Ulysses drew this picture on his magnetic doodle pad, then took it to show Donald, saying, "Fish!" So Donald snapped a photo, and sent me Internet chat at work to tell me about it. I was so excited, I told everyone in the room, and I couldn't wait to get home and see my little boy's first picture!
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| 2007_0217 3rd birthday party |
Everything made from scratch, of course.
The culinary theme was kid food. We wanted to serve food that U would actually want. The only thing he ate all evening, though, was a PBJ. And cake.
Corn Dogs
We worked on this recipe for days! We were so far off at first that we decided we'd better eat corn dogs at every meal until we got it right, so we wouldn't run out of time. That's a lot of corn dogs. We started out with a recipe from a book called "Street Food" that we got at a yard sale a summer or two back. Great book, goes international! Can't find it on Amazon, or I'd give the link.
The final version included stone ground corn meal (gives a nice crunch), masa harina (gives a nice fresh-tortilla-like scent) and flour. The dogs are speared with a craft stick, then dusted with cornstarch and dipped in batter made with the dry ingredients above, plus a bit of salt and baking soda, an egg, and our wonderful homemade buttermilk. Macaroni and Cheese: We used a recipe from the April-May 2005 issue of Cooks' Country, the new publication from the makers of Cooks' Illustrated. Love it, love it. The recipe was a low-fat version. Boy, was it good, and luscious and filling, too! Where it said skim milk, I substituted whole milk. It didn't seem quite cheddary enough, so I doubled the cheddar. The crumb topping didn't seem buttery enough, so I doubled the butter. The white sauce didn't seem to call for enough butter, so I doubled that from the start. That sure was great low-fat mac 'n' cheese!
Pepperoni Pizza
Don made this. We've used lots of recipes; this one was also from the glorious "Street Food." Started with flour, yeast, warm water, olive oil, salt, made dough, let rise. Used pizza sauce we had frozen from a month or so back, made with I don't even remember what. Some form of tomatoes in a can, seasonings, salt. Topped with shredded mozz and sliced pepp. What else do you need?
Birthday Cake
I worked from The Cake Bible for this one. Fabulous cake -- yellow with chocolate frosting. I've never eaten better cake in my life. I plan to post separately about the cake adventure.
We also planned to make guacamole and serve Breyer's vanilla ice cream in cones, but people were somehow too stuffed.
The culinary theme was kid food. I wanted to serve food that U would actually want. The only thing he ate all evening, though, was a PBJ. And cake.
[Note: This post is copied from the original ulysses.blogware dot com blog. It doesn't really apply anymore. Now, go to our Picassa page to see our photos from any time period. – VVK, 12/24/2007]
Blogware has a nice photo album feature that I'll be making more use of. My plan is to create month-by-month albums for months to come.
Blogware also lets you "post to the past." I'll take advantage of that to fill in past months, as well. The post-to-the-past feature was one of the main reasons I signed up with this service, back when I was blog-shopping in 2004. So when you tune in someday and see lots of photos or stories that you don't know how you missed before -- it's because they weren't there before. It's also very handy for the online scrapbook of my published articles. You can see articles with a posting date of 1999, when I first started freelance writing, even though I sure never heard the word blog that long ago.
Eventually, someday, one of these days, gradually, I'll match the pictures with all the clever, heartwarming stories that I've always wanted to post them with. But my new strategy is to aim for getting more of the pix up first, then filling in the stories, rather than the other way around.
No matter what profound insights I post, how much I work on look and feel, no matter how many published articles I archive on the "Vesna's Published Work" portion of the blog, friends have just one comment when I finally persuade them to check out the blog: "Where's recent pictures of Ulysses? I couldn't find them!" As if I would hide them in a secret directory. So, OK. I'm trying to figure out how to efficiently post a lot of pictures at once -- that's currently the time-consuming part. Because there are a lot of pictures on my computer that are not on the blog, and should be. Stay tuned.
Here are some photos we took during December 2006. Click on the photo to the left to get to our December 2006 Picasa album.
Looking over these, I realize most of what I take is pictures of Ulysses, pictures of some great food we cooked, and pictures of Ulysses eating some great food we cooked. So our obsessions are pretty clear.
Also note Ulysses' disdain for clothing in general, even in December. In Wisconsin. When we can get a shirt on him, we're so happy about it, we don't care how long it stays on. Till the next bath, even. Now if only we could communicate to him somehow that if he wore boots and mittens, it would be fun to play in the snow, instead of instantly freezing. His hands and feet run hot -- like his father's -- so as soon as he touches snow, it melts into water. The water is freezing cold. And it makes his hands cold. So, thanks to the magic of conductivity -- water being a more powerful conductor than air, and all that -- his warm hands actually make for cold hands, if he grabs a handful of snow.
And, note how many pictures are of Ulysses playing with trains. His obsession.
