Last Week in Suppers: Almost October
**Monday’s menu: Roasted tomato soup. Cheese melts (aka giant croutons). Quinoa and couscous salad.
**Original plan: Thanks for the suggestion, Nath.
**In the kitchen: Roasted tomatoes and prepared soup on Sunday. Made quinoa salad early Monday morning. Good thing, because we had no water all day due to construction mishap.
**The reviews: “I don’t like tomatoes.”
**The verdict: Soup was under-seasoned (my bad). But I could live off the quinoa salad. What did I do before knowing it existed?
**Tuesday’s menu (pictured above): Red beans. Steamed rice. Cabbage salad. Tortillas. Etc.
**Original plan: Chili in crockpot. But this is even easier. And certain fussy eaters don’t like their flavours all mixed up.
**In the kitchen: Soaked and cooked beans while I was home all morning. Whipped up cabbage salad and baked rice during interlude between playgroup and kids getting home from school. Left beans on stove, rice in oven, dashed to swim lessons.
**The reviews: Five stars, man. Or six. All around the table.
**The verdict: Good meal to make in advance. We ran in from swim lessons, set the table, and tucked into the still-warm rice and beans.
**Wednesday’s menu: Ratatouille. Noodles.
**Original plan: Vegetarian lasagna, in response to a request. Turns out kid doesn’t want vegetarian lasagna, he wants the carnivore version. So, he’s going to make it himself, perhaps this Sunday, for “cooking with kids.” (We’re letting the kids cook with meat, if they so choose).
**In the kitchen: Lots of chopping pre-breakfast, toss in crockpot. Smells fabulous. Makes use of languishing eggplant and zucchini and green beans.
**The reviews: Sisterly advice: “If you don’t like the look of something, just swallow it whole.” Motherly advice: “There’s lots of yummy veggies in it, like eggplant.” Albus: “Are you trying to help?”
**The verdict: Meh. Ho-hum.
**Thursday’s menu: Cod roasted on a bed of roasted vegetables (eggplant, onions, zucchini, tomatoes, cilantro). Pesto. Mashed potatoes. Gallo pinto (fried beans and rice).
**Original plan: Fish and potatoes. Thumbed through Joy of Cooking and discovered a use for my eggplant and zucchini, too.
**In the kitchen: Super-easy prep, though peeling potatoes is time-consuming. These were our potatoes, too! Grown in our lawn. (Does that make them sound good, or kind of suspect?)
**The reviews: Some of us don’t like fish; the gallo pinto was a last-minute addition for them (protein!). Those of us who do like fish thought this meal was heavenly. We used the pesto like tartar sauce.
**The verdict: Not vegetarian. But really freaking good.
**Friday’s menu: Food from Bailey’s pickup, plus heated up leftovers.
**In the kitchen: The only work is unloading the massive Bailey’s order, and putting it all away. We buy the bulk of our food from Bailey’s, which supplies us with the ingredients for a 100-mile diet.
**The verdict: Great conversation around the table. Always the sign of a good supper.
:::
**Weekend kitchen accomplishments: Four loaves of bread. Big batch of fresh tomato sauce; extra for freezing. Granola. Fruit custard bars for school lunches (this version’s fruit: stewed plums, plus a banana someone peeled but neglected to eat earlier in the afternoon). Also made a (non-vegetarian) lasagna for Sunday’s supper; Albus was sick for the latter part of the week, and I didn’t want to subject us to any lingering germs with a “cooking with kids” venture.
** Still needs to be made: Yogurt. Will attempt it this afternoon while looking after two little boys.
Yesterday: where we were
Yesterday morning, I was at a race, all by myself. Kevin was working. The kids were home with a babysitter, and we’d arranged carpooling for AppleApple to get to her soccer tryout. It was so cold. This is me after the race with the medal around my neck.
A nice touch, I must say, though it was earned merely for completion. The race was a 25km trail run, and oddly, it was held at a place filled with happy summer memories, for me: a conservation area not far from the farm my family lived on when I was a young teenager. We had a season’s pass and came swimming all the time, windows down, watermelon packed into trunk; me with permed hair and a black and white bikini and painful adolescent self-consciousness. The start line was at the beach. I was having flashbacks. To read about the race in detail, visit my triathlon blog. For results, check here.
Because of what I did yesterday morning, this is what we did yesterday evening. Kevin was in Toronto at a Toronto-FC game. The kids and I planned a pizza party. We ate every scrap of pizza, the kids got to drink pop, and we vegged on the couch and watched two movies, with a brief intermission in between for tooth brushing and putting on pajamas. I could scarcely keep my eyes open during the last movie. We all went to bed immediately afterward.
I’d say it was a really really good day. Really good. A keeper.
Framing the space: progress
Just look at this, the progress made from one day to the next.
The ceiling in my new office is going to be 1.5 stories tall. Down the road, I hope to add a wall of built-in bookshelves. Possibly a long way down the road. After I’ve sold a few more books and can pay for such an extravagance myself. Meanwhile, this seems quite extravagant enough. A room of one’s own. It’s really boggling my mind.
I’m gathering a lot of restless energy these days, and not spending it entirely wisely. What to do when a big project like Juliet is DONE? Really, I long to leap into something else, possibly something entirely different, and just keep moving. Pour this energy into the next big thing. But life doesn’t necessarily offer up one big thing after another. There aren’t always mountains to climb. I’m looking for the right metaphor (as always). I’m listening to the universe. I’m testing door knobs. I’m waiting for a sign.
When I look at the framed space that will contain a new room in my life, I’m wishing for something as concrete as that to shape my hours. Writing. It requires so much internal energy and drive. Stirring up freelance work takes effort and imagination. No one is (yet) knocking down my door offering plum writing gigs (will that ever happen??) And starting a new book is an act of pure faith: there’s your hope, optimism, and love, right there. It’s not something anyone can tell you to do, really. You have to do it by yourself, of your own initiative, because you feel it must be done.
Question: Do people who go out to a job every day gain a sense of satisfaction and purpose from the simple act of going and doing? Or am I romanticizing?
Can I create a sense of satisfaction and purpose without having an external employer to guide me? More to the point, will this new room create for me a sense of purpose? I’m loathe to hang that kind of responsibility on a room. I’ve been able to work in a variety of carved-out spaces: Hair Hat was written at the end of my bed; The Juliet Stories were written (mostly) here in the playroom. I’ve been proud of not needing a room of my own.
And yet. If I am honest with myself, that’s exactly what I’m hoping for, from this room, from this framed and real space: that stepping into it will create a sense of direction and importance and weight, and legitimize my hopeful efforts, and define me ever more concretely as a writer. That’s asking a lot. As the room gets framed, beneath my excitement, truth be told, anxiety roils.
But maybe, just maybe, stepping into a space devoted to the act of writing will be similar to getting dressed in the appropriate clothes. I’ve learned that simply putting on my running gear makes heading out for a run easy, somehow (and tomorrow morning I’m going to put on that gear for a 25km trail run). It’s not that the run itself is made easy, it’s those first steps that are made easy, and once begun, I never mind how hard it is, and even relish the difficulty. Taking the leap to start is the biggest obstacle of all.
Coming from a Mennonite background, I have minimal in-born appreciation for spaces that are designed to be sacred. I grew up believing that worship could happen anywhere, that stained glass and soaring ceilings and incense and elaborate stagecraft might as much keep people out as draw them in; further, that maybe we end up worshipping those external elements instead of wrestling with our own faith. Too much hierarchy. Too much evidence of wealth and exclusion. Too much us and them. And somehow that translates for me across the board. I’m only slowly, in my mid-thirties, coming around to ideas that others probably don’t find very radical at all. That the things that surround us matter. Clothes. Rooms. Architectural beauty.
I still strongly believe that any space can be sacred (just attend a birth and try to think otherwise). I believe that writing can happen anywhere (just add ear plugs, that’s my motto). But that doesn’t diminish the possibility that beauty and purpose is contained and expressed in beautiful or purposed spaces. That we’re drawn to these spaces for a reason. And that I’m damned lucky.
Do you have a house elf?
I am craving a solution to two tiny domestic mysteries: we’ve got a ghost in the house. A ghost, or a tricky house elf, or an invisible door that leads to a pit of no return into which random objects are being tossed. First, it was Fooey’s brand-new blue water bottle. She remembers carrying it into the house after piano lessons, and she remembers setting it down beside her shoes in the front hall. While I can’t corroborate her story, I remember seeing it in the truck beside her when I strapped her in just before we left piano lessons. How could it have gotten lost between piano lessons and home? But, it is gone. She set it beside her shoes in the front hallway, and we haven’t seen it since.
Next, AppleApple remembers removing her lunch box from her school bag last Wednesday and setting it down … well, she doesn’t know where, exactly. She’s a drifting sort of child. Suffice it to say, we haven’t seen it since. Disappeared. I have searched the lost and found at school, she’s searched her classroom (just in case her memory was in error), and we’ve combed every surface, cupboard, and drawer in the house. The bag was a junkie grocery store special, but it was full of lovely reusable containers and a thermos. Gone.
Poof.
These small mysteries are bothering me out of all proportion to the value of what’s been lost. It’s their inexplicable nature. I can’t come up with a reasonable theory. And I do like reasonable theories. They’re so comforting. For now, we’re blaming the house elf. We’ve even started referring to the house elf, on occasion. I heard AppleApple calling for the house elf to point her toward a misplaced something the other day (that item got found).
:::
What I meant to write about was the progress on the porch. The footings are in, and some lumber is now being attached and giant screws are being drilled into brick. These photos were taken this morning. My plan is to take a photo every morning, so we can watch our porch grow. That’s my office there. Can you see it? I almost can.
Give this woman a nap, please
I haven’t been napping. It’s starting to show. Because, yes, I’m still getting up early four mornings a week to exercise, and the combination of less sleep and construction mayhem and zero power naps makes for a woman who looks just a little frayed around the edges.
Confession time. Come a little closer. Let me lay it on you: By early evening, my bark has bite. And the person most likely to be bitten is, well, my husband. He’s around, he’s a grownup, he’s probably doing something not to my (impossible) standards, and snap. Like that.
Yesterday evening, I arrived home from yoga, a two-hour out-of-the-house, happy alone time for me, which is made possible by him. (It’s also made possible by a ton of pre-planning by me). Anyway, I walked in the door, and the dishes were basically done, the school lunches had been made, and the children were upstairs in pajamas with brushed teeth. He was reading to the younger ones. What a lovely scene! All was well. All continued to be well as I did laundry, checked in with homework obligations (older children), and went through the necessary bedtime rituals with the younger ones. All was well until I came downstairs to get myself some supper. I was pretty hungry by this point, and, yes, flipping tired.
I opened the fridge. I saw before me a half-consumed jar of pearsauce. And … I just about lost my mind. Pearsauce!? The pearsauce I canned less than three weeks ago? Which I’d planned on serving in February when pears are but a distance memory? When WE STILL HAVE ACTUAL PEARS????? Yup. That was me. Losing it.
And this was him. Working away at the computer and blinking at me in silence. Really, what else could he do?
I sat down to my bowl of supper, still seething. (Side question: Am I crazy, or do others out there have ideas about when canned food should be eaten? Restrictions? Personally, I like to wait until the snow is falling).
Then I noticed it was time for the big kids to get to bed. “Could you go up and tell them?” I asked Kevin. Who responded, “This is the first time I’ve gotten to sit down since you left for yoga.” Yup, he was probably pissed about the pearsauce; or more precisely, about my reaction to the pearsauce. Which he’d served the children for bedtime snack. While I was at yoga. Having quiet alone time.
This is how wars start.
But off he went, to tell the kids to get to bed. I sat gobbling leftovers and muttering under my breath, Do you think I’m sitting down all day? You get home from work and I’ve got supper on the table and mumble mumble swim lessons! and mumble mumble porch guys here this morning and mumble trying to work and … add in a few choice swear words and you’ve got the picture. I’d dumped it out of my system by the time he came back downstairs. Well, almost. I managed to get in a good grouse this morning when serving the kids breakfast, reminded by the half-eaten jar in the fridge. I’m pretty sure none of them will be asking for canned pearsauce again until the snow flies.
Lest you think I’m all zen all the time. I’m not. And boy, do I need a nap.
(But isn’t that photo zen? Ah. Another one from our summer holiday.)