Pretzels and Popsicles

Having kids has allowed me to discover a variety of things about myself: I hate the smell of a dirty bathroom, I can only answer the question "what's for dinner" 5 times before screaming "THERE WILL BE NO DINNER FOR FORGETFUL CHILDREN!", and I love to cook for people who will happily eat what I make.

As a single graduate student, I lived off of oatmeal and PB&J. Sometimes I'd eat Ramen noodles, uncooked with the seasoning sprinkled on, sort of like very salty popcorn, but that was a special treat.

When I was dating my husband, he would cook for me. I should put cook in parenthesis. He thought he could cook. He tried his best to cook. And it was very sweet of him to make dinner for me, being that I was a graduate student who subsisted on oatmeal, PB&J, and uncooked noodles topped with MSG and sodium.

The first meal he made me was pork chops cooked on the grill, with a side of green veggies. I don't remember what type of green veggies because when anything is boiled for 30 minutes it basically all looks like boiled overcooked green stuff. Yummy. The pork didn't have any sauce or marinade on it. It was just a cut of meat slapped on the grill until it was too overcooked to cut properly and tasted like cardboard. Although I think cardboard would have had a better texture. And more flavor.

But I was falling in love, and so I oohed and aahhhed over his meal. I choked it down the best I could and pretended I just naturally was a light eater. The next week when he invited me over to dinner, I accepted. On the way there, I stopped at a very convenient Taco Bell drive through. For his dinner of overcooked chicken with boiled green things, I simply ate like a bird. A small, delicate bird trying not to gag in front of my host. Thus Taco Bell became a sort of pre-dinner ritual, a form of surviving my beloved's poor cooking without the stress of having to tell him that his dinners were pretty hard to digest. I was blinded by love, but love doesn't do much for a person's sense of edibility.

When we were married, I knew that there was no question of who would be doing the cooking. If I was to survive, I had to learn how to cook for myself, my husband, and my two new stepsons. Thus began my love of cooking and baking. It started as a method of sheer survival and has turned into a thing of joy.

Where was I? Oh yes, pretzels and Popsicles. Today I made my first batch of homemade pretzels, and they turned out ridiculously good if I do say so myself. There are none left. The neighbor kids ate two, Aidan ate three, Wayne ate two, Jim ate three, and Maryam and I each had one. This makes me very happy because it means I can make more tomorrow. I think they'll be great in the boys' lunches in the fall. I wish I liked pretzels. If they were dipped in chocolate or smothered in cream cheese (rather dipped in chocolate and smothered in cream cheese) I might nibble on them. Or they'd be good cut up and put in ice cream, or dipped in ketchup. Everything tastes better in ketchup.



Okay, Popsicles. I hate buying them because they're so horrible for you. The kids love them because they're cold and messy and sweet. In the past I've made them with fruit juice (root beer if the kids are lucky). This time the boys and I made them with leftover strawberry juice from my jam making.

Here are a couple of pictures of my lovely children eating my lovely strawberry Popsicles.Kids are never sad when they consume Popsicles. Maryam looked like she had slaughtered a cat afterwards, but a bath cleaned that up and now there can be no more accusations that I allow my daughter to play with dead and bleeding felines.