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…

Huff…puff…gimmie a second here…whew…!

I just got back from Costco. Which is pretty much a “nuff said” anyway because we all know how Costco is, right? Yeah. Well. This is the first time the staff at Costco has actually commented on the sheer volume of stuff I was buying. I had one of those hand trucks stacked clear up to “here” with everything from milk to meat. From the cashier’s assistant to the door guard, seemed like everybody I crossed paths with had eyebrows raised clear into their hairlines and some pithy comment along the lines of, “What are you, nuts?!” on their lips.

But, now I have everything I need for my insane list of cooking this weekend. How insane? Breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner and dessert for six people for two months.

Crazy…but of course, that’s why I scheduled these long weekends scattered throughout my contract at MegaBank, so that I could restock the freezer, get the Den back in something resembling good order, take care of any business needs that have been idling because I’m too busy to deal with them, fix anything that broke, upgrade anything that needs it, preserve harvests and try to keep us saving money by doing as much as we can for ourselves.

The temptation is strong to just put all of that kind of stuff on the back burner while I’m working. I’ve got a paycheck and the bone-deep exhaustion to prove I earned it, after all, hardly seems fair to have to bake my own bread from scratch so I can have a sandwich. But having just taken the family to fast food this week because I deserved a night off from All That and paid thirty bucks for stuff that I suppose was food (although I’d like to see the technical specs on that because I’m not sure it actually was)…paying more for one meal than I usually pay for a week’s worth of dinners…well.

It won’t do us a whole lot of good if half my take home pay starts going to food instead of strengthening our position.

And so, dear friends…I’m off to my kitchen. To slice and dice, marinate and bake, knead and shape, measure and freeze.

To the kitchen…away!!!!!!

No. Way

Dudes. I need to buy a lottery ticket tonight. The chances of getting a four-top all to oneself for even one leg of the journey are, like, a mazillion to one.

But BOTH?!

My calculator can't display that many characters...

If you need me, I'll be enjoying the legroom...
(sent from my Treo)

Happiness...

Right sized circulars. Freshly-wound ball of good wool yarn. Highlighted copy of pattern. Coffee. Train table all to m'self (for half an hour at least). iPod.

ahhhhhhhh...life is good...

(sent from my Treo)

Broccoli

OK, it's still blurry. You'll have to take my word for it: that's newly sprouted broccoli. So tiny! I still marvel that a plant which will ultimately produce a crown bigger than both of my hands cupped together, and which will be as tall as my hip and so wide around I can barely embrace it (what? I like broccoli...) starts out as a seed so small they're difficult to handle (though not as bad as carrots that way), and sprouts as a tiny little clover a camera has trouble focusing on it.

Going well out there tonight. The diva carrots are popping up, more broccoli has shown up, all four hills of summer squash have signs of life, as do the beets and spinach between them.

Unlike the laundry, the garden is a lovely chore to come home to...

(sent from my Treo)

That's it, I'm sleeving

Heh heh…knitting humor…ahem…

Look! I finished the first sleeve of Captain Adventure's Lillehammer on the train this morning! I even ran in all the ends!



I feel so accomplished and some junk…except that I forgot my DPNs so how I think I'm going to start the next sleeve is a bit beyond me. I may have to {gasp!} not knit all the way home tonight.

I KNOW. I'm not sure I can survive, either. I tried to do a magic loop with the circular needles I do have with me, but there are two problems with this:

1) There are only 46 stitches cast on. They practically can't even fit on the needle part of the circulars, let alone by any stretch of the imagination, um, stretch. Even with the magic loops jutting out on either side of it like butterfly wings. It's so awkward I'm not sure I wouldn't make better progress by just waiting until I'm home and starting over.

b) They're the wrong size. Which should be a show-stopper right there but who ever let a little thing like {pfffft!} wrong-sized needles stop them? Not this knitter. So I'm all trying to figure out how many stitches I'd need to not cast on, and how many fewer rows I'd need to do in the rib, to end up with approximately the same size cuff. Which might take me the entire trip home, at which point I will be able to just use the right flippin' DPNs instead of attempting to do all kinds of alchemy around how to increase an extra ten stitches or so without it looking, well, stupid. You know, to balance out the fact that I had to cast on ten fewer to get…never mind.

Yeah. I'm kind of thinking…I should stick with working on the laptop all the way home. Hey, here's a thought: I could actually do work-work. Because I do have Friday off work, which oddly hasn't changed the due dates of anything (Dear MegaBank, in future I would greatly appreciate it if you could put all data migrations and mergers on hold for a period of not less than three days before and after any planned time off I have on the calendar, thanks in advance, all my love, Me.), and therefore any extra time spent, you know, work-working…would be a good thing.

Eeeeeeeeeyeah…

Nah!

BECAUSE, I was blathering non-stop at talking to my husband about the whole "yarn would 'only' be $121 but I'm kind of thinking that might be stupid considering I have half the WNP (wooly national product) of Australia in bags and boxes all over the house as it is, but see, thing is, I don't have anything that is the right weight for these sweaters, or the right color, and the chances that I could dye 8,000 yards of yarn the "right" red all in one dye lot given the constraints of my "dedicated amateur" equipment (better than many, not awesome like someone who does this stuff as a full-time career) are, like, pffffft, yeah right – I mean, they'd be close(ish) and all, but they wouldn't be exact which might be fine, you know, if I could get enough for each individual sweater done in one go (and that should be do-able, sure) but see if the thing is that these are supposed to be matchy-matchy sweater, well…"

I know. Everybody is wishing they were married to me, so they too could be listening to this kind of faaaaaaaaascinating stuff at 5:15 on a Tuesday morning before they'd even gotten their coffee because the woman doing the blathering was making the coffee as she blathered. Awesome!

…the only thing better is when I've already read my Wall Street Journal and have a few Items I want to discuss…

Anyway, as I was (slowly) working my way around to not making the matchy-matchy sweater because it was stupid and I wasn't sure I could really justify the yarn purchase and all, my husband suddenly said, in tones that brooked no denial, "Buy the yarn. You have to make the sweaters. You have to. I want us to have the sweaters. Buy the yarn."

He may have put a certain word or two indicating great emphasis before the word 'yarn.'

You know, like, "gosh darned." Or possibly "danged."

So I've got a KnitPicks order to figure out and place. BWAHAHAHAHAHA… {ahem}, I mean, which I will do solemnly and only because I have been told I have to…

Most. Awesome. Pillow. EVER.

My husband was putting Captain Adventure to bed, which since I had chosen to finally get around to changing the sheets on his bed...well. By "changing" I mean "taking all the sheets off to washing them and then getting distracted such that everybody headed to bed tonight only to find themselves confronted by bare mattress pads because I did all the changing stuff except for the part where you actually CHANGE the sheets on the beds."

Hey, at least they're getting washed.

Could be worse.

ANYWAY. This meant that we were making up the Captain's bed for him while he was bouncing around being hyper because he is so tired.

It's a thing kids do. I'm so tired! I must fly around the room like a hummingbird on Red Bull! Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-FLOP!

And then...daddy pulled out of the linen cupboard...the Power Rangers pillowcase.

"Hey Captain, look at this!" he called.

Captain Adventure skidded to a stop. He regarded the pillowcase with wide eyes.

"Oh. Mine. GAWD!" he shouted at last. "Dat de best piw-whoa in dey WURLD!! And I wannit dat one!"

And then I died laughing, the end.

Money Monday: April 26, 2010

I realized this week that I am about halfway through my initial twelve month contract at MegaBank. It was one of those moments where you feel a bit…taken aback. It was not unlike getting together with a friend after what seems like no time at all to find that the baby she “just” had is now eleven years old and trying on a teenager’s ‘tude.

Whaaaaaaat? When did THAT happen?!

To be honest, my first thought upon realizing that the contract was half over was a sturdy round of “oh @*&^@!!!”

I haven’t paid off as much as I wanted. I don’t have the savings I wanted to have. I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to show for all this crazy.

But as I was working myself up into a true and proper fit about it, I thought maybe I should take an actual look-see at how things were going. Maybe get some actual numbers together instead of just going with the gut feeling that nothing was happening.

Nothing is not happening. (…dude…wait…what?)

Let me put that another way (yes, please): Things are definitely happening. Good things. Very good things. We’re stabilizing and moving forward and paying things down and saving a little up and most importantly of all I am not performing weekly acts of Accounting Alchemy to keep checks from bouncing like a Pinkie ball on a playground full of hyperactive fifth graders.

But in the course of going over the records since I went back to work in November, I discovered something I hadn’t really realized before: The period between just-before-Christmas and April is kinda hellish for us, in terms of big ticket stuff coming due all at once.

I hadn’t realized it before because in the days before the Great Under-Employment Fiasco of 2008-2009™, I did this crazy thing called ‘savings goals’ to handle things like the property taxes and the insurance premiums. So each month when I was paying other bills, I’d set aside an amount equal to 1/12 of the anticipated bill. It’s just a virtual envelope in the savings account; Quicken makes this painlessly easy for me. It can even “hide” the cash so that I can forget all about it until the time comes to cash it out.

Then, when Due Date rolls around, you know, {shrug}. Transfer the money out of the savings account, pay the bill. No problem.

It had become so automatic for me that I didn’t really think about what it did for me, year after year…until it was gone and I was left with the alternative, which is to find yourself scrambling flat-footed with five days until Due Date on a $2,000 “pay up now” statement. Gah!

Needless to say, I spent some quality time this weekend setting up the savings goals for next year. The virtual accounts are set up, and the “bills” to fill them up scheduled, each and every month…and accounted for in my new budget.

And then I looked at the rest of the year and had to smile. The flipside of all those big expensive bills coming due all at once over that four months period is that we’re now clear of such things until December.

Sure, I can’t guarantee something stupid won’t happen that costs us a bundle (and in point of fact, it is entirely likely that even daring to post about not expecting big bills in the near future is practically inviting the roof to collapse or one of the cars to spontaneously combust)…but even if it does, it will happen in the absence of another big old bill for property taxes or insurance.

Which means I should be able to get some actual traction going, here.

Which will make all the crazy seem a lot more worth doing, don’t you think?

...not fair...

My poor little Captain is having EIGHT fillings this morning. Eight. EIGHT!! All way in the back, where nobody has ever been able to really look / x-ray because when he isn’t sedated he will clamp his mouth shut and GOD HELP the foolish person who has a finger in there to try to stop him doing it.

 

Thank GOD for the better dental insurance. It’s still going to cost a fair bit, but far less than it would have otherwise AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, is being done by a man who “gets” not only children in general, but autism in particular. No trauma, no fighting, no terror, no pain.

 

For the child, anyway. Mom…might need a nice sedative, here…

 

(sent from my Treo)

And the Wheel spins to renewal…

I finished up my work week a little bit ago (well, more accurately, I finished up for the day a bit early because once again I will be logging on over the weekend, but let’s not start picking nits, shall we?) and thought I’d take a quick tour of the garden before picking up the Denizens to get our weekend started.

Maybe, I thought hopefully. A few things will have come up since the last time I looked…

Have you ever had Life just sort of…rush up, grab your hand and shake it madly while screeching, “Hi! Good to see you! Awesome! Yeah! Hi! Great! I’m so happy to be here! I love you! I missed you! HI!!!!”?

All around the Den, in patches here and stretches there, are tiny little things like this:



Spinach sprouts. I’ve been tucking them wherever there’s an open space, from the front patch to along the “dark” side of the house (they don’t seem to mind if they only get partial sun – they’ll kind of prefer it, I think, when we get up into those triple-digits in a couple months) to the front patch between the blueberries.

Which, by the way, have gone from being dead-looking twigs to this:



Two are smaller, but this guy has just really decided to go for it!!

The artichokes are doing well…



…even the one I thought was a donation to the Snail Hunger Relief Foundation…note the skinny leaves, which were chewed all the way down to the middle rib…



The cranberries seem like to their new home just fine, too. They’re putting out bright green new leaves and starting to stretch a bit.



The surviving roma tomatoes are throwing off their nasty yellow color and developing new leaves. There are about fifty left; I’m still not sure about a few of them, but by jove I think the rest are going to make it.



Sunflowers are saying “howdy-do” along the back fence.



There are tiny little broccoli “clovers” starting to appear in the mounds. They’re so small my camera can’t focus on them. Hard to believe something that small will get as massive as broccoli gets in the end.

The cucumbers…are bored by the whole thing. They’ll come out when they’re darned good and ready, and not a minute earlier. (Cucumbers. They’re such divas…) (So are the carrots. “I said fourteen days and I meant fourteen days…quit walking around here looking for sprouts, there ain’t gonna be any for at least fourteen DAYS…)

But the green beans didn’t want to be left out of the party…



…and the butternut squash is feeling show-off-y…



…and the beets are all, We were here first, you know…



The peach / nectarine tree hasn’t lost the little fruits yet, either. I don’t dare expect them to hold on until they’re harvest-size, but I can’t help but hope.





Four thornless blackberry bushes are leafing up and spreading out.



And the heirloom yellow-striped tomato? Put on a flower today, just for the occasion.



Red potatoes.



And white potatoes.



And purple potatoes whose plant looks more like an exotic flower.



The milk/water spray appears to have worked well for the peas – there’s still white on the leaves, but there is significantly less of it. And the plants have erupted with new flowers and big, fat pods.



Up in the front patch, I also have a tiny patch of green in one of the summer squash hills.

As I was coming back in the house, already overwhelmed, a scent wrapped its arms around me. Dizzying and sweet, familiar, like old songs remembered…



The lemon tree has blossoms singing from every branch.

Just…wow.

The year-wheel spins around again, from the short death of winter to the new life of spring; what was stark and bare is lush and green, what was dark is light, what was cold is warmed, what was barren is fertile.

What blessed creatures we are, to live in such a world, where such miracles are commonplace!

…and where carrots occasionally come out of the ground looking like this…



Awesome.

OK! Onward, to the weekend! Ho!!

Haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but…

…I did determine that the yarn to make Lillehammers for the female Denizens (including me) would run $121.39 if I went with the Telemark from KnitPicks.

Not too shabby for four sweaters; the adult sized one is a hair under $42, the two bigger kids are just under $30 each and the smallest is $20.

Knitting is such an awesome hobby to have (she said, expressing a completely unbiased opinion of the sport) (ahem).

For $121.39, I can make four custom sweaters that would run, what, gads…well, quick Google search seems to indicate that if you were able to get a similar sweater pre-knit, it could run you as much as {gulp} $400 ($200 for the less complicated ones, more for the crazy-talk ones like the Lillehammer) (hey, found one for “just” $150 on eBay!)…just for the women’s medium. Each of the kids sweaters would run around a hundred bucks.

I’m just going to take a moment here to pause and reflect on paying a hundred bucks for a toddler’s sweater. HA! HAHAHAHAHA! HA! {snicker!} {snort!}

Ya know, maybe there are toddlers out there in the world who don’t instantly wreck their clothes.

I suspect they are considerably more “managed” than mine ever were. I’m afraid I just couldn’t be the kind of parent whose children were always neat and tidy…mine are always the ones with dirty pant hems, ink-stained sleeves, holes in their knees and splatters of Gosh-Knows-What all over. They come by it honestly, at least – that’s what my clothes look like most of the time, too, since I never pause to think about my clothes before dropping to my knees in the dirt to get a closer look at newly sprouting squash, or firing up my rangetop, or daubing dye on something.

Even if the thought does occur to me that maybe I should go change into my “junk” clothes, I always immediately follow that up with “nah, I’m only going to do this one thing, and I’ll just be Super Careful.”

Please see ridiculous number of references to my inability to learn from past experience, scattered throughout this blog.

ANYWAY. I could pay $500 for four pre-made sweaters, or I can make all four for less than I’d pay for just the adult size.

And then I get to knit them, a process that would take a minimum of 24 weeks of my undivided knitting-time attention…probably more.

So my entertainment tab is pretty much covered for at least six months.

And then when I’m all done, we have sweaters that nobody, not even a non-knitter, could possibly mistake for something that came out of the last chance bin at WalMart. Sweaters that say, “Wow! Matching wool sweaters, huh? In California no less. {pause} Dude. Your mom is, like…wow…have you ever thought of calling CPS or some junk…?”

Awesome.

You know what else? I will bet you a burrito right here and now that after I’d finished all these, I’d find that I had tons of yarn leftover (which I don’t dare count on and buy a few balls less because we all know how that ends) (weeping…gnashing of teeth…rending of hair…frantic screams for help on Ravelry, does anybody have two balls of Color X in dyelot ABC123 pleasepleaseplease, it’s an emergency!).

So I could then make the matching hats and mittens and stockings, too! It’s Dork-A-Palooza, folks, c’mon down and join the fun…oh-oh-oh! Maybe, I could even crochet little nose bags for everybody, because noses need love too, right?

DOUBLE awesome!

(I can imagine the call to CPS now. “Hi, ya, my mom? She’s, like, crazy or something? Ya…double-knit wool…California…six matching sweaters…we’re, like, refugees from a 1950s sitcom over here…with nose bags…oh, nose bags? They’re, like, little things that you put over your nose, and they have strings that tie behind your head, and…oh, the cop’s here, that was fast…”)

Why I'm not blogging so much right now

It started so slowly. One night, one kid has finished her homework early and asks if she can get on the computer and go to CuteCrittersRUs.com…and I can't really think of a good reason why not. After all, she's done her chores and finished her homework…

One night I'm trying to make dinner and Captain Adventure is making it difficult and his father is so deeply entrenched in the Man Cave that I would need grease and a crowbar to get him out of there (actually, just a crowbar…to smash his Netflix-watchin' computer with…), so I hand him the Wii remote and tell him he can play until dinner is ready…and then I can carry on chopping onions without being rammed from behind by his hard little head. (That's my favorite of his little autistic tricks, the "I'm going to run up on mommy from behind and slam my head into her backside while she's cutting things with a big old honkin' knife…awesome!…)

I come home extra tired, and make the Critical Error of sitting down on the couch in front of the TV to watch the news. Just the half hour national one. Well, and maybe the top of the 6:00 local. Up until the weather. Oh, but I totally want to hear this local politician 'splain hisself, so I'll just leave it on until they get to that part of the 6:30 show…

The husband wants to watch his Netflix movie and when is he going to do that? Now, of course, because we have to get up early tomorrow and can't stay up late tonight…so into the Man Cave he goes, to watch until dinner is ready and then, naturally, he'll emerge…well, after this scene or that scene and can he help put the kids to bed because I'm kind of up to my eyebrows in dishes and laundry and cat puke on the stairs and…sure, sure, yeah, I'll do it in a minute {stares fixedly at computer monitor until movie is over an hour later}

Meanwhile, I'm upstairs staring at my monitor because I've got a lot of stuff to do. Email, blogging, reading, researching, paying bills, etc. etc. etc. (Amazing how "paying this bill real quick" can lead to a seven hour Internet odyssey, huh?)

Once a week becomes twice, twice becomes thrice, and thrice becomes Every Night.

It didn't happen overnight. It happened over a period of months, not a bit coincidentally the months between when I started working again and now.

Monday, I got an email from Captain Adventure's teacher asking if anything "different" was going on around the Den, because his classroom behavior has been eroding lately. And folks, we're talking about a classroom full of autistic kids – by the time the teacher is telling you your kid is being a pill, it's serious.

He's humming (tunes from his video games). He's refusing to participate in the class activities (because he wants to be playing the Wii instead). He's making weird hand gestures (which would probably be the same movements he makes to play his game – waving the wand and remote, pressing buttons, etc. etc. etc.). He grudgingly responds only when his teacher asks if she needs to pull his last card…which means she'll email me, which means no Wii.

HORRORS!!!

More tantrums. More stubborn. More withdrawn. More anger.

Less communication. Less interaction. Less play, and therefore less learning.

Good Parenting Points: Negative 27,000,000,000.

This came on the heels of a nasty surprise we had a couple weeks ago with one of the girls (who shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty). Report card that looked like something you would never expect from a kid that smart. Downright bloody awful, across the board. How? How is this possible? She's done her homework, she's told us so…granted, we haven't been really looking at it much because we're so busy-busy-busy. We'd glance and see a filled-in page and say, "OK, good, yeah, you can go ahead and play on the computer now."

She'd been dashing off practically random answers. Did she actually know what 'perpendicular' meant? Could she pick an octagon out of a lineup? (She could when she was two, but now, {redacted} years later? Knowledge gone.)

She'd done the same thing on tests. Turns out that maybe telling her how smart she is all these years wasn't such a good idea – she thinks she's so smart that whatever answer she comes up with will be the right one. Duh. Because she's sooooooo smart.

She is smart. But Lord-Lord, is she ever ignorant when it comes to basic {redacted}-level math, science, English, social studies, art and even PE.

Good Parenting Points: Negative 26,276, 004.

And, last week I got another call from another teacher who wanted to Express Concern (teacher code for "scold roundly") about another child's sudden sloppiness around doing and turning in homework. Doing it but not turning it in. Not participating in activities. Not giving a flip about what she was doing.

Same basic thing: Dash off any old thing on the homework sheet, shove it under the nearest parent's distracted nose, and get the blessing to get on with the electronic f-u-n.

Good Parenting Points: Negative 8,000,007.

I relayed the email from Captain Adventure's teacher to the husband as we were settling in on the BART train. And we agreed right then and there that, no matter how much we didn't want to (because we knew he was going to be a seriously pissed off kid on this deal), we needed to cut him off on the Wii / computer playing on school / work nights.

But all the way home, I was thinking that the problem wasn't just Captain Adventure playing video games too much…and the girls' problems weren't entirely their problems.

Yeah, they do need to start developing their own drive and ambition. They need to care. They need to learn responsibility and accountability and blah blah blah.

But it isn't enough to take them aside and go, "Blah! Blah blah blah! Blah! BLAH! BLAH BLAH BLAH!!! Blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah…" and then walk away saying, "Wow. That was an awesome lecture about responsibility. I am the Parent of the Year™!"

I was pondering the old saying, Whenever you point the finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at YOU.

We came home this one time, probably a Thursday or Friday when the commute + working + late nights + early mornings starts to really catch up with us, and just didn't want to deal with the whole homework / housework / kid wrangling thing.

Then we came home another day and it was the same way.

Then it was every Thursday. Then Thursday became Wednesday and Thursday. And then it started on Tuesday, and if it's OK on Tuesday, why not Monday, too…

No need to really go over homework with the kids, they're smart, they get good grades, they don't need any extra help from us, shoot, they probably know more about it than we do anyway. Oooooooh, a two hour documentary about the derivatives market!

(Seriously? I can't even pick CSI:Anywhere? MSNBC? Seriously?!) (Although actually, I would watch CSI:Anywhere, but I can't with the Denizens running around. They have a knack for running in right when something really yucky is on the screen.)

And look where it's getting us. The Denizens are going feral. Their school work is suffering. Our son is getting less and less social. Yeah, yeah, we're tired and we just wanna sit down and have some peace and @*&^@ing quiet when we get home…but hey, guess what?

We can't. Not unless we'd like to sit down and redefine what we think is really important. Scratch out things like "good family life" and replace it with "four hours TV nightly" or "at-will Internet fix." Get rid of the whole thing about self-sufficiency (which is hard work that has few shortcuts) and homemade meals and replace it with nightly pizza delivery or Chinese takeout. (One of the most dangerous discoveries I've made in the last month is that my favorite Indian place delivers. GAH! NO! No you don't! YOU DO NOT DELIVER! Get thee behind me, Satan…!)

Instead of sending four kids to college with a scholarship or two, we can put a more reasonable goal; say, "at least one of the kids will graduate high school."

And while we're at it, we can just downgrade our hopes for Captain Adventure. Instead of "eventually mainstreaming and being able to live a happy, independent adult life," we can just go ahead and say, "will end up making macaroni art in adult day care, still in diapers, unable to communicate with other humans unless they speak 'autism'." Awesome!

It doesn't feel like we're doing anything that bad at the time. It just feels like we're having a pleasant evening. The kids are happy; we're happy; sure, the food situation is dreadful but just this once it won't kill anybody to have, let's see, whatever this is…because it's fast and gets me back to my documentary so much faster than actually making dinner would…

So as we were getting into Homer the Odyssey at the train station, I cleared my throat and proposed that we extend the ban to all the computers, all television, all video games. Even if homework is done. Even if he's being a royal pain. Even if there's a show we really want to watch. Even if we're tired. Even if I do need to pay a bill or my email inbox is bursting at the seams.

None of it goes on until the kids are all in bed…so that we're forced to focus on taking care of family business, forced to engage with Captain Adventure even if he's being a pill on a Thursday night when we're tired and there's an awesome show about the great Wyoming wildebeest migration on, and to actually look at the girls' schoolwork, to do chores together, to actually make dinner instead of being perpetually about to get around to that at the next commercial…

And we agreed to it. Just like that. Both of us.

The regrets didn't start kicking for almost twenty minutes.

I'm not kidding: I think I'm taking it the hardest. Even Captain Adventure seems to be adjusting better than me…especially when the kids are in bed and technically I could be flipping on the switches, but if I thought I was tired before? Ha. Yeah. Astonishingly, it is a lot more, um, draining to spend the two hours between getting home and bedtime alternating fending off a feisty Captain Adventure and chasing him around the house trying to stop him from doing whatever inappropriate thing he's decided to do instead of playing with, I dunno, how about…toys?!

Pffffft, toys. Please. There are so many better things to do with your time than play with the $42,000 worth of toys-as-such he owns! There's dragging all the bedding off all the beds and piling it up on the stairs. Finding things he can pry batteries out of, and then sucking on the batteries. Getting an onion out of the fridge and sitting on the couch to carefully peel all the skin off it, then crushing and scattering the skin all over the room. Opening up the gallon-sized refill of liquid hand soap and pouring ALL of it in the sink.

The possibilities are endless. Every room a playroom! Every object a fun-source! Every shriek from his parents boundlessly amusing!! And it only takes having your parents' eyeballs off you for 0.0003 seconds to get the party started…which isn't hard to do when there are three other kids competing for their attention while you're trying to sneak away from it…

Yeah, for some reason? I'm a lot more tired this week than usual…way too tired to sit down at the end of the day to turn on a laptop or even the TV…yes, please, I'd like to just go to bed now, thank you…

But it's OK. It's better for all of us, and furthermore I'm almost probably certain that I likely won't actually die from the abrupt withdrawal of incessant technology. (Probably.) (Although I think I read on the Internet once about this guy? Who had an iPhone? And it broke? And he died, I swear! Hang on, let me see if I can find that link… {click-click-click-click-click-click-six-hours-and-several-million-funny-pictures-of-cats-later}…nope, can't find it…)

Besides, there's always underwater blogging. HI! I WOULD BE RIGHT IMMEDIATELY NOW IN THE TUNNEL BETWEEN OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO, UNDER THE WATER!!!! BLOGGING! ON THE INTERNET! FROM UNDER WATER!!!!

(It never gets old.)