“I’m not spoiled, I’m primitive!”

That’s what my older daughter yelled at me after I had a hissy fit about my children having the nerve—the nerve!—to thumb their noses at the food I serve.

I busted up laughing, of course, which stopped her short and prompted her to ask, “What’s primitive mean?”

That’s my girl, the primitive spoiled one. Or the primitively spoiled one. Or the spoiled primate.

Whatever.

My son has been playing with his MP3 player. So far he’s already deleted all the music he put on it. Smart move, sonny.

And he’s discovered it has a webcam and that he can hook it up to the computer and then take pictures of the computer screen which makes the screen go on into infinity, like those three-way mirrors in dressing rooms.

I’m intrigued with the pictures he comes with. Like of me turning my head:

Or of me writing:

Don’t I look tortured?

It’s already come in handy, too.

I sent him out on a six-mile, round-trip bike ride with orders to take pictures of the agreed upon destination spot as proof he got there.

He also took a nauseatingly wobbly video of the trees and road and garbage cans, his voice in the background saying, “You believe me, Mom? You believe me now?”

Here’s a novel way to peel garlic. It really does work! (I entertained the family with a demonstration. My husband was sufficiently impressed.)

I have another little non-recipe to share with you. It’s my method of choice for preparing sweet potatoes in quantity.

I stuff my oven with sweet potatoes and bake them potatoes until they’re fork tender. (I’ve always pricked my potatoes with a knife, because that’s what I do with the white ones, but I recently read that you’re not supposed to prick sweet potatoes. Which makes sense, considering that my baked sweet potatoes ooze lots of juices that turn to balls of char when they hit the stove floor. I’m eager to see if no-prick baking equals a cleaner oven.)

Once the potatoes have cooled a bit, I tear off the peels with my fingers. The skins go to the chickens and the soft potato pieces plop into my large mixing bowl where I give them a thorough beating with my handheld mixer.

Now, at this point I have two options. I can either refrigerate or freeze the potato puree for later (think sweet potato pie!), or I can proceed with the mashed sweet potato recipe. I usually just work up to this step and then refrigerate the whole kit and caboodle. The mashed potatoes tend to disappear over the course of the next several days, usually before I can even get around to making a pie. The kids love to eat it by the bowlful.

But if I want to make this into an official side dish, I stir in a little salt, scoop the mashed sweet potatoes into a greased baking dish, dot the top with butter, and then bake them in a hot oven.

And that, my dears, is about as simple as simple gets.

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

sweet potatoes
salt
a little butter

Roast the sweet potatoes, scoop out the soft flesh, and beat it until it’s creamy smooth. Stir in some salt to taste. Spoon the potatoes into a greased baking dish, dot with butter, and bake at 350 degrees till the top gets slightly caramelized and the potatoes are hot the whole way through.

I’m in a cooking rut. Zero inspiration, no happy kitchen feelings, nothing. And I miss it. Because turning out pots of beans, baked potatoes, granola, chef salads, and bread, over and over again, is delicious, but boring. I need my cooking mojo back asap.

I have a hunch that my bah humbug cooking slump is a result of other busyness. There have been lots of writing projects (does this mean I prefer writing to cooking? I’ll have to ponder this) (oh, and last night when I was in bed, my mind racing with lots of writing energy, I said to my man, “I just have so many ideas and things I want to say and not nearly enough time to do it, know what I mean?” “Um, no,” he said), church meetings, homeschooling, cleaning, and celebrating. As a result, I end up cooking the fastest and easiest foods possible, not wanting to waste extra minutes and mental energy on recipe research and food play.

I did, though, come up with a new brownie recipe. It goes something like this.

1. Be appalled at the insane amount of candy your kids hauled in on October 31st.
2. Make lots of disparaging remarks about childhood obesity and rotting teeth, all the while giggling hysterically and shoveling as much candy into your mouth as you possibly can.
3. Sometime in the next 48 hours when you emerge from your candy coma, stuff the majority of the candy in a hide-y hole and try to forget about it. But first, fill a bowl with mini chocolate bars (sadly, or happily, depending on how bad your hangover headache is, this is just a fraction of the chocolate haul).
4. Mix up a batch of brownies.
5. Unwrap (important step alert!) the chocolates—Butterfingers, Kit-Kats, Snickers, Milky Ways, Mars, Reese’s, etc.—chop them up, and stir them into the brownie batter.
6. Bake the brownies, taking care to under bake them by a good 5 to 10 minutes.
7. Once cooled, cut and freeze. Because there is no way (in ha-a-ill) you’ll be able to stop your fingers from shoveling these babies into your mouth.
8. Every time you eat a brownie, ponder these two amazing facts: a) the candy bars do not give the brownies a chemical flavor (and you were sure they would), and b) chocolates are good on their own, yes, but they are so much better when encased in gooey, chewy, rich, chocolate-y brownies.

Halloween Candy-Infused Brownies

Brownie batter (I made a double batch)
Assorted Halloween chocolates, chopped (2-3 cups)

Combine, (under) bake, and eat. Brilliant.

This same time, years previous: a teacher’s lesson

Well lovies, the pie party happened. There were people and there were pies, and the people ate the pies, the end.

Just kidding. Like I could ever be that concise, ha.

Really though, I don’t exactly know what to say about it. It was fun, a lot of fun, and sweet and simple, and surreal and special. I had no expectations—because how could I?—and then after it was over, I didn’t know how to process it because I didn’t have any expectations in the first place. It was weird. And a little sad. I felt kind of weepy the next morning, partly due to exhaustion and partly because my mind and insides were all scrambled up.

Let me ‘splain.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up. (Name that movie.)

We cleaned house for forever. We tacked on some fall cleaning (like taking out window screens and putting the garden to bed), some heavier cleaning (like wall and window washing), and some fix-it jobs (like replacing the toilet seat) so it really did take forever.

It was a little insane, and what made it all the insaner was that the house still looked raggedy when we were done. So I gave up and made pies instead.

People came. This little fact never fails to amaze me. Because I can clean and bake pies till the cows come home, but it ain’t a party if there ain’t no people, right? And it’s a little miracle that people read some words on a computer screen and then carve time out of their day to visit with a bunch of random people. It’s rather nifty miracle, if you ask me.

And here’s where the surreal part comes in: one of the guests flew in from Washington state for the party, I kid you not.

She was at our house when we got home from church and as soon as the kids spied her red rental parked in the driveway, they forgot all their normal inhibitions and tore into the house ahead of us. Because MAVIS WAS AT OUR HOUSE! And there she was, sitting at the table in the downstairs bedroom that’s not a bedroom, working on the computer and drinking tea.

This was my first time meeting a blog friend—we have been reading each other’s blogs for years—and it was simultaneously an intoxicating thrill and a total comfort. And surreal. Have I mentioned it was surreal?

The kids immediately took to her, and no wonder—she had brought all the supplies needed for making party hats and right away set up shop. While I fixed the salad for lunch (no waffles when a pie feast is in the works), she instructed the kids in the fine art of handling feather boas and glue guns and fabric. She had them eating out of the palm of her hand.

Mid-afternoon, people started trickling in.

We visited on the porch for awhile before getting down to the business of eating pie. There were all sorts of pie, but Katie-from-West Virginia’s kale-akopita was the only savory pie in the bunch.

It was good, too, and I now have the recipe in my possession. Stay tuned.

Also present: peanut butter pie, two pumpkin (one with pecans and one without), red raspberry, sour cherry lattice, pineapple buttermilk tarts, gluten-free grape, my mother’s stovetop grape crumb, shoofly, green tomato and apple mince, whoopie pies, and sour cherry crumb. Not a single apple, can you believe it?

We ate and visited (and the babies played) and ate some more and still there were leftovers.

After awhile the majority of folks headed home and just a handful of us were left. We curled up on the sofa, pulled up rockers and chairs, and settled into a leisurely visit while the kids played and the candles burned low.

Then everyone was gone but Mavis. My husband and I tucked the kids into bed, made tea, and settled down by the fire for another long chat. Mavis left in the middle of the night—I got up to give her a hug goodbye—but back in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. There’s something lonesome and sad about a newly-acquired friend driving away in the frosty dead of night, on her way to a plane that will take her thousands of miles away.

I caught up on my sleep last night and ate the last of the kale-akopita for my lunch today. The kids divided out the one remaining tart (I snuck snitches). The stack of party hats on the hutch and the shiny-clean windows are the only signs of the weekend festivities.

This same time, years previous: laid flat, crispy cinnamon cookies, lessons from West Virginia, brown sugar icing, no zip, sausage quiche with potato crust