New Home
Hi Everyone!
I just wanted to let you know that Boopy is finding a new home. We’re staying in the same neighbourhood (WordPress) but we’re just upgrading. Unfortunately we had to change the name site name slightly to www.boopybaby.com.
I’m still in the process of getting that up and running, so in the next couple of days, if you can’t find us here, please check us out at BoopyBaby.
Thanks for visiting!
Nicole & Ella
Not just for looks
My presentation guru Garr has posted this Free Hugs video on his site to promote beautiful, simple presentations. As I watched this 3 minute-plus video, I cried. Not for it’s visual excellence, but because it’s such a fantastic philosophy.
Sending you a virtual big hug until we see each other in person.
Nicole
Marshmallow Spiderwebs
When I was a child, my grandmother lived with us. 
She was a professional chef by trade and did all the cooking and baking in our home. We were allowed to pour our own cold cereal in the morning and make some toast, but beyond that, the kitchen was her domain. If you wanted to help, you were allowed to wash the dishes, but never did your hands become involved and deliciously connected with the ingredients as hers did with flour and dough and cocoa powder.
I loved being with her in the kitchen, just watching and anticipating licking the batter out of the bowl once she scraped it almost clean was a great way for me to spend a quiet afternoon. The delicious smells she created, her relaxed attitude about food and the connection it made with your heart and soul, not your hips, gave me the confidence later in life to pick up the spatula and try my hand at it too. But because she was such an accomplished chef (she used to own and manage a hotel with my grandfather in Sweden before he passed away, ran her own bakery after that and then worked in all the top hotels and restaurants in Stockholm) we were never to have anything as pedestrian (and commercial) as Rice Krispy Squares grace our counter tops. No way.
So yesterday when I found myself at the grocery store purchasing Rice Krispys to make squares with the marshmallows left over from our weekends up north, I was concerned that I didn’t have a knowledge base to accomplish the task at hand. I’ve successfully made chocolate souffles with vanilla sauce, deluxe bread-pudding with chocolate and cranberries (Steve makes the butter sauce), dense chocolate tortes (can you tell that I like chocolate) all from scratch. But Rice Krispy squares? Lucky for me, instructions are on the box.
Once Ella was down for her afternoon nap I went to work. It was quite an experience. Easy and yet it weirded me out. I like marshmallows at the end of a fresh switch from a pine tree over a mesmerizing camp fire, burned to a carcinogenic crisp on the outside, soft and exceptionally gooey on the inside, squished between two chocolate wafers (Smors a la Nicole!). That’s it! Don’t give me a raw marshmallow, I’ll gag. Don’t put little floating ones in my hot chocolate, you might get me coughing it all up across the table at you. So when I started the marshmallow melting processes I realized that I might not even be able to enjoy them over a camp fire again. The way they slowly broke down in the pan and then stuck and pulled like a gazillion spider strings, grossed me out completely!
Then I added the Rice Krispys and vanilla extract, and the spider legs and stings increased and stuck to everything. The pan, the spoon, the spatula, my fingers…I was happy to get it all into the Pyrex pan, cover them and put them in the fridge to harden into that treat that I enjoy so much. Will I make them again? I guess if we have marshmallows left over and Steve and Ella ask 100 times or more, then yes, I’ll make them again. But as it stands now, I don’t think so.
