Unless, of course, you’re talking about making 7-Layer Bars (thanks, Meagen Ryan!) a prerequisite for a birthday party. That is definitely a lifestyle change everyone should embrace.

The party was definitely Midwestern, all the way from the contributed food & drink – Steve Mandzik’s strawberry, almond leafy greens with vinaigrette, Jenn Bonsall’s homemade marshmallow fruit salad, the aforementioned 7-layer bars, chocolate and lemon cakes, countless sausages and hot/chicken/tofu dogs, buns, and condiments in addition to beer and vodka lemonade courtesy of Matt McNabb – to the the Midwestern cookbook our neighbors brought Wayne as a present.

In addition to literally bringing home the bacon (to wrap the hotdogs in, of course), I committed myself to four dishes: green bean casserole, potato salad, something involving Jello and Kool Whip, and Mac-N-Cheese cupcakes. Here’s my postprandial redux with recipes:

1. Green Bean Casserole

During the research phase, I spoke with a fair amount of Midwesterners and they all agreed that this is pretty standard party food. The basic ingredients – milk, one can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, and green beans – definitely didn’t stir up as much debate as the topping. When one of my choir mates suggested potato chips for the topping, another looked at her as if she had just suggested topping a California roll with peanut butter. I was intrigued but I do love me some fried onions.

Ingredients

• 1 can Campbell’s Condensed Cream of Mushroom soup
• 4 cups of green beans
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 can of french-friend onions
• salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

1. Cook the green beans and set aside in a strainer. Whisk the soup and milk together until smooth in 1 1/2 qt baking dish. Add the beans and 2/3 cup of the french-fried onions. Bake for 25 mins at 350°F.
2. Sprinkle another 2/3 cup of the french-fried onions evenly over the top of the cooked mixture and bake for another 5 minutes, or until the onions are lightly browned. Best served warm.

2. Potato Salad

I’m kinda picky about my potato salad – I don’t like crunchy stuff in it (unless it’s bacon) and I’m not a huge fan of vinegar. I tend towards things involving dill and some mayo/lemon juice but I was committed to making something Midwestern. I started with this recipe because the author shares the same Germanic/Irish background that Wayne does and ended up modifying it as below.

Ingredients

• 2 lbs red potatoes
• 2 small onions
• 2 cups mayonnaise
• 3 tbs mustard (from a jar, not the spice)
• 1/3 cup cider vinegar
• salt and pepper, to taste

Preparation

1. Boil the potatoes until just done. Set aside to cool and drain. I leave the potato skins on (Cue the voice of my grandmother: “It’s where all the vitamins are!”) but you might feel otherwise. If you really can’t stand the idea of eating potato skins, it is much easier to slip them from their skins AFTER they’ve been cooked. Once cooled, place in a big bowl and break into chunks with a fork.
2. Chop the onions finely. Saute in some oil (or my favorite, bacon grease). Once cooked, turn off the heat and mix thoroughly in a bowl with the mayo, vinegar, and mustard. Coat the potatoes evenly and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve warm. Also tastes great from the fridge

This was hands down my favorite recipe of the day (that I made). Since I expected a couple of vegetarians at the party, I left out bacon but I have plans to make this again with sauteed bacon and onions. Very definite plans.

3. Jello Molds

A couple of years ago, I found an Easter egg mold for Jello and Wayne and I made some striped Jello eggs for his parents one year. It must have left quite an impression because what should I find under the Christmas tree this year but 3 Halloween-themed Jello molds – an anatomically correct heart, brain, and a tray for Jello eyeballs. Spiffy!

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait until Halloween to use them. I will confess that I didn’t oil the heart mold before pouring in the Jello and ended up completely ripping the first heart in half trying to get it out of the mold. The second one turned out just fine. Definitely go for the jiggler version of Jello instead of the straight up Jello – your body part will hold its shape much better.

The super cheesy part of making a heart and brain Jello mold for Wayne’s birthday was that I got to tell him I love him with all my heart and mind. Awwwww….

4. Mac-n-Cheese Cupcakes

When I went through a big cupcake phase last year, I spotted this this recipe for Mac-N-Cheese cupcakes on Bake and Destroy and filed it away for a rainy birthday. Or a sunny birthday, as it turned out to be. I cheesed out* and went the Jiffy corn muffin mix route due to my demanding pre-birthday preparation schedule but given the feedback, I’d definitely be up for trying them again with a nicer corn muffin base.

Disclaimer: Being allergic to milk, I didn’t have one of these myself. I will say, however, that they didn’t last very long.

*Yes, that was a deliberately bad pun.

It’s a pretty versatile recipe – two years ago, Wayne used it to build a scale model of his parents’ farmhouse in Michigan. Last year, we got ambitious and designed modern art interlocking sculpture cookies. In the middle of July this year, I was struck with a vision of Tetris-shaped gingerbread cookies.

Side Note: I was lucky to have this idea in the middle of July because it gave me exactly 5 months to procrastinate, pretending to look for Tetris cookie cutters online and then 1 week to infect my crack cookiecutter engineering and production team with a nasty stomach bug. Fortunately, it was easy enough to lure unsuspecting cookie production staff to the house with promises of homemade chicken stew, apple cider, sugar cookies, SomaFM’s Xmas in Frisko, and Apples to Apples.

Ingredients

• Dough
• 2 1/4 cups unbleached all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
• 1/4 cup mild-flavored (light) molasses
• Glaze
• 3/4 cup half and half
• 1/3 cup (1 ounce) juniper berries, lightly crushed
• 1 pound powdered sugar
• Assorted decorations (colored sugars, nonpareils, and dragées)

Preparation

1. Whisk first 6 ingredients in medium bowl. Beat butter and sugar in large bowl until fluffy. Beat in molasses. Beat in dry ingredients. Gather dough; divide into 4 pieces. Shape into disks. Wrap; chill at least 2 hours and up to 2 days.
2. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment. Roll out 1 dough disk to 1/8-inch thickness. Using 3 1/2-inch cutter, cut out cookies. Transfer to sheet. Gather scraps; chill.
3. Bake cookies until almost firm in center, 12 minutes. Cool on sheets 2 minutes, then cool on racks. Repeat, using all dough. Store airtight at room temperature up to 3 days or freeze up to 2 weeks.
4. Bring first 2 ingredients to simmer. Cover; chill 5 hours. Strain. Place powdered sugar in bowl. Whisk in half and half by spoonfuls until glaze is spreadable. Frost cookies; decorate. Let stand until glaze sets. Store between sheets of waxed paper in airtight container at room temperature up to 3 days.

Note to self: If you’re going to invite people to a potluck involving chili, be sure to delegate the bringing of chips to one person and one person alone. Otherwise, be prepared to horribly torn between the fatty salty goodness of Fritos and the light crispy goodness of Xochitl.

This meeting was extra fun for 2 reasons: 1. It was at my house. 2. We made playdough.

Or, to be accurate, our fearless leader Kelli Shewmaker made playdough. She had the sneaky idea that playing with playdough would free our subconscious creativity during our planning discussion. And boy was she right! While we made bees, flowers, tiny vegetables, sheep, and things disturbingly shaped like human organs, we had really productive conversations about event scheduling, venue, attendees, website, eventbrite, ticketing, meals, etc. I think we even impressed our newest member who was attending her very first meeting and decided to come again (although it could have just been the excellent food).

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 cup water
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
• food coloring

Preparation

Mix flour, salt and oil in a saucepan on the stove, and slowly add the water. Cook over low heat, stirring until dough becomes stiff. Remove to a plate or wax paper and let cool to a temperature where you can handle it easily. Knead the playdough to desired consistency. Use as is, or divide into balls and add food coloring. Playdough remains pliable for about a day in open air. After a day, it begins to harden and will be completely hardened in 2-3 days.

Preparation Note: Do NOT make playdough shortly before a job interview, fancy dinner party, or anywhere else you might be embarrassed by technicolor rainbow hands. The more deeply you work the dye into the dough, the more deeply it gets worked into your skin.

TEDx events follow the TED format but are independently and locally organized. They are largely a volunteer effort – the speakers are unpaid and many of the organizers and supporters (myself included) are unpaid as well.

Last Thursday, I photographed the very first TEDx event in this area – TEDxMidAtlantic, which was held at the MICA’s Brown Center in Baltimore.

I encourage you to have a look at the entire set of all 429 photographs on Flickr here. If 429 seems like a lot of photographs, scroll down for my favorites below of each presenter below.

e3bank Chairman Sandy Wiggins

Security researcher Marcus J. Ramun

NPR reporter Scott Simon

Polyface Farms’ Owner and Sustainable Agriculture Advocate Joel Salatin

2003 Nobel Prize winner Peter Agre

Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra

Artist & activist Naomi Natale

Multimedia sculptor Ico Bukvic

Director of Food & Nutrition for Baltimore City Public Schools Tony Geraci

ReWIRED for Change founder & performer Sonja Sohn

Walters Art Museum Manuscript & Rare Book Curator Will Noel

Entreprenuer Mark Walsh

Director of the American Visionary Art Museum Rebecca Hoffberger

Harris Chair of economics and NYTimes columnist Tyler Cowen

Singer & songwriter John Forté

Photojournalist, teacher & author Karen Kasmauski

JHU Senior Advisor Aris Melissaratos

Tai Sophia Institute President Bob Duggan

JHU professor, researcher & author Roland Griffiths

Classical guitarist Ana Vidovic

The human eye can see a much wider gamut of light than even the most expensive camera. Caught up in the passion of “OMG! That’s so cool! I gotta get a picture of it!”, it’s easy to forget that the camera doesn’t quite see it the same way as I do. Exposing for the super-bright moon renders everything else black and exposing for the ambient scene around it loses the moon in a haze of brilliant light.

This picture is the most satisfying of the bunch but clearly the challenge deserves more consideration.

My great-great-grandfather, Frank G. Carpenter, and his daughter Frances (my grandmother’s mother), were geographers and authors who published over 50 books between them. Naturally, everything in my grandmother’s house had a story attached to it as well: the silver tray, once belonging to Benjamin Henry Harrison, most often used to bring tea to Eleanor Roosevelt, the Indian sapphire necklace bought for two halves of a hundred dollar bill, the living room sofa that used to be in the lobby of some grand hotel that closed long before I was born.

It was a great place for a kid with a hyper-active imagination to grow up in. I could be a happy dolphin or a ponderous manta ray, swimming slowly back and forth in a giant bathtub and, at night, I was an spy, creeping softly and silently down the hallway so as not to awaken the terrible clawfooted furniture. The basement was full of ancient things from far away in place, like Russian palakh boxes delicately decorated with fierce heroes astride elegant horses, or far away in time – Great-Aunt Laura’s fish plates of lovely etched green glass, just perfect for peering through on a sunny day.

Behind her house was a good-sized garden and we grew vegetables during those summer vacations together: Tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and pole beans. We had a deal typical of grandparents and grandchildren – I was responsible for watering and picking the vegetables when they were ready and, in return, she bought me stuff. Which, in fourth grade, seemed like the real benefit but now pales in comparison to the many hours I spent with her in the kitchen, perched on a rickety white stepstool next to the stove.

My grandmother didn’t so much cook as create food. She never told me any details of a recipe – just the ingredients (usually they were measured in terms of “some”, “a little” or “a lot.”) Combined with a little of this and some of that, those ordinary vegetables, grown with little more than the distracted attention of a ten-year-old turned into the soups of summer – delicate, cooling cucumber-dill or thick, rich gazpacho. The beans were transformed into salty, summer heaven with a little bacon, salt and pepper and the zucchini – well, to be honest, we just couldn’t keep the bugs off the zucchini.

Last year, I started my own garden in the backyard of the house we rent. I was mainly curious to see if 1. I could get anything to grow in the backyard and 2. if I could keep anything growing. The cucumbers did great, the eggplant did OK and the tomatoes were a real learning experience (overwatering will cause all the leaves to fall off and leave the fruits exposed for squirrels and birds to pick off… grrrr).

This year, I expanded the garden repertoire to include herbs – 2 types of basil, mint, oregano, thyme, and dill in addition to Lemon Boy and Roma tomatoes, Sweet Gypsy and Purple Beauty peppers, a line of bush beans, and a very ambitious vine cucumber. From a neighbor, I adopted two watermelon and two cantaloupe seedlings that have since sprouted into healthy vines just discovering the vertical excitement of our stockade fence.

Last weekend, I made a grand harvest of the herbs, turning the mint into a Moroccan-style mint tea and the basil into pesto. My boyfriend happened to mention to his mom that I was making mint tea, she asked him for the recipe and he asked me to send it to her.

Of course, I haven’t sent it yet because I have no precise idea what it is. The steps are easy:

Moroccan Mint Tea

1. Bring some water to a boil
2. Turn it off, throw in 6 green tea bags, and let them steep a while
3. Take them out, bring the water to a boil again
4. Turn it off again, throw in a good handful of crushed mint leaves and let them steep a while
5. Strain the leaves, chill (or not – your preference), and enjoy!.

But how much mint? How many leaves? I have no idea. And how long? Hard to say, the mint steeped while I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie and pesto – add that to the above: “Steep for the amount of time necessary to assemble and bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie and make pesto.”

And now I understand why my grandmother would look at me in exasperation when I badgered her for the precise details to her pecan pie recipe. Perhaps just like Michelangelo would sigh wearily at overeager assistants demanding to know what brushes he used on the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven would shrug his shoulders apologetically when asked what pen he used to write the 9th Symphony.

Creativity doesn’t require a particular brush, a pen or exact quantity of mint. Hugh MacLeod sums it up really well in his book Ignore Everybody this way:

“Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.”

My grandmother’s kitchen was a tiny space dominated by an old stove. She had drawers and cabinets full of strange things like clay Rumertopf pots and double-sided melon ballers. But it was obvious what she used most to make her magic: her favorite paring knife had a wood handle, well darkened and rubbed smooth from use, her favorite saute pan was always bright and shiny.

Will my trusty EOS 5D look like that after 20 years? I doubt it but I hope so.