good neighbors

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Dog Birthday Party

Happy Thanksgiving, to all those who are celebrating today! I am going to be cooking for part of the day, and swimming in a blissful lake of mashed potatoes and gravy for the rest of it, but before I dive in…

Did I tell you that Carla was invited to a dog’s birthday party?

I believe I have documented thoroughly just how obsessed Carla is with dogs. We are the luckiest people in the universe because we have seventeen dogs on our cul-de-sac (we can’t have many more houses than that; some households have multiple dogs). Carla knows them all by name. She is not quite so good with their humans. But I am familiar with our nearer neighbors, and so I have been trying to teach her to greet the human neighbors by name and to ask after their health before she turns her attention to the dogs. It’s a little perfunctory, with many of the neighbors, but I would say she has developed good relationships with several of them. One is a grandmother-type, who is lovely and sweet, and who allows Carla to walk her very well-trained cockapoo (while she walks alongside them). Another is an empty nester (Lynn) who enjoys kids.

(P.S. Lynn is the type of woman whom I want to be my best friend. She is outgoing and friendly and kind. She has a strong faith that is clear but not evangelical, she works in a social-services type career that I admire, she makes AMAZING baked goods. She has four grown kids, and LOVES having a big family. I get the feeling that having them all home from college during the pandemic was a joy for her, and that it has been really hard to have them all leave her at once this year. She is the kind of person who treats you like a friend even when you don’t actually know her that well, and I wish there were some manual for upgrading from Neighbor Who Entertains My Kid Sometimes to Bestie.)

Lynn has a beautiful, well-trained golden retriever named Barbara. Carla loves Barbara almost as much as she loved my parents’ late golden doodle. And Lynn is very lenient about allowing Carla to play with Barbara on their lawn. I can watch Carla from across the street, so I usually sit outside and write or read while keeping an eye on Carla.

Anyway, it was Barbara’s birthday recently, and Lynn let us know in advance and said she would be having a party for Barbara. Carla immediately wanted to buy a present for Barbara, so we went to the store one day after school and she looked through all the options, haggled with me on budget, and finally chose an appropriate gift. Once home, she wrapped the present and made Barbara a lovely card.  Please recall that Barbara is a dog.

The day of the party, Carla could talk of nothing else. What time was the party? When would Lynn be home from work? Could Barbara come over to our backyard? (No.) Lynn, of course, had normal adult-human things that delayed her and so was an hour later than she thought she’d be; very easy to understand as an adult, but less so for a child frantic to celebrate.

At LAST we got word that Lynn and Barbara would be home for the party! Carla grabbed the gift and the card (Barbara is still a dog) and we headed over. Carla helped Barbara open the gift. Lynn read the card out loud. Then Carla and Barbara played with the brand-new squeaky hamburger, Lynn allowed Carla to give her some treats, and we took lots of pictures, and Lynn handed us some cookies. That was the party. It was entirely for Carla’s benefit.

I feel so incredibly lucky to have such wonderful neighbors. Neighbors who are friendly and kind. Neighbors who understand Carla’s love for their pets and indulge her by bringing their dogs out for pets and walks and games of fetch. Neighbors who stage canine birthday parties purely for the joy it brings my little girl.

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Fake Flowers

I love flowers as much as the next person. Despite facing various and sundry obstacles, including but not limited to disrespectful rabbits, a black thumb, and a flower-hungry herd of suburban deer, I planted flowers in containers for my front porch and back yard. 

Part of this is flower envy. Many of my neighbors have beautiful yards, full of gorgeous flowers. One neighbor planted a border around all their shrubbery of alternating yellow and orange marigolds, and it is so cheery and I ogle it every time I’m out on a walk. 

But I have noticed that some people take a… different tack when it comes to flowers. 

They are going the fake route.

A few years ago, back when I was in a book club, a friend and co-book club member would regale us with stories of her next door neighbor. Among many other quirks, her neighbor was notable for “planting” artificial flowers in her yard each spring. 

We thought this was a remarkable and unusual behavior, specific, perhaps, to this one person.

But it is not, Internet. It is NOT.

I first noticed fake flowers at one house on my walking route a few years ago. (They have since moved, or come over to the dark side of fresh floral arrangements.)

But this year, I’ve noticed more and more artificial flora cropping up around the neighborhood.

This house nearby recently built a fence/gate thing for privacy… and filled in the gap with some fake flowers. 

I drive around a small traffic circle each day and noticed recently it had been spruced up for Independence Day. With fake red-white-and-blue flowers. 

Another house on my route has a wide array of fake flowers in various sections of their yard… but also, some living flowers in their side yard. 

Listen, no judgment. Mild amusement, maybe. But you do you, boo. 

After all, there’s much to be said for artificial flowers. They are eye-catching. They are probably less expensive than fresh flowers. They take way less time to reach their full potential than growing flowers from seed. They are GUARANTEED to be bright and colorful year-round. They never wilt or require weeding. They are extremely drought tolerant. And deer and rabbits don’t have a taste for them (yet). 

If artificial flora makes your heart sing, then by all means, let your fake flower flag fly.

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Sufganiyot Success

For future Hanukkahs, this is my experience with making sufganiyot.

First let me say that I have never had sufganiyot before, so I had nothing against which to measure my results. I read somewhere that they are somewhere between a beignet and a donut, but I have never had a beignet, so in my head I translated “beignet” to “fritter,” which is denser than a donut. (They are also, according to Smitten Kitchen, like Polish pączki or Russian ponchiki or Italian bombolini, none of which I have had either. Clearly I need to expand my donut eating habits.)

Because I don’t like oil spattering all over my kitchen, I sought out an air fryer version. (There is still oil involved in the air fryer recipe, so it seems like it still adheres to Hanukkah tradition.)

The Spruce Eats had a recipe for air fryer sufganiyot, but the recipe didn’t work for me. Not only did it require me to scald milk (an instruction that had no additional details; I had to look up what scalding meant and then look up what temperature the milk would need to be to not kill my yeast), it also had a couple of confusing directions (do you roll the dough out to 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch thick, because the recipe stated both). Unsurprisingly, the dough refused to rise. I still air fried a few, for practice, and they LOOKED adorable but were unpleasantly dense and kind of bitter. They reminded me more of biscuits or scones (neither of which I like) than donuts. This is all to say I DO NOT recommend the Spruce recipe.

I tried a second recipe, from Tori Avey, that worked MUCH better. First of all, NO SCALDED MILK which made me feel scammed by the whole scalding milk nonsense earlier. Secondly, it has vodka in it, which I found appealing simply for its novelty. (WHY is it there? I am sure there is some reason; in fact, I’ve heard of adding vodka to pie crust to make it flakier? Like it evaporates more quickly than water and lightens the dough? I am quite possibly making this up.) Third, the dough rose very nicely; it’s possible that it could have risen more if I had left it to proof longer, but by that point I was up against the clock — I still had to make the fish and green beans and latkes. (Remember, by “make the latkes” I mean removing them from the Trader Joe’s box and baking them.)

I used a glass to cut the rounds. I might experiment, in future years, with making them slightly larger. They are very small — between two and three inches in diameter.

I used the air frying instructions from the Spruce article (except that I pre-heated the air fryer for three minutes and sprayed the inside generously with cooking spray): I put four of the dough circles into the basket, brushed them with oil, fried them for 2.5 minutes at 350 degrees, then flipped them, oiled them, and fried them for 2.5 additional minutes.

I used seedless raspberry jam for the filling. I have a little plastic squeeze bottle that was ideal for filling the donuts. I used a shish kebab skewer to puncture each little sufganiyah and then filled each one with jelly until I could feel the jelly pushing back against me; a couple of times, the jam erupted through a weakness in the meridian of the donuts, but this happened rarely. After they were filled, I sprinkled the tops with powdered sugar.

The Tory Avey batch was much lighter than the Spruce version. I really liked the texture — still a little more dense than a traditional yeasted donut, but lighter and fluffier than a scone or a fritter. The dough was slightly sweeter than the first recipe I tried, too.

I do wonder if they would have been lighter and airier if I had allowed the dough to proof a little longer? The one “issue” I had was that the jelly didn’t really FILL the inside — it made more of a little well in the center. And if the air pockets in the dough were bigger, I think that would allow for more jelly filling.

AFTER I’d made both batches, I saw recipes for sufganiyot on Smitten Kitchen and The Kitchn that are WILDLY different from what I tried, so it might be fun to give those a go in future years.

These are the perfect size for eating like three or four in a sitting.

Perhaps the BEST part of the sufganiyot experiment is that we had too many for the three of us to eat (they are better eaten when warm), so we made up a plate and took them across the street to a neighbor. Please do not mistake this easy breezy sentence for an easy breezy decision: I fretted EXTENSIVELY about it. What if the sufganiyot weren’t very good? I mean, they were good compared to the first batch, but I had never tried the real thing and maybe they were a very poor attempt. And what if my neighbor didn’t want to eat something prepared in a home kitchen during a pandemic? And what if she wasn’t Jewish? Something she said to me in the past — the exact nature of which has since exited my memory — left me with the impression that she was Jewish, but I could have misapprehended what she’d said or misremembered the conversation. Or what if she is Jewish but can’t eat gluten or sugar or is allergic to raspberries? What if she was eating dinner and we interrupted her? Ugh. So many reasons NOT to do it. But a generous impulse should be embraced and followed through!

Our neighbor is this absolutely lovely woman who has a dog Carla loves and who is sweet and patient with Carla and very friendly to me. She’s had a really hard go of it during the pandemic and yet she is supervising remote learning for her grandkids AND working full time and I just wish I could help her more. (She has nearby family, so she has not once taken me up on my offers to help.) We took over a plate and at first it went HORRIBLY. We could see lights on in the house and could hear talking, but no one answered the doorbell. I even knocked, just in case the doorbell wasn’t audible, but — despite Carla’s dismay — we decided to leave. I felt super uncomfortable: maybe they were all eating dinner together! maybe they didn’t want to answer the door during a pandemic! maybe they were purposely ignoring us! So we went back across the street.

But then, just as we were about to go into our house, we heard people leave the neighbor’s house. Carla, who was carrying the plate of donuts, rushed back over with me training awkwardly behind, my glasses suddenly COMPLETELY fogged over at that exact moment even though I had been wearing them and my mask the entire time. I felt So Awkward.

But Carla asked for our neighbor, and her family called into the house and asked her to come out. Carla handed her the plate and told her we had sufganiyot to share and asked if she celebrates Hanukkah and when our neighbor said yes, Carla said that she did, too, and our neighbor just seemed so surprised and delighted. The neighbor’s daughter told us a charming anecdote about visiting Israel during Hanukkah and seeing sufganiyot in storefronts everywhere. The grownups seemed thoroughly unbothered by our presence and our little offering, which helped me feel less awkward. (Although it would have definitely helped if I could SEE.) Carla got to pet the neighbor’s dog AND the neighbor’s daughter’s dog, which made HER day. And then we said goodby and left.

Later, our neighbor called and left me a VERY sweet voicemail, saying thank you, and assuring me the donuts were good, and expressing shock and pleasure that she wasn’t the only Jewish inhabitant of our neighborhood. The whole experience made me feel very glad I’d fought through my frets and gone ahead with the generous impulse.