Black Pepper Ice Cream

So I'm here by myself watching/listening to Iron Chef America on the food network. The special ingredient is lobster and it's a French chef against Iron Chef Morimoto, who specializes in Japenese cuisine. It's a good battle.

I wonder if they will make lobster ice cream. Probably. Someone always winds up making a really weird flavor of ice cream that the judges usually hate. They're given an ingredient like sea urchin or jerusalem artichoke and expected to make 5 dishes including a dessert. Actually, I sense an undercurrent in the culinary world to create savory ice creams anyway. I've heard that black pepper ice cream is good, but I haven't tried it.

Hippy music is playing in the background. Words like lobster medallions, tomalley, stock pot, lemon verbena are rising above the music. Phish is going bananas covering Prince's Purple Rain via Lime Wire.

Life is good in our house.

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Rob and Sadie went to see the Nets this evening. He got a ticket for free and best friend is in AC. So I get a night to myself and everyone is happy.

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I've been strongly trying to convince Rob to switch our family website over to a blog format, which he has been slowly warming up to. This way, we could both add to it, contribute to it, daily. It would be kind of nice to update it weekly and just let the grandfolks and others know what we've been up to. Also, to receive their feedback and ideas via comments would be really great too.

***

Back to the Iron Chef, the first chef, Morimoto, made vanilla ice cream with lobster sauce. The French chef made lobster ceviche with olive oil ice cream. Talk about yummy! These dishes wouldn't go very far in our house. Too bad...

Oh, and...

...the baby peed on the toilet again yesterday after our shower!

Wrapping up the Year

I have been strangely calm through most of this holiday. I had a small meltdown in mid-November, probably related to my birthday. If I had to blame it on something. Maybe it had more to do with the activity in our household at that time. At any rate, Free sent me an email entitled "Negative Energy Cripples the Human Spirit" or something to that effect. It wasn't the easiest thing for me to read since saw a lot of myself in that essay and realized that I was crippling my own spirit. Anyway, kudos to Free for keeping it mad-real.

Sometimes the things that are hardest to hear are the things we need to hear the most.

So after I got over myself in November I got really into things for the holiday as you can tell some of my last couple of postings. I wouldn't say I went overboard at all, and I'm quite happy with the way the holiday turned out for us. I just tried to simplify and I feel like this method made me succeed at enjoying the season.

Some things that were more low-key this year

• Gift buying-I began slightly earlier than usual, some of it in November, some of it very early in December. I only bought for those closest to me and decided in advance just to give one or two people cash only. I went with a lot of first instinct purchases that were within my budget. I used some coupons.
• Wrapping-As soon as the gifts started coming into the house, I wrapped them all and stored them in the attic. To make this possible I cleared off the dining room table and set it up as a gift wrapping station with the tape, the paper, name tags, etc. It made my life so much easier to do this.
• Cooking-rather than take on the daunting and impossible task of cooking the perfect turkey again, plus cooking a million different side dishes, I focused on 4 really good foods that pleased the gang. For Christmas Eve we had stuffed shells. And bread. And butter. The end. And everyone enjoyed it. And for Christmas we had filet mignon, sea scallops, mashed potates, asparagus, and carrots. Five simple foods that don't need sauces, accoutrements, complicated cooking techniques, just a little bit of attention. The result was delicious.
• (A side note about the filet mignon-we went to BJ's and got a whole 5 1/2 pound tenderloin that I carved at home into about 5 different meals, reserving the best, most uniform steaks for our dinner. So in the end I saved about $5 per pound, which is a lot of money.)
• Cookies-picked a handful of easy recipes and just went to town over the course of a few days. Wouldn't have been possible to enjoy this much time in the kitchen baking if I hadn't taken care of the gifts and everything else the way I did.
• Delegate-I actually shared a little bit of the duties with others this year. I normally don't do it, it's a habit, and I'm trying to reform myself into a person who will actually accept the help and kindness from others. Kinda still makes me feel funny, but...

There you have it. These few changes and improvements helped me enjoy the holiday, Rob, the girls, my family a bit more. Now I'm at the point where I feel like we wrapped the year up really nicely and I feel comfortable with life for a change.

The tree is down and I don't think I took a picture. Hmm, I'll have to see what I have if anything. The tree was nice, same artificial tree we've had for a couple of years now. It's a good enough tree. I actually didn't jam every single ornament on this year, but I think it looked better that way. More tree, less crap.

Lists

I like lists. Been noticing them popping up more and more in the blog world. I think I'll do some lists from time to time. So here's the first, a good girly topic-

Male Celebrities I Could Totally Get Jiggy With:

• Christian Bale
• Orlando Bloom (especially as Legolas Greenleaf)
• Viggo Mortensen
• Tobey Maguire
• Joaquin Phoenix
• Luke Wilson

I was going to link all these names to photos, but hell, you should know what they look like by now. If not go to IMDB. They are all babes, in my opinion.

Pre-Christmas Eve Day

Today started with a bang at 5am with the baby waking up and demanding our attention. We went to BJ's for a gigantic filet of beef that will be lovingly carved into filet mignons for Christmas. We also got a bunch of other crap I won't bore you, the reader, with. Suffice to say about 12 or 13 items ranging from a 12-pack of light bulbs to a 4-pack of Chardonnay glasses. A good store!

I promise to take and post a picture of the filet before I butcher it.

The baby napped through a breakfast at the Meadowlands diner and the trip to BJ's. Stinker...

But the biggest stinker of all today was Sadie, who hung around in her pajamas for the major part of the day playing Xbox. Sheesh. She also played around on the Sims for quite a while working on new characters. I dragged her away from that to make cookies with me. I think in the end she enjoyed it.

My in-laws brought her to see Santa at the Bergen Mall while we did the Stop N' Shop thing. Evidently she screamed her head off as soon as she was placed in his lap and stopped screaming promptly upon returning to arms of her Grandpa. So no Santa picture this year. Eh, that's fine with me. I know there's a lot of pics out there of babies screaming in terror on Santa's lap, and that's cool and all, but we'll survive without one.

I baked 3 batches of cookies today: gingersnaps, chocolate crinkles, and thumbprints (AKA Russian teacakes) cookies. Every one of them is scrumptious. Tomorrow we will make sugar cookies, chocolate chip, and chocolate-pecan tartlets. The tartlets are at Sadie's request.

I plan on TRYING to get a pedicure tomorrow. Wish me luck. I need some festive toes.

Hope everyone's weekend is awesome and may the spirit of the season be with you.

Lately

Catching up on the Christmas thing.

My manic enthusiasm for Christmas has cooled off slightly. I was really ROLLING in the spirit on the 11th, mostly because it was Day One of Two Days Off in a Row. God, I was practically crying tears of joy over those days off.

Today was another day off too, but it wasn't planned and it wasn't really for a joyous reason like preparing for Christmas. The baby has four top teeth coming in all at once and evidently that's not such a great feeling in the middle of the night. She got up around 11 last night, sort of went back to sleep, woke up several times between then and 1, cried, nursed, cried, had a bottle and finally fell back to sleep around 2 and woke up for good around 5 this morning.

My head was splitting. I was just too miserable and decided that I'd rather just have an awful headache in the privacy of my own home than at a job I am beginning to hate. She stayed home with me and had a difficult day. She had some really lovely moments where she was playing, smiling, and adorable, but those moods would change so rapidly into something much less pleasant. At one point she was standing on my belly, pinching the skin on my chest, and spitting on my face. That was sort of a low-point, but I was still glad not to be at work.

She refused to nap until she was somehow physically connected to me. At 3pm I actually woke her up to bathe. We were still in our pajamas, her hair was sweaty against me, we were both starting to smell gross, and I was just disgusted with our condition. We took a nice, long, warm shower which seemed to revive us and finally get us on the right track after a trying day.

The neatest thing happened after the shower though. We took our sweet time drying off and I managed to clip her toenails and a few fingernails, clean out her ears, etc. I thought to myself "this baby is going to have to pee soon, I'm surprised she hasn't peed in her towel yet." I got the idea to sit her little rear-end on the toilet and voila: pee in the toilet. It meant absolutely nothing to her. Nothing. She had no idea why I was praising her or what had happened, but it was just the cutest thing ever. I mean, she's not even a year old...

Well, that headache from this morning is probably on it's way back. I am soooooo tired. The husband is sleeping to a basketball game which I am half-listening to. College ball. Kent State is losing to Duke. He'll be happy when he wakes up since he likes Duke.

Day Off!

Alright, alright, I think I might finally be in the mood for Christmas. Yesterday afternoon while the baby was napping in her crib and the husband was snoozing in front of the TV, I decided to yank out the old Christmas tree. Hit by a rare combination of motivation and Christmas spirit, I finally began getting the house ready for the season.

In order to even get that far, I had to reorganize some of the attic just to reach the tree and decorations. I managed to lug the tree downstairs and assemble it before the baby woke up. Luckily ever single light on the tree was in perfect working order. It all fell together perfectly and now most of the tree is finished. We just have to hang some ornaments, but I've decided to leave most of the glass ornaments off of the tree this year, with the little one and all...

So far the baby hasn't tried to pull the tree down. She reaches out and touches it, but recoils at the pointy fake needles. They aren't sharp or anything, but I guess she's expecting to feel something different than the bristly, bushy appendages. I'm sure she'll grow bolder as she gets better acquainted with the tree.

The tree gets all squished in the box that houses it during it's long off season. We have to go around the tree, tediously straightening out every branch until it looks more like a real tree. I love having a fake tree mostly because I don't like the idea of killing a real one (I am a recycling-fanatic, but that's for another posting).

I put one ring of red garland around the tree, evenly spaced. The top always looks a little awkward for some reason, even with the angel in place at the top. This problem was neatly solved for the first time by placing a small wreath of red plastic berries on a circle of fine woodsy material. It's like a little red tree halo that the angle sits on.

So far that's the tree.

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I think a fun thing to do while the baby is little would be to take pictures of her with over-sized pieces of food at different family functions, outings, and such. We've sort of started doing this I think. The turkey drumstick picture was taken on a whim the day after Thanksgiving when I was busy processing the turkey carcass. Then, just this past weekend we took a picture of her in at a table in a deli in NYC with an enormous meatloaf sandwich in front of her. I think we're on to something.

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This past weekend was wonderful. We saw the tree at Rockefeller Center in the city. Big Tree! It was really cold and we were all bundled up. We walked around and saw some sights and had really big sandwiches for lunch in Times Square. Sadie had hot brisket, I had meatloaf, Rob had most of a 10 oz. cheese burger. It was outrageously expensive at a little under $70 with a tip. Still, the day went great even though Penny peed up her whole outfit and Sadie had to help me change her in the bathroom. The best part is that we were back home around 1pm.

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The best thing about today is that I HAVE THE DAY OFF! Those four words have the power to transform the day into something magical. I have so many plans including: prime the foyer, go shopping, work on cards, enjoy my life!

It doesn't end there though! I have tomorrow off too! I'm planning on buying some sneakers at Modell's. I have a coupon :-)

Tweaking the Holiday Season

I'll just jump right into this-after having one of the worst Thanksgivings of my entire life, I've been heavily contemplating how to make Christmas as enjoyable as possible. Is it all about perfect gifts, cards, hostessing?

If I succumb to the subliminal messages sent out over the airwaves, I will wind up charging thousands of dollars on merchandise that my friends and relatives won't want, don't need, that won't actually bring us any closer together, or prove once and for-all that I am all grown up now and have loads of money at my disposal!

The only bit of Christmas-fueled shopping pressure I have caved in to has to do with work. The eight nurses who work at my agency, myself included, get together for a holiday dinner and exchange a grab bag. It doesn't stop there though. I found out last year that they also break their own rule by giving everyone a little token gift, something small.

But small x 7 = not exactly cheap.

So, to avoid feeling like a jerk tomorrow night at dinner, I got everyone a coffee mug with 2 packets of gourmet hot chocolate that I'll put together with some red or green cellophane and put a little bow around it and shush it out a little bit and voila! Jerk feeling avoided. Then I'll come home and worry that maybe it was a little too much and think about that a hundred times over and over before falling asleep. (Mental note to self-do not drink coffee with dessert tomorrow.)

All in all, it'll come to about $45 with the wrapping stuff. Not too bad I guess, but there are other corners of my life where I could spend $30 here and $40 there. Singularly, it's not a fortune. "Don't be a scrooge, I tell myself." But add it all up and it's some serious coin.

*****

Q: What would be one of the greatest things we could do with Christmas to just improve it beyond our wildest dreams?

A: Rather than buy gifts for others, we could buy gifts for ourselves!

This is a genius idea on so many levels. Just picture it-gathering together with your family and friends, showing off all of the wonderful things that you've purchased, sort of like show-and-tell. You could discuss the price openly, candidly. Hell you could actually brag about just how cheap the stuff you bought was. This is a big no-no in our current Christmas tradition. By God, you could leave the tags ON!

I love the idea of oohing and aaaahing with my family over the wonderful things we've given ourselves. I could give Sadie a chunk of money and let her go to town. The only exception would be the baby, the little ones who can't really buy themselves gifts. We could make exceptions for the very young, the very old, and those who are disabled (provided they have a note from their doctor :-P ).

Some of your family members would spend outrageous amounts of money on themselves and you could just smile to yourself, shake your head, and say "Crazy Aunt Peggy, she doesn't know when to quit!" You wouldn't feel like your gift to her is completely out of proportion to her gift to you. There would be no keeping-up-with the-Aunt-Peggies to drive you crazy and/or into bankruptcy.

Other members of your family who are notoriously chintzy would just suffer with their own lame gifts to themselves. No hard feelings there!

Think of all the wrapping paper (aka TREES) we would spare if we were just giving gifts to ourselves!

*****

My Christmas Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity to not spend too much money on presents
Courage to actually get to the mall before Christmas Eve
And the wisdom to never

buy an $80 prime rib roast ever again