Kitchen Labels via Sharpie

Some people use their computers to create and print fancy labels for their kitchen containers. Not us. No way. Give us a Sharpie and we'll just write on the side of the Tupperware.

We actually have two such Stites family masterpieces. The first one, pictured here,

is powdered sugar. You may have figured out that part. It says some form of "powdered sugar" or "not flour" on all four sides of the container. Because, well, some of us can use a little reinforcement. Jeffrey Stites is a really good cook. He's not afraid to try anything in the kitchen and has conquered things like coq au vin and homemade Cuban bread (is it still Cuban if it's made in North Carolina by an American of European descent?). But he has also made French Onion soup using powdered sugar instead of flour to make a roux. Twice. Twice he did this. The first time we chalked it up to being an honest mistake. But the second time? We don't even keep these two things anywhere near each other in the cabinets. We really laughed at him the second time. Since I wanted to make sure that never happened again, I took a Sharpie to the plastic and voila! There should be no more mistaking those two in this house.

The second container also has a story. We were working on Brunswick Little Theatre's summer musical a couple years ago. We were doing "Into The Woods," and the plan was for a teenaged boy to carry a cow to portray Milky White. We needed flour to make the cow white. It was a brown cow that needed a light dusting to make it stand in for the white cow and...well, go see the show live if you can find it playing on stage anywhere and otherwise, rent the movie. Anyway, we needed to keep a supply of flour backstage. Being the ever -resourceful stage manager that he is, Jeffrey borrowed our flour container and labeled it "Instant Milky White."

Surprisingly, those are the only two we have felt the need to label so far. Knowing us though, they won't be the last.

Christmas Cheer and Making Messes

I really felt the need to bake Christmas cookies this year. I knew we didn't need to eat five batches of cookies, but I really wanted to bake. Jeffrey came up with the perfect solution.

The Let's PLAY! children's workshop holiday showcase was this Saturday at Brunswick Little Theatre, and he thought it would be nice to have cookies and cider for the kids and their parents and friends who came to see the show.

I was going to write this blog post about the cookies I made, but I took a picture of the aftermath in the kitchen, and knew this post had to be about something else. So here's the short version on the cookie deal. We (yes, it was a group effort) made pumpkin cookies with a brown sugar glaze, peanut butter blossom cookies with peanut butter-filled chocolate chips on top instead of Hershey Kisses (not what we intended but it totally worked out) and shortbread chocolate chip cookies with cinnamon sugar. 

Our little reception got rave reviews. The kids loved the cookies, and so did the adults. One little girl asked me if I made a certain cookie and when I said yes, she told me I should do that more often. :-) What a nice feeling it was to see everyone enjoying themselves during and after the show. 

So this is what the kitchen looked like after we were done baking. Now, I did my own share of the mess-making, but Jeffrey surpassed my efforts when he was left unsupervised to work on the shortbread cookies. 

There is just so much "us" in this picture. There's a Mickey plate in the background. It's a plate, but we keep it propped up against the backsplash so we can see it because, well, it's Mickey. There's a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce on the counter. Not cookie related, of course, but we have a long-running joke about Lea & Perrins since I once scoffed at Jeffrey for even thinking of buying something other than "the name" in Worcestershire sauce. There is a pint glass we used to dip in the cinnamon sugar. The bowl of sugar is a baby bowl that the boy has long outgrown but I now use for a variety of things in the kitchen. The flour container, seen behind the pint glass, says "Instant Milky White." See, it was used during BLT's production of "Into the Woods" this summer. They used flour to make the fake Milky White cow and the boy holding it, well, somewhat Milky. There was obviously a mini chocolate chip spill, and there's a new stain on that page of the cookie cookbook. 

That's the Stites life in a nutshell. There's always a story, and though sometimes it's messy, it's always full of love and joy.