Monthly Archives: October 2013

Super Freekeh

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Today I was in the grocery store, and I noticed something in the grain/ cracker/ cookie/ ethnic food/ chocolate bar/ ice cream topping aisle. Does that seem like a strange combination of goods for one aisle in the grocery store? It does to me too. In any case, my friend and I were looking for quinoa, which is apparently an incredibly elusive ingredient for my old-people Co-Op, and I came across something called Freekeh. It’s super-freek-EH! I have had a loop of that song, plus Le Freak (or, Le FREEK) going through my head for the past couple of hours. I feel immense regret that I didn’t buy it, because although I do not know exactly how one prepares Freekeh, I feel I could have figured it out. What’s for dinner, Mom? Oh, we’re going to get a little FREEK-EH. The jokes could go on forever. Hilarity at the dinner table. Or, hilarity on my part. It’s probable that my children would be less than enthusiastic about my adventuresome culinary ideas.

It turns out that Freekeh is actually just a kind of toasted wheat, which is fairly anti-climatic.

Other semi-freekeh things:

1) Tonight is the first School Council/ Parent Association meeting of the year, and I have just taken my traditional offering of brownies out of the oven. CARAMEL brownies. I have never made such a thing before and possibly won’t ever again, but I have over a litre of caramel sauce in my fridge due to a small kitchen disaster yesterday, and I’m trying to find ways to use it up. This is a teaser for the full post which will be coming up next week over at the Yummy Mummy Club. Let’s just say that I now have more caramel than anyone really needs in their life, and that I keep finding small splotches of stickiness on the countertop, taps, cupboard handles, etc. I don’t even LIKE caramel.On another note, I have a cookbook giveaway going on – if you like baking, this is the book for you!

2) A few weeks ago, I put our decorative scarecrow family into the front garden, which is my traditional way of festively greeting autumn. Every single morning I pull open the living room drapes to let the sun shine in, and every single morning I gasp and have a little heart palpitation because someone is at the window.

If history is any indication, I will probably become used to my little ragged friend in the window once it’s time to take him down and put up the Christmas lights.

3) This is Rosie. She’s “my” scarecrow. The others are named Dummy Jimmy Too Tall, Idiot, and TV. I only named Rosie.

4) I bought a red sweater. I know. I bought it in a moment of passion and now it’s sitting in my drawer like a judgement.

5) After some discussion with my husband, I realized that I am not the romantic one in our relationship. This seems strange to me. And here I thought that not plucking one’s chin or upper lip in the presence of one’s husband was the ultimate in romanticism, but apparently that’s not enough. Well, he knew who I was when he married me, and that is someone who would much rather roll over and fall asleep immediately than engage in pillow talk for hours. Wham, bam, thank you sir.

6) Related: I think “boner” is the funniest word in the English language. If it was socially acceptable I would work it into every single conversation. Alas.

7) A yoga friend said to me the other morning that he wasn’t sure what I was doing on Sunday nights now that Breaking Bad is over. Nothing, Glenn. I am doing nothing. Mad Men doesn’t start up for months; I basically hate television now. Anyone want to recommend a show for me to become obsessed with? I hear House of Cards is good.

All right STOP. Collaborate and listen.

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My husband just phoned me to see if I was feeling somewhat normal, which I am, thank goodness. When he picked me up at the airport yesterday morning, I was running on four hours of sleep and had been a social butterfly all weekend. What would you do if you were at parties sponsored by Ontario wines? Would you not drink all the wine? Of course you would! And by “you” I mean “I”. What a fabulous and fun weekend. I learned something new about myself, something I had not realized before:

When Ice, Ice, Baby is playing, I will always do the running man.

It’s true. Just like I cannot listen to Bust A Move without obnoxiously rapping all the lyrics – she’s dressed in yellow, she says hello, come sit next to me you fine fellow – I cannot hear Ice, Ice, Baby without immediately breaking out the running man. I also discovered that I always want to join the conga line, and that I have a secret, show-offy wish for limbo contests. Sadly, no limbo contests manifested themselves this weekend.

Fine, I’ll have to just have my OWN limbo contest.

I feel pretty great today, in part because I made it back to the yoga studio, where my teacher, upon adjusting me, said “Hmmm. Too much wine?” MAYBE. Maybe it was the meal of BBQ rice cakes one evening, followed by peach daquiris, I DON’T KNOW. But I’m back on the mat, back in the groove, and immediately inundated by School Council/ Parent Association/ Book Fair things. Just another day in the Boyhouse.

Big thanks to Erica Ehm and the Yummy Mummy Club for getting me to Blissdom. Meeting everyone at YMC who I’ve known for years but have never met in person was truly incredible. Every single person I met this weekend was warm, kind, and some kind of wonderful.

I LOVE writing for this woman! If you’re vegan, vegetarian, or just interested in the occasional meatless meal, you should check out my recipe blog over at Yummy Mummy Club, if you aren’t already.

Speaking of awesome recipes….

 
 

Julie van Rosendaal, a.k.a. Dinner with Julie, is an absolutely amazing person. So fun, so warm, so generous and kind. I’m thrilled to call her my friend! Also, we share a love of lentils.

Speaking of friends (and lentils?) this is my favourite picture from the weekend:

What a blast to hang out with Allison and Hannah, who indulged me in my running man/ disco dance moves. We laughed all weekend long. I met so many wonderful people this weekend, I cannot even begin to name them all, but suffice it to say every person I met exceeded my expectations of awesomeness.

But, all that pajama partying left me kind of tired, which is to say I really needed a cup (or five) of coffee this morning.



Cute mug, right?

That’s my post shower, OMG I NEED A COFFEE I’VE BEEN UP FOR THREE HOURS AND IT’S ONLY 7:30 face. I’m happy to have gone, happy to be home, and now I need to figure out how I’m going to manage the after-school hour for the upcoming book fair…anyone?

This episode brought to you by The Simpsons

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Did you check the traplines? is a question that my husband and I have been asking each other since Saturday, like we’re old-timey settlers trading furs at the Hudson’s Bay Company for blankets and tobacco. Happily for us, the answer has been they are empty which is good for both my mental state and for the general atmosphere of the household. My friend Julie reminded me of the scene in Little Town on the Prairie, before the Ingalls get a cat, when Pa’s hair gets nibbled off by nesting mice. I did not need for her to remind me of that, because I had already thought of that, which made me feel like this, substituting the word “boogeyman” for the word “mouse”.

But, we are happily mouse free, I say confidently and hopefully, and not at all in a traumatized way. I spotted a dead mouse in our backyard, and envisioned Barkley eating the dead mouse, and me having to deal with the aftermath of such a situation, and I went inside to talk to the boys. Boys, your mother is having a nervous breakdown. Mark, after assessing the situation, asked for me to fetch him the large shovel out of the shed, and then neatly picked the mousey corpse up and threw it out into the alley where a “car would flatten it”. I wasn’t entirely pleased with this conclusion, but I was pleased enough to not have to deal with it one way or another that I baked some chocolate chip cookies for him and Jake to take to school for snack for the remainder of the week. 

Tomorrow I’m heading to Toronto for the Blissdom Canada conference, and boy, am I excited. I’m especially excited because I’ve gotten all of my to-do items done, and also we have the vermin situation under control. These are equally exciting to me. I’ve been working hard to cross all of those things off the list, and at some point I was behaving exactly like this. I was a bit worried since a) this is the longest I will have ever been away from the children, yes I KNOW they are eight and nine years old, and b) I’ve never been away from the children during the school year. We all know things are much simpler in the summer, when there are no scholastic nor activity schedules to navigate. IT’S GOING TO BE FINE, I say to myself. What’s the worst that could happen? And then I come up with some strange worst-case scenario that makes me think I should just go ahead and open a bottle of wine.

The kids have had colds, and then my husband – who was possibly a wee bit run down due to work pressures and also sobbing hysterical wife pressures – came down with the cold, but in massive form, so that he basically looked like this, minus the sandwich. I have been so worried about getting sick before my very first blogging conference, and meeting all these people, that I have been sleeping over NINE HOURS A NIGHT and consuming possibly toxic levels of Vitamin C. Also oil of oregano, so much so that it’s not even gross to me anymore. Happily and knock on wood, I seem to have escaped the worst of it, only dealing with a tickly throat and fatigue.

But! I’m all packed (including a baggie full of Vitamin C packets, along with Advil Cold and Sinus JUST IN CASE) and for once I feel that I’ve packed just the right amount of clothing. Shoes, however. I have four pairs of shoes packed, not including the boots that I will be wearing on the plane, nor the fabulous hippo slipper-socks bought for the occasion. What is wrong with me? How can I possibly feel that FIVE PAIR OF FOOTWEAR is appropriate for a Thursday to Sunday trip? Well, there is no going back now! Tomorrow morning I’m going to be taking my well-heeled (literally, shoes, see what I did there?) self on the plane. And I’m going to read a book the whole way! And not think about what I’m making for dinner! Well, I MIGHT think about what I’m making for Sunday dinner….