As in, “what’s in yours?”

I’d love to say I’m one of those people who has a bunch of Emergency Food all saved up and regularly rotated, just in case there’s a six-foot-of-snow blizzard or a massive flood that keeps us from the grocery store, but sadly, I’m not.

Right now, in my freezer(s), since we have two refrigerators, both of them old as dirt and not even remotely enviromentally-friendly, there is:

• One full bag of ice, and one nearly empty bag.
• One bag of chicken breasts, partially used.
• One 3-pound pack of hamburger
• One frozen partial can of tomato paste, since martha said you can freeze it.
• two boxes of pop-tarts (my husband’s)
• two bottles of vodka
• and two pounds of coffee.

I know. I’m not in the candidacy for Housewife of the Year. *facepalm*

One thing I’m doing in 2008, though, is trying out Once A Month Cooking — where you take one day and chop things and season things and put them all in baggies and end up with 30 meals, just waiting in your fridge for the morning you want some real food without all the mess and hassle. I’ve done it once before, and while the Preparation Day was much more rigorous than I thought it’d be (I was figuring 3 hours of prep-time…it was more like 8.), it was REALLY nice being able to NOT worry about cooking, even on those days when I was really, really busy.

The downside is that you have to buy everything at once, and that much meat can be waaaay expensive. (I think our grocery bill was around $300 that week. Granted, it was cheaper in the long run because I was buying food in bulk quantities, but still….that was a choke-moment at the register.) And you do still have to go to the store every week, to get your side dishes, perishables, and breakfast/lunch foods, so you’re not saving a whole lot of time, for sure.

Still, for us, I’m going to try it twice more, to see if I can get us out of the habit of picking up fast food when life gets overwhelming.

For the record, I’m using this set of menus. It’s the Mega-Mailer stuff — and I have to say, when we did this last time, there was maybe one stinker in the whole bunch of them. (A lot of times, when I try to make menus untested, I have about an 80/20 ratio — out of every ten recipes, two of them will be hooboy I’m not making THAT again for sure recipes. With Mega-Mailer, we had one out of thirty, which seems like pretty good odds to me.) It’s less than $12 per mailer, and she gives you side dish ideas and nutritional info in there, too. AND there’s a vegetarian AND a low-carb version, for people with special diets.

So there’s my pontification for the week. I’m not affiliated, I’m just a fan. (I’ve had the regular menu-mailer for about six years now, too. Helps IMMENSELY in meal planning.)

This week, I’m planning on trying out the Real Simple Speed Cleaning plan. Or at least trying to start it — I plan to do it for three weeks, just to see if it works for us and our lives. It doesn’t cover any of the deep cleaning, but I’m thinking it might help for the day to day stuff that I tend to…uh…forget. My poor husband is about to choke on the dust bunnies and the mud, so it’s time to start *something*, at least.

I’ll keep you updated.

I am obsessing.

And what I’m obsessing over isn’t even something all that important, since I have one of these already, just not this brand or type.

Oh, but seriously. I’m obsessing over a Typhoon Vintage loaf pan, after seeing a similar one on a blog I often read. And since I got a set of pink mixing bowls as a wedding gift (of this same brand and color), now I really, really want the loaf pan.

See, one of my goals for this year deals with learning to make bread. By hand. Not in the bread machine, since that’s kind of cheating, but honest-to-goodness, kneaded and loafed-up bread by hand. Because no matter what anyone says or doesn’t say, homemade bread is one of life’s great pleasures. It’s like alchemy of a sort. There’s the flour and the salt and the water and the yeast, and miraculously, through workings of your own fingers, bread emerges.

And ooh, is it ever tasty.

So why not make it myself? Learning how seems to be worth the final result. And I think buying this pan (which isn’t all that expensive, really. About $20 or so.) gives some added form to the function.

I think I just talked myself into it. I’ll beg my husband for valentine’s day, maybe….

Now, onto the weekly meme. We’re up to “E” for Everyday. It asks the question, “What do you do every day?”

I’m a big stickler on beds. I really feel like the beds need to be made. And there’s a practical reason for this, other than just the fact that it makes the bedroom look about seven zillion times better.

See, I have this husband. And this husband has the bizarre tendency to turn himself into a pretzel while he’s unconscious. And since he’s most often unconscious in bed, there are covers to contend with. Which means that by the end of an average night, we end up with a LEGENDARY tangle of covers.

And by “we”, I really mean “him”, because usually, by the end of an average night, he is wrapped in a twisted pretzel burrito of covers, and I have approximately four inches of Sheet Triangle with which to keep warm. Add in the four dogs, most of which are large and wait for us to fall asleep before assaulting us with their furry, sleeping selves, thus binding up even MORE of the covers underneath an 85-pound labrador retriever’s ass — well, you can see where I’m going with this. I either make the bed every morning, or when I get into bed the next night, I will have literal centimeters of a single blanket, and it’s six degrees outside. Six. Which means inside temperatures at this place sometimes hover around 60 degrees farenheit. And that’s too cold to be sleeping without toasty blankets.

By making the bed every day, I’m able to keep the burrito thing to a minimum. They’re still burrito-wrapper covers when I get into bed with my unconscious husband, but usually by the time I collapse, he hasn’t had nearly enough time to be wrapped double in them, and I can grab a corner and yank hard enough to actually get enough of the blanket to stay warm. For a while. All bets are off around four a.m., but by then, I’m out cold.

I swear, if he wasn’t so gorgeous, I’d kick him out of bed entirely.

The other thing I’m endeavoring to do daily, soon, when I get that far down on my list of oals for this project, is to follow Real Simple’s Speed Cleaning Guide for three weeks to see if it works for our family.

Have you seen it? It’s supposedly a miracle-worker. Much like the whole FlyLady thing, but more spread out over the whole house. Though I can see the wisdom in doing both — you can’t really clean clutter, you just have to get rid of it so you have the space to live within. But if you’ve been doing the whole Flylady decluttering bit for a while, I think it might be the simplest 19-minute-cleaning system I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it’s going to take me longer than 19 minutes, to be sure. (There are three bathrooms and four bedrooms in this place, not including the laundry room and the studio, both of which get horrendously dirty from time to time.) But if it keeps me from having a house that kind of looks like a small tornado might have hit it and left dirt in its place? Totally worth it.

I really should take some before-and-after pictures for posterity’s sake. It gets so bad in here — so cluttered and wrong, that I fully expect an episode of Cops to be filmed here sometime soon. Jimmy Hoffa’s probably in one of his parents’ junk closets in this house.

Anyway, that’s my Everyday. Make the beds, do the dishes, try to do some laundry. I’ve added “cook dinner” to that list on every day but Thursdays (evening meetings), and I’d like to add more than that, just as a pre-emptive strike against the Crazy that is our house’s clutter.

We’ll see how it goes.

(edited to add this:)

OMG…I just clicked on the comments at the Real Simple site (where the 19 minute speedclean thing came from), and the comments are making me gag a little.  Like this one:

miss clean
These SIMPLE solutions are for someone with NO children, NO pets, and NO husband. What size home are we cleaning here. A box. It takes my maids (3-5) approx. 6 hours weekly to clean my house which is 4000sq. ft. I pick up daily, work at home, with one 16 year old child, and NO husband. NOT possible. Is this a joke? This is the most insulting thing I have ever seen in print. Who ever wrote this needs to get a different job. 11/27/06

*blinkblink*

The “most insulting thing I’ve ever seen in print”??

How about having three to five maids for six hours a day for a four thousand square foot house, and then BITCHING that someone else’s plan is oh-so-wrong?

I am suddenly reminded how spoiled we are, as modern women, and how screwed up our society is to think that we *need* four thousand square feet of space to house all our crap, requiring three to five maids to service our posessions.

I think my new prayer will be to ask God never to let me have so much stuff that I have to employ five people for six hours a week to maintain it all.  The *only* reason we’re in this house is that it’s company housing, and I didn’t have a choice.

It all makes me just a little sick of heart.

Is this meme food obsessed or what?

I figured, since this is pretty much a yes or no, have you made them/no I have not answerable question (to which the answer is yes, by the way, I have, on several occasions), I’d expand this a little bit to kitchen gadgetry.

And the reason this leap in logic was spawned?  Finding this under my kitchen counter, left here by the previous occupants (who happen to be my in-laws).  Evidently, they didn’t make donuts very often:

In the box is the stick-free donut oven which looks like it just might have seen better days, and a recipe booklet for about eighty-seven-bazillion different kinds of donuts you can make with the aforementioned “factory”.

I haven’t tried to use it yet.  I’m a little scared of the electrical cord, which is the part of it that looks the most worn, but I may have to dig it out, throw on an apron, and try a few of these one day soon.  I figure the most I’m out is some flour, spices, and time — and while time is premium around here most days, it might be kind of fun to see what I can whip up.

I’m not a big gadget person, really.  I like the IDEA of most gadgetry — make your life simple with a wafflemaker!  Easy clean up with this new tabletop grill!  Feed your family with healthy smoothies with this new feature-filled blender! — I just can’t see the sense in buying a lot of separate gizmos to take up storage space where one tool that’s not as “featured” can do the same.

I’ve got the wafflemaker.  And we use it a lot.  And the crock-pot, which I see as more of a staple than a gadget.  A breadmaker that’s used less now that I have the other staple — a good KitchenAid mixer with a bread-hook attachment.  A blender.  That’s really it.  None of the food processors or tabletop grills, specialized nutcrackers or grinding tools, hand-held blenders or one-cup coffeemakers.  (Well, an espresso machine, but it gets used DAILY, if not more often than that….)

Oh.  And a donut factory.

It’ll most likely be cut in the next trip to goodwill for donation, since a nice little pan of oil will do the same work and probably taste better, even if deep-frying is less healthy than a non-stick pan.  (Though I’m not sure about that — did you hear all the flap about the DuPont Teflon factory workers coming down with rare cancers?  I’m a little wary of cooking things in chemical carcinogens.)

Got a favorite gadget you can’t live without?  Share — tell me about it.  (Not that a lot of you read this blog, but if you do, I’d love to know.)

So I was minding my own business today, when the new Sundance Catalog arrived.

I’ve talked before about my insane love of this catalog.  Not that I order from it very often, since I’d probably have to take out a second mortgage on my kidneys to get what I want, but I’m inspired — a LOT — by the style in those pages.

I found this inside:

It’s a set of draper’s cabinets for some insane price (like Used Car Insane) that I can’t afford at this time, but what got me wasn’t so much the cabinets themselves (though those had me drooling a little bit, too), but the display.

Do you see those books and magazines?

They’re all backwards on the shelves.

Now, I know this is fully impractical.  I mean, searching for a book when you’re not looking at the spine is like trying to remember what all’s in your refrigerator with the door closed.  You’re going to have some issues with retrieval.  But the look of it… with the much more uniform-of-color page-sides out… is much less cluttery feeling than a whole lot of books tend to be.  My collection (which is still insane, by the way), is pretty eclectic, both in size and color, and I’m thinking that something like this, for the shelves with the most often-used stuff, that is, might not be a bad idea.

I might try it with a few shelves and see how it works for a few weeks.  If I forget what I have, I’ll turn ‘em back around.  It’s a quick fix.  (And if I forget what I have?  It also probably means I have too many books, but that’s beside the point.)

So we left off the A-Z list with my baking Issues, but C…  C is always for Cookie:

I’m all about the cookies.  As anyone can probably tell by looking at the size of my hips.  But cookies are THE ONE THING I can bake relatively reliably.  Sugar cookies, snickerdoodles, bar cookies — I usually don’t screw those up nearly as badly as I do cakes, pies, or breads.

That said, there’s usually one batch in there somewhere that comes out like little brown hockey pucks.   And I’m okay with that.  Means I’m human, right?

My favorite all-time recipe is one that I got from my mom’s Better Homes and Gardens Cooky Book (the one I recently re-found in the bookstore, rereleased for this new generation of bakers).  It’s the “Mary’s Sugar Cookies” recipe, and it’s in there, if you have that book.  (Since it’s re-released, I’m probably not going to list it here, just to avoid copyright infringement.  Not that I’m above using excerpts for review purposes.  I’m just sayin’.  It’s BH&G and they have Big Hairy Lawyers.)

Actually, that whole book is nothing short of fabulous, so if you’re looking to have more cookies in your life, pick it up.  It’s cheap and great to use.  And it connects you with generations of women who have gone before, making cookies for families before we were born.  I like that.

Off to see if I can’t make the bookshelves prettier, if not less functional…

Yes, I know it’s been awhile since I managed to update.  Christmas totally whipped my butt there for a while.  And not because I was doing a whole lot of Christmasy Fun Stuff, either.

No, it’s because I foolishly thought that it would be a fun idea to handmake all my holiday gifts this year.

*facepalm*

Y’know how there’s that saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”?  Um, yeah.  When you’re a knitter, primarily, let me just say this:  That time had BETTER be sometime in JULY.  Because if it’s after that?  You’ll either a) not make it, or b) give yourself lobster claws where your hands used to be from the insane amount of stitches that fly off your needles for the four weeks preceding Christmas.  Seriously.  Ow.  My wrists still hate me just a little bit.

But I’m not here to bitch.  Really, I’m not.  It was a fabulous holiday, and all the gifts (other than the husband’s, which he knows about and knows it’ll be probably February before he receives it/them…it’s a big honkin’ project that he’s going to love, though…) were done by Christmas Eve.  I really can’t complain.  Everyone loved everything, so all’s well in Wifetown.

So I’m getting back to this Alphabet meme, with B is for Baking…

I am a fabulous cook.  No, really.  That’s not ego talking, that’s just a fact.  I can rock me a pan on the stovetop and find dinner in a bare cupboard full of shoe leather and old barbie heads, as long as I have spices.

But baking…?  Not so much.  Part of it, I think, is that our oven here is inconsistent at best (it’s propane, not real gas).  The other part is that I *suck*.

I can take foolproof baking recipes and be fooled.  Seriously.  Things from a BOX die at my hands, much less anything mixed up by me.  Remind me to tell y’all sometime about the time I tried to make blackberry cobbler without flour.  You may die of the giggles.

That said, I’m finding that practice, while not making perfect, is making passable.   I have a few recipes that I don’t screw up 90% of the time, so I make them over and over.  I’m working on expanding my repertoire a bit this year, but still?  Those same six recipes are pretty much the only ones I don’t hose up on a regular basis.

I figure I’ll keep trying as long as J keeps eating my mistakes.

And for getting this far and still being here, despite whining and long blogpauses, this is the best. soup. ever.   I thought I was going to have to extract the crock pot from my husband’s head, he was so into it.  (And I really wish I was kidding about that last part, too.)

Cheesy Potato Soup

serves about a billion (or 6 with good appetites)

16 oz. sour cream
2 pounds of potatoes, peeled and diced
3 cups of cheddar cheese
2 green onions
2 cans of cream of chicken condensed soup
1 can of cream of mushroom condensed soup
1/2 lb. cooked ham, diced
3Tbsp chives, chopped.  (Or 1Tbsp dried chives)

Cover the potatoes with water in a saucepan and cook them until tender.  Meanwhile, throw everything else together in the crock-pot and stir it well.  When the potatoes are done cooking, pour the potatoes AND the cooking water into the crock pot.

Cook on high for four hours or low for six.

Serve with fresh-ground pepper on top.  It won’t last long.

Happy New Year everyone!

I wish I had fabulous pictures for you today, but out where we live, there’s been a string of dreary days with very little sun and torrential rains, and my camera…? Does not like flash. Turns a perfectly lovely picture into a washed-out, overexposed bit of digital celluloid. So rather than scare you with flash-ridden ghouliness, I decided to forego the photo-ing until later today, when we’re supposed to see a bit of blue sky. I, for one, can’t wait. And to say thank you for reading ginormous blocks of text, I’ve got a recipe for you, below.

This whole week has been about trying to find a routine that works for ME. One that can give me some stability and is healthier than the stay-up-until-dawn type of a routine I had before. I realized I can’t take care of my family and my house when I have no energy as a result of the poor habits I’ve cultivated, and the artificial caffeine-laden energy peters out so quickly that I was spending much of my life in a haze.

And I’m fully proud to say that I believe I might have done it. I’m in bed no later than 11 most nights. (Last night was an anomaly, but my husband had a performance and didn’t get home until 1:30. But it was the exception rather than the rule.) I’m up no later than 6:30. The first few days, I was a little bleary-eyed in the morning (and found myself cursing that giant yellow hurty-orb in the sky for being so bright), but by Friday, I was bounding out of bed like the morning person I used to be.

As a result of all the new energy (and the amazing new vacuum, which I’m still loving, by the way), my house is cleaner than it’s been in the last year. Seriously. There’s a long way to go with it, but my carpets are the colors that the factories intended, instead of being grey-brown with dirt and dog-hair, and I can’t tell you how many dishes I’ve done. There’s less clutter because I’m throwing things out, and our bills got paid on time because I knew where they were.

It was made a little more complicated, however, by two things:

First, we woke up on a very rainy Saturday to find a new dog by our door. She’s small and adorable and well-trained, which, to me, says she’s somebody’s pet. We put up signs, checked her to see if she’s microchipped, and called to notify all the area pet shelters. Nobody has claimed her, though, and after ten days, she becomes ours if we want her. Because, you know, what I really need is more dog hair. But she loves us, and the other dogs are starting to love her, playing with her and nuzzling her, and while we don’t NEED another dog, this one sort of found us, so I think we might be stuck with her. And by “stuck”, I really mean, “OMG SO CUTE! MINEMINEMINE!”. Unless her real owners show up. I’d rather see her happy.

Oh, wait!  I have the picture of her we used on the Found Dog posters…lemme find it….

Aha!

Second, our oven broke. It was bad timing — right as I was getting into a routine of making our dinners instead of buying the pre-packaged crap, and baking more than buying a lot of high-fructose-corn-syruppy stuff. I ended up getting intimately acquainted with my crock-pot. Like, to the point where I may never go back to a regular oven. (I will, once it’s fixed, but I’m hyperbolic in my love for this week’s crock recipes.) There’s something fabulous about being able to throw in five or six ingredients and some baking potatoes, and walking away to do whatever you need to for the next seven hours while your kitchen slowly fills with the smell of dinner cooking without you involved.

And with that, a little recipe for you.

Easiest Meatloaf Ever
(makes enough for 4, easily)

2 lbs ground beef
1 packet of onion soup mix
1 packet of ranch dressing mix, your favorite
1 cup bread crumbs
2 eggs
1/2 c. ketchup

Mix everything together in a gallon-sized baggie or a bowl. (If it’s in a freezer baggie, you can totally freeze it for a later date.) Really knead it around so it’s all combined well. Form it into a loaf shape, put in the crock pot with several baking potatoes and carrots arranged around the meat loaf. Cook on low for 7 hours, or until no longer pink.

See what I mean? EASY. And it’s moist — much more moist than any baked meatloaf I’ve had. I love that.

This next week, I’m going to be finishing up the basic cleaning of the rat-trap we’ve been existing in and doing some decorating while my husband’s away on business for most of the week.  (I’m going to be alone for the first time, really, since before we got married.  He went away once, for one night.  This time, it’s *five*.  I may have a meltdown, or I may end up getting a lot done.  We’ll see.)  If I do, there will be pictures.   Hopefully, he’ll approve.

I almost forgot — I put dinner in the crock-pot today, and it was fabulous and easy. So I thought I’d share.

The basic recipe is from a Gooseberry Patch cookbook, but I modified it a little to be a little tastier.

Chicken Cordon Bleu via Crock Pot
serves 4 to 6

ingredients:
4-6 chicken breasts
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
thin-sliced ham (lunch meat)
monterey jack cheese
swiss cheese
1 can of sliced mushrooms
garlic powder
1/4 c. milk

Pound the chicken breasts flat with a mallet. If you don’t have a mallet, a hammer will work if you put something hard on the breasts (like a book) and then pound *that*. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

Lay a slice or two of the ham on the flattened breast, and top it with thin slices of the two cheeses. Sprinkle with just a tiny bit of garlic powder and salt/pepper as desired. Starting from one end, roll up the breast into a burrito-like shape, and arrange them in the crock-pot in one layer. (You can layer more, if you have a small crock pot — in mine, six breast-rolls fit comfortably in the bottom.)

Mix together the drained can of mushrooms and the soup with the milk. Stir until smooth. Add in just a bit more garlic powder and salt/pepper, if you’d like. (I like. A lot.)

Cook on high for 4 - 6 hours, depending on your crock-pot and the size of your breasts. (The chicken breasts. Not your breasts. Those don’t matter in most cooking.)

To serve, arrange on the plate and ladle some of the cooked sauce over the top. You may need to add a little flour to the sauce and bring it to a boil to get it to thicken enough. Serve with wild rice and a big green salad, and it’s a well-balanced meal, and so easy you’ll have time to do all kinds of other things in the interim.

I’ll be making this again, for sure.

Someone told me once that whereas cooking is an art, baking is a science. You utilize chemistry and knowledge of how things will react when subjected to heat, and instead of being improvisational (like cooking), you’re tied to a certain combination, measured in teaspoons and cups. At least you are in the States. Grams, elsewhere, which is even more sciencelike.

I’m a really good cook. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but just to state it as fact: I’m a damn good cook. I blame it on being an artist.

By the same token, I have baking stories that would curl your hair. My family would be overjoyed to tell you about the time when I was eight and we’d just bought our first microwave oven, and I tried the recipe in the instruction booklet for making cinnamon rolls. In the microwave. At eight years old. Let us just say that hockey pucks are still jealous, and my family, still amused.

That said, every Autumn, when the weather starts to turn cool and the night air can make you think that winter’s surely only days away, I get the urge to bake something. Most of the time, that something comes out of a box, for me, because I’m aware of my own limitations.

Partially because of this project, and partially because my husband dropped the bag of apples on the ground while bringing in the groceries, bruising them and mashing them up a bit, I thought I’d try letting the Fall Urge manifest this year in a bit of Apple Science.

I surprised myself.

Not only does it LOOK like pie, but it TASTES like pie.

And the Project begins to bear fruit. Or, at least, bear fruit-stuffed pastry.

The recipe, for your own baking pleasure:

Apple Pie
serves 6

ingredients:
6 cups thinly sliced apples, peeled and cored
3/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
several tablespoons of butter
1 batch of pie crust, your favorite recipe. (or from a box, if you like it easy.)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Mix together all ingredients except apple, butter, and crust until well mixed.

In the bottom crust, arrange a layer of apple so the bottom is covered. Sprinkle this layer with some of the cinnamon-sugar mixture, and dot this layer with butter. Add another layer of apple, more sugar mixture and butter. Repeat this until your pie crust is full or you run out of apples or both.

Cut the upper crust into lattice strips, or cover and pinch closed, cutting ventilation holes.

Bake for 10 minutes at 450 degrees. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake for another 30 - 35 minutes.

Serve warm or cold — tastes great either way.

Mmm, science.

Amy, of Angry Chicken (a *very* cool housewife, by the way), has in her blog today a link to a free PDF that she created with all her favorite recipes on one sheet.

Talk about a brilliant idea.   I think I might make one of these for myself, customized a little for the stuff my husband and I eat.  (Which, by the way, is a little less baked and a little more grease-laden, sadly, than Amy’s.)

Hoping to launch this site today, or at least get writing rather than messing with code.  I’ve some social obligations, though, that might get in the way.