About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
I didn’t get creative this month with food, travel logistics ate my brain, but my family did. For our trip to SDCC, my beloved Mama S made me so much good food, adapting my favorites to a GF version. She’s the best.
This was a very baking month. I turned out a few versions of rolled oat and peanut butter cookies. They’re still not quite right, they come out too flat and nearly crispy. I hate crispy cookies. Chewy is the goal! Next round, I’ll sub in powdered sugar for the granulated sugar and refrigerate the dough before baking to see if that helps.
Do you suppose reducing sugar in a cookie recipe without any substitutions would be dreadful? If the recipe also has peanut butter and chocolate chips, it feels like a 25% reduction in sugar should be safe.
It was also Muffin Month. I bake like I work, I do what I feel like when I feel like it. And July felt like a muffin month so I baked as much as I could and froze the rest against a month when more cooking than baking was happening. It’s my version of making hay while the sun shines – when there’s energy and willingness to bake, roll with it.
Month 5!
Meatloaf! This was my first meatloaf since going GF and I substituted ground up rolled oats for the breadcrumbs. It was a little softer than usual, probably because I used a giant zucchini instead of a small one like usual, so I’ll double the breadcrumbs and reduce the zucchini next time.
Coconut curry (from a packet). We picked up a GF curry packet at Sprouts and combined that with my sauteed chicken thighs, cubed potatoes, and sliced carrots. We usually don’t like cooked carrots much but JB especially requested them.
Roasted pork log. I don’t remember which part of the pork this was but I slow roasted it at only 275 degrees with garlic, sadly we were out of pesto or it would have been covered in that, and we ate it for daaaaays with rice and veggies on the side. Later, the second and third pork roasts I made were slow roasted with pesto, for 3-4 hours, and it was perfection. I’m not making it any other way again!
Pork turned into enchiladas. PiC was perfectly happy eating the pork as is but I decided not to push my luck and transformed the leftovers. He was skeptical the first time I pondered this aloud but as is almost usual when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen, my idea panned out. I made red and green sauce enchiladas in the same pan because each packet only makes 4-5 enchiladas but our casserole dish holds at least 10-12. Leftovers!
Shrimp and cheesy grits. I finally perfected the water to grits ratio (3 cups water to 1.25 cups of grits) when I’m also adding lots of mozzarella cheese, and cooked it all on low. We get our large shrimp frozen on sale from Sprouts for $7/lb every so often and I grill those babies right before serving dinner. This was a hit – so much so that JB ate all the shrimp that we adults didn’t eat, and nearly all the grits as well.
Speaking of perfecting ratios and recipes, I’m not there yet with zucchini but they’re back on our dinner table and not just hidden in pasta sauces, muffins, and cake. It turns out, when done well, we all like it. The problem is the darn things go from not cooked to over-roasted in some mysterious and mystical way that has no relation to temperature, cook time, or cut size. It’s driving me up the wall but also got my attention in a way that no vegetable has since we discovered brussels sprouts and bacon are a winning combination. For the moment. Update: 7 minutes at 400 degrees seems to be doing the trick as long as the quartered slices were big enough. My store bought zucchini has also been going into several rounds of a modified lower sugar version of Erin’s chocolate cake.
Micro-income: Achievement. Another 10,000 points combined for diligently answering my chronic pain surveys and being active equals $10 in PayPal. Not bad. I do wish I had a better app to connect than Google Fit though. That earns a paltry 6 points per day of activity instead of points according to the amount of activity.
Mrs. Steward on work uniforms. I am developing a very uh … shabby chic(?) uniform? I own one pair of jeans that are showing their age, a very comfy pair of athletic type pants and three pairs of leggings in variable quality and thicknesses. Most of the time the jeans and athletic pants are rotated all week, but I started rotating the black leggings with a longer top plus my super comfy cardigan. What do you wear to work and play?
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
If we’re just talking about the literal HOW DO YOU DO IT, these are the technical steps that I take:
First up is willpower! This is the weakest of the ways. Willpower is finite.
Depending on how challenging your days or your life feels, it can be so limited as to feel non-existent! I understand this: if you return to The Precious ten times and say no ten times, that’s 9 other times that you could have been saying no to something else or exercising better judgment.
However, it’s the most important initial set of brakes on the impulse to buy. Once I say no the first time and it pings my consciousness again, then I push it to the next step.
Sometimes I’m fresh out of willpower but I have just enough energy to pull out the credit card. Oh let’s not pretend I don’t have that card number memorized. I do.
So let’s say I don’t even have willpower or the precious little left needs to be preserved. Call in the reinforcements!
These pretty sparkly pretty (sparkly!) Star Wars flats lured me in ….
Talking to my dear mentor-friend about living spaces, I was mulling over my wish to have just a bit more.
We are usually perfectly comfortable with what we have for 2 adults, 1 child, 2 large dogs, and hosting 1-2 adult guests for a week at a time multiple times a year. But there is still a bit of me that wishes we had just a tad more.
She declared that buying too much house was just a waste. She’s absolutely right.
The “more” I want is just a bit more luxury. The ability to comfortably host 1-3 of JB’s friends at a time (at this age, a friend means the whole family with siblings) or even just our own friends and their families for birthdays and other celebrations – 300 square feet inside. The ability to have spacious grass for the dogs to play AND a food-producing garden – 200 square feet outside. The space in the garage to fit two cars without playing Tetris each time we pull in – 50 square feet. Room to plant tall and thin plants along our side walls so that our neighbors can’t just glance over and see everything we’re doing – 50 square feet.
Even if we had to pick just two, we would have been paying a whole lot more money, though. Let’s say we got a bigger place which has, on average a lower price per square foot. Not low, mind you, just lower than our current PPSF. There’s a place listed for 1.25M in our neighborhood with about 2400 square feet. It’ll sell over list price, they almost always do, so call that a 1.3M/2400 square foot = $540 per square foot.
Just skipping the garage Tetris? $27,000. Hosting space? $162,000.
Put it that way, paying $200-400 a year to rent out space a couple times a year, for the kids to play or to host a birthday party, is looking like the far more affordable option. We usually celebrate birthdays with a special home cooked dinner and a couple of friends over, so really, it’s just big milestone birthdays we’d host.
And honestly, though I get a pang of envy whenever we visit friends in the Midwest who have 3000+ square feet, I don’t want to be cleaning all that! Our hands are full with what we do have right here. If we were actually rich then we could stimulate the economy to hire a house cleaner, a gardener, and what have you. But we’re not so it’s all DIY for the daily living chores.
So in the end, my mentor-friend stays right. At a much bigger footprint, our house would own us, not the other way around. That’s no way to live.
:: How much room do you have? Is it enough, too much, or do you wish for more?
I most certainly dream about luxury travel but we still haven’t done it. The most luxurious thing we’ve done is enjoyed a lounge as part of our travel card benefits. The travel itself remains the main attraction.
I want to jump up and down for NK Jemisin who won a third Hugo in a row. Historic! Her Broken Sky trilogy is beyond amazing. (This link is NOT broken, WordPress is just being a wart and pretending that it is, and I can’t fix it. ARGH!)
Cloud on uncertainty and grace. I’m trying to practice this now that we’re hitting some troughs in our once-balanced lives. We’ve had an extraordinarily good run in job stability and it’s ended but I remind myself that we went through a trough before this good peak and that if we are lucky and work at it, we will end this trough with another peak. I can’t embrace the good without acknowledging and understanding that bad comes with it. Or put it another way, we spent three years with professional ease which allowed us to deal with a most difficult phase of parenting and now that THAT is arguably less harrowing, the professional side of our lives needs more attention. That’s fair.
I’m glad to see Kelly Marie Tran again. The online harassment of her as a woman and POC with a leading role in Star Wars was unconscionable. Also, I adored her character in Star Wars.
First Burn
I missed this Hamildrop in April but it is SENSATIONAL. Just utterly beautiful down to the bone.
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.
I’m incredibly risk averse and conservative in my money management. This trait (habit?) goes waaaay back.
I was once a workaholic, wrapped up in building my career and scrutinizing every single move and communique like it might have hidden gold or a secret message for success because every penny mattered. Because I had to support a family even before crossing the threshold to adulthood, at age 17, any money that I earned went to paying down debt and building up a basic savings account instead of investing in a Roth IRA. I had to keep cash on hand at all times because there was always something going wrong: someone got sick, my trainwreck sibling had run up another utility bill, an endless stream of flat tires, dental emergency, or more dental issues.
Obviously, after many long, tough years of working and saving, I made it through that period. But also just as obviously, I bear the scars which translate to being even more risk averse. At this point in time, I’m highly concerned about the possibility of a recession in the next few years, as well as highly concerned about our job security. There’s always been a question mark over my job, but recently one has been hung over PiC’s job, and that brought all of my fears back to the fore.
Month 4!
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.