Turkey Meatloaf Recipe: Looks Like Dog Barf, but Tastes Great

Sunday evening suppers tend toward comfort food at my house - a little something to soothe the disappointment that the lovely weekend is drawing to a close and to provide a boost as everyone heads off to cram in the last of homework and work prep for the week ahead.

This week's menu was turkey meatloaf, baked sweet potatoes and tossed salad with blackberries and cashews -- and a bowl of canned soup for my teenaged daughter who declared herself unwilling to choke down even a bite of what looks to her like dog barf. She has held this opinion for many years now -- but this Sunday marked an important transition for her. She was persuaded to have a nibble, decided my meatloaf was perhaps better than dog barf or even canned soup, ate a whole slice and then had seconds. And has since been caught picking at the leftovers straight from the fridge.

So, while it's undeniable that this dish does resemble dog barf (which for the record, my dog would happily eat), I think we can all agree it must in fact taste much, much better. Which it does.

This is another one of those recipes that I make slightly differently, depending on the availability of ingredients and/or my mood. It's equally delicious served hot on a cold winter evening or cold in a sandwich on a hot summer afternoon. It's even good for breakfast, and apparently also tasty straight out of the Tupperware in the fridge for a bedtime snack. It's adapted from the turkey loaf recipe my wonderful former neighbor Eileen Edson used to make and from the classic meatloaf recipe in my ancient copy of the Better Homes and Garden cookbook.

The measurements below are the American-style ones, but I just found this great website that tells you how to convert the measurements, depending on where you live. If I have time tomorrow I'll have a go at a metric/celsius version.

Turkey Meatloaf

For the loaf:

1 or 2 eggs, lightly beaten (depends on how gooey you like it)

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats OR bread crumbs OR cooked rice OR other filler kind of stuff

2-3 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup catsup (can vary to taste)

1 onion, grated

2-3 ribs celery, finely chopped

2-3 carrots, shredded

Or whatever combo of veggies you have in your fridge and like

1/2 tsp Italian seasoning or some sage or whatever seasonings you prefer

1 pound ground turkey (I normally use the extra lean ground turkey breast, but you can really use any ground meat, including combos of different ones)

For the topping:

1/4 cup catsup

2 T brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine all the ingredients for the loaf EXCEPT the ground turkey in a large bowl. Lightly mix in the turkey (if you over-stir it, it gets tough). Spray a loaf pan with Pam, then dump the dog barf, I mean meat mixture, into the pan and pat it smooth.

Mix the extra catsup and sugar in an old coffee mug and smooth it over the top.

Pop the pan in the oven uncovered and bake for 1 hour and fifteen minutes (at 350 degrees F).

It is tricky to get slices out of the pan in one piece. On occasions when I have guests who don't mind an entree that looks like dog barf cut in slices, I'll line the pan with baking parchment before I put the mixture in. Then I'll let the loaf sit for 15 minutes after cooking and lift it out using the parchment paper. It will then slice rather neatly. (But this is too much bother for ordinary family meals, especially given the usual rejection of it, however it looks.)

The only problem with my daughter learning to like this is that there will now be much less left over for my lunches. And that's bad, because this is insanely good in a sandwich on homemade Swedish sour rye bread - which you can find my favorite recipe for here.

I'm drooling already and will have to go hide the last couple meatloaf slices and get up early tomorrow to bake bread.

My Creative Space - HELP!

I'm joining in for the first time with the meme "My Creative Space" over at Kootoyoo's fun blog - you can check out all the other cool spaces and projects for this week here. Pictured above is one of my projects for this week, a button necklace that's a belated birthday gift for a good friend. (My first attempt was a disaster. This one is not going much better. Just a few tips - if you're going to make someone a crocheted button necklace, it is probably good to know how to crochet already. And to follow the directions. And to have the right size crochet hook.) This project is on my kitchen table because, as anyone who read yesterday's post will know, my studio is a disorganized disaster.

So I'm pleading for some ideas. I got these great books out of the library - and they do have sound strategies and photos of some truly gorgeous work spaces - but I am sufficiently organizationally impaired, and my space is small and odd enough, and my stuff varied and uh, numerous enough, that their ideas don't really work for me. I'm open to any suggestions, except to throw everything out and start over. (But pare down...that I'll probably have to live with.)

Here's a tour of my studio, which is in a big landing area at the top of the steps to our second floor. It has some charming features, like knee walls and a little alcove-y thing, but it's pretty small, has low ceilings, the original dark wallpaper, tiny windows and generally poor lighting, and it's rather "public" since anyone going to one of the bedrooms or upstairs bathrooms has to pass through it. Which means, my husband thinks, that it would be better if it didn't always look like the aftermath of a major earthquake or Category 5 hurricane. He may have a point.

This is my drawing table, which is pretty large. I never use the tilt function, so I probably don't really need something this nice, but it is in good shape and I already own it. I usually have it set up with "stations." The near edge is for cutting (mat, blades, etc.). The edge along the right has, sometimes, space for working with polymer clay (including my oft-used pasta machine). (The stairs are just out of the photo on the right, and it does make me a bit nervous to sit along that side, with my back to the steep staircase.) The far edge is my sewing area, with my trusty vintage Singer Featherweight (hand-me-down from my mom). The sitting space is a bit tight, but it does more or less work. And the side on the left is for drawing, gluing and whatever else needs to be done. There is not supposed to be so much stuff piled all over the desk, but there always is.

Behind the drawing table along the far wall, there is lots of storage-y stuff - some narrow shelves, a 2-drawer file cabinet, a small chest of drawers, an old glass-fronted kitchen cabinet with tool drawer things on it, and thread racks. Across from that, forming a hallway to the bedrooms is a large flat file. It has a great melamine top that my husband made for it and could be a good extra workspace, if I ever managed to keep it clear. I store large pieces of foamcore and some finished stuff vertically between it and the stair railing.

This is the view in the opposite direction. I have bookshelves and an old card catalog with tons of little items in it to the left (which is a narrow space leading to the door to my daughter's bedroom. I would feel sorry for her having to navigate through all my crap except: a) she has just as much crap in her room, b) she uses my studio herself all the time, and c) she's often responsible for lots of the mess in my studio too.)

I love the little alcove/dormer area, but feel like I'm not making good use of it. There's a cabinet where I store things like stuffing and batting and various odds and ends. On top I have a light table thing, which I rarely use anymore and could probably get rid of or at least store out of the way. I'd love ideas for how to make this area either more attractive or useful. Or, and this would be really cool, both.

On the right is an old IKEA piece of "little drawers." They are mostly filled with crap and badly need to be purged and reorganized. On top are my homemade trays for when I'm working on a book - there are 34 of them, one for each page in the book plus the covers. They were an ingenious (I think) solution for my weird needs - they keep all the little odds and ends for each page corralled and unsquished until I glue them in place and even give me a space to lay out each page on top of a photocopy of the sketch so I can make sure things are going along well. I'd like to have smaller stacks of them - it's tricky grabbing a tray from the bottom of one when I'm working - but on the whole it's one of the better organizational strategies I've used.

Finally, a view of the third wall. I have a large old IKEA unit that used to be in our family room for the TV and whatnot. It is in desperate need of sorting and organizing. It holds various reference books for drawing and techniques that I use often, as well as the "Bible" notebook I create for each book I'm currently working on, fabric, paper, old "stuff" I quickly hide during pre-houseguest clean-up frenzies, and most of my polymer clay stash.

Not shown is where I have all the artwork from the books I've done. I've given away a lot of it, but I still have enough that it's quite frankly overwhelming. It's all stacked in the bedroom of one of my kids who's off at college. I'm praying he doesn't want to move back home for a while after he graduates; there's not really much space left for him. (Legally, I can't really sell or give away my work anymore, thanks to the stupid CPSIA law - it almost certainly wouldn't pass the tests for lead and phthalates, plus the testing would destroy it. I think it's okay to sell or give it to adult-only households or art/kids' books collections, since it could then be classified as a collectible, but I'm not exactly famous enough to attract much interest from those markets yet.)

This is my mish-mosh inspiration bulletin board. I haven't updated it in many, many years. Bad me. But check out this unbelievably cool (and unused feature). You lift off the bulletin board and...

Ta-da! There's a hidey-hole, complete with a safe from the days when this was my middle son's "bedroom" (he got a real bedroom when he reached adolescence, but it's still kind of embarrassing that we made him sleep on the landing for years). I do not know the combo for the safe, but I bet I could jimmie it open. Wonder what's inside?

I have various little cool storage thingies that I don't make good use of. The little drawers above are from my 70s teen years and now contain 1 needle threaded with white thread, 2 gold paper leaves, and a handful of picture hangers. The shopping cart usually holds spare postcards, business cards, flyers, etc. that I take with me to book events.
The little drawers have stuff like buttons, but mostly my buttons are in jars. The locker used to hold my spare x-acto blades and a tin of used ones, but now it's pretty much empty. It looks like a real locker inside with a high shelf, a low shelf and a biggish middle area with hooks on the sides. Any ideas for making better use of these?

After you guys help me with this, I'll get your assistance with my desk area downstairs. (See it below.) Yikes.

What's Hot + What's Not

Dangy blangy. I meant to start back posting at least several times a week, and here it's been a whole week again.

I'm joining in again with Loobylu's hot+not meme because it is easy and fun. I urge you to go to her site and check out the blogs of all the participants - there are some very inspiring (and funny) postings out there - and to join in yourself. I've also discovered lots of new blogs to follow, which is a good thing given the not-hot thing that happened to my computer last week.

HOT

Leaf Art I decided to make a new banner for my blog that's appropriately seasonal for the northern hemisphere -- for another week or two anyway... Someday I'm going to do that stuff in a timely fashion, right?

The papercut leaves in my banner are incredibly easy to make, though a bit time consuming if you're foolish enough to choose leaves like these Japanese maple ones that have little toothy edges. Don't even try that super lacy one I show in the photocopy unless you're a glutton for punishment. Anyway, here's how:

1. Collect leaves with interesting shapes and press them (to make instant pressed leaves, iron them on low heat between a couple layers of paper towels).
2. Photocopy your favorites.
3. Cut loosely around the shapes (see above).
4. Use a repositionable glue stick to attach the cut-out shape to the wrong side of a piece of paper. I used some of the beautiful rice papers from my stash (the ones I tend to save in perpetuity because they're too beautiful to use).
5. You can use an embossing tool to go over the veins (these should be reasonably clear on your photocopy). The resulting texture is subtle on these soft rice papers, but I can see it, if the light's right.
6. Cut around the photocopied image. I used an x-acto knife, taking care to go through both layers of paper, but embroidery or decoupage scissors would work too.
7. Peel off the backing. Only don't wait weeks to do so like I did because then the repositionable glue stops wanting to be repositioned/removed. Though that seems to be okay too.

These make nice greeting cards and they look great framed as seasonal art - a good hostess gift.

Or, you can do something even easier that looks really elegant (my photos don't do these justice). I just painted these pressed gingko leaves with gold leaf paint. Thicker, sturdier leaves work best. The gilded leaves look dramatic glued to black paper or fabric and displayed in a vintage gold metal frame. (I find the frames, with little embossed designs, all the time at estate sales for almost nothing.) Or scatter a few on a dark tablecloth around an autumn centerpiece.

Creative Inspiration

Thanks to the SCBWI conference I attended last weekend here in Pittsburgh, PA. Not only did we get some good swag (the nice tote bag shown above, with an image by local illustrator Leda Miller), but Bruce Coville was everything I hoped for and then some - go check out his website which is funny and interesting. His keynote address was encouraging, uplifting, motivating - and hysterically funny. The main points I took away are:

1. Hard work and persistence are the main keys to success. Plenty of talented people never succeed because they never put in the time and/or effort to learn the craft of writing or illustrating, or because they give up too soon when they meet initial rejection. I've certainly found this to be true - it took me five years to get my first manuscript accepted and more than 10 to get offered a book to illustrate - and meanwhile, plenty of aspiring writers and illustrators with more natural ability than I have have fallen away.
2. The 7 Deadly Sins for Writers are: Dullness, Repetition, Cliche, Sloth, Inattention, Perfectionism, and Clumsiness.
3. The 7 Virtues for Writers are: Passion, Sensuousness, Wisdom, Guile, Humor, Courage, and Joy. Of these great virtues, the greatest three are humor, courage and joy, the last of which is the birthright of all children.

It's impossible not to feel inspired to sit down at my keyboard and drawing table (aka the kitchen table) after that - and to top it off, all the other speakers were interesting and informative. Probably best of all was reuniting with some of the most talented, creative, hardworking and kind people I know. I feel all "popcorn brainy" now, as my friend Kitty Griffin puts it.

Chalkboard Paint and Chalkboard Markers

I can see where it might be possible to go a little overboard with these. A lot of the woodwork in my house has secretly become writing surfaces in the last week.

The colors and variety of line you get with these chalkboard markers make them way cooler than ordinary chalk, not that I don't like it too. (They can be a little stubborn about coming off, despite the manufacturer's promise that they are easily erased with warm water - but they do come off with a little elbow grease and/or Clorox Clean Up.)

Claire's Nice Comments

Incredibly kind of Loobylu to visit everyone's blogs and comment. I'm going to try to be equally thoughtful this week. (Okay, and I was blown away when she called my art hot, since I think hers is flaming.)

NOT

My Creative Space

Which is disorganized. Cluttered. Messy. And impossible to work in, which is especially frustrating now that I'm brimming with creative urges. Thank goodness we had a houseguest all last week, so I kept my fall-back workspace (the kitchen table) pretty much cleared off.

You know the saddest thing? The photo above is the after picture - I actually purged and tidied it before the company came, and that's all the better it ended up. And now all my closets are overflowing with junk I swear I'm going to sort through, but probably won't until I'm desperately searching for something I need to finish a project.

The Kitchen Computer

I'm actually very lucky - our household has gobs of computers I can use, so even though the kitchen one is dead, as in it won't even think about turning on, I can still get my work done. But the kitchen computer is where I kept my calendar, so I now feel adrift and anxious. (I've tried to back it up in the past, but I can never get the backups to open so I finally gave up. I know; I need a new system.) And it's where all my bookmarked blogs are (I know, I should just subscribe to my favorites, but I haven't.)

And it's where I had the last couple chapters of my novel, which I (I know, stupid-head, stupid-head) hadn't backed up. My husband thinks the problem is a dead motherboard and that we'll be able to rescue the hard drive and get all my data back - and I'm praying he's right. If not, well, what's a little more hard work, right?

A Nameless Teenager Who Must Be Nagged Endlessly to Finish Her College Applictions

Fortunately I have these good chalkboard markers and door panels coated with chalkboard paint to help out in the nagging department.

I do love that Douglas Adams quote (he's the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and many other excellent books).

Leaves

There is no pleasing me. This week I'm whinging about the ones that are smothering my yard or still clinging to the oak trees so that raking will never end.

And I'm moping about all the beautiful ones that are GONE or nearly so. (I'm trying hard to heed Claire's advice to just concentrate on enjoying the colors. She's right, of course - the colors were downright spectacular this year.)

By the way, about that word "whinge"? It's a new one for me that I keep seeing on Australian and English blogs and I would like to start using it. Specifically I would like to tell my teenager, "Quit whinging about your applications and just finish them!" But I don't know how to pronounce it - is it WIN-jing or WHINE-jing? Or something else?

Have a great week, everyone. (Though I am planning/hoping to post more often than weekly.)

What's Hot + What's Not

I love playing along with this theme with loobylu. Be sure to visit her site and see all the other bloggers participating - lots of inspiring and pleasing things to check out.

Hot

Squash and Squash Players

My husband is in charge of a squash (the sport, not the vegetable - though that could be interesting too) tournament in Pittsburgh this week, so it is all squash all the time for our family this week. And of course my husband is hot. And we're also hosting a very nice young player from France - a bonus for those of us who enjoy a cute French accent and a chance to try to remember our high school French. It's also making me want to plan a trip to France again soon.

Leaves

The reds are looking a bit faded after a couple of freezes, but the yellows and golds are still breathtaking. I've been pressing leaves like mad this year, and even doing the iron them between sheets of waxed paper and hang them in the window thing. I've decided I'm just going to go back to doing all my little kid crafts that I love right now and not wait for grandkids to give me an excuse to indulge in them again, because that will likely be a long wait still (well, I hope so on the whole at least).

The Western Pennsylvania Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Fall Conference

It's coming up this weekend, and I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends like Marc Harshman, who's working on a book project with me (and my daughter Sara) involving this bear, who is still in the development phase, and possibly a chipmunk too.

The keynote speaker this year is Bruce Coville, and I can't wait to hear him in person. I've heard and read interviews where he consistently comes across as funny, smart, talented, inspirational - and best of all, just plain nice. I have high expectations.

If you are interested in writing or illustrating for kids and don't already know about SCBWI, you should definitely check out their website and consider joining. They have lots of useful info, especially for newcomers, and they're beginning to offer more and more for experienced people in the field too. It's a great way to meet people too - and like gardeners, kids' book people are nearly uniformly generous, interesting folks.

Unfortunately some good friends won't make the conference this year, having had the gall to move away and have busy lives (just kidding - but I do miss all of them.) This includes my dear friend Julie Stiegemeyer, with whom I have TWO new projects in the works with these characters: The Little Red Monster and Benny.

NOT

Leaves

I do not understand how my yard and pond can be completely covered already again right after I raked a zillion leaves two days ago. Nor do I understand how there can still be so many left on my oaks, most of which don't even appear to have changed.

The weather. The dark.

Geez, it's cold! 28 F (like -2 C) this morning. And SNOW in the forecast for tomorrow. It is much too soon for winter. And daylight savings time ended last weekend so now it is dark, dark, dark when I go on my walks with my friend Mary Lou in the evening, and there are still only the first glimmers of light when I have to get up in the morning - not enough help as far as I'm concerned to be worth the end of day light.

How many plants I have yet to get in the ground

We have been too insanely busy this fall on the weekends, what with traveling and frantically trying to clean my house for visitors, so planting has not been happening. But lots of plant buying did, so this Sunday, snow or no snow, visitors or no visitors, I MUST plant.

NaNoWriMo

Swore I was going to do it this year. Have. Not. Written. One. New. Word. on my novel. Poop.

Halloween Redux Part 1: Costume and Pumpkin Resolutions

Happy post-Halloween!

I hope everyone out there had a good one, with more giggles than tears. My kids are old enough that the holiday has lost some of the magic it once had, but also most of the headaches. This enables me to be Wise and Knowing about the holiday and to offer you a list of the resolutions I've made over the years regarding costumes and pumpkins. You can make the same ones for next year if things haven't gone smoothly at your house this year. (In the spirit of full disclosure I will note that I rarely managed to keep my resolutions the next year, but still...)

Alternatively, you can just indulge a few moments of feeling like a Halloween pro compared to me.

Resolution Number 1 I will be accepting of my child's costume choices.

...even if that means that Child A in the photo above chooses at the last minute to wear her big brother's tattered bat costume from the year before after I've spent weeks crafting a lovely, feminine Butterfly Fairy costume from yards of tulle and sequins and glitter. Even though I have been dying for a dose of girly after two boys, and even though all her friends are outfitted in tutus and tiaras, and even though she will then insist on wearing the bat costume daily right through the Christmas holidays when every other little girl we know is wearing velveteen and tights and sparkly hair bows.

...even if that means that Child B wants to be a praying mantis, a costume you cannot possibly buy ready-made and that is also insanely tricky to make and that absolutely no one can tell what it is. I will recognize that being unidentifiable is part of the appeal for some children and I will graciously make him a "black hole" costume the following year even though it is even more unidentifiable.

...even if Child C takes one look in the mirror, scares himself, and insists I wash off all his ghost make-up after I've spent nearly an hour carefully applying it to his directions and we are already running late for the school Halloween parade.

Resolution Number 2 I will remember that sweatshirts are the basis of the best costumes.

They're great for a number of reasons: 1) they're versatile enough to be modified with moderate sewing/gluing skills to be a bat, a praying mantis, or, in the case above, a roly-poly bug costume; 2) they're warm, plus roomy enough to put extra warm layers underneath (this advantage might not apply if you're lucky enough to live some place where it isn't routinely freezing cold, raining and/or snowing on Halloween); and 3) they're reusable after the holiday, simply by removing the various accessories you've hot-glued or tacked on. Or not, if your child continues to demand to wear her costume for months.

Resolution Number 3 I will remember that indulging kids' costume preferences can lead to all kinds of good things.

Like imagination and creativity and a strong sense of self. Like cementing a passion for science and natural history that will last well into the teen years and even become the foundation for career choices.

Like giving me an idea for a character to put in a picture book. That's Mimi in the picture above with her pet roly-poly bug Frank.

My daughter's costume was inspired by a science unit her class did on roly-poly bugs, and becoming a roly-poly bug herself for Halloween really seemed to take her interest to the next level. After Halloween that year, we gathered up the roly-poly stragglers we found under the flower pots I hadn't yet gotten around to dumping, named them all Frank for easy identification, and moved them into a warm habitat in a special old diaper wipe box. Which we then kept as a centerpiece on the kitchen table, so we could observe their behavior carefully over the winter months. (As a bonus, the centerpiece also curbed my appetite, a good thing after all the leftover Halloween candy I "took care of.") Sara has since remained fascinated since by all creatures great and small. (This was actually the second time we'd housed roly-poly refugees over the winter, but Sara had been too young to really take notice the first time around.)

Resolution Number 4 I will remember to rush out and buy lots of costume stuff on November 1st because there is really no better birthday gift for a preschooler than a dress-up box - and no better time to find good stuff on mega-sale.

Resolution Number 5 I will not put the jack-o-lantern out for the trash thereby causing my toddler to wail, "The garby-men took my PUMPKIN!" every time we see a garbage truck for the next 12 months.

Instead I will plant pumpkin seeds so that my child can observe the full life cycle of his beloved pumpkin. This will cause an enormously long and prickly vine to take over my entire garden and kill half my treasured perennials in the process. And then I will put the used jack-o-lantern back in the garden so we can check every day to see how moldy, slimy, blobby it gets as it decays back into soil. And then we will plant the seeds again in the spring so we can start the process all over again, wiping out the last remaining perennials in the process.

I will also remember that a good alternative to carving a pumpkin - a too-difficult task for a preschooler - is to let him hammer large nails all over the pumpkin, pull them out, and then enjoy the lovely polka dot effect when a candle is placed inside. I will also remember that it is much better to cut off the bottom (easier to light the candle) and scoop everything out BEFORE all that hammering.

Thanks everyone for the comments welcoming me back to blogging! It's great to be back.

Next up: handling the horrors of all that Halloween candy.

What's Hot + What's Not

I'm taking up Loobylu's challenge to post a list on Wednesdays of what's hot and what's not. So here goes:

HOT

1. Me, blogging again Wow, that was a long unintended break, but I'm glad to be back at my keyboard. The one good thing about such a long hiatus is that I have TONS of material saved up.
2. New books! I haveTWO of them out this fall! I illustrated the picture book An Apple Pie for Dinner by Susan VanHecke (Marshall Cavendish) and wrote another book for parents of young children, The Preschooler Problem Solver (Peachtree). I'll write more about both these books in coming days, but in the meantime, you can check out the beautiful website the author created for the apple pie book here.
3. Fall color in my garden
   
4. It's spectacular this year. Hard for me to stay in the house when I know my trees look like that.
5. Autumn-themed miniature gardens
   
6. 
   
The first one was a gift for my mother-in-law and largely made by my daughter; the second is a teeny tiny one we made several of as small gifts. I'll provide some how-to in future posts, but the little ones are pretty easy to craft.

What's Not

1. CPSIA The Consumer Product Safety law has not gone away nor been amended in any significant way. Vintage books have been confirmed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as forbidden to children 12 and under despite any evidence that they pose even a small threat to kids' health and abundant evidence of their value for them. Grr.
2. Radio interviews I'm lucky to have gotten a bunch lined up to promote The Preschooler Problem Solver, but even though I've done tons of media interviews over the years, they still make me feel a tongue-tied mess.
3. Amtrak I'm normally a huge fan of train travel, though I've long lamented the sorry state of it in the U.S. - but Saturday was a particularly deep low in my regard for it. My son's five-hour train trip from NJ to Boston arrived nearly five hours late, putting his arrival close to 2 am instead of anywhere near the scheduled 9 pm. Which meant he missed the last connecting commuter train to his destination in Worcester MA where he attends college, as well as all the bus options. And no taxi would take him that far nor to his friend's place at a Boston area college. And the train station was completely deserted and no one at the Amtrak "customer service" number would offer any assistance in finding alternative travel or lodging because he wasn't continuing on an Amtrak train. And that stinks.

Okay, as usual I have NO control of the numbering function on blogger. Pretend the numbers aren't there. And the random text color stuff also defeats me. Sigh.

Happy Easter! With Just a Little about CPSIA and Vintage Books

This Easter, as I have for every Easter I can remember, I read The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, with illustrations by Margery Flack (the author-illustrator of the Angus books I've written about before), and as always, the book warmed my heart and gave me a burst of energy and determination to be kind to children in need.

The main character of this 1939 classic is well-ahead of her time. She's dark-furred, raised in an impoverished environment, left a single parent of 21 children - yet she manages to succeed in a privileged, white-furred all-male world as one of the five designated Easter Bunnies. She triumphs because not only is she wise, kind, and swift, as all Easter Bunnies must be, she is unusually sensitive to the needs and abilities of children and possessed of courage and determination (okay, and she's the timely recipient of a pair of magic gold shoes, but a stroke of good fortune has cemented many a success story). 

The copy of this book from my childhood technically belonged to my older sister, and when she left home to raise her own family, she took it with her. (The country bunny was a role model for all the females in my family, so I couldn't really blame her.) I immediately acquired the used paperback (below, in pink) because it wouldn't be Easter without the country bunny! And I was delighted when I found the used hardcover a few years later. My own kids have grown up loving the book - and peeky eggs, which are a prominent object in the story.

Both of these books predate the 1985 "safety date" under CPSIA (and the paperback is actually older) but both are in good shape, and I'm planning to pass them along to my future grandkids. In fact, I'm probably going to order a few more hardcovers this week while they're still easy to find, because these old ones are so much nicer than the new ones. You can get a new hardcover from amazon for about $12, but there are vintage ones beginning at $4, and even a 1939 edition for a mere $10. 
The old ones are bound in a lovely yellow bookcloth. The above is a close up of the bunny image from the cover. I do not have the dust jacket for my book, but it looked a lot like the paperback cover I believe.
Margery Flack's illustrations have the same beautiful graphic quality that they do in the Angus books, and I'm so impressed with how much she manages to do with the color in spite of the limitations of hand-done color separations. Flack's work is always notable for the way she integrates the text and illustrations and the expressive postures of her animal characters, and this book is no exception. I particularly loved the detail in these books - each of the 21 offspring of the country bunny is a distinct individual. In the vintage copies, the paper is heavy and the colors rich.

I was so enamored of the peeky egg in this book that I eventually learned how to make them with my kids. In fact, one of my first ever blog entries was about making them - you can read it here.  (By the way, I no longer worry about getting salmonella from eggs, since I learned about how remote the chances are - see this post from Deputy Headmistress.)

The peeky egg on the shelf above was made by Jacob, the son of my kids' book collaborator Julie Stiegemeyer (see her blog here). He did a great job, and I bring it out every year to enjoy again. The eggs will last ages as long as you keep sugar fiends like my dog (and me) out of licking range.
Children's books are always a key feature of my holiday decorating. This year I also decorated my shelves in different colors - but I didn't have a good Easter book for the blue shelf above - any suggestions?
The nice thing about having a late Easter was that we had so many things in bloom to brighten the table.

I realized this year as I finished my reading of The Country Bunny that she not only influenced my career choices and the attitudes I've tried to cultivate in my own kids, but apparently my choice of house - I noticed that her little cottage with its arched door and leaded windows looks an awful lot like my own home. Even her kitchen hutch is mighty familiar. 

Those old kids' books really pack a wallop. (Be sure to check out the reader reviews on amazon - I'm not the only one with strong feelings about this book!)