Magrilless

Sometime this weekend, I got in the DIY* mood. I’m not necessarily a “crafty” person, or at least not consistently so. But 4 projects have struck my fancy lately, and Sunday was the go-to day. Most of them are still in the works, marinating so to speak, and so you’ll get updates later. But this one we’ve gotten to partake of right away:

It’s a fruit roll-up! Two things occurred to make this seem like fun: 1) I received my replacement dehydrator instruction manual for Christmas (the first one was devoured by a very young puppy who shall remain nameless). And 2) I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the cranberries I have in my freezer that doesn’t involve mounds of cream cheese, butter, or sugar. Mmmm. Cranberry pie. Mmmm. Cranberry cheesecake. Mmmm. Cranberry sauce over ice cream. Mmmm.

I digress.

So, I decided to smoosh up some cranberries with some oranges and a drop of honey and dehydrate the heck out of it. Voila! A pizza-for-one-sized fruit roll-up! And it turns out that really you should add mounds of sugar. Or at least more than a drop of honey. Maybe a banana or two would have done the trick. Well, the dog is enjoying it piece by piece anyway.

But it was successful fruit-roll-up-wise! It made the little leathery sucker! Now I can go on to blueberries and a few cranberries. Or apples and cinammon and a few cranberries. Or bananas and persimmons and we’ll leave out the cranberries. My handy-dandy instruction manual even says yogurt works, although it might take me a little bit to work up to that.

Project #1: Half Thumb Up!

*DIY meaning “do it yourself.” Now you’re fashionable and in the know.

This is the sort of direction that frightens me away from recipes with sugar. How in the world does one quantify soft, firm, semi-firm, hard. Or cold, for that matter. Probably I’d overcook the junk and end up with strawberry jam you break with a hammer. Oh wait, Mother’s already done that.

Not a good precedent.

In my mind, candymaking is only directions like these, with some “a dark caramel color” qualifications thrown in for “clarity.” Hope you have good lighting in your kitchen to discern between dark caramel and golden.

So when the parental units suggested candymaking as a New Year’s activity, I thought, “Well, I won’t be the only one there to screw it up. Or clean it up either. We can have a hammer party and take pictures and remember it forevermore as the most hilarious and doomed recipe endeavor we ever undertook.”

Instead, we ended up with a new New Year’s Day tradition. Thank heavens for recipes that involve candy thermometers. Science to the rescue! And furthermore, scrumptious success!!

What to do if your pot is too deep for your candy thermometer.

Almond bark setting, before adding the chocolate layer on top.

Our kisses aren’t as picture-perfect as the ones by
Mr. Hershey, but they were sure tasty.

What we ended up with at the end of the day:
Rum caramels, Pistachio pralines, Almond bark, Chocolate kisses

And we were afraid that this might be close to true, once you count up all
the tins of leftover candy that wouldn’t fit on the plate.

It has, as of late, been too slick to go running outside. Not to mention it’s a bit chilly too. So what’s one to do for a bit of exercise? Ice skating, of course!

A club from the chemistry department hosted a couple of hours of skating at the university’s skating rink — free of charge for chemists and their friends! So we trundled off to find the little building, nooked in plain sight but never noticed, for a little bit of old-fashioned cross training.

In the end, we both agreed that some of the novelty has worn off since our childhood. Now that we live somewhere that regularly is frozen outside, going inside to freeze just doesn’t hold the same pizzazz. But there is still something absolutely charming about taking off your skates, donning your own shoes, and realizing you’ve forgotten a little bit how to walk.