cooking

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Weigh In Wednesday: Take One, Leave One

I find myself in need of advice on little silly things that are nonetheless driving me crazy. In exchange, I thought I’d share a few little tips that have been helping me out lately. 

If you have any hot tips to share, please do so; if you are in need of any advice, ask away. I will chime in if I have something to offer, and I hope your fellow readers will do so as well. 

Tiny Tips That Are Making Life Better

  • Low-Effort Houseplant Watering: I love houseplants – looking at them, owning them, watching for new growth or flowers. And I am also terrible about keeping on top of their watering needs. After several died or nearly died, I finally broke down and bought a pack of plastic watering bulbs so that I could put one in every single plant I own. It’s not foolproof – they do need to be refilled every week or so, depending on the plant. But it is making my plants SO MUCH HAPPIER and my days are no longer punctuated by random stabs of guilt when I realize it’s been several weeks since I last watered my plants.
  • Morning Time (and Madness) Saver: Mornings have always been tough in my household. They continue to be tough, especially since we have added Primping to our daily routine. And also, school starts earlier this year than it ever has before so we need to be out the door fifteen minutes sooner than we did last year. One thing that has made getting out the door slightly better is to keep a hairbrush, hair ties, and a small makeup kit in my car. That way, Carla can do her hair and makeup while I am driving her to school. Secondary tip: One common frustration around here is that no one can ever find a hairbrush when she needs it. I bought a bunch of small hairbrushes so that Carla can keep one in her backpack, one in her sports bag, and one in her locker.

  • Easy Sheet Pan Meal Clean Up: I love sheet pan dinners, and I love using a barrier between the food and my cookie sheets so I don’t have to deep clean the cookie sheets every night. (They don’t fit in the dishwasher.) I own reusable silicone sheets, and use them for certain things, but they are too difficult to clean for me to use them every time I make a sheet pan meal. For the longest time, I’ve been using aluminum foil. But I am continually frustrated by food sticking to the damn foil. I tried parchment paper, but found it super annoying because it’s so insubstantial it doesn’t stay in place and it’s difficult to crease. I’d seen tips before for putting a little sprinkle of water or cooking spray on the cookie sheet to hold the parchment in place, but it doesn’t always work and/or it requires me to wash the cookie sheet, which I was trying to avoid by using parchment in the first place. Then I saw someone on Instagram crumple up the sheet of parchment paper before smoothing it out onto the cookie sheet. GAME CHANGER. 
  • Connection Points When Talking Is Hard: The credit for this genius idea belongs with my friend G. She told me that she and her daughter have a special notebook in which they write each other secret notes. “Secret” in that no one else can read their exchanges. I have tried this technique with Carla, who can be quite reticent about sharing her feelings and talking about her worries. It works so well. She is willing to share all sorts of things in writing that she refuses to discuss out loud. Because of this silly little journal we pass back and forth, I feel much more connected to her and what’s going on in her inner world. It’s not even something we write in regularly. Sometimes we’ll go back and forth for a few days, sometimes the journal will sit untouched for months. But so far it’s been the perfect bridge when I sense she’s something is troubling her but she’s reluctant, for whatever reason, to share it, or just when we haven’t had a chance to chat in a while. Oh look – there’s a whole line of journals specific to this purpose. We just use one of the many old journals I have lying around.
  • Instant Mood Improver: Get a cat. Please note: mood improvement requires close proximity to cat and may disappear once cat is out of sight, which could be quite often, depending on the cat. 

Please Advise: Here’s Where You Tell Me What To Do

  • Do you have any tips for making it simpler to put laundry away? Especially if those tips apply to getting other people in your household to put laundry away? Our current “system” involves me doing laundry, folding or sorting Carla’s clothing, and then asking Carla to put it away. Which results in Carla using my bedroom as a dressing room, because that’s where I fold the laundry. I have started putting the clean/folded laundry in a basket and putting that basket in my bedroom on the landing outside Carla’s room in Carla’s room, but still – the basket remains there, full of clean clothing, growing less folded by the day, until I Make A Fuss. And honestly, the Making A Fuss only results in the laundry ending up on the floor, which makes me incandescent. I have not opened the door to Carla’s closet lately, and do not want to, lest my head implode like a firecracker. I am willing to do Drastic Things. Should I get rid of 75% of her clothing? (I did ask her to go through her wardrobe this summer and remove everything she doesn’t or won’t wear.) Should I buy her another dresser?  The child has AMPLE storage, seriously, so much storage, but what we are doing is clearly not working for her and she doesn’t have any ideas (besides I like having all my clothing in a laundry basket / on my floor) for how to make the situation more user friendly for herself. The only thing I am unwilling to do is put her laundry away myself. She’s twelve. She can put her own laundry away. Oh, okay – there is another thing I am unwilling to do: ignore the mess. I have tried that tack and it is not workable for me or for our family. 
  • What are your favorite low-effort houseplants? Especially if they require low light? As I mentioned above, I LOVE plants and would love more. But a) our house has very little direct light and b) the cat will seriously eat any plant, or at least give it a little taste test, so any plants I buy need to be non-toxic. I have moved all the currently toxic plants I own to out-of-cat-reach spaces, but they aren’t necessarily low-light plants and they aren’t doing very well. For instance, the Christmas cactus and the kalanchoe I owned pre-cat have been relocated to the top of my bookshelves, and they are no longer dying of thirst but they are clearly not loving their lighting conditions. I have also purchased a few plants that require “bright, indirect light,” and even those seem a little light-starved. I think I need plants that thrive in less light. But not no light. All the plants have access to natural light. Just not bright light.

  • How do you keep your fingernails tidy? Okay, confession time: I am a nail picker. I will pick at my nails and the skin around my nails, sometimes until my fingers bleed. I think I developed this gruesome habit as an alternative to nail biting (although I still do that at times, too, ugh ugh ugh), and I am ready to stop. But… I don’t know HOW. It’s a nervous habit, for sure, and I don’t think you can help me get over my social anxiety. But part of the reason it’s such an addictive habit is that my cuticles (is that the right term for the skin on the sides of my nails???) are often dry or peeling or otherwise pick-able. Right now, my pinky finger is all painful and inflamed because of this habit and I Don’t Like It. My questions for you are: a) If you or someone you know has gotten over this gross habit, HOW? And/or b) Is there something I should be doing to enhance my overall nail skin / fingernail / cuticle health? I do tend towards dry skin, and use Working Hands cream like it’s my job. But I get overwhelmed by the abundance of cuticle oils and creams and have no idea which ones WORK. Or if buying a “cuticle remover kit” would do anything at all to help me.

I do not want to end this post on weird giant photos of my fingernails, so here’s where I turn things over to you. What hot tips do you have to share today? Or, at least, the little things that are making your day-to-day easier/better/more enjoyable? And in which areas are you in need of advice?

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Dinner Adjacent Topics + Desultory Dinners This Week 

Dinner Topic the First: My daughter has made friends with a family on our street that has three kids. Occasionally, she will be playing with the kids and the kids will be called into dinner, and Carla will get kind of swept up in the mix and end up eating dinner there. This has happened… hmm. Three times? Four times? I’m not sure. I always say yes because a) whatever gets Carla jazzed about eating dinner is okay by me and b) I like the idea of Carla getting exposed to what other people eat and how other people “do” dinner. 

Anyway, the kids were playing this weekend, and Carla brought one of the neighbors in to use the bathroom, and the neighbor kid asked quite cheerfully if she could stay for dinner. 

Well. It was nearing five pm and I had no dinner cooking, and in fact had no dinner planned. Carla was busy offering the neighbor some chicken nuggets when the other kids rang our doorbell and said their sister had to go home for dinner. (Carla ended up eating leftover salmon, edamame, and rice for dinner. I had a microwave meal; my husband had leftover spaghetti with meat sauce and an English muffin with peanut butter. Clearly the neighbor child didn’t miss much.)

When the kids rang the bell, it was five o’clock on the button, by the way. Even on the rare occasions when I have specified a time for dinner, I usually give myself about a thirty-minute cushion because I am so unbelievably terrible at estimating how long things will take to prepare, cook, and serve. 

I was thinking, this morning, about how unbalanced it feels that Carla has been over to their house for dinner multiple times and yet we haven’t had their kids over for dinner once. 

The thing is, it will never be spontaneous. I could never just, on a whim, have people over. People DO this, I know they do. But I feel completely off-kilter just thinking about it. A big part of it, I think, is the specific way we typically “do” dinner. Which is to say: I make something for Carla that I know she will eat, and I also make a completely separate dinner for my husband and myself to eat. We have been better about eating together as a family, but there are still many, many nights when Carla eats at 5:30 or 6:30 or somewhere in that timeframe, and then my husband and I eat dinner at 8:30 or 9:00 after Carla is in bed. 

This dinner style doesn’t really lend itself to having surprise extra people at the table, you know? 

Anyway. I do try to have lots of snacks in the warm weather months (note to self: get more snacks) so that the kids can come in and grab a snack when they’re playing, and it isn’t always Carla depleting the neighbors’ snack supplies. But I think having them over for dinner would have to be planned, in advance. Maybe the next time I plan to make tacos I should invite them over? But that would mean making double the tacos, right? Because I would have to invite all three kids, right? And what if they don’t want to come over? 

Dinner Topic the Second: I am still reeling a little after spending just shy of $200 at the grocery store today. The amount isn’t wildly out of the ordinary, by the way. I was just rather shocked because I have only two dinners on my meal plan this week, plus “ham sandwich,” and I already had nearly all of the ingredients for one of those meals already. So what exactly did all that money BUY?

We eat a ridiculous amount of dairy, I think that’s the main culprit. My husband eats yogurt daily, I make a smoothie with yogurt and milk daily, my daughter eats yogurt confections for dessert (I tolerate them because they have some protein and calcium in them) and continues to drink hot cocoa on the regular. We all adore cheese. Half and half is a necessity. Yogurt is not cheap, folks! Sure, the stracciatella yogurts were on sale for a dollar apiece, but I bought EIGHT of them. (Carla only recently learned that they are delicious. I was eating them for dessert, and now I have to share them with her.) Okay, I was curious, so I added it up and $71 of my total bill was devoted to dairy. The cream cheese was $6.99 a 16-oz box, the Fage was $6.99, and the Fairlife milk was $5.49.

Tea was also on sale, so I got three boxes. I drink a lot of tea, but I also have writing partners who come over and drink tea with me, so I need a wider variety than I might otherwise have. 

Carla requested “meat sticks” and then specified that they be “the red Chomps.” Fortunately, the red Chomps were on sale, so I got a bag of small ones for $6.99 and few of the large sticks at a dollar apiece. 

Usually when I spend a big hunk of money at the grocery store, it’s because I’ve purchased a lot of meat. Like when chicken is on sale, I buy a bunch of it. But the only meat I bought today was a) two on-sale hamburger patties for Carla ($4.88), b) a half-pound of ham ($5.60), for my husband’s ham sandwiches, and c) ten grilled shrimp ($10.56) for the pasta primavera because I am sick of chicken. (The shrimp, by the way, were the single most expensive item on my grocery list. Prepared foods are so convenient but so spendy.)

Let’s see. Tortillas, beans, and chocolate chips were all on sale, and we tend to eat a lot of each of those things, so I loaded up. I bought broccoli for… some fleeting reason that has since been left behind. No worries; I’ll eat it. Eggs, powdered sugar, cream cheese, butter, carrots, and (ew) golden raisins are for my Easter baking projects. Lettuce and onions because I use those things regularly. Jalapeños for a recipe, green beans for Carla. Tomatoes and bananas are for Carla snacking purposes. I bought apples because I am in the mood to make muffins. (My writing partner always has home made muffins for us to munch on while we write. I’m feeling some 100% self-inflicted muffin guilt, which I will address with muffin reciprocity.) Kind bars were on sale, and they have a good amount of protein, so I will stow them in my car for those days when I am in the car during mealtime. Nutella because Carla loves Nutella. Canned pumpkin even though it turns out I already had two cans of pumpkin in my pantry. Rolls for my husband’s ham sandwiches, hamburger buns for Carla, and sourdough bread because Carla is on a toast kick. It’s not nothing, that’s for sure, but is it really $200 worth of food???

I still need to procure lemon curd for the cupcakes this weekend, and coconut milk for the curry I’m making later this week. Trader Joe’s should have both, hopefully at lower prices than at my regular grocery store. 

And what dinners will I make with these groceries, you ask?

Dinners for the Week of April 14-20

  • Pasta Primavera with Shrimp: My husband is not excited about this meal and may be less excited still once he realizes the protein is shrimp. I am looking forward to all the veggies. 
  • Coconut Curry Chickpeas with Pumpkin and Lime: This was my husband’s request; I am not looking forward to it, although we’ve had it before and I like it okay. As is my custom with curries and stir fries, I will add bell peppers to amp up the veg quotient. And maybe the random broccoli I bought?
  • Ham Sandwich: One night this week, I am going on A Fun Adventure with a friend, which I am very much looking forward to, and I am leaving Carla and my husband to fend for themselves, dinnerwise. Hopefully the ham stretches to cover a few additional meals this week, as well. 
  • Easter Dinner with My Parents: A meal I do not have to cook! Cannot wait! 

What’s on your meal plan for the week? Do you have A Specific Time when dinner is on the table, or are you loosey-goosey like me? What was the single most expensive item you bought on your last grocery run?