The Taste of Freedom

Recently I made a goal to try a new recipe every now and then. I like to keep my goals vague so that when I fail I don't go on a depression-induced Berry Burst Oreo cookie bender. Anyway, one of this week's new recipes was for Yellow Curry a la Benja Thai Garden.

The recipe called for two teaspoons of fish sauce. Behold, the only size bottle of fish sauce available at the Asian grocery store:

It's in the door of my fridge now, where it will remain until one of my children discovers my hidden bottle of Thai "root beer." That will be fun.

I was hesitant to make yellow curry at home. I've only ever eaten it on dates with DJ or on girls-night-out with my sisters-in-law, sans children. I've said before that yellow curry "tastes like freedom" because I've never once been interrupted from eating it by someone who wants me to cut their food, change their diaper, or wipe food off of their face. It's like, every time I take my first bite of yellow curry I hear faint ukulele music, feel the trade winds blowing, and I'm sitting on a beach somewhere TOTALLY ALONE. Just me and my curry. And someone mysteriously scratching my back, even though I'm TOTALLY ALONE.

It's that good.

You can see why I finally gave in and made it. Here's Macey checking out my big double batch:

Here's the recipe, for those who are interested in complete and utter happiness:

1/4 cup yellow curry paste
2-14 oz. cans coconut milk
2 large chicken breasts, chopped
4 potatoes, sliced
1 large onion, chopped
2 cups frozen stir fry vegetables (this is absolutely not an authentic Thai ingredient; I went with Great Value brand)
2 teaspoons fish sauce
1-2 teaspoons sugar

In a big pot, saute curry paste in a little vegetable oil until your kitchen smells exactly like the Asian grocery store. Stir in chicken and cook until done. Add remaining ingredients, cover, and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Serve over steamed jasmine rice.

Chock-dee-na!

(That's how you say "good luck" in Thai phonetically. Thanks, Google. And in case you find yourself in a bind: "Where is the toilet?"--"hxngna pi thaang hin?" For real.)

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, eh?

Happy belated Canadian Thanksgiving, everyone! And you thought I forgot! I wouldn't forget. We celebrated Thanksgiving with our northern neighbours this year, but between Pinterest, my selection of silly LDS fiction, and thinking about folding my laundry I haven't had a minute to report about it until today.

The mass text I sent to my in-laws said this: "We are BBQing Monday at 6:00 to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving. Everyone's invited. Practice your accent and dress like a Canadian." I forgot to dress like a Canadian. Or to be more accurate, I don't own any beanies. And the only accent I can pull off includes me saying "eh?" after everything. But, oh...how we partied.

I'm unsure what constitutes a traditional Canadian Thanksgiving, but I figured it would involve these things:

...and family:

...and a selection of barbecued meats:

...because nothing says "Canadian harvest celebration" like a bunch of Americans barbecuing hot dogs and wearing shorts when it's eighty-five degrees in October. Good times, eh?

I have this calendar that reminds me of the national holidays of nearly every foreign country, so I have an excuse to party on almost a daily basis. Today: Día de la Raza (Mexico). I don't know WHY we're celebrating, but mark my words: there will be cookies. And possibly a $2 meal deal from Taco Bell.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

slow news week? um, yeah.

This has been the week of making stuff. I have this insatiable appetite for painting and sewing and baking, on the condition that whatever project I start must be completed within three hours and require minimal craftiness skills. Anyway...here are a few of my creations:

Pillow covers made from mismatched fabric remnants and a little frame that I repainted and turned into a chalkboard. I gotta get rid of that chalkboard paint. I'm up to my ears in homemade chalkboards.

Next, I experimented with microwaving bacon:

Who knew that microwaving bacon carried with it the risk/excitement of exploding dishes? Not I. I should mention that that was not my plate. Do you guys have dishes like this? Foreign dinnerware that mysteriously appears amongst your other dishes? I apologize if that was your plate. I actually quite liked it. It was my go-to microwaving plate because it didn't get scorching hot. I guess the bacon pushed it over the edge. Rest in peace, plate. You were a good dish.

[Speaking of bacon, a few nights ago I decided to play a little game to see how well I know my offspring. I asked them a random list of their favorites--color, food, movie, animal, book, et cetera. I tried to predict their responses in my mind before they answered. Ugh, FALL. Anyway, I asked Olivia her favorite animal (which is a two-way tie between sheep and kitties, for the record) and after thinking for a second she asked, "Mom, which animal is bacon?" Heh heh. That apple didn't fall too far from the DJ tree...]

I also made this face:

I pulled that face just for my friend Marie. You're welcome, Marie. Voluntary public humiliation is a mark of true friendship. Unlike INVOLUNTARY public humiliation:

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

de-funking

Is anyone else really bummed that the satellite didn't crash land in southern Utah? I thought for sure it would. Psht. NASA.

Anyway, what's new with you guys this week? Good news! I think I'm pulling out of that funky funk I've been in these past few weeks. For future reference (in case you or I find ourselves in another slump) these have been the most helpful rungs in my de-funking ladder:

1. President Uchtdorf. I'm too lazy to find the exact quotes online, but in my notes (neeeerd!) I wrote "be thankful for small successes--God notices them" and "everyone has strengths and weaknesses--stop punishing yourself" in large, underlined letters. Let's take a minute and thank heaven for President Uchtdorf, huh? He has his finger on the pulse of your average Mormon mom, that's for sure. Out of respect, I also drew this in my notes:

2. I had an opportunity to scratch my creative itch (without having to bare a child) thusly:

I also learned something important about refinishing furniture. It's a lot like running in that the entire time you're doing it you're thinking "I hate this! Why am I doing this to myself?!" but when you're done you think, "That was FUN! Let's do it again!"

3. My children. They are weird, they smell like puppies sometimes, and one of them (you know who you are) still wears a diaper, but they bring me a lot of happiness:

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Hi. I'm Tonje.

I wash my laundry and then I wait a week to fold it. If you follow the same laundry schedule I do, you will have noticed that somewhere around day three, laundry congeals and conforms to the shape of your hamper.

Heads up, on day nine your laundry will crawl out the door, hitchhike south on I-15, and get a job at the Bloomington Walmart, where it will provide mediocre customer service.

For the past few weeks I've been a really bad housewife. I enjoy my job as a mom. Sure, the labor is menial, the salary is nonexistent, and the hours are ridiculous, but I get to MAKE PEOPLE. I mean, come on!

It's the housewife part of my job that I've shirked lately.

Up until two or three weeks ago, I found quite a bit of satisfaction in running my home. I usually enjoy having a tidy house, planning and cooking meals, and being able to boss everyone around. Not lately. Lately I find myself asking questions like this aloud: "What's that on the carpet? A cockroach? Or a really old olive? Do I care?" And we've covered the laundry situation.

Somehow the fire under me has been snuffed out. Am I having a mid-life crisis?! AM I GOING TO DIE WHEN I'M 62?!?! Maybe I need a new hobby. Maybe I need give more service. Maybe I need to be more grateful.

One thing's for dang sure, I need to act fast before I turn into this lady:



(If you're like me and you rarely click on these things, allow me to offer you some incentive in the form of bribery: I will personally bake, decorate, and deliver the cake of your choice if you can name the initial on the white-hatted gangsta rapper's giant necklace at 1:51 AND be the first to mention it in a comment. Yes, this is a test.)

I saw this video over the summer and filed it away in my mind under "Things That Are Blog Worthy" and then immediately forgot about it because I accidentally misfiled it under "Things That Are Not Dorky" and I never open that mental file, obviously. But this weirdo Norwegian lady popped into my mind this week.

Eight years ago I made the decision to be a housewife. Actually, if I'm being honest, I made that decision a long time ago....

I've kind of always wanted to be a "crappy housewife," as Tonje so eloquently puts it. So what's my dealio? I need to find some motivation, I think.

Rewatching that spectacle of a video is actually quite inspiring. If I choose to abandon housewifery, this is my other option? A nearly abandoned discotheque at what appears to be three o'clock in the afternoon? I'm suddenly looking forward to scrubbing my toilets.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Dum Dum Doctors

I'm having a hard time getting my creative juices flowing, or any of my juices for that matter. I'm tired. It all started last night.....

{{{entering Saved By The Bell-type flashback sequence}}}

We went to my sister-in-law's house for mango sticky rice. Also for the company, but the mango sticky rice was the main thing. As groups of small children are wont to do, there was quite a bit of noise and rough-housing between my four children and her...one. It really wasn't ONLY my kids making the noise, but I digress. At one point someone produced two large inflated bouncy balls that I'm sure were manufactured for the purpose of an adult using them to sculpt their abs. Our children used them for the purpose of rolling face-first onto the carpet.

So consumed was I in the enjoyment of my mango sticky rice that I didn't see when Tess, apparently, rolled face-first into a tangled wad of children.  She screamed and cried. She refused to move her left arm. She refused to be soothed by my singing "Leafy Treetops" or my knock knock jokes. That's when I knew it was serious.

Fast forward two hours. DJ took Tess to Instacare whose motto is, "We'll pop your kid's bones back together so you don't have to!....for a small fee..." where he discovered that Tess had dislocated her elbow. The doctor popped it back in, it popped back out again, he popped it back in again, he gave Tess a Dum Dum, and DJ brought her home. She was still crying and refusing to use her arm when she got home, but we figured she was just being dramatic, so we spanked her and sent her to bed so that we could watch Smallville.

Not really.

In reality we were up most of the night with her, trying to pop her elbow back together the way the Dum Dum doctor showed my husband. She wimpered. She screamed. She cried herself to sleep a few times. At two in the morning DJ searched "how to pop an elbow back together" on YouTube. The only thing the videos resulted in was me getting nauseous.

Finally, the sun came up. Tess still wore her yellow Sunday dress, which was soaked in purple children's ibuprofen by that point. Her scrawny little arm just hung there like a ventriloquist doll arm, only less weird. I immediately drove her to our doctor, who is actually a physician's assistant, but it's okay because he's witty and has the drawer full of Dum Dums.

He popped her elbow back together and outfitted her with the smallest sling possible by today's technological standards. In my exhausted daze I mentioned offhandedly that the YouTube videos weren't at all helpful. This got a good laugh from the doctor who cracked some kind of "I got my medical degree from YouTube" joke. Like I said, witty. Usually in circumstances such as this I would respond by demanding my doctor's home phone number so that I could call in the event of another 2 AM not-quite-emergency-room-worthy moment, but he hadn't given us the Dum Dums yet.

He told me to leave the sling on Tess for 48 hours to give her elbow a chance to rest before she pops it back out again. "Looks like she's going to be wearing that dress a little while longer!" was his parting shot after he gave Tess her Dum Dums, and with a flurry of white lab coat and antiseptic he was gone.

Tess was happy.

In fact, she was riding such a Dum Dum high that it was hard for me to get a clear picture of her.

{{{Returning from Saved By The Bell flashback}}}

Now, Tess is catching up from her all nighter.

I'm so grateful that Tess is happy again I don't even care that her dress is layered with ibuprofen, ketchup, Dum Dum goo, and swingset grime and I can't take it off of her until tomorrow.

Yes I do.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Monday Monday...dah daaaah, dah dah-dah dah...

Has it really been two weeks? Did you grow out a beard while I was gone? Read the Old Testament? Plant and harvest a crop of zucchini? Are you anxious to hear about our adventures? Since it's been so long, I will kindly reconstruct the events of the past two weeks in numerical order. I'm SO kind.
1. DJ came home from Colorado. There was much rejoicing.
2. The next day we drove to Logan, Utah to attend the blessing of my niece, Jamma Jammer Jamie Astrid Alfred. The blessing was eloquent, the luncheon was pink pork, and I left without helping with the dishes because I am a TOTAL DORK.
3. The next day was Labor Day and we had a picnic in Pine Valley.

4. A few days later this spider crawled up my husband's leg as we snuggled upon the Lovesac:

. I named him Harry. And then I sprayed him with half a can of Raid and flushed him down the toilet.
5. The next day, we decided to exact our revenge upon Nature by camping at Yankee Meadows.

6. The next day was Marianne's baby shower. My assignment was cake. I accepted the assignment gladly, since I figured my other options were things like making people race to drink lemonade out of baby bottles or being pregnant.

7. The next day was September 11th. We watched YouTube videos of the attacks. I cried about it all over again. In case you haven't caught on yet, I avoid discussing painful reality on this blog. Moving right along...
8. That brings us to the present. See? You didn't miss much. Hairy Spider of Doom, campfire, Supercake. Tune in next time, I plan on unearthing some embarrassing childhood photos and revealing the secret to a happy, fulfilling life. Or it'll be another recipe and dumb story. Only time will tell.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

a little yin with our yang

Bear with me, we have a lot of information to cover today. First, and perhaps most critical, is the following announcement:

WE ARE OUT OF SALSA.

It's bound to happen when you eat salsa for every meal.

This started as MY bowl of salsa, by the way.

And then Chancho joined in. Yes, he IS sitting on the table. I also let him run in the street and listen to alternative music. I'm not a very good mom. Fortunately, they don't require licensing. And by "they" I mean the same people who require a license for driving trucks and getting married.

I'm trying to get the hankering for salsa out of my system before DJ comes home from Colorado. The last time he left me alone I ate a quart of salsa single-mouthedly in two days. He came home at two in the morning, crawled into bed, sniffed, and said, "What's that SMELL?!" (Did you know that I sleep with my mouth open? I do. I hate it, especially since I heard that statistic about how many spiders the average person eats during sleep in their lifetime.)

I want to share the recipe, but I feel like I should get permission from my cousin-in-law, Blake, who invented it. Ah, what the hey! He lives in Nevada, like he would drive all the way up here to pick a fight about recipe rights. Even if he did, he could never withstand my kung fu salsa breath. Here it is:

Blake's Salsa
2 cans Mexican-style stewed tomatoes
4 green onions
2 cloves garlic
1/2 a bunch of cilantro
1 serrano chile
1 jalapeno
Put everything in a blender, push the button, and vee-oh-lay! Salsa!

Because we need a little yin with our yang, I'm still pumping my family full of green smoothies. My mom visited yesterday and was so completely weirded out by them that she took pictures. Lots of pictures.




DJ just called and said that he might come home this week. I really miss him and his "I don't give a crap about social norms" attitude.

The funny thing about DJ is that, without consulting me, he places bids at silent auctions for sports memorabilia that I don't even care about and then uses my cell phone as the contact number. AND THEN HE WINS. And then when I ask him about it, he says "I didn't think I'd win!" like it's a prize or something. Wait...that isn't funny at all. I gotta get that boy home.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Salsaaaah!

Things are weird these days. DJ is still in Colorado. He'll probably be there for another couple of weeks. (Dear Potential Prowlers or Rapists, I sleep with a shotgun, my cell phone, and a really heavy flashlight. Plus, I have disarmingly potent salsa breath. Think again. Sincerely, Elise)

On the bright side, this weekend I found 22 Babysitter's Club books in MINT CONDITION at a yard sale. When I was nine I wanted to be Claudia Kishi. I wanted it all: the rad clothes, the junk food stashed around the bedroom, the Japanese heritage. To this day I dream of being Asian. I'm excited to share this important part of my childhood with my daughters.

We've been eating a lot of salsa these days.

I got this recipe from my sister-in-law, who got the recipe from my husband's cousin, Blake. It is delectable. This salsa has RUINED ME for every other salsa. I wake up thinking about it. Tess loves it, too. I give her a little bowl with a little pile of tortilla chips. She dips her chip, licks it off, her eyes water, she goes "aaaaah!" and then repeats the process. With the same chip.

And finally, lest you think I only take pictures of inanimate objects:

This is Tess's first taste of I Can't Believe They're Not Chicharrones (my in-laws got these from the Latin grocery store and brought them to a family function). She used the same technique with the fake chicharrones as she uses with the salsa. I'm thinking Tess inherited a little something from her Mexican great-grandma.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

NOT a post about what's wrong with Barbies...

...today we're focusing on the positive. Unfortunately, Luckily, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Barbie aisle this weekend. These are my findings.

Rock Hudson.


There would be a Rock Hudson Barbie. I suspect that when the last of the StuffMart employees go home, little Rock Hudson sneaks out of his box to go hang out with all of the Princess Charm School Ken dolls. Or this guy....

Sweet Talkin' Ultimate Boyfriend Ken:


Where do I even start? "YOU make me talk!" Yeah, that's pretty much how it works. "Record your voice - I say it back in mine!" If only it were so easy. "TRY ME" Bah ha ha ha ha!

It appears that the Mattel people are making strides toward more lifelike dolls. Next I'd like to see "Fourth C-section Barbie" and "Snores Super Loud Ken."

The reason I spent so much time in the Barbie aisle is because Olivia turned six on Saturday. She wanted a Barbie cake. How do you make a Barbie cake? Make a pink cake, slap a Barbie on it, ta-flipping-da! Barbie cake!



I sure love my Livie Livie Lou Fuss Fuss....


Obviously. I can't think of many people in this world for whom I would spend an afternoon in the Barbie aisle.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4