A Sunnier Version of Sweden

This was the week of desserts - next week I'll be back to dinner food, but I felt like it was time to have an option other than grocery store bakery items when my sweet tooth struck. Once again, I plucked recipes from the NY Times Cooking website, both that looked quite simple relative to what I always imagine anything from scratch might be. Not as simple as from a box - my typical baking m.o. - but quite manageable, and I even had all of the ingredients on hand. On Sunday afternoon, for the first new recipe of the week, I pulled everything out - ingredients, bowls and measuring tools - and off I went! I was going to give Katharine Hepburn's Brownies a try. I've often considered the fact that I do truly enjoy cooking and baking, but I truly do NOT enjoy cleaning afterward. Cooking from scratch also equates to about a zillion and one dishes in my mind, and while the number varies, it's almost always more than cooking from a box. I'm learning, though, that the...

With so many routines disrupted by our move, it's taken some time to get back to what feels like normal. A new normal, yes, but something predictable that brings a rhythm to our days and weeks here in Wisconsin. A big step in that direction, in my mind, was getting the kids back to taking tennis lessons. Our neighbor had mentioned Valley Athletics as the place to go for tennis in the area, but I had held off on joining because I had an inkling that come January, there would be a membership deal to join as most gyms do to take advantage of good intentions and New Year's resolutions! My intuition was right and a couple of weeks ago, I toured the facility and took advantage of the no-joining-fee window. Next step, get the kids on the calendar for lessons! After a couple of emails back and forth, we had it set up with Adam, one of the pros, and last Friday I managed to get home from work in time to tag along to see how it went for their first lesson in months. Overall, the kid...

I've always said I would run in pretty much any weather, but that was when I lived in the South and extreme weather was more in the triple digit range vs. the negative number range. That statement has been challenged a few times as I've gotten back to regular workouts by wind chills that dipped below -20* sometimes here in Wisconsin. I'm still committed, though, to running outdoors any time I can, because try as I might, I lack the grit and stick-to-it-ness needed to get much farther than three miles on a treadmill. Big problem there, because three miles is totally insufficient for the training I'm doing right now! Shauna and I are going to run the Illinois Marathon together in April , which means long weekend runs and increasingly long midweek runs to get enough miles under my belt to make it the 26.2 miles. I have my training plan printed and on my dresser to keep me on track, and last weekend was supposed to be a rest weekend with no long run on the calendar. I had...

We hit a major milestone this week: Caroline's first school band concert! Band has been one of the interesting challenges with this move. In Arkansas, school band doesn't begin until 7th grade, so Caroline has only been playing the cornet since August of last year. In Wisconsin, though, the kids begin band as early as 5th grade, so she found herself a couple of years behind the first day she showed up to band class. In a quirk of scheduling, the only band class that fit her schedule was the 8th grade band, so her gap to the other kids was now expanded by an additional year compared to her classmates. She spent her first couple of months practicing solo in a room in the band hall during class, which I know was frustrating but necessary for her to try and catch up with the other kids. Thankfully, her band teacher, Mrs. Bauer, has been wonderful about working with her, and by virtue of not having much choice, she has progressed very quickly. By December, Caroline was integrate...

No overachieving this week with only one new recipe - unless you count baking with real, live yeast! For some reason, I've always been intimidated by the idea of baking with actual yeast. Somewhere down the line, I decided any recipe that required yeast required the absolute, perfect temperature liquid to get it to work, and that was way more precision than I was willing to deal with in a recipe. Once I learned that was patently wrong, though, I've been inching my way toward homemade bread, and last week, I took the plunge. And it was TOTALLY EXCELLENT! Which is great, since the recipe promised as much: Excellent White Bread from the NY Times cooking website lived up to the hype of its name. I'm a late comer to the baking and cooking scene, as Justin has done most of that for me over the last almost 20 years. One of the things I'm learning to embrace is to read the entire recipe all the way through and then gather everything together first, before you really start,...

It comes around every year - Girl Scout Cookie time! Even as a brand new member of the troop, Caroline has the same enthusiasm she's shown in years past for selling cookies, and I'm also helping by volunteering to supervise booth sales and anything else the troop leader needs. Been there, done that - it's always easier when others volunteer to help! Caroline has set an incredibly ambitious goal this year - she wants to sell 800 boxes to get to the reward level where she'd earn over $200 in cookie dough to use toward Girl Scout camp next summer. That's a LOT of boxes, so she set out this weekend to start knocking on doors and making some sales! Saturday, she and John went down the street, but I was disappointed when she came back after just a short time and only having sold six boxes. She said she was tired from skiing that morning. I did understand, but I also told her that when we have big goals, sometimes we have to work harder to achieve them. Despite my encour...

That flash freeze delivered for me, with temperatures all over Wisconsin getting back down below freezing and more snow back on the ground. My obsession with cross country skiing was stoked, and it was back to the internet to find a place and a time to get back on the trails! In my googling, I stumbled across exactly what I'd been looking for - an introductory class to help us learn the basics and some groomed trails to make it easier to get comfortable on skis. I signed up and Saturday morning, Caroline, John and I headed north about an hour to Shiocton and the Navarino Nature Center to embrace the season and spend some fun time together! We got some classroom instruction first, learning a little about our equipment and then the basics in push-glide, push-glide. The instructor also covered techniques for going up and down hills which was great, since the only other time we'd been out on our skis had been on the flat loop in our backyard. Finally it was time to get outsi...

After all of the incredibly frigid arctic air over the holidays, and then enough of a moderation to finally get out there and try our cross country skis , the mercury kept on rising and we had a couple of really nice days. In fact, I switched up my workout plan last Thursday morning to take advantage of a 50* temperature at 5am and go for a run in capris and a shirt, no layers needed! On one hand it's nice to have a bit of a break from the cold weather, but honestly, it's a disappointment to lose all of the snow. After our backyard adventure last weekend, I've found myself returning again and again in my mind to think about when and how we can get back on skis. Critical ingredient: enough snow on the ground, and sadly, it was totally missing as of last Thursday afternoon. My guess is this is fairly unusual. As soon as the winter weather begins to appear, my very safety-conscious company sets out boxes of salt for the sidewalk, reminds everyone of the winter weather proc...

I know it's early in the year, but this is one resolution I may find easy to keep. So far, two weeks, two new recipes each week. I'm finding that I'm really enjoying trying new dishes, and there is a lovely satisfaction that comes from the process of making something, serving it, and getting praise from your family. Having a motivation beyond the intrinsic may make this my favorite resolution of 2018. For week 2, I looked for inspiration to find ways to continue using the leftover New Year's ham in the fridge. I found a Split Pea Soup recipe on AllRecipes that looked simple and I could use the ham, so I put it in my virtual recipe box for Sunday dinner. One of the side benefits and tangential resolutions to my cooking plan is to use my KitchenAid stand mixer and attachments more often. I've had the mixer for years but it didn't sit on the countertop; instead, it was stored in the pantry, out of sight and out of mind. the food processing attachments were a C...

Okay, okay - I know car washes are everywhere. I've given car wash gift certificates for gifts to people who most definitely don't live in the midwest. Now that I've been in Wisconsin for just part of the winter, though, I'm telling you - the necessity  of the automatic car wash is definitely an upper midwest thing. See, when it snows, they put salt on the roads. Salt. REAL SALT. I didn't even know that was a thing anymore! I heard about beet juice while we lived in Arkansas; on the rare occasion we expected ice or snow, crews would pre-treat the roads in an effort to minimize problems. I guess I just assumed, too, that there were synthetic alternatives that felt like a more environmentally friendly choice. Of course, I may be terribly misinformed, and real salt may be just fine. But doesn't it seem weird that after 100 years of driving and paved roads, that's our plan? My concerns aside, though, that's the deal - salt on the roads, which results in ...

Concert going is definitely a hobby that I've seen range from "go when tickets come my way" to "it's my favorite way to spend available time and money." I have friends all over the spectrum, and I've usually fallen closer to the "it's nice if it's easy" spot. I'm also more likely to seek out concerts of the symphonic nature than the rock arena type, though I like almost any good music. If I were to choose my absolute favorite rock 'n' roller, it would be Lenny Kravitz - I've loved his hard-driving guitar since I was in high school and heard the opening riff of "Are You Gonna Go My Way" for the first time, and have picked up his CDs and downloaded his music pretty frequently over the years. He shows up on many of my running playlists, motivating my steps over many, many miles. His ultra cool, uber hip swagger adds a little something to my love of his music, and if there was going to be one concert on my ...