Mommy’s Mini Cheesecakes

The best part about the holiday season is baking goodies, making soups and other comfort foods, and getting the added benefit of warming up a cold kitchen.  When you wake up to frost on the windowpanes, just fire up the oven.  These little cheesecakes are beautiful and surprisingly easy to make.

Send the kids out to make a snowman and before they come back in to complain that “Joey hit me in the face with a snowball” you can have these cheesecakes done and their whining and tattle-telling won’t bother you (once you wake up off the floor still clutching the empty Bailey’s bottle.)

Yield: 24 mini-cakes Ingredients:

For the crust:
16 whole Oreo, finely ground in food processor
3 tablespoons melted butter

For the filling:
16 oz (2-8-oz pkg) cream cheese
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups sour cream
3 Tablespoons Bailey’s Irish Cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled slightly

For the ganache glaze:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons light corn syrup

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F.

1. Combine the ground Oreos and melted butter into a bowl until well combined. Spoon into 24 mini cheesecake cups. Press into the bottom of each cup so the crust is flat.  Bake for 10 minutes then remove from oven.

2. In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Stir in sour cream, Bailey’s, and vanilla.

3. Pour or spoon batter into cheesecake pan cups to fill to a little less than half of the cup. Then add the melted chocolate to the rest of the batter.  Fill the cups to about 3/4 full.

4. Bake for 25-28 minutes until cheesecake is cooked through.  Remove to a wire rack to cool.

5. Once the cheesecakes have cooled, loosen the edges with a plastic knife and remove them from the pan by pushing up on the removable bottoms. Arrange them on a piece of waxed paper and pour on the glaze.

Warm Weather is For Wussies

 3rd Annual Airbiscuit Anniversary and Chili Cook-Off

Airstream Rally in Wellington, Ohio

So what if the highs each day barely hit 50 degrees with wind gusts to 30 mph and the lows each night froze our noses and toes.  We saw it as an opportunity to sport our winter flair.  There were bedazzled Stormy Kromers and lots of buffalo check flannels on display.  When it comes to keeping warm, we’re professionals.   Hence, the necessity of the Chili Cook-Off contest.

Folks from far and wide hauled their heavy, black iron dutch ovens filled with spices, mystery meat and those stinkin’ beans to the camp pavilion for the judging.   A sea of buckskin colored Carhartt jackets and insulated overalls swelled back and forth, shifting from foot to foot to keep warm.   The wind blew the heat from the pots right up our noses until our eyes watered.  Trophies were handed out and then the real tasting began.

One of my favorite things about this rally was the “magic” pillowcases that we made.

Watch this on youtube.com!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYWCma9wgM

These are great for shut ins, children, charity events and as Christmas gifts for people of all ages.  I made mine for my Grandma Vargo who just turned 100 years old on June 5, 2013.  She loves butterflies and gardening so it made my heart happy to sew something special for her.

The campground did a great job of decorating, and sponsored a trick or treat hour for children to walk up to each camper for candy.   Our group had a Halloween decorating contest, a BIG raffle, a HUGE pot luck dinner, a heated party tent, several group breakfasts on a GIANT griddle , and cowboy coffee each morning.  Our rally hosts did a fabulous job with the swag bags and planning!  It was great to see some rally friends from the past and to make many new ones.

When I saw the skeletons in the canoe and the two by a campfire, I texted my cousin, Sandy (like the beach) and said, “OMG…San, that’s us until the end of time!”

Dream On

Could there have been a better time to be a teenager than when Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic album came out?  The Nuge wasn’t far behind with Stranglehold and ballads by Elton John killed the charts.  Candle in the Wind…they don’t write them like that anymore.  Then there was the Zeppelin movie.  Robert Plant sang and Jimmy Page played.  Mix in a little Jimmi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.  Boy, was I lucky to see these standard artists when they were up and coming.

We were the generation after the 50′s fins, when stripes and powerful engines ruled the streets.  My boyfriend had a Mustang Cobra and it was the bomb.   I smoked cigarettes, drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine, skitched behind cars in the winter, and cussed like a sailor.  I was 17, young and dumb and full of fun.

Memories are what makes getting older worth it.   What I wouldn’t give to go back and see a Farrah Faucet poster hanging inside a boy’s school locker or mood rings for sale on a gas station counter,  or (too much) blue eye shadow.  Yes.  I said it.  Blue eye shadow.  We were all too cool for school.   Smoking in the boys’ room, ditching classes, and drag racing was about as naughty as it got.  We wore bell bottoms and skin tight tops that snapped together at the crotch.  Our hair was big, our dreams were big, and Elvis was still in the building while John Travolta made the white polyester suit famous.

Archie Bunker ruled the airwaves, microwave ovens were given away by banks as incentives to open savings accounts, and the pill was new on the market.  Dolly Parton was a regular on the Johnny Carson Show and Saturday Night Live premiered.  Starsky and Hutch solved crimes, Fantasy Island was on every Friday night, and long distance phone calls were still expensive and rare.

This past weekend my mom came over from Chicago, with my two aunts and cousins.  We sat around the table, talking about family, old times, and shared grandma stories about grandmas who left us too soon.

I’m feeling nastalgic and grateful to have these women to share my life and memories with!

Resurrection

Hands without wear on them

Wrote them

And those same hands, 

Now torn and lined with age, open them.

My  heart skips a beat thinking about the past.   It has been almost 35 years.

What was written and preserved?

…Through love letters written by hands without wear on them?

Throughout the course of our marriage, the births of our children, our successes and disappointments, an old box of love letters has sat by, quietly, watching and waiting for the right time; a time when life slows down, memories become sweeter, and the wish to be young and so in love again surges and swells.

The letters were neatly stacked and rubber banded in chronological order by a college football player who attended school in Big Rapids, Michigan.   (He has been known to over achieve.)  They were written by his girl, me,  an 18 year old who had just graduated high school in Elmhurst, Illinois and was holding down two jobs to support herself, make a car payment, and get a head start on life.

 We met at Long Chevrolet, a car dealership I was working at.  He was a college intern and I was the customer relations specialist who routinely received cat calls when walking through the shop. We dated from 1979 until June, 1981, when we married.

Our generation may be the last lovers

to write long-hand letters of longing,

hope and dreams.

 As an act of bravery, I decided to open this neglected, old box of letters that John saved when our love affair was new and everything glistened.  I’ve never opened it in all these years.  There is a part of me that is curious and hoping I wrote of my family life with my parents, of the times and new inventions, and included the names of friends I have forgotten.  There is a part of me that is terrified of being disappointed or that I won’t recognize my true self in them.  Silly, isn’t it?

Fall Migration

Each summer of nearly all of my summers, I’ve spent time fishing and camping in Crystal Falls, Michigan.   As a child, my folks made the six hour ride from Chicago with my brother and I packed in the back on top of the luggage and squeezed between the camping gear.   We escaped the city sun and heat for two weeks of heaven each July.   Woody and I swam in a remote Yooper paradise, diving off the pontoon dock into orange stained water and “going under” to keep the horseflies from biting us.  When we weren’t swimming, we were spending our quarters in the tavern or gathering driftwood for the fire.  Each night we would wade out under the stars to shine for crawdads.  (I held the flashlight and made Woody catch them and pile them in a bucket where they would be our captives until the next morning when our mother made us let them all go.)

Our grandparents would camp out with us on The Island without electricity or running water for a week at a time.   We were professionals.  Our skin turned brown.  Our shins got scrapped up and our ankles were all bitten up by mosquitoes.  The pads of our feet toughened up on the colored rocks. There was no television, telephones, or going back; video games and microwave ovens were not invented yet.  Texting and cell phones would take decades to appear (and work up there).  Instead, we fished all day for perch and walleye and fried them up by a toasty fire at night.  Always too soon it would be time to pack up, load up, and make the 350 mile trek back home.

These days I feel a migratory pull on my heartstrings to spend time in this place I love the most; the place that helped raise me.   Now I see geese flying in the sky with beating chests and I understand them and know why.  This place holds my childhood memories and much  happiness.  As I went on to marry (a man from Michigan!!), we brought our own children up to Crystal Falls and continued camping and fishing, watching another generation discover our secret spots and figure out the hard way where the drop off is.  The kids and cousins got to go fishing with Grandpa and Grandma.  Now our trek is 460 miles up I-75, across the Mackinac Bridge, to beautiful U.S. 2, along the picture perfect Lake Michigan shoreline and I don’t mind the extra miles.  It is all eye candy.

This month is the first time I’ve ever gone back up in the fall.

My mom and my cousin, Sandy (like the beach), met me up there and we spent more time leaf peeping than reeling in fish.  The woods were on fire with colors so bright they made us squint.  The air was crisp and the bugs were gone.  The sun was out.  The night sky was littered with sprinkles and twinkles of stars.  Sandy and I (we sharpies) took a canoe trip in 35 mph winds down the river and almost drowned.  Almost.  Ok, not really, but it was tough sledding the whole way; another memory maker for sure.  My mom and I played dominoes and sat on The Point catching the last rays of hot sun for the season.    After the first bottle, Sandy and I gave up wine glasses and drank from our own bottles by the fire.  Real classy.  The big question every night was, “Is it big enough?”

The deer were loading up on winter wheat so we were able to see and photograph a lot of them.  Bow season opened up  and every gas station offered bulk carrots and cabbage.   $$Five Bucks$$    Wild turkeys were everywhere and the only good thing I can say about them is that they were all hens so we didn’t have to listen to those awful gobblers.

Our next trip is already planned for August, 2014.   Until then, I’ll pass the days looking at all the pictures we’ve taken through the years and try to stop myself from checking weatherbug.com to see what the highs and lows are for the day up there and watching the Crystal Falls radar.

Woke Up This Morning With a Blue Moon in My Eye