Dear DVR,

I know, it isn't really your fault, but I'm frustrated. The Criminal Minds season premiere was last night. I recorded it, as usual. When I sat down to watch it this afternoon (I fold laundry to Criminal Minds), what came up instead was A Special Address from the POTUS.

*sigh*

20 minutes of POTUS. 40 minutes of Criminal Minds. I need closure!

Yours in frustration,

PH

It isn't truly autumnal here, not yet. But last night, as the temps dipped into the low 70s, we turned off the AC and opened up the windows. The windows are still open as I write; it's expected that today will warm up, so we'll probably close 'em this afternoon. But in the meantime? Bliss.

Also, Meg was excited about her "space lunch" bento today. It's made of stars -- starfruit, cantaloupe cut out in stars, hot dogs with "shooting stars" designs, star-shaped cheese. (Tiny cookie cutters = bento adorableness.) She was very excited.

Best of all, Robert slept the entire night (okay, 1:00 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.) in his own crib. Which means I slept the entire night in my own bed without someone demanding nursies or kicking me. Ah, sleep! It makes EVERYTHING better.

And now, I am off to get a crown where I had a root canal last week. But even the idea of sitting around the dentist's office isn't fazing my good mood. Breezy cool weather! Children of great adorableness! Hurrah!

In a fit of Equinox domesticity, I made a butternut squash and sage lasagna yesterday. The recipe, I admit, came from the pages of Martha Stewart Living. It just sounded so good. OF course, it was complex, because it was a Martha recipe. You had to:

Skin and gut a 3 1/2-pound butternut squash, and cut it into 1" chunks
Roast the chunks with a little olive oil and salt (25 min at 425)
Let the chunks cool and then mash HALF of them with the back of a wooden spoon
Bring two T of butter to a sizzle
Add 1/3 c chopped fresh sage to the butter and stir around
After 3 minutes of so, add the sage/butter to the squash, and add 1 1/3 cups of chicken stock*
Stir it all up.
Mix up the ricotta-egg-mozzarella-cream-nutmeg
Boil noodles. Martha would like you to make the noodles fresh, but, um, NO.
Assemble lasagna: cheese, noodle, squash, noodle, cheese, noodle, squash, noodle, cheese
Scatter parmesan on top and bake (30 min at 375)
Let it rest for 15 minutes before eating.

It took all day, in and out of the kitchen. And it was good. But honestly, the best part about it was the squash and sage filling, which I would make all on its own and pop in the oven, sprinkled with a little parmesan. The ricotta mix was a nice complement, but the squash was the real draw.

Because here's the thing -- as a main dish the lasagna was filling, but it needed a complement I didn't have (a crisp salad, I think, and a hot baguette) to really make it a sterling meal. I had green beans and sliced cucumber. Not enough.

However, there are leftovers and there is a grocery store where salad fixings can be had, so perhaps it will be more exciting on round two.

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*Why chicken stock in an otherwise nicely vegetarian recipe? I have no idea. It was good, though.

I ought to have run off to Starbucks this weekend to work on my latest job, but instead I worked at home. Poor choice. Rob's in high-cling mode -- we have put him to bed, no lie, THREE TIMES tonight. Each time he is sound asleep. And each time he wakes up again within an hour. I'm hoping this last round sticks for at least a few hours because I am going to go crash myself in a minute.

On Saturday Meg and I went out with crevette and her lovely daughter to lunch and then to shop. Because I'm still nursing, I'm still wearing shapeless tops, but I wanted a little better QUALITY shapeless top, so off we went to the Avenue's clearance section. I lucked out, finding a shapeless top in a nice pattern and in two flattering colors (bought both), and crevette found a really stunning shirt that looks gorgeous on her. I also found a gothy black broomstick skirt, of the sort I used to adore when I was in my 20s, and I bought it, because really, a swishy broomstick skirt is an awesome thing when you are feeling that capris and shorts make you look like a mother who never leaves the house.

Today, I worked in the morning before everyone woke up and in the mid-day when Rob slept. I worked around his sleep bursts in the evening, but I also took some time that I should have been working to prep Meg's bento, seeing as tomorrow is the first day of fall. She has autumn leaf-shaped cantaloupe pieces in honor of the season. I'd thought of doing sun- and moon-shaped sandwiches or something, but she requested onigiri, so she's having that and a hard-boiled egg white. (moorewr's bento isn't thematic, either -- he's got a ploughman's lunch. And there's boiled egg for me, too, to make egg-salad sandwiches tomorrow.)

At least that's taken care of. I'm finding that the better I am at completing things the night before, the more likely it is that I will have a leisurely morning. Hmmm.

It's almost that time of the year:


(You can make your own.)

Welcome to autumn, Florida style. The equinox is Monday, but we won't feel any real change for a month and a half, at least. Of course, this hasn't stopped me pulling out the autumnal decorations, since by the time it feels like fall, we'll be well past Halloween and possibly even Thanksgiving. GRUMBLE.

Be that as it may, time marches on, and the stores already have Halloween stuff up -- and some of them even have Christmas. I took Rob with me to JoAnn's to buy the dye for Meg's costume, and yes, they already have aisles stocked with Christmas stuff. You might be thinking, "Oh, they're a fabric and craft store, they stock it early so that you have the time to make stuff." Which is all well and good except that what they were stocking was decorations, cards, and so on -- the kind of stuff you don't have to do anything to. At least it's reminding me to start the Christmas shopping. I guess.

I'm getting a project in, possibly today, possibly Monday. If it doesn't come in today, I plan to do the dyeing project this weekend (that sounds better than "I plan to dye this weekend," don't you think?), which will mean that part of the costume is out of the way. Then it will be Fun With Gauze Bandages.

Let's see, other news -- I made sushi for the first time this week, using krab stick and cucumber, so it was almost a California roll. It went over gangbusters; both Meg and moorewr ate everything in their boxes. I'd planned to do that again for today, but for the past two nights I've been trying to convince Rob to go to sleep at a reasonable time. And he has... but so have I. So the bento lunches have been heavy on the fruit and leftovers and sammiches, and not so heavy on the actual bento-y stuff.

...and I hear the little one waking up from his morning nap. Got to go rescue the baby!

(cross-posted to bentolunch)

I was making onigiri the other night, and it occurred to me to try and season the rice during cooking (because we weren't that fond of furikake). And one thought led to another until I thought, "what if I made onigiri amarillo?"

And the next thought was "...and I could stuff it with black beans and onion!"

So I did. I cooked the sushi rice according to the instructions, but added a packet of "sazon" yellow rice seasoning. Then I formed the onigiri, adding drained black beans and finely chopped onion. Here's the onigiri in process:



( Finished onigiri behind the cut )

Tamora Pierce posts that on this date 25 years ago, Alanna: The First Adventure was released.

One of my formative books, right there, ayup.

Meg has informed me as to her choice of Halloween costume this year. Though she dallied with the idea of being EVE (from WALL-E) and with various things involving massive structural creations, she has finally decided that she will be a cat mummy.

But wait! Before you think, "Excellent, PH gets off easy this time" -- no. It's not your usual cat mummy. It's a ginger tabby cat mummy.

I'll just be over here tie-dying leggings and a long-sleeve shirt... all of which will be under bandages, of course.

Two weeks, no post. Well. That would probably be because...

1. I've been working on the railroad latest job, which I finally finished and sent off. Hurrah for incipient fundage. Bonus amusement factor this time: the book was about mergers and acquisitions, and I have been through several of those (as a peon, of course) so it was entertaining to read and say, "a-HA, that's what went wrong with THAT one..."

2. We've been settling into Meg's school schedule, which is going well so far. The early mornings (early for us) are a bit difficult, particularly when Rob has been particularly fussy the night before (why does he not SLEEP? I need more sleep than he does!!), but we have dealt with that by having Meg choose her outfit and set it out the night before, and all homework, papers that have to be sent back, and so on are taken care of before going to bed. (Lunches are usually mostly packed by then as well; only sandwiches are assembled in the morning.) Harder to deal with, in some ways, have been the afternoons -- she comes home starving because lunch is so early, and munches her way through whatever she can find. Also, she's developed a disturbing habit of thinking she should get rewards for every little thing (e.g., "I swam really well so I should get a treat!"). She also likes to find "surprises" left at her place on the dining room table. Thus far, we have mostly just set up existing toys in tableaux for her to find, but if you give her the inch, she wants the mile and preferably the whole marathon.

3. Rob has been making great developmental strides, most of which mean I don't get any time at the computer. He crawls at top speed! He walks around the house while holding your hands! He eats solid foods! He shoves every tiny thing he finds into his mouth and must be watched like a hawk! He babbles! He stands! He is trying really really hard to take his first unaided steps! Did I mention he will be eight months old on Saturday? Oh, and that he won't sleep for longer than two or three hours at a stretch? At random? As in, one day he'll give you a massive nap, and the next it's three 20-minute naplets, but there's no pattern to it which is damnably annoying. Sometimes we get as much as four hours, but that's rare -- and usually not at night. At this very moment, having declined to stay asleep at 9:30 and refused to even be sleepy at 10:30, he is standing next to my chair and babbling at me. When the weather starts to cool, we'll go out for stroller rides more -- he loves that, and it wears him out for some reason.

4. I was contacted by the local paper about being interviewed and photographed making Meg's bento boxes. The interview and photography haven't happened yet but I've been obsessing over the appearance of the kitchen. Because my kitchen, it looks like the 1970s. It would make a good backdrop for an article on, say, Hamburger Helper, or Fondue: the Revival. It does not look shiny or bright (it has dark "wood-look" cabinets and white countertops with a twining harvest gold pattern), but by jingo it is CLEAN and ORGANIZED. Or clean enough, and I'll get to scrubbing the corners of the floor soon anyway because Rob keeps crawling into them and excavating interesting items. (How is it that he can get a found item into his mouth with ease, yet he drops the little fruit puffs everywhere?) Anyway, I was thinking about what I'd do, designwise. I had a fine idea of making a palm tree design out of a baby corn ear and some snow peas, and it looked great except that it doesn't fit in Meg's bento box. Oh well. We'll go for the cutout shapes (heart sandwiches! carrot flowers!) and the variety and color. When they call, I'll make a few sample bentos and have them available to look at, and then make one for them on the fly for photography's sake (depending on what they need). Today, for example, I made a trilobite out of a piece of red bell pepper with fine carrot sticks as antennae. Meg ate it up, literally.

5. Rob's timer has just gone ding yet again and i have to leave my sweet sweet inernets.... night night.

Meg has made it through her first (half) week at school. More to the point, so have I, in that I have awakened on time every morning, gotten her through breakfast and dressing and so on, and gotten her to the bus stop with time to spare. (Okay, this morning moorewr took her to the bus stop instead of me, but that's only because Rob was sleeping.)

So far, things seem to have been going all right. She got in trouble for talking when she was supposed to be listening, but that's par for the course, and I figured she'd run up against that wall at some point. Otherwise, it was smilies every day. She seems to be loving it. She has also been taught the school "clap-off" and has repeated it many... many... MANY times.

And now I have to go remove the griping baby from the playpen and make an attempt to climb Mount Dinner.

Meg came home happy about school. She didn't say much at first but then everything came pouring out, a little at a time. As usual, with Meg, it's hard to tell what was real and what was imaginary, but the gist of it all was that she enjoyed school, that her friend from VPK was her hand-holding buddy for the hall, that this month's words are "responsibility" and "respect" and "reading" (and she can explain them all rather well, I was impressed). Oh, and that Bullies are Bad! (There's a big anti-bullying movement around here.)

However, the day was not without one glitch: she came home without her lunch bag. (And then informed me that she wanted to buy lunches, because the lunch line folks had hamburgers and french fries. Ah, no.) We are improvising for tomorrow by borrowing Daddy's laptop lunchbox. If it works out for her, we might swap around some. I did (gently) ask her if there was a problem about the bento, and she didn't seem to think so (and liked all the food), but I wonder if leaving the lunch bag at school was somewhat premeditated. Probably not, she just forgot it in the scheme of things.

She was a girl on a mission this morning, from the moment she woke up until she finally arrived at her classroom. SCHOOL! SCHOOL! SCHOOL!

I think this photo says it best... ( Yay for school! )

She woke up at 6:15 when her new alarm clock went off, got dressed, had a waffle and milk for breakfast, asked me about a million times whether her lunch was packed yet. Once it was (and she had inspected it to be sure all the requested items were included), we hooked the lunch bag on her backpack, plopped Rob in the stroller, and walked to the bus stop in the early morning light.

There's another kindergarten girl in the neighborhood, and that was nice; they chattered together while waiting for the bus. When it came, there was delight! glee! rapture! and Meg barely tossed us a second look as she boarded.

We walked back home, and I transferred Rob from the stroller to the car seat so we could drive to school and meet her there. The school is All About Safety these days, and so Meg's bus was met by a phalanx of administrators and the kids were all guided to classes by staff and fifth-grade safety patrollers (the fifth-graders will take over after two weeks). I took Rob straight in to Meg's room, figuring she'd have gotten there first -- nope, we were first by a few minutes, because Meg was the last of a group of kindergarten bus riders being distributed. She looked radiant.

I went with her into her classroom, helped her stow her backpack and lunch bag in the appropriate places, and said goodbye. She was already so into what she was doing that she barely spared me the time for a kiss.

May she always love school so much. *sigh*

Wow, TS Fay is just dawdling along. We aren't seeing much except some grey weather and a good breeze, and that's all we're likely to get. (And I'm fine with that.)

Meg's quite disappointed that there was no school today and that there wasn't some great exciting storminess to make up for it. But it occurs to me, perhaps belatedly, that I need to acquire a raincoat for her if she's going to be riding the bus. And hurrah for LL Bean.

In the meantime, I've used the extra day to have her sign (!) various forms from the school, mostly having to do with accepting and abiding by the school's code of behavior. I set out her clothes for tomorrow morning. I just packed up a set of "accident" clothing for her and labeled it -- the first time I've had to do that! She is quite worried that I won't have her requested bento done in the morning -- really, it's almost done already! I think I'll cut the octodogs up this afternoon, though. She has a long list of what she wants in it, none of it related thematically, of course. She wants fish-shaped onigiri (already done, yay rice mold), an octodog, a pig in the blanket (this one probably won't happen), her kitty decoration, some umbrellas punched out of nori... it's very eclectic. I was going to do a fish-shaped hard-boiled egg, too, but I think I'll hold off -- her box isn't that big!

This week giveth, and taketh away. For example...

GIVETH: It's the first day of school tomorrow!
TAKETH AWAY: Or not. You see, we have an oncoming storm. (No, not him. Her.) School will likely start on Wednesday, but maybe not.

GIVETH: I got a nice big project in (due on Sept. 4)!
TAKETH AWAY: An adorable child whose name rhymes with "blob" managed to prise the left shift key off my keyboard, which slows my typing considerably. A new keyboard is on order.

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Meg, of course, is highly disappointed that school won't begin tomorrow. We did go to meet the teacher today; she seems warm and welcoming and fun. I could barely pry Meg out of her classroom to go home, which bodes well.

Also, after more dithering, we finally decided to let Meg take the bus to school. Given the times necessary to sit through pickup and dropoff (in an idling car! the gasoline!) and the way her bus schedule works (she's at the next-to-last stop before school, which means the second stop on the way home), she'll actually get to leave later and arrive home earlier if she rides the bus. And if there are Issues, we can always change our minds.

I took the kids to have lunch with Daddy at work today, which is always big fun. As usual, I packed our lunch and used the bento boxes (Meg has a new one for school so we are practicing).

Meg had octodogs and onigiri along with some grapes and carrots. Even Rob had a tiny bento box (courtesy of columella) with some yogurt and Gerber "puffs" in it. But for moorewr and I, something more... adult was called for. I had a couple of Italian sausages left over from making spaghetti the other night, a bag of potatoes, and a fresh bunch of chard, so... Bento Toscana!

I sauteed the sausages while steaming the potatoes (cut up small) over chicken broth with fennel seeds thrown in. Once the sausages were cooked, I transferred them into the bento boxes. I splashed some of the steaming liquid into the pan and stirred in the chard, cut up small. Once it was wilted, I added the potatoes, mixed it up, and split the results between our bento boxes. Voila, Zuppe Toscana deconstructed. We also had grapes and slices of red bell pepper with a wedge of Laughing Cow. Oh, and I sprinkled shaved parmesan over the potato-chard mixture.

Pictures tomorrow when I download them and all that. It was quite tasty.

Because it takes me too long to upload pictures. Here's Monday's bento for moorewr.( Read more... )

Ha! naomikritzer ups the ante. ( Eljay Cut is keepin' it slim and trim on the flist tip )

I'm not as brave as some people (cvillette, I'm looking at YOU) but here's my foodie list: ( the PH lj cut has been saving you from scroll since 2002! )

My tooth was extracted this morning. Fortunately, the procedure wasn't bad. At least, not on my end -- the anesthetic was very thorough. ( description of tooth extraction weirdness, cut for the sensitive ) They were very careful and explained everything to me as we went along, which was nice.

So far, I've had no pain, just slight discomfort (mostly associated with having to talk and eat and drink around a wad of gauze). I was given -- and filled -- a prescription for Vicodin, but it's looking like I won't need it. For which I am very thankful.