Getting Off My Butt To Make Cornbread

There is one problem with self challenges.  It may not be a problem for other people, but it is for me, and that problem is that my mind will obsess about it.  It is like a hamster wheel that just keeps spinning for no other reason than just to spin.  I realized over the weekend that it had been a month and a half since I had truly tried a recipe from my Cook Book Challenge.  I disgust myself at times.  The recipes in the books won't cook themselves.  Then to top it off I gained two more cookbooks during Christmas. My mother had a good laugh as I opened up a cookbook on homemade candy bars and another book on canning.  I would groan and call uncle on this whole challenge, but I am at the half way point and there is plenty of time to catch up. 

In the name of catching up, and because I am compelled by good manners to offer to bring something to a get together, and also because I do truly like to putz around the kitchen, I offered to bring something to the annual girlfriend gift exchange.  This is where a good majority of my girl friends get together and exchange presents and catch up with each other after a nice long holiday. Eat, Drink some more and be merry are all part of the experience. 

Too Lazy to Flip this Picture

Lizzy hosted it this year, and a hearty winter soup was part of the menu.  I don't know about most people, but I do love a chunk of bread to go with soup, so I volunteered to bring bread for the meal. In my head, I was going to do this fancy braided bread that looked really awesome and probably was going to take half a day to accomplish. That was the original plan, then I realized that I had to work over the weekend, and complicated braided bread was not something I was going to have time for. 

In fact, I was seriously debating on a quick run to the grocer to pick up french bread or table bread, but the monologue in my brain would not shut up. In fact the monologue got quite vicious, stating that if I had time to play games on my phone, then I had time to bake bread. 

Flipping through the book, The Art of Bread by Cooking Club of America I settled upon Classic Corn Bread.  Corn Bread goes with almost everything, and the recipe looked almost like every other recipe that I have seen of corn bread.  With a lot of mental berating and very little skill, I toss a corn bread batter in the oven and flounced off to run a brush through my hair and find a shirt that didn't have flour on it, so that I would be ready to go when the corn bread was ready. 

The gift exchange was fun, and thankfully the corn bread was a success. It didn't do all the horrible things that I thought it would in my mind, which mostly consisted of it not solidifying in the center or being dry.  It was also successful in the fact that it got the internal monologue to shut up for once, and compelled me to start looking at some of the cookbooks I still have on the list. Yay for small victories.

CSA: Week 5- More Turnips

Risky Glamour Shot of a Turnip. 

I thought that I understood the turnip.  Thought is the key word.  I discovered something interesting about the turnip and it just boggles the mind.  In case you have not guessed, I ended up with turnips again in this weeks CSA box.  There were other things, such as broccoli, Granny Smith Apples, Butternut Squash and a head of cabbage, but it is the turnips that still seem to strike a little bit of fear in my heart.

I tried to replicate the recipe that I had used the last time. The first step is to microwave the turnips for a couple of minutes an then peal them. It sounded pretty simple, but I think that I microwaved the turnips too long, because it did not feel right when it came out of the microwave.  With out looking up the genetic composition of a turnip, I would have to say that it is a water logged vegetable, because it felt a bit squishy when it came out of the microwave.

It would seem that with all things squishy, I can't help but squeeze it. That is when things got interesting with the turnips. When I squeezed the turnip, it sprayed water as if it was a water balloon with a pin prick. The spray of liquid shot forth, and continued as I squeezed the turnip like a squish ball. I don't think that turnips are meant to be used as stress relievers, and I wasn't feeling the slightest bit stressed with a turnip in my hand.  I might has squeezed a turnip to death, because I was fascinated.   The amount of liquid that came out was almost majestic in its oddity. I don't think that this is what I was supposed to do with a turnip and in all fairness to the other turnips  that I microwaved as prep work for dinner, I made a point of dicing them and consuming them, so that they would have an honorable food death.

Next weeks CSA is going to be interesting if there are turnips involved, because I don't know if I can ever take a turnip seriously again.  What sort of vegetable does this after being microwaved? It  is not normal.

Laundry and Gratitude

With the beginning of a new year there is often time a pause of reflection. A reflection of life and the challenges and triumphs from the past year. Over all I could say very little happened last year, or perhaps a lot happened last year, and it is all a matter of perspective. The new year is good for one thing, and that is making me think about gratitude.

A couple of weeks ago I had invited my mother and the love of her life over for dinner and to put up the Christmas Tree.  Traditionally we have dinner and drinks, before we get to the tree hugging part of the evening. I really do mean tree hugging, because how else are you going to get the lights on the tree?   Over dinner we were trading stories of the past. because nothing brings forth a fresh bout of nostalgia like Christmas Traditions.

I don't know how we ended up on the subject, but I told my mother a story that she had never heard before. A story about why I am surprised to be alive, and one of the reasons I adore my husband. It was a story about laundry and gratitude.

Several years back and a few months prior to when my husband and I got married, we had bought a house. It was a beautiful house and gave us plenty of room to grow, however it did not come with a washer and dryer, like our apartment did. I had put off doing laundry as long as I could,. I draw the line at flipping my underwear inside out to get a second round out of them. It was time for me to take the six loads of laundry to the laundry mat, so that I could quite wearing the back of the closet rejects.

I had loaded up the vehicle, grabbed the detergent and every quarter that could be found in the house and headed to the only laundry mat that I was aware of, which was near the old apartment. It was dark out when I finally got everything in the car an ready to go. It was the sort of darkness that seemed to cancel out light sources and caused the normally bright street lamps to look like dim night lights childhood  nightmares in the quagmire of the gloom.  The laundry mat was devoid of human life other than me. It was weird, and I probably should have taken it as a sign and turned around and gone home, or at the very least tried to find a laundry mat closer to the new house. The need for clean undergarments was a strong motivating force for me to suck it up and donate some quarters to the cause of proper hygiene.

I have no love for laundry.  I do however love my life. While I was sitting in the hard plastic chairs of the laundry mat, fiddling with the odd bits of entertainment that I had brought with me to make the time pass, I saw a young man walk past the the front of the laundry mat. I did not really think much of it, because the mat was in the middle of a residential area and people are known to walk. I didn't think much of it, until the young man turned around and walked into the laundry mat.

There is nothing creepier then a person coming into the laundry mat with no laundry. It is even creepier when said person decides to chat up the only person in the other wise empty laundry mat and then later follow them to their car an hour and a half later. It could have been harmless flirtation, but to me it felt like I was in the staring role of a murder mystery, and I was playing the role of victim.  Not a single soul other than the young man, that occasionally jingled something in his pocket came to the laundry mat the entire time I was there. There were no witnesses to be found if something were to go south.

When I finally drove away from the laundry mat with the piles of clean cloths in the back of the car, half of them folded and half of them shoved in the basket once they were dry enough, I pondered over how I was still alive.  All of the logic in my brain told me that I should have expired my last breathe in that laundry mat.  That laundry mat that did not have any sort of security camera's or rest room, but was nothing but the bare minimum to get the clothes clean I should have died in and perhaps me in a different dimension did.

I was still shaking when I got home.  My soon to be husband had never seen me so rattled as I told him the story. I fell into a puddle of tears on the living room floor as the adrenaline started to leave me.

The next day, my soon to be husband bought a washer and dryer so that I would never have to go back to the laundry mat ever again. We weren't planning on buying such an expensive item for several more weeks, since we wanted to have a cushion for any unanticipated wedding expenses.  I had never been so grateful in my life.  It would have been easy for him to shrug off my entire experience and tell me I was over reacting, or even tell me to try and find another laundry mat since that one creeped me out, but he went above and beyond to quell my fears, and even though I still hate laundry and folding it is my least favorite pastime, I would much rather fold laundry then be an unsolved murder.

Sharing the story with my mom, while we finished are evening meal made me recognize that I hate being vulnerable.  Not a lot of people do like to be vulnerable, but I really have a problem with not being in control and that moment in the laundry mat was one of those moments that I rarely share with people, because it is one of those moments I was the most vulnerable and had the least amount of control.  I have come to the realization that it is okay to be vulnerable, because without being unprotected I would have no depth to my gratitude.  In order to be truly grateful, you have to know why you are grateful.  I know why I am grateful.