Perfect pie crust

That sounds like such a Suzy Homemaker thing to say, but I gave up on homemade pie crust a long time ago. Years and years ago. I tried so hard, but it just wasn't worth the hassle once Pillsbury came up with pre-rolled crust. I can't seem to find online what year they invented rolled out pie crust but it's been since I was married to my good Mr. Dub. You used to have to buy them frozen in an aluminum pie tin if you wanted pre-made crusts. Remember those? They were so, well, dinky. They always burned around the edges too, remember?

One day I was watching the Barefoot Contessa make crust on her show. I like The Contessa because she's friendly and real and she loves her husband. Anyway. I didn't have any Pillsbury crusts (which thing I almost always have on hand but for unknown reasons did not have this one particular day) and I wanted to make either a pie or a quiche and despite knowing better than to even try to make pie crust again I did it like she did. In my food processor. And for the first time ever I did not slice one or the other of my hands nor any fingers wide open in the process of either using or washing or putting away the food processor. It was like a miracle and I figured it must be a good omen. The recipe made two crusts so I stashed half the dough in the freezer even though I knew that was a big mistake because I can't make pie crust. (I had made my peace with that fact though. Nobody can do everything.) I chilled the other half of the dough for a little while and then I rolled it out.

It sounds like such a non-event. "I rolled it out". Huh.

But I did. I rolled it out and baked my pie. Weeks later (last week, actually) I thawed and then rolled out the other half. It just laid down and let me roll it out. No crumbling mess. No sticking to the counter. No tearing. No fuss, no muss.

So tempting fate with all my might I did it again today. Made the recipe, froze half, and then I rolled out the other half. I just rolled it out and laid it down in my pie pan and made a pie.

Like it was no big deal.

You can get the recipe by clicking on the link there. I have it printed out and put in my recipe binder in my kitchen.

A closer look

A cross-section, so to speak, of my brain.

There are a few things rattling around in here and I want to get them out.

I had a bit of vertigo for about an hour last night. I sat/laid/sprawled out in front of the toilet (in case of the unholy puking that comes with vertigo) until I passed out from exhaustion. Somehow during the 5 or 30 minutes I was asleep I hurt my toe. It feels better today, but I feel sort of washed out and hazy. I sent a lot of ESP messages to my good Mr. Dub that I was upstairs dying on the bathroom floor but he didn't hear them. Probably because the football game was on SO LOUD.

A handful of spinach leaves got thrown away today. There are also about 1 1/2 cups of red seedless grapes that are going out with the trash tomorrow. I feel bad about this. The good news is that I made the most delicious pizza ever tonight wherein I used the homemade tomato sauce that saved the tomatoes last week. I have also been using up any stale bread in French toast for breakfast in the mornings. (Tomorrow morning we will have a bit of bacon too, before that goes bad.) I have been baking bread for the last couple of weeks and I think I'm getting into a groove with it, but that is where all the stale bread is coming from. I have some chopped onions, some corn tortillas, and some "nacho/taco" shredded cheese that all need to be used up. Sounds like enchiladas on the menu tomorrow night. Sort of like these, but with chicken and green enchilada sauce. Tomorrow afternoon I am making pie dough, and an apple pie for my good Mr. Dub to use up some apples that have been in the crisper bin for...well...for a while now. I have thrown a rapidly degrading banana in the freezer but I don't have high hopes for it. It may just be delaying the inevitable, but maybe I'll make banana bread with it and some of its overripe brothers that are sure to come along?

My granddaughter was especially adorable today. Maybe because I wasn't feeling well? She says things to me like, "I sure love you, Grammy" and "Wait for me, Grammy!". She is such a love.

I finally got around today to taking care of some school nurse paperwork/cafeteria business that had to be done for Jake at his school. It is so nice to have it out of the way. I'm not sure why I hadn't done it before today, and when I try to analyze it what I feel like is overwhelmed and that nobody ever helps me - I always help everybody else. Which is stupid because of course other people help me. But that's my initial reaction to guilty feelings of inadequacy and procrastination. Is that lame and immature?

While Avery napped today I read a book. Pictures of Hollis Woods, by Patricia Reilly Giff. It's a Newberry Award winning book that I've had for awhile but never picked out of the bookcase until today. So sad, but the most satisfying ending! I found out today that it has been made into a TVmovie so maybe someday I'll get to watch it.

I am not ready for my scrapbooking adventure this weekend and I am running out of time to prepare for it. I might end up "getting ready for it" while I'm there. Which will not be the end of the world. It will just mean that I won't get as many pages done and I will have to take all of my scrapbooking supplies with me, instead of the more manageable amount of stuff I would only have to take had I been more diligent over the last few weeks. Is it okay that I've outgrown scrapbooking? Probably. I only have a few more pictures that were taken with film to scrapbook before I run into having to choose from digital pics on SD cards. I don't know if I'll continue with it at that point.

Because of some things I have seen and heard I have had a look at some of the stuff inside my head and heart the last week or so that I'm still trying to come to terms with. I have had an opportunity to wonder if I am a ultra-sensitive person who takes things in very deeply and feels them all. Because of things that have happened in my life I have always felt like I had to have a stiff upper lip, a thick skin, a rock solid shell. That I have to let things just roll off my back, never thinking about them too much or feeling them too intimately because I can sense that incurable heartbreak and insanity wait for me down that road, and, well, I have things to do that require a clear head and some sensibility. It's not fun or easy or lighthearted to be broken and crazy and I don't want to be there. It's a miracle to me that I was raised to stay away from drugs and alcohol because if I hadn't I would surely be a drunken, addicted, sorry, hopeless piece of humanity. I feel great sorrow for the people who have been through the things I have experienced and have turned to chemicals to escape their pain. I can see that it has only made their problems worse. I'm glad that I don't have to personally live through some things to learn from them.

That's enough.

Gift Idea?

I've been trying to look for ideas of things that I can make to give to close friends and extended family for Christmas. Things that I can make a lot of in not too much time and for not too much money but that will be meaningful and (hopefully) useful. Things I've made in the past include:

• crocheted pot holders
• knitted dishcloths
• Christmas tree ornaments
• pillowcases
• homemade candy and other goodies

I found this on the Internet and with a few modifications to make it larger I believe it is the winner for this year. I already have quite a few skeins of a smooth, soft, satiny, and washable yarn that is made from 100% post-consumer plastic.

Reusable grocery bags (eco-friendly) made from yarn that's made out of recycled plastic water bottles (that are definitely not eco-friendly) that I already own. All it will take now is some time and effort.

Sometimes the world seems good.

Sleeping Beauty Redux

Remember this?

It's rivaled only by this:

My shame

I looked up some numbers. In the United States in 2010 approximately one in seven households were "food insecure". Meaning that those homes lacked the resources to provide enough food for themselves. On my side of the street on my neighborhood block there are eight homes. So statistically at least one house full of my immediate neighbors regularly went hungry in 2010. Globally the statistics are about the same - one in seven people are hungry.

Here is my confession: I throw away food. Pretty regularly, and much to my horror - without even thinking twice about it.

It is a shameful and entitled and thoughtless and cruel thing. I am trying to change that, beginning by reducing the amount of food we regularly waste in our home. I occasionally read a frugal-living blog and every Friday this blogger posts a picture of food that she wasted that week in an effort to publicly expose herself to the shame and embarrassment that should accompany such a practice. It has inspired me to do the same thing.

In the last two days I've thrown away about a cupful of spinach leaves that I let get soggy before we ate them. Also a squishy, rotting tomato, 1/4 of apple that had become brown and wrinkled, and a hard-boiled egg that was hidden in the depths of the fridge. I can't even remember the last time I boiled eggs. And why in the world would I eat 3/4 of an apple and put the rest in the refrigerator to never again see the light of day?

Nutrition facts:
1 cup spinach has 10 calories,  80% RDA of vitamin A and 20% RDA of vitamin C.
1 roma tomato has 22 calories, 20% vitamin A and 26% vitamin C.
1/4 of a really big granny smith apple has 20 calories and 5% vitamin C.
1 egg has 78 calories and more than 6 grams of protein.

That would have made an awesome, healthful and nutritious omelet with a side of sliced apple for some hungry person. Or for me. It's disgusting that this food has been wasted. Disgusting because I spent money to buy it in the first place, money that Mr. Dub earned and handed over to me without question. Disgusting also because there are people in our country, maybe even in my own neighborhood - men, women, and children - who went to bed hungry every night before that food went bad, while it was still edible.

Thinking about this for the last couple days has shown me there are some things I do without thinking that contribute to this waste. Last night we had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and while cleaning up the kitchen I saw that there were 6 meatballs left in the pan. I was all set to throw them away before I came to my senses and tried to think about it for one second. My thought process went like this:

"There aren't any noodles left in the pan. I'd have to make a whole new batch of spaghetti again before we will eat these meatballs. We don't like to eat spaghetti two nights in a row. What could I make with just six meatballs, anyway? This is ridiculous. It's not that big of a deal. It's only six freaking meatballs. But I am not throwing them away."

They went into the refrigerator and I chopped them up into a quiche that I made for dinner tonight. Also into the quiche went the spinach leaves that were still good. While rummaging through my veggie bin looking for salad ingredients I came across a number of tomatoes, the one which was too far gone and had to be tossed, but the others, while not exactly fresh and perfect were still on the good side of okay. But barely. So I simmered them in some water, put them through my food mill, and made them into fresh tomato sauce which will be stashed in the freezer until the next time I make soup.  I'm ashamed to say that previously I would have found it "easier" to throw away the whole bagful of tomatoes rather than pick through them to find any that might still be good.

While cleaning up the kitchen last night I also came across 3/4 of a graham cracker that I immediately went to throw away, because for heaven's sake it was the last graham cracker in the box (I had broken off a piece of it to give to Avery for a snack) and I'm not going to put one partial cracker back inside an otherwise empty box, am I? My newfound awareness stopped me in time and I wrapped it back up in its wax-paper wrapper and she had it again for a snack today.

It's the worst sort of entitlement. "These things are mine and I can throw them away in the trash if I want to, la de da."

I know I have a long way to go and there is a whole 'nother part to this that I'm not even going to go into right now which is that me figuring out how to not throw away food from my own refrigerator helps exactly zero hungry people.

But it's a starting point, and I'm on it.

The Desk

Do you remember that one of my goals was to keep my desk cleared off this year? Remember how piles of clutter disrupt my mental and emotional equilibrium and over-all sense of well-being? It's here, and here. My desk is, obviously, a trouble spot for me.

Ugh.

Here's what's on my desk this morning that doesn't belong here:

1. Lists #2 and #3 of items that I will need to compose 72-hour kits for my family. This means list #1 is missing.
2. 1 giant box of baby wipes
3. 1 Michael's coupon
4. 1 pink comb
5. a roll of double-sided tape
6. a box cutter
7. 3 recipes that I printed off the internet
8. my Primary binder
9. the water bill
10. 2 Walmart receipts
11. two 1-cent euro coins
12. one 3-cent euro coin
13. one 5-cent euro coin
14. 1 rubber band
15. 1 packet of fairy portraits
16. 1 gas card bill
17. 1 mortgage statement
18. 1 wedding announcement
19. 1 scrap of paper with an important phone number/address scribbled on it
20. 1 receipt from an internet order of sewing supplies
21. 1 empty 3-ring binder
22. another recipe
23. 8 pages that I photocopied of handwritten notes I took during training meetings
24. 1 blank sheet of cardstock
25. 1 printed out email
26. 1 family home storage center order form
27. 5 pages of receipt/rebate info for the new cell phones I ordered over the weekend
28. 18 empty page protectors
29. 1 Fire Safety merit badge workbook (Am I the only one who finds this ironic?)
30. 2 bank statements
31. 1 check re-order form (Uh, hello. I might want to take that over to the bank today. It might be important.)
32. 2 church bulletins from 2 different weeks (which may give you an idea how long my desk has been cluttered)
33. 1 velcro-strap thingy to hold electronics' cords together
34. 1 freebie mass-mail magazine that lists all  of some unknown person's best-picks for home service providers
35. another gas card bill
36. 1 plastic packet of some metal pins that hold bookcase shelves up
37. a bobby pin
38. a Student Diet Modification Form that I should probably fill out and return to my Little Friends's school
39. a Home Depot pre-approved credit card offer
40. Mr. Dub's YMCA key chain tag
41. some dust
42. something sticky that's been smeared.

Once just a couple of things begin piling up my desk it becomes a dumping ground for everything that anybody (but mostly me) can't spontaneously and immediately figure out what to do with, or that is "momentarily" placed here to be put away later in the place where it actually goes.

The sweet, peaceful after:

31 Days

I've seen a few blogs the last few days that are doing some variation of a 31-day challenge. Like 31 days of lame excuses, or 31 days of writing for 31 minutes each day, something like that.

I like the idea. Here are some things I've thought about for a 31 day challenge:

• exercising 31 days in a row
• blogging 31 days in a row
• really studying the scriptures 31 days in a row
• and other things that are equally good for me

but after much reflection I've decided that I'm not in a good place to do something that will take a lot of additional effort or time every single day for 31 days.

I decided that my 31-day challenge will be to make my bed. Every day for 31 days, starting today on October 1, I will make my bed. They say it takes 3 weeks to make doing a thing a habit, and while I do make my bed semi-regularly there are lots of days when it never happens and I (and my good Mr. Dub) get into a rumply, messy bed at night.

Reasons why I don't always make my bed:

1. Both of us like to lay down on the bed after getting out of the shower. We live in a usually hot, always humid climate and laying down on the bed under the ceiling fan helps with cooling down/drying off like a towel cannot. Unfortunately a shower doesn't always happen first thing in the morning. Since I don't like it when I (or other people) lay down on the bed after it's made, I like to wait till we're done with showers before I make the bed.
2. People laying down on/messing up my bed after it's made is a pet peeve of mine.
3. Related to reason #1 is I sometimes wait to take a shower until I have to go somewhere, and then I might be in a rush to get out of the house.
4. Once the day is in full swing I just don't think again about making my bed.
5. Sometimes it seems like so much effort for such a small thing when it really only takes about 2 minutes and makes a big difference in my attitude/feelings about my house.

Because bed-making time varies for me from day to day I don't have a lot of hope that it will become an ingrained habit after a month of doing it.

I'm doing it anyway. I feel like the queen when my bed is made and fancy and beautiful, and like some sort of grubby scrub when it's not. Also, I wanted to pull the coverlet up over me last night because I got a little chilly and it was all balled up at the end of the bed. That is not fancy.