Cross Another One Off the Life List

Got a little busy last year and lost a lot of my blogging inspiration. Just realized today that I never posted evidence of one of my Life List accomplishments: To make my children their first Halloween costume.

Though I only have one child currently, I am justified in crossing this one off the Life List because I'm pretty sure any subsequent children will wear the same costume for their first Halloween because it took forever to make and because it's pretty original. I made it all myself without a pattern. Even her little sweatpants were made using a second hoodie as they did not have any baby sweats in the right color.

Our first family Halloween costume theme: Chicago Hot Dog

Nathan went as our favorite hot dog restaurant worker (Wolfy's), while I went as your typical Chicagoan Hot Dog Eater, and Eleanor was a Grade A, one of a kind, 100% all Vienna Beef Chicago Hot Dog with all the fixings (poppy seed bun, yellow mustard, onions, pickle relish, sport peppers, and a tomato wedge). I even sprinkled her with celery salt for total authenticity.

New Fruits

We took Sarah up to Devon Avenue the other night for some Indian food. After dinner, we walked around so she could get a feel for Chicago's version of India (not all that far off, really), and stopped at a few of the grocery stores up there that we like. I found SIX new fruits that I haven't tried yet, so we had ourselves a strange fruit tasting last night.

From the top middle, winter melon, a Forelle pear out of South Africa, guava, jack fruit, dosakai, and a burro banana.

The dosakai tasted like a tangy cucumber (almost pickle-like), the winter melon was the blandest melon I've ever had, and the jack fruit was everyone's favorite and truly almost the weirdest fruit I've had yet. Its deep yellow fruit had the consistency of meat, but its flavor was somewhat like a mango. The guava was lightly fruity, but the hard seeds were difficult to get used to, the pear was very nice with a good flavor and firmness, and the banana was terrible! I decided to pan fry it so it really ended up just tasting like french fries. Looking it up later, I should have let it ripen because it's supposed to be a very lemony banana flavor. I think I'm going to have retry this one with a ripe one.

Also, as I typed this, I had a tasty plumcot that I just picked up from Trader Joe's for breakfast.

The Cookie Fairy

One of my goals on my life list was to take cookies to a nursing home, but when I tried that last year, I was told in no uncertain terms that they couldn't accept strange food from strange people because that was a health risk to their patients. I'll still try to meet that goal sometime, but it becomes a bigger goal because I'm going to have to make friends with someone at a nursing home in order to bring them cookies personally (that's still allowed).

In the meantime though, I wanted to do something nice that was related to this goal. A few of our neighbors are older (one just turned 92!), so I thought it would be fun to make a batch of cookies each week (or month, I'm not going to be a stickler about how often I do it) so that I could take a few to the neighbors.

This weekend I made some Oatmeal Carmelitas (though I used more chocolate chips and more nuts than this recipe), which are pretty much the best cookie bar ever invented. You should definitely make a batch tonight. SO GOOD.

I wrapped them up in individual largish servings and dropped them off with a handful of neighbors. It's pretty hard to walk quietly up a wooden staircase when you're six months pregnant, so I'm not sure this Cookie Fairy went completely undetected, but it was nice to think of their pleasure upon discovering their cookies as I munched on the remaining cookie bars.

Weirdest Fruit Ever

While my sisters were visiting, we bought a few new fruits to try. One of them was this one, the African horned melon, sometimes called a kiwano. It was pretty expensive ($5) for one, so I put trying it off for awhile since I didn't want to be disappointed. When we tried it; however, it tasted better than it looks. The edible fruit part of this is the green part, while the white seeds are also edible (like cucumber seeds). The green bit tasted like a mix between banana, kiwi, and cucumber. It was definitely weird, but it was a good weird.

New Fruit

I tried a new fruit this weekend. Now I can add the guayaba to my list. Had sort of a banana-y texture and flavor, but with a fruity element too. Kind of a passion fruit flavor, I think, (though I haven't tried a real passion fruit yet, so that's not scientific.)
 

Forgive the blurry photo. People were staring at
me taking this photo, and I felt self-concious. 
The little yellow things in the front are the guayaba.
They're about the size of golf balls, but really soft.

Lots of seeds, which I ate. It was a little odd, but not bad.

99 Fruits but a Bitter (Melon) Ain't One

Weak joke, that title, I know, but JayZ's voice keeps singing that in my head as I researched my list of fruits I've tried, so I couldn't come up with anything better when it came down to it.

Paw-Paw (Tried in Athens, OH)-Good.
Sweet and pulpy. Kind of like a bland peach.

When I created my Life List, I added the goal to taste 1,000 fruits. It's totally doable because there are thousands of different varieties of many fruits like mangos, apples, grapes, and even watermelons. The biggest problem I'm realizing that I will have naming them all is that so many are represented in grocery stores under their basic name. For example, when you buy grapes, cherries, peaches, nectarines, or plums (just to name a few) in the grocery store, you have the possibility of getting a range of varieties depending on the season. However, for some inexplicable reason, grocery stores vary rarely even mention the variety.

Apples are one of the few fruits that are actually sold by variety, and that's why they are one of the better tasting fruits in grocery produce sections. Because they're sold by variety, they can charge higher prices for the ones that are more difficult to get to market (example: Honeycrisp) because people will pay more knowing that the brand tastes better than those that are cheap and easy to transport (example: Red Delicious). For some reason, this has not yet advanced to other fruits.

I'm actually pretty ashamed to admit that the thought really never crossed my mind before that I was eating different varieties of peaches, nectarines, or plums (among others). You'd think that I would have realized that the variety was the reason that sometimes my stone fruits were delicious and sometimes they were terrible. Still, better late than never! Hopefully, being more aware of the varieties offered in stores will mean that I buy less awful fruit in the future.

Here are a few of the odd fruits I've tried since setting my goal.

Dragon Fruit (Tried in Korea)-Not great.
Didn't have much flavor. Light sweetness, a little grainy.
Might have been overripe.

Yellow Melon (and Dragon Fruit)-Good
Tasted like Honeydew

Loquat (Tried in Jeju, Korea)-Good
Sort of a sweet/sour tiny orange. Annoying amount of seeds.

Chayote (Tried at home/Cooked in Thai dish Nathan made.)-Good
Tastes like a mix between an apple and a potato.
Image by Stephen Crout, The Obsessive Chef

Merry Happy

Merry Christmas!

via Pinterest @AmyDame

I hope you all get lots of reading done over the holidays. I am looking forward to my plane ride to finish a few I've been working on myself for awhile now. Cookie making, present wrapping, shopping, and decorating have been encroaching on my reading time as of late so I haven't added to the book list in awhile, but I'm hoping to pack my suitcase with five or six good books for my upcoming Christmas trip to Savannah. Knowing my husband, however, I will not have even one second to sit and read!

Stay tuned because I'll be posting again soon with a collection of top ten lists from 2011, including my top ten best books of 2011.

Random Acts of Cookies

I love the idea of practicing Random Acts of Cookies.

This was my inspiration to tackle one of my goals on My Life List, to Take Baked Goods to a Nursing Home. There's a nursing home down the block from my house which always makes me a little sad because so many people there spend time sitting outside watching the traffic on Ridge. It's a pretty busy thoroughfare for cars in our neighborhood, but it always strikes me as a bit of a depressing view. It's certainly not a nursing home with a lovely view of the lake, though it does have a modest view of a park across the four lanes of traffic. I guess it's not as bad as it could be. 

Source

Turns out the biggest hurdle is finding a place where it's actually possible to donate homemade food. Apparently if it's any place that is state regulated (which is probably all nursing homes), then you can't. It's a reasonable restriction of course. It means I'm going to have to get creative in order to achieve my life list goal. Going to have to think about this goal some more.

In the meantime, our block club (for which Nathan and I are officers) decided to volunteer at the local food pantry. It was a really great date night actually, and we're planning to head back again to bring by some things for the organization's clothes closet sometime in the next week or two. If you have one near you, I certainly recommend your trying it out.

I'll just have to practice my Random Acts of Cookies on other people who are unprotected by government health codes. Maybe I'll save that for the neighbors in those dull winter months that seem to be right around the corner after the holidays. I'll give people time to set their goals of losing weight and getting healthy in the new year and then, Bam! They'll find a plate of salted caramel brownies waiting eagerly at their front door. Hmm, that seems a bit un-neighborly, doesn't it?

My Life List

I was inspired by a lovely blog I read (Mighty Girl) to create a Life List of things I want to experience, learn, and do sometime in my lifetime.  It's funny, after publishing my list, I have come to realize I've actually already accomplished a few of my entries.  Progress already.  In fact, I'm going to start crossing things off.  And, of course, I'm going to start that list of fruits I've already tasted.  I think I must be able to claim at least 100 so far...