Monthly Archives: March 2009

Reading

If you give a girl a letter …

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A few months ago, we checked out “If You Give a Pig a Party” and “If You Give a Pig a Pancake” by Laura Numeroff. One morning as we were writing some letters and drawing pictures, Pi decided she wanted to draw a picture for the author. So she did, and we wrote a little note to go along with it. I looked up her contact info, and we popped Poppy’s drawing and letter into the mailbox.

Can you guess what was in our mailbox today? It was a letter for Poppy, from Laura Numeroff! Here’s a bit of what she wrote:

Dear Poppy,

Thank you so much for writing to me!! Your drawing of the piggy and the cow is very special and beautiful.

I’m glad you love to read — and clearly you love to draw. Just be careful you don’t draw all over the walls with a permanent magic marker! And I love your name — it’s adorable! Ed: This got a very large smile from P.

I have an iPod and I love music and look forward to hearing “Personal Penguin” — thanks for the tip! …

She goes on to say that she’s working on “If You Give a Dog a Donut” and that “If You Give a Cat a Cupcake” was recently released.

The letter really brightened our afternoon. Poppy is always excited to get things in the mail, and receiving a note from one of her favorite authors was just terrific. I’m pretty sure Numeroff now has a lifelong fan!

Screen time

So say we all

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Disclaimer: This won’t make any sense if you don’t watch “Battlestar Galactica.” Also, I’m aware that this is evidence of my nerdiness. I’m OK with that.

BattlestarRockford and I spent many long nights last year catching up with “Battlestar Galactica.” Now there are only two episodes left, and I’m not liking the direction we seem to be heading. I’m hoping it’ll be otherwise, but here’s my official prediction for how the show will end:

  • Adama assembles a skeleton crew to man Galactica. They find The Colony. They fly Galactica straight inside and fire up the ol’ FTL. Boom. Space dust. The end.

    • Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? This season has been 99.9% depressing. But at least there’ll always be the memory of Fat Apollo.

    Eating

    Muffin cups to the rescue

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    Back in January I talked a little bit about the muffin cup’s potential. Since then, I’ve tried a few more things with it. And now it might be my very favorite kitchen tool.

    We almost always have pizza for dinner on Fridays, but I’ve never made my own pizza sauce. The last time we purchased pizza sauce, though, was months ago. (And when I say “we,” I mean the friends who brought the pizza sauce with them when they came over for dinner.) The sauce came from Sam’s, which meant that we had roughly 17 gallons of pizza sauce left over. Rather than finding a giant container to put it in — where it would’ve gotten stuck in the back of the fridge and ignored — I portioned the sauce out into pizza-sized batches and put it in a silicon muffin tin. And then I stuck that in the freezer. It took about three days to freeze all of it, because I only have one muffin tin, but now I have about 30 pizzas’ worth of sauce pucks in a bag in the freezer.

    The muffin cups are also great for chicken broth. I have several recipes that only call for half a cup or so of broth. I used to dump the rest of the container down the drain. But now the muffin cup has changed my wasteful ways! The standalone muffin cups I have hold about half a cup of chicken broth, which makes it pretty easy to thaw and use what I need.

    So there you have it. Muffin cups work for me. I might just get that printed on a T-shirt. That’s how much I love them.

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