Having a sneaky nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing...just as long as the person is good at heart. I can’t hide the fact that I am sneaky, growing up in the shadow of my sister and mother’s stronger figure and bolder personality, (not literally; that sounds like I spent my childhood camping out by their ginormous stone statues…) I was given many chances to hone my skills as a raccoon..er..tiptoeing around. Now that I am older, and possibly matured, I use those learned skills for the good of my friends and family.

I have a lot of fun surprising people with monetary, practical, completely silly, or edible gifts. I enjoy spending time and putting love into something, and taking someone totally by surprise when I give it to them. You may mention a need for an item and it gets stored in my brain’s filing system as “things to watch out for while shopping or cleaning out closet for Goodwill”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not boasting about all of the wonderfulness that I possess and how lucky you should be to consider yourself my friend, but more so about the wonderfulness that is giving. See a need, fill a need. Whether you subscribe to good karma, the Golden Rule, or paying it forward the act of giving almost never leaves both parties unhappy. And it’s simple mathematics; You’re hungry and I love to cook. Or you need groceries and gas, I can either hand over $20 for my own personal happiness for the week, or give it to you and we both get a little happiness for ourselves.

I really do get a lot of enjoyment out of giving. Unfortunately, in my nephew’s case, I need to back it down a notch. When I come to visit and I happen to be carrying a bag (which is almost always) he suspects that there is a gift waiting for him inside. I’m still on the fence as to whether or not this is a good thing. Since I only see him, maybe twice a month, it is a good thing. But on the other hand, it’s almost to the point where if I show up without something, what I would get is “Auntie Naaeee, where’s my present?” Bah…that’s what family members (non-parents) are for! Spoiling!

On the topics of giving, food, and general sneakiness…I have a friend. Yes, I do. 90% of my friends’ meals come from every fast food joint in the area, and the other 10% would be PB&J at home…but that’s only when there are 2 slices of bread in her cupboards. Now, I never eat breakfast, even though our mothers and women’s health magazines tell us that is the most important meal of the day. I don’t eat it because of two reasons: I’m rarely ever hungry in the morning and two, if I put something in my tummy other than coffee before the sun has been up for a few hours, I get sick to my stomach. Maybe it’s the coffee…

Back to the story, I decided to make a breakfast meal for my friend. Or it could have been the other way around; I received in my daily email from allrecipes.com, a recipe for Ham breakfast braid.


This is a breakfast deserving of a real plate! Paper plates be damned!

Wanting to try it out, I chose my friend as a guinea pig. Whichever one works best for the story, I prefer to call it divine confection. This recipe, like most are after the fact, is super easy and the ingredients are incredibly basic. Allrecipes.com did not provide a step by step photo montage though, and if you learn visually, like myself, you can check out this chickadees blog instead.

Bakingwithbeth also follows a smaller serving size than Allrecipe, but I didn’t realize that until after the oven had preheated and I was beating the eggs…but what is good cooking without mistakes? And yummy mistakes and “ooo lemmie try it this way” ideas?
Meat! Any will do and I suggest using the most flavorful of the choices. Spam, Baconbits, and 88c hot dogs are some options to avoid.

I had the needed ingredients; Eggs, cream cheese, milk (I used canned milk and it was just fine), shredded cheese, and 2 tubes of crescent roll dough. (I just realized that frosting is really the only food that sounds decent coming from of a “tube”.)



An example of how to take unappetizing photos. This was the beginning formation of the dough, later I added additional dough to cover the complete top surface.

You really only need enough dough to make a base for the eggs to sit in and some more to cover them up a bit. I noticed that, while a lot of photos show an equal baked dough/egg ratio on the top, there were a lot of photos that made the whole thing like a human torso with its skin flayed and its innards showing.


Place 2 eyes and a menacing mouth on this and viola! you have the cutest Halloween breakfast mummy!

Nomnom. I chose the modest path and went complete coverage, using all but 4 crescent triangles of dough; I made the base, piled on the goodness and then covered it with “braids” of dough. I forgot to brush the top with butter, but if you forget too, it does not make it less yummy!

This is what a baked braid looks like. Don't do drugs kids.

Another mistake that I made was beating the eggs with the milk and cream cheese, all at once and without an actual blender or beater of any kind. I used a spoon. I am only admitting this because it just shows how hard it is to screw up this recipe. My concoction left the eggs and milk whipped, of course, but with the occasional bit of cream cheese. I would like to try it again with an adequate beater, but I am not dismissing the enjoyment of taking a bite and hitting a pocket of SURPRISE - CREAM CHEESE!

The cream cheese melted during both the frying and baking process, so if you make the same mistake I did, no worries.

Additional touches to the mid-morning nap inducing breakfast included these bad boys (sliced) and a sprinkling of tarragon.

Do not ask me what I am up to at 6 o’clock in the morning. If you did, I would have to tell you that I woke up at 5am, with my mind set on doing some not-so-much reading accomplished for my history class and thinking “I went to bed at 10-ish, that’s more than enough sleep!”. I can’t recall what spurred the google search, but I started reminiscing over fashion fads of the 90’s, like flannel shirts, grandpa sweaters, and chokers. There were very few fads that I was interested in as a child of the late 80’s-early 90’s;


Neon Lycra bike shorts. Every other girl wore these shorts, usually with an equally neon skirt, and I wanted them. The “sausage casing” metaphor was something I learned years and years later, but looking back, I’m somewhat pleased with my parents’ decision to refuse both my sister and myself the opportunity to wear these shorts. I’m not sure of their reasoning, whether it was based on wasting money on a fad item, if they were aware of our chubbiness and just trying to save us from the agony of ridicule and chafed legs. Or maybe it was due to modesty and not having to deal with photos of their two loverly daughters at the 1989 family reunion sporting the dreaded camel toe. I do remember devising a plan, with my sister, to get our hands on these shorts though. Our preacher’s two daughters had a huge collection of these shorts, and no, we were not going to raid their closet during a sleepover…putting 2 and 2 together, I deduced that if our own father were a preacher, then of course, we would be allowed to wear the shorts. Childhood logic is so beautiful in its simplicity.


With the recent “come back” (my inner child is reluctant to accept the fact that I have to now use phrases like that, along with “kids these days” and “back in my day”) of fads from my childhood, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the cute little plastic charms. Unfortunately, the plague of the late 90’s removed the part of the brain that reminded parents to both keep an eye on their children and accepted responsibility for allowing such hazards in their household. If only we could blame biology instead of psychology! On that note, toughen up and bring these charms back! Even if it’s just in Canada, I would gladly cross the border for a bracelet or two.


It might be strange, but I can remember the very first time that I wore a flannel shirt. I suppose it is so memorable, because it was one of the first “fashionable” steps (using that term VERY loosely here) that I took as a teenager. It was my father’s blue flannel shirt, one that he had owned for probably 10 years. I remember the elbows being thread bare, but wasn’t that also fad? I also remember walking down the sidewalk on the top of the hill in Madison, Indiana, past JC Penny, and Video Towne, and I felt cool. We kids were treated to a clothes shopping spree at the local K-mart, usually around the changing of the seasons, and with $100 budget, I felt like I millionaire at the time. The sea of flannel, earth tones and faux fur were enough to drive a teenage girl clothes crazy! Unfortunately for the photo memories, I was taken over by my inner tom-boy by my early teens and wore nothing but basketball shorts and t-shirts that were covered in either Looney Tunes characters or, if I could get my hands on them, my favorite bands. “Dressing up” became wearing jeans with mysteriously weak fibers in the knees…Oh crap, look at those holes, I should patch that up with some flannel!...and a clean white t-shirt.
I am really hating using the word “fashionable” when I mention perms, but it has to be done. It was a fashion statement at some point in history, and my sister and I worked it. But boy, did we work it wrong. I thank God that I cannot get my hands on a photo of either one of us at this moment, the embarrassment at trying to describe our teased bangs and how, at the end of my perm’s life, I would walk around with wet hair in order to keep the curl.



Equally offensive – the slouch sock. My sister swears up and down that she invented the slouch sock. I’m sure if you asked her today she would still stand by her claim. And heck yeah, we all layered them, and I can finally place blame on something for the poor circulation in my feet.


Until this morning, I had no idea just how many freakin’ Barbie and Barbie accessories that my sister and I owned during our childhood. Magic Dance, Fashion Jeans, Jewel Secrets, Tropical, Perfume Pretty, and Loving You Barbie, Bath Set for Two, and the complete Heart Family set, to name just a few. Google image search has allowed me to spend this morning repeating “Oh my gosh! Yes!” at every photo of every Barbie I played with as a youngin’. It also reminded me of the belief that the Barbie dolls led girls to see her as the perfect female figure, and develop eating disorders. Let me slide myself into my skinny jeans for a second... there were no comparisons of her body to mine, or any other female in my life. As a kid, the only recognition her body received was “How the crap am I going to get this homemade dress over her head?” or at the worst, “hehehehehe those are boobies!” If a dolls figure was supposed to have such a major impact on my ideals of what a woman was supposed to look like, what about the bean bag dolls, female Fisher Price people or even better, Ken? Imagine my surprise when I saw my first male crotch and found out that men actually have something between their legs other than a smooth surface.