Portland Parents

Here’s a lovely idea for a craft project, tomorrow while the rain returns to our fair city.

You’ll need some cotton string or yarn, some white glue, some little cups, some small blown-up balloons or wax paper. It’s messy so you’ll want to have some soap and water handy too. You might want some food color, glitter or paints.

Put the glue into the little cups; about a quarter to a half cup of glue per cup. Add food color if you want. Take a length of string about two feet long or so (more or less) and submerge it in the glue. Get it thoroughly glued up, and take it out and either wrap it around a balloon or create a flat design on the wax paper.

If you like, sprinkle it with glitter.

Let it dry for a day or two, and remove it from the wax paper or pop and remove the balloon. String it up with some thread and invite the grandparents to come admire the beauty.

It’s that time again! Get your kids in the kitchen and make some salt dough ornaments. Good for kids of all ages, but of course you’ll want to judge your individual snowflake’s artistic ability.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup water
• Rolling pin
• Cookie sheet
• Toothpick

What to do:

• Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F.
• Mix together, salt, flour, and water until dough is formed.
• Knead the dough on a floured surface until the mixture is elastic and smooth. If dough is too sticky, sprinkle with flour, continue to do so until stickiness is gone. Do not add too much flour, this will dry out the dough and will cause it to crack before you get a chance to bake it.
• Roll out the dough to about 1/4″ thick with a rolling pin that has been dusted with flour.
• Use cookie cutters to cut out as many trees and stars as you want.
• Use a toothpick to make a hole toward the top of the shape. Poke the toothpick into the shape, then holding toothpick straight up and down, make a circular motion as if you were stirring something. Keep circling until the hole is the size you want.
• Place all shapes onto an ungreased cookie sheet and place into the preheated oven.
• Bake for 2 hours.
• Remove from oven and allow to cool completely.
• Paint with acrylic paints.
• When dry, thread ribbon through hole and tie in a knot in the back.

Of course you can hand-shape the ornaments too. Use some glitter glue to add sparkly!

With the summer looming in front of us, you may be looking for ideas on what to make for picnics. In Italy, there is a delicious rolled sandwich creation named “stromboli,” a name that summons up “strolling along the pier” for me. We make it here about once a week, and it’s very easy to do. It also travels well and tastes great cold.

Like spaghetti, most anything can go into your stromboli; we use cheese, ham, sun dried tomatoes and marinated artichoke hearts. I boil the tomatoes in water in the microwave for about four minutes to get them to soften up, then chop them up, and chop up the artichoke hearts. Then I take a roll of pizza dough (it’s from Pillsbury; you can get it near the biscuits in your supermarket, on the same aisle as the chilled cookie dough), spread it out on a floured cutting board so that it’s roughly rectangular. Then I spread shredded cheese (my current favorite is the “italian style” with provolone and mozzarela), thin sliced ham from the lunch meat counter, and then the tomatoes and artichoke hearts. When it’s all relatively even, I roll it up, starting from one of the two narrow ends of the rectangle. I roll it to a cylinder and then seal it up by pressing the dough together (and the ends too).

Once I bake it at 375 for 25 minutes (or so), it’s good to eat! And it’s even better the second day.