nothing good comes from using the phone

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Dinners This Week

It’s a new week, which means that another 21 meals stretch before us, waiting to be planned and created. That both sounds like A LOT and not that many, although it feels endless and insurmountable. It’s also an appointment-heavy week, which I am not looking forward to. So much driving. So much trying to squeeze in Normal Life around these holes in the schedule. Why do I do this to myself? I think what happens is that, as I’m scheduling the appointments (which is usually months in advance of the actual appointment), I either think, “Oh, it will be so nice to just get everything over with at once!” when in fact I do not find that “nice” at all, but overwhelming and disruptive. Or I get all flustered on the phone and feel like I am being A Pain if I continue to request different dates/times. Probably it is a combination of the two. Either way, Past Suzanne is a jerk. 

Dinners for the Week of January 23-29

Lemon Chile White Fish with Chickpeas: I think I have shared my rule of thumb with you before, which is, if my husband suggests a meal, I make it. I hope that this encourages him to suggest more meals because coming up with meals is so tedious. (Once again, I fervently wish that I had A Mostly-Fixed Weekly Rotation, like Nicole… or a handful of tried-and-true recipes that we eat regularly, like NGS. Alas.) We do not own “Aleppo pepper,” but my husband is confident we can use chipotle powder and no one will know the difference. Probably we will have something green on the side – steamed broccoli, maybe?

Greek Chicken with a Big Salad: I am going to use this marinade as the dressing. Alert alert: I do not use a mortar and pestle with the marinade/dressing ingredients: I blend everything up in the blender. My Greek salad will have feta, Kalamata olives, red bell peppers, red onions, and cucumbers. My husband will have tomatoes instead of olives. I may also make some pita bread, just because it’s not too hard and it’s so fun to see the little pitas puff up. 

Japchae (inspired by this post from Birchwood Pie Project): Birchie eats this meal with gyoza, but says steak would probably be a good accompaniment. I may make steak for my husband and shrimp for myself, or just load it up with veggies and eat it without meat.

Farro with Garlic and Roasted Vegetables (inspired by this post from The In Between Is Mine): This sounds so wholesome and wintery and versatile. I will not be using tomatoes (quelle surprise), and I don’t have any potatoes on hand. I think I am just going to throw in whatever I can find rolling around in the house: mushrooms, red onion, zucchini, maybe a sweet potato although I’m trying to decide if that would taste weird with the other ingredients or not. I don’t really like sweet potatoes, but they are supposedly pretty healthful and my husband likes them and I have one languishing in the pantry. Hmmm. It will be a game-time decision.

Black Bean Burritos: I have been in a burrito sort of mood, so I’m putting this on the list. My favorite kind of burrito is a simple one. On the inside: black beans, a little cheese, a lot of hot sauce, a sprinkling of cilantro if I have some on hand. On the outside: copious amounts of cheddar – no, more than that, maybe just a little more – heated in the oven until it’s all bubbly and melty, lettuce, onions, sour cream, and so much hot sauce the whole thing looks more like an enchilada than a burrito.

What are you looking forward to this week?  Or not looking forward to, as the case may be?

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Five for Friday

I rarely do “five for Friday” because usually I have too many words and thoughts burbling around in my head to limit it to five. But I’m having a hard time with posting lately, so I’m hoping the Five Things Only structure will be useful instead of restrictive. 

  • My daughter’s new alarm clock has had some unintended consequences. First of all, it has proven to be both an excellent purchase and a terrible purchase. Terrible because it does not work in the way it is intended to work. Its purpose is to wake up my child; it does not do that. She sleeps right through the sunshine and the birdsong. (You can set it to wake you up with different sounds, and Carla chose birds chirping.) It is excellent, however, because it gently wakes ME up, even though I am in the other room. I greatly prefer it to the blaring of her old alarm clock. The bird noises are cheerful and pleasant, and when I go in to awaken Carla, the room is already light enough that I can easily navigate the inevitable dinosaurs or stack of drawings or tangle of yesterday’s clothing on the floor. My only complaint is that the birdsong is a short snippet that repeats on an endless loop. I do wish that the manufacturers had recorded a longer excerpt. Maybe that’s what you get when you buy one of the more expensive versions. The other thing is that now I feel like I hear birdsong at odd moments of the day. Has the alarm lodged itself inside my brain, only to go off each day in the late afternoon? Are there birds outside our window that sound identical to the alarm clock, perhaps hoping that by mimicking the sounds of the birds trapped inside the house we will release them? Am I experiencing avian auditory hallucinations? I swear that I hear birds chirping merrily on a three-second loop, but then when I go still and silent to try to pinpoint where it is, I can’t find the source. 
  • Did you know that you can substitute wheat germ for flour? A friend taught me this wonderful secret a few months ago when she handed over her grandmother’s recipe for chocolate chip banana bread. Supposedly, wheat germ has a bunch of good things in it: thiamin, folate, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc. I think it also has a bit more protein than regular flour. What I really like about it is that it adds a different texture to baked goods. Over the long weekend, I made chocolate chip cookies and threw in some wheat germ (I think you can use 1/3 cup of wheat germ per cup of flour) and it gave the cookies a slightly nuttier flavor and a nubbly texture a bit like that of an oatmeal cookie. Yesterday, I made a second batch of banana muffins for Carla and I have been using wheat germ in those, too. I don’t know how much healthier a cookie or a muffin is, just because I’ve added wheat germ. But I like the phrase “wheat germ” and it gives me a very wholesome Laura Ingalls Wilder sort of feeling when I scoop it into the mixing bowl. 
I am sure it is the wheat germ that makes these so appealing and not all the sugar sprinkled on top.
  • I have had to make too many phone calls lately. Several of these calls are for work. Part of what I do as a freelance writer is interview subject matter experts. Technically, I quite LOVE this part of my work, because there is nothing cooler than chatting with someone who is an expert about something, or passionate about a subject, or loves what they do. It is inspiring and exhilarating. But I get so worked up in advance of our phone calls, and I get all tongue-tied (at least at first) and sweaty, and afterward I am completely spent. I made FOUR PHONE CALLS IN ONE MORNING this week, and it was awful. I mean, I got to chat with awesome people, but I also had to leave a couple of voicemails (HATE. Even if I carefully prepare what I’m going to say ahead of time, I bumble over my words and take WAY too long to leave a message and yet inevitably forget some important piece of information. Like I had to leave a message about a prescription recently and forgot to leave my phone number. Voicemail is almost worse than having someone ANSWER the phone! Although worse even than leaving a message is the long Schrödingerian moment when the phone is ringing and you have no idea whether someone will pick up or not.) And now I have two more phone calls to make: one to the gutter cleaning service that was supposed to clean our gutters in December and one to my dentist. I have to reschedule a dental appointment. I have known I needed to reschedule the appointment since I made the appointment, and didn’t call at all last week, so I put a reminder on my phone to call the dentist this past Tuesday. Instead of just calling, I have found very real and pressing reasons NOT to call the dentist every day this week. It’s so dumb and it will take five minutes, but I hate appointment-scheduling phone calls. Again, there’s the anxiety of being on the phone. But then you add that to trying to look at your stupid calendar at the same time, and going back and forth about possible days and times, and then – as I did last time, hence the need to reschedule – idiotically making your appointment at a time when you were already committed to something else. UGH. It is all the worst. But I guess I should just GO MAKE THE PHONE CALL ALREADY.
My husband surely has nothing better to do at work than respond to my complaints about making phone calls.
  • I am doing a new thing where I (try to) soak my feet every morning. The recommendation comes from my acupuncturist, whom I am seeing for my plantar fasciitis. (Would anyone be interested in a Swistle-style report about my acupuncture experience? With the understanding that I realize I am not, nor will I ever be, Swistle.) She gave me a specific list of things to include in the foot soak: Epsom salt, rosemary oil, and eucalyptus oil. She specified that the water should not be boiling, but should be more than warm. While I do find it difficult to set aside twenty minutes every morning to soak my feet, it is quite luxurious. (“Go soak your head” is a dismissive expression of annoyance; “Go soak your feet” is a gentle suggestion for self-care.) It gives me a chance to listen to my audiobook and sip my tea and feel like I am following doctors’ orders rather than wasting time. After I’m done, I slather my feet in lotion (I think Nicole – HI NICOLE – recommended this specific lotion awhile ago and I love it.) and put on some warm socks. The whole thing is rather lovely. Except for the part where the water is too hot and I overcompensate and make it too cold and then I have to heat it again.
  • Do you know about LibraryThing? I am sure the website is full of excellent resources for book lovers, but I have used it specifically to help me identify a book I cannot remember. I guess I’ve only used it successfully one time, but I recently posted a new query. The first time, I was looking for a book I remembered reading in fourth grade. It was a mystery, and the only things I could remember about it were as follows: The protagonist was a middle-school aged girl. The story took place at a ski resort. There was a tertiary character named Eunice (I remember this specifically because I can hear my fourth grade teacher saying, “Usually, this name is pronounced ‘yoo-NEESE,’ but in this book it is pronounced ‘YOO-niss.’” and I thought at the time, how could she possibly know that? and to this day I wonder. Did she have an in with the author? This was in the eighties, so there were no podcasts. Mysterious.). (Still, to this day, I have never encountered a real-life person named Eunice. So I still have no idea how to pronounce it. For all I know, it could be Gaelic and sound like “Chelsea” or “Bruce.”) The protagonist couldn’t ski well, and the climax of the book saw her being tricked into going down a black diamond run in a snowstorm. That was all I could dredge up from the depths of my memory. And yet I could not get the book out of my head – for YEARS – and was desperate to know what it was. So I posted my question in the Name That Book group and someone figured it out!!!! The book is called Mystery at Snowshoe Mountain Lodge by Lisa Eisenberg and I keep dithering on whether I need to buy it and read it again. Anyway, it is so amazing to have the answer, finally, to a question that’s been nagging you for years! I am hopeful that my most recent question will find similar success, although my memory of the book series in question is even fuzzier. (A middle grade/young adult series from the 1980s or early 1990s about kids solving mysteries, but maybe there’s a werewolf? Maybe the word “shadows” in the title? It’s really bugging me, but my brain isn’t helping.)
Extremely blurry image from LibraryThing.com

Well, that’s the long and the short it, my dear Internet. I hope you are having a lovely Friday.