Martha, Martha, Martha

I have a confession to make. So Martha Stewart stole a bunch of money and I'm not entirely sure that she actually has a soul, but the bitch has some good ideas. Earlier in my life I'm pretty sure I vehemently denied supporting anything Martha'esque or even house keeping/hosting in general, but I have to say that these days I absolutely love being a hostess. Bakerella is one of my heroes, and since 'Top Chef' has been one of my reality programs on record during the last few days of working from home, I've been in the mood to craft some stuff in the kitchen. We're having some friends over for a cookout the 4th of July (unless it rains, then it's more of a cook-in), and to me that means several things but right now I keep hearing "Theme Party!"

Though I'm not going completely crazy (discount plastic red white and blue star themed glasses from Target, and flag napkins does not equal crazy.. by some definitions), I did see these really cute pretzels on Martha's site and thought they'd be easy to do.

I thought wrong.

Actually, they're not that bad but I didn't think about several things.

1) Nobody makes those pretzel rods anymore, and ESPECIALLY not in Gluten-Free and Vegan (Hubby is vegan right now, and one of our guests is gluten-free)

2) Apparantly you need to order red white and blue sprinkles online or something, because I couldn't find any at Hobby Lobby or the grocery store (just had sanding sugar in the wrong colors or nothing at all, listen I'm all for fair trade organic but is there really something so harmful about a chemically died sprinkle?!).  I could have driven across town to Williams-Sonoma, but I couldn't justify traveling about an hour round trip in a bunch of thunderstorms to find.. sprinkles.

So, I improvised.

Instead of red white and blue pretzel rods, we ended up with white, light blue, pastel flower, and orange mini-pretzel rods.  For a while I had a nice little assembly of dip in chocolate, roll in sprinkles, place on tray - with the occasional broken pretzel dropped down on the floor for the dogs to scarf up.  This lasted for about as many pretzels as you see here, before I got bored and went for a more modern approach.

I have not yet developed the patience to accurately dip beautiful chocolate pretzels.  Maybe next year! 

On the horse front, I'm going to have to wait a few weeks before I can go try out the Hanoverian.  The weather has been really crappy, and he's apparently afraid of thunder. He sounds like a really nice horse, but I'm also going to look into some local barns in the meantime and try to develop a list of places to check out that are close to me.  On my last day of my discount at my old job, I bought a brand new IRH helmet - exciting!