It Has Been a Happy Holiday

Silent Night? Calm and Bright?

Asheville was awesome. But I haven't had time to write about it. Wrapping up at work until I return in January, trying to finish Christmas cards, still shopping for kids. Anyone in the Triangle know where I can find a pair of Heelys in a size 13 or 1? That's my mission today...after the party at Spanish For Fun. Last night was caroling at Galloway Ridge in Fearrington with Grace's choir. The hot chocolate ran out so I promised I'd make some when we got home. I made the homemade kind with cocoa, sugar, milk, and vanilla. While that was all out, I decided I might as well bake a couple of pies. Which I did. My grandmother's famous chocolate chess and Karo's famous pecan. I tend to forget how easy some pies really are. There's only about 5 minutes of prep time and the rest is the oven's job. I think a lot of the effort in baking, and cooking in general, is just the thinking energy it takes to plan a menu, buy the ingredients and commit to the time it takes doing it, following the recipe step by step. Anyway, I have two unexpected pies in my fridge now.

Western Otto: If you're reading this, this is for you.

Booba's Chocolate Chess Pie

1 1/2 C sugar
3 T cocoa
mix sugar and cocoa
Add 1/2 stick melted butter...mix well
Add 2 eggs
Add 1 small can of Pet Milk
blend
Add 1 tsp vanilla and a
dash of salt

Bake at 350 for @ 45 min.

The trick with this is to preheat the oven and put the pie crust in first with the racks pulled out, and then pour the mixture into the crust. Otherwise if you try to carry the liquidy pie to the oven, it often makes a mess.

Happy Friday, everyone!

An Example of How My Brain Works

Christmas lights are going up in my neighborhood on all of the regular houses that usually have them up, like the one on the corner with the duck pond out in front. You know it's Christmastime at the duckpond house because they string lights all along the edge of their house and always have one of those lit-up deer out on their short pier, bending down looking as if it's drinking from the pond. I've been worried about those ducks for a long time now as I watch their surroundings dry up as the drought worsens. This year I noticed that the owners put the house lights up and on but not the deer. My first thought was that maybe it had something to do with the drought and the idea that the deer shouldn't be drinking from a water source where every drop counts for those ducks. Like it's un-PC or something.

As If I Needed Something Else to Fret About

Since exams and papers have long been turned in, I now have something new to fret about in my dreams...whether or not I've put enough butter in the lima bean/asparagus casserole. If you're not familiar with this dish, it was a holiday staple growing up in my family. Cook some lima beans, throw in some fresh or canned asparagus, add a can of cream of asparagus soup, top with cashew nuts and bake until bubbly. It's a delicious dish even if it doesn't sound that way on paper, I mean on screen. I haven't fixed it this year as we went out for Thanksgiving and Christmas has yet to arrive. But it made an appearance in my dream last night as the kitchen cast prepared a meal at Chapel Hill's Community Kitchen on Rosemary Street.

In real life, I got an e-mail from my church asking if I could help prepare and/or serve the lunch meal at the Community Kitchen on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I was already going to take some time off to go to Grace's program at school so I thought, what the heck, it's something I've always wanted to do, so why not.

I got there about 9:30 AM for all the cooking and prep required to get a meal ready for 100 people by 11:30 AM. There was fruit to cut up, meat to cook, side dishes to bake, bread to cut up and my job? To dole out 100 individual pieces of dessert (cake, cupcakes, cookies, pies, etc). The kitchen scene reminded me of the kitchen at camp where I worked for two summers but with real adults doing the fixing, not kids out of college for the summer. It was one of those times where I walked into the unknown, to a well-oiled machine with a head staff person leading the volunteers and a head volunteer leading all of us. I was the new person that wanted to jump in and start getting desserts ready without having to ask a lot of questions, but there were a lot of questions to ask. Where were the desserts? Where would I actually do my work? Where would I put the hundred servings of dessert? Where were the knives, etc? I tried to learn quickly and stay out of everyone else's way...especially the ones with the sharpest knives.

I found the cooler with all the Harris Teeter cakes and pies and cookies, and the homemade stuff too, and the rule was, if I wouldn't eat it, then I shouldn't put it out to serve. I checked expiration dates on marble cream cakes and made my own judgements about whether to put out the puff pastries again. I found out that putting cupcakes on napkins was easier and less messy than cutting into cherry and blueberry pies. I found that my job invloved a bit of quality control as in how would I know if the pumpkin cheesecake was fit to serve the Community Kitchen guests if I didn't sample a bite first? My colleagues agreed. There was a lot of sampling going on. I learned that I wasn't the newest one by walking up to a middle-aged man to ask him, since he's been doing this longer than I have, if he thought one day past the printed expiration date would be ok. He said that he'd been there a total of twenty minutes longer than I had and that my guess was as good as his.

I learned that once everyone got into a groove with their jobs and had been working for about an hour, that the conversation moved more from "Do we need any more apples in this fruit salad?" to "Have you seen the new UNC basketball uniforms? They look good on the players!" Which led to middle-aged church women going ga ga over how Tyler Hansbrough looks in a jersey and shorts which led to one of them exclaming, "Ladies, we're old enough to be his mother!" Which lead me to exclaim, "I'm old enough to be his mother!" Which led to a moment of pause.

I got all of the 100 dessert pieces ready to be served but had to leave before the serving actually began. I had a great time working with that team in such a tangible way. I thought we were preparing a holiday meal, but we weren't. This is what they do every single day for people who live at the shelter and even people who come in to eat lunch for a wholesome, tasty, free meal. Afterall, lots of attention is put on having a meat, vegetable, starch, and dessert at every meal. That's more than I can say my family gets.

So to my dream...I was back in the Community Kitchen, this time working on a vegetable side dish, the lima bean casserole, when one of the team members (a man, not a woman) looked around funny when I was ready to serve it up. He apparently did a "quality control taste" and it didn't pass. I was crushed because I had followed the directions, I'd thought. Then I realized I'd only put 1 tablespoon of butter in instead of 1 stick of butter. We had to throw the whole thing out because we couldn't serve anything we wouldn't eat ourselves.

I guess I have food on the brain due to my restricted diet. The closest thing I've come to eating dessert or anything sweet is last night when I sliced up a few sweet potatoes, put them on a baking sheet, drizzled extra virgin olive oil on them then sprinkled generously with salt and pepper and baked at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. They were good. Even Johnny thought they were yum.

Photo Shoot

Last summer I ran into an old college friend who's recently started a photo decor business in Cary. She needed some models to get some promotional materials up and out so I volunteered my kids. I picked up the photos this past Sat. and have uploaded most of them to my new Flickr account that you can view by clicking here if you're interested. These are a few of my favorites.

I wanted Grace and Johnny to smile and laugh "naturally" but they were all fake laughing and posing for the camera. I had to resort to interspersing "toot sounds" into a song I was singing to elicit the real laugh shown above.

Bad Timing

My latest health adventure involved a trip to Greensboro yesterday to have my first appointment here. When they asked me who referred me, I said, "Suzanne Somers" and they knew exactly what I was talking about. A year ago I was watching Larry King Live and Suzanne Somers was on talking about her new book Ageless, The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones. There was and still is lots of controversy out there about Hormone Replacement Therapy, if to use it, and if so, which kinds, and what authority does Chrissy Snow have on any of this anyway? Long story short, I bought the book, read it, saw where Dr. Webster of Greensboro got rave reviews and decided to give him a try. I didn't actually see him yesterday but will at my follow-up visit in 2 weeks. Although I spent over $200 on supplements and refills of progesterone, I came away feeling good about the overall course of treatment. The last place I went charged me $90 out of pocket per visit to eventually end up saying (after several years of sticking with them) that I would just have to deal with my problems, like migraines, because, really 2-3 full-blown migraines a month isn't that many. The new place accepts my insurance and charges my $25 co-pay and tells me that they will not give up on helping me feel better. Better already.

The bad timing part is that they suspect (and I agree) that I have a systemic yeast problem going on in my insides cause by a compromised immune system, stress, all of that--the stuff that's been going on for about 4 1/2 years now. To heal my intestines and clear this up, they've put me on an anti-yeast medication as well as a strict diet to follow while I'm on the medication. I may need to be on the strict diet for 3-4 months. After that, I can slowly add the good/bad stuff back into my diet if I want. The stuff I have to avoid from today on out is:

• All yeast foods including bread, rolls, pastries, bagels, biscuits, and buns.
  
• Things that have been fermented, aged, pickled, malted, risen and leftovers.
• Avoid alcohol including wine, beer, whiskey, brandy, gin, rum, vodka and other fermented liquors and liquors (that means no spirits all during the holidays including Irish coffee on Christmas morning!)
• Apple cider, root beer, soft drinks, coffee and teas of all types, including herb teas, except Organic Chinese or Japanese green teas.
• Mustard, ketchup, soy sauce, vinegar, pickles, commerically prepared mayo and salad dressing.
• All sugars and all sugar containing foods. Aspartame should also be avoided
• All cheese
• All processed foods
• All fried foods
• All fruit
  

What can I eat?

• beef, lamb pork, rabbit (I've missed my rabbit!), buffalo and other game
• poultry ONLY free range and ONLY if cooked to 180 degrees.
• lots of vegetables such as artichoke, broccoli, squash, greens, parsnips, turnips, zucchini, cabbage, garlic (THIS is good news), beets
• limited corn, sweet potatos, winter squash, white potato
• dried beans
• barley, qionoa, millet, teff (I don't even know what those last three ARE), oats, rice, rye, and amaranth (again...?)
• flax seed, pumpkin seed, sesame seed, sunflower seed
• walnuts, cashews, brazil nuts, hazel nuts
• extra virgin olive oil
• NO deep fried foods
• NO grocery store oils
  

Yes to unsalted dairy butter, homemade mayonnaise and dressings.

All of this because there are little elves from Weaver Street that have lost control while baking loaf after loaf after loaf of bread in my stomach. All this right before the holidays and my big trip to Asheville. I am going to become the weird lady who brings her own salad dressing and sits in the corner nibbling on nuts and seeds. All of this so I'll eventually become, I hope the weird lady who nibbles on nuts and seeds that FEELS WELL.

Getting in Trouble

Us Against Them

Why does pareting have to be so hard sometimes? There's definitely a battle of wills going on at our house with Johnny refusing to eat anything other than junkfood and Grace refusing to swallow her medication in some form or fashion. We were told by Grace's doctor that if she couldn't swallow the capsules, then we could empty the contents and mix with a bite of applesauce or two at breakfast. Well that didn't go down well (pun) with Grace because she doesn't ever eat applesauce at breakfast. She gagged and coughed and fought and buttoned her lips and wiggled so much the first day, that we moved to plan B the second. David actually got her to swallow the pills with a few sips of water and we were all, like, way to go, Grace, good job. And for several days she did fine swallowing her pills until one day she didn't. She started gagging and coughing and kicking and spitting til we were like is it even worth all this? She won't eat it in applesauce or yogurt so David had the bright idea of getting the jumbo marshmallows that our kids love so well, thumbing a little well into the middle, pouring the capsule powder in the middle of the well, sealing the top and letting her eat the marshmallow for breakfast in one happy gulp. Didn't work. This morning she knew the first marshmallow was the one with the medicine in it and instead of just eating it already she nibbled a bit here and there waiting, just waiting for the taste of yuk. She did taste the bitter taste of yuk, b/c she took too long. And the gagging and coughing and dry heaving started all over and I'm not sure what we're going to do tomorrow.

In the meantime, Johnny has gotten to where he just doesn't eat supper. It's ok with me if he refuses to eat, because I know he'll eat when he's hungry, but he doesn't eat supper and demands he gets dessert, like a marshmallow. No way, we told him. No supper, no marshmallow. Last night this went on for a l-o-n-g time. It reminded me of the book that David and I read for our two-person bookclub, The Corrections where this father tells his son he can't leave the table until he eats all of his greenbeans. The little boy eventually falls face first into the cold, rubbery green beans, after having sat there for five hours.

We didn't do that to Johnny but we did say, no supper, no marshmallow. We heard all the excuses and still didn't budge. Supper last night was pork barbeque on rolls with baby carrots and grapes. I mean, how hard was that? He ate a few grapes and asked if he could then have a marshmallow. I told him, no, that a growing boy like him needed some protein and he needed to eat some meat. He said he hated protein. Oh really? I reminded him that he liked cheese sticks and that they have lots of protein in them and that if he ate the cheese stick (which he eats like two of every day), he could have a marshmallow. Talk about stubborn. He would not eat the cheese stick. It sat, he whined, it sat, we didn't waver. After over an hour of seeing if we would crack, he told me the cheese stick was just "too long." Ok, I told him, and cut it up and only put one bite and a handful of grapes on his plate in order to get the marshmallow. He. would. not. eat. the. $%&*ng. bite. of. cheese. stick. I then gave him another choice, I said, that if he didn't want the cheese as his protein tonight, he could have a few pecans...and the grapes. He finally agreed to that, ate his stupid protein and got his stupid marshmallow. Later in bed I heard him whispering "sorry" to Santa. I told him that Santa wasn't the only one he should be saying sorry to.

Silver or Black?

Now that my first semester of the MSW program is over (well, almost over...one more exam) I'm really in the mood to celebrate. I got off to a really great start this semester and am encouraged b/c in many ways, this is supposed to be the hardest. It culminated on Friday when I turned in my term paper I'd be working on all...term. So that meant 14 weeks working on it and thinking about it and 14 weeks of phone calls with my dad who guided me along the research and writing process. He sensed my enthusiam all along and encouraged me to keep this particular project going and maybe turn it into a Master's Thesis or Dissertation. We'll see. Other classmates described turning in the paper kind of like giving birth (these were students who, of course, have never given birth). Some people had emotional cathartic reactions while others experienced "dreaming in primary sources." One boyfriend of a classmate said that he was having nightmares about turning in the paper late. I'm glad it's over and that I can get a break from writing academic papers for the next six weeks or so.

I've caught the holiday bug and have started cleaning and clearing my house in preparation for the decorating the kids and I are going to do. I'm also getting excited about the Grove Park Inn/Biltmore House/Asheville getaway Kate has invited me to. We're planning out what we're going to wear on both nights of rather formal festivities. I had settled on this glittery silvery top that I got on Talbots on sale but Kate talked me into wearing my killer red dress that I got last year (on sale). She's right, it looks the best. I said to her the other day that I want my hair and make-up to be perfect when I wear the red dress and she replied, "Then let me do your hair and make-up." Ouch, Kate, don't hold back. My current dilemma is deciding on precisely what shoes to wear and more generally what color of shoes to wear. There's the standard black as black goes with everything, but I have this urge to wear strappy sliver high-heeled sandals and basic sliver (or diamond) jewelry. What do y'all think? Silver or black?