Don't suppress natural selection

I know I'd feel differently if my kid were to do something so dumb, but can you imagine someone actually mistaking the plastic capsule inside a kinder surprise egg for nourishment and consuming it?

...the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act outlawed the combining of
“non-nutritive” objects with confections.

Eh? Look at the picture from the link, the second one down where the large, green, plastic pill thing is almost as large as the egg itself. Who can get their kids to take vitamins let alone gnaw on one of these bad boys? I think this is simply the result of a larger law excluding even those things which are blatantly non-hazardous.

It's a good thing we can still make our own confections with "non-nutritive" objects. There are a number of cakes, traditional or otherwise, available for those who still love finding the prize.

Vassilopita is the Greek version, then there's the Mardi Gras King Cake, with a doll or coin baked into it. What kind of doll I sure couldn't say and that does sound less than appetizing even if it is inserted after baking. Can you imagine getting the piece of cake with Disco Barbie "hidden" inside? Or cutting her up... "Hey, Mike, what'd you get?" "It looks like a foot and a sequin-guilded clutch. The horrifying part? This handbag is so last year..." There's even this pagan version that's all spiritual and one-with-the-earth and stuff.

Other prize-finding ideas include what my husband grew up with: the bay leaf was the prize, and an extra prize for a busy mother of 8 who didn't have time to fish around for the darn thing before supper time.

Back to Kinder Surprise Eggs, I'm a bit miffed that they aren't available here because they're really cool. I got one as a young woman over a decade ago (ack!!) and there was a little puzzle inside. I can't imagine a more perfect way to stuff a stocking.

Does anyone know why that law was passed, about non-nutritive stuff not mixing with food? What were people putting into food that a whole law had to protect us from the unscrupulous? You know, if you wanted to take this law to the nth degree we could outlaw all pills with cellulose powder or silicone-based caps, or about 80% of available junk food, and certainly most American chocolate since I'm sure that paraffin isn't nourishing.

::grumble::

Anyway, OB appt this morning was uneventful. The ultrasound did show Freida as being about 3 weeks larger than her due date would indicate (her head was 4 weeks larger!!), and my belly is measuring about 5 weeks big, but induction is still full ahead go for the 27th of Dec. At the rate she's growing, I'm sure I'll have a plenty full-sized baby for the event. I'm in enough maternal discomfort but there was a poor lady at the park today doing laps to try to get her labor to do something besides tease. She isn't due for another week but after 3 months of bed rest, as many months of terbutaline, and 3 days of active but unproductive labor, she is so ready to be done with the whole bloody ordeal. Thank goodness I carry better than that!

I'm almost legally blind.

So I went back to the eye dr today to finalize my presciption. He held a prism in front of my normal glasses to see if my eyes would accept it and they did.

I asked him to tell me again what my vision was relative to 20/20. He said it's 20/2800. What?? He said that he could stand 750 feet behind me and see what I could see at 20 feet. What?!?

Legally blind is 20/200, but only if it can't be fixed with corrective lenses. I'm still within the correctable range so I won't be getting any disability any time soon.

For the love of Pete!! Hopefully I won't go blind before I die.

If you had to choose between being deaf or blind, which would you take?

"Eye appt", or "Did you know?"

Man had this past Friday off so I ran on over to the eye dr to get a check up. Two items of interest:

1) Tag is not the only person in our little family who has an eye that likes to wander off and do its own thing. My left eye strays up a bit, which apparently is very unusual and should be fine with a prism lens. The only problem with that is that contacts don't come with prisms, so it's looking like glasses time again. During the exam things kept going completely double. In real life, that means that my brain is going through enough strain that it gets tired of trying to fuse the images from both eyes together that I'll either get tired eyes or get generally irritated with what I'm reading or otherwise studying (both are common occurrences for me).

2) Glasses won't be a bad thing because my eyes need a break from contacts anyway. In an effort to be frugal, I've been stretching my (fairly expensive) torics for longer than the recommended 30 days... by like 90 days. The dr was not pleased with that at all. What happens is, the longer you wear them the less oxygen exchange happens so your body ends up compensating by having engorged, visible capillaries grow all over the cornea. This will eventually turn the cornea opaque which is a Very Bad Thing. ::sigh:: Glasses again. And my vision is something like 20/260, so I'm totally dependant on corrective eyewear.

The initial part of the exam was sort of funny. He had me sit in the special seat.

Dr: Do you see the white box on the wall?
A: Yep.
Dr: Great. Read the letter off to me.
A: There's a letter?
Dr: Um, yes, the largest letter the chart has. Go ahead and start walking toward it.
A: [close enough to the white box on the wall that my head is mostly in the way of the projection] It's starting to look like a vague blurry square.
Dr: Ok, turn around and walk back toward to the white square. Let me know when you can see it.
A: [about 3-4 feet away from the letter thingy] If I squint, I think it's an E.
Dr: Oh, wow.
A: [thinking, "I don't like it when dr's say that where it concerns me."]
Dr: You have some special eyes there.
A: [thinking, "crap. don't like that one either."]

Interesting article

First off, freezer update. Apparently my freezer doesn't like the outlet we had to choose, even though a fan thinks it's just fine. The headache now is just finding where we can possibly plug this thing in. It isn't exactly portable. And never mind that it's been there for almost a year now before quitting. Maybe they're having relationship issues.

Anyway, this article caught my attention this morning, and led me to wondering why people I know chose their mate. A lot of people will say something like "God led us to each other" (which is certainly what I claim, even though he's handsome, funny, smart, a good kisser, and at least as tall as I am) or "love at first sight".

But let's keep it to the superficial. What would you be able to tell about your mate after just 4 minutes of focused chatting that would lead you to a second date and from thence to a lifetime commitment? I listed mine above (except I obviously didn't smooch him after just 4 minutes... that took at least 4 dates) so now it's your turn.

Days like this

Days like this.

Last night I heard little crying voices in my dreams, and this morning I found out why. I left Pebbles in her crib sleeping while Princess got ready for school and I scooped her out of bed right before the school drive to find that she had been sick in the night. Oh, well, no time to mop her up before putting her in the car. Bath as soon as we got home, but then she managed to soil the tub pretty badly. Drain, wash, repeat, this time ending up with a clean girl.

Then I find that my chest freezer isn't freezing for some reason. My poor little freezer is now completely stacked with all of the valuable bits I could salvage with several things I'm simply going to have to cook up right away.

::sigh::

May as well clean it out and try to find what's wrong. Yes, it's plugged in, the outlet works, it's turned on, but the power light is off. We've only had it for 2-3 years.

Same old theme, new experiences

I finally got some decent sleep last night so I decided to get all ambitious with this other menu planner thing I'm looking at. I know, I know, I'm always searching for the perfect way to get dinner on the table, but lately I've needed something new to shake things up a bit with little effort involved.

Enter Menus4Moms. Simple, no nonsense, easily adapted recipes for the busy mom.

Poor Man. Last night we watched Ratatouille for the first time and immediately thereafter I had to go get dinner on the table. It was a decent little dish -- onions, garlic, chopped zucchini, chopped carrot all sauteed golden, remove and add chicken that had been floured (with flour, salt, black pepper, and ground coriander) and brown on both sides, remove and deglaze with white cooking wine, add chicken and veggies back in along with chopped roasted almonds and chicken broth, simmer until chicken is cooked through and sauce is thickened. Not bad at all. Served with roasted sweet potatoes (dipping sauce was sour cream, lemon juice, and high quality curry powder)

Thereafter Man asked whatever happened to the dozens of other meal planning strategies I've used over the years. I told him that I got bored with them all and wanted something new. This usually results in inefficiency and uncreative last minute cop outs. There are times when I'm feeling absolutely inspired, when something jaw-droppingly wonderful manages to come out of my pots and pans and Man makes me sit down and write down the recipe. 95% of the time, however, I'm going through old recipes to find what's easiest but still interesting, and also matches up with stuff I have in the cupboards.

The result -- blah.

This website is different from some in that it's free. I also like the versatility of it, giving me something to spring board from without feeling bound by complexity or otherwise difficult to adapt flavor combinations (like chicken piccata -- lemon and capers together don't allow for a whole lot of inspiring acrobatics, unless you're a real foodie, which I am not).

It also encourages the use of a variety of protein sources both vegetable and animal. My standby is chicken. Or hamburgers. Man is getting tired of it and so am I.

This morning I took the lady's suggestion of cooking up a whole bunch of onions (see "prepared ingredients" toward the bottom) at once and freezing to allow for almost insta-meals in some cases and after peeling and dicing 8 onions I finally cried uncle and admitted that I really hate prepping onions. It's a painful thing to spend 45 mins only to end up with 3.5 cups of final product but I have to admit that it's going to make some things unbelievably fast and easy. I just dread the prospect of having to do this particular chore again in just a week and a half. Either that, or I could use copious amounts of onion powder. Blech!!

Or maybe I could just train my kids how to cook one thing each and then I could take their off nights. Yeah, that'd work.

T S Eliot

I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Til human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

Gourmet flavor combinations that sound gross

Hearkening back to those salad dressings, I've found that there are a lot of flavor combinations in the foodie world that sound hideous but actually work extremely well together. The most memorable example from the dressings was watermelon/cayenne.

When we take a look at the world of haute chocolates (hahaha.... very punny) you find things like cayenne (theme?), fleur de sel, ginger, pumpkin, orange peel, liqueur, passion fruit, lime, anise, curry, coffee, black pepper, and the list goes one. We havn't even gotten into the combinations, like curry + orange in dark chocolate.

So, what sort of interesting things would a foodie come up with for something so achingly normal as a cupcake?

Behold, Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit.

Who would think of something like pumpkin + saffron, or parsnip + apple and then bestow that inspiration upon the humble cupcake? I think the oddest so far has been the sweet corn + maple + bacon cupcake. I enjoy all three of those flavors on my breakfast plate when in combination with the actual foods associated with each flavor, but in a cupcake??

The strange thing is that when I try these odd concoctions many of them work wonderfully well. I'm sure that some of you might be happy to just take my word for it and I don't blame you. I was tempted to give the watermelon-cayenne dressing a pass as well, but found a whole new way of considering each flavor as a result of that experience.

I'm learning more in my old age that food can be an experience. We live in enlightened times and in affluent society, so food is not nearly so much of an issue of survival as it has become a three times daily experience. If that means something like adding a bit of Thai peanut sauce to my cabbage salad, sure, why not. Or even sampling the mango + cardamom cupcake.

What are you favorite food experiences? The ones that you remember, savor, and look forward to? What food have surprised you?

My most recent interesting experience involves a strawberry ice cream formed into a lump and wrapped in a slightly chewy rice dough. Tasty, and interesting texture. Different. I found that one little lump gave me enough enjoyable experience that I didn't need to eat the whole container in order to feel satisfied.

Neighbor gifts

I've never been much for the cookie tray. It always seems like a ton of work to make 6+ different kinds of cookies, taking into consideration the dietary concerns of each friend I have. I'd rather just make a landslide of nut-free brownies and let them sort through their own dietary issues.

Anyway, if you're the sort who likes to get all creative and stuff for your holiday treat giving, here's a nice topic of the month put together by Recipezaar. It includes cookies, those weird cookie in a jar things (I don't know that I've ever ended up actually baking cookies from a jar), homemade ornaments, and even some treats you can make for your favorite canine. Heck, you can even bake something to put your cookies into. Edible cookie plate?? That's going the extra mile, especially calorically speaking.

I'm just going to stick with my old standby. Made on jelly roll pans, you can whip out many plates' worth in just a couple of hours, no frosting needed. Plastic wrap, stick on bow, smile when you knock on the door, get home in plenty of time to enjoy hot cocoa and candy canes with the husband and kids. The plates also stack in the stroller basket if you take them Christmas caroling. Just take a small bag of bows with you so they don't smash, then add at the last minute.

Or, even easier, snowman soup. I've seen this made with those tree and star colored marshmallows which makes for very cute presentation and, with no cooking time and just-add-water, it's more likely to get used.

Halloween, etc

First, dr's appt didn't reveal anything on Tuesday except the results from the hospital had not gotten back yet. They didn't expect that fast of a turnover anyway. Oh, well.

Anyway, Wednesday was interesting. Princess had her first "Harvest Festival" feast and costume parade at school. It was the expected milling about of 5 year old kids. I got there early enough to (barely) find a parking spot and help her change into her costume.

It's her new holiday dress with a pair of wings. Later that night we added purple sparkle makeup, lip gloss, and her loot bag was a watering can. They had a rousing game of musical chairs in which Princess proved herself to be entirely too genteel for such an aggressive game, offering her seat to the poor sad little kid next to her. Then we all trooped out to the large blacktop in the back of the school so the kids could travel around the perimeter to such tunes as The One-eyed, One-horned, Flying, Purple People Eater and an instrumental version of Ghost Rider in the Sky. They made about 5 circuits before everyone, including the kids, got tired of the whole thing. Princess frolicked around the whole time, enjoying her wings and twirly skirt. I got bored fairly quickly but shrugged and figured it looked like the kids were having a good time. On our way out to the van, Princess asked "so, what was the point of that?" I laughed and said I had no idea, but she sure looked beautiful in her costume. Oh, well.

I'm bad and didn't take a pic of Tag with his gumball machine outfit, which, unfortunately fell apart while trick or treating. We leaked balloons all over the neighborhood until the friend I was walking with offered to let him use an old costume of her son's. He finished the rest of the evening as a bespectacled pirate which I think he actually liked a bit better since he could run in that outfit.

I'll get a pic of Pebbles as a dinosaur later today. Her costume was purchased and actually could be used as pajamas now.

The trick or treating itself was an adventure. I took the stroller for Lil' Miss which turned out to be a heaven send. She went up to doors for the first 5 or so houses until she found out that riding in the stroller was more fun than trying to keep up with the other kids. We went walking with our neighbor and her two kids and they had such a hoot. The evening was absolutely perfect for haunting the streets, with a thick salty fog that left a lot of trees dripping just from ambient moisture, and all of the old, bent, twisty trees and shedding eucalyptus. We just stuck around our part of the base instead of going to the new housing, aka the "rich" housing (which is a misnomer since most of the people in the "rich" housing have the same pay grade as we do, they just got lucky). There were only about 4-5 houses on each street with their porch lights on, but we also managed to be either the first or second people to come by the entire evening, which at first didn't seem weird until the clock rolled around to 8:30 and we were STILL either the first or second people at each door. By then people were two fisting the giving of treats. I weighed Princess' bag of loot after we got the kids home and in bed. Just her bag came to 3.5 pounds! It seemed silly to me that all of those people went only to the new houses when I'm sure we came back with a better score in a shorter amount of time than they did. Oh, well, trick's on them. I heard of one house that just left their candy out in a box. The next morning they woke up to find that the raccoons had figured out how to unwrap candy and had made a terrible mess. The wife took the box inside and didn't touch the mess at all, which confused the man telling the story, until her husband came home and was made to pick it up all by himself. We can only guess whose idea the outside box was.

Anyway, Pebbles was able to fit her petite little self into a size 18m costume, which led to a mass measuring of the kids this morning. Pebbles is 2 feet, 8.5 inches, Tag is 3 foot 7.5 inches, and Princess has put on another inch in the last couple of months for a grand total of 4 feet 2 inches tall. She's already grown out of her whole last crop of clothes, you know, the ones I got right before school started. ::sigh:: I'm sure this is the generational lament of the ages. Or, one of them, at least. :)

Anyway, Man's on CQ recovery today. Someone needed to swap and Man figured it'd be better to do someone a favor now and then be able to call it in after little Freida puts in an appearance. We all know what a treasure sleep becomes in those first couple of months. So he called me up at 7:45 yesterday morning to ask if we had anything going on yesterday night, then that was the last I heard of it until he called back at 5:30pm or so to let me know that he started CQ that very morning and wouldn't be home until today. Just goes to show, you never know when your soldier will be coming home in the evening, or if.

So today we're measuring kids, watching Toy Story 2, and getting ready to finish some grocery shopping so he can sleep. Speaking of Toy Story, Ratatouille comes out on DVD on Tuesday!! We havn't seen it yet but we have a standing policy of buying Pixar movies.

Also, don't forget to set your clocks back an hour before bed tonight. Daylight Saving Time ends at 2am tomorrow morning and we all get to sleep an extra hour.

Unless you have kids.