Aimee

It’s Who I Am

Posted by Aimee on January 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

Below is an actual scan of diary pages of mine from when I was 12 years old. I was living with my father at the time and we weren’t on the best of terms so our therapist (whom I despised) recommended that we keep a journal with each other. When I wanted to discuss something with him I would write it down and leave it on his pillow. He would write back to me and leave the journal on my pillow. All these years later I would still prefer to write down my feelings regarding a difficult issue than to discuss so it face to face. I’m getting better at it, but it’s taken a long time.

When I read this now I am horrified at how bad my english and grammar was at 12!

But, the point is is that at 12 years old I had, on my own, called the zoning board in Stamford (where I grew up) and gotten zoning permission to own a goat where we lived. On my own I called feed stores and researched the cost of feed and hay. I had researched breeders. All of this was presented to my father in this journal that we kept.

There was no response to this entry in our journal to show you, so I’m guessing he just told me no directly to my face — no goat for me.

I’m on the left with my stepbrother in front of me, my sister in the middle and our friend Hilary on the right

All through my childhood I loved animals. We always had a dog, but they were mutts that my grandmother would pick up and bring to us (whether we wanted them or not). We had a vicious pekinese named Fancy forever. We had a dachsund that peed on the floor all the time named Rocky. We always had a cat or two. Back in those days there were no leash laws, so pity any dog that wandered too close to my house. I would snatch him up and carry him home and beg to keep him. I never was allowed to of course, as they already had one and just happened be walking by the house. This happened time and time again.

I also had a lot of other animals. I had rabbits, guinea pigs, a pair of mice that turned into a family of mice with babies that turned into multiple families with babies. I think by the time I got rid of them all the count was up to 76. I had finches for a long time. I loved the quiet peeping noises they made and they would lay little eggs for me occasionally but would never sit on them. I had doves that made the most delightful cooing noise (which was probably why I was so smitten with Carrie, our injured pigeon last year).

About 10 years ago I proposed getting some chickens to Jim. I’d wanted chickens for years. We had an old playhouse out in the yard that the kids never used that would be perfect as a chicken coop. I would do all of the work in taking care of them.

Jim told me no. We would not be having any chickens.

I ordered 25 day-old chicks from Murray McMurray hatchery anyway. I picked Silver Laced Wyandotte’s because they were beautiful and were good egg layers.

I knew what I was doing was wrong. Jim had said no. (By the way, we’re working on that whole ‘getting approval’ situation – and the ‘me going behind his back and doing things anyway’ through therapy) I carefully cut boards to fit into the windows of the chicken coop to hide the fact that there was a heat lamp with baby chicks in there. I got away with it for a few weeks before Jim figured it out — then the feathers really flew.

I got to keep the chickens in the end, and true to my word Jim does not have to care for them. He’s even come to grown quite fond of the chickens over the years and really loves the fresh eggs. He enjoys having watching them wander around the yard looking for tasty bugs and they have an odd habit of going up and pecking on his home office door, like they want to come in.

I wish i’d kept count of how many chickens we’ve actually had over the years. We’ve lost so many to predators. We’ve lost chickens to dogs, fox, raccoons, possum, skunks and who knows what else. Sometimes we’ll lose one. Sometimes we’ll lose many. It was heartbreaking at first, and it still is, but I have learned it up to the circle of life and have gotten a bit of a farming mentality about it.

I was born an animal lover. I’m going to explore a little bit of what’s happened along the way and how that’s evolved in coming posts.

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Coconut Snowballs

Posted by Aimee on January 13, 2011 1 Comment

I loved Hostess Coconut Snowballs as a kid. I didn’t get to eat them very often, but they were always a real treat when I got them.

Since my coconut cake is one of my favorite desserts, I decided to try and remake the old classic Hostess Snowballs in a more adult version. I’m quite certain mine also had a whole lot less chemicals in them that the Hostess variety – I think the shelf life on those things is l like 6 months or something scary like that!

This recipe does require one piece of special fairly expensive equipment; half-round silicone baking molds. Luckily I made these for an event that I could write them off to my husband’s business. They can be purchased at a professional baking supply store. I ordered mine online at J.B. Prince. They only came in a full-sheet pan size which is so large that only professional restaurants have ovens that big. I simply cut the thing in half and they fit onto my half-sheet sized pans perfectly.

Starting with the same recipe I use for my coconut cake which I originally posted on March 7th, 2010 you will follow the cake directions exactly as shown in that original post. However, when your batter is done you will pour it into a pastry bag fitted with a large plain round tip. This is how I filled the silicone molds and found it easy and neat. You could also just use a spoon or spouted measuring cup as well.

Place the silicone molds onto your baking sheet. They are very flexible so make sure that they are sitting as flat and straight as possible. Fill each mold about 3/4 full with the batter and bake until lightly golden brown, about 10-14 minutes. You don’t want to let them get too brown on top. The molds are small and if you overcook them they will get dry.

When done remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes before lifting the silicone mats off of the sheet pans and placing on a wire rack to finish cooling. When cool you simply push them out of the silicone pans and they easily release.

My kids had a great time with the way they came out. For some reason they all had dark brown tops so from then on we called them “coconut boobies’.

You will need less buttercream for these than you would for the original cake, so although the ingredients stay the same, use the following ingredient measurements.

Coconut Buttercream

4 large egg whites
1 cup granulated sugar
pinch table salt
1 pound unsalted butter (4 sticks), each stick cut into pieces, softened but still cool
1/4 cup cream of coconut
1 teaspoon coconut extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Following the original recipe on the link (above) to make the icing.

For the coconut topping you will need one 14 oz. bag of sweetened shredded coconut. My preferred brand for this is Baker’s brand as I find it much moister than other brands I’ve tried. Pour the coconut into a large bowl and with your hands toss it around and break apart any clumps. Using some pink paste food coloring if you have it, if not use liquid food coloring, and put a small amount on a toothpick or the tip of a knife and brush it onto the coconut. Using your (clean) hands toss the coconut around rubbing it together to get the coloring to evenly distribute and color the coconut. You can add more if it’s not pink enough. Keep working it together with your hands until you’ve got the color you want and all of the color is evenly distributed. You also don’t have to make them pink; make them red for Valentine’s Day or green for St. Patrick’s Day.

Now place your icing in a pastry bag with really any tip I used a rather flat one with a serrated top but any smaller tip will do. If you don’t have a pastry bag, then you can ice them by hand with a knife or small spatula. Holding them carefully on the edges you want to get a fairly even coating of icing around the entire half-round.

Then, holding the cake as close to the edges as possible you want to place it into the colored shredded coconut. You want to push it in a little to get the icing evenly distributed and the coconut evenly covered. Roll it around a bit until you’ve got it all covered in the coconut.

These were so amazingly delicious. They were soft and coconutty and so much better than the hostess variety.
They were a little complicated to make, but if you’ve got an upcoming event or party that calls for a special dessert hors d’oeuvre this is definitely a dessert that both kids and adults enjoyed.

Print This Recipe

Filed Under: Cooking, Desserts | Tagged:

Sunset in the Badlands

Posted by Aimee on January 12, 2011 Leave a Comment

A Stunning Sunset in The Badlands National Park in South Dakota

This photo was taken on The Crafty Farm Sister’s Great Plains Road Trip last May. You can read all about that day of the trip if you click here.

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Cocktail Party Flowers

Posted by Aimee on January 12, 2011 Leave a Comment

Because I’m not quite right in the head, or because I felt like I’d never have a life after having twins, right after they were born I signed myself up for the certificate course in floral design at the New York Botanical Gardens. It took a year of part-time courses and an internship at a floral shop to complete, but I did it. I was pretty good at it too.

Once I graduated I even attended a TeleFlora class in Oklahoma City for a several day course for professionals taught by a woman named Hitomi Gilliam who is one of the most well-known floral designers in the industry known for her very unusual, asian-inspired arrangements. I have a preference for non-traditional arrangements, so I really enjoyed the course and learned a ton. Here are some of the arrangements I either made at the course or after from what I learned.

A Framed Arrangement I Created

While I never worked at a flower shop, I did freelance arrangements for parties and events and had regular clients that I delivered to. I finally decided that the money I was making didn’t justify the time I was putting into it and gave it up. I still, however, really enjoy doing it.

There was a wholesale flower market in the next town that I’d used since way back when I worked for Martha Stewart. Basically they eliminated the need for local professionals to trek into the New York flower markets. If you had special flower needs you could order them in advance, but they always had a large assortment of standard flowers available at the ready.

So, for the cocktail party in November I of course planned on doing the flower arrangements as well as all of the cooking myself. Two days before the party I headed up to the wholesale market so I would have the necessary time to prep them and have the blooms open to perfection. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that they’d gone out of business! I can guess that the recession hit the floral business pretty hard — it was hard enough to make money in that business when things were booming. I felt bad for all of my friends there and wonder what they are doing now. Flowers were all they knew. They had all worked there as long as I’d been going there, which now that I think back on was for over 20 years!

Now I am stuck with no flowers, and I wasn’t going to go to a retail florist to buy them as it would be prohibitively expensive to create the things I had planned. I quickly decided that I would change to vegetable and fruit arrangements. I love working with alternative things like that in arrangements. I did buy a few flowers to use, but primarily they were done with vegetables.

Making a traditional arrangement when you know what you’re doing is pretty easy. You start with your main flowers, then fill in with “filler” flowers and greenery. Not very time consuming. The quality of the flowers has a lot more to do with the beauty of an arrangement than the time it takes to assemble them.

Not so I quickly discovered with arrangements made entirely of vegetables and fruit. While I’ve made many arrangements that had vegetables or fruit in them, these were, with the exception of a few flowers I’d purchase, entirely made from fruits and vegetables. Every vegetable had to be wired or hot glued onto a floral pick and the assembly time was huge. However, the final arrangements were quite lovely.

They were fun to make, but extremely time-consuming. Which probably explains why half of the hors d’oeuvres I’d planned didn’t get made; I simply ran out of time.

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My Birthday

Posted by Aimee on January 11, 2011 Leave a Comment

Today is my birthday. I turned 48 today. I’m still trying to figure out how the heck that happened. How did I get to be so old? Why do I still have such young children? How do I have one child about to turn 21?

Just to keep the record straight that photo above was not taken of me recently. It was probably taken about 5 years ago, so add five years of life to that and you get something more like this.

I’ve never been one to get hung up on age. I don’t plan on ever having a facelift or botox injections. I embrace every wrinkle as well-deserved. However, I must add that the magnifying mirror that I asked for as a christmas gift is slightly horrifying if you look at anything other than your eyebrows for tweezing. The age spots and wrinkles are significantly magnified and could lead to a heart attack if looked at in the wrong frame of mind.

The only birthday I ever remembering suffering any anxiety on was my 23rd birthday. I remember crying because I wasn’t married yet and didn’t have children. I couldn’t believe how old I was. I still laugh about that in hindsight.

It’s been a good birthday so far. My husband got up with the kids so I could sleep late. I blocked my whole calendar out so I could work on my website. My daughter called from college bright and early. I’ve gotten lots of calls and emails from friends and family. A beautiful flower arrangement sent to me by my sister. A lovely potted primrose plant delivered along with an espresso by my friend Susan. Gifts to open from my friend Lisa. Even a rare call from my mother.

Tonight I will eat the birthday cake my sweet daughter made on Saturday night before driving back to college in Kentucky at the crack of dawn on Sunday. We will eat take-out of some sort and then I will take my son to the Woodworker’s Store in Norwalk and take a “making a pen on a lathe” course that we signed him up for as a christmas gift.

However, having a birthday also reminds me of the more important birthday in my life now. Every October 15th for the past 7 years I have been able to celebrate my sobriety birthday. So this morning as I was reflecting on that I took my 7-year sobriety coin out of its dish in the bathroom and put in in my pocket for the day. Then I got down on my knees and thanked God for another day sober; for the new life that I have because of that decision I made over 7 years ago.

My ‘real’ birthday is a date that I can’t change. Whether I want it or not, every January 11th I’ll turn another year older. However, my ‘sober birthday’ is a day that I can change any time I choose to forget the fact that and I cannot safely drink.

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Sunrise Through Bunny’s Leg

Posted by Aimee on December 10, 2010 Leave a Comment

This photo was taken several years ago when I attended a photography course in Dubois, Wyoming given by the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts. It was early one morning and this bunny was giving himself his morning cleaning. I love this shot because of the way the sun reflects through the hole between his head and his leg.

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