Monday, Jan 30, 2012 | Recipes |
I did not make this haggis, but it was good
**Monday’s menu** Veggie Vindaloo (crockpot). Baked basmati rice. Leftover cabbage salad.
**Recipe-worthy** Veggie Vindaloo: Saute two chopped onions and four cloves of chopped garlic in 1-2 tbsp of oil. Add and saute 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or less, to taste), 1/2 tsp turmeric, and 1-2 tsp salt (start with 1 tsp and add more later). Scrape into the slow cooker. Meantime, peel and dice six potatoes (more or less) and two large carrots. Add to slow cooker, along with 1 tbsp fresh minced ginger root, 1 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tsp dry mustard, and some chopped red pepper (frozen is fine). Add 3/4 cup red lentils. Add 8-10 cups of water (this is approximate; I check the slow cooker during the day and top up the liquid as needed), and stir the pot. I also added some leftover tabbouleh, and if you wanted you could add chopped tomato and parsley and a handful of bulgar to the mix. Totally optional. Cook on low all day, checking in to stir occcasionally. About an hour before serving, toss in 1-2 cups frozen peas. Just before serving, stir in the juice of a freshly squeezed lemon (note: several tablespoons of cider vinegar is a good local substitute). Taste for seasonings (salt, pepper). Serve over rice.
**Why we liked this** The lentils blended in and acted as thickener. It tasted delicious. Any veggie could sub into this mix.
**Tuesday’s menu** Mexican red beans. Leftover rice. Leftover cabbage salad.
**Sorry, everybody** This was a request. But it was very ho-hum with the leftover rice. Somehow I’d managed to undercook the beans ever so slightly too. It was a rushed meal anyway, as we landed home from swimming and darted out again for soccer, with less than 30 minutes for turnaround time.
**Wednesday’s menu** Coconut sweet potato soup made with squash, too (crockpot). Wilted tatsoi salad. Bread and cheese and hummus.
**Good food** I didn’t follow the recipe for the tatsoi salad precisely, but it was a good use of the tatsoi, which apparently can be harvested from under the snow; that explains why I can still source it locally.
**Colourful** There was something so satisfying about eating this rich orange soup and the deep green tatsoi. Winter needs more colour. Two out of four children adored the soup. Zero out of four children tried the tatsoi. Such is life in the bread and cheese lane. Dinner conversation was brilliant and we had no conflict.
**Thursday’s menu** Red sauce with hamburger (!). Noodles. Broiled tofu.
**Aren’t we vegetarian?** Yes and clearly no. I bought one package of organic local hamburger. Everyone seemed tired and draggy this week. Extra iron?
**Secret veggies** I slipped a package of frozen grated zucchini into the red sauce (which made with my canned tomatoes). Zero complaints.
**Friday’s menu** Turkey in the crockpot. Roasted beets, potatoes, carrots, and garlic.
**Total vegetarian fail** I ordered the turkey on a whim from Bailey’s. What can I say? I can say nothing.
**Recipes by Facebook** I have very little experience cooking meat in a crockpot, let alone an entire (small) turkey, so I asked Facebook for advice. And Facebook replied. I stuffed the turkey with carrots, onion, garlic, and poured a bottle of Guinness over top along with some cranberry juice. I added some Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, dried thyme and rosemary. Then I couldn’t get the lid to fit. I had approximately two minutes to prep the turkey before I needed to get out the door with the kids. So I covered the crockpot with aluminum foil to keep the steam in, balanced the lid on top, and left. And then I was gone for about five hours — about three hours longer than I’d planned on being out of the house. I was kind of freaking out about the precarious state in which I’d left the turkey. But all’s well that ends well. The alumimum foil worked.
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**Weekend cooking accomplishments** Eight loaves of bread (OMG we are eating so much bread! I can hardly keep up. I am baking two batches back to back some weekends). One batch of Really Good Granola. Double chocoloate cookie squares. And one giant pot of cockaleekie soup, made in honour of Robbie Burns day. Our family had our own tiny Burns dinner before Saturday night’s scotch party. (Secret ingredient in cockaleekie soup — do you know? Prunes.)
**Cooking with kids** Starring CJ. Who couldn’t think of anything he wanted to make except for pizza. So Kevin made pizza (I made the dough).
Sunday, Jan 29, 2012 | Birthdays |
This is just to say that I made it through Party Week*! Party Week is officially over, and we are now revelling in Recovery Sunday**.
*Party Week is defined, for this early-rising cougar-aged gal, as more than one late-night social event in a seven-day span. This Party Week included three late-night social events in an intimidating four-day span.
**Recovery Sunday involves me and my pajamas. Do not knock on the front door unless you want the visuals.
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Have to report yet another breakdown: first the tooth, then the hip, and now the camera! (Yes, it feels like a part of me). As of this morning, my camera refuses to connect with my computer. It looks to have broken bits in its USB port. The manufacturer does not answer the phone on Sundays. Photos of last night’s address to the haggis are therefore inaccessible. You may or may not be sad about this depending on your feelings toward haggis.
Saturday, Jan 28, 2012 | Kids, Mothering, Writing |
… “m” for Marita!
This was easy and fun. I’m tempted to do it again. I really like giving things away. (Would you come back and enter your names all over again for a second round?)
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AppleApple picked the name out of the basket because she and I had scheduled writing time together this morning. I wanted her help on The Big Fat Juicy Belly Worm story. She’s got lots of top secret information about the BFJBW. So we found a pinch of time on Saturday morning, squeezed in between starting bread dough (me) and soccer game (her). She looked forward to it all week–and so did I. Except it wasn’t as fun as we’d anticipated. Writing isn’t really fun, exactly. There’s a lot of erasing and starting all over again. Most ideas get chucked. Information has to be spun into plot. I’m afraid she found it all very tedious. I’m also afraid I’m very abrupt and business-like when writing, even when the subject is a fun children’s story. And we didn’t even finish the chapter.
Maybe I’m just not good at sharing?
Friday, Jan 27, 2012 | Running |
Neither time nor mental wherewithal to post a deep and thoughtful blog today. Nothing deep and thoughtful going on today. Today has been filled with uneventful events. Your curiosity is piqued, I can tell. And so I will elaborate …
**Rushing. Slept in (til 7:30!). Therefore spent the first hour of the day madly dashing about. Turkey in crockpot! Breakfast in children! Signing various papers! Issuing various reminders! Big kids out the door! CJ to nursery school! Forgot to eat breakfast! Gobble cold porridge! Pour coffee in portable mug! Race out into snowstorm! Drive across town to dr’s appt!
**Waiting. The result of all the rushing was a prolonged period of waiting at the sports medicine clinic, first for the woman who did the initial assessment, and then for the doctor, who ordered an xray. I’ll see him again on Monday. Meanwhile, take-home-message: no running.
**More waiting. I followed up my first bout of waiting with more of same, in a different location. Upon arrival at the xray place, and without my first asking, the receptionist estimated the wait time to be 45 minutes. I heard her continue to estimate the same time to everyone who came through the door throughout my two hour stint in the waiting room. Maybe that’s just the standard measurement she gives out. She should have mentioned she was referring to units of 45 minutes, of which I would spend about three. The xray technician, a sparkly former-long-distance runner, spent the entire appointment recounting her own running injuries. A decade of running injuries. Cheerful stuff, let me tell you.
**Texting. What would I do without texting? And my phone? The wait at the xray office was so long that I realized I would not make it home in time for the babysitter, who was picking CJ and a friend up from nursery school. Luckily, through the marvels of text messaging, I was able to arrange for the friend’s mom to bring everyone to her house instead (God bless friends!). For less practical reasons, the texting also broke the intense tedium of waiting in perpetuity. When not texting, I read the book I’d brought along (The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell). Someone in the first office had read it too, so we had a conversation. Which also worked for entertainment purposes. No one in the second office cared to chat with me about the book. Most were too busy texting. Except for the friendly man telling everyone in earshot about the diarrhea he’d acquired on holiday in Jamaica. I sat extra-far away from him. What surprised me is that not everyone did.
**Overdue. Library book, that is. Thought I’d finish off my wasted writing day by stopping in at the library to discuss a book which has been lost, and has yet to turn up despite ample and dedicated hunting. It was due today. And cannot be renewed again. BUT it can be placed on some special library list which gives me another seven weeks to find the book, and the library will hunt for it too (because the kids think we returned it). I also learned that our library caps late fees. Did you know this? I will have to pay late fees on the book, even if I do find and return it, but it will cost me no more than $9.00. This actually sounded like such good news to my desperate ears that I high-fived the librarian. In my head.
**Home. When I opened the front door, the turkey in the crockpot had filled the house with comforting smells. The laundry basket was still sitting, full of dirty laundry, on the kitchen floor. I hadn’t eaten since the cold porridge. I made myself a pot of tea, and warmed up some leftovers, and sat and read the newspaper. And that about sums it up.
**Aside. Does it strike you, as it does me, that none of this fits into either of my words of the year? It ain’t work. And it sure ain’t play. What is it?
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**In other news. The giveaway is now officially over! Thanks to everyone who entered. I will pick a name out of the hat, and announce the winner tomorrow.
Thursday, Jan 26, 2012 | Music, Play, Sleep, Work |
my 4:45am companion, with sound effects
I did not take photos at last night’s show. It was late for mamas at mid-week, a decade and a half older than the kids who came out to dance. But we mamas came out to dance too. And we still know how, despite our complaints about the lateness (so late!) and the loudness (first band, so loud!), and the “Oh God, I hope my hip holds out” (so lame!).
The dancing. It was really fun. We danced for the second band, but the really inspired getting down didn’t happen until Kidstreet arrived on stage. I love my siblings! Their sound is infectious, their performance is joyful and welcoming, and my sister is just the most gorgeous and composed creature on stage that you can possibly imagine (whether or not she can see it herself). As the set progressed, my dance moves got more adventurous, less fearful of will-this-hurt-my-hip? By the last song of the night, I’d shed that decade and a half, at least inside my own head. Walking home through the quiet of freshly fallen snow, I had to admit that I was limping ever so slightly. But when I woke up this morning, my hip actually felt years better.
Seriously. I could jog across the living-room without pain. How bizarre is that?
Let me tell you about the few hours between dancing and morning. I was gloriously asleep when the pitter-patter of feet woke me. CJ had gone to the bathroom by himself (yay!), returned to his bed and decided he didn’t like the looks of it (uh oh!), and come into our room lugging his water bottle and a giant sheep stuffie (noooooooo!). “I had a bad dream!” he announced, which is his new code for “I don’t want to go to sleep.” He attempted to climb into bed beside me. The sheep didn’t fit. Seriously, it’s enormous. We could all see this wasn’t working. I dragged myself upright, walked him back to his own room, explained about it being the middle of the night, sleeptime, etc., tucked him in.
Pitter-patter, pitter-patter. No sheep this time. “Is anyone downstairs?” he asks from the side of the bed. It’s pitch black. 4:45am. “Nope. We’re all sleeping. Because it’s the middle of the night!” He climbs in beside me, snuggles up. I’m too tired to object. We “sleep” like this for an hour until I just can’t stand the wriggling anymore. (I know lots of parents share beds with their children, and I just want to know: do those children hold still in their sleep? Because mine are like squirrels, if squirrels were much larger and not furry and had sharp elbows and hot breath and digging heels).
“Listen,” I said at last. “I can’t sleep like this. I’m going to your bed.”
“What?”
“You can stay here, and I will go sleep in your bed. Or, you can go sleep in your bed and I’ll stay here. One or the other. Because I’m not getting any rest and I have to get up in an hour for a dentist appointment.”
“My blankets are too small.”
“Not the green one. The green one is plenty big. So what you do want: should I go sleep in your bed, or will you?”
Surprisingly, he chose to return to his bed. And then he slept.
And much too soon after that I was sitting in a reclining chair staring at beige ceiling panels, listening to top-forty soft rock while a masked woman scaled tartar off my teeth.
If I were sketching a trajectory of pleasantness upon a graph, say, from midnight until nine this morning, it would look like a ski hill. High to low, baby, high to low. The nighttime bed-sharing was definitely several graph points above the hygienist prodding exposed nerve endings between my teeth. At least with the bed-sharing I got to snuggle up to a hot-breathed, wriggling, pointy-elbowed creature of intense dearness. With the dentist all I got was a return appointment a week from today to fill a cavity — my first in TWENTY YEARS.
See. Straight down. Like a ski hill.
It’s a life.
