• The kind of day

    April 9, 2009

    This has been the kind of day where you wake up and then, suddenly, it’s 1:04 in the afternoon and you haven’t even washed your face yet.

    Maybe you don’t have days like that. Maybe you always rise promptly at six o’clock, shower and dress and do fifty stomach scrunches, eat a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with flax seeds while reading the Bible first, paper second, wash and dry your bowl and spoon, and then, because it’s seven o’clock, you wake the children and step into your day, smiling serenely, deodorant applied and bra fastened securely.

    I’m not quite that organized. I do a lurchy dance most mornings: I attempt to hit the ground running, but instead end up crashing into husband, kids, and furniture, at least until the coffee I’ve been greedily slurping enters my blood stream. Then I hit my stride, running a straight race, even though I never washed my face and I neglected to eat breakfast, remembering only when I started to get the shakes, and then I quickly, before getting distracted again, wolf down a bowl of French chocolate granola and keep right on running.

    Despite my unwashed face, I still managed to do a whole lot of other stuff this morning, such as straining and jar-ing the creme fraiche, mixing up and shaping a batch of bagels, boiling and baking the bagels I made yesterday, creating and baking sourdough hot cross buns, making a crockpot full of chili, helping Yo-Yo with his school work, baking a batch and a half of Dutch Puff for breakfast (Yo-Yo mixed it up the night before—a math lesson, though I didn’t call it that), and boiling eggs for Easter. I also yakked a mile a minute to some friends, one shoulder elevated awkwardly to keep the phone smashed against my ear, while shaping the buns and boiling the bagels and now I have a backache.

    And then it was time to get the kids settled for rest time, and there I was, still in my pjs with scuzzy face and hair…

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  • Coming of age

    April 8, 2009

    This is the season when I want cheeses. I mentioned a long time back that I make cheeses, or rather, that I have occasionally made cheeses. Oddly enough, now is the time when I want to start that little impractical hobby of mine back up again. Bad timing, if you ask me, seeing that I’m soon going to be itching to be outside digging in the dirt and will not have time, or patience, to stand by the stove watching milk curdle.

    It’s also impractical because it makes no sense to make your own cheese if you do not own a cow. Cheese-making evolves out of a need to use up excess buckets of white frothy milk, and I don’t see a single, solitary bucket of milk lurking in the corners of my kitchen. At three-something for a gallon of commercial milk and seven dollars for a gallon of raw milk, not to mention the cultures and rennet and wax and cheese cloth and hours spent, homemade cheeses are almost worth their weight in gold.


    The two wheels of Parmesan that have been curing in my basement came of age, nine months of age, on April first. I had been excited to cut into them but now that the date is here I’m kind of scared. The cheese will probably be moldy inside its red wax casing. It’s much more impressive to say that I have two wheels of Parmesan aging in my basement than to say that I made a couple wheels of Parmesan and they sat in my basement for eleven months, rotting.

    I don’t want to open the cheeses when I’m feeling at all vulnerable or susceptible. If they’re rotten I may need to go back on Lexapro, start running, and cut out coffee. Oof. Now I really don’t want to cut open those cheeses. Just thinking about it makes me want to start popping antidepressants again.

    But, it’s sunny outside, so regardless of my emotional state of being (for the record, in the throes of some wicked PMS), I’m going to break open this cheese. If it’s bad I can just turn tail and run out to the garden to plant the radishes.

    Here’s the cheese. As you can see from the label, I’ve been waiting for a loooong time.


    Now to cut it.


    Um, this is some really hard cheese. Maybe I’ve unwittingly made myself a wheel of Parmesan rind instead of Parmesan cheese. Excuse me while I put the camera down so I can use both hands.

    (Insert much straining and pushing, incredulous, high-pitched laughing, and an unnerving amount of knife-slippage.)

    Still a no-go. This block of cultured milk is tougher than a hunky-lunky pumpkin. Time for my largest, heaviest knife.


    I still can’t do it! This is impossible! Hi-yah!


    Whew. There.


    I’m breathing like I just did fifty push-ups.


    Now for a taste: Chew-chew-chew..gulp.

    Wow! The flavor is, like, excellent, man! Like, like …. Parmesan!


    But wait—the texture isn’t quite right. Oh no! The texture isn’t anything like cheese. It’s like, like …. rubber. Twang-ang-ang.


    Congratulate me, folks. I aged myself a wheel of Rubberized Rind of Parmesan.


    It’s not too bad when paired with hard pretzels. (Work with me here. I have PMS. I must stay positive, or else.) The flavor is really quite good—better than other hard cheeses I’ve turned out—salty and mildly sweet.


    And really, really chewy.

    Oh dear. I think it’s time to go plant the radishes.

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  • An effort

    April 7, 2009

    I’m feeling mentally stodgy and sluggish. My mind isn’t a-simmer with things to write about, but I want to produce something—the chicken-cheese lasagna sitting on the counter waiting to go into the oven wasn’t enough of a creative production, I guess. (Maybe I should announce a game, such as “Incite Mama JJ: The person to suggest the topic that gets her the most fired-up wins.” Then again, that sounds rather dangerous. I don’t think I want to go there.)

    In an effort to get my mental juices a-flowin’, I perused the chapters of our book, looking for some inspiration. The chapter on marital conflict holds all sorts of juicy stories, but they are long (we fight a lot) and detailed (to be fair, all sides must be duly expounded upon), making it rather difficult to find a post-appropriate excerpt. However, I did pick out one of the shorter stories to share. Maybe I’ll dig into the bigger picture later.

    So, in regards to marriage…

    ***************************************

    Mr. Handsome and I have at various times sought outside help. Before our engagement we met with two people from my congregation to ask if they saw any red flags in our relationship. None? Okay then! On to premarital counseling and the wedding!

    Off and on, since then, we have gone for counseling. Nothing earth-shattering has ever resulted from the sessions, though I always secretly hope that the counselor will wave a magic wand and say, “Sha-zam! This is The Problem and this is The Fix!” But a third person’s observations of our interactions forces us to articulate our thoughts and challenge each other in a more civil fashion than what usually happens when we’re in our home, out of sight of critical eyes.

    We’ve also resorted to pop psychology from books and magazines. In one of those articles (I don’t remember which magazine I found it in) I read about a marriage covenant, so I got Mr. Handsome to sit down with me to outline our goals for our relationship so that we would have something to refer to when we had to make an important decision. Mr. Handsome was grumpy about the whole thing, but I persisted, typing up the results and sticking the paper to our fridge.

    I’ve also read a book about love languages, the different ways that people give and receive love. Several months ago I proposed to Mr. Handsome that for one week we try to love the other person in the ways they want to be loved, not how we think they should be loved. Much to my disgust, he declined. “I don’t know how you want to be loved, and I don’t know what I want.”

    “Bullcrap!” I yelled. But he wouldn’t budge.

    This past weekend I proposed it again—“what do you have to lose, huh?”—and to my delight he agreed. We even shook on it. So from Saturday night at midnight till this Saturday night at midnight I am to think of what he needs and wants, anticipate him, and do everything in my power to make him happy.

    But for me, the converse is much more difficult. How can I let go of my expectations and have faith that he will rise above his chronic self-absorption, as mom so nicely describes it, to take care of me?

    Last night, coming home late, I caught myself wanting to complain about the unswept floor. He usually cleans it if I’m gone, and often when I’m not. Let it go, I chided myself. Just trust him. However, I wasn’t able to completely refrain and scrutinized the floorboards a little too pointedly (nagging dies hard). He noticed, but instead of making a snide comment or ignoring me, he said cheerfully, “Don’t worry, I’m going to sweep in a minute.” The communication was dizzying! Here was my knight in shining armor, broom in hand, fighting for my needs. I nearly swooned.

    So maybe this would be a good new rule: just love your mate in his lingo.

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