The Roar of Bowser

A couple of months ago, I posted this goal on Go Mighty (and here on this blog):

Make a Bowser Costume for My Foster Son Before He Leaves Us in March

To be honest, I had hoped that J, our foster son, would forget the promise to create a Bowser costume. I had no idea how to even start and with limited time in trying to take care of two little ones plus befriend/mentor their very young mother, building a costume seemed impossible. Plus, I was struggling on how to translate the literal image of Bowser into fabric and felt.

As often happens, the deadlock was broken with a simple reminder. One of my quilting friends saw my blog post and dropped a quick email of ideas and advice. “Remember,” she wrote, “imagination can fill in a lot.”

All you parents out there may be shaking your heads by now, but for me, it was a revelation. Duh. I’d seen J use a vacuum attachment as a sword. And in our home, where we did not allow toy guns or even the word “gun”, J had quickly figured out how to build fancy “machines” out of Legos which shot out ice bombs or fire bombs. Imagination….of course.

Armed with that conviction, I sewed and cursed and sewed and finally cobbled together a semblance of a costume. My goal was his birthday in March and with several very late nights plus some hand sewing done in the office on conference calls (shhh), the costume was mostly done.

Unfortunately, between the mother, the grandmother and me, we can’t find any pictures of J in his costume, even though we know that they exist somewhere. Even if I had them, I couldn’t publish them anyway. So without further ado, the components of the Bowser costume:

The front + look at those adorable gloves!

That tail!

Me modeling the hood

It is hard to describe what it feels like when you *make* something and a newly five-year old boy’s  eyes light up with joy. When he throws down his current toy, and immediately shucks off his clothes (that’s not too hard to imagine if you know little boys), struggles into the costume then runs off, tail swinging behind him, with a shout that he’s “GONNA GO SHOW CHRIS!!!!” 

My heart exploded into a million pieces that even now, with the kids happily back with their mother, is not fully put back together.

Pattern:  Simplicity 1765

Materials:  Fleece, more fleece, fiberfill, felt, zipper

Missing:  Fierce arm bands, a spiky shell

Bowser Therapy

Bowser - just your basic dragon/turtle bad guy with penchant for mohawks and ships.

Bowser - the ubiquitous villain from Nintendo's Mario Brothers game is just your basic bad dragon/turtle hybrid guy. He enjoys roaring, throwing fireballs and most of all, kidnapping Princess Peach who by now I think pretty much digs it as revealed in this hilarious video by College Humor.

Nonethess, when J, our foster son, joined us in October, he had never played video games before. It was our logical first step in the middle of the chaos of being placed with a stranger-to-us 5-year old. We had no toys, books or even a bed, but we did have Wii and Mario Kart.

Turns out, in the aftermath of a traumatic separation, video games provided him the perfect outlet to release frustration and grief. There were tears and yelling – but it was aimed at the game and eventually, with enough determination and grit, he fought his way through levels and began collecting the coveted Mario Galaxy stars.

Along the way, J (who cannot be pictured due to confidentiality issues), developed quite a fondness for Bowser, the ultimate Mario bad guy. Who knows why, but nothing Bowser threw ol’ Mario’s way could dissuade this love. When I jokingly suggested one day that I make him a Bowser costume, the idea stuck. And unlike the suggestions for eating vegetables or drinking milk, this one has been pursued with a vigor that has surprised us all.

So I've added this to my Life Life (it has to be a quick one!) on GoMighty.

Make a Bowser Costume for My Foster Son Before He Leaves Us in March.

So, now it is off to Pinterest, Joann’s and crafting sites to figure out how in God’s name this costume is going come together.

Sewers and crafters, your ideas and suggestions are welcome. In a rare instance to a foster case, this one will have a happy ending and I’d like to send him off with his costume.

How to Fill 66 Jars in a Day

In the late 90s, I became a certified "Master Food Preserver" through my local county extension office. It sounds very fancy, but at the time, canning and food preservation was truly out of favor. I was undoubtedly the youngest person in my class of about a dozen people.

As Master Food Preservers, we were expected to field questions from county constituents contacting the understaffed extension offices as well as give demos and teach classes. In the entire time that I lived in Weld county, I never once got a question nor did I ever teach a class. I fulfilled my required hours mostly by helping out at the county fair and manning a little visited food preservation booth at various county functions.

Fast forward to 2008, after a long time away from my canner, I decided to make some pickles. I wrote this about the craft:

There is no doubt that canning is as laborious and useless a kitchen task as there currently is. But there are fewer culinary tasks more satisfying than seeing rows of your own (tastier) pickles lined up in the pantry. 

And while that is still true, over the past three years, for whatever reason, canning has seen a resurgence. Whenever I mention my pickles, which is frequently as I am an unabashed canning evangelist, I inevitably get a request to "teach me how!" I started with a small class to a  friend and her husband, then another much larger class to my church, and then my closest friend asked to learn. One hot August day, we put up our favorites:  jams, pickled beets and bread and butters pickles. The Annual Cannual was born.

This year was the third Annual Cannual and every year we learn more. Canning is still useless, hot and laborious, but this is how you do it right.

The Set Up

Apparently, glass top stove manufacturers forbid canning using traditional ridged-bottom canners due to a combination of weight, pot size and the temperature fluctuations of the glass top stove. Knowing the volume of the Annual Cannual, I was unwilling to accept canning in my smaller flatbottomed canner. So we did this instead:

Yes, a propane-powered, dual-burnered camp stove with an output of 35,000 BTUs per burner. We kept two canners constantly going (even in the rain), the heat stayed outside and all four burners were available on the range inside for cooking. Also, spills? No problem.

The Bounty

Tomatoes from fellow choristers, peaches from coworkers, cucumbers, onions and chiles from the local farmers markets and the rest from the uber gardeners, my parents. The fresher, the better.

The Tribe

Many hands make light work - never truer when you have pounds and pounds of produce to convert into pickles and jams. Everyone did prep work at home so on the morning of the Cannual, we only had about two hours of blanching, peeling, chopping and foodmilling left to do.

Cilantro and tomatoes for salsa

Apples for apple butter

Peaches and strawberries for jam

The Yield

We started at 10:00 am and finished at about 8:30 pm. Plenty of time left for ice cream and consuming extra jam.

7 pints of peach salsas

7 pints of tomato salsa

4 pints of pickled beets

7 pints of bread and butter pickles

10 half-pints of apple butter

17 half-pints of peach jam

9 half-pints of strawberry rhubarb jam

5 half-pints of plum preserves

10 half-pints of apple butter

Everything definitely has a season.

My Life List (part the first)

When I first read Maggie Mason's Mighty List project, I was intrigued. Her theory is that the act of writing such a list is in and of itself transformative and secondly, if you put what makes you happy on the list, then doing the items on your list will contribute to a happier life. It's basically a bucket list, but without the whole "kicking the bucket" aspect - something which I, a detester of "over the hill" parties and the like - certainly appreciated.

I played around a bit with some of the things that I would put on my own list, making vague notes here and there, and when she finally posted this, I was inspired enough to write my own.

So without further ado, here is the first part of my own Life List...I plan on blogging about the good stuff (which, because of its virtue of being a Life List, is all of it.)

1. Read the entire Bible - CHECK
2. Visit five Colorado landmarks (Royal Gorge, Dinosaur National Park, etc)
3. Take the train to Glenwood Springs
4. Taste 100 cocktails
5. Climb a 14er - CHECK
6. Visit ten Colorado museums
7. Visit ten national museums
8. Scrapbook my Life List
9. Sew something that I actually wear
10. Visit Hadrians Wall
11. Eat pho in Saigon
12. Cook my way through an entire cookbook
13. Visit all 50 states (continuing from where I am at now)
14. Design and create a font
15. Go on a girls-only trip with my best girlfriends - CHECK
16. Taste 100 unique desserts
17. Attend a taping of The Daily Show or the Colbert Report
18. Write my freakin' book
19. Go a full week eating all my food made from scratch (by me)
20. If it isn't beautiful or useful, get it out of my house
21. Submit a funny picture to I Can Haz Cheeseburger
22. Host a really swanky dinner party
23. Read the Big Read 100 books as ranked by the BBC
24. Leave a secret in a Post Secret book
25. Get a tattoo to honor my heart donor
26. See the glaciers in Patagonia before they disappear
27. Read Entertainment Weekly's list of new classics
28. Dine at the French Laundry
29. Learn how to alter/tailor my own clothes
30. Grow my hair to my waist - CHECK
31. Volunteer for Meals on Wheels
32. Learn how to knit and make scarves and handwarmers - CHECK
33. Learn how to use my DSLR on its manual settings
34. Get in the habit of grand loving gestures
35. Create family archive scrapbooks
36. Get paid to write

There you go! The first 36!

Friday Link Round Up

I don't know if anyone else's week has been exceptionally long, but mine has. Whew. So yippee for Friday. Especially because tomorrow is the Lafayette Oatmeal Festival - where I plan on consuming my weight in oatmeal - and also a much-anticipated Sister's Day.

So to celebrate the close of another week, here are some links that I found inspiring or moving in some way. Enjoy!

• America: Too Stupid to Cook - a mini-manifesto on America and cooking by Michael Ruhlman. Preach it, brother!
• Cutest stamps ever. So love the argyle patterns you can make with these.
• A powerful and moving essay by Roger Ebert (yes! the movie critic) on life without what most of us hold sacred.
• And last, just what a craftygirl needs before the weekend starts...100 Best Craft Tutorials of 2009. I already have fabric for the bags!

Have a great weekend!

A Lost Art

I can see why home canning is out of favor in today's world. The process is fairly complicated, you need to be hyper-clean and the best time to can is the worst time of the year. Who wants to spend a July afternoon in a hot kitchen filled with several large pots of heavily boiling water? And most importantly, why bother? You can buy perfectly adequate pickles, jams and canned fruits at your local grocery store for cheaper and easier.

But even against those odds, the siren call of little baskets of bright green cucumbers called out to me at the farmer's market this weekend. I remembered snorting from getting a face full of tangy boiling vinegar and fingertips tingling from boiling hot lids and water. I remembered a kitchen so hot with billowing steam that I canned in a bikini top and shorts. I remembered being able to serve my own pickles as relish with every meal and knowing exactly what was in them. I bought the cucumbers.

And yesterday I turned out six lovely pints of deep yellow-green bread and butter pickles. Air conditioning and a strong husband helped with the heat and the lifting. It's enough to get me barely exited for winter with hearty bowls of soup and sourdough, soft cheese and pickles. (Yes, Chris and I understand and accept fully that we are hobbits).

There is no doubt that canning is as laborious and useless a kitchen task as there currently is. But seriously, there are fewer culinary tasks more satisfying than seeing rows of your own (tastier) pickles lined up in the pantry. And of course, the knowledge that the carbon footprint on these pickles is much smaller than the ones at the store is a pretty nice side benefit too.

Hooray for canning!

Being Creative

Chris and I are currently in the middle of a week of creativity. Every day for a week, we are encouraging each other to do something creative - something outside our normal realm which means creatively reorganizing the storage closet at work doesn't count.

Today's creative endeavor was in the kitchen with a no-recipe dinner of an Asian chicken salad. My favorite guilty kitchen secret is prepared salad dressing. I love it as salad dressing, marinade, quick sauce and even for a flavorful cooking oil. Such an easy way to pump up flavor on a busy weeknight without feeling like I'm simply assembling processed foods.

So, it's a super easy salad. First, take a few boneless chicken breasts and marinade them in an Asian salad dressing. I used Kraft's Light Toasted Sesame or somesuch. After they sat for an hour or so in the fridge, I had Chris fired up our grill. While it was heating, I took some diced yellow peppers and quickly sauteed them with some minced ginger and shallots. I don't care for raw peppers but didn't want them cooked so I only heated them enough to be slightly toothsome and to bloom out the ginger.

I spread that on a cooking board and got the chicken grilling. To distract me from continually poking the chicken, I tore, rinsed and dried enough red leaf lettuce for two salads. I threw that into a bowl and added the cooled pepper mixture, some diced dried apricots, sliced almonds and some ginger-garlic wonton strips I found in the salad section of the store.

I tossed the salad with some of the dressing then plated it into our favorite salad bowls. The chicken was done then sliced and put on top. We added more dressing to taste and dug in.

Mmm. My creative cooking in the kitchen was delicious. Every bite was gingery and juicy with the peppers. The chicken was moist and thanks to the beauty of the prepared dressing, all the flavors melded quickly and superbly.

An admirable creative effort if I do say so myself!