1. Go to the fair.
2. Arrive home from the fair at 9:58 with a carload of exhausted, dirty, ice cream-sticky kids.
3. Open the fridge door and notice that it’s (the inside of the fridge, not the door) warm.
4. Notice that it stinks, too.
5. Open the freezer door and notice that everything is soggy.
6. Panic.
7. Put the kids to bed while simultaneously panicking and yelling at your husband who is also panicking, but in a manly sort of way.
8. Call your brother at 10:15. You do not care if he is awake or asleep. This is an emergency. He says yes to your question of whether or not they have extra fridge space.
9. Thank your lucky stars that your brother’s family does not hoard food like you do.
10. Curse your unlucky stars that you hoard food.
11. Remember that your mother wanted to clean out your fridge when she last visited you.
12. Decide not to think about that.
13. Load a couple wash baskets with food to take to your brother’s house.
14. Load a couple boxes with food to take to the basement.
15. Cover the counter with a multitude of jars and tubs and bottles and bags of food that might no longer qualify for that title.
16. While your husband drives the soggy, stinky food to your brother’s house, dump all the unnecessary, ancient, not-worth-keeping food into one giant bowl: maraschino cherries (two bottles), a bit of salsa, moldy blackberries, rotten celery, a lime and a lemon, horseradish, old oil, ham broth (from Christmas, really?), honey mustard no one will ever eat, a half can of orange juice concentrate…and the list goes on. And on and on.
17. Refrain from gagging.
18. Feel nauseous anyway.
19. When your husband comes back, give him an opportunity to wash the dishes. (In other words, declare that you quit and walk away in search of some desperately-needed fresh air.)

20. Come back and help wash down the fridge.
21. Let your husband take a turn washing down the fridge and watch, completely depleted but pleased, nonetheless, as he disassembles the thing and then points out all the dirt you left behind.
22. Discuss what may have gone wrong with the fridge.
23. Fret about another huge expenditure whopping you upside the head so soon after the purchase of your lovely new cleaning machine. (Appliance polytheism does hold a certain appeal, you admit.)
24. At midnight, go to bed.
25. Wake up at 7:44 and go downstairs to a wildly gesticulating husband who points out, with much knob-turning and way too many words for your fuzzy brain to absorb, that the fridge setting wasn’t just turned down a little bit as previously thought, it was turned down one-and-a-holy-cow-half revolutions, as in OFF.
26. Recall that you have four children.
27. Interrogate them.
28. When the littlest one fesses up to the error of his Curious George ways, explain the importance of NEVER touching the refrigerator knob, and then forgive him.
29. Feel pleased on many fronts: the fridge is shiny-clean and empty, there is no need to buy a new fridge, and while the work was intense and disgustingly painful, it was blessedly short-lived; there was no time to dread the task—typically the most painful part of refrigerator cleaning.
30. Become an obsessive refrigerator knob checker because there is no way on earth that you want to repeat that cleaning method ever again.

More How-To Stories:
How To Get Your Kitchen Clean On A Leisurely Sunday Afternoon
How To Get Your Bedding/House/Kids Clean All In One Day

The unheard of is happening: it’s raining! We’re supposed to take the kids to the fair tonight but I’d rather not go. I’d prefer to stay at home and luxuriate in the foreign sound of pounding rain on metal roof.

Plus, it’s chilly outside—perfect for baking nectarine tarts and making spaghetti sauce.

Plus, I made a library run this morning and I adore the sounds of the kids slishing pages, books thudding to the ground after they finish them.

So tell me, why would I want to go out on a night like tonight? To some godforsaken field the whole way across town where the lights glare and the music blares and my kids are bound to get a frightful case of the gimmies? I am not a proponent of fairs.

I am a fair proponent, however, so because we said we’ll go, we’ll go. I will stop my whining right now.

The other night for supper, I threw together a hodgepodge of a meal which ended up delighting me down to the tips of my paint-flecked toenails. I got the idea from a fun blog called Stonesoup, the focus of which is minimalism. (Which is not a word, I know. Humor me, okay?)

I am not, let me state for the record, a minimalist. I routinely make my life as complicated as possible and then take perverse pleasure in trying to wiggle my way out from under. Just ask my husband.

And, again, for the record, I get irritated with modern thinking, the kind that tries to lump everything you’ve ever known into three categories, or perhaps five. You know what I mean: The top three things to look for in a man. Or, Three kitchen gadgets you simply can not do without. Or, Cleaning your house in five easy steps. We are a people flooded with too much stuff, too many desires, and too little wisdom. Compartmentalizing life helps us to feel like we’re in control.

To which I say hogwash. There is no such thing as being in control of life.

Though the illusion is quite charming.

Oh my goodness. Now where in the world did that speech come from? I must be feeling peevish.

But, since I brought it up…

The top three things to look for in a man:
1. work-worn hands
2. twinkly eyes
3. straight teeth
Bonus points for a tool belt.

The top three kitchen gadgets you simply can not do without:
1. a sharp knife
2. a grater
3. band-aids, because knives and graters are dangerous things
Bonus points: food to chop and grate.

How to clean your house in five easy steps:
1. Eliminate the word “easy”
2. Put everything back in its place
3. Dust
4. Vacuum
5. Wash windows
Bonus points for not crying.

And to think I started out this post telling you about my supper. Sheesh. I’m not sure I even remember what it was anymore. I’m starting to feel guilty for sitting here when I have dirty windows and all my bookshelves are, quite simply, chaos shelved.

Supper was (quick! before I run down another bunny trail!) beans, barley, and sausage simmered in tomatoes and red wine.

The top three components of a good dinner:
1. scrumptious
2. easy
3. filling
Bonus points: it gives you the illusion you are in control.
Extra bonus points: the kids like it.

Barley and Beans with Sausage and Red Wine
Wildly adapted from Stonesoup

I used barley because it’s what I had on hand, but pasta would work fine, as would (wild) rice.

1 quart chopped tomatoes and their juice
1 onion, chopped
1 cup red wine, plus a splash more to deglaze the sausage pan
1 pound sausage links
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 19-ounce can Cannellini beans and their juice
3 cups cooked barley (or another grain)
½ teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
Parmesan cheese to serve, optional

Cook the sausage links in a kettle over medium-high heat for about 12 minutes, turning frequently (or according to package instructions). Transfer the cooked sausage to a plate, cut each link in half and set them aside.

Put the olive oil in the now-empty sausage pan and add the onion. Saute for about five minutes.

In a large-ish kettle, dump in the tomatoes, red wine, and the sauteed onions. (Splash some extra red wine into the dirty sausage-and-onion pan and cook for a minute or two, scraping the bottom to loosen all the flavorful bits. Add the wine-y, oily juice to the pan of tomatoes.) Simmer over medium heat, uncovered, for about 45 minutes until a bunch of the liquid has evaporated and the contents have cooked down a bit. (If you want the final dish to be more soup-like, cook it for less time.)

Add the sausage chunks, barley, beans, salt, pepper, and oregano. Simmer for another five minutes. Taste to correct seasonings.

This is delicious served with a flurry of Parmesan and some slices of warm, buttered toast.

Mr. Handsome likes to invent things to make life simpler. He always says he should’ve been born in—

Wait. What period was it? Hang on a sec while I call him up on the phone:

Me, with zilch introduction: You always said you should’ve been born in a different time period. What was it?

Him: Huh?

Me: Just answer the question.

Him: I don’t know. The eighteen hundreds, or the colonial period.

Me: Why?

Him: I don’t know. Do we have to have this conversation right now?

Silence.

Him: I guess we do. Uh, because my skill set is suited for that period? I don’t know. Don’t quote me.

Irritated pause. Banging hammer in the background.

Him: Is that it?

Me: Yep! Thanks. Bye.

So there you have it: the colonial period.

A small sample of his inventions include:

1. When we lived in Nicaragua we were practically back in colonial times. We built our house with nary a power tool in sight. (This means we sawed the beams by hand. And we planed the beams by hand. Our hands just about fell off.) We had to haul our water from a well that was 100 yards away, down in a ravine, and instead of doing what the other men did when they got stuck with the women’s work of carrying water—they hauled it in five-gallon buckets, the heavy buckets bouncing awkwardly against their legs (the women carried buckets on their heads)—my inventive husband crafted a wooden yolk to wear across his shoulders, a rope dangling down from each end and a bucket hooked to the end of the rope. He carried hundreds upon hundreds of buckets of water that way.

2. Also in Nicaragua, we had a hammock by our bed for Baby Yo-Yo. Mr. Handsome strapped a belt to it so that we could lay down and rest while periodically tugging on the belt to keep the baby asleep, or to make him go back to sleep. I liked that one.

3. Currently, my concrete counter top has a drain hole in it underneath the drainer. This way I don’t need the (so often moldy, slimy, gunked-up) rubber mat that drainers sit on. I can just set my soppy dishes directly into the drainer and the water drips down onto the counter and then runs into the little drain hole. It’s one of my favorite things about my kitchen.

Those are just three random examples. There are dozens more.

Note: Not all of our life is ease and comfort. Among the many glitches is our stairless attic. To get to the third floor (storage space only), a person (never me, always Mr. Handsome) has to shimmy up through the little hole in the ceiling using whatever is at hand—door/chimney/oddball furniture—to give a boost up. It’s crazy difficult and drives me mad when I think about it for too long.

Another area that Mr. Handsome likes to fiddle with and improve upon is My Kitchen At Canning Time.

(Alert! Alert! Random, totally off-track thought: Is Mr. Handsome’s name sexist? I always hate it when men refer to their wives as “my beautiful wife,” as though that’s their main asset. But yet I’ve gone and named my husband based on his appearance. So I must be sexist? Discuss.)

Back to canning and Mr. Husband (the Handsome One).

We often butt heads over his constant piddling with my methods (ha! we’re buttheads!), but lots of times it works out fine. And it’s only fair that he has a say in the canning process seeing as he does fifty percent of the work (or more), depending on the project at hand. He hooks up hoses so I can have (hot, sometimes) water on the porch, moves tables around, creates makeshift tarp roofs to keep out the sun, and so on. Last year when we did applesauce he came up with a new apple-coring method. (His apple-cutting/smashing method wasn’t as successful. You can’t win them all!)

Last Saturday morning, applesauce-making day, I ran errands in town, leaving Mr. Handsome at home to set up the whole process. The night before (while I was living it up in town with my girlfriends, eating enormous dinners and attending a magnificent theater production of Wild Oats), he had already washed the four bushels of apples.

When I returned home mid-morning, already there were bowls of steaming applesauce, kettles of chopped apples burbling away on the stove, and more cooked apples in the process of getting cranked through the mill.

Except they weren’t getting cranked. They were getting drilled.

Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeeee! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I stared, confused. Mr. Handsome pointed to the mill, his face wreathed in grins. With just one trigger-happy finger, the cooked apples were getting sucked down into the mill and the hot sauce came pouring down the shoot.

This is what happens when carpenters make applesauce.

We got the applesauce done in record-time this year—about nine hours total. All the kids worked hard—hauling buckets of water, running more jars up from the basement, squeezing the drill, filling and lidding jars, cutting apples—but this kid busted his tail all day long.

I didn’t touch a knife the entire day and I never even stirred a kettle of apples. This, my friends, is my definition of progress.

*Some of the photos courtesy of Yo-Yo Boy.

This same time, years previous: Peach and/or Nectarine Tart (I HIGHLY recommend the nectarine version) and Thoughts on Breastfeeding