Tasty Tuesday, bring on the yum!

Today is going to be a whirlwind of finalizing homeschooling portfolios and nailing down an end-of-year evaluation with kid #1's evaluator (a mother of 10, who is super awesome with managing to be flexible with the times available for evaluations), laundry blitz, emergency trips to the dry cleaner where I will need to beg and plead for things to be cleaned in time for my husband's trip to his grandmother's funeral, and then an impromptu trip to the grocery store to load up on the week's necessities with all four kids in tow.*  This, of course, means I have to think fast about the coming week's meal plan and take quick (read: inaccurate and pretty sloppy) inventory of our food situation so I know what to buy within our budget.

Even still, I insist on making a dinner without the invasion of processed foods.  Some days, these feel impossibly incongruous, but I can't fall back on ordering out/driving thru/invading the freezer section of the grocery store.  It's better for our health and our budget to keep the ingredients simple and pure.

Believe it or not, some things can be put together quickly if things are already prepared.  For example, we buy dry beans and soak them in water and raw cider vinegar (they won't give you gas that way!) because it's more economical and I know exactly how the beans go from dried to ready-to-use.  I'm not SUCH a food snob that I won't use canned beans in a pinch, so this will obviously be a recipe that can be altered and substituted to suit individual tastes.  And I love using homemade yogurt when recipes call for sour cream.  It's addictive to make your own yogurt, especially since it's so much cheaper to do it and it buys so much peace of mind!

Because preparation takes about 10 minutes (if you don't include time spent preparing the ingredients like beans and peppers and yogurt, of course), chili is a great way to make sure a well-rounded meal makes it to the table.  And if you remember in time (unlike yours truly today, derp derp derp), it can be tossed in the crock pot and forgotten until dinner time.

So, without further ado:

WHITE CHILI - makes 7 servings


                      Photo source

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1 medium onion, chopped

1 tablespoon fresh garlic, minced

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 cups (or 2 cans, 15-1/2 ounces each) great northern beans, rinsed and drained

2 cups chicken broth

4-6 fire roasted green chiles, skinned and chopped (or 2 cans, 4 ounces each, chopped green chilies)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup sour cream or plain yogurt

Optional additions: corn, red peppers, fried onions, whatever makes you happy

In a large saucepan, saute the chicken, onion and garlic powder in oil until chicken is no longer pink.

Add the beans, broth, chilies and seasonings. Bring to a boil. 

Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 30minutes.  Stir occasionally. 

Remove from heat and stir in the sour cream or yogurt.  

Optional: add a half cup of cream.  I like mine thick, so I omit that.

Enjoy!

*I feel like a complete pansy complaining about taking my four kids to the grocery store, especially in the possible company of moms of 5, 6, 7, 10, 15 kids, but on days like today, it may as well be 15 kids.

Monday's Meme and other news.

Because it's so true...

And some follow-up news:

I didn't post on Saturday because we got the sad news that my husband's grandmother had passed away.  It was not a surprise in the least, but it was still hard to take.  She had an amazing life and she and her husband were the biggest reasons I so quickly fell in love with my husband's family.  And where concern for her failing health once occupied my husband's thoughts, they turned quickly to his father and how he was going to handle it.  The day after my father-in-law's birthday, almost a year after he lost his father, he lost his mother.  His Father's Day this year will likely be spent burying her.  My heart breaks for him and his sister.

The rest of our week will be spent finalizing travel plans to get my husband out for the funeral.  Blogging may be spotty until things smooth out.

Thursday's Thoughts: Meeting Today's Goals.

I won't be blogging tomorrow.  It will be my 10th wedding anniversary, so I will be drilling the kids on what will be considered appropriate behavior for when the babysitter is here.

Tomorrow evening, the mister and I will head out to a Mediterranean vegetarian dinner (we're meatless on Fridays), where I plan to have wine AND dessert.  Then we'll catch a movie.  It is the tried-and-true, good old fashioned American date formula.  We do it once a year if we're lucky, so I am excited.

All of this brings me to today's goals.  I plan to employ the kids to help me clean the entire house, top to bottom.  We got a decent amount of cleaning done a few days ago in their rooms and the bathrooms, but the living room and kitchen need some intense attention.  Since the kids are great at the more superficial stuff (loading and unloading the dishwasher, sweeping, mopping, picking up toys), I'll be able to focus more on the deep cleaning things.

Giving our house this kind of attention, sadly, is usually a holidays/special occasion/mommy meltdown kind of event.

Every time I do this, in my head I swear up and down that we're going to do daily picking up and chores that will keep the place lovely and peaceful, which leaved Saturdays open for more intense cleaning, made LESS intense because the week's cleaning went so well.  At its longest, this has lasted for four days.  The kids would pick up the living room before going to their rooms for the evening, then they'd pick up their rooms before going to bed.  But once I or my husband was too tired to enforce it, the whole thing would fall apart.

I have to remind myself that they ARE kids.  They are constantly and consistently messy.  I have to celebrate their creative processes and their learning through their playing.  But I also need to strike a balance between that and the responsibility of keeping a clean living space, respect for property, and expectations for the bare minimum when it comes to pulling their weight.  Therein lies my failure, and it is entirely mine.  The way things are now, it's more of a pendulum process: messy is awesome, until it's time for things to be super-duper clean.

Well, the one thing that stuck in my head from when I was a kid was the "one end to the other" approach.  My mom usually said it in the context of clearing the kitchen counters, but when I apply it more broadly (to the whole house), sometimes things just get done.  Whatever is still in my face by the time I hit the back door usually ends up in a donation bag.

One of these days, I'll make "one end to the other" a daily habit and that will turn my days into more peaceful and serene moments.  Until then, the pendulum is in full swing and it's cleaning time.

Cue the doomsday music. ;-)

Wednesday's Window

Wednesday's Window is a bit of a mash up.

I saw this cute idea on Pinterest for framing pictures and a calendar on your fridge:

from heart-2-home.com

I loved it and wanted to put it into action on our fridge.  After all, I needed a place for our calendar to be more of a focal point in my unending quest to be more timely and organized.  Opting for bright, cheery colors, with some frames and adhesive magnetic strips, my fridge now looks like this:

Now my weekly and monthly events are in an ideal place and some art and photos are framed nicely.  With such an orderly display, how could this possibly be a window into my reality?  Because, while I was focused on this one rather insignificant corner of the house, the rest of the kitchen continued to look like this:

Welcome to my house! :-)

Tasty Tuesday

As I mentioned is the last post, Tuesdays are set aside for recipes.  

One of my favorites comes from Creme de Colorado, a cookbook my mother gave me when I got married.  It's easy peasy and versatile enough to substitute/add/subtract whatever your heart desires.

Chicken Scampi
4-6 servings

What you'll need:

half cup of butter
quarter cup of olive oil
quarter cup finely chopped green onions
one tablespoon of minced garlic
juice of one lemon or generous splash of white wine
two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast cut into half-inch pieces
one teaspoon of salt
half a teaspoon of ground black pepper
quarter cup of fresh minced parsley
one tomato, chopped

pasta, gnocchi, rice, quinoa, egg noodles, or whatever you want to serve the scampi over

What to do:

In a skillet, heat the olive oil and butter together.  Sauté the green onions and garlic for about a minute, then add lemon juice or wine, the chicken pieces, salt, pepper, and parsley.  Continue cooking, stirring continuously for 5-8 minutes until the chicken is done.  Turn off the heat and add the chopped tomatoes, stirring them into the mix so that they warm through.  Serve over pasta, rice, etc.

Notes:
I love adding seasonal veggies to this dish, tossing in a cup of sliced zucchini, summer squash, eggplant, or make it vegan by omitting the butter and using chopped fresh cauliflower instead of chicken.  My mom likes to omit the butter and cut down the amount of olive oil to make it low fat, or using chicken broth instead of oil for sautéing.  It is really easy to tweak to suit your personal preferences.  And it's blessedly quick to throw together.  From prep to finished product, I doubt you'll spend 30 minutes making it happen, and it's free of processed junk.  Well, depending on the base grain you choose, of course.  It pairs beautifully with dry-ish white wines and spring greens tossed salad.  

Want a painfully easy vinaigrette for the salad?  Whisk together a half-tablespoon of seasoned salt (I prefer Jane's Crazy Mixed Up Salt), a quarter cup of olive oil, and an eighth cup of your vinegar of choice (balsamic or raw apple cider vinegar are our favorites).  Taste it and adjust the oil/vinegar/spice ratio to suit your personal tastes.

I have made plans!

The best laid plans of Mice and Men
oft go awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
             -Robert Burns

It isn’t very likely that I will blog every day.  I do have children to raise and educate, a house that (did I mention this?) is in constant disarray, and life to live in the cracks of a full schedule.  I will try to keep a formulaic stream of something going, just to practice some form of organized planning.  If I’m anything, it’s insanely disorganized, so I need to start somewhere, right?  Right?!

Monday seems like a good day to share my favorite meme from around the internet.  It will likely apply to my mental state of mind or the physical state of affairs in the home.  Monday’s Meme it is!

Tuesdays, which are the most common night for Taco Tuesdays in the American home (don’t ask me for the stats, because I totally made that up), I think I’ll share a recipe that works when the schedule is otherwise chock full of the crazies.  Tasty Tuesdays, suit up!

I do intend to share real windows into my life.  Wednesday’s Window will feature a picture taken within the previous week that chronicles the various adventures we have as a family.  Or, like I said, maybe before/after shots of a place in the home that finally got the attention it needed, just so I can look back and think, "Yes, Meghann, it IS possible!"

Thursday will be a day to just talk about stuff.  I’ll yackity-yack my thoughts about politics, religion, cloth vs. disposables, homeschooling triumphs and woes, and everything else under the sun.  Thursday’s Thoughts sounds about right.

Friday will be a toss-up between the odd craft that managed to make it through to completion or tips/tricks to surviving homemaking on the cheap.  This is more to keep me accountable to a schedule and budget, but if you find it helpful, then we all win.  Fashion Friday or Frugal Friday is set, then.

Sometimes kids say things and do things that make me question the order of the universe.  I think I will designate Saturdays on this blog to the most notable event during the week that made me just shake my head and question my abilities as a parent.  Hold on to your butts for Saturday’s Sayings.

Sundays will not have an entry.

Soak up all of that delicious lameness.   

Crafts, kids, and cops: a rambling slice of our reality.

I’m crafty.

Well, let me clarify: I love planning and daydreaming about all the crafty stuff that I want to someday do. 

Pinterest is a black hole of my time and attention.  I have a tremendous love-hate relationship with that website.  I have the entire interior of our house worked out, my daughter’s wardrobe planned to the stitch, a myriad of health and beauty products that I can make from 3 ingredients, and a gourmet menu to last for months on end.

But as soon as I turn around from my marathon of "pinning," I’m delivered a roundhouse kick to the face by reality.  My couch is buried in unfolded laundry, at least one of my kids is half naked (usually the same one who just snacked on coffee grounds and broccoli ends from the compost bowl on the kitchen counter), and it’s already time to make dinner, which means I have to navigate the minefield of Legos and books in the living room to get to the kitchen.  The kitchen is a minefield of grainy mystery stuff underfoot, as well as toys, shoes, and dirty laundry.

The stack of to-do crafts is huge, but I have never, in good conscience, been able to start a project when there is cleaning to be done in the crafting space.  That space is the living room.  And since our living room and our kitchen are practically the same room, I tend to want the kitchen cleaned as well.  You can imagine how often such an event occurs.  And when it does, I want nothing more than to collapse in a heap with a glass of wine and some Mozart (or Mumford) afterwards.

I am disorganized, to put it delicately.  Reality and reason dictates that I’m as guilty of being a human tornado as my kids.  I think this is true for everyone under my roof.  I sometimes tell myself that it isn’t as bad as all that.  I mean, come on, we’re not an episode of Hoarders waiting to happen.  But when a cop knocks on my door because the neighbor called to tell them that a naked kid was throwing buckets of water out of the top window in an effort to melt the snow off of your roof, my house suddenly descends into a reason for CPS to show up and take the kids away.*  So, as you can imagine, all the sewing and scrapbooking and embroidery and crocheting that I want to get done takes a big, fat backseat to our day-to-day scramble to live like we aren’t, in fact, zoo animals.

Once in a while, maybe twice a year, I DO throw my hands in the air with a big mental “EFF THIS SHTUFF!!!” and carve out a spot amongst the mess to sit, dream, and get one project knocked out.  Sometimes it’s enough.

*The cop story is true.  Kid #2 took his shirt off to keep from getting wet while he dumped buckets of water out of the upper window to melt the snow off our porch awning.  It was snowing, so the neighbors thought I was negligent enough to warrant police intervention.  I had the flu and was stupid enough to think I could catch a quick nap while the kids played upstairs quietly.  I should have been more suspicious of the fact that they were uncharacteristically quiet.  The cop wanted to come in, but I explained that I had the flu and he’d better not.  Thank God he agreed, because the house was a complete disaster.  I spent the rest of the afternoon crying and cleaning, feeling miserable about the incident and just feeling miserable overall.  But that cop showing up got my kids to clean diligently and thoroughly without a hint of protest.  And, if anyone was wondering, CPS has not knocked on our door. :-)  Now, whenever a cop drives by the house on patrol or administers a traffic violation on our street, my kids quietly get up and diligently clean the house.  I may invite the cops over for cookies and milk thrice a week so that the kids keep the place picked up. J