Childhood Stories

You know how when you were a teenager there were so many times where you'd think, 'Man, my family is crazy!' or 'My dad is nuts!' Well, even though I'm not a teenager anymore I still think my family is crazy and that my dad is nuts.
Do you want evidence?
My brother, Wade, just started a blog devoted solely to our childhood memories. He started out with some posts about my dad. Just so you know, there is ENDLESS fodder for these posts, so keep checking it over and over again!
I'm hoping everyone in the family will pitch in with their own cherished/insane childhood memories.
My brother's GENIUS new blog

Baking with Beth: Meridee's Artisan Bread

...or, Beth's Ghetto Bread

Meridee found this great book about how to make artisan-style bread in just 5 minutes a day. It's called, How to Make Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Doesn't that sound like the oldest gimmick in the book? I bet if I send them 6 box tops and $19.95 plus shipping and handling they'll send me a free trip to Hawaii, too! Please.

The truth is, it takes more than 5 minutes (i.e. 2 hours of allowing the bread to rise), but the bread is REALLY GOOD and REALLY EASY!

And when it comes to making bread, let's just say I ride the short bus. Everytime I try to make bread it turns out dry, unrisen, or in some other way, not worth the 3 hours I spent making it. (suddenly paying $6 a loaf for good bread at the farmer's market seems more affordable)

I don't have a mixer (because I broke it) and I lost the cute little paddle that mixes and kneads the dough in my bread machine. As long as I'm admitting all my culinary faults, let's get out in the open that I tend to break ANY and ALL of my kitchen appliances, giving them a relatively short (but meaningful) life. This explains why I no longer have a blender...or a hand mixer...or a crock pot (actually Meridee recently handed me down hers)...or an electric rice cooker...you get the picture, right?

So with that background, let me say that I produced moist, dense, crusty bread with the first batch I tried! Did I mention that there's no kneading involved? Genius! I'll never knead again! Another bonus to this recipe is that it makes enough dough for 4-1lb. loaves. Technically, you can bake one loaf at a time and save the rest in your refrigerator for another day. But I don't think you'll want to do that. What you'll want to do is bake all four loaves at the same time, eat 1 1/2 loaves by yourself as soon as they come out of the oven (hot and moist and delicious!!!), let your kids share 1/2 a loaf for an afterschool snack, and then have some elegant, European-style bread with your campbell's soup for dinner! And, if you're a compassionate, servicing leader (as it were) of a person, you might want to share one tiny loaf with a neighbor or friend.

The recipe is easy enough for me, so any fool with a pizza stone can duplicate it, k?

Buy the book if you want all the fancy-dancy terms and reasoning behind why the recipe is the way it is, but use my ghetto version for now.

Meridee's Artisan Bread/Beth's Ghetto Bread

3 c. lukewarm water

1 1/2 tbsp. kosher or coarse salt

1 1/2 tbsp. yeast

6 1/2 c. flour

cornmeal for pizza peel

In a 5 quart ice cream bucket put in water, then salt and yeast. Then add all the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until there are no dry patches left. Put bucket lid on (or saran wrap - loosely) and allow to rise for 2-3 hours, or until dough has collapsed or at least leveled off.

Sprinkle dough with about 1/2 c. flour, divide dough in half with a butter knife while dough is still in bucket. Then cut one of the halves in half again, and pull out with your hands 1/4 of the dough from the bucket. Quickly fold sticky ends under the dough, forming a ball. Place shaped ball on a *pizza peel sprinkled with cornmeal (or a wooden cutting board - I think it needs to rest on wood so that it breathes better) Allow to rest for 40 min. Twenty minutes before baking, place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack and a pizza stone on the middle rack and preheat oven to 450 degrees. After bread has rested for forty minutes, sprinkle each loaf with about a tbsp. of flour and with a serrated knife cut a tic-tac-toe or X pattern into top of bread, penetrating about a 1/2".Carefully and quickly pick up dough and put onto preheated pizza stone and then pour two cups of water into cookie sheet below and close oven door to trap steam. Bake for 30 min., or until crust is golden. Allow loaves to cool for at least an hour on a wire rack. (Or use an oven mitt to cut into crust furiously so that you can stuff a buttered, jammed piece in your mouth as fast as humanly possible)

Note: You don't have to cook all your dough at once. You can cook one loaf at a time and just leave the remaining dough covered in your fridge for up to 2 weeks (right Meridee? or 1 week?)

*a pizza peel is one of those fancy paddles that real fancy restaurants use for getting fancy pizzas out of fancy brick ovens. I don't have one of those, and I don't even have a wooden cutting board. So, you know what I used? A board out of my garage (settle down! I washed it first!) and it worked great. What part of the term GHETTO bread don't you understand?

Next Time I'll Wear An Adult Diaper

I peed my pants in fourth grade.
And if you played 4-square in elementary school, you’ll understand why.
I was playing on one of the coveted 4-squares with some of the top players in the grade. And I really needed to pee. But I had brought my A-game and was
squarin’ it up,
if you know what I mean.
I really, really needed to pee.
I was even doing the pee-pee dance to try to hold it in. I even had other players ask, appalled, if I wanted to take a break and go into the bathroom. “No, I’m okay.” I said as I danced. I didn’t want to miss out on the game, especially as I worked my way up from
D-square to
C-square to
B-square and finally to
A-square.
I was the ruler of the 4-square!
I had dominated the game to the point of being queen of the square.
That is, until I peed and peed and peed my pants. I was wearing these light pink pants in some light nylon-type fabric (parachute-type material?), so the pee spread quickly through the fabric from my crotch down to my socks and into my L.A. Gear knock-offs. The pee cascaded so freely from me that there was no stopping the dam once it’d been compromised (help me out here, Joel, with explaining the engineering principles of a compromised dam) and my classmates stood aghast as one of them incredulously exclaimed, “She’s peeing her pants!!”
I was in A-square and I wasn’t ready to give it up. I kind of stood there, hopping from one foot to the other trying to decide whether to stay there and play the game out (did I mention I was in A-square?) or go to the bathroom like any sane child would. One of them finally offered, “Why don’t you go into the bathroom and…clean yourself ?” I reluctantly acquiesced.
Here’s the best part: I was soaked. SOAKED! And do you know what I did? I stayed at school for the rest of the day sitting in my pee.
I went to class and sat in my desk (not to get up until the school-is-dismissed bell rang) amid disgusted looks from my classmates and muffled cries of horror at the smell.
Yes sir! I was a socially well-adjusted child which helps explain my winning personality today!

So, that was when I was ten.
And this week I lived to experience it all over again. How, you ask?

(Wow. How did I NOT get picked to go the Olympics?!)

I went to Jump On It for Lincoln’s birthday. It’s a place where there’s about 50 trampolines all smashed together which = heaven for me.

(Fun, no?)

The trampolines were all so bouncy! Growing up I bet I spent more hours outside on my trampoline than I did inside sleeping at night.

I loved reliving all my aerials, 1 1/2 back flips, suicides, oreos, and round-off back handsprings. But, to put it discreetly, birthing 4 children has not been all roses, people. I had a hard time maintaining bladder control and I had to end my jumping session a little early due to…well, I'll let your imagination fill in (or lose control of) the rest. (I think Joel thought he was a gazelle.)

You okay? Sorry if I lost some friends in admitting that on my blog.

Anyway, here’s a couple photos from Lincoln’s birthday, including the special cake he requested. He specifically asked for a cake that said STAR WARS THE CLONE WARS.

(Incredible art work!)

And he wanted the cake to be strawberry and blueberry flavored. I went to a bit of trouble trying to fill that tall order and then he didn’t eat even ONE PIECE of it. He doesn’t like cake, even strawberry and blueberry flavored cake. (Thanks, son. I’m glad I spent all that time on it so that you could NOT EAT IT.)

(Note new homemade Jedi robe, homemade Jedi tunic, and solid gold soccer medal)

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

At my Relief Society cooking group meeting this month my neighbor, Linda, brought cookies. Good cookies! Chocolate with chocolate chip cookies dipped in white chocolate, or in other words, black and white cookies.

There were spicy notes to the aftertaste which left me intrigued. Provoked. Upon investigation I was surprised to find no nutmeg, no cinnamon in the ingredient list of the cookies! This cookie was so yummy, yet complex, that I could taste the afternotes of the white chocolate they were dipped in! Genius! (I'm not TRYING to sound like a foodie. I AM one...okay not really, but I wish I was)
Here’s the recipe, which I made for some of our neighbors who helped us with our sod last weekend:

Double-Rich Chocolate Cookies (Mrs. Fields recipe)
Submitted by Linda Drake

2 ½ c. all-purpose flour
½ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
½ c. unsweetened cocoa powder
1 c. dark brown sugar, packed
¾ c. white sugar
1 c. salted butter, softened
3 large eggs
2 tsp. pure vanilla
2 c. semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 300 º. In a medium bowl combine flour, soda, salt and cocoa powder. Mix well with a wire whisk and set aside. In a large bowl blend sugars with an electric mixer at medium speed. Add butter and beat to form a grainy paste. Scrape down sides of bowl, then add eggs and vanilla. Beat at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add the flour mixture and chocolate chips, and blend at low speed just until combined. Do not over mix. Drop dough by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased cookie sheets, 1 ½ inches apart. Bake for 21-23 minutes. Immediately transfer cookies with a spatula to a cool surface. (Option: dip cookies into melted white chocolate chips or almond bark for a triple chocolate treat!)

Unkempt Squiggles
My sister, Laura, was over while I was making these this weekend and for some reason she was really ticked off about a lot of elements of this recipe.

“20 minutes at 300 degrees! Ha! Turn it up to 350 and cook it for 10 minutes!”

(She had angry eyes as she said this)
Later, when we were dipping the cookies, it proved too much for her patience. She ended up plooping out huge wads of white chocolate onto the cookies.

Sad.

I was hoping to impress my neighbors with my culinary elegance. Our ploomps were accomplished by filling up a Ziploc sandwich bag with white chips, microwaving them (for some reason the white chips made my microwave make angry, chemically, electrocution sounds) and squirting the chocolate on top of the cookies.

After I finished the recipe I realized I needed a few more cookies than the doubled recipe had made. But I didn’t want to go to all the hassle of creaming the sugar and butter, etc. (Plus, I was out of baking cocoa)

So, I turned to my old standby: a box of chocolate cake, 2/3 c. of shortening and 2 eggs mixed with 2 c. chocolate chips. I baked the spooned out dough onto a cookie sheet and baked for 9 min. and then smooshed white chocolate onto them.

You know what? they were almost as good as the real thing (baby). Super chocolatey and yummy with lots of chocolate chips and the contrast of the mellow white chocolate. But with this batch, I missed out on the spicy nuance in the previous batches' cookies.

Next time I'm going for the real thing, baby. Even though it was extra work it was a better-flavored cookie that I appreciated a lot! Although, I literally ate at least 10 cookies from the first batch and then 10 more cookies from the second batch, so maybe having access to either cookie is a mistake (note sidebar where my fantasy baby weight-less wardrobe waits for me)

And now, who here is itching for more disco? I thought so. Alicia Bridges sings my favorite disco song of all time. But you may not have known that it only became my favorite AFTER I watched this music video on VH1. ENJOY!

And if that wasn't frightening enough for you, know that the following music video was in earnest. This is not supposed to be a joke, folks.

Gore-Jis!

(Our front lawn: pre-tilled)

When we moved into our house the back lawn lacked…lawn.

Our backyard was a mess of crabgrass, weeds and when it rained, puddles that didn’t ever drain. This year we aimed our saved pennies at saving the backyard.
The vision we had for our lawn included sprinklers, sod, a swingset and a cement pad.

We've planned and worked for six months, making slow progress

and feeling frustrated with each other a lot.

(My big bro, Wade)
Today we laid our sod!

And it looks GORE-JIS!
I really stopped believing (around mid-June) that this day would ever come,

even though Joel has literally spent every free night and weekend working on it.

We’ve had a lot of help from family and friends, but really folks, Joel is the real hero here.
Bless him, will you?
Joel and I spent much of this afternoon just staring at our new and improved lawn.

We decided just Wednesday that we’d spring for sod and install it this weekend. Joel asked me if I would send an email out to our friends in the ward to see who could come help us, and this is what I sent out:

You Busy Saturday?
Who am I emailing this to?

The Cooking Group!

Why? Because you're the only people in the ward that I have emails for.
What do I want? Free labor.
That's right, folks. We've been tearing up our sad, sad lawn all summer and even have our new sprinklers in.

We've ordered sod (yikes!) to be delivered sometime Friday night and are going to lay it on Saturday starting at 8:00 a.m.
Do you want to help us?
We'd love to have your help, whether it be for an hour or for 10 minutes. We'll be working on it all day, but we're asking for any of ya'lls help from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
If that's not enough to entice you, we'll also have snacks, treats and a live band...okay, no band, but we might turn the radio on or something.
So, if you want us to be your BFF and to owe you BIG TIME for future services, come over Saturday morning and work like crazy.
Thank you in advance for your help. We love this ward and feel lucky to have so many friends here. (have I instilled enough guilt in you yet? just kidding...kind of)
Thanks,
Beth

Joel’s comment on this email was that I was basically just begging for help, but I thought I was rather clever.
Then Joel sent out another email to friends and family which went like this:
When it’s sod-layin’ time in Nebraska…
. . . it's also sod layin time in Provo at Joel & Beth's house. We're
having sod delivered friday night and will be laying it in the back
yard on Saturday morning. We're inviting all we know to come help.
On such short notice we realize that most of you will already have
better things to do, but we thought we'd send out a plea anyway. If
you've got an hour to spare, we'll appreciate your help, if not, we
know you'll be here in spirit, laying that spritual sod . . .or what
ever spirits do at a sod laying party. Hmmmm. . . maybe we should
have looked into that spiritual sod. I bet it's much lighter and
never gets weeds, but does it green up?
Anywho, thanks for the thought,
Joel

(Nice shot of somebody's be-hind)
Here was the response this morning: About 15 people from our ward, Joel’s friends, and my brothers showed up to help.

('Nuther good butt shot)

What we thought was going to take us four hours took one hour with everybody’s help.(hard workers, paid in Krispy Kremes)

Then we decided to use the leftover sod for a problem spot in the front yard. We borrowed a neighbor’s tiller and with everybody’s help the front lawn was tilled, cleaned up and graded, with new sod in place in about another hour. Wow! What great friends we have! Thanks to everybody who took time out to help us. We appreciate it so much and look at what we have to show for it. Amazing.
Don’t you just want to roll around on it naked? Just Kidding!...kind of.

(Cookies taken to our neighbor-helpers)

Re-upholstery Magic

Presto-Change-o!

Most of you know that just about everything in our house is either from D.I. or it was given to us. Here we have the highest in country charm fashion from 1990, a hand-me-down from somebody I used to babysit for. While it boasts high quality construction and upholsteryship (made that term up myself) the fabric was getting worn and....stained. Ah, here's the matching ottoman. Beautiful. Perfect for rolling down the hallway like a boogie board in the ocean. It, too, suffers tears and stains unbefitting a furniture piece of its caliber. (Note in this picture my uber sweet log bed)

What these fine furniture needed was someone with a loving, patient touch; Someone with skilled hands and an unabashed flair for high fashion.

You can assume they never got that. What they got was ME. You know me: impatient, cheap, with reckless abandon. This nice set was practically begging me to just LEAVE it in its shabby state rather than endure the tortures of my "Chester-quality" job. (Chester is my dad and he does odd jobs just as well as I do...which a lot of times means the job gets done and fast, but not always well.)

But I couldn't. I wanted to recover them. So, I went to the Home Fabrics in Arm (Orem) found cool gold fabric for $3.50 a yard and bought a bunch. Then with meticulous precision I ripped off most of the fabric and pulled out hundreds of staples. See:


Poor chair and ottoman!

Then I cut out huge pieces of fabric, laid them over the chair and did my best to jimmy rig them in place with Chet's electric stapler. The arm pieces, shown below, were cut out wrong. So, after I cut out all my other pieces to staple on I realized I had just enough fabric left over that I could cut out new arm pieces. So I did. And then five seconds later I realized I CUT THE FABRIC IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!!!!!!! Aargh!

Here they are finished. You see that cushion looking so unpresuming and cute? Well the little punk took me FOUR hours to make and the piping still looks like a cub scout did it! If I ever do another reupholstery project again, piping will NOT be included!

Don't look close, fools! This is a Chesterized Beth Williams project! Why do you think I chose such blurry photos?

In all, this project took me about three years to complete (...or 1 month) It was a lot of headaches and I have a bruise on my shoulder from the kickback of the staple gun (really). But if you're a woman of leisure, like me, you've got plenty of time for these little crafts.

Whenever I do these projects I'm always diving in before really thinking through things, assuming the project will figure itself out. I don't like to think about step two until I'm halfway through step one. Afterwards I often feel a bit of remorse that I didn't plan better or try harder to do a better quality job. Then I console myself by thinking how it looks better than it did before (though not much) and that the whole project came in under $25.

If you think you'd like to Chesterize a chair or two of your own, here's some words of advice:

1. Don't plan ahead.

2. Rip off the fabric way before you buy your replacement fabric so that your kids will roll all over the batting/foam for a few days to dingey it up.

3. Don't worry about having the right size of staples. Just use whatever you have (1/4") for half of the chair and then switch to a bigger size when you realize your two year old could pull all the fabric off by herself.

4. Buy as little fabric as needed. You don't want to spend an extra $5 on fabric when you could piecemeal the back of the chair...nobody looks back there, anyway. Plus, you love taking another hour out of your day to go back to the store to buy more.

5. Don't worry your head about taking all the old fabric and piping off before you put the new stuff on. Everybody LOVES seeing piping from the old job under your new fabric. It's really cool.

6. Clean up can be saved for a rainy day! Scissors, electric staple guns still plugged in, loose staples and jewelry pliers are FINE where they are when you have shag carpet and small children running around.

7. Buy as much time away from your kids as you need to finish this job by turning on PBS kids...for educational purposes. Every good re-upholstery mom wants to expand her children's minds.

8. Finally, put your finished product in the baby's room because it will NEVER get beaten up there.

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