School and Such

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Fire Dreams, New Schedules, Dinners This Week

I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.

My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.

Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes. 

We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way. 

Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her. 

But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems. 

Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat? 

(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.) 

I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)

Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go. 

Dinners for the Week of August 22-28

  • Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas: I can definitely amp up the chicken and veggie quotient to get at least one, maybe more, days of leftovers out of this. 
  • 20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty. 

What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?  

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Dinners This Week Plus Potato Salad Nostalgia Plus School Fretting

Well, yesterday’s sunshine has been washed away by an hours-long thunderstorm that woke me at 6:00 am and seems to have settled right over my house for the duration. It is very dark and wet with intermittent startling bursts of lightning and the grumpy follow-up of growling thunder and I am trying Very Hard to tamp down my School Is Actually Starting Anxiety. So I am retreating into happy memories – forcibly, this time – and still dreamily eating my way through my childhood summers. The food nostalgia is real strong, folks. 

Let’s talk about food! 

Today, for Labor Day, we are having ribs (it will be very fun and soggy to grill them if the downpour continues) and lemony potato salad.

(As an aside, potato salad is one of my Family Tradition Foods. We had it several times a year when I was growing up: New Year’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Fourth of July, Labor Day. My mom makes the BEST potato salad – it’s got a mustard base so it’s a nice sunny yellow, and it’s speckled with little bits of pickles and celery and red peppers and also – hork – hard boiled egg. My mom performs some sort of magical chopping technique on the egg so that it becomes dust and I barely even notice it. The potato salad is amazing and when I go to visit her, she makes a big batch of it and I eat it for breakfast. There is NOTHING that beats my mom’s cold potato salad for breakfast, you have to trust me. But even though she hand-wrote a copy of the recipe for me, I cannot make it so that it tastes the way her potato salad tastes. There must be something special she does, or maybe she doesn’t measure the ingredients as exactly as the recipe implies, or maybe she includes some sort of special ingredient like – hork – love. Whatever it is, I cannot replicate the flavor. So I have found my own potato salad recipe that I love but which tastes NOTHING like my mom’s. So even though it is Tradition to eat potato salad on Labor Day, it doesn’t really feel like tradition, because we’re not eating the traditional potato salad. Have I used the words tradition and potato salad often enough to create semantic satiation?) 

(My family is still sort of floundering to find our own Family Tradition Foods. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we haven’t really settled on specific meals that are so good we want to eat them every year forever and ever amen. And that’s okay! I think variety is wonderful! But I also have such fond food-related memories of holidays growing up. The foods we ate at specific times throughout the year took on such significance – and eating something like my mom’s potato salad can bring so much warmth and happiness flooding back that I would love to create the same kind of thing for Carla. Of course, there’s the added hiccup that Carla doesn’t EAT anything, so…)

(Family Tradition Foods must be a thing for other families, too, yes? Do you have any that you remember with fondness? Or horkitude, I suppose – I’d be interested to know about the Special Food your dad made every September First that only he liked to eat, or, like, the hot dish Aunt Violetta used to bring to every family barbecue that you all pretended to love, but would dump behind the shrubbery at the earliest opportunity, or whatever.)

Back to the Labor Day holiday pigging: my husband made these AMAZING brownie crinkle cookies for dessert. We may have eaten some yesterday already. You know. To make sure they weren’t poisonous, and weren’t going to ruin the holiday or anything. They are so fudgy and delicious. You should make them immediately. 

Here’s what else is on this week’s menu. Spoiler alert: it’s full of comfort food.

Dinners for the Week of September 7-13

As I have already mentioned, several times, Carla is starting in-person school this week. She goes to a very small private school that has expended significant money and thought into how to make in-person school work safely for all involved. We feel hopeful and grateful and that this is the best decision we can make for our family at this time… but I am still nervous. Any and all distractions, especially but not limited to food-related memories or your dinner plans for this week, would be MOST welcome and appreciated. 

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Talking About It Without Talking About It (We’re All Thinking About It Anyway, Right?)

 

Let’s pretend that we don’t care one way or another about the outcome, and let’s act like we are confident that we could calmly and resolutely march forward into the coming school year whatever it looks like, and let’s denude the entire situation of ALL its anxiety and stress and fear for the world and our own particular children, and let’s talk brightly and cheerfully about Back to School Shopping When We May Not Know Where School Will Take Place.

(Edited to add: We are currently anticipating sending Carla back to in-person school. Things could change; the school year doesn’t begin for a few weeks yet.)

So! My first question is about backpacks. How long do backpacks last? And, even if they are Sturdy Enough to last for multiple years, how long do they last from like a… user-preference standpoint? My husband says that Carla’s backpack – a Pottery Barn find of the Sturdy type – is totally fine for her again this year. She’s had it for three years, though, and – while it is still in Good Shape, it is looking a little dingy. My husband also reminds me that her backpack is a child’s size, and that he thinks a full size backpack would be too big for her. Maybe he’s right. But… at what age/size does a child need to pgrade to a full size backpack? I am not going into Pottery Barn kids anytime soon to compare sizes or have her try them on, so I realize we can only speak hypothetically here. Or perhaps – I am hoping – from experience. My own experience with backpacks is that I think I got a new one every year? I could be misremembering – conflating the Extreme Excitement I felt during the possibly fewer times I DID get a new backpack with general New School Supplies Excitement. (Oh man, is there anything as delightful as the purchase of a new TrapperKeeper and a colorful array of folders to snap inside it? I don’t know that many things in adulthood properly measure up.) Anyway: When it comes to backpacks for Carla, is it time for an update?

I am also wondering about school clothes. Carla’s school has a no-jeans dress code, with some other stipulations that I find less difficult to adhere to than “no jeans.” But I am not particularly inclined to buy her a whole closet full of new dresses at the moment. (See how I deftly sidestepped talking about WHY I am reluctant to do so?) She has a whole closet full of dresses, many of which still fit. And those that are too short, well, it’s harder to care about that sort of thing when you might only interact with other students over Zoom. (Whoops – got a little too close to The Subject We Are Avoiding there for a minute.)

She does need new pajamas, though. Her current jammies show off three or four inches of shoulder and wrist.  That’s not technically a Back to School Shopping Item, though.

What about shoes? Will there be a lot of shoe-wearing in our futures? WHO CAN PREDICT.

I think we are all set on water bottles. We have two, even if one is pretty battered. And we have masks galore (my dear friend, who said she would make Carla a mask, made her TEN MASKS and then made me a mask as well with the extra fabric she is a SAINT), so I am not worrying about facial protection.

Carla’s school provides all day-to-day school supplies, like crayons and paper and scissors and such (yes, I know we are deeply, deeply fortunate), so we don’t need to buy any of those things. Plus, we are All Set on that kind of thing at home from the end of the last school year.

Part of the thing about Back to School Shopping, though, is that it helps build excitement for the school year. I mean, that’s how I remember it. Getting new clothes and new pencils with perfectly sharpened tips and notebooks filled with fresh, crisp sheets of paper was all tied up in that thrill of nerves about the new school year beginning. Even if we have replaced the delicious anticipation about which teacher we’ll get and which kids will be in our class and which wing of the school we’ll be in with – skipping briskly over stressful subjects la la la – other things, we should still get to be excited about a new year, no? Maybe a First Day of School dress is in order? Maybe a new backpack or a new water bottle WOULD be a good use of money? Maybe I could get her a bunch of erasers in fun shapes and pencils in fun patterns and hand sanitizer in cloying scents and cute fidget toys? If they aren’t exactly necessary, maybe they would HELP nonetheless?

It feels like we’re all in this endless holding pattern. And, okay, even once Decisions have been made — and I know that What Happens With School has already been determined for a lot of people — life still isn’t The Way It Was. So all these routines and seasonal purchases and annual Things We Look Forward To just… aren’t there right now. I think I’m leaning toward getting a few things, just for the sake of (fake) normalcy, fun, and creating joy where we can. If there’s anything on the list, it should be those three things.

Plus, I have my own personal Back to School Shopping List, and let me tell you, it starts with tequila and ends with gin.