The roundcheeked expressions and little body language of my cutest and most trusted critic so far while thoroughly critiquing The Scary Monsterare precious! That is what makes me going with passion! Thank you Benji!
Today I feel like celebrating The Scary Monster on Amazon and its critical acclaim sharing with you a deliciously easy summer dessert; don’t we also need some sweetness to finish in bellezza (literally in beauty) our pick nicks, pot locks, and all kind of happy gatherings with family and friends?
Fluffy Pineapple Cake.
What you need for 8-10 people:
One can of crushed pineapples, including their juice
1 box of Angel Cake mix
2 tbs of pine nuts*
*In case of allergies, substitute the pine nuts with dark chocolate chips.
From Celery Charles & Pals.
What to do:
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
In a bowl, pour the Angel Cake mix, the crushed pineapples with their juice, and mix very well.
Add the pine nuts and mix again.
Pour everything in a baking pan and bake until the top is tanned (About 40 minutes)
Extract from the oven and let cool down.
The cake will be ready to eat when it comes out of the pan easily.
You might find that the fluffy cake is delicious with a garnish of strawberry spread, or simply with fresh berries.
I am sure most of you find that young children instinctively give a role to their adults in their mind; it usually is what they perceive one particular adult does the most. In our case it was like: mommy goes to the supermarket and papa’ (dad) can fix it!
Finally, after 73 years of drought, my husband’s family had a baby girl! And I had my May girl! Everybody was a winner. Our little boy, always very curios and observant, while I was changing his baby sister’s diaper one day noticed that something was amiss. “Mommy, she doesn’t have a birillino!” (little pin), he told me surprised and somewhat concerned; in his experiencethat was a piece she definitely couldn’t function without! Well, he was barely two, what was I going to say? “OH, no! I must have forgotten to put it there while she was in my tummy.” “Don’t worry mommy, we go to the supermarket and we buy one!” was his reassuring answer. “And papa’ can fix it!” Satisfied of the brilliant solution he had just thought of, he went back to his toys. Problem solved!*
Tings where not always smooth after we brought his baby sister home from the hospital. If at the beginning she was a peculiar novelty that fueled his endless curiosity, pieces missing and all, eventually he realized that she was there to stay. On second thought: couldn’t she be returned to the factory like we had done with the fire engine truck that had arrived with out one wheel?!
*On the other side of the coin, like we say in Italy, when one of my younger sisters, also barely two, saw our mother change our baby brother’s diaper, with eyes out of their orbit alerted her, “MAMMA! Look where he has a ditino!” (little finger). In her experiencethatwas an absolutely superfluous item he was delivered with! Missing birillini, superfluous ditini: how confusing!
Our little rascal was about a year old when I got pregnant again. My desire was to have a May girl, but there was a glitch: while in my family girls abound, in my husband’s family they seemed to have lost the mold and there had not been a girl, nowhere also within his extended family, in 73 years. When I was wondering what the new baby would be, I was always told, “A boy, what else?”
My thought was, “I will love him to death, but will keep going for the girl!” “You have been warned!”, I notified my husband, expecting he could actually do something about it. The poor man almost collapsed at the thought of the couple of male sport teams we were going to create in the quest for a girl who would never materialize. Then for minor reasons I had to have a couple of medical tests done, and while giving us the results the doc inadvertently hinted that I might be expecting a girl. (We have never wanted to know the sex of the baby we were expecting.)
When the notion of the possibility that the new baby was going to be a girl hit him, my husband asked me, “What do we do with a girl?” There’s no need for special skills, really?! My parents had four of us, and finally a boy (one, the third baby after my second sister and I, had died in infancy). I am the eldest of the bunch and, since I was seven, the one who did with my dad what he would have done with a boy, while his son was still a baby. Also, my second sister and I never played with dolls, unless you consider the times we played cowboy and Indian and we used our younger sisters’ (“the girls”) dolls as prisoners.
In the countryside at the age of 12 I was driving the farm’s old, bitten up Fiat 500, with a weird ignition and obviously a manual shift, on the paths bordering the fields. My father, who in his youth had raced cars and motorcycles, and had scars to show for it, was as proud as he was worried when at 20 I got a Kawasaki 400*. Girls can do it all!
Not too early to teach her, is it?
Interesting enough, the first comment that came out of my husband’s mouth, an Italian man who was soon probably going to be the father of a girl, was, “I will have to start my collection of guns!”
*My Kawasaki was great fun and I felt so cool driving it in Florence until during a summer, to avoid a truck coming towards me on a narrow dirt road while at the beach (picture shorts and a flimsy top), I flew into a thick thorny bush, coming out of it looking like a porcupine. Note to self: the truck might actually have been the better choice!
Jenny and Josh is a series of books about the daily occurrences in the life of growing children. It involves events important to them, like the loss of a tooth, the fear of a nightly thunderstorm, isn’t the bank going to give us money? Why is our skin all kind of different colors? We will follow Jenny and Josh, two young siblings, through their early years’ growing up journey.
Loosing a baby tooth is a big event in children’s young lives! The fear of feeling pain is usually eased by the thought of the reward the Tooth Fairy will bring overnight. But what if the child is sleeping in a different bed, in a different country; will the Tooth Fairy know where to go to collect the fallen tooth and leave the reward?
Jenny finds a foreign coin.
It is an Euro
The Worldly Tooth Fairy‘s introduction.
A brief history of the Tooth Fairy:
Centuries ago, in Europe, when a child’s baby tooth fell it was customary to bury it in the ground with the belief that a new tooth would grow in its place.
As long ago as the Vikings’ time children’s teeth were said to bring good luck in battle and warriors would hang them on a string around their neck. It is said that the children received some sort of payment for their teeth.
When, eventually, most people left the fields and moved to towns and cities, land wasn’t always available any longer, and people began placing baby teeth in flower pots. After which teeth are placed under a child’s pillow or a glass on their night table. The parents’s task is to quietly exchange the fallen tooth with some money during the night, when the child is asleep.
Curious children wanted to know what happened to their fallen teeth; the Tooth Fairy was born. The myth of the Tooth Fairy helps assuage and comfort children fearful of the pain that might result from the loss of a tooth. Also, parents use it to encourage their kids to take care of their oral hygiene as it is made known to children that the Tooth Fairy will reward them more for a perfect tooth than for a decayed one. Tooth Fairies have been known to leave appreciative notes praising the children for their good dental habits.
Contrary to the looks of other famous folk characters like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, over the arc of time the Tooth Fairy has been rendered in different shapes and sizes: from animals like mice, cats, dogs, beavers and squirrels, to human males or females of various ages. Jenny’s is a modern, green haired, purple skinned Tooth Fairy. She is well traveled, able to find Jenny anywhere in the world, and smart enough to know what kind of currency to bring her in exchange for her baby teeth.
I’ll see you tomorrow with more from Jenny and Josh.
Fun fact:
Once, while in Switzerland, a Tooth Fairy friend of grandmother’s left one Swiss Franc for our little boy’s fallen baby tooth. Either she particularly liked that tooth, or she was very generous, or math wasn’t her thing and she didn’t realize that with the current exchange she was overpaying. The good thing is that our little fellow was too young to realize that when back in the States the Tooth Fairy would short change him of about 50 cents for each of the baby teeth that would fall next!
There was one merenda we, kids, loved that someone could have considered… controversial? Tuscany is the land of good wine, and among our various tasty merende (plural) was pane, vino e zucchero, bread, wine and sugar.
A drizzle of red wine was poured over slices of freshly baked bread, then covered with a thin coat of sugar.
Although we devoured merende of pane vino e zucchero at a single digit age, and we grew up with wine on the table at every meal, my siblings and I (five of us) never had a problem with alcohol. Wine wasn’t a forbidden fruit, which made it not interesting. Just saying…
In fact, although there are producers of great wines in our immediate family, I didn’t start to drink it until my mid twenties, when my father in law, a true connoisseur and collector, would take me into his cellar to choose the wine for the meal our family was about to share. Far from being an expert, at least I now know what I like or don’t. As a Tuscan D.O.C., I favor red wine!
Fun fact of the Fun fact
My in laws lived in Switzerland where by law all homes were required to have a ‘bunker’ in the basement: a windowless room with cement walls and a ‘safe like’ metal door. Also by law, people were required to store non perishable food and basic necessities in the bunker, to be able to survive for a while in case of a nuclear attack.
My in laws’ bunker was furnished with stacks of shelves on all walls. One wall stored what was required by law. The other three walls were my father in law’s cellar, and contained a collection of a couple of hundreds bottles of wine from all over the planet. The way my father in law looked at it was, “If we have to die we’ll die happy!”
