muffin stump as possible before taking each bite. Thank you, Ben! Next up, ginger muffins!

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Chili, Elote, Sort of. My pantry was dwindling, but I knew I wanted to make something with the single aging sweet potato in the back of the shelf and a can of black beans. Henry had barely eaten all day and his mood was suffering because of it, and he had asked for “something delicious and a lot of it” for dinner, and I remembered this recipe that my mom had shared with me. I had to improvise a bit because I was missing ingredients, but this turned out great AND Henry ate four bowlfuls. I didn’t grill the corn, I just boiled it and brushed it with sour cream (not mayonnaise like you’re supposed to because that kind of weirds me out) and sprinkled it with cotija leftover from our beach trip. It was ok! It should really be grilled, but corn plus fat plus cheese is always going to taste at least semi-delicious.

George’s Requested Birthday Cake: Brown Cake, Blue Icing. Plus Rainbow Sprinkles.

George’s actual birthday was on Friday. Andy took the day off and we had a leisurely morning opening presents and eating canned cinnamon rolls. Not the fancy can with organic ingredients. The pillsbury can. The kids didn’t enjoy them much, which meant that Andy and I got to eat nearly four each. Then we drove up to Pflugerville to go to a huge indoor playground at a place called Mt. Playmore. George and Henry both really loved it, and crawled around and around the huge play structure, with Andy and me in tow, cause those are the rules, y’all. We ate a pile of fried snacks at the bowling-alley style cafe there, and played in the arcade (they had The Grand Prize Game from the Bozo the Clown show!!! it was hard and we did poorly) and earned ourselves 45 tickets, which was enough to buy Henry a Rainbow Dash tattoo and George a sparkly purple magic wand. God help me, we ate more pizza for dinner. Homeslice, this time. And we over-ordered and ate the leftovers all weekend and I’m officially never eating pizza again. Singing happy birthday to George, before we cut into his blue-frosted cake, was one of my all-time favorite moments. George looked around at all of us with his sweet, quiet smile and just seemed so happy that we were all singing to him.

This is George’s smile when you ask him to smile and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it rocks my world.

The Party Spread. George is perpetually picking up sticks and holding on to them for (literal) hours, going so far as to sleep with them clutched tightly in his fist, until I’m able to pry them out of his grasp. So we had a stick party for his birthday and ate a lot of foods on sticks, and went fishing with sticks wrapped up with a straightened-out metal coat hanger for a hook, and made crafts with sticks.

Same Cake, Same Icing as the Blue Cake (with mashed strawberries mixed in this time), plus Cake Topper from my Sisterrrr!

Close Up on the Cake Topper. It’s so dear! Deer! I love that my sister can make this stuff, and that she’s willing to do it for me. It’s so nice to not have to try to decorate cakes with frosting, which I am truly terrible at.

Extreme Close Up. I love them.

More Spread. That basket of clementines went untouched.

All the stick-y snacks. Plus Doritos because they are one of George’s favorite things.

All the stick-y candies! Plus snickers because they are a waterproof candy that fit inside easter eggs that we turned into fish for a backyard fishing game.

Fruit Skewers. Nothing interesting to say about these.

Veggie Sticks. These are also uninteresting.

Same Cupcakes as above, with Cup4Cup instead of all purpose flour. Oh yeah, and when I’m making these cupcakes for kids, I just use a cup of boiling water in the batter instead of the cup of hot coffee. The coffee version is delicious, but my research shows that it has notable effects on kids, even in cupcake form, so I skip it. They taste simpler, but still so good.

Really Sharp Stake-Painting Table! My sister set up this table plus everything else in the backyard. Half an hour before the party she said “What else can I do to help?” and I said “Oh nothing, I think we’re done” and then I remembered I had done exactly none of the work for the meager craft projects I had come up with for the party, so she did all the things!

We were out for an after-dinner walk a couple of week ago and someone had put a ton of these yard sign stakes on the curb, so we took em. I thought it’d be fun to sand them down and kids could turn them into swords and decorate them with my new wood burning kit. Well I didn’t get around to sanding them down, and more responsible people pointed out that toddlers + wood burning kit is a liability issue. So we put out paints instead and the kids decorated them so beautifully! And left them here! So now they’re mine forever and I’m going to stick em in the garden for a rainbow fence.

1000 popsicle sticks, y’all. There’s nothing we can’t do.

My sister cut these flowers! My maximilian sunflowers are going crazy right now- they’re so huge and overloaded with blooms that they’re sprawled out pitifully on the ground. But they look real nice in this vase.

The first to arrive!

Several hours of partying later, George passed out. Since he fell asleep at 5:30 I’m mentally preparing myself for a 5:00 AM wake up time. Please note the shirt, which was a gift from Christy and is hand-embroidered to say “I ❤ Sticks”. George had such a happy birthday, and I am so grateful to our friends and family for coming together to celebrate him. Love to everyone! And many happy returns to beautiful George.