Morning Mess!

I got up somewhat early to get my son ready to go hiking up Camel's Hump with his dad this morning.  I have been trying to be a better housekeeper so as soon as I come downstairs I clean the kitchen, take care of the dishes, and sweep and vacuum the floor (its white, because someone thought it would be fun to put white vinyl down in a g-d kitchen) and then have my coffee and eat breakfast.

I got the kitchen all pretty except for the Eternally Cluttered Counter which seems to breed crap when I'm not looking, and went up stairs to make my bed and get dressed.  The girls had gone downstairs and Alex had left for the day.  I sat down to continue cleaning out my computer (the kind of housework I probably shouldn't be doing) since it has been running slow lately, when I hear "OH NO!" and "OOPS!" in a midget voice.

I gently laid my forehead down on my keyboard wrist cushion and closed my eyes.

"MOM there's a HUGE MESS of cereal down here!!!  Autumn spilled Kix everywhere!!!"

All I could picture was a sopping milky mess of soggy nasty sticky yellow balls and me going through a million paper towels and having to mop and fight the cats to get the milk cleaned up.  Did I mention that I ran out of both coffee k-cups AND creamer so I hadn't had my go-go juice?

I sighed and got up, walked downstairs, and to my slight relief saw this:

Thank you, God, that it was DRY CEREAL and not the nightmare I had imagined.  

"Autumn, what the heck happened?" I said.

"I was trying to get these CRACKERS when the cereal went upside DOWN and all OVER the place!"   

"But you need to have breakfast not crackers!  Those are a snack!" I said. 

"Oh."

Alicia jumped up and said "I'll vacuum!  Mom, you go relax, you deserve to be lazy today."  Aww.  How sweet.  Except that our vacuum can only hold about 1-2 cups of Kix so I had to supervise and empty the canister a couple of times.  Those Kix really take up a lot of space.

Autumn helped too with her little broom and dustpan :)

It's full!

Afterwards I went to make my coffee, emptying out a previously used K-cup and putting in some Starbucks Vanilla coffee from a bag, dumping half the old grounds on the floor when trying to tap it out into the trash and causing me to curse a few times.  I finally got it taken care of and went to the Dollar General to buy a box of those nasty little (no refrigeration necessary) International Delight creamer cups, a box of nail glue, and a box of fake nails.

Alicia has a new obsession with fake fingernails since she cannot stop biting her real ones.  Yesterday I tried to put some fake ones on her with Krazy glue before reading that its a horrible idea and therefore within 10 minutes I soaked her hands in nail polish remover and took them off again.  She was after me this morning at 7:30 to get her some real nail glue.

Unfortunately the problem with putting fake nails on a 9 year old is that she won't stay still long enough to let them dry and set properly so she kept coming back to me with different ones that fell off from switching gears on her bike, opening the front door, etc.  Eventually they all came off and I told her we can try again maybe tonight so they can set while she's asleep LOL

Bread Attempt #3: A short, fat failure!

My Jovial brand einkorn wheat came yesterday so I was excited to try to make bread with it today.  After going bowling with my 3 year old's preschool class I was pretty tired (and that was just from watching!) but I mustered up enough strength to give it a shot.

Unfortunately the bag of flour was a lot smaller than I had hoped it was.

Because it is called a "sandwich loaf" I was really hoping this would be the recipe that would replace our store bought bread that we use to make...sandwiches!

I combined 4 cups of flour with 1 tsp of salt in one mixing bowl

In a smaller bowl I dissolved 2 teaspoons of Fleischmann's active dry yeast and 1 tbsp of honey in 1 cup of warm water and let it sit for 5 minutes.

Note:  Before really double-checking the recipe I had combined the honey and water with 2 TABLESPOONS instead of 2 TEASPOONS of yeast and this is what happened:

Nice head on that eh?  I ended up throwing it outside because I was afraid to pour it down the drain!

After the 5 minutes I stirred the liquid into the flour and kneaded it inside the bowl until it was to the point where I could knead it on the counter top.  It looked really nice, smooth, and much less sticky than the last try:

I let it rise in a greased bowl with a plastic bag on top since I only own 2 boxes of wax paper and 2 boxes of aluminum foil.  That's a head scratcher. 

Once it had risen for an hour I punched it down.  That step was NOT in the recipe but I had read to do that in other recipes so I just did it.  Probably this was my first real mistake.  After kneading it again for a few minutes I tried to shape it into a loaf.  That didn't work out so well.  I put it in the greased metal 8x4 pan and let it rise for 30 more minutes.  It did not rise very high this time.  Uh-oh.

The recipe called to bake it at 375 for 35-40min.  I checked it at 35 minutes and it seemed overcooked.  I took it out and it smelled like it had been about to burn!  

I took it out of the pan and placed it on the cooling rack.

I let it cool for an hour and then I went and cut a piece.  It was like corn bread texture.  Thick, dense, a little crumbly but not too bad.  Tasted great with butter on it.  BUT NOT A REAL LOAF OF BREAD like I have been envisioning!  I want bread I can use for sandwiches dangit!

My father has a Kitchen Aid that has a kneading attachment and he has a convection oven so I'm going to probably take my ingredients over there the next time I attempt this.  

Back to the flouring board.

Fresh, Yo!

I hadn't had much domestic bliss to write about lately because, well, I've been damn lazy.  Winter tends to do that to me, especially freaky-deaky weather like what we've been having here in Vermont.  One day its 55 (but 35 mph winds of course) and the next its -20 (also with 35 mph winds).  Ya just can't go outside!!!

Perfect day for baking!

After a month or so of this crap I start to just withdraw and have spent too much time watching reality TV.  Teen Mom 1 to be exact.  I just can't believe Gary lets Amber beat on him like that and that SRS doesn't come take Catelynn's brother away from her crack head mom.

But I digress.

Since Thanksgiving as you may know I have been adding fresh juices to my diet.  I'm not fasting (nor do I think I have the discipline to.  Ever.) but I am trying to add 2 veggie juices a day to my regular eating habits.  I also have not had a soda since Thanksgiving.  This is huge for me because I was a big Diet Coke addict from the age of 15 (I'm 34 now) and I didn't think I'd ever be able to stop.  We'll see if I can keep it up in the summer.  I don't feel any different to be honest.  I actually have gained about 6 pounds total since I stopped my antidepressants (when I started juicing) and began eating healthier.  Of course not exercising hardly at all doesn't help.  The juices are not calorie-free so I'm really hoping that when this weather crap breaks I can start walking outside again and even myself back out.

Along with juicing comes an awareness of the other foods you are putting into your body.  I am turned off by pasta now, and by a lot of the snacky foods that I was eating before.  Namely cereal, crackers, and candy.  I was also a York addict but the thought of putting that much pure sugar into my mouth at one time makes me want to gag. I do still eat chocolate though, but I prefer the good stuff.  One thing that I also wanted to learn about was what exactly was in the bread that we all eat so much of.  I have to wonder at times if I am not gluten sensitive.  I have learned from this juicing process that red meat really messes up my insides as I get an episode of IBS every single time I eat it.  I used to think it was vegetables that did that to me until I stopped eating red meat and then reintroduced it.  Holy moly.  I also notice that when I eat a lot of bread I often do not feel that great after.  When I say a lot I mean 2 slices of whole wheat Pepperidge farm type bread and probably a dinner roll in the same day.  That's a lot for me.

I did some research on the type of wheat flour that is used today and found out some interesting facts.  The first thing that I discovered was that the wheat of today is drastically different on a genetic basis than the wheat of our ancestors.  In the last 50 years we have been fed "dwarf" wheat.  Here is a quote from an article on HuffPost that is a real must read:

The Bible says, "Give us this day our daily bread." Eating bread is nearly a religious commandment. But the Einkorn, heirloom, Biblical wheat of our ancestors is something modern humans never eat.

Instead, we eat dwarf wheat, the product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that created short, stubby, hardy, high-yielding wheat plants with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize -- it promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well, it has, and it has made them fat and sick.

Here is the full article: Mark Hyman, MD: Three Hidden Ways Wheat Makes You Fat

Naturally I decided to try to find this einkorn wheat. Nope, nowhere to be located in Chittenden County!  Not even in the hoity hippie food stores.  I went online and found out that some people call it "farro" wheat flour.  Without spending more than a few moments on that I remembered seeing that kind of wheat in the bulk section of the Healthy Living market.  The next day we went back there and I bought about a pound and a half of it.  Not super cheap, but perhaps worth it?

Yesterday I tried to find recipes for bread that use this flour.  Zilch.  I found plenty of recipes using the grain itself, but nothing with the flour that was doable in a reasonable time and price range.  Crap.  Several sites kept calling it spelt (which it is not) and emmer (which it kind of is...sometimes) and then I was all confused.  On the advice of my friend Astrid I emailed the King Arthur Flour bakers.  Unfortunately they did not give me a recipe as I had asked, merely gave me more information on the wheat.  I'm thinking at this point that I am wasting my time trying to figure it all out, and decided to just go all in and make a regular bread recipe using this flour.

The first thing I tried was an All Recipe bread.  I used half all-purpose flour and half farro.

The bread did not rise and came out very dense.  My entire family devoured it though and Alicia stated that it was "SPECTACULAR".  I think they are just deprived of good home cooked foods because, let's be honest, I HATE COOKING so they never get any.  They are probably so excited that I actually used the oven for something other than a countertop that they think anything tastes SPECTACULAR.

This morning I was determined to make a real loaf of bread, one that looks bread-y.  Thanks to the magic of Facebook I was offered a delicious sounding recipe from a friend who I have not met in real life but who loves baking.  I substituted 3/4 of a cup of honey for the 1 cup of white sugar since I didn't have any turbinado sugar to use, and I used 1.5 cups of farro plus 3.5 cups of King Arthur Flour Bread Flour.  I also bought new yeast, the Fleischmann's fast rising active yeast, which made a big difference I think.  With the first load I had used an organic Rize brand yeast which was a week out of the sell by date.  I didn't think it would matter but apparently it did!

The first step was to melt a stick of butter and add it to evaporated milk and hot tap water in a separate 1 quart bowl.  She didn't specify how much evap milk and I had only bought small 5 oz cans so I used a total of 8 oz.  I wanted to go easy on the liquids anyway because I was using honey.  Next I had to mix 3 tbsp of yeast with very warm water in a separate small bowl.  This was probably the most difficult part of the entire process.  The yeast immediately clumped up and became nearly impossible to stir so I had to add about a half or 3/4 of a cup of water to it in order to be able to stir it for 3-4 minutes!  It kept sticking to the spoon.

Then I poured in the first liquid measure, added a cup of bread flour, and then added the yeast.  I kept adding flour until I had put in 3.5 cups of KAF bread flour and 1.5 cups farro flour.  The dough seemed to be the right consistency to start kneading.  I spread bread flour on my (clean) counter and then slapped that sucker down.  My only example of kneading to go by was what I remember my mom doing when I was eye level with the counter top.  Can't be all that hard, right?  Those muscles on the backs of my arms started screaming after about, oh, 45 seconds.  I kept going though, picturing the 2 cm shard of glass that is in my left hand in between my metacarpals grinding around, probably puncturing something.  Maybe I really SHOULD get a bread machine.

I kneaded that dough for a good 10 minutes.  I measured the time in Dr Phil commercial breaks.  I then placed it in a greased plastic mixing bowl.

I really do not have a lot of the tools necessary for successful baking, seeing as I have always hated cooking.  I covered it in a damp towel and placed it on top of the oven, which was preheating to 330 degrees.  Within a half hour or so the dough had risen substantially.  I punched it down and kneaded it again for 10 more minutes (or 3 commercial breaks).

 Then I divided it in half since I only have 2 small bread pans, greased the metal one, and placed the dough inside.

I let it rise again until it was about 2 inches higher than the edge of the pan and then put it in the oven for 25 minutes.

Sorry for the blurry pic but my camera lens is busted and if I get a pic in focus its from luck!

After 25 minutes I took them out and knocked gently on them.  Three times.  It sounded hollow to me, which is what the recipe said to listen for.  Yay it was done!!

Except, something wasn't quite right.  The one in the silicon pan was a bit obese due to no support on the sides, and seemed like it was falling in on itself.  I shrugged and walked away, being told to let it cool before messing with it. I waited an hour and went back. I took the one in the metal pan out and decided to cut off the end and eat it.  It was lunch time after all.

Uh....what?

It is hollow!  Like, a huge hole I can stick my head in hollow!  Back to the drawing board.

Shadow says "I'm going back to bed."

Burn It Down

Today started out pretty good.  I woke up with enough time to shower (ok so Autumn's door was stuck shut from the humidity so she couldn't get out...) and actually ate breakfast before I had to leave to pick up a child that I was transporting from S. Burlington to Milton, plus I had a coffee and it was kind of nice out!  Upon my return home I got the dishes done, the floor swept, the living room cleaned up, all sorts of stuff.  Then Autumn said, with those big blue eyes, "Mommy I want pah-corn" and I was in such a good mood I said "Ok honey, if I can find some I will make you some."

What it looks like when properly cooked

Well, I found 2 bags of the kind that come in the bags that have the red cellophane on them so that you can use the bag as a bowl.  I have cooked them a couple of times before with no problem, usually taking 2 min and 15 seconds or a little more.

So trying to think ahead I set it for 3 minutes and figured I'd just stop it when it was done.  I started it and when it had just started to pop at about 45 seconds in my phone rang.  It was Alicia calling me from New York where she was camping with her Dad and brother.  Then as I was trying to understand what she was saying, Autumn started asking me questions about something.  I tried to ignore her but she is very persistent. So I'm talking on the phone to one kid and trying to figure out what the other kid is doing, and meanwhile the time on the popcorn has reached 2 min and 45 seconds.  I smell something funny.  Oh crap I burned the popcorn, wasn't the first time and wouldn't be the last.

Except that there was something a little different about this time.  I was somewhat far away from the microwave when I realized that it was burning so it took me a few crucial seconds to get to the Off button.  Thick yellow smoke was pouring out of the edges of the microwave.  I opened the door stupidly and a billow of smoke hit me in the face with one of the nastiest smells I have smelled with my smeller.  Burning plastic and burning corn kernels.  Barf.  I immediately threw the door shut and stared at the smoke curling up towards the ceiling.  Crap.  It was heading straight for the smoke detector!!!  Well that sucker didn't even go off with smoke tickling it's sensors.  Great.  That's comforting.  I had Autumn go upstairs (wrong way, should have put her outside or the basement I know) and threw the cats into the basement and shut the door.  Then I opened every door and window and turned on all the fans I could.  My throat started to burn and my eyes started to water.  Suddenly I understood how people could easily be overcome by smoke, thinking there was no fire in the immediate area so they were safe, but sadly wrong.  Scared the crap out of me.

Luckily I was smart enough to have shut that microwave door because I cut off the oxygen and the smoke eventually dissipated, however leaving a horrible raunchy smell.  Not enough Febreze in the world.  The inside of the microwave is now a permanent shade of piss yellow and everytime I open it I get hit in the face with that awful smelly smell.  My house still has the odor of it as well.  I think I need to scrub the entire kitchen floor to ceiling to get the freaking burning movie butter stench residue off!

Can you see the drip stains from the burning butter? LOL

Meanwhile, upstairs, I went to check on Autumn.  She had shut her door to her bedroom and was hiding in the closet!  I came in and she said, "Mommy I scared of fire!"  (Note:  there were no actual flames that I could see, but I think that a few seconds more and there would have been)  Poor kid.  She came back downstairs and I put PBS Kids on for her while I scrubbed the inside of the microwave out.

"Mommy, where my pah-corn??" I hear her sweet little midget voice say.

I looked at the last bag of popcorn sitting on the counter.  Dare I try?  Ah, what the heck.  I threw it in and watched it that time and it came out fine.  But it still stinks in there.

Weaning Day 1: Yeah, Right.

Yesterday was my baby's 15 month checkup appointment. When she was a tiny baby she had the chubbiest thighs and this booty that her pants wouldn't fit over. I really thought she'd be off the charts in the height and weight department (repeat after me: its not a contest. its not a contest. its not a contest.) but ever since she started walking her clothing started falling off of her and she has turned into this picky eater who only likes raisins, black olives, and edamame!

The doctor did not like what she saw after we had wrestled Autumn on to the scale and gotten an average of the three attempts. She had only gained 4 ounces in three months and had "flat lined" on the growth chart. "Let's see her back here in a month. Meanwhile, what are you feeding her?"

I cringe when people ask me this question. It really depends on where we are and what mood she is in. When we go to my friend's house she seems to be interested in EVERYTHING such as Pop Tarts, Fruit Loops, dill pickles, quick breads, peanut butter, baby bottles, etc. At home she wants one thing and its down my shirt.

I told her that I offer her a variety of foods but it comes down to that she wants crackers. Anything crackery or bready she seems to like, and also cheese. She refuses to let me feed her anything and she won't eat without a fork or spoon. Don't I kick myself for thinking introducing those utensils at 11 months was a good idea.

"What should I do? Give her bacon and donuts???" I asked.

"Yes. Well, donuts are empty calories but stuff like that that has fat, protein, and calories. Oh and give her chocolate milk." The benefits of the milk outweigh the chocolate's tasty badness apparently.

Ah, the milk dilemma. She really does not like milk unless I make it personally. As of late I have been thinking to myself that I really want my body back. I want to be able to eat less if I want to, to drink 3 coffees a day if I want to, and if I want to exercise so hard that a bunch of ketones go into my blood, well, I want that to be my business. I also do not want the cold hand of death going down my shirt everytime I sit down on the couch. I want feeling to return to my....well you know.

The pediatrician yesterday said "You can wean her now. She doesn't need it and it sounds like you are ready." Boy am I ever. The past few nights she has acted like she wants to nurse and then bites the crap out of me. So I was thinking chocolate milk might be the answer to this issue.

Wrong.

She hates chocolate milk. The above picture was taken right before she actually took a gulp. That's why she's smiling. Shortly after she made a face of horror and then chucked the sippy on the floor. So glad I put it in one with a plug in it. Maybe I put too much chocolate in (didn't know there was such a thing...) or maybe she just wasn't thirsty. I will try again today. But as usual when she woke up at the unexpected hour of 6:30am and I had only gotten about 4 hours of sleep and my poor husband had gotten home at 2:00am my first response was to lift shirt and insert baby. Perhaps I can just step it down for the first few days and only do mornings. I'm stronger after my first cup of coffee.