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You Need Food to Live

With the pantry reor­ga­nized and the Hunger Aware­ness Week behind me, I decided to go ahead and do an inven­tory ofthe freez­ers, then cleaned and restocked the fridge. After not shop­ping dur­ing the hunger chal­lenge my pro­duce was in a pretty sorry state and I also rid myself of a few things that had got­ten lost in our cheese drawer round about last sum­mer some­time (I need a big­ger cheese drawer so things don’t get buried or pushed into back cor­ners!) but the waste from the fridge wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. My kitchen stores are in such a state that if Gor­don Elliott were to pop round for an episode of Door­knock Din­ners he and his chefs would be fix­ing me quite the meal indeed. HA!

One handy lit­tle habit I’m cul­ti­vat­ing is to use a mag­netic notepad on the fridge to write down pantry items as they get used up. No longer will I end up with three jars of cumin because I remem­bered that I used it but can’t remem­ber that I bought a replace­ment, or con­versely for­get time and time again that I’ve used the last of an ingre­di­ent but keep for­get­ting to buy a replace­ment. I’ve used the notepad tech­nique on and off for a few years and encour­age Chris and Kate to leave their requests on the list as well but under the cur­rent, reor­ga­nized pantry the notepad sys­tem seems to be work­ing much more smoothly than in the past.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve repli­cated my suc­cess with the “Old Reli­able” French Bread recipe and have pro­duced yet more edi­ble bread for the fam­ily. This may become a reg­u­lar rou­tine, at least as long as the price of flour and yeast remains a frac­tion of the price of “arti­san” breads at the gro­cery store. I started buy­ing bak­ery bread when I was doing my research into high fruc­tose corn syrup and dis­cov­ered it was in every­thing, includ­ing our gro­cery store bread.

I’ve tried three new recipes this week with good results. Two I pulled from my copy of the Cook­ing Light Annual 2010, one I pulled up from South­ern Liv­ing, which is about as far from Cook­ing Light as you can get (and has the cup and a half of half-and-half, four large eggs and ten strips of bacon to prove it). All three are online through MyRecipes.com so I’ll just go ahead and link to them there. I was able to make all of these with ingre­di­ents that I already had around the house, still cook­ing from the freezer and the pantry with what I have on hand.

Spinach and Bacon Quiche
Penne with Sage and Mush­rooms
Singapore-Style Noo­dles

French bread


French bread
Orig­i­nally uploaded by Nikchick.

This is Hunger Action Week in King County. In 2007 I shared my thoughts on the Ore­gon governor’s Food­Stamp Chal­lenge. Every­thing I said then is true now. If any­thing I feel even more strongly , con­sid­er­ing the way the coun­try has changed in the last three years.

In the­ory I’m up for this chal­lenge but hav­ing felt plenty of food inse­cu­rity not only do I have no desire to relive the expe­ri­ence but keep­ing my pantry stocked “just in case” is, hmm, obses­sion is too strong but let’s say it’s a high pri­or­ity. So instead of track­ing my spend­ing and try­ing to cook from only what I bought for the week I’ve been try­ing to honor the spirit of the chal­lenge by using what I have on hand in my newly reor­ga­nized pantry and my freezer. In a case of handy tim­ing, our “junk food” cup­board is bare so there are no chips, pret­zels, sodas or other prepack­aged snacks in the house at the moment.

Despite all of my food-loving ways I’ve never had good luck with breads. I can whip up a quick bread, muffins, cakes, cook­ies, or bars with good results. Yeast breads, din­ner rolls, even bis­cuits have been another story though. Even using a bread maker has been 50% dis­ap­point­ment. Seat­tle has many lovely local bak­eries sup­ply­ing the local mar­kets with an array of fresh breads but at $3.00 to $4.50 per loaf (and with a daugh­ter who loves bread just slightly less than pota­toes and slightly more than rice in her largely white food diet) that can get spendy, espe­cially when I know full well how inex­pen­sive the base ingre­di­ents for bread are in comparison.

With the Hunger Aware­ness Chal­lenge in mind and bread in the house run­ning low, I decided to try again yes­ter­day. I decided to shy away from the bread machine and try going with the Kitchen Aid and my plain ol’ oven. I couldn’t find my Kitchen Aid recipe book­let I had to rely on the handy Inter­net. Google help­fully turned up an entry from some­one else who didn’t want to mis­place their Kitchen Aid recipe again and so put it up on RecipeZaar under the name “Old Reli­able” French Bread (for Kitchen Aid Mix­ers). How could I resist a recipe called “Old Reli­able”? I couldn’t!

What do you know, it worked, too. To my shock and my family’s delight, I have suc­cess­fully made two good loaves of French bread for about $1 in flour. Not quite as excel­lent as the $4.00 loaves from our local bak­ery but cer­tainly at least as good as if not bet­ter than the $2.00 loaves from the gro­cery store. If not spurred on by the Hunger Aware­ness Chal­lenge I wouldn’t have made this breakthrough.

More Small Steps

I feel like I’ve been doing a rea­son­able job har­ness­ing my enthu­si­asm to get things in order since Christmas.

We had a pro­duc­tive fam­ily meet­ing last week where we divided up house­hold chores and estab­lished some­thing of a sched­ule, which makes me very happy. Of course, we haven’t begun the sched­ule yet and we know that say­ing about plans and con­tact with the enemy, but just hav­ing some­thing (a plan) where there used to be noth­ing (chaos) counts a progress. I’m also slowly cross­ing small, irreg­u­lar jobs off my list.

One thing that I did this week­end was a small chore that I’ve been mean­ing to take care of for years. Lit­er­ally for years! It took less than five min­utes. Home secu­rity experts advise home­own­ers to replace 1/2″ screws in your dead­bolt strike plates with screws 3″ or longer so the strike plates are secured to the house’s frame instead of the door­jamb. You can also replace the whole dead­bolt, replace the wimpy two-screw plate with a four-screw style but even just chang­ing out the screws in the exist­ing hard­ware makes your dead­bolt lock a ton more effec­tive. I had some 3″ wood screws left over from last year’s planter box project. Zip, zip, DONE. Improved security.

Lest I seem like I’m pat­ting myself on the back exces­sively, I’m not expect­ing any­one to be thrilled to read that I’ve replaced some screws, remem­bered to clean the oven, changed some light bulbs. I’m just pleased to be check­ing off a num­ber off lit­tle things that had been pil­ing up. Even small for­ward progress is satisfying.

I’ve also been try­ing out a bunch of new recipes since Christ­mas. I’ve had some decent luck with some recipes out of a slow cooker book I got for Christ­mas, from the author of the blog http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ and the cur­rent issue of Bon Appetit as well as my tried and true go-to Cook­ing Light. Here’s what we’ve been eat­ing around here: Spaghetti and meat­balls all’Amatriciana, Break­fast Risotto, Crock­pot Lamb, Morn­ing Glory Muffins, Spaghetti with Fen­nel, Ham and Lentil Soup, Turkey Orzo Soup, Cooks Illustrated’s Turkey Tetrazz­ini, Three-Cheese Baked Penne, Red Pep­per and Goat Cheese Fri­tatta from Eat­ing Well, and Alton Brown’s Cheesy Grits. Not a bad start to the new year!

Kitchen Re-org 2010


Kitchen Re-org 2010
Orig­i­nally uploaded by Nikchick.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was think­ing orga­ni­za­tion. Ha!

I did the same thing in Jan­u­ary 2009, but things had slowly grown out of hand again, so I decided to build on my suc­cesses and do another reorg. Putting the booze into its own cab­i­net freed up an entire shelf in the pantry, which inspired me to get another cou­ple of orga­ni­za­tional do-dads (like tiers for the canned goods). Half-used bags of rice or beans or other “bulk” items were com­bined (like with like) and put into new clear, air-tight con­tain­ers. I’d pre­vi­ously bought a bunch of metal can­is­ters but I could never tell what was in them or how much and often bought things I already had because I couldn’t be both­ered to dig to a back­shelf and open can­is­ters to check. The new set-up is def­i­nitely an improvement.

Kitchen Re-org 2010

I also put an addi­tional rack in the laun­dry room (where I’d added two wire stor­age shelves last year) which nicely hold other dry goods. One of the prob­lems I had with my pre­vi­ous storge “solu­tion” was things in bags (like pasta or beans) were get­ting lost in the bin sys­tem that I’d tried to set up. I moved all the bagged beans and rices to clear jars or plas­tic stor­age con­tain­ers and put bags and boxes of pasta as well as jars and bot­tles (maple syrup, pasta sauce, var­i­ous nut but­ters) on the new laun­dry room rack. Even­tu­ally I expect that will become even more of a true dry goods area.

I only uncov­ered a few things that had gone past their expi­ra­tion dates due to being pushed back in the pantry (a cou­ple of shelf-stable tofu boxes and some nuts) but I did uncover a sur­plus of corn­meal, grits, and dried beans. I’ll be work­ing to get those sup­plies down to a rea­son­able amount now that they’ve been rediscovered.

Nikchick’s Thinking Organization

…must be January.

I’m not sure what it is about Jan­u­ary that dri­ves me into a re-org frenzy. Noth­ing to do with it being a new year or res­o­lu­tions, I think it’s more that the hol­i­day sea­son (my birth­day, Thanks­giv­ing, Kate’s birth­day, Christ­mas, the New Year) brings a bunch of new stuff into the house. Gifts come in, food and drink and other hol­i­day enter­tain­ing essen­tials spring up, dec­o­ra­tions are dragged out from the nooks and cran­nies where they’ve been stashed all year… and as I look at the new untidi­ness in the calm after the storm it’s orga­ni­za­tion time.

A major relief has been get­ting the plumber in to fin­ish the work of clos­ing off our heat­ing sys­tem from our potable water sys­tem. Our super nice plumbers came in and replaced all the pip­ing in the water closet with lovely cop­per pipes and fit­tings, stuck a heat exchanged and pres­sure gauge on the heat­ing side and replaced our ten-year-old water heater with a nice new tan­k­less sys­tem. When they pulled out the old expan­sion tank it was rusted inside and full of water, a sure sign of impend­ing fail­ure, and I was glad to have them take away the water heater while they were at it rather than keep the thing and have to revisit this whole issue again in another few months or a year. The heat­ing sys­tem, now that it’s closed off and held at a lower pres­sure, only holds about three gal­lons of water. In the future, should any leaks spring up they’ll be eas­ily dis­cov­ered because of the pres­sure gauge and with only a few gal­lons of water in the sys­tem the risk of cat­a­strophic dam­age is removed.

A bonus to hav­ing the water heater out of the tiny water closet is that I have a tiny amount of extra stor­age! It’s not much but it’s enough to have a place for my brooms, mops, buck­ets and other small clean­ing items, which were pre­vi­ously crowd­ing my already crowded laun­dry room. (As I dis­cov­ered when I had to replace my wash­ing machine, the room is just barely big enough to hold a mod­ern washer and dryer and still have room to open the door.)

Any­way, despite our declut­ter­ing and orga­niz­ing efforts in 2009, the bot­tom line is that we still just have too darn much stuff! I’ve also reached my limit on how much clean­ing and orga­niz­ing I can take on myself. I’m aller­gic to dust and shirk dust­ing duties, but that just means the dust­ing doesn’t get done. I spend sev­eral months in 2009 nurs­ing a shoul­der injury that made things like even dry­ing my hair with a towel, chop­ping veg­eta­bles, or scrub­bing pots a painful expe­ri­ence. I got the thumbs up from my phys­i­cal ther­a­pist to go back to nor­mal rou­tine at the end of the year but my first foray into vac­u­um­ing the house and scrub­bing the bath­tubs left me hurt­ing. My lov­ing fam­ily does what I ask (most of the time) but we have very few reg­u­lar, assigned chores and absolutely no sched­ule. Instead of con­tin­u­ing to try to be super­mom who either does it all myself or takes the blame when things don’t get done, I’ve been look­ing over options for assign­ing chores and cre­at­ing a sched­ule. I have a pile of orga­niz­ing books and home upkeep books beside the bed. Now that Kate’s back from her dad’s a fam­ily meet­ing is in our future. I haven’t decided exactly how the chores will be divided but we’re going to build on the orga­ni­za­tional suc­cesses of 2009. Here we go!

Christmas Baking 2009, Round 1


Christ­mas Bak­ing 2009, Round 1
Orig­i­nally uploaded by Nikchick.

I did my first round of Christ­mas bak­ing today.

Today’s dishes: ginger-wasabi pop­corn, fudge sauce, bar­be­cue spice rub, sug­arplums, chocolate-filled crois­sants, apri­cot rugelach, and choco­late gin­ger­bread bundt cake.

Only one of my planned recipes met with dis­as­ter, because my oven was run­ning a lit­tle hot. Two cookie sheets of mixed spiced nuts ended up burn­ing. They weren’t uni­formly burned, just enough so that they tasted gross. After sam­pling I decided to toss them.

Oh, I also made some ched­dar and chive scones today. Don’t like the recipe I used as much as the Cook­ing Light and America’s Test Kitchen recipes for scones I’ve used in the past but they were sat­is­fy­ing enough with a cou­ple of cups of coffee.

I’ve got cran­ber­ries mar­i­nat­ing in a sim­ple syrup for tomorrow’s two-fer recipe: sug­ared cran­ber­ries, with the bonus of left­over cranberry-infused sim­ple syrup! Must mix up some cock­tails with that this holiday.

Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines

Tomor­row may just be the day when I finally get the plumber into the house to install the heat exchanger and pres­sure gauge for our defec­tive heat­ing sys­tem. We got our set­tle­ment in Octo­ber and have been talk­ing with this plumber for weeks try­ing to sched­ule him to come in. I can’t imag­ine how frus­trated I’d be if we’d actu­ally had to go with the full-on “rip out all the walls and pipes” plan at this point, with the cold weather upon us and sched­ul­ing con­flicts abound­ing. Fin­gers crossed for good news and an effec­tive solu­tion this week!

Kate cel­e­brated her 14th birth­day this week­end, with a girly sleep­over on Fri­day that dragged well into Sat­ur­day after­noon. Red vel­vet cake was made. I used Pinch My Salt’s recipe and dirt­ied about every bowl in the house in the process but man­aged not to ruin any­thing in the kitchen with red food col­or­ing. The girls were glee­fully using the Domino’s online pizza cre­ation tool to cre­ate con­coc­tions but Chris talked them into get­ting their actual piz­zas from Stel­lar Pizza so they’d be, you know, edi­ble. One Beanie and one Fidalgo Four Cheese later and the girls set­tled down to watch Star Trek together. One of the girls couldn’t stay the night so I drove her home a lit­tle after mid­night and, aside from hav­ing to put a stop to some rough-housing at 1am, the whole thing went off well and Kate was happy.

It was poignant for me because I’m all too aware of the changes loom­ing in the future for these girls. Not bad changes at all, just that they’re on the road to becom­ing lovely young adults. The girl who left early had to do so because she needed to spend the week­end work­ing on her high school appli­ca­tions! Some of these girls have known each other since kinder­garten but with Seattle’s new school bound­aries they’re all most likely going to dif­fer­ent schools by next year. Some are apply­ing to pri­vate schools or mag­net schools or out-of-district schools because the choices we’re pre­sented are dif­fi­cult or dubious.

Kate’s got three options under the new school plan. One is a small alter­na­tive school that had his­tor­i­cally been good but last year was merged into a build­ing with another orphaned pro­gram and an exist­ing mid­dle school. Par­ents com­plained that the new build­ing didn’t have proper sci­ence labs for high school sci­ence require­ments, the build­ing has sev­eral mil­lion in needed build­ing upgrades that haven’t been addressed because of the Seat­tle bud­get cri­sis, etc. There’s not even a Nova school web­page any­more, so I don’t know what to expect from that pro­gram, though it is a nat­ural tran­si­tion for kids from a school like Orca (250 or so kids, alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion curriculum).

The sec­ond option is a new math and sci­ence mag­net school. This is cur­rently a reg­u­lar high school in a recently upgraded build­ing. It’s the clos­est HS to our house and cur­rently one of the worst pro­grams in the city (low­est WASL scores… frex, less than 7% of stu­dents pass­ing
the state’s sci­ence require­ment, high­est dropout rate, high­est sus­pen­sion rate, low­est SATs). The new super­in­ten­dent has decided to remake this school into a School of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing & Math (STEM). The school will have accel­er­ated math and sci­ence “acad­e­mies” and an extra-long school day to add an addi­tional full period. High focus on math and sci­ence with few to no options for elec­tives and extra-curriculars and a school pop­u­la­tion of 1600 stu­dents. Kate is good at math and sci­ence and is cur­rently on track to be able to enter HS hav­ing com­pleted fresh­man math but that’s all a huge switch from her edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence up to this point. No idea if it would be a wel­come change or a com­plete dis­as­ter for her.

The last option is the default high school: a fail­ing high school with about 1500 stu­dents where 1/4 of fresh­man fail to earn the 5 cred­its nec­es­sary to advance, where only 28% meet stan­dard in math and 18% meet stan­dard in sci­ence. And, of course, there’s also the issue of gang prob­lems in the big Seat­tle high schools. Not exactly high on my list of places to send my child.

Of course all of this is what I see through my mom glasses. The kids are only vaguely aware of what lies ahead for them, ner­vous but excited about high school’s oppor­tu­ni­ties. Four years of high school seems like a long way off and long time to get through when you’re 14. When you’re 40 and look­ing back at how fast those 14 years have flown by, being one high school career away from adult­hood is more akin to a race car hurtling into the final lap, check­ered flag in sight.

Speak­ing of moth­ers, my mom called Kate for her birth­day and then talked to me for a while. She shared the results of some of her recent med­ical tests and will be need­ing more surgery in 2010, this time it’ll be remov­ing a sec­tion of her colon and will be a much big­ger deal than the rel­a­tively minor sinus surgery. She hasn’t talked to the sur­geon yet so I don’t know what the time­line is. She seems to think that she can put it off until the sum­mer but I told her to let me know what the sur­geon actu­ally says. I sup­pose there’s a chance that this will spoil the cruise we’re sup­posed to take with Kate’s class in May and, of course, if our expe­ri­ence with her sinus surgery is any indi­ca­tion she’s going to need a lot of out­side help with her recov­ery when­ever this surgery takes place. I’m steel­ing myself, as I will inevitably be called up for duty.

Noth­ing to be done about it now, so I’m set­ting my sights on Christ­mas and chug­ging ahead towards the new year. Must decide on a hol­i­day menu since it will be just the three of us for the first time in years.


November Food Recap

It all started around my birth­day. I got a great response to my call for birth­day recipes and my head was swim­ming with the pos­si­bil­i­ties. Chris threw me a delight­ful brunch with a dozen friends, rich with food and cock­tails. In fact, it was Serafina’s first day with their new sea­sonal menu and every­thing but two Ser­a­fina stan­dards was new to me.

A few days into my 41st year, I was assaulted by yet another food extrav­a­ganza! I choose the word assaulted on pur­pose because I’ve never had an expe­ri­ence quite like it. Ray and I went out to Ele­men­tal @Gasworks which I hadn’t even heard of before let alone been to (I’m a bit out of the loop on the hot new high end places these days) but Ray had and thought I would enjoy. I’m glad Ray had been to the restau­rant before and warned me a bit about it because it appar­ently has a bit of a neg­a­tive rep­u­ta­tion with some food­ies and I could eas­ily have been put off by the expe­ri­ence if I hadn’t been warned in advance. Here’s the deal: if you’re going to go to Ele­men­tal, you’d best be pre­pared to have the expe­ri­ence wash over you and be will­ing to go with it. Host and owner Phred West­fall said approx­i­mately five sen­tences to us through the entire multi-course din­ner. He offered us a table, asked us if we were ready for a cock­tail, asked if we had any food aller­gies, and um, pretty much noth­ing else. There was no pre­tense, no gush­ing over how the greens were locally sourced or this vin­tage of wine came from the Yakima region. Noth­ing. No expla­na­tion what­so­ever. When a small poul­try dish of some sort was set in front of us I actu­ally tried to ask Phred if it was quail or some­thing else… but he dropped the plate and was off again with­out a word of acknowl­edge­ment. Another time I had fallen behind on the wine pair­ings, to the point that I hadn’t even tasted the glass in front of me when he was ready to serve the next course… and there went the wine glass, bye-bye, I don’t even get to taste it because it no longer goes with the food in front of me. the light­ing was also very dark, so hon­estly it was hard to see what we were eat­ing! I can really see how this would rub some food-lovers the wrong way!

That said, I had a fab­u­lous din­ner. The food was EXQUISITE. Yes, many times I was forced to stick my fin­ger in a sauce and say “I think it’s mus­tard… and hazel­nut…” or “Yes, there’s some sort of fish with this salad… I’m not sure what it is… it’s GOOD though.” I had the best lamb chops I’ve ever had in my life, that had me unashamedly gnaw­ing the bones to get every scrap of meat right in a pub­lic restau­rant. Each course was served with a gen­er­ous pour of a paired wine and wow, by the time we fin­ished din­ner I was a lit­tle woozy. I wish I could even remem­ber (or knew to begin with) what I’d eaten! It was lovely and they’re clearly very tal­ented, kind of the anti-Herbfarm (where they give you a lit­tle menu of what you’ve eaten as a keepsake).

The fol­low­ing week I took advan­tage of another birth­day gift, this one from John and Jenny, who gave me a gift cer­tifi­cate to Theo Choco­late. Wednes­day night I attended one of their Choco­late Uni­ver­sity classes, “Choco­late: Exotic and Erotic” where I learned how to make sim­ple choco­late scrubs, lotions, and lip balms in the first half and then lis­tened to a lec­turer from Babe­land (NSFW) who delved into the erotic and sen­sual (choco­late lotion, choco­late can­dles, choco­late body paint, and ahem, more) and was a great pre­sen­ter, lots of humor. I passed on pick­ing up a “bet­ter then choco­late vibra­tor” but did glut­to­nously spend the rest of my gift cer­tifi­cate plus some pick­ing up assort­ments of choco­lates (includ­ing their col­lec­tion of scotch-infused choco­lates, using great sin­gle malts like Oban and Talisker!) and sev­eral sea­sonal vari­eties plus a cou­ple of body scrubs and lotions from our ear­lier pre­sen­ter, whose prod­ucts I was famil­iar with already.

Round­ing out Novem­ber was Thanks­giv­ing. We spent this Thanks­giv­ing with John and Jenny and their extended fam­ily, which was a great deal more fun than stay­ing home just the three of us let me tell you! We par­tic­i­pated in the potluck din­ner by con­tribut­ing Kate’s favorite Pump­kin Pie (which she made her­self) plus some Wild Rice Stuff­ing, a cranberry-pear-ginger cob­bler (recipe I’ll post later) and a cranberry-vanilla bean sor­bet that didn’t set up prop­erly in the ice cream maker but was really yummy any­way. We ate SO MUCH, sam­pling every­thing we brought, plus turkey, gravy, bread stuff­ing, brus­sels sprouts, grean beans, and more. So good, a really nice night.

I’ve bene doing a lit­tle more cook­ing again after a bit of a hia­tus where Dragon Age con­sumed me and pizza, beer, and xbox sounded like the best thing in the world. I’m bet­ter now. A cou­ple of the recipes I’ve been par­tic­u­larly pleased with include Ancho Pork and Hominy Stew and this Corn, Clam and Mus­sel Chow­der, with­out the mussels.

I’ve been tin­ker­ing again with my web­site, hop­ing to find a bet­ter way of dis­play­ing my recipes for peo­ple who want to browse or print them but I’m still unhappy with the way things are so I’ll keep limp­ing along with the cur­rent for­mat for now, I suppose.

The weeks roll on

First off, thanks to every­one who helped make my birth­day so great! Get­ting all the mes­sages with recipes of all stripes from so many of you was like open­ing up dozens of lit­tle birth­day presents. I was pos­i­tively inun­dated and it was a delight. I’m still decid­ing exactly how I want to put the birth­day book together, so if you still want to send some­thing to me but were afraid it was too late, please do. I’ll final­ize the book after Christ­mas some­time, I think.

We’re still in limbo on the heat­ing issue. I have been exchang­ing e-mail with a plumber who I hope will come and install a pres­sure gage and a heat exchanger so we can keep an eye on the sys­tem and reduce the chances of any­thing truly cat­a­strophic hap­pen­ing while we limp through this win­ter (and try to fig­ure out how to get the addi­tional tens of thou­sands of dol­lars a full “rip out all the walls” replace­ment of the exist­ing system).

I swear every­thing in the house is choos­ing this time to break down! Not only am I deal­ing with the heat­ing sys­tem BS and coax­ing the clothes dryer to limp along for just a while longer but the dish­washer is not get­ting the dishes clean and it seems to be inter­mit­tently leak­ing. Then his morn­ing when I went to the refrig­er­a­tor (the refurb fridge I bought a cou­ple years ago when our came-with-the-house fridge died) and the inside was HOT. Not just warm, not “oh, the door didn’t get shut all the way” room temp, but hot enough to melt the but­ter I had on the top shelf. Why? Appar­ently some­thing broke some­where and the inside lights were on ALL NIGHT even though the door was closed. The bulbs got so hot they melted the cover of the fix­ture (which fell off into the fridge) and pro­ceeded to heat up every­thing else within 10–12 inches. I had to unscrew the bulbs to shut the lights off and they were so blis­ter­ingly hot that even work­ing with an oven mitt and (even­tu­ally) a leather glove, I still man­aged to slip and burn a blis­ter on my fin­ger. Lovely way to star the day. Ha.

My mother came up for an unex­pected visit after my birth­day and it was fun to see her. She sat in the kitchen with me, read­ing over my recipe books and cook­ing mag­a­zines while I turned the last of the sum­mer toma­toes into mari­nara sauce and whipped up a din­ner from The Herb­farm Cook­book (pork ten­der­loin so good that Kate had sec­onds, took it in her lunch, and begged me to make it again within the week). She’s dri­ving down to Ari­zona at the end of this week to be around for my grand­mother, who is hav­ing yet another med­ical issue (this time mul­ti­ple lumps in her breast) on top of her heart prob­lems and fail­ing kid­neys from the last two near death episodes. Mom wanted me to drive down with her but I just don’t have it in me. I hope I don’t regret not going. Grandma wrote to tell me she fully expects “another mir­a­cle” but every time some­thing new comes up I can’t help wor­ry­ing that this will be the one. Mom promises to keep me informed.

Mean­while Pra­mas and I have been tag-teaming the sev­eral hours a day to research the ins and outs and every minute aspect of Dragon Age: Ori­gins now that it’s avail­able for the Xbox. When Chris was work­ing on Box Set 1 for the table­top game he had access to doc­u­ments with much of this infor­ma­tion in spread­sheet or table form but see­ing it all put together and work­ing with the visu­als and the game play is a dif­fer­ent beast and very inspi­ra­tional. I’m LOVING the game, it’s exactly the sort of game I want. The depth of char­ac­ters, the rich­ness of the world, the abil­ity to do more than just roam from room to room killing things… I’m a sucker for the writ­ing, the voice act­ing, the devel­op­ment of the NPCs. I adore the refine­ments to the rela­tion­ship sys­tem with each Bioware release. I’m fin­ish­ing up my sec­ond run through and already plot­ting my third. In short, Bioware owns me. Good thing we’ll soon have the table­top game out (it’s been out for approvals for a while now and I’m bit­ing my nails to nubs hop­ing we can get it approved and out to stores before the end of the year!) because I’m smit­ten with the world and want to explore more. Speak­ing of, I think my shift is start­ing any minute now. Fer­el­don here I come.

A Birthday Request

It’s Novem­ber and that means my annual cycle of intro­spec­tion has begun. I turn 40 in less than a week and look­ing around there’s a lot of change in the air. I’d hoped to go to Belize, see the Mayan ruins and dive or snorkel on the reefs, take a float­ing tour through jun­gle cave com­plexes. Maybe I’ll do that for 45 instead. This year is a close to home year. We put in a patio, bought a grill and some fur­ni­ture to put on it, built those raised beds I’ve wanted for years. It was a good sub­sti­tute. I enjoyed the heck out of that patio this summer.

It’s also been a strange time for my social group. The cou­ple who were the bedrock of our “cho­sen fam­ily” since Kate was small broke up this year and with­out them as a cen­tral touch point, other periph­eral rela­tion­ships have fallen away. Friends have con­tin­ued to spin off in other direc­tions, tak­ing jobs in new cities or coun­tries, skip­ping con­ven­tions or other “gamer socials” in favor of time with fam­ily. I under­stand it, I sup­port their deci­sions… they’re the right ones. I still miss them. It’s been a year of estab­lish­ing strange, new equilibriums.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though I haven’t been blog­ging about it as much this year, is the joy I get from food and cook­ing. My heart is full of food mem­o­ries, my head is full of inspi­ra­tions to make and (high on my suc­cess in the new gar­den beds) grow. I may not have any fam­ily jew­els to pass on to Kate but I have a trea­sure trove of tastes and smells and mem­o­ries in food form, sweet and spicy, sim­ple and deca­dent, special.

So, here we are. My birth­day request: for my birth­day I’d like a recipe from you. Yes, you. You may not ever com­ment, may never have admit­ted that you even read this blog. You and I may not agree on much of any­thing, may not have spo­ken in years, may not ever have met out­side of the inter­net… that doesn’t mat­ter. In fact, it’s pre­cisely the POINT of my request: I may have spe­cific mem­o­ries of Stan!‘s dev­iled eggs or Linda’s crock­pot lasagna, the year Cather­ine and I made that glo­ri­ous mustard-pickle (the recipe for which I’ve since lost (SOB)) or the time Chris­tine intro­duces me to my first bagna cauda but I want to make sure I have a mem­ory of YOU, too.

On Sun­day I’m hav­ing a birth­day brunch. Sev­eral friends will be there to cel­e­brate with me. Many more, if not most, of the other peo­ple I know, inter­act with, and enjoy will not be there. You game indus­try friends, far-flung rel­a­tives, for­mer co-workers, and peo­ple who lurk, hit this blog look­ing for recipes, send me feed­back, or tell me at con­ven­tions or par­ties how much they like some­thing they’ve found on my blog and made for themselves…you won’t be there and that makes my world seem so much smaller than it really is.

Please send me a recipe. You can send me an e-mail at nikchick@aol.com, or mes­sage me through Live­jour­nal, or Face­book, or Nikchick.com. Maybe it’s a recipe that makes you think of me. Maybe it’s a recipe that will make me think of you. Some­thing sim­ple, some­thing com­plex, some­thing you love! I’m going to com­pile my birth­day recipes and get them bound into a book for myself, a keep­sake of my time with food and peo­ple to this point, some­thing I can use over the next 40 years. That’s what I want for my birthday!