Death by Zucchini

With all the baking and fundraising and whatnot, my gardening time has been pretty scarce this summer. Luckily, we've had sufficient rain at convenient intervals, and I haven't had to water (much). Therefore, my garden attention has been limited to thrice-weekly tomato picking and once-weekly Swiss chard picking. The (!@*&#) bunnies munched the pole beans a few weeks back (hence no beans to pick), and I grow yellow-skinned zucchini ('Gold Rush') that are usually pretty easy to spot and pluck at the right youthful moment. So, pretty low-maintenance, right?

I should have known my laissez-faire attitude would get me in trouble eventually. Look what the zucchini plants did when my back was turned.




The only hope for it was to butcher them, scrape out the seeds, and shred them in the Cuisinart. I now have 13 pounds of shredded zucchini in my freezer. Who wants some?

Here are the offending plants. Notice how they have taken over the pathway.


I swear, I can hear them snickering at me when I go out there.

Week Four -- My Head Is Still Spinning!

So you remember those photos of my living room from from mid-last-week? That was nothing. Guess what it looked like by 8pm Friday.


It started on my cell phone at about 5:15 ("Do you mind if I bring some stuff over this evening? Is it too late?"), continued with messages on the home voice mail and live calls during dinner prep, and finished up with neighbors dropping by en practical mass up until 8:30 or so. Michael and I were stunned by the last-minute (wonderful) onslaught, but our reactions were definitely tempered by the dodgey weather reports (rolling thunderstorms throughout the night and early morning hours, maaaaaaaaaaybe tapering off by 7am, maybe not -- maybe continuing all day Saturday! Whee!).

So, panicked as I was at the thought of having to cancel the yard sale and the prospect of living with all this dross in my house for weeks on end, I did what any sensible person would have done. I made cookies. (It did eventually occur to me that rain would not only scotch any yard sale activity but would seriously hamper cookie sales, as well. But I was programmed to make cookies, and make cookies I did.)

Now, this will be hard to believe, but last week there were some mommies at the booth with toddler-types who didn't think it appropriate to buy cookies at the ungodly hour of 10:30am (the mommies, not the toddlers). Can you imagine?! Not my kind of mommies, for sure. But it did spark a good idea. Did you know that you can serve cake for breakfast if you call it a muffin? Me, too! So, I reached for Dorie's wonderful Lemon Poppyseed Muffin recipe.

I adore Dorie's technique of massaging the zest with the sugar to release all of the wonderful citrus oils. This is a very easy muffin; the only tricky part is making sure your poppyseeds haven't gone rancid in the cupboard while your back was turned.

I had made an executive decision early on that each week's offerings must include something chocolatey. We've been yacking over at CooksTalk about Alice Medrich's recipe for Classic Cocoa Brownies (from Bittersweet, which is an excellent book), so naturally, I turned to it as well. This is my kind of brownie -- gooey rather than cakey, and with a crispy crusty top (none of this icing or glazing nonsense on my brownies , please). Alice says that the crispy crust comes from the granulated sugar content (among other things), and I have no reason not to believe her. I double the recipe and bake it in a 9" x 12" pan instead of a square 8" -- that way you get nice thick brownies. (During this whole process, I am always trying to be mindful of making treats that have appropriate heft for the $1 price tag. These brownies definitely qualified.)

Although I premeasured a lot of the ingredients earlier in the week to save time, the muffins and brownies had to be mixed and baked on Friday night. So the third offering had to be an easy drop cookie with make-ahead batter. The Peanut Butter Chocolate Kisses had been popular a few weeks back, so I decided on Peanut Butter & Jellies (Dorie, once again). It's the same cookie dough as the Chocolate Kiss cookies. The recipe's brilliance is in the handling of the jam, which gets boiled on the stovetop and carefully spooned into the cavities of the baked (still warm) cookies where it sets up nicely and holds its shape without jiggling about. I'm not a jam-maker, but I suspect that what happens chemically is that the boiling "unsets" the pectin in the jam, and that the cooling process "resets" the pectin, causing the wonderful firm, clean, glossy set of the jam centers.

I ended up with 36 Peanut Butter & Jellies, 24 muffins, and 32 brownies, and we went uneasily to bed, serenaded by violent thunder, lighting, and steady rain.

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Even though I was exhausted, I had a hard time sleeping. It felt in many ways like the first day of school -- such anticipation mixed with dread! Michael woke up first, and his clunking about the bedroom spurred me to crack my eyes open to check on the weather. Gray-ish, but not too dark, and no plinky-plunky sounds. I dragged myself out of bed and peeked through the blinds. No rain falling! The pavement was wet in patches but dry in others, which gave me hope that the ground would not be sopping wet.

We left the kids to fend for themselves with dry cereal and staggered outside to set up tables, mop off wet spots, and start carrying the flotilla of .... stuff.... outside. The advertised start time of the sale was 9am, and we had our first drive-by at 7:15am (friends had warned us to be prepared for this). By 8am, people were ignoring the fact that we still weren't set up, and simply parked their cars and started rummaging through still-packed bags while Michael and I made endless trips back and forth. We made our first sale almost immediately, and it really never stopped after that.

We sold books, we sold VHS tapes. We sold a child's guitar, we sold luggage. We sold ugly costume jewelry and lots of little china and glass trinkety things. We sold stained glass windows and lighting fixtures and a tricycle and my mother's copper salmon mold which hung on her kitchen wall while I was growing up. We sold mismatched bedroom end tables and candles and stemware and golf balls and tablecloths and tarps still in their wrappers. We sold handbags and shoes. We sold hardware storage boxes with zillions of compartments and decorative plates and a brand-new ELPH digital camera. We sold plush toys and comic books. We sold the clay cooker that Michael's mother bought us as an anniversary gift years ago and that only got used once. We sold the fabulous puppet theatre that was Quin's "big gift" on the occasion of his fourth birthday. We sold the footstool that I used to rock myself in the old wicker rocking chair while nursing the boys.

And the sun came out.



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I left Michael with some reluctance at 9:45 to go sell cookies. The sun was out, the humidity was returning, and I had lots of customers. Lemonade and iced tea (peach, this week) were very popular. I told everyone that the tea was so sweet because I LET MY HUSBAND MAKE IT THIS WEEK, but few people seemed to mind much.

I did manage to finally get a picture of the brownies. Yum, gooey.



And of the muffins with their zigzags of glaze.



We sold a few dog biscuits to a happy customer.



There were a lot of familiar faces this week, including the regular Co-Op lunch crowd, a young dad with his 2-year-old daughter who likes to climb on the wrought iron patio chairs like a marmoset, the lovely Shaeffer family with their boys and visiting cousin from San Diego, and one of our family's oldest friends from Swarthmore.

We moved here when I was 6, and there was a family living across the street with 4 kids who were clustered age-wise right around me and my brothers. Even though they moved to another part of town before many years had passed, they remained our closest family friends throughout the years. My bridal shower (the one for the "grown-up" friends and relatives) was given by their wonderful mom, Mrs. I., and some years later, my mom and I hosted a bridal shower for their eldest daughter. My first serious crush was on their eldest son (oh, how a sixth grader can pine!). My dad and Mr. I. have been orchestra-going partners for decades now, Mrs. I. called me on my late-night reading habits when I was about 12 (she could see the light of my tiny reading lamp through the window and across the street during the wee hours) -- but she didn't rat me out to my mom. When my mom went back to work, if we kids got sent home from school sick, we always went to their house and got to watch cartoons, which was plenty of incentive to get sick and sent home from school. When more serious, adult issues arose -- mysterious and frightening illnesses among family members, the discovery of a child molester in our neighborhood -- they were always the trusted source of strength and support. Looking back, it truly feels as though I had a second set of parents while growing up, and what a blessing it is to feel that.

Mrs. I. had come by the cookie booth a few weeks back, and we had a lovely, though brief, chat. Mr. I. happened by this week, and he pulled up a chair and stayed a while. We chatted about their kids and grandkids, the summer travels and new jobs and current projects. I told him of our boys' current mischiefs and how glad I feel to be doing this project right now. He eventually got up to do his shopping, and swinging back around a few minutes later to grab a sack of cookies, his parting words to me were "You're doing a good thing." I couldn't feel more proud than if my own father had said so.

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So I sold cookies and muffins and brownies and lemonade and iced tea and made $108! I staggered home at 1pm to rescue Michael, who had been also going non-stop (and without lunch) all this time. And as he pointed out, at least I got to sit down while he was on his feet 95% of the time! The flow of yardsalers had mostly stopped, so we surveyed the wreckage with an eye toward "now what."

There is soooooooooooo much stuff left over, you guys wouldn't even believe it. We still have a fax machine and ice-hockey skates and bikes and a CD player and a quilt rack and a sleeping bag and cookware and TONS OF BOOKS, YO! It took almost 2 hours to pack it all up again, with a few judicious boxes going directly to Goodwill without passing Go first. Guess how much leftover stuff is now in my basement! Go on, guess!


That's about 10 boxes worth, people, NOT COUNTING THE 7 BOXES OF BOOKS IN THE LIVING ROOM.

Three guesses who's having another yard sale in the fall?

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We made an amazing $683 on the yard sale, and the number continues to creep up as Quinlan keeps discovering books in the living room boxes that he wants to buy. Can you believe it? Me neither. All told, our total money raised to date is hovering right around $2300.

Mr. I. was right. We're really doing something good.

An Appreciation

I want to take a little time-out post to throw some appreciation to the blogger who inspired me to get writing, though she doesn't know it. Mir at http://www.wouldashoulda.com/ is whip-funny and bitingly smart. And she writes well. She also raised $6,000 for breast cancer research, largely through the power of the internet and her amazing blog.

Mir writes about the challenges of raising kids, the business of writing, and the daily business of life in a way that is alternatively heart-rending and down-right hilarious. She doesn't know me from a hole in the ground, but that shouldn't stop you from visiting her blog and telling her how pretty she is. You'll be glad you did.

Tiptoeing Through the Stuff

If we do not make a zillion billion dollars at Saturday's yard sale, it will not be due to lack of wherewithall.






This is what my living room has looked like for the last 2 weeks. Stuff from co-workers, stuff from neighbors, stuff from families of the kids' friends, stuff from my boss, stuff from my own extended family members. Terrific stuff, some of it; junky stuff, some of it. And there is supposedly more stuff coming. Even with borrowing every folding table on the block, I'm still not going to have enough space to display it all.

Pray for us.

This Is Weird, When I Stop to Think about It

Usually when I bake, I end up with various smallish oven burns on my hands and forearms, due to moving too fast, getting distracted by boys and dog, and the like. I've been baking (what feels like non-stop) for the last 3 weeks and I don't yet have a single oven burn. It's almost as if there is an outside force looking over me and this project ............

Do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do!

Week Three

Yesterday was incredible. Hot on the heels of our newspaper article , we had a boffo day. Every single baked item got sold -- what a thrill! We also went through a full gallon of lemonade and half a gallon of herbal iced tea. (The beverages have been much slower-moving compared to the baked goodies.)

My garden is producing tons of zucchini this month, so I decided to make zucchini cupcakes, using the zucchini bread recipe from the new King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book. My kids don't care for raisins or nuts in baked goods, so I left them out. The result was a rather bland little cupcake, particularly when compared with the zucchini cupcakes from Rose Levey Berenbaum. I sent one to day camp in Garrick's snack bag, and he was underwhelmed (Quin wouldn't even give them a tumble). This did not bode well, and I still had 23 cupcakes on the counter.

Those who are at all familiar with my baking habits know that I'm a firm believer in the power of buttercream. Not the gritty confectioner's sugar + shortening goop that passes for buttercream in most chain bakeries, but the real stuff -- silky smooth buttercream, starting with a base of either meringue or whipped egg yolks, stabilized by the addition of a hot sugar syrup and carefully emulsified with unctuous sweet butter, real vanilla extract or liqueurs, or folded with fresh lemon curd or cooled melted bittersweet chocolate. I like cake, don't get me wrong, but I confess that I value cake less for its own sake than as a conveyance for buttercream.

So, when life gives you bland little cupcakes, turn to buttercream! Here is what I found in my freezer:

Each of those containers holds buttercream -- maybe a few tablespoons, maybe a cup or more, in every possible color and flavor -- left over from various Cake Projects of Yore. I was pretty embarrassed at how much room their removal created in the extra freezer, but Michael kindly refrained from taunting me about it.

I whipped up a new batch of Italian meringue buttercream, folded in about 3/4 cup of lemon curd (also discovered lurking in the bowels of the freezer), and iced the cupcakes. Lookin' better already.

The plan was to use the various snips and bits of colored buttercream to decorate the cupcakes, making them so appealing and scrumptious-looking that our customers wouldn't be off-put by the zucchini and whole-grain-ness of it all.

When in doubt, I make flowers.

I iced the green leaves on Friday night, but didn't place the flowers until Saturday morning. The buttercream flowers are a bit fragile and prone to melting, so I stored them in the freezer on baking sheets overnight. In the morning, they were firm enough to easily peel off their parchment squares. They needed a few moments to warm on my fingertips before placing onto the cupcakes, but from there it was child's play.

I had made and refrigerated cookie dough earlier in the week: Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice cookies and Midnight Crackles, both from Dorie. I began Friday evening with baking off the molasses cookie dough. No matter what I did, I could not prevent the utter and complete flattening of the cookies. I chilled the dough hard on the baking sheets after shaping; I turned the oven down 25*, I didn't flatten the dough balls after rolling. No good. Here's what I got.

The above pix are about 30 seconds out of the oven, while still slightly puffed. After they cooled and set, they were absolute pancakes:

Very frustrating! While the flavor was excellent, the cookies were very soft (I was trying to bake at the minimum amount of time possible to avoid flattenage) and did not look very appealing. Once again, buttercream to the rescue.


We sold them as Ginger-Lemon Whoopie Pies and they were flying off the table! (On a side note, I was describing these concoctions to a much-younger co-worker this morning, and she didn't know from Whoopie Pies. Boy, I'm getting old.)

Once again -- the power of buttercream cannot be denied.

In all the panic over the above, I somehow missed photographing this week's third offering, Dorie's Midnight Crackle cookies. Apologies! These are a butter cookie, but on the drier side -- almost a sable in texture. They came out very well, and the little corner I managed to taste was very rich and chocolatey. Quinlan gave them a 4 out of 5 -- I think if they had been at all gooey, they would have gotten a perfect score from him.

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Saturday was another perfect day, weather-wise -- low-mid 80s, sunny and breezy. We have been so lucky! We took the suggestion of the Co-op's manager and bought some balloons to draw attention to ourselves this week.

As you can see from the facial expressions, the kids were especially pumped up this week! Here are the cupcakes in natural light.

They sold out first, then the Whoopie Pies, then the leftover Applesauce Spice Bars (which held amazingly well), then the Midnight Crackles. We sold so much so fast that I phoned my mom at 11:30 to warn her that there might not be anything left if she didn't put down the Times crossword and scoot on over!

Sitting at the table was really an amazing experience this week. In the wake of the article, many people who stopped were eager to talk -- about ways in which PKD has touched their lives and lives of their neighbors, about having lost family members to kidney failure, about their astonishment that this disease is not more widely known. Many had questions about what causes PKD and what the current research is focusing on. One older Swarthmore resident who has been by the booth every week had good news to report -- her friend who has been battling kidney failure got a new kidney next week, and is doing very well post-transplant. I don't even know these women past a hello, how are you, and I wept.

Other visitors this week included -- again! -- our young Mennonite baker friend, whose name we finally learned is Linda. A very sweet girl, she continues to be amazed that I make all of the baked goods at home. (Perhaps she's surprised that any "English" bake at home?) She walked over from the farmer's market in her bare feet, and I think she enjoyed my motherly teasing. The head of the bakery, a young Mennonite man in his early 30s, came by as well and offered to help out, which was so touching.

We also met an out-of-towner who was here looking at houses. When we asked where he was looking, it turns out it was right around the corner from us! We kvelled about the town and the school system, and told him to look us up after settlement.

Theo came by, as well. Isn't he handsome?

Total haul for the day was $128 -- twice what we made last week. Pretty amazing! That brings the bake sale total to $275. The money counted, I fell down for a nice nap, woke up, and asked Quin -- "So, what should we bake for next week?"

He was very amused.

Out of the Closet

Take a look.