Yesterday morning after breakfast, Kaylee wandered into the office, threw up everything she’d just eaten, and then proceeded to eat it all a second time. At first I started to yell at her to stop, and even took a step toward her, as if to snatch her away, and then realized – you know what? I should just let her eat it, then I won’t have to clean it up. Let her take care of her own mess and be happy doing it.

Welcome to my life.

Filed alongside: “silently watching Lemmy rub his balls on the kitchen counter” and “leaving Mags’s pee puddles sit until morning.”

May your holiday be bright and shiny,
and your ‘verse, filled with shindigs and thrilling heroics.
- Kaylee and Jayne
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Happy holidays, y’all! As I said the other day, I’ve been dying to do some holiday cosplay with Kaylee and Jayne ever since we adopted them five years ago, and this year I finally got to it! I decorated the entire tree with pirates in their honor (The crew of Serenity? Space pirates! Totally relevant to Pastafarianism, since doctrine holds that the decline in pirates is correlated with global warming – and thus in order to avert the apocalypse, we have to bring back piracy. Check and mate.), which was no small feat seeing as I made most of the ornaments by hand over a two-month period. I also hired someone to custom-make Kaylee Frye and Jayne Cobb outfits way back in August. Oh, the planning that went into this holiday card!

Unfortunately, my seamstress totally flaked, leaving me to cobble together costumes from off-the-rack pieces at the last minute. Instead of a green mechanic’s jumpsuit and floral blouse, Kaylee is wearing her shindig dress – that is, a Cotton Candy Dog Dress by East Side Collection. And while Jayne isn’t sporting a trademark brown Jayne Cobb ringer tee, she does look pretty badass in a green army jacket – really an Army Green Utility Jacket by Zack & Zoey.

Of course, the Jayne hat is the star of the ensemble; I actually had three custom-made for me by two different etsians: Sam’s Crochet (that would be the adorably floppy, Rasta-style hat Jayne and Peedee are wearing) and Whitaker Knits (the smaller hats with the orange tie, as seen on Ralphie and O-Ren, below). Rounding out Jayne’s look is a Browncoats logo pin I scored on Amazon. (It’s on her chest and not clearly visible in all the photos.) I also picked up some cute ID badges on eBay, but couldn’t find a place for them in the final outfits. Instead, they became ornaments for the tree.

Here’s a little character collage I put together for my family, who are not Firefly fans (THE HORRA!) and thus didn’t get the reference. Side-by-side comparison time! How do you think I did?

All’s shiny that ends shiny, I say.

Outtakes and extras after the jump!

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My poor little lady Kaylee was brutalized at the vet’s yesterday. She went in for a dental cleaning and ended up having two teeth extracted. To be fair, this was no real surprise, what with her past dental issues. But her one remaining fang, GONE! The horror and injustice of it all!
 

Kaylee circa 2007, after her second round of dental surgery. If you look closely (or click through to flickr for the notes!), you can see how her mouth is lopsided: many of the teeth on the left side of her mouth were removed, making her look adorably silly, but also kinda sad. As of yesterday, the “fang” on the right side of her mouth is now history, too.
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At our request, the vet also removed some rather large fatty deposits – which had been growing progressively larger over the past few years – from her left shoulder and right side. The one near her rib cage was especially stubborn coming out, and she’s got the 2″-long, ragged, angry red incision to prove it. Her shoulder looks even worse: because she had two lumps there (don’t worry, all benign, thank dog!), he had to make two separate incisions, which kind of meld together visually for an especially horrifying effect. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

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The want is strong with this one!
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Tender baked apples, seasoned with chai tea spices: that about sums it up!

Serve with ice cream, oatmeal, pancakes – or warm on its own – for a delicious, healthy treat.
 
Baked Chai Apples

Ingredients

6 cups apples, diced
1 cup water
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon cardamom

Directions

In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine the water with the sugar and spices and mix well with a fork or whisk. Place the diced apples in an 8×8″ glass baking pan and add the water; stir well, until all the apples are coated in spices. Bake at 425 degrees F for 30 to 45 minutes or until tender.
 
Serve warm with…

a scoop of vanilla ice cream!

Store-bought or homemade, you can’t lose.

your morning bowl of oatmeal!

For extra chai goodness, use the leftover liquid juices to cook your quick oats.

pancakes!

Pictured is an oven-baked pancake; let’s just say that I’m still refining the recipe and leave it at that, mkay? THE APPLES WERE DELICIOUS THOUGH!

 

 
For a brief moment, I considered making my veganmofo theme a His Dark Materials one this year. But after several days of wracking my brain and only coming up with a few scattered foodstuffs – namely, marzipan, chocolatl, Tokay, tea crackers and vegan seal blubber (!) – I gave up on the idea, with not a small twinge of regret. But! We can still have marzipan and chocolate, can’t we? I don’t know about y’all, but I fancy some sweet almond paste today! Plus, I did promise you a marzipan recipe earlier this month, did I not?

Since marzipan ice cream is a more unusual flavor, I decided to try my hand at making my own concoction. Plan A was to use a standard vanilla ice cream recipe as a base, and then mix marzipan blended with (vegan) heavy cream (for a creamy effect) in with the ice cream after it was processed through an ice cream machine, à la this recipe for Marzipan Swirl Ice Cream (veganized, of course). For the marzipan, I used this recipe (also veganized!) for Almond Paste at food.com. Epic disaster!

I’m not sure what (if anything) I did wrong, but the end result was less like paste and more like soup. Even after I doubled the dry ingredients, the almond “paste” had at best the consistency of caramel sauce – not even close to paste-like. Just as I was on the brink of despair, it hit me: I was planning on liquefying the marzipan anyhow, so what’s the diff? If anything, this saved me the extra steps of making vegan heavy cream and then heating it with the marzipan to make the “cream” for the swirl. Score!

So here’s Plan B, the result of a happy accident which saved me at least a half hour of extra work and a quarter sink of dirty dishes. May this little taste of the sweet stuff bring you a fraction of the wisdom and fortune that it did to Mary Malone – and, by extension, Lyra, Will, and all the animals of all the worlds, human and non.

Go forth and play the serpent, my friends.

 

FIND THE GIRL AND THE BOY. WASTE NO MORE TIME.
But why?
YOU MUST PLAY THE SERPENT.

- Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (The Subtle Knife)
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“Playing the Serpent” Marzipan Ice Cream

Ingredients

for the marzipan:

1 1/3 cups dried blanched almonds or almond meal
1 1/3 cups powdered sugar
2/3 cup sugar
1/8 cup agave nectar
1 tablespoon almond extract
1/2 cup water

for the ice cream batter:

1 cup soy or almond milk, divided
2 tablespoons arrowroot powder
2 cups soy creamer
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract

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Ralphie! Everyone’s favorite one-eyed wiener dog turns fourteen years old today! FOURTEEN! He’s not old, he’s distinguished. Doubly so with all these surgical scars and skin tags and patches of missing fur. His motto? “Bitches dig scars.”

Hey, Rennie can’t get enough.

(Note peeping Peedee off in the background. Pervert! Nevermind that I’m photographing their intimate moment.)

Rolling with the weather, we celebrated his birthday a wee bit early this year. On Friday, I baked him a batch of Apple Cinnamon Muffins

and made him dress up in a silly hat -

but not before he got the first taste of his pre-birthday treat.

(The other six canines were pitching a fit, locked in the house away from mom and her nomz. I think Ralphie enjoyed that as well – almost as much as the muffins!)

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…for Friday was their adoption day (five years! five!) slash birthday (thirteen and seven years, respectively). Naturally, I was too busy celebrating to write a proper blog post. As with last year, Shane and I took them walking along nearby Smithville Lake – an outing which was more for our benefit than theirs, given that neither girl is very big on walks.

(Note how Kaylee has hunkered down, signaling her refusal to walk one! more! sticking! step!, in the photo above.)

After a slow start (we couldn’t remember where along the lake’s 175 miles of shoreline we’d parked on previous visits), we were eventually able to find some nice trails,

including a miniature “beach” area for Jayne. (Unfortunately, the main swimming beach was a) closed for the season and b) isn’t open to dogs, anyway. Boo! Hiss! Boo!)

(She loves the water! As long as it isn’t in a bathtub!)

But mostly they couldn’t wait to get back to the car. Actually, we didn’t even make it that far; in the end, Shane trekked back to retrieve the car while we girls waiting to be picked up in the picnic area. The laziness!

Happy to be back home, they spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in the backyard, soaking up sun and bellyrubs, and enjoying a nice cardboard shipping envelope “chew.” Ah, the simple pleasures in life.

Note to self: next year, make them muffins. They’d rather have the nomz.

People! The dates for VeganMoFo V have finally been announced! (Funny, the timing: just after I drew up this submission for the vegan problems tumblog,

but before I had a chance to submit it! Procrastination FAIL. Or WIN, I guess, depending on how you look at it!)

This year the Vegan Month of Food is October. By signing up, basically you pledge to write about vegan food – emphasis on VEGAN, and vegan only! THAT MEANS NO DEAD TURKEYS, Y’ALL! – all month, weekends optional, for a total of at least twenty posts. Challenging but fun, and an awesome community-building project to boot. There shall be contests, and giveaways, and prizes, and daily nomz roundups, and more vegan sweets that you can wag your tongue at, and a marvelous time will be had by all! Until week three, when everyone is exhausted and burnt out. (BUT WE’LL WORRY ABOUT THAT LATER, MKAY?)

2011 will be my fourth year participating (I missed the first go-round. Boo! Hiss! Boo!), and I’m really overextending myself by throwing three of my who-knows-how-many blogs into the ring. (Err, kitchen?) Over on tumblr, fuck yeah vegan pizza and fuck yeah vegan ice cream will be a breeze, since I already post four or five time per day, per blog. (Microblogging, gotta love it!) But twenty posts in this here space? Is more than I’ve written in the previous four months combined! Oh self, what were you thinking!?!

If you’d like to play along too, here are some links to get you started.

- Official VeganMoFo blog

- Vegan MoFo sign up form

- VeganMoFo on Facebook

- VeganMoFo on twitter

- VeganMoFo on flickr

The deadline to sign up and be featured in the official VeganMoFo blogroll is September 28, so get to it!

And now, let the post hoarding commence.

Oh, but first: the first batch of Mags & Finnick photos are up!

(Mags and Finnick being the “senior” rat terriers we adopted last week. “Senior” in scare quotes cause Fin’s more like 6, and Mags is maybe 9. The shelter staff said 10, at least. WHY OH WHY DO THEY ALWAYS DO THAT! I know that guessing a dog’s age is just that – a guess – but if you’re bound to err, why not err to the dog’s benefit? The same thing happened when we adopted Rennie: we thought we were getting a four-year-old adult, and ended up with maybe one-year-old pup. Ack! But I digress.)

Seven dogs, only one photo (so far!) in which they all appear.
And of course I’m not in it, pfffft. No justice.
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More to come soon, along with a super-sweet, adorable and sentimental blog post, no doubt. But for the time being, I have my hands full with SIX RAT TERRIERS AND AN ORNERY OLD DACHSHUND! Oh, and now twenty mofo posts too. Seriously what was I thinking!

Updated to add: veganmofo.wordpress.com is now www.veganmofo.com !!!

For reals.

Let’s spend the afternoon playing dress-up, I know how much you lurve it!*

* For serious, he really does enjoy it! He’s a mama’s boy all the way, and there’s no shame in that! Also, I’d normally take him on a walk, but. Rain. All day. Le sigh.