childbearing hipster

I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself

Yesterday Dug and I flew home, sans children, from the cabin. It was weird. We got to watch the inflight movie (He's Just Not That Into You, which we weren't that into, but it gave us a few chuckles), and nap on the plane, and read entire magazines, totally uninterrupted. We didn't have to lug any sleeping kids up the stairs when we got home.

We slept late, and then we lazed around drinking coffee, and then Dug headed into work at his leisure. It's 10:30 and I'm still in my jammies and nobody has asked me for a snack. It's weird. We may go to a movie tonight, one that isn't animated, and eat popcorn for dinner.

Then tomorrow we're going to go to wine country for a few days and eat vegetables and not have to force anyone to eat tiny servings of said vegetables. Weird. We will sit in hot tubs for as long as we like and ride our bikes around and not have to ride really, really slowly so Daisy can keep up.

The kids stayed behind with their grandparents. They're going to get haircuts and be allowed to use knives but required to eat outside. They're going to ride in boats and go see Ice Age and maybe go berry picking or to visit the maple sugar farm. They're going to have trouble getting to sleep because the sun doesn't go down there until after 9, and then it comes up before 5 and they'll wake up along with it. Then their grandma will fly here with them next week, and I won't even recognize them because they will have grown up without me (also, the new haircuts).

I don't know what to do when they're not here. I'm so used to having them shadow me that everything I think about doing seems like...well hell, I can do that when they're here, that's not a big deal. It feels like my style is more cramped without them than with them. Like I need a whole new hobby to fill the little-girl-shaped holes in my life today.

Last day of school!

                                                                                        

She was home sick yesterday but woke up early this morning and cleaned her room (?). Put on her new (really new! A rare non-thrifted non-handmedown!) outfit.Left for school a first-grader, but she'll come home a second grader. Crazy. 

As Seen On TV

I wanted a Big City Slider Station the moment I saw Billy Mays hollering about it in between commercials on Nickelodeon. During our daily snuggle-up-and-watch sessions, Daisy and I would ooh and ahh over this little contraption that makes tiny burgers (TINY BURGERS!) in the blink of an eye. I refrained from ordering, but it has been a dream.

Until today, when it became reality. Inside those Sara Lee dinner rolls are little patties of ground beef mixed with Montreal Steak seasoning and Worcestershire sauce, scooped with the special scoop that makes perfectly sized patties every time, and smooshed between the loving plates of the Big City Slider Station my mom, the Infamous Grammy, bought me today at the local household crap store. Of course, buying it locally means I forewent the long list of WAIT, THAT'S NOT ALL that you get when you order by phone, but hey, I also didn't have to wait a moment longer to satisfy my tiny burger urge.

And the verdict? It is not too bad. It only takes a couple of minutes. The edge of a rubber spatula is all you need to lift the burgers out of the pan without making a mess, and you can fill it up and keep right on pressing up TINY BURGERS 'till the meat runs out.

They're not a substitute for grilled burgers--they kind of steam in their own juices, really, as they sizzle in the individual compartments that shape them, thus totally lacking in the Maillard effect that elevates all meat.

Should you be so bold as to follow me down the path to TINY BURGER! nirvana, some thoughts from my first outing:

• Though the instructions don't say to, preheat the base pan and press together for a few minutes before using--I did this while I was mixing seasonings into the meat.
• Drain the liquid that cooks out of the meat in between each batch.
• The instructions say you'll get 14 burgers out of a pound of meat with no ingredients added that would bulk up the mixture, but I got precisely twelve burgers out of slightly over a pound of meat. This is perfect, because there are 12 buns in a bag of dinner rolls.

My next trick with it? Patty melts on cocktail-sized rye. TINY MELTS!

Yogurt: A picture, then I'll lay off a little bit

This is what homemade yogurt looks like strained: thick, like store-bought Greek yogurt or like sour cream.

Its purpose tonight: to offset the heat of an Indian curry. A little also went into the salad dressing for a similar reason: the arugula was allowed to grow just a tad too long and it's got a bite that needs cooling down.

Offshoot obsession: what to do with the whey? Use it in bread? Make ricotta? Drink it in smoothies? Pound it down in between weightlifting sessions so I can get totally ripped? We shall see, we shall see.

A Brief Yogurt Update

My second batch of yogurt, made from the last few tablespoons of my first batch, was cultured for about 20 hours and came out quite a bit more tart than the first, just the way I really like it. No difference in texture, and I still haven't tried straining any yet because the kids sucked it down too fast, so I may try expanding my next batch by half again the amount, so I can have a little extra to play with.

If anyone else gives this a shot, or has ever already made it by this or other means, I'd love to hear about it. Comment or drop me a line.

California Blondes

Molly and Henriette

First Harvest

Red oakleaf and Sierra lettuces, arugula. Off to make a vinaigrette!

Good Kids And A Clean House

This was my mom's answer to any impending gift-giving holiday. What do you want? "Good kids and a clean house".

Frustrating, because as a kid, I knew it was impossible. I was never going to be good. I was never going to clean the house.

Frustrating because as an adult, now it's all I want and yet I know it is impossible. My kids are never going to be good. I am never going to get a clean house.

But satisfying, too, because I know that from my mother's point of view, I've made up for it. Any mess in her house is no longer my fault, and I am no longer her problem, so it's all good. I made grandchildren. I'm off the hook.

Satisfying because I know that my kids are actually good, despite the frequent and often hilarious badness they display. And because my house is exactly how I want it to be--it must be, or I'd do something about it, right?

Happy Mother's Day, Internet. May your kids be as good as they are. May your house be what it is.

I Made You This Myself

Add yogurt to the list of things I can now make myself, as from-scratch as a person without a cow can muster.

There is something incredibly gratifying about making something you can buy just as easily if not more so. It's almost inevitably cheaper, for one thing, freeing up budget for stuff that's way more fun than making stuff from scratch. It's almost inevitably healthier, for another.

But not everything is really worth making from scratch all the time, not for everyone. I myself would not dream of buying boxed macaroni and cheese, but some people will never let go of that. On the other hand, despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of making awesome rice pilaf, there will always be a box or ten of Rice-a-Roni in my pantry and I will always prefer it to homemade, although if I added MSG to my own, I'd probably change my mind.

Some things are only easy to make if you have a specialized piece of equipment: fancier pastas, maybe,  although I don't know this for sure as I've never tried out the specialized piece of equipment in question, a hand-cranked pasta machine I bought at an estate sale last year. That's a summer project, I hope, or I'm going to start feeling bad about that pasta machine whether it was five bucks or not.

Some things aren't as economical in the short term to make the experiment worth trying. This recipe for mineral makeup, for example. Love me some mineral makeup, for sure, but I don't go through it very fast. Spending a ton of money up front, and not being able to buy the ingredients locally, makes a from-scratch experiment less attractive. This might be one for trying if I can get some other mineral makeup fans on board to share the cost of the raw materials, because it would definitely be a long term savings.

Anyhoo, the idea of making yogurt dates back to when Molly started eating it, and reared its head again a couple years ago when I started relying on my crock pot more and wondering if that could double as a yogurt maker, and then this article reminded me that I'd never tried (and also inspired me to add "make bagels" to my list of things to try).

A quick Google turned into a long sift through recipes that might as well have all been for totally different things, but this one, the simplest one I found, seemed like a safe place to start. I halved it to make only one quart at a time, and I used Brown Cow plain yogurt as a starter--of the few small containers of plain yogurt available at my grocery store, it had the most live cultures.

I started the process late in the morning yesterday, so it ended up culturing for about 18 hours (I admit, I tasted it right before I went to bed and it seemed way too mild, so I wrapped it back up in its towel and left it alone). This morning it was pretty darn good--I might even let it go a little longer next time to see if I can get it a bit more tart. The texture is thick and creamy, almost drinkable but still totally spoonable. I'm going to strain a little of it to see what happens, whether it's worth it to achieve thick Greek-style excellence.

The kids had some for breakfast, drizzled with farmer's market honey and deemed it "as good as the kind from the store", which, considering that yogurt is something I don't skimp on, is high praise.

The Farm

The chicken thing started with the shame of being too lazy to compost, letting ourselves get carried away with what our food scraps could do for us. It wasn't enough to get some fertilizer out of the deal, not when you can have eggs, too! We've discussed it for a couple of years and now we're just like everyone else, chickens in our backyard.

No, technically, in our elevator (the one the old lady who previously resided here had installed in her last years, but which isn't currently hooked up. A nice safe place for baby birds to hang out).

We started with four Leghorns (two white, two brown), setting them up in a comfy cage found on Craigslist, which a nice feeder to poop in and a nice waterer to poop in and nice soft bedding to poop in. Cute. As. Hell.

The flock numbers three now, and they're getting bigger every day. Their personalities are distinct enough that even if Henriette wasn't a different color, you'd be able to tell her from Penelope who is different from Betty despite looking so much alike.

Right now they are at the surly tween stage, where they still look baby-cute sitting still but their gait is becoming awkward, their limbs lanky. But like any tween, they still long for snuggles. Still, what they're thinking right now is "Ugh. STUPID".

Very soon they will not be cute at all. More of their big-girl feathers will be in (let's hope they're big girl feathers, there's a ten percent chance of big boy feathers and a relocation program). Pretty soon they will be the chick equivalent of teenagers. Ay, me.

And pretty soon they'll be living in a coop in the yard, which Dug is building. And in six months or less, we'll start getting eggs.

The chickens will also be contributing to the rest of the food production in the house, by eating some of our scraps and contributing their (copious) poop to our compost. Said compost will be enriching the raised beds Dug has built/is building for vegetables--so far in the first bed I've got four kinds of tomatoes, one crookneck squash, one cucumber, and a few heads of lettuce that I bought as starts because I couldn't wait for the lettuce I'll be growing from seeds in the next bed. I am looking forward to canning some of our bounty, making tomato sauce and pickles. And I fantasize about having a home-grown spinach salad this fall with a home-grown hard cooked egg on top.

Or, I will get bored with it and everything will die. We'll see. My grandfather once told us that farming was impossible unless you were born into it, but I don't think that's any reason not to do what we can to stay close to the land, as it were.