The January Tipping Point

Because I've been in a constant state of coming and going this past month, I've been feeling a little out of touch with my kitchen. While I normally spend a fair amount of my free time in the kitchen, I find it surprisingly easy to break the home cooking habit. If I spend several nights eating out of the home, I often find the thought of actually having to cook my own dinner a little horrifying when I return home.

But after returning from my latest out of town jaunt, it was clear that I couldn't ignore the calls of the kitchen any longer. When I made a lazy dinner of spaghetti on Sunday night, I realized we were down to a single container of marinara sauce in the freezer. We'd been limping along without any bread since sometime shortly after Christmas. It was time to replenish.

So yesterday, while the wind whistled past the cabin windows, I got a batch of marinara burbling in the crockpot, prepared some make-ahead pizza dough, and baked three loaves of "our daily bread." This morning I pulled a loaf of crusty bread (Andy's favorite) out of the oven. Not only do these kitchen projects make the cabin smell great, they also help me re-ground myself in home life and reclaim my kitchen mojo.     
 

I always notice an interesting shift in my kitchen mentality each January. I don't mind really putzing in the kitchen this time of year and during deep winter days, I'm most likely to try out new recipes - probably a mixed result stemming from Christmas gifted cookbooks, the new year, and dark evenings. It's also the time of year when I decide all of that food I worked to preserve over the past summer and autumn, really ought to be eaten up. Although the gardens provide us with plenty of instant-ish gratification during the summer, now is when I'm most grateful for the hard work we put in to growing our own food the summer before.

And so we start slowly eating our way through the pantry and freezer, enjoying the tastes of far-off seasons. Oatmeal with a dollop of blueberry butter or breakfast bars that use a jar of jam to start off blustery January mornings. A pot of green bean soup burbling on the stove top. Blueberry pie or apple crisp hot out of the oven. Cabbage thrown in with a venison roast. Snacks of peach salsa on a tortilla chip, applesauce straight out of the jar, or bread and butter pickles paired with a grilled cheese sandwich. There's such abundance in our pantry this year; so many flavors to play with. What to do with all of those pickled jalapenos? Or all of those pickled cranberries for that matter . . . .

Every season is a pretty tasty one around these parts, but there's something about January that makes the homemade flavors of the kitchen even more satisfying and reassuring. The jars I pop open while the snow blows and drifts outside remind me that the seasons do change and the abundant goodness of this life.

What do you cook this time of year?
 

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Happy Little Miss Homemaker

Last week, Andy and I devoted a large portion of our evenings to watching all of Mad Men Season 1. (Behind the times, I know.) Despite the affinity I felt for Peggy throughout the first season, I spent today much more like Betty than Peggy.

Well, no, I didn't spend my day chain-smoking or start consuming wine at or around 1 p.m. But I did spend my day off engaged in decidedly homemaker-esque tasks. And what a happy little homemaker I was . . . which I guess makes me less like Betty than I previously thought.  ;)

I'm what Suzy Guese calls a "nomadic homebody." As much as I love travel and a good adventure, I need an equal, if not greater amount of time spent puttering around my home to really feel balanced. After a long, busy work week, the cabin and I were overdue for some quality time together.

When I woke up this morning, a mountain of dishes waited by the sink, "past its prime" produce rattled around in the fridge's crisper drawers, the recycling spilled out of its bin and across the floor, and the bathroom was smelling less than fresh.

So today, I vacuumed the entire cabin, finally blocked an afghan for my mother, cleaned the bathroom, did two batches of dishes, did some ironing, took out the recycling and trash, and managed to prepare a balanced supper from a nearly bare fridge. Mundane tasks, yes, but each one was a major accomplishment both for the cabin's appearance and my well-being.  

I performed fridge triage, the happy results of which were a batch of crockpot marinara sauce -using some bruised and otherwise unattractive tomatoes - and these Asian inspired fridge pickles from a cucumber no longer in a state for salad and some garlic scapes from the garden.

I've been chomping at the bit to try these nutty granola bars ever since Marisa posted about them over at Food in Jars.  I have a tried and true granola bar recipe that both Andy and I like, but the chief binder in that recipe is marshmallows and I've been looking for a slightly more wholesome recipe. I finally got a batch made this evening. I'm pretty sure I overbaked them, but they're still darn nommy and *very* calorie rich. One change I would make if I were to make them again would be to use all butter instead of a mixture of coconut oil and butter. (Or I wouldn't use coconut oil that's been in the pantry for an unknown amount of time. . . ahem.)  Besides, who has two thumbs and likes butter? That's right . . . this guy.

I also fertilized the vast majority of vegetables. One patch of veggies that didn't get any fertilizer was the potato patch. These guys already got a goodly amount of Tomato-tone last week and they're looking quite content in their straw-y abode. Maybe, just maybe, this crazy "let's grow potatoes in straw" experiment is going to work. 

It was a good day.

Are you a happy homemaker or do you find chores to dull to be truly pleasurable? 

 

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Happily Ever After? What's Wrong With Fairy-Tale Weddings

Marriage may be at an all time low in the United States, but it doesn't seem the twenty-somethings of the country have gotten that message. I'm not be getting married, which pretty much means I'm standing still while a stampede of brides-to-be course around me. Starting to feel like a tinny, broken record of "Congratulations!" here.

I'm not opposed to marriage in the least. But over the years, I've grown increasingly apprehensive of the notion that we need just wrap ourselves in a "let's get married and have babies" bandage to reach "happily ever after." For half of us, our marriages won't last a lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, problems to any potential union aren't vanquished with the magic words "I do." So I tread carefully with the whole marriage issue.

Still, I'm a girl. I get the excitement that goes into planning a wedding with all the decisions about cake, dresses, and colors. If we can keep our inner-Bridezillas at bay, I think planning a wedding sounds like a pretty good time.

But I guess I'd forgotten that the stampede of brides-to be rushing past me spent as much, if not more time, watching Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, as me. And that means that this whole generation of girls grew up with Disney's female leads, Belle, Ariel, and Jasmine, as their style inspirations. I never realized the biggest first name in the wedding dress industry isn't "Vera" or Vivienne," but "Walt."

This past week, Disney announced its "Fairy Tale Wedding" dress line which offer seven dresses all inspired from dresses worn by animated characters from Disney films. And the dresses aren't bad. Some of them are really quite pretty. But I find something discomfiting in the amount of suspended reality that's involved with slipping into one of these dresses.

Can I say something? It does not bode well if you are getting married solely so you can be princess for the day. A wedding's meant to be a celebration of two people committing to a life together. It's not supposed to be your last shot at the great Halloween costume you never had. This latest dress collection just seems mildly unhealthy for the concept of marriage.

But I could be wrong. . . . Maybe it really is true love if you can get your fiance to stand at the alter looking like this: 

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Bake or Buy: Be Happy

By all intents and purposes, the females of my generation – the Millennials – and of my socioeconomic and racial profile – middle class, Caucasian – came into this world a pretty privileged lot. Women had gotten the vote 65 years before I was born and by the time I was toddling around, the Feminist movement was on its last legs (be that good or bad). In fact, females my age sometimes take the idea of “equal opportunity” so for granted that we often treat the word “feminist” like a profanity. We didn’t have a whole lot to prove: we were accepted for who we were.

But as the first generation of women who have basically gotten whatever we wanted, we might be just a tad spoiled. We forget how hard other women fought to get us where we are today. We forget that at its heart, feminism is about equality. More than that, we forget that equality and getting whatever you want are two different things entirely. And we forget that we have feminism to thank for several general ideals we use to navigate through life.

Ideals? Well, like the fact that we can do whatever we want to do, but with that comes an obligation to find some sense of purpose in life and to live up to your full potential. It’s fine to have kids, if you want them, but we were taught that being a mother is meant to be a small part of a larger context. And also, you better be really, really into being a homemaker if that’s the path you decide to head down, young lady.

Often it seems as though I’m in a strange power struggle with feminism. I never know who’s winning and I don’t understand why we can’t just be friends. Try as I might, my inner career woman is always picking battles with my inner homemaker.

Which is why I threw a fit when I discovered we were out of bread yesterday morning. (We’ve been out of butter for ages too.)

Lately, it’s seemed like the gears are finally turning and I’m starting to slowly chug down the tracks towards my career goals. It’s exciting and fun and it means long hours and having to eat store bread while your house falls into an increasingly chaotic mess. In general, I try to keep homemade bread on hand – when there’s time -- but that’s not to say that we don’t eat a fair amount of store bread too. For the last month, we’ve been buying a loaf of bread every now and then to tide us through until I have time to bake. But instead of me finding time to make bread, mostly we’ve just been running out of bread on a pretty consistent basis.

Yesterday, when I opened the fridge door to grab the sandwich makings for my bag lunch and spied only a flat bread bag holding a single crust of bread, I felt as though something in the big scheme of things had failed me. After all: does having it all mean we’re so busy we don’t have time to stock basic food stuffs?

So today I made Betty Friedan roll over in her grave. I baked bread and brownies and attempted to make sense of the piles of crap that had accumulated around the cabin. I realized what a lot of work it is to be a homemaker. For sure, it’s a full time job (I’m exhausted), yet we largely poo-poo homemaking because we fear the great merit of homemaking – comfort – is synonymous with complacency. That’s not really fair.

Maybe the secret to being a female in 2010 is to stop feeling like you’re letting someone down. I don’t want to have to eat store bread just because I have a busy work life. I don’t want to feel like Betty Friedan is glaring at me every time I take a loaf of bread out of the oven either.

I have yet to strike the perfect balance between, well, everything. It’s tricky business determining how to best live life as a privileged female, without squandering or taking our advantages for granted. And at its heart, being a female in 2010 isn’t really about choosing one way to live your life. Rather it’s about mixing together all the life lessons from previous generations of women who taught us to be independent and determined and who reminded us that baking should be a pleasure, not a stressful obligation

So the moral of the story is this: Bake your bread when there’s time. Buy enough to last when there isn’t. Above all else, be happy. After all, we’re a pretty spoiled lot.

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