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Giveaway Winner, Mystery Item Identified, Things I’m Making and Planning to Make, Something But Not a Lot

We’ve got a new week and a new month and a new blog post. Thank you for being here.

Giveaway Winner

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the giveaway for Nicole’s debut novel, Inhale, Exhale. Twenty commenters threw their names in the hat, and the winner is…

Stephany! Woo hoo! Your copy will be in the mail asap.

Mystery Item

It took until Saturday for me to remember the mystery item I’d been meaning to order last week. (By the way, I loved Kate’s suggestion that it might be chipotles in adobo, which I’d previously blogged about running out of in a previous post! Good eye, Kate – fortunately, it’s on my grocery list, although my store was completely out of chipotles the last time I looked.) The mystery item was Loop ear plugs. Not a kitchen item AT ALL. I keep meaning to get Carla a pair of these ear plugs because a) I think she could use them during in-class study time, when her teachers discourage the use of headphones and b) I know she could use them when we go to noisy restaurants, which tend to make her feel unbearably overstimulated.

Things I’m Making

Speaking of Carla: she is going through another phase of not being particularly amenable to eating. She eats a decent enough variety of things, I think, but she gravitates toward easy foods which are often less nourishing and/or nutritious than I’d like. I would especially like for her to have easy foods to grab for breakfast a) because she often skips lunch. (We have discussed this with her doctor, we are on top of it, do not worry.), and b) because I want her to be self-sufficient in the mornings.

One food she has been into lately is the Starbucks bacon, gouda, and egg breakfast sandwich, which she gets without the cheese. I am having a strange and intense aversion to Starbucks lately, which isn’t the worst thing for many reasons. But this means I am less open to taking Carla to Starbucks. Also, Starbucks costs money and I am not eager to spend money on fast food breakfast more than once a month (outside of extenuating circumstances). Anyway, this is to say that I gave in once last week and took her to Starbucks for a sandwich with the caveat of using that sandwich as a prototype from which to make our own homemade breakfast sandwiches.

I made these bacon and egg sandwiches on ciabatta bread and froze them. (I added about a quarter cup of cheddar cheese to the egg mixture, because my kid likes cheese mixed in to her scrambled eggs, she just can’t abide it melted on top of things.) The finished product seems a little dry to me (no butter? no mayo?), and Carla has yet to try one, so please cross your fingers on my behalf. I will be quite irritated if she doesn’t eat them. (I eat very few sandwiches and also dislike eggs, so I will not be eating them. Maybe my husband will eat them.)

While I was cutting up the loaf of ciabatta bread, I made a miscalculation and ended up trimming the ends off of all eight sandwiches. Which gave me an excuse to make French toast muffins, a thing that seems delightful and which I have never tried before.

The French toast muffins needed to sit for two hours, so while they were sitting, I made a batch of homemade granola. I love granola, but it’s spendy. This batch called for coconut oil, which I don’t love, but it turned out okay. I used chia seeds, which is what I had on hand (because I purchased them specifically to make granola), but I would like to try adding flax seeds and/or hemp hearts and/or puffed quinoa to future batches. I suspect it will take me a long time to make it through this batch, though – I really only add a few tablespoons to yogurt.

Things I’m Planning to Make

I suppose while I’m making things, I might as well make a meal plan for this week.

Dinners for the Week of February 2-8

  • Slow cooker Mongolian beef: This sounds good and slow cooker meals are always appealing – especially when it’s so enduringly chilly outside.
  • Cream of mushroom soup: This sounds luxurious and warming. I will have to make some sort of protein for my husband to go along with his.
  • Ramen with shrimp and edamame: My husband wanted to try the squiggly noodles from Trader Joe’s, and I am always a fan of ramen with shrimp and some frozen edamame. Easy peasy.
  • Chicken paprikas: Yes. We haven’t had this in a while and it’s the perfect cozy comfort meal for winter.

Something But Not a Lot

In a rather drastic tone change, sometimes I feel so keenly the exhortation to say something that reaches beyond my little cozy corner. I have sat at my computer, many hours and many days, trying to find the words to express my despair and disappointment at the state of the world, to articulate the scale of my love and hope for all of us. Maybe it’s ignorance or delusion or cowardice or all three, but again and again, I find that I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I continue to read and listen to voices stronger and braver and more knowledgeable and more eloquent than I am. (The fragment “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse” keeps looping through my brain.) I continue to seek out blog posts, fiction, essays, and poetry to make sense of things, to offer comfort, to provide distraction, to inspire, and to organize the complicated tangle of emotions into words.

Today, this poem is resonating with me.

That’s all I have for you today, Internet. Stay warm and be well.

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Seven on a Saturday

It’s been a snowy, cold, two-days-of-school week and I am ready for the weekend. I have also been allowing myself to scan the news once per day for ten minutes, in case you want to try that technique. It keeps me moderately informed but tempers the anxiety a bit. Let’s have a little randomosity instead of thinking about The News.

  • I Am Really Terrible at Giveaways! You may or may not recall that I planned a little baking giveawayback in, oh, 2024. As with gift giving, I have lots of enthusiasm for thinking about giving and then I run out of steam with the actual giving part. Anyway, the winner of the rolling pin is Michelle G. from MG Doodle Studio! Yay! Michelle, I hope the rolling pin helps inspire many fun and delicious baking projects.
  • Fleece Lined Leggings. Due to the cold this winter, I have discovered that my threshold for walking outside is 20F. I can do it at 18F, but it takes longer for me to feel warm and my face is always numb and immobile at the end. Is there such a thing as a hooded sweatshirt that has, like, a pull-up face warmer thing? If so I would like to own one. Anyway, my favorite leggings for walking in the cold are fleece-lined leggings from Athleta. (Are we saying “athLEEta,” like “athlete” or are we saying “athLEHta” like “sweat-ah”? I say the former and my daughter is constantly correcting me with a tone like I am the most embarrassing person in the world.) After an encounter with one of the neighborhood puppies, my leggings now have a hole in the thigh. This was enough of a slight for me to tell my husband I NEEDED new leggings, but the Athleta ones were out of stock, so I bought my first ever pair of Lululemon leggings, these fleece-lined running tights. The Lulu tights are everything Nicole has been saying and more – they are comfortable, they are warm, they are fitted rather than bootcut (hard no), they stay up, which has been a big problem for me with my beloved Athleta leggings (except for the fleece ones – those do not fold up beneath my jelly roll). But… they are not quite as warm as the Athleta fleece leggings. I can wear those for hours and stay warm. I can “play” in the snow with Carla in just my jacket (also from Athleta) and those leggings and be roasty toasty the whole time. Maybe I just bought the wrong pair of Lulu fleece leggings? They also have these thermal tights… not that I can tell at all how they differ from the running tights. Or these adaptive state fleece joggers (although I look terrible in joggers, so I am resistant to these). Maybe I need to expand my search criteria? These Title 9 fleece lined tights popped up in some articles about “the best fleece lined leggings,” they don’t get great reviews on amazon, but ooooh you can buy them straight from Title 9 and they DO get great reviews there. These Arc’teryx leggings also show up on searches for high quality fleece leggings, although they are just as pricy as the Lulu option. L.L. Bean has a version of fleece leggings at a more appealing (to me) price, but the pant is mid-rise, not high-rise and it looks like a lot of sizes are sold out. I suppose for now I will continue wearing my Athleta pants, complete with hole (yes, I realize I could sew it up or patch it but those things are beyond my capacity; I am barely making it out on a walk at all please don’t give me another assignment) and the Lulu pants on slightly warmer days. 
  • Height. I kind of go around assuming all my Internet friends (that’s you, dearie) are approximately the same age and height that I am. I don’t know why this is. But recently I saw a photo of someone I’ve never met in real life, and I was shocked because she looks at LEAST 5’10”.  I am somewhere in the 5’5” to 5’7” range, myself. (In fact, I refused to be weighed at the doctor the other day which meant I was also refusing to be heighted and the medical assistant asked, “Are you 5’7”?” and I said, “Something like that” which I am only just now realizing is not a helpful comment when someone is trying to record my actual physical statistics.) Anyway, what I want to know now is: How tall are you? The likelihood that I will promptly forget and go back to thinking you are in the 5’5” to 5’7” range is high, but I’m curious.
  • Smoothie Cupdate: One of my longings over the past couple of years has been for a travel cup for my daily smoothies. It would be so nice to drink them in the car! Or take them to meetings for the group I volunteer with in a vessel that does not imply I am guzzling alcohol at eight o’clock on a school day. (I may or may not have, in desperation, brought my smoothie in something similar to this to a recent meeting.) But I am very picky. I hate straws – HATE – so I don’t want anything with a straw. I cannot stand plastic cups. I cannot stand handwashing things. So my ideal smoothie cup would be dishwasher safe, non-plastic, straw-free. I got TWO smoothie cups for Christmas, which was such a delight! The first one is this Simple Modern affair, which comes with a straw but also comes with a “chug lid.” The second is exactly what I had in my mind’s eye when I pictured The Ideal Smoothie Cup, although it is plastic. I will have to see if it bothers me. The double-walled heavy-duty material feels less like plastic than any of the sporting-events plastic cups we have around the house, so it will probably be just fine. 
  • Speaking of Holiday Hits: A sleeper hit in our household was this last minute surprise my husband and I got Carla for Hanukkah. We were wasting time in Dick’s for a couple hours (yes) until picking up our kid from a sleepunder and he spotted a rack of sweatsuits and thought she might like one. Sure, I thought. Why not. We got her a pink Nike matching oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants. It turned out to be one of her favorite gifts of all. She’s worn it pretty much non-stop. I kind of want to get her another one. 
  • Milk Magic: I have long bemoaned Carla’s dislike of milk slash anything with protein or calcium. But I think I have finally tricked persuaded her to drink milk through the magic of Starbucks. Apparently, the sixth grade set is big on Starbucks, and some of them bring drinks to school with them. Which of course prompts my kid to want Starbucks of her own. Because I am a Mean Mom, I made a rule: you can only get Starbucks if you get a steamer. A steamer is PURE MILK. Well. Sometimes with a splash of sugary flavoring, but still: MILK. Calories and calcium and protein. So Carla complies with this rule. And, since I only allow her to get Starbucks once a month (again, Mean Mom), she has begun requesting steamers at home. My husband has a fancy Nespresso machine that makes steamers and he’ll make them for her on the weekend. On weekdays, I make her hot cocoa. The kid won’t drink chocolate milk, but warm the milk up and add cocoa powder and mini marshmallows and voila! She’s all over that. Thirteen grams of protein, thirty percent of her daily calcium, we’re completely ignoring the sugar. 
  • The Book: Sixth grade is not just about Starbucks. It is a strange new world, let me tell you. These kids are into ALL the grownup stuff. For instance, I feel like curse words have become very interesting to Carla’s friends. (I have no problem with curse words in the right context.) Another example is The Book. Carla expressed an interest in reading a few very specific books recently, so my husband and I took her to Barnes & Noble. I am never going to refuse a request to READ. (Also, The Book was not available at the library, we did look there first.) Carla made some comments that implied maybe her friends would be surprised that I would approve of this book. It had some trigger warnings for some Adult Topics, but I am wary of censoring books from my kid. (There are surely exceptions, I just haven’t come across them.) Carla read it in about a day and loved it and then she gave it to me so I could read it. Simultaneously, one of my mom friends mentioned The Book, and that kids were passing it around and reading it in the bathroom, which I find SO charming. Of all the things to sneak around doing, reading has to be the most wholesome. Anyway, I have finished The Book and it is… very adult. And I disagree with some of the messaging, for sure, but it’s rife with topics I now have an easy opening to discuss with Carla. But it made me wonder: did you have The Book when you were a tween/teen? I vaguely remember It being passed around my eighth grade classes because there was a sex scene in it. But since I was reading Scruples I wasn’t particularly fazed. 

Well, that’s it for me, Internet. I hope you are staying warm and dealing with All the News as well as can be expected.

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Saturday Randomosity: Oh By the Way We Went on Vacation Edition

Oh hi! It’s the weekend and it’s AUGUST. The second weekend in August, in fact, even though that seems impossible on multiple levels. We just got back from vacation and are not fully adjusted back into Real Life. Let’s have some randomosity, shall we?

  • Perhaps you recall that Carla accompanied me on a recent grocery store trip. My policy is to pretty much say “yes” if she points out a food she wants to try, although I reserve the right to limit the number of sweet things I let her put into the cart. I kept close track of the things she actually ate from that trip. 
    • Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese: I am pretty sure this is still unopened. But that’s because we left town for a week. She did eat most of a giant block of cheddar that was in my mother’s fridge, though.
    • Demi Baguette: Carla ate half of this baguette in the car and the other half for dinner. 
    • Chobani Flip Cookie Dough Yogurt: She ate all but one before we left on vacation.
    • Watermelon: I kept reminding her it was in the fridge and she kept saying she would eat it and then… it went bad. SIGH.
    • Fully Cooked Bacon: I think she ate four slices immediately and then forgot about it.
    • Black Seedless Table Grapes: She ate some of these, but not all of them. I consider this a half win. Next time, I will take my grocery store at their word that we can take a smaller portion out of the grapes bag and buy that instead of an entire huge molds-before-we-can-get-to-it amount.
    • Crepes: She has been eating these pretty regularly, both before and after our trip! She put sliced strawberries in the first one, then moved on to Nutella. (I tried one, too; I found a recipe for a lemony yogurt spread to put inside and it was so awful I couldn’t finish it. The crepe was good though.)
    • Golden Berries: I washed the whole carton of these little guys and ended up eating a few. They had a texture I don’t love, but the sour-sweet flavor was enjoyable enough to override it. Carla ate ZERO. This may be my fault, though; when I ate the first one, I mentioned it was sour, and then she kept asking me if they were as sour as WarHeads. She LIKES WarHeads, so I don’t really know why “sour” would have been a deterrent, but maybe she doesn’t like sour fruit?
    • Raw Slivered Almonds: This container remains unopened in the cupboard.
    • Wax Beans: Carla ate about half of these before we left. Next time, I am going to buy fewer than AN ENTIRE PACKAGE.
    • Ham: Carla ate the entire quarter pound of ham!  
    • Protein+ Spaghetti Noodles: Carla has made several pots of spaghetti noodles.
    • Wholly Guacamole: We still have a whole package left, and I ate at least half of the other package myself. 
    • Cookie: Not eaten on account of walnuts.  
  • Our vacation was lovely and relaxing. We had a mix of rainy days, during which we stayed inside and did things like read and watch movies, and sunny days, during which we went swimming and boating and hiking. On our last hike, Carla managed to attract a dog. This is much more surprising than it sounds, considering the nearest neighbor lives about a mile away in the middle of a very isolated and remote forest. Leave it to Carla to find a dog wherever she goes! The other highlight of our trip, for her at least, was a bird that fell down the chimney into the wood stove. The four of us had to team up to remove the bird (who was sooty but flew away, seemingly unharmed) and Carla thought it was The Best Thing Ever. 
Lake time.
Front yard.
  • Carla and I have been getting into hair styling videos. I have never been Good At Hair. My hair has been pretty much the same style since high school. I can form a rudimentary braid, I can pull it back into a ponytail, I can stuff it into a claw clip. That’s really the extent of my hair styling abilities. So I’m always intrigued by videos on Instagram that show Super Easy Ways to Braid! I have saved a bunch of these videos but have not tried any of them. Carla tried a braid on me the other day. She decorated it with those little plastic rectangles you use to close a bread bag. Slay. 
  • Another recent purchase was a big hit, though. My daughter is always asking, “What does that mean?” when my husband and I use idioms, so I got her this book to explain what a bunch of common phrases and sayings mean and where they came from. She LOVES IT. Oooh – it looks like there’s a whole series of these books! Maybe I need to get her another one for Christmas or Hanukkah?
  • My “vegetable garden” is finally producing some vegetables. Tomatoes are starting to ripen, peas are podding, strawberries are somehow surviving the birds. I have only had ONE LONELY ZUCCHINI. Next year, I think I will plant multiple zucchini plants and only one cucumber. I don’t really LIKE cucumbers, and the two cucumber plants I planted have been prolific and weird. One of them produces round cucumbers. The little card that came with the plant has a picture of totally normal oblong cucumbers on it… so I’m not sure what I’ve done to produce globular cucumbers. I’m just letting it do its thing. 
Zucchini and a normal cucumber.
Why is it round and why is it yellow???
  • Speaking of plants behaving oddly… Do you remember a million years ago when I was complaining about the state of my front stoop? Well, I buying a couple of little evergreens that I LOVE. I bought them from the same garden center, on the same day. I planted them in identical pots, at the same time, with identical soil and fertilizer. I have watered them identically. And yet… one of them has done rather poorly. 
Tree on the left: thriving! Tree on the right: has given up on life.
  • I am thinking about starting a beef with our FedEx driver. Is that the correct way to say that? “Starting a beef”? Sounds more like prepping dinner than I intended, but oh well. We have a front door with a covered stoop and UPS and the mail person leave packages there. This is nice, because they are protected from the elements, plus we know that someone left a package there because we have a video doorbell that alerts us. The FedEx driver does not leave packages on the stoop. He leaves them by our garage, right out in the open. Which is why we did not know that a package my in laws had sent us – full of fun gifts and snacks from Europe – had been delivered until the next morning, when my husband went to work and found the box in a mess of candy wrappers. Some grateful raccoon mistook our package for its own, broke in, and ate every single edible thing within. 
  • Do you know a Cat Lady for Kamala? A friend of a friend created this coloring book and I am in the mood for a little giveaway. Let me know in the comments if you (or someone you know) are interested in having this coloring book, and I’ll choose a number at random and send a copy to the winner! 

That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope your weekend is off to a great start!