What’s a common misconception people have about happiness?
One thing I know about happiness is that it’s fleeting. There’s really no such thing as “happily ever after.” Things will change. They always do.
Here in the United States, millions had a happy day yesterday. New Yorkers reached a state of high ecstasy celebrating their championship basketball team—the Knicks. And we all got to see our inspirational former leader—America’s first Black President—Barack Obama open the new, magnificent Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. All of our living presidents and their wives were there, except the Incompetent Orange Fascist currently occupying Our White House. He was not invited. There were speeches and incredible musical performances by everyone from Jennifer Hudson to Eddie Vedder.
We got reminded of how far we’ve come and what the future could be, if we don’t give up. Michelle Obama’s speech was so beautiful it made me cry. Check it out here.
Combined with all the World Cup joy in Boston and beyond (thank you Tartan Army) and the successful Artemis 2 voyage earlier this year, I’m reminded that Americans can be happy again.
Also, I just read that the correct guy won the special election in the UK yesterday, which is also great news.
Read President Obama’s speech here. For me, the opening of the Obama Presidential Center was the real celebration of America’s 250th birthday.
NYT Cooking’s Salmon with Avocado and Cilantro salad. This is part of my eat more salad to lose weight quest. Unfortunately I followed it up with a big bowl of freshly baked peanut butter cookies and vanilla ice cream.
I’m still celebrating my own birthday (which was last Tuesday), even though everyone else is over it.
On my actual birthday the weather was spectacular. My son met us at a new-to-me restaurant with a great waterside location. That’s obviously the parking lot side behind us in the picture, but we were looking out onto a lovely lake.
Turnpike Market in Billerica, MA has been nearby for years with this nice view and I had no idea.
The food was good too!
I like when a restaurant knows it’s my birthday, so my husband told them. They didn’t sing to me, but I did get to meet the owner and they sent out a lovely tiramisu for dessert.
Birthday flowers from my very thoughtful son
On Thursday, I got to see my daughter and my granddaughter. Yay!
Loved this gift so much!
And this ❤️
“Birthday week” continued last night with the opening of the new Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day. I got a delicious “Passion Star Martini” and fried dumplings beforehand.
Passion Star Martini: Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Licor 43, passion fruit liqueur, mango infused syrup, lime, sparkling wine float
Today I’m making my husband go to a downtown Boston art museum with me.
After that, I don’t think I’ll be able to play the birthday card again until next year.
A beautiful spring cupcake with about an inch of delicious buttercream frosting from Magnolia Bakery
It’s dessert. I’m always headed towards dessert. I walk, I swim, I close the rings on my Apple Watch, I eat the salad, I eat the fruit, I don’t have seconds…all so I can have dessert. That’s the point of it all.
My daughter discovered this. Or maybe she saw it on TikTok.
Melt a dark chocolate bar.
I do it by breaking it up and microwaving for 30 second intervals at 50% power.
The secret is to quit microwaving while you still have lumps. Just stir the chocolate until it’s perfectly smooth. You don’t want to burn the chocolate in the microwave.
Prepare a small pan or large plate with a piece of wax paper. Dip sumo orange slices, banana, pineapple, strawberries or other types of fresh fruit in the chocolate and place them on the wax paper. Put the pan in the fridge until the chocolate hardens. It doesn’t take long.
Chocolate-covered fruit can be stored in Tupperware or ziplock bags in the fridge for a few days.
Yesterday our furnace died. Maybe the blizzard was just too much to keep up with, but it was only 14 years old. It should’ve had a few more years left. Note to everyone: never buy a Maytag furnace. We had several other problems with it before its untimely death.
Fortunately, my husband got right on it and we’re having a new one installed this morning. (K’Ching$$$) In the meantime, it’s cold in here! I’m thinking it’s about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, but I have my coffee and my Comfy, I’ll be fine.
Last night we lit a fire in our fireplace and I made s’mores and then put them on top of ice cream for mixing in. It took some effort to crush the s’more and fully mix it with the ice cream, but I did it. It was good. Not as good as the best mix-in I ever invented, but yummy.
The chocolate didn’t melt as much as I would’ve like, but I managed.
Here are some of my post-blizzard pics from Tuesday.
This is the snowbank at the TOP of my driveway—right next to the house. I’m 5’ 8.5” so that’s a lot of snow. The plow guy has no other place else to pile it all up. There’s a flower garden under there, which I’m worried about. Note: I had to balance my phone on a trashcan with my mitten and use “timer” to take this photo. That’s real skill.My aptly named street Neighborhood snowbankI can’t tell if this mailbox is still attached to its post. Sometimes the plows knock off mailboxes and people just shove them into the snowbanks until they can be repaired. People then try to make the town do the repairs, but I know from experience, it’s easier to do it yourself.
In all, we got about 12-14 inches of new snow, but Rhode Island really got slammed. They beat their Blizzard of ‘78 record, with 35” inches in Providence (38” at the airport).
A couple weeks ago, I was trying to figure out what to make for a family birthday dinner. I decided that I wanted to try making a “Minnesota Hot Dish” in honor of the brave people of Minneapolis who stood up to ICE in the coldest weather imaginable for weeks on end. I have never been to Minnesota, but I was intrigued by their hot dish recipes that Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar and others were always talking about during the last election cycle.
Being a typical East Coast liberal, I went straight to The New York Times to find a recipe and this one sounded good: Tater Tot Casserole. Everyone liked it. There were no leftovers. I forgot to take a picture, but it looked identical to the photo in the recipe.
As some of the recipe commenters noted, the point of a Minnesota Hot Dish is to make something delicious, filling and easy. (That’s why a can of condensed soup is a typical ingredient.) Commenters said that only the NYT could find a way to make it hard. BUT it really wasn’t that hard. In the NYT version, you basically make your own condensed soup, which took a bit of doing, but I really liked that it didn’t come out too salty. It tasted very good. (I didn’t add any of the optional salt listed because I used 4-5 of those little beef bouillon granulated packets for the base and I was already worried they would make it too salty.)
For dessert, my husband requested a double layer chocolate cake. And, since it’s the Year of the Knee, I felt bad for him and decided to make one from scratch. Again, I went to the NYT and attempted the richest, most chocolaty, most decadent birthday cake imaginable. This, I would NOT make again. Too hard! And waaaay too much butter. There are five sticks of butter in this thing (two in the cake and three in the frosting), plus tons of cacao and melted dark chocolate. I mean, it was very good, but it was a lot.
Birthday cake for my two Aquarians ♒️
Here’s the recipe, in case you are a true chocoholic. And yes, I did serve it with vanilla ice cream, because what is even the point if you skip the ice cream?
If you’re an older GenX American woman like me, you have feelings about Martha Stewart.
Maybe you liked her in the 80s and had a few linen skirts that looked just like hers. In the 90s, maybe you started to find her annoying when your friends threw over-the-top wedding showers that made you feel inadequate. Then maybe you were indignant that authorities had the GALL to put Martha in JAIL in 2004 on ridiculous charges and she took it like a champ and helped the other women she met in the slammer.
And maybe after that, you found Martha & Snoop an amusing duo and realized that no matter what she does, you will pay attention because she is Martha Stewart. And you are not.
On that note, I made Martha Stewart’s Cacio E Pepe With Lemon last night. Yes, I was annoyed that the “Grana Padano” cheese she uses is not readily available in stores. The Whole Foods cheese guy hadn’t even heard of it. How very Martha! (I substituted Parmigiano-Reggiano and it was fine.) And yes, I was irritated that I had to grind 4 teaspoons of pepper by hand, because everyone knows that when Martha calls for “freshly cracked pepper” she means it. And finally, NO I did not happen to have a MEYER lemon on hand, but thankfully Martha made it clear that any lemon would do.
The result was good. Very good.
I doubled the recipe so I could use the whole package of spaghetti, rather than half.
Martha Stewart’s “Cacio e Pepe with Lemon” “Cacio e Pepe” is simply pasta with cheese and pepper and it’s a classic Roman dish.
I wanted to make a special dessert for Christmas dinner so I decided to try a “Baked Alaska” which is something I’ve always wanted to do. It was a Bucket List dessert for me. I wasn’t even clear on exactly what’s in it, but I had a vague memory that it is delicious and special and involves flames. I think our next door neighbor growing up (Carolyn) made Baked Alaska for her big annual Christmas Eve parties. If my memory is right, Carolyn covered hers with actual flaming liquor as the final step. The internet has many examples of that step going horribly wrong, so I chose to follow my favorite baking website’s version of the recipe, which doesn’t include lighting alcohol on fire, but did urge me to purchase a kitchen torch so we could still experience some drama.
Sally’s Baked Alaska Recipe is a brownie base, with two 1.5 quart containers of any flavor ice cream (I used mint chip), covered with a toasted meringue dome. According to her recipe, if you don’t have a kitchen torch, you can bake the whole thing (ice cream and all) in a hot oven for a few minutes to toast the meringue.
I had a couple setbacks along the way. The first was that my 35-year old handheld electric mixer died during the ice cream beating step. It started to make a funny sound and then smoke started pouring out of it. I had to yank the plug out of the wall and dump the whole appliance in the trash. Fortunately, the ice cream was mostly creamy by then and I was able to finish up with a wooden spoon.
The disastrous part was that I hadn’t yet made the meringue. Have you ever tried to make meringue with ONLY a hand whisk? It took my husband and me one full hour of whisking to get the egg whites, sugar and cream of tartar to turn into “glossy meringue with stiff peaks” as directed. In the end, we prevailed, but I was really worried that our shoulders were going to be sore the next day on Christmas. (We were OK.) I was able to completely cover the ice cream dome with my stiff-enough meringue and popped the whole thing in the freezer for the next day.
The next obstacle was the kitchen torch that Sally recommended. I didn’t have one, so despite not being a fan of Billionaire Bezos, I had to order one from Amazon, with Christmas Eve delivery. And by George, Amazon did get it to me on time, but I hadn’t read the fine print about the fuel (butane) not being included. I arrived one minute after closing time at our friendly local hardware store. I wrapped on the glass hoping (and frankly, expecting) that they would unlock the front door and sell me some butane, but no dice.
I then drove to a hardware store in a nearby town and scored some butane. Phew!
The final product was delicious and dramatic, as I had hoped. Also, everyone took a turn toasting the meringue with the torch which was fun.
My one-year old granddaughter gave it a try (the Baked Alaska, not the torch) and seemed a bit startled by the flavor. I think maybe mint is a strange taste the very first time you have it. I might use plain vanilla instead of mint chip next time.
But hey, now that I own a kitchen torch, any damn thing could happen—even Crème Brûlée.
As Sally says in her recipe, if you make it a day ahead and freeze it, it takes a few minutes for the brownie base to warm-up enough for easy slicing.
From ChatGPT:
Baked Alaska originated in the 19th century, inspired by advances in insulation and refrigeration science. The dessert—ice cream and cake encased in meringue and briefly baked—demonstrated that whipped egg whites could insulate cold interiors from heat. It is commonly credited to French chef Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York, who popularized it in 1867 after the U.S. acquired Alaska. The name referenced Alaska’s cold climate, contrasting with the dessert’s hot exterior and frozen core.
I wanted to make things easy on myself yesterday as I am doing all the cooking, while my husband recovers from total knee replacement surgery. (His leg still aches too much to eat out in a restaurant.) I had the idea of making chicken parmigiana with store-cooked chicken cutlets, but the price for TWO of them was $16.99, so I decided to make them myself.
Believe it or not, it was my first time making chicken parm. I looked at NYT Cooking’s version of the recipe, but then decided to go with something simpler that Google turned up:
I like how there’s a baked version of the recipe (if you don’t want to fry the cutlets in oil first), but for my first time making it, I decided to fry the cutlets.
I didn’t have sliced mozzarella, so I used about 8 ounces of grated mozzarella and it was yummy. I also didn’t have basil, so I topped with a bit of fresh parsley leftover from my Slow Cooker Garlic Butter Chicken.
My husband was very appreciative (as always) of my efforts and I liked it too. I used store bought marinara sauce (Rao’s), so it was really pretty easy.
I recommend buying high-quality organic chicken breasts (like Bell & Evans) and slicing them into cutlets yourself before pounding.
Buy the good chicken breasts for best results Served on leftover pasta with a salad
The healing process for my husband’s knee replacement is ongoing. Sadly, we had to cancel dinner with our son for his 25th birthday tonight, because my husband just isn’t ready for restaurants yet. There’s still a ton of pain, swelling, and stiffness, which apparently is normal at this stage (3 weeks post-op), but he’s never dealt with anything like this, so it’s pretty hard.
I decided to try a recipe I saw on NYT Cooking “most popular recipes of 2025” list—Slow Cooker Garlic Butter Chicken. It looked easy and it was. My husband loved it. He said the flavor was great and it really was. I even made my own croutons, which soaked up the delicious sauce perfectly.
New England is experiencing real “depths of winter” cold right now. (It’s giving late January vibes.) Given the very cold weather and the knee, I think this was a success. And so easy.
Next time I’ll put the croutons in the dish first to absorb as much sauce as possible 😋
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