Living-Deliberately.com

Like I said, this is Pimento Cheese in it’s heavenly body. Ya gotta try it…..

Green Chile Pimento Cheese (Southern Living, March 2001)

2 (8 ounce) blocks extra sharp Cheddar, shredded
1  (8 ounce) block pepper jack cheese, shredded
1 cup mayonnaise
1 (4.5 oz.) can chopped green chiles
1 (4 oz.) jar diced pimento, drained
1 medium poblano chile pepper, seeded and minced
1/4 small sweet onion, minced
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Yield: about 6 cups

She did not include the poblano because of the heat, and she also did not include the onion because she wanted a creamy texture without the crunch. Enjoy!

Her hubby, Randy, recommends spreading this on a burger. We’re having it tomorrow on soft Oatmeal bread or the sweet prairie bread that Horn of Plenty sells around here. And it’s good as a dip for salty kettle chips too! I think it would be fabulous to stuff peppers, hot or mild, in, and ohmyheck..watch out if you then batter and fry ‘em! Put it with crackers or spread onto thick wedges of tomatoes…or wait! Serve it with Fried Green Tomatoes and sweet tea! Oh!!! Must try, must try!

I’m not sure what we’ll do for the fourth this year. I went ahead and planned for a quiet day at home, since that is very likely what we will most want! In the event we opt to hike or something instead, what I planned is pretty packable. The kids’ appetites have lessened lately so my plans reflect that and if you are using my suggestions and have a grill, go ahead and sub out where I roast! If mine were hooked up, that’s what we’d be doing!

Saturday:

BK: Pancakes and Sausage (will go to Farmer’s Market for fresh eggs for Sunday!)

LN: Pimiento Cheese Sandwiches (will post Shannon’s recipe next! She sent it!!!)

DN: Burgers, Milkshakes

LOL…I just noticed how our Saturday menus are usually geared towards FUN only, rather than high nutriton heee hee.

Sunday:

BK: Eggs Benedict and coffee

LN: Roasted eggplant, mushrooms, summer squash and onions in olive oil, served with bagette and a good cheese

DN: Sandwiches

Monday:

BK: French Toast
LN: Hummous and Pita Chips, fruit

DN: Sprouted Lentils with tomatoes in tortilla, fruit

Tuesday:

BK: Granola Bars and yogurt

LN: cheese and fruit

DN: Sloppy Joes, potato salad, cottage cheese and blackberries (picked last week!)

Wednesday:

BK: Cheese toast

LN: PBJ

DN: Hamburger and Mushroom Stroganoff, mashed potatoes, green beans

Thursday:

BK: smoothies

LN: leftovers

DN: Roasted chicken, crostini with white beans, tomatoes, and feta

Friday:

BK: Scrambled eggs and veggies

LN: PBJ

DN: Black Beans and Rice topped with fresh salsa, cheese, and guacamole. Served with a Friday Night Margarita.

Don’t forget your second wind
Sooner or later you’ll feel that momentum kick in
(One more time!)
Don’t forget your second wind
Sooner or later you’ll feel that momentum kick in

Don’t forget your second wind
(You’re only human, ooo-ooo)

From Billy Joel’s Only Human (Second Wind).

Felt it hit my sails yesterday. Woke up ready to have a gameplan. Was someone praying for me? It felt like it! Shut off the Boob-Tube and took the kids to the library. From there we hit a couple of stores and came home with some writing books, math stuff, and fun books that are based on some of their favorite characters (Judy B. Moody and Harry Potter). They plunged into the books, loving freshly sharpened pencils and something cerebral to do. One can only veg to PBS for so long….

I’m reading to them Chew On This, by Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. (I’m too lazy to go find a link to Amazon right now).  Probably not so timely as we have more fast food in our diet than usual with with moving-mayhem currently a part of our existance, but interesting stuff nonetheless.

Today I’ve got tons of paperwork to assemble, a menu to make and food to shop for, and a house to clean. Who knows when we’re actually moving?!? Irony of ironies, all my little whispered perphery prayers/dreams are happening: I”m going to see the fullness of my garden, since we’ll be here past the end of this month, maybe all the way into the next. Yesterday sunflowers bloomed and there a few full ears of corn. Tomatoes are getting a slow start but some come in every day. David can stay at the local UPS and get us over the insurance hump, helping with, and maybe even eliminating, the problem of the 63 days. I’m probably going to be able to build my chicken house in small, more manageable sections, since they are going to need bigger space before the move. I was getting a bit nervous about my ability to construct the big thing at one time.

So today I”m a redhed with a mission. We’ve got a new plan for conflict resolution that seems to be a big improvement and may help greatly on our goal of greater affection between siblings. We’ll buckle in and adjust to this pattern of not having meal times together or only seeing dad on the weekends; it’s not going anywhere for awhile. Might as well establish a routine on the front side of it rather than constantly watching the clock and wishing every day that it would be different. That takes more than a little faith: my tendancy is to fight against what I know is hurting our unity and wholeness rather than trust that it is only for a season. But the trusting is what makes it less damaging; there is less disruption and turmoil.

Today I’m going to be the breeze. I’m going to come and go and bend and flex and be refreshing.  I won’t blow too strongly and I won’t be absent and let things stagnate. I’m only human…ooo oooo ooo

It changed again. Finance guy: Fired. Closing appointment tomorrow: cancelled. Moving this weekend: obnoxiously unlikely. Insanity level: through the roof. Deer-In-The-Headlight expressions: present.

There actually may be some hope in the form of the financer (?) that we had origionally planned to go with before we hired Charismatic Guy Who Promised to Save The Day But Who Really Has An Anger Problem and Lies A Lot. Maybe she can pull something out of the hat in a week. We’ll see.

It’s all how you look at it right? I got two gloriously orange tomatoes from my garden today and 5 sweet little yellow pear tomatoes. Two of my kids are in bed asleep and there is dinner waiting with fresh basil from the garden as well. The one who had surgery is tearing through the house is a purple gown, being Super Hero of the Living Room, and stopping to take bites from a triple decker roast beef sandwich. The oldest one is out having quiet time to himself out on the swing and Hubby Dearest is on his way home.

I could use an Anne of Green Gables fix tonight, where she says, “Tomorrow is fresh and new, with no mistakes.” Or something like that. Like I said, I need reminding

• yesterday morning, BC (before coffee), R pulled down the fryer full of oil (cold thank God) all over the kitchen floor. He screamed as a golden lake of thick fluid smelling of old french fries surrounded his ankles and spread over the white grey vinyl. I stood there for a long incredulous moment, wondering how in the world to clean it up. It came of skin nicely, vinyl not so nice. After I had a fleeting image in my head of an elementary school janitor cleaning up some kid’s puke with sawdust sprinkled on it I got out my cornmeal and covered the oil. Two rolls of paper towel, half a bag of cornmeal, and half a bottle of multi-purpose cleaner later it was up.

Celia came in and said, “Well Mom. Be glad. At least the floor is white again.”

• We had a beautiful, soul-restoring day yesterday, picking gobs of suculent blackberries. More on that later. We picked with friends, one of whom is definitely every bit as active as Andrew, if not more at times. He certainly knows how to find loopholes in the law better! There was a pen of goats not far from where we were picking and when the boys got bored with trying to find berries (we were unknowingly on the wrong row) they wanted to go play with those goats.

Our little friend asked his mom, “Can we go play?!”

She answered, “Yes but stay away from the cows!”

A said, “they’re goats, not cows!”

She quickly fired back, “You may not go into the pen of any living creature and do

not feed them!” (or something like that, knowing, that within minutes we’d soon

have kids that were wrestling goats under the rebuttal of, “but mom….you said

to stay away from the cows!”

• The oil wasn’t the end of R’s adventures. Before the day was out he’d sampled the flavors of sunblock and motor oil, and had a dried pea seed stuck so far up his right nostril that I had to work his cheek over his sinuses to coax it out. Anyone want to try and figure out why his latest joy is taking a bottle of windex and spraying his belly?

• After dropping A and C off to spend the night with friends I took W to get his new
  jammies for surgery, which is a tradition for him. He picked out his Cars 3 piece set and a pack of new socks and after we got in the car he said, “Mom, I just hate myself.”

“What?!?! Why would you say that?!?!” I ask, my mind spinning with therapy

options.

“I just don’t have a truthful life.” said he.

Huh?!?

• On the way to the hospital this morning, in the wee hours when it was still dark, he said, “Mom? Why can’t we see the planets? And why can’t I rollerskate on those rings that go around them?”

• On the way home, still a bit groggy from the anesthesia: “Mom? How O’Clock is it?”

• C, coming home crying of a headache and all poofy from being in a car full of boys, “Mom, can we just not be around that many boys again?”

Me: “What? No…..”

Her: “Well, the 8 year old at least?”

Me: “You know, it would be better to be forgiving. 8 year old boys can be a little

obnoxious sometimes….”

W: “Oh yeah…tell me about it! So can 8 year old GIRLS be a little snobnoxious!”

Surgery went very well. A little bit of diligence to remind the staff on our part, and a little bit of flexibilty on theirs, thrown in with a blessing that there were no reactions, and it all went smoothly. We were home early and he’s felt fine all day. His ears are worse then we knew though. We’ll be doing this routine again in the not-so-far-off future. But he knows the TV was “Too Loud Mom!” and can hear me in a normal tone of voice again (even if he hasn’t yet returned to speaking in one!)

• Our church has a fellowship twice a month; we call it the “Psalm Sing”. Basically we get together at someone’s home, the kids play, we share a light potluck supper, and then we sit and sing together for a few minutes. Usually we are going over the new Psalm and hymn of the month. Our kids practically live for these fellowships, checking the bulletins each week and begging to go even though we’ve almost never missed. It’s a particular joy for our whole family; I love sitting in the back and looking over our church friends gathered and here us all sing together. I like knowing that we have a great, functional, and healthy group. I like seeing women chit chat, men banter, and children frolick. It’s beautiful.
• Beauty of a different kind: Shannon’s Pimento Cheese!!!! OH. MY. GOODNESS. It wasn’t just the sangria talking (though that was absolutely fabulous too!); I really could have sat in a corner by myself and scooped out that whole entire bowl with a big slap-happy grin on my face! Wow! This was pimento cheese in it’s heavenly body, I”m sure. Usually it’s got too much mayo. It’s a bit sloppy. Not spicey enough. Not sharp enough. THIS PImiento Cheese was Sharp. Creamy, not dry, not wet. A perfect bite of spice. It was too late to schmear it all over my hambuger but I delightfully dipped my kettle chips into it. By thirds. Unapologetically; I think many there weren’t sure either A: what it was and B: that they were in the presense of greatness.  See, when food, even simple food, is done WELL, it shines like a thing of true beauty. Who said Pimiento Cheese couldn’t have such great aspirations? I will post the recipe just as soon as Shannon sends it my way.
• On the way home we had a perfect rainbow. It was a totally intact semicircle and every color of the prism was visible. While one child begged to go find the end of it and another sat dumbfounded, we found even the highway a pleasant place to be. Down the road there is a construction site that has the dark red clay open and exposed. And somehow the view to the mountains there is amazing. It will all be blocked by some building soon but for now you can see red clay, with dark green trees, a thin silver-blue line of the river and then periwinkle sky. It glows and pulses in that spot, a place over faster than you glance if you go the speedlimit.
• Today is a day of rain. Non. Stop. Rain. We’ve needed it for weeks so one tries not to complain but it can make a cooped-up family that was suposed to have moved go even more nuts. So we packed it up and headed out to the movies. There was that mist again, that smokey mist sneaking between peaks. I don’t know how I survive driving around, looking everywhere but the road. I can’t believe we LIVE here!!!
• Cars: Long. Cute in the middle. Boring at the beginning and end. Then again, first consider this: I have never, ever gotten the idea of car racing. It seems like it must be the most boring thing in the world, lap after lap of traffic, concrete, heat, noise, blaring lights. YUCK. Methinks the real talent of the drivers is in their attention spans to be able to stay sane, going in a circle like a hyper rat that many times. So….the begining and end of the movie is actual racing and the middle is character driven, and that’s what had my interest. There are some cute jokes and ideas in the illustrations. I was thankful I understood story arc well enough to guage perfectly how much time was left halfway: Our hero still needed to discover the wealth of the ones around him, hit his crisis and humble himself, fulfill his destiny, get the girl,  and save the day. Perfect time to get popcorn for Baby, who didn’t like it after all and preferred instead to run back and forth in the empty last aisle.
• You’ll never beleive what we did next! I still can’t beleive it!!! We went to Walmart to do nothing but hang out. Really. We just wandered around looking at stuff at the stuff-mart and waited for it to be Baby’s nap time. I’m probably the only person who left there without buying anything; I imaged all kinds of suspicious cameras on me as we left, our cart empty. Maybe not.
• A true miracle occurred yesterday. Last week Andrew was accidentally shot in the eye with a pellet gun at close range. We thought it hit the outside of his lid; it was swollen for a few days and red. He squinted more as the week went on but he could see fine and we thought it was going to be just fine. His mood was awful though; by Saturday night he was crying and angry and a total bear. Again, we didn’t think it was his eye; he’d also had his feelings hurt so we thought that was the cause. But Sunday in church, a PELLET CAME OUT OF HIS EYE. A little chess-piece-shaped metal pellet had been wedged inbetween his eyeball and lid this entire time!!! And it never got infected, never cut the skin, never seemed to affect his vision. I can’t imagine how much it hurt,  knowing what it feels like when my little contact lens gets up there. He is like a different kid, saying, “It feels sooo much better Mom”. Well YEAH. I’m just overwhelmed with close a call it was. A hair in a different direction and he could be blind or dead. He must have a posse of angels on him all the time….

Pancakes and Sausage and hot coffee, finally made with the right proportions because David was home to share a pot. Fresh eggs and scones from the Farmer’s Market. Picking cucumbers, green beans, peas, and lettuce from the rain-soaked garden and seeing purple morning glory draping all around. Putting up another 2 qts. of beans and (drum roll) making and canning my first ever Bread and Butter Pickles!!! I’ve wanted to do that for years. Absolutely years!Phone call from sis and a message from Mom. Watching David do chicken chores and work in the yard. Reading the latest issue of Real Simple. Sharing a Harry and David Moose somethingorother bar and being surprised at the depth of the chocolate. Dappled shade and breeze down in the hollow with baby swinging joyously. A card from Celia. A happy boy back from a day hiking with friends. Dinner with friends, spontaneously put together and excellently done! Mexican food makes me happy! Salty Margaritas and Blueberry Crumble and homemade vanilla ice cream. Little boys screeching with excitement. Birthday candles stuck into the dessert and endearing faces singing Happy Birthday, when they didn’t even have to. Sleepy, heavy baby hugging my neck. Night breezes driving home with the windows down. Summer nights, full hearts, blessings over flowing.

The kids are totally over cereal as a breakfast but I still can’t cook an extra meal yet (see moving nightmare below for the “why”) so I chose some different things. I also have no idea what life is going to look like so I kept my planning and forecasting to a minimum; got us through the weekend and the two days I know for sure that can’t incluse closing on our house. Wednesday is W’s surgery so that will be a weird eating day and I’ll figure that out then.

Tonight’s dinner: White bean salsa/salad, mixed with corn, cucumbers from the garden, cheese, basil, lemon juice, olive oil, etc. Served with tortilla chips and margaritas.

Saturday:

BK: Pancakes and Sausage (blessed tradition to the rescue!)

LN: Tacos

DN: Fried Zuchinni, Bicuits and honey, cheese, and whatever else strikes our fancy

Sunday:

BK: Eggs Benedict

LN: Chicken and veggies with ravioli

DN: bringing chips and a Raspberry Pie to the Psalm Sing

Monday:

BK: Cheese Bagels

LN: Roast Beef Sandwiches

DN: Black bean salad with jack cheese and tortillas

Tuesday:

BK: granola bars and hard boiled eggs

LN: sandwiches and fruit

DN: Chicken Salads with avacado wedges and french bread

your insurance agent and your mortgage lender have a shouting match in a crowded room.

An UGLY shouting match.

Closing might be next Thursday. Maybe we’ll move at night now. I don’t think we have next Saturday as an option. On the other hand, we can’t get the truck during the week so maybe it has to be Saturday.

Maybe I’ll go get the stuff to make a margarita.  Sit in the shade and think blank, vaccuous thoughts.  If you find me in the corner rocking back and forth and muttering to myself, chocolate might help

No closing today. Seems Insurance Guy (why did I see this coming?!) didn’t get Important Paper Work to the Proper Authorities in time for our appointment today. There may be an arrangement where we can move in before closing, meaning our plans for tomorrow will be intact but at mid-day Friday we still have No Idea either way.

But wait! There’s more! Included in your Not-Too-Unusual Moving Situation Weekend is a primo, nearly exclusive Insurance Headache! Remember the Small One, now 5, Major Overcomer of Medial Trials and Tribulations? Well he has Pre-Existing Conditions! That means that your new insurance, to go into effect September 1, will not want to cover what he Goes To the Doctor For. UNLESS you get the certificate-thingy that says he’s been insured before. No problem right? Well, from what it looks like now, that certificate-thingy is null and void if he goes 63 days without insurance.  Which, without either: impossible UPS schedule maintained all summer OR incredibly expensive COBRA, he will.

So, pick your poison: Keep UPS job with hours that mean you see your husband/father a few mintues each morning and on Sundays? Find some way to afford COBRA, which probably means keeping second job, which of course would negate the purpose of COBRA in the first place? Keep UPS for a few more days, get the surgery over with, and hope and pray that he’s fine for  YEAR? Or, if UPS can’t work out what they say they would, hope and pray the hearing loss doesn’t continue and you don’t end up with a deaf child thanks to a treatable yet unaffordable condition?

Makes wondering where we’ll hang our hats by weekend’s end seem like a puny concern.

I’ve got stacks of bills to get in the mail, meal planning to do (but for what scenario?!), crabby kids (one of which continues to make blow-guns out of every single tubular object he can find), grocery shopping, laundry, new chick box to get (since they may be in a brooder a whole nother week), some mystery dog came and did his business on my back porch, nothing but TV for the kids because our life is in boxes (unless we go out and spend money which can’t keep happening every single day for cryin’ out loud)….

So, it’s a hairy day. One way or another it will work out. Or, we’ll disconnect our phones and internet and not be able to be reached with problems this weekend. So many scenarios, so many possible solutions. Just rearrange the cards and keep it all straight. A friend used an analogy yesterday: one mango short of a brain smoothie. I feel it sistah.

Deceptive title it is. I don’t know if there will be a favorite quote of the week or not. Or just a random favorite. Or two in a week or once a month….but you get the idea.

And I don’t know why this particular quote struck me as so funny. Maybe it’s because I’m tired or that my skeptical-self gets weary of arguments that suggest history wasn’t manipulated or that much of God remains mystery. But I liked it and here it is:

“I figure creation took as long as it took.”

said by Larry Moffit, editor of a Religion and Spirituality forum  and commenter on a friend’s blog.

This great post on Choosing Home is worth taking a look at. They also recently dealt with women who are first generation christians, trying to raise their children differently than they were raised. Thought-provoking stuff.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.

Like snow flurries and honeysuckle and the first tulips are fireflies in Tennessee to me. We’ll just be sitting there talking, sipping something and maybe sighing in fatigue, and it will catch our eye out in the yard and there’s no choice but to smile. They dance in a swirl, extinguish as abruptly as they ignite, and enchant any who see.

My garden is beautiful. “Stick that feather in my hat”, I grew corn. I grew last night’s salad, I grew pickles that we’ll have in winter. The tomatoes are rippening and my transplants miss their native holes in the ground. I’ll miss seeing how the carrots did most. My friend isn’t moving in after all; my garden will go to a stranger. I’ve already done the letting go and there is so much I want to do in the new house that I’m not even going to do much in the dirt until later this fall, in preparation for spring. Maybe I’ll get some garlic in the ground in enough time.

I want to be done. I want to load it all and lock the door here and turn face forward and uplifted to the future. Bring it on…we’re ready.

The latest issue of Mothering magazine tackles this topic, which is a growing problem among American parents. Who’d of thought?! It’s mostly a problem with parents who don’t even realize that they rarely HOLD their babies. The infant car seat is a great car seat but it’s not a replacement lap or set of arms. It’s not good for an infant’s back or head development to spend hours in one, it’s not good for the parent to be carrying the extra and awkward weight. And it’s no longer unusual for a baby to go from carrier/car seat to bouncey seat, to swing, to crib.

One sad aspect of this in my current environment is that it’s common for me to see an infant spend most all of their public babyhood in a carseat, until they positively exceed the weight limit, and then the mom will expect the baby to sit well on her lap. She may even discipline the toddler for not doing so! But this is first and foremost a child who is unaccustomed to being held for periods of time; the lap is an unfamiliar place.  Imagine being used to sitting in a recliner for large parts of your day and then suddenly expected to sit and sit still on a surface that is alternately bony and lumpy and firm. It would probably take a lot of getting used to!

Sigh. Babies are babies for such a short time. When I look at my older two children, back in the days when I was reading books like Babywise and To Train Up A Child, and I realize how little I held them and how much I attempted to control and “condition” them, it makes me grieve the lost time. The lack of bonding can be improved but it can’t be wholly repaired; you never get those infant days of learning to be held and to trust back again. The parent/child relationship is built by HOLDING, by close communication, by being in each other’s presense with enough quantitative time to develop intuitiveness for one another. It’s that bond that can be built upon later when the discipine and training issues are much more serious, and with a good bond, “training” can even more be a “coming alongside” and lifestyle. The bedrock of communication is already there.

Car seats and lots of baby equipement do make it easier to “manage” having a baby around. They help entertain and sometimes keep safer when mom is busy and can even be a “second pair of hands” in a pinch. But our culture has taken it too far in my humble opinion. Maybe we don’t need to “manage” our babies….we need to mother them.

This morning I had a perfect plate of sunshine…soft yolk and golden buttery sauce and wished I could share a plate with my dad. I’d kind of like to spend a day hitting a movie, watching him snore on the couch, sketch on his ever-present clipboard a New Great Idea, and grilling onion burgers. My dad is the hardest working guy I know but he also has the art of relaxing down to perfection. From him I observed how to really “just be” in every moment, whether it’s a quick mid-morning nap, working hard with sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, or laughing with the guys on the dock. He lives in the moment, not obsessing about the past or worrying about tomorrow. It’s that kind of acceptance of what “is” that allows for unconditional love. He takes people as they are and meets them there. Now if I can take observation and turn it into real adoption……

When David woke up this morning he had cards from the kids and a stained-glass panel I found in an antique store. It’s a combination housewarming gift; he’s so excited about this new house and stained glass is one of his big interests. He was so surprised! I don’t usually do anything more than encourage the kids to make cards. It’s not even big or fancy; just exactly what he would have wanted, one of those times when it was just the right gift. A had written a list of things he appreciated about his Dad and C had made a book/card with her own jokes inside.
So Happy Father’s Day to the men in my life. I love you!