Family Date Day: Quarantine Arcade

With a pandemic outside our doors, our monthly family date days have become a challenge. This is inarguably the LEAST of our concerns right now. BUT with a son who is working long, physically demanding hours and a daughter who works even longer, mentally draining hours - we take our downtime very seriously. When the shelter-in-place order went through, the SECOND thing I asked my kids was, "What would you like to do about date-days?" And the answer after a few minutes of blank stares and shoulder shrugs was, "What about having an over-the-top game day?"

Family Game Day is a weekly event in our house. It's the first thing that gets added to the calendar each week, once we know what my son's work schedule will be. Every other week we flip-flop between "unplugged" when we play board and card games, and "plugged" when we compete in PS4 and Wii games. How do we change that into an event? The only thing I could think of was turning the living room into an arcade.

I was 4-14 during the '80s. Arcades and arcade games were absolutely everywhere. But I didn't set foot in an arcade until I was 22, and I was in a Chuck E Cheese ONCE during the whole of the 1980s. Likewise, we never owned a gaming system when I was growing up. The closest I got to arcade games was the occasional game of Frogger on my cousin's Atari, and watching my Mummy play Mission Impossible on the Commodore 64 and purposefully running the agent down the shafts just to hear him scream again... and again... and again... So when my son developed a passion for vintage arcade games, I had extremely little experience with these blip-blip 8-bit noisemakers.

In my quest to transform the living room, I began with a pair of gift cards from MyPoints I'd been saving "for a rainy day." With these, I hunted about on Amazon and purchased teeny tiny tabletop versions of Skee Ball and Whack-A-Mole. These were for a new surprise and to help set the proper mood. A PS4 retro game (since I was informed that the one I THOUGHT we owned was for a console we got rid of years ago) and a new book of Mad Libs (for when mama's decrepit eyeballs can't stare at screens any longer) were added to the cart as well, along with some popcorn seasoning and a box each of movie-theater candies. All that needs to be purchased now is a pair of pizzas from our favorite pizza take-and-bake that happens to still be open and offers online ordering and contact-free pickup... AND just sent me a coupon!

Because I am a strong believer in ambiance when setting up these family fun events, I then pulled out the printer and got to work creating decorations... cheesy homemade 80's style. With the help of three vintage arcade-y free fonts from FontSpace I soon had enough printed goodies to color and cut, to fill an entire wall in the living room. Several hours and more than a little bit of cramped-hand later I was able to transform this...

into THIS!!!

 My son already owned a few things that made perfect decorations next to the TV, and I set up scoreboards for four different games along with a few movie suggestions that are theme and period-appropriate.

So this weekend, while we stay safe inside our home, we will be "at the arcade" - playing games, snacking on all sorts of goodies, laughing 'til our sides hurt at how terribly BAD mama truly is at arcade games, and watching retro movies.

It's not a trip to the zoo... but it's something to look forward to. Which is all we need for right now.

Scottish Fare: Irn Bru Recipe #2

Today I thought I'd try something naturally sweet with another bottle of our Scottish Irn Bru. I wanted to try cupcakes.

Due to pandemic-shortages at the store, it ended up being more prudent to make a poundcake. So Irn Bru poundcake, with Irn Bru icing it was.

Now to be fair, I have to admit that while I LOVE cake... I don't tend to prefer poundcake. It's a bit too sweet and far too rich for my everyday tastes. But in working with what I had on hand, I figured that cake was cake... and if I didn't end up liking it, there's a 24-year-old starveling in the house that will happily gobble up any baked goodie he sees lying around.

To keep things simple, I used a very simple recipe:
1 1/2 c gluten-free all-purpose flour
1 1/2 c raw sugar
 3/4 c softened butter
3 eggs
and 1/4 cup Irn Bru

Preheat oven to 310F and grease a bread pan (in hindsight, I should have also floured it!) then set aside.
Cream the butter and sugar, then slowly add the flour in thirds.
Add the eggs one a time, then pour in the Irn Bru and mix just until combined.
Pour into pan, and bake for 80 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

For the glaze, I mixed 2 Tbsp Irn Bru with 1 cup powdered sugar. (and only used half of it)

The cake did not rise quite as much as I wanted, but with gluten-free baking that's always a possibility. It had a beautiful buttery crispy crust on the top, but the minute I went to release it from the pan... the crust evaporated. (I did try a crumb, and yes it tastes positively divine!) And I didn't need nearly as much glaze as I'd made, but I am a frosting girl so that may be personal preference.

How did it taste? The cake itself was far more buttery than I wanted, and honestly, I couldn't taste the Irn Bru - it just tasted of sugar and butter. The texture was lovely, however; with a delicate melt-in-your-mouth crumb. The glaze itself DID taste of Irn Bru and was quite good - but when you mix a too-sweet drink with straight sugar, you get something that's painfully sweet. I paired the tiniest of slices with an extra-strong cup of Edinburgh tea and enjoyed it as a sugary sweet, rich buttery treat.


Would someone else like this? Absolutely! If you like rich, buttery sweet cake and soda-flavored glaze, this would be amazing. For me, I will stick to the occasional cupcake.

But it was a fun adventure. The color is a beautiful pale orange and the texture is divine... and while I personally would not choose to eat this, I am sure that my son will love it once he gets home from work. Because just between you and me... I made this for him. Unlike my daughter and me, HE likes poundcake... and his waistline will not suffer from eating an entire cake!

Garden 2020: When crisis inspires gardening

In times of crisis, people return to gardening. It happened in WWI and WWII with Victory Gardens, and it's happening this year with the current pandemic. Seed stores are selling out, and potting soil can't be found anywhere. The uncertainty of not knowing if the grocery store will have what we need when we visit, coupled with an urge to do SOMETHING when we feel as if the whole world is falling apart, seems to whisper to us the memories of our grandparents' yards - with their raspberry hedge bursting with juicy treasure, and neat rows of squash just waiting for the Thanksgiving table.

Gardening is known to be therapeutic. It has been proven to help reduce anxiety and depression, reduces stress, and can lower blood pressure. When special tools and care is taken, it can help keep fingers and wrists limber to slow the progression of arthritis, and it counts as low-impact exercise. Even if you yielded nothing else... wouldn't that be enough incentive to start a garden this year?

This is our 14th year of urban container gardening. Because I'm being asked a LOT of questions right now from people on multiple continents about our garden and how we do what we do... I wanted to start this year's gardening posts by sharing where we began. Because yes, our garden may look like we know what we're doing NOW... but it took us a LOOOONG time, and years of trials and errors to get here. Please, ask away. If I can help even one person avoid some of the mistakes we learned the hard way... that would absolutely make my day!


This is what our garden looked like near the end of the season, in 2007. The first photo is the "south half" and you can see: tomatoes that aren't planted deep enough and barely produced, pumpkins that never fruited, (though they did make a beautiful arbor!) and carrots that were tinier than a baby's pinkie and bitter when we finally picked them.

The second photo is the "north half" and here are: pumpkins that didn't get enough light and never grew, herbs that produced too MUCH and bolted before we could use them, and - honestly I've forgotten what we tried in the orange and black pots... it might have been peppers, or possibly salad greens. *shrugs* Whatever it was, however, you can clearly see that by August they had barely done a thing.

I want to share this because I've heard a few friends say that they lost interest in gardening when their first year didn't look like our 10th... 12th... 13th...

Please, don't compare and DON'T give up! This is where we started. This is what our first year looked like, and it has taken us 14 years of learning, failure, and slowly saving up to acquire some of the more pricey tools that we now have in our little oasis. Small space gardening IS worth it... but it takes time and patience. Two tomato plants in 5-gallon buckets and a pair of favorite herbs would be better than where we began. Start small. Learn slowly. And add one or two things each year.

For our garden this year, we are needing to make allowances as we may not be able to purchase our precious herbs. Life will go on, and we will plant what we can. We might have extra salad greens where the herbs would normally grow. Adaptations will be made, or we'll do without. But our 2020 oasis has begun.

Here is a quick sneak-peek at our 8'x16" deck garden as it sits mostly dormant, awaiting our Memorial Day planting this morning.