live from sublurbia

Works for me Wednesday!

On a scale of Food Network Chefs, I’m somewhere in the middle between Sandra Lee and Rachael Ray. I use a lot of boxes or cans or pre-prepped ingredients, but I do pretty well when faced with fresh ingredients and a hungry crowd.

Recently, I’ve been coming into the “ends” of things at cooking time. The last of the mustard, the last of the pasta sauce, the last of this or that. Not enough to really “do” something, but enough to flavor something, maybe.

One of my favorite tricks for jars of pasta sauce has been adding the pasta to the jar during meal preparation. Once I’ve poured out the sauce I can, I take a big scoop of pasta and pour it into the jar. Next, I close the jar and shake it, using the pasta to capture drips and drabs of sauce, then pour the contents back into my serving dish.

But that still leaves quite a bit of sauce in the jar to finish up or rinse down the drain before the jar joins the rest of the recyclables. I happened to have planned ahead a tomato and lentil soup for the next day, so instead of rinsing the sauce down the drain, I added drinking water to the jar, shook the sauce and water to make a think flavored soup, and added it in place of the required water to the tomatoes and lentils ready to go. If I hadn’t had the soup ready to go, I could have frozen the liquid to use another day.

The same is probably true for the mustard I just rinsed away, too. Mix it with a little water or chicken broth, then add to a baked chicken dish or chicken crock meal. Spice it up with the last of the container, rather than washing all those flavors away.

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I finally nailed today what it is, fundamentally, about me wanting to commute to work on the train. Or bus (if there were one). It wouldn’t quite work for biking to work and doesn’t really work for driving, either. It’s the reason I’d hang out at the mall as a youngster … and enjoy, as much as one can with 100 pounds of luggage, two car seats, and two kids who tend to wander allow, the airport.

It’s not the hard plastic seats in 70’s era oranges, yellows, and tans. It’s not the rush to catch a train or bus that is uncharacteristically on time. Or the crush of three car loads of people on one car. It’s the sitting. And the waiting. And the watching. And the observing. People watching.

The wave of letting someone else, something else, carry me along doesn’t hurt. The illusion of the big city life fantasy from my child hood, of being “grown up” enough to ride by myself, figuring out the time tables and just going. But more than that, the people.

As a teen riding the bus system, I’d listen to the grown ups talking about their lives, their kids. I could people watch more closely than at the mall because the conversation carried along with us. People rode the bus or train regularly, with their friends and family, and it was just an extension of their day. On the train they do that to a lesser extent; they carry their loved ones in their pockets and talk using their cell phones. Continue Reading »

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Going to be picked using a random number generator at 9pm EDT Sunday evening. Stay tuned!

Comments on the entry post are now closed. No comments made after now (midnight Friday) will be in the drawing.

Thanks for playing! See you Sunday (I’ll update this post)!

Update 9pm EDT:

I ran a random number generator to pick between 1-113 using this generator: http://www.random.org/integers/

I checked the official time using this site:

http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5

And the winner is:

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

43

Timestamp: 2008-04-28 01:00:06 UTC

Which makes our winner (skipping dupe entries):

# CanCan
April 22nd, 2008 07:50 e
43

I’m all about going green! If I can go green and have bling at the same time, I’ll be a very happy mama!

CanCan, you’ll be getting an email from me this week to get your shipping address.

Congrats and thanks to everyone for stopping in!

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My friend Cal recently spied a tree that helped him really put together the thought that it takes energy to shed leaves. He’d observed a branch that had broken and lodged in the tree, noted the leaves browned, but were not shed though other branches, still alive, had shed their leaves in preparation for Winter. (They get seasons up there.)

These unseasonably mild winters are affecting us, and have for a while. There is no denying changes are going on, but if the changes are irreversible in a way, or something we shouldn’t be reversing, or part of a cycle that won’t be stopped even if we all do shrink our carbon/waste/unsustainability footprints.

Here I have a lovely day around me. The wind is blowing, we’ll have a mild shower to parch the drought of our still unseasonably dry dry season, I hear birds and am attacked by the tree pollen, and my feet crush through fresh fallen dry leaves. It’s Sprawl. Spring and Fall. Things are blooming and the trees are independently giving up on waiting for the Autumn signals to drop their leaves and take a sleep. It’s Sprawl in South Florida.

Then again, so is this:

But, in between the piles of sprawl, my little garden is coming back through it all. Yay!

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I had my first taste of Rice-A-Roni® in college (oh those wild, experimental days of youth!). It was pretty good but a bit pricey for my budget at 59 cents a box. Now it’s 1.39 a box, and I don’t really need to get 31% of my daily intake of sodium from a simple side dish.

But I also need something ready to go; RaR is pretty quick. I decided to trade quick in for planned-ahead, did a search, and finally found a way to cook rice in a crock pot. I’d tried just guessing on my own or following random recipes online, but these experiments usually failed quite mushily. But I found a working one here. The blogger decided to make use of her crock pot every single day this year, and had just done white rice.

I took the recipe and ran with it, making rice pretty well a couple of times before venturing into Spanish Rice (like she did, just last week!). Once I was sure I had the crock pot part down, I worked on combining the two recipes, and it worked!

CrockPot Spanish Rice

*

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[Think Of A Something Thursday!]

I had a plan when it came to breast feeding and traveling for business. Don’t.

It didn’t quite work out that way, though, as an unexpected trip came my way before my youngest was on cow milk in any substantial amount.

My supply has always been sporadic at best, and she wasn’t helping the situation by refusing formula. I kept up as best I could for as long as I could, but was relieved when she finally took to solid foods. Even then, I pumped at work and home, and slowly built a little freezer stash.

Once I found out I’d be traveling in the middle of the transition to more cow milk, I burned through my stash as quickly as possible and started up a new one. Continue Reading »

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I’ve been paging through some of my old entries and it seems a lot of my pictures have gone missing. And while this is a pretty layout, it’s difficult to go back and forth between entries. In the short term, I’m changing to a different theme that allows you to search more easily.

In the long term, say, now through May, I’ll go through and move to a new system (still WordPress) but with the ability to add more options and themes. I’d like to allow OpenID posting since that seems to be all the rage, and I’ve got a few more surprises in store for you (never fear, Milehimama , not too drastic!).

So there might be a few broken links yet, a few oddities here and there, but it’s just a shedding of one skin and moving into a new phase. Or maybe just looking for a new, larger shell. Meantime, kick back, stay a while, and party on. Don’t forget to sign up for my carnival give-away, too!

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I don’t know how the conversation started, but I know how it ended.

“I don’t eat animals*.”

Sure you do, honey. Chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, meatballs. Those are from animals.

“Really?”

Yes.

“Are we talking animal crackers here?”

No, dear, real animals.

“Are you sure?”

I don’t remember much of the rest of it but I was laughing too hard internally to pursue it further with a straight face; I changed the subject to something else entirely, instead.

_{*This from the kid that used to make clucking noises as chicken tenders moved from plate to mouth}

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Works for me Wednesday!

Once the office work day ends, another set of races begin. Get the kids. Supervise homework while dinner cooks. Cool food enough to serve hungry children. Try not to scorch their little taste buds. Actually manage to serve the adults warm food at the same time.

For a while, I simply mixed frozen veggies into each serving of kid food, then tossed the plated meals in the refrigerator for a few moments. Mixed results, mostly good, until it was time to rotate out the hurricane stocks of canned veggies. At the same time, I realized the kids were ready for actual plates and bowls made of glass instead of plastic, current data on BPA aside. So I borrowed a trick from the hub: keep the plates and bowls cold, using the refrigerator.

This time, I put the empty bowls and plates in the chiller. Then I started dinner. By the time the meal was cooked, the dishes were rather cool. I pulled the dishes, added hot food, popped them back into the fridge, and waited a shorter amount of time than I had with frozen veggies or room-temperature plates. As the kid meals continued the cooling process, I plated the adult food as usual, and everyone could sit down at the same time to meals served at their desired temperature.

The idea hit me like a bolt of lightning as I pulled a dish of leftovers out of the fridge for re-heating. The heat just transfers to the dish, glass or plastic. If you start with a cold dish, the temperatures balance out more quickly. Now if only I could convince a few restaurants to do this with the perennial kids’ favorites such as the scalding-hot mac-n-cheese meals or spaghetti … I guess that’s what large tables and pocket book treasures are for.

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PS, happy Earth Day.

But when did it turn into earth week? Are we going to see countdown signs for Earth Day and Arbor Day? Mixing it with Mother’s Day? “Tell mom you love her with the gift of planting 100 seedlings in former Amazon rainforest.” Or fashion? “Get this years hot new reusable bag and repurposed shoes!”

On the one hand = spreading the radical idea of buying less crap, keeping it for longer than a millibleen, and recycling our reduced consumption is good. On the other hand, the first “R” is reduce, too. We don’t need to go buy six million new things. And some of the ideas are better than others: ending the distribution and use of plastic shopping bags at some stores, or the suspect advice to “sweep fertilizer off of the driveway”.

Maybe I’m biased, but that advice from Scott’s smells more of greenwashing to me. “Hey, look, we have an environmental campaign!” Or you could use fertilizers (not from Scott) that are more environmentally friendly in the first place.

Then again, maybe we need a little ammonium phosphate in the water supply to offset all the prozac in the water.

But whether you celebrate Earth Day, Week, Month, or life, Happy Earth Day! I’ve been swamped at work and home lately and haven’t had a change to give my diapers a good line dry in ages, so I snapped a shot of a couple that needed a little sun the other day. I’m a bit wistful about it, as this is probably the last diaper line I’ll post on Earth Day. This time next year I expect we’ll be diaper-free. Ah well, more room on my line for other things!

We’ll be spending/celebrating tonight eating some green spinach tortilla wraps I prepared last night, along with snacky foods, out back on a picnic blanket. Should keep the kids happy while I tend the weeds without Monsanto’s help.

How did you/ will you celebrate this year?

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