The Vittetoe Times » cooking

Traditional Holiday Old-Fashioned Candy

Bruce — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:22:00 +0000

Riona is hard at work breaking the candy.

For the past couple of years I have been making the old-fashioned candy my mom always made during my childhood. It was always a tradition I loved, so I decided to make it a tradition for our family. I started early this year so I would have enough time to make it all before Christmas. The house has been full of a mixture of aromas including licorice, cinnamon, and spearmint. Riona loves to help me break the candy into the little pieces once it has cooled and hardened. All the girls love the candy and a day doesn’t go by without them begging for another piece. We can’t wait to hand out the little goodie bags full of candy as presents this year. If you get one we hope you enjoy it. The recipe I use is below, so you can make some for yourself.

ingredients:

2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup water
1 dram LorAnn flavoring oil* (1 dram is approximately 1 teaspoon)
Liquid food coloring
Powdered sugar
Candy thermometer
Aluminum foil

Directions:

1. The first thing I do is get my aluminum foil pan ready. The foil I use is the Reynolds Wrap Easy Release Non-Stick. If you don’t have that you may want to lightly grease the pan to prevent the candy from sticking. I use about a 12 inch by 12 inch piece of foil. Fold up the sides of the foil to make four walls. This should make a simple pan that is about 10 inch by 10 inch or so.
2. Next, in a mid to large sauce pan mix together the sugar, corn syrup, and water. Make sure all the sugar is wet before heating. I heat the mixture on high but medium high may work as well. Bring the sugar mixture to a boil without stirring and insert the candy thermometer. Continue to cook the mixture until the soft crack temperature or about 275 degrees and then add the color. No need to stir, the boiling action will incorporate the color. I use 4 to 8 drops of food color, depending on how dark or light or the mixture of colors needed. Experiment! Once the candy mixture has reached the hard crack temperature or about 300 degrees, remove the mixture from the heat and add the liquid flavoring oil. Stir. Use caution when stirring in the flavoring as steam may rise from the mixture.
3. Now pour the candy mixture into your foil pan making sure it is evenly distributed. When the candy begins to harden but still somewhat soft, fold down the foil walls and score crisscrossed lines to form small candy squares. I use a pizza cutter to do this. This will make for easy breaking when the candy is cooled. Wait till the candy is completely cooled and carefully break the candy squares apart. I dust my hands with powdered sugar to do the breaking and then dust the finished candy with powder sugar to prevent sticking.
4. Enjoy the intense aromas that will fill your home after making this candy!

I owe credit for this recipe to my mama, who taught it to me and has reminded me of various details over the years. Thank you mama!

* The LorAnn flavoring oils can be found on their website or at a local candy/cake supply store.

School Days

renmckay — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:34:52 +0000

How can the past two months, and the severe lack of posts, possibly be defined in one? We’ve been up to our ears in busy-ness, to say the least. August is a tough month for us, almost like the holidays for the rest of the world. Between Bruce’s birthday, our anniversary (twelve years already!), Riona’s birthday, three girls going into a new school year, and me the same, overwhelming couldn’t begin to describe the stress involved during the hottest month of the year that everyone knows ought still to be summer.

All the same, we have survived and made it into the fall. Mythili began kindergarten this year, and has adapted well to only listening to Spanish all day long. She is already learning some new phrases and repeating them at home, though she did admit the other day, “My teacher finally understanded me when I told her, ‘I have Girl Scouts.’” (Her teacher doesn’t speak English–ironic, right?). While she is a bit tired at the end of the day, she seems to like school, and has also enjoyed joining our Girl Scout troop.

Meanwhile, Riona began her one and only year of preschool. To say she loves it would be an understatement. She knows details about her teachers’ interests and lives and has made a few friends already, though at first she was a bit shy. Bruce has also been taking her to Prairie Preschool at the Plains Conservation Center, where she gets to ride the wagon, feed the chickens, pick vegetables from the garden, and pet the snakes!

Isabella is a full-fledged school girl, delving into complicated subtraction and word problems, reading short books in Spanish, and longer chapter books in English. She and Mythili both participate in a once-weekly after school activity: for Isabella, dance class, and Mythili, art. Both girls are enjoying their school year.

In addition to the usual day-to-day activities, we went troop camping this year at Twisted Pine Girl Scout Camp just outside of Genessee. The girls had a blast creating survival bags, hiking and observing nature, learning about and searching for constellations, singing songs and telling stories around the campfire, and playing outside in the homemade tee-pee. The lodge was amazing, with three large bedrooms, a decent sized bathroom, and a huge, fully stocked kitchen! We can’t wait to try out all the Girl Scout properties and have already booked a different camp, Meadow Mountain Ranch near Estes Park, for some winter fun in January.

In addition to working with new teams this year and teaching a computer class (ACK!), I am also very busy teaching three University of Phoenix online classes back to back until December 20th! In addition to cramming in bike rides to school and walking thousands of steps for our district’s pedometer competitions, busy is the only way to describe my life right now. Fortunately, Bruce has been amazing, taking the kids to and from school, doing all the shopping and errands, cooking delicious meals every night, and dealing with our breakdown-central van. Thank goodness for some stress relief!

On the weekends, we’ve been enjoying the glorious Indian Summer weather in Colorado with long bike rides, hikes, and trips to various farmers’ markets to pick up fresh eggs, vegetables, and Colorado peaches and apples. And of course we made our annual visit to the Aurora Jack-o-Launch, watching the pumpkins fly through the air from their catapult and rifle-like contraptions, enjoying some Dry Dock beer, and watching the kids create crafts and play in the corn box (rather than sand box). Now that autumn is upon us, we’re hoping things will settle down a bit and we can r-e-l-a-x!

The End is Near…

renmckay — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:39:06 +0000

I say this every year, but I will say it again anyway. Remember when we were young and summer used to end at the end of August, not the end of July? OK, I’m done complaining. Don’t have much to complain about. Only that we will be leaving Kentucky in five days and it’s a bittersweet goodbye. We’ve had nothing less than a two-month blast of a summer vacation, even if we did regularly participate in activities such as menu planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning and laundering for eight people, and maintaining a car and a yard and a supersized family. None of that seems to matter when you can hop on the bike and take a ride in the country for an hour as the sun sets in the west (never mind the mosquitoes, they can’t keep up). Or when you can take a drive into the countryside and ride a free ferry into Illinois, shop at an Amish dairy farm and bakery, and learn the true meaning of locally made. Or when you can pack up the car for the weekend, kayaks on top, and head to one of the endless lakes with water as warm as a bath and air that stays warm far into the night and campsites within walking distance of the shore and paddling out at dusk and dawn and love, love, love. Or stepping on metal step after another into the depths of the world’s largest cave. Or swimming in Zak’s parents’ pool, eating their delicious home-cooked meals, and feeling like we are staying at a bed and breakfast. Or Bruce taking the girls to visit his family for a good long time, enjoying at last the day at the picnic area in Cades Cove that he has spent our marriage telling me about, where the girls wouldn’t get out of the creek all day and caught frogs and crawdads, saw a snake and a fawn, and had a day they will never forget. Or taking one more day at the paint-your-own-pottery place, where this time gifts for home were on their mind… Or taking a drive into St. Louis to stay in a “fancy” hotel with a circular tower, a room with a view of the Arch, walking distance to the Cardinals game (they won 8-4!), where Bruce and Zak struck up a conversation in line and got handed box seat tickets, where we could pretend for one glorious weekend that we were rich… oh, but we are, aren’t we?

But, alas, the end is near. We will spend the first half of the week indulging in a few more bike rides, one more beach day, and then begin packing our million point five items (we thought we would have so much space going home, as we brought so many items to give to Lucy, but it appears we might be heading back with MORE) into, on top of, and behind the van. We’ll head out on Friday night, make a stop in St. Louis so the girls can go in the Arch for the first time (we didn’t have time over the past weekend), and drive all night while they sleep. Then we will have just ten days to rest and recover, to rediscover our friends and our home, before reality hits. Reality being, school starts! This may seem overwhelming for most families, but for a teacher it’s double duty. Every year I feel like I’m beginning a new job all over again, and this year I kind of am. I am working with different teams and doubling up on my ESL class and teaching a computer class for the first time! It’s going to be a stressful but exciting new school year, especially since it is Riona’s first (and only) year of preschool and Mythili is entering kindergarten! Oh how the time flies… Seems like we were just pulling up, and now we will be heading out… but life is cyclical, so I’m sure we’ll be back before we know it, on two wheels or four. For now, here are my poems for the girls this July.

Kentucky June

renmckay — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:18:10 +0000

It is impossible to summarize June, and would be more adequately defined, day by day, here. Filled with bike rides that have taken me in all directions from Mayfield, first to the Mississippi River in the west, then the Land Between the Lakes in the east, even south to a Civil War battlefield in Tennessee, to wonderful excursions with the girls, everything from camping along a cove where we kayaked and swam into the night (the water being relentlessly warm), a petting farm with miniature versions of every animal you ever imagined, the beaches where the girls could spend a lifetime (five hours without a fight, complaint, or announcement of boredom), walking along the pivotal intertwining of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers in Paducah, taking the Vittetoe Express (my bike + tagalong + bike trailer–yes, a train of bicycles) to the parks and library, meeting two published Kentuckian authors (and their pets), going out to eat, visiting farmers’ markets that run twice weekly and are just blocks away, baking fresh peach pies and apple cobbler, and alas, sending my four favorite people onward to Tennessee for the next part of our summer-long journey…
It is impossible to summarize June, but for the girls, I have made my usual attempt. Here it is.

A Busy January

renmckay — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:45:38 +0000

We have been busy! Isabella has attended two birthday parties this past month–one at Skate City to fuel the fire of her new obsession: roller skating. She absolutely loves it, and last weekend she and Mythili had their first of six lessons. Mythili learned how to march with her group, and Isabella learned how to stop and skate on one foot. The girls are happy and so are we: in addition to the affordable price of lessons (just $30 for the six-week session), the girls get to skate afterward at the first open skate of the day. AND it’s just over a mile from our house. Can’t be beat!

In addition to the excitement of roller skating and bike riding, Riona has reached her own milestone this past month: potty training. We hunkered down and stuck with it at the very end of Christmas break, and by the end of the first week back to school, she’d mastered the bathroom. After nearly seven NONSTOP years of changing diapers, we are officially beyond the baby stage! Exciting times in the Vittetoe home.

I have been busy working, baking the brownies and a new recipe: flourless chocolate cake (sure to be gone in an hour or less), and keeping up with my new blog. Bruce has been busy coming up with amazing new recipes and creative ideas for our dinner every night–everything from homemade hoagies w/meatballs to pepper lime chicken and latkes. It’s all about the food.

Another exciting event: as I write this post, my sister is in labor with her baby! More news to come when s/he arrives!

February is sure to be as busy. How the time flies when you’re having fun.