I'm back!

It’s been quite the week and a half since I last blogged.  I totally got thrown off my game when my daughter fell ill last weekend.  In all of her 8 and a half years of life, this was undoubtedly the most sick I’ve ever seen her. The first day wasn’t so bad and comprised of a sore throat and low-grade fever.  A negative strep test later, we were back home to wait out the virus. However, later that night, her temperature spiked to 104⋄F and stayed there for 3 full days.  J has always run very high fevers, necessitating several trips to the emergency room when she was a baby - there is nothing like a 1-yr old with a 105 ⋄F to mobilize an emergency room!   This virus was no exception, and Motrin or Tylenol alone was not enough to control the fever.  Every 24 hours, she seemed to get worse - including day 3 when she basically slept the entire day.  Thank goodness on day 4, the fever broke but by now my son had it too.  Fortunately, he rallied within 24 hours and didn’t get thrown under the bus in quite the same way as his big sis.  I’m convinced this may have been swine flu and wanted the pediatrician to test the kids for it.  I figured that their school would want to know if they had cases spreading among their students, and I wanted the information before having to make a decision on whether to get the kids immunized with the swine flu vaccine.  If they’ve already had this season’s H1N1, there’s no point to having them vaccinated as they already would have the antibodies to virus.  I was surprised that the pediatrician was not testing for H1N1 and stated that we weren’t seeing it widely in this area.  So now I don’t know, so we will be making the decision when the vaccine becomes available in our area.

Both Jordan and Ben are back at school now, armed with some very cute gifts for their teachers and the school nurse.  Thanks to Just a Girl for the idea!  According to J, the third-graders are having a great time hamming up the “toxic” effects of the hand sanitizer.  Now I need something equally as cool for next month!

Halloween Hand Sanitizer

Lessons from the Family Kitchen - Guest Post!

Hi all - I'm incredibly excited to be able to host my first guest post today!  My dear husband, Ed, wrote this earlier this evening.  He maintains a personal blog - which is only open to family members, but had the idea of letting me cross-post today's musings to Unstructured Bliss.  Of course, I jumped at the chance! I hope you enjoy reading his writing as much as I do!

Nearly twenty years ago, my cousin, Sigrid, had the wonderful idea of creating a family cookbook.  She solicited recipes and anecdotes from everyone on my mom’s side of the family and compiled them into a wonderful book that I still use more often than any of the more than 50 commercial cookbooks in our kitchen.

My own lovely wife has started the process of writing a similar cookbook using recipes from her family.  Hopefully at some point not too far away, we’ll be able to actually devote some real time and effort to it so that we can have matching cookbooks on our shelves.  With so many still young and time-demanding kids on her side of the family, the task of going through recipes and writing down snippets of stories about family gatherings inevitably gets put on the back burner (to keep with our kitchen motif!), but we’ll keep plugging away!

The family cookbook idea has risen to our attention again because of an observation Christine made while fixing her delicious spaghetti sauce this afternoon.  She typically includes 3 links each of hot and sweet Italian sausage, and she did something different today in preparing the sausage that she realized was a big improvement.  But before we get to what that change was, let’s go back to our general theme of lessons from the family kitchen.

Family lore has it that my mom always began the process of cooking a pot roast by cutting off one end of the pot roast before she browned it.  At one point in my parents’ young married life, my dad asked, “Why do you cut the end off the pot roast?”  To which mom answered, “Because that’s what my grandmother always did.”

Turns out that, when mom asked Grandma Straub why she cut off the end of the pot roast, the answer was not some ancient cooking wisdom that one might have expected from a woman who was born at the close of the 19th Century and lived until almost the 21st.  No, the answer was as common-sensical as that same woman who spent her life on a farm raising chickens and selling eggs.  She cut off the end of the pot roast so that it would fit in the pan, which wasn’t big enough to hold the intact roast.

So sometimes, you watch someone do something in the kitchen, and you figure, “Well, that’s how you do it.”  Hardly an earth shattering concept, certainly, but there are probably many things we do that are the result of observational learning, and we simply follow what looks like a good example.

In Christine’s case in cooking sausage for spaghetti sauce, this meant following her parents’ practice of cutting up the links of raw sausage into smaller pieces so that they are then sized appropriately when the sauce is served in individual portions.

But cutting up raw Italian sausage links is a messy, ungainly process that leaves the kitchen area, the relevant knife, and usually the chef’s hands all a mess of raw sausage detritus.

Which leads us to last weekend, when Christine made a wonderful sausage soup from a recipe from my mom.  Having made that last week, Christine realized as she was about to start making spaghetti sauce that rather than cut up the sausage as the first step, she could do what was called for in the sausage soup recipe - cook the links FIRST, and then cut them up into little medallions!

Voila!  We had perfect little sausage medallions in our spaghetti sauce this evening, to go with the always delicious meatballs, which also were produced with a new cooking twist that may serve as a lesson for the next generation of our family.

Someday our children may be fixing meatballs for sauce and they will be asked, why are you putting the egg, bread crumbs, and parmesan cheese into that plastic bag?  Well, it just may be because today Christine had the bright idea of not getting her hands completely coated in raw ground beef to squeeze and mix meatball ingredients, but instead used the freezer bag the thawed meat was already in to serve as a “mixing bag” in which she kneaded all the ingredients and then made the meatballs.

New Front Door

We are making small but meaningful strides on the front of the house. If you have missed my previous post on the water damage we uncovered click here. Don’t get me wrong - my front yard still looks like an archaeological dig site but things are definitely improving! The water damage has been repaired and new stucco/cement has been applied to the front of the house. I’ve been advised by my contractor that I can’t paint the stucco for 28 days until it fully cures. Anyone ever heard of that rule? Four weeks seems a little excessive.

The wood rot behind the porch was so extensive that it was seeping up into the front door causing that to need to be replaced as well (and the door was almost 20 years old - so it was time). I didn’t really have time to shop for my “dream door” since it was kind of an emergency situation to get one on order right away. So we picked out a very standard door that was similar to what we were taking out, and our contractor finished installing the new one today. (I’m doing a little dance now, can you tell?) It’s so much more solid that the previous one - I have no doubt that we will have some energy savings with it. AND here’s the best part: this door qualifies for a tax credit as part of the stimulus package. So hopefully we will get a little money back next year on the unexpected purchase! If you are replacing windows and door this year or next, make sure that you check out the energystar.gov webpage to see if your project qualifies too!

Next up is the front porch and walkway - then I will focus on painting the door. I’m thinking a dark forest green....

Cleaning for the Cleaning woman

There are 4 of us in our family and none of us have that little neat-freak gene that my sister seems to have inherited from my maternal grandmother. I aspire to clear clutter (I really do!) but am continually fighting an uphill battle. As I said, it just does not come naturally to me nor to anyone else in my family. Both Ed and I work full-time, which makes the mornings about getting everyone up, dressed, fed and equipped with homework, lunches paperwork, briefcases, etc before heading off to school and work. The evenings are for activities (girl scouts & swimming), homework, dinner and hearing about each other’s days. On weekends, between soccer games and play dates, we get laundry, grocery shopping, bill paying, yard work and other errands done. There is not a lot of time left for a rigorous cleaning routine. So we made the decision a while ago, to hire a bi-weekly cleaning person and use that time we bought back to enjoy our family. It has created an interesting phenomenon - the bi-weekly cleaning for the cleaning person. Its not cleaning per say, as much as it is de-cluttering and putting away all the things that have been left out over the past two weeks. Tensions run high on these evenings and the followings mornings, prompting my husband to initiate the inevitable discussion about whether it is all worth it. My answer is always the same - we are keeping our cleaning person. These bi-weekly events are the barrier that keeps us from falling into total chaos and potential squalor. For all the stress it creates getting ready, it is worth it to come home that weekday evening to a spotless home where every carpet is vacuumed and every surface glistens. And once again I am optimistic that we can maintain this perfection for the next fortnight.

Front Porch Nightmare

The current crisis at home is with our front porch. It is beautiful Italian stone, and was somewhat newly installed by the previous owners when we bought our house six and a half years ago. But over the past several years, the stones on the porch have shifted around. Ed and I have consulted with many landscapers and masons over the past two years about how to best approach the situation. The collective opinion was that the steps were never put in properly in the first place. In particular, they were built over the existing concrete foundation and inadequate drainage was provided causing everything to move, and the sides to sink over time. Just yesterday, our selected contractor began to take apart the porch in order re-build it properly. However, what we found behind the steps was that much of the water from the wet weather was draining toward the house and the wood under the door is damp and decaying. Like with any home repair - we’ve uncovered a much bigger problem than we had anticipated. Now the steps can’t go back in until the wood is ripped out and replaced and the whole thing is re-stuccoed. Everyone is saying “one week” but somehow I think this may be the tip of the iceberg.....