A woman,
black severe hair, closely cropped,
Pale skin, red, red lips, arching dramatic eyebrows,
Dressed all in black,
Carrying a huge shopping bag with a cartoonish vampire face on it,
Getting out of a Red Cross Mini Van,
“Give Blood!” it said.
I hate to admit it, but I have become sort of house-wifey in some ways. Cooking is one example. In general, I love to cook, and get all sorts of ideas from wandering the aisles of the grocery store. I also LOVE to grocery shop (and I mean that!), because I like food and feel creative looking at the endless possibilities of things to make. It is fun to go out to eat, but only because I like to taste things and think about what is in them in the hopes of replicating that recipe at home.
As much as I love to cook, I don’t care for following recipes. I am distressed by food waste,(hence the compost, hence the chickens, hence the less packaging), and I try to manage our household to make the most use out of what we have. I am not the type to go out and shop for specific things for just one recipe. I struggle with recipes that tell you to use a quarter cup of onions when you are going to end up cutting the whole onion. And no way am I using just half the can of tomatoes! What will happen to the other half of that can? In general, I make vast quantities of food, often freezing the left overs for another day or tweaking the ingredients. In our house you find squash and chard for dinner day one, beef burritos day two, and squash, beef & chard enchiladas day three.
Here is a good website on trying to avoid food waste.
The truth is that I sort of hate following directions anyway, so recipes and cookbooks are used mostly as loose recommendations around here. Even so, I still occasionally need a loose recommendation just to keep cooking foods that are interesting and to break out of my cuisine rut. Here is a “loose recommendation” that turned out SOOOOO GOOD, even with me making it sort of following the recipe! The kids loved it, it is pretty healthy, and I had most of the ingredients (and the ones that I didn’t have were easily substituted out). I recommend it highly, especially served with rice. Super good.
West African Peanut Soup
Ingredients:
1 cup cooked, skinless, chicken breast, diced
2/3 cup onion, diced
1 1/2 teaspoons garlic, minced
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
3 cups reduced sodium, fat free chicken broth
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can stewed tomatoes
1/2 cup reduced-fat peanut butter
Directions:
1. In a large pot, sauté onion in sesame oil until translucent; add garlic
and chicken and stir to heat through.
2. Add seasonings and sauté 1 minute longer.
3. Add broth, paste, tomatoes, and peanut butter. Stir until well
combined.
4. Heat over medium heat until hot but not boiling.
5. Serve immediately.
6. Refrigerate leftovers within 2-3 hours.
This is up above Brad’s parents’ place in Grand Ronde. I think it is beautiful. Eerie, but beautiful.
There is a dirt road through the woods and when you run down the hill, the ground is soft and cushiony with fir needles. I took this picture in the dark, looking back up the hill at where the light shines through. The kids love to race down the hill into the darkness. I do too, that is why it is the best.
I know, I know… how can a tree be a man? Trees are not feminine or masculine (so there French, Italian and Spanish!), they just ARE. And yet, this year just before Christmas, Francis, Inez and I discovered this kind of cool place and saw our very first man-tree.
The special place was Portland’s Queen Anne Victorian Mansion. It was all lit up for Christmas, and for a measly $3 we could stroll through it and check out all sorts of lights and trees and such. I wasn’t interested much in lights and trees, but I was interested in the first house in Portland to have running water and electric lights. In 1884, David Cole thought it might make a nice wedding present for his new bride, Amanda Boone, Daniel Boone’s granddaughter (hey Brad, how come I never got a house with running water and electric lights for my wedding?—Oh wait, I did. Thanks honey!). The house is full of Povey stained glass and has most all woodwork still intact. David Cole was a millwright, so all the treadles and do-dads and wooden stuff that I forgot the names of, was all made in his mills. Most interesting of all, the house was on the Columbia river before the river was dammed above Portland and MOVED for God’s sake. That is ridiculous how a house could be on a hill above a river in 1884 and just 126 years later sits on a neglected hillside overlooking a railroad track, ugly Columbia Boulevard, and an abandoned sugar mill. Where is the river? Oh, a mile or so away….
Anyway, Man-tree. Man-tree.
So, there were 10 trees in the house which means that there was a Christmas tree in almost every room (some had two!). In the mass of trees we saw one upside down tree and many, many themed trees. In David Cole’s study, we saw the head of a boar, the head of an elk, a stuffed pheasant, and this:
Isn’t that a man-tree? It screams out, “I’m gonna’ grab this bird and kill it with my bare hands, ripping its feathers from its body to adorn a Christmas tree in my manly study!”
And so, the Man-Tree is also THE BEST, but in a different way, I do admit.
Okay, maybe it isn’t technically the BEST, but I think it is pretty good.
Portland area transportation gurus have a new fancy light rail train, and our son freaks out every time he sees it go by:
Now, have you ever spent time around a 2, 3, or 4 year old? What do they like? If you answered, “Trains!” you are absolutely right. Around Christmastime, our son told us that what he really wanted for Christmas was a “fancy train”. Thinking that surely a well-run city transportation system like Tri-met would have plenty of merch, (at least a t-shirt for God’s sake!), we hit their website and even walked into their office in downtown Portland.
“Do you have any toy trains?” my husband asked.
“Toy whats?” they responded.
“Trains. Like the wooden kind that can go with Brio or Thomas sets.” They looked at him blankly. ”Okay, maybe a poster?” he queried. They offered a cardboard bus, but that was the best they could do.
So what do we do for the boy who just wanted a fancy train for Christmas? We painted one.
It certainly wasn’t perfect (I am not a master painter by any means), but it captured the main idea.
Come on Tri-Met! Wake up! You need wooden toy trains and you need them fast. Every indulgent bohemian bourgeois “car free” parent in the metro area would snatch one of these suckers up and they would consider $20 a bargain. It is the BEST idea. Come on already!
I as I stated previously, our house is cold. Our house has also adopted a very asian custom of shoes off at the door, which keeps the whole place a lot cleaner what with the chicken shit all over the back yard and the muddiness of our special Oregon locale. I never liked to take my shoes off while growing up– it just seemed too cold– but it occurred to me as an adult that this was because I never had any slippers. Now I have slippers and believe it or not, they are really important to me. I spend most of the day in them as a matter of fact (Yes, I am working, but you can do a lot wearing slippers!).
I am a lucky, lucky girl. I have not one, but TWO sources for homemade slippers, and they are both right here in my fam-damily! Source one is my lovely and very talented mother-in-law, Sue. She knits up these cute, colorful little things with pom poms on the toes. She is a big football fan, so she has been known to knit in school colors. Want a pair? Too bad. Are you her daughter-in-law? I didn’t think so.
Source two is my very own auntie Therese who knits and crochets and felts and does pretty much any old thing with yarn. She is an avid recycler of art supplies and she has mastered the art of buying up wool sweaters from Value Village, making them into ingenious things and shrinking the hell out of them so that they are nearly air tight! I got a pair of her slippers in the Christmas exchange, and I tell you, I love them. The felting technique makes them super hardy, sort of thick but still flexible. This is the sort of thing that you can curl up under a blanket in and never feel weird that you are still wearing your slippers. They sort of hug your toes. I tell you— I love ‘em! She has an Etsy site too if you care to check it out. I think she is sort of giving things away, but what the hell— that is her prerogative! And for this, I grant homemade slippers as one of THE BEST!
This last year on the day before Christmas, Brad and I took a sunny (and cold!) walk up behind his parents’ property onto what is now the Grand Ronde Tribal Pow wow grounds. Pow wows in my childhood had always happened on the grounds nearer to where the medical center now is. I am not sure why they moved to this new spot, but it certainly is more lovely, tucked up against the hills and spotted with tiny creeks emptying into Agency Creek. I had driven past the new grounds, but never walked through, (and I haven’t been to a pow wow in at least 10 years).
Looking up, we saw this at the edge of the woods:
It looked like a giant bird house. Being a snoopy sort of person, and seeing not a soul around for miles, I ran up and hopped inside.
There I found a breath-taking place, a magical place, a place that spoke in a loud, clear voice right into my core.
The Grand Ronde Tribe opened their plankhouse in November of this last year to celebrate the anniversary of the restoration of the tribe, (maybe the only decent thing that happened under the Reagan administration).
You know how places sort of affect you physically? How some places could hold no evil or fear? How some places make you fly right out of your own brain and body and settle somewhere above yourself? That is how I felt about this building, about walking through this space. I tiptoed through it breathlessly, touching a support beam here, a massive wall there. The tribe has truly created a thing of beauty. Many blessings on all those who enter this gorgeous building to sing, dance and be together. It is the best place.
Any date night is a good date night.
This year I recognized that three kids was really going to put me over the top–”The top” being a place that was definitely not good to be. Hence, I took out an “ad” in the neighborhood newsletter asking for babysitter contacts. Enter Alexandria. At first, her text-message misspellings and OH-MY-GOSH enthusiasm had me worried. In my 37 year old exhaustion, I cynically could not believe that anyone could “really, really love kids!!!!!!!” (no exclamation points added). But once I met her and listened to her (and more importantly watched her), I have become a believer. She is not as well read, but she is perhaps a better parent than me, even at 17. She is earnest, eager to do a good job, and she really does love kids. She is dependable, has an excellent memory for times to do things, sticks by our rules, and is firm. She is also fun. The kids love her. And did I mention? She is 17 so she is affordable.
Now Brad and I have bi-monthly date nights. We were going out once a week, but all those beers and desserts added up so we’re now switching to every other week. I jump on the train and meet him downtown where we check out happy hours, chat uninterrupted by youthful questions and complaints (!), look at books at Powells and every now and then catch a movie at Livingroom Theaters. It is THE BEST! I highly recommend it for those who want to stay married.
Brad looking out the window on the train---I know he doesn't look happy, but he is because we are on a date night.
I learned a lot about chickens this year, but perhaps the best thing I learned that I will put to use in the future is how to integrate new chickens into a home flock.
First of all, there are chicken psychologists out there who will tell you all about their special methods for integrating new birds with minimal trauma. It involves quarantining the bird, holding the bird a lot, bonding with the bird, and then introducing slowly visually before the other birds have a chance to peck the new bird’s guts out. Meanwhile you, the owner, stand near the new bird and say “NO!” firmly whenever another bird tries to flay it. You are suppose to be like the head bird or something and your word goes. That is bullshit. Or at least, I tried that and it didn’t seem to work so great. My new bird at this time last year, Hildy, was quickly cowed and attacked and pecked so much that she was featherless across her back most of last year. Here is what I did wrong.
First of all, I only introduced one bird at a time. Mistake. One new bird quickly becomes an obvious target for EVERYONE ELSE. Because the old birds are not so bright, it is much better to introduce 3 or so birds to them so that they can not easily distinguish whom to jump. It is also much more exhausting for them to try to attack every newcomer when there are just so many of them!
Last year I introduced my one bird into the henhouse that everyone was comfortable in. They already knew their roosting spots and weren’t eager to shove over for a newcomer. This year, I took the hens out of their old spot and shoved them into their new house at the same time as I introduce the four new hens. Everyone was bewildered! No one could get up the focus or presence of mind to attack anyone else! If I had not been moving the hens anyway, I could have accomplished the same thing by putting the hens somewhere weird for a night and half a day (like our shed) before reintroducing them to their hen house. This is sort of a solitary confinement thing, and could also be accomplished by separating the hens out into cardboard boxes for the night— each bird thinks they are out of the flock and therefore doesn’t really know their place/is ready to reestablish pecking order. Or maybe put them in the weird spot, lock them out of the chicken run for the day while the new hens roamed around in there and then let them go back in at twilight while the new hens were already down to roost. Ah hah! Chicken psychology.
Birds of a feather do sort of flock together. Our old hens hang out near each other while the new ones prefer each other’s company, but our new hens and old hens all seem to be getting along. No one is missing feathers or looking harassed like Hildy was last year. Thus, my new methods for chicken introduction and Hildy with her new feathers makes the list for THE BEST!
We are considering having our walls and attic insulated. It seems like a good idea. It has been difficult for me to get it into my cold-numbed brain that this is a good use of remodeling funds. It’s tough you see, as I am all about aesthetics and the attic and walls are not going to LOOK any better. Remodeling stuff should make it pretty and the attic is never going to be a place to gaze upon. That being said, our house could use a little weatherizing. It is more comfortable every year as we figure out how to heat it more efficiently and retain that heat, but it is still sort of cold for old people and anyone without a layer of protective fat.
When I am cold, I simply retreat to the bathroom and fill a bath full of scalding hot water. I like it hot enough so that my forehead is actually sweating, hot enough so that when I am done with the bath, my naked form is invisible walking out of the bathroom because my body is steaming. When I get out, I like to carry the heat for another few hours, otherwise, what is the point?
Obviously because it is cold around here even with my protective fat layer, I need to take more baths than any lack of cleanliness might warrant. I find purpose in this activity though with this jar of loveliness:
These are bath bombs from Lush and I love them. It is decadent, I know, but it gives me great joy. You toss these bath bombs in the tub and they go crazy fizzing and swirling around. It is truly a miracle of baking soda. Now obviously I can not use one of these suckers every time I take a bath, but when I am particularly cold or tired or just generally feeling sorry for myself, they work wonders. And if I feel cheapo-stingy, I just put the bath bomb in for a minute or so and then fish it out to dry out and use for another bath on another day. I learned quickly to put these up out of ‘Nez reach as the kid quite efficiently threw two into a bath (one in each fist!) while I was otherwise engaged on the toilet. I highly recommend the bath bomb, and that is why it is THE BEST!