Hi! Thanks for visiting my cyber coffee shop! Please have a cup of your favorite beverage and cuddle in for a few paragraphs!
I wanted to mention my cyber-recipes. Usually if I post something tasty you can make at home I’ll either include the recipe (look for “Davlicious” in the key words at the bottom) or I’ll include a link to a recipe page if it’s a recipe I find on the web. Most of the time when I offer up a piece of black forest cake, or recently tiramisu, it’s cyber-cake; completely calorie free, but not something you can replicate at home. This is an ages old Naniism. Time for a “Little Nani Story.” In this case two.
For the beginning of the story, let me offer you a comfy chair in my cyber coffee shop.
Here’s a couch for a couple of guests
And maybe we have someone joining us who’d prefer a kitschy chair!
I have always loved pretend imagery. One of the first TV shows I loved when I was a child was “The Friendly Giant,” one of a few CBC kids’ shows I watched with my mom. One of the spoils of being a border-baby is that, even before cable, we got CBC in from Windsor, Ontario, Canada; great kid’s shows and Hockey Night in Canada! Mom always watched a few episodes of any shows I watched. I guess I figured out when I was an aunt to very young girls that she did that as a responsible parent to make sure she knew the content of the shows I watched, but I remember it as just getting to pick the show that we were watching together. Parents watching the shows the kids are watching at least a little is important. I even remember my dad complaining that “they should be learning Italian, not Spanish” on Sesame Street. Of course my dad was still only about 10 years in this country and wanting a little of his roots to make him feel a little more welcomed. (It was only a year or two after we started watching Sesame Street before he chose to become a citizen and stopped complaining about the Spanish segments on Sesame Street.)
But back to The Friendly Giant. It was basic kids content. Friendly was a giant who had animal friends; a puppet was one and watching a clip on YouTube I remembered the giraffe that visited his window. The thing is I remembered those characters watching a clip from the show. What I didn’t need a clip to remember a few years shy of a half century later was the beginning of the show when he set up the little living room for us.
He invited the viewers into his castle and set out chairs in the little living room so we had a seat while we visited. That imagery and use of imagination has always been part of me. So when you choose a chair, imagine you're really relaxing with your coffee for the read!
Now that you see where my brain learned how to get comfy in a pretend chair, the next “Little Nani Story” will explain the “scratch ingredients” that go into making cyber-cake!
My brother, Dave, and I were pretty normal kids in that we often had to be nagged about cleaning our rooms and occasionally mom came in with the big garbage bag and “helped” us clean our rooms. One of the list of things she didn’t know or understand until I was an adult was why, more than once, she was throwing away a cardboard sheet or box with pictures of food taped on it.
Well, Star Trek came out the same year I did, in 1966, and my mom was a huge Trekkie. That meant Star Trek was one of the shows we watched together that she picked. One of the things I played often was that my closet was a space ship or shuttle and I was the captain. I had a control panel that mom never wondered about because it looked like a spaceship panel a kid would draw. But those boards with the pictures of food on them were my replicator. Thinking back they were sort of a cross between a vending machine and a replicator because if I touched the picture it created the food I touched, well, I pretended it did. If I wanted something that I couldn’t find a picture of in the grocery sales papers from the newspaper, I’d ask for it. I imagined the taste and looking at the picture enjoyed my meal on the spaceship.
So, now I serve all-grown-up replicated desserts, or cyber-food, in my cyber coffee shop. As an adult I can still pretend the wonderful flavors but I appreciate the calorie-free more.
Have some black forest cake…and don’t ever let you inner child grow up!
