Karen

Emergency food stash

October 24, 2010 by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, shopping

In keeping with one of my goals this year of Food Security (well, full disclosure: it’s my goal every year, but this year it’s an official, written down type of goal), I thought I’d write a little about different food “emergencies” that a person might experience and how I prepare for them. Here are 5 food emergencies that often come up in everyday life:

Work day lunches (and breakfasts, and suppers, too, depending on the hours that you work). Disclaimer: assumes presence of water and microwave at your place of employment. Here’s what to keep in your pantry…er, desk drawer for days that you just don’t have time to pack up a meal (or meals) before you leave for work: single serving 3 oz cans of tuna, peanut butter (of course), granola bars (good luck finding ones without HFCS), packets of oatmeal, cups of instant minute brown rice, cans of nuts.
Last minute playdate for tween, the timing of which will undoubtedly span a meal time (and possibly a winter storm in which you’d prefer not to drive). Keep a box of mac and cheese on hand, but hidden so that no one eats it when you aren’t around. This is a meal option that no tween has ever turned his/her nose up at. I make this statement with full confidence since I’ve had to rely on it on many occasions for both the boy-child and the girl-child over the years and it has never failed to please.
Last minute invitation (or you actually remembered the invitation at the last minute) to a potluck (work, family party, book club). An antipasto platter is the way to go. You can keep everything you need in the pantry so all you have to do is open the jars and dump on the platter (this step can even be done at your destination, so all that prep would involve is bagging up the jars before you leave). If you have any lettuce in the fridge, that would be a bonus, but it’s not necessary. *Note: pay attention to spouse’s anxiety level due to over-stuffed pantry, fridge, freezer…he may not take kindly to a bonk on the head from your stockpile. Also, try to ignore it when he mumbles about ‘hoarding behavior’ under his breath.
And speaking of weather (see #2 above) that you don’t want to drive in…there will probably be plenty of occasions of that in the next couple of months…this is Maine, with winter approaching, after all. Keep a box of the macaroni of your choice (capellini and rotini are my go-to’s) in the pantry, a block of parmesan in the fridge, and a bottle of olive oil on the counter, and you will never starve (garlic, red pepper flakes, and parsley are welcome bonuses to the above dish if you have ’em). . . well, unless the power goes out and you are generator-less.
Chocolate emergency. I keep a few (okay, many, many, many) pieces of dark chocolate around for when I just have to have it. There really is no substitute that works in this case. Buy a bag of dark chocolate Hershey’s Kisses. Split the bag between your hiding place…um, cabinet at home and (the back of ) your desk (drawer) at work. You’re welcome.

That’ s my short list of food ’emergencies’ for today. Do you have any of your own to add to the list?

Tess Gerritsen at Kennebooks

October 21, 2010October 21, 2010 by Karen, posted in books, local fun

Tess Gerritsen came to speak at Kennebooks last week. If you aren’t familiar with her work, you are missing out. She is a local author, from Cape Elizabeth. She currently writes predominantly murder mysteries, often with a medical theme (hey, she is a doctor, after all!). She started out her career by writing romances…she certainly has range. 🙂

Rather than reading from her newest novel Ice Cold, she decided to talk about how she writes, as well as answer audience questions.

She hears about a story, either from present news or from history, and if she is still thinking of it a couple of weeks later, then “I know what my next book is about!”. One idea that fascinated her and later became a book was this: What must it be like to wake up in a body bag? After hearing about an instance of this actually happening, Ms. Gerritsen did some research and discovered a facility in which this was a common occurrence…and a book was born.

Ms. Gerritsen also had advice for other writers on getting their first book published.

First: write your book (or in my case, finish writing it)! She writes her first draft longhand, the second draft is typed…then she will do 4-5 (or even up to 8) drafts total before it’s ready for submission.
Make sure your book is the best that it can be and is in perfect condition before you submit the manuscript.
Get a literary agent. She believes it is very important in today’s market to have a literary agent to represent you and to sell your book.

One thing she mentioned is that she doesn’t let anyone read her manuscript before sending it to her publisher (including her husband!). Other writers, for example, Stephen King, say that they count on their spouses to be their first readers and sometimes will incorporate their suggestions into their writing.

She also talked about how she develops her characters, and how she often doesn’t know how the book is going to turn out, so she doesn’t ever edit her first draft. Writing it longhand helps her to resist this urge to edit (legal pads are not conducive to cutting and pasting!). In one book that she wrote, the main character was a man until midway through the book, when she realized that it wasn’t working and changed him into a woman, which solved all of the problems she had been having with it.

🙂

Bottom line: finish writing your book!!!

What Moms want

October 19, 2010October 19, 2010 by Karen, posted in family

The headline this week in The Portland Phoenix is “What Women Want”…which of course echoes the famous Freudian question.

This got me thinking…isn’t the real question, which heretofore has failed to be asked, this: What do Moms want?

Anyone? Anyone?

Well, I’m here with the answer to this never-before-asked question.

Mom’s want (what my friend calls) a “Party for One”. That’s it. That makes us happy. What is a “Party for One” (will I will abbreviate as PFO)? Time alone in our house. Rules for “PFO”:

Unstructured time. No appointments.
No housework: this means no laundry, no meal preparation (unless it is solely for ourselves and because we really do prefer our own cooking to going out).
No “just picking up a little” in the kids’ rooms…this is a colossal time sucking vacuum that, once entered, is extremely difficult from which to disengage. Close their doors. Back away.
Do whatever you feel like doing and don’t feel guilty. Watch those Oprah episodes that you’ve been taping for 6 weeks but have had no time to watch. Get out the stack of magazines that you have had no time to read. Grab a book from the pile that you hoped to get to read someday. . . PFO is that day!

Final thought:

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”
-From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones, 1953

…maybe he should have asked a Mom. 🙂

The rule of tree…I mean three

October 15, 2010 by Karen, posted in education, friends, Someone's gotta say it, tweens

So, although I’d been complaining in an earlier post about the homework my daughter’s teachers had been assigning to the parents…I mean, the kids… I have to revisit my resentment some in light of the unexpected gifts that one of these assignments has had for us.

The (dreaded) Tree Project is the assignment to which I am referring (any mother who has had a child attending our local junior high school in the past 20 years or so will be familiar with this). After I heard some of the other moms talking about their efforts to help, like: “I spent 2 1/2 hours one Saturday afternoon driving my daughter around to get leaves!” for example (after I’d walked my daughter around the school yard for 15 minutes, got a mosquito bite, and called it a day), I was shamed off the bench and into the woods to help find leaves.

Toward this end, I asked a couple of work colleagues if they had any interesting trees in their yards that they’d be willing to ravage for leaves, nuts (extra credit!), bark, (same!), berries (same!)…you get the idea.

Well. They sure did.

My friend Jody produced Pin Cherry leaves and then took a chance and loaned us a treasured little book, Advice from a Tree by Ilan Shamir. Last weekend we read this book together on the couch (with the TV off!), and talked about what it meant to “Be content with your natural beauty” and to “Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes“…oh yes, and to “Drink plenty of water“…even trees know this!
My friend Sheri produced a Beech Tree leaf with the coveted beechnut to go along with it. She also sent Izzy and me a copy of the tree poem, which I am planning to read with her this weekend.
My friend Doreen brought leaves from a Quaking Aspen tree. Izzy now has all of her pages filled in her Leaf Project book, which was her goal. The gathering is done!

So, these are the tree gifts: a book, a poem…and remembering what a great gift good friends are. 🙂

Homework

October 14, 2010October 14, 2010 by Karen, posted in education, family, Someone's gotta say it, tweens

Well, after only the first month of school we’ve already had 4 homework assignments…for the parents.

The first day of school brings the myriad of (redundant) forms that we have to fill out for each child every year, regardless of whether the information has changed even one iota from last year, regardless of whether it is the same for both (or multiple) children, except for their names and dates of birth. Here’s an idea: Let us do it online! They let us send lunch money online now, and they send us school notices online as well (so that we have to subject our own printers to wear and tear, use our own ink and paper to print out notices and forms. . .but I digress). Why can’t we have our New School Year Forms online, then update only what needs updating and email them to the school? Time saved: approximately 2-5 hours (or more, depending on how many children you have and how complex their medical histories, etc. might be).
The next assignment we got was this: In a million words or less, write an essay about your child. Enough said.
Then, a Current Events homework assignment came home for the student, which says the parent must assist them in these projects. Weekly. If it can’t be done without the parents’ help, clearly it is too advanced for most 6th graders to undertake. To me, this translates to: Not Appropriate Homework for a Sixth Grader. Am I wrong?
The Leaf Project. Anyone who has lived in my town for the past decade or two (at least) is familiar with this one. Now, I have to be fair: it isn’t explicitly stated that parents have any involvement, but hey, it’s not like the 6th graders can drive themselves around looking for the 20 different types of leaves they need!

How do you feel about getting homework from your tween-agers’ teachers?

Life in the cube

October 13, 2010 by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, fitness, health, movies, yoga

I was sitting in my cube at work (hour 10), checking out Mayo Clinic’s website for anything new. I found a video of people working at treadmill desks.

I do not have a treadmill desk. Currently, I sit in my cube (to borrow a line from Sandra Bullock in the movie While You Were Sleeping) for 10.5 hours a day “like a veal”. I am not burning the 10% more calories that people who are blessed with bad backs and get notes from the company’s contracted physical pherapy associates and are awarded “sit-stand” stations. So I sit, not stand.

I recently attended a yoga workshop led by Judith Hanson Lasater. I learned many things from listening to Judith, including that the optimal angle for the hips while sitting in a chair is 120 degrees. I am currently sitting in a chair at my job that gives me about a 45 degree angle of hipness. Not good.

I attempted to remedy this. I rolled up a blanket and put it on my desk chair which afforded me a hip angle that more closely approximated the goal. I was feeling smug about having saved about $50 on a new cushion for about an hour, when I started noticing that my right shoulder (which was now clearly at an untherapeutic angle) was killing me, thereby proving once again the theory that “the thigh bone’s connected to the shoulder bone”.

Darn! I guess I also need to attend a workshop about shoulders. Or ergonomics. Back to square one.

Girls’ Night

October 8, 2010October 8, 2010 by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, family, friends, local fun, restaurants, tweens

On the (rare) days when the male members of the family are off at work, but the females have the day off, we have a Girls’ Night. Today, Girls’ Nights started early, at 7:24AM. The men were out for the day so the females were left to our own pursuits. This is what my daughter and I did today:

Breakfast: Cream of wheat for Izzy and egg white omelet with spinach, mushrooms, and roasted red peppers for me. OJ and coffee, respectively.
Met up with friends at Cafe Perfecto in Kennebunk. We split a gingerbread muffin. We ate it too quickly to photograph it. It was goooooooooooooooooooooooooood. 🙂
Next, browsing at Kennebooks. We bought some cards, some books, and a really cool mushroom shaped eraser with the sharpener built right in.
Coolest mushroom eraser/sharpener ever!
Home for lunch: PB&H on homemade bread for me; grilled cheese and bacon on whole wheat bread for Iz. Then she caught up with a friend on the phone, while I caught up on the laundry, chicken tasks, and dishes. Yay.
Next, North Berwick Farmers Market. My friend Rebecca was there so we got to visit a bit. Lucky for us, it was the day of their Pie Contest, and we got to try a piece of the winning pie, baked by a 9 year old girl; very impressive. Besides pie, we got some fudge, some granola, herbs to mix with oil for bread-dipping, oatmeal coconut cookies…hmmm, seems like something is missing. What is it? Oh! The (token healthy food that was the excuse for going to the farmers market) apple! I ate that at the next stop.
Izzy had a riding lesson and I spent the time in the car catching up on the last 2 days of newspapers that I hadn’t gotten to yet.
At 6Pm, lesson over, we headed to Johnson’s Seafood and Steak. This is our new favorite restaurant, partly because it’s right on the way home after riding, but mostly because of the pumpkin cheesecake. OMG. It’s worth going just for that.
Finally, home for a movie night. We watched The Clique. Izzy had seen it before and wanted to watch it again with me. Great mother-daughter movie.

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That’s it. She’s gone to bed; I’m getting ready to. We had a great day. 🙂

These are a few of my fa-vor-ite B’s~revised

October 6, 2010October 6, 2010 by Karen, posted in books, family, health

When you have to schedule a not-so-fun medical or dental procedure on your day off, it can be hard not to look at the day as a total loss. If I can schedule it for earlier in the day rather than later, that helps some; at least I don’t spend the whole day with a root canal hanging over my head. Just get up; get the kid off to school, go to the appointment, then when it’s over, the rest of the day (such as it is, depending on your pain and/or anxiety threshold) is your own.

Shortly after it was over, I thought of some positive things on which to focus my attention:

Beach: I went to the beach to sit and look at the ocean for the extra 20 minutes I had between dropping off child at school and getting to appointment.
Books: I stopped off at Nonesuch Books, newly located in Biddeford (next to Best Buy), to “be with the books” for a half an hour. Just because I could. Also, buy a present (for someone else). I bought some cute little horse magnetic book clips for someone…(reference said child who loves horses above). Nonesuch has (besides books, magazines, newspapers) a lot of gifty-type things…good for stocking stuffers, I’m thinking.
Breakfast: Pumpkin Muffin from Tim Horton’s. The best pumpkin muffin in Southern Maine thus far (and I have
Tim Horton's Pumpkin Muffin

been doing my homework).
Bed. Fear (of medical procedures) is exhausting. 🙂
Best root canal ever! After thinking it through, I realized that this was true; Tina Kell at Dental Specialists of Maine is the best endodontist ever!
Oh yes: the most important B of all: my husband BILL! Bill, who took me to my appointment, who took me to see the ocean, who brought me to be with the books, who took me to get my pumpkin muffin (…I think that I’ll skip over the bed part…)…thank you, Bill, for making a difficult day so much better than it might have been.

“The true creator may be recognized by his ability to always find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.”~ Igor Stravinsky

Sometimes I have to look hard, but the good moments are usually there.

The garden’s last gasp

October 4, 2010October 5, 2010 by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, gardening, raising chickens

So I went out to see what was left in the garden, and was surprised to find that there actually was something left. A

Oct garden harvest — October garden harvest

handful of cherry tomatoes, a japanese eggplant, and the sole orange bell pepper that was produced by that plant. There is also some basil, beets, carrots…lettuce and spinach coming up that was replanted last month. There are a few apples, but they have black marks on them, souvenirs from the hail. They taste great, but their eye appeal is zilch.

What else? Oh, yes…3 raspberries! There is also a cherry tomato vine that is kicking butt, covered with green tomatoes that showed up as a volunteer in the raspberry bed, a covert stowaway in the compost, I presume. I don’t think the tomatoes will ripen before the frost, but who knows? They won’t go to waste anyway. Chickens love tomatoes as much as they love pumpkins!

The herb garden is going strong still: a few different oreganos, probably a half a dozen varieties of thyme, rosemary, bay, lavender, lemon verbena, the sages. Will be bringing the rosemary and bay plants inside to (hopefully) live through the winter.

Even though the “pickin’s is slim”, there is still a lot to do in the garden, like: getting it ready for winter. How to do this? Not sure! Have to check with my husband…has something to do with compost, I think. And getting dirty. 🙂

Heart Rocks

October 2, 2010October 6, 2010 by Karen, posted in family, friends

heart rock from susan — Heart rock from Susan

I started collecting heart-shaped rocks a few years ago. I have them in all shapes and sizes; many I found at the beach myself, but some are gifts from friends who know of my collection. These gifts are actually the best ones that I have. This is my most recent addition: from my friend Susan. She found it at the beach after Hurricane Earl (didn’t) hit.

One thing that I’ve found helpful when looking for heart shaped rocks is not to be too rigid; it’s not likely that you will find a perfectly heart-shaped rock. What I’m looking for is something…approaching (hmm, this is somehow giving me deja vu for math of some sort…calculus maybe? I can’t think why) a heart shape. Keep an open mind (I’m just sayin’).

Did you know that there are books about heart-shaped rocks? My son gifted me with one recently. There is even a (well, at least one) blog about collecting heart rocks: Farm Girl Fare. At over 300, she has me beat, but I do have a half filled (reusable!) shopping full of them at this moment.

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