Mother's Day

Mother's Day started early this year.

Don, Dianna, Austin and Shelby stopped by on Friday afternoon with balloons and a really pretty potted plant for Carol. Brad and Donna gave her a beautiful yellow chrysanthemum on Sunday afternoon.

Earlier in the week I had been telling JC about an ad I saw on TV that featured chocolate covered strawberries for a Mother's Day gift.

“I can do that,” he said, “I've done it before!”

“If I get the strawberries and chocolate, would you help me make some for Carol?” I asked. “I'd probably screw things up royally if I tried doing it.”

“Sure,” he said, “I'll even go to the store with you to make sure you get the right stuff!”

We decided that we'd get together on Saturday morning while Carol was helping with the fire department yard sale, and surprise her with them when she got home.

JC picked me up at 9 a.m. and after buying some giant strawberries and packages of white and dark chocolate at our local market we went to his house to begin.

He put a pot of water on the stove to boil and sat a pan on top of it. “OK, now we put the chocolate in and stir.”

After a few minutes the little brown lumps (or “morsels” as Nestle calls them,) began to melt and turn soft. “I think we're ready to dip!” JC said. I grabbed a strawberry by the leaves and dipped it in the brown goo, turning it to even out the coating. “Perfect!” I said as I sat the coated berry upside down in an aluminum foil covered egg carton that we'd had the foresight to prepare. A little melted chocolate ran down onto my fingers but I licked it off, getting a little on my chin in the process. The next one was a little messier, and by the third or fourth one, my hands and face were turning into a sticky, brown mess. JC began dipping because I was slowing down, and as the level of the chocolate dropped we had to spin the berries to get them covered. This resulted in the sleeve of my sweater getting a nice, shiny brown finish to it. By the time we finished with the dark chocolate phase of our project the strawberries looked great, but us... not so much. We put our masterpieces in the freezer to cool, and cleaned ourselves up with warm water and soap.

“Now for the white chocolate!” JC said, as he poured the little white lumps into a clean pan and started stirring. For some reason the more he stirred the more lumpy it got and pretty soon it was just one big lumpy lump.

“I don't know what's going on here,” JC said as he began reading the directions on the chocolate bag.

“Are you sure you've done this before?” I asked.

“Well, actually no, but I watched Emeril do it on TV the other day, and it looked easy! Oh, it says here you can microwave it.”

The first seeds of doubt began trickling into my head, but the microwave has always been our friend, (despite a few fires and explosions,) so JC glopped most of the lump into a cup and started nuking it.

After one minute he pulled it out and it still was a lump, but a little smaller. He added some more and put it back in for another minute.

His microwave has a really good light inside of it, so we had a great view of the white lump almost instantaneously turning brown. “I think it's burnt,”JC said as he shut off the microwave, pulled the cup out and put a piece in his mouth to check it out. To his credit he didn't scream, but he had to peel the burning piece off of his tongue with his fingers. I couldn't understand very much of what he was saying for a while after that, but we mutually decided to forgo the white chocolate part of Carol's Mother's Day gift.

JC made a pot of coffee and we stirred a spoonful of burnt white chocolate into our cups. It wasn't half bad! Maybe Starbucks could use the recipe.