But I’m not going to let that stop me from writing.

Hm, let’s see. What to talk about?

(Jiggle knee. Sip coffee. Look out window. Pick teeth. Scratch head.)

For the next month, I have two-day, free shipping from Amazon. This is dangerous. And scary. And exhilarating. What should I buy? Hmmm? I’m hoping to order all school books for next year. Or maybe for the next ten years. After which we’ll need to reinstate the spending freeze for the next six months to compensate. Moderation is not my strong suit.

Mr. Handsome finally broke his spending fast yesterday. I broke it long ago with lemons and goat cheese, but he was determined to go forever. (Snort-HA!) He bought two bags of day-old bagels. The Baby Nickel was so psyched for “donuts” that he was running laps around the table and bouncing off the walls.

While I was puttsing in the garden last night, I discovered that the baby potato plants are covered with puddles of orange eggs, so I abandoned the radishes to crawl down the row squish-squishing the evil babes with my fingers.

The feet of the Potato Bug Smoosher. Be very afraid, ye yucky bugs.

And now for some kiddisms.

1. Miss Beccaboo likes to pretend she has claws.

She tapes these finger thingies to her toes and hobbles around.

She has to take them off when she does dishes because she doesn’t want them to get wet.

And I thought those fake fingernails must be a pain….

2. She also twists her arms together in a backwards pretzel shape, fingers intertwined, and then states dryly, “I’m letting my brains talk for a little while.” Apparently a friend told her that when you cross your arms like so, the left and right sides of the brain can converse. Maybe she’s deficient in brain equilibrium?

3. Which reminds me. The other day she said, “I used to be a good thinker, but I’m not anymore.” I’m not sure why she said that, and it actually sounds kind of pathetic now that I’ve written it. She probably just did a number of dumb things in quick succession. Getting in trouble repeatedly will make you feel like a not-so good thinker. That’s how I feel when I flop cakes and talk without thinking.

Or blog without thinking.

4. One day, out of the blue, The Baby Nickel said, “Mom, your hands are different.” I asked, “How do you know?” and he replied, “I smelled them. They smell like a new mom.”

I don’t know what that means.

5. Yo-Yo asked me, “What are statistics?” I tried to explain and failed, plus I kept mutilating the pronunciation, so I finally resorted to a round-about answer, “It’s what your uncle is studying in school.”

Yo-Yo quipped, “What? Can’t he say it yet?”

About one year ago: Baked Macaroni and Cheese

My computer is giving me fits. It’s been giving me fits for several weeks now, but yesterday it threw a gigantic hissy fit and now it no longer allows me to upload pictures or save any word documents.

All I have left (besides my family, house, and photo albums) is the internet, for which I am truly grateful. I can email and post, research and read to my heart’s content, but I can’t post any new photos that I take. That means no new recipes.

But no matter. I have lots of old recipes that I’ve photographed and have been meaning to tell you about. We’ll work on those for now, okay? The new computer that we ordered last night should be here in a couple weeks. In the meantime, I’ve got some roasted rhubarb for you.

I’ve made roasted/stewed rhubarb before, but I didn’t really like it all that much. I’m not a cooked fruit sort of gal. Fruit cooked in a pastry, yes. Fresh, yes. But just the hot saucy fruit? Not so much.

This recipe changed that, at least in relation to rhubarb. I made it twice, in quick succession, and then I ate so much of it that I got sores in my mouth. At which point I went cold turkey. My mouth has now healed and I’m ready to dig in with my spoon again. But this time I’ll be a little more moderate.

The recipe couldn’t be easier: a couple pounds of rhubarb, a half-cup of white wine and the same of sugar, and a vanilla bean, split in half. I found it to be an excessive quantity of vanilla (not because it didn’t taste good, but because vanilla beans are so darn expensive), so I recommend using half a bean. Even that will provide you with plenty of vanilla flavoring and lots of dainty black specks throughout. (Whatever you do, do not throw out that vanilla bean when you’re done with it. Rinse it off, dry it well, and then grind it up in your food processor with some sugar to make vanilla-flecked sugar. Or simply stick it in a canister of sugar and let it do its magic, no loud motors involved.)

The second time I made this recipe, I served it with skillet cornbread and vanilla ice cream. The paring was delicious, if I do say so myself. And I do. Nubbly, buttery, slightly-sweet cornbread, tangy-tart rhubarb, and creamy-cool ice cream, oh my!

I used this cornbread recipe, but I baked it in an eight-inch cast iron skillet which improved the texture considerably. Simply preheat the skillet in the oven, add a tablespoon of butter and swish it around, making sure to coat the sides. Add the batter and return the skillet to the oven to bake for 20-30 minutes (or longer, if you forget to turn the oven back on after removing an earlier batch of baking). It’s a 100-percent whole grain recipe (my mother’s jaw about hit the floor when I told her there was no white flour in it), what with the cup of cornmeal and a cup of whole wheat pastry flour, both freshly ground.

Do I sound annoyingly holy? I’m not. I’m addicted to Swedish fish.

So there.

Roasted Rhubarb
Adapted from Molly’s blog Orangette

Molly says that red rhubarb is best for eye appeal, and I agree. However, the variety I have in the garden is mostly green with some red thrown in, and I deal just fine. Though I am hoping to get some starts of ruby rhubarb sometime soon. Anyone have some to share?

2 pounds rhubarb, washed, trimmed, and cut into two-inch pieces
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 vanilla bean, split in half

Put the rhubarb in a Dutch oven. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir gently. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes, or until the rhubarb is tender. You may need to stir it once or twice, but don’t overdo it. Otherwise it shreds and mushes and loses some of that all-important eye appeal.

Serve plain, with whipped cream or vanilla (or strawberry) ice cream, alongside cake (or not), hot or cold.

About one year ago: Pounding the pulpit

1. Get a phone call from your friend who tells you in a I’m-trying-to-be-really-calm-but-I’m-kind-of-hysterical voice that her daughter has head lice.
2. Hang up the phone.
3. Grab the nearest head and start looking.
4. Be really uncertain because you have never seen head lice in your life and you have no idea what you’re looking for.
5. Grab another head. Find lice.
6. Call the doctor.
7. Call the pharmacist.
8. Call your mom.
9. Call your friend back. Laugh as though you’re possessed. Listen as she laughs as though she is possessed.
10. Yell at the kids to bring down all the bedding.
11. Pile the bedding in the bathroom. To get to the washing machine and toilet, you now have to scale a pile of laundry that rivals Mount Everest, but never mind that.
12. Start a load of laundry.
13. Repeat Step Twelve every forty minutes for the next ten hours, sleep, and then continue the process the following morning.
14. Email the relatives that were planning on spending the night to tell them that you are very sorry, but perhaps they might want to find other accommodations.
15. Hang up the first load of laundry.
16. Repeat Step 15 every forty minutes for the next ten hours, sleep, and then continue the process the following morning upon waking. Thank your lucky starts that the sun is shining and that you have a crazy-huge number of clotheslines.
17. Throw all the kids in the car and hightail it to a pharmacy.

18. Buy two delousing kits. Breathe deep when you see that you are spending 42 dollars and some odd cents on some lousy bugs.
19. Arrive back home and shave the little boy’s head.
20. Check with your daughter to see if she would like to have her head shaved as well. Don’t push her when she declines your offer.
21. Be very glad that just several weeks prior you checked out a children’s book from the library, a book about a prissy little girl who gets head lice. Because of that book, your kids are totally up-to-date on lice and their treatment. They are unbelievably calm about the bugs in their hair. (You are not, but you pretend to be.)
22. Vacuum the whole house.
23. Spray down the mattresses and rugs with some stinky spray that you’ve heard doesn’t work, but you don’t care about that because you are going All Out.
24. Yell at the kids. Then cry a little.
25. Feed the kids lunch. Don’t forget to eat something yourself.
26. Send the older two lice-free children on a three-mile bike ride to visit their daddy’s job site.
27. Dump toxic chemical on the two littles’ heads, soak, rinse.

28. Set the kids in front of the TV. Over the course of the afternoon they will watch both Aladdin and Beethoven.
29. Be as nit-pickily nitpicky as you can possibly be for the next three hours.
30. Surprise yourself by enjoying the task at hand. Massaging your babies’ round little noggins while listening to Robin Williams’ fabulous voice impersonations makes you feel rather zen-ish. Think of his—Williams’—poor mother and of how she must have suffered when he was ten years old and at the peak of annoyingness.
31. Continue with laundry and cleaning.
32. When hubby gets home, hand off the cleaning duties so you can finish cooking supper.
33. After dinner, force yourself to keep cleaning.
34. Collapse into bed, completely exhausted.
35. The following morning, at your husband’s suggestion, go hang out in town for several hours to recuperate. While there, drink lots of coffee, write, and imagine your head itches.
36. When you come home, the laundry is mostly finished and put away and you can mostly put the whole rotten experience behind you.

P.S. For the next several days/weeks, obsessively check heads and wash sheets.

P.P.S. For those of you who saw us in church on Sunday, know that both the doctor and the pharmacist said that there was no need to quarantine ourselves after completing the treatments. We were not carelessly jeopardizing your scalps. (My kids had a mild case and their heads never even itched.) But also know that the public schools are having trouble with lice right now so it would probably be a good idea to check heads anyway.

About one year ago: Classy Rhubarb Pie and Cream Cheese Pastry