Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Since my parents are in town at the moment–they live about 5 1/2 hours away–I got to try a recipe for dinner that I’d think twice about for just my kids.  Why, you ask?

Potatoes.

We actually have three issues with potatoes in this house.  Number one is that NONE of my children have liked them until recently (and really, this baffles me.  I mean, aren’t potatoes pretty innocuous?).  The oldest–who is also the least picky–has started to come around, but the middle is NOT a fan and the boy seems pretty underwhelmed thus far.  The second issue is really just habit…before we had kids I worked two jobs and didn’t cook on a regular basis, and you know what eventually go bad (and smell really foul when they do)?  Potatoes.  You know what doesn’t go bad and keeps for an incredibly long time? Pasta.  And rice.  The third issue, however, is the trickiest.  If it weren’t for this, I could overcome the habit problem.  But the sad fact of the matter is this:

Peeling potatoes makes me sneeze.

No, seriously.  It starts a few potatoes in, and by the fourth or fifth, I’m sneezing multiple times a potato, and if I happen to be peeling enough for, say, Thanksgiving–back when I was a kid, and living with my sister who never met a potato she didn’t like–then I can’t breathe through my nose for the rest of the day.  It’s awful.  I don’t know why, and I know it’s weird, but my mother actually started excusing me from potato peeling on major holidays (and you KNOW it’s legit if my mother let me off the hook–I may be the youngest, but she’s not the spoiling type).  My sister–yes, the potato lover, I’ve only got one–started up with the same problem a few years ago, which is much sadder for her than for me.  I can take or leave potatoes, you see.  I’m fine with them, but I don’t miss them when they’re not there (even after living with more than one Idaho potato farmer roommate!).  Mostly I wish they were a better occasional carb option for dinner, but like I said, that’s dicey with my kiddos.

Anyway, since my parents (who, coincidentally, now live in Idaho!) are in town, and they are both fans, I decided to try this Loaded Baked Potato and Chicken Casserole.  It went over much better than expected with the family (not SO much with the Middle, but that was really too much to hope for), and I really enjoyed it.  I sprinkled some Lawry’s Seasoned Vegetable & Pork Rub on top of my serving–I discovered this quite by accident (it’s kind of a funny story, so maybe I’ll tell it sometime!), but it’s my favorite way to flavor a cheesy baked potato.  There are a few issues noted in the comments, but I didn’t find them to be deal-breakers.  When cooked as directed, the potatoes on top of mine were firm but done enough, which is the way I like them; if you like really soft potatoes, I’d dice them fairly small (or up the cook time, or parboil…you get the idea).  I used evaporated milk instead of heavy cream, and it did look curdled when I took it out of the oven, but neither the flavor or texture bothered me.  It didn’t look pretty, but then, I’ve already mentioned that I don’t care all that much about what food looks like (within reason, of course.)  I thought the chicken would be weird, but it absorbed enough cheesy and bacon flavor that I actually enjoyed it, and you really need it for the protein if you want this as a decently filling main course (that is, if you’ve got a metabolism like mine.)  I served broccoli on the side, which seemed thematically fitting, and this was a respectable dinner.  I’m absolutely going to make it again, although I’m open to suggestions about the cream/evaporated milk issue that don’t involve cream of chicken soup (I’m not looking for the flavor change that would bring).  Any ideas?

Well, I warned them.  (That was the seven-year-old, by the way.)  On Saturday, since I wanted the girlies to be in bed by 6:45 in preparation for the time change (the middle to sleep, the oldest to read for her usual 40 minutes or so), I was waffling about what to have for dinner.  My poor hubby has been sick all weekend into today, so he wasn’t going to be eating with us, and I just wanted easy.  EASY.  (It’s hard enough to get kids in bed that early without lots of dinner prep and cleanup besides.)  So I was browsing one of my Pinterest boards, thinking breakfast for dinner sounded promising, and I saw this Cinnamon and Spice Sweet Potato Bread.  HEY! thought I.  I’ve got roasted mashed sweet potato in the freezer from forever ago, and while it was going to be sweet potato gnocchi when I roasted it, that hasn’t exactly happened yet, has it?  And so dinner was born.  I used 3/4 cup of whole wheat flour and white for the rest, and I browned up some deli ham for protein, and the girlies had red pepper strips while the boy and I finished off the grape tomatoes.  (I got maybe two, which is why I went for a grapefruit later.)  Not exactly a Chopped worthy meal, but we hit the major food groups, right?  And it was easy.

(That is, if you don’t count listening to your four-year-old, by force of habit, call it banana bread.  Every time.  Which wouldn’t have bothered me except that her seven-year-old sister then felt the need to correct her.  EVERY TIME.)

The real question, of course, is whether or not it was both easy and good enough to make again, and the answer is–probably.

This isn’t an indictment of the recipe, you understand.  It’s just that I used the spice amounts the recipe called for, and I really should have known better.  They’re probably right for a vast majority of the world’s population, but I, my friends, I am MAD FOR NUTMEG.  Seriously.  I love the stuff.  I wished I’d upped that and lowered the amount of allspice (and really, a touch of cloves would not have gone amiss).   I love my fall spices, but I’m kind of particular about how much of each I can taste.

By the way, I also got my jury duty info in Saturday’s mail.  I get to call this Friday night, and if I have to go in, my fabulous mother-in-law gets to come spend the day with my kiddos.

Hmm.  I better write down the directions for preschool carpool…

I’m completely blaming my niece for this, by the way.  And my chocoholic hubby.  I’d put the girlies to bed and my 20-month-old was hanging with Daddy, and my fabulous almost-17-year-old niece called and asked me for the recipe for Chocolate Pudding Cake.  (This goes by many names, by the way…my in-laws call it Hot Fudge Sundae Cake.)  I don’t use the recipe we had growing up–I think I copied it down wrong, because I never could get it to come out right–so I gave her this Chocolate Cobbler version, which is more or less the same thing.  And then my hubby, who’s been sick all weekend and has just gotten his appetite back, thought it sounded kind of good, so while the 20-month-old mooched pizza off of Daddy like a champ, I popped this surprisingly lowfat concoction into the oven.  And then the boy went to bed, and there was warm, gooey chocolate goodness and cold, soft vanilla creaminess to be had.   Mmmmmmmm.

(By the way, come to think of it, I might not have actually copied the recipe down wrong.  I spent a decade wondering why the things I baked growing up never came out quite right anymore before it finally dawned on me that going from sea level to over 4,000 feet above sea level might just have something to do with it.)

I should really feel more guilty about stuffing myself so badly, because I just don’t bounce back in an hour or two the way I used to!  On the other hand, I got one less hour of sleep last night, and I had a child with digestive issues at my bedside at 4:30 this morning (not to mention a Diaper of Doom just before bedtime, which meant Daddy (who has a bad back) got to read stories to the girlies while I got to bathe a boy an hour early in what little hot water his sisters left him), so I’m just not going to judge myself too harshly.  And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have eaten so much to begin with except that the one downside to this recipe is the timing.  It is AMAZING right out of the oven.  You put whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on top and you’re in heaven.  The day after, on the other hand?  Meh.  It’s not BAD, really, but it’s a pale shadow of the amazing goodness it once was.  (A warning, by the way.  Pay attention to the self-rising flour thing.  If you don’t have any–and I never do–the substitution is listed and simple, but you do have to do it.  If, say, you’re pregnant and craving this and your husband makes it but doesn’t notice that part of the recipe, well…let’s just say it doesn’t end well.  Or terribly edibly.  Which should really be a word.)

(Incidentally, I should report that my upping bedtime incrementally all week long paid off.  The girls did well.  The boy, well…he’s having bedtime issues at the moment.  The but-I-was-having-fun-why-do-I-have-to-go-to-bed kind of issues.  He’s getting better, though.)

Of course, eating too much is one thing.  Staying up too late after the night we had is quite another…and on that note, it’s off to bed for me.

If you’ve read my maiden post, so to speak–the one about my Newbery project–you’ll notice that I said I can count on one hand the number of Newberys I’ve actively disliked.  And this is true.  If you happened to make a list, however, of books I sort of expected to dislike, it’d be longer. To be honest with you, I put off reading Holes and Maniac Magee because I assumed–yes, we all know what happens when we assume–that they’d be so boy-oriented I wouldn’t really like them.  (THAT was clearly not the case, by the way.  Loved.  Them.  Both.)  And The Underneath and Elijah of Buxton looked so depressing (the latter by virtue of the general topic, really) that I put each of them off for a few years before bravely picking them up and–loving them, too.  You’d think I’d learn, right?  Then again, there was that Awful Experience that was reading The Planet of Junior Brown.  (If anyone out there really liked that one, please comment and tell me why.  Because I found it just SO VERY BIZARRE. And not really in a good way.)

Anyway, to make a long story short–too late! LOVE “Clue”!–I didn’t actually expect to like Doll Bones that much.  I’m not much of a ghost story person–it’s not that they freak me out, necessarily, so much as I’m generally not that interested–and really, between the cover and the premise, it looked like a creepy ghost story.  And it was, I suppose.  Except that telling the story through Zach’s eyes meant that the writing wasn’t atmospherically creepy, if you know what I mean.  He’s a twelve-year-old boy, and his observations sometimes made me giggle.  Even better than the non-creepy tone, however, was the emphasis on relationships throughout the book.  At the end of the day, those were even more important than the ghost story, although the ghost story was the catalyst for all of the relationship change.  I liked Zach, Poppy, and Alice; I liked learning more about them; and I enjoyed following them on their ‘quest.’  I could see the story being creepier for kids or people who get freaked out by that sort of thing, mind you.  It’s not that it wasn’t creepy at all.  (And it’s not that things don’t scare me.  I would never claim that.  This just doesn’t happen to be the sort of thing that does, particularly.)  The point is that it’s so much MORE than just creepy.  Doll Bones is officially the newest title on my list of pleasant surprises.

My neighbor had a hip transplant this week, and he and his wife are pretty much the best neighbors ever (together with the Beatties, my awesome neighbors when I was a kid), so the girlies made him get well cards and I made treats.  And on Tuesday night I brought him over the cards and the plate of treats.  I did.

And then there was the rest of the pan.

And now it’s gone.

It is true that I gave a few to the kiddos–more so to the ones who are home for lunch–and my hubby had a couple.  I also gave one to a friend today, in a tragic ‘too little too late’ attempt at self-defense.  As for the rest?

Yeah, I ate them.

I cannot tell a lie.  I’m pretty sure I ate more than half the pan in three days.  And no, I’m not proud of this, but they kept calling to me. Seductively.  In that ‘just one little piece, no one’s looking!’ kind of way.  And I caved.  Every time.

I think part of the problem was that I wasn’t quite expecting them to be THAT good.  I was looking for a really easy recipe, so I broke out 101 Things to Do with a Cake Mix and picked something that looked enjoyable, but I wasn’t expecting the yumminess that was the Reese’s Pieces Bars.  I love homemade, from-scratch treats, but a little easy warm sweet goodness is never a bad thing.  Here goes:

You take 1 yellow cake mix, 2 eggs, and 1/3 cup oil.  Mix them together, add 1 1/2 cups of Reese’s Pieces and mix them in, and bake at 350 for 13-19 minutes in a greased 9 x 13 pan.  Take them out when they’re golden brown, let them cool just enough to cut, and go to town.  (I have a slow oven, so I did 19 minutes, although the original recipe actually said 13-17.)  You have to like Reese’s Pieces, of course, and it takes a bigger bag to be sure to get the full cup and a half, but oh, my.  I really just couldn’t stop eating them.

And to my husband, who always reads my posts and only got three bars in three days?

Sorry, honey.

You wouldn’t BELIEVE the cheers from my girlies when they found out we were having artichokes with dinner tonight.  When they actually made it to the table–I kid you not!–my 7YO did a little chant.  “What are we eating?”  Cue the 4YO:  “Artichokes!”  “What do we love?”  “Artichokes!”  I’m pretty sure this isn’t normal–but I love it!

The problem with artichokes, of course, is that I bought them a couple of weeks ago and started cooking them tonight before remembering  that my prime objective this week is to make bedtime a little earlier each night, in order to prepare for the WEEKEND OF DOOM.  Yes, folks, that’s right.  This weekend we spring forward.

The inhumanity.

Before I had kids, I didn’t actually ENJOY springing forward, but I did love falling back, and really, how much did it matter anyway?  No biggie, right?  You get used to it.  Just don’t forget the clocks and be late.

Ah, the good old days.  Now I spend the week before springing forward in a frantic rush to start accustoming my children to their new bedtime, and while it makes for a hectic week, come Sunday morning?  It’s totally worth it.  We never make it the whole hour ahead, of course, but even 25-35 minutes is a really good start.  And honestly, in some ways, springing forward can be easier.  If you’re one of those parents whose kids sleep in naturally, well, that may not make sense, but putting my kids to bed earlier, in a dark and quiet room, is easier than teaching my poor 7YO to sleep in.  (Her siblings don’t really either, but they, unlike the 7YO, conk quickly at night.)

But wait.  You’re wondering how artichokes matter in this scenario.

Have you ever seen a pre-schooler eat an artichoke?  Because they don’t exactly do it quickly.  And then the 20-month-old gets restless, and you find Curious George on Youtube on your kitchen computer (which your awesome, awesome husband installed for you), because if you let him down from the high chair he’ll just climb up on the dining room chairs and dump the butter, or the plate of artichoke leaves, or his sisters’ water cups…you get the idea.  And you know what happens when Curious George comes on?  Both of the girlies start eating in slow motion.  And since Daddy isn’t home from work yet to distract the 20-month-old, and toddlers don’t really get the concept of how to eat artichokes, it becomes the longest dinner ever.  Which makes an early bedtime routine that much more difficult!

We managed, though.  More or less.  Now starts the week of the kids being up a little earlier each day, which is less than ideal, but still the better option.

Did I mention that I hate, loathe, despise, and abominate Daylight Savings Time?  (I do like old movies, though.  Kudos for you if you know the reference!)  There is hope, though.  Someday I’m going to have teenagers, right?  And teenagers like to sleep in, right?  Which means that this whole time change/parental torture thing will get better, right?  RIGHT?

Of course, then I’ll have teenagers.

We’ll just focus on the silver lining right now, shall we?

It’s been kind of a crazy weekend, what with my sister-in-law and her family in town from Alaska, but I did get the chance last night to finish the old Newbery I’ve been reading.  And I have to say, I really enjoyed it!  The Avion My Uncle Flew was written a year or two after WWII ended, and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable adventure tale of a boy sent to stay with his uncle in a French village while his–the boy’s–bad leg heals.  While there, of course, he helps his uncle build an ‘avion’–really a glider– and discovers signs of a Nazi spy hiding out in the mountains.  Newberys tend to be coming-of-age stories most of the time, and there was certainly some of that, but it was still very much a historical adventure tale.  I don’t read as many of those, I suppose, which is why it’s always a nice change of pace.  Fun is rarely the FIRST adjective I use in describing a book, and while that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the more poignant tales I so often read, every once in a while it’s nice to be taken on this sort of a ride.  (I felt the same way about Gordon Korman’s Ungifted, which is also totally worth the read.  Not at all the same kind of book, really, except that reading it was, again, just fun.)

Anyway, the boy in the story is 13, but there’s nothing to worry about content-wise, so this is a good read for kids in general.  (Although you may have to fill in some blanks in a young reader’s knowledge of WWII and post-WWII France.  Basic stuff, nothing complicated.)  Go out and get this one–AND Ungifted.  You’ll be glad you did!

The first time I made these, I kid you not, my girls asked for seconds.

Of the meat.

This had never happened before–EVER.  (Ok, unless you count breakfast sausages, but that’s just a different sort of thing.)  And the funny thing is that neither one of them will voluntarily eat mustard.  So yes, these Mustard Glazed Pork Chops do contain 1/3 of a cup of Grey Poupon (it’s a killer deal at Costco!), but you needn’t like mustard to like them.  Or love them, as the case may be.  They’re tangy and delicious, and they’ve become a family staple.  I usually serve them with carrots, since the glaze on the meat complements my usual brown-sugar-and-butter glaze for carrots so nicely.  Tonight I either had an especially good pork loin (so much easier to buy one whole when they’re on sale in the fall and cut it into chops! because really, who doesn’t prefer boneless pork loin chops, no matter what the recipe says) or I cooked it EXACTLY the right amount of time, because it was even juicier and more lovely than usual.  I don’t even bother to baste, by the way.  (Opening the oven multiple times during baking when you have an almost-20-month-old walking around always seems like such a bad idea.)  What I DID do several years ago that I have never, ever regretted is spend $15 on a digital meat thermometer.  No more cooking pork (or chicken) to death because you’re afraid it might not be done enough!  I will warn you that I’ve never gotten the glaze to be completely smooth, and it doesn’t thicken a great deal, but frankly, if you care much about aesthetics in cooking, you probably want to give up on my blog.  I’m not great at making things look pretty, and I’m pretty much all about taste.

To finish off a slightly crazy evening with the kiddos–I’m not gonna lie, there may have been some silly string inside the house (those who know me KNOW that was my hubby’s idea!)–we got to read Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, since my oldest chose it for her bedtime book.  If you have girls and HAVEN’T read this yet–I am appalled.  Put it on hold at your local library IMMEDIATELY so that this great wrong can be rectified as quickly as possible!  And while you’re at it, get the rest of Kevin Henkes’ mouse books.

You won’t regret it.  I promise.

Ok, ok, it’s a day later, but here it is.  On Sunday my husband grilled chicken for dinner, leaving the oven free to try these Cinnamon Apple Cider Muffins for our carb.  They looked so good, even if it is spring and not autumn, and yet–I don’t know.  It’s hard to say they weren’t good, because they were fine and it’s totally my fault that they got too done, but I didn’t love them the way I wanted to.  I even used half white and half wheat flour to avoid the heaviness you get if you don’t have soft white wheat.  They still seemed heavy to me–did I overmix as well?–but my biggest problem was the lack of apple flavor.  Sure, you got chunks of apple, and those were nice.  But the applesauce and the apple cider didn’t add much flavor, as far as I could tell.  (To be fully truthful, I used Trader Joe’s Pear Cinnamon Cider, since that’s what I had readily available, but let’s be honest–how much of a difference could that possibly make?  It’s part apple to begin with–everything that’s pear is–and pears have no integrity as fruit.  I once made a caramel pear pie and everyone assumed it was mostly made of apples.  No, the pears weren’t super ripe, because I was younger and kind of clueless then, but still.)

And here’s the thing–should that really be surprising?  Aren’t you supposed to be able to substitute applesauce for oil and not taste a difference?  They weren’t bad muffins, and I suspect the execution was a big part of the problem, but don’t expect the moon in terms of appleiness.  (I think that should be a word, by the way.  Although I’m open to suggestions for different spellings.)

Tonight we had the kind of main course where you look at a recipe, use it as a starting point, and make it up as you go along.  I made a recipe of Betty Crocker’s alfredo sauce (as in, followed the recipe in my cookbook), throwing some onion and garlic in to cook in the melted butter, and then added an 8 oz can of tomato sauce and some basil and oregano.  (Maybe 1/4 t oregano and a scant 1/2 t basil.)  I tossed it all with a pound or so of penne and a couple of leftover grilled chicken breasts from Sunday, and my kids loved it.  Even my middle, who has a slight tendency to eat all the pasta and then ask for more pasta to go with her chicken…

Actually, my friend’s kids had some the last time I made it, and they loved it too.  Go for it.  But here’s a tip for free…check your propane levels before you start grilling the chicken, because it just does NOT taste the same when you have to heat up the oven and finish it in there, and the kids don’t necessarily wait patiently.

Not that we know this from personal experience or anything.

Like I said, the kiddos love it.  Enjoy!

Since I’m still plugging away at an older Newbery and I didn’t cook dinner tonight (I went out to a pizza buffet with my in-laws–think lots and lots of cousins all eating pizza and playing together), I thought I’d give a little info about me, for any reader out there who might be interested (and not already know).

I’m coming up on 35 this year and my husband and I just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary a couple of months ago.  He’s from Utah and I’m from Rhode Island (I was born there and everything, although my parents grew up in Utah and my brother was born there before my parents moved to the east coast).  We have three children:  my oldest is 7 1/4, my middle is 4 1/2, and my youngest is almost 20 months.  He’s the only boy and he likes vehicles, books about vehicles, and balls. My two girlies are very, VERY different; my oldest is more of a practical sort–except when she gets past a certain level of upset!–and my middle is passionate and extremely tactile.

Hmmm.

Okay, I give up.  I’m sitting here trying to describe each of them succinctly, and I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about all three.  How DO you describe real, complex, individual beings who bring you love and laughter and a healthy dose of exasperation?  What I can say is that my children (and their father) are the most important people in my life; raising them gives me a sense of eternal purpose I’ve never had in any other pursuit.  I love to read, and I love to make (and eat–especially eat) food, but at the end of the day what matters is whether I’m teaching my children how to be kind, loving, happy, healthy people who leave this earth a slightly better place than they found it.  My faith plays a huge role in this process–I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  It’s what keeps me from screaming in terror at 3 o’clock in the morning, every morning, because of the responsibility I have to these little people I helped bring into this world.  Parenthood is scary, parenthood is hard, parenthood is exhausting, and parenthood can be incredibly repetitive.  It is also joyous, fulfilling, and never, ever dull.

Let’s see.  Anything else about me?  I worked at Borders for 10 years–I’m still sad it’s gone–and I taught at Sylvan for 5, but I am currently a stay at home mom.  I also have really awesome in-laws.  We are unlike in many, many ways, but they are fun and loving and nice and not crazy (and believe me, I know people with in-laws who are).  Being unlike means I can learn a lot from them; it also means that my own family (which is awesome in its own right) and my in-laws complement instead of compete with each other.  I am blessed in all of my families, and I am truly grateful for it.

Ok, enough about me.  Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the new muffin recipe I tried–about which I’m currently undecided–and (possibly) other things.  Tonight it is off to bed for me!