The week in suppers, plus Christmas baking!
**Monday’s menu: Black bean chili (crockpot). Steamed rice.
**Circumstances: I had to skedaddle to Toronto, so this was set on the table at about 4:56pm (it’s already dark anyway). I wasn’t here for the eating, but the leftovers are fabulous.
**Veg quota: No need for a side. There were plenty of veggies in the chili: corn and red peppers frozen this summer, and home-canned tomatoes.
**Tuesday’s menu: Curried lentil soup (crockpot). Leftover rice.
**Circumstances: This was the evening we went Christmas shopping WITH the children. Arrived home and ate supper out of the crockpot. Should have added a vegetable side, but it was too late by then.
**Wednesday’s menu: Pasta with roasted red pepper sauce. Napa cabbage salad with tahini dressing.
**The reviews: It’s a hit! Mama has a hit! This meal debuts at number one on the charts!
**Mini-recipe: Tahini dressing: Whisk the following ingredients together in a bowl. Half a cup of tahini; 1/2 cup of oil (olive or canola, plus a smaller amount of sesame); the juice of one lemon; 1/4 cup of tamari sauce; salt to taste, plus a sprinkling of sugar if that’s your thing (yes, it’s mine).
**Thursday’s menu: Roasted root veggies (pictured above). Roasted breaded fish. Quick cheese bread.
**Chef’s complaint: Those beets were all about two inches in diameter. I had to wash and peel each one by hand. It took me as long to prep a bag of beets as it did for the cheese bread to bake. Forty minutes of my life!
**Caveat: But the veggies were delicious, especially the beets. Worth it?
**Friday’s menu: Black beans. Baked rice. Tortillas.
**Because: In a rush, of course.
**Awesome leftover meal: Tortilla lasagne. Whipped this up on Saturday, with layers of corn tortillas, black beans, feta cheese, shredded mozzarella, and leftover roasted red pepper sauce. YUM.
**Weekend kitchen accomplishments: Ten dozen ginger snaps. Eight dozen cut-out cookies. Two pans of krispie squares. Four loaves of bread.
**Monday morning addendum: Home with sick son, so putting houseound time to good use and making one batch of really good granola and four litres of yogurt.
A hint about our day
The creative life: dig in
Yesterday, a reader commented on my Green Dreams post, which was written about a year and a half ago. This morning, I read that post again and found these words, which feel like a wise reminder from my (slightly) younger self:
I would like to offer my time–because I have it, and I’m grateful for that gift–to living creatively. Anyone who’s ever made anything knows that there is a great deal of invisible work behind what’s created. There is the original vision, changed and altered and made deeper by reflection and time, there is work, there is error and recognition of error, and incorporation of error, too, and there is luck, happenstance, improvisation. There are bursts of production and activity, and lulls of wondering, daydreaming, even doubt. There is sacrifice. You have to figure out if it’s worth it to you–figure out what you’re sacrificing, and why you want to.
Mostly, though, you just do it: you do the work you’ve chosen to do.
Living creatively, improvising, digging in, committing, taking risks, messing up, pausing to reflect, continuing, trying new things and rediscovering the tried and true: that pretty much sums up my life at present–or at least, the life I’m aiming for, every day. Yours, too?
::::
On that note, I’d like to tell you about a few projects I’m currently digging into.
* increasing subscribers to my blog: If you look on the right-hand side of the blog, I’ve got links to a variety of extras, including a new feature that allows you to type in your email address and receive blog posts in your inbox. We’re still tinkering with this (and by “we” I mean my techie friend Nath is troubleshooting for me), but I’d be happy if you signed up. And then please let me know if it’s working for you.
* Storywell: My friend Susan has launched a business aimed at helping people tell their stories: “Whether you are writing for your own family and community, aiming at publication, or needing help in telling your company or organization’s tale, we can help you tell your story well. We offer you a team of professional writers, editors and proofreaders whose goal is to help you develop as a writer.” And guess what? I’m one of the professional writers on her team. Interested, or know someone who might be? Get in touch.
* a new challenge: “Make Carrie’s Book a Bestseller.” Okay it’s a crazy challenge over which I have no real sway. Even publishers don’t know how books make it onto bestseller lists, the compilers of which seem to collect data from a variety of unpredictable sources. But I think it will be fun. Kevin is the brains behind the idea. He created and hosts a flexible web site for his business that can be used by personal trainers as a forum to run challenges. We’re using that forum to create a challenge called: “Help Make Carrie’s Book a Bestseller.” The site is still under construction, but I plan to have it ready to launch in the new year, and you will be invited to join. I only have one hope for my book, and that’s that it will get read. Then it can speak for itself.
* early to rise: This isn’t really a project, it’s just something I want to continue whether or not I’m working toward a particular race (my next one is in March, which still seems too far off to be highly motivating). I like the ethic involved in getting up early. I like that it’s not easy. It’s not easy, but it’s ALWAYS rewarding. This morning, my internal alarm woke me up for yoga. I’d planned to sleep instead, but when my eyes saw 5:48 on the clock, I recognized that it was a little gift, and I accepted it. Few of my evenings are free. My only guaranteed alone time is in the early morning hours. I’ve never been a morning person and even now do not consider myself one; but that doesn’t mean I can’t rise early and move my body and stride confidently into the day.
(Just realized that this looks like an early New Year’s resolution list. It’s not meant to be. I’m very ho-hum on resolutions. I prefer big picture overviews of the past year combined with swooping excitement and energy beamed at the year ahead. Every year on the eve of my birthday–which is Dec. 29th–I write just such an overview in my journal, by hand. Very old-school. Very satisfying.)
Ring your bell, ring it loud
Good morning. Good rainy dark pre-solstice morning. So dark, the bus picked up AppleApple in what appeared to be the pre-dawn. At our house, at this time of year, everyone takes vitamin D and fish oil. Yes, I make my children take fish oil. Nobody objects. CJ actually came running for his fish oil this morning. Here he is, waiting patiently to ring his bell during his Christmas concert yesterday.
He’s not the only one in the family ready to ring some bells and make some noise.
At supper last night the conversation ranged. It started with the weather. Albus and friends had rescued their snow fort from the rain, but it was dwindling. “It’s going to be 11 degrees tomorrow,” he reported. “Why is this happening?” “Climate change?” I mentioned an article I’d read about giant plumes of methane gas bubbling out of the Arctic Sea. We talked about Canada’s government withdrawing from the Kyoto accord. We talked about the oil sands. We talked about the power of money. We talked about weather versus climate. AppleApple worried: what could she do?
My suggestion: start by sending a letter to our federal environment minister, Peter Kent, a former television journalist who in fact reported in great detail on the emerging science of climate change way back in 1984 (the internet is useful for so many things). I write a lot of letters. It’s one of the few things I can think of to do and I’ve been doing it since childhood. In fact, in 1987, aged twelve and in homeschool, I was upset and disturbed about the effects of greenhouse gases on our environment, and wrote to then-environment-minister, also in a Conservative government, Lucien Bouchard. I received in return a large package in the mail some little while later: glossy pages of activities and suggestions (turn off the tap when you brush your teeth!). No actual response to the questions raised in my letter. I was disgusted by the obvious waste, and the irony: the ministry of the environment producing glossy reams of paper, essentially propaganda. (My parents were peace activists, so yes, I knew about propaganda.)
And so, our dinner conversation turned to propaganda. We talked about how we humans like to fool ourselves. We like to comfort ourselves, and distract ourselves from news that would make us sad or worried. (Which would explain why celebrities are a bigger “news” draw than actual news.) And then the conversation got really funny. Albus didn’t get the concept: How could we fool ourselves?
Hm. Pretty sure you’re a master at it, Mister “It Was an Accident” Albus. We all admitted familiarity with that sickish feeling when you know you’ve done something wrong. Around the table, almost unanimously, we discovered that that feeling arises more often when we’ve done something wrong by accident, and less often when we’ve been deliberately bad. (Maybe when we do something deliberate we’ve already built up the rationale around why we’re doing it; we’ve already bought into the wrong-doing; cough-cough “ethical” oil sands cough-cough.)
AppleApple decided to research climate change–what we can do, what the government could be doing. She wants her ducks in order before she writes her letter. She wants INFORMATION and FACTS. Maybe we’ll all write letters (you, too?). Albus also suggested that we could have a protest. Hey, good idea, grandkid of activists. Protests are in the air. The Protestor was just named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
But as I watch cars stream past my house this morning, as I myself turn to my vehicle in the cold and the rain, as I consider how we are creatures of cultural habits and patterns (currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers), as I tap out these words … I wonder how to answer AppleApple’s anxious question: What can she do? Is there anything we can really do? Really? Beyond hope and pray and protest and write and try and hope some more? Life is so damn short. A second ago I was twelve; blink, and my daughter is nine–and what’s changed?
But that’s not how the conversation ended last night. Somehow, it ended with us going around the table taking turns trying to fake laugh. You should try this at home. In fact, you must. Don’t think about it too hard; just give it a shot. It will give you hope. Because even the most ridiculous half-hearted attempt will turn genuine in about two seconds when everyone else joins in.
Christmas shopping: Is there a lesson in here somewhere?
“Is there a lesson in here somewhere?” I asked the general cacophony yesterday evening. “Are we really teaching you anything about being generous or being giving or how to think of other people? What is this all about?”
You guessed it. We were about to go Christmas shopping. For the past few years we’ve let the kids choose small gifts for each other, though CJ has been too small to really participate. Turns out, he’s still too small. We have a favourite store we go to that the kids call “The Castle Store.” It used to be oriented toward gamers–Dungeons and Dragons figurines and whatnot, but it’s expanded successfully into board games, crafts, puzzles, Lego, Star Wars figures, and some other toys. Walls of puzzles. I love this place. So does CJ, but he really couldn’t think of anyone but himself. Nor could he think past the present moment to Christmas morning.
I want what I want and I want it right now! could have been his motto.
But that was at the store. Back at home, as I attempted to prepare for our shopping venture, there was covetous CJ, but there was also Fooey, recovering from pneumonia, well enough to head back to school, but pretty much pooched by 4pm, and in a generally surly and screamy state, perhaps a sign of improving health, or a sign of being spoiled by a week at home watching movies and being catered to by her loving mother, but really, who cares why? It’s virtually intolerable. The bossy-Fooey-screams send AppleApple into fits of indignant rage, while Albus’s response is to poke rational holes into her (il)logic. Helpful.
Toss in the much-anticipated trip to The Castle Store, and our after-school scenario yesterday resembled nothing more than a miniature civil war battlefield. I remained the voice of calm, but you know, no one’s listening to the voice of calm in the middle of a bloody battle.
Which brought me around to my rhetorical question: “What is this teaching you guys?” Okay, not so rhetorical because I really didn’t know the answer. Still don’t. I was about to give up when Kevin called and said he could come along too (this was planned as a me-and-the-kids outing; short-sighted planning right there). With another parent along, we were able to manage. Plus, aside from CJ wanting everything right now, the other kids turned angelic in the Castle Store aisles as they thought about their siblings, consulted their siblings, and secretly made choices.
So what’s the lesson here? I really really really don’t know. At various points in the venture I would have said it was:
*Don’t take your three-year-old Christmas shopping! (And really, if you have the option, just don’t.)
*Don’t go Christmas shopping, period!
*Materialism sucks!
*And: Can’t we shove the toothpaste back into the tube and everyone will just get a nice big orange in their stocking and that will be plenty?!
But I guess I came around to this:
*Give your older children the opportunity to choose thoughtful gifts for each other. They might surprise you.