Late Start

        Saturday was so busy for me that I got a late start on my letter blog this week and may not meet my Sunday evening deadline.

          “We enjoy it whenever it arrives. You’re the only one who feels like there’s a deadline. We don’t pay you enough to sweat it. Oh, wait, we don’t pay you nothing. LOL. Just love and admiration,” my beautiful Missouri gal says.

          I’m always thankful for your love, but I don’t know about that admiration stuff, and Linda, you’re just a little bit wrong about the pay thing. Y’all do pay me. Just not with money. And quite honestly, there’s no amount of money that could ever equal the satisfaction I get when I read your comments.

          “I am so blessed to have a friend like you,” J.D., one of my readers writes. “The cost of all these letters is stunning.” I snail mail my letter blogs to him. Most weeks I pay for a one-ounce stamp, seventy-eight cents. “I’m not sure I’m worth it but I can’t say enough about how fortunate I feel. You have a unique story telling style that is fun to read and the way the pictures are placed perfectly illustrates your writing. Not only is it fun to see such beautiful scenery but the information about what I’m seeing, from historical details to the details of plants and things, makes your stories rich.”

          So, keep your love and comments coming.

          So, Saturday, as I said, was busy.

          One of the things my beautiful Jody and I talked about on our Michigan trip was recycling. My trash company used to do recycling but when they quit, I didn’t know where to take my recyclables. I’ve kept so many containers that my handsome husband has started to call me a hoarder.

          “It’s not hoarding if it’s for crafts!” I defend.

          Quite honestly, I have more than I can use. I just hate throwing them away but recycling them won’t bother me near as much.

          “The Boy Scouts set up a recycling station at the Wilmot Fire Company every second Saturday of the month from nine to eleven,” Jody told me.

          Yesterday, if I finish and post this on Sunday, was the second Saturday of the month.

          “I want to go and see if they have a list of things they accept,” I told Mike and that would take time out of my blogging Saturday.

          That in and of itself wouldn’t take a great amount of time but Saturday was also the day my little country church was having a potluck for a visiting missionary that we help support.

          Potluck.

That means that we do the cookin’. That’s really way okay for a lot of us ladies as it allows us to showcase our cooking and baking skills. I decided I’d make my beautiful cousin Stacey’s mac and cheese recipe, a grape salad, and for shits and grins, Dandelion Cupcakes.

“Dandelion Cupcakes!” you say.

Yep. It has dandelion flower petals in it.

I did as much prep work as I could on Friday. I made the mac and cheese and all I had to do was pop it in the oven for twenty-five minutes before leaving the house.

The caramel syrup in the grape salad tends to go to the bottom after a few hours so I had the grapes washed and cut in half, the cream cheese/sour cream sauce made, pecans toasted, and I’d assemble it Saturday afternoon.

I’ve never made Dandelion Cupcakes before. I didn’t know if I could make them Friday and they’d still be good Saturday or not so I didn’t want to chance it. I’d have to make them Saturday.

And that made for a very busy Saturday.

The first thing I had to do was pick dandelions. That wasn’t a hardship at all as my yard is full of their little sunshiny heads.

I had time to go out and pick before we left to visit the recycling center. I’d read someplace that the best time to pick herbs was just after the dew was gone. That’s when they retain the most nutrients. So, I went out early, but maybe it was just a tad too early. These guys open with the sun and they weren’t fully open yet.

I have my bag and I have Bondi with me. She’s sniffing and exploring and I’m walking along plucking the biggest heads I could find. Those were in the weed line. The ones in the yard were smaller. I’m guessing they have to hurry and bloom before the mower strikes again.

I’m reaching for a blossom and stop. It looks like something was eating the flower. I never gave it one thought as to what that something is or was, I just passed the flower by.

Then I see what that something is! Who knew snails ate dandelions? Not me!

I sat on the patio with a cup of coffee, a measuring cup, my bag full of flowers, and I went to work. I only took the best parts of the flower, namely the center. I was afraid if I got too close to the edge, I’d get some green in and that’s the bitter part. It was a little bit of a job to get enough petals to make a cup, but it wasn’t too bad.

“How many flowers did it take?”

I knew you were going to ask me that! I counted. One, two, three… it didn’t take long until I was picking up and dropping the flowers back into the bag by twos. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty … the whole way to a hundred! I was tired of counting and guesstimated that there were probably fifty more. My answer? A hundred and fifty flowers.

Then it was nine o’clock and time for the recycling run.

          It’s a nice drive down along the Susquehanna.

          I barely got my camera up in time to snap a picture of all these Black Vultures sitting on someone’s garden fence.

          We pulled in and parked. A couple of young men came to help unload the recyclables. Little did they know that I didn’t have any this trip.

          “I’m just looking for some information,” I told them and walked over to one of the adults in the group.

          “Do you have a paper or something to tell me what you accept?” I asked.

          “Oh yeah,” a gal replied, picked up a laminated sheet, and handed it to me.

          “You don’t have anything I can take with me?” I asked.

          “No, sorry.”

          Then the sometimes slow and dim lightbulb goes off in my head. “I’ll just take a picture of it.”

          I didn’t read the sheet. Why would I? Now that I have a picture of it, I can read it anytime I want! In hindsight, it answered a lot of questions I asked one of the other volunteers. Luckily, he was nice and even though he could’ve said something snide like, all that’s on the sheet, he didn’t. He was polite and answered all of my questions.

          I’m excited to start recycling again. It saves our oceans and our landfills and our resources.

          So that didn’t really take very long.

          Mike took the dusty dirt roads on the way home and I took a few more pictures for you.

          The Dogwood is blooming.

          “Want me to stop?” Mike asked.

          “No, that’s okay. There’s one at the church. I’ll get a close-up picture then.”

          I set to work on the cupcakes as soon as we got home — and I got another cup of coffee made. The first thing I had to do was find a cupcake tin.

          “It only makes twelve,” I was telling my feisty redheaded neighbor. “People might only want a taste so I’m going to cut ‘em in half. But first, I have to find a cupcake tin.” In my mind’s eye, I was seeing myself digging through boxes in the wayback. About a year or so ago, I cleaned out my pantry. The things I didn’t think I’d use were relegated to a box and stored back there. And the cupcake tin was one of the things I hardly ever use.

           “Lamar has to find my angel food pan for me,” Miss Rosie said. “I’m going to make a peach angel food cake and I think it’s way in the back of the bottom cupboard because I haven’t used it in a really long time either.”

          Despite thinking my cupcake tins were in the way back, I stopped and took a gander at the pantry shelves. Guess what I found?

          “A cupcake tin?” you guess.

          And that’s a good guess. What I actually found were three mini cupcake tins. I have no idea where or when I acquired them but there they were! This is even better! I’m thinking to myself. (Who else would I be thinking it to?) With mini cupcakes I don’t have to cut them in half.

The batter for these cupcakes was pretty straightforward. It has all the things in it that you’d expect. It did have a lot of butter in it, though. One and a half sticks. At least I think that’s a lot.

I Googled how much batter to use. The internet says a standard cupcake will give you three times the mini cupcakes.

How fortunate that I have three, I’m thinking. Then it occurs to me that whatever yard sale I’d picked them up at probably knew that and that’s why there were three.

          I pulled out the scoops that my beautiful cousin Lorraine had given me and the first one I tried filled the little mini cupcake cup the whole way to the top with batter. I scooped up and deposited a second scoop into a second cup and stopped. It took me that long to realize that continuing on that path would be folly. They should only be two-thirds full. I left the batter in the cups and got out the smaller of the scoops. This time I measured how much liquid it held and it was one tablespoon. Exactly what the internet said I should use. I filled all thirty-six cups and had tons of batter left over. I popped ‘em in the oven to bake while I decided what to do with the rest of the batter.

          A bread tin? I don’t think that’ll work.

          Dig out another cupcake tin? I was dreading going into the wayback and digging through boxes.

          I’ll just pop the cupcakes out and refill the tins, was what I decided to do. And I also decided to live on the edge. I’m not washing and re-greasing the tins either!

          The minis only took about ten minutes to bake. Well, except for the two jumbos. They went back in the oven with the second batch and basked in the warmth of the oven for another ten minutes. I ended up with fifty-six mini cupcakes.

          “Bark. Bark-bark. Bark-bark-bark. Bark-bark-bark-bark-bark-bark!” went Bondi.

          Translation. ‘Mom! Come quick! I found something! Mom-mom-mom-mom-mom-mom!”

          “What did you find?” I asked Bondi when I went out in the yard. “Did you find a snake?”

          When I get close enough, I see it’s a feather. I looked around and didn’t see any other bird parts laying around. Maybe the bird got away from the cat or he took it somewhere else to eat it. “It’s a feather,” I told Bondi and picked it up. I held it out to her and she backed up. I had to laugh at her. “It’s just a feather, you silly girl.” She got brave enough to put her nose up and sniff it, then she grabbed it, chewed it up in revenge, and spit it out.

          While waiting for the cupcakes to cool, I put the grape salad together.

          The cupcakes didn’t take very long to cool so I was able to go right on and make the lemon buttercream frosting. I’ve never piped frosting onto a cupcake before but by golly I was gonna try it now. I can’t imagine how long it would take to use a knife and spread the frosting on all those tiny cupcakes. I put it in a bag, cut the corner, and piped it on. It was fast and easy. Can you spot the jumbos?

          “What did they taste like?” you wanna know.

          Here’s the thing. I plucked a pinch — pinched a pluck— of flowers and tasted ‘em. They didn’t taste like much of anything. The recipe has honey and lemon zest in the batter, lemon zest and lemon juice in the frosting, so I think they tasted honey/lemony.

          It was one-thirtyish when I was able to sit in front of my computer. I made a card for my cupcakes. I called ‘em Sunshine Cupcakes and underneath that I wrote, Made with dandelion flower petals. Dandelion flowers are an antioxidant, reduce inflammation, detoxify the blood and stabilize blood sugar.

          Then I worked on my letter blog for a while. I download pictures from my camera, sorted out the ones I thought I’d use, edited and reduced their size. I even had enough time to write a line or two before I had to get up and get ready for the potluck.

          As you can well imagine, there was a lot of food there. What surprised me was we didn’t have a lot of people. Usually when food is involved, the turnout is larger.

          Tom has been serving in Nicaragua for a year now. At the end of dinner he gave us a nice talk about his mission and took questions.

          Later, I asked that handsome Lamar Kipp what the Dandelion Cupcakes tasted like.

          “They taste like dandelion cupcakes,” he said, being no help at all.

          Miss Rosie thought they were earthy, or green tasting.

          Jody thought they tasted lemony.

          Sunday, Tom gave us a look into how he teaches group leaders to be effective group leaders. He calls it Stories of Hope and has a whole formula to follow. “It’ll work with any of the parables,” Tom told us.

Some of us need formulas. I wrote as fast as I could but soon realized it was futile. I’d ask for a copy of his notes afterward. It was both and interesting and inspirational service.

          Then, surprise! At the end, Tom announced that he would make both his notes and the outline for Stories of Hope available to us. I’m happy to pass them on to anyone who wants them.

           My week was bigger than Saturday Sunday. I have maybe thirty more pictures and more stories to show you, some of them from last week! Aye-yi-yi! But maybe this is enough for now. And if some of them get lost in the shuffle, then that’s the way it’s going to have to be.

          Let’s call this one done!