Five for Friday

It’s Friday and I am posting this on Friday, March 15; you may not see this until June for all Feedly cares, but I don’t think I have any control over that. This is kind of a cranky way to begin a blog post, so, as I say to Carla: Let’s try that again.

It’s Friday! I am coming off a night of broken sleep (child coming in at three, returning to bed around four, husband waking up for the day at five thirty), so let’s have some Friday bullets. 

1. Are you as steeped in the Kate Middleton drama as I am? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a) bless you and b) here is a really thorough explainer. If you are In It, I highly recommend finding a friend who is similarly obsessed so you can text her memes and links to conspiracy theories at all hours of the day. My personal opinion is that Kate is recovering from surgery, probably doesn’t look or feel her best, and just wants to recover in private until Easter as previously planned and communicated by the Palace. BUT, simmering in that dark gross part of me that enjoys drama, especially when it feels very removed from my own boring non-royal life, I am kind of hoping that someone is pregnant with someone’s love child.

2. What kind of snacks do you keep stocked in your house? I ask because we have become friendly with our new neighbors and they invite us over all the time for all manner of things. While I am a little intimidated by reciprocating with A Real Meal (they are incredible cooks and bakers, and every time we’ve been invited to their house the food has been astonishing in both quantity and quality), I am ostensibly fine with having them over for drinks and snacks. The other day, the kids went sledding and we had them over for impromptu cocoa. Luckily, we had cocoa mix in the pantry, and even more luckily the mix had tiny marshmallows, and even more luckily, we had an unopened bottle of spray whipped cream because one of the neighbor kids informed me that he really likes whipped cream on his cocoa in a tone so grave I understood him to mean that something dire would happen if no whipped cream appeared. But then there are all these kids and their parent in my house and I realized I DON’T HAVE ANY SNACKS. It’s not that I don’t enjoy snacks; it’s that I enjoy them too much. We managed to scrape together some muffins I had in the freezer and some individual bags of chips and veggie straws that we had leftover from some party or other, so no one starved. But it made me feel like I need to have at least some snacks on hand. But what?!? I’m not crazy about having a bunch of cookies around, because they either go uneaten or get devoured in two seconds. If we have chips, I will eat the chips. Cheese and crackers aren’t big among the elementary school set, and it’s not like I can have an emergency brie on hand for last minute guests (or can I?). Fresh fruits and veggies, yes, great, and I try to have those around as much as possible, but we don’t eat enough of them to have a ready supply in the fridge at all times. Occasionally I panic buy a bag of clementines, but at least a third of them inevitably go bad before we can eat them. So: shelf stable snacks that appeal to kids and adults but are not so appealing that my family will eat them before we have guests. Is this a thing? 

3. In vanity news, I have been Influenced to buy several things lately. I really like this very inexpensive multi-use highlighter stick. Of course I cannot find the video that originally persuaded me that this was an essential tool in my (non-existent) makeup game, but I like dabbing it on the inner and outer aspects of my eyes and swiping it below my eyebrows for a little bit of lively glow. Totally worth $2.94. The other thing I’ve already tried enough times to recommend it is this bronzing mousse. The weather is edging ever closer to summer, and I don’t want to scare the new neighbors with my fish-belly legs, so I’ve been practicing in the hope that I can add a little lifelike color to my skin before I appear in public in running shorts. I am always on a quest for the perfect fake tan, and this is the closest I’ve gotten. The things I like best about it are: a) It’s dark when it goes on, so you can SEE where you are applying it, and you can also see if you are introducing streaks to your thighs or stomach before the streaks have become one with your skin. b) While it has a scent, as all tanning products inevitably do, it strikes me as much fainter and less objectionable than any other tanning product I’ve ever used. c) The resulting tan is darker than my normal skin tone, but not so dark that it screams FAKE TAN. (I use this tanning mitt to apply it to my body which works really well and helps prevent streaking.) Once again, I have no idea which account suggested this tanning mousse, but I am a fan.

4. One of my current parenting goals is to provide more opportunities for Carla to spend time with her friends. I think I’ve mentioned before that I hate playdates. They fill me with anxiety, because they are both forced social time – sometimes with parents I don’t know well – and because I have no idea how to deal with more than just my one child. For better or for worse, that’s just how I am, and so we haven’t had a ton of playdates. But now that Carla is older, playdates presumably no longer require that social element AND the kids are old enough that I can give them a lot more independence. I used to agonize over how I was going to entertain two whole children, and so I’d gravitate toward things in my comfort zone, like baking projects or crafts. Unfortunately, those things require a lot of prep and supervision and clean up, so they aren’t relaxing or easy. But now I can pretty much let the kids go off and play together. Sometimes we all take a walk outside, and I’m always happy to take a walk, even if the kids ask me to pretend I’m not with them.

Even though playdates are, in many ways, easier now, I still of course have anxiety about them. I find myself fretting about planning An Activity, just in case. I find myself worrying about what happens if the kids get into a fight or misbehave or want food (it always comes back to snacks!) or want to be on screens the whole time.

This is so silly! When I was a kid, I don’t think my friends and I EVER had An Activity. We just went and played Barbies or roller skated in my basement or played school or ran around outside or played house. I can’t even imagine asking my mom or a friend’s mom for ideas. And snacks were not provided by the parent! We scrounged up our own snacks, and I don’t even remember a parent being present for any snacking. In fact, part of the fun of going to someone’s house was checking out their snacks. (Not as fun: eating any sort of meal at a friend’s house, because they had different foods than I was used to and different rules. THAT filled me with anxiety.) I loved my friend J’s house because they had an entire drawer full of candy, and you could just… eat candy when you wanted to! J, notably, was pretty uninterested in the candy. I loved my friend R’s house because her garage freezer was STOCKED with popsicles. At my house, we always had little bags of chips or Zingers in the pantry and Dilly Bars in the freezer and pickles in the fridge. (R and I used to each eat a pickle when we were at my house.) So I am guessing that kids DON’T CARE either what they do or what they eat at playdates. They will figure it out. And yet. We have two playdates on the schedule in the next few weeks and I am already stressing about it. I am planning to be Mean Mom and put a ban on screens, but beyond that… I don’t know what to do or what not to do. Wow, I wish I could chill out about this. 

5. You know something that always feels like magic to me, even though it’s science? Topology. Various algorithms keep serving me videos of topological experiments – because I keep watching them when they appear in my feed – and my mind cannot grasp the mathematics/physics. My dad taught Carla how to make a mobius strip and even seeing him create it with my own eyes doesn’t help me understand how or why it works. It’s witchcraft.

What are you up to this weekend, internet? And, more importantly, what kind of snacks will you be eating?

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Five for Friday

Friday already, and looking down the barrel of another long weekend! So here are five topics I’ve been thinking about, beginning with MORE CAKE TALK!

A No-Cake Defense (TL/DR: This Is a Me Issue): I loved everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post about choosing my birthday dessert. One thing I additionally loved was how some readers took issue with my husband’s anti-cake stance. I just want to say: I love you. Thank you for defending my cakely honor. You are a treasure and a joy and I feel so cozy and loved. 

While not knowing his exact reasons for not wanting to bake a cake, I can speculate. And so I do want to defend my husband a teeny bit. You do not have to accept these reasons! You can still glare in his general direction! 

If I am understanding correctly, his first objection is the time. He fears it will take all day to bake a cake, and he doesn’t want to waste a big chunk of my birthday in the kitchen, when we could be doing something else. While perhaps baking a cake should not take several hours, it does always seem to work out that way. At least, it does for me. But then again, I always end up making some silly mistake that requires me remaking some aspect of the recipe.

Also, and this may be projecting, but he might be a little nervous about making a cake. He is not the cake baker in the family; I am. And I am in no way a good role model for The Ease of Cake Baking, in large part because I am always doing something that makes the whole process more difficult (cough cough leopard spots, cough cough rainbow layers). But my husband has never made a cake. I have no doubt he COULD make a cake (he is generally a better direction follower than I am), but for your first cake to be the Replacement Cake for your wife’s birthday, after her previous birthday cake was such a disappointing experience… well. That seems like a recipe (see what I did there) for failure.

However, these perfectly reasonable reasons aside, after I read the umpteenth comment suggesting that maybe my husband should just suck it up and make me the cake I want (I am paraphrasing; everyone reading this is much more tactful), I started to agree. If he has volunteered to make me a birthday dessert, why shouldn’t I ask for the dessert I really want? And I am sure that if I said, “honey, this is what I REALLY want,” he might grumble a bit, but he would make it for me.

So I spent some time looking online for The Perfect Cake Recipe to send him.  But the process looking for a recipe to send him made me realize that there is a secret third reason he may be unwilling to make me a cake.

As you may already know, from reading all my food and cake related posts, lo these many years, I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t necessarily stick to a recipe. I might pair a cake from one recipe with a frosting from another recipe. Or I might make a smaller cake than the recipe recommended. Or I might take a cupcake recipe and turn it into a cake. Or I might choose a recipe that calls for poppy seeds in the icing, but I would exclude the poppy seeds. I am comfortable with this, both because I now have some experience in messing around with recipes and because I am comfortable with the idea that it might not turn out. My husband is NOT comfortable with either of these things. He doesn’t have the cake baking experience to draw on, for one thing. But he is also a Supreme Instruction Follower and would find it blasphemous to deviate from a recipe’s explicit directions. 

And the thing is, when I search for My Perfect Cake… I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Okay, it DOES exist, and Kate found it (thank you!) but it is too large and too expensive for just the three of us. BUT, it’s very nice to know it’s there, if I need it! What I’m saying is the recipe for My Perfect Cake doesn’t exist. There is this perfectly lovely sounding cake, but it calls for lemon extract and I am a lemon purist. But I can’t ask my husband to just… exclude the extract. I mean, you probably can’t just DO that anyway, you’d need to track down other lemon cake recipes and compare various amounts of lemon juice and lemon zest and choose an amount that seems appropriately lemony for this specific cake. I can imagine how overwhelming it would feel if I suggested my husband do that. Even if I did the research, and wrote on top of the recipe, “omit lemon extract; use X tbsp of lemon juice,” he would feel worried that it wouldn’t turn out, and that if it didn’t, it would be HIS fault. 

This recipe looks very close to my ideal… but there are so few reviews, and of the reviewers who seem to have actually tried the recipe, it sounds like the cake comes out too dense for what I would prefer. 

I do love Sally’s Baking Addiction, and this recipe sounds similar to what I’m looking for and I trust her recipes, although sometimes the cake is a bit more dense than I prefer. But… there’s no lemon curd in this recipe. I want lemon curd. But I don’t think I could just say, “spread some lemon curd in between the layers” to my husband without him feeling like he needed additional, very specific directions to follow. (I actually used this recipe to make my daughter’s seventh birthday cake, and did put lemon curd between the layers.)

Are you beginning to understand that this is not really a problem with my husband trying to deny me the cake of my heart? That it is, instead, an issue of me being too picky?

Like I said, feel free to continue to feel irritated with my husband. But perhaps you can also spare some irritation for me, as well. I am hard to please. 

***UPDATE***: I wrote all of the above last night, before my husband got home from work. After sending him the link to Kate’s cake, and deciding that it was really too expensive, and explaining to him that I have been thinking about this particular cake for more than a year, I thought we finally settled on him making me cupcakes. That would be great! Lemon curd filled cupcakes. I explained how to do the filling part, and my husband listened attentively and asked if I would object to him putting pink food coloring in the frosting which strikes me as very adorable. And then thirty or so minutes later, cake clearly on the brain, my husband asked me, “Should I just make you the cake you want?” and I said, “but I thought making a cake was too much?” and he said, “but if I’m going to make cupcakes, I might as well make a cake,” and I said, “yes, please.” And then there was some discussion about my favorite cream cheese frosting and whether I would be amenable to him adding some lemon zest to the frosting (yes) and whether I need homemade curd (no). So I think it is happening????? If there is cake in the offing, I will certainly share all the details with you. (Although cupcakes would also be excellent.)

Surely This Is Not Right: I went to the dentist and noticed this poster hanging prominently on the wall. I do not object to the sentiment, which is lovely. But it raises the question: how do you pronounce “hygienist”? 

After spending far too much time listening to online pronunciations of the word, I believe that in British English, the pronunciation is “hy-JEEN-ist.” But in American English, it’s “hy-JEN-ist,” is it not? 

In no way is the first syllable “hahy.” Not that I would even know how to pronounce “hahy.” Hah-hee? Hah-high? (My husband thinks this is a way of representing the diphthong of “hy,” but I think there are better ways to represent it than “hahy.”

I suppose this could be one of those words that you have only ever experienced in print and have not yet heard aloud, and when you do finally hear it spoken, the pronunciation is a shock. (Do you have a word like this? Mine is ravine.) But I don’t think that this is one of those cases. 

Okay, I still apparently have more to say about this. If you were the person buying wall art for a dental office, a dental office in the United States specifically, wouldn’t you be uniquely aware of the correct pronunciation of dental terms? And wouldn’t you find this EXTREMELY ODD?

Freelance Does Not Mean Free: One of the most… shall we say interesting aspects of freelancing is the money aspect. Some clients are very on top of it, saying things from the get go like, “This is our budget,” or “We typically pay this for this type of project.” Other clients seemingly would never raise the topic if I didn’t broach it first. When it comes to invoicing, some clients are very clear to say, “This looks good, send me your invoice” while others drag out projects for months and would probably never even consider that I should be paid for work completed until I finally say something like, “Great, I’ve included an invoice.” (And I realize that I have a unique privilege of allowing projects to sometimes drag on without pay – and do so only with clients I have had for years and whom I know will pay eventually; it’s not something I would advocate when you are just starting out. And also, for big projects, it is important to ask for a portion [I do half] up front before you begin.) It’s just so fascinating to me that some clients seem completely oblivious to the fact that the work a freelancer does has a price tag.

Aspirations Mini-Update: I have been working toward all my aspirations. Well maybe not all, but many. (I have made progress on all but one of my Personal/Self Improvement aspirations, for instance.) One thing I did was start a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I could track the things I wanted to do regularly, if not necessarily daily. Playing the piano and writing and exercising and walking outside. That kind of thing. And what I have noticed is that I cannot do every single thing I want to do daily in a single day. There are just not enough hours in the day. I mean, I suppose I could break up my day in such a way that I could get to everything… but that seems overly rigid and also, to be honest, exhausting. There needs to be some flexibility. For one thing, if I walk outside for 30 minutes then it seems like overkill to also walk on the treadmill. For another thing, if I am really on a roll with, say, writing, I don’t want to STOP just because it’s time to play the piano for fifteen minutes, you know? So I am still trying to feel my way through what is a reasonable way to achieve these goals without achieving them simply for the sake of putting a check mark in my spreadsheet. Perhaps I do need to find a way to create some sort of a schedule, though. 

Unusual Snack Foods: One of my all-time favorite snacks is a half a green bell pepper filled with cottage cheese and sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. (We called it “carrot salt” when I was growing up, probably because my mother also sprinkled it on carrots.) (Carrots are also delicious dipped in carrot-salted cottage cheese.) 

Neither my husband nor my daughter would touch this snack with a ten-foot pole, but it is delicious and crunchy and full of protein and SO GOOD. I cannot be the only person in the universe (besides my mother) who enjoys it. Have you ever tried this amazing combo? If not, would you be willing to try it? (You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no; I am still very iffy on the chicken thighs situation, so I fully understand New Food Resistance.)

Are there unusual combinations of foods that you like to snack on? 

That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope you have a fabulous weekend full of cake and weird snacks and reasonable pronunciations!

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Feeding-the-Babysitter Fret, SNACKS, Old-Fashioned Blogroll

After posting yesterday, I was fretting (mildly, very mildly) about what we would eat for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I like to have a plan, especially when it comes to food. Plus, the grocery store situation will get iffier as we get closer to the holiday – busier and then closed; that’s what I mean by “iffier.” I had to dash over to the grocery store yesterday afternoon, to find something to feed the babysitter.

(Did I already fret about this to you? I feel like I did, but I can’t find it in yesterday’s post. Oh well, if you have already endured this fret, perhaps skim down a bit or come back another day. Here, I will put in sub-headings to make it easier to skim.)

Feeding-the-Babysitter Fret

What do YOU feed the babysitter? Why is this something that I fret about so much? We rarely have a sitter, but when we do I almost always get a frozen pizza. My thought process around frozen pizza is a) easy and b) most people like pizza and c) Carla eats it. (She does not eat macaroni and cheese for instance. Or most other things.) But when I fretted out loud to my husband and daughter, a) my husband said “You ALWAYS get a pizza” and b) Carla said “I’m tired of pizza. I’d rather have chicken nuggets.” Oooh, two multiple choice lists in one paragraph. Wild.

These were highly interesting comments. First, yes, as I already told you, I do tend to ALWAYS get pizza. But we have had a babysitter, what, twice in the past three weeks? Is pizza two times in three weeks really that egregious? But more importantly, the babysitter last night was a different babysitter than the one we had last time. So she hadn’t eaten pizza three weeks ago.

Secondly, yes, Carla ate pizza three weeks ago with the other babysitter… and I think we made pizza last week or the week before as well, so that’s twice. In the meantime, aside from two nights of steak and maybe a night or two of salmon and maybe one night of tacos, I think she’s had chicken nuggets for every other dinner. (I am refraining hard from making a self-deprecating “I am such a shitty mother for feeding my child nuggets daily lol” comment because she EATS them which is better than not-eating other things and they are easy and they have protein and sometimes I get the ones that also have veggies in them and this is a very long-lived phase but it is just a phase that won’t last forever and I make up for my lack of meal creativity in other good and valuable ways.) 

Being a mom slash babysitter-food-decision-maker is so fun. So, so fun. 

Now, I don’t personally care to eat chicken nuggets. (I have never typed “chicken nuggets” so many times in my life.) But I think many people are fine with them, so I decided that I would just let the sitter make some nuggets for herself and Carla. But I still managed to fret about it. The dear wise friend to whom I fretted via text suggested I get pizza and chicken nuggets so that there were options. This was genius, so that’s why I went to the store. Plus, I figured I would come up with some wonderful idea for NYE / NYD food in the moment. The store was very busy. 

(By the way, I have been masking again in the grocery store, these past few weeks. Around Christmas, I noticed that quite a few more people than usual had joined me… but I went yesterday afternoon and I think there was only one other person in a mask.)

Snacks

While I was there, I did indeed experience a lightning strike of inspiration. For our extra special New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day meals, we are going to have SNACKS!

(By the way, when Carla was very small she pronounced the word “snacks” with kind of a swallowed H/N combo instead of the initial S. Like “HNacks.” So that’s still how my husband and I refer to them.)

We have not yet made the cranberry salsa for which I bought ingredients last week, so we will have that with pita chips. I picked up a small bag of Lay’s Potato Chips and some Southwest Ranch Dip, and I have plenty of vegetables to cut up for extra dipping. 

(Since this post is rife – RIFE – with parentheticals and asides, what’s one more? I first became acquainted with Southwest Ranch Dip when I was pregnant. My mother-in-law served it at her apartment one day – this was when my in-laws had an apartment in our city – and I loved it. Pretty much everything made me nauseated in those days, but crunchy greasy Lay’s chips dipped in that dip were HEAVEN.) 

(I am getting such a silly kick out of posting these photos, as though you don’t know what a bag of Lay’s looks like. I mean, maybe you don’t, but it seems unlikely.) (Images above and below from lays.com, marzetti.com, Instacart.com for some reason, and traderjoes.com)

In addition to chips and dip, I grabbed some mini pretzel dogs that I’m hoping my husband and child will eat (I eat one hot dog a year and it is normal sized and in a BUN not a pretzel; I do not care for pretzels) (are you beginning to get a clearer picture of why my child is so picky), and some feta and caramelized onion pastry bites. I also got a garlic and cheese flatbread, which sounds good but not terribly different from garlic bread; we’ll see. We have some cheese and crackers and some olives already. This is all way too much food already, but I have arranged a family outing to Trader Joe’s later today to see if we can find any other treats to add to the selection. Trader Joe’s is usually pretty great about having fun frozen treats.

Do you have favorite snacks to recommend? I would be willing to go to another location in addition to Trader Joe’s if there is something I NEED to try. I am serious about snacking.

As far as sweets are concerned, we have PLENTY. So many sweets. I ended up throwing out a bunch of leftover (and now stale) Christmas cookies, which was both sad and cathartic (the ratio of cookie plates for neighbors to cookies made was waaaayyyy off; lesson learned), but we have many other cookies and candies that kind family and friends sent. Most of it is chocolate, which I don’t like except in very specific situations. But as I prefer savory to sweet anyway, I will be perfectly happy with my Lay’s and dip. 

Old-Fashioned Blogroll

(I am feeling very smug about my choice to put subheads into this post, because there is no good segue between Lay’s and blog reading.)

Lately, my Feedly has been acting up. Either that or user error but PROBABLY it’s Feedly yes that makes the most sense. The problem is that I keep missing posts. I’ll think, “Oh, so-and-so hasn’t posted in a while!” and then I’ll go to her blog and she posted sixteen days ago and I missed it. I’m not opposed to leaving comments on old posts, not at all, but I like to know what’s being posted AS it is happening, not after the fact.

I was remembering how, in Days of Yore, I had a list of blogs I read on the side of my homepage. And every morning when I had a tea break from work, I would click through the list to read everyone’s posts. When I got back to regular blogging in 2016, my blogroll was so depressing; so few of the people on the list were blogging anymore! Some of the links went to defunct pages or spam sites!  So I deleted the whole thing.

But now… maybe it’s time to create a new blogroll. This wonderful blogging community I am so fortunate to be part of is robust, and I don’t want to miss anyone’s posts because of user a Feedly error.

Of course, the very idea of creating a blogroll raises frets like “what if I accidentally leave someone out?” So I need you to promise that if you have a blog, and for some reason it does NOT appear on this hazy future blogroll should I ever get it together enough to make one, that you would TELL ME because it was clearly I don’t think we can blame this on Feedly user error and not a deliberate decision to exclude.

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Road Trip! Snacks

In response to my recent Road Trip! post, several people mentioned snacks – a couple offered specifics; others were more general.

But it made me realize that I am Very Eager to discuss Road Trip! snacks. 

When I was a kid, my dad would buy rolls of Necco Wafers and hand them around. We had to take the wafer we were offered, so there was always the immense danger of getting the licorice flavored one. He was also a big fan of Planters Heat Peanuts. My mom, I seem to remember, perhaps incorrectly, enjoyed things like Chex Mix. 

For me, a Road Trip! is all about the chips. Aside from tortilla chips (which I eat occasionally), I hardly ever buy chips. This is because I LOVE chips and will eat an entire bag in one sitting. So chips are a real treat for me, and that’s my go-to snack for Road Trips. My favorites are Barbecue Lays, Miss Vickie’s Jalapeno, and Doritos Salsa Verde, the latter being a variety I don’t see in gas stations that often anymore. 

I have also recently become… well, obsessed isn’t the right word for it. Infatuated with? Yes. I have recently become infatuated with Skinnypop, despite the irritating name. My daughter got me into it; I think parents often buy individual bags of Skinnypop for birthday party snacks, and maybe they offer Skinnypop as one of the snacks at school; I’m not quite sure about anything that goes on in my kid’s life when I’m not around. Anyway, she liked Skinnypop first and asked for it enough that I ended up trying it. Now we buy it by the giant package at Costco. I love it. Don’t get me wrong – I would much prefer a giant bowl of freshly popped popcorn drenched – drenched – in butter, but Skinnypop is really quite delicious. So I might consider adding it to my Road Trip! snack repertoire.

While I am much more interested in salty things than in sweet things, sometimes the best chaser for a bag of spicy chips is a bag of Twizzler Nibs. Or maybe a Milky Way Midnight bar. 

And I rarely ever drink soda these days, but I do love a nice frosty bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. 

I may or may not indulge in my traditional Road Trip! snacks on this particular Road Trip!. They are not, as you might have already intuited, keto friendly. But my husband has already decided that he is NOT sticking to keto while we are on our trip, and that makes it much harder for me to stick to it. 

If I stick to it, though, I will survive by eating copious amounts of Zero Sugar York Peppermint Patties and Zero Sugar Reese’s Miniature Cups which Swistle has been recommending for a long time and I just recently tried. They are SO GOOD and do not taste like keto food; they taste like treats.

(I have yet to find keto chips I like. I tried the Quest Chili Lime chips, which were WONDERFULLY crunchy and had a nice chili lime flavor. But the chili lime flavor, though strong, was not strong enough to disguise the flavor of the chips themselves which I find to be oddly bitter.)

Speaking of my husband: I feel like I should KNOW what kind of Road Trip! snacks are his favorite. But I… have no idea. Maybe he doesn’t have one or two repeat snacks that he always eats? Maybe he goes for a wide variety? Maybe I am so hyperfocused on my own snacking that I become completely oblivious to those around me? I am not sure. Honestly, I don’t even know what I would buy for him if he sent me into the gas station with instructions to pick him out a snack. Some.. Sun Chips? That seems like the wrong answer. 

My daughter LOVES snacks and LOVES treats, so you know she is going to have many, many requests. If I were to choose something for her, I’d probably pick a trifecta of Cheetos or Cheez-Its, something weird (like a plunger shaped lollipop that you dip into a toilet bowl filled with sugar – yes, this is something she purchased with her own money recently), and something sweet. She likes most (all???) sweets, so I’m not even sure what I would choose for her, but I think she would probably like it.

Now, I have been speaking mainly of gas station treats. But Road Trips! are an opportunity to eat fun fast food, too. If you like fast food. I don’t particularly care for it, I have to say. So usually I vote for Arby’s so I can at least order curly fries. When I was a kid, Subway was our fast food stop of choice, and I do enjoy a six inch Spicy Italian sub on whole wheat with no cheese, plenty of spicy mustard. I don’t know if I would enjoy it quite as much now. But I suppose we will have a chance to find out! 

So now it is your turn! Tell me, in detail, your FAVORITE Road Trip! snacks – sweet, savory, and any other category. 

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Dinners This Week, Go-To Snacks

Man, I don’t know WHAT it was about yesterday, but I was feeling snacky ALL DAY. I tried to quell my snackishness with the usual recommendations: drink a glass of water, eat a bunch of veggies, eat some protein. I ate a green pepper. I ate carrots. I ate a pickle. I drank water. I drank tea. I ate a protein-packed lunch. 

None of it worked. I just wanted SNACKS. 

(This reminds me that Carla, when she was in the one-ish and two-ish age range, did not say her initial Ses very well. It came out as more of a nasal H sound, made between the nose and the back of the throat. So instead of saying “snacks,” it sounded something like, “Hnacks.” This is still my husband’s and my preferred pronunciation. Man, I wish I had recorded more of those babyisms before they’d vanished from her vocabulary.) 

What’s your go-to snack? 

Mine is always chips. (My husband is the opposite – he’s a sweet snacker. He’d probably go for a big spoonful of peanut butter and a little bowl of chocolate chips, or some cookies.) If I had a magical metabolism, I would eat chips all day every day. Tortilla chips with salsa. Tortilla chips with guacamole. Tortilla chips with queso. Tortilla chips with melted cheese and hot sauce, which is how I staunched my snack attack yesterday. Nachos. Ruffles dipped in Marzetti Southwest Ranch. Salsa Verde Doritos. Miss Vickie’s Jalapeno Potato Chips. The mix of crunch and salt and fat and spice is my idea of heaven. In a pinch, I’d eat cheese and crackers. A nice sharp cheddar or a nutty Manchego or a creamy Brie paired with a delicious Triscuit cracker or a crunchy, buttery Ritz – yum. Have I just talked myself into a second day of snackishness?

Anyway, chips. Food of the gods.

Of course, a person cannot live on chips alone. 

Dinners for the Week of February 2–8

• Crockpot BBQ Pork Tenderloin with Baked Potato: I haven’t had this in forever and I am CRAVING it.
• Creamy Shrimp Pasta: Speaking of cravings, this sounds SO yummy.
• 5 Ingredient Spicy Pork with Roasted Broccoli: Since the pork tenderloins usually come in a two-pack, this pork dish would be a good second-tenderloin option. I haven’t tried it before but it sounds delicious. 
• Crockpot White Chicken Chili: Ever since I tried and loved chicken tortilla soup, I have been inspired to branch out into more chicken-based soups and stews. I have never in my life eaten a white chicken chili, but this version may persuade me to finally dip my toe in. (Not literally.)

We have ground beef in the freezer, so there’s always the possibility of tacos. And romaine in the fridge and salmon in the freezer, which could easily result in a delicious salad. Lots of options. 

Happy eating this week, Internet! 

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Walking Thoughts

The weather is so perfect right now. I feel sorry for my parents, who are expecting a winter storm. (This also makes me worry about Nicole. Hi Nicole!) Today was hot and sunny with high, placid clouds lolling around in all the endless blue. The humidity was low and it was breezy, which made the heat lovely. And with every flourish of the wind – darting forward with a curtsy; retreating with a bow –: a thin ribbon of cold rippled along its edge; a fleeting portent of fall.

My family and I live in the suburbs, an area I find very pleasant for walking. An elementary school nearby is surrounded by calm, quiet streets, so (when my husband is home to hang out with Carla) I do a four-mile loop through that neighborhood. I love engaging in the house equivalent of people-watching as I walk – checking out who has already swapped out their peonies for gold and mahogany mums, how many houses have autumnal wreaths on their doors already, which homes are proudly – or grimly, who am I to know – proclaiming their political affiliation with yard signs.

There are blessedly few political signs in my area – at least, for now. They seem to crop up in little pockets, often right next door to each other, or across the street. And it seems, often, that if there is one for one candidate, there is one for his opponent nearby – a little call and response, a hoisting of the banners. It’s almost (almost) amusing; the two Trump signs one on side of the street, facing two homes boasting Biden signage directly opposite. I wonder which comes first, the Biden or the Trump? 

Recently, on my way to one of the parades that seem to be the enduring method for celebrating pandemic birthdays (for the elementary set, at least) I drove past an entire (short) block of political signs. One small Biden sign. Then, next door, an ENORMOUS “Trump – no more bullshit” sign, then another Biden sign, then two yards with Trump signs, then another Biden sign. I guess it’s natural, with such a vast divide between the parties, to feel like you have to counteract your opponent with a sign of your own. (As an aside to my aside, one of the many, many things I don’t understand about Trump is this type of messaging: “No more bullshit.” Doesn’t that imply that there is, currently, bullshit – bullshit that only Trump can end by being re-elected? And yet… HE is the current President, so wouldn’t hebe responsible for – if not the cause of – any current bullshit? I don’t get it. If there is all this bullshit now, under his administration, why would extending his presidency be the solution? I suppose it is like arguing with a two-year-old; you are never going to fully grasp the argument and you are never, never going to win, and there will be tears and yelling.)

The neighborhoods I walk through are so lovely. The homes are all similar in size and shape. The lawns are neat and manicured. I love peeking through to the backyard (from the sidewalk, as I walk along – I am not trespassing except with my eyes) to see if I can glimpse a firepit or a pool or a playground. So many homes have a backyard shed, often designed to look like a miniature version of the house, which I find so charming. Few homes have fences, which broadcasts this neighborly feeling of openness and welcome. It’s fun to think about all these people living so near to me, so similar to me yet so different. I wonder what they do all day, how they earn a living, if they are married or have children. I walked past one row of houses that had extra deep backyards. In one of them were several kids, taking turns on a zipline that spanned the length of their yard. A zipline! So fun! Many of the driveways have multiple cars; our neighborhood is full of big families, so I am assuming everyone has four or five college students at home, not that they are hosting wild parties. There are lots of American flags; they don’t seem to correspond to any sort of political candidate, which makes me feel tender and grateful. 

I have taken to ogling garages (still, as I am walking on the sidewalk). I think I mentioned recently that, alongside wishing for an actual mudroom, my biggest regret about our current house is that it has a small garage. Now, I know I shouldn’t be greedy; we have an attached two-car garage that fits both cars at once. But it’s a tight squeeze. If I could buy exactly the house I wanted, I’d get one with a four-car attached garage. Or, better yet, a three-car attached garage and then a separate detached garage that could hold two to three cars. This is because my father rebuilds cars; he rebuilt one for himself that he originally intended to pass down to my brother, but my brother no longer wants it, and he has just recently rebuilt a car specifically for me. (I am not what anyone might call a Car Person, and yet I cannot bear the thought of those cars being sold/given to anyone else. My father has put literal years into rebuilding them, and they have become so intertwined with Him that I could easily see myself, long after he has left this mortal coil [in many decades, still, God willing], talking to the cars as though his spirit exists within them.) Moving on from Possible Therapy Discussion Topics: I imagine at some point Carla will want to drive a car (GULP), so I am not being greedy, I am being practical. (Ha.) 

So I ogle garages when I walk past. I love it when people leave their garage doors open so I can peek inside. Some are neat and tidy, lined with shelving units and cabinets. Some are completely, inexplicably empty. Some are packed so full of furniture and paint cans and odds and ends that cars cannot possibly fit inside. One house I passed had turned their garage into an outdoor living room, full of chairs and end tables. Some look rather like ours, fairly clean but stuff jumbled along the edges. A lot of garages have a refrigerator.

My Dream Garage would definitely have space for a refrigerator. Or, better yet, a deep freeze. My parents had a deep freeze in their mudroom when I was growing up. The mudroom was pretty small (though cavernous compared to ours): just big enough for a tangle of shoes and boots, a few hooks where we could hang our coats, and the deep freeze. Each summer at the county fair, my parents would buy a half a steer from one of the 4-H kids, and so our freezer was permanently stacked with various cuts of beef, all wrapped in clean white paper. It was almost miraculous, how my mother could ask me to go get a package of ground beef from the freezer and there was always a package of ground beef in the freezer. 

We also always had popsicles in the freezer. Twin-pops – the ones that had two popsicles joined together. I could never cut them in half properly – they’d break in a jagged line so that one half would be too heavy for its wee stick to hold, and the other would be a curve of flavored ice gripping tightly to the wooden stick you could see peering out of one side – so I’d just eat two at a time. Let’s blame my frugal father for always buying the variety pack. Cherry, grape, orange, and banana. I could eat cherry and grape all day. Orange, in a pinch. But banana? Yuck. At the end of the summer, you had to be really desperate for a popsicle because only the banana ones were left. 

We also usually had a big bag of Dilly Bars snugged away in the deep freeze. My dad and I would go to the Dairy Queen early in summer and get a king’s ransom of them – 16 or 24 or some other obscene amount. When I got old enough to order them myself, the (teenage) cashier would always goggle at the number I requested. “I don’t know if we have that many… I’ll have to check with my manager.” (What? We lived in a Very Small town.) (The Dairy Queen was the only ice cream shop in town, and it ONLY sold ice cream. It was a single room with enough space for maybe three people to stand in line behind one another, and then a counter where you could order, and then the space for the staff to work.) (Once I spilled an entire blue raspberry freeze on the floor of that Dairy Queen.) Our Dilly Bar bag would usually contain a selection of chocolate, cherry, and butterscotch Dillies. I think my dad was the only one who enjoyed the butterscotch. Although, I can taste it, just thinking of it, so I must have tried one out of desperation a time or two. Once in a great while, we’d get Dilly bars with chocolate ice cream and chocolate coating, but those were rare. 

There’s almost nothing better in the summer than a Dilly bar: cracking through the shell with your teeth, hurrying to lap up the ice cream before it slumped down the stick and over your hand. And, when it was all gone, scraping the last bit of chocolate or cherry coating off of the stick with your teeth. I used to try to remove big chunks of the shell and save them in a bowl, to eat them last. 

(Do you remember the freezers of your childhood? The summer treats? The refrigerators in your friends’ garages, so novel because you had a freezer in the mudroom, and they had six-packs of Koolaid Burst and chocolate pudding in their garage fridges, just for snacks, while your parents’ idea of “snacks” was a half-empty box of Nilla Wafers and a case of Shasta?) (I only got Koolaid Burst and chocolate pudding when we went on a school field trip and had to bring a lunch.) (To be fair to my parents, we did usually have variety packs of chips, from which the Doritos and Ruffles would disappear quickly, leaving only dejected packs of Fritos. We also often had Zingers — a cousin of the Twinkie that came in chocolate with chocolate frosting or yellow with lemon frosting. No matter what flavor, I think, they each had a glut of white frosting in the center.) (And pickles. I remember that being the Snack of Choice for me and at least a couple of friends.)

September has barely begun and I am already nostalgic for summer. This summer; summers past.  This has been, perhaps, the longest summer of my life. It’s been, in many ways – if you are practicing the well-worn art of denial – the most relaxing. No trips to plan for or execute, no camp or summer sport schedules to keep, no dinner parties or visiting family to host. I think back on it and I think of all the popsicles we’ve eaten (the good kind, not the twin pops), all the hours we’ve spent melting pleasantly in the sun, all the catch we’ve played and bubbles we’ve seen blow into the sky, all the books we’ve read and walks we’ve taken and meals we’ve grilled in the backyard. It’s a dangerous, giddy sensation – that back-to-school, summer-slipping-away, not-quite-fall feeling that makes everything seem almost… normal. 

It’s not, of course; nothing is normal. But if you close your eyes and take a deep breath – fresh cut grass mixed with the smoke of someone’s backyard wood fire, sunsoaked pavement and the damp-rock scent of newly watered lawns – you can almost imagine, for a moment, that this is any old summer, meandering serenely toward fall. And for this one, beatific afternoon (you have to grab tight to them when they appear), I am holding onto it.

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