Rained Out Haiku

Clouds bode a downpour,
but I rejoice in downtime--
unexpected gift.

Today is haiku day in Blogathon 2012, and rain out day for my family's sole scheduled activity. Hurray!

Letter to the Tooth Fairy

The tooth hangs by a strand of flesh. Last night it brought forth enough blood to simulate a vampire movie, but alas, it remained. This spawned great weeping; for how, the child conjectured, would funds be gathered and applied toward Disneyland without the immediate benefactor-y of the Tooth Fairy?

Sorrow continued past bedtime, but then, quiet ... and finally... Eureka! Glorious light! A vision, a solution!

The child descended the stairs in haste. Gathering paper and pencil, the wee one perched at the dining room table and penned the following:

Translation (as read to the child's father):

Dear Tooth Fairy, 

I am sorry I didn't bring a tooth. But it didn't come out. So give me a surprise next morning. I would like to have 2 more dollars. 

Love 

___

Is this the first ever Tooth Fairy IOU? If accepted, what sort of credit debacle would that be?

Recipe for Chuck Roast

I originally posted this recipe at my consistently neglected food blog. It's one of the most popular posts I've ever written, and it's a great recipe for families on the go. I hope you enjoy it!

My personal tastes run toward the ridiculously expensive. Take my relationship to beef. I wait until I have a few extra bucks and splurge on ribeyes, our favorite cut. This means I sometimes forget about the simple beef roast. But when I give it a chance, I'm always pleased.

I grew up on chuck roast, and I still enjoy that cut and flavor: satisfyingly beefy. It was on sale this week,  and I was excited. It's a great cut to cube for beef stew or Hungarian goulash, but I really wanted to make it in the slow-cooker.

While this is not their recipe, I've got to give a special shout-out to America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. I've learned a lot about cooking from reading the recipes and tips, as well as everything else published by the folks at Cook's Illustrated magazine. I love everything about it. If it were a wine, I'd describe it as 'nerdy but accessible'. It's ad-free, well-illustrated, and scientific. The recipes are so detailed, they're practically foolproof.

A few thoughts:

• Set aside the extra 15-20 minutes and brown the meat and vegetables. It will add depth to your finished dish. If you don't want to take my word for it, believe my mom. She's not a foodie. She's a very practical woman who doesn't like to fuss over a dish, and I can remember her standing over the frying pan awkwardly turning big ol' roasts - because she could taste the difference. 
• If you don't do wine, try a 'dry' juice like cranberry or pomegranate.
• This recipe would suit a 6 quart slow cooker. Mine is 5 quarts, and there was about 3 cups of liquid that just wouldn't fit - but still plenty of delicious sauce. 
• Served with baked potatoes and salad. We're planning on leftovers with noodles.
• My estimated cost per serving is $2 for the main dish, salad, and potatoes (had a nice coupon for the meat)

Slow Cooker Boneless Chuck Roast and Sauce

Makes 8+ servings

5-6 lbs. chuck roast (I used two smaller roasts for a total of 5 lbs.)

1 tablespoon kosher salt

2 dashes cayenne

2 dashes paprika

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 1/2 teaspoons dried ground thyme

1 tablespoon canola oil

2 onions, coarsely chopped

6 carrots, peeled and sliced 1/4-inch thick

8 oz. sliced mini-bella mushrooms

1/3 cup chopped celery (fresh or frozen)

1 cup dry red wine

1 1/2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 tablespoon Worchestershire sauce

4 cups low-sodium chicken stock

1 beef bouillon cube

2 bay leaves

In a small bowl, mix kosher salt, cayenne, paprika, pepper and thyme. 

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Pat the top of the roast dry with a paper towel and  sprinkle with a teaspoon of the salt mixture. When oil is hot, place roast seasoned side down in pan. Sprinkle an additional teaspoon salt mix on top. Brown roast on both sides, 5-10 minutes, and place into slow cooker. If working with two smaller roasts, brown each one individually.

Reduce heat to medium. Add onions and cook about 4 minutes. Add carrots and cook about 4 more minutes. Add mushrooms and cook an additional 3-4 minutes or until the vegetables begin to brown. Add the wine, scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen and browned bits. Add the Worchestershire sauce, tomato paste, chicken stock and bouillon cube and bring to boil. Add bay leaves.

Pour liquid and vegetables into the slow cooker over the browned roasts. Cover and cook on low for 8-9 hours or on high 6-7 hours.

When meat is fork tender, remove from liquid and place in serving dish (a large casserole would work well here). Remove as much fat from the liquid as you can (I used a gravy separator) and purée the vegetables in batches. Transfer to a gravy boat if you're feeling fancy, or just put in a bowl with a ladle. Serve.

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?