Scheduling Like Clockwork

I have a friend who can remember not just the birthdays, but the due dates of all of her friend’s children.
Me? Unless I make an effort, I can’t remember how many kids she has.

This is what I mean when I say that I am not a detail person. In some ways, this makes me feel very unwomanly. Combine this with a distinct tendency toward uni-tasking, and there’s no doubt. I fall short of the feminine ideal. If I bring home the bacon, the frying pan is dirty.

This is why I require such a commitment to a calendar. One calendar. Singular.

I used to keep a paper wall calendar, but somehow, this one wall calendar begat more wall calendars. These spawned scheduling problems and missed appointments. I then moved to a purse-sized paper calendar, which was great until they stopped making the one that tracked everything I needed to track and still fit in my purse.

This year, everything’s on the computer. I color-code each of our activities, so I quickly know who’s got what when. I usually write out the week's schedule and post it. Nothing may be added to the schedule without coming through me. So far, this is the best system for us.

How do you stay on top of your family’s schedule? Any tips you’d like to share?

Happy Mother's Day

We celebrate moms today: their love, their care, their sacrifice. I especially want to celebrate my mom's sense of humor. She's funny, and she thinks her kids are funny (and at least two of them are). I loved sitting around our dinner table, listening to her pun away. Still do.

Happy Mother's Day! May your quick wit and clever ways continue with your children's children.

Top posts

As some of you know, I'm participating in a 31-day blog challenge hosted by Michelle Rafter. I wanted to take the challenge and see if I could post about life as a family on the fly. How do we stay connected to each other and our communities? What do we see and learn? How do other families do it?

As of yesterday, the challenge is one-third complete. These are my most popular posts:

Mom Marketing for Picky Eaters - Four tips on how to persuade your kid to try new foods.

Queen of the Road - A quick introduction to my life. Includes great youtube clip of Roger Miller singing "King of the Road" in front of some psychedelic backdrop.

A Tale of Two Bagels (one standard, the other gluten-free) - My longest post of the challenge. Two bread machine recipes for bagel dough, and a review of the process.

Pause the Spin Cycle - How do you enjoy the journey?

And my most popular post so far?

Comedies that Inspire - Six movies that make me laugh and inspire me as a parent, road warrior, community member, and writer.

Thanks for reading! Have anything you'd like to read about in the next third of the challenge? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Out of the desert

When you come to a desert in your work, what do you do?

Obligation, Like Mercy, my new essay, is now available for reading at Curator Magazine. Here are a couple of quotes that influenced me as I wrote:

• What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.-C.S. Lewis

• We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.-Marie Curie

How are you participating in and pursuing beauty in your life and work today?

Music on the Road

Life on the road, I hear, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Oh sure, traveling sounds great, and some of the destinations are remarkable, people tell me, but you get sick of the airports and the restaurant food and the hotels.

I get this, but consider how irritated you might be on a flight with unsupervised children behind you, kicking your seat, whining, starving, fighting with each other over who said which word first, as if "jinx" were a UN treaty. You might wonder, where is their mother?

Life at home means their mother is present but occupied, the pilot of that flight, a stripped-down operation where she is also the stewardess and baggage handler. The chair being kicked is hers.

I'm not saying I'd trade spots with the business traveller. My kids aren't always awful. Sometimes they're fabulous. One of the things that helps them be fabulous? Music. Music hath charms to soothe the savage children who scream at each other for the slightest offense. Singing along is like magic. For a brief moment, there is unity. Harmony, even.

We sing along to all types of music, but here's a video clip of one of our favorites:

How do control your flights and keep the backseat beasts at bay?

Mom marketing for picky eaters

five more than I would eat

I was that kid. The one sitting at the dining room table for hours. It was me versus four lima beans, I think, and I didn't budge. I like to think I won that round. Some might argue that's three hours of my life I'll never get back, but when you're a kid, you've got time.

Now I've got no time plus kids of my own, and can't imagine using the "sit there until you eat it" strategy. We've got places to be. This is the season for mom marketing. Four tips:

Tip #1-Rebranding, Part One: Concept Dining

Potato-cheddar soup sounds boring and torturous. Everyone talking like pirates and eating Golden Treasure Soup? Shiver me timbers.

Tip #2-Secret Recipe

When making individual portions of something (a burger, for example), let the kids sniff their way through the herbs and spices. Each child can then season his or her own (but careful with the cayenne pepper!).

Tip #3-Rebranding, Part Two: Gross? Cool

(A couple of friends of mine reminded me of this one yesterday, and inspired this post.)
Raising a little thrill-seeker? Come up with something awful to call the food you set before him or her. Alien eyeballs with a side of monkey brains, anyone?

Tip #4-The Magic of Bacon

This one's courtesy of my mom and dad. Well, probably just my dad. When I would refuse to try something, he'd tell me it was like bacon, or a different form of bacon. I believe he used the line with both sweet potatoes and mushrooms. Note: I'm guessing this strategy evolved after the lima bean incident.

How do you market food to your kids?

Two bagel recipes, one GF

Road warrior foodie moms, how do you handle it? Sometimes our pace in life puts our values in conflict. I get sick of packaged food dominating our meals and snacks, but can you imagine if even packaged food was a difficult option?

Some of my friends don’t have to imagine. Those with celiac disease must eat a gluten-free diet. You’d be amazed by the ways gluten sneaks into packaged food. Finding appropriate, tasty, well-priced options is challenging, especially for those who live in rural areas.

According to one of my GF friends, this is especially true of bagels. She is a road warrior mom of the highest order. One of her tribe needs her to travel a long way, and she’s going. She wants to be prepared, especially for breakfast. She spotted a recipe for GF everything bagels, and thought it would be a fantastic, portable choice to freeze and take. She knows I love to get my food nerd on, so she invited me to help with a test batch.

wheat bagel dough

The Pre-Test Batch (Gluten-y)

Before making the GF bagels at her house, I made a regular batch at mine. I wanted to be able to compare the doughs. I use a modified version of Beth Hensperger’s recipe from her amazing “The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook” (My modified version appears as the first of two recipes at the end of this post).

The dough was lovely: heavy and elastic. The challenge? I suck at dividing dough evenly, and I excel at over-flattening the dough balls. No matter. The bagels tasted great.

GF everything bagel dough

The Test Batch (Gluten-Free)

With this experience fresh in my mind, I headed to my friend’s house. We reviewed the GF recipe together, as well as her preferences. She likes the “everything” of the everything bagel (poppy seeds, sesame seeds, onion, and garlic) in the dough, so we tweaked the recipe to suit her taste (this appears as one of two recipes at the end of the post). We were careful not to increase the salt in the dough, as salt retards the growth of yeast. While the recipe called for a mixer with dough hooks, we decided to give a bread machine method a try.

We discovered that the dough was a little dry, and added water a little at a time until all dry ingredients were absorbed. We also used a rubber spatula to help during the initial knead.

Gluten vs. Gluten-Free Prep Notes

• Compared to a standard dough, the GF dough does not have the same visible rise. I think this is due to the differences in density. 
• After you divide the standard dough, you poke a hole in each dough ball with your finger, then leave it there and spin it, expanding the hole. It’s fun. The elasticity causes the hole to close a little as the dough rests. The GF dough was dense, but soft. No spinning! Just form the hole with your index finger, and it holds.
• The standard bagel recipe calls for boiling the bagel in salted water for about 7 minutes. The original GF version uses canola oil in the water, not salt, and the suggested boil time is only about 30 seconds. My friend and I upped that time to about a minute. 
• The standard bagel recipe uses an egg wash after the boil but before baking, and then you sprinkle each with your topping(s) of choice.  With the GF bagels, we buttered the tops of the boiled dough and sprinkled them with salt. 
• After 20 minutes, the GF bagels smelled great but were not browned. We moved them up a rack and let them back for about 10 additional minutes. (This was more in keeping with the time in the original recipe. We let them cool for as long as we could stand it, and then split one. Delicious!

Recipes

Regular Wheat Bagels
(Modified from the Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook)
Yield: 16 bagels
1 cup water
2 large eggs
1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
2 cups bread flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon gluten
2 teaspoons fine kosher salt
2 1/2 teaspoons SAF yeast or 2 1/4 teaspoons bread machine yeast
***
3-4 quarts water
2 tablespoons fine kosher salt
1 egg yolk beaten with 2 tablespoons water for glaze
Seeds for garnish (sesame, poppy, caraway, or fennel)

1. Place the first eight ingredients (water, eggs, flours, sugar, salt, gluten, and yeast) into the bread machine pan according to manufacturer’s instructions. Place pan in the bread machine, select the dough cycle, and press start.
2. After about 2 minutes, check to see if the dry ingredients are being absorbed into the liquid. Add water a tablespoon at a time as needed, pausing after each addition.
3. Allow the dough to go through the entire dough cycle. When cycle is complete, empty the dough from the pan onto a prepared surface.
4. Divide dough into 16 equally sized balls. Stick a finger into the middle of each ball to form a hole. Spin the dough on your finger to expand the hole (it will shrink a bit as the shaped dough rests). Allow dough to rest as you prepare the water. No additional rise is needed.
5. While the dough rests, bring three or four quarts of water to a boil and add remaining salt to it. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line two baking sheet with parchment paper.
6. With a slotted spoon, lower 4 bagels one at a time into the boiling salted water. Boil for 4 minutes, then flip the bagels in the water and boil an additional 3 minutes. Remove with slotted spoon and place on lined baking sheet. Repeat with remaining bagels.
7. Place desired seed garnish on a plate. Brush tops of bagels with egg yolk/water mix and then dip in garnish. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the bagels are golden brown. Cool before serving. Serve the same day you bake them, or freeze for up to one month. (Hint: you can slice before your freeze them.)

Gluten-Free Everything Bagels
(Modified from http://delightglutenfree.com/gluten-free-bagels)
Yield: One Dozen Bagels
2 cups warm water
5 ½ cups all-purpose gluten-free flour blend with a one-to-one ratio (we used King Arthur brand)
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
1 tablespoon dried minced onion
1/4 teaspoon powdered dried garlic
2 packets active quick-rise dry yeast
***
2 quarts boiling water
2 teaspoons canola oil
Melted butter
Kosher salt for sprinkling

1. Place the first nine ingredients (water, flour, sugar, salt, flavorings, and yeast) into the bread machine pan according to manufacturer’s instructions. Place pan in the bread machine, select the dough cycle, and press start.
2. After about 2 minutes, check to see if the dry ingredients are being absorbed into the liquid. Add water a tablespoon at a time as needed, pausing after each addition.
3. Allow the dough to go through the entire dough cycle. When cycle is complete, empty the dough from the pan onto a prepared surface.
4. Divide dough into 12 equally sized balls. Stick a finger into the middle of each ball to form a hole. Allow dough to rest as you prepare the water. No additional rise is needed.
5. While the dough rests, bring two quarts of water to a boil and add canola oil to it. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
6. Poach bagels a few at a time in simmering water for 60-65 seconds. Remove from the water and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
7. Bake for 18-30 minutes until the bagels are golden on top. Cool before serving.

How do you handle your food challenges?