Saying Goodbye to a Great Vet

Our family vet, Dr l, is moving. I'll admit it was a blow. Little bailey actually cried. Dr L. saved his life and he was very grateful. The rest of us felt like we needed to make her a card. So that's what we did. Good bye Doc. Have a happy move and a great new life. You'll be missed.

Me & Maribeth: Blog Cooking part 1

Introducing the Me & Maribeth cooking attempt number 1. Neither one of use are chefs,(MB kicks ass in the kitchen, but will not admit it to anyone) but we enjoy food and felt this would be fun. Actually, we watched Julie & Julia and felt inspired. Maybe someday there will be a movie about us. Uhm…probably not, but that’s OK.

So, I’m up first and my attempt at blog cooking will be Peach Cobbler. An absolutely delicious dessert that I have never eaten. MB thinks she may have tried it once but isn't sure.

I went online a couple days ago and got several recipes. One good Youtube video was by Scott Hargrove.

I will state that the recipe below is a smorgasbord of general ingredients and methods and in no way suggests that their recipes will look or taste like this. They are real cooks and we are not!
I started by:

...getting some peaches. About 6 cups worth. They say fresh peaches are the ones you want. We picked our own at Eastmont Orchards off of route 34 in Colts Neck.

Cut up the 6 cups of peaches and add ¼ cup water, ¾ cup sugar and ¾ brown sugar. Throw this in a pot and bring to a boil and then lower the heat and let simmer. Stir every so often and monitor it.

Meanwhile, combine 3 tbsp flour, ¼ cup sugar, a pinch of salt, 1 tbsp cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg and if you have allspice, a pinch of that too.

When the peaches look soft on the edges yet firm in the center, toss the flour mixture in. At this point, keep mixing. The flour could burn on the bottom or sides of the pot. So I mixed this until it had a consistency of apple filling.

One of the recipes used cornstarch instead of lemon juice, but I didn’t have any. Take the whole, hot, yummy pot and put it in a casserole dish. Then I started on the cobbler.

In a bowl I mixed 1 cup floor, ¼ cup sugar, ¼ cup brown sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, ½ cup milk and 3 tbsp butter. It will start to look like cake batter. It didn’t taste too bad either. Then
I plopped the batter over the peaches.

(I looks pretty funny…kinda like…well…you know)

Anyway, I baked it at 400 for like 35 minutes, until the top looked golden brown and actually pretty good.

When it was desert time, we got some Vanilla Bean ice cream and here you go.

I would rate my cobbler a 7. (Ten of course being in the class with Hagen Daas or Toll House cookies) It was sweet! It tasted great, but this was sweet. The ice cream helped. I think I wanted the cob to be more cobby. Or crumbly. Or both. I’ll have to work on that. MB liked it, but did request more ice cream, so I think she would agree with me.

It lasted 3 days worth of deserts. On to the next…

Ice man

I read an interesting article last night about this guy named Frederic Tudor. In a nutshell, he single handedly is the reason why we have ice cubes in our freezers and ice cream in our bellies. I mean, in our freezers as well. I know…Ice cream? It’s crazy. Well here’s the link. It’s awesome and inspiring.

http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20311.html

Ginger July 5, 2008

Ginger

5-29-2001 to 7-5-2008

We Love You Sweetie!

You will always be our little princess.

(I have to write this out...)

I know I told you a thousand times how much I loved you, Ginsing,

when you would lay into my arms like a baby.

You would look up at me, right into my eyes.

And then put your paw on my mouth as if to say,

"Shut the hell up and let me sleep, you freak."

You are, as of this moment, the closest thing I have had to a child.

I know this sounds crazy and nuts, but I don't care. It's true.

And I'm finding it hard to breathe without you around kiddo.

Me and your Mom miss you terribly.

You sleep quietly and peaceful, and I promise,

We'll see you again someday.

It's JUNE!

It's June already and my plan to keep this blog updated has failed. How sad I am. I've done quit a bit since last I posted something. Me & Maribeth went to NC with my family on a very needed vaca. I had a couple different jobs for illustrating and BOBs are doing well. I want to create a BOB Blog sometime soon. We'll see.

My children (My 4 cats and 2 birds) got me a New Grill for father's day. (With the help from Maribeth) That was very, very nice. :)

I'm planning to attend the NAMM convention next week in Nashville, as well as the ICON5 Convention in NY city in July. So I'm as busy as a Illustrator/Music Store Manager.

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by Erica from Knittedfiddle (FiddleLee.etsy.com), who runs an Etsy Treasures blog that features weekly artist interviews. There are a lot of great interviews on the blog so I agreed.

Well, it posted this morning. It's pretty cool. Check it out at:
http://etsytreasures.blogspot.com/

What about BOB?

Oh yeah. I wanted to thank my father officially. One of his many creations

was unvailed a couple days ago on my Etsy site. I'm calling this little guy B.O.B. It stands for "Bunch of Bolts". I'd love to make those copper robots my dad made for me, but I haven't welded in a very long time.

Well...Kudos dad. And thanks.

Now if I could only reproduce your hand drawn Dinosaur book, that would be cool.