What I'm Doing On My Summer Vacation

My Mother of the Groom Dress (Oh, settle down. Not really.)

Over the weekend one of my oldest and dearest friends sent me a picture of herself with two hiking buddies. They live in Alaska so the picture was gorgeous, shot in a field of wildflowers with mountains rising in the background.

"I went hiking this week with friends, ALL older than me.  The woman in the middle of our threesome in the photo turned 77 years old this week!  She kept up with all of us, and in fact on a boulder field I had trouble keeping up with her as we stretched, leaned, shifted weight, balanced, etc.  She is amazing. What a role model as this summer I find myself making age excuses for why I might be doing less…"

Well.

Where should I start about my summer? Outside of our Boston adventure I have been...well, shall we describe my lifestyle as "focused"?

Yes, that word works. Except the entire focus has been on me, me, me. Here's what I replied to O&D Friend:

Holy cow! That's amazing. Congratulations on finding the most picturesque spot in North America to take a shot AND coordinating your friends and outfits to match. 

I am doing way less strenuous work than that: I haven't started my accompanying gig yet so I'm taking advantage of a true summer vacation by knitting and binge-ing Netflix. So far I've finished a shawl and the entire "Midsomer Murders" series. (So very sad about finishing MM--each episode felt like spending a day or two in England and whenever I think of that possibility the angels sing, although Midsomer seems like a very dangerous place to live. So many options of how to be dispatched.)

Oh, and I've spent an inordinate amount trying to become beautiful. Our part in the Wedding of the Century Part Deux is obviously limited, since we're (a) not the parents of the bride, and (b) not there. So we sent a check ("Spend it any way you want!") and our best wishes, and I've channeled all other impulses into personal primping.

So far I've found a dress (finally, after having four different options lined up and hanging from the closet door), had custom trays made for teeth whitening, tried out a new pedicure technique, and spent several hours net-shopping and muttering "Hat or fascinator? Hat or fascinator?" before having the groom tell me that probably "neither" was the correct option. 

(A side note: I am a little concerned about whether I have made the right choice of dresses. You know that I hate, hate, hate shopping. Husband took me to the mall last week and after two hours I was walking the dangerous line between cranky and catatonic. The love of my life observed that his mother was a better shopper than I am up until about three weeks before her death at age 92. And yes, we are still married, but only because he then bought me an expensive dress.)  

Because much of my dress shopping was done online my search engine now defaults to "Mother of the Bride Dresses" and a few days ago today's beauty shot was the first result. I think Google has me pegged. Do I wear that with a hat or a fascinator? 

Anyway, I am absolutely sincere when I say I am so proud of you, O&D. That friend who's 77 has nothing on you--you just haven't lived that long yet. 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a trip to the yarn store planned and those British crime procedurals aren't going to watch themselves. 

I believe I'll put on my Mother of the Groom dress and be comfy. 

Ta-ta, and watch out for butlers bearing Roman swords!

QUACK-QUACK!

(Yup. It's still Boston.)

I have done a fair amount of travel in my life, from the days when my parents took their five children to the edges of the United States in a 1948 school bus that had been converted into a camper (and now you know why they're my heroes), to my stint in the Peace Corps, to the dozen years we spent herding the Boys through any museum near where we'd set up the pop-up camper. (Little known fact: Any space can be called a museum, and many of these "museums" are strangely mesmerizing. Barbed wire anyone?)

But because I was often traveling with a tribe, travel activities tended to be limited to the low-cost option--the self-guided tours, the campgrounds, the historic sites.

I had never been on a Duck Tour.

Now, though, I can cross that off my bucket list. Our recent trip to Boston included a city/water tour on one of these amphibious buses, and it was a hoot. To know why this was so much fun, though, you need to know that a primary reason for this Boston vacation was to meet Boy#2's future in-laws.

We have known Two's Lovely Girl for some time now, and she is enchanting. Smart, funny, beautiful, she is the perfect other half to our smart, funny, handsome son. In fact, she is so wonderful that it was a little intimidating to meet her parents. What kind of human beings raise the kind of daughter who can not only fit in at TWO Ivy League colleges but also in the House on the Corner?

That Tuesday when we met J. and L. we found the answer to that question. Her energy? Her intelligence? Her effervescence? Turns out they're genetic.

So when her mom suggested we go on a Duck Tour, then made that event happen, it wasn't surprising but it was delightful. It was so much fun, in fact, that the only picture I remembered to take was a shot of the Lovely Girl herself taking a picture of our replica World War II landing craft.

Today's beauty shot was taken right before we piled on the bus/boat and joined what seemed like dozens of other Ducks rolling through Boston. It was the perfect getting-to-know-you activity, even though the sheer volume of the tour and the fact we were sitting on different bus benches meant the parents of the groom didn't talk much to the parents of the bride. But we gawked at the Boston sights together, and laughed at the corny conDucktor (tm), and screamed QUACK-QUACK at the other Ducks when we passed on the streets.

When we piled back off North End Norma at the end of the tour, it felt as if we were one joyful, raucous, face-splittingly corny shared experience deep into this new world of shared family, and joyful, raucous, and corny are among my favorite descriptors of any family.

Quack-quack, everyone. This is going to be fun.

America's Test Kitchen Is My New Happy Place

(These posts about our week in Boston are in no particular order--kind of like my life right now.)

When I was in labor with our first Boy, Husband was my labor coach. At one point, in an effort to help me relax and save the fingers on his right hand (which I was in the process of crushing) he urged me to think of a happy place. "Vermont!" he told me. "Think of Vermont!" And the thought of the  cow-dotted New England landscape did help, although not as much as the epidural that came a bit later.

Anyway, after 32 years I have a new happy place: America's Test Kitchen.

Since this is my true confession medium, I admit that I am not one of those who have watched every episode of this public television show since it started in 2001. I didn't discover ATK (as we groupies call it) until Boy#3 found the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, and even then I skirted around the edges of devotion. But then I discovered Cook's Illustrated magazine (one of ATK's publications), which may be the most beautifully practical magazine ever, and...well, I haven't been such a fan-girl of anything since Here Come the Brides. 

With the exception of my dinner rolls and chocolate sheetcake I have always been been a mediocre-at-best cook and sadly, one does not live on bread and cake alone. America's Test Kitchen made me not only feel like I could be a good cook, they made me feel like I wanted to cook.

So when I knew we were going to Boston, and knew ATK would be so close that I could practically wake up and smell the (scientifically engineered, perfectly brewed) coffee, I really, really, really wanted to tour that facility. Sadly, they do not give public tours. But I'd had occasion to be in contact with the lovely Kelsey, one of the moderators of the the ATK Facebook group, so I messaged her to ask if there was any chance we could come peek through the windows.

"Sure!" she wrote back "I have some time Thursday afternoon. Would that work?"

Commence fan-girl squealing.

The rest of this post is going to have a lot of pictures, so if you don't have the time to look at everything I found fascinating, this is the bottom line: America's Test Kitchen lived up to every hope and expectation I had. Kelsey and her sidekick, Sarah, were the perfect ambassadors for ATK, and along with every person we met there made me want to go live in that building on the seaward side of Boston.

I mean, check out today's beauty shot. That is Kelsey (in the pink) and Sarah beside the Take-Home Fridge. After recipes are tested and rated, leftovers are put in this refrigerator and anyone who works there can TAKE THAT WONDERFUL FOOD HOME. I used to take the stub end of notebooks home for scrap paper when there were no longer enough pages for story notetaking--imagine if those notebooks had been crab cakes, or brownies, or Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies. Aaaaaah.

Or there's this:

The recipe development area is a huge room with the kinds of equipment you'd expect to find in a test kitchen--walls lined with refrigerators, individual work stations--except this huge room had something not found in other test kitchens. Lan Lam.

Yes. This cooking star was RIGHT THERE developing a recipe for a better French toast! And as she saw our little group coming around the corner, she stopped and told us about her process. It involves finding five or so "old" recipes, trying them out to see what she likes and doesn't like about those recipes, modifying, cooking, comparing to previous versions, modifying some more, cooking again, comparing, repeat, repeat, repeat. The newest iteration was almost there--she liked its texture and taste, but she wasn't satisfied.

"Want to try some?" she asked. Uh, yes, we believe we would!

Those are my teeth-marks in the toast.

For the record, Lan's going in the right direction. Husband, Boy#2, Lovely Girl, and I agreed that the improved version is fluffier and richer-tasting, even though Lan didn't think it was perfect yet. When she gets done, she'll not only know the new recipe is better, she'll know why. Test kitchens, folks. It's science.

But all of our drooling at ATK was not over the lovely food. If you're a foodie yourself, take a look at this:

An entire rack of Le Creuset Dutch ovens. This piece of equipment won its category in the ATK equipment review, but is pricier than my occasional use would justify. I was delighted to see a more familiar friend:

Cuisinart 14-cup food processor. 

Just last week Amazon had delivered my new food processor, which replaced one I'd had for decades and finally pushed too far into a broken chopping blade. The one I ordered had been the top one in the ATK equipment review, and was far from the most expensive.

"We use the same equipment here that we recommend to home cooks," Kelsey told us. "We want them to be able to duplicate what we do and they can't do that if all we're using are commercial products."

As this rack of burned bread indicates, toasters are in the current test cycle. And what happens to the test equipment after the ratings are done? It goes into the Christmas party raffle, and whether you're a star or a dishwasher you could take home a high-end mixer or espresso machine. Ho, ho, ho!

Personally, I'd rather take home the staff. Three full-time dishwashers are responsible for keeping the pots and pans and other cooking accoutrements clean and organized. Also, full-time shoppers make sure all ingredients are purchased, bagged, and sorted for distribution to each tester.

Is this heaven?

"You can sometimes tell what they're working on by what's in the baskets," Kelsey told us.

And of course, the recipe and equipment testing is only background material for the real product--information distributed in three magazines (America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cooks's Country), on television and YouTube, and in dozens of cookbooks.

We were practically still licking our chops from the delicious French toast when Lan was already preparing for a live question-and-answer session for online subscribers.

There were rooms filled with equipment and photo props, much the same equipment and photo props I have at home albeit not in the same multiples.

There were homey-looking studios and pristine pantries.

Better than the facilities or the food, though was the pride everyone we met seemed to take in their work. Kelsey will be transitioning to a different part of the company soon (she'll be working with a new initiative for kids) but it was obvious that she delighted in this work, including going out of her way to give these Kansas tourists a Boston highlight. Soon ATK hopes to make public tours a regular event, she said.

And when we left, she congratulated Two and Lovely Girl on their upcoming wedding--and handed them something for their new life together.

A week later Husband and I are still marveling at the people, the kindness, the calm, the beauty, the food of America's Test Kitchen.

It's my new happy place.

Where in the World Are MomQueenBee and Husband?

You'll never guess where Husband and I were last week.

Let me give you a hint: It's somewhere you can take a duck tour, so there's water. It's famous for its beans, so it automatically rates an A+ in my gastronomic rating system. (See also: MomQueenBee's Favorite Foods, a post I have yet to write but one that will focus strongly on beans.) It rather puffed-upped-ly calls itself The Hub, short for The Hub of the Universe, and also Titletown, so we know that it is far, far from Kansas and the Sunflower State's mealy-mouthed, cringing self-effacing self-image. (Seriously! They call themselves that!)

Give up? Need one more hint?

Boston! We were in Boston!

I may have mentioned once or twice or forty-eleven times that Boy#2 and his Lovely Girl are getting married this fall. Because the Parents of the Bride are energetic, generous, and well-organized, the planning of the Wedding of the Century Redux is mostly complete, but some final decisions were still to be made, including nailing down the menu for the wedding dinner. Tax season was over and my middle school accompanying gig is on summer break, so Two asked if we would please come to Boston for the tasting.

(All of you dear reader(s) of my general age group are now humming along with Dave Loggins. I'm not sorry, because this song was practically the anthem of my teenage years and I still love it.)

Anyway, a trip to America's Walking City would also be a chance to meet Lovely Girl's father. We had already met the Mother of the Bride, who is as lovely and energetic and gracious as you could wish the future mother-in-law of your son to be. And we could check out the matrimonial venues, and help with a move to a new apartment.

So off we went. I prepared as if we were getting ready to join a wagon train rather than boarding Southwest Airlines. Don't believe me? I have photographic proof:

Yes. That was what I carried onto the flight, which was scheduled to be five hours from Kansas check-in to pick-up at the airport in The Athens of America. I may have died from measles, snakebite, dysentery, cholera, or exhaustion, but I would never have been the one who starved to death on the Oregon Trail.

We were in The City on a Hill for eight days, and rather than try to cram everything into one post, I'm going to stretch this out interminably. Sit back and enjoy the ride. Also, have a pretzel, or a Rice Krispy treat, or a Fiber One bar, or a Wheat Thin, or a piece of fruit.

We've had plenty.