Mystery Ingredient Monday and Four Other Favorites

My calendar is lying to me.  Straight up lying to me.  It cannot possibly be Wednesday already, can it?  This last week has been a blur, to the point that I'm pretty sure there's been a glitch in the Matrix.

But, rather than dwelling on our evil computer overlords messing with the circuitry in our brains, let's turn our attention to happier things, shall we?

1.  Friends

Despite Delta Airlines' best attempts, Kim managed to get here for her much-anticipated visit (and only 21 hours late- super job there, Delta!), and it was such a great time.

Her husband Ben asked her if it was awkward, spending so much time with me after not seeing each other for a couple years, and Kim told him that truth about all good friendships, "We picked up exactly where we left off, like no time had passed at all."

God exists outside space and time, and I think He gives us a glimpse of what that means in friendships like that.

2.  Birthdays

Joaquin and Gabriel have back-to-back birthdays, which I love.  Ken takes off for the kids' birthdays, so that meant this year, when the days fell on a Monday and a Tuesday, it was like Ken had this bonus four-day vacation, right in the middle of June.  

Also, since I have two halves of two cakes left over, I can call them "coffee cake" and breakfast is done for the next two days.  

p.s. If you're ever looking for a really good, simple yellow cake recipe, try this one.  It was easy and really tasty.

3. Mod Cloth

I love Mod Cloth so much.  I've gotten a couple of dresses from them, and when I saw this one, I realized that it had been specifically designed and crafted just for me.  Which is really nice of them, don't you think?  So how could I not get it?

You're right.  I couldn't not get it.  But sadly, once I got it, I discovered that it's too tight in the chest.  Like, I can't even zip it up, it's too tight.  Ken thought I could take it to be altered somewhere, but I've never had a dress altered.  Have any of you?  Can they add inches to the chest area even in a printed fabric? Or do I just have to practice detachment and send the dress back?

4.  Theme Thursday (always and forever)

This week is water.  Which we've had a lot of recently, as evidenced by the Farmington River, which has flooded sizable portions of the Valley.  

5.  Mystery Ingredient Monday

I love this game.  Every Monday, the Catholic Cabal triad comes up with an ingredient for that week, and the following Monday, one of them hosts a linkup where you can show how you incorporated it into a dish (only this week the linkup seems to be missing...?)

This past week's selection was mint, which I thought about cheating and just using the mint extract post I'd just done, but then I remembered mojitos.  

I'd only had mojitos once before, back when we lived in Michigan.  I seem to remember that they gave me horrific heartburn.  But, ever the adventurous spirit, I thought I'd give them another try.

My chocolate mint plant was still recovering from the heavy-handed harvesting from the week before, but I managed to get enough sprigs to provide about 15-20 leaves.  Then, I went to the store to buy rum.  Now, I'm not much of a rum drinker, so I don't know what qualifies as "good" rum, which means I had to employ the following method in rum selection at my local liquor store:

1. Look at the rums stocked on the top shelf

2. Look at prices

3. Look at packaging

With that fail-proof trio of criteria in my arsenal, I was shocked to discover that rum, or at least the rums my store carries, is relatively cheap.  Like, top shelf tequila (which I do know quite a bit about) runs you $80- $100 (not that I've ever had top shelf tequila, but I know what to look for).  Top shelf whisky's just as bad.  So when the most expensive rum was $25 for a fifth, I was confused.  I began to suspect that rum was really just the Caribbean's version of moonshine.

Anyway, packaging won out, and I got something in a really pretty frosted blue bottle:

Then, I did what I do best- ignore the recipe and wing it.

Cari's Doesn't Know What She's Doing Strawberry Mojitos

15 mint leaves

good sized squirt of lime juice

1 T Simple syrup (more to taste)

6 ounces rum

8 strawberries

club soda to taste

ice

Bruise the mint leaves, throw in pitcher.  Add the lime juice.  Swirl around and stick your face into the pitcher to marvel at how good mint and lime smell together.  Remove face from pitcher.  Add syrup.  Add ice to pitcher, pour rum over ice.  Swirl around and stick face into pitcher.  Recoil in horror when rum smell punches you in the face.  Quarter strawberries and toss into pitcher, hoping that you didn't mess it up by adding too much rum.  Add, what?, maybe a cup of club soda into pitcher.  Swirl again, feel relieved that rum smell has died down.

Pour over ice into martini glass.  Enjoy and think of fruity pirates.

I haven't been able to find this week's mystery ingredient, but while I'm waiting, I think I'm going to mix up another pitcher of mojitos.  Strawberries are very high in vitamin C, you know.
EDIT:  I found it- I'm such a ding-a-ling.  It's jalapeños.  Yikes.  Gonna have to put on my big girl panties and my rubber gloves for this one.

Join Hallie, who could use those strawberries in her header in a pretty sweet drink.

Fathers Day Shambling

Ok, for any of this to make sense, you need to watch this movie.  It's seven minutes long, and there's no dialog, but you really need to see it.




I don't think I'm being terribly dramatic when I say that I think this film is the greatest homage to fatherhood I've seen in a long time.  I think it is a brilliant response to all the places where fatherhood breaks down in our current culture.

This is not a story about a baby daddy, who creates a child and then at some point afterwords abandons wife and child to pursue "something better" (I use the word "wife" rather than the more general "mother" here deliberately.  The fact that the man's wedding ring is clearly shown in several scenes speaks volumes about the high esteem the writers held marriage).  The man in this story- who we're now going to call "Conrad" because it's the first name the men in my house could come up with- is a man who understands that the "for better or worse" section means something.

When faced with an unspeakably terrifying situation, Conrad doesn't head for the hills, leaving his (zombie) wife to navigate the treacherous waters of single motherhood.   Instead, Conrad looks the horror full in the face, makes the hard choices (killing your undead, zombie wife to make sure she never is able to injure someone else definitely falls under the "or worse"category), and takes stock of his responsibilities.  This is the story of a father who takes his role seriously.

Neither is this a story about an effeminate, ineffectual father.  What would would be, in other narritives, cues pointing to these traits (he wasn't driving the car!  he's wearing pink!  he's got his baby in a sling!), are turned on their head in this piece.  Here we are presented with a man who clearly understands his duties as father, and dedicates himself to fulfilling them.  His understandable million-mile stare is quickly shaken off when he hears the cry of his baby, and the rest of the film invites us, the viewers, to watch him do everything he can to ensure her safety.  Where so many men today look at the cultural forces gathering against them and simply give up, Conrad will not be deterred from his goal.  Like Christ, he gets up from his fall, and continues on.

Then, once Conrad succumbs to the virus within him and goes blank eyed and ravenous, the movie hits us with the knockout punch.  Zombie Conrad is dispatched at the hands of a distant sniper, and a trio of two men and a woman approach his corpse.

The two men give the scene a perfunctory glance, shrug, and turn to go back to their post apocalyptic world, but the woman lingers.  She looks at the jumble of objects at her feet- a bag of entrails, a stick to hold them, corpse hands bound by a belt, and tries to make sense of what she sees.  The woman, who I'm going to call "Julia" because it's the name of my best friend's baby, is the one who recognizes something special in the man.  Isn't this what God intended when He created us male and female?  That the sexes would compliment each other, and through that complimentarianism we would be help one another win Heaven?

Because Julia takes her time inspecting the body of Conrad, she's able to hear Baby Rosie's cries and rescue her.  And- and this is the part where I get all teary- once the trio realizes Conrad was a father, they view him as an individual worthy of proper burial, taking the time and energy to dig him a grave.  It was through his fatherhood that people recognized the dignity in Conrad, and responded to that dignity in kind.

It's no secret that the horror genre acts as a sort of mirror, reflecting our fears and neurosis back at us, but it's unusual for a horror film to celebrate and affirm the building blocks of our humanity in such a concrete way.

So today, take a moment to thank your Heavenly Father for all the tireless tending He's lavished on you, and give your earthly father a call if you can, letting him know that you see and register all that he's done for you.

And if your dad happens to be a victim of a zombie attack, well, stand outside biting range and do what you gotta do.

Seven Quick Takes: The Kim Edition

1.
In seven hours, I will be picking up this woman from the airport:

Actual picture of how much fun life is with Kim around.  Not Photoshopped at all. Oh, and pick me a winner, Dominic!

2.
Haven't seen Kim in a year and a half.  A YEAR AND A HALF!  She's never met Veronica, I've never met her baby, Julia.  ALL THAT WILL CHANGE IN SEVEN HOURS!

I took this picture three years ago.  It's still her Facebook profile photo.  

3.
Kim's dislikes (short list)
1. nuts in her food
2. coconuts in her food
3. willful ignorance
4. lazy, sneaky behavior
5. flying by herself

(this is Kim and her husband Ben.  I also love Ben, but he is not coming on this trip.  If you want to make Ben crazy mad, tell him with a straight face that advancements in food technology mean that we no longer have to eat meat to survive, and now doing so is morally problematic.  I miss you, Ben!)






4.
Kim's likes (short list)
1. yard sales
2. truffles
3. my cooking
4. Ken's temper
5. Madonna of the Streets

(I've got a dozen yard sales lined up for this weekend, which we will go to while eating truffles, after eating my cooking and listening to Ken swear about something.  Maybe we'll find a Madonna of the Streets picture at the sales, which Kim can then turn into a beaded version for me because she does that, too.)






5.

Kim is laughing at my Very Serious Take.  So is Ben.

When I found out I was pregnant with The Jude, a mere six months after Gabriel was born, I was the tiniest bit freaked out (sometimes, my hyperbole is expressed through understatements).  I took the positive pregnancy test to Kim's house (what?  You've never done this?) and angrily showed it to her in her kitchen.  I was crying and scared and you know what she did?  She didn't tell me it was ok to be scared, or that she understood the anger but it would pass.

Nope.  She looked at me straight in the eye, and said, "Congratulations!  Babies are a blessing, and you and Ken are fantastic parents.  God is so good."

You guys, do you know how huge this was?  I was a grown woman in a great marriage who could easily welcome another life, and I was still terrified.  Can you imagine what the world would be like if every pregnancy announcement was met with such a heartfelt expression of joy at the creation of new life?  If every woman facing an unplanned pregnancy had one Kim in her corner, even just one, cheering her on and praising God for the gift of new life, I think that would do more to stop abortion than all the legislation and sidewalk counseling in the world.

6.
Kim got these boots for her birthday:

I'm hoping she brings them so we can be boot buddies.  Then we can hit up all the yard sales in the Valley, laying the southern-fried accents on really thick, and generally reinforce cultural stereotypes of people from the South.

7.
I wish that everyone could have a Kim in their life.  But you can't have mine.  Go find your own.

Off to Jen's for more Takes.

Theme Thursday: Dad

Dads.

Men- particularly dads- are the target of so much ridicule and cruelty in our culture.  As if the "stupid man" stock character in every! single! commercial! wasn't enough, there's the repeating echoes of Homer Simpson in pretty much all sitcom fathers starting before Homer was even a glint in Matt Groening's eye.

Men (all five of you who read this blog), allow me to tell you this:  Fatherhood is important.  Fatherhood is a vocation, and the work you do ripples out through space and time and makes the world a better place.
So thank you.

Now back to your lawnmowers and sporting events.

This week, I'm using an old picture, because it comes with a story that exemplifies fatherhood to me:

 This was taken at the M&M store in Times Square.  It was the end of a long and fairly stressful daytrip (wrangling six young children in NYC is actually not as easy as you'd think).  My dad was watching three of my monkeys, while the rest of the posse waited in the gigantic line for the cashier.

My dad is not in love with large crowds, and he would have been completely happy going to New York exactly never.  But the rest of the group overruled him, and off we went.

The ten of us were trying to navigate our way down to the subway that would get us to Grand Central, and we got separated.  Ken, my parents, and five of the kids went down one staircase, and Veronica and I ended up down another set.  When I got down to the subway platform, I couldn't see my people.

Not particularly concerned (what were they going to do, leave without me?  Ha.  If it were that easy to ditch me, they'd have done it years ago), I started walking along the platform looking for the rest of the group.

I found my dad first, marked by a severe scowl on his face.  I looked at him quizzically, wondering what could be so wrong that he'd look that angry, and he started yelling at me.  Yelling at me!  A grown woman!  In the middle of a subway platform!

Then, full of indignation, I yelled back at him, and we spent the rest of the subway ride in stony silence.  Now, however, telling this story, I'm cracking up, because it's so quintessentially dad-like, isn't it?  Father can't find child in the middle of crowded space.  Father is anxious because his duty is to protect his family.  How can he protect his family if they insist on getting separated in the middle of NYC?

It doesn't matter if your child is six or thirty-six- you're still a dad and you still have a job to do.

Thank you dads- none of us would be halfway as cool without you.

 

Five Favorites

Joining Hallie and the Girl Posse today

1.
Who wants to start off my favorites with Theme Thursday?  You?  Then you came to the right place!  This week's theme is:

(That's my dad there.  Everyone say, "Hi Brian!")

2.
I like bird watching.  I've been known to make pre-dawn trips across international borders (before we had to have stinking passports to do so) in hopes of seeing multitudes of warblers.  I've dragged my whole family to landfills in Florida because the Internet insinuated I may see kites there (the bird, not the toy).  I've endured mosquitoes so thick they were a tangible wall so I could catch a glimpse of a spoonbill.
I like birds.
But I don't think you have to be quite so rabid to enjoy this piece about proposed improvements to State Birds.  Best thing off the Internet all week.  Guaranteed.

9. Florida. Official state bird: northern mockingbirdI am finishing this post the next day because I had to go buy a new computer after I threw my last one out the window when I read that Florida’s state bird was the northern mockingbird. I cannot think of a more pathetic choice for one of the most bird-rich states in the nation. What’s their state beverage, a half-glass of warm tap water?  What it should be: American flamingo

3.
Catholic Cabal's selected mint as this week's Mystery Ingredient. 
My best friend Kim is due to come visit me in 51 hours from the time of this writing, so I'm going to make her my Guinea pig for this week's challenge.  Kim doesn't drink (???) so I'm going to make these two mojito recipes for her, and if she likes either one of them, I will declare myself the winner of this week's challenge.  Even though it's not a competition, and really I'm just using it as an excuse to have mojitos with my bestie out on the deck.

4.
This post on Catholic Vote.  A fantastic read on men, women, and porn, and a movie that I'm crossing all my fingers and toes for David Ives to review on Aleteia.
(do you hear me, David?  You need to take this one for the team, and review it ASAP)

5.
The IT Crowd (streaming on Netflix until the jerks remove it for no good reason)
If you haven't already seen this show, I urge you to cancel work today, and fix this glaring gap in your life.  Ken and I re-watch the whole series at least once a year, and in light of Arrested Development's dismal new season, I think we all could use a truly funny pick-me-up.  Plus: Moss.

Chickens and Bagels- a Delicious Combo but We're Only Eating Half

Woosh.  Yesterday was a mad productive day over here, y'all.

While taking breaks from writing this week's article for Aleteia (which will be linked once it's up; I know you love them so  EDIT: It's up and it contains poop jokes.  My favorite), I overdosed on past posts from Like Mother Like Daughter.  Now I know this doesn't sound like the start to a productive day, but oh you would be so wrong.

Actual bagels, boiling on my actual stove.

Like Mother Like Daughter has the same positive effect on me that Martha Stewart does: make the home! make it tidy! make it beautiful! but with none of the annoying materialistic hangover that such overexposure generally causes.

Yesterday, LMLD inspired me to finally go ahead a try my hand at making homemade bagels, a project which always struck me as tremendously exotic and labor intensive.  So imagine my shock and awe when I discovered it was neither.  In fact, it was quicker to make the bagels (even with the added boiling step) than it is to make my daily bread.

(The only drawback was that the recipe made only eight bagels, and you can imagine how quickly those went around here.)

Oh, and now, knowing how easy and how completely delicious the bagels are, my children are like sharks swimming in chummed waters- "Make bagels!"  "Bagels?"  "You're just sitting there, typing! You could be making bagels!" It's like when we learned how easy it is to make your own pasta dough, and now I've got six tiny foodies on my hands, insisting that eating commercially-made ravioli is a fate worse than death.

So after the writing and the bagel-ing, we tended to the broody hen and her eggs, which were starting

The chick inside had "pipped" the egg,
meaning that it had punched a hole
through the shell to start the
hatching process

to show signs of hatching.  Yesterday morning, we saw two of the eggs had pipped, which sent us on a frantic Internet search to learn all we could about the hatching process (basic summary of what we learned: leave the eggs alone- mama hen will do what needs to be done).  And do you know the most amazing part of chicken hatching?  You can hear the babies peeping from inside the egg.  FROM INSIDE THE EGG!!!!  Honestly, I walked around with my mind blown all day yesterday when I discovered that.

And while I thought I took forever to deliver my babies, the snail's pace that the chickens adopted made my labors look like Speedy Gonzalez was my midwife.  Which is to say, that despite Lotus and I performing hourly chicken checks (in complete disregard for Internet advice, mea culpa), we had to go to bed last night, chick-less.

But this morning!  This morning we woke up to see this in the hen house!

Two babies hatched and a third egg pipped.  The other four still show no signs of hatching, but we'll give things a couple more days before we clear them out.

Babies, y'all!  In the hen house!  Allow your eyes to glaze over while I wax philosophic for a moment.
For all my complaints about ticks and bobcats and such, there is nothing that fills a spot in my soul like moments of domestic bliss like these.  I honestly think that this is an amazing time to be alive- we have advances in medicine, technology, and labor saving devices that our foremothers could only dream of, and we can mix the best of now with the best of our collective memory.

I can make homemade bread in a kitchen sanitized with clean hot water and sterilized, dishwashed utensils; I can keep chickens to produce my own fresh eggs and baby chicks, then sleep in a clean, dry house, with the fans blowing in the windows.  I can homeschool my children with the help of the Internet and a car to take us places.  And if I ever got my act together, I could learn to knit off some YouTube videos.

These are amazing times, I tell you.
Here's a video of the babies!

Mystery Ingredient Monday Premiere: Cherries

My mom loves cherries.  Well, she loves one particular kind of cherries- the yellowy red ones.  Rainier cherries?  Bing cherries?  Ugh.  Now I'm tempted to call my mom at 7:30 in the morning to ask her what her favorite kind of cherries are.

For the premier round of the Catholic Cabal's* Mystery Ingredient Monday, I was going to make this recipe, with my mom's favorite kind of fresh cherries.  She and my dad are coming to visit in a few weeks, so I thought I would perfect the recipe by then and knock their socks off.

Then I found myself unable to remember what kind of cherries my mom likes, and it was Sunday afternoon and I was feeling very lazy, so I scrapped the whole idea.

Instead, I went with what could arguably be called my mother-in-law's signature dish:

So let's get this started, Pioneer Woman-style.  You're going to need these exotic and hard-to-find ingredients:

(not pictured: gallon of vanilla bean ice cream.  I like it without, but let's stay true to the original recipe today)

Now comes the super hard part.  Are you ready?  This step is vital to the integrity of the recipe, and if you mess up here, the entire dish will be ruined.  Carefully, do exactly as I write:

-get out your crockpot.

Did you do it?  Is it out?  Mine was lost for a good 15 minutes, until I remembered it was in the fridge, full of pulled pork from last week which no one really liked.  Anyway, I feel confident that you are not a gross housekeeper like I am, and your crockpot is gleaming and ready to go.

So let's go.

1. Pour in pie filling
2. Sprinkle cake mix over cherries
3. cut butter into squares and place over mix (my MIL's recipe says to melt the butter and then drizzle it over cake mix, but that always strikes me as one dirty dish too many, so I take the lazy way out)
4. Put crockpot on high for two hours or low for four to five hours.  My crockpot may be old and wonky, but when I cook this on high, it never turns out very well.  If you can, take the low and slow route.  You won't be sorry.
5. When cake is golden brown, it's done.  Dish into a bowl, put a scoop of ice cream on top and, if you're around Jude, keep your hands back because he'll bite you.

I love this recipe.  It's easy, like, even the kids can make it easy, and it travels fairly well.  I've taken it to cook outs before; I just cook it partway at home, unplug the crockpot, take the whole thing with me, and finish up the cooking at the host's house.  It provides 10 generous servings.

Now head on over to the Catholic Cabal's* websites to link up your cherries recipe and get the ingredient for this week's challenge.


*It's my new nickname for the Jessica/Anne/Tasha collective.  Less typing!