by Kathy Brasby | Dec 9, 2019 | Christmas, Family, Humor, Stories
A Cookie Cutter Set
Long before Pinterest could puncture my creative bubble, there was the nativity Christmas cookie cutter set.
I sometimes call Pinterest the dream site: I can only do those projects in my dreams.
Not my nativity set, obviously, but these might be better.
Christmas baking has always been a special time of sharing holiday love in our family. I keep telling myself that, anyway. Over and over.
When I had seen the cookie cutter set on display, it seemed to fit that goal. The box seduced me with photos of beautiful cookies in the shape of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger. A little piping of frosting, a few sparkles in the right place, and we would have a unique nativity set.
And the best part was that we could do this project as a family with everyone helping.
A Special Family Project
I bought the set.
Yes, I knew we wouldn’t get the cookies quite as perfect as the photos. We had a two-year-old at the time. I knew he would produce a cute but goofy little cookie.
It was OK. I could overlook the children’s immature attempts. They were children, after all, and still developing their fine motor skills.
I forgot to factor in their mother.
I Knew We Were in Trouble
The family had gathered around our dining room table, frosting and decorations at the ready, waiting as I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven.
Baby Jesus in the manger resembled a toasted marshmallow.
The sheep – and I’d made lots of them – all were blimps. Some had short fat legs but, since you couldn’t tell where the head was, the legs could have been prickles, too.
Great. Christmas porcupines. Or cantaloupe.
The camels’ longer legs had grown together while baking.
“Is this a tree?” asked the six-year-old, pointing to a former camel cookie.
The shepherds had morphed into tall planks of fencing. Or maybe a Volkswagen bug. It was hard to say.
Kneeling Joseph was now a giant S.
This Didn’t Slow Them Down
The kids were game. They slathered on frosting that was so thin that the blues and oranges for the wise men’s gowns flowed together, making a muddy brown.
Well, I think those were the wise men because of the lumps at the top, which I identified as crowns. Maybe they were cows, in which case the muddy brown frosting made more sense.
There was a stable printed on the back of the box that could be assembled as the backdrop. I tossed that idea after our older son frosted an angel as though it were a donkey. I couldn’t see displaying these peculiar little figures.
When we were done, with sticky frosting on our fingers and sparkles drifting to the floor, I studied the blobs of icing and cookie.
“Well, this didn’t work out quite as I had hoped,” I told the family.
My husband surveyed the table, surrounded by sets of eager young eyes, and picked up a cookie. “Then we’d better destroy the evidence.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 2, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
Colorado winters can range from warm to blizzard – and this is in a single week. In our rural area, residents debate over when to overcome the storm and when to give up and stay in. Some people don’t give up easily.
For example, I had just moved to a small farm town a few months before a smothering blizzard struck. The wind was throwing fistfuls of snow into the air outside my cozy office, and I could make out ghost-like fronts of stores hidden by the storm.
It was an excellent day to stay inside. Which, obviously, was what all the farmers in the area thought because the street was packed with their pickups. They’d come to town to swap stories and drink coffee during the storm. Inside, of course.
I have another story about persevering in a winter storm.
I was a teenager celebrating the snowstorm that had swept through our farm the night before. School was canceled – the reason for my celebration – and our family was sipping hot chocolate.
Today was calm. We gathered around our heater and celebrated the notion of a leisurely day without the mad rush to catch the school bus.
Then Mom noticed a milk truck lumber to a stop at the top of the next hill.
Our house sat at the top of a hill. The dirt road that skirted our property continued down a draw before rising again to the top of the next hill a mile away.
At the top of that next hill sat a shiny milk truck, rocking with indecision. The large semi-trailer contemplated its regular route.
Blocking its way was the heavy snow that had been driven into the draw. Whiteness had blotted out the road in the valley, and none of us had any idea how deep the drifts were.
The truck gathered itself like a sprinter in the blocks, rocking forward and back.
We didn’t have time to pop the popcorn, but we all gathered around windows to watch the show.
“Don’t do it,” Mom said.
“Go for it!” said one brother.
The other brother countered: “He won’t go.”
The truck rocked forward and back with indecision and then took recoiled before barreling down the hill.
The valley suddenly exploded in white as the truck entered the drift.
“He won’t make it,” Mom said. The snow flurry continued, though. The truck was making progress, we thought.
But then, as the flakes filtered back down to the ground, we could see the truck. The snow had draped itself victoriously over the hood and gripped the doors. The truck hadn’t gotten a quarter of the way through the valley’s snowpack.
Dad trekked down in his tractor. Unlike over-confident milk trucks, tractors can go about anywhere. Some neighbors came, too, and together they managed to tow the truck back to its starting blocks.
Dad reported that the snow was packed like concrete around the engine.
In Colorado winters, sometimes it’s fun to slog to town to drink coffee and swap stories with the other travelers. And sometimes it’s wiser to park that milk truck and wait for another day.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 25, 2019 | House rehab, Humor, Stories
I haven’t told a story about our property rehab projects in a while. My sister Ann and I have done almost 25 different rehab projects in the last 5 years, and the tales go on and on.
This is one of those stories.
Patricia Valerio at Unsplash
The backyard in this account looked like the county dump except the dump is better organized. The best way to handle this, short of tipping the earth and letting the garbage slide into the alley, is to get to work with trash bags and rakes.
We always don safety glasses and gloves just in case. It’s amazing what you can find in a heap.
The backyard of this project had some promise. It was small and could be charming except for the bags of debris along the back fence. Well, and the litter all over the grass. Well, assuming there was any grass left under the junk. But you get the idea.
We started clipping hedges and trimming evergreen limbs that swept the ground.
And there we found a trash can, completely hidden behind the canopy of branches.
The trash can was overflowing, of course.
I grabbed a handle, but the trash can was too heavy for me to move alone. “I need help,” I said.
So Ann gripped a handle, and we lifted. We pretended to lift, I mean. This trash can must have been full of concrete.
We drug the can to the alley, leaving nice trench marks behind.
“Huh, it’s full of water,” Ann said. So, not concrete, as it turned out. All the rubbish was marinating in rainwater.
We decided to tip the container onto its side to let the liquid flow out. If this had once been rainwater, it had been transformed into swamp sludge. We hoped nothing had died under the junk, but it sure smelled like it.
An hour later, our nostrils had cleared out enough to return to the project.
Seizing both handles, we started our dragging strategy again. The trash can was lighter, and we were able to get it to the dumpster in the alley.
This trash dumpster was a metal monster with a wide-open mouth hungry for garbage. We hoped it didn’t gag when we added our treasure to the feast.
The fact that the front jaw of the dumpster was about four feet tall presented a new problem. We couldn’t lift this trash can that high.
But Ann had an idea. There were brackets on the front of the dumpster where the truck could grab and pour the contents. “Let’s lift the cab up and set it on that bracket,” she said.
We were confident we could hoist the container halfway up, to the bracket, reposition our grip and tip it over into the dumpster.
Maybe the trash can fumes had done something to our brains because this idea seemed totally doable.
And so we bent down and lifted.
Somewhere between the ground and the bracket, somebody’s hands slipped, and the trash can fell to the ground.
I was now convinced there was concrete as ballast because the trash can landed square on the ground, sending a geyser of bog sludge over both of us.
There we stood, baptized in marshland mud.
But all was not lost: we should be inoculated against every germ known to mankind.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 18, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor
Many years ago, I was a country woman who was milking goats, feeding out bucket calves, and raising kids.
My husband had constructed a nifty room in our barn with a door that closed tightly, allowing me to heat the room and keep out all the barn cats. Barn cats get addicted to freshly squeezed milk and make themselves a leaping, milk-seeking nuisance. I kept them out, or they were all over the room, even trying to dip their paws in the milk bucket.
Photo by Remmington Wanner on Unsplash
This particular morning, I entered the milking room with my four-year-old daughter and brought in the first milking doe. My daughter perched herself on a large feed box.
I had just started squeezing out milk when my daughter said, “Mom, there’s a cat back there.”
Ugh. There were not supposed to be any cats in that room. If a cat got trapped in the room, it couldn’t get out. How long had it been there?
I was afraid to ask. “Is it dead or alive?”
She studied the gap between the box and the wall. “Dead. Can I pick it up?”
No!” Good grief.
My husband always seemed to be working 40 miles away from home when these ugly situations came up. It sure would have been nice to turn that dead cat over to him. But, no, I was home alone.
Well, me and a curious preschooler.
“Leave it alone,” I said before she got any more ideas. You need to understand that this girl had once gone with me when I had a baby goat autopsied. She begged the veterinarian to let her watch the procedure and nearly got her nose cut off because she peered so closely into the body.
He was willing to show her the location of the lungs, the stomach, the liver after she asked a tumble of questions.
My point? This girl wasn’t traumatized by a dead cat.
I toyed with the idea of leaving the project for my husband, but I really didn’t want that dread hanging all day long. Besides, my daughter would probably want to sit with the dead cat until her dad got home.
Better get it over with. I finished milking the goat, took the milk into the house, and gathered my supplies. Trash bag. Check. Hand sanitizer? Face mask? Gloves?
I marched back to the barn with my little girl hot on my heels. She wasn’t about to miss this next step in her veterinarian experience. What a kid.
I leaned slowly over the feed box, my breath wheezing through the face mask. I had put a mask on my daughter, but she had slid it on top of her head. Sigh. Next, she’d be snapping the rubber band between her fingers. Not too concerned about this mess.
I was more concerned. I did not want to see roadkill in my milking room, but I finally focused my view into the gap.
There, tattered and soiled, munched and bent, was a purple and white stuffed cat toy.
She was right: it wasn’t alive.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 11, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
I’m all for trying new things, and so, when my daughter gave me a bottle of vanilla extract that she had made, I figured I’d check into the recipe.
I’m not cheap: I’m curious. I keep telling myself that, so hush.
I’m suspicious of the recipe blogs which promise, “It’s effortless,” but they were right this time. It was easy!
I had to locate some vanilla beans (probably the hardest part of the project) and then put a few vanilla beans in a bottle and cover the beans with cheap vodka. Let sit for a few months, and you have the best smelling vanilla extract around.
But this isn’t a recipe blog. You can Google the recipe if you want.
I made a batch a few months ago and pulled out the first bottle to use on my famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. You know, my everybody-snitches-the-dough chocolate chip cookie recipe. Google the recipe.
I mixed up the ingredients, and the snitchers wandered by. Each one took a sample and said, “Weird. This has an odd aftertaste.”
So I tasted, too. And it did. Blech.
I had already put the first batch in the oven, and I’m averse to throwing away a batch of cookie dough. I mean, it has butter and eggs in there. That’s like liquid gold. So I waited out the baking process.
When the cookies came out of the oven, and I tasted one, they were fine. No aftertaste. Pretty much like normal.
What in the world? Where had the aftertaste gone? Curious minds like mine need to know.
Some who have a scientific mind would formulate experiments. They’d try the recipe in different ways until they uncovered the cause. They’d waste a lot of time, in other words.
Not me. It was faster to do some thinking. What was different? New?
Aha, the new batch of vanilla.
I unscrewed the lid and took a sniff.
This was not a lovely vanilla scent. This smelled of pure alcohol. I had not added the vanilla beans four months ago.
No vanilla beans giving up their sweet aroma. No vanilla beans adding flavor to the cookies.
The odd aftertaste was the vodka, which burned off when I baked the cookies.
My daughter, one of the snitchers, put it best: “You served us vodka cookies?”
Well, only to the snitchers, I guess. Glad my grandsons weren’t around that day.
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