Lovelihood

Our coarse kosher salt may not be optimized for salt dough activities. But we make do, because it's the only kind of salt we keep in the house. As opposed to the twenty varieties of sugar stocked in the cabinet. Priorities.

I decided to get a little fancy with the marshmallows this year. Which gives me license to make them half the size as previous years' and package them in smaller batches. So there are the peppermint candy-topped ones (which, frankly, came out odd-looking), and then these babies, painted with a bit of melted chocolate and sprinkled with crushed graham crackers. A perfect, no-fuss s'more. www.lovelihood.com

For the past week, I've been parading through the kitchen all manner of baked and otherwise sweet goods, off limits to The Boy both for their Christmas giftiness and their highly allergenic qualities. He has expressed his unhappiness. Today's marshmallow preparations yielded a beaterful of the good stuff, sticky and gooey enough to satisfy this treat-deprived rock star.

Spent the morning pressing those carved blocks to fabric, which is more forgiving than paper, but sheds off miniscule bits of lint that eventually obfuscate the finer lines of linoleum blocks.

Tonight's makings: shortbread cookies, which imparted such a dense buttery aroma into the kitchen aether that I wouldn't be surprised if The Boy broke out into hives just walking downstairs tomorrow morning.

We're still loving the bento box lunches, with their neat compartments for meals and filler-foods. The one thing they're not good for, though, is sandwiches, and The Boy finally put the kibosh on the sliced-up, smashed-in affairs that would occassionally make their way into his lunch. When I showed him my latest supermarket find, the "party-sliced" loaf of pumpernickel, he lit up so absolutely, that, of course, I had to curl up some salami and not-cheese between those enveloping layers to make the cutest damned sandwiches to ever fit perfectly in a bento lunchbox.

Our pair of heavy, pointy reindeer, settled into their pre-festive perch on the windowsill behind the couch.