Frugal, Effective, and Green

Yeah, that's totally a title I would see from a crunchy granola mommy blogger. However, it's all true. Here's the story.

While continuing my spring/Easter cleaning I decided that I must pull out the bed skirt and iron it. Maybe I was afraid someone would "gasp" discover I store mismatched socks and wrapping paper under the end of my bed. Maybe I ran out of things to do. (Yeah, right.) For whatever reason I decided that I must get that bed skirt ironed and on the bed. So I started ironing. Then I was struck by the desirability of starching said bed skirt. The problem is that when it comes to ironing I'm on a strictly low carb diet. No starch. I don't like using it on my cloths, and the work culture out here (in the tech industry at least) is such that Allen wears hiking boots and jeans to work on a regular basis. So, there's no starch in the laundry cabinet. Since I really didn't want to spend 20 minutes walking to the store I decided to try my friend Google for possible substitutes. After all, most kitchens contain an abundance of starchy substances. Google told me that one heaping tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in two cups cold water and poured into a spray bottle would do the trick, and Google did not lie. It's dirt cheap, effective, and keeps me from spending money on an extra can that will just go in the trash. I'm not the biggest eco-hippy out there, but it's fun when saving resources is this easy (and thrifty!).

Easter Menu

Ok, so this is my first time ever heading up an Easter celebration, and I'm just praying everything turns out ok. There's going to somewhere around a dozen people total -mostly young folks like us who can't celebrate Easter with their families. Young folk - Allen turned 30 this year. I guess young is truly relative. Anyway, fortunately our church is deeply rooting in the "tell me what I can bring" tradition, so I don't have to do quite all of it myself. We all live in relatively small places and are used to loaning each other chairs and folding tables and such and therefore enabling each other to host rather more people than our normally modest abodes allow. Allen and I live in "large" apartment, and even we find it a stretch to fit a dozen people in here. But enough about California housing!

Easter Menu:

Appetizers:

Cheese Plate
Devilled Eggs
Veg and Dip

Main course:

Roast Ham (recipe from Perfect Recipes for Having People Over)
Tamari Marinated Chicken Breasts (MIL recipe)
Mashed Potatoes
Oven Roasted Harvicot Vertes
Rolls
Salad
Wine/Italian Soda

Dessert:

Trifle
Undecided
Limoncello
Coffee/Tea



I've tried to pick items I could prep in the days previous or that would cook quickly with minimal attention. The roast can cook while we're at church. Things like trifle, devilled eggs, and rolls I can make ahead of time. Most everything else will either cook quickly or be brought by my delightful friends.

The big deal right now is just getting things cleaned up. We're in the midst of an organizational shift, which means that I've accumulated clutter from the "oh that will go somewhere else later" pre-organization that's been going on lately. It might be about time to make a pot of strong black tea and just blast through some of that. Of course that likely means my back bedroom (otherwise known as that room full of stuff) will become even more impossible (and impassible), but at least I'll have my new sideboard cleared away. Yes, I have a new sideboard (ok, it's from Ikea), and my dining area is so much nicer now. The table actually fits where it's supposed to instead of being awkwardly thrust out in the middle of the room because I had no place for dishes but the baker's rack and no place for the baker's rack than that much needed corner of the dining area.

I hope I really can get through that clutter quickly because until I get that done I really can't decorate, and that's one of my favorite parts of celebrations :) I don't know that I'm all that good at it, but I love setting out candles and turning on my Christmas lights (which are year round contributors to my bookcase). Oh, and I found the most amazing idea for an Easter egg hunt. One of the suggestions I found was to hide puzzle pieces in the eggs. I thought that might be a fun element to get people mixing together and moving around a little.

So there are my Easter plans. I'll try to post pictures once some of this comes together, but for now I need to clean out my closets so I have a place to put all the stuff accumulating on various surfaces.

Flax Seed is my new friend

Recently I've started adding flax seed to my fruit smoothies, and I think it's really improving my focus and energy levels. Yesterday I spent the whole day cooking giant batches of everything to share with some friends of ours who have twin babies and recently moved. When I was done we had some lovely pot roast, zucchini bread, garlicy rosemary dinner rolls made with fresh ground flour (love my vitamix so much!), and two chicken pot pies made with homemade stock, and I didn't crash once. Yeah the kitchen still isn't back together, but with my history of depression, low energy, and poor focus I felt really good about what I accomplished. Taking my supplements regularly is a huge part of all that, but I'm also thinking that the extra omega-3s and antioxidants are helping. That's brain food right there.

In case you're wondering what I put in my smoothies here's my basic formula:

1 scoop whey protein powder (got to have protein!)
1 scoop fiber blend (helps slow sugar absorption and keeps me feeling good)
1 scoop green food mix (pick your favorite powdered greens supplement)
1/2 frozen banana (makes it sweet and creamy)
small handful whole flax seed (a genuine super food)
1T cocoanut oil (If you don't like nut oils then leave it out. All I can say is that my cholesterol is just fine, and I haven't gained any weight on it.)

From there I add whatever sounds good at the moment. Peach Mango Strawberry is great, and I really like making an all berry blend with a bit of pineapple. I top it off with kefir and orange juice, but yoghurt and any other fruit juice on hand will work. I've used carrot juice in the past occasionally with good results. If you have any blood sugar issues a bit of cinnamon will help even things out.

I know that sounds like a whole lot for one meal, but I keep everything by the blender and can put together lunch in 5 minutes max. Plus, it really does taste great. Just make sure you pick a fiber that doesn't have an offensive taste. Slippery Elm powder, for instance, can be pretty nasty. Apple pectin and psyllium hulls do much better. Once you drink a class of this you've gotten in good oils, probiotics, your fruit for the day, fiber, and gotten a start on your leafy greens. Did I mention that it's also taken care of my ice-cream cravings? Not bad for lunch :)

Teaching: a short recap and some thoughts

Over the past 5-10 years I've been interested in teaching. It hasn't been a ruling passion of mine or anything like that, but it has been an interest of mine right up there with literature, camping, and discussing odd subjects with my husband. Given my interest it would have seemed sensible for me to do something like major in English education instead of the taking the English/philosophy path I did take. However at the time I had grandiose dreams of graduate degrees and professorships and the like because I figured that was where the fun happened. A professor takes open minds and pours into them all the distilled knowledge and passion from her own and searches for that one answering spark in the minds of her students. In between teaching there are researches into the compelling book of the moment and long hours of crafting prose that simply sings with new discoveries and insights. Perhaps that is true for some professors, but I rapidly begin to suspect that it's not. During graduate school I continually saw students and professors driven not by what is, not by the true and beautiful, but by voters and interest groups and this heaven turned hell that secularists long to create on earth. If it's true that men (in general) at all times and in numeral ways oppress women (in general) and that this is one of the great truths of literary history then that says something very specific and odd about how you read. Books cease to be windows into the human condition (at least in the way commonly thought of as such) but instead function at frames for the persistent arguments of feminists against men. Jane Austen becomes a feminist. Shakespeare becomes a misogynist. These become moral categories, and they start to privilege books to support their own faulty understanding of the world and denigrate books that would question these values. "So," they might say, "you do much the same in saying that Shakespeare or Bunyan or Burke is better than Hemingway, Joyce, or Rousseau." The difference, which hardly bears mentioning since they willfully can't see it, is that we have a firm set of standards for evaluating all literature in all ages. True the tides of opinion might ebb to and fro and legalism or license takes the upper hand in Christian culture. The point is that we have fixed principles that guide our taste and evaluation. They don't and are therefore at the mercy of every new student demographic and every new socio-political stance that appeals to their secular hearts. And so I left. I walked away from graduate school and every dreams of peacefully scribbling away in my ivory tower. I suppose I could have gone to a Christian school, but on the whole I don't think they're so very much better. I was also looking at doctoral studies, and the school where I went had a program to do so.

By the time I left I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be. I'd always had an aversion to government run education programs, and so many of the Christian schools just toddle along with the same methods as the government schools. I wanted something different. Then I found this classical school that let me volunteer and learn on the job. I got to work with students and see the process happening on a lot of different levels. I learned later that some of the processes where dictated by the board and that not all the teachers thought them effective, but at least I got to see real Christian education happening. Just recently I was hired temporarily to fill in for a couple teachers who left abruptly. It's been challenging, and yet I find it so addicting. I didn't realize how much my students would test my compassion, justice, intelligence, and judgement. It's incredibly intense, and I love it. I really feel like I've found something I can pursue. Unfortunately, since this particular school is closing I don't have the option of carrying on there next year. At this point though I'm just glad to have found something that makes me come alive and want to get to work. Right now the hard part is mainly trusting God that I'll be able to continue working in Christian education. Despite the doors slamming shut I feel confident that somewhere the road will shake itself out, and I'll find myself in front of the right door at last.

Welcome to my new blog!

I decided it was time to go ahead and start a new blog. After a while I think there are times when you just want a fresh page. So much has happened in the past year -even the past few months- that I feel it's time to refocus and get back to the other thing I love. Writing!