live from sublurbia

The six-year-old birthday girl screams as a doll that is whole only from the waist up is removed from a birthday cake, sobbing and hiccuping, trying to be understood by adults trying hard to stifle their laughter.

I do remember it being a lovely cake. Lovely. A wonderful gesture by one of the Aunt Mommies in my family. Yellow star-shape frosting squirts decorating a lovely full hoop-style skirt. Barbie’s torso sticking out of the top, smiling her open-mouthed smile as if everything is fine, that she doesn’t mind us feasting upon her lovely limbs and ankle-length finery.

“Wow,” I probably thought. “A Barbie doll of my own! With all her parts!” I did ‘own’ a few dolls of her style, hand me downs with their own enormous trunk of inflatable furniture. These were shared with a sister and several cousins; all their finery and furnishings were quite loved. The one true Mattel brand Barbie doll we did own was shy a hand; the second gone somewhere in the yard after a dog took her as a chew toy for a while.

I apparently got over it the butchered Barbie doll, though I don’t remember tucking her in my little bag after the party. Mom says that they hid what was left of her away and distracted me with other things. That Aunt Mommy had been making those style cakes for years, and I was her first terrified recipient. From then on she made the cakes using whole Barbie dolls instead of refugees from Sid’s bedroom.

The next winter, I did get my own new Barbie doll from that side of the family. She came complete with inedible yellow dress and full, bendable legs and special “shampoo” that let me set her hair straight or curly (until it ran out and she was stuck in curly mode forever).

Now adays, picking cakes for my own kids, I see that birthday cakes come from the store bakery with fully-functioning removable toys as part of the decor. I haven’t asked about Barbie-dress cakes yet; but I’ll make sure she’s a whole gal when I do.

My thanks to Wife and Mommy for reminding me of this story with her post about what is possibly one of the worst cakes ever from the Cake Wrecks blog.

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So composting in the tumbler is going well. All the husks of summer corn and nut shells from various trips are browning my overly green bin nicely.

But the darn thing still smells funny. Not rotting or putrid from too many greens or enthusiastic spinning, and not yet the nice earthy smell my worms churn out.

In a word, popcorn. The bin, at last check, smelled like freshly popped microwave popcorn. A little corny and a hint of oily burn you don’t get from air or stove and oil popped corn.

I’ve asked a couple of gardeners and done searches online. Nothing. Ideas, anyone?

Other than that, a quiet summer in the garden. A few veggies, no fruits of my own, but much bounty in the gardens I’ve been touring as I spend a few days with friends. I’m coming back full if ideas for expansion and more gummy edibles.

Hope your summer gardens are growing well.

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I like to fiddle with cooking. Just to tweak it or improve it, or cut out foods we’re not fond of or don’t have in the house. And I don’t have the eleventy million spices listed in most cookbooks. So I’m teaching myself as I go; which flavors go with the usual suspects from our garden and pantry.

Recently I found myself with a couple of pounds of left over squash and not a lot of other fresh foods in the house. We were in that “no shopping” time before and after a traveling week, so I flipped through Bowl Food to figure out how to use up the squash for that night’s dinner (the rest I planned to toss into a lentil stew).

Inspired by squash risotto, I fried onions and squash in curry powder and a drip of oil. I brought water to a boil, and added cous-cous (and a chicken bullion cube) to the pot. I turned the stove off, removed the pot from heat (glass top + cast iron = keeps cooking even when off), added canned chicken, and let it sit, covered for 5 minutes.

The next night, more squash, plus an onion and canned tomatoes and garbanzo beans were mixed with a store-bought packet of lentils and seasoning. I’ve got a bit of a taste now of what the store’s spices are, so I can make my own next time around.

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I know that retail is hurting. Small boutique shops closing around my neighborhoods, incredible sales online with discounts, free shipping, anything to get us into (or mostly back into) the stores and buying again. I do shop locally when I can or it makes sense - the local shoe store didn’t have anything wide enough for me the last three times I’ve checked. They’re still around, but a few other stores aren’t.

But when it comes to other things, it’s easier and more economical for me to click it and ship it. And continue doing so as I get online offers and reminders. Some of the offers are very targeted: they’re collecting data on me, and using it. My habits, my desires, my window shopping.

Amazon makes recommendations to me (Usually pretty dumb ones - if I bought a microfiber gym towel for a super duper discount, why am I going to care about a 5% discount on a smaller, similar one? I have a towel now, thanks!) and adjust what they offer based on what I’ve bought or looked at. They do this for all of their users, and I’ve found it useful enough that I don’t mind this creepy minimal spying anymore. The small privacy I’ve given up there has paid for itself in both discounts and time saved not driving out to a big store to get a case of wipes and then getting sucked into the “as long as I’m here” trap.

Other retailers do it, too, but less subtly than Amazon. I’ve been trying out backpacks and diaper bags and wallets and purses as I shift towards carrying a lighter load on the train riding with the kid every day. I may only work a few miles from the ocean, but I am slowly coming to the realization that I don’t need to carry a tsunami-ready jump pack at all times. I could use a smaller purse, too. The purse that replaced the evil bag (it killed my camera and ate my wallet last fall) is just too big for light, daily, commuter train use.

So imagine my surprise when this showed up in my inbox:

Dear [aunt mommy],

We noticed that you left items like the Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case in your shopping cart at eBags. Come back and order this great product and we will take 15% off your eBags purchase*. Now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, why not buy it today!

See the items left in my cart now

If you’re still not sure, please take some time to browse eBags customer reviews for the Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case or one of our other 30,000 products onsite.

Kind of funny that I’m shopping for privacy equipment and the shopping cart wants to know why I hesitated pulling the trigger on the purchase. I’m sure the NSA will be happy to know I went with a less secure plain leather wallet instead.

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So I had a night out with the girls recently. Partying down on Miami Beach, us mild-aged gals looking for some variety of food and scenery. Despite getting a little lost a couple of times in downtown Miami (putting my love of public transportation in perspective when I realized I work banker’s hours and normally wouldn’t have to stand around at 11pm at night waiting for the last bus), it was a blast.

We were looking for Cuban food but ended up at a great little restaurant named Tap Tap. Sat out on the porch, and tried a little bit of everything: A goat stew, a roasted chicken, and some grilled conch. Yumm. One of the reviews for the restaurant calls it great and cheap but I must have a skewed view of cheap; it was still decent pricing for a delicious meal.

Got a few pictures walking around looking for food, too: a great fishy building, and a lot of for sale signs. The buildings are being kept up well, despite the economic downturn and property bubble implosion. Nice to get out and about with the ladies, too. I’ll have to remember Tap Tap next time we’re in the area (and keep looking for Cuban @ Miami Beach, too). The next day’s activity plan included hitting up the Maurice Gibb Memorial; if I’d realized at the time we were so close I would have joined them for that outing as well. Maybe next time.

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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 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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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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Though I’d be hard-pressed to figure out what “good” would be in this case.

I seem to have a strange power: killing off decent Mexican/Spanish restaurants. All I have to do is show up and like the food. That’s all it takes. Within a couple of months, the menu has gone bland to cater to the blander tastes of my neighbors, or they decide changing the grease in the kitchen is a very bad idea and vow to never change it again.

Or worse, they shut down completely. One was a short drive from the house, closer towards our downtown area. A decent variety on the menu, salsa that had more than bell peppers and vinegar, and live music some nights.

Another was an even shorter drive; tucked in the back corner of a strip mall down the street, it was flanked by a couple of diners that specialized in such varied tastes as wiener schnitzel and Thai cuisine. We’d ducked in there one day that we had off (the kids didn’t) and found the food filling and fresh, reminiscent of our “southwest” trip a few years back. I decided it was worth telling friends and family about, but on our next excursion there was a small sign on the door indicating the restaurant had closed. A month later, the sign is a bit weather-worn, but shows no sign of coming down to open again anytime soon.

So tonight I’m making it myself. Using my favorite quick way of cooking up the corn tortillas (6 to a cookie sheet, spritzed with cooking oil, and baked in the oven 5 min @350), we’re having plain tacos tonight. But with the dearth of authentic restaurants in a 15 mile radius, I’m going to have to crack the lid on the grill and roast my own chiles for a batch of salsa. There’s the buzzer. Time to pull the tortillas and toss the spanish rice I crocked up yesterday in to warm up as the oven cools.

Anyone else with this strange power? Are you a killer of healthy plants? Buyer of doomed product lines (I so miss Dulce M & Ms)?

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