weekend haze

Yesterday was the Queen's birthday so Elphine made an Italian Apple Cake again. She had to double the recipe because of adding an awful lot of baking powder. Also Matt and I argued vehemently about how much sugar she should put in. This morning, as I lay wondering why anyone was up and what horror would arise should I open my eyes, Matt put my tea tray down next to me and said, 'Remember the Bert and Ernie about the salt? That's such an important lesson--the amount of sugar you prefer isn't the same as what everyone else does.'

On Friday, Marigold ripped out the only daffodils that had bloomed in my back garden. Was so annoyed with her. She sticks out her lower lip really far when she's done something terrible, like she's the one that's been hurt.

She puts on a huge big dress every day and says its her favorite. All of them, we guess, are her favorite.

On Sunday in the parish hall Marigold and Fatty Lumpkin gathered with their favorite baby friend to eat a lot of food and have a Little Girl's Party. This scene really only needs a large Paddington sitting in the cake to be perfect.

he lives, we seem to still be living

It is April, as some of you might have noticed, and I am sitting in my bed covered by two large quilts and holding a warm mug against my mouth waiting for it, my mouth, to slowly thaw, or whatever the word is. There are stupid ugly snow flakes dithering their way down out of the ugly gray sky. (I like to keep track of the weather, for future reference, so when my children look back at this moment they will know exactly what kind of day it was. That Kind of Day.)

Earlier this morning, having dressed myself up in red striped socks, soft comfortable jeans, a thick sweater and the armor of anxiety, I presented myself precisely at 9:50 to the fancy and expensive specislist dentist at the top of that hill in Binghamton with the expansive view and capacious cemetery. There, for two hours, I fixed my internal eye on Jesus and survived my first, and it seems, probably not last, root canal.

Knowing that I have a surprising ability to gag and more than a goodly share of anxiety, my own new regular dentist had called ahead for a large tank of nitrous, or, as they so funnily call it, 'laughing gas'. I lay back and breathed heavily waiting for all my troubles to melt away. Well, after a few minutes, I did feel very drunk, a sensation I not only do not approve of but also do not enjoy (not, of course, that I would know) but there was no melting away of anything. The hysterical woman on CNN persisted through any sense of relaxation (it must be hard, keeping the hysteria alive, hour after hour, in this case about Michael Jackson--really?--and some poor basketball coach who said something unpardonable which they wouldn't say on TV), and then the various injections killed the rest of it off after that. As they lowered my head towards the floor and started chipping and whacking away, the grief of the suffering of the cross--that our Lord lay and died, that his friends were similarly tortured--wafted over me more powerfully than any so called 'laughing gas' and I eventually gave myself up to sorrow and pain and lay there crying.

'Are you ok?' The begloved and persistent nurse kept asking, 'Are you ok?'. Oh sure, I'm fine, I thought, nodding cheerfully, I feel like I'm drowning and choking and definitely dying, but otherwise fine. When she wasn't asking how I was, she was telling me to swallow, something I couldn't manage to properly do.

So to all the people who told me this week that they fell asleep during their root canals....well, I
I don't really have anything to say. Please don't try to commiserate with me about it or I might say something unbecoming of my station and situation in life.

As I write this the children are eating vats of candy and fighting over some Xbox game. Elphine is baking an Italian apple cake. She has only broken one tea cup saucer and received one slight burn in the process of making everyone fried eggs for lunch. I didn't want her to make fried eggs, but she took advantage of my emotional weakness to bash me into letting her have a try. So also with the baking of a complicated cake. For some reason, the baby is stark naked and covered with chocolate. I dressed her twice before I went away this morning.

Here they all are in their Easter Finery.

Here is Strawberry Jello concocted by Alouicious for Easter Dinner. None of us had made jello before, let alone in any kind of mold, so we were all impressed.

And here is Plum Pie, by Elphine, not in the sun, obviously, because there hasn't been any sun for weeks, but it was for everyone.

And Eggs, ready to be hidden.

Everyone ready to hunt eggs. No pictures of them hunting because no one held still for even one second.

Marigold, hopped up on sugar.

And here is The Table, before the children had a go at it.

Flowers of the altar made their way home with us. Thank you Altar Guild!

So, here we are, lying back in a house awash in Easter Bunny grass (stupid Easter Bunny), a couple of baseball practices to force us out of bed, teeth perhaps on the mend, a few hundred piles of clothes to wash, waiting for Elphine's cake to be a triumph. Another season of penitence gives way to joy, exhaustion into rest, snow into...oh never mind.

early adventures in sourdough

Being rather a creature of habit it takes an act of God, or the valiant shoving of a friend (not that those are necessarily different) to get me to do new or different things. In this case I have been making bread in exactly the same way for about 14 years--the precise way my dad showed me when I was at the point of wanting to make bread. Well, I mean, of course, I've made adjustments--mainly on the size of the loaves and how often I make it and how lazy I'm being. So basically I have had no interest in the no rise excitement, even though it would mean buying new kitchen equipment, or any other excitement that requires thought and change.

But my friend arranged herself comfortably in my living room and bestowed something that looked like this

upon me.
And so what could I do but make a big fat chart of when to add flour and water and when to add salt and when to start the whole process all over again and spend the week fussing over it.

And do you know? Not only is it not too hard, it feels all pioneering and all grid-fail-exciting. And it's been a great providential blessing because I am, as Marigold would say, Actually all out of My Own Yeast. So there you are. An Adventure, as it were. Maybe later I'll post about how I've already been cheating, but don't get too hopeful. I'll probably just do something else.

election eating

For Breakfast: Cinnamon Rolls that feel healthy because of being whole wheat but not really healthy because of all the butter and sugar. The children will eat them. Matt will eat a carefully measured cup of Fiber One (blech) and I will eat an egg.

For Lunch: Whatever. Who cares about lunch on election day.

For Dinner: Fondue as a nod backwards to Reformation Day. This year, the Swiss Reformation. Last year was the German Reformation (Sausages and Beer). Next year oughta be the English Reformation. What would that be? Steak and Kidney Pie? Trifle? I have a year to consider.

Anyway, Fondue. Really easy. Two pounds of cheese (Emmental, Gruyere, etc. etc.) grated and dusted with flour. Fondue pot rubbed with a garlic. A bunch of white wine. A bay leaf. Heat the wine and add the cheese in handfuls and attentively stir it as it melts. Don't let it clump together on the bottom and burn. Gather in Lots of Bread to dip in the cheese. But, a la Asterix, if you drop your bread in the pot, you have to be thrown into Lake Geneva with a millstone around your feet. Am I remembering that correctly?

And then Nigella's Chocolate Pots. Times 4: 3 bags Godiva dark chocolate chips, 2 cups heavy cream, 1 1/3 cups whole milk, splash vanilla, brandy or something, melted together and then blended and then 4 eggs tempered and added to the hot milk chocolate. Don't burn it like I did tonight! Pour it all into little cups and stuff them in the fridge to wait for the moment you realize, as you're watching the returns, that what you really needed was not more cheese, nor more wine, but a serious amount of chocolate to see you through the difficult times.

les crepes

Matt needs to buy me a new crepe pan, but in the meantime, I'm making do as best I can. We don't really call these 'crepes', we call them 'fancy pancakes'. Alouicious always has them for his birthday. If you want to quadruple this recipe, and why wouldn't you, you need
8 eggs
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
2 cups sifted flour
1 cup water
2 cups milk
a large pinch of salt
don't bother with any sugar because then you can't take them right out of the pan and rip off a hunk of steaming pork, wrap it in the fancy pancake, dip the pancake in the saucepan of gravy and eat it right there when nobody is looking, and that would be a real miss for you.
While you're flipping your crepes in your good crepe pan, using plenty of butter in between each, drinking a glass of wine, and slewing batter everywhere because you haven't positioned all your utensils correctly, you can cook two apples into a pulp with more of that Manzanilla that you now always have on hand because it goes so well with everything, again, with no sugar because the apples are perfect without it.
Then you roll each crepe with a dollop of apple and a dollop of mascarpone and stuff them into a baking dish so that everyone at least will get two each, although more is better because there will be a real sense of real loss when they were all completely gone. Drizzle Lyles Golden Syrup generously all over the top and let them warm in a 275 degree oven for 20 minutes. Then spread a whole lot more mascarpone over the top as if it were butter and eat them, either with your hands, or with a spoon, or with a fork, or, as Marigold did, with chopsticks. Of course, more apple ladled over the top would be delicious, if you happen to think of it.

pie or cobbler or whatever

I started out thinking I'd make apple dumplings but as I went on I got lazier and more pressed for time. After peeling and coring three apples, when they wouldn't fit nicely in my pan I lost my temper and sliced them up. By which point it was supper time and my dessert making moment had essentially vanished so I pivoted towards a pie crust (2 cups flour, 2 sticks butter crumbled together) using milk instead of water for binding, instead of making that complicated dumpling dough I can't even remember how to do. And then it really was supper time so I piled all the dough all over the apples and mushed it down in a heavy-handed and fraught way (normally I'm pretty careful about rolling out pie dough--confidence but not thuggery or it comes out too tough). And then I baked it at 350 while we ate lentils and rice, the children carefully trying to eat around the lentils and Matt and I gazing across the table at each other in boredom and anguish as the baby poured glass after glass of water on the floor and more and more rice was pushed over the side of each plate. The pie/cobbler/whatever came out golden and gorgeous. I should probably also mention that before mashing the dough in over the apples I happened to pour half a cup of Manzanilla along with a whole lot of brown sugar all over them. This, perhaps, is the key to the whole experience. The pie was tart and sweet but not too sweet. I fed it to the children in little prep bowls--first, seconds and then thirds--and stood furtively in the kitchen eating it quietly myself with a large serving spoon.

goodnight all

And so we come to the end of another extremely long day. While the children idled away their time in indolence and ignorance, I baked a bunch of stuff--cinnamon rolls, cheese and pepperoni rolls, muffins--and then made realio trulio cheeseburgers. Well, Matt cooked them, but I mushed the ground beef together for a long time, muttering curses at the state of the world and the fact that by 4:30 this afternoon, Elphine and Alouicious had not completed the absurdly simple number of tasks on their wretched laminated lists.

So, being that it is still depressingly pouring rain and I ought to be going to sleep anyway, I thought I would end this wreck of a day with some Jeeves and the Old School Chum.

"'Abandon the idea, Jeeves,' I said. 'I fear you have not studied the sex as i have. Missing her lunch means little or nothing to the female of the species. The feminine attitude towards lunch is notoriously airy and casual. Where you have made your bloomer is in confusing lunch with tea. Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it. At such times the most amiable of the sex become mere bombs which a spark may ignite. But lunch, Jeeves, no. I should have thought you would have known that--a bird of your established intelligence."

when's the eating

I'd been really wanting to cook a lot of little things from a Spanish Tapas book I have sitting around and so after church one Sunday in August, Matt roasted a large piece of pig and I fussed around a lot of little dishes. First up are these egg stuffed tomatoes. Each tomato has an egg, heavy cream and Manchego cheese mellowing in its interior and was baked for a while until the egg was creamy and gorgeous. The end pictures weren't remarkable at all but over all...what an amazing way to eat egg and tomato. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and remember it.



Then, it turns out, you can deep fry sweet peppers without any kind of batter. I dropped these into hot hot oil for a bit and waited for them to turn a stark beautiful green.

Oops, turns out they actually turned brown and wrinkly. However, when I cut into the first one and tasted it, I thought perhaps I would cry, but then I thought, how stupid to cry when you can just have another bite and another and another. 
I lathered these all over everything I ate that day and the day after.

I should also say, these were grown locally by a couple who who belong to COGS.  Every Sunday, as the summer rolls gently by, a table in the Parish Hall is laden with the contents of their garden and with glorious eggs from their chickens. You walk in to see people hovering prayerfully over all the beautiful vegetables and praising God.

This wasn't in the cookbook but the combination of butter, mushroom and Manchego was not to be resisted by me. I kept adding butter as the mushrooms absorbed them...I wouldn't be able to tell you how much butter because I lost track after a while.

When it came time to sit down together for dinner, Matt told all the children that these mushrooms were so disgusting that we were doing them a great favor by not making them eat them. They seemed dubious but there was so much pork and bread mounded on their plates some of them eventually forgot. This, along with a whole avocado, we managed to eat silently and completely. Its so difficult, having to share food with children or other people.

And then I roasted some baby tomatoes from my garden with thyme, garlic and olive oil.

Matt also took the innerds of the egg stuffed tomatoes and mushed it around with some fresh herbs and poured cream all over it. And then we just stood there and ate it with spoons, again, very quietly, because the stupid baby loves tomato and squawks like an out of control raging duck when she sees one. I tried to photograph it but it came out badly every time.



So here is the long wait before dinner. Marigold and The Fat Baby of Binghamton sat for something like 45 minutes hoping for food.

And here is Elphine photographing the food along with me. Not sure what she planned to do with the pictures but she made a little news report later on the same camera.

Another waiting child.

And a child who wasn't that hungry because he ate a lot of cake at church and wishes he was playing on his kindle or something but is making the best of a bad situation by taking quiet mental inventory of all the wrongs and injustices done to him since very early that morning.

And what am I doing photographing during prayer? Doesn't he look pious? Don't be deceived. The second the prayer was over he asked if he was going to have to eat everything. "Oh no no," I said, "You get to eat pork and bread. Everything else tastes funny and is bad for you."
"Oh," he sighed heavily, relieved.
Elphine narrowed her eyes at me and insisted that she loves mushrooms. Irritating child.

I've been trying to get this post up every day for the past week. IN FACT, I had promised myself I would blog every day, without fail. But instead of blogging I recalibrated our homeschool day and plan and continued trying to get ready for the start of Sunday School, which is tomorrow. Just as soon as Sunday School is humming nicely along I can face the Great Autumn Clothes Change Over of 2012. It is at these moments that I long to live in a temperate one temperature climate. And now, I will arise, and have another go at those Sunday School Rooms because those little sheep are not going to dust and arrange themselves. Have a lovely weekend and Go To Church!

7 quick takes

one

It is gray and pouring rain. It feels like we're about to have winter already. Seriously considering taking up a seasonal affective disorder because, well, it seems to be there for the taking.

two

We're starting school next week anyway. Let it rain because the children will have LOTS to do. Think its going to be a little shock for their poor tender selves. Can hear the agonized whining already, just because they've had to make their beds and practice the piano this morning.

three

If you can call that plinking that I'm listening to right now, "practicing the piano".
We have a proper piano teacher! And so it won't be my problem when they have to explain why they don't know the song. Hard to put into words how happy I am about this.

four

So what do you do on your last full day of summer holiday and its pouring rain? If you're a child that is?
Watch this funny little guy.

My mom thought that "beyblading" was some cool Olympic sport. Sorry Mom! It turns out to be the above. And All Six of my children do it all day long, even the baby. She picks up anything she can find and flings it down hoping it will spin--plates, forks, grapes, books, everything--shouting what sounds to be 'epic battle' but I can't really tell.

five

But if you're me on your last day of summer "holiday" you fold laundry, finish making up a strict school schedule and wait for the last evening of VBS. Five evenings of four children going to hear about Jesus and two children going to bed early has brought about white fish baked with curry powder rubbed all over (I don't care, I like ordinary curry powder) and laid over a bed of stir fried vegetables from my garden. Well, I say 'stir fry' but that's just because I stirred them around in a pan and lathered them with butter and curry powder until they were practically fried. AND then, the next night, I sauteed shrimp with garlic, chives, some kind of old chili pepper from the back of the fridge and tomato from my garden, swirled round with a dollop of greek yogurt, a cutting of basil and a lather of hot chili oil at the end. So delicious. Honestly, I would have paid ten dollars to eat it.

six

Tomorrow we will have been married eleven years. Eleven years of remarkable eating. Eleven years of a wrecked house and constant cleaning up. Eleven years of pastoring and studying and preaching and teaching. Eleven years of pretty good, though sometimes very cheep, wine. Eleven years of stupid exercise. Eleven years of arguing about which documentary to watch. Eleven years of shouting at children to go back to sleep. Eleven years of talking theology and politics. Eleven  years of reading the Onion, Failblog, Cakewrecks, and other stupid stuff on the interwebs. Eleven years of the common things of life. Eleven years of sheer bliss.

seven

So now I guess I'll go have a stab at that "strict schedule". You have to make it, you know, so you can have something Not to do. Every morning over the next ten months I'll wake up and look at my plan for the day and say, to myself and anyone else standing around, 'boy, that was a dumb idea. Who thought of that?' And then go on and do something entirely different. But if I didn't have the plan, where would I be? This year I've got a fourth grader, a third grader, a first grader, a kindergartener, a preschooler and a menace. ALL that will be accounted for in my plan, as well as blogging, laundry, exercise, tea with a friend, occassional Shepherd's Bowl cooking, Sunday School teaching and organizing, maybe a little Altar Guild, some texting and internet surfing and then, also, constant Pimsleur Mandarin CD's in the background so I can shout 'BE QUIET, I JUST MISSED THE ENGLISH!'

on a saturday evening

Lately we've been exclusively eating frittata on Saturday evenings.

Eighteen or so eggs, a dollop of full fat cream, chives or sauteed onion or something, a golden mound of some kind of cheese, sometimes some sausage, all whipped together and plunked into a pan and into the oven at 350 for a while--until its golden and puffy and a knife comes out clean.

And a massive loaf of bread sliced up and lathered with butter. And a big salad.

Doesn't it sound all golden and lovely?
But here's the thing. Tonight There Were No Leftovers.
Let me repeat....There Were No Leftovers. The wretched children ate every single scrap of food and then cast their eyes about for whatever else there might be.

Which just, well, it just made me angry. Leftovers are such an integral and necessary part of a well functional household. If you  don't have leftovers, well, where are you? Stuck making a dinner every single night, that's where.

Its a crying, as they say, shame. Two nights ago I made gorgeous mounds of strawberry shortcake. Two cups flour, one tablespoon baking powder, pinch salt, two-thirds cup lard, one cup milk, and, just to be really special, a spattering of cinnamon and a Whole Third Cup of Real Sugar, mushed together onto a baking pan at 350 for a while till a knife came out clean. And then a whole glorious bowl of strawberries with sugar until they were  running with juice and sweetness. Only three of the six children were there so I figured there would clearly be a chance to nip in well after dark and just finish it up. What? You don't bake with an eye towards that last closing of  the fridge whenever everyone else isn't around?

Anyway, There weren't Any Leftovers. None. Three children, one vat of strawberry shortcake, No Leftovers. It was almost enough to make me give up. Really, what's the point. I might as well just crack open a can of spam and climb under my bed.

hee hee

David Mitchell is doing soap boxes again! And since practically everybody at Good Shepherd stood in front of the vast array of coffee hour celebratory Anglican cake yesterday and 1. knew they shouldn't eat it and 2. had been told not to fast by the preacher, I thought this really would cheer them all this fine Monday morning. Except, don't believe him! heheeeee

cook with your children, the experts say

Elphine is making brownies.
She's been making them since about 1pm this afternoon. I've been trying to patiently not loose my mind, but as we head into the fourth hour of brownie making (from a box, let the truth be known) I feel that the battle may be too much for me.

First she got the boxes of brownie mix out of the cupboard.
Then she read the directions. We got all the measuring cups out and talked about fractions....again. Her eyes glazed over and she stuck her chin out until that part was over. Then she got a half a cup of water from the sink, and a cup of oil  from the cupboard and six eggs out of the fridge.
"You're only making two boxes" I said, "you only need four eggs." So she put two eggs back.
(God help us all.)
Then she poured all the liquid into the dry mix and stirred it for a while.
And then she added the eggs.
One
crushed
wreched
shell
at
a
time.
Then she stirred it some more.
"Good job." I said smiling through clenched teeth, "Let me stir it a little bit more so that there are no lumps."
Then she spooned the batter into muffin tins.
At this point I went and did something else because of the possibility of either infanticide or suicide. When I came back, she was covered in chocolate.
I know, as a parent, that its easy to toss that off--covered in chocolate--like, you know, the child has a lot of chocolate on the face and some on the elbow. I just want you to stop and rethink that image of "covered in chocolate" and instead of a child with a little bit of chocolate on the face and elbow, think of first a berry covered in chocolate, and then think of my whimsical meadow loving child (can you feel the positivity oozing from my pores?) covered in chocolate.
She was covered in chocolate.
Then she put the pans in the oven. After a bit she undertook to take them out. One pan was done, and then a few minutes later another pan was done and she took it out. But in all the comotion, she also took the third pan out--the bigger muffin sized tin. Through the course of the afternoon I have put it back into the oven no less than four times, and each time she has taken it out again almost immediately.
And so the final product (I hope its final, she is now in the shower trying to get the chocolate off) consists of a lot of underdone brownies jammed into a small casserol dish and then lathered with chocolate frosting. I expect they will be declicious, but they look a little worse for wear.
So there we are. Elphine made brownies. Maybe later she can make something else. May God have mercy on my soul.

little meat pies

But first, here are my tulips blooming.

And a remaining daffodil.

So, Little Meat Pies.
The dough is 2 1/2 cups flour, and because I was lazy, two sticks of salted butter instead of actually taking the trouble of having to stir a teaspoon of salt into the flour. Cut the butter into the dough until you have a good crumbly mix and then add cold water, just enough to bind the dough but not so its too sticky. Don't be afraid of handling the dough. You can make it tough with over mixing but you mustn't worry. Just authoritatively bind the dough into a ball and let it sit while you dig out your leftover mashed potato, cheese and ham. Roll out the dough and use a glass to cut out rounds. Two rounds per pie. You lather potato on the first round and then a slice of cheese and then a bit of ham.

Then you plunk the second round over the first and fold the edges up. I never bother with wetting the edges or anything. It's too irritating and sticky. I got 12 full pies and three half ones out of one batch of dough.

I can't stand that my camera is so irrevocably sticky that I can't get a picture in focus. SO Maddening.
The children whose birthday it wasn't filled deviled eggs in a sticky disgusting mess. Marigold filled an egg, licked the filling out, filled it again and so the long day wore on.

Pie and eggs for lunch.

And, if you don't feel up to making meat pies, here are some animals who are very very disappointed in you. Mad props to Kellie for bringing this amazing link to my attention.

now that christmas is over

It seems time finally to post some gratuitous baby/children pictures from the last few weeks.

 Here is Marigold badly in need of a haircut and an attitude adjustment. She picked out the shoes herself--shunning the pretty black patent leather for her favorite red clunker shoes.

 Here is Matt after the Christmas Pageant on Christmas Eve administering libations to people like me who were filled with relief and joy that the pageant went off So Beautifully! I await with eagerness seeing the video (I know someone taped it, surely) and pictures by Andrea Kovac.

 We came home from the service that night and ate three very nice cheeses, a pate de compagne, a gorgeous loaf of bread, olives, those little tiny hot dog things wrapped in pastry, and mussels in white wine with a little bit of onion and garlic. I ate far to much and didn't sleep well, but it was worth it.

Here is Elphine and Marigold. Lately, Marigold has required that Elphine carry her everywhere on her back--everywhere! And Elphine is very nice about it especially as Marigold is a fat chunk of a toddler now, eating everything in sight.

Romulus with his new flashlight, doing what he does best, which is to lie on the floor and moan gently about there being too much work. This from the child who has only one job--gather the clothes off the stairs and put them in the laundry hampers. That's it. Just gather the clothes and, no, don't interrupt or lie down, gather the clothes and carry them into the laundry room and put them, no not on the floor, In the Hampers.

Gladys got a little notebook and a fancy pen which she carries with her everywhere, making little marks that look sort of like letters and explaining them to anyone who will listen. Every time we sat down to watch a movie she began talking and kept on until the movie was over. Strangely, we managed to see five different versions of The Christmas Carol over the course of ten days.

The boys received boys and arrows from the bosom of Santa who ought to be stopped. Elphine has a pretty good steady hand and in this fine clement weather has been working at it a little every day.

This is the Sunday of Advent 4. There are 20 or 30 of these pictures and only two of them turned out.

Here is Gladys in her Christmas dress on Christmas Eve. Everything was wrong. The seam of her tights was not fitting over her toes correctly, her little pantaloons wouldn't stay on the right way, her hair kept needing to be combed. In short, she was a miserable wreck. Nearly didn't participate in the pageant as a result of everything in life being so difficult. Changed her mind at the last moment and turned out to be a perfect angel (bwahaaaaaaa, get it, she was an angel in the pageant, get it?).

These aren't in proper order. Here Elphine, Romulus and Alouicious are all watching Matt showing them how its done.

So everything is finally put away and we've had a miserable first week of school back. I did make some New Year's resolutions, for the first time in a long time. I'm going to seriously read books, hopefully every day, and I'm going to try to recover my love of cooking. My husband has become such a good cook that I'd sort of given up. So last week I made meatballs.

Tomorrow I'm going to make a meat pie and Wednesday I have determined, God willing, to make a cheese souffle. Matt, apparently, has never seen or tasted a souffle (that spelling doesn't look right) so he won't know if its not as it should be. And now it is time to stop this and find out why every single child is crying or shouting.

Roast Chicken, Candy, other stuff

Various teams of Good Shepherdians are out mucking out peoples houses this afternoon. Actually, they've been at it all day. It seemed bad to me to lollygag around so we've done a fair bit of school (even though generally Monday we don't do Anything) and I've spent a while ineffectually moving piles of laundry around. Outside the bright sun is, a la PG Wodehouse, ominously and meanly cheerful while so many suffer.

Yesterday! though, we suspended all the human and community suffering to have lunch with still a long way off which, as Gladys would say, was "Awthum!!". He came to worship with us and then unloaded a large apportionment of cool Japanese candy and other beautiful and amazing gifts over a nice afternoon of roast chicken (see below) and potatoes (see below). So dear to all our hearts, he has been referred to all day as "Father Awthum Candy". Thank you for coming!

So, here's how to roast a chicken during church.
Have your husband buy and prep the chicken the night before (Crushed garlic, salt, pepper, thyme, olive oil rubbed under the skin and all over the outside. The inside stuffed with fresh thyme, a whole onion and whatever bits of lemon you find in the back of your fridge.) cover it with cling film (or whatever you call it) and leave it the fridge.
In the morning, after you've run over to start the 8am service without drying your hair, leaving a gaggle of hysterical and anxious and hungry children at the mercy of their father whom you've irreparably wounded by not finding his collar for him and whose sermon won't print and then come back after the readings because his sermon finally did print and he slipped in and poked you in the back so you knew it was ok to leave, vacuum the house, dry your hair and put the bird in at 275 for three hours.
Go back to church and make a poster for Adult Ed, gather up handfuls of preschoolers and teach them Sunday School, run upstairs late for church and remind your husband of two announcements he needs to make as he's processing down the aisle. Concentrate on listening hard to the sermon and music and everything and not be distracted by counting people who aren't there and worrying about them. After the creed, run home and take the chicken out and throw a dish of whole scrubbed potatoes covered in olive oil and salt covered with tinfoil. Sprint back to church so as not to miss communion and have a lovely friend pray over you at the back because you look maniacal. Run around after church trying to talk to everybody on the list scribbled on your hand about all the things on your list at home. Drag yourself away to a really perfectly moist chicken.

Give us this day our daily ham

Romulus hates having to eat anything that isn't made out of sausage, ramen noodles or rice. As you can imagine, he is unhappy a lot of the time because we don't eat sausage that often, although we tell him that almost everything is made out of it, nor ramen noodles, nor rice. We eat a nice array of healthy and unhealthy foods, sometimes including ramen, sometimes including sausage, but not Every Time.

Two days ago I caught Alouicious trying to shove a piece of lemon tart in Romulus' mouth while shouting, "Its made of sausage! Its made of sausage!"

But today, after watching every body eat delicious ham, cheese and lettuce sandwiches, face still covered with the chocolate from his own, he decided to make a bold move and try one himself.

"Mmm" he said, "this is as good as sausage."

Oh Dear

I appear to have invented a breadish sort of thing that is so delicious I'm not sure we'll be able to leave it there until morning--and it has to be left there till morning because of its being breakfast.
So, um I'm pretty sure it needs a name, but I'll write it out and see if I have one by the end.

Buy or be given a large amount of rhubarb.
Cut it up as if you're making Nigella's Rhubarb Custard Pie but then realize you have too much rhubarb and not enough eggs for custard. Glance at the clock to find its 2 whole hours later than you thought it was. Panic and dump all the rhubarb into a pan with roughly a cup and half of sugar and turn it on high. Stop to make supper and then discover a small bottle of orange juice and dump it over the rhubarb before it burns. Cook it down to a full delicious mush and bung it into the fridge when you realize the blueberry cobbler you made was perfectly delicious on its own.

Three days later make the bread.
3 T dry yeast
2 cups room temperature buttermilk
4 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil (or several sticks of soft butter)
1 T salt (or less)
6 to 10 cups flour or until dough is elastic and not sticky. I used all white flour because I was out of wheat but normally I would do half wheat. I do mine in my kitchen aid with my dough hook. It occurs to me that you may not want to make enough bread to feed 5 children for a week, so you could revise down accordingly.
Let it rise.
Roll it out into a huge square and spoon the rhubarb over half and then fold the dough over and pinch the edges so that essentially you have a big pocket. I'll try and take a picture before its devoured.
Bake in a 350 oven. Its probably going to be divine lathered in butter.

I need a name for this! Oh please try it out and then suggest something!

10 Minute Fish

One bag super cheap (5$) fish, frozen, dumped ( half-frozen on its way to being thawed, I mean, its fine if you have your life together enough to fully thaw whatever it is you're planning to eat) on a baking sheet and lathered in oil, salt, pepper and curry powder. In the oven at 375 skin side up for about 10 minutes or until just beginning to brown and flaky and white when you cut into it
or
just long enough to dump a can of chopped tomato, a can of coconut milk, salt, pepper, curry powder, a tablespoon of peanut butter and the juice of a juicy lemon into a pan, bring it to a boil and smooth it out with an immersion blender (or skip that if you don't have one).
Eat it with salad in a light vinaigrette. Don't bother with rice or couscous unless you're STARVING. We just ate the sauce up with a spoon. Baby (big baby not little baby) had two pieces of fish and licked the sauce off her plate after throwing the lettuce on the floor. Even Romulus ate it. That delicious.

Brazilian Boiled Pork

So you take a huge, practically obscene, piece of meat, pork, that you bought at 1.25$ a lb at Wegmans, and you come home with it, all your groceries, and five kids, learning, along the way, that the sixth kid has learned how to climb out of her crib just that moment, and fretting that this Wegman's trip marks the point at which your oldest child will no longer be going in to the play place but will now, being nine, go shopping with you and the babies, but that in many ways even at just about nine, she is still way too silly to carry on a reasonable conversation,
so you take this marbled fat pork shoulder, after getting all the groceries in and realizing that you forgot three things but then getting distracted while putting everything away and sit down to drink an entire pot of tea by yourself because your husband said he would have a cup but forgot and went to work and it seemed a waste to let it sit, and then you realize that your end of the year reports are due tomorrow so you freak out and start trying to do them and swearing gently under your breath and pleading with the kids to leave you alone and go play, somewhere, anywhere but right here so you can concentrate,
and you put the pig in a giant pot and you pour a cup of soy sauce, and something like 15 smashed cloves of garlic, and two lemons (it should be limes but you were distracted in the store) and a bunch of dried thyme because you're out of oregano and rosemary, and you cover it with water and your bring it to a boil and then turn it way down to simmer/boil gently,
and then, after you print and mail your reports you decide not to put the groceries away because you'll have to be in the kitchen again later but instead to start taking everything out of the office and putting in the sun room on the bookshelves you emptied of books a few days ago, and you do that until 6 o'clock, making both rooms into an utter despairing mess, and then you realize its supper time and everyone is crying and trying to eat sugar popsicles and so you wildly put groceries away and make couscous and salad while taring off bits of this most divine and amazing pig that you've ever tasted and you fling it on plates and the children start stuffing themselves even before their father has walked through the door and then you realize
this is why you could never ever be a vegetarian.

A Trick a Trial a Trifle

I have a beautiful trifle dish. I bought it for a dollar at the Christmas Tree Shop in 2007 and made a gorgeous trifle right away. This week I thought it was time for a second trifle.

I instructed Matt on my way out the door.
"Cut up the last bit of delicious Easter bread/cake" I shouted, flinging kids and backpacks in the car, "and pour some brandy on it and put it in the fridge."

He gazed back at me in confusion and wonder. "How big should the chunks be? And how much brandy?"

"Just a splash!" I called gaily and swept out of our drive narrowly missing hitting a school bus. I'm such a great driver.

Five hours later I came home. "How did it go?"
"Well, you didn't say how much brandy. What does 'Just a splash mean?'"
I looked in the dish at the brandy laden bread/cake. Matt had poured almost an Entire Bottle of Brandy on it. It smelled delicious but Too Much.

So I made custard and arranged raspberries all over the top and left it for a while hoping the Trifle Fairy would come and fix it or something (why not? The kids have the stupid old forgetful Tooth Fairy. Why can't there be a Trifle Fairy?). In the face of no obvious improvement, this afternoon I dumped it out of the Trifle Dish into a baking pan and baked it at 350 for an hour. It came out golden, pungent and basically delicious if you ladle it with cream and sugar and take very very very tiny bites and drink lots of water to keep from getting tipsy.