This is my favourite fudge recipe. Not as easy as the type made with marshmallow cream. This one is the old fashion kind that needs to be cooked and then beaten. Worth the effort though. Creamy and Smooth. Home Cookin Chapter: Recipes From Thibeault's Table ================= 1 cup white sugar 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup cream 1/3 cup of butter 1/4 cup of maple syrup pinch of salt vanilla . Add the two sugars, butter and cream maple syrup and salt into a sauce pan. Place over medium heat. Stir while bringing to a boil. Lower the heat and continue to stir slowly while the mixture cooks. After about 7 minutes, test by pouring a small amount into some cold water. You want it to form a soft ball. You might need to cook it for another minute or two. Remove from the heat, add a couple of teaspoons of vanilla and start stirring. It takes about 14 or 15 minutes for the fudge to cool and thicken. Pour into buttered dish. Option: Replace the cream and cup of white sugar with one can of Sweetened Condensed Milk and increase the maple syrup to 1 cup. To make Caramels instead of fudge, 1 1/2 cups brown sugar 1/2 cup white 1/2 cup white corn syrup 1 cup butter 1 cup cream pinch of salt vanilla Cook to almost hard ball stage. Let cool slightly, stir and then pour into butter pan or mini muffin tins.

Jim, we have a candy store downtown right next to the drawbridge. They make wonderful old-fashioned fudge with cocoa. It's a bit grainy, firm, with or without walnuts, & it's not just the tourists that line up. This time of year you can get caught up on all the town news standing in line. Fudge is one of those things that, to me, is best purchased from a good candy maker. There's something nostaligic about carrying that little box home tied with a ribbon. We always buy little mini-boxes with 2 pieces per box & one box per person snuggled into the branches of our Christmas tree. Tradition. Christmas is the only time of year we eat fudge & just those 2 pieces. /tricia

Funny how different things appeal to some and not others. My first thought when looking at the DR, is I hate the coral ceiling. It just made the room feel closed in. Ditto in the Bedroom - too dark of a color. Maybe if they had done 50% of the wall color, but to me it just looks like they were lazy and didn't want to trim out the ceiling. I'm not a huge bright white ceiling person, but a creamy white would have been perfect. Also not loving the kitchen color. That wall color does nothing to highlight the lovely cabinets. I love the exterior of the house. I think they did a great job architecturally with capturing the old farmhouse style with the window sizing and trim and porch. I think the inside should have been done more in keeping with the style of the house - not necessarily country, but less contemporary. I was expecting a beautiful quaint home, but instead saw a sparse contemporary bright colored house. I actually thought the LR was one of the prettiest rooms - maybe I'd have done a slightly different shade of blue, but overall it was very nice. That picture over the fireplace being the first thing you see when coming in was just wrong - again too contemporary for that house. OK, I'm done venting.

lemonhead, thanks for picking up on the research paper/project question. I find the responses very interesting and informative. I'd bet that you still remember more about Bonnie Prince Charlie than many of us ever learned. If I hadn't had a brother who loved Sir Walter Scott's Waverly and anything by Robert Louis Stevenson, I would have gone through elementary and secondary school without hearing a thing about the Jacobites. I took an anthropology class in gender language differences and found it both fascinating and dismaying. For instance, females often have a 'voice' they speak with around other females, but if a male enters an otherwise all-female group some of the gals' voices change immediately (often becoming breathier), no matter if the females are eight or eighty years old. I already knew this from observation and often found it annoying; but that it is largely an unconscious thing on the part of some females irritated me even more because I had thought it was a matter of choice, a mere affectation or a bad habit. elliottb: I'm intrigued how and why myths come to be, though the myths themselves don't interest me much. I will take a look at the 'Unhistory'. I know what you mean about anything "that holds interest" -- so in furtherance to your dilemma and mine, I will respond to woodnymph: woodnymph, I would enjoy a nonfiction thread and I would certainly contribute. Nonfiction seems to get short shrift here at RP. I know you mention the NF you read, Mary, but I'd say the "What are you reading?" thread runs something like 70/30 or 75/25 percent, favoring fiction over nonfiction. I can never keep up with all the bestselling fiction -- sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm only one person while there are dozens of people here at RP (and multitudes elsewhere) following the fiction trends. Yet nonfiction is even wider than fiction, so it's hard to comprehend that reading through post after post and there's hardly a mention of it. Maybe a thread devoted entirely to NF would bring more of it out -- I hope it would.