Dinner was on Cooper last night…
Not only did he catch it, he cooked it!
He fried the grouper and smoked the little fish on the hibachi.
The grouper was divine. The other three got mixed reviews.
Cooper was clearly a fan. His grin and the leftovers reminded me of the old cartoon cat that puts the fish in its mouth and pulls it out with nothing left but the spine. As for me, I don’t care much for heads on my plate. It started at the hibachi…their mouths were opened too wide and looked too circular. It was as if they were pleading with us, “Nooooooo!” Plus it’s a lot of work to eat a whole fish like that. You have to pull the skin back and watch for bones. Cooper looked like he knew what he was doing; John did not. Big men shouldn’t eat small fish…he was spitting out bones every other bite. Still, life and dinners are good when you live by the water.
Cooper and Grouper
Honey Cake
Lucky for me, honey is sweet and tasty and it’s the thought that counts…my honey bee cake for John’s birthday party last night was a total disaster. This is what it was supposed to look like courtesy of http://aristolafood.blogspot.com…
And this is what it actually looked like…
Wha-wha 
The only redeeming aesthetic quality was the fondant and almond honey bees. They were very cute, but had they been placed in the center of the cake, they would have drowned. John suggested poking a hole in the center to drain the pool. It’s hard to even say what caused the pool in the first place. It was either the burning or the scraping.
As a child, I thought my mother was this great cook who never burnt anything. Then one day I caught her bent over the sink with a serrated knife scraping a black piece of toast brown again. I had been duped for years; why couldn’t I pull this off for one night? So taking a page from my mother’s waste-not cookbook, I scraped the top right off that cake.
And beyond a burnt bite here and there, the cake tasted nothing like it looked. What was left of the cake was moist and chocolaty with the added and distinct flavor of honey. Slightly different from the average chocolate cake, it was extremely sweet but delicious. I’ll definitely take another crack at it. And everyone with the exception of my father, who kept asking what was with that pool in the center, tried a piece. But who really cares about cake when the company is so cute?
Sarasota Boat Parade of Lights
We had all seen the parade before but never from the water. It was front-row, and it was fun. We tied up in a line of boats along the parade’s route at Marina Jack. 
There was dancing…
There was boat-hopping…
And there were lots of lights…
I don’t know who won the contest; although you can find out at Marina Jack restaurant. The trophy will be on display for the next year. But the birthday boy’s pick for the winner was this 1957 Chevy.
Happy Birthday, John!
John’s birthday was yesterday, but since we love him so much, the celebration is being extended to include the whole weekend. That being said, it didn’t have the most glamorous start. They both start with a “g” but a garage sale is anything but glamorous. Unless, you spend some of your earnings on lobster.
And one was free! Lotsa Lobster is just South of the Sarasota Square Mall, and they’ll give you a free lobster on your birthday…but sorry, kiddies, you have to be 18 to indulge. You also have to spend $10, which is no problem considering their selection of fresh scallops, clams and fish.
With our bellies full of lobster and drawn butter practically seeping from our skin, we floated off to the Sarasota Boat Parade of Lights. The weather was perfect and the sun was setting as we made our way over to Marina Jack.
Sidebar for the house Katherine Harris is building. The word on the street is that it’s a house for entertaining not living. There’s supposedly multiple fireplaces and a large ballroom surrounded by balconies.
Now back to the joys of nature not inheritance…
I haven’t sorted through my pictures of the boat parade yet. To be continued…
Raccoon Tracks?
Since I just posted a photo of a baby raccoon, I just had to post this photo of a baby…
It was an adorable treat delivered to my inbox courtesy of my sister-in-law. This is her three month-old baby boy’s hand next to a raccoon track, and only her husband and God know where they were walking to come across that track. Tie a cape around her neck, and she is Adventure Girl Adventure Mom now. But when she was still Adventure Girl, she and her husband macheted their way through the jungles of Thailand for fun. Thank God there are different types of people in the world because if I am ever macheteing my way through a jungle, my plane went down. They had a guide and still managed to trek so far into the thicket that they accidentally hiked into another country!
But back to the photo, raccoons and babies have strangely similar tracks – size and shape. Could it have been a baby crawling around my pineapple? I do see them around the neighborhood.
The New After-school Hot Spot
Lately I’ve been buying from King Farm at the Phillippi Farmhouse Market on Wednesdays. They don’t have a stand, but another farmer there buys from them. It’s convenient buying my heirloom tomatoes in Sarasota, but the Phillippi market can’t deliver this…
Smiling Ella! By happy coincidence, Cooper and I ran into my sister and niece at King Family Farm and Market yesterday after school. Sisters think alike, and we both love King Farm.
My favorite part of shopping local markets is finding fruit and vegetables passed over by supermarkets. Variety took a serious hit with mass production. There are hundreds of different tomatoes in the world; I see about three types at my local grocery store.
Yesterday’s discovery was Rangpur limes. They look like tangerines and taste like limes, but they’re not limes. They’re a hybrid of Mandarin oranges and lemons.
I wanted to test the sourness because my eyes couldn’t believe these bright orange balls could taste like sour limes, so I told Cooper to take a bite and grabbed the camera.
Yep, Rangpur limes are sour. The juice went into some mango salsa and I took a bite myself to be fair and because his first words after regaining the ability to speak were, “Now I get to hold the camera.” He didn’t get the camera out of me, but a sour bite, he did.
I saw a raccoon in the middle of the day…
…and it didn’t attack me. It was just taking a nap in a tree.
I’ve never been so happy to see a raccoon before. This little baby, or kit in raccoon terms, was absolutely adorable and not at all abnormal. Raccoons are known to nap in trees during the day, and it’s also common for a mother to forage for extra food during the day.
I remember seeing a raccoon skulking along the fence once while gardening; it scared the hell out of me. With my head practically inside a croton weeding underneath it, it was startling to turn around and see a raccoon right behind me about 20 feet away. I immediately went running into the house with the frantic thought of RABIES racing through my head.
But thinking back on it after reading this line from the University of Texas Environmental Health & Safety’s website, “If a nocturnal animal is out during the day and is sick you will know it,” I know that raccoon was fine. The site goes on to say, “The symptoms when an animal is sick or injured can vary, but regardless it’s fairly obvious that something is wrong.” The raccoon that scared me wasn’t foaming at the mouth; it wasn’t trying to approach me; it wasn’t acting crazy in any way. It was actually acting quite normal trying to sneak behind me undetected. I was the one acting rabid running for the door.
I’m not suggesting you try to feed them as if they are ducks by a pond, but day-foraging raccoons have an unnecessarily bad name. There’s no reason to automatically assume they are all rabid…and look how cute!
Happy Thanksgiving!
We spent the day with family and friends at someone else’s house…and that may be what I’m most thankful for this year – no cooking, no cleaning and no dishes. All I had to be responsible for was fruit. I can’t remember a recent Thanksgiving morning when I’ve had so much free time on my hands; the proof is in the fruit.
If all I had to bring was fruit, then I was bringing FRUIT! Some boring fruit salad would just not do, and as I proudly set my gigantic fruit art down on the table, my teenage niece says, “God, you always have to show off.” Add an eye-roll and here’s the face to go with that comment.
Mary
LOL! Thanksgiving is about family, and OMG I’m turning into my father. Leave it to a teenager to point it out. Although I don’t think either of us are show-offs per say…over-the-top on occasion? Yep.
It a weird thing when you realize you are the person you’ve been making fun of. I was just goofing on him today with my sister because he’s walking now. To a normal person, this would consist of simply walking more. But to my father, he has to plan his whole day around his walks because each one has to be two hours long. He bought a new iPod, that I know of only because he forced my little brother to load it, but I’m betting there are more shiny, new things strapped to him too – a pedometer perhaps, at the very least, new sneakers. And his iTunes bill probably cost more than my phone bill last month.
But here I sit, the mocking woman who couldn’t just bring fruit salad. My house is littered with the evidence of past gung-ho efforts – reams of scrapbook paper, pounds of soap, shards of tile, the list goes on. Oh well, one more thing to be thankful for today – the ability to laugh at myself.
And if you’d like to make a fruit bouquet yourself, it’s actually not as difficult or ostentatious as my niece would have you believe. It’s all in the tools – cookie cutters and skewers. 
I cookie cut all the pieces before assembling the bouquet and kept popping the fruit in and out of the fridge to keep the pieces cool and fresh.
The base is a half a watermelon, fruit kept in tact to hold the skewers in place. As long as you cut your fruit slices thin enough to clear your cookie cutters, this is an easy project with some show-off, wow factor. Yes, Mary, you will be seeing this fruit bouquet again.
Hitchhikers
Having worked at a domestic violence and rape crisis center for seven years, I would never recommend picking up hitchhikers. It is highly dangerous as a woman and not much less dangerous as a man. Watch Monster starring Charlize Theron for proof of this; it was based on the true story of a murdering, hitchhiking prostitute. Still, I’ve had a couple of hitchhikers lately convince me there is such a thing as safe hitchhikers; although they don’t follow the conventional thumb rules. They just hop on – rude but cute.
Potatoes Aren’t Just for Mashing
The ingredients for ceviche were a bonus; yesterday’s goal ingredient that we could not and would not leave the farmers market without were organic potatoes…not for cooking, for science class.
Cooper’s hypothesis: If I introduce fertilizer and pesticides to a potato, then it will produce more phosphoric acid therefore increasing the voltages. The YouTube video that sparked his interest: How to Make a Potato Battery.
His hypothesis was wrong; the voltages were about the same regardless of organic versus non-organic, but anything that requires a knife and voltage is a fun project for a 13 year-old boy. And by the end of the weekend he had transformed the potato batteries into potato targets.
He made a slingshot out of a stick, clothespin, duct tape, ruler, hollowed-out pen, and piece of elastic. The arrow is a skewer with a nail duct taped to the top. The gadget works so well that he was slinging the skewers into our back fence and they were sticking in the wood!
It was in the news recently that many of the techies in Silicon Valley send their children to a Waldorf school that doesn’t use computers and even discourages their use at home because they stifle creativity and intelligence. The potatoes and slingshot have me believing.
Cooper has suffered a series of unfortunate events lately. First his computer blew, literally, it was smoking. Second, our cable company made a change that requires a new box we haven’t picked up yet, so he’s down on channels. Third, he came home with a terrible report card and got his tablet taken away. His situation is now what I grew up with – basic cable…boohoo. But on the sympathetic side, in teenage wasteland today, no Facebook equals desert island. I can’t wait to see what the upcoming five-day holiday weekend will bring…hopefully nothing sharper or faster than flying nails.