Kindred spirits

Starting around age 12, I developed an obsession with tea parties. I thus formed The Tea Party Guild, which also speaks to another healthy obsession I had with my Roget's Thesaurus. I came up with the name after looking up synonyms for "group." I considered "society," "gathering," and then ultimately decided on "guild" for the simple reason that it made me think of the Lollipop Guild in the Wizard of Oz. Which is a ridiculous leap, especially when you consider that I was truly aiming to be like Anne of Green Gables. I wanted nothing more than to gather my kindred spirits, use big words I didn't quite understand yet, and have an occasional afternoon of all things fanciful. If we happened to spill a little tea on the nice table cloth, launching us into an elaborate scheme to clean it before an adult noticed that evolved into a complicated web of not-so-clever cover-ups that ultimately led us to being caught red-handed, so be it. It would be such an Anne situation. And believe me, at that age, whatever I could do to be more like Anne Shirley, I did it (though I never found myself in any particular sticky situation).
"It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it?" Oh Anne, you're adorable.

Fortunately, I had 4 very close girlfriends at the time who bought into my love of Green Gables and tea parties, and boy, oh boy, did we have fun. We dutifully rotated hostess responsibilities from house to house, and for each party we wore dresses andhats. I even scored a pair of short gloves from the old Emporium in Boise. As part of the guild membership, we banded together each Friday in wearing dresses and hats. Looking back, I'm not sure whether I was more blessed to have friends who did this with me, or classmates who did not ridicule us to our faces.

For our tea parties, we generally stuck to the simple Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings variety packs, but we also made goodies, like those fancy crustless tea sandwiches with cucumber and cream cheese, not to mention sweets like lemon bars, merigues, you name it. My parents had the perfect antique-y dining room, too, with plenty of mismatched tea cups featuring dainty gold embellishment. My mom helped by ironing one of her nicest table cloths, and even boiled the water for us once we had sat down adn began chatting (though don't think the trappings of the occasion were any indication of civilized grown-up talk; close your eyes and you could just as easy picture girls standing around their lockers, gossiping about crushes and who's going through puberty fastest).

ALL THIS IS TO SAY, I gave my 10-year-old niece a tea set that she could paint herself as a birthday present, and it is now all decorated and ready to use. She has requested a tea party on Saturday. We're spending the better party of the morning and afternoon together and my mind is already swooning with ideas of all the things we can bake and assemble and talk about. I am so excited, feeling like I was born to be an aunt with nieces to have tea parties with.

I. Can't. Wait.

What shall I give you?

Here are your options:

1. Two rotting pumpkins on the porch steps

2. A one-pound bag of dirty Kleenex

3. Expertly stacked (empty) mini boxes of Junior mints

4. Vegetable soup I've eaten so much of I can hardly stand the sight of it (and there's so much left...gah)

5. A photo taken before the sickness took over, displaying the only Halloween costume I've put any effort toward in the last 10 years.


Option 5, you say? Fine by me!

Losing daylight and bad metaphor alert

We all know it is bound to happen. As of two nights ago, the horizon at 5:45 was nearing the end of its tube of toothpaste, so I came home and ran down the street to capture the last bit of light squeezed out over the top of the bluff. ( A total stretch. I warned you.)

Living in Spokane gets rough starting now. You wake up in the dark, you come home in the dark. You hope the roads are dry, and pray your car makes it up the hill when they aren't. It's cold till about April 27. Everyone whines. You pause on QVC when you're channel-surfing because shopping at home is the more realistic option (or because watching their featured "gem fest" sounds like it could be an all-out laughfest).

Living in Spokane also gets nice starting now. There's long underwear, for one (and tights! don't forget those), and that magical feeling-some call it relief-when your body thaws (and let's not forget nice, hot baths), and then there are all those girls like me who equate cold weather with hair dye and going dark. That's fun to think about, right? And finally, a chance to hole up in the house and just craft and bake and call all your old friends. There's that feeling of optimism that this cold WILL end, and while you wait, why not skip a day of work and go skiing? 

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. For tonight, I've got a date with a swimming pool. Indoors, of course.

When we were 8

While searching for my grown-up journal tonight, I came across my "My Secret Diary" book, which I kept as an 8-year-old. It was a paperback, 50-page or so, junior diary for young girls who need direction on how to write about secrets. I ordered it with my mom's permission from the Scholastic Book Order form which we always got at school every few weeks. 

"Is some secret someone special to you?" it asks on the back cover. "Is something on your mind that's private and personal? Write all about it in My Secret Diary."

One of the nice features was that it taught you how to write your secrets in code, and there's one page that lists directions for starting a sponge garden in your bedroom, and another to list your new years' resolutions. (The thought of an 8 year old thinking about such resolutions is kind of sweet, isn't it? Nothing too heavy, like "Lower my cholestorol," or "Pay off my VISA." Mine were simply to be nice to everybody, to not litter, and to cheer people who are feeling unhappy.) 

But every time I look through this, I can't help but wonder if other 8 year old girls who got this book from Scholastic wrote anything remotely close to this? I mean, really:

Let me explain the "and not dead" part. It was one of the biggest tragedies of my life at the time when I learned that Fred Astaire was not actually alive. I don't know if you could have called it a crush, but I really had a thing for this man, and dreamed of one day being Ginger Rogers, dancing gracefully in super-high heels and a billowy dress on a shiny floor. I also had no idea that I was even unique to know, at my age, who these people were. I breezed right past colorful Saturday morning cartoons and graduated to 1930s black-and-white musicals (except for maybe Punky Brewster and Alvin & the Chipmunks. And the Smurfs. I wasn't completely lost in my generation). And the only Astaire/Rogers movie I absolutely did NOT like was the Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Why? Because ol' Fred died at the end.  My young heart not bear it.

Then, of course, was the real heart of the matter in this book: my crush on Lyles. This was intended to be the only place I could express this affection, which would last through the bulk of my elementary school career, ultimately, save the few weeks here and there when my eyes were averted to Gabe or Karl.

Finally, here's all the proof you need that, when asked, "What's on your mind?" I would tell you "Slumber Party for 4."

I can't decide what my favorite part of this illustration is. The friend who's kind of walking in from the right side, not worth drawing in completely and looking a bit like a frumpy spinster? The fact that we're smartly dispersed around 2 sleeping bags? Or that there are only 2 sleeping bags? Or the key element that to this day is a very important part of a happy evening - the bowl of popcorn?

Casserole: the verb

What dish deserves its own event?

Answer: The casserole, of course. And an event it got.

To be perfectly honest, I was a little worried that planning a gathering of this feastable magnitude would only lead to a let-down afterward for not living up to the high expectations we'd set in our minds. I remember that feeling when I was younger when my party planning entailed glorious mental images of endless laughter, puffy paint, ghost stories, snacks, sodas, movies, fun music and staying up till sun-up - the reality being that we all fell asleep by, like, 10 p.m., while watching a movie.

We had been planning this party for literally 2 months, right after we made the discovery that we all shared this guilty pleasure for canned soup with pick-your-vegetable, cheese and crunchy topping. I tried my best to keep myself from imagining a table overflowing with hot pads, serving spoons a dishes of varying sizes containing steaming, creamy delights, with people standing around it in wonder and amazement. Or drink stations around the kitchen to offer the social lubrication needed to loosen our dance joints and aid us in enjoying a game or two, causing us to hoot and holler.

I blocked those ideas from my mind and just decided to just let the thing happen, casserole style.

Do you see how appropriate that was? The casserole is basically the easiest dish ever, designed to quickly fill the tummies of you and the rest of your army. You can try to make it more difficult, but we all know that in the end, you're just going stir something together and plop it in a dish and bake it. It's not a dish to worry about - it comes out every time.

So all we had to do, in theory, was to provide the place and invite the known casserole lovers to bring their casseroles (and a little booze), and our party would be set.

I'll take this opportunity to mention that a casserole never suffers from throwing in a few last-minute ingredients. Corn and cheese are great examples. Also great for describing what else got thrown in during the final hours of party-prepping, such as the embroidered souvenir "Casserole King" t-shirt for our friend Jeffy (oops, forgot to take that picture) and a couple games (which weren't as cheesy as they were brilliant).

When the guests began parading in with their hot dishes, the magic happened. It all turned out. The party totally casseroled. What else do I need to say here? I think I've gone on far too long about it. My lack of photos only speaks to the amount of fun I had - here's practically the only photo I managed to pause to take.

In case you wondered...

This was the finished deal. Pret-ty rich, difficult to slice, but fun.

27 Fabulous Chocolate Wafers

Here are the first 9, coated on one side with melted bittersweet chocolate and stuck to the pan.

And here are strawberries we picked this summer, thawing out in sugar on a warm stove.

Some heavy cream, whipped stiff and introduced to the strawberry goop from the stove (boy was it hard to not mistake it for fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt and eat it for a snack).

And the remaining 18 wafers, stuck neatly in line for a treat which is waiting in my freezer now. Mmm.

It's a Pop-Art Strawberry Icebox Cake, adapted from the one on Epicurious that uses raspberries.