Cooking practice

What do you do if it's 50 degrees and drizzling outside?

Make a shantytown out of a giant box, of course.  Pajamas optional.


If you can get lunch served to you in your box, all the better.


I'm wrapping up my cooking class now.  Below, barley-chickpea salad with balsamic-tahini dressing.

When I'm not cooking these days, I'm probably at a Little League game.

I'm still working on fitting in the last of the cooking lessons.

Farfalle and chicken with creamy basil sauce

This was the lesson on "making food sexy," ie, plating; aka, appealing visual presentation.  Very appropriate for date night.

 Major extra credit for the fireplace and candles.

Soup night.  Below, Tom Turkey Soup... one of my practice dishes that got a tepid response.

Jason enjoyed this one:  Iron Chef challenge.  He was to go in the kitchen and pick 3 ingredients "at random" and I had to use them (and others if I wanted) to make dinner.

When I saw his chosen ingredients I knew there was nothing random about it.  I managed to deliver what he really wanted, which was obviously peanut chicken.


And it was seriously good.

Soup night #2 was a better success.  Here, Poulet de Provence Soup, served with fresh bread and salad.

Last week I ran in the same 5k that I ran last year.  As I hoped, it was much less grueling, both during and after, despite clocking in a good 5 minutes faster than last year.


My legs are really sore though.


My dear family came to cheer me on.  The race started a few minutes early, so I first spotted them on lap 2, when I heard cheers of, "Mommy!  Mommy!  Go Mommy!"  Lap 3, more cheers.  Sometime during lap 4, Caleb apparently sustained a mortal scratch on his knee that was invisible to everyone but him, so laps 4 through 8 the cheers were replaced by screaming.


Every.  Lap.


At least I knew they were still there.


They were there at the finish line too, recording video, cheering, and screaming about the wounded knee, respectively.

You would think running several miles on a hot day while your child screams on the sideline is one of the more difficult ways to support charity.  But actually, I was much more successful at that than the far simpler task of donating to the local food pantry.

It really couldn't have been easier.  A bag appeared on my doorknob with a note from the local Ruritan Club.  All I had to do was put a few things in from my pantry and leave it on the doorstep, and the Ruritan Club would pick it up for donation.

Unfortunately, I got the date wrong when I dutifully set my bag on the doorstep.  And more unfortunately, it rained all night long.  

And most unfortunately, cardboard boxes of dry pasta don't do well sitting in the rain all night.

When I brought in my waterlogged bag and lifted out the wet spaghetti box, it dissolved in my hand and bloated noodles spilled all over my foyer.

Awesome.  

I saved the cans that did survive the rain and made a note of the real date... and then forgot to set out the bag.

Charity donation fail.

I'll have to stick to running hot miles in the sun instead.

I've gotten lots of opportunities to play with my camera, now that spring is here and there are lots of baseball games.

Jeddy had a night game.

See?  Night.

And I even got some cool pics under those challenging lighting conditions.


I love my camera.

I haven't bothered to get out my camera for recording my practice meals, so, sadly, all my food photography is with my phone.

Last night was date night again:  we had parmesan and herb chicken breast filets; white, brown, wild and red rice; oven-roasted Brussels sprouts; and crispy kale chips.

The lesson part was actually the appetizer, which was to try something I've always wanted to but thought was too hard.


I roasted whole garlic, which was actually really easy.  The cloves turn to mush and you can spread it on your fresh bread....yum.

I'm really glad I'm doing this course.  I think it's getting me over the hump between someone who knows how to follow recipes to someone who knows how to cook.  The cooks I admire most are the ones who can seemingly make dinner ex nihilo, and do it day after day without fuss or waste.  I hope I'm on my way there, and that it pays off for my guinea pig family.

Why you should pack your lunch if you work at home

My cooking class continues.

I just packed our lunches for tomorrow, and the kids are having.... peanut butter and honey sandwiches.  

Sigh. 

But, it is the first time this week, so that's a significant improvement in the too-many-peanut-butter-sandwiches-department.  

Also, I don't know if it's because they're homeschooled or not, but the packed lunches have been a huge hit.  They love their lunchboxes (tupperware with separated compartments) with color-coded lids.  They love being able to get it out of the fridge all by themselves.  And they love being able to take it wherever they want to eat, be it at a table, in the lawnmower seat, or sitting in a cardboard box in the garage.  

Again, homeschooling is awesome.  

I'm also loving the packed lunches because I have a thoughtfully-prepared lunch all ready to go for me, which is a great treat.  Plus the past few days it has enticed Jason to emerge from his home office and eat lunch with me.  It allows me to be braindead at noon when I'm naturally braindead, and creative around dinnertime the night before, when I already have food out and I'm in the mental food-prep zone.

Furthermore, kids don't swarm me when I'm trying to make a decision about what to serve.  Full kids wander off after dinner so I can think and act, and hungry kids at noon can grab and go without mobbing me with requests.

Beautiful.

And let's not forget that that most insidious of questions is now easily answered:  "Did I earn dessert?"  No more "How much did you eat?  Did you eat a vegetable?  What was originally on your plate?"  Now a single glance tells me--and them--whether their box is empty or not.  

I've completed taste-testing lessons.  Here, exploring different combinations of salty, sweet, fat, sour, and bitter:

One of several learning/practice meals that have come out surprisingly good:

I'm a terrible food photographer.  I need about 3x more food or a much smaller plate, for one thing.  But the broccoli was seriously good.

Then, in a grand exhibition of my new cooking skills, we dined al fresco for last Saturday's date night.

The table and chairs were my birthday present to Jason. 

This setup is just oozing romance, isn't it?  

The weather was perfect too.

What didn't make it into the pictures was that this meal was a horrifying fail.  The beautifully-roasted chicken, seen above, looked great... until I carved into the breast and it squawked.  

Raw chicken is kind of a mood-killer.

I was really discouraged but Jason poured me more wine and we had yummy bread and butter, and after another round in the oven the chicken actually came out rather delicious.  

By that time we had already finished dessert.  But it did mean good lunches in the early part of the week.

We spent Sunday afternoon enjoying the empty ball field.

Formerly known as church clothes.
Also, we don't gel Caleb's hair before church, although that would look great.  The crustiness in his bangs is from Sunday school, when he struggled to squeeze a glue bottle while looking directly at it, and it finally exploded onto his face.  When I looked over and discovered him stunned, with gobs of glue on his head, he said meekly, "I need a napkin."

Caleb and Liz worked out a brilliant system whereby the puller of the wagon wore the one available helmet.  The rider just ducked.

Eventually they made themselves useful by patrolling the field for balls to collect and return.

I have about another week of cooking class, in which to answer all my pressing questions, such as how to make fish, how to not scare off my date with raw chicken, and how to permanently ban peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

Living with a four-year-old

Caleb's been on a roll lately with his comments, zingers, and brutal honesty.


Grandpa stopped by with Slurpees one afternoon while Caleb was supposed to be napping.  Grandpa caved when he heard him calling pitifully from his room and sprung him early.  As he was sucking down the sugary goodness, Caleb thoughtfully said, "Grandpa, you were on the tippy bottom and I didn't like you, but now you're on the top of the list."


[Unfortunately for Grandpa, Caleb's "list" changes more frequently than the NASDAQ composite, so no one keeps their tippy top rating for long.]


Lizzy had her first T-ball game--an entertaining sports spectacle if ever there was one.

Lizzy herself did great:  she left her bat somewhere near home plate, ran the bases in order and touched at least most of them, and stayed on the field while the other team was at bat.

She even fielded a grounder and threw it to first base.

And she got a couple of hits off real pitches--no tee required.

Caleb, forever uninterested in any game involving following rules, brought along his digger trucks to blissfully play in the dirt during the game.  At one point, he came running over to my chair to tell me, "I found some dirt to dig in on the other side of the dugout, and there's a girl there digging in the dirt too......I love her."

I understood his passion when I saw the girl and she was as dirty as he was.  She looked like a great match.


Last week we celebrated Passover, with some other non-Jewish friends.  She grew up celebrating Passover every year with a program that incorporates New Testament passages about Christ's fulfillment of the Law with the traditional Jewish elements.  It was really neat to engage all our senses  (Bitter herbs!  Stinky horseradish!  Singing!  Dancing!)  in meditating on God's redemption of His people from Egypt, and the far greater redemption accomplished by the true Lamb.


Plus we got to meet some new friends there.  It was our first visit to their home, which was on a farm, complete with all the good stuff:  trampoline, wheelbarrow, cows, shovels.  Caleb was thrilled to discover a little playground with digging equipment and came running in to announce the good news to our host (whose house it was, and who was probably already aware of the playground in his yard).

Caleb:  "There's a playground here and it has diggers!"

Host:  "Far out!"

Caleb:  "No, it's not far out.  It's near the house."


Two days after celebrating Passover, we went to Good Friday service at church.  Lacking the usual children's church, Caleb sat on my lap and bent all his powers of will to behave himself for an hour.  He was full of impressively thoughtful questions, some of them posed to me a little louder than ideal.


"What are those black things?"  (Speakers.)


"Why did Jesus have to die?"  (For our sins; to take the punishment for us.)


"Who is Jesus' savior?"  (Hmmm...never thought to ask that one.)


"Why is he yelling?"  (That's not yelling; it's preaching.)


The most candid of all came the evening of Easter, on the way home from Grandma's house with four kids in the car.  It was late, the kids were hyped up on Easter candy, it had been a long day, and the car was very noisy.


Then came the voice of Caleb from the backseat.


"Mommy?  Can you get rid of all these kids except me?"

Easter at Grandma's house

Grandma's house:  quite possibly, the prettiest place on earth.

When it comes to Easter egg hunting, this boy don't play.