kdiddy.org

Please tell me that I’m not the only parent who occasionally (like once a day) says to her child, “Buddy, please, PLEASE just stop talking for like five minutes.” I feel like I’m stifling him or just being a bitch, but he really never stops talking. And while I totally appreciate that he’s asking questions because he’s just so curious about everything, how the hell am I supposed to answer stuff like, “Why does Godzilla sound like that?” and “Why do they make popsicle sticks?” I don’t know, dude. It was like that when I got here.

Anyway, with the semester in full swing, I’ve been finding that cooking gives me something to focus on that is usually something I can accomplish and it gives the three of us a chance to sit down and relax for a little bit. I’ve said before that I’m not a natural in the kitchen. That is, I can’t just walk in and cook something. But I’m more than proficient at following a recipe and I’ve even gotten bold enough to deviate from time to time…or sometimes I just forget shit and am lucky enough that it turns out okay.

My main source for recipes is Everyday with Rachel Ray and Everyday Food. While not all of the recipes are budget-friendly or mindful of the fact that crappier grocery stores don’t carry stuff like arugula, I’m usually able to pull about a month’s worth of recipes to follow from the dozens of issues I’ve accumulated. So far this week, I’ve tried out two recipes that I can definitely recommend.

Harvest Creamy Corn “Choup”

I know, I know. Ms. Ray is highly irritating with all of her cutesy phrases and speedy personality, but her recipes are kind of the shit. And this was a perfect early autumn dish and the husband and baby both liked it. I also took some tips from Miss Smilex and used a “garbage bowl.” I also chopped everything up beforehand and put the various ingredients in those crappy plastic bowls that you get wonton soup in from Chinese restaurants. We have a billion of those. Normally I just chop stuff as I go along and I think that makes the whole process take a bit longer.

As an aside, this “choup” (ugh) is not Weight Watchers friendly. I calculated it to be 19 points a serving. But my tactic is to use minimal points during the day when my non-WW family members and I aren’t eating together so that I can cook something “normal” for dinner.

Last night, I made Whole Wheat Pasta Arrabbiata with Arugula.

Like I said before, some stores (coughcoughWalMartcough) don’t carry arugula, so I just used spinach. Not the same thing, but it wilts nicely and tastes good. This dish was a big hit. It was spicy and fresh, also a good early autumn dish. Oh, I forgot to add the reserved pasta water, which I guess would have made the sauce a little thicker, but it still tasted very good. I calculated this to be 12 points per serving.

I’ve not been feeling very communicative over the last few days. I blame the weather. Everything is moist and sticky and gray and it sucks. Walking takes a huge amount of effort.

Yesterday, I read about toxins and carcinogens in personal care products, plastics, and toys on at least three or four different and unrelated sites. Obviously, recently published reports certainly had an impact on that frequency, but it got my wheels turning.

See, here’s where I’ll admit something to whoever happens to read this: I do nearly all of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. This is not something that I’m happy about and I don’t enjoy supporting them since they violate pretty much every principle of mine. But for the time being I am the breadwinner for our family and I have a BA in English, so you can imagine that money is pretty tight.

When we first started out on our own, we were shopping at the regular local grocery store and even with coupons, we couldn’t afford more than two weeks’ worth of food there. Bottom line: we need to eat all four weeks out of the month. It is pretty shameful how difficult it is to buy food and other products that are good for you or at the very least not potentially harmful. Just buying fresh produce eats up a large portion of our grocery budget. Buying organic and/or locally-grown food on a regular basis is something that we might be able to afford to do in a few years’ time, but it is simply not an option right now. So I can avoid the chemicals and starve or fill my belly with something and count the days until I feel that first lump. Awesome.

Such is life. If you’re not wealthy, you can’t afford to buy food that doesn’t owe much of its existence to laboratories and mad scientists. That in turn causes health problems, which your shitty insurance won’t cover. But your health problems have to be addressed, so you go on medications that half of the time are later discovered to be more harmful than whatever you had in the first place. Awesome. But it does really bother me that the U.S. government is seemingly just not bothered by this kind of thing at all. The stuff in our environment is so bad for us, but imposing any kind of inspections or regulations would hurt business and be un-American and god forbid human lives win out over businesses and bunk American mythology.

As an aside, have you seen the commercials for the new medication for Restless Leg Syndrome?

It can cause compulsive gambling. I can’t wait until we get to the medications that cause compulsive punching-pharmaceutical-CEOs-in-the-face.

It’s rainy here today. Shocking, I know.

I’m coming down off of a burst of energy that was stopped in its tracks by my lunch. Jwan tipped me off to this new place in the Strip, Big Mama’s House of Soul. My mom and I stopped there last night for take out. It’s goooooood. I got a fish dinner with greens and macaroni and cheese and a big hunk of cornbread. It seemed like I was eating for a good long while but when I went to heat up my leftovers a little bit ago, I realized that I hadn’t even made a dent. Two big meals worth of outrageously delicious soul food for under $10? Rad. Also, the place is decked out in Steelers paraphernalia and pictures of Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin adorn the walls. The woman who owns the place wasn’t there so her kids were running things. They got a little busy while we were there and when I pointed out that they had forgotten the husband’s ribs they kind of freaked out and started yelling at each other in that way that only unsupervised siblings can. “I’m telling Mama that you messed up the orders!”

Anyway, prior to the soul food road block, I had grand plans to attempt to organize the attic. Not surprisingly, the room that is not the husband’s studio is a wasteland of boxes. We have grand visions of putting the Sega Dreamcast and the old Nintendo systems up there and creating an Old School Video Game Room. I’d also like to clear enough space so I can do some yoga or some shit.

Also, I went to Target yesterday and procured some awesome kitchen gadgets: a meat thermometer, because Alton Brown said so, a vegetable scrubber, because potatoes scoff at my barehanded scrubbing attempts, and a citrus juicer, because Jen showed me hers and I’ve had to have one ever since.