I'm ONLY 10 Days Late = DB Mallomars = Alert the Media!

Post in Progress... Betcha ya didn't think I was tellin' the truth about makin' the DB Challenge in my last post didja?....

These are some of the four dozen roses and other flowers that A. got me for my birthday on Saturday. Purty huh... I'm not really a flowers kinda gal (don't get me wrong, I love flowers, but receiving flowers is not something I long for, I'm more of an "equipment" type of gal on the longing scale).

And this is one of the goodies that baby Saffron let me get into the kitchen to make over the last two weeks. Yep, between the three or four 30mn naps she takes a day, it took me that long to get these done from when I started them on the 26th (yeah, the day before I should have posted them, wanna make something of it?) Working on the post now, you'll see all of it when I'm done and not a minute sooner. Hold your water.

I know y'all probably have mallow(mars - see below) coming out of your ears right now, but what's done is done, and since I even took some damn pictures while I was making them, you're stuck with this write-up now.
The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

You could make either one or both so I chose to make the mallomars (let's call a spade a spade, shall we) because Pepperidge Farm and I have had a relationship over the years that was exclusively centered on their Milano cookies and I'm just not ready to give that up right now. Also I wanted to try my hand at marshmallows.
Naturally, the first thing I did was use a different recipe for the base than the one given which was a shortbread recipe. I figure if I'm making a cookie that has marshmallow and chocolate, I might as well make a cookie base that's graham cracker and make a s'more. So of course in my time of need, I turned to Deb of Smitten Kitchen and her adaptation of Nancy Silverton's recipe for graham crackers. What's that you say? you think Deb's the bomb too? I know, and trust me, if there ever was something that Deb was right about, and Deb is right about a lot of things in the kitchen, it would have to be how good these graham crackers are. Better than any other graham cracker and certainly better than the store-bought ones

I made half the recipe in her post anticipating that that should be plenty, and indeed it was. I felt like playing around with some cookie cutters I hardly ever use and made both fluted and plain cookies. They were one and a half inches in diameter.

I think I underbeat the marshmallow batter just a touch but they stayed put anyway once on the cookie rounds. I improvised a piping bag and tip (as mine are packed away somewhere) with a ziploc bag and out they came.

As for the chocolate glaze, I think the recipe's is too thin, I used 1.5 ounces of sunflower oil instead of 2 and it still hardly set and melted very quickly once between my fingers. I think it might be preferable to do some sort of very thin ganache or something, anything that would set a little more sturdily.

Yeah yeah, I didn't temper the chocolate, have you seen the title of this post? I'm 10 days late people, these look good enough and taste good too, right now that's about where I set the bar.

Thanks for listening. By the way, in case anyone cares, this month (well last month now) was the 2nd anniversary of my being a Daring Baker. Two years. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to keep at it but it's been fun. At some point I have to do the 6 or so challenges that I've missed in that time between the ones I missed when I was getting married, being pregnant and having the papoose (I guess you could say it's my 1.5 year anniversary then).

J'ai Fatigué = I Have Tired

When my youngest niece was 4 (only 2 years ago), being Franco-American, she would have difficulty with the use of the verbs to be and to have, which are auxiliary in French and thus have to be learned individually, and would say j'ai fatigué (I have tired) instead of je suis fatiguee (I am tired). This became her go-to-phrase whenever she didn't want to do something or felt needlessly and cruelly put-upon by the adults around her. She would lean back, sometimes dramatically putting a hand up to her forehead, and say as lamentably as possible "J'ai faaa-ti-guéééée" as she would almost stumble away looking for the nearest soft surface on which to crash.

This incorrect, but impossibly cute as acted out by her, turn of phrase became a joke on the French side of the family so that now whenever one of us, and I in particular am guilty of this, is overtired or simply weary he or she will say "j'ai fatigué" to the others.

And now I'm telling you, any of you who still come by and see what I'm up to even though I'm absent most of the time now, that j'ai fatigué.

Baby Saffron is the most adorable baby I could wish for, and the most alert I could have asked for. She turned 4 months old this week and is up almost the entire day since she sleeps for up to 12 hours at night (with feeds of course), so I'm tired.

We got everything ready to go to Paris and then we couldn't go, which should have been predictable at this stage, but as that brilliant writer John Updike wrote "hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists." So I'm tired.

I took the opportunity of not going to Paris to go see my sister in Chicago and visit my nieces, including the aforementioned quote-maker. I went by myself with Baby Saffron so my sister could meet her while A. stayed here and tried to fix things so we could go to Paris. It's a long trip to get there and back, I was there for three weeks, and now I'm back, and we still can't go to Paris yet, so I'm tired.

I'm mostly tired because I don't like it here, or at least I don't like 97% of it here. I'm here because A. couldn't leave here for reasons that are very complex and long to explain, so I came to him, a little over a year and half ago.

The only thing I'm not too tired to do is still try to get in the kitchen and bake things. Though most of the time I'm too tired and short on time to take any pictures and do the whole thing after that (if I can figure out the time to do it while taking care of my little killing-me-with-cute-bundle).

I got a new computer while I was gone which was nice but now I can't find the pictures of the last Daring Baker challenge - the Bakewell Tarts - and on top of that, since it's a Mac, I am trying to figure out Aperture which is not at all like any of the photo software I've used before (like I have all the time in the world for that right?) I might make the Bakewell Tart again to christen my new rectangular fluted pan which I love whole-heartedly, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

The new Daring Baker Challenge is coming, just don't hold it against me if I can't finish it for today, but it's definitely half done. So it really is coming this week unlike that damn Bakewell Tart which may never come around again.

I will give away cookbooks when we finally get out of here, just for the sheer joy of making total strangers happy, because I'll be so happy that we're out of here, so if you're checking on occasion because that's what you're waiting for, it will happen, I just don't know when although I wish I could say I was giving them away right now in this post because it would mean we were gone.

Don't get me wrong, I have many things to be thankful for and I am fully aware of them, but sometimes I just get really really tired. And then I have tired, instead of being tired.

J'ai fatigué.

Bakewell Tarts coming soon to a post near you...

As you read this, we are in the middle of moving the whole circus troupe to Paris, so while I barely managed to make the Bakewell tarts at the very last minute (thanks to a kind soul's oven), I haven't had time to download the pictures and do that whole tra-la-la.
I don't know when we're going to be up and running with internet and everything but hopefully very soon (no one wants to live with me very long if I am sans internet. I went to Stanford people, at the time it was one of the only two fully networked campuses in the US and I remember Mosaic Netscape when it was literally 5 or 6 pages and you could actually get to the "end" of the internet, so I don't take kindly to being sans network for too long - it gives me the shakes...)
So coming soon... and also, heh, I'm going to be giving away some neato cookbooks shortly after we're back up and running, so you might want to sneek a peek from time to time so you don't miss out.
As always, thanks for stopping by to begin with.

Richmond Park

I know I've mentioned that I love Richmond Park at least twice on this blog, once in the last post. So what's so special about Richmond Park you say? Well, I'll show you...

This is Richmond. Not the park, the borough. Just giving you an idea of how lovely it is and you're not even in the park yet. Oh and yes that's the Thames River.

This is a typical view in the park. And it's a sunny day, so there are lots of people there. Yep, that's lots of people.
See something in the grass in the distance, close to the trees? No? It's too far, right? Let me take you closer.

Yep, your eyes do not deceive you. Deer. Dozens of deer. Hundreds of deer. OK not hundreds of deer in this picture or even in this area, but throughout the park. This is why I love Richmond Park. How come all the (apparently unmolested) deer you ask? Let me 'splain.

Richmond Park belongs to the Queen. You've heard of her, right? Little, white-haired, 80s, answers to the name of Elizabeth, though there was another Elizabeth before her so she's the second Elizabeth. But why am I showing you a bunch of deer butts in this picture you say, interrupting me? Because I love the little bird perched on the middle deer. It's like those little fish that attach themselves to shark to clean them of parasites. Well, that's what it makes me think of.

Anyway, it's the largest royal park in London and because it's a royal park, the deer belong to her. So you better not be gettin' up in her little crown about wantin' to shoot yourselves some deer now 'cause it's illegal. Just try to adopt a zen attitude, like these two gals...

You know...relax, have a snack or beverage of your choice, like this young couple. Right? That looks like a young stag to me because he's only got 6 points and it looks like he's got 4 more coming out. Anyone more versed in the growth patterns of deer want to enlighten me?

I don't know how you react when you see this, but I want to cry out "Bambi! I'm sorry about your Mama!" although technically, anything louder than a whisper sends them bounding off so maybe not.

And now it's getting to the golden hour and--there's one of those birds again! And he's perched on the young stag! Had to take a picture.

The most amazing thing is how used they are to people being around (as long as they don't get too close). I mean, seriously, when have you ever seen a Golden Retriever that close to a herd of deer? She wants to go home, he looks back wistfully at what could have been...

Ah Richmond, I heart thee. If we'd been allowed to live with you while we were sequestered in this country, we totally would have. I'll miss you, but there are beautiful places where we're going too.

Petersham Nurseries

This post was originally going to be about Petersham Nurseries and Richmond Park, but the baby and the packing to move again got the best of me (and Blogger was no help whatsoever being down all the time). As you can see from the date I originally started writing this post up on the 8th of June. Yep. And then it occurred to me just a couple of days ago that I was being far too ambitious, that trying to sort, pick and post-process the pictures from Richmond Park on top of the ones from Petersham Nurseries was just going to be beyond my capabilities right now. In fact post-processing just the few pictures I picked from Petersham Nurseries was beyond my capabilities, so here they are unprocessed, except for their size.

If you happen to live in London or around the Western shores of it and haven't been to Richmond Park, let alone Petersham Nurseries, you must go NOW. OK maybe tomorrow or some day when the weather is nicer. But go as soon as you can, and if you go to the Nurseries, try not to drive, you can get there by public transportation (it's a whole thing with their permit to be there or something or other like that because zoning and permissions are an abomination to obtain and keep a hold of in this country).

Others have blogged about Petersham Nurseries before me, notably Keiko Oikawa of Nordljus and Shuna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater. They have a restaurant and a tea house there. Really that's just a fancy way of saying they are set up for dining in the hot houses and outdoors.

The food is lovely as is the setting, but it's all a tad more rustic than you would expect. We went there with Baby Saffron on a weekday when it was really hot and it seemed like a good idea to be sitting outside in the shade enjoying some good food and drink, but actually when we got there, even though the restaurant service was over, we weren't allowed to sit at the outdoor restaurant tables (Neither A. nor I really understood why) and since the other outdoor tables were all taken (and in full sunlight)and those that weren't were in a far corner by a crumbling wall with a bunch of construction and gardening equipment by them, we chose to eat in the hot house, which as I'm sure you can guess, was sweltering even with both doors and all the windows wide open. Not a way to win a new Mother's heart for sure, although they are wonderful nurseries if you're looking for plants and the food is great.

I'll blog later about Richmond Park which I just love love love (hanging out with the deer) when we're not in the middle of boxes and more packing and moving again with little Baby Saffron.