Occupations that I would never be good at.

Fishing, fly tying…  You know .. circle the wire around, the up and over the feather parts, and thru the eye of something aruther.. (my own word) … tiny, dinky, stuff… no patience.

I didn’t do well as a seamstress either.. my mother had a few started but never finished projects of mine in a trunk for years.

Any thing that entails sitting in one spot, doing tiny little stuff with tiny parts.. is not my bag.. Now I use to smash cars for scrap iron.. (no, not on the road, those who have read my blog for years, know that I used a huge square iron)

I took care of the elderly, cleaning up all kinds of stuff. And ducking when there were swings coming my way.. as sometimes happens when you take care of the confused.

But small stuff.. count me out..

Candy maker is another occupation, I would have to pass on. Especially one where you have to dip what ever into chocolate.  Like strawberries, or cherries..  Nor pretzels.

You know where you get the chocolate really runny, and then you take tongs and dip the pretzel into the chocolate.

I found that one out over the weekend.   I make baskets of goodies for my friends, with bread, cookies, some have bacon wrapped jalapeno’s … and etc.  Well, this year I decided to give dipped pretzels a go.

After all how hard can it be to just dip it in, and put it on parchment paper?  Well, first off, you have to know how to melt the chocolate.  Now being one who doesn’t like to stand and stir forever.. in a double boiler pot… when I spotted you can do this in the microwave, I knew I had it made.

NOT…  first I went with chips because I wanted several different flavors.. besides, just chocolate and white chocolate.

I now have a small blob of caramel in a sandwich bag.  Plus a larger blob of dark chocolate… and medium size of bark chocolate blob.

How did this happen?  I did get one half of the bark chunk to get running and I was able to make all kinds of pretzels with that.  But when I went for the white.. well, it is now a white chocolate blob.   So I went on line to find out what the heck I did wrong..  Seems they can’t have ANY AT ALL moisture. Not a drop.. other wise it seizes..   you know like seize the day?  Well, this not that kind of seize..  and I am here to tell you it is not a good thing. And the chips recipe told me to put in 1 tablespoon of whipping cream.. NOT A GOOD IDEA.

And that is why I have 3 bags of seized stuff.

So I got the rest of the white bark.. put it in a super duper dry glass bowl.  And wa-la… it is runny.. and it is sticking to the pretzels.   So off and running with some more. 

Now I bought two large bags of pretzels.  I used half of one.  Two reasons.. one is because I was running out of stuff to do the dipping with… second.. to me  … dipping pretzels is right up there with putting tinsel on the Christmas tree.  At first you start with dipping carefully, making sure it is all covered.. then you tap the tongs on the side of the bowl to get the excess dipping stuff off… tap tap tap..about 10 times.. before you get to see daylight between the folds holes.

About 30 later it is tap tap tap.. about 5 times. When you are up to 50 or so.. it is tap tap and we are good.  So it has the dip in the holes of the folds.. extra candy.. folks…How can that hurt?

I have enough pretzels for my baskets.. and maybe even enough for the bus shop mechanic crew that the King use to work with..  And next year.. OH, NO..not this girl.. I might be not too sharp, but I am no fool.  Nope.. a candy maker I will never be.