This Disney Children's Cookbook is Exactly the Right Level for My Kitchen Skills

The Disney Villains Cookbook by Walt Disney Company
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am 49 years old, with what is apparently the cooking skill of someone at least 40 years younger, because this children's cookbook was EXACTLY my speed.

And I didn't even know that it was a cookbook for children when I checked it out of the library. What that says about me, I do not care to explore. But although I am mostly disinterested in cooking (if someone ever invents a middle-aged human chow with all the vitamins and nutrients needed by a perimenopausal woman, sold in 50-pound bags with instructions on the side about what size scoop you should dish out per meal, I will be incandescently happy and my life will immediately become 1000% easier), I DO love myself some thematically-appropriate novelty foods, and I thought this book might snooker me into actually, you know, using my stove this week.

Especially with the excuse to eat my dinner in front of a movie!

Alas for that last part, because this book's only flaw for me is that the recipes are VERY loosely associated with the Disney villain each claims to represent. I'll give it a point for the Spotted Scones to represent Cruella de Vil, because okay, chocolate chips are a cute idea for dalmatian spots and the book/movie IS set in England... but they don't actually represent Cruella, just the concept of the film. An actual Cruella recipe would be something like a black and white cookie. And the Black and White Bean Salad that comes later in the book and is also supposed to represent Cruella doesn't work, either, because black beans aren't really black.

The two recipes that my partner and I tried have even looser connections to their Disney villains. You're supposed to cut the Baguette Breakfast Beaks into triangles to represent Maleficent's raven familiar, but other than the fact that it's kind of gross to make an egg dish to symbolize a bird, cutting it into triangles is literally the only connection. And a baguette cut into triangles doesn't look like beaks? Captain Hook's Stuffed Shells is even worse, because even though the description notes that "Captain Hook and his crew would no doubt appreciate a warm plate of this ocean-themed dish," the absolute only ocean-themed part of it is the jumbo pasta shells. No nori, no seafood, no ocean colors, no crumbly textures to represent sand... just baked pasta with jumbo pasta shells.

Y'all, my grown-up autistic ass can barely accept this as even remotely on-theme. There's no way you're going to get a kid with any kind of neurological pathways to buy into it.

HOWEVER... the two recipes that my partner and I tried were DELICIOUS. And SIMPLE. And infinitely repeatable in a menu rotation. And super easy to riff on with whatever ingredients you have on hand.

The best part, though, is that the recipes are so clear and intuitive that you just have to make them while looking at the recipe exactly once, and then you can make them forever. The baguette bake is just beaten eggs, whatever veggies sound good, and a bunch of cheese baked in a hollowed-out baguette. I threw in some diced peppers and onion and chopped spinach and halved cherry tomatoes, my partner added bacon because otherwise he wouldn't be able to recognize the meal as food, and he and I killed an entire baguette's worth between the two of us. The stuffed shells is just a carton of ricotta, a beaten egg, whatever veggies and herbs sound good, and a bunch more mozzarella and parmesan layered casserole-style with cooked pasta and marinara sauce and baked. I threw in a ton of sauteed kale from my garden along with scallions and a shocking amount of fresh parsley, my partner added sausage, and my only regret is not going even harder on the greens because my partner and I FEASTED!

Seriously--if this is what cooking is actually like, then I can actually do it, and I actually enjoy it!

We watched Ted Lasso while we ate our stuffed shells, though, because that recipe is absolutely NOT Peter Pan-themed.

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I'm Now Selling Play Dough in Three Sizes and Ten Colors Because Decisions are Hard

I dunno, you guys. I already sell one-pound packages of homemade play dough, and it's awesome. One pound is a terrific amount of play dough for a kid. 

But then I needed to restock my one-pound containers, but when I went to the big supply store in the big city an hour away from here, which was a special trip that I planned specifically for this one errand, although of course I tacked on a trip to the Kurt Vonnegut museum and lunch at the hot pot/Korean barbecue place and then a quick run by World Market (I bough the ridiculously expensive Bonne Maman advent calendar that I do not need but I've literally been thinking about how I want one since this time last year so I just need to conserve some brain space in 2026, you know?) and Trader Joe's... I didn't remember which size container I needed. 

So I bought three different ones!

One of them did, indeed, hold the perfect one-pound amount of play dough, and as for the other two... well, I guess I offer play dough in 12 ounces, 16 ounces, and 20 ounces now!

The new containers are a LOT nicer than the old containers, too. I originally bought the old containers because I wanted something eco-friendly, and they were advertised as being made of a kind of corn-derived plastic that is also compostable. But the way you had to break the seal to open the container meant that they also weren't really re-usable, and I never had an indication of how many, if any, customers actually tried to compost them. 

These new containers are just regular plastic, but they ARE reusable, which honestly I think makes them even more eco-friendly than a single-use container, even if it's made from better plastic and you can compost it afterwards. 

Maybe this will be the encouragement I needed to also start offering sensory mix-ins, since I've now got so many sizes in play. How cool would these colors be with colored sand added?!?

Ooh, or maybe over Fall Break the kid can help me get started offering slime?

Until then, though, I've got seven witch hats all cut out and ready to be sewn, photographed, and listed--stay tuned!

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20 Hours in Ohio, and Free Doughnuts are a Lie

You do not have to work hard to convince me to take a trip with you, ESPECIALLY if you tell me that I can pick some of the stops.

So when the younger kid came to me with the information that the lead singer from her favorite band was going to be playing a concert in Columbus, Ohio--

--and she suggested that if we went, maybe I'd like to also do a little sightseeing along the way, she basically barely had time to put a period at the end of her sentence before I had concert tickets in my online shopping cart. 

And a couple of weeks later, there we were at this bar in Ohio!

Do you guys like to stand as close as possible at concerts, or are you calm and happy to stand at the back? I'm short, and I like to stand in the front so I can see, although a lifetime of this has definitely contributed to my current hearing loss and the front of the crowd, pressed against the stage, is the last place I'll want to be when the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits. Oh, well. I wasn't planning on surviving the zombie apocalypse, anyway...

Although Jake Ewald didn't play all the Slaughter Beach, Dog deep cuts that the kid had been hoping for, he did play one of their biggest hits, "Summer Windows"--

--so my own personal basic bitch self was satisfied:

I didn't know Ladybird before the concert, but this is my favorite song of theirs now:

The next morning, I picked our breakfast spot solely because of this TripAdvisor review that lauded the complementary DIY coffee bar and complementary serve-yourself doughnuts:



The DIY coffee bar was as indicated and was awesome, but y'all, the complementary serve-yourself doughnuts was a LIE!!!!! They did indeed have serve-yourself doughnuts, but you for sure had to pay for them. 

I think that TripAdvisor reviewer accidentally stole herself some doughnuts...

Ah, well. My doughnut-less but very en-coffeed breakfast was delicious:

Afterwards, I managed to snooker us into not one, but TWO sightseeing stops!

Obviously, if you're going to Ohio, you HAVE to visit an ancient Native American mound:

Shrum Mound is said to be an Adena burial mound--

--but as far as I can tell, it's never been excavated or even really researched, so I'm not sure how accurate that identification is. It's right next to a quarry, across the street from a housing development, and next door to another house, though, so probably its biggest claim to fame is that it wasn't destroyed the same way that whatever other earthworks were surely around it must have been. For example, there used to be a mound twice as tall at the intersection of Mound and High streets, but it was destroyed in the 1830s.

Here it is with me for scale!

Since it's roughly on our way home, I was also able to convince everyone to detour over to the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument:

The kids and I have been here before, but didn't realize until we got there that back then it was open "by appointment only," so this is the first time I've stepped foot inside!

There weren't a lot of artifacts inside, but the signage was VERY informative. I didn't even realize until this moment that I didn't actually know what a buffalo soldier was!

Charles Young's story is very interesting, and I'd love to read a more substantive biography of him. Apparently, his whole life, during his education and his career, he suffered from systematic, institutionalized racism, and he just... persisted!

He did incredibly well for himself, and worked consistently to lift others up with him, but who knows what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been beaten down at every opportunity?

Racism is so depressing. Let's eat an apple fritter about it:

Will we be able to complete the Butler County Donut Trail in a timely fashion, considering that most of our trips to Ohio are for college drop-offs and pick-ups? 

I don't know, but I'm fully prepared to get diabetes trying!

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On Our Last Day in Las Vegas, I Started Drinking Before Dawn

Las Vegas definitely has an effect on a person!

It makes a lot of practical sense, though. We were checking out of our hotel in a few hours, then flying with only carry-ons that night, so OBVIOUSLY we needed to eat up the rest of our groceries.

That means peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips, and whiskey for breakfast!

If nothing else, it gives one an opportunity for one last toast with Our Lord and Savior, The Sphere:

I really miss that giant eyeball!

Later, after everyone was up and about and packed, with all the bread and potato chips and most of the peanut butter and the last shot of whiskey in the bottle consumed, we headed down to the always ridiculously crowded lobby to check out and store our backpacks--

--and just like that, we were having our last Las Vegas adventures!

You KNOW how we feel about doughnuts, so this shockingly expensive but super fancy doughnut shop was on our must-see list:

A nine-dollar blueberry yuzu doughnut is still shockingly expensive when split three ways, but not, like, *as* shockingly expensive:

And to be fair, it was big enough that we had to eat it with forks!

The last item on my personal to-do list was this Hobbit-themed slot machine that we'd passed several times, but never when we had time to stop so I could play it. I hadn't actually planned to do any gambling on this trip, but a Hobbit-themed slot machine isn't gambling--it's paying a dollar to watch ten seconds of Hobbit-themed animation!

Alas, it turned out that the minimum pay for playing the game was not one, but FIVE dollars. I could justify wasting one dollar for ten seconds of novelty animation, but good lord not FIVE dollars! If I have five dollars to waste on novelty nonsense, I'll spend it on the Halloween Oreos that were going to start appearing on store shelves in just a couple of months (and Reader, I DID).

Honestly, it was just as fun to take photos of it for free.

You know what was also fun and free?

Using up the rest of the kid's free drink tickets!

And so some of us holding a drink in each hand, we ventured out towards our last day on the Las Vegas Strip:

You'll be pleased to know that although we were heading south, towards the more crowded part of the Strip, it was still only early afternoon, and so the crowds and buskers and solicitors and scammers were just an obnoxious background drone rather than foreground chaos. The guys dressed up as Buddhist monks trying to sell prayer beads, and the women dressed up as Showgirls of old trying to scam tourists into $50 photos were around, but the break dancers, the buskers with their own sound systems, and the people in giant cartoon character costumes were not.

It was downright idyllic!

The last item on the kid's must-do list was the Flamingo:

Because: flamingos!

We'd missed the zookeeper's talk while we were still daydrinking back at the Venetian, but fortunately one of the keepers was bopping around setting food out around the habitat, and she was happy to come over and chat and answer questions. It turns out that as well as the flamingos, they have ducks, but they ALSO have invader ducks that come in from the wild to eat up all the resident ducks' food, and quite a lot of her job is separating the two.

It makes sense, I guess. I mean, it IS a nice habitat, and the neighbors are lovely:

It was actually quite pleasant to spend the day simply wandering down the Strip. It was super hot outside, but SUPER air-conditioned inside, and so honestly popping into and then out of casinos and shopping malls felt refreshing every time and kept us from 1) dying of heatstroke or 2) freezing to death.

Before the trip, I'd marked up my Google Map with absolutely every single thing that I thought might be of interest, from free shows to weird restaurants to giant statues to themed bars, so that even though we were technically "wandering," we knew what we might want to check out along the way:

Such as sharing a french fry flight and a margarita flight from a restaurant with an entirely flights-based menu (it's a family joke that I love myself a flight--it means you don't have to make a decision!) while watching a free (incredibly underwhelming--but free!) light and projection show inside Planet Hollywood:

The only noteworthy things inside the MGM Grand were the buffet prices and getting to see a person sleeping at a slot machine--

--but I think the outside facade is lovely:

The New York New York facade is a little too corny for my taste, but it does look nice silhouetted by the sun:

My personal favorite facade and interior was Excalibur, but by that time I'd been walking for over two miles, powered entirely by alcohol and French fries, so I was fading and didn't take any photos. 

But by then our final destination was in sight, and finally, we made it!

Welcome to The Luxor! My Ancient Egypt Special Interest was still at its height, so I was STOKED to check out all the Egypt theming:

I was additionally stoked to sit down in the air-conditioned food court and drink a beverage that was not alcohol, ahem.

After a good rest and a wander around the Luxor, we tried out the free tram that got us a little ways back north--

--but otherwise it was just a long evening slog, albeit made more interesting by the fact that there was a Lady Gaga concert that night, so there was a LOT of fabulous fashion to check out as we slogged. 

When the kid suggested Las Vegas as the destination for her 21st birthday trip, I thought it was such a funny choice for her. She's not a party kid or a drinker or gambler, and honestly I tacked on that side trip to the Grand Canyon just to make sure she'd have something she genuinely enjoyed, because I thought for sure that she'd find Las Vegas disappointing. 

But Dude! Las Vegas was so fun! I was genuinely shocked by how much we all enjoyed the trip, other than the acrophobia parts, of course. I would happily go back anytime to that exact same Venetian hotel room overlooking the Sphere, to again spend my early mornings reading and watching the sunrise, my late mornings to mid afternoons reading and swimming in the resort pool, my late afternoons wandering the Strip and finding something weird to do, my (early!!!) evenings watching a show, and my late evenings back in my hotel room watching TV and eating take-out in my pajamas. 

I guess now I've got one more option for how to spend my 50th birthday next year!

Here's our entire trip!

• Day 1: Omega Mart and Driving to the Grand Canyon
• Day 2: Grand Canyon National Park
• Day 3: Vegas Strip, The Sphere, and the Lake of Dreams
• Day 4: Wynn Buffet, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio Fountains, and Cirque du Soleil
• Day 5: Walking Tour of the Strip and a Red-Eye Home!

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