My four-year old won’t touch anything green unless it is a skittle or a jelly-bean, so I do what I can to make sure he gets some of his nutrients.
I’ve found some winners in this book, most definitely, though unfortunately, they haven’t been the vegetable rich ones yet. Crispy no-fry fries were received with ovations from both the preschooler and my husband. I love the No Harm Chicken Parm, but the preschooler decided he wasn’t hungry after the garlic bread was devoured and the husband said it didn’t hold a candle to my standard chicken parm.
We all loved the Cream of Tomato soup made with sweet potatos, carrots and evaporated milk. We also will be keeping the pancakes and breakfast cookies in a frequent rotation.
If nothing else, this book is helping me to see the health benefits in the things he will eat. The fact that there are multiple fruit purees makes me laugh. My kid not eat fruit? His standard breakfast is a banana, strawberries, blue berries, apple and whatever else fruit is in season and a bagel.
Maybe I’ll need those recipes for my one year old, who currently won’t touch fruit unless cinnamon plays a part.
My birthday approaches. I look around and realize I’m old by most standards of today.
I own a home. I work a Monday through Friday week. My title is three letters long. I have two children. Both cars are paid off. We have some college savings for at least one of the boys, and a pile of paperwork in order to set the next one up. I cringe when I open the explanation of benfits from Aetna, as I know just how high our deductible currently is. I find myself thanking the higher power for the new job, with the OUTSTANDING benefits package that will become effective 9/10/08, just in time for the boys’ well-child checkups.
Pair the above with the fact that last Wednesday, I was introduced to a woman as the new three-letter-title for my employer. She did a double take, shook her head, and said to me, “You look like a teenager!” (I still get carded when I’m not also buying diapers.)
I snicker at certain double (and 1.5) entendres, and I had a very long laugh fest with my eldest child when he “tooted,” I called him on his stinkiness and the giggling ensued. After about three full minutes of laughter, he recapped the events for me. “Momma, you were helping me put on my pull-up. I tooted. You said, ‘Oh, stinky,’” (here he replicates my face at the time of the nasal discovery) “and then we laughed. I want to do it again tomorrow!”
I might be almost 28, but at least I’m young in the face and heart.
Scene 1 - Or - How I Can’t Find Things In My Own Wallet:
Today was a day full of important activities: grocery shopping, getting Hayden’s birthday present, comic book store, and a visit to Sam’s to stock up on various staples and a haircut for Hayden.
I had set out in the middle of the day by myself for comic books and Sam’s.
I realized after I left the comic book store that I didn’t have my Sam’s card with me. I checked all through my wallet but couldn’t find it.
So I called Brie at home to look for it but she wasn’t able to. So I proceeded to Sam’s to get a new card printed out. They gave me a new card with no problem, and it wasn’t until after I had checked out that I realized the new card didn’t have my name on it.
I went back to customer service to get a card for my account instead of some random person’s when I realized the photo holder portion of my wallet was missing.
That in itself was not a big deal, but that meant that my social security card was missing as well. I searched through my wallet just to make sure that my social security card wasn’t in another section but I couldn’t find it. I called around all the places I had recently shopped and had Brie look at home, but no dice.
Finally I went home and started to look around for my card and Brie asked to see my wallet. She was immediately able to turn up both my original Sam’s card and my social security card. This meant the photo holder was no great loss.
Me: “The only thing I’m missing is some pictures of our kids and an old picture of you that you had written a nice note on.”
Brie: “You mean this picture?” she said as she pulled the one I was talking about out of my wallet.
Scene 2 - Or - How The Unexpected Can Stop A Temper Tantrum:
The flurry of activities today meant that naps more of less didn’t happen. Gabe napped between several stores and Hayden napped for 5 minutes on the way to getting his haircut.
By the end of the day tempers were a little bit short. Hayden was throwing a temper tantrum right before bath.
Gabe was already undressed and being held by Brie, poised to get into his bath chair. As we were trying to unsuccessfully talk Hayden down from his temper tantrum the cold air got the best of Gabe’s bladder control and he let loose all over Hayden’s shirt.
I am a kitchen enthusiast, but even so, it is not common for me to read a cookbook cover to cover. I was not searching for a recipe; I was not planning a weekly grocery list. Instead, I was simply drawn into what Clotilde Dusoilier has to say about food.
She paints vivid images of culinary creations, using historical, cultural, and familiar dialogues. She is able to share snippets of food history and background, without drowning me in data that is soon to be forgotten, letting me hold onto the information long enough to process its relevance in her introduction to the recipe. She details French cooking in a way that makes me understand why it is both an art form and achievable by the likes of me, that even soufflés that fall can still be tasty. She makes it clear that adventures in a kitchen can and should be a lifetime endeavor. Childhood memories can bring the pursuit of the perfect mashed potatoes into a full life cycle. The personal stories have made me appreciate the time I spend in the kitchen with and for my husband and children, hoping that they are creating memories that will spark them to love the exploration of food even more.
I was a follower of the blog, Chocolate and Zucchini, before picking this cookbook up. I think I took more away from the cookbook than I ever have from the blog. The connections, the groupings, the continuity all make this a strong cookbook, especially for those who are ready to learn not just recipes, or even how to begin to create your own, but how recipes can be connected to your life in both the minutia and the grand.
We have managed a few outings in the past few weeks despite Brie’s new job and the vast time sink of mine, including a trip to my parent’s to celebrate my nephew’s 7th birthday and a trip to our local zoo today.
I realized today that I’m not young anymore as I somehow injured (sprained?) one of my big toes while pushing my children in a stroller up a hill. This is by far the lamest injury I have ever received; and if you know me, that’s saying a lot.
Question of the day from Hayden: Mommy, what’s Urgent Care?
I’m having one of those days when I question nearly every choice I’ve ever made. Not that I’m unhappy with my life and I want it to be different, just more along the lines of “How would things be different - not how would they be better or worse, simply what would the differences be?”
I personally believe that every life is like one little twig on a tree… you start out as a sprout, pretty much going in one direction, up. Eventually in your growth, you come to a choice. That choice determines which branch you follow in life. The other option branches out, too. Perhaps there are parallel universes where each person is a different leaf sprout on their own tree. Perhaps if a time machine is ever invented outside of Hollywood, I’ll find out what my other branches are like by going back and making other choices.
What choices am I interested in? There are so many, with a wide range… and many of the choices may have seemed small at the time, but would have put me on a completely different area of my possibility tree.
Here are some of my big questions:
What if I hadn’t asked Shawn if Stage Left did improv, and hadn’t been led to join both the scripted group (Stage Left) and the improv group (Tower Players) in college? Would I have (had) any of the relationships I have (or had)?
What if I hadn’t chosen the ECHO as my first new car? Would I have been protected more by a larger car?
What if I hadn’t resigned from the country club when my manager told me he was leaving the job, too? Would I be even close to where I am in my career now?
But I’m in the small question mood tonight, too:
What if I had never read anything by Orson Scott Card?
What if I didn’t prepare tomorrow’s dinner tonight?
What if I just relaxed for the rest of the night instead of working on my long list of chores?
Perhaps we’ll find the answer to that last one… Who knows, it could make me an entirely different person.
I’m not often able to, as I tend to have very low blood pressure, but my reading of 90 over 62 today (I still have no idea what those numbers mean) was good according to my nurse, Sheila.
The blood flowed quickly, and I finished up, had two cranberry juice drinks, a chocolate marshmallow cookie and headed out.
I went to Half Price Books, used a 50% off coupon, and got one of my amazon wishlist cookbooks, Chocolate & Zucchini… so for about 25% list price. I saved a book from a landfill, saved my dollars and got new inspiration to cook. w00t!
Tomorrow, I start the new job, at a non-profit charitable fondation. Life is good. and I feel like I’m finally doing my part.
I didn’t get everything accomplished that I had wanted to today, but a few things got crossed off the list. (Goodwill trip netted 8 things for me, 14 for the boys, laundry is started, kitchen’s a bit cleaner…)
Hayden has taken to requesting video games as part of our nightly routine. As long as he’s had good behavior we generally allow it. Tonight he requested the old NES Super Mario Brothers.
What followed was 15 minutes of pure video game heroism.
They don’t really make games like this anymore. Those old NES games remain some of the most difficult games in existence.
I still remember all the old secrets; the warps, the hidden 1ups and stars, knowledge cultivated from countless hours played after school as a child.
The earlier levels are pretty simple. I rush through the levels building coins and lives, but rarely slowing down.
I eventually make it to 8-1 where things start to get tricky. This is where the number of lives historically takes a dive, but I make the impossible jumps and advanced onward.
I rush past 8-2 where I used to get stuck on the Bullet Bills and collect the last 1up I remember.
8-3 is a breeze as I still have the Fire Flower I picked up in 4-2.
This gives me a huge advantage coming into the final level, 8-4. I’m close to pitching a no-hitter. So far I’ve not lost a single life and have only been touched by only one Goomba, but my memory falters. 8-4 is a maze that I don’t remember.
I try to navigate my way through the maze as the clock ticks down. I have to double back a few times and I start to get nervous as the timer drops under 100 seconds. Eventually I find the right path, which I identify as things get more bizarre. A fish jumps out of the lava and knocks me back down to a small Mario.
I recognize that Bowser is coming up and that only one hit from him will kill me, but I have no choice. I press on, leaping over him, sure that one of his hammers will make contact with me, but I clear them all and knock him into the lava.
I rescue my princess and cheer. Hayden and I high five repeatedly.
This collection by Sherwood Anderson makes me remember both why I would love to be a writer and why I fear writing. Some of the stories are absolutely amazing. Some fall short. Some delve into characterization with such finesse; some leave me with no interest in the person’s life, nor how the life affected anyone.
I would come back to these: The Other Woman, The Egg, Milk Bottles, The Man’s Story, Death in the Woods, In a Strange Town, Brother Death, Virginia Justice, Mrs. Wife, Pastoral, Nobody Laughed
Probably won’t come back to read them again: Certain Things Last. Brothers, An Ohio Pagan, The Return, A Meeting South, The Flood, In a Field, The Corn Planting, For What?, The Masterpiece,
Not worth reading the first time, in my opinion: I Want to Know Why, I’m a Fool, The Man who Became a Woman, There She is – She is Taking her Bath, These Mountaineers, A Criminal’s Christmas, Not Sixteen, Fred, The Red Dog
Anderson deals with real people in way that most writers today don’t seem to anymore. He concentrates on the details that make a person who he is, the details the character might not have even worked out for himself yet. I appreciate this, but I admit it can make it difficult to become absorbed in a few pages of a short story. In his top tier works, he snatched me within a paragraph; in the bottom tier, I wasn’t sure there was anything worth snatching.
I also found myself drawn into the third party stories in relation to small town Midwest life. Gossips abound everywhere in the world, but those of us from the Midwest might be able to appreciate Anderson’s style just a bit more than most.
“I met this man, and here is his story…” is a good way of summing up many of these pieces. Most of the time, within the format of the story, and what snippets come in between, a close reader can gain a true sense of the story teller as well.
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