Pink Prickly Pear

Yay/Boo: The inmates are running the asylum version.

Yay: My "picky eater" two fistin' pears.  

Yay:  The other one.  Crazy.  But happy!  So happy!  Cannot squelch her joy!

Boo: The fireplace is not a great place to play (purely from the perspective of the mother and family laundress).

Yay: The removable top of my sewing table is the perfect size to hide the fireplace!

Boo:  Uh, sewing table?!?!?  No sewing table.  No sewing table.  No sewing table.  No sewing table.  I am gutted.

Related boo:  The underside of a workbench is not the most attractive addition to our decor. 

Yay:  Spaghetti carbonara with organic bacon for dinner last night.  And leftovers for lunch.  It's the little things, isn't it?

Yay: Reading Watership Down aloud with the whole family.

Possible impending Boo: Claustrophobic nightmares (mine - not the kids, they are as tough as nails) brought on by sympathizing with the plight of anthropomorphic rabbits.

I don't know why I bother keeping my old cookbooks around.

90% of the time, I just type in my ingredients and "recipe" into Google and see what comes up.  Or I'll have an idea about something I think will go well together and so I type the combination in just to see if it's been done, or what else might make it taste less "thrown together".

So today I have a couple of rotten pumpkins, some leftover Quinoa and a hankering for rice pudding.  I'm thinking of simmering it in a little whole milk with some flaked almonds and a bit of cardamom, but it never hurts to see what my other options are.

I prefer recipe sites with reviews.  Sometimes the recipe will get a bad rating, but reviewers will post substitutions or other tips for tweaking it.  Sometimes the reviewers are of no help whatsoever, but apparently feel the need to comment anyway:

This was fine, but not great. I used applesauce instead of bananas, and fat free milk with a little canola oil instead of whole milk, which seemed to work. Maybe it would have been better if I followed the recipe exactly, though.

I don't know.  Might as well say, "Well, I made chocolate pudding instead, but I'm still going to give this recipe a low rating".

For the record, everyone else gave the recipe excellent marks.  I'll let you know how mine turns out.

Let's put Thriller on repeat today, shall we?

Mini-Pear has declared Halloween her favorite holiday.  She ran into our room this morning and dove under the covers with us, "Happy Halloween!" 

Halloween.  I could take it or leave it, but I'll try not to squelch the kids' joy too terribly much.

 

Our park day's Halloween Shin Dig (organized by Mini-Pear) was a raging success.  Potluck contributions were the bomb.  I ate very well, as did the boy, but apparently it didn't stop my little kitty from hunting mice.  All we want for Christmas is hanta virus!

 

Close inspection of both pictures will reveal the kids in matching tie-dyed costumes.  Insufferably cute, and once again, we demonstrate our homemade costuming prowess!

The dog ate all our bread on Monday, so I'm having a brownie for breakfast. 

Nothing like modeling healthy food choices.

So I bought new running shoes.  Yawn.  Not news.  But running shoes made in the USA?  That's some news.  Some good news.  I took them out for an inaugural run this morning and my feet are very, very happy indeed.  And no, they weren't outrageously expensive or hideous or anything like that.  Thank you, New Balance. 

Last night I watched enough of The Future of Food to thoroughly freak myself out a bit regarding genetic engineering.  I fell asleep at about the halfway point, so I'll try and finish it tonight, but I somehow doubt I missed the happy ending.  And then this morning, while D'anjou napped, Mini-Pear and I watched King Corn about High Fructose Corn Syrup.  Having watched the stuff about genetically modified foods made the information about the pervasiveness of HFCS even more alarming.

Afterwards, I guiltily ransacked our kitchen cabinets.  HFCS is in everything, isn't it?  Well, maybe it is in a ton of stuff, but happily, I didn't find any at our house.  MSG made a surprise appearance in a package of Planters peanuts (we also had a bag of peanuts from Trader Joes with three ingredients - peanuts, peanut oil and salt), but no HFCS!  I even checked things that seemed like the perfect candidates for a little hidden sweetener - bread, barbeque sauce, a box of crackers...nada.  It's reassuring to see that we weren't going to have to make any big changes to our diets or shopping habits.  I mean, I wasn't a total rube...we're former vegans at our house, but I've certainly become a lot more relaxed about our food and I had suspicions that my new (over the past couple of years) mantra of "everything in moderation" might have let some unsavory ingredients in the back door. 

I do think I will exercise a little more moderation in the meals I eat outside of the house though. 

Confession:  I quite enjoy reality television.  Well, not Survivor or shows like that...it's the shows about people with more money than sense (Hulu, please stream more of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, New Jersey, Orange County, etc...) that suck me in.

However, after watching two My Super Sweet Sixteens in a row last night, I think my appetite for shows about spoiled teenage girls is quelled.  I think that show I watched last week about NYC prep school kids pushed me to the outer limits and last night, it all just spilled over.  From my pinned in position on the bed, sleep'n'spin D'anjou on one side, laptop balancing Mr. Pear on the other, I just about managed to squeak out a "Make it stop..."

For what it's worth, I did attempt a little politics of food last night, but I just cannot get into The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I'm not getting enough sleep lately, and the place I'm noticing it the most is my brain's capacity to absorb all but the fluffiest information.  Hey!  I think yours would too if first and foremost it was continually scanning all surfaces for choking hazards and scalable eights, not to mention the ever present "Where's the boy?" alarm.

But I've got to get into The Omnivore's Dilemma, if only because it's what my in-laws (they of the Splenda and the South Beach Diet) were reading on their visit.  Amusingly, they seemed quite horrified by my consumption of organic instant oatmeal for breakfast.  Not that pulverized grains in a little paper sack is my first choice, but after the boy's sucked me dry all night long, I am famished and instant organic oatmeal fills me up...and fast. 

There's a special place somewhere for Craigslist no-shows on gorgeous Sunday afternoons. 

Whatev.  We enjoyed ourselves anyway, so I suppose it's neither here nor there.

Last week, Mandy sent us home from what can only be described as a canning party* with a pile of peaches.  I was determined to make a pie, and I was going to have to be quick about it, because those delicious peaches were going fast.  I also had to be realistic.  D'anjou was not going to wait in the wings while I messed about with pastry, so I settled on a crumble (with a quick and dirty topping of flour, sugar, butter, oatmeal and almonds).  Once all my peaches were prepped, it was obvious we'd eaten too many peaches, so I added blueberries.  The end result?  A whole lot of yum.  There was not a lot left over.  We like sweet treats.  We like to eat them at 11:30 in the morning on a Sunday.

Sunday in pictures?

My babies sharing a quiet moment together.

Catching up to the rest of the family on the way to the park.  I love stepping out our door and seeing the ocean.

Smiley boy.

I love this picture of my thoughtful girl.

What do you do with the red wax that comes on your baby bella cheese?  We make gum.

D'anjou gets his first shiner.  Explora-boy meets table leg.

^{* As always, she has posted some excellent photos of the event over on her blog, so pop on over for a look-see!}

Road food?

I need ideas for our road trip.

Anyone who suggests street pizza can get stuffed.

Mini-Pear and I rode our bikes over to a friend's house this afternoon.  Mini-Pear is going to be cat sitting for them.  I suggested we just ride over.  She seemed a bit dubious, "Isn't there a big hill?"  There is, and I think she was more nervous about riding down it.  I was impressed that she actually rode all the way up it on our way back home.

I've missed my bike.  I don't think I realized just how much until this afternoon's jaunt through the neighborhood.  When I first moved to DC, I didn't need a car.  I used my bike pretty much everyday.  I rode from my little studio apartment with the red brick floor in Adams Morgan up to work.  There was one summer where I found myself doing a lot of night riding (spare me the David Hasselhoff jokes), sometimes with friends, sometimes just on my own.  Most of the time I didn't even have a particular destination - there was just something about pedaling along under the yellow street lights, generating my own cool breeze in the hot DC summer night.

*

Have you tried an aprium yet?  I am generally skeptical of cross-bred fruits and vegetables, but I am tired of the ever available local strawberries and if I eat too many mangos my mouth gets all itchy (because mango, wouldn't you know, is apparently related to poison ivy) so I thought I'd give them a go.  They're good.  I'm having a hard time restraining myself from eating all of them.

*

Mr. Pear is supposed to come downstairs and watch Weeds with me, but I think he's fallen asleep.  I don't know how he fell asleep.  Our asshole neighbors are having a loud party.  Why are they assholes?  Well, they park in my driveway for one, and for two?  They have their million dollar deck wired for sound.  And what do they play on this surely expensive system?  The radio.  That's sort of worse than playing bad music, because at least bad music just means you have your personal taste and I have mine, but listening to the radio tells me you have no ear whatsoever...

How many times can you say whoo-hoo?

Speaking of music, I can't believe how many of you had never heard the song I linked to in my last post.  Mr. Pear actually thought it was a song I'd made up...like I actually sat down and composed my own original lyrics about flatulence.

The grocery store where I do most of my food shopping has reconfigured its interior, with fancy new fixtures arranged in a different layout.  I'm sure we'll all get the hang of it sooner or later, but shopping there yesterday was a total bear.  Gridlock in the produce section!   Bewildered yogis bleating about the elusiveness of the tortillas.

The wine section's up front now.  Squee!  I'll never forget to pop a bottle of local in the cart again! AA thanks you in advance for my support.

I think they are running a bit scared about the new Whole Foods (currently a huge hole in the ground a few short blocks from my front door), hence all the wood and burnished metal.  Despite the suburban nature of my old house, I could actually walk to that particular grocery store, albeit along a rather busy roadway.  I can walk to everything else in the new neighborhood, but for groceries I have to get in the old Saturn, unless I want to go and get depressed at the dilapidated Vons a few blocks away.  It's totally walkable, but so Soviet it's not even funny.  Where do they get all that brown fruit?  It smells like roach traps.