sitting and waiting, poised for snow and hot cocoa....

mom is safely back for thanksgiving from helping aunt pat and uncle jack down in virginia.

the holidays are fully upon us and once again, the weather is nose diving towards those lower regions of the thermometer and i've hit one of those crucial martha stewart milestones that so many of us measure our lives in....for some folks it's the laying on of hands to create festive and fragrant holiday wreathes from pine boughs and cones, for others it's opening up a hermetically sealed shrink wrap of pre-fab cookie dough to make the entire house seem homey and more enticing than it would otherwise feel in such dreary days....for me, it's back to my basics....let's start with the endeavors that become fiasco and work our way forward, shall we?....

let's see, friday i decided i finally needed, not wanted, but actually needed, to make homemade peanut brittle....that in and of itself should alert the papers and put me right in line with fiasco-ville, right? right! since i bought the christmas treasury cookbooks at night heron out in laramie with mona and mom this summer, i've been waiting, and waiting...and even waiting some more for inspiration to spark me into a kitchen frenzy for something divine and off my beaten path...peanut brittle struck me as that thing....easy enough recipe...except for the part that insisted a labor of love such as making home made brittle would also encompass the hand shelling of the required peanuts....pre-processed in a can wouldn't do....so i sought out and found my own 5 pound bag. peanuts be damned...and damn the peanut shells, i was going to do this and do it right.....

so i did....boil, boil, roiling boil and more boiling, add the peanuts, add the butter and the vanilla....boil some more...must be close to 300 degrees for hardcrack candy right? it drops in to water and makes a little ball with the string on the way down...very elementary in my cooking rudiments...only perhaps my timing and my thermometer were both off....i removed from heat, added the baking soda and stirred thoroughly....then turned to butter my jelly roll trays to pour it into for hardening....when i glanced back over my shoulder the damn science project (as it is henceforth to be known....) was growing all over the friggin' stove....yep....baking soda....inert and active ingrediant all at once...if you don't have the trays pre-greased, you can kiss the stove top goodbye...and about anything else within range of said experiment....drop the trays, butter flying, grab the silicone spatula and beat the beast (with much love of course) back into saucepan submission....that's why they say use a large pan....5 quart saucepan, far too small for the creature to live in when it's really raging to get out....

i debated with pouring it directly on my silpat...but afraid the counter would be un-level and spill boiling and chemical goo into my drawers i went for the pans...great choice....it was hot and stringy and sticky and nutty for hours....

knowing full well i was going to want to try it before hefting it off on others in the coming days, i pried a small corner out for myself....yep....sticky....stringy....gooey and i might add a little delicious too, but over all too stringy and sticky for my liking (and i'm not allowed to have the nuts and who needs the sugar...i'm sweet enough - couldn't you just go diabetic knowing me?) so i decided to place them in the fridge and then flip them out on the silpat and container them for giving...what a brilliant plan...except for the fact i should have sprayed them down with pam instead of the somewhat invisible butter, so when i flipped and smacked my trays, i cracked the brittle...in fact, the warmth re-gooed the non-brittle - brittle and allowed for very slickly brittled nuts to fling about the kitchen with abandon....sticking in every crevice, on every surface and sliding oh so slowly as a science project is bound to do, down the cabinet doors hoping to reach my previously immaculate floors....

you know that brought bob to the window (you all remember bob, my squirrel(s?) from early on in the blog....yep...bob's back...and jonesing to get in for the gooey goodness of my non-brittle-brittle....who knew....?

i took a tupperware to ken's apartment last night after prying it out of the copperclad grasp of my revereware one fingernail at a time....it passed the peanutty-goodness test, but alas, ,even refridgerated it was barely brittle...that said, i think it was ok in the end, since most of it is out of my house, off the walls, deglazed from the floors and scraped from the stove....and what was at ken's was a well dented attempt of sharing....

this moves us to the successful portion of the weekend candy making experience....teaching ken and his friend michael how to create home made molded chocolates so ken can make up fancy little boxes for his client roster as an extra something for the holidays. i think i lost my love of chocolate making somewhere between the last wedding cake with disasterous flower ramifications and the umteenth hundred-thousandth hand rolled, dipped and marked chocolate truffle for someone else's wedding....i used to make candy in my sleep, in fact i used to love the intamcy and intricacy of hand painting each petal of a floral mold or each figure on a chess set, creating the fondants and cream fillings used to be an adventure, each taste something to wonder over and compare with the prior batches....but now, that's a million years in the past or so it would seem and i've had to step back and watch with new eyes from a different perspective.

ken can come across as a bit shy when he's not yet mastered something...or so it would seem....he's very much like me in many ways....meticulous but he has such a firm grasp on reality that he is the first to remind everyone to "remember the fun"....which is a good lesson to take away...because when all is said and done, the chocolates were beautifully done for a first go. ken and michael managed to even get down the fine art of inserting flat fillings of almond paste and liquid carmel into the centers without mucking up the fronts or the back of the pieces....ken played the concept of using edible gold leaf on the rosettes he'd poured and quite tastefully accomplished! i ate my fair share of the dark chocolates (life is far too short to be wasted on the other varieties in my opinion)....as ken stated a couple of times "they're so good, they're better than godiva...."

and as i am left to point back out to you ken - you are correct, they are better than godiva...that's because you embraced the moment and kept it fun.....

as i trudge towards birthdays, holidays and post holidays recoil, i am going to start working on stitching a little something to remind myself of that very self-same thought "remember the fun...." truer words to live with may have never been so randomly uttered with greater take away value....for now i'll log off so i can start the next project on which i must stitch....and then when i log in next i'll be ready to bitch about it i'm sure.....