Various

I haven't done a "various" blog post in a long time. I've sort of missed them - have you? As per my tradition, these are mainly updates.

- Breaking my own rule right out of the gate, as this is not an update. Ha! While it could have been about 5 degrees cooler everyday last week, I generally like heat and humidity especially in the early evening when the blazing sun is below the trees. I appreciate the sun for keeping us all alive, don't get me wrong. I just don't like it blazing down directly on me. I prefer the same 90 degree temperature but with indirect sun. I'm not at all picky though.

We finally tried out the fountains at Ballantrae Park in Dublin. Anything that is compared to the Easton fountains is an automatic negative for me so I was a little leery. However, it was great! Absolutely no shade but considering J insisted I remain at his side (I don't blame him since we didn't go with other kids) it was fine because I was soaked. I hope to go again this afternoon and this time I'll wear my bathing suit. I've decided I'm too impatient for the "quick" dry of quick dry shorts. I hope to get some photos this afternoon too - cross your fingers!

- Our house is still being "landscaped," though right now it looks more like a foreclosure-scape. Perhaps we were too hasty in ripping out the hedges. It looked better at first but now the once empty beds with freshly tilled dirt are dry and full of weeds. Very attractive. D spent May beside himself over how horrible it looked; fretting that all eyes were on his eye-sore of a yard. Worried that all the neighbors were whispering and pointing. June was a month of acceptance that it is what it is. Now in the heat of July we're simply waiting. Waiting to get on our landscaper's schedule now that we've finally gotten quotes from him for the work. They'll be prepping all the beds in the front, and D will then plant the trees and shrubs himself. Of course we cannot get any of this done until the masonry company repairs our brick wall (ah yeah, rebuilds our brick wall). Seems I failed to mention the pile of bricks in our front side yard. Pretty. Supposedly that work will be done this week though it was supposed to be done last week. All I know is even I'm starting to think the house looks like complete ass outside.

- After two grueling, yes grueling, weeks of working on our adoption profile, I took a copy to our attorney on Friday. Attorney or lawyer - is there a difference? I like attorney better but I'm not sure why. I use lawyer more but I think only because it's faster to type.

Anyway, I seriously spent every single naptime and every single evening working on this thing for nearly two weeks. I had to locate images, scan them, color correct them, crop them, re-size them and then finally place them into the document. I used Word and if you don't already know, Word doesn't like too many images in one document. And if you get the images too close to one another, no amount of wrapping voodoo will keep them from dancing all over the page however they like, which I assure you is not how you like. I'll claim it was my mad Word skillz but maybe it was also having a Mac now that made this easier than in the past. However, once I added textboxes for all my captions it was on. Fun times. I'm so glad to be done! I have to give a shout out to AJ who was beyond, beyond, beyond helpful with the entire project. She spent most of her day on Thursday looking over every single page and emailing me thoughts for each one. I know I thanked her but I have to do so once more - THANK YOU, AJ . . . you rock! And I would be remiss not to thank everyone else who also helped. This thing was 26 pages of photos and answers to about a dozen questions. It was time consuming for everyone - THANK YOU ALL!!!!!!!!

Our attorney will be looking over it this week and letting us know if it's good, correct, awesome, I'm not sure what. I'm assuming that since we followed his suggested guidelines I'll have little or no additional work to do. I'll have more printed and we'll be all set for the long period of waiting. Of course "long" is a relative term and I have no idea how many weeks or months that could be. I'm thinking positively though so not that long.

- My attempt to eat less sugar has had a reverse affect. I find that often happens and it's got to be subconscious. I'm not dieting so there's no internal mantra of "don't eat sugar" or "don't eat this, don't eat that." If there was then I'd understand the reverse happening. I had just hoped to make better choices but alas I think I've been making worse choices!

At this rate, I will not have a very good habit formed going into fall which (no pun intended) is my downfall. Once Halloween hits all bets are off through Pi Day in March, well really through J's birthday two days later. What else is one to do in the midwest in winter other than bake and use up all those frozen summer berries?

- Speaking of summer berries, my collection from last summer is thankfully still good. I taste-tested them this morning. I plan to make two mixed berry galettes this week - one for our visit to the lake, and one for a family reunion. We are traveling again for another long weekend. I hope to hit a flea market or two while in WM. I can't seem to find any around here and I'm looking for a vintage pizzelle maker. Yeah, more baking, I know. I have my great-grandmother's pizzelle recipe and I really want to start making them and perfecting them. I suspect it will take awhile.

I only have three old family recipes . . . kolachi (I can't seem to find a universal spelling on that), pizzelles, and tomato gravy. The first two are my great-grandmother's and the latter is my grandmother's on the other side (as in my mom's not my dad's). I love them all equally, but I do wish they had more of their old friends in my recipe book.

Speaking of family, I found a photograph of a headstone with what is, according to my dad, either my great-great grandmother or great-aunt's name on it. He's leaning towards the latter. I looked up the name on Ancestry.com and found a couple close hits in the 1930 census records. Of course you have to have a paying account with Ancestry.com to view the record. Has anyone signed up with them? Did you get your money's worth out of it? I'd love to do family trees on both sides for my dad and the one on my mom's that is currently non-existent.

- One final update and it's a sad one. Sorry to end on a bum note. Our kitty Gato died this week. He was 12 years old and seemingly in good health. D found him dead one morning.

Gato was awesome basically. He had a wonderfully friendly and outgoing kitty personality. I don't think anyone ever met him and didn't like him. He was a huge (as in big-boned though I'll admit a little heavy too) orange tabby tomcat. A gentle giant though, he would never even fight back when one of the dogs was after him. At most he'd punch them and wait for help. But, if his sidekick Tatey was the one cornered Gato would turn into a ninja. Out of nowhere he'd jump down onto one of the dog's backs, biting and scratching to create a diversion and escape for Tate. It was shocking and comical at the same time. We love our dogs but they're little shits and they deserved whatever Gato gave them.

Gato had one issue, he was territorial (aka he sprayed sometimes). This became a huge issue at the other house but we were able to work through it and fix the damage to the house and stop him from continuing. After the move to the new house he started again and was currently living in the basement with our other cat until they could get used to the new smells and sounds of the place. It was taking longer than we would have liked and we'd been discussing the option of having the kitties become indoor-outdoor because basement life just isn't right.

I feel really guilty that he did not have his fair share of people-time in the new house and well really at the end of his life. I feel like I would have made other decisions if I had known he was sick and nearing his end. I also feel really bad because he and J were buds in the old house and definitely not here in the new one. I have no one to blame so I have been blaming myself. But for my own sanity, I think I will move the blame to carpeting. I hate carpeting anyway, especially cream colored carpeting. Let the petitioning for bamboo floors begin! Also, I'll be moving Remember Me up to the top of my Netflix Queue as I hear it's a tearjerker and I could use a good cry.

Miss you Gato - tell Tatey and Cleo we said "hi."

Oh sugar, sugar

I've not yet hit the acceptance stage of my apparent sugar addiction. I'm still in denial. Over the past few years I've had it implied by a couple people that I have an addiction. In my defense though, I'm not as bad as her over there, or HER for goodness sake, and what about him? No, I'm fine. I barely eat any sugar. I watch D sprinkle it on his cereal in utter disgust. I'll take the honey, thank you very much.

And THAT is my downfall. Sugar IS in more things I eat than I am consistently conscious of; and so when I actually eat cookies or drink my Tall, Soy, No water, No foam, Chai Latte I think I'm still doing okay. I'll admit, I have sugar "issues" but I'm not ready to commit to removing it from my life and hence I'm not willing to admit my body could be addicted.

I think you may have noticed with my past few blog posts that I like to bake and want to bake more, and get better at it (ah, yeah like the tart incident). I do try to make my baking healthier so, for example, I do vegan lemon bars to avoid all the egg (oh and because lemon curd sends chills down my spine - anything overly yolky does) and I use whole wheat flour often with ground flax and wheat germ added. This is how I came to find myself baking banana breakfast bread, which claimed to be healthy and guilt-free for breakfast. JUST what I was looking for! Too bad I didn't do the sugar math until it was already in the oven. Assuming I cut the bread into 12 pieces, that is 1 tablespoon of sugar per serving. That's a lot. I would not put 1 Tbsp of sugar in my tea, or on my cereal, or on my macerating berries. I certainly would not want to give J 1 Tbsp of sugar at a sitting or in a day even if I could help it (which really, I can). Besides, cutting those into 12 pieces is not realistic which means more sugar per serving.

I tasted the bread this morning and it didn't even taste that sweet. I added an extra banana, didn't put in the full 3/4 cup of sugar, added wheat germ which is normally a bit sweet, AND added a handful of chocolate chips. If the recipe had been written by a food expert I would leave a comment stating my disappointment. But really, this got me thinking and that's a good thing. How can I make this bread into a truly guilt-free breakfast bread full of flax, nuts, and banana? How can I make it taste good?

To answer some of my questions I'll need to do some research. How is honey digested and utilized by the body? I'm under the assumption it's no different than sugar or banana. So maybe I need to look into stevia. Or what about agave nectar? There are so many sugar alternatives and I wonder if any of them are *really* a healthy alternative? I'm willing to look at sugar on a recipe by recipe basis but not as a whole in my life. I feel like the latter is too overwhelming and if I take care of the former then I should be okay.

I also met with my naturopath this week. I have not had an appointment with her since I got my prenatal vitamins. My file was so old that it was in storage in her house, but she did find it! That was good because it showed that in 3 years my cellular health and weight and metabolism have all remained the same or gotten better. However, my cholesterol is way too low, I failed her calcium test, and she thought I generally had a horrible diet. I can't disagree. I'm always thinking that if I ate only what I fed J then I'd be amazingly healthy and probably thinner too. It's easy to give him healthy food and expect him to eat it; it's all he's known and he's used to it. On the other hand those things taste weird, bland, and generally nose-wrinkling icky to my white bread taste buds. I'm doing far better but I'm not to the point where I will choose water over DQ ice cream. This is what J did last night. He spent our drive saying "yum yum" over a cup of ice water because it had the always coveted straw. Meanwhile his cone sat in the seat next to him with only a couple bites gone. I realize this sounds horribly messy, but let me clarify that J gets an empty cone and I sort of dip it into my ice cream so he gets a few licks. He isn't an ice cream fan and we learned this the hard way at the beginning of summer. Luckily a boy can be washed and a Jeep can be hosed out.

My naturopath gave me a suggested diet to follow but I gotta admit, it's just too much. I have a lot going on and while I want to improve I need to make baby steps or I'm gonna quit. So I've decided to tackle taking my vitamins regularly, eating more vegetables, and adding better sources of protein into my diet. These were things I knew I needed to do and wanted to change anyway. What I don't want to do is limit my carbs - at all. The suggestion was that I do one fruit and one whole grain carb a day. Okay I'd be done at breakfast after my cheerios and strawberries. No. I have to draw the line somewhere.

So basically my future food related posts will likely be a little healthier. I'll probably be doing more salads for one. I love to re-create restaurant salads so I'll likely share a few of those with you all. I found another recipe for lemon bars and since I'm not a sugar addict I may try those as well.

D asked if my naturopath had anything good to say. She did. In addition to all the cellular stuff, she admired my working out. Ha! I think I'm horrible at sticking with that but I guess perspective is everything. I'm in week three of the Couch to 5k program. I'm also planning to start back up with Zumba this week and finally get to my last couple bootcamps. So yeah, I work out semi-regularly and generally I'm no longer sedentary since leaving cubicle serfdom. Now, according to my naturopath, I'm ready for the next step.

Homestudy & Profile

Our homestudy is done. It's actually been done for a few weeks now but with vacation, work, celebrations, and life in general I've been derelict in my blogging. I know I tend to be gone for awhile then post like mad. Trust me, if I knew how to change the date stamp in Blogger for my posts so they wouldn't get lost in the mix then I'd write a bunch and dole them out slowly over a few days. But back to the homestudy! I think it went well.

Our case worker arrived fashionably late. I think this is to allow frantic parents-to-be the chance to finish up scrubbing tile grout, dusting light bulbs, and alphabetizing their media cabinet contents. We were doing none of these though, we were ready in time with baked goods. However, our house was also full of smoke, the smoke detector was going off, and said baked goods were a complete disaster.

I used the homestudy as an excuse to try a new dessert, a pretty yet seemingly simple dessert. I refused to purchase any number of round tart pans I saw. I finally found myself at Williams Sonoma, the evening before the homestudy, staring at the rectangle tart pan I wanted. However, I continued to stare because it was clearly smaller than the one used in the recipe. No size was stated in the recipe for the tart pan, and I wrongly assumed tart pans were standard - ya know like pie pans and loaf pans. Nope. I bought the WS tart pan and headed home to bake, hoping all would be fine!

I made the crust the night before and the filling. The morning of our homestudy, I spread the filling over the crust, placed my not-at-all-inexpensive fresh, organic apricots into the frangipane filling and put it in the oven. I should've put a pan under it, but I was in a hurry and while I did consider it, I thought the filling didn't seem like something that would bubble over. THAT was the mistake of the day. Being that my tart pan was on the small side, the filling bubbled over, poured over, goo'd over and basically found every and any way out of the tart pan that it could. It proceeded to burn all over the bottom of the oven.

I had asked D to check on it and by the time he did the damage was too far gone, and by the time I got into the kitchen alarms were going off and every single window was being opened and fan cranked. The tart had cooked long enough so I took it out and turned off the oven. Luckily I had made two desserts and the second had turned out, well decent which I rank below "good." Those were my vegan lemon bars. They never did setup fully and while they were delicious they were also ugly and soupy. Regardless though, the caseworker passed on any food; she didn't even want water. So much for all that.

She was there for just over two hours and the questions were not as difficult as I expected. It was the same stuff that will go into our profile. D described himself, then I had to add to it and vice versa. We had to discuss why our family was totally awesome but also what "opportunities" we felt we had here in Chateau Thompson. The example we were given is that some couples say they need to lose weight. So I guess anything can be an opportunity then because I'm not sure how weight issues reflect on parenting. Our opportunity was completing our home renovations - lame! I mean shouldn't we have had to get into the nitty gritty?

Trust me, I'm okay with it having been easy peasy. Maybe since we have a lil one who's made it over 2 years here without major damage she went easy on us? Her tour around our house was less involved than the ones we give to our friends. She had no desire to see the laundry room for instance which was actually a disappointment for D. I made him finish it before she came and apparently for no reason. Ha! I'm just glad it's done now.

After writing down our responses to her questions, taking our paperwork, completing our safety inspection, and explaining the process she took her quick partial tour and left. Then I devoured my lemon bars. I had planned to have those as breakfast as she snacked. I was famished. I also tried the tart. My poor tart. I might as well have cooked it over a campfire. It was smoky and goopy and generally disgusting. D's comment was that perhaps tarts are advanced baking. Pa-sha!

We're still waiting to get the final report from the court. That would be the report that the caseworker files after our meeting. She seemed to imply we'd passed. What we have gotten is our breakdown of how our first payment was spent and I was none too happy. We currently have $37 remaining. That's fine; we've known we'd be paying more. What's not fine is that for each of our 90 second phone calls, in which the front desk clerk rushes us off the phone, we are charged for 15 minutes! Wow. Let's just say my next call will be lengthy. The front desk clerk and I are gonna be bffs with all my chatting. Honestly, I'd rather be charged by the minute and have each minute be more expensive than be charged for at least 3x more minutes than were used.

Rant done.

We're currently working on our profile (or as some call it, life book). It's going to be spiral-bound and printed front and back, roughly 20 pages with text and full-color photos. I have it 80% completed. D needs to write more, and I need to add more photos. After that I'll be formatting and tweaking. This thing is a monster and it's taking forever! I'm sure it will be gorgeous when done and used for years by our lawyer as the shining example of what a book should look like. More importantly though, I think there's a birth mother out there that will read this and not surprisingly choose us!

Travel Blog

I posted to my travel blog! I did; I really did! I actually had a vacation to post about - yeah! :)

Enjoy.

Main Blog (scroll down and work your way up)

or

Individual posts (with photos):

Cook Forest - not so long ago

Our trip day 1

Our trip day 2

Our trip day 3

I ♥ berry season

We don't grow our own (yet), but with what's apparently a bumper crop of strawberries this year we don't have to grow our own. With that being said, we are trying to purchase local. This isn't easy when the Farmer's Market strawberries are so much more costly. To avoid the sticker shock, we went with a CSA (community supported agriculture) that offers fruit. We've already gotten our first delivery, which included a wooden pint box brimming with those red berries. They appeared to be the smaller, lop-sided cousins of the mammoths you see in the grocery store. I like that each is unique and getting a big berry is a big deal. While these berries weren't super sweet they were still really flavorful and delicious. I can barely wait until tomorrow's delivery.

This CSA is going to take a little getting used to, because I'm not sure how much I'll get each week or even what I'll get each week. I ended up already buying some produce for the weekend and beginning of the week knowing the local stuff will get me through the end of the week. I do try to buy local at the grocery but it's rather difficult outside of summer. I try to stop at Anderson's Market which is conveniently located near our Whole Foods. Both carry local produce and in-season WF's prices aren't quite as breath-taking. Anderson's is normally very reasonable though when you're dealing with the shipped in stuff from CA and FL they can't hold their own with the big box grocers.

I'm not sure how my love of berries has turned into a monologue on which grocery/market has the "best" produce. I currently have three different types of berries in my fridge right now. I have tasted them all and they are all delicious. I even got to discuss the seemingly unknown elderberry at a party this weekend. Berries, berries everywhere!

Everyone here loves berries - even D who's by far the pickiest eater here. J's been carrying around a toy tea kettle as his blueberry pail. And ever since our strawberry shortcake a couple weeks ago he's obsessed with "cake." Sweets fall into only three categories right now with J . . . cake (anything cake-like including pancakes), pie (he rarely gets pie but apparently remembers what it is) and cookies which is any small version of the previous two plus of course actual cookies. On National Donut Day he even had a donut which he licked all the glaze off of while repeating "num; mmmmmm; yummy," but he never took more than one bite of either donut. Yeah, he was double-fisting the donut holes. C'mon it WAS a national holiday!!!! Needless to say he seems to agree with D that donuts aren't all that great. Personally I very much enjoyed the donuts which I so rarely get.

Since I started with a doozy of a tangent let me go offsides a bit here too. My mom used to take me to a little bakery in downtown Sharon when we lived on the west hill. This was pre-siblings and pre-move to our later rural setting. I remember the cases full of shelves and shelves of sweets. What I cannot remember is the name of the bakery and neither can my mother. It's been closed for years; I think it was Tastee Bakery. Anyone know? It was downtown by the Post Office. Anyway, I'm not sure what all we bought there, but my memories are all about the donuts. No Dunkin' Donuts for us, thank you. I really want to find a small bakery around here like Tastee (I'm convinced it was Tastee Bakery). I know I can be weird and this supports that, but I'd prefer J have a less national-chain, shared memory of things and something more personalized. That is a benefit to a smaller town, and while I'm not moving back anytime soon (or ever - as my perks here are more plentiful), I definitely want to be weird and work to give J some small-town. I mean it's not like we live in an mega-metropolis.

Okay, back to berries or at least food. I have not baked anything lately. I feel like that's insulting to the fresh berries. Weirdness again, I know. I'll bake with them at the end of the season when they start getting a little iffy. I have been cooking though! I've tried out a few new recipes and tweaked versions of old. I didn't take any photos - I was too hungry. I think I need to start dinner sooner most days. Perhaps descriptions will interest you enough, and if you want a more detailed recipe just leave a comment and I'll get it to you.

First off I also love sandwiches. I was inspired by a brie and basil sandwich on chocolate bread that I saw on FoodGawker (I'm still addicted). I thought that was a little too close to dessert to even remotely pass for dinner so I used raisin bread. Clearly that screams dinner. It was essentially a grilled cheese. It was delicious. J gobbled it up. I didn't even hear any "eh, green" as he pulled out the basil . . . because he didn't pull it out; he gobbled it up along with the rest.

Next I re-created my favorite dinner on St. John. With all the restaurants to choose from, we normally visit Morgan's Mango twice to get this meal. It's so simple but sooooo good. It's the Vegetarian Plate which has veggies (duh), island rice, beans and plantains. The plantains make the meal (in my opinion). I mean the broccoli was good too but I have that all the time. It's hard to find ripe plantains here and I don't usually plan ahead well enough to allow time for ripening. This dish inspired me to pan-fry all my over-ripe bananas this year. J loves them that way, as do I and we get to hoard them all since again the picky D is not a fan.

My island rice lacked any sense of any island but it was still yummy. My beans however were wonderful and full of Caribbean flavor. The plantains were perfect and with J's sensitivity to broccoli we opt for grilled sweet potatoes (with a spicy little kick). Yum. We just needed some Ting to round it out . . . oh and a tan, snorkel exhaustion, and Love City atmosphere would've been nice too.

A final look into our culinary week would be our baked sweet potato lunch. J is not a fan of regular potatoes and since I didn't have the required sour cream for those anyway I went with sweet as well. I topped them with some chipotle seasoned, heavily buttered, corn and then cheddar cheese. Very yummy. I never liked sweet potatoes growing up and I think it was because I only ever saw them assaulted with marshmallow and syrup. I like their natural sweetness when their grilled, but they are equally good balanced with a little spice.

We'll see how I do this week. I have two packages of veggie dogs, fixings to mimic a local hot dog shop, and D's father's day gift (an enormous grill) is assembled and ready. I think I'll also be working hard to get J to eat zucchini which so far he hates. I'm hoping AJ's simple sauce & cheese recipe will win him over as it did me oh so many years ago when I was on the fence about this little summer squash. I'll try to be better with photos as well . . . okay I will be better with photos. I know, there is no "try" there is only "do" and "do not."

In the meantime, enjoy the end of spring everyone.