attacked by the bird in Dumbo

Oh look at that Corolla speeding along down there ...

You know in the opening scenes of the movie Dumbo where the patient Mrs. Jumbo finally and with much relief hears the stork calling out her name and is given her baby elephant with the massive yet adorable ears?  Okay I saw him.  Not the elephant, the bird.  It was huge, it was grey and was not wearing that smart little hat but it was a stork or a crane or something like it.  It was huge, it had a long neck with a floppy skin-pouchy looking area under its beak and it was apparently not at all afraid of my Corolla speeding down the street.  Scared the crud right out of me and between the startle factor and the fact that I have a nasty and otherwise unexplained phobia of birds, it aided in the unleashing of an impressive litany of swear words.

Problem with this story?  Both kids were in the back seat.

Now Thing 2 wouldn't have noticed anything given he is seven months old and mommy's forgivable time is still at hand.  The ten year old Thing 1 ... um, yeah. He's part nun and has been sniffing out swear words from a rather young age.  One of my friends just hands him a five dollar bill whenever she sees us so that she is "pre-paid" and doesn't have to worry about it for a while.

But rather than tell me that I didn't make good choices with my words like he once would have, he laughed.  He said that my word choice was funny.  I honestly don't remember how I combined words, but it is my art, so I am sure it was well done of me.

But it got me thinking about how I have some bad-mom tendencies of "do as I say not as I do."  Anyone who says they don't do this is either lying or not actually raising their kids, and I accept that I am not a fully conventional-mother-of-the-year-award-winning-Martha-freaking-Stewart-esk mom with as much grace as I can muster.  I read blogs.  I see the homeschooling moms who change their mantle decor every 15 seconds so that it can reflect the current season while sewing clothes for their children and making lots of cakes.  Not her, and won't be.  But I am open minded and think of me as a student of life.

So that big nasty bird that swooped over the street whilst I sped toward it and made me slam on the breaks and craft word chains that could have made a sailor blush made me also realize that I have not paid any attention to my list.  So I will be adding to it, and I will hopefully be marking some stuffs off of it soon.  And I am sure I will have plenty of sad, yet amusing, stories to share because failure is a part of learning.  And lord knows, when it comes to domestic skills I am bound to do both.

plastic wrap and dry yeast - two deadly foes

In my valiant efforts to pretend I know what I am doing and am not completely worthless at domesticity I am plugging away at my little list. But to prove that I have the opposite of the Midas touch and remain ever the lucky gal I tried baking from scratch with a recipe* that called for bread flour (took me forever to find that in the store, they have special flour for bread?!) and dry yeast. 

I admit, never used the stuff in my life.  Baking experience up to this AM incorporated soley following "recipies" that were read off of the side of the box and said complicated things like "pour mixture into bowl with water and bake at 350 for 20 minutes." So the dry yeast was supposed to do one thing, but of course, for me, it did another. 

The recipie called for one amount of water, the yeast packaging another.  The yeast package also called for sugar, but the recipie said nothing about sugar.  I am sure actual cooks/bakers who know their shat and have done this before may read this shaking their heads and say something like "oh you poor dear, donchya know you just ..." (I do picture it with a Minnesota accent for the record).

The recipe says to dissolve warm water and yeast.  Then let stand.  Stand?  I do know what stand means, don't ask how because I am really not sure.  For how long?  How will I know?  Why in the sam heck did I pick a recipe that presumes minimal knowledge as my first foray into being a big girl?  After staring at the murky mixture for a few minutes I went to go google it ... ah, damn, computer is doing its dying swan act ... thank the techno gods I have a phone.  It says I'll know when standing is done because I will have a hella poofball of foam.  Okay it didn't say that, I am paraphraseing.  When no poofball happens I read that with some yeast you have to add sugar.  Now that makes perfect sense to me because I either need coffee or sugar (not together though) to get my ass moving in the morning. 

Its a blur what I actually did do here, but ultimately I got a foamy looking concoction in the bottom of the bowl that looked like the foam on top of a a beer you pour too fast.

{light bulb momen: beer has yeast in it!}

Mix in other ingredients ... yada, yada, blah, blah, blah ... its supposed to rise.  Baby wants fed, perfect timing!  Then I realize that my five month old, male baby seems to have an intuative baking sense greater than my own which both alarms and discourages me at the same time.  Moving on I feed him and return expecting dough that has risen, but I find dough that has maybe inhaled a bit.  Give it another 10 minutes, I think it looks a bit bigger, but that may be wishful thinking.

Then the story gets ugly and pathetic.  The beauty of this recipie is that I can freeze it.  This means I can make it and swear at it when only the baby, who can't talk and tell on me, can see.  Then all Betty Crocker punk rocker style I can whip a frozen dough ball out of the freezer and make something uber cool like homemade pizza.  But you have to wrap it all up.  I have gallon size freezer bags, but alas, I must wrap the individual balls in *gasp* cling wrap.

I hate cling wrap.  Ever fiber of my being hates it.  On the cellular level I hate it.  If you were to take a swab of my cheek, whip out a DNA sample, centrafuge the crap out of it you would see right there on the 14th chromosone I have the HatesPlasticClingWrap gene.  Right next to it would be the PlasticClingWrapMakesMeLookLikeAMoron gene.  Someday they will find my body laying on the floor wrapped in this crap like a mummy with a bowl of uncovered food on the counter and the coroner will conclude that I died via suffocation while trying to just cover the damn leftovers. 

In an effort to lesson the complexity I cut the !#$%ing wrap into sections so I would have all 16 sections ready and just needed to put the dough in them, wrap it up, toss it in the freezer bag and *POOF* I'd be done, right? Wrong! Wronger than the wrongest wrong.  Because guess what my lazy assed yeast decideds to do NOW?!  Now, after it has had nearly 45 minutes to rise but hasn't?  Now, when I have predetermined size of cling wrap to wrap the balls in based on their size?!

Yeah, the damn yeast finally gets the memo, and it rises.

Long story and half a box of cling wrap later, I have them bagged and in the freezer. 

Now the really annoying part of this fiasco if you ask me is this: the directions explain how to go about freezing the whole batch for use later.  So I freeze all of it once, I swear it into the too-small cling wrap packaging and proudly stuff it in the freezer while smiling thinking that I might have triumphed after all.  When I recall one little detail ...

Now that I have frozen all of the dough, what in the Sam Hill are we having for dinner tonight? 

Damn.

* Found the recipe at Money Saving Mom, here is the actual recipe if you are a yeast whisperer or something.

what the words "tomatillo salsa" *really* mean

As I bravely face the unknown (to me) world of domestic skills I am trying to make things from scratch. I am doing good, though I know my blogging about it sucks. I am just impressed I haven't given anyone botulism or burned the house down. Hollah!

Anyhoo, I made fresh tomatillo salsa last night because we got a hella lot of tomatillo's in our Bountiful Baskets bundle a bit ago. Didn't know what to do with them, and they hadn't decided to abandon ship in fear of my attempt to cook them somehow, so we found a recipe that seemed too simple to screw up. Here ya go ...

1 lb fresh tomatillos

8 fresh jalapenos

2 cloves garlic

1/4 cup fresh cilantro

salt and pepper to taste

You husk the tomatillos, then roast them and the jalapenos until burned then essentially throw it all in a food processor until smooth.

I dropped the tomatillos and jalapenos in a baggie with olive oil, salt, pepper and a little bit of onion powder before I "roasted" (AKA burned the crap out of) them.

Notice that the recipe does not call for seed removal of the jalapenos. Yeah. That is a highly relevant bit of info if you ask me. Perhaps it should be recommended for future attempts at this recipe.

So I do my thing, and it looks good. I smell it and it made my sinus clear right up. So I took an itty, bitty taste of it ...

And after I got done crying and downing 30 ounces of fluids I decided that I just made a lovely salsa ... for someone else to eat.

So the words Tomatillo Salsa in this case actually translate:

Salsa that will feel like nuclear fusion is occurring on your tongue

and will make you cry like a whiney assed baby.

Next up on my attempts to make "real" food and be better at this domesticity crap ... pizza dough. I can't make that too spicy at least!

me cramming veggies down Jack's ...

A while back I got one of those cookbooks that teaches you how to supposedly hide veggies in yummy foods like brownies in order to get your kids to eat them. I had two issues with this,and the less predominant of them was the whole lying to my kid thing. Yeah, I disliked that, but seriously I felt this was doing irrefutable damage to the brownie's rep.

But I tried it. And if you got over the fact that everything was funny colored, that the brownies left your hands coated in a sticky green leafy looking goo and had none of the sweet chewy goodness that we all associate with this delicious food group, it wasn't so bad to my adult mind. Not worth the work, but not that bad.

To a kid's mind? Pure abomination. And really, I had to agree with him.

Given a combination of things -- my freak out factor at eating animals, Mr. Deaux's health, Thing 2 being an allergic rash/reaction waiting to happen, and Thing 1's flat refusal to eat anything that didn't once breathe and bleed -- making healthy food is a challenge in our house at times.

But we have found an answer: juicing.

Not only because I find it immaturely funny to say things like "I am hitting the juice" but also because you can squish an obscene amount of veggies through a juicer (ours is named Jack) add some fruit and ice and poof, you have a smoothy.

But Mommy, smoothies are a treat! They aren't health food! They are yummy.

Yes, baby, they are yummy and I only added green food coloring to make it look gross! So much for the not-lying-to-your-kid bit, eh?

Anyhoo, you want the healthy low down check out the bottom of this entry. I am a non-proselytizing vegetarian so I won't bore you with the gore of meat and dairy if you aren't interested in hearing it. But if you want yummy juice and pictures read on ...

I made two different juices today, and they can be drank straight, with crushed ice in a smoothy, or make faboosh cocktail starters given how fresh they are! {wink, wink, now you too can mean it when you say "Mommy's hittin' the juice!"}

Usually I mix fruits and veggies, today I did them separate-ish so that I could use these as bases to make a couple different smoothies. (There are fruits and veggies in both, but not 50/50)

The fruit one:

There are 2 pink ladies apples, 2 huge pink grapefruit, and one orange. Also a small hunk of ginger. Ginger is really good for juicing, but when I bought it I got this branch of it. You don't need much for flavor with juicing, so take what you need, freeze the rest in a glass jar.

So I shoved all of that through Jack (remember, that's my juicer's name) with the least juicy thing going first. Ginger, apples, oranges, then grapefruit.

That's what real apple juice looks like. Note how non-urine looking it is? Can you tell I have a deep aversion to store bought apple juice? Now here comes the other stuff ...

I think that's the last of the grapefruit juice and the start of the orange. When I got done with all of this it was tasty, but really tart and citrusy. So I looked in the fridge and I have a bag of baby carrots that could pass for an Oompa Loompa.

Given that we had so many and carrot juice is really sweet I added that.

Because I feel that recipes are merely guidelines or suggestions to start with I tend to not pay super good attention to how much of this I use since I cook by look or taste. Therefore I would love to give you precise measurements or amounts, but alas, I cannot. It was something in the area of 6 huge handfuls of baby carrots that made that juice up there. This illustrates quite nicely one of the biggest perks of using Jack -- I would never, even in my most veggie of moments, want to consume six huge handfuls of baby carrots. In fact, a little secret: I hate carrots. The juice I don't mind, it has something to do with the texture. I am not down with eating branches of off young saplings and I am not a big fan of carrots. Go figure. But all of those branches, er, I mean carrots made that juice. All of the nutrients and vitamins are in there, why eat the rest of it? I would need a ton of ranch dressing to even consider consuming that many carrots.

Low and behold, you have pink grapefruit, pink lady apple, orange, carrot and ginger juice. For now I am just calling it Pink & Orange. And yes, I agree, Pink & Orange is crying out for her long lost friend, vodka.

Now the veggie one, and this is where the things get impressive.

There is a bag of Romaine there, igrnoe it. I took it out and never used it, but the sneaky little bastid got in the picture anyway. So you have 3 cucumbers, a bag of kale and a bunch of spinach. Kale was on sale for like 59c a bunch, so we happen to have a ton of it. Lots of good stuff in kale, but I personally don't want to eat it much. Its a real witch to clean because the leaves are all curly and it stays wet for-ev-ah. Spinach on the other hand is a friendly one to clean.

Again, the least juicy gets shoved through Jack first, ginger and kale. Then spinach. As things get stuck or it sounds like Jack is working to hard, I put a half cucumber through.

Cucumber is one juicey mutha.

After I got done it smelled so green and I know kale and spinach are pretty bitter greens, so I put two apples in to make it a bit sweeter.

While I am sure it sounds gross, I swear its actually pretty good. Now that green mixture is good by itself (it has to be super cold, but I promise it is actually tastey) or it can be poured in the blender with fruits to make it sweeter and thicker.

While this isn't really a Betty Crocker list-worthy moment, I was trying to mimic all the really non-domestically challenged women out there who blog foodie stuff. Frankly, I respect the dedication they have even more because not only is real cooking a lot of work, but respect the pictures man! Not only taking them (without dropping your camera into the juicer!) but also putting them in these dang posts. They always load at the top and I am seriously far too lazy for this crap. Enjoy it, I may never do this type of posting again!

*** The healthy babble: Google "juice detox" or "raw foods diet" or watch Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead or Forks Over Knives or read any of the Skinny Bitch/Bastard series. If you wanna be real hard core, go read the China Study. Seriously, I just made it pretty damn easy for you, just get link clicky!

tootin' my horn

So I am trying to not totally suck and the whole stay at home wife thing. I rock at the stay at home mom part, the baby is still in one piece and hasn't needed therapy (yet) -- what more can you ask?!

Its the domestic crap I am bombing at. So I am trying to get organized, clean out, and set goals.

Today I did a total Betty Crocker thing and made my own recipe cards. Seriously, how lame, --er I mean, how housewifey, organized is that? Quaint, I know. Yes, I feel a little ill too.

But since I am cooking more, (I am, I have pictures to prove it and will post them soonish) I needed to be organized with the recipes. Yes, real recipes, not just the directions on the side of the box. This is a huge departure from my norm.

So I found like 375 different print-your-own-free-template things online and I either had to pick between gagolicious teddy bears or cows and roosters, neither of which were very me. Then I had ones that required a recipe author and this meant I had to come up with a smart ass names for each one which was both time consuming and bound to get me in trouble at some point.

"Mommy did Manuel Labor give us this recipe for enchiladas?"

So I wound up making my own. It took five minutes to make a design that was neither juvinile or creepy then I just had to type the recipes up. That took much longer. Much better, and I have no frightening clown-like dolls smiling at me from the side of the card. Score!

domestic goddess in training

I accept that I am not a casserole-baking-sewing-my-kids-clothes-homeschooling-scrap-booking queen.

I am trying to become some of those things (I would like to scrapbook someday, and casseroles I have nothing against) but, to anyone who actually knows me it is pretty apparent that I am not a natural at any of this.

Before I had an excuse. I worked full time. Who expects someone who pulls 50+ hour weeks to be a Martha Stewart? No one, and we gawk in awe and disgust at those who somehow are, and either fantasize about marrying them or dumping their bodies bedazzled garbage bag somewhere. Those bitches give the rest of us a really bad name.

But now? Now that we decided for numerous reasons that I would stay home now with Thing 2, now am I supposed to be good at that stuff?

Now its almost tacky for me to not have my schmidt together. How disorganized or pathetic do you have to be to mess this up?

The answer is clearly however disorganized or pathetic I am. I actually am very uninterested in hearing the amount that would work out to be because I am sure it would be depressing. But in my defense, I challenge those who would judge to try it. Be an entirely non-Joan Cleaver type person and suddenly try to fit in that apron and heels. Yeah, that is so not happening here.

The other day while on the phone I had to answer what I do for a living. The woman gave me the title of "homemaker." I almost laughed. My husband, when I later relayed this story, did. In his defense, I was laughing when I told him about it.

But now that I "don't work" (that is a hilarious notion indeed) I feel like I should really be a lot better at all this wifey/mom stuff. So I am making a list of crap that I feel I need to learn to do and rock at. The list will be a work in progress. For example, I might try something and swear it off and never do it again, thus needing to remove it and all things related to it from the list. I can also add stuff later as I think of it. I don't want to become a 50s housewife, I just want to have fewer domestic reasons to laugh at myself.

The list has stuff on it that I view as being worthy of my attention or stuff that I have seen other moms/wives do that I have thought "dang, I never do that" before. I won't waste time putting stuff I know I won't do down but I will shamelessly put down stuff I already have started to do before the formal idea of a list popped into my head. Hey, it gives me a sense of accomplishment and this might improve my general chances of success!

Domestic Stuff I'm Gonna Rock At: (catchy title, eh?)

1. Use my Crockpot (for something other than the one recipe I know)

2. Use my Kitchen Aid Mixer

3. Make a weekly menu and actually use it

4. Regularly make weekly menus

5. Try to make something from scratch (this doesn't have to happen regularly and will involve goal #2)

6. Iron (when we aren't going to a funeral)

7. Make a cleaning schedule (I need organization dammit)

8. Figure out how the food processer works

9. Find the damn food processer because its in "storage"

10. Figure out what the hell Mahjong is

11. Use coupons

12. Budget better

13. Wear an apron (I have one, wore it at work or when painting, yet I get filthy while cooking and never thing to wear the stupid thing)

14. Seasonal decorating (this one is already in danger of not happening just because I think putting scarecrows up in Arizona's fall is stupid)

When I imagined my list it was a lot longer, but at least this is something to start with. Lets view this in a positive way, the list is short because I am already so faboosh that I don't need to do much more! Woo hoo!

Oh shut it, I am trying to be positive here!