Another day

  • Poultry is my kryptonite

    I made an extensive grocery store list on Monday morning because I’d spent most of last week just trying to piecemeal some pantry items together and call it dinner. But the jig was finally up on Monday morning because P was out of Coffeemate and, while we can live on leftover Easter ham for a scandalous amount of time, we aren’t complete barbarians who drink our coffee black.

    Of course I drink choffee (half hot chocolate, half coffee…patent pending) in the morning so it really makes no difference to me if we run out of Coffeemate, but it’s P’s lifeblood. As evidenced by the fact that he goes through a large bottle of it every other week.

    As I made a list comprised of every household item or foodstuff imaginable, I decided to take a more organized approach and actually plan out some meals for the week as opposed to my usual method of getting home from the store, unpacking all my groceries and realizing that I have cupboards full of delicious snack items but dinner comprised of Cheetos and powdered Donettes does not a meal make. (Contrary to what I believed in college.)

    One of my goals was to make the No Knead Bread that Sophie mentioned last week because, ever since I made Ree’s cinnamon rolls last fall, I’ve experienced some freedom from my fear of the yeast. But once I read through the bread recipe, I realized that I don’t own a proper Dutch oven. I didn’t feel like my current version of a Dutch oven with synthetic handles could handle the heat required to bake the bread, so I’ve had to shelf my dream until I can purchase some better cookware.

    Honestly, I feel like the only thing standing between me and a career as a wildly successful food blogger is my lack of proper cookware. Well, that and the fact that everyone already knows how to make tacos from Old El Paso’s Taco Kit.

    I’m just so glad that when P and I got married we received some lovely china that takes up vast amounts of cabinet space and has been used exactly two times, but yet I don’t own one pan that allows me to make homemade bread for my family. I’m sure I received a very nice Dutch oven and returned it so I could have store credit to go towards that expensive navy plaid Ralph Lauren comforter that now serves as the dogs’ bed in the winter time. People shouldn’t be allowed to register for nice things when they’re twenty-six years old and believe that marital bliss is ensured by the number of monogrammed silver frames they receive.

    As God is my witness, I will get myself a Dutch oven and I will bake my bread.

    In the meantime, I had to come up with some other dinner options. I’m fairly certain P had an allergic reaction to HEB’s rotisserie chicken (I can’t even go down that road right now.) so I decided to overcome my fear of dealing with raw poultry and bought a couple of packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts to bake and use in various recipes throughout the week.

    I unwrapped the chicken, placed it on a baking sheet, seasoned it and baked it at 350 degrees until it was thoroughly cooked. And then I took a Silkwood shower.

    But it has been totally worth it because I made a big batch of homemade chicken salad for us to all eat for lunch this week and I cooked chicken cakes for dinner last night. However, we have no homemade bread to go with everything because I believe I may have mentioned my lack of a Dutch oven.

    A few weeks ago, I talked about Gulley’s chicken salad and several of you asked for the recipe. Or maybe I just made that up in my head. It’s possible. But I’ll share it anyway because it is delicious and not too mayonnaise-y and that’s my primary criteria for any type of luncheon salad.

    Gulley’s Chicken Salad (adapted from Southern Living)

    4 cups chopped cooked chicken
    1/2 cup mayonnaise
    1/3 cup shredded parmesan
    3 green onions, chopped
    3 celery ribs, chopped
    3 tablespoons toasted pecans, chopped
    salt and pepper to taste

    It’s up to you how fine you chop the ingredients and you are certainly welcome to add more mayonnaise if you feel the need. Stir everything together and chill. (The chicken salad. Although you are certainly welcome to kick back and relax.)

    Best of all, it doesn’t require a Dutch oven. But if you’re feeling fancy you can serve it on that china that you never use.

  • Oh my aching feet

    I don’t know why I was incapable of recapping our weekend yesterday, but I just didn’t have the strength. And that makes it sound like we did all sorts of exciting things when the truth is the most interesting detail is that I willingly went to an Art Fair and walked around for two hours wearing wedge heels. Somewhere there is a podiatrist who is going to get a new house at the lake because of my shoe bravado.

    Seriously. My foot is charlie horsing as I’m typing this and my toes may never be the same.

    It was all innocent enough. Some friends met us at church and after it was over suggested that we go downtown to the Southwest Craft Center for this art show. It’s one of the official Fiesta events and I felt like it was our duty to attend at least one Fiesta event since we try to avoid the others due to my issues with having beer spilled down my back or being involved in some kind of knife fight. That whole coronation crowd is rough.

    (That’s totally a lame San Antonio joke. The coronation is actually a high society event where girls wear dresses that cost more than my car and people celebrate fake royalty. However, Fiesta does provide plenty of other events that increase your odds of smelling like Miller Lite for the rest of the day or getting stabbed.)

    (They should totally add that last sentence to our official tourist brochures.)

    Anyway, I was wearing my chocolate brown wedge heels because I thought the sum total of my walking would be from the church parking lot to inside the building and back again. Then we decided to head straight to the Art Fair and I thought about asking if we could stop by the house so I could put on my flip-flops, but who wants to be the person who’s all “Mamaw needs to stop and put on some proper footwear with cushioned insoles?”

    As it turns out, I will now be that person for the rest of my life.

    In other news from the weekend, our soccer game was rained out on Saturday morning. I have no doubt that the Cheetah Girls were poised to get their first victory of the season (No one officially keeps score since we don’t even use goalies, but I keep score in my head because that’s who I am.) but P woke me up at 7:15 a.m. to inform me that it was pouring down rain. However, the official soccer website didn’t officially cancel the game until 8:02 a.m. which isn’t really convenient when you’re supposed to play at 8:30 a.m. And so even though I knew from P’s updated radar reports every four minutes between 7:15 and 8:02 that we most likely wouldn’t be playing our game, I couldn’t really relax and go back to sleep until it was official.

    The good news is that once the game was called I found the strength to crawl back into bed and sleep until 10:30 to the sound of the rain. It may go down as one of the best Saturday mornings ever. Oh, and the only reason I was able to sleep was because Caroline had spent the night at Mimi and Bops’s house. Otherwise I would have been up and playing UNO with a questionable set of rules by 7:00 a.m.

    Caroline came home around noon and we spent most of the day cleaning out her playroom. She is always reluctant to get rid of anything which is why I normally just throw stuff out while she’s gone, but I decided it was time for her to make her own decisions about what she can live without. It helped move things along once I announced that she needed to get rid of at least TEN things before any more toys came into this house. EVER.

    Later in the day, we headed over to Gulley’s house because it’s time for the making of the Fiesta Shoebox Float. If you’ve been reading here for any amount of time, then you know all about the blood, sweat and hot glue gun burns that go into making a shoebox float. Will had decided to make a pirate ship for his float and so I offered my vast experience in the proper mechanics of making a sail on a shoebox. It’s a little skill I learned last year when I (I mean Caroline) had to make a replica of the Santa Maria.

    Sadly, Caroline is past the days of making shoebox floats. Which is probably just as well considering that my wedge heels caused me enough pain this weekend without adding in some hot glue gun burns and a stiff back from bending over and gluing eighteen Happy Meal figurines on a shoe box.

    Viva Fiesta.

  • You have questions, I make up answers

    I’m sitting here trying to come up with some kind of lead in for this post, but am only drawing a complete blank. So I’ll just say that there have been a few questions that have come up and I thought today would be a good day to answer them. I can’t promise it will be interesting or enlightening because there’s a good chance I have no idea what I’m talking about. But it’s rare that I let that stop me.

    1. Several of you have asked about my new Shark vacuum.

    I bought the Shark Ultralight Multi-Vac from Target. According to the instructions, it can turn into three different types of vacuums. However, I had enough trouble just assembling the dang thing in the first place and I’m not even going to pretend like I’m going to turn it into a hand-vac for small spills. If I have to drag the thing out of the closet, then I’m going whole hog on the vacuuming.

    Before deciding on a new vacuum, I extensively researched various models on the internet for at least five minutes. The Dyson sounded great except paying that much for something that only cleans and can’t be worn on your feet seems like the equivalent of buying a shovel made out of gold. I chose the Shark because it was fairly inexpensive as far as vacuums go and I only have four small-ish rugs in my house.

    I am a fan of The Shark. Not only because it has a cool name, but because it has a clear canister where I can see all the dirt and dust that’s coming from the floor. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but it feels like instant gratification (mixed with a little bit of horror) to see all that dirt and dust while I’m vacuuming.

    (I feel the need to make sure you know that this is not any kind of a paid endorsement or anything. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other if you buy The Shark. I believe in the freedom to choose our own vacuums.)

    2. Other people have asked about the photo apps I’m using on my iPhone.

    Listen. I have no idea what I’m doing here, but I’m enjoying messing around with the different photo settings and occasionally I’ve even managed to take a decent looking picture. One of the apps I’ve been using is called Camera Bag. Someone recommended it in the comments a few weeks ago and I fell in love. After you take a picture, Camera Bag gives you all kinds of different ways to change it up.

    All of these photos were taken with the Camera Bag app.

    These photos were taken with the Hipstamatic app. It comes with different lens and film options. Honestly, I’m still figuring it out. It can make things look really cool or just absolutely creepy and when I use it to take pictures it’s a little bit like a box of chocolates.

    The truth is that I’m really tired of my little point and shoot camera and want to move up to something a little nicer. I’m not ready to take the plunge yet because I know it will take more than five minutes of research to figure out which one to buy and a lifetime for me to learn how to actually take great pictures with it. So in the meantime I’m just using my iPhone because I always have it with me.

    3. No, P was not the pilot of the helicopter. The pilot just didn’t show up in the pictures thanks to my stellar photography skills.

    4. No, I’m not watching Celebrity Apprentice. Donald Trump gets on my nerves. I’m sure he’s a lovely person, I just don’t want to watch him on T.V. (Says the girl who watched every episode of Growing Up Brady.)

    5. I haven’t started painting my kitchen yet. No one actually asked that, but I like to keep you up to date on everything that’s not happening around here. I’m praying for a rainy day so that Shorty won’t have anything to do except float and tape the cracks in my kitchen.

    And this has nothing to do with anything, but I went to watch American Idol on the DVR last night and the description of the show came up on the screen. It said, “American Idol starring Ellen DeGeneres and some other people”. Is that not the laziest piece of television writing you’ve ever encountered? I believe someone has lost their passion for their job.

    I hope y’all have a lovely day.

  • An Easter sonnet

    After four Easter Egg hunts and stuffing over eight dozen plastic eggs with candy, I don’t care if I never see another brightly colored, plastic egg for the rest of my life. However, I just spent ten minutes opening up all of Caroline’s eggs in search of a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup, not to be confused with a Reeses egg. It’s a controversial topic to bring up, but I find the holiday version of the Reeses don’t compare to the regular version. There’s something awry with the peanut butter to chocolate ratio. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong, but I know I’m not.

    We had a great Easter weekend even though I’m pretty sure that I never quit moving until 5:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon when P took one look at me and told me to go take a nap. So I did. For two hours. When I woke up I had no idea where I was or what was going on. Which isn’t that much different from most mornings but was a little disconcerting at 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday night. He’d already gotten Caroline in the bath and fed her dinner. That’s why I keep him around even though he tears paper towels in half and leaves the unused half on the kitchen counter for days and is also incapable of throwing away a Band-Aid wrapper. A fed and bathed child covers a multitude of Band-Aid wrappers.

    Friday was actually a pretty relaxing day. P took Caroline to the ranch with him and I went over to Gulley’s house to work on a little project. She made homemade chicken salad for us to eat for lunch and even used all white meat just for me because she understands my issues with dark meat. We spent the day catching up and listening to Will voice his concerns that the Easter Bunny might get tired from all that hopping because it’s a long way to hop from Africa to Texas. The whole discussion just confirms my theory that the Easter Bunny is a hard sell because the whole idea of a giant rabbit is difficult to swallow. I mean, is it an actual bunny with floppy ears or is it a person dressed in a bunny costume because, if so, that’s kind of creepy.

    The Cheetah Girls had a game on Saturday morning and Caroline scored her first goal of the season. We played the team from last season with the coach who wears track pants and blows a whistle so I was a little intimidated, but we held our own. And I think it goes without saying that we had the best snacks.

    After the game I asked Caroline if she was tired and she said, “I was so tired but I wanted to beat that other team so I just kept running.” Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we have ourselves a fierce competitor.

    We left the soccer fields and went to eat lunch at P’s mom’s house with the rest of his family. The cousins all hunted eggs and ran around the backyard smashing cascarones on various heads. No one was safe. Not even Gigi.

    (Yes, I’m currently experimenting with about three different photo apps on my iPhone. Why do you ask?)

    Eventually we headed back to our house because I had to cook and clean to get ready for Easter brunch the next day. Fortunately I have a cute assistant who is fascinated by our new Shark vacuum that replaced our sad Hoover after it confronted one too many Polly Pocket accessories and an assortment of hair clips.

    On a totally unrelated note, the Shark vacuum works much better when it’s actually assembled properly. I put it together completely backwards (I have a gift.) and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about because it didn’t seem easy to use AT ALL and barely got my rugs clean. After P intervened and perhaps mocked my assembly skills a little bit, it works like a dream. In fact, I’m saddened to realize how dirty my rugs were before the Shark came along.

    Anyway, I cracked approximately sixty-two eggs to go in various breakfast casseroles and spent a sweet forever trying to find enough room in the fridge to store them overnight. We have a fridge in the back house that I’d normally use but it is currently filled with about 600 pounds of the antelope that P killed last week and EWW.

    By the time I finished cooking and cleaning, it was time to shower and get ready to attend a friend’s wedding that evening. Are you exhausted yet because I kind of want to lay down and take another nap just thinking about it. The wedding was beautiful and I cried a little bit because I’ve known the bride since she was thirteen and where does the time go?

    Later on, I met P and Caroline at another friend’s house and we dyed Easter eggs and also the tips of our fingers just in time for Sunday morning.

    Exhausted, we all dropped into bed and slept peacefully knowing a large rabbit/person in a rabbit costume was going to break into our house in the middle of the night to drop off some plastic eggs and a few treats. And, sure enough, the next morning there were eggs and treats aplenty.

    Fortunately, the only thing missing was sufficient lighting to take a decent photograph of all the precious memories.

    The Easter Bunny brought us another chicken that poops bubblegum this year because he thinks those are hilarious.

    And he also made a strategic error by hiding one of the plastic eggs in the chandelier. I was getting dressed for church when P came in the bathroom and told me he smelled something burning. What kind of moron forgets about a plastic egg hidden in a light fixture and then turns it on? The same kind of moron that finds pooping chickens to be hysterical.

    (Sidenote: I would guess that the smell of burning plastic filled with Reeses Peanut Butter Cups will be one of the smells in hell.)

    Finally, we all managed to get dressed and get out the door to church even though we were running late and I only had time to snap one quick picture.

    Shortly after this photo was taken, two things happened:

    1. I twisted my ankle walking down the driveway and said a decidedly un-Easter like word when I did it.

    2. Caroline decided those cute sandals hurt her feet and they were dead to her. They now fall under the category of $19.99 I’ll never see again. She wore plastic Gap flip-flops to church instead. Classy.

    However, we did have time to take more pictures once we got home from church even though the humidity had taken a toll on our hair by then. Well, except for P. A monsoon couldn’t take a toll on his hair.

    (The sandals made a reappearance for the pictures because CUTE trumps pain.)

    Then we hunted more eggs because everyone knows the sixth time is the charm.

    And my nephew Luke wore madras pants that made me so happy.

    And then Caroline spent the rest of the afternoon sorting her candy and negotiating how many pieces she could eat.

    So, yeah, it was a good Easter.

    And now I’d like to sleep for five days. Thank you for your cooperation.

  • Closet confessions

    I’m not sure what came over me, perhaps fear of the IRS, but on Monday morning I finally got all our tax stuff together, laid hands on it and prayed for mercy, then sent it all to our accountant so he can call us in a few weeks and let us know how many weeks we’re going to have to eat hot dogs without buns (or if it’s really bad, buns without hot dogs) to be able to write a check to the government. For obvious reasons, this will be more painful this year than ever before and not just because I’d rather spend the money on a new pair of shoes or granite countertops.

    I have a tendency to obsessively clean and throw out clutter when I start to feel like things are out of my control, so I guess that’s why I came home from the post office and decided I couldn’t wait another minute before I cleaned out my closet and put up all my winter clothes. It has been the coldest winter I can remember and they are all officially dead to me. Except for my Timberland boots. They still have my heart. I just don’t want to wear them again for another six months.

    So I began the process of switching out my winter clothes with my summer clothes. And, honestly, it was depressing because I wasn’t nearly as excited to see the majority of my summer clothes as I hoped I’d be. I had kind of hoped that maybe, against all odds, they’d spent the winter procreating at the top of my closet and making all manner of cute skirts, tops and a great pair of nude wedge heels. But no. It was the same sad assortment of clothes that I put up last October. No new skirts. No cute tops. A nary a pair of nude wedge heels to be found.

    I’m trying to console myself with the fact that once summer actually gets here I won’t care about looking cute as much as trying to stay cool. Which means all I’ll really need is a swimsuit. Never mind. I just got more depressed.

    And I’m also pretty sure I hear the voice of Jillian Michaels taunting me.

    Whenever I clean out my closet I make a point of giving away anything I haven’t worn during whatever season just ended, so I made a pile of a few sweaters, faded turtlenecks that shouldn’t have made the cut last year, and a few unfortunate pairs of pants.

    Like these.

    Red corduroy pants. I don’t even know what to say.

    But for every item that doesn’t make the closet cut, there are those that do and probably shouldn’t.

    I wore that dress to my ten year high school reunion and many of you may remember that I attended my TWENTY year high school reunion this past summer. I know I’ll never wear it again, mainly because it’s a size 0. And, let’s be honest, that paisley isn’t helping matters.

    But yet I can’t throw it out because I LOVED it when I bought it. From Harold’s. Eleven years ago.

    There’s also this.

    I bought this when Gulley and I went to New York back in 2002. I’d just been through a miserable summer after having a terrible miscarriage and decided that nothing would make me feel better than owning a long denim jacket with a big fake fur collar.

    I blame the hormones and the sorrow.

    I’ve worn it one time, but yet it remains because it reminds me of a time when I believed that wearing Chewbaca as a collar would make me feel better.

    Oh, this zebra skirt.

    I bought it to wear to my sister’s rehearsal dinner and I don’t know that I’ve ever liked a piece of clothing as much as I liked this skirt. My sister and her husband are about to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, the hem of that skirt is way too long and it has turquoise fringed beading. Yet it remains.

    Maybe Caroline can wear it to a LATE 90’s theme party someday.

    And then there’s my last black business suit.

    It’s the last wardrobe evidence of my career in pharmaceutical sales. And if I had to actually put it on I’d probably break out in hives and start to hyperventilate.

    Or I might begin to give you a lecture on the importance of a cholesterol medication raising your hdl while it simultaneously lowers you ldl. And then offer to bring you Chinese food if you’d just please prescribe my drug so I don’t get fired.

    I tell myself that I can’t get rid of it because what if some super important business opportunity comes up and I need to look professional?

    Because what looks more professional than a five year old black suit with a greasy Kung Pao chicken stain on the lapel?

    Lastly, there is the Nicole Miller dress.

    I paid way too much for it back in 2001, but it was worth it. Gulley and I call it the miracle dress because it sucks everything in and makes you look instantly thinner.

    Sadly, I thought the miracle could work for me in September of 2003. I’d just had Caroline five weeks earlier and was invited to a friend’s ultra-fancy 40th birthday party. Somehow I Spanxed, girdled, and lacquered myself into that dress for the party. I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my life, but I thought I looked good. Bless my heart.

    Photographic evidence would later reveal that I looked like a sausage stuffed into a beautifully embroidered Asian casing. I’m keeping the dress as a reminder that just because you can get something on doesn’t mean you should wear it out in public.

    The good news is that my closet is officially clean and will remain that way for at least the next day and a half or until I can’t find my favorite pair of jeans.

    Wow. I own a lot of white shirts.

  • What’s left of me

    Well, between the Aggies losing to Purdue in the NCAA tournament and the government trying to be the boss of me and the four new gray hairs that sprouted overnight in the region of my bangs, I’ve got a bad case of the Mondays. And technically it’s only Sunday night.

    Of course it doesn’t help that Spring Break is officially over and we have to go back to the real world with all its daylight savings time nonsense, especially since this was the first time in the history of Caroline’s life that she fully embraced the concept of staying up late equals sleeping in late.

    We made it back home on Friday afternoon after another big day of fun. One of the first things Caroline noticed after we checked into our hotel room was the big menu on the night stand that read “Breakfast in Bed”. And so, after a little campaigning on her part, I agreed that we could order room service on Friday morning.

    A diva is born.

    She ate at least three bites of her $20 pancakes and $8 eggs (Apparently room service is run by the same people who work on government budgets.) so it was totally worth it. Plus, she really needed her energy because we had a big morning of ice skating at The Galleria ahead of us.

    I wish I had a picture to share, but if you think I’m coordinated enough to balance on ice skates and take photos at the same time, then you have grossly overestimated my skill level. It took all my energy and balance to stay upright and not humiliate myself in front of three levels of Galleria shoppers.

    Caroline was a little disappointed because she wasn’t as good as she remembered herself being. This came as no surprise to me, especially since she spent most of the Winter Olympics telling me that the female figure skaters were “pretty good”, but she couldn’t help but notice that none of them showed her talent for being able to clap to the rhythm of “We Are the Champions” by Queen while skating at the same time, which was a skill she picked up at a friend’s birthday party back in January.

    I tried to explain that it usually takes more than two times to really be good at something and that many of those Olympic Skaters had probably skated three or maybe even four times before they were ready for the Olympic Games. Finally, somewhere between five and too many laps around the ice, she was ready to call it a day. It probably helped that I noticed a bungee jump in the food court and decided that $7.00 wasn’t too much to pay to put an end to sliding on a slippery surface with razor blades on my feet with thirty-eight year old ankles that are unreliable at best.

    So she bungee jumped and then we walked around the Galleria for a while and, oh, how my heart wanted to really shop, but it wasn’t going to happen. There was a shirt in Zara that I’m still thinking about and it was only FIFTEEN DOLLARS. Or maybe a little bit more than that. The details are vague. But finally we just ordered some drinks from Sonic and hit the road.

    The minute I walked in the house, I realized how tired I was from the week. But I powered through and unpacked our bags and started a load of laundry because I knew once I sat down that it would be hours, if ever, before I got up again.

    P and I visited in the kitchen while Caroline played in the backyard. (I can’t even bear to tell you that in the last ten minutes of our drive she asked if we could go roller-skating when we got home. Seriously.) We talked about what we wanted to do about dinner, which led me to ask him what he’d done about food all week long. He confessed that he’d lived on leftover sloppy joes until he ran out and then ordered pizza one night and sushi another night. Oh, and he’d also made a trip to HEB to buy essentials that consisted of the following:

    Vanilla Duncan Hines frosting
    Promised Land chocolate milk
    bag of Kit Kats
    one Terry’s Chocolate Orange
    Honey-Mustard Fritos
    six pack of Dos Equis

    At least all the major food groups were represented. Assuming that you’re twenty-one and live in a fraternity house.

    On Saturday, he took Caroline to the ranch and I sat on the couch in my pajamas with the remote control by my side and didn’t move all day long. It was my own personal Spring Break and it involved hours of reality television and yelling, “OH MY WORD!” at the end of “24” which was so satisfying because the previews had promised this would be the episode that would make me freak out and for once they were actually right. Unlike last year when I had to suspend all disbelief when some terrorists scuba-dived their way into the White House.

    By Sunday it was inevitable that I was going to have to make a trip to the store. I mean, not that the Honey Mustard Fritos aren’t totally delicious but they don’t really constitute a school lunch or a well-balanced meal. Caroline went with me and asked if we could buy two cans of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup. I told her we could and she said, “OH MAMA. YOU ARE THE NICEST MAMA EVER! NOT MANY MAMAS BUY THEIR KIDS TWO CANS OF CHICKEN AND STARS SOUP!”

    Which totally seals it. Next Spring Break, we’re going to HEB and buying two cans of Chicken and Stars soup.

    And maybe a bag of Kit Kats.