Tag: family

My new year’s word: Part 2

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, Holidays, Karen's Kitchen, Pantry Project, writing

I finally did choose my one word for 2011; my word is:  EDIT. I’m loving this word for many reasons.

  1. I can actually remember it! It works its way up from my unconscious with very little effort on my part. Bam! It’s there, remember to ‘edit’!
  2. It applies to my Pantry Project: use the food I have already before going out to buy more food. I’m editing my pantry (and freezer and fridge) contents by using up what’s there already. Today: Chicken Orzo Soup in the crock pot; all ingredients already here in the pantry (orzo, bay leaf, parsley, chicken broth, onions, garlic) and freezer (chicken thighs, end of a block of parm cheese) and fridge (tomato paste, carrots).
  3. It applies to my book: I finished the book and now am working on the editing.
  4. It applies to my (and everyone else’s too, actually) closet. I’m working on whittling the contents of all of them (hint: do the tween’s closet when she’s not at home) so that we have more space. 🙂
  5. It applies to my diet: I’m trying to eat less. Editing the choices that are readily available makes eating better more likely (hel-lo….can’t eat the cookies at 10pm if there aren’t any in the house). Full disclosure: this one is one of those obvious things that my husband pointed out to me.

How’s it going for the rest of you with your new year’s word/resolutions?

A room with a view

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, writing
The view from my room this morning

I got to have an entire room of my own (with a view!) in which to work on editing my book.

This is big; you see, I’ve never had my own room before.

My husband, after realizing that I had an extra day off this week said, “Hey, get a room!”…Well, even though he didn’t mean what I thought he meant…it still turned out to be a great thing.

Here’s what he proposed: I get a room, pack up my laptop, book draft, notebooks, and anything else I thought I’d need, go there and work on my book. Alone. Away from the laundry. Away from the dishes. Away from the fam (I love them all, but I always stop what I’m doing because I want to do things for them, as my husband pointed out, instead of doing things for me).

I arrived at the (cheap! off-season! weekday rate!) room around 1:45pm, worked until 6pm, when my husband and daughter arrived with supper. It was one of my favorite meals:  sausage pizza from Spiller Farm (Jeannine Spiller makes an awesome pizza!) and a bottle of Diet Coke. We ate together, balancing pizza on napkins on our laps as we perched on the edge of the bed (Izzy got the chair). Life was good. Then they went home and I continued working until 10pm.

Having a great excuse (for the second week in a row) to skip the gym, I picked up some pre-dawn breakfast and got back to work by 6:45am. I worked until noon and managed to finish the first round of edits on my manuscript. While I was working, I set a timer, and every thirty  minutes I took a break, jumped up to do a minute or two of yoga, then got back to work.

Structure…it’s a beautiful thing. 🙂

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Snow day! Top ten (fun) things to do

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, italian, Karen's Kitchen, movies, recipes, writing

I have not had a snow day for quite a while  (the Christmas Blizzard doesn’t count because I was too worried about my husband and son driving home from work in it to enjoy it). I decided to plan ahead for the next one, so I was ready to dive into distraction at a moment’s notice.

Stuff to do:

  1. a.Crack out the crock pot. The big one. Make soup. Here’s a recipe for Minestrone using whatever you have in the pantry and fridge. Whatever is left over can be frozen to bring to work to eat for lunch during the week.  b.Pull out the frozen gravy, meatballs and sausage from the freezer; place in crock pot. Add whatever odds and ends of meat you have leftover. Supper is almost ready!
  2. No crock pot? Here’s a great recipe from Stephen Lanzalotta (author of The Diet Code, and baker extraordinaire at Micucci’s on India Street in Portland) that uses stuff (once again) that you have in the pantry right now. Really. I’ll wait while you go check. It’s for Tomato and Tuna Soup for one. Not alone (or just really hungry)? Just employ a little math to double or triple the recipe. Done.
  3. Got Netflix? Load up your instant queue so now that the flakes are flying, all you’ll have to do is hit the “play” button.
  4. Bake! You can mix up a bucket of bread dough (keeps in fridge for up to two weeks) so it’s ready when you are. Not much gets those endorphins going like the smell of fresh bread baking.
  5. Read! Got a stack of books by (or under) the bed? A stack of magazines you’ve had no time to read? A Kindle? Go for it.
  6. Write! Keep a file that you toss your little scraps of napkins, post its, notebook paper on which you’ve jotted down ideas that came to you while driving, watching TV, listening to a boring lecture at school so you will always have your own prompts and projects ready.
  7. Got kids? Play Wii! (or Uno, or checkers, or whatever!)
  8. Take a nap. You know you want to.
  9. Virtually  visit with friends and relatives via FB or email. In other words…DON”T DRIVE!
  10. Be grateful the fam is all safe and sound.

🙂

One of the Best Christmases ever

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, Holidays, italian, quest for the best, tweens
Our tree!

I originally thought that this would be one of the worst Christmases ever.  It had three strikes against it before it even started:

  1. I had to work late and wouldn’t get home until 8:20PM Christmas Eve.
  2. My husband had to work early Christmas Day, leaving at 5:10 AM, and would be gone the entire day and night.
  3. My son had to work Christmas Day as well. He was home in the morning, which was nice, but then couldn’t come with us to have dinner with relatives.

We tried to make the best of it. The kids each opened a couple of gifts with Dad on Christmas Eve while I listened in from work over the phone. My husband and I had a little time to exchange our gifts Christmas Eve.

Christmas morning, after Bill went to work, I stayed up and baked some bread and then put our traditional Christmas morning breakfast (cinnamon buns) into the oven. We opened up the gifts, then got ready for our (mostly separate) day.

We stopped to see Grammy and Papa before heading to my brother’s house for Christmas dinner…which may well have been one of the Best Christmas Dinners of all time. We played Wii games between dinner and dessert, rationalizing that we’d have more room for tiramisu (was that wrong?).

Then we brought some dinner to my son and his girlfriend Lauren at work. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there until 6:30PM…oh well. The food was worth the wait! My sister-in-law Andrea is an excellent cook!

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Gratitude

by Karen, posted in family, good grief, Holidays, Midlife Crisis
Simple Abundance Journal

I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal this year. A long time ago, I read Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach and decided to give the “keeping the journal all year” thing a shot. 

It was an easy enough premise: write down at least three things that you are grateful for each day. That’s it. It starts off fairly easily, but as the days, weeks, and months go on, it can get more difficult. I did it though, and completed the journal on December 31, 1998.

A few years ago, I found another one of these hardcover Simple Abundance Gratitude Journals at a yard sale for a buck; I bought it.  It had one or two entries in it, but I figured that I’d just wite them out and write over them. I brought it home, put the journal away, then promptly forgot all about it.

Fast forward to December 2010: I found both that journal, and the one I kept in 1998. I decided to start the journal January 1, 2010, and I have kept it up all year. Periodically, if things were especially happy (or alternately, tough) for me in 2010, I would look back to 1998 to see how I was doing on that day twelve years ago. There were lots of ups and downs in 1998: I was expecting my second child, and my father died from cancer that year. It was difficult to read some of the entries. Turns out that the emotions may be different, but feel every bit as strong all these years later as they did back then when it happened.

Today, I was thinking that things hadn’t been going that well for the past few days, and it was looking like 2010 was not going to end on a high note. After I finished my journal entry, I decided to look back to see what I had written on this day last year. One line stood right out: “I am grateful for my life.”

It’s as true today as it was twelve years ago when I wrote it. Thank you, past self, for reminding me of this tonight, when I needed it so much.

The worst cell phone experience ever

by Karen, posted in family, Someone's gotta say it, tweens
The Offender

What’s a mom to do? When you have the whole Christmas thing under control, all presents bought and (almost all) wrapped, you might be feeling a little cocky.

The only thing that I had left to do was activate the cell phone that was the tween daughter’s big gift this year. Imagine my surprise (not to mention annoyance)when, as I tried to activate the cell phone, it would not activate!

Now, I was certainly no stranger to cell phones. I had purchased and activated more than one of these little suckers over the years without a hitch, but after one automated line and two different cell phone company reps were unable to activate it, I still had a cell phone with no service. The helpful reps suggested that I return the phone (60 miles away from where I was) that day (it was the last day they would accept the return) and start over from scratch, preferably at Radio Shack.

I did go to Radio Shack, but they didn’t have the color I wanted and they were going to charge me $20 more, so I didn’t buy it. I went online and tried to order it that way, with a very nice, helpful customer service person, Latricia, on the phone trying to help me troubleshoot. After 36 minutes we determined that this alternate route was not working either. She offered to call around to local stores to find one that had The Phone That She Wanted (see picture of The Offender above) and call me back. I accepted this offer.

She did call me back, and none of their stores had the phone I was looking for.

Meanwhile, I gave the online method another shot. An online “live chat” person was helping me, and after another 40 minutes or so had passed, it was still not processing the order. I gave up.

Thirty seconds later, I got an email thanking me for my order. Go figure.

Now, I still had to activate this one, so I was not celebrating yet. Activation  was a long, drawn out affair, lasting about an hour, and when I finally got off the phone with them at almost 11 o’clock last night, I still had no guarantee that anything they said that they did actually was done.

It will be very interesting to see the first bill when it comes.

Any guesses as to which wireless company I’m dealing with?

To frost or not to frost?

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, family, friends, tweens
Iz ready to bake!
My daughter and I were looking for something interesting to bake last weekend and came upon a recipe for blondies. Not just any blondies…pumpkin blondies.
Now it’s not often that we bake things that don’t list chocolate as one of the top ingredients, but these looked and sounded so great that we decided to take the leap.
We found the recipe in this month’s issue of Mixing Bowl Magazine.
My husband happened to call during the decision-making phase and I told him that we were baking, and the recipe we had picked. “What’s in them?” he asked. I told him that besides pumpkin, there were white chocolate chips and coconut, and he interrupted me. “White chocolate chips? Sounds gross,” he decided. “Don’t save me any.”
(Note: Never ask my husband his opinion about anything if you don’t really want it). 🙂
Well, we made them anyway, of course, and they were excellent. I thought a little maple frosting would kick these up a notch (I mean really; what isn’t better in life with a little frosting on top? I ask you), but my daughter didn’t agree.
We compromised by frosting half of them with some maple cream cheese whoopie pie filling that I’d made, and left half unadorned.
Well, they turned out great! We’ll definitely make these again. Our compromise on the frosting issue is this: next time, we’ll make a maple glaze and drizzle it over the bars.

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Dinner, revised

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, tweens

As I was rushing to get out the door the other morning, trying to make it to the gym before my workday, I heard my daughter say to my husband, “What’s for supper tonight?” He replied, “I don’t know yet. What do you want to have?”

I didn’t hear the response, having made it outside and to the bottom of the stairs by then, but I thought about it often throughout the day after I got to work.

Making supper every night had usually been my job, since after we had kids that were old enough to sit at the table and eat human food, I usually worked during the day, and my husband usually worked at night. About five years ago, however, we did a 180. I started a new job that required me to work evenings at first,  and so my husband changed his work schedule, and became the primary supper cook.

Now, it’s not like he had never cooked a meal before; he was a restaurant cook when we met, and he’d worked as a pizza maker for several years as well. It’s just something that he had rarely been called on to do at home, since a) I loved doing that job and b) he wasn’t home at suppertime. 🙂

His style of cooking is quite different from mine. I usually think about it for hours in advance, shop for all the things I need or may potentially someday need, and often will painstakingly follow a recipe, but he almost always just walks into the kitchen, looks around to see what we have, and then makes something out of what’s there. If there isn’t anything appealing in the house already, then he’ll go to the grocery store, and do basically the same thing: look around to see what they have that looks good, then go home and put the ingredients together into a meal…

…a meal that the kids (more often than not) actually like, and will eat. Really, what more could a parent ask?

So, here’s to all the Dad’s that are cooking dinner for the fam tonight; YOU ROCK!

Tangled

by Karen, posted in family, local fun, movies, tweens

If you’ll forgive the tired old cliché, Tangled is a “coming of age story” for Rapunzel, Flynn, and even (in a weird way, a “coming of old age” ) for Rapunzel’s evil, passive-aggressive step mother (who continues the long tradition of evil stepmothers in Disney Movies.).

What’s totally great about Rapunzel is that she is a normal looking girl. This is huge for a Disney movie.  They have deviated from whatever mathematical formula that they have applied to prior princesses that make their faces flawless and perfectly symmetrical and give them bodies that are anatomically impossible. You know, like Barbie.

What’s also great about Rapunzel is that she saves herself from Flynn (the would-be hero), when he breaks into her, um… house, and without giving too much more away, she repeatedly saves herself in other situations thereafter. Flynn doesn’t save her; she saves him.

The horse Maximus and Flynn have a comical, sibling-type relationship going on throughout the movie which was so much fun to watch that it elicited a few disapproving “Mom! You sure laugh loud!”‘s from my tween.

This movie also brought to mind a few other clichés: “If you love something, set it free,” embodied by Rapunzel. “If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it,” embodied by the evil stepmother.

The lights that are launched annually recall the tune “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”, which is reflective of Rapunzel’s optimism in spite of the deck being completely stacked against her…and I mean: Completely. Stacked. Against. Her.

Then there’s the frying pan, which is perhaps a nod to the woman who can “bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan”. At one point, Flynn asks: “A frying pan! Who knew?” A woman knew, that’s who!

Don’t get me wrong; all of these cliches are comforting, familiar. They help to make the movie accessible, and overall, EXCELLENT. Bring your kids and go see it (but try not to embarrass them by laughing “too loud” at Maximus and Flynn). 🙂

Grieving my dead relatives, Thanksgiving edition

by Karen, posted in good grief, Midlife Crisis

While driving home from work last night, I was thinking about something

Mom and Dad, way back when

from my past and wondering if I should share it with my kids. Now that my parents are gone, I realize that there are lots of times when I have a question about their lives and am sad because there’s just no one to ask.

Every so often when I was growing up, they would tell me something about their own growing up years, and more often than not, I would roll my eyes and wonder, “Why are they telling me this? Who cares?”

Well, now, having had the same impulse last night, I get it. They just wanted me to know them better, to know them (even a little bit) as real people, instead of just mom and dad.

I wonder if this lightbulb moment I’m having is a function of being in the midlife crisis stage of life. It’s nice to have the insight, but it makes me wish that I had cared a little more about , and had shown a little more interest in, what they had to say when they were here.