Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I have a confession to make.

I almost never liked soup growing up.

My mother is a big fan of The Broth-y Soup, which I am not.  I remember her saying once, in this ‘can you believe it?’ tone, that “When your Dad makes chicken soup, he puts these big hunks of chicken in it!”  I stared.  And said something like “Uh, Mom, I LIKE it that way.”  She looked at me.  “Oh.”

Clearly we inhabit different soup universes.

The only soup my mom made that I really liked was ham-and-lentil, or (occasionally) split-pea-with-ham.  It was thick instead of thin and had that lovely ham flavor, and it wasn’t spicy, like the other thick soup (read:  chili) my mother made.  (Well, okay, realistically that wasn’t spicy either.  But as a child I was really, REALLY sensitive to heat.  Which, yes, I still kind of am, but I was worse as a child.)  We almost never had milk-based soup, because my sister is lactose-intolerant, so it was broth-y or spicy most of the time, and I was not a fan.

Fast forward twenty years?  I LOVE soup, from a menu point of view.  It’s generally got the veggies in it already, so you make soup, you make some sort of bread, you’ve got a meal.  Easy-peasy.  And I’ve discovered  soup recipes that I really like.  I still don’t make the broth-y kind much, and I haven’t made chili in years (this might have something to do with my oldest throwing up chili–every 15 minutes–at my mother-in-law’s house at a fairly young age.  It was the middle of the night, and there was general unpleasantness everywhere.  It kind of puts you off of the food involved.), but I experiment with a range of soups, and we have several staples at our house.  (Also a few I loved but the kids couldn’t stand; it happens.)  My oldest loves pretty much any soup with ham in it, and she’s generally willing to eat other kinds, unless there’s a speck of some kind of heat somewhere, ANYWHERE in the recipe.  (Gee, I wonder where she got that from?)  My youngest is too young to be anything but a nightmare where soup is concerned, and anyway, he can’t talk well enough to offer an opinion.  My middle, on the other hand…

That’s another story.

She HATES soup.  HATES it.  Corn chowders?  Ham and lentil, or ham and bean?  Any variety of potato?  No, thank you.  This isn’t necessarily surprising, since she’s my pickiest in general, but her feelings about soup are especially strong.  Which is why this recipe for Tuscan Bean Soup is so amazing, because, my friends–she likes it.  LIKES it.  As in, this is the only soup I think I have ever served that I haven’t had to partially FEED HER MYSELF.  (She’s four and a half, by the way.  This is not a capability issue.)   And it’s lovely.  I substitute basil for the thyme–no one in my house loves thyme, including me) and use Great Northern beans (they’re easier to find here); I also double it and just use a whole can of Italian diced tomatoes, because really, isn’t that so much easier?  It also makes enough to freeze that way, which is why it was such an easy dinner to make tonight (minus the annoyance of the floating ice burg you always get when you thaw soup).  I’m also not picky about the kind of ham I use–leftover, deli ham, whatever.  It still tastes great.  You can add a sprinkle of Parmesan to each bowl, but I think I actually prefer it without.  (And ANYONE who knows me knows that pigs everywhere took to the sky after that sentence came out of my mouth–er–off of my keyboard.)  It’s even gluten-free, for those who need it (I know this because I heard about this recipe from my friend with celiac.)  So go, my friends, and make soup.

Even my middle likes this one.

I’ve always been a ‘breakfast for dinner’ fan–especially since I got married and found that my husband prefers waffles and their ilk at dinnertime, not first thing in the morning–but lately I’ve been branching out a little.  Pancakes, waffles, muffins, cornbread…these are all familiar staples at our house.  I’ve done (and will likely continue to do!) a lot of variations on them, but we definitely have our favorites.  Scones, however, are another thing.  My mother made amazing scones when I was growing up, but they were of the deep-fried variety.  She has a gift with yeast dough, and these were light and lovely and mouthwatering.  I requested them for my birthday dinner for years, until my father came to me and pointed out that deep frying scones in July without air conditioning can be really unpleasant, and could I please pick something else and we’d have scones another time of year instead?  (For the record, that never happened.  I picked something else, yes, but to the best of my knowledge, we never had scones again.  Ever.  As a kid, this bugged me; as an adult with an anniversary in December, I am intimately acquainted with the difficulty of needing to pick an arbitrary day to celebrate something, because when you can pick any day, you just don’t end up picking any day at all.)

But I digress.  I almost never deep fry at my house, but I’ve been experimenting with British scones when I’m desperate for dinner ideas, and that’s been kind of fun.  We had one semi-disaster–they tasted ok, but the dough was like pudding and doing anything with it was ridiculous–but these incredible Apple Cheddar Scones were a huge hit with all of us, and last night’s Caramel Apple Scones were tasty as well.  (Perhaps I should clarify.  The scones themselves were tasty.  The caramel sauce/frosting made me want to sing and dance and compose bad poetry.)  I substituted maybe 2/3 cup of wheat flour and white flour for the rest, and I used evaporated milk instead of regular for the sauce, since I had some hanging out in the fridge from something-or-other, but other than that, I followed the recipe.  (Okay, the apples were kind of dry in the pan and I added another half tablespoon of butter, but that probably has more to do with the dying state of my non-stick skillet than anything else.)  It’s not really for the faint of heart where butter is concerned, but mmmm.

I also got to finish Paperboy last night, and it’s the first of this year’s Newberys to get a full five stars from me.  I loved it!  I even dealt just fine with the ‘no quotation marks at all’ style, which I usually object to, because it worked just fine with the character.  I really liked all the characters involved (except for the one you’re really, really not supposed to like!), I loved the story and the different threads coming together, and I loved the main character’s voice.  Which is the point, because he stutters, so the written word is the only place you get to hear his full voice.  By the end of the book, I found myself horrified that the people around this boy only got to interact with him through speech, because he often chose not to speak, rather than trying and failing.  (According to the author’s note, he stutters and always has, and this book is more autobiographical than not.  Which explains its power, but it also leaves me worried.  I want him to write more novels that are THIS GOOD, and what if the rest don’t resonate quite the same way?  Way to borrow trouble, Self.)  I also rather liked the fact that racism and segregation played a part in the plot, but weren’t the MAIN part.  It needed to be that way for the story the author wanted to tell, and I find that hitting those kinds of issues sideways, instead of head on, can be just as powerful in a different way.  You could argue that Paperboy makes that first novel mistake of too many story threads, but I don’t think so.  Everything that happened was too plausible, too well-connected to the main premise.  There were quite a few different things going on, but that was the point; the narrator takes over his friend’s paper route for the month of July, and it brings him out into the world, connecting with people, in a way his stutter has caused him to avoid thus far.

Anyway.  I loved it.  Go out and read it, folks.  This one’s definitely worth your time.

My poor 19-month-old has been on antibiotics for an ear infection in November, December, and January…and once again, he’s crying at bedtime and getting angry at things he normally wouldn’t.  My dilemma here is that he’s also working on at least two teeth, and aren’t the symptoms of teething and ear infections kind of, um, identical?  Pain?  Grumpiness?  Sleep issues?  I have three children and I have yet to see a one of them tug on his/her ear for pretty much anything.  Fevers don’t accompany other illnesses at this house, either–if my kids have a fever than they have a FEVER (the kind that requires capital letters) and that’s a big part of what’s wrong with them.  And so I dither.  Is it teething?  Am I paranoid?  My oldest child’s teething years are partly responsible for the dithering.  I brought her in over and over for sudden screaming during the night–that’s a classic ear symptom, right?–and it took me many appointments and a year or two to accept that her first sign of a new tooth–before you could see ANYTHING, even a tiny bump in her mouth–was her waking up and screaming during the night.

Every twenty minutes.

For three hours.

This went on for WEEKS.  Because my children–her especially–have impossible, ridiculous, preposterous GUMS OF STEEL.  Nothing gets through those babies.  Not a thing.  Pushing a metal spoon on the tooth?  Tried that.  Nothing.  You can see so much white that you’d swear the tooth was through already?  It happens.  That doesn’t mean a breakthrough is imminent.  Teething is kind of the pit of despair at my house, because it goes on, and on, and on, and ON.  And by the way, they don’t sell age-appropriate teething toys for children who have NO teeth on their first birthdays.  (To be fair, that was my oldest.  My middle shocked me by pushing two through at 10 1/2 months, and my son had at least one by 9 months.  I about fainted.)  And when one-year molars come in at 20 months?  Please.  Nothing helps.

But I digress.  The point is that I have a usually happy-go-lucky 19-month-old who is acting unhappy now but has a well-check on the 20th (yes, it’s really really late.  I forgot to make his one year until really, really late, and those shots and the 18 month shots have to be a full six months apart.).  And Monday is a holiday.

Moms, what would you do?

Really, I just couldn’t resist that title, but I suppose I can’t promise that this review will be illuminating.  Part of the problem is that I still can’t decide whether I feel this deserved to win this year’s Newbery Medal.  It has many good points, you understand.  It was thoroughly enjoyable to read; it had profound things to say about love and finding your way, in Kate DiCamillo’s VERY distinctive style; it was immediately fascinating (while, it must be said, also being quite bizarre); and it used illustrations in an interesting sort of way.  Although I will say that I’m not sure that that last point makes it any more Newbery-worthy to me (I suspect the book’s occasional forays into a bit of a graphic novel helped it win, though).  As for not-so-good points…hmm.  I did really enjoy reading the book.  I didn’t end it and marvel at the beauty of it, like I did Okay For Now and True (…Sort of), but that has more to do with the book’s intent.  And I did choke up a bit once or twice.  This was definitely more of a Tale of Despereaux than an Edward Tulane, and I’m glad of that.  I suppose my hang-up over whether it really deserved to win comes more from an ambivalence about DiCamillo’s trick of melding important truths about ourselves and life with exceedingly bizarre plot twists and turns.  I got a big kick out of the ‘squirrel gets vacuumed and becomes flying, poetry-typing superhero’ idea–it’s certainly entertaining–but it’s a, well, weird marriage with the ‘let’s express our love for the people who matter’ and the ‘finding our way home’ themes.  Her tendency to dot her books with characters who make profound observations on life on a regular basis is also a little on the edge.  It works okay for me in general, but it could just as easily not.  I can’t help agreeing with my friend Abbie, who was surprised that Flora & Ulysses won while Navigating Early got nothing from the Newbery powers that be; then again, at least it’s not 2005 over again.  I’m STILL furious that Kira-Kira beat out Al Capone Does My Shirts and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy to win the medal.  It was a travesty that a book that WANTED to be really good–but  didn’t quite make it all the way–got the gold (so to speak), while two amazing, beautiful, and heartwrenching masterpieces ended up with silver.  Really, while we’re on the subject, the other Honor book that year was The Voice that Challenged a Nation:  Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights, and it was ALSO better than Kira-Kira.  (Yes, I know, I’m not holding back here, but come ON.)  I digress, however.  Suffice it to say that it was good, and I enjoyed it, but I’m on the fence about its medal status.  Feel free to comment and tell me what YOU think!

I was pondering what to make for dinner tonight–and it needed to be relatively quick and easy, because my daughter’s SEP (Parent/Teacher) Conference was at 6:15–and sudden, beautiful inspiration struck.  Half a cup of whipping cream leftover from the ganache for last week’s Chocolate Coconut Bars–which were quite tasty, by the way, if a little messy to eat, and went over VERY well at my sister-in-law’s birthday party–was going to go bad in my fridge within the week.  The last of a batch of Mel’s Oatmeal Pancake Mix (a household staple) had been sitting around in that same fridge for a while, and I had maybe a quarter of a cup of crushed pineapple left from Sunday night’s Hawaiian Haystacks.  Bingo!  I tossed the pineapple into a pint measuring cup and filled it up with frozen strawberries from Costco.  I made the mixture into this AMAZING Strawberry Sauce, whipped up the cream (sweetening it, of course!) and a triple batch of pancakes (for which I had to make another batch of mix, but I do prefer to have some knocking around my fridge or freezer, and anyway, a double batch no longer reliably feeds all of us), and, well, that was dinner.  Not the healthiest dinner ever, but such a delightful splurge!  And after a truly horrendous night’s sleep, a splurge was in order.  (My son has not been sleeping well.  I can’t decide whether it’s just the teeth he’s trying to get or if antibiotics aren’t doing enough for his ear infections, but SOMETHING is up.)

AND speaking of splurges, I am going to go IGNORE the dishes in my dishwasher (clean) and sink (dirty) and go read some more of Flora and Ulysses:  The Illuminated Adventures.  I’m tired enough that I can’t start reading too late or I’ll just fall asleep, but I really, really want to read some more of it.  Goodnight, world.

I was wandering around in the produce department at the grocery store today, and what do you think I saw?  Asparagus for $1.69 a pound, baby!  Wahoo!  (Of course, I looked through my weekly ads just now and saw it for $1.39 a pound at a closer grocery store, but we’re just going to file that information away for future use.)  Anyway, I hadn’t finalized my dinner plans by then, and when I saw the asparagus–the fat kind, which roasts so nicely–it was kismet.  And so we had Mel’s Penne with Roasted Asparagus and Balsamic Butter, just because we could.  (No one enjoys this as much as I do, unfortunately, but it’s hardly the recipe’s fault.  My two younger ones don’t care for asparagus, my older one prefers it as a separate side dish with our favorite Balsamic drizzle, and my husband isn’t much into pasta.)  Guess who’s not sharing the leftovers?  Furthermore, guess who gets to try ANOTHER asparagus recipe with the other two pounds sitting in the fridge?  If I’m really lucky, my friend and I can make this Asparagus Leek Chowder, without pimientos (why obscure the other lovely flavors going on?) and with evaporated milk instead of half and half.  And with rice flour, since she got diagnosed with Celiac a couple of years ago.  (We used to cook together quite a bit, which I miss; it’s more complicated now.)  If you live somewhere with great asparagus sales going on this week, you should try one of these.

Or you could make your own favorite asparagus recipes and share them with me.  That works, too.  I’ll just be sitting here browsing my asparagus-containing pins on Pinterest until the price goes up again.

Valentine’s Day is just going to keep getting more complicated, isn’t it.  Today we pulled out the boxes of Valentines we picked up for the girlies–AND the instructions they each brought home from school.  (I’m kind of disturbed that there are instructions.  I absolutely don’t want kids to feel left out, but the whole thing seemed simpler when I was in school.  Then again, it probably seems simpler to my girls, too.  Maybe what you have to do as a parent hasn’t actually changed that much…)  My four year old is supposed to bring 30 Valentines–NOT addressed, although they may be signed.  Treats are optional (and yeah, I’m the mean kind of mom who is NOT going to add any more sugar to that mix.  I still remember teaching at Sylvan at 5:30 in the evening on Valentine’s Day.  It wasn’t pretty.).  My seven year old has 23 kids in her class–including her–and a list of names was kindly provided.  (THANKFULLY she can tell me which ones are boys and which ones are girls, because I sure would have guessed wrong in at least one case.)  For this let’s-do-Valentines-while-your-brother-is-napping party, my husband and I picked up 2 boxes of Doc McStuffins Valentines, 1 box of Sofia the First Valentines, and one box of (much cheaper) Lego Star Wars Valentines.  The last we picked up because we have nephews we figured would love the stickers, and the boys in the seven year old’s class could get them too, right?  (Call me sexist if you want; I’m guessing they’d prefer that to the Sofia the First notepads, but my seven year old LIKES Sofia the First, so that’s what the girls are getting.)  Well, that’s all well and good, but the reason the Lego Star Wars box was cheaper for twice the Valentines was because it came with a postage-stamp-sized sticker per Valentine, with no way to affix the sticker without rendering it unusable for the recipient.

Hmmm.

My current plan is to buy a pack of something like Dum-Dums and tape one on each boy Valentine.  The girls are going to need to be happy without candy, since they’re already getting a Sofia the First notepad (the preschoolers are all getting Doc McStuffins notepads; since we can’t address the Valentines and don’t have a list of names, the boys are just going to have to live with that).  This whole process, of course, brings to mind making cards with my mother–yes, making cards.  My mother has an art education degree–she finished it while I was in junior high–and we made Christmas cards for my classmates with red thumbprints that were magically transformed into a reindeer by a woman who didn’t pass much of that particular talent on to me.  (I remember attaching peppermints to the cards one year; I was good at the taping part.)  To my Mother:  every day I am a mother I realize a little bit more how amazing you are.  I hope I’m not failing my children by taking the easy-Valentine-way-out.  (Of course, it didn’t feel easy to everyone.  Signing her name thirty times completely exhausted my four-year-old.  She’s got an August birthday, meaning she might be the youngest in her entire preschool class, and printing is still very laborious for her.)

Anyway, after this whole laborious process, I felt the need to make treats tonight, because, well, I wanted to eat treats.  (Isn’t that why everyone makes treats?)  I went through one of my ten dessert boards on Pinterest (sadly, not an exaggeration) and found something easy enough to appeal to me on a Sunday evening:  these Coconut Blondies.  Mine had more calories than these, of course–I don’t generally throw away egg yolks for random treats I’m just trying out, and I don’t keep stick margarine in the house–and so they should have been even better, right?

Meh.  I was underwhelmed.  My husband said they were ‘ok,’ and that’s exactly what they were.  Ah, well.  I imagine the kiddos will enjoy them with us…

From a nutritional standpoint, you see, this weekend was probably an abject failure.  Friday night’s dinner was very kindly provided by Little Caesar’s…my seven year old got a coupon for free crazy bread from school and so we reveled in a hot ‘n’ ready Hawaiian, which they almost never have ACTUALLY READY but miraculously did yesterday.  (I know it’s over $3 more than cheese or pepperoni, but we all so love Hawaiian!)  We also learned an important lesson:  even with unlimited red grapes (and we ate plenty!), one pizza (of that size, anyway) and one order of crazy bread is no longer enough for all of us to have all we want of both.  No one went hungry, you understand, but there were no leftovers, and several of us could have eaten a tad more.  Tonight Daddy grilled hot dogs, and while green beans also figured prominently on the menu (all of my kids enjoy green beans, weirdly enough), well, we still had pizza and hot dogs for dinner this weekend.  But, on the OTHER hand…

Yesterday the girls and I deep cleaned the living room…as in, the “look under all of the couch cushions and sort through the toy buckets” level of clean.  (I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility of certain McDonald’s toys finding their way to the bottom of the recycling bin on the sly.)  This morning we dragged everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, out from under the bunk beds in the kids’ room, finding the two lost socks that have been irritating me for days in the process.  I even convinced my seven year old to get rid of the empty box her American girl pet (a gift from a great-uncle) came in, and believe me, this is front page progress.  The poor girl inherited the Heron pack rat genes in full (I’m so sorry, Love.)  I also gave Daddy and Carter haircuts today, we got more propane (which is why grilling was an option for dinner!), I packed the Christmas boxes neatly back in the basement closet (and therefore out of the way), AND I did two loads of wash.  Wahoo!  The best part about this was I also got some time to kick back and chill, which doesn’t always happen on a Saturday.  I used a small part of this time to cut away the crinkly plastic library cover from a book my best friend got me for something like $.10 at her library sale (yes, that’s ten cents, and while we go to different libraries, they’re both part of the Salt Lake County system).  Which led to me re-reading said book, or most of it (I may have skipped a bit of the beginning so I’d have time for the rest of it!).  While I can’t read a first-time book while the kids are awake, I can re-read/skim like a champion if I’m motivated enough, and I was motivated, because really, the book was Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now.

I really, really love Gary D. Schmidt.  I love The Wednesday Wars, which was a Newbery Honor book a few years ago, and I really love Okay for Now, which is its sequel (of sorts), and I really, REALLY love The Sin Eater, which doesn’t even come up on his current website because it’s an older title and published by NOT the same people who published any of his other titles.  The man is brilliant.  He makes me cry.  He makes me laugh.  He makes me love my family more, and think about the world more, and–seriously, if you have not read any of these books, go read them now. Don’t wait.  Just do it.

Incidentally, he also wrote Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, which was ALSO a Newbery Honor book a few years ago.  A few years before The Wednesday Wars, to be precise.  That one is really, really good as well, AND incredibly beautiful, but the specific sort of tragedy it deals with was painful for me to read.  (It was based, in part, on true events, and I was inspired enough while reading it that I visited the spot where it took place on my next trip to Maine; it’s totally worth the read, but the tragedy will break your heart.)

And that, friends, is why it depends on how you look at it.  You could call my weekend a nutritional failure, an organizing achievement, or a rather relaxing experience, and you’d be at least partially right every time.

There’s a lot to be said for this sort of weekend.

I finished my first of this year’s winners, folks, and the lucky title is…The Year of Billy Miller!  I will freely admit that I read this one first because it looked like the fastest read; new Newberys are rarely renewable at the library, so it’s best to move right along if you can.  To be perfectly honest, on the night I started it I got thirty pages in and was kind of disappointed.  I didn’t think it was bad, necessarily, but Billy didn’t feel like a character that I personally had anything in common with (someone really needs to invent a way of not ending sentences with prepositions that doesn’t sound formal and/or pretentious in today’s society).  So I set it down feeling kind of glum about not enjoying my first 2014 winner as much as I wanted to be enjoying it.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised on the following night.  (Did I mention that I mostly read before bed?  I don’t concentrate well with the kids interrupting me, so my reading time happens at night, once the kids are down and all necessary nighttime tasks are performed.  Or most.  I’ve been known to procrastinate some such tasks in favor of reading once or twice…a week.)  And the next night as well.  By the end I decided that I like Billy Miller BETTER than I liked Olive’s Ocean, Henkes’ other winner.  The writing and the story flowed together more nicely, and the simplicity of it fit the plot well.  And although the plot deals with simple experiences in a 2nd grader’s life, not life-changing ones, I found I liked that, too.  Much of our growing is done that way, through brief, not-very-memorable-sounding incidents that for some reason bring us up to a slightly higher level of understanding.  This worked for me.

I have to admit, though, that as much as I liked this one, my very favorite Kevin Henkes books are the ones I read to my kids.  Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, Chrysanthemum, Owen, Chester’s Way…the man is a genius.  I gave Sheila Rae, the Brave to my four year old for Christmas this past year.  I love that man’s mice.  ‘About all I can say is, WOW!’

(Postscript, or another Newbery note:  my seven year old is really, really enjoying Mr. Popper’s Penguins.  Which I took some time choosing for her for Christmas.  This makes me happy!)

I was looking for something different to make for dinner tonight–something that DIDN’T involve any big hunks of meat, since I got nothing out of the freezer to thaw last night–and after reviewing a few of my 10,000,000 food pins on Pinterest (that’s only slightly exaggerated), I decided to try this Cheesy Quinoa Casserole.  I halved it for my family, of course; I say of course because I doubled the last new casserole recipe I tried, IN CASE it didn’t make enough, and that worked out so well that I ended up freezing more than one container of it to feed to my toddler (the ONLY family member who ate it with enjoyment).  After that debacle, I decided that instead of doubling an untried recipe, I’d just serve banana bread on the side (read:  something filling that everyone likes).  Besides halving it, I also added some diced ham (a cup and a half for the halved recipe), because really, why bother serving a casserole as only a side dish when cheese and broccoli practically beg for ham?  The consensus was as follows:

Mommy and the 19-month-old:  Thumbs Up!

Daddy:  Thumbs Middle

7 year old:  Initial dislike which morphed into “maybe I like it a little bit”

4 1/2 year old:  Initial thumbs up which quickly descended into Mommy having to feed her every other bite (I’d worry more about that, but really, from this one, the initial thumbs up was the surprising part of the meal.)

A keeper recipe?  Hard to say.  We’ll see how the 7 year old feels about the leftovers…

My other venture into the unknown tonight involved someone sharing “Thug Notes” on Facebook.  Has anyone ever seen any of these book summaries/analyses?  I’m torn between not at all loving the language but being highly entertained by the concept (and the execution).  If you can deal with some language, try them out on Youtube when the kiddos aren’t around.  They’ll make you giggle.