Tacos and...I know what I did last summer

Writing about food, especially food I've prepared dozens of times, is coming more easily to me than writing about my life at the moment. Last night I made tacos, so it was Taco Tuesday, woot woot! Over the summer I've tended to alternate between tacos and fajitas every Tuesday. There isn't really much of anything to write about making tacos, except that this time I used some ground pork I had on hand instead of ground beef. If you've got ground turkey on hand (because let's face it, it is cheaper!) that works well because this isn't a meal that requires the meat to be particularly flavorful on its own--that's what the seasoning packet is for! Usually when I make either meal, I warm up some salsa con queso in a ramekin for Dan, and some plain cheese sauce the same way for myself. I write the date on each jar the day I open it, but a full jar normally lasts about 3-4 meals, and a month is about as long as I'm willing to let that stuff sit in the fridge before I throw it out. Dan likes black olives on his tacos, and I like sour cream. We both tend to use shredded cheese, and tortilla chips on the side to dip in our leftover cheese sauces. When I am feeling ambitious I'll add some diced tomato and/or shredded lettuce, but mostly I leave the veggies for fajita night.

This summer has been stressful, to say the least. I left my full time babysitting job by choice. Last spring, the mother of the child I did daycare for went into some sort of inpatient treatment, for what, I have no idea. But for a month, the beautiful, sweet little girl I cared for was without her breastfeeding, cosleeping mother, and living with her (albeit very kind and good with her) grandmother instead. Being in a crib at night, in turn, meant that she flat-out refused to nap in a crib for me during the day. I have no idea whether they practiced any sort of CIO sleep training, but I suspect they must have at least tried it based on her absolute terror of my crib. I went from having at least an hour of time each morning to myself when Sam was at school and she slept, to having to hold her for her entire nap.

At the same time, Sam was adjusting to school well, but getting extremely bored at home. On my days off, I'd be able to set up sensory bins and other stimulating toys that would not have been safe to use with an 18 month old running around. Days that she was here, he was increasingly destructive, coloring on walls, breaking things, just getting up to mischief in general. Field trips tended to take a lot out of me, so I wasn't doing them more than once or twice a week. As time passed, I became more and more aware that Sam would need my full attention, especially for the month of August when he'd be out of school the entire month. Once her mother was back, I gave my two weeks' notice, feeling as though I'd done the honorable thing to keep her in her normal daycare routine while her nights were uprooted. By coincidence, the week that the mother returned, I threw out my back chasing the little girl to try to fasten her diaper and had to call my mother to help take care of the kids that day. It was just too much, and I was done.

Without the extra little one, I was able to put together "theme" weeks for Sam's after-school and summer break educational stimulation. Week 1 was farm week, which I began to write about here and then didn't. I made a sensory bin with tractors and crushed oreos for dirt, with a little chocolate pudding for mud and some plastic pigs in one corner. We borrowed some little people farm sets from my parents, and took field trips to the library, farmers' market, and the farm at the MN Zoo. We made some art projects. I set up a YouTube playlist of videos and music about farms. For the first week, I was a little over-ambitious and burned out a bit.

Week two was all about transportation and vehicles. We did a little less, but still took a couple field trips and went to the library and rode the monorail at the zoo, which Sam was a little apprehensive about at first, but then really enjoyed. I wrote most of a post about a field trip to a park which housed an antique WWII airplane, but never finished it.

We did weeks loosely themed on fish/ocean animals complete with a trip to MN SeaLife Aquarium and music complete with a trip to a local park where Sam played a big outdoor xylophone. I wasn't quite cut out for the level of planning that would be needed to keep up the level of curriculum from that first week, especially as I was trying to get my house in order and my home economics going. (I did, however, set up YouTube playlists for each week, and you can watch them here! We still do!) The rest of our time was spent with trips to the park and the grocery store, the farmers' market, the zoo, the mall, and wherever we felt like going each day. By the last couple weeks of summer I was so ready for Sam to be back in school so that I'd have a little more time for me, for meal planning, for couponing, for cleaning, for getting his activities organized. And by no coincidence, time to write again. I lament not continuing to document my year of giving, but at this point, I feel like I've given the last 4 or 5 months to Sam and the little girl. Making oneself available when family and friends need you was part of the text from Isaiah, so I say it counts. Another post I started to write and didn't finish was one questioning the idea of writing about the whole project at all. Maybe I'll clean it up and post it one of these days.

Which brings us to today. Yesterday was Sam's fifth day of school, and his teachers have autism training today and tomorrow, so no school again until Friday. In the heat these last few weeks, we've taken to the play area at Burnsville Center instead of going to the park each day. Tonight I'll make Spaghetti Puttanesca and tell you all about it tomorrow.

Linguine with mushrooms in cream sauce

This is a post that I've meant to write for a very long time. I took all the pictures for it, twice, and never managed to actually write it. So I am taking the pictures a third time and writing the heck out of it.

This is a recipe I got on Digs Magazine, "a home and living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation."  The main creator, Yee-Fan Sun, wrote a book called First Digs, had twins, and abandoned the website, it seems. But the archive is still up, and I hope it stays that way. Needless to say, I've saved and printed many recipes from her site just in case. The Zucchini Pasta I made last week was from there, as are several other of my favorite pasta dishes, breads, and meats. Many of the recipes are targeted at either A) Entertaining on the cheap or B) Feeding one or two without a metric ton of leftovers.

So. Linguine with mushrooms in cream sauce is a recipe that I like, Dan likes, and Sam will at least eat the plain noodles portion. That's sort of how a lot of my pasta dishes work out for Sam. One modification I've made to the recipe is that I double the amounts of everything in the sauce. We just wanted a higher proportion of mushrooms and sauce with our noodles.

Earlier in the day I try to chop the shallot and slice the mushrooms. Shallots are one of the best kept secrets I've discovered in recent memory. They are shaped a little like garlic cloves, but their interior is more like a very delicate onion. I find that they taste a bit like a cross between the two, only a little more mellow. I chop mine similar to how I do an onion, but with smaller rows and columns. My shallot was fairly large so I didn't use two this time. It had three lobes, and normally what I get is one with two and one with one, so, same diff.

Big ol' shallot 

Three lobes

Ready to throw in the fridge until cookin' time

I threw a little saran wrap on my ramekin of shallot and tossed it in the fridge. Now it was time for the mushrooms. My least favorite part of cooking with mushrooms is cleaning them. You don't wash mushrooms with water because they absorb too much of it. Instead, you sort of brush or rub any residual growing medium off of them and call it a day. I don't have a fancy mushroom brush so I use a paper towel. My preferred mushroom for this recipe is baby bella (aka crimini with a name that makes people think they are cute). I've made it with regular white button mushrooms, but in a recipe where they are really the star ingredient and there's no color elsewhere, cooked white mushrooms take on a boring grey color that just makes the whole thing unappetizing. On the other hand, criminis, porcinis, or whatever else you want to use will probably turn a nice brown when cooked, which will in turn give the cream sauce a nice color. Anyhow, down to business with my mushrooms.

Remember, double recipe. Great with pasta...no, really?

Since the cleaning and slicing of the mushrooms can be kind of tedious, I tend to do one container from start to finish and then do the other. It also saves room on my cutting board.

Batch one, cleaned

Then I slice off most of the stem from each mushroom and discard. Too much stem can make the next step more difficult, and I just like having that fresh cut rather than a tough edge. Next, I put each mushroom through my egg slicer. Yes, I go through a lot of egg slicers this way...about one every couple years. Yes, it is worth it. You might wonder why I don't just buy the presliced mushrooms they sell at the store. To be honest, I have done so in a pinch. I really dislike doing it for several reasons: 1. They are usually more expensive. 2. They are dang near impossible to clean and I usually find bits of growing medium in with the slices. 3. They leave on too much stem for my taste, and 4. They are cut a bit thicker than I like, which makes them take longer to cook. Just not a fan.

Caps getting sliced

 Batch one, cleaned and sliced

All of the mushrooms cleaned and sliced, ready to pop in the fridge.

When it's time to start cooking, I put a large covered stockpot 2/3-3/4 full of water on the back burner of my stove on high heat. In a large skillet, I saute the shallot and garlic in oil for a few minutes, until it is softened and translucent. Then come the mushrooms. I let them cook for a good while before adding the wine. Finally, when the wine has cooked down a bit, I add the cream (I used half and half) and let that cook down and thicken. Meanwhile, I'm cooking a half box of linguine according to package instructions. When everything's just about ready I grind some sea salt over the sauce and plate it up. This is another one that could be served with a salad or bread, but it usually is enough food for all of us without it. Here are some crappy photos of the process and final result.

Shallot and garlic starting to cook

Just tossed in the mushrooms

Added the wine

Added the half-and-half

All done!

I had a coupon for the mushrooms, so this meal cost very little. $2.56 for mushrooms, $0.36 for the shallot, and about $0.33 worth of pasta, $0.85 worth of cooking wine, probably about another dollar worth of cream+oil+salt+garlic. Roughly $5 to feed two adults and a preschooler, drinks not included. Not bad!

Tonight is tacos, so I probably won't write as much about that recipe, since it's just 1. brown meat & drain 2. add seasoning packet 3. put it in tortillas. Which means I might have to write about my feelings. Oh no! :)

Rotisserie Chicken

Sunday I decided to make something I hadn't made pretty much all summer: a whole chicken. I am a huge fan of whole roasted chickens, so much so that I made one last Thanksgiving even when we all had colds. Summer is not, however, a great time to run the oven at 425°F. Enter the Ronco Compact Showtime Rotisserie. It's small enough to not take up a ton of space but large enough to make a fryer-sized whole chicken. I don't really use a recipe for this. Here's what I entered into Cozi as my "recipe".

Ingredients 

1 whole chicken, fryer-size (3-4 lbs)
Lawry's seasoned salt
Onion or lemon (optional)

Preparation

Remove giblets and neck and rinse bird inside and out. Sprinkle seasoned salt inside cavity and then rub over the entire outside of the bird. Place sliced onion or lemon inside the cavity, if desired. Stick it on the spit butt-end first and tie on with kitchen string or truss first. Cap the spit and place in the rotisserie. Cook using formula on side of rotisserie, at least one hour or until 165 degrees in thigh and breast, and juices run clear. Allow to rest 5-10 minutes before carving.

So. This time I happened to have one last onion from my farmer's market trip last Wednesday, so I sliced it up and jammed as much of it into the cavity of the bird as I could fit, about half. (It was a rather large onion and a rather small bird.) I trussed the chicken using one of the elastic strings that came with the rotisserie. Regular kitchen string works just as well. There is a neat little disc that you place the end of the spit on so that it stands up, which helps with loading the chicken on. I had a 3.5 lb bird and the formula said 15 minutes per pound, so technically it might have been done at about 52-53 minutes, but I always figure a whole hour for a whole bird. Here are some pictures I took!

Just started

Halfway point

Done!

Resting (digital probe thermometer in the background, love that thing!)

More resting, and my carving tools.

After it was done, I let it rest on the spit, and then on a cutting board I placed inside a cookie sheet. The cookie sheet provides a nice groove for the juices to flow into as I cut, so I don't get my counter ridiculously messy. Google has plenty of guides as to how to carve up a chicken, so I'll let you choose the one that makes sense to you. I couldn't find the one I originally learned from. I started taking pictures of the carving process, but it got too messy to keep going back and forth between the chicken and my phone, so I just took one of the finished product.

Popping out the hip joint

My favorite, the leg quarter!

The whole shebang

I served the meat with some frozen corn and bread and butter. If I'd thought about going to the grocery store again I'd probably have tried to serve some sort of salad/baguette combination, but to be honest, when I make a whole chicken, we tend to eat mostly the whole chicken.

This particular chicken was a Gold'n Plump fryer which I paid too much for ($6.99, about $2 per pound) but the only other less expensive per pound option I could find was a whole roaster which would have been 7 lbs, the same price or more, and wouldn't have fit in my rotisserie. When whole chickens go on sale this winter I will stock up and freeze them, so I'm not stuck paying those prices next time. I have been known to buy 4 or 5 chickens at once when they go to $0.99 per pound. They take a couple of days to thaw in the refrigerator, but if I've planned ahead with my meal plan calendar, I know in advance when to start thawing. The other thing that I could/should have done to make the whole meal more economical would have been to boil the carcass to make homemade chicken stock. One of these days I will actually do it, but Sunday was not that day. ;)

Anyhow. This meat-heavy meal cost about $7.66 for newly purchased ingredients, and the rest I had on hand (probably another dollar or so.) I'm looking forward to sharing my bargain-basement meatless meals soon! Tonight I am making my infamous Linguini with Mushrooms. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Tangy Slow Cooker Pork Roast

Yesterday morning while Sam was at school I popped a roast in the crock pot and didn't have to think about what to make for dinner all day long. Those are my favorite sorts of days. The recipe is here, and the only major thing I changed is that I skip the hot sauce and double the amount of garlic powder. As I mentioned Thursday, this isn't exactly a healthy recipe. The marinade that the pork cooks in is full of ingredients that those on a strict diet might want to avoid: sugar, soy sauce, ketchup, salt, etc. Not sure how modifying it might work out...you'd probably still want some sort of tomato-based acid to break down the meat and a vinegar to add flavor. Plus, depending on the cut of meat, it can be loaded with saturated fat. In the past, I've tried making this recipe with a loin roast, trimming away the bulk of the fat from the top. This time, it was a bone-in shoulder roast, just because that was what was on sale (and I'd used up all the pork roasts we got when we bought on the hoof with my parents.) Anyhow. I heated up the water in the microwave for about a minute to get it nice and warm, but not boiling. I added it to just the sugar first and whisked until it was totally dissolved, added the other ingredients, and whisked again. Since the ketchup comes out of the fridge cold it can sometimes be difficult to blend in with the liquid ingredients, so the whisking helps.

So here's the roast in the crock pot on top of the sliced onion (second recipe in a row with a farmer's market ingredient, WOOT.)

And then the sauce/marinade/whatever you want to call it:

And pour it over, and we're good!

I set the crock pot on low for 8 hours. When it was finally done, it looked like this:

It falls right off the bone, so if you were serving it as a roast, you'd need to be very careful getting it out of the crock pot. Rather than serving it with noodles, I decided to make sandwiches with some buns we had on hand already, barbecue sauce optional. Dan had the brilliant idea to add shredded cheese, which was also delicious. Of course I totally forgot to take a picture of the actual sandwiches, but here's a picture of some of the meat and onions I pulled from the crock pot.

Altogether the meal cost $8.21 for the roast and the onion, the rest I had on hand already (maybe amounted to another $2-3, depending on what kind of sale price I got on the buns and frozen veggies), and we had plenty of leftover meat to make another couple sandwiches this weekend. It's a pretty rich recipe so I try not to make it all that often.

Tonight Dan is going to grill hamburgers from his own recipe, so I may blog about what I make during the weekend for Monday's post.

Jumping back in...and a new short-term project

Since the last time I posted a new blog entry, I've quit my job, spent Sam's summer break going on endless field trips, slowly but surely worked toward getting my homemaking back on track, and gotten him back to school. It's been a little nuts, and I've started and abandoned several posts that just never got finished before they were irrelevant. But now Sam's back in school roughly 3 hours every day. So I've got time to take on a project each day, cook every night, and pretty much get my "poop in a group", as my mom says. Yesterday, the first day of school, I cleaned out our minivan from a summer's worth of straw wrappers, toys, abandoned hoodies and shoes, and whatever else was back there. Before I stopped watching Maggie, I had flipped the third row bench under so that I had a huge flat surface to put both strollers in, but it wound up full of other stuff eventually. No more. The third row is back up where it belongs and the cargo space is now limited to what will fit behind it. Whew.

Last night I plotted out a menu plan for the entire month of September in this nifty software called Cozi. I have the app for my phone but the menu planning is only available on their desktop website, so I was using that on my pitiful little netbook. It's pretty neat, though: you can enter all the recipes you use regularly (including links if the recipe is online) and then drag and drop them onto dates. There's even an option to add the recipe's ingredients to your grocery list (which is available on the mobile app, natch.) The only thing it seems to be missing is a social networking piece. It would be cool to have the option to share links to my recipes with notes either here, on Twitter or on Facebook. A lot of my friends on Facebook have been posting about wanting healthy dinner recipes and whole food cooking ideas, so I figured an easy thing for me to do over the course of the month would be to blog each recipe as I cook it. Days which are repeats will be posts that I write a little more about what's on my mind or what's going on in our lives, but days which are new recipes will be mostly devoted to the menu.

Last night was my Zucchini Pasta, which I have already written about here, therefore I'm not going to rehash the whole recipe. Wednesday was the final day of the MN Zoo Farmer's Market for the summer, but I was still able to get a few onions and a pound of yellow squash. Many of the other local markets go through Halloween so I may have to get a new favorite. :) One thing I tried with the squash was to slice it using the slicey side of a cheese grater. It did NOT go well. Those things are not sharp enough to slice produce neatly. So I dragged out the mandolin slicer after all, and got two kitchen implements dirty. Sigh.

Tonight, pork roast! Will post about it tomorrow. (Note: not a particularly healthy recipe. Potentially high in fat. Contains refined sugar, ketchup, and soy sauce.)

Writer's block

So I've had a lot on my mind lately, but not a lot of it is publicly shareable right now. (No, I am not pregnant, as far as I know.) A lot of what's "on my heart", to borrow the evangelical expression, is related to something that is not my story to tell, even though it's taking up a lot of my time, energy, and worry. I will write what I can, when I can, and backlog those posts as drafts until I and able to talk more openly about it.

I realized a few days ago that I'm filling up Facebook with my cute pictures and anecdotes about Sam. Part of why I started this blog was to move my content off of Facebook as much as possible. So you can expect more "fluff" kid-related posts from me in the near future. Here is one:

Sam has taken to pronouncing the word "tortilla" the way an old southern woman would say "oh dear": oh, DEE-ah. Cracks me up.

And another: Wednesday was unofficial "hug day" at my house. Both kids would walk up to each other and me and say, "Hug?" Hugs would follow, often group hugs. It was the best.

Just so you don't think my life is perfect: we recently came to the conclusion that all of Sam's toys have to be locked away in his closet, or he will dump everything all over the floor and then not even play with it. It was exhausting to try to keep up with and frequently I would just mutter "oh f*** it, whatever" under my breath and just give up. We're almost to the point where everything's put away, and he's taken to writing on the walls (how the heck does he keep finding crayons?) And ripping his books apart. And bringing sticks in the house from outside. Can. Not. Win.

Also as I was typing this? With my thumbs, on my phone, because that's apparently the only way I am allowed to computer lately (side note: do anyone else's kids climb up and lay themselves across your forearms whenever you're using a handheld device? Just mine? OK.) And he jumped up on me and headbutted me, right on the mouth. I am going to have a fat lip. Lucky it wasn't harder or my front teeth would be gone.

So. I am going to try to post more of that sort of stuff, in the mean time. Because honestly, my kid does weird stuff on the daily.

Sam and Autism

I wrote the following the week of April 8. Beyond the general description of what was going on, I was unable to finish because I am still in the process of processing everything. Additional information added "now" is in brackets. So here is what I had to say then:

Sam began special ed preschool last week on Tuesday. The last round of testing with the school district's early intervention programs indicated that he qualified for the educational category of autism, [with varying severity of delays in the areas of language, fine motor, gross motor, cognitive, and social/behavioral.] We kind of knew this was coming, and frankly I'm relieved, as it means he will continue to receive speech therapy which he still desperately needs. [I believe that the main reason he tested so poorly in the other areas is that he does not follow directions well. To be clear, he hasn't backslid on specific skills since his last set of tests, but he hasn't made adequate progress for his age.]
So far it is just Sam and two other little boys in his class. They have a teacher, a teacher's aide, and a variety of specialists that work with them in specific areas. Rather than seeing a speech therapist twice a month, he'll be seeing one twice per week. I am elated, especially considering how much progress he's made with even that amount of help.
We also made it into the ECFE class "Parenting the Child with Special Needs" on Wednesday nights. This is the one where the beginning and end of class are with both the parents and kids, and in the middle we separate for an hour of playtime and a snack (for them), and an hour of group therapy aka parenting class, for us.

So now (in June) our ECFE class is over, and Sam finished spring term at school. This week is the gap between the end of the school year and the beginning of summer school, which will begin mid-June and end toward the end of July. The ECFE class was hugely helpful in terms of hearing what other parents are also going through, and finding some role models in terms of advocating for one's child. About two thirds (maybe more) of the class was parents whose children have autism, and the rest were parents of children who have Down Syndrome or other chromosomal conditions. It ended a few weeks ago and I am finding myself missing having that support on a weekly basis. In the fall that will start up again and Sam will start going to school for four or five days per week for a total of 12.5 hours a week rather than the 3.75 he's doing over three days now.

I'm working through the Autism Speaks 100 day kit, slowly getting myself educated about things a mom needs to know to cope with the diagnosis. Today Sam had his 3-year-old checkup and I talked with his doctor about starting the process of evaluating him for an official medical diagnosis.

Sam is talking more, listening more, and doing more things by himself than he did before he started going to school three days a week. He is excited to get on the bus, and the aides tell me that he climbs right up into his seat and starts trying to harness himself. He puts on his backpack all by himself. I have hope that he'll be ready to start potty training soon, but am aware of the reality that it will take at least twice as long, probably even longer, than it would take to train a kid who didn't have autism.

Anyhow. I am still having lots of feelings about this and I'm not sure how much of that I want to put out on the internet for the world to read. Know that there are a lot of frustrating days, with a lot of good moments in them. For every time Sam does something ridiculously disobedient or destructive there is a time when he is full of snuggles and smiles or just bursts into song for no reason. So many of the things he does that annoy me are completely typical of any toddler. He's still my beautiful, joyful, problem-solving boy.