a couple gifts...

I did get two more remembrances of the day (early for Friday).

In addition to my own wooly purchase, I mean. (And I now realize just how irrationally exuberant I was about having the Hagrid sweater done "soon")

I got a box of Pates de Fruits from my parents. This is a French confection, it's essentially fruit pulp boiled down (these may also have some pectin in them) with sugar until it takes on a thick, not quite jelly-like, consistency.

These come from Bissinger's (perhaps other confectioners also make them). Bissinger's is where my dad usually orders chocolate from theses days - they are St. Louis-based but are apparently the American branch of an old, old French confectionery house. Their chocolate is quite good but I especially like the Pates de Fruits because they are different. (As my mom said: "I figured you could get chocolate about anywhere.")

So that was nice. (The flavors are raspberry, strawberry, and mandarin orange)

I also received what I assume is a Valentine's gift (and I am also assuming who sent it) of Pony cooky cutters - there's a place that does 3-D printed versions of these. I got a set of 3: Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Derpy. I'm saying I assume I know who sent these because I got into a conversation with someone on Twitter about food-modification for kids, and the fact that I currently owned no cooky cutters (except, I forgot, I had a few - picked up at an antique store, a star and a bell and I think a circle).

I was referring to something my mom did when my brother and I were kids. We were both picky eaters (my brother was worse than I was, I think - my pickiness tended to be more along the lines of me getting bored with food and wanting to go play). To entice us to eat, sometimes my mom would take the cooky cutters and cut our peanut butter or cream cheese sandwiches into animal shapes for us. I remember her using the rabbit cutter and also the horse cutter (These were copper cutters, I think many households in the 1970s had a set - a rabbit, a chicken, a horse, and there were probably others I'm not thinking of). And I commented that remembering that kind of made me want a sandwich cut in the shape of a horse.

(I don't remember what she did with the "offcuts," whether she ate them or whether she managed to get us to eat them. I do remember being told as a kid that eating the bread crusts would make my hair curly, which led to me then being very suspicious when some years later someone told my brother that eating bread crusts would make him grow hair on his chest.)

Anyway, now when I want a Derpy peanut-butter sandwich, I can make one.

And I appreciate the gesture. It was a nice little surprise, when most of my mail tends to be junk mail these days. (Seriously, one of the dodgy payday-loan places is sending out cards that say "happy valentine's day, by the way, come to us and get a loan" or, worse, "Be my Valentine" with "come to us and get a loan....oh, usury? I must have made up a word that doesn't exist" on the back. (Well, okay, not the usury part, but I always THINK that when I see ads for those places)

(I don't often make cookies, but I might have to do a batch of gingerbread or shortbread that can be cut out just to use these. Maybe for my birthday the end of this month.)