Mint Brownies, Memorial Day, and Museums

For our memorial day picnic today Melissa sent me to Macey's to pick up stuff for Pasta Salad and Mint brownies. The pasta salad part was easy (except that I forgot to buy chicken, which meant we ate vegetarian today), but the mint brownie ingredients proved more difficult. Not difficult to find, but difficult to pin down. You see, we had a difference of opinion on whether mint brownies called for mint extract, or peppermint extract. I brought home mint extract, which ended up smelling more like chewing gum than anything, and Melissa added it to some neon green frosting and spread it atop a pan of brownies from a recipe titled something like: "The Best Brownie Recipe Ever," an internet find that unlike most superlatively named recipes, actually stands fairly convincing as the best ever.

The Best Brownie Recipe...Ever!

From allrecipes.com

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup melted butter 2 cups white sugar
2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/3 cup confectioners' sugar for decoration (lose this and frost the brownies, who wants a little powder sugar when you can have fudge frosting?

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DIRECTIONS: Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Line one 9x13 inch pan with greased parchment paper. Combine the cocoa, melted butter, sugar, eggs, salt , flour and vanilla. Mix until well combined. It should be very thick and sticky. (Joey's note, its better with Chocolate chips in it too.) Spread mixture into the prepared pan. Bake at 300 degrees F (150 degrees C) for 30 minutes. Cool completely before cutting into squares.

I actually had a a classical CD once called "The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World...Ever!" The title even included the ellipses and the exclamation point, which seemed kind of cheeky for a classical musical collection. And I must say, in terms of relaxation, that CD definitely did the job, but...ever?...come on...how can you even measure that? Superlatives are doomed from the start, because once something becomes the biggest, fastest, smallest, richest then people start wanting to top it. Not only are they doomed from the start, but they are almost always not true. Everything being subjective, nothing can truly be superlative.

For our picnic today we went to a large park in Orem built just east of I-15 and south of the Walmart. There are two wading pools, plenty of green space, a playground, a scattering of picnic benches, and a large rotating swing (that in my opinion is too heavy to be any fun at all). It was windy, as you can see, but Callan wanted to get into the water, so right before we left, we let him play for a while. When it was time to go he said he wanted to keep playing. "We thought you might be getting too cold," said mom. Callan looked at us and said, "I'm getting too cold," and he hopped out.

We spent the rest of the evening putting kids to bed, and working on the house.

On Saturday we took Melissa's parents and little sister to the Airport and spent the day in Salt Lake.

We visited the LDS Church history Museum where Callan spent almost 30 minutes changing, weighing, dressing, and carrying baby dolls in the "I am a child of God exhibit," and Nolan sat on a giant ABC rug and took his turn holding the dolls.