Selfie

Stream of Consciousness on a Wednesday Morning

A totally selfish post.  As if my thoughts and wishes would ever matter to anyone else but me!

 My favorite peonies, blooming on the side of my house by the driveway.  I see them every time I get in and out of my car.

They've been blooming for 3 days now.  I snap a picture every time I pass by.  

I snapped this picture this morning after I dropped my son off at the train station.  Then I decided to count the peony pictures in my phone.

There are 18 pictures of the same flowers!  I won't bore you with them all.

But it made me start thinking.  How cool it is that I can so easily snap pictures with my phone all day long.  How awesome it would have been to have had a camera phone when my kids were younger.  Which led to this thought: I wish I had started my blog 20 years earlier, so that I could have a really awesome photo journal of my kids as they grew up.

Instead of impulsively taking pictures of everything that catches my eye--like big fish in the supermarket--I could have a phone full of images of my kids.  If only there were camera phones back then.  If only I had a cell phone back then.  

~1997~

If only I was blogging back then.  If only I had internet access back then.  

~2009~

At ages 22, 19 and (almost) 18, there's no way my kids would let me blog about their current lives.  And there's no way they'd let me post pictures.

But if I had started this when they were younger, they would have been fair game.  

Rum Punch

Mother's Day was perfect.  Both Sean and Caitie had their finals during the week before.  Sean came home Friday night, Caitie arrived on Saturday, and that's all I needed for Mother's Day.

And then my baseball team surprised me after our game that afternoon.

It was a perfect day.

I've really enjoyed the past week, having everyone under the same roof is the best thing in the world.

Today, Caitie and Sean both began working their internships.  Exciting for both of them.

I don't think I've mentioned that Caitie's internship is in New York City?  Uh, yes.  She moved into her place yesterday.  Sigh.

It's been her dream for a while, to spend the summer in New York City, before she graduates college.  For the last few years, I have mixed feelings with every milestone, and this was no different.  So, so happy for her, so sad that she won't be here for the summer.  

And then the worries set in.  I couldn't turn them off.  Where will she live?  How will she get to work?  How will she find her way around?  Who will help her if she has any questions?  And my racing mind answered every one of those questions with it's a city that she's never been to and she doesn't know anyone there.  

First, we tackled the housing quandary.  Where to stay?  Thankfully, her school sent us a few links to places where past interns had stayed.  

Mr. Terrific went to the first site and told me, "Hey, I like this one.  An apartment building that only rents rooms to single women who are working, interning or studying in NYC.  Includes maid service and two meals a day."  He told me the name of the apartment and I googled it.

When the results popped up, the only thing I saw was HELL'S KITCHEN.  And I swear, it was bright red letters, font size about 50 point.  I kid you not.  It's all I could see.  

I need to add a disclaimer right now, I mean absolutely no disrespect or disdain toward anyone who lives in Hell's Kitchen.  But as a mom, looking for a place for her daughter to live, surely you can understand why I would not want my daughter living in a place called hell?   And though I imagine that hell is generally an extremely hot place, I can't help but think that the kitchen--a room with an oven--might be the hottest spot in hell?  It could be a misnomer, but I just couldn't get past it.

The next place on the list was in the Flatiron District. The word "flatiron" conjured up images in my mind of steaks and hairstyling tools, and with "Hell's Kitchen" still tattooed on my brain my racing thoughts quickly drew corollaries between steaks/kitchen and hairstyling/heat/hell, but it did not make me feel like I needed to breathe from a brown paper bag lest I pass out from anxiety.  After a quick google of "Flatiron District" I learned that the name comes from the Flatiron building and that the district was previously called the Toy District, and before that the Photo District.......all names I can live with.  

Whew.  Found a place for Caitie to live that's not hell!

Gnocchi With Sage & Garlic Butter Sauce

Oh, what a day.

Today is Caitie's birthday!  How on earth did the last TWENTY-ONE YEARS fly by so fast?!!

My baby.......

.........is all grown up, in little more than the blink of an eye.

Erin and I spent the better part of today making a birthday cake.

My first attempt at making fondant.  Nothing I've ever made has even come close to frustrating me as much as making this fondant.  At this moment, I can politely say I am not fond of fondant.

Yesterday, when I made the fondant (or Saturday, when I made my first batch of fondant that was so cement-like all I could do was chuck it into the trash), I had nothing polite to say about fondant.

It even gave me second thoughts about the dinner I was planning on making tonight.  Another attempt at something I had never made before.  Gnocchi!

Last summer, my son went on a trip to Italy and came home raving about gnocchi.  It was sort of surprising to me, because other than potato chips and french fries, he just doesn't like potatoes.

So here we are, 8 months later, I finally decide that today is the day I'm going to make gnocchi.  After the frustration of making the fondant, I can't believe that I still wanted to take on a recipe that by all accounts, takes lots of practice to perfect.  And a recipe that is hard to use exact measurements for ingredients because it all depends upon the starchiness of the potatoes and the level of humidity and--for all I know--which side of your head your hair is parted and whether or not you listen to music while you cook.

I'm just kidding about that last part.  Sort of.

Oh, what the heck.  I told Sean that today was gnocchi day and I wasn't going to wimp out on him.

I had researched gnocchi recipes on the Internet, and sort of morphed all the recipes together and came up with this one.   The only thing the recipes agreed on was potatoes, eggs and flour.  All of the measurements were different.  All of the methods were different.  In a nutshell, this is how I came up with the recipe:

1.  Out of the six recipes I looked at, five boiled the potatoes and one baked them.  Yet they all agreed that moisture is not your friend--so I went with the lone rebel and decided that baking was best.  (I mean, the water that you would use for boiling is moisture, right?  And moisture is not good?  So why would I boil?  Am I not a logical thinker?  Should I continue to ponder this?  Why ponder, when baking makes sense?)

AND

2.  Though all of the recipes were made with at least one egg, four of the recipes said that authentic gnocchi should not have eggs.  However, since it is very hard to get the dough to bind without eggs, it's best to use eggs, just use as little as possible.  The recipe that used one egg used two potatoes.  Since I'm so competitive, I decided that I was going to try to see if I could manage four potatoes with one egg.

AND

3.  Three of the recipes only suggested an amount of flour, and said to add it a little at a time, until the dough "felt right."  Too much flour makes the dough heavy.  The recipe that used the least amount of flour suggested 3/4 cup for 2 lbs. of potatoes.  My four potatoes weighed almost three pounds, so I decided I would try to use about a cup of flour.