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Toffees

Saturday, November 21st, 2020

A couple of weeks ago I remembered a home-made lolly from my youth called ‘toffees’. I recalled buying them at church and school fetes, but hadn’t had one for decades.

A quick google search later and KLS had found a recipe. It was time to try and recreate this sweet from my youth!

The ingredients are simple: sugar, water, vinegar and cream of tartar. The process of cooking isn’t too difficult either: just mix it together and cook on medium heat for about 20 minutes:

The above shows our first attempt. When it’s ready we poured it into cupcake cups:

And after adding a few sprinkles we were done:

Not bad for our first attempt are they? They tasted great but there was a problem: they were incredibly sticky! As in you could barely open your mouth when you bit one. To be honest, they were scary to eat!

A second issue was that they were impossible to get out of the cupcake cups, and eating one included a good mouthful of paper as well. 🙂

Kristin knew the cream of tartar was the culprit and less would result in a harder toffee. It was time for round two! This time she let the mix boil slightly longer until it turned golden, and then when we poured it we used silicon cups as well:

These were much more successful! Not as sticky with a better taste. The one in the top left was sublime since KLS topped it with salt! As a bonus they came out of the silicon mold perfectly:

Alas there was still one issue: they were too big! This made them difficult to eat since they were too hard to bite through and a bit too large in the mouth. It was time for further refinement…

A week later we had secured more sugar and a new set of smaller molds, and we tried again. Golden brown boil, smaller silicon molds, salt on top:

Finally, we had crafter perfection! These are astonishingly good and 100% the taste of my youth.

A great success! Even though they’re basically just sugar, they taste like salted caramels. Next time you visit, we’ll make you some 🙂

Posted in Blog, Food, Home | 2 Comments »

Happy Halloween!

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

On Kristins birthday a few weeks ago we went pumpkin picking!

We drove to a farm about an hour away and they had a few massive fields full of pumpkins of all shapes, sizes and colours!

Kristin searched for just the right pumpkin for Jack-o-lantern carving, and I just grabbed any old vegetable 🙂

With raw material secured, it was time to carve some Halloween decorations:

As you can see Kristin is quite proficient! My attempts were comparatively modest. Here’s the finished display:

That was 3 weeks ago almost to the day. And now we arrive at Halloween, and our pumpkin buddies haven’t fared so well. I took a photo every few days to document their aging process:

As you can see they’ve been nibbled on by savage beasts and infected by some evil rot. Both are now full of poisonous liquids and smell of death. In short: they become the perfect Halloween decorations!

Right now we’re at the drive-in for their Halloween extravaganza (two films, cider and donuts and some sort of special stage show!). I hope your Halloween is as much fun, and you’re not too scared by monsters 😉

As a bonus, here’s a two-month ‘timelapse’ of a chrysanthemum we bought for our front step:

Posted in Blog, Family, Home, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Green Thumb Days

Thursday, July 30th, 2020

We planted some seeds. How did they turn out? Let’s look!

That’s the ‘left’ planter on the back patio (this is a rare post from my computer so you can click on the images to see them in higher resolution). The whiskey barrel is old and falling apart so it may be it’s final year, and we planted morning glory seeds in it. These photos were taken over an approximately 4 month period, about one a week. You can see a few (purple) flowers in the second last photo, but it’s starting to look a bit ragged probably due to the excessive heat it receives during the day.

That’s the ‘right’ planter, and you can easily see the dilapidation of this barrel (not to mention the no-longer-functional palantir in the middle). As with the other barrel we planted morning glories and you can see they flourished in this one since it is partially shaded by the tree above. However they are still showing sun damage in the final few shots. Had I taken any of these photos during the early hours you would see more flowers; they are mostly closed during the day.

And here we have close to the full life cycle of marigolds from seeds. I bought the seed packet for next-to-nothing at Walmart, and planted all the seeds in two cheap pots. Sue told me that this was a bad idea since they’d compete for nutrients and it seems she was correct. Even though I tried to thin them out when they (all!) sprouted, their roots had entangled a bit and this was difficult so I decided to leave them to their own devices. As you can see they started promisingly but quickly became weeds. They were not helped by a rogue chipmunk hell-bent on digging out the soil and monsoonal rains that kept knocking them over for days at a time. Basically these plants were cursed, and their ruinous lives led to a wretched final state. If we actually see flowers I’ll deem it a miracle!

So there you go. Some success and some failure, but mostly more the former. Lessons were learned, and next time the marigold seeds will fare better 🙂

Posted in Blog, Garden, Home | Comments Closed

That Time Of Year

Sunday, July 5th, 2020

Happy July 4!

No interstate trip this year due to COVID, so these guys came from the local grocery store.

We let them off last night after a day of cookouts and Gundam building.

The Kims were to share the holiday with us. As we lit our fireworks the sound of booming echoed around our neighborhood: obviously many other people did take the interstate trip to get the big fireworks 🙂

Our modest display was fun though. All fireworks are fun, and I’m glad the pandemic didn’t shut this down like so many other joys.

We kept some back since we’re going to visit the oldies in a few weeks and want them to enjoy fireworks as well 🙂

And here’s a bonus shot: Kristins work booked out the drive-in last Thursday night and before the film gave everyone a professional fireworks show:

It was great!

Posted in Home | Comments Closed

Wildlife XVI: The Dead Of Night

Saturday, April 25th, 2020

Maybe you’ve heard the stories of nature encroaching as man stays home? I was wondering if that was happening even in our own backyard, and dragged out the (old, borderline obsolete) wildlife camera for another bout of surveilling. Here’s what I found…

The usual suspects were of course represented. As you know by know squirrels are so abundant I sometimes wonder if they own this house and we just rent. The deer (with baby) photo I had to adjust since it was near pitch black. The nights have been dark recently and the animals have skulked with abandon.

KLS and I were just debating the difference between doves and pigeons but we’re 99% sure this dude is a dove since we’ve recently had one lurking. When they sing – or rather make their dove noises – it really carries and it can be difficult to tell where they are. Yesterday there was one on our roof (I think?) and his cooing filled the house.

We’ve had rabbits living in our backyard for years and they’re a common sight during the day nibbling at the edge of our lawn. Sometimes they’ll come up onto the patio in the middle of the day and make good viewing for the kitties. Apparently they hop around at night as well.

So with the expected visitors out of the way, time for some not-so-common ones:

A racoon! There were several shots of this guy over a few nights. Aside from some rock-hard break (see below) we hadn’t put food out so he was probably just exploring. In a few photos it looked like he was even grooming. I guess he’s comfortable on our patio.

There were only a couple of shots of this possum, and they were separated by over a week. He’s decently sized (about as big as a small cat). I wonder where he lives?

This one is a mystery. See that black thing at the edge of the yard? We’re not sure what it is! The likely culprit is a fat dog with a tiny tail looking away from us, but in all the aeons we have lived here we have never seen a dog running wild (which is not allowed in NY State). Therefore I’m inclined to think it’s either a giant unidentified black cat like the Beast of Exmoor. What do you think?

This last pic is even more mysterious! See that half-blurred thing flying by? Is it a bumblebee? A wasp? A hummingbird? A goldfinch? The camera doesn’t have a super-fast shutter speed so whatever it was is flying somewhat slowly, but the size seems to preclude an insect since it isn’t that close to the lens. A genuine mystery. What do you think?

Incidentally you can see one of our doorstop-breadrolls in the above pic, just at the edge of the patio on the right. I was hoping for some evidence of who took them but there was none. Between two empty daytime photos separated by 23 minutes the roll had just disappeared. The rolls were (we think) too big and heavy for a squirrel, so whatever took them was too fast for the camera! Another mystery unsolved…

Posted in Animals, Blog, Home, Nature | Comments Closed

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