Emotional Eaters Anonymous

I think I have a problem.  I love food.  I enjoy eating. That is not the problem.  The problem is, when I am sad, or angry, or having a bad day, I eat because it makes me feel better.  In one instant all the days problems melt away with sweet chocolate, warm bread, french fries, you name it (normally not all at once...). I haven't figured out if I just enjoy eating and that after a bad day I want to do something I enjoy, or if it's the opposite.  Either way, I know I have to watch it, practice self-control regularly and of course exercise. The last few weeks however have been pretty rough at work.  I have found myself digging into leftover Christmas or Valentines day candy  at least twice every afternoon.  It's not a lot, but enough to pause, take a moment, and breathe as I quickly chew and swallow.  Today was an exceptionally frustrating day, and after work on the drive home I started thinking about all the things I would like to go home and bake.  One of them is my Aunt's beer bread, and the other is blueberry scones.  So, I stopped off at the grocery store hoping for a great sale on blueberries, but alas, no such luck.  As I was walking around our corner market I happened to remember that they have a new-ish pastry isle with fresh pastries for sale.  I walked over to look at the selection and saw something I had never seen there before.

Now, for those of you who know how much I like food, you will also know that I love to try foods that I haven't had before.  After all, I may be missing out on the very best thing ever.  So, I bought it.  I knew it had to be some kind of pastry.  When I picked it up it must have weighed at least half a pound.  When I cut it open I discovered that it was absolutely filled with ... something, custard maybe?  Nope. It was like a cheesecake pastry!  I can't say for sure if it actually was cheesecake, but I can say for sure it was delicious!  And, it was only $0.91. Yeah.  The cheapest cheesecake I have ever had.  Maybe not the best, but good enough.   I don't think this is the discovery of the century, but it's definitely the discovery of the day.  Thank you Devon Market for your freshly baked isle, and for being just a few short blocks from home.  The rest of the evening is looking up :)

Perspective

Was it a good day, or a bad day? I guess that depends on your perspective. If you were a student in our pre-k class, you probably had a great day.  You played with play dough and made an awesome garden.  You ran around the classroom pretending to be on safari, whooping and hollering, climbing up mountains and fighting  jungle monsters. You built a city, made cards, pretended to be dogs, lions, ninjas and explorers.  You helped your friend learn a new game on the computer and you got to show the principal your masterpiece.  If you are the teacher, it was one of the worst days ever. You were a fish in a fishbowl. The principal was in the classroom for you bi-annual evaluation, watching every move, judging your classroom management styles, seeing how you manage to run a small group and teach a high-level math concept to 4-5-year-olds while trying to maintain peace in the classroom.  The students were yelling at each other across the room, refusing to sit down or settle down.  The noise level was out of control. You had to stop what you were doing to try to explain once again how to use inside voices in the classroom.  When you went back to the lesson, the principal was taking over, changing the lesson and trying to make it even more advanced. 

During clean-up time, a group of kids suddenly forgot how to clean up and put the blocks away as the principal was closely scrutinizing skills you had taught them. One child wandered around the classroom at will and refused to do anything you asked.  When the principal left the room, it took everything inside of you to not curl up in a ball and cry or scream at the children in your craziest wild banshee imitation.  I don't know about you, but given the choice, I think I would rather be the student on a day like today.  

Day Off?

Today was a much needed day off, thanks to George Washington, and the other presidents.  I had imagined that my day off would include a trip to a few of my favorite second-hand stores, a few hours of crocheting, a few hours of reading, and maybe a few hours napping/watching a movie.  But instead, I woke up with pain in my right ear for the second day in a row and decided on a trip to the suburbs to see the doc.  When I got there, the place was in chaos. All of the computers had gone down and we had to fill out loads of forms by hand.  The doctor saw me quickly and confirmed that I had an ear infection and prescribed an anti-biotic.  Then, I stopped by to see my mother-in-law and had a lovely visit.  She served lunch for me- ham and bean soup and a sausage and pepper sandwich followed with a cup of coffee and chocolate cupcake.  Yum.  After that delightful respite, I proceeded to Wal-Mart to pick up my prescription.  There were a lot of people there.  After driving around the parking lot for about 10 minutes, I resigned to park in never-never land and walk.  I ordered my meds, and they told me it would be an hour.  I live about 45 minutes from the Wal-mart, so I walked to a bookstore nearby, and then to Michaels, picked out some yarn and headed back to Wal-mart. There were about 3 people ahead of me in line to pick up the prescription, and it took about 40 minutes until I was walking away from the counter with my prescription.  Ugh. Then, I drove home, fighting traffic all the way and just got in the door at 5pm.  I was away from home more than I am on a regular work day.  :(  Aside from the nice chat with my mother-in-law, I don't feel like this was much of a day off.   Ah well. At least I didn't have to use a sick day for the doctor visit.

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, Glenn and I were in Minneapolis, MN awaiting Lucian's Baptism. One year ago today, I was oblivious to what was to come, enjoying the company of my family, and looking forward to sledding with my nephews. One year ago today, Glenn was sweating bullets and wondering how he was going to get me away from my family long enough to "pop the question".  What a difference a year makes!   It's hard to believe that my new baby nephew has teeth and is/will shortly be walking.  It's a miracle that in a year, we planned a long distance wedding (with the help of a wonderful supportive team of South Dakotans!) got married, squeezed in a mini-honeymoon and a honeymoon...and filed jointly on our tax returns (of course all this was in addition to a whole host of other, more normal things that happen in a year).  So, being the good Catholics that we are, this day called for a celebration... and celebrate we did.

Beef ribs slow roasting away in the window

We decided that we would go see a movie (in the theatre!) downtown and go out for dinner.  We opted to see The Kings Speech. If you haven't seen it, it really is a delightful movie, and I highly recommend it (not for young ears due to some profanity). Afterwords we walked the 5 blocks to  Fogo de Chao and arrived only a bit early for our dinner reservation  Oh... my sweet carnivorian heaven!  The meal at this restaurant is a fixed price.  Everyone pays the same amount, and you get the unlimited salad bar and meat selections (15 different kinds-and mostly all steaks!) and because it was "restaurant week" the meal was $5 off and included dessert.  Let me tell you about the salad bar. I know what you're thinking...big whoop. Salad Bar.  I'm here for the meat.  Yeah, I thought that too, until I saw it.  The salad bar was beautiful.. and not like any salad bar I had ever seen.  It was filled with trays of marinated mushrooms, artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, peppers, olives, sun-dried tomatoes and asparagus spears all beautifully arranged on oval trays.  In addition to the marinated goodies, there were about 5 different kinds of cheeses, generously sliced and several different kinds of cured meets including bacon, prosciutto and smoked salmon.  Then of course there was the lettuce...no ice-berg in sight!  Just beautiful piles of spinach, butter lettuce and romaine, and there were a couple of pre-made diced vegetable salads of the cucumber tomato pepper and onion variety...all superb and very fresh.  What a treat.  And then, there was the meat.  When you were ready for your meat, you flipped over the coaster at your table from the red side to the green side and servers came over to your table with huge skewers of meat. They brought rib eye, prime sirloin, top sirloin, bottom sirloin (my favorite), fillet minion, leg of lamb, lamb chops (Glenn's fav), pork ribs, bacon wrapped chicken, pork loin, pork sausage and garlic beef. 

Glenn's lamb chops

And you could eat as much as you wanted. When you wanted a rest, or to take another trip back to the salad bar, flip your coaster to the red side until you wanted more.  Only when we were stuffed to the brim did our server clear away our plates and offer dessert. For dessert they offered two different kinds of cheese cake, a chocolate lava cake, something with ice cream, i can't remember, flan, tres leches and papaya or strawberry creme.  We are both huge fans of tres leches cake (if you haven't tried it, you should) and opted for that as our selection.  For those of you who may not know what tres leches is, it is a dense, semi-dry vanilla cake that is soaked in a blend of 3 milks: heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk. MMMM, MMMMM, MMMMM! 

And this one did not disappoint.  It was one of, if not the very best tres leches I have ever had. Needless to say, we waddled/rolled away from dinner with happy contented smiles on our faces repeating "wow, that was sooo  good" to each other as we slowly made our way back down the street to the El.   We went straight to bed at 7:00 due to food coma.  Definitely night everyone should experience at least once!  Happy  1 year engagement anniversary honey! Looking forward to many more!

Valentine's Day, Delicious!

This Valentine's day, I was inspired by a picture in my Martha Stewart Living magazine.  (Thanks again Kell for the awesome Christmas gift!).  I decided to make Martha's darling peanut butter and jelly cookies for friends and co-workers.  They turned out wonderfully and were as cute as can be.  The process was a little more involved than your run-of-the-mill peanut butter cookie (Each cookie had to be rolled into a ball, flattened into a circle, and indented with the shape of a heart- then, refrigerated for 20 min. before baking. Once in the oven, they had to be removed after 12 minutes so that the heart indentation could be re-shaped and filled with jam, and baked for 8 more minutes).  All in all, however, I enjoyed baking them and had something cute to give out on V-day.

Glenn's grilled masterpiece!

For ourselves, Glenn and I decided to make our own special V-day dinner at home  on the 13th rather than fight the crowds out at a restaurant.  We decided on bone-in Rib Eye on the grill for dinner (it was close to 50 degrees...in February... we had to take advantage!) and commenced shopping.  While we were out, we also found 1in. think pork chops on sale for $2.99/lb and couldn't pass those up, so we grabbed those and proceeded to the next grocery store looking for a sale on Rib Eye. Jackpot!  Delmonico cuts (boneless) were listed for $4.99 each, and when we went back to the meat section, there were bone-in rib eye there too at the same price!!!  So, we quickly snatched up the last 2 and went to check out.  $22.00 was the total.  Wait, what?  "Excuse me, miss, these are on sale for $4.99" to which she replied "no, not those ones" "Well, could you kindly show us the ones that are on sale?  These were the ones that were next to the sale sign".  Glenn followed the check-out clerk to the back and returned 5 minutes later with a triumphant look on his face "It was the managers mistake.  He put the wrong ones out and said we could have them for the listed price!"  We totally lucked out.  We also ended up catching a sale on asparagus, and headed home to do some grilling.

And, who can grill without beer?  My brother Paul is dabbling a bit in beer brewing and had brought us up a bottle to try out. We were saving it for a special occasion and decided that this was it.  I couldn't tell you what kind of beer it was, but within a matter of an hour, it was gone.  My hats off to you bro... the beer was AMAZING! 

Of course, I had to contribute something to the table, so I decided to make a cherry pie.  We bought a pie filling when we were on our mini-moon in Door County this past fall, so it's not a made-from-scratch pie, but I think making the crust from scratch should be what matters most... and that, I did.  I just learned how to make pie crust this summer.  We made 100 rhubarb pies for a fundraiser. That'll teach anyone! However, since then, I have made 3 pies on my own, and the crust has always turned out too thin, too though, or too sticky.  The first time I rolled out a crust onto our counter top I couldn't get it off.  I destroyed it 3 times before bursting into tears and a string of near-profanity. That pie crust was too tough in the end because instead of throwing it away after re-rolling and flowering about 4 times (a serious no-no, I know) I used it anyway and patched it together.  Not my best work, I must say.  The second time, instead of rolling the crust out on the counter-top, I rolled it out on plastic wrap so it could be easily lifted and transferred.  (If you don't know this trick, you should... worked wonders for me!)  But (and there is always a but with crusts) it was much too thin.  I couldn't get it to fit over the entire pie without rolling it almost paper thin, so of course, it tore and once again I was frustrated and angry.  For this valentines day pie crust, I decided to use a recipe given to me as a shower gift from Annie. 

Using all of the tricks I learned and a different pie crust recipe, I only had to roll the dough out once, and it only split after it was baked... It was the best one yet, but still not perfect (looking that is... the crust was delicious!)  The next one will be perfect... right?  So, I guess you could say we had a pretty wonderful day shopping, grilling, baking and of course EATING!  Happy Valentine's day one and all.  I hope your day was as delicious as ours!

A reflection on mothers from a mother "wanna-be"

In college one of my professors gave me praise over a book report I wrote.  I was the only one who followed the directions and therefore the only one to receive and A on the paper.  As he was complimenting me, he asked what I planned to do with the rest of my life.  I told him that I wanted to be a housewife, and that barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen suited me just fine.  He was appalled. He couldn't believe I wanted to "waste" my life like that.  How could I, such a bright young pupil have no aspirations for my life?  Excuse me? No aspirations?  Have you been a wife or a mother lately?  As a professor, I would assume you could see some small impact you may have on the lives of some of your students.  How much more influence does a mother have over her own children?  I argued that by educating myself and being the best I could be, I could drastically impact my own children and be the best mother I could be.  Motherhood seems to be so undervalued in society. Why? What happened?  Since when did motherhood become a "lesser" vocation for the uneducated and unable?  A mother is so many things.  A teacher, nurse, chef, interior designer, accountant, actor, storyteller, singer,  judge, seamstress, magician, counsellor, manager, boss, and friend...just to name a few.  It seems to me that mothers have chosen the most difficult job of all.  The one that requires you to be everything to everyone. A mother is continually evolving, improving, and adjusting, while still managing to provide stability, comfort and familiarity in the home.  And you thought your job was something to aspire to?  I'm sorry to disappoint, but I think if I want to be challenged, I'll try motherhood.  If I want to put my gifts to good use, there will be no shortage of uses for them as a mother.  Thank you mom, and all the moms out there who have been an inspiring witness to the beauty and gift that is motherhood!