Soooo Slow

I am making some progress on painting the kids' bathroom.  I did all the cutting in for the primer two weeks ago... then it got cold.  I don't want to paint with the window open when it is 30 degrees outside, right?  So there it sat, pictures off the walls, towel racks down, no place to put the toilet paper.  Nice.

It's a small room, maybe five by ten feet, so I know it won't take a lot of time to paint.  But it took me weeks to finally just get started already.

But I did!  I started!  I primed all four walls!  Sad to say my bathroom looks better now, with bare primer on the walls, than it has since I moved in 18 months ago.

So here's the dilemma:   I am hosting a trunk show on Thursday.  There is no possible way I can get the painting completed before the party.  I'll need to do at least two coats of each color (pale blue and brown for a sky and sand theme, for those of you playing along at home), and I'm playing around with the idea of making the dividing line a curve instead of a regular straight line.  This will take some figuring on my part - not to mention way more time than I have to devote to it before the trunk show.

Sigh.  Guess I will be setting the bathroom back up (pictures, shower curtains, toothbrush holder) for the party, then strip it all back down for the final paint job.  Did I mention blah?  But at least I'm making progress, right?

Devil Soup

Another installment in the game of cooking roulette:

My third Bountiful Basket was an adventure in cooking with random co-op vegetables.  This week the starring role was played by a dozen fresh green chilies.

What the heck was I going to do with green chilies?

My big tough husband has a delicate flower of a digestive tract.  He is allergic to a wide range of weird foods (lettuce? seriously?) and just won't eat a lot of others.  My children are both currently experimenting with the air plant diet.  Anything remotely new and/or different prompts a food strike of epic proportions.  Sometimes it seems like they subsist on a diet of simple carbs.  I'm afraid they are going to get scurvy or rickets or whatever disease it is when you only eat from one nutritionally sparse food group.

So.  Green chilies.  Thank goodness for Google!  After a quick perusal of about a million variations of green chile casserole and green chile stew, I finally settled on a recipe from All Recipes for Roasted Green Chile Stew.   It seemed harmless enough:  pork and potatoes to absorb any heat the roasted chilies brought to the table.  Enough other spices that it wouldn't just taste like boiled chilies.  Super!

I decided to roast them on the grill.  (And besides, T likes playing with fire, so if he grilled them we could have a little quiet hanging out time.)  The recipe said to give them an even char all over, so that is what my sweet grill master did.  He charred them within an inch of their lives!  After I sweated them in a tupper, I tried to peel off the charred outer skin.  Um, the char went all the way through!  Out of the dozen chilies, maybe four of them yielded a usable product.  Sigh.

The rest of the recipe went without incident, but I tweaked it a bit to suit my family (recipe as I made it below).  I doubled the broth and tripled the potatoes.  I mashed up a few of the potatoes to give the broth a little more body.  The end result?  There was no heat to speak of.  The pork was super tender and it had a great texture.  Delicious! 

Or so I thought.

Q refused it entirely.  The slightly greenish tint of the soup was WAY too foreign for him.  Z fished out all of the pork and potato pieces, but only because she was trying to eat just enough to get dessert afterward.  T forced down a minuscule portion and loaded up on crackers.  Shortly after dinner, he emerged from the bedroom pale and sweaty and pronounced my delicious stew to be 'devil soup.' 

Huh.  Oh, well.  More for me!

Pork, Potato and Green Chile Stew

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 pound boneless pork shoulder, cubed
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 4 large roasted green chiles
• 3 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
• 3 roma (plum) tomatoes, chopped
• 2 (14.5 ounce) cans chicken broth
• salt to taste

Directions

1. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven or heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the cubed pork, garlic, onion, cumin and oregano. Cook and stir until pork is browned.
2. Cook and stir for a few more minutes, then pour in half the vegetable broth. Reduce the heat to low, and simmer for about 30 minutes.
3. Add the potatoes and enough broth to cover them to the stew, and simmer for about 35 minutes. You can roast your chilies during this time, peel, seed chop and add to the stew. If the stew becomes too dry, add a little more broth.  When the potatoes are soft and the pork is tender, add the tomatoes. Cook for about 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and serve. It's delicious with a dollop of sour cream on top!

If roasted chiles are not available you will need to roast them yourself. A grill works best. Roast Anaheim or New Mexico chiles on grill till they are black on all sides. Place in a plastic bag in the freezer for ten minutes. This will make it easier to peel them. Rub the blackened peel off and rinse clean, then cut in half lengthwise, seed and chop.

Spendy

Kids?  Are expensive.  What with the 'Mama, I'm hungry!' and 'Mama, my sweater won't fit over my head!' and 'Mama, I don't want to drown in a tragic fishing accident!' and 'Mama, I don't want to contract cholera from my own bathroom!' and all.  Needy little bloodsuckers*.

Today's expenditures:

• Swim lessons for one month - $80
• Second season of soccer for Z - $60
• Food for the kids' beasties - $70  Okay, to be fair, they only account for half of the dog ownership, so - $35
• Presents for Q's upcoming birthday - $25
• Pajamas for Q so he doesn't have to sleep outgrown summer PJs - $15
• Leggings to replace the ones Z put holes in - $10
• Shoes to replace the ones Holly ate - $10
• Cleaners for their narsty bathroom - $10

Gah, make it stop!  And that doesn't even touch on the groceries, tuition, ballet lessons, tumbling, and book orders we're already in for the month.  Is it too late to reconsider my decision to become a parent?**


* I know being needy is a kid's job.  I kid!
** I would never choose to not have my kiddos.  I love them more than air.  But the money... anyone want to buy a kidney?

Lookin' Good!

After a long and largely fruitless search for new glasses, I finally have a pair that I like!  I searched every optical outlet in Wester to discover that a.) all glasses frames in Wester are boring/square; and b.) frames even a little outside of average? Really, really expensive.

I prefer cat-eye glasses, which are harder to find than one would think.  Thank goodness for the internet! Though really, they weren't easy to find there either.  But I persevered!  Eventually, I found an eBay store that had just what I wanted.  In lots of colors!  With rhinestones!  Squee!

Actually, I ended up with optical quality readers.  Such a deal!  They were  $25 a pair.  Then I just took them into LensCrafters and had them put prescription lenses in.  That was not particularly cheap (their 2-for-1 deals only apply to frames and lenses).  I probably could have gotten a better deal if I had shopped around, but I was DONE with my old glasses and just wanted to get into the new ones as soon as possible

What do you think?  (Please ignore the dermatology-appointment-closeness of my un-made-up face.  Also, I do actually have eyelashes, I just look like a radiation victim without mascara.)

Spoiled Brat

Let me preface this post by saying that I have the most kind, considerate, generous dad-in-law of all time.  He is willing at any time to give of his time and talent.  I feel like a total brat for feeling the way I feel (that was a lot of 'feels,' huh?) as I write this.

So.  The kids have reached the age where we are ready to start them out on computers.  We are a family with a lot of computers to hand down, so all we needed were some work stations to set them up.  Enter GanGan.  He is a very talented wood-worker.  We have several gorgeous pieces of furniture that he made in our house.  When he heard we needed desks, he stepped right up.  I drew him a picture of what I had in mind that looked like this:

I wanted something simple with good clean lines.  I was going to paint them, so they didn't need to be made from fancy wood.  Other than standard desk height, I didn't care about the size.  Drawers?  Cool but not necessary.

"No problem!" he said.  "That's basically a trestle table.  I've built lots of those," he said.  "I don't need dimensions!  Building these will keep my brain sharp," he said.

This is what arrived at my house yesterday.

OMG, the ugly!  And there are two of them!  Yay...  With weird stick-out-y pieces!  And completely random pieces of trim!  And feet(!) that stick out further than the desk!  With routed edges!  Sob!  All the weirdness with the legs happened because he couldn't get the X-legs stable.  Hoo, boy.  They are stable now.  And SO heeeedeeeeous!

Now GanGan, for all his (many) talents, is very insecure.  All during the building process, he kept saying we could just chop them up and use them for firewood.  And I kept saying, "Never!  They'll be great!"  Which makes the fact that I want/need to completely change the legs all the more controversial.  Why don't I just kick a puppy while I'm at it?

On the up side, he took me at my word and didn't use furniture grade wood, so the supplies were cheap.  It won't be sacrilege when I cut the legs clean off.   And the tops are great!  Two drawers? Perfect!  But the legs?  Gots. To. Go. 

I'm such a brat.

So here is the plan (more or less):  1.) remove legs and all the assorted braces; 2.) trim out the top so that nothing is sticking out awkwardly; 3.)  attach new side panels to both sides; 4.) brace along the top and bottom of the back.  Something like this:

  Guess I need to add that to the 'To Do' list.  Sigh.

Mommy Haiku

I stumbled upon a fun little challenge over at Two Peas in a Pie and just had to play along.  She invited us to pen a little ode to motherhood in 5-7-5.  And I loves me some haiku!  Here goes:

Scream, yell, pinch and poke.

Mine! No mine! Leave it alone!

Crappy McPlastic.

A tiny tyrant

and an empress in training

search for minions.

Funny little guy

Pretty girl so very smart

Can't believe they're mine.

Checkity Check!

Apparently, all I needed to do to get the ball rolling on home improvement was wave my shame flag to blog-land.  Items completed thus far:

• Hang art in entryway.
• Find a place for the painting that used to hang over the fireplace in the living room. 
• Hang curtains that mom-in-law bought me for the guest room.
• Hang art in guest room.
• Hang art - especially cool David Bromstad-esque deer portrait I made T for Christmas - in kids' den

Yay, me!

Don't quote me on this, but there are even plans afoot to get started on priming the kids' bath tomorrow.  Will the wonders never cease?