Kara DuLac-Shields

So I’m working a job now where I don’t get home until after 8:15 p.m., but Rick is working a more normal schedule. That means that he gets home hungry for dinner three hours before I’ll even be hopping into the Buick Regal to wend my scenic way back to the nest. If I start fixing dinner when I get home, that means we’ll be eating as late as 9:30 p.m., and it’s not healthy for Rick to go to bed at 10 p.m. with a full stomach.

And unless I’ve been exceptionally proactive and motivated that morning, it means Rick is either cooking hamburgers/hot dogs/sloppy joes for himself, or eating (yet another) peanut butter and jelly sammich.

And we all know exactly how proactive and motivated I am in the morning, which is -4 on a scale of 1 to 10, so my Wonderful Pumpkin eats hisself a LOT of PB&J.

“Don’t worry,” he says trying to make me feel better, “I really LIKE peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” That doesn’t really work, because the Pumpkin likes a lot of different foods, but it doesn’t mean that he should eat them for days and days on end. Nutritionally speaking it doesn’t seem balanced, and I worry that it might eventually cause him to snap, and I’ll come home from work to find the entire 7-pound jar of Peter Pan we found at Sam’s Club pasted over the whole kitchen.

Rick insists he can’t cook, which is really not true. The man can make a mean chicken stir-fry on his own, with just the envelope of stir-fry seasoning mix from the store, which is still home-made in my eyes. He could do that before we met.

“But I can’t just go into the kitchen and say ‘Oh, we’ll have pan-fried chicken tenderloins with cole slaw and biscuits for dinner tonight’ and fix it,” he says to me. I have to remind him that I started cooking and baking when I was old enough to hold a hand mixer steady in a bowl of cookie dough, and anyone with 33 years experience in anything is going to be ‘better’ at it than someone with less.

When I was on the fire department in Highland Township, I’d be in the middle of fixing dinner when my pager would go off, and I’d have to abandon everything to respond. In the middle of grabbing my stuff and listening to the address of the call, I’d be giving Rick instructions on how to finish fixing all the food that was in-progress at that moment. “Finish steaming this until it’s fork-tender, drain and mash the potatoes with butter, milk and salt & pepper, and pull the biscuits out when they’re nicely browned on top!”

And when I returned, dinner was always done perfectly. So the man can cook–he just doesn’t know it.

Or maybe he doesn’t want to know it.

But I’ve been fretting lately over how poorly nourished we are, and the more often we opt for pizza or take-out food, the more money we waste on junk that just fills our stomachs without really doing us any good. We’ve got to figure out a way for us to have home-cooked meals with me on this crazy schedule.

The logical thing to do would be to plan the weekly meal menu, and then do as much of the food prep as possible ahead of time, either on the weekend or in the morning. I’d then leave instructions for Rick on how to finish preparing the meal, and he could have a hot, homemade meal when he’s ready for it, and I could have leftovers when I get home.

Again, though, that’s assuming that I can remain focused and motivated to plan all this ahead of time, stick to the schedule, and peel potatoes at 8 a.m. on days OTHER than Thanksgiving.

So we joined E-Mealz, to get their weekly menu plan and shopping list that will allow us to save money while still eating well. We were pretty gung-ho about it, until I looked at the first menu plan.

It sounds lovely, and I’d be very pleased to be working with a ready-made meal plan with such wonderful food, mostly from scratch. But I’m not the one who’d be doing most of this prep–Rick would.

I looked at the first recipe, Chicken Dijon, which calls for two chicken breasts pounded to 1/4″ thickness, and asked him “Are you okay with doing all this prep and cooking?” And then I knew that for this first week, at least, that Rick would be eating PB&J.

This weekend, we’ll take a look at the menu plan and see how much we can collaborate on the food prep.  I’ll let you know how that works out.

I love my toaster oven. I’d even go as far as to say that it’s an essential piece of kitchen gear.

It’s not often that I endorse a specific piece of kitchen equipment. Many tasks have been accomplished over the years using nothing more than a good knife, a sufficiently-large cutting board and basic cookery equipment. I’ve never owned a food processor, nor have I wanted one.

Yes, using a food processor can save you a lot of prep time. You could process all the potatoes for a batch of potato soup in a matter of SECONDS. But then the time it takes to break down and clean the food processor offsets that time saved. It’s so much quicker to keep a sink full of hot, soapy water and wash the knife and cutting board as you go.

We DID have a juicer, once. Once. But it was such a complicated travesty of parts and disks and doohickeys that to use and dissemble it to clean it was a multiple-hour task. We weren’t dedicated enough to the idea of juicing to continue to use it.

We do have a breadmaker that I’ve begun to use again, just for the joy of freshly-baked bread. If you’ve read any of my past blog postings, you may recall my battle to make bread from scratch–I really do feel this is something I should be able to do by myself, without the help of a machine…but I’m lazy. I’ll work on the bread skills later.

I don’t want to mislead you–we do have kitchen equipment with very specialized uses. Of course we have a coffee maker, which just makes coffee, and we have several slow-cookers, which only cook food very slowly. We also have a blender, which is used very seldom, and a Fry-Daddy, which is used more often than I care to admit.

But our toaster oven is the most-used piece of kitchen equipment we have. It warms left-over pizza much more appealingly than the microwave, and if we’re having pasta it heats up to crisp frozen garlic bread in seconds rather than preheating the entire full-sized oven, using much less electricity in the process.

Hot appetizers and baked sandwiches can happen in the toaster oven with much less fuss than the full-sized oven, and I can prepare a hot Westminster dip before dinner even though the oven temperature is different than what’s needed for the entrée.

And anytime we feel like a fresh biscuit, we can take some frozen biscuit dough from the freezer and bake one (or eight) up in a snap. I’ve heard that one can do that same thing with cookie dough, but I’ve always just baked the whole batch of cookies rather than putting some aside to freeze.

All in all, a toaster oven with temperature control is a fast, efficient way to bake small batches of baked goods and not use lots of electricity heating the big oven and then cooling the house. I would strongly recommend a quality toaster oven for every small household.

I’m a very tactile and (in some respects) private person, and I tend to read a lot into the most banal experiences.  For example, laundry.  What type of laundry detergent do you use?  Do you use fabric softeners, or a dryer sheet?  Are you a bleach person, or Clorox 2, or do you use both at different times?  Do you have clothes that tend to retain the scent of your perfume or the odor of your workplace even through laundering?

Just walking by someone else’s house during laundry day can give one an intimate glimpse into someone else’s life.  What’s more intimate than the scent of cleaning your clothes?  Yet your clothes dryer exhausts right out into the yard, giving the neighbors, your meter man, ANY casual passers-by a whiff of your wet-goose-feather comforter, or the lovely lavender-vanilla dryer sheets you use, or the weird plastic+sweat scent your Lycra yoga pants and jogbra give off when they’re wet and heated by the dryer.

Whether the scent is pleasant or furtive, I savor the experience of other peoples’ dryer vents.  It’s almost on the same level as experiencing someone else’s cologne, or finding out that an acquaintance prefers cedarwood-scented candles in their home.  I feel almost as if I’ve gained a valuable bit of data about someone if I can identify their laundry detergent or dryer sheet, and I enjoy the clean, cozy scent of laundry fresh from the dryer.

For those of you who don’t have access to my dryer vent (and frankly if you went to the trouble of seeking me and my dryer vent out, it would be kind of creepy) I use method brand laundry detergent, in Sweet Water scent, and Arm and Hammer Essentials Lavender and White Linen dryer sheets.  I don’t use a fabric softener in the washer (why put petroleum products on freshly-laundered fabrics?) but I like the scent of these, and the fact that they’re derived from plants, and they offer SOME static relief.

Maybe I’m out of line.  Maybe I’m weirdly affected by scent.  Or maybe I’ve just given voice to something that has occurred to each of us in the secret portion of our minds, something that we contemplate briefly and then put it away again immediately with all the other errant thoughts that are best left unexamined.  Which is it, people?

Yesterday I went to Big Lots on Kingston Pike here in Knoxville, to stock up on household stuff and health and beauty supplies. I’ve found lots of really good deals at Big Lots, but you’ve got to keep an eye on the prices: For example, a 64-ounce bottle of a brand-name liquid hand soap (all right, I know you can probably guess what brand it is, but still) was FIVE BUCKS, and I know that I can get that same size, same brand soap at Target for $4.64.

I also can get the Target brand soap (same size, same scent) for $3.05, I think–which means I don’t buy the brand-name hand soap refill at all anymore–unless it’s on sale and I have a great coupon.

Since we’re now a one-income family, I’ve made it a priority to try to get the most mileage out of each dollar possible. It’s kind of a game to me to see how much money I can shave off the grocery bill by combining coupons with sales or buying store-brands over national brands, and some days I hit a home run, which is gratifying. Other days I lose coupons and forget which store has the sale and that’s a downer, but suffice it to say that I enjoy challenging myself.

One of the cost-cutting measures I’ve made in the past year has been to change my laundry detergent from Method to Purex. I looooooooove Method’s Fresh Air scent–it’s so very clean, and I personally think the detergent does a great job, especially on whites. And it’s very concentrated, which means that even the 64-load bottle is teeny–but that shizznat’s EXPENSIVE compared to Purex: At Target, the 64-load bottle is $14.99. Before the summer gas-price debacle, I used to could get a 32-load bottle of Purex for $2.34 on sale, with even more savings if I had a coupon for it.

I don’t see coupons for Method brand products very often. :(

So, as much as I love the Method detergent, I couldn’t accept the price difference per load: Twenty-three cents per load for Method, compared to SEVEN cents per load for the Purex. Scent and other aesthetics are ludicrously important to me, but so’s money. I bit the bullet and continued to buy the Purex.

Fast-forward to last night, and my quest for household staples. I didn’t really expect to find laundry detergent at Big Lots but I thought I’d look anyway. Since I’ve misplaced my coupon wallet (AGAIN, dammit) I didn’t have any coupons for detergent (which brings up another question regarding why there are no COUPONS in the paper around Christmastime, but I digress), so I wasn’t bound to purchase any particular brand.

I saw an endcap for a big bottle of a national-brand detergent with a smaller sample bottle of liquid fabric softener cello’d to it but I passed that up because I don’t use liquid softener. And then! Lo! Behold! I turned the corner and was greeted by rows of the sweet, petite, curvy Method detergent bottle! Thrity-two ounces of household bliss for only $4! O, joy! O happy day!

Well, it wasn’t Fresh Air scent, it was Sweet Water, Method’s signature scent,but still! I like Sweet Water, too! I put four bottles in the cart and felt that I should have taken more whilst I could lay hands on it, but that might have felt like I was obsessed.

I was mentally rubbing my hands together and chuckling all the way home (I’m telling you, scent is VERY important to me, and I love doing laundry with a lovely detergent!). When I got in the door, I couldn’t WAIT to tell the Pumpkin about my find! I must have looked like a junkie coming home with a badly-needed fix. I explained about the price difference and how that prevented me from using this wonderful detergent and my eyes glittered as I toted the liquid gold to the laundry room.

And the Wonderful Pumpkin suggested that I check the other Big Lots in the area to see if they maybe had this same detergent, but in the Fresh Air scent. I love him so. He completely understands me.

But in the midst of my rush of joy, I realized that I was all ecstatic about laundry detergent. LAUNDRY DETERGENT. How shallow is my life that something as mundane as a sale on laundry detergent can elevate me to ecstasy? :::groan::: I have REALLY got to find a job or do something to broaden my world a little more.

I’ve decided I will go back and buy more today. It really is an excellent bargain for an outstanding laundry detergent. I’m just a little abashed that I was going to approach this with the same verve which I might have used in my youth to pursue INXS concert tickets. Sad, sad, sad.

Okay, you’ll love this: You’ll remember from previous posts how much trouble I have de-freaking-frosting a frozen-freaking-turkey in time to prepare it, right? I bought Rick a 20-pound turkey as a Christmas present (he really LIKES turkey) and wanting to be PROactive instead of REactive, I put the damn thing into the fridge a week ago. On the bottom shelf.

And because turkeys in my refrigerator NEVER thaw, I didn’t bother putting the dang thing on a plate. It just plunked and skidded on the bottom shelf of the fridge, where I assumed it would remain FROZEN just like the last two have done, until I took it out the day before preparing it to thaw it in a cold-water bath.

Yep. You guessed it. Checked it this evening, and the damn thing DEFROSTED. All over the bottom of my refrigerator. SHIT.

You should know that ‘cleaning the refrigerator’ is one of my least-favorite activities. It’s tied for first place on that list with ‘having a gynecological exam’ and ‘dental work.’ Why? I don’t really know, because it’s not as germ-laden as picking up dog poop in the backyard, nor as cleaning the bathroom. I just HATE IT. Don’t know why. So I wussed out and cleaned the fridge using a bunch of Chlorox wipes and paper towels. I know I should have used hot soapy water with a little bit of bleach, but screw it. I am lazy, and proud of it. And yeah, now the turkey is sitting on a serving platter. Better late than never, I guess.

My Wonderful Pumpkin is champing at the bit for me to cut this loaf of freshly-baked banana bread:

Mmm. Look at that thing. That is a loaf of steamy, hot, banana-y goodness right there. Still too hot to slice, because I just took it out of the oven. The Pumpkin’s gonna have to wait a few minutes.

That’s how we sold our house in Michigan, by the way. Every single time we had a showing scheduled, I’d run through a do a quick cleaning, and then I’d bake something. Sometimes the baking was nothing more than a casserole dish of apples, Splenda, cinnamon and butter, thrown into the microwave for 10 minutes and allowed to stew. Then after the showing, I’d come home and dish them up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and enjoy dessert.

But the banana bread…oh, the banana bread. Heavenly. Does anyone out there NOT like banana bread?? Anyway. The woman who was looking at our house was pregnant, and when she encountered the heavenly scent of freshly-baked fruit loaf, she was hooked. Was that wrong of me? >:)

She even mentioned it at closing: “You know, that banana bread…that was pretty cruel to do to a pregnant woman.” Hmm. That WAS cruel of me. I should have sliced some for them and left it on the breakfast bar with some honey butter.

But if I can make such a celestial loaf of banana bread, WHY can I not make a simple loaf of yeast-risen bread?? Arrgh. I’m going to go make a tuna sandwich and see how well tuna and banana get along.

It’s kinda sorta cold down here in Tennessee today, and it’s also pretty dry. That means it’s dry inside, too, which brings STATIC ELECTRICITY along with. Our poor dogs pretty much shock each other and themselves, and us, too, when they try to wrestle around and play, or if they’re even coming up to Rick and I to get petted.

Gigi doesn’t even want me to cover her up at night because her polar fleece blankie gets a pretty serious static charge by the time I drape it over her.

So i came up with what I thought was a pretty good idea: I’d plug in my little Crock Pot and heat some water and cinnamon sticks. But the little bastard isn’t heating up very quickly. Mind you, this is the small, two-quart Crock Pot that is always so bloody hot that it burns everything I fix inside it. It only has one setting, ‘On’, which apparently is another word for ‘Incinerate Everything Within.’

Especially if whatever I’m cooking has cheese in it. Cheese, burnt on to the surface of the crockery in this little bitchmaster, will NEVER EVER EVER come off. I don’t know why no one’s hit upon the burnt-cheese compound as a suitable industrial adhesive yet, because it’s extraordinarily effective, and it doesn’t seem to be water, acid, or bleach soluble.

And it seems once you’ve burnt something in crockery, that particular place is a magnet for future burned food.

So I thought this would be a prudent use of this cute little Crock Pot, which is otherwise too juiced-up to use as a slow-cooker. Water can’t burn, although I guess cinnamon sticks could leave a nasty residue if they cooked for a while and the water all boiled off, but I’m really past the point of caring what happens to this Crock Pot anyway.

And that means that I should be cleaning. I don’t know if that’s a good idea right now because I’m still technically sick with this awful cold, so maybe I shouldn’t be stirring up dust and getting myself all worn out with the vacuums and the dusters and cleaning cloths, etc.

But on the other hand, four dogs and two humans make an awful lot of dust, and I know that getting all that dust out of the house will help me recover from this cold quicker.

Where the heck is my cleaning gnome? I want a cleaning gnome, NOW. Let’s face it–even though I’m short, I’m not as short as a gnome, for whom tasks like vacuuming under furniture and dusting mopboards would be a breeze.

Plus I think the dogs would really get a kick out of having a house gnome. They love me, sure, but can they chase me under the sofa? No. Think of the merriment! Imagine how our household would be enriched by having a cleaning gnome!

Okay, maybe the cold and flu medication I’ve been taking is affecting me. I’m gonna go lay down for a few minutes. Maybe the gnome will be here by the time I wake up from my mid-afternoon nap.

And sooo Thanksgiving is here again, but as per usual I have a huge turkey in my refrigerator that is not thawed yet. What a surprise. What a change from the normal status quo. NOT.

I love fixing Thanksgiving Dinner. Yes, I DID capitalize ‘dinner’ because Thanksgiving Dinner is iconic, it is a special dinner loaded with meaning for probably everyone in the United States. It’s actually pretty simple, too, compared to some meals. Maybe it just seems more impressive due to the size of the turkey and the amount of mashed potatoes. (Large amounts of food can be mesmerising to me.)

And this year, even though we’ll be away from our families for the holiday (again), we’ll actually have some company. Rick’s coworker Sterling is on call and he’ll be staying here to do his duty while his family visits relatives elsewhere. It will be nice to have someone to spoil along with Rick this holiday. Told Rick to let Sterling know in no uncertain terms that he will be expected to play lots of board games because there aren’t a lot of card games that work with three players. Parcheesi, here we come!

But before the Parcheesi comes the food. That turkey is 20 pounds of joy, frozen joy, to be accurate, but foodie joy none-the-less. I pulled it out of the freezer on Sunday evening, and just like every year before it, it’s still pretty stiff. I think it’s because I’m so paranoid about germs and food safety that I keep my refrigerator VERY VERY cold. Ice crystals do form in milk and iced tea if they’re allowed to sit long enough in my refrigerator, and that’s on the top shelf. I’m guessing that it’s not very far away from the temperature range in the freezer, so even though it’s not 32 degrees Fahreinheit in my fridge, it is cold enough to slow down a thaw. I’ve waited DAYS for a freaking Gladware container of soup to thaw, so you’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now.

But NOOOOO. Come tomorrow morning, along with making the biscuits and the pumpkin pies for Thursday, I’ll also be dunking my turkey in a cold water bath in the sink, hoping against hope to get that little bugger bakeable by Thursday morning. I shoulda known better. I shoulda just come home from the grocery store and chucked that plucked little monkey straight into the fridge. A week in there should have done it.

A turkey that’s even partially frozen will take a lot longer to cook, ya know. Ask our good friends from Ann Arbor, when we had a ‘holiday dinner’ a couple of years ago. Breads, veggies, taties, gravy, pies, everything was done at 7 p.m. except the turkey–even though it had been in the oven for most of the day. Finally I gave up and just started carving from the outermost regions and left the deeper breast meat intact, and flung the carcass back into the oven while we munched on the carved bits.

Cheezwhiz. Maybe I should go get my hairdryer out…no, no, NO, I KNOW that the hairdryer doesn’t work for this. It’s too boneheaded an idea to work, anyway. I might, however try throwing it in the microwave on defrost for a couple of hours tomorrow. BTW, if you DO use the microwave to defrost your turkey, PLEASE make sure there is no metal in the carcass before doing so. Some turkeys have metal clamps to hold their little leg stumps in place, and I guess that there can be metal bits in pop-up timers, and we all know that microwaves and metal are not friendly toward each other.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a little excitement and you have an extra turkey waiting in the wings, go for it. Take pictures and send them to me. Video, too, if you’ve got the capability. We can submit it to America’s Funniest Home Videos and YouTube.

The rest of our menu will include biscuits, asparagus pan-fried in bacon drippings, cornmeal stuffing with celery and onion, and pumpkin and apple pies. Something I’ll be doing differently this year is making my own pie crust. I hope they turn out tender and good, because I’d hate to experiment on Rick’s friend with something as CRUCIAL as pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. But piecrust is almost on par with a loaf of plain white bread–it’s simple and I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO IT DAMMIT. Yeah, piecrust is up there, but maybe it’s not quite the white whale to me as yeast bread.

I’ll cheat, though. I have a couple of coupons for refrigerated pie crust, so if my own is really inedible, I’ll just throw together another pie with that. I’ll let you know how it all turns out. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!

So Jes and I were just talking about where we get all our useful information these days (why, the interwebz, o’ course) and she asked a rhetorical question: “Who uses a telephone book anymore these days?” And I said “I use mine. The thick ones. I’ve stacked them up to make an elevated water bowl stand for the kids (dogs).”

And when we get the new ones, I’ll get fancy and tape them together with strapping tape, and wrap them in a piece of old vinyl tablecloth to keep them nice & dry. Sooo, it’s kind of sort of recycling, because I wouldn’t be using the phone books any other way.  And it’s being frugal because I won’t have to go spend money on an elevated watering bowl for the dogs–I’m just using what I have here at the house. (Always, Gentle Readers, always keep packing tape on hand in your household.  The uses are myriad.)

My next question would be “does this count as being a craft project?”  I guess it could, if I used a really nice vinyl tablecloth…