Some holiday stretching

In the spirit of trying to stretch our holiday dollar a little further this year, I decided that I would try & make something for the brave souls who enter into the classroom everyday & patiently try to impart some knowlege on my 2 hooligans.

I am not a very crafty person, so my options for hand crafted items were pretty limited. I can't sew, or knit or crochet... at all. I can bake, but I figured the teachers probably get pretty tired of the tins of cookies brought in by other families. Since I love making cards, I decided to get on the computer and try my hand at creating them all some personalized stationary.

For the most part, I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. Each teacher will get a dozen cards in 4 different colors with matching envelopes. I asked Mr. Crackers for his opinion on the idea and discovered that the concept of personalized notecards seems to be a complete mystery to him (to paraphrase Mr. Crackers a bit... apparently the appreciation of personalized notecards requires a vagina).

The most exciting part is that I had everything I needed for this project up in my office already, so the out of pocket cost for this project is $0. All it took was a little time & creativity.

Now that I've gotten started, I just can't seem to stop making them. I've been playing with the colors & fonts and designing them for other special people as gifts. And yes Mr. Crackers, all of the recipients will have a vagina.

Updates here & there

Since I know you've all been on pins and needles waiting for me to do a little follow up on some previous posts, (said with a dose of heavy sarcasm) I thought I'd catch you up on things here around the House of Crackers:

Supper Gourmet Club
You'll be happy to know that the dinner we hosted for Supper Gourmet Club on Saturday was a success. Yea! I'm sorry to say that I have no pictures to share of the evening because I was a bit stressed out about frying up my first ever batch of chicken for a group of people with discriminating palettes. (of course it could also be said I was too also too busy sampling martinis...)

The chicken turned out both crispy and juicy (which it should have been considering it spent 24 hours brining in a salt water bath, followed by another 24 hours soaking in buttermilk). It was a fun night filled with delicious southern favorites and tasty martinis. I think the star of the evening was the Bourbon Glazed Bread Pudding served with brown sugar ice cream (Haagan-Daz, I will be soon be writing a love sonnet for your brown sugar ice cream). Sweet, sweet bourbon bread pudding, where have you been all my life?

Now I just have to figure out how to get the smell of fried chicken, bacon & lard out of my house. It smelled delicious as it was all cooking Saturday night, but 2 days of living in a place that smells like KFC is starting to bring me down a little. A friend of mine suggested leaving out bowls of white vinegar & that seems to have helped a bit. If I ever make another batch of fried chicken again, I'll do it in a warmer month so I can open all the windows to air the place out a bit.

If I can't get the smell out soon, Santa will be expecting a plate of fried chicken when he comes down the chimney instead of cookies.


The Dining Room Dilemma
As a follow up to my post about my complete lack of decorating prowess, I wanted to let you know that we decided to replace the curtains in the dining room. Since the "Harry Potter" red plaid curtains in the room seemed to make Mr. Crackers' a little anxious when paired with all of the other patterns in the room, we decided to replace them with solid green panels. Of course it was also considerably less expensive than option #2 which was replacing the area rug. We hoped the new curtains would help us tie the conflicting patterns of the newly covered chairs with the patterned area rug.



Here's the result:


And from another angle:


Did it work? Hmm, good question. I will tell you that these green curtains definitely work with all of the patterns in the room better than the plaid ones they are replacing, but I'll also tell you that I definitely shouldn't be allowed in a fabric store again anytime soon.

Misplaced priorities on my to-do list
And finally, just thought I'd share what I did while K was napping today. I'm sure you are thinking I was working on the normal things that keep us all busy this time of year: writing Christmas cards or Christmas shopping or even starting to pull together my son's 7th birthday party which will be here in just a few weeks...

Nope, I spent my "down" time this afternoon organizing my spices & putting little tiny labels on them so I could actually find them quickly without doing my usual 5 minute spicy scavenger hunt.



I am very excited about the labels, don't they make it so much easier to find the spice you're looking for (yes I know I am dork, we've discussed that before haven't we)? In my defense, I will tell you that my Mom was performing the same task today & put the idea in my head so I will shift the blame to her. I'm just saying that if your Christmas cards are late this year, now you know why. It's worth though isn't it?

Thanks for the idea Mom. Hope you got your cabinets done too!

I'll take the lard... with a side of bacon

This evening Mr. Crackers & I take our turn hosting Supper Gourmet Club. Supper Gourmet Club was the brainchild of a friend of ours who thought it would be fun to get together with a group of friends once a month every other month whenever we can find time on everyone's schedule, for a night of cocktails and fine dining WITHOUT CHILDREN. While I've always had trouble referring to the dinners as Gourmet Club (which definitely sounds a like something I would not get invited to under normal circumstances) the meals themselves have definitely warranted the title.

So far we've had delicious meals inspired by the cuisines of Italy, South America & Japan. All of them featured sumptuous food & tasty wines and cocktails. Truly, they have all been meals that rival the food found in some of the best restaurants around town.

So, tonight it's time for the House of Crackers to host the group. What is the theme, you ask? Well, Mr. Crackers and I picked Southern Cuisine. You see, one of the couples in the group (the couple whose idea it was to start the club in the first place and who are the "glue" that holds the rest of us together) will be deserting abandoning moving to Atlanta sometime in the next couple of months. Since we ourselves just moved from there a few years ago, it seemed a fitting theme.

But, this meal really won't be a true Gourmet Club event, at it's heart it going to be Supper Club. While there are a lot of innovative dishes that are part of the cuisine of the "New South" this dinner will be paying homage to traditional family-style southern recipes. I will be frying up my first ever batch of fried chicken. If you've never cooked fried chicken before, let me just tell you to go to KFC instead it seems like there is a lot that could go wrong....I am feeling more than a little pressure about this evening's dining experience. I know now why I prefer getting my fried chicken right from the Colonel himself (It only takes 5 minutes of waiting in line & it always tastes good). We'll also be having wilted salad, squash casserole and bourbon glazed bread pudding.
Mmm, I think my mouth is already watering.

I hope everyone has a great time tonight & that the food will live up to the high standards set by the meals we've had in the past. But perhaps I should lower my expectations a bit. Honestly, I will just be happy if no one keels over from clogged arteries by the end of the evening. The amount of butter, bacon, mayonnaise, and (lord, help me) lard that is being used tonight to prepare these dishes may have us all wishing this night of traditional Southern cooking never happened. It's a good thing we restocked the bar.

Bon Appetit Y'all!

Happy Thanksgiving 2009

I just got a call from my parents that my sister & her family have arrived. Let the holiday festivities begin!

The older I get, the more I seem to like Thanksgiving. In fact, it rivals Christmas as my favorite holiday. There's just something wonderful about gathering together with family (or friends) and enjoying one another's company over a meal filled with comfort foods. When you add to that the smell of roasting turkey and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, what's not to like?

Last year I posted a short pilgrim story that C had written in kindergarten. To be fair, I thought I would let K handle this year's tribute to the holiday.

I know I have a lot to be thankful for. Now I can add the fact that I'm not a turkey to my list of blessings.

May your your turkey be juicy, may your gravy be smooth and may you enjoy the smiles and laughter of those around you.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

The dining room dilemma

The dining room is the first room you see when you come to visit us here at the house of Crackers and quite frankly it's pretty uninspiring. The walls are a golden tan color, the floors are a honey stained wood and the dining room set is also a light golden hue. Even the fabric on the dining chairs is a solid color in the tan/gold family.


The only bits of color in the room are an area rug (whose primary colors are...you guessed it gold and brown with some bits of red & green), the curtains (which are red & gold plaid - Mr. Crackers thinks they look like they belong in a Harry Potter movie) and a mirror and hutch which are both painted a barn red.



I had been trying to think of something inexpensive to give the space some color without making it too dark. Usually when faced with this problem my first instinct is to paint, but since I wasn't sure what color to use, I had been mulling over some other options. A couple of months ago, it occurred to me that if I could recover the chairs it would be a really easy (and cheap) way to refresh the whole space.

So, last week I ventured to a local fabric store with my Mom and the paint swatches for the walls and the red hutch to see what I could do about giving the room a new look. I found a fabric that I really liked that matched my paint colors & ever better, fit into my budget.

Ta da...

I really thought it was pretty. I was bold and looked really good against the light wood and walls. I was really proud of myself - I was going to make a dramatic impact in a room and pull everything together for under $100.00. Wahoo!

Except, that once I started recovering the chairs, I noticed something. You see, while the fabric looked great against the walls and really set off the honey color of the furniture, it did not really match the carpet... at all. It turns out that the red in the carpet was not really the same red that the hutch & the mirror were painted and um... the brown in the background of the fabric is completely different than the brown in the carpet. Ooops!

Not only that, but it seems that the pattern I chose for the chairs doesn't really work well with the pattern in the carpet. In fact, they kind of fight each other for your attention.

Unfortunately, the room which was so boring that it was putting me to sleep is now filled with so many competing patterns that it is starting to give Mr. Crackers a headache (Sorry Mr. Crackers, I had forgotten about the patterned couch in the sitting room, oops.)

This picture doesn't quite illustrate the cacophony of pattern that assaults your eye when you come into the room. But trust me...it's a lot to take in.

So now Mr. Crackers & I are talking about either replacing the carpet (which would be significantly more than my $50.00 budget for re-decorating this room) or replacing the Harry Potter curtains (a far more likely scenario that is not nearly as budget crushing as getting a new rug.)

Oh well, I guess I won't send in my audition tape for HGTV's Design Star this year.

Finding the right look...

I've mentioned in previous posts that my 6 year old son has been doing some experimenting with his personal style lately.

You may recall that at the beginning of the school year he was going for what I like to call "The Erkel" look. This uber-conservative style had him buttoning all of his uniform shirts to the top & tucking them into his pants so tightly that I feared he was limiting the mobility of the top half of his body. Since a lot of his time is spent in his school uniform his means of self expression is somewhat limited, so I tend to just let him do his thing.

One day about a month ago he declared that he wanted his hair put into "standing up spikes" for school that morning. I asked him what inspired this new style & he just said he thought it would look cool. So, I got out the gel & went to work. He got a couple of smiles & speculative glances, but overall he must have had at least some postive feedback since he's still at it. These days though he does it all on his own. "I don't need help Mom! I can do it myself!"

I have to say that I think he is starting to express his mood with hair gel. Some days he wets his hair & gels it into spikes on his head. Other days he gels it flat against his head and brushes it all forward (this look kind of creeps me out a bit & I can't seem to resist trying to get it to part off to the side) and then unexpectedly on other days he just leaves alone and goes au naturel.

My point is, I'm never quite sure what kind of hair style the day will bring. Case in point, this past Friday. Both of the kids were off school for teacher in-service days and the only plan we had for the day was a quick trip to K's pre-school for a 15 minute teacher conference. C had gone to the school back in the day & he was excited to see all his old teachers again. He was even more excited about the fact that we were heading to Toys R Us right after the conference so both of them could look around & start putting together a Christmas list (Santa Claus, Mr. Crackers' and I are trying to save a little money this year with all the pre-season sales that are going on).

Do you want to see what kind of hair style that the excitement of a no-school day paired with a trip to a toy store produces?

Wow-ee!
Yep, it's a "faux"hawk. I really have no idea where he's getting this stuff. I volunteer at his periochial school & I can tell you that all the boys I've ever seen there are pretty clean cut looking. I've never even seen a boy with long hair there.

His hairstyle made quite an impression with his former pre-school teachers. That is for certain.

What can I say? I guess he's trying to find his look. I'm a little afraid of what is in store for us in his teen years. If he's sporting a "faux"hawk at 6 what is he going to come up with at 16?! (shudder, shudder...).

I guess only time (& hair gel) will tell.

More bang for your entertainment buck.

Earlier this week we went to the end of season pizza party for C's soccer team. After dinner most of the boys dissapeared into the game room never to be seen again. After a few minutes I wandered to the back room to see what my hooligan was up to. Large groups of unattended 7-8 year old boys make me nervous.



When I got to the room, this was the scene before me. There are at least 9 boys clustered around a video game watching a teammate play. You'll notice that C looks like he is using the top of the game as some sort of hand hold. I'm not sure what he was standing on, but I wasn't going to tell him to get down. That would mean I would actually have to supply him with his own money to play games.

Playing a video game at your local pizza parlor = $.50
Letting all your friends watch you play for free = priceless!