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Do you ever get something in your head that you just HAVE to eat? Well, for me, I'm in a polenta kind of mood. One recipe, specifically, where you roast all different veggies with balsamic vinegar and then place it over broiled slices of polenta and add some goat cheese on top. It's so good!
I made this once before with homemade polenta, and made a mess of trying to broil the polenta. My homemade version comes out good, but too sticky. The recipe was still delicious, but I wanted to try it again using premade polenta. You know, the kind you buy in a tube.
Well, apparently, premade polenta is no longer available. At least not where I'm looking. Four different supermarkets and one large farm stand before I finally locate some premade polenta. I found it at Roche Bros supermarket, where my boys proceeded to have a huge meltdown for some unknown reason. Oh, and compounding my problems, I had decided when we got to the store that since my boys didn't want to ride in a cart, they'd be fine walking along with me.
So, I've got a basket in one hand, a huge yearning for polenta, and two boys having tantrums. I get them reasonably comforted, and a very friendly employee finds the polenta for me. I throw it in my basket, pay, and head home. Later that night, I cook dinner: the polenta tube is ripped open and the polenta is hardened and discolored in places. It's obviously been open for quite some time...longer than just a few hours. So, I toss it and we eat plain ol' roasted veggies for dinner.
I still want my polenta. I guess I'll have to go on another grand polenta quest soon.
Random somewhat unrelated topic: Still trying to eat local on a small scale. Figured I'd give a brief review of a local product: gouda from Smith's Country Cheese. I found it at Roche Bros (just before the above mentioned double tantrum that occurred between the cheese section and the polenta aisle). I tried a regular gouda, which I found to have a creamy, mild taste with a faint bitter aftertaste. It was good...better on crackers than by itself. Even more delicious was a Herb flavored gouda spread, that tastes phenomenal. Yum! Roche Bros. didn't have any local cheddar, which is my true cheese love. I'll keep looking...
Here's the "conversation" I had with B-man while I was trying to change his poopy diaper:
B-man: Noooooooo! Noooooooo! NOOOOOOO!
Me: What's wrong? I have to change your poopy diaper.
B-man: Noooo! No change my poopy diaper!
Me: I have to. It's stinky.
B-man: My want my stinky diaper! [Tears are flowing copiously by now...]
Me: You can't wear a poopy diaper.
B-man: Yes! Poopy diiiiiiiiaaaaaappppper!
Me: No, I have to change it. No one wants to sit in poop.
B-man: My want to sit in poooooooooooppppp! [Said multiple times, at increasing volume until the dreaded diaper change was complete.]
Oh yeah, this is a definite sign of potty training readiness, isn't it?
In other poop-related news, N-man cracked me up by coming over to me with a stinky diaper and saying "my smell like the zoo!" He said it with such joy in his voice. He was, unfortunately, correct.
Is this my crappiest post to date?
Random unrelated thought: I need some sleep. Zzzzzzz!
Yesterday, I went to a blood drive, to volunteer and to give blood. It was a rockin' good time. Okay, maybe not, but it's a relatively painless way to do good, and I'd been meaning to get back to donating blood for quite some time now.
As I was leaving, I joked with the two woman checking people in that I felt lighter. Well, that left us wondering: what does a pint of blood weigh? Did I really lose weight just by donating blood? I'm not an idiot (okay, that statement may be up for debate)...I realize that you can't PERMANENTLY lose weight by donating blood. I'll drink some water, and my body will get to work replenishing those blood cells. But, did I temporarily lose weight? I highly doubted there would be any discernible difference on my scale.
Luckily, I had just happened to have weighed myself that morning. I went home, got back on the scale, and was shocked to see it registered two pounds less! Okay, that's amazing. Now I'm really curious: how much does a pint of blood weigh?
In asking around, it turns out I may be the only person on earth not to know that saying "A pint's a pound the whole world 'round". That's talking about water, a pint of which weighs one pound. Who knew?
But, I'm more OCD than that. Blood, while it may be primarily water, is not *exactly* water and therefore probably weighs a slightly different amount than water. Also, how much faith am I going to put in some random folk-ism? Is a pint really a pound, or is that just an approximation? (Turns out, a US pint weighs 1.04375 lbs).
I'm not google-impared, but I couldn't really find an answer to how much a pint of blood weighs. Thankfully, someone just as obsessive as I am, and much more weights-and-measures conversion savvy than I, calculated that a pint of blood weighs approximately 1.1 pounds. That makes sense, based on this information that blood is slightly more dense than water.
So what does this prove? First, that I'm insane enough to keep researching this...I just couldn't be happy with an answer of "oh, about a pound". Second, the fact that I lost two pounds (still off today, despite the two packs of cookies I had post-donation) I can attribute to nothing except the good karma from donating blood. Sure, a 1.1 pound loss would be explainable, but that extra 0.9 pounds I'm chalking up as a cosmic good-deed thank you. Or, you know, some random event.
Random unrelated though, What I'm Reading Edition: I just finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See and found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable book. Interesting, believable, engaging: All that My Sister's [idiotic] Keeper was not. I mean, it's not on my "greatest book ever" list, but I'm glad I read it and would certainly recommend it. It also spurred me to spend over an hour researching foot-binding on the internet. When TK saw what I was doing, he was relatively unfazed. It's fair to say that neither food-binding nor the weight of blood have been the first things I've obsessively researched. I think I've broken TK of being surprised by whatever odd topic is pulled up on a browser!
Now I'm reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I'm not too far into it, but am totally loving it, which is good since it's my book club selection. Only google search it has spurred so far: the surprisingly boring definition of duralumin.
I'm not one to blame my parents for all the things wrong in my life. They did a pretty good job, I think, and the bad decisions I've made....yeah, they were pretty much all my fault. But, there is one thing I've always blamed on my parents: my asthma. Both of my parents are smokers. They would always smoke around us kids. No one in my close or extended family has asthma, just me, and I wasn't diagnosed until I was in high school. It's not bad, and it's gotten better since I moved out of my parent's house. Well, except when I lived in Atlanta. Reason 412 why I hated living in Atlanta: crap air quality. But I digress. Back to my point...I've always assumed that my asthma was caused by my exposure to second-hand smoke. So, I wasn't that worried about passing asthma along to my kids. Bad eyesight, sure, but breathing problems? Not from me!
Now I have to reevaluate where my asthma came from because it's official: B-man has asthma. Last winter, he had a lot of upper respiratory infections: colds, croup, even two cases of pneumonia. They'd linger, he'd need nebulizer treatments, but his pediatrician was always careful to clarify that he had reactive airway disease, not asthma as asthma cannot be diagnosed in children this young.
Well, B-man got a cold, and all of a sudden on day two of the cold, he was gasping and wheezing and coughing non-stop. I took him right in to the doctor's office, pretty sure we'd be sent to the hospital. It was THAT BAD. But, he was given a few breathing treatments, and we were sent home with steroids and antibiotics and albuterol.
It's been rough for the past few days as he's been coughing near constantly, and was obviously tired and sick. He hasn't slept in days, and therefore I haven't slept in days. I think the breathing treatments are finally starting to work, though, and I hope to get at least a few hours of sleep tonight in my own bed. We'll see.
So, I give an official "I'm sorry" to B-man if it was my junky genes I passed along to him, and to my parents for blaming them all these years for my asthma. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm going to believe it's just a coincidence B-man has asthma and still hold my asthma over my parents' heads as proof of how stupid they are to smoke.
Random unrelated thought: I got to escape from the house for twenty minutes today when I went to go buy some bagels for everyone. Well, like a total idiot, I left the boys' Laurie Berkner CD playing in the car. I'm finally by myself for a minute, and I waste it by listening to kids' music?? I could have been listening to Regina Spektor or Ani DiFranco, and not even skipping over the songs with swear words. I'm such a dope. Laurie Berkner is surprisingly catchy, though...
...very burnt when I'm cooking. But let me back up. First, I quickly got out of my bad mood yesterday...thank you! Whenever I realize I'm down, I try to do something to change it, and yesterday, my decision was to go out to the supermarket to get the ingredients to make mini-apple pies with my twins. We bought apples and pie crust, then set about making our delicious creations.
The boys helped me grate the apples (okay, helped me EAT the apples), helped me mix in the sugar and flour (okay, helped me SPILL the sugar and flour), sprinkled in cinnamon (okay, they mostly missed the bowl), and helped me roll out the pie crust (okay, knocked stuff off the counter with the rolling pin and put huge dents and holes in the crust).
We had a great time. Seriously, I love this kind of stuff. We ended up with some "pies" that looked like mini-calzones, and some that looked like those purse appetizers you get at a Thai restaurant. They ended up pretty tasty, too.
My problem started when I felt like we shouldn't waste the pie crust that was left after we had cut out the circles for the mini-pies. So, I decided to make some fried dough. Good idea so far, right? And what's better than fried dough rolled in cinnamon sugar? Here's where my thinking fell apart. I got worried: the dough would come out too hot for my boys to roll in the sugar. That's probably true. Then I made the stupidest decision of the day. I let them roll the dough in cinnamon sugar ahead of time.
Yes, I do cook. Quite often. I know very well what happens when you apply high heat to sugar. It melts, caramelizes, and, well, burns. I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me ahead of time. The first batch didn't actually turn out all that badly since the oil probably wasn't quite hot enough yet. I realized I had made an error, but figured I'd go ahead with the second batch anyway since it didn't seem dire. I took the first batch out and put it on paper towels to drain. Remember that, I'll come back to it. Then I put in the second batch to cook. Back to the first batch: I realized that sugar + hot = hard candy when it cools. So now I return to the first batch, which has begun hardening, melding into the paper towels. I try to pick some of it off and put it on a plate, burning my fingers. I'm busy taking turns between scraping hot crystallizing sugar off of paper towels and blowing on my fingers to keep them from burning.
That's when I notice the smoke. From the second batch. Which has now turned completely black and burnt. I took it off the heat very quickly and luckily there were no flames. Just completely burnt sugary dough. Oh, delicious.
Thankfully, the only good decision I made in this whole misguided effort was to wait to start the frying until the boys were snapped in their booster seats eating dinner. I figured it wouldn't be safe for them to be anywhere near a fry pan of hot oil. So, at least they were happily eating and enjoying my antics from a distance.
Random unrelated thought: are coats out of fashion? I drove past a local high school today, and half of the kids outside were just wearing hoodies. It was 27 degrees out! I'm not saying I never did something just to fit in, or in the name of fashion, but it's pretty darn cold out and these kids were just milling about. Kids today! Hee!
I'm currently flipping out about preschool, so I'm about to subject you all to my insanity. We picked out a preschool that we totally love. Visited it, talked to the director on a number of occasions, who assured us it wouldn't be a problem to get our boys in. It's the only preschool we've visited that I've totally loved. So, last night I went to the open house to get the application.
Here are the stats: 44 parents in attendance (and I know at least one of them besides me has twins). Number of openings for 2008-2009: 7. Yes, seven. And I have twins so I'd need two spots. Oh, and they admit residents of the town before non-residents. We are not residents.
I asked the woman in charge of admittance what she thought, and her answer was "Don't worry yet, we usually have a lot of movement on our wait lists." Basically, we will certainly be wait listed, so our best hope is to get a lottery number near the top of the wait list. That's our BEST hope? Shoot. One other "helpful" parent added that her daughter didn't get off the waitlist until July. Great. And she is a town resident. I can't wait until the end of the summer to finalize preschool plans for September!
So now I struggle to find another preschool. Shoot. I thought I'd been so proactive. We visited all the preschools in the fall. If I had known it would be impossible to get into this one, I would have just signed up at one of the preschools that accepted applications in the fall. Now I'm in a bind.
Oh well. Things will work out, right?? Right??
Random unrelated thought: Yesterday I got my first comment on the blog from someone I don't know. Unless it is someone I know, just posting with an assumed name. I was ridiculously excited. I mean, here I am yelling out into the abyss...it's nice to know someone heard me. Not to mention the comment was a validation that I'm not the only one in the world to dislike My Sister's Keeper. So thanks, Sarah! You made my otherwise crap-tacular day.
Wow, not that a comment on my blog isn't exciting, but it really shows how bad a day it was if that was the high point! I hope today looks up, but one of my sons is sick today, as am I, and I'm overly focused on the Great Preschool Debacle, and TK isn't coming home until after dinner tonight. Geez, I guess I better hope for another blog comment since otherwise my "high" point will probably end up being paying the bills.
I should know by now the more good things I hear about a book, the less likely I will be to enjoy it.
I just finished My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult, and I highly DON'T recommend it. First problem: I found the method of telling the story through different character's voices to be distracting and a cop out, from a story-telling point of view. I could see how it might have been interesting or well done, but it sadly wasn't. I didn't find that individual character voices were captured. In fact, more than once I had to return to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself which character's POV we were in. That can't be good.
Second problem: it was the most predictable book I think I've ever read. The big "surprise" at the end...um, I kept hoping she wouldn't go there. But she did. And the whole "why" of Anna's lawsuit...also not a big surprise. What, were her lawyer, parents, and guardian complete idiots? Wait, you don't need to answer. I read the book, and yes.
Third problem: why were certain things kept a secret from the reader when everything was told in the first person? It wasn't interesting to have the lawyer keep his need for a guide dog secret from the *reader*...we were supposed to be reading from his point of view! If I'm inside his head, why don't I know the reason? Same thing with all the secrets of Anna and Kate, or what Jesse liked to do in his free time. It wasn't like the story was unfolding to the reader. Things were alluded to, mentioned, but left unanswered. That's a cheat. If you want to keep things a secret, stick with one character's 1st person POV...then all the other characters' internal motivations and secrets can remain a hidden for as long as you'd like without damaging the structure of the book.
Fourth problem: Jesse. The character was completely flat for me, and what a cliche. It was kind of like a preacher's daughter who is a bad girl. Once again, was his way of acting out supposed to be a surprise? It was only surprising that something that trite would be in such a popular book.
Fifth problem: The topic of this story (a girl who sues to gain medical independence at the expense of her dying sister) is just dying, if you'll excuse the pun, to pull at the heartstrings. Number of tears cried during this book: Zero. Sorry, I cry a lot while reading, but this book just made me angry at how badly it was done.
My Sister's Keeper made me want rewrite it the RIGHT way. I mean, the story idea is phenomenal. I haven't felt so strongly annoyed about something like this since Star Wars: Episode One came out. Yes, that pissed me off, too, in a way that made me want to redo it correctly instead of just pretend it never existed.
But, I didn't fan-wank a new Episode One, and I won't rewrite My Sister's Keeper. But I will get it off my bookshelf.
Anyone who read My Sister's Keeper, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Random Unrelated Thought: I did go workout today, and left the boys in the gym daycare for the first time. Well, I got back about forty minutes later, and they were both hysterically crying. I don't know what happened. They go to a drop off playgroup once a week and do fine. I took them to the gym daycare once and stayed with them to make sure they were okay. I dropped them off today and played for a few minutes before letting them know I was leaving and would be back soon.
I feel so guilty. I'll give it another try, but this daycare is really subpar. The facility is nice, but there are way too many kids for the number of adults in the room. Mine were not the only children crying, and there just weren't enough daycare providers to comfort them all. I'm upset because we paid extra to join the "nice" gym mostly because of the daycare option so I'd be able to workout. If I can't leave them there, I can't workout.
If I can't workout, I can't justify my breakfast of chocolate chips. Just kidding. For the record, I had eggs this morning. Chocolate would have been better.
