...need more hours...

This morning, I got through making 48 pancakes, a dozen scrambled eggs and four pounds of bacon, pouring half a gallon of milk and two quarts of apple juice, refilling and heating almost a pint (!!) of maple syrup, and the general hysteria that follows a sleepover.

Our littlest camper had to go home just before midnight. The strangeness got to be too much, the darkness and the noises and the no-mommy and the no-daddy and eventually even though she was sleeping with Boo Bug with her sister just on the other side of the wall (with the big kids)…it was a no-go.

So the husband pulled on his gardening shoes and bundled her next door to sleep in her own bed.

Bright and early, there came an enthusiastic knocking on the door and she threw herself right back into the party like she’d never been gone. Oh hai, I can haz bacon?!

Then I went outside and discovered one of the potato plants had graciously decided to throw me a bone – or rather, a beautiful little purple flower. (Please envision a picture of said flower here. Cute little purple flower with a brilliant yellow center.) And I went, “Eeeeeeeee!” like it was a winning lottery ticket and made everybody come outside and look at it.

Pre-teens are so jaded these days. Although one of them had managed to play here all day yesterday without ever glancing in the backyard, and she was rather…let’s call it “impressed” even though I think it was actually more like “unaware that her friend’s parents were quite that crazy”…most of them just kind of went, “…yawn!...” and went back inside to watch Happy Feet.

Humph.

So I planted some carrots, and some onions and some lettuce. Weeded the corn patch a bit and then suspended all weeding because some of the corn is sprouting and looks too similar to the nasty thick-bladed grass that was the reason we killed off the original lawn lo these many moons ago.

Checked the spinach along the shady side fence (doing fine) and the green beans (ditto), the cilantro (perhaps a little too well) and the horseradish (boy, am I ever glad I put that into its own little cement-enclosed area – it really does try to take over the world, that stuff). The blueberries, the raspberries, the strawberries in their hangers, the peaches and the cherry trees, and my brave little apple tree.

Then I came back inside and started some new cups with new jalapeno, Serrano and bell peppers. Then I had a fit of silliness and started eight more cups of beefsteak tomatoes. I have no idea where I think I’m going to put them. Just a vague plan involving every spare container we own plus maybe some repurposed plastic totes with big holes in them; they aren’t any good as totes anymore, but I was thinking they could make perfectly good herb containers or something and a couple of them are deep enough that tomatoes might be fine in there. I don’t know, and with the investment being maybe ten cents for seeds, heck.

I’m willing to take a chance and see what happens.

Which is kind of the nifty thing about starting things from seed using whatever is lying around: The Great Tomato Disaster, with over 150 plants lost, set me back…seven bucks. And some time. Plus I think I owe a fair chunk of change to the Cuss Jar.

Then I pondered the other stuff I’d still like to get into the ground somewhere. More golden beets (but we need to get water out to that part of the Back Forty(yards)). Bok choy (nah, I want to use the front boxes for that because they don’t mind partial shade conditions and are so darned adorable while growing). More spinach (not in the mood). Re-planting the cucumbers that also got eaten (stupid earwigs) (and snails) (and cutworms).

And then I found myself groaning softly to myself because gah, earwigs and snails and cutworms, OH MY. And the impending aphid invasion.

It was around this point that I stood up and realized that I am old was done. The hip, the back, the attitude…all clearly said, “ARGH!!! YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!!”

With a follow up of, “I wanna take mah pills, sit in mah chair, and not budge unless the house catches on fire.”

Except that we were out of milk, and needed watermelon seeds.

So I went out to get those two little things and it turned into this two hour odyssey of do you have anything other than this fiddly seedless / heirloom / personal-sized melon? that got downright silly by the end.

The problem, of course, is that our Home Depot has diddly for seeds really, and the other reliable source of seeds is WalMart, and I would have to be suffering from a severe concussion that brought on complete short and long-term memory loss before I would voluntarily go to WalMart just for one package of seeds.

I need a far more compelling reason. My WalMart irks me. It’s just…I don’t know. The staff is surly, the aisles are weird (and got worse after their big recent remodel), the other customers are either brain-dead or intentionally trying to piss me off, the parking lot is like…Toddler 50 Meter Dash meets Indianapolis 500.

Anybody who isn’t just sort of weaving slowly and drunkenly in random circles is speeding, yo.

So I need to have an actual list of things I can’t get anywhere else before I’ll go to WalMart.

Which meant I went to Orchard Supply Hardware instead, because they have seeds. Only they only had these “specialty” watermelon seeds. I’m kind of looking for the hardy old-fashioned kind of watermelons, watermelons that aren’t going to require that I sing to them in Welsh or tuck their tender little fruits into individual mesh wrappers, or whose vines are going to faint dead away when (not if) the aphids get into town and attach themselves by the millions to their vines every day.

Also, I need them to be the standard green rind pink interior sort. You know, the kind children recognize as being watermelon? Yeah. I kind of don’t want to have to wrestle the Denizens to the ground and force-feed them any blue or orange or white “watermelon” flesh to prove it tastes like watermelon even though it isn’t pink.

Then I stopped at a defunct feed and seed store.

Then I stopped at one that is closed on Sundays. Awesome.

Then I gave up and headed toward home and almost forgot to stop for milk and had to make the Biggest U-Turn Ever (like, a two-mile long one) to get back to the store, passing another store on my way but did I have a $3-off coupon at that store? No I did not.

And then I got milk and the same kid ran over my foot twice and hi, not to criticize your parenting skills or anything but could we please not let the three year old push the cart any more times because I am two seconds from killing him and if he runs over my foot again I may just bellow “YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!” in his face and that might confuse him and stuff?

And then I came home and looked at my party-demolished Den and my kitchen that needed cleaning and my fridge that needed clearing out and I thought…well, let’s gloss over what I thought precisely and go with, uh, “Gee gosh golly, I think I’m going to take a little resty-pooh before I think about that any more, where a ‘little’ can be translated to mean ‘for the rest of my life, maybe.’”

This turned into quite a weekend, and as usual I’m a little kerflumped to realize that in seven hours the blasted alarm will be shattering what feels like the middle of the night to tell us that it’s time to get up and do it all again.

This working thing, man, it’s seriously cutting into my work day.

But it’s also seriously cutting into our cash flow issues, so even though I complain pretty steadily about it – I’ve got no actual complaints.

Except that it would be awesome if someone could arrange for the human body to need just half an hour sleep a night to be all refreshed and stuff, and then maybe slow the earth down a bit so we get 38 hour days.

Yeah.

That would be awesome.

So if someone could get on that, that would be...you know...awesome.

Thanks in advance.

The only constant

The Plan: A birthday party for Danger Mouse (newly turned ten this very day) of, eh, well, we’re late planning this so let’s call it maybe six kids in addition to our four.

Revised: Oooookay, eighteen kids in addition to our four, a jumping house, $90 in pizza, cake and ice cream. But it’s over at 3:00 so we can collapse in a state of advanced lethargy later in the afternoon.

Update: Right, so, two more kids showed up at 2:45 so they’re staying a little later. No big.

Correction: Oh, there’s the other two neighbor kids. OK, so, they’re just…settling in for a while. No problem, they live right up the street…

Clarification, please: Sleepover? Who said anything about…oh, well, I guess just the one friend is no big deal, that should be fine…

Several phone calls and trots up and down the street to consult with parents later: Six giggling, whispering girls between the ages of 6 and 13 are deposited on mattresses, in sleeping bags and doubling up on beds all over the Den. None are sleeping. None are likely to get around to it before 3 a.m.

Conclusions: One father wonders how he keeps getting talked into these things (and/or left out of the decision making process).

One birthday girl is delirious with joy, having had The Absolute Perfect™ birthday celebration.

One formerly disappointed pre-teen who was supposed to go to her first “big” slumber party next week (cancelled because the organizing child’s parents suffered a spasm of sanity realized they had a scheduling conflict) thinks her lot in life considerably improved.

One little brother is a bit perplexed by the sudden influx of sisters and rather hopes they are going home soon because they sure do boss people around an awful lot.

One youngest child is sleeping for the first time in a house where her parents are not. (They live next door. She'll be fine.)

One big sister gets to finally not have to go to a boring old stupid little brother baseball game FOR ONCE tomorrow.

One little brother is irritated that having a baseball game first thing in the morning means he can't crash the sleepover party. SO not fair. {pout}

Ten children are looking forward to bacon and waffles and eggs tomorrow, even though they are currently so stuffed with pizza, cake, ice cream and watermelon that they could hardly walk up the stairs to their assorted sleeping spots.

One mother is questioning how it is she gets herself into these things, but has to admit that when one lives in a Den of Chaos where the only constant is change, well...things are going to change. Constantly.

Potaytoe, pohtahtoe

Either way, they're about to have flowers on them.

This makes me happy in a way that is entirely childish. I can't wait to find out what a potato flower looks like...

Touch-Speak

One of my new favorite blogs is Cold Antler Farm. Not long ago, she wrote a post about a salad.

As she goes along telling the story of her salad, she ruminates, You know, I really think if every house had a loaf of bread in the oven the divorce rate would go down about 27%.

Oh, I totally agree. Not because of the bread itself, but because of what that sort of thing represents.

You know why a loaf of bread can save a marriage? Not because it’s darned good eats, not because it is “healthier” or “frugal” or because the smell of it brings an indescribable joy and comfort to anyone who enters the home. (Those things don’t hurt, mind you, but I don’t think they would actually cause people determined to divorce to stay together.)

It saves a marriage because the act of making the bread is an investment of time and touch. It’s an act of love. It’s an investment of self into something mundane…and with such things so readily replaced by the automated and outsourced, they have gained even more power than they held when options were few, or none.

Choosing to go through the mess and bother and time to bake bread when it can be had pre-sliced and conveniently packaged in any supermarket (or gas station, for heaven’s sake) says something, loud and clear…and to do it more than just once or twice turns it into an ocean-wave roar and crash, constant and strong.

I don’t have to say a word. The actions of my hands speak for themselves, in a way that is hard to misinterpret…unlike the spoken word, which has a way of coming out wrong or being heard wrong or being just the right thing said at just the wrong time.

Sometimes I say I love you to my family in bread. Sometimes in clean bathroom mirrors. Sometimes in an ill-sewn patch on a favorite pair of jeans. (My sewing skilz, they are not mad.) Sometimes in a knitted sweater or a hand-dyed shirt in “that” green with blue speckles. Sometimes in a handful of weeds pulled on a day when really on the whole I’d rather have been lying inside watching the Deadliest Catch marathon.

Or maybe in a plate of green beans freshly picked from our own backyard, lightly steamed with a little Mason-jar butter…and buttermilk biscuits to use up what the butter-making left behind.

The human touch is a terribly powerful thing, you know. We can throw others into fits of anger with certain gestures…we can show we mean no harm with others. We can soothe a crying infant who knows nothing of language with gentle strokes along her back. We can transfer courage to a suffering friend with an embrace.

We can make the ordinary extraordinary, simply by applying our hands to it, pressing our spirit into it.

It’s easy to say words that sound shallow, insensitive, derisive.

It’s hard to bake a bread that tastes like sarcasm or indifference. Generally speaking and culinary disasters being set aside for the moment…it tastes like warmth and love and home.

It is infused with touch-speak, the subtle yet transcendent language of the powerful human touch.

It’s the next best thing to flat-out mental telepathy.

Even if they come out a little crooked or too boxy or otherwise not perfect, the gardening boxes my husband is building for me will clearly say he loves me…and for that reason they will be beautiful and perfect.

And if I accidentally iron a perfect crease right down the front of his favorite work shirt, the message that I treasure him won’t get lost.

That’s how touch-speak is.

If there were more of that in all the homes of the world, if more of our everyday were infused with it, I’m sure there would be a lot less divorce…and suffering of all kinds. Less emotional turmoil and mental anguish. Less aloneness and wondering what our place is in All This.

Our place is here, with the kin we were born to and the kith we’ve chosen for ourselves, infusing our simple everyday things with our time and talent, with our selves, nurturing and being nurtured, gifting and receiving gifts not measured in dollars or carets, but in depth of spirit, in the quiet assurance of being loved and treasured…and loving and treasuring.

Tall order for a humble loaf of bread or a well-spliced drip irrigation line; but with the power of the human mind guiding the hand behind it, they can be the epoxy that melds a family together.

Surprisingly...

..these are very comfortable. And I love them. And they cost me about three dollars with a $25 coupon I got at Famous Footwear...you know, my reward for buying $400 in Denizen shoes in the last six months...?

AND, now I don't have to get three pairs of "classier" but too-long work jeans hemmed up. Score!!!

But I'm goin to go take them off now, so I can keep them nice for a while. Time to head out to the garden, and just this once I'm going to recognize that the yard is ruinous on shoes instead of thinking it'll be FINE and then getting mud all over them.

(sent from my Treo)

Then, with a flip of the switch…

This morning was miserable. We’re in the middle of rushing around like crazy people getting ready to leave for work, and suddenly we realize that Captain Adventure isn’t just being tired and draggy and pissy – he’s sick.

Gah.

There are a few stages involved in your kid getting sick on a work day.

First, you realize something is wrong.

Then you go into denial about it for a few minutes. He’s not sick, he’s just {tired, angry, sad, obstinate, groggy, thirsty, hungry}.

Then you waste some time trying to figure out whether this is a sick-sick, or a I-will-be-fine-fifteen-minutes-after-you-call-me-in-sick sort of sick. It’s a waste of time because by now you know in your heart of hearts that you are totally staying home with this kid today regardless, so trying to work that around to where you’re going to pop some cold medicine into this child and take him to the sitter’s house in spite of his obvious misery on the theory that he’ll be fine in half an hour is just pointless.

But you do it anyway, because a day home with this particular sick child is a day with no pay for me. I don’t get paid time off (have I mentioned that lately? I have? Oh, well, then I shan’t mention it again for at least twenty seconds), so I am what might be called loathe to go taking days off so I can watch my kid bounce around being perfectly healthy the minute I’ve sent out the “I won’t be coming in or logging on or anything” email.

The older kids, you know, if they pull a miraculous recovery out of their hats like that, I can set them down with crayons and start working. But Captain Adventure can’t (and shouldn’t) be left to his own devices like that.

Bad things have a way of happening. You might as well just go to your most precious, hardest to replace, most expensive object and smash it to bits right away. It saves time and nerve tonic.

ANYWAY. Yeah. He was obviously sick.

So sick, in fact, that he wanted to go back to bed. So I carried him back upstairs, put him to bed, kissed him on the head and rushed to my laptop to let people know I wasn’t coming in and probably wouldn’t be logging on either today and maybe I’ll just real-quick take a look at this thing holy crap, what is that screaming up there?!

He woke up vomiting. Awesome. All over his bed, his clothes, himself, and needless to say he was not happy about it.

Although I still find myself amazed by the things you’ll think when you have a special needs child…I was kind of happy (inasmuch as I could be happy at that particular moment) because what he was screaming was, “MOMMMMMEEEEEEE, I NEEEEEEEED YOU, MOMMMMEEEEEEEEEE, WHERE ARE YOU?!”

See, that’s a natural thing for a kid to holler when he wakes up under such unpleasant circumstances – but it’s not been natural for Captain Adventure. Shoot, it took almost a year before he would acknowledge that I was a separate entity; he didn’t even have a sound for me until he was three and a half.

So I was kind of tickled that he was summoning me specifically in his time of need. Good progress in the recognition of titles and use of words to ask for assistance, kiddo!

And then he wept on my shoulder while I cleaned him up and got him into fresh clothes like any average child would.

And then he hauled off and decked me for absolutely no perceivable reason. Oh yeah. Autism rocks, y’all. He can’t read me, and quite often I can’t read him, either. I didn’t see that one coming one bit. POW! Right in the eye.

…just call me Blinky…

For the next two hours was a pissy little bundle of rabid monkey. He spit his water back at me, pinched me, pulled my hair, hit himself repeatedly in the head, demanded to play the Wii and then shoved the remotes at me shrieking, “YOU play it, mommy! YOU play it!” (I think because it was making him feel sicker trying to follow the action on the screen.)

Three hours into the ordeal, I was desperate for two things: A moment’s peace, and to get some form of liquid into him.

And then I remembered I had Pedialyte popsicles out in the freezer, from when he had gotten eight fillings all in the same day. Eight. The mind boggles…

When he saw the bright blue popsicle in my hand, it was like somebody threw his pissy-switch to “off.” He beamed a big smile at me, his most charming grin, pointed at it and said, “Oh! I like-it dat kind! May I pwease have-it dat one?”

He ate it, and then he ate another one.

Five minutes later, he was running laps around the Den.

Five minutes after that, he ate half a box of macaroni and cheese, a sliced apple with a dusting of cinnamon, drank about ten ounces of water, climbed into my back pocket and has stayed there ever since.

But it’s a much less upsetting sort of clingy behavior. Sure, I’d love it if he’d just color for a while without my constant input and attention, but at the same time, given a choice between this and the earlier “hitting myself in the face and screaming like I’ve got bamboo rammed under my toenails” thing?

Yeah. I’ll take this, thanks.

And now, I’d like to close with a brief note:

Dear Husband:

Please come home at your earliest convenience opportunity.

Bring chocolate.

And vodka.

Love,
Me

I wanna go home...

More accurately, I want to BE home.

Somehow, today just felt super-extra long. I just want to be home now, and pretend that I don't have to get up tomorrow and do it all again.

Fortunately, the kids will probably all be fighting and creating HUGE messes and the cat will need a bath (I don't want to know what she got on herself that smells so...ahem...pungent), and there will be Drama and Mayhem and I'll go to bed tonight thinking, "Thank $DEITY I get to go to my nice, safe office tomorrow..."

Ah, the sweet, pastoral bliss of home...

(sent from my Treo)

Passing batons

So there I was. Saturday morning. Coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. It was late in the morning; too damned late. I had overslept. I had a huge list of things I positively had to get done. The new boxes were being built by my excessively-supportive and handy spouse, I had corn and onions to plant, herbs to start, a house in dire need of elbow grease, bread to bake – you know, the usual lazy weekend list.

In a pathetic attempt to avoid getting to work While frugally finishing my coffee to the last drop, I glanced through the yard sale advertisements in our local paper. Toddler clothes, scrapbooking, {yawn} shoes, knickknacks, ‘too much to list here,’ yarn machine and lots of yarn, gardening supplies, estate sal-…wait…what?!

I looked at the words.

I read them three more times.

My first thought was, It’s probably one of those Ultimate Knitting machines. I already have one. And I hate it. Well. Hate is a strong word. I just kind of find it to be…somewhat limited. And fiddly. And it always seems to me that I could have knit whatever it was by hand in far less time than it took to get the yarn to feed through the carriage correctly. (Which isn’t actually true I’m sure, but it feels that way at the time.) Mine has the simple narrow bed that can’t even quite manage a sweater for a robust male figure without fudging, three size-adjusting cartridges and every time I use it, I end up cursing at it.

And my second thought was, What if it’s one of those absolutely unbelievable electric machines? You know, the computerized ones where you just show it the stash and it takes things from there?

Then I had a good laugh because I had a vision of the knitting machine clunking across the floor pulling out every ball of yarn I own and muttering to itself while it tried to program sweaters out of them.

And also because even at an estate sale, such a thing would be way out of my league.

Then I looked at the time and compared it to the starting time on the yard sale and knew – knew mind you – that I was too late. Whether it was a stupid old Ultimate Sweater Mac-phooey or a $10,000 Passap, some other knitter had probably aced me out. Yarn too. Probably all gone.

Well. Maybe not.

But it would probably be all acrylic.

Still. Possibly not all acrylic, possibly not all gone and I had to go to the farmer’s market anyway and I suppose there couldn’t be a whole lot of harm in stopping by.

Oh. My. Stars. And. Garters.

I walked up to a yard sale that had lots of people already shopping away. My wool-senses tingling, I walked straight through the dishes and the clothes, the beautiful furniture and cedar box, and threw open the metal lid emblazoned with Toyota.

One Toyota KS 901, in beautiful condition. Being the owner of a lousy Ultimate Sweater Machine, I’m hardly the go-to expert in all things knitting machine – but I do have a basic idea how they work and what kinds of things render them inoperable.

This thing was beautiful. It had been used, clearly, and loved, and its previous owner had taken very good care of it.

And beside it, still in their boxes too, a tilt-table stand and a ribber and a Knit Tracer. Wow.

Now considering that a new Ultimate Sweater machine is running about $150 at our Michael’s store, I’m looking at something with a bit more functionality and a lot more in accessories. Something that is probably way out of my price league, especially with all those accessories. All still in original boxes, with their manuals still tucked inside.

Yeah. Out of my league. Probably shouldn’t even bother to inquire. Because it’s got a knit tracer and a lace carriage and an Intarsia carriage and holy smokes, the ribbing transfer and a bind-off carriage?!

Whoa.

Yeah.

They’ve got to be asking a good five hundred bucks for this thing.

About the point I was thinking I should probably consider asking what they were looking for, you know, for all of it, the lady of the yard sale came over and started talking to me about it and oh yeah, the yarn.

The bags and bags of yarn. The cones and balls and skeins of it. The ha ha ha, you’ll never believe what she had in every corner of the house stash that we knitters know so well. (A thousand years from now, archeologists will unearth balls of yarn on the site where the Den stands now, still snug and safe in their Space Bags or Ziplocs, and wonder what strange religion was practiced here, when in truth it was just that I managed to hide put away that particular bit of stash extremely well.)

And then her daughter began bringing out Grandma’s yarn. And more yarn. And more yarn. In totes and garbage bags and boxes. And her husband began saying, “Hang on a second, there’s more to that machine over here…” and he’s dragging out a big old Rubberneck tote full of yet more cartridges and manuals and books.

“So, what were you…uh…for the…did you…?” Oh, I am smooth. A salesperson’s salesperson. Suave, sophisticated, butter not melting in my mouth, no indication that I might be the slightest bit interested, ready to bargain the thing down.

“I dunno…I was thinking, you know, because, you know, just the machine would maybe be almost three hundred dollars…maybe three hundred for all of it?”

“Oh, for, so, for the…and the…and…?” Here we go. This is the part where I tug at my chin thoughtfully while making the I dunno… face and point out that we’re talking about an older machine that is no longer manufactured and maybe bring up the issue of replacement parts and such, here we go, my mad negotiating skilz are brought the fore and I say… “Oh, uh, OK.”

{face-palm}

I’m a terrible negotiator. I’m one of those people who will set a price inside my head and then just walk away if the price asked is higher than that. Which is undoubtedly extremely irritating to the red-blooded horse trader, who sets his price unreasonably high naturally expecting that I’ll counter unreasonably low and we can argue our way toward the middle where we both want to be.

But all kidding aside, the yarn alone would cost more than $300, even second-hand. At a buck apiece the books would have been nearly a hundred bucks. And Oh yeah, there’s the small matter of a knitting machine with a zillion attachments and extras and the valet that fetches you your morning cappuccino and irons the paper for you.

They helped me load all the stuff into the van. The boxes and bags and totes, the “two men to lift it” box of instructional materials. The yarn, the carriages and cartridges and punch cards and clips and swifts and ohmygah.

I feel like I’m opening a factory or something with all this stuff.

When I got it all home and started going through it all, I just got more and more amazed. This thing is going to take me a long, long time to figure out. It has more bells and whistles than I had imagined. It can do more things than I ever would have thought possible.

And the box of books is a treasure trove of crafty goodness. Encyclopedias of knitting stitches, patterns for both hand and machine, a rug making book, an encyclopedia series of family crafts with everything from glass to leather, bobbin lace to hammock making.

Some of it in like-new condition; some of it with copious notes in neat handwriting in the margins. “Set knob to 1, not 3.” “Gauge too tight, use DK+.” “Put in other side UP.”

When I was going through the yarn I found a baby sweater, beautifully crocheted, all finished except for an end that needed running in.

I ran it in, and eyeballed the skein that made it thinking there was definitely a pair of booties and a little hat left in there, and I wondered – someday, would another knitter come to a yard sale and find herself with a bag of yarn with an almost-finished baby sweater in it?

And would she finish it, and think to herself there was a pair of booties and a hat left in that skein, and then make them and hand off the gift to someone from both of us…freezing that moment in time when the baton left my hand and went to hers?

I hope so. I even trust so. I don’t think knitting and knitters will change all that much between now and then; we’re that sort of breed.

I’ll try to take good care of your things, fellow knitter, and to make warm and loving things from the yarn you left behind.

And thanks for keeping all those manuals. Lord knows I’m going to need them, and badly…

Hey look, kids, another Friday!

This week has been…well, it’s been…wellllllllllllll…

…ughhhhhhhhhhhhh*

Yeah. About like that.

I am so tired right now that I could go to bed – and it’s only 5:30, y’all. On the plus side, I just turned OFF my work laptop, which means that nobody can ping me for “just one more quick little thing” until I choose to turn it back on again.

Which might be tomorrow, because I have just one more quick little thing I’d kind of like to get done before Monday morning. Because I have caught the disease, y’all. There is no hope for me. Save yourselves.

To be honest, the week went by so fast I’m a little startled to find myself back at Friday already. It’s just a blur of commuting and sleeping, really, with frantic periods of activity between.

And now just when I should be starting to relax and be thankful that it’s over and I’ve got two days off…my brain is beginning to ramp up the weekend chore list.

And what a list it is, too.

With the big tomato planting largely failed and most of the back forty(yards) available for Other Things, well, I’m moving on to Other Things. Which is all well and good but the main thing I really want to get done this weekend is the front yard – which looks like freeze-dried, reconstituted, microwaved crap thank you very much.

The fact that it has looked that way for a full decade now is beside the point. As I have spoken, so let it be! HAIL, PHARAOH! {CLASH!}

All kidding aside, what I want to do up there is not completely epic…but I think it’s what we need to do. The dirt strip is going to become raised beds – made out of the good stuff for once, out of good clean wood that we paid {GASP!} actual money for, and built with attractive hardware wherever it might show. We’ll put in three or four smaller beds, and line the spaces between them with gravel. (Heh. I typed ‘gavel’ first, which is kind of what I’m banging here – silence in the court! The Honorable Me is addressing you! Bow before me, peasant, as I declare your fate, which is that you will spend this weekend doing woodworking to please Me! HA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) (um, yeah, my husband? He kind of doesn’t know he’s doing all this tomorrow. I mean, he knows about the project, but I think he kind of missed the part where it is happening right-now. Oops.)

And then we’ll plant them with shade-tolerant stuff – herbs, lettuce, spinach, stuff like that. Real square foot gardening, instead of the hybrid version I do in the backyard.

Which is square foot gardening, just without the boxes…I still have the “hard work” of breaking up the ground (which can be tedious but personally I don’t find it distressingly so) (yet) and the weeds can become a bother if you don’t stay on top of them, but at the same time, you know how you can grow even more in a constrained space? If you don’t take up a whack of that space with bulky boxes!

But it does look…weird. And a lot more random than it really is, actually. Which is OK in the backyard, but up front I’d like to have it look more…purposeful.

And if it could also look tasteful, well, you know…bonus.

Oh, wait, I’ve got to run. The husband just came in and was telling me how happy he was that this week was over? And I was all, “Yeah, it was a rough one all right…so! you ready for the weekend?”

And he asked, warily, “What about this weekend?”

And I said, “You know, the beds, up front.”

“YOU WANT THAT DONE THIS WEEKEND?!”

“Well, yeah.”

{pause while he desperately searches for any hint that I am joking and about to say, “Ha ha ha, no, let’s just sit around eating junk food and watching movies instead.”}

Finding no such signs, he ran his hand wearily through his hair.

“Well, @*^&@. You’d better get outside with me so we can take some measurements…”

Oh, he loves me and my little home improvement projects…!

…coming, dear…

Five centimeters each way

Not that I'm counting or anything.

Today is Ride Your Bike To Work day...in honor of which, I almost killed my very first cyclist this morning.

You know how sometimes you're kind of driving on auto-pilot and maybe aren't paying the absolute best attention you could to your environment?

Yeah. Dude on the bike was doing that this morning. "La la la, ridin' my bike, oh, there's the train station on my left across four lanes of traffic, I'll just swerve across all four lanes without so much as GLANCING around me, let alone signalling my intentions la la la..."

In related news, the brakes on my Civic are fully functioning. Which is why he was still alive to be all embarrassed when we were on the platform together and I was giving him Mommy Look #112, "What the (beep) was THAT?!"

In also related news, I have been WIRED ever since. Brrr. Killing someone by running over them with my car is SO not on the "to do before I die" list...

(sent from my Treo)

How many phone meetings did I have yesterday?

About two inches worth.

The meetings thing is curious for me. I might go a month with only one or two a week...then suddenly, I have flurries where...well. Yesterday, I was in back-to-back discussions about this-n-that-n-t'other from 10:00 until 3:30.

Surely does give the old cell phone battery a workout...

(sent from my Treo)

Nibbling, nibbling, like a very large mouse…

Something has eaten the last remaining summer squash plant from our front yard patch.

It’s not a snail or a bug. It is something with teeth. Something light enough not to leave footprints, but big enough that it ate a healthy four-inch summer squash seedling leaves and all, right down to the earth.

Which sounds like a rabbit to me. Which would not be a bit weird because we are surrounded by the varmints out here. What is weird, though, is the utter lack of rabbit by-product, anywhere in the entire patch. Seeing as how they have now eaten four summer squash plants ranging from 4” to 6” in size…which had to take some time and also required them to hop a good forty feet along in the bed…I find that a little bit weird.

And the neighbors probably find it a little bit weird that I was crawling around in my front dirt patch grousing about not being able to find any rabbit poop in it.

My life? Totally awesome. If I’m not scraping cat vomit off my couch or a toweling up puddle of human pee from the bathroom floor in front of the potty that wasn’t quite reached in time, I’m crawling around my garden beds looking for rabbit poop. Don’t you wish you were cool like me?!

Whoever this is has also very carefully eaten just the four squashes…but left a small field of tender young spinach (usually a big rabbit favorite) between them completely alone. Not so much as a single nibble.

Also, forget if I mentioned it, not a single bit of rabbit scat.

Whoever did this nibbling left nothing. Not a paw print, not a single hair, not a pile of poo or a how-do-you-do.

Just summer squash plants nibbled right down to the ground.

Hmmmmmmm…

Well, if they’re not careful, I’m going to sit up all night to catch them so I can beet them bloody.

With actual beets.


Don’t think I won’t do it…although perhaps threatening to take craptastic pictures like this one of them with my phone would be more painful for them…?

Flame-Broiled Enthusiasm

The Denizens were not feeling the dinner-love tonight. I put the sauerbraten into the crockpot this morning before we left, so as we walked into the Den there was that rich, heady scent of ginger, red wine, onions and beef hanging in the air.

They were not impressed. It smelled like flavor, and they are against that. Ketchup is about as bold as they want to get.

And it didn’t get a whole lot better. Oh sure, there were some plain buttered noodles – but there were also beets.

Which are a vegetable.

Which, you know…well, veg-ee-tah-bul.

Also pronounced, “Yuck.”

(To which I rejoin, “Get used to the beets, dudes, we’ve got about ten pounds of them coming out of the garden this week.”)

(Addendum to the above: “MWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!”)

Not even the Fun Fact that they might turn your pee pink could make up for their vegetable-ness.

But it must be announced that they did a noble job bellying up to the table and risking the horror that is a vegetable. None of them liked the beets, but they all choked down what they had before them and then turned their attention to the one thing that could prevent overnight starvation: dessert.

I said, “Let me think.”

They said, “No! No, we want Girl Scout cookies!”

“Are you sure?” I queried.

“Yes! Yes! We want Girl Scout cookies!!”

“You don’t even want to know if there’s another option?”

“UH…” {three little memories spun like crazy, doing an inventory of the sweets in the house} “No, that’s OK, we just want Girl Scout cookies.”

“Ooooookay. Let’s go get a box.”

So we went out to the garage and got a box of Girl Scout cookies.

And a box of graham crackers.

And a couple Hershey bars.

“Oooooh, can I have a candy bar instead?” Danger Mouse was intrigued by this sudden and unexpected development.

“Nope. You’re having cookies,” I told her smugly.

Eldest looked at what I had in my hands coming back through the door and said, “Oooooooooh! I changed my mind!”

“What? What?” yelled Boo Bug.

“Nothing. You’re having cookies,” I told her, digging through the cupboards. Ah…

You may think you know what a “loud” noise sounds like.

Ha.

You haven’t heard “loud” until you’ve heard four kids putting together the presence of a box of graham crackers, chocolate bars, and a big old bag of (only slightly stale) marshmallows.

These are the moments when I wouldn’t trade my finicky old gas range for the sleekest, fanciest electric model on the market.


Just like camping – without the bugs!


…oh…wait…well, Boo Bugs don’t count…

Suddenly, everybody got a lot more enthusiastic about that whole “preparing and consuming food” thing.

Hmm. I wonder if there would be some way I could make beets a s’more-like interactive dining experience for them…

Monday ALREADY?!

Well, must be Monday - there's some sweater progress.

But still...that weekend surely did go by in a hurry, didn't it? A blur of sound and light. Mother's day presents, cleaning, shopping, gardening and suddenly here I am...back in the office like the weekend never even happened.

And there's a light drizzle falling this morning. Because it was hot in my neighborhood yesterday, so I wore a short-sleeved shirt. Awesome!

..thus begineth another week...

(sent from my Treo)

The terror of the turkey

When I was a kid, I had no idea the pangs of terror the cheerful playing of Turkey in the Straw could bring to a parent.

What could possibly be bad about an ice cream truck, for heaven’s sake?

Yeah.

Yesterday, one of the neighbor’s kids had a birthday party. At about 10:30 in the morning, the plucky refrain began to ring out over the neighborhood – and I automatically started going, “No, no, no, no, NO, no, NO, no, no, NO!, NO! do not ask me again, the answer is NO!”

It saves time, compared with waiting for each of the four Denizens to rush up to me begging, pleading, asking one more time, then once more, then dredging up legal precedent and informing me that it was Saturday and etc. etc. etc.

“It’s too early,” I pronounced firmly. “There will be ice cream at the party. And furthermore you haven’t had lunch yet.” Ha-HA! Beat THAT if you can…

So the very nice ice cream truck man waved cheerfully and went on with his route.

But he is not stupid. Oh no. He is not stupid. He saw the excited children. He noted the jumpy house on the neighbor’s front lawn. He said to himself, I should come back here in a few hours…

Sure enough, a few hours later, at that perfect 2:00 timeslot (well after lunch, well before dinner), I once again heard the theme from Jaws Turkey in the Straw chiming forth…followed by screams and shrieks and redoubled begging and pleading. ohpleaseohpleaseohplease…

That lovely man pulled right up with his big beaming smile, threw open his window and sat like a skinny t-shirted Santa Claus as approximately 6,200 children flung themselves wildly toward his van.

Our court is often a good score for him. We have four, the next door neighbors have three, there’s one more across the street, and of course That Thing where each child will constantly have one or two friends over. Even if one family is saying absolutely not!, it’s a fair bet somebody else’s parents are handing out a five dollar bill and putting in their own order. Don’t forget my triple chocolate coffee sundae! (The ice cream truck has evolved a bit since I was a kid…he has about forty kinds of ice creams in that [I kid you not] minivan, a few of them definitely geared for the parents. Like I said – not a bit stupid, our ice cream man.)

Yesterday, though, was a bit on the epic side. Not only were there the usual about twelve, there were all the kids of the extended family-next-door over as well.

All kidding aside, I think there were something like thirty children and eight parents crowding around that truck. Which is funny considering they’re coming from a birthday party where there will be, in fairly short order, cake and ice cream.

But there’s just something about that music. It has a way of reaching down and touching something inside. Even children who don’t really know what’s going on will catch the excitement.

And after that first time, when they get it, well. I cracked open the garage door and called out, “Hey, Captain Adventure – the ice cream truck came back.”

He flew out the front door leaving a boy-shaped hole in the air behind him, hollering, “Waaaaaaaaait, Misser Isss-cweam! I wannit de kind wif da stick an da orange and da pink kind!!” (In English: A Push-Up.) He was so excited he was jumping wildly up and down, shaking his hands and putting in his order over and over and over again.

Ah, the excitement of the ice cream truck. There’s really nothing quite like it. Orders were placed. Money was exchanged. Change was forgotten by overly excited children. Wrappers exploded. The music faded into the neighborhood as, smiling and waving and calling, “See you next time!” out the window, the Magic Man trolled slowly away to other courts and streets, to other crowds of children waving their dollar bills triumphantly in the air as he approached.

And in our court, rapt silence as all the children applied themselves to the serious business of consuming their watermelon bombs, their snow cones of many colors, their strawberry-crunch coated ice creams, their cookie sandwiches and missile pops and fudge bars and Spongebob sherbet.

Lots of things have changed since I was a kid…but the ice cream man remains a symbol of the end of winter, a reason to do your chores and get your allowance first thing Saturday morning, a blissful sea of options in a world where choices are seldom yours to make.

And the sound of that music, flowing thinly out from worn PA speakers, still strikes fear into the hearts of parents. Oh, NO! Not THAT! Quick! Hide my wallet! Bring the children inside! Bar the doors! Close the blinds! Turn on fans! Turn on the TV! Here, kids, take a Wii remote! No, don’t look out the window, look at the video game…!

Sorry, I’m fresh out of SHAZAM…

I’ve got the “so much to do I just can’t deal so I’m going to sit down and do nothing instead” blues going today. So far today I have cleaned about four square feet of the Den (OK, I’m being modest…it was a small area, sure, but it was a very thorough cleaning that included washing the walls for Pete’s sake, which is not something that is generally on my list of “Must Do” cleaning except that I have these little varmints running around called children and they do things that cause you to suddenly stop in your tracks, peer at the wall like you’ve just seen the image of Christ [or probably Satan, actually, given the kind of reaction one has to what one thinks one is seeing on that wall] on it or something, start to ask, “Whaaaaaaaaat…?” then realize you really do NOT want to know the answer to the question you were about to ask and go find your Murphy’s Oil which has somehow migrated out of the cupboard where it belongs to some random place like under the master bathroom sink – you know, the one room in the house where you would never, ever in a hundred years find yourself needing Murphy’s Oil to clean anything), pulled a few dozen weeds, bought 3 gallons of milk, one bell pepper, a couple packages of lunchmeat that were on extreme sale, five pounds of onions…and a package of onion seeds, a package of bak choy seeds, and a huge amount of dirt.

Which is kind of funny, because part of what I really need to do today is to remove a huge amount of dirt from inside the Den. It’s a fairly impressive disaster zone in here right now.

Bet if I just dumped the contents of the vacuum cleaner cannister into the pots, I could totally plant potatoes with what I’ve already got here in the house.

Oh. And I made this…hmm. What to call it. It’s not a curry, exactly, but it’s kind of…well shoot. It’s…

3 pounds stewing beef, cubed into bite-sized morsels
3 large onions, diced
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
2 bay leaves
1 jalapeno, diced
3 cups coconut milk
2 cups beef stock

And then you sear the meat and dump it into a crockpot, and then you sauté the onions and garlic until they’re nice and sweet, and then you add the ginger, coriander, bay leaves, jalapeno and turmeric and sauté until it’s all aromatic and your husband suddenly finds he has all kinds of stuff he needs to do in the kitchen, then you put that in with the beef, add the coconut milk and beef stock, stir, turn the crockpot on “high” for about four hours or so if it’s a newer one that actually boils stuff, longer if it’s an older one that doesn’t run quite so hot, and then you serve it over rice.

Not very well liked by the kids due to being “too spicy”…which could be remedied by leaving out the jalapeno or substituting a milder chili or even just plain black pepper…but the husband and I are pretty fond of it as is so the kids can just eat some boring old rice or something and serves them right for being such picky eaters.

So there. Nyah.

I still have about 95% of the Den to clean.

And I just really don’t wanna.

I don’t wanna so thoroughly that I can almost work myself up to not caring about the state of things – which are cluttered, dirty, sticky in places, slick in others, dusty in still others, with a solid inch and a half of cat hair on everything (Dharma is shedding big time right now as our temperatures are doing their usual thing where one minute we’re shivering and there’s ice on the rooftops and the next we’re in the 80s by 10:15 in the morning inside the house) and really…kind of disgusting, actually.

And I almost don’t care.

Almost.

So…close…

Oh well. Guess I’d better slouch down there and get busy. If I can just get four more areas cleaned, I’ll have half the Den done…and then I can feel all self-righteous and smug when I refuse to do even one.more.thing all night long.

(Plus I won’t be all pissy about the house being in such a state. I hate doing housework, but I hate having a dirty house even more. It upsets my delicate little nerves something terrible.) (Oh.My.GAH, I have definitely become my own mother…sigh…oh well, there are worse things, I suppose…although I’m still not as put-together as The Lady My Mother always is, and am more regularly seen without makeup than with and tend to color my hair in ways that amuse me rather than ways that necessarily look good, which I think actually causes her physical pain but she’s too classy to say anything…)

Maple Baked Beans

OK, I admit it: I have a sweet tooth. A serious sweet tooth. It’s…pretty bad, actually. I put too much sugar in my coffee, I raid the Denizens’ Halloween candy shamelessly, I pour maple syrup on my bacon…yeah.

I like me the sweets.

So when baked bean recipes are all, “…a less-sweet version of whatever…” I’m all, “WHY?!?!”

These are not less sweet. These are shamelessly, gloriously too darned sweet.

Awesome.

You’ll need…

1 pound dry beans (pinto, great northern, little whites or navy beans…for a treat, use Stueben yellow eyes or Anasazi beans)

Pick over the beans, discarding any that are broken, funky-looking or not beans. (Little rocks have a way of fooling the packing equipment…no matter how long you cook them, they will never be succulent little morsels of tenderness.)

Rinse them, then either cold-soak them at least three hours or overnight, or use the hot soak method – put them in water, bring it to a boil, turn it off, clap on the lid and leave them alone for an hour.

After they have soaked, put them into a large saucepan and add ten cups of water. Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until they are almost done. They should still be a bit “al dente” because they still have a fair piece of cooking to do. Drain, reserving the liquid.

Put the beans into a big old 6-quart casserole dish with…

1 large onion, diced
1/2 pound bacon, diced
4 teaspoons minced garlic

Mix them up. Take that pot liquor and add in…

15 1 cup real maple syrup. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t use the maple-scented liquid plastic stuff. Go for the real deal on this.
2 tablespoons ground ginger. Yes. Tablespoons.
1 teaspoon ground mustard
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper

…then pour that over the beans. Cover and bake at 325 until the beans are well and truly tender, which is going to take forever (or about 3 hours) (you can also do this in the crockpot - set on low for about six hours).

You can also use a ham hock or diced ham in place of the bacon, but personally I prefer to use the ham for ham-n-bean soup.

You can also, of course, omit the bacon altogether.

Now. Obligatory cheapskate note about that maple syrup…Look. I know the real stuff is expensive…I stopped for a price check the last time I was in the supermarket and found that a 12.5 ounce bottle was going for $10.75 on sale. The regular price was $12.99, which would make each ounce $1.04, and a cup of the stuff a hair over $8.

Kind of painful.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I buy mine by the gallon, from places like Triple Creek Maple. Their price for a gallon is $46, plus $18 each gallon to ship it from Pennsylvania to California – not exactly a short trip for it. Your shipping costs may be lower, if you are lucky enough to live closer to Pennsylvania. (I can specifically recommend Triple Creek – ordered from them last time and got an excellent supply of luscious syrup at a very decent price.)

Now, it might seem kind of pricy, paying $64 for a gallon of maple syrup. But that gallon is 164 ounces, and that $64 works out to about $0.37 an ounce – or $3.12 a cup, less than half the cost of the supermarket brand stuff, even on sale. You can store the unopened gallons in any dark, cool place (garage cupboards for us), and the opened ones go in your fridge and take up no more room than a gallon of milk would and will keep for up to a year in there.

If you need to keep it even longer, you can put it in the freezer. Maple syrup will not hard-freeze, so be prepared for that – it can make a devil of a mess in your freezer if you think it’s going to freeze up into ice cubes and get careless about how you keep it.

And if you dig around, you can probably get it for even less. Shoot, a few minutes consulting The Great Google led me to The Field Farm, which has a gallon for $59 including shipping – that’s $2.88 a cup, and they mention volume discounts…hmm, you never know, sometimes what constitutes “volume” isn’t as much as you might expect, especially when you’re dealing directly with a smaller producer.

The real maple syrup is really good stuff.

And that’s enough commercials for one day, thank you very much.

Besides, I’ve got beans to get going this morning…I need about another 40 gallons or so of them to get through my lunch hours next week (I really like these…seriously…sweet little bites of pure deliciousness…)

Crescent rolls

Crescent rolls

Quick, before I forget again…you’ll need…

4-5 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons yeast (one packet)
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter, margarine or shortening
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs

If you’re using the packet yeast, you can skip this step and just mix the yeast into two cups of flour in your mixing bowl – technically, I can probably skip it too. But, I buy my yeast in big four pound containers and keep it in the fridge for anywhere from “no time at all” to “months on end” depending on the baking schedule, so I kind of like to know it’s still alive before I waste a bunch of time and effort with the mixing and kneading and so forth.



So I put a little water in a cereal bowl (about a quarter cup, maybe), zap it for fifteen seconds in the microwave to warm it just a tad, then put my yeast in it, sprinkle with a pinch of sugar and set it somewhere warm for about ten minutes to see what happens while I move on with warming up the milk.

Which is the next step. So, uh, yeah. You warm up the milk and fat (butter or shortening), either on the stovetop or the microwave. Stir until the butter is melted or almost melted; add your sugar and salt and mix it until it’s all dissolved.

You want it to be “Just Warm,” not hot – too hot, and you’ll kill your yeast (and possibly get scrambled eggs into the bargain). You should be able to stick your finger in it without yelping.

Add that to your flour and stir until mixed in; if you’ve “activated” your yeast first, pour that in too and mix it up.

Add the eggs and blend them on in there. Mix it up really well, so that there’s no flour left on the bottom of the bowl and your arm is getting tired and good grief, why didn’t anybody TELL you there’d be so much stirring?!

Now, if you are blessed with a KitchenAid or similar stand mixer that can handle this sort of thing, get out your dough hook. Add another two cups of flour and turn that sucker on. Keep adding flour a tiny little bit at a time until the dough is pulling away from the sides of the mixer and begins to form a smooth elastic ball.

Try to learn from my mistakes here, and always keep in mind that it is easy to add more flour…but a lot trickier to take out if you get a little too excited about adding more. eeeeeeeyeah. Some of us…are faster learners than others…

You’ll want to let it go for at least five minutes. Keep an eye on it even if the dough looked perfect the last time you looked, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to occasionally rest your hand on the top of your machine to make sure it isn’t getting so hot you could fry an egg on it.

Because that is not a recommended way to use these machines.

Or so KitchenAid tells me.

If you do not have a stand mixer, continue adding flour until you just can’t add anymore – the wooden spoon refuses to move through the cement-like creation you’re working on.

Then turn it out onto a floured surface and begin to knead in even more flour. You’re still going for that smooth elastic ball thing, and it will still take a good six to eight minutes. Keep thinking of the excellent workout this is for your upper and lower arms. (It really is.) (It’s also a great way to take out any frustration you may have…very therapeutic and when you’re done, you have a home filled with the scent of prosperity, plenty and love. And if you should find yourself still frustrated, well, you’ve now got better-toned arms with which to smack the daylights out of the problem.)

When you’ve got one of these…



…put it in a greased bowl big enough to hold twice as much, turn it to get some of that oil on the top, cover it with a clean cloth, put it in a warm, draft-free place and ignore it for about an hour while it doubles in size.

Then punch it down, cut the dough in half, and cover it again to rest for ten minutes. It’s the least you can do for it, after all, after having walked up and punched it for no apparent reason.

Then comes the fun part, the shaping. You can make the rolls any shape you please. ANY SHAPE YOU PLEASE. You can make them into crescents like I did this last time. This recipe makes about 24 crescents – you roll each half out into a circle, then cut it into twelve wedges. (Although actually, I do sixteen. Because the way I cut the wedges is like cutting a pizza – in half, then in quarters, then each quarter in half, and so on and so on.)

Or you can divide each half into six equal pieces, shape them into circles about 3-1/2 inches across – ta-da, a dozen hamburger buns. Or you can do the same thing but roll them out into roughly 5” long rolls – hot dog buns.

OR (this one is kind of cool because it looks hard but isn’t), you can grease a muffin pan, divide each half into twelve portions, then divide each portion into three (stay with me here). Roll each little third-of-a-fifteenth bit into a smooth ball and drop three of those into each muffin pan. After rising, they’ll look like you did something all fancy to get that cool “clover” pattern but it was just three little balls of dough dropped into a muffin pan!

You can also just drop one larger ball into the muffin pan to make regular old rolls.

Whatever shape you choose, after shaping put them on a greased cookie sheet cover them back up and leave them alone for about half an hour, then bake at 375 degrees for about 12 minutes, until they’re nicely browned and the smell of bread baking is driving everybody in the house nuts. Watch the bottoms! They tend to burn pretty fast.

Take them out and let them cool on your handy wire racks – if you can. But if you just can’t wait, well, we understand.

Just try not to burn yourself, ‘kay?

Yeah, it’s definitely a Friday…

Friday is the most frustrating day of the week for me. I know that’s kind of backward but hey – this is me we’re talking about, here.

See, Friday is the day when all the stuff I’ve been pushing off because I’m doing my corporate thing all week starts to insist on being heard, and thought about. The day when the full-time suburban housewife and mommy whips around a corner with her arms full of laundry only to crash into the homesteading nut case carrying a sloshing bucket full of graywater who then gets rear-ended by the career woman who was too busy trying to make out the words on her itty-bitty Treo screen (because she can never find her glasses, ever) to notice she was about to crash into people (typical!) and then the owner of a teeny-tiny business zips along clutching forms and topples on top of all of us.

Ooooof!

Furthermore, by Friday I have almost no GiveADang left. I’m tired, achy and feeling run-down and then I look at what-all I’ve got forty-eight tiny hours to do and I find myself really wondering if anything really matters all that much and maybe I could just, I dunno, ignore everything and perhaps little helper elves will come in the night and do all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, Denizen-pampering, laundry, ironing, gardening, car washing and checkbook balancing for me.

Still waiting, little helper elves…!

So then I start trying to find a finger I wouldn’t mind chopping off. Because obviously, something has to go, right? Right. So I start trying to figure out what something can not get done this weekend (or ever) and then I start to feel a bit like crying because friends, if I haven’t already moved it to the “how about never, does never work for you?” list, it’s probably because it can’t (or really shouldn’t) be moved.

Feh.

But the good news is, I am so run down and achy and tired and meh by Friday night that I tend to just kind of flop. (I’ve tried to make this a rule, but every time I try to make something official it’s like the Universe just has to lay the smack-down on it…oh, Tuesday is ‘your’ night? SMACK! The husband now has deployment meetings Tuesday nights! You’re going to take Friday nights off? SMACK! “Something” is now an Every Saturday “Something” and if you don’t do every last thing on the list on Friday night, you will be doomed, dooooooooomed I say…!)

I make something painfully simple for dinner (like leftovers, gently simmered in mommy is busy reading on the Internets right now, sweetie, why don’t you ask Daddy about that sauce and served with a crunchy side of talk to the hand, I am blogging right now! with perhaps a delicious serving of cheap downloaded video game for dessert), and then goof off like there’s no tomorrow until I decide I want to go bed.

And then I take some of the Good Stuff (prescription pain meds for the back and hip, which otherwise have a way of keeping me awake at night – go figure) and go to bed. What a concept!

Then I don’t get up the next morning until I’m darned good and ready.

Or when the neighbor’s dogs all start barking.

Or WWIII breaks out downstairs because Boo Bug wants to watch cartoons but Danger Mouse wants to watch Wizards of Drama Pre-Teen Band Angst of Much Boyness.

Or when the neighborhood kids start galloping through the house because Fritter erroneously told them I was making cinnamon buns for breakfast (which has happened, like, twice in the last twelve years, but Fritter is nothing if not optimistic).

Or when Captain Adventure bursts into our bedroom shouting, “Hey mom-MEH, you hafta make-it mine hawt coh-CO-WAH!”

And then it is Saturday – a whole new day chockfull of hours in which to do stuff I want to do.

Like figuring out what happened to my summer squash. It was coming up beautifully up front and then this morning…it was gone.

Not like somebody picked it, but like somebody nibbled it.

My first thought is that we have ourselves a rabbit on the loose.

My second thought is that rabbits can make for darned good eating, and that one good nibble deserves another.

My third thought is that I talk a really tough story, but I’d love to see me actually catch and kill a rabbit. Heh. Yeah. That would make for some epic YouTube footage, yo.

…especially the part where I was getting the husband to build a hutch for our new pet wabbit-bunny-foo-foo-beans…

Code red, y'all…

Guess what was waiting for me when I finally got home last night?



Oh yeah. The yarn for the other four Lillehammers. Which is fortunate, because I just finished the second sleeve on Captain Adventure's sweater and was all, Hmm, now what?

I'm as adventurous as the next knitter, but there is no way I'm going to attempt steeking on a moving train, y'all.

So I happily cast on the smallest of the red ones, and then halfway to the office realized that was probably not the best idea I've ever had. I mean, which would be worse, to run out of one of the main colors while I'm working on the biggest sweater, or one of the smaller ones? Plus, I'm sure I'll be heartily sick of these by the time I get to the fourth, which kind of nudges one toward doing the larger, slower ones first and saving the instant-by-comparison-gratification ones for later, does it not?

So I'll do this one for Danger Mouse, then do mine, then Eldest and then Boo Bug, who will undoubtedly decide this means I do not love her at all and always do everybody else's stuff first and never do anything for her.

Because she is (overly) dramatic that way.

In other news, OHMYGAH. I went to this bakery called Specialties this afternoon for a little pick-me-up? And they had these "pecan tea cake" thingees and I said, Hmm, I like pecans.

I could actually feel myself gaining weight while I ate it. I think there was something like six pounds of butter in that one little cookie-cake. It was crunchy and crumbly and coated in powdered sugar and buttery and loaded with pecans (which is big for me because I hate it when a bakery gets stingy with the pecans…I know they're expensive, but given that y'all are charging $2.95 [or whatever] each, I think it only fair that you give me more than three pecans on my sticky bun [or whatever])

I want the recipe. Well. Not really. If I started making these things, I'd need a new wardrobe within a matter of days. But at the same time, I do. For special occasions.

Like, uh, Tuesdays.

Because Tuesdays have long been underappreciated, and could use a little building up. Happy Tuesday! Have a tea cake! In celebration of the Tuesdayness!

And then we could start having parades. The Tuesday Parade. With tea cakes.

And everybody would take half of Monday off so they could get ready. Because you know, tea cakes take time to bake and all…

…say, I'm liking this idea more and more...viva la Tuesday!

How to be popular

Tonight as I was weaving drunkenly toward the Den after what seemed like an interminable open house with two hyperactive girls bouncing at my side, I was hailed from across the street by one of the neighborhood children.

“HI, MRS. BOO BUG’S MOM!”

“Hi, uh, um, er, ah, Matilda!”

“CAN I COME OVER AND PLAY?!”

“Uh, not right now, sweetie, it’s 8:00 on a school night.” (I left off the part where we hadn’t had dinner yet, or looked at homework, or anything else.)

“OH, OK.” {pause} “CAN I COME OVER TOMORROW NIGHT?”

“Not on school nights, OK? You can come over on Friday if you want, though.”

“OK, COOL. ARE YOU GOING TO BAKING, YOU KNOW, ANYTHING?”

Ah, yes. How to be the most popular kid(s) in town: Have a parent who bakes stuff. This weekend we had a veritable herd of children constantly flooding through the Den. Children can sense baked goods happening. The news spreads through the whole neighborhood, faster than Twitter.

A coworker today dubbed this mystic power “Fritter: The ability to telepathically send the news of cookies, pies, pastries and so forth faster than news of a good shoe sale spreads through the Twitter-vine.”

Or so I understand. I was the last human on earth to get an iPod, I’ll probably be the last to sign up for Twitter too. $DEITY only knows how many sales I’ve missed already.

The most disappointing part of the cooking weekend was the baked goods. Not because they didn’t turn out, but because most of them didn’t make it into the freezer – Fritter saw to that. The turnovers were consumed while they were still hot enough to burn people. The bread dough that was supposed to be frozen got baked instead because the bread that got baked got eaten.

The only thing that made it into the freezer were some crescent rolls; and I suspect they survived only because the cookies took one for the team. And because nobody was around when I was doing the fun part, which is when you roll them out…



…and cut them into wedges…



…and paint them with a little butter…



…and roll them up into little crescents you’re sure are too small…



…but then they puff all up and come out of the oven regular-sized rolls.



If you get them in the freezer quickly they can last up to a month.

Or fifteen seconds if you leave them out on the cooling rack and Fritter gets wind of them.

In other news, this has been a long week already. Today I went off to work only to get a memo from the husband that I had to catch the earliest train home because of the open house I’d forgotten about.

There were mother’s day presents involved. Sigh. So I dutifully packed it in an hour early so I could catch the earliest train, which naturally led to a fairly robust delay on the BART line so that I missed the bus shuttle to Train #2 by a good nine minutes. Argh.

So the husband drove out and got me so that I could get to the open house on time. Which we mostly did. And then the middle two Denizens ran me all over the school twice and I came home and we had spaghetti with sauce out of the freezer and now it’s going on ten o’clock and I haven’t gotten half of what I’d hoped to get done, you know, done but tomorrow is coming fast and I’d better wrap things up and get to bed or else! and I really wish I could work from home tomorrow because I could use a full day of working but no there are Meetings and Missives and I said I’d come in tomorrow so instead of getting a nice full eight (or better yet, ten or twelve) hours of actual work done, I’ll get six hours in the office, only two or three of them spent working and the rest spent trying not to yawn in meetings.

And then get back on the train so I can catch the shuttle that gets me to the second train on time.

My life? Never ending rollercoaster ride of excitement.

Now with crescent rolls.

And maple baked beans, which incidentally are awesome and possibly addictive, and I need to make more because I only made a couple quarts and they aren’t going to last long.

'kay! Goodnight, sweet Internets, I must go wash the allergens off my face and hit the sack, so that I can get up tomorrow and do it all again…

…hmm, somehow that doesn’t sound as appealing as it might…

Kid's Medicine Recall

A friend forwarded this to me this morning; I also saw it in the newspaper over the weekend and just spent a little quality time on their website.

Parents, let us network the word out.

Important anti-panic notice: No child has been harmed by these medications as of yet. This is a matter of quality control not having been up to snuff, and they want to recall it rather than take any chances. So if you've given your kid(s) some of this stuff and nothing has happened, it probably won't happen now.

Which makes me feel a darned site better, seeing as how we've had a bout of cold/flu sweeping through the house the last couple weeks and the kids have drinkin' this stuff like soda pop. Sigh. Does kind of piss me off that I just loaded myself up with two bottles of everything Friday morning, though…timing, it is the essence of both comedy and aggravation…

If you click through to their website, they have a NDC lookup function that will let you know if your specific bottle(s) are on the recall list (all of mine, ALL OF THEM, even the ones I just bought) (did I mention that? That I just bought, like, 6,000 bottles of the stuff?!) (oh, I did…OK, carry on then…); they also have a form you can fill out for up to six bottles, and you can choose between a high value coupon (basically, "get a replacement bottle free") or a check refund for the average retail price of the bottle.

You can also call to discuss things if you have more than the six bottles and/or need a little extra assistance. Scuttlebutt is that the wait times right now are bordering on ludicrous (imagine, they seem to be getting a LOT of calls this morning...), so be prepared for an overdose of "your call is important to us, please stay on the line" and elevator music.

Subject: Major recall on kids otc drugs

On 4/30/10, McNeil Consumer Healthcare issued a voluntary recall for the following liquid children's medicines:

Children's Tylenol
Infant's Tylenol
Children's Motrin
Infant's Motrin
Children's Zyrtec
Children's Benedryl

It is recommended to parents and providers that these medicines NOT be administered.

For more information on the recall and for product reimbursement, visit http://www.mcneilproductrecall.com/index.jhtml or call 888-222-6036.

Cook, clean, cook, clean, cook, clean, BREAK!

Every time I do this, I get to about this point and say, “That’s it, I quit and I’m never doing this again, EVER.”

So far, I’ve got:

For dinners:
3 pork chop meals with Marinade #1
3 pork chop meals with Marinade #2
3 pork pie meals
3 meatloaves (which will each also make one or two lunches)
6 taco casseroles (a layer of taco meat covered with a layer of kidney beans topped with cornmeal and baked)
4 chicken pot pies
6 quarts of spaghetti sauce (meat this time…usually I do “just” tomato sauce but the Denizens and their father did this big campaign for meat sauce so I did meat sauce…tune in next week to hear all the kids say, “Actually, I don’t think I like meat sauce.”
1 4# sauerbrauten “in progress”, which will be two dinners and then make a lot of lunches

For sides:
8 servings mashed potatoes
8 servings maple baked beans
8 servings black beans and rice
4 servings “smoked” beans (which is just beans baked with some BBQ sauce in the mix)
Lots of pre-existing bags of carrots, peas, zucchini and beets
48 warm-n-serve crescent rolls

For lunches:
8 pork with rice
8 beef with rice
8 Cornish pasties
8 curry chicken turnovers
8 Sloppy Joe turnovers
8 sesame chicken turnovers (with sesame seed oil instead of actual sesame seeds, in deference to the husband’s diverticulitis) (which bums me out but oh well, it is what it is)

For breakfasts:
Unbelievably, I’ve got nothing. I had (get this) 24 smallish turnovers stuffed with things like cinnamon-laced applesauce, homemade strawberry and blueberry jam, and a simple chocolate sauce…but then this swarm of children came through the house and I turned around and there were only three still on the counter. THREE. And by the next morning? There were none.

Truly. Astounding. It took less than ten minutes for almost two hours of work to just :poof!:, disappear.

Of course, when you have ten kids (my own four pus six neighborhood kids) passing through your kitchen, well, anything that isn’t nailed down or a vegetable is subject to vanishing. And they were all hungry, and they had all just been told, “NO!!!” by their Evil Overlord Parents when the ice cream truck came through, and these little turnovers taste an awful lot like Pop Tarts only they were fresh and hot and either crunchy with a cinnamon-sugar-water glaze or drizzled with confectioner’s sugar icing soooooooooooo…can’t blame them for each grabbing a couple and making a run for it.

I still have a few things to go (where “a few” equals “almost half”) (…sob…). Fortunately, most of it is a simple “layer and freeze” assembly rather than actual cooking at this point; unfortunately, there’s still a couple things that do require actual cooking and all of them are going to end up meaning more cleanup on aisle Whole Kitchen. Feh.

I kept hoping the kitchen fairies would, you know, zip in while I was using the bathroom and clean things up for me this weekend. But no. They were probably on furlough this weekend or something.

Budget cuts, I hates them…

Fortunately Tragically, I have to stop for a while now because I have a not-appointment with my hairdresser and eyebrow specialist over at Supercuts. It may be a sad commentary on my life in general, but it counts as a real treat when I get to go to Supercuts without any of the Denizens in tow…and today, I have a free hair wash and a free eyebrow wax. (Um…goody?) (You know what would be awesome? If I could either not care that I have a unibrow, or, if I would actually keep up the beautiful pair of arches she gives me…I always mean to and I usually do for a couple weeks but then I get lazy and I forget and I don’t do it and then the wooly caterpillar starts crawling across my forehead again and then I get all nervous because This One Time I overdid it on the self-plucking thing and ended up with these Mutant Alien Fuzzy Caterpillars of Lopsidedness of the Gods +10 perched awkwardly over my eyes and it took, like, years for them to grow out again [which is a great irony, isn’t it? It takes mere weeks for them to return to unibrow status, but overpluck and you’re looking at a fifteen year sentence of Mutant Alien Fuzzy Caterpillars of Lopsidedness of the Gods +10])

And then I have some free goodies from Victoria’s Secret to pick up, and some free goodies to get at JcPenny, and some rather impressive coupons to use at Target, plus Kohl’s has some nice things for me and I’ve got about $40 in Kohl’s cards to get them with, and guess what else?

My $25 Starbucks card arrived from MyPoints (wait…maybe it was SurveySpot…I can’t remember…I also don’t remember redeeming them, so it was probably over two months ago when I did so but who cares? I GOT A STARBUCK CARD IN THE MAIL!!!) over the weekend. Well, in either case: Woot.

…and I’ll try not to think about all the work I still have to get done tonight while I’m out and about…or that I have to go back to work tomorrow, whether my feet and back feel ready to do so or not…

It’s a pork fat thing…

Well, this isn’t all of it (or even half of it, actually), but here’s this morning’s haul:



Whew. Nothing says “Happy Saturday!” like a first-thing-in-the-morning run to the farmer’s market, a warehouse-like store and the supermarket, huh? Speaking of which, though, the farmer’s market is back from the dead! The winter run wasn’t that good for anybody, with only one or two vendors actually sticking it out and not a whole lot going on down there. But today when I got there promptly at 9:00, the street was already packed with tents and loaded with goodies.

Missing from the picture is…hmm…fifteen pounds of pork, fifteen pounds of beef roast, fifteen pounds of ground beef (lots of fifteens there, hadn’t really noticed that before), eight pounds of ham, twelve pounds of breakfast bacon, four pounds of bulk sausage, eight gallons of milk, five dozen eggs, fifty pounds of flour, an enormous bag of tortilla chips, three boxes of Food Saver bags (good coupon for those this month), three whole chickens (which actually came out of the freezer – I buy them whenever they go on sale for under $0.80 a pound), twelve cups of frozen shredded hash browns, a half gallon of sour cream, eight pounds of butter, five pounds each of cheddar, mozzarella and Monterey Jack cheese, a big old jar of minced garlic, and lots of freezer bags full of carrots, beets, peas, and zucchini that are from the garden.

Whew.

Favorite things in all this mess…our supermarket often has a couple carts near the front of the store with steeply discounted stuff in them. Banged up cans, things nearing their expiration date, stuff with older labels than the most recent delivery, or holiday items for holidays past.

I love treasure hunting…today, I got two pounds of dry organic red kidney beans for $0.25 each, and a pound of brown rice mix for $1.00 (usually around $4.50).



Then I found some beautiful brown mushrooms at the farmer’s market. Added to the cooking list today: A big old batch of wild rice and mushroom soup. Woot!

This is something I get at Smart and Final, which is kind of like a “Costco Lite.” Their prices on the super-basics tend to be higher than Costco, but they have areas where they really shine…and this is one of them:



This costs about a buck a pound – it’s basically bacon trimmings, all the little raggedy ends and too-thin or too-thick bits that do not meet the quality control standards for regular breakfast bacon. When you cook it up, it frequently comes out more like bacon bits than bacon-bacon, but the flavor is still bacon-awesome. Great for flavoring soups, beans, etc. etc. etc.

I can’t wait for the little apple tree to start producing apples…don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that the Denizens love apples, but gee whiz, this is an awful lot of them, isn’t it?



This is a fairly recent discovery for me: #10 cans of tomato products.



What we have here is tomato sauce ($2.99), diced recipe-ready tomatoes ($2.99 again) and Heinz (name brand, even!) tomato ketchup ($3.29). Granted I’m going to have to use my own containers to store the ketchup once I crack open that bad boy but still…that’s half the price of the “regular” bottles.

And, this. Local honey, from the farmer’s market.



Eating local honey can help with allergies – a teaspoon a day can really help the old hay fever. And my personal hay fever season is about to kick into high gear; it’s always when the grasses are starting to dry out that I start to sneeze, itch, have eyes that think they’re auditioning to be stand-ins for Niagara Falls, and suffer from nasal congestion that always leads to a sinus infection (I get infections every time the wind blows, which irritates me no end…I get a cold, I end up on antibiotics almost immediately…also, if anybody in a thirty mile radius of me has strep throat? I’ll get it. ARGH.) (This does not fit into my Personal Perception of Self, which is a lot more She-Ra, you know?!).

ANYWAY. Yesterday, I did the pork…so I thought I’d post up the recipes on that before I get started down there on the beef-stuff…

Honey-Ginger Marinade for Pork

1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup dark apple cider vinegar (or light) (or just plain old cider) (you know, whatever is on hand, who am I to tell you what kind of specific vinegar to use for Pete’s sake, like I’m some sort of vinegar expert or something, geesh…)
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger or 1/4 teaspoon ground dried ginger or 1 teaspoon finely minced crystallized ginger
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons soy sauce

For freezer meal purposes, put six pork chops into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Mix all these ingredients together and pour them over the chops, then lay flat in the freezer to freeze up.

The morning you want to eat them, set them in the fridge to defrost. Then you can either bake them at 350 degrees for between 30 minutes and an hour and a half (this depends entirely on how thick the chops are – thicker will take longer, thinner will be done sooner) (my little half-inch ones usually take half an hour, which is largely why I slice them so doggone thing) (well, that, and the fact that we Americans eat way too much meat in the first place, so having less meat and more whole grains and vegetables on the table is an excellent idea that might lead to my husband finally losing some of that weight he’s been kvetching about, like, forever and I am all for that because I’d like the dude to hang around for a lot more years, thank you very much)

I used this same recipe for the stir-fry pork slices. Let it marinate for at least thirty minutes, drain and discard the marinade, heat up a skillet with some vegetable oil and cook until no longer pink. Not that they look pink anyway because the soy sauce kind of makes them look, uh, brown.

Cranberry-Orange Marinade for Pork

3 cups cranberries (look in the freezer section if you didn’t buy a few extra bags around Thanksgiving and freeze them)
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup water
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
Half an onion, minced
1/4 cup honey
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh cracked black pepper
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Start with the cranberries, water and orange juice. Put them in a small saucepan and bring to a gentle boil. Reduce the heat and keep them simmering until the cranberries start popping – which is awesome and fun. This takes roughly ten minutes. Let cool slightly, then run through the blender to puree. Wheeeeeeee! (The original recipe says to peel the cranberries…I, uh, kind of don’t bother doing that. But if the skins bug you, by all means feel free to peel them.)

Add the rest of your ingredients, whisk it up and then set it aside to cool. When it’s back to room temperature, layer up your pork chops in your trusty Ziploc, pour the marinade over them and pop them in the freezer.

Same cooking instructions as the honey-ginger version.

Pork Pie Filling

This is really simple, which is good because when you’re cooking a whack of meals all at once, “simple” becomes your favorite word.

1-1/2 pounds pork, cut into bite-sized cubes
1 onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup butter or vegetable oil
1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh-cracked pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground sage
2 cups chicken broth
and then the options…
2 cups mixed vegetables
or maybe
2 cups peeled, chopped apple (which is awfully good, but does make for a distinctly sweeter meal)
or even
1 can of whole-berry cranberry sauce – look for one that is minimally sweetened. You can also replace some of the chicken broth with cranberry juice; I like it best with “real” unsweetened cranberry juice-juice as opposed to cranberry cocktail, but I’m kind of weird that way. I have a horrible sweet tooth when it comes to cookies, pies, ice cream, etc. etc. etc., but then I’ll turn right around and say I don’t want my pork pie to be “too sweet.”

Heat your butter or oil in a large skillet or saucepan over medium heat. Add your onion and bell pepper and sauté until some of the fight has gone out of the onions and they’re nice and tender – you don’t have to stir constantly, but making a regular habit of it helps prevent burning. Raise the heat up to high, add the meat and stir until it’s no longer pink. (No soy sauce to hide behind this time, pork!) Add your flour, salt, pepper and sage and stir until it’s all blended in; then lower the heat to medium again, add your chicken broth, and stir constantly until it thickens up. The constant stirring is important here, otherwise you’ll get ugly lumps and do not taste nice.

Reduce the heat to as low as you can. Then cover it and let it barely simmer for a good forty minutes, until the pork is tender and awesome. Stir in your vegetables or apple or cranberry sauce, remove from heat and let it cool all the way down to room temperature.

Then bag it up and freeze it flat.

When you’re ready to eat it, take it out of the fridge that morning and let it defrost in the fridge while you do other things. Then you can put it between two pie crusts and bake it at 375 for about forty minutes (or until the crust is nice and brown), or you can put it in a casserole dish and warm it up at 350 while you make some mashed potatoes, then top it with the spuds and maybe a sprinkling of cheddar and put it back in for just a few minutes to brown the potatoes and melt the cheese. Or, if you’ve gone the cranberry route, you know what else is good? Mashed sweet potatoes or yams made with a little cream and a dash of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

Hokay. Right. Beef stuff. Here we go…

You know what I SHOULD have done?!

I really wish I’d thought to take pictures earlier today. Being nudged to do it now is like…you know how sometimes somebody will just be, you know, gah! and you really wish you could think of a really good zinger to hit them with but you can’t, and then two days later you sit up in bed at 2:35 in the morning and shout, “You know what I should have said?!” and you have this incredibly clever snark-back that you totally wish you’d said?

Yeah. Kind of feel that way about taking a picture of the Costco cart right now. And/or the back of Homer the Odyssey. And/or the kitchen table before I got stuff shuffled away to its many places of repose…because there are many, many places where food goes around here.

We have two refrigerators, one in the house and one out in the garage, plus a large stand-up freezer out in the garage. We also have a second set of kitchen-like cabinets out in the garage, and a tall wire rack in the playroom right by the kitchen where I keep a lot of the bulk flour, rice, beans, sugar etc. etc. etc.

Everything has a place, and nothing is ever in its place. Ever. I’m constantly changing things on myself, and then getting pissed off because nothing is where I think it is.

It’s a sick, sad cycle, it truly is.

At the moment, I think my kitchen looks fairly normal. Everything is put away somewhere, even if “somewhere” is a big cooler.

Which is where much of the meat is, actually, with defrosting chicken acting as the ice for everything else. (By the way: don’t mix raw meats up in a cooler all willy-nilly. I’ve got these guys separated from each other in sealed plastic trash bags, so if anything leaks it won’t get any further than, well, itself…I don’t want my raw chicken fraternizing with the ground beef, ya know?)

Today was really all about planning and acquisition of what-all I didn’t already have, plus a little tiny bit of actual preparation. I’ve got nine dinner entrees and eight lunches for the two of us done, all of them pork, all of them on the very simple side of the difficulty scale.

I bought two pork loins, about eight pounds each. (Yeah, not the little ones – the big ones.) One sharp knife later, they turned into 42 pork chops (about half an inch thick and a bit bigger than my palm – and for $2.49 a pound instead of $4.49), a pile of tiny bite-sized pieces and a larger pile of cubes.

For the chops, eighteen went into three gallon-sized Ziploc bags and were doused with a honey-ginger-garlic marinade; another eighteen went into three other Ziplocs and were drenched with an orange-cranberry-cinnamon marinade. Then all six Ziplocs migrated out to the big freezer to spend a couple hours on an empty shelf to quick freeze. (The cool thing about the Ziplocs is that if you freeze them flat, you can then stack your meals up in pretty minimal amounts of space. Same thing for Food Saver bags.)

The last six got eaten for dinner tonight. Because I know one of you is going to notice that the math doesn’t line up there.

The bite-sized pieces spent about half an hour marinating in the honey-ginger-garlic stuff while I got some bread started, then got stir-fried, spread out on a tray and put in the freezer to harden up. What I’m after is the ability to put the whole mess into a single Tupperware in the freezer while still being able to grab just a few bits out at one time – those are going to be lunches for the husband and myself, to go over rice laced with whatever I’m pulling out of the garden. (Peas and spinach right now…but a couple heads of broccoli look like they might be ready soon.)

Then I turned the cubes into three dinner’s worth of pork pie filling. It’s going to cool overnight in the fridge, and then I’ll split it up into Ziplocs as well and freeze them flat…that way, I can either make a traditional pie crust to put it in, or I can top it with mashed potatoes, or I can make a sweet potato topping…or just leave it as is and call it stew.

Which fools nobody but I like to pretend it does.

And then I made dinner-tonight-dinner, and put the bread into the oven, and then everybody ate and the bread came out of the oven and I set some beans soaking and called it a day.

Because it was a day.

And now it is night.

And tomorrow is another day…a day on which I want to get together stuff with beef, and stuff with chicken, and stuff with ham, and vegetable stuff, and pastry stuff, and bread stuff, and cookie stuff, too…

Yeah.

Think I’ll go put the camera’s battery in the charger. It’s going to have a busy day tomorrow…