Author: brookeshelf

I Bet the Pioneers Never Saw the Spitting Dragon Coming

brookeshelf3 Comments

I like the fact that July in Utah is bookended with two patriotic-ish holidays: Independence Day, and then Pioneer Day three weeks later.  I don’t know of any other state that celebrates its founding this way.  (Although I’ve only lived in seven different states, so who knows?)

Brian and I don’t do much for the holiday.  In fact, our only main observance of the holiday —

Okay, other than getting stuck with playing the difficult “pioneer” themed hymns in church for the third year in a row.  Take my word for it, “For the Strength of the Hills” takes all the strength in your fingers.  And don’t even get me started on “Carry On.”  You can stick that song in your handcart and haul it off.

ANYWAY our only main observance of the holiday this year was going down to the South Towne Expo Center to see a preview of all the floats that will be in the Days of ’47 Parade tomorrow morning.  It’s really quite fun, because who can resist . . .

. . . Seagulls and crickets working together to run a Book of Mormon printing press!  (I love that the books roll off the press with the covers on and everything.)

A squadron of eggs hang gliding over the Jordan River Temple!  (Apparently South Jordan is known historically for egg farms.)

People dressed as bees driving little Shriner cars!  And some kind of alien spaceship!

A creepily faceless cowboy!

REALLY ADORABLE PENGUIN MISSIONARIES!

As you can see, the Oddity Meter expressed very high levels of Odd.  I love it, especially the float devoted to the Murray City Library, which is where I had my first reference job:

The library’s mascot is a dragon.  The Chinese Cultural Association also had a dragon on their float — one that sprayed water.  Cool, right?

Unfortunately, it was also sponsored by the “WTF Foundation.”

The float below celebrates “Wilford Woodruff: First Fly Fisherman in the West.”  Oh, really?  Well, you learn something new every day.  I will say that this float had the best sculptures.

We did have some personal favorites.  William adored this train float, which was from the Youth Parade held last week:

And Brian and I both voted for this float, celebrating religious diversity in Salt Lake.  It has tiny models of all these churches in the city, including the LDS Tabernacle and the Cathedral of the Madeline.  Way impressive.

The tiny houses were decorated with little flowering vines, and some even had bitty wreaths on the doors.  Wow.

In fact, the only bad thing about the parade preview is that there were clowns giving away balloon animals, and Eleanor reallllllly wanted one, but we had to say no because our kids have a tendency to put balloons in their mouths.  Thus began the Grand Commencement of the Whining.  Eleanor whined for a balloon all through the expo center, during the walk to the car, the entire drive home on the freeway, and continued to do so even as we dragged her into bed.

Well, if nothing else, you gotta be impressed by her persistence.  That’s the pioneer spirit, baby.

Katie’s Half Birthday

brookeshelf1 Comment

We have a little tradition in our family of celebrating a baby’s first half-birthday (that is, when they turn six months old).  We make a half-cake, top it with a half candle (Brian takes great pleasure in cutting a candle in half lengthwise) and then sing “Happy Half Birthday to You” while the baby blows the candle half-out.

Older siblings usually blow out the other half.  You can read about William’s half birthday here.  Katie’s was much the same.

William helped me frost the half cake.  He took his duties as Quality Control Inspector quite seriously.

The finished half cake is below.  I was gratified that it turned out well.  A recent attempt at making yellow cake was a spectacular failure.  This one, on the other hand, was perfect.

Everyone was so excited to celebrate!  We told Katie that if she was a good girl and ate all her carrot puree, she’d get to watch us eat her birthday cake.  She thought this was a great idea!

After cake came the giving of the half-gift.  Half-gifts in the past have included baby socks and half-finished handknitted sweaters.  William and I went shopping together and picked out this:

It’s a little mini-blankie shaped like an owl.  We’re hoping it deters her from finding and chewing on other cloth objects, like Jeffrey’s discarded socks.  (Yeah, ew.)

Eleanor used the package ribbon to make a “crown” for our little half-birthday girl.

She is getting improbably big.  How dare she grow so fast! — although we love every inch.

Summer Eats: Something-for-Everyone Tortellini Salad

brookeshelfLeave a comment

Hmm.  Can you guess what Eleanor is thinking?

If you guessed “I’d rather be friends with a racist kangaroo than eat that,” you’d be absolutely right!  It’s a face I’ve become familiar with over the years.  That’s why I like this recipe.  You serve it like this:

Everyone chooses which toppings to put on — or not put on — the top of a pile of tortellini: things like fresh mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, and other objectionable foods.  Those who want plain pasta can blah it up as they choose.

Grown-ups are rumored to even put a nice balsamic-lime dressing on top of the salad, too.  But that’s just a rumor.

Something-For-Everyone Tortellini Salad

  • 1 pound cheese tortellini (don’t substitute ravioli.  Ravioli, while great in its own floppy way, doesn’t salad-ify as well as tortellini.)
  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
  • 1/2 fresh mozzarella, cubed*
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
  • 1 avocado, cubed
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • juice of 1 lime
  • 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
  • Salt and pepper

Cook tortellini according to package directions.  Drain and rinse under cool water (if you don’t, the tortellini will glom together in a Starchy Ball of Doom).  Put the tortellini, tomatoes, cheese, basil, and avocado in separate serving bowls.

Whisk together the olive oil, lime juice, and balsamic vinegar.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

To serve, pile some tortellini on a plate, then add other ingredients as desired.

*Fresh mozzarella is the pure white, very soft stuff usually found in the “fancy” cheese sections of grocery stores.  Sometimes it’s packaged as bocconcini — little pre-made balls that you don’t even have to chop.  My kids call these “cheese marhsmallows” — it’s what we used in the photographs above. But you can substitute regular mozzarella if you want.

Hiking Jack’s Mountain Mailboxes (Well, Almost)

brookeshelf3 Comments

In which Brian poses for the cover of a Louis L’Amour Novel!

This one is called “The Baby Rustler.”  Apparently Mr. L’Amour has gone a bit daffy in his old age.  (Wait.  Is he even still alive?)

So.  There’s this trail above the foothills of Salt Lake City that leads to Jack’s Mountain Mailboxes, which is a memorial to a little boy who died from cancer back in 1995.  His parents scattered his ashes on one of the foothill peaks, and placed two mailboxes in the hillside.  Hikers who visit read and leave inspirational messages in the mailboxes.

My kids thought it would be ripping to find the “secret messages” on the mountainside.  I was really curious, too.  Up we went!

Starting at the “H” rock (a big rock painted with an “H” for Highland High) . . .

. . . Easy peasy.  But then the trail got steep.  Very steep, although there were scads of dragonflies to keep us entertained.

The following picture shows Brian (and Katie) at the trail’s halfway point.  See the peak in the distance?  Brian said, “Hey, all we have to do is climb up that!  It should only take half an hour!”

But thin Western air can be decieving.  Things are farther away than they seem.

We kept going up up up up up uuuuuup.  Somewhere along the way I noticed that the trail map we downloaded indicated a 1200 ft. elevation gain.

Finally, we came to these rocks — what we thought was the peak.

But then we scrambled over the top and realized we still had half an hour of climbing to go. The real peak was off in the distance, taunting us.

It was 8:30 p.m. by that time, and we had run out of water.  We didn’t want to hike down the steep trail in the dark, so we had to turn back.  Eleanor, who had been the most whiny on the way up, was surprisingly devastated by this decision, and launched into an inspirational pep talk:

“We don’t have to give up!  If you just BELIEVE in yourself, you can do ANYTHING!  And I know we can reach the top if we just BELIEVE!”

Brian was already heading downhill by the time she was done.  Buh-bye!

Jack’s Mountain Mailboxes will have to wait for another day.  In the meanwhile, we got to admire these delicious views of the Salt Lake valley:

Summer Eats: Shrimp Cocktail Gazpacho

brookeshelfLeave a comment

Oh, the summer eats.  Sure, thanks to imported melons and hothouse tomatoes, you can pretend it’s summertime all year round, but let’s be real: some foods need to be made in season.  (Yes, I’ve become a tomato snob, picking out limp pink specimens from restaurant salads.  Blame the backyard garden.)

I have a whole collection of recipes that are strictly for summertime only.  Here’s one of them:

This is probably the best thing to do with those frozen rings of shrimp cocktail you can find in supermarkets.  Yes, yes — those weird perversions of Christmas wreaths that come with the little plastic tub of cocktail sauce.  Stop wrinkling your nose at the computer screen.  Have the trust, people — this is full of all sorts of goodies like avocados and lime juice, and you don’t even have to turn on the stove.  (The broiler does come on if you want to make your own parmesan crostini for serving on the side.  Otherwise, just purchase those, too.  You’ll need ’em for scooping all the treats out of your bowl.)

Shrimp Cocktail Gazpacho

Ingredients:

  • One of those Christmas wreath perversions (as mentioned above)
  • 1/2 cup tomato juice
  • 2-3 fresh tomatoes, diced (feel free to substitute cherry tomatoes if that’s what you have)
  • Ripe avcoado, chopped
  • jalapeno pepper, seeds and ribs removed and then minced
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • Fresh lime juice (juice of 1 lime)
  • 1/2 red onion, chopped (totally optional.  I really dislike raw onion, so I never put it in.  But perhaps you’re more sophisticated and world-wise than me, and can stand it)
  • Extra cocktail sauce, if you happen to have some lying around
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Thaw the shrimp by setting it in a bowl of room-temperature water.  Drain it when the shrimp is soft enough to eat.  Refrigerate the shrimp until ready to serve.

Meanwhile, put the tub of cocktail sauce that came with the shrimp in a small bowl.  Add tomato juice, tomatoes, avocado, jalapeno, garlic, lime juice, red onion (really?  Bleh), and stir.  Taste it, then add extra cocktail sauce, tomato juice, salt and pepper to get the flavor combination you want.  I like my gazpacho on the tart side.

Dish up bowls of this heavenly stuff and serve with shrimp and dipping carbohydrate of your choice.

Parmesan Crostini

Ingredients:

  • One baguette.  Go for one that’s more firm than fluffy.
  • 1-2 garlic cloves, halved
  • olive oil, for brushing
  • freshly grated Parmesan (do NOT use the stuff from a can, it won’t melt properly.   But you’re probably a brilliant foodie who’s already munching down on the raw red onion and didn’t need to be told that)

Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and preheat your broiler.  Slice the baguette diagonally into 1/2″ slices.  Brush one side of the bread slices with olive oil and place them on the baking sheet.  Broil — keeping a close eye on them so they don’t burn — until nicely toasted.

Remove the bread slices from the broiler and carefully flip them over.  Rub cut edges of garlic cloves on the untoasted sides of the bread.  Sprinkle with Parmesan and return to the broiler — once again keeping a close eye on it — until cheese is golden and bubbling.  Let cool slightly before barking at your eight-year-old for swiping pieces when you’re not looking.

Heber Valley Snapshots

brookeshelf1 Comment

My friends from college like to go camping with our families at least once a summer.  This year we planned way in advance (thanks to Kellie) and spent our trip up at the Heber Valley Camp, an enormous campground owned and operated by the LDS church.

(This is what the cabins look like.)

I’d never heard of the place before; it was only built over the last 5-10 years, its main purpose for providing a location for young women to attend Girl’s Camp.  The place is gorgeous — snug wooden cabins, lighted pavilions with cooking stations, showers, and bathrooms.  There are a series of ropes courses (you know, with swings and zip lines and such to build teamwork/character) AND a beautiful little lake with canoes and paddleboats.

We took advantage of it all.  Unfortunately, I forgot my camera — but here’s what I remember best:

The kids roaming in packs — there were some 15-odd kids ages 8 and under.  They skittered from cabin to cabin, passing around walkie-talkies, shining flashlights at each other, and arguing over the elaborate rules involved in a game of Uno.

My kids each had a different response to toasting marshmallows over the fire pit: Eleanor would hold hers too close to the flame, then scream when it caught fire while whapping the poor mallow on the ground.  Jeffrey just like to drop the marshmallows directly into the fire, then jump up and down while watching them slowly explode.  William, on the other hand, took his father’s advice and held his marshmallow on the edge of the flames, patiently rotating it on its stick until it was nicely browned.

My job was to hand out marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate for s’mores.  Little Adam and Arwen are gluten intolerant, and kept asking about it in the most adorable little baby-voices: “Does dis cwacker have gluten?  I am awergic to gluten.”

That night, with the children (theoretically) asleep in their bunks, the grownups gathered in the pavilion to play games.  We made silly jokes and ribbed each other; it reminded me of when we were all in school together.  Loved it.

. . . that is, until it was 11:00 and we realized that several of the kids were still partying it up in Cabin A.  Aw, nuts.

What we ate the next morning: eggs, pancakes, sausage AND bacon AND hash browns AND fruit.  For beverages, cocoa with marshmallows and juice.  Collaborative meal-making rules.

Owing to some clerical error, our reservations for the child-friendly ropes course was misdirected; we ended up on a course with a zipline.  A few of the older children actually completed the course though — little Abby, her glasses decorated with black pipe cleaners to look like Harry Potter’s, stretched up so high to shuffle across the tightrope!  Her fingers barely curled around the guideline — it was amazing. Jeffrey wasn’t as interested in doing the zipline as he was in greeting people after they zoomed to the bottom.

After lunch, we hit the lake.  I stayed on shore with Katie in the shade of a pavilion and had fun watching the boats.  The sun was bright, flattening the lake into a steel-grey pan.  As the canoes and paddleboats moved away from shore, the people devolved into little sparks of color, slowly gliding back and forth in the heat.

Somehow Jeffrey and his friends Lucas and Sam ended up in a canoe by themselves.  One of the senior missionaries working the shoreline pushed them off, and they paddled about by themselves.  They didn’t do so bad, they managed their way around the lake just fine.  Although there were a few going-in-circles moments, and one time when they drifted back towards shore and had to be shoved off again.

I called them the S.S. Knuckleheads.

Hiking Gorgoza Park

brookeshelf1 Comment

Our local newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, has this fabulous “Hike of the Week” feature in its “Fit & Healthy” section.  Brian and I love keeping an eye out for kid-friendly trails that are close to home.  The side of our fridge is thick with little trail guides we’ve snipped out of the newspaper.

This past Tuesday we decided to try one of them out — a trail up Parley’s Canyon in a little natural area called Gorgoza Park.

What a charmer this place turned out to be!  There’s a tiny little pond at the base of a small green foothill, and the trail crosses over and around a tiny stream, its banks thick with aspen and scads of wildflowers:

Yes, yes — William is wearing his pants backwards in this picture.  His shirt was inside-out earlier in the day, and it took me several hours to convince him to fix it.  The pants were non-negotiable.

Eleanor wanted me to take this “silly” picture of her:

It was a little over a mile to a rocky outcropping on the peak.  There’s a great view of the surrounding area, and also, in this case, gathering storm clouds.  Look how oblivious we are of the impending doom:

We got caught in a five-minute cloudburst for the last five minutes of our hike.  It poured hard as we approached the trailhead, and then stopped right after we scrambled in the car.   That’s how it always is, right?

July 4th . . . Celebrated on the Actual July 4th

brookeshelfLeave a comment

I love visiting my parents’ town, West Point,  for Independence Day.  Here’s reason #1:

Awwww.  Who’s cuter?  I can’t decide.  My dad took on the awesome task on Saturday of giving me a golf lesson.  He’s a great teacher — I actually made a ball go up in the air!  In the direction I wanted!  Sweet.

But here’s the main attraction in West Point:

THE PARADE!  As you can see, the Casket Man made a featured appearance, along with the plumbing-themed float.

Annnnnnnnd let’s not forget the candy. My kids quickly learned that jumping up and down and yelling “candy! candy! candy!” got results. The people in the parade threw gobs of the stuff down on us.

You know what I learned?  A piece of saltwater taffy thrown from the height of a fire engine can really sting when it lands on you.

Eleanor had brought her parasol along and found it handy for collecting loot.

Who can blame her?  Here’s the result:

Now, keep in mind that this is just 2/3rds of the candy they collected.  It wouldn’t all fit in that big bowl.  I picked out the lone chocolate item (an Almond Joy) right away.  Lollipops were put into service later that afternoon during our family viewing of Cars 2.  The rest was hauled off on Monday by Brian to fuel the endeavors of clinical pathologists at ARUP.  (Excepting the handfuls of stuff the kids grabbed when we weren’t looking.)

Dinner that evening featured a strawberry pie.  Featuring fresh strawberries from my mother’s garden.  It couldn’t be more perfect.

In the evening, we headed to the back of the West Point park to see the local fireworks.  West Point has grown enough in recent years to merit its own fairly impressive July 4th celebration.  I mean, they had a Beatles tribute band and everything.

The back of the field is mostly empty — the crowds are all at the other end of the park — so we had room to romp.  I threw a Frisbee around with Dad, Brian, and Alex (I haven’t Frisbee’d in eons).  Arial fireworks became legal in Utah this summer, and we could see mini-fireworks blasting into the air all along the horizon.

In the meanwhile, the kids ran around with glow sticks.  Many, many glowsticks.

My mom had found a big package of something like 30 glowsticks on sale.  There were enough to share with other kids nearby, and enough for experiments.  They made a giant ring to throw a football through.  Later they connected a dozen of them to make a glow-in-the-dark jump rope.  William looped them on all on his arms and legs, and Eleanor piled them around her neck and danced around.  Even Katie had a few wrapped around her car seat, to prevent people walking on top of her.

Katie, remarkably, was not afraid of the fireworks at all.  She just sat on my lap and smiled at them.  Eleanor, however, was once again curled in Daddy’s lap.  The rockets were going off right over our heads, it was fabulous.

The sad thing is that my camera ran out of batteries before I could take any pictures of the glowy-ness.  But perhaps it would be against Fate to have a  completely perfect day, right?

History Face

brookeshelf2 Comments

How long is July 4th?  One day, you say?  As in, that’s why it’s called The Fourth of July?

OH, HOW WRONG YOU ARE!

In Provo, July 4th is at least a week.  A week.  Which is why we spent the first half of our holiday weekend there, taking in “Colonial Days.”  This is an exhibit sponsored by a local printing press museum.  There’s a Civil War encampment on the lawn, an exhibit about the Mayflower, some guy making lead bullets over a campfire, and ladies in 18th-century dress knitting doodads with acrylic yarn.

Brian and I agree that this mismash of time periods should lead the organizers to rename the event “Olde Tyme Days.”

Need I even say that Jeffrey was in hog heaven at Olde Tyme Days?  He insisted on coming in costume — the tricorner hat was a Christmas present from Uncle Michael and Aunt Natalie — and once Eleanor and William got wind of this, they insisted on costumes, too.  That’s why, in the picture above, she’s wearing a pioneer dress two sizes too big, and why William is sporting a leather vest (Grandma came to the rescue with those.  Whew!).

Oh, and Katie was dressed as Napoleon:

As interesting as the various exhibits were (one was a big collection of famous peoples’ autographs, including letters from Mark Twain and Helen Keller), my favorite part of Olde Tyme Days was this expression:

We call this Jeffrey’s History Face.  He wears it whenever he’s learning about the past.

Even kicking back in an Olde Tyme chair is no reason to let down your History Face:

Eleanor, meanwhile, was given this little cornhusk doll:

And William got a snow cone.  A slushy, slushy, snow cone:

A SNOW CONE IS NO REASON TO LET DOWN YOUR HISTORY FACE!

Apparently.

After Ye Olde Tyme Days, the kids got to visit our friend DeLynn and visit her horses and donkeys of various sizes.  Jeff made the mistake of walking into the stableyard with a bucket of oats.  DONKEY MOB!

I stayed at home and made a blueberry pie.  And then spent the subsequent hours chasing Jeffrey away from the pie.

This was probably not necessary, since the pie, while pretty, was not my best culinary success.  I don’t think the recipe included enough cornstarch in the filling.  It was more like “blueberry soup pie.”  But dinner also included a lovely spice-rubbed pork tenderloin.  It pretty much made up for soup pie.

After dinner we headed to a hillside in my in-law’s neighborhood to watch the firework display over BYU’s stadium.  (On July 2nd!  See?  I told you it was a week long thing!).  Eleanor, who is usually skittish with fireworks, was relieved to be so far away.

“Not too loud, not to soft — these fireworks are just right,” she explained before the display.

She ended up running to my lap for comfort anyway.

Boy Heaven

brookeshelfLeave a comment

Jeff spent the past two days at Cub Scout Day Camp.  It was his first time there, and it sounds like it was loads of fun.

Well, that’s what I assume.  Whenever I try to get him to tell me about it, he just describes the store.

Apparently, Cub Scout camps have stores.  Wonderful, wonderful stores full of all the little things boys love.

Which is why Jeff came home from his first day with a bullwhip.

That’s right, a bullwhip.  A bargain at only $2!  Jeffrey was sad that he couldn’t afford the rubber band guns or pocketknives. He then said that he’d like to wear his thick snow coat to camp the next day “so it won’t hurt as much when the BBs hit me.”

BB guns?!?  What are they DOING at this camp?

Everybody wanted to try out the whip, so the rules were: go outside, and make sure nobody else is around, so as not to accidentally flick anybody.

Well.

Within minutes, Eleanor accidentally flicked William in the face.  She honestly didn’t mean to — she had finished whipping around (or whatever you call it) and was walking back inside with Wimmy, dancing a bit and swinging the whip from side to side . . . well, you can guess what happened.

Eleanor was MORTIFIED that she hurt her brother.  While William came crying to me, she ran into her room, buried herself under the covers of her bed, and stayed there, silently crying until I came to coax her out.

Yesterday Eleanor made a sign for the backyard door:

“No Whipping People.”  Good advice, that.  In addition to the whip is an image of William saying “aaaaaaaa!”

You can just imagine how THRILLED I was when Jeff came home yesterday with a plastic sword.

It’s a darn cool sword, I will admit.  It’s shaped like a rapier, and has a big fake ruby on the hilt.  But we’ve had so many fights over it that the sword is now in Permanent Time-Out.

Oh, it could be worse.  The boys down the street came home from Cub Scout Camp with hand buzzers and fake gum.