Off with his hair!

My firstborn son was beginning to develop the John the Baptist look.

My parents-in-law gave me a very nice haircutting kit, complete with electric shaver, all kinds of combs, scissors, and those nifty hair clamps.

The first haircut I attempted was horrible. You should have seen the hairstylist laugh at me when I took Alex for a haircut later. I swore that I wouldn't touch his hair again.

But he was getting so shaggy. My sister-in-law cuts her boys' hair, and she just gives them a buzz cut, what my brother used to call a Butch.

So I handed the shaving kit to Ryan and said, "Whack it off."

It wound up being a joint effort. Alex had about a metric ton of hair on his little head. We cut and cut and cut.

The results:

And having all that hair off instantly sent him into the heights of hyperactivity. He ran around like a lunatic for the rest of the day. It must have felt really good.

The sedentary blogger

I visited my Mom's yesterday. My sister-in-law came, too, and we sat around and exchanged blogging stories.

One thing that filled me with dismay was when my mom started talking about blogging comment etiquette. If somebody leaves a comment on your blog, you leave a comment on theirs, and if you want to drum up a lot of hits on your blog, comment on lots of people's blogs.

Then she told a story about a lady who had been real active in the blogging community, who suddenly went AWOL for a while. And people were leaving her nasty comments because she hadn't posted on their blogs in so long. Turns out she had had a family emergency and just hadn't been around a computer.

This story filled me with horror. I used to run a fairly large videogame website, and talking to whiny people was what I did, day in and day out. Most of them being hormone-ridden teenagers didn't help matters. And the trouble was, I HAD to talk to them because half the time something on MY site was giving them trouble.

I ran that site almost ten years. I still have what you might call "web admin burnout". I have no desire to go back to being at the beck and call of the general public, no matter how nice they are.

Blogging, for me, is a nice, small way to have a website with no strings attached.

But this blogger etiquette thing would make me dump this blog faster than you could say "flame war". So if you comment here, and I don't go to your blog and comment, it's nothing personal. I'm just very sedentary when it comes to blogging. I can't handle the social demands of an active internet life again.

Devotion: Waiting for hope

From Streams in the Desert:

For we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness" (Gal. 5:5, RV).

There are times when things look very dark to me--so dark that I have to wait even for hope. It is bad enough to wait in hope. A long-deferred fulfillment carries its own pain, but to wait for hope, to see no glimmer of a prospect and yet refuse to despair; to have nothing but night before the casement and yet to keep the casement open for possible stars; to have a vacant place in my heart and yet to allow that place to be filled by no inferior presence--that is the grandest patience in the universe. It is Job in the tempest; it is Abraham on the road to Moriah; it is Moses in the desert of Midian; it is the Son of man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

There is no patience so hard as that which endures, "as seeing him who is invisible"; it is the waiting for hope.

Thou hast made waiting beautiful; Thou has made patience divine. Thou hast taught us that the Father's will may be received just because it is His will. Thou hast revealed to us that a soul may see nothing but sorrow in the cup and yet may refuse to let it go, convinced that the eye of the Father sees further than its own.

Give me this Divine power of Thine, the power of Gethsemane. Give me the power to wait for hope itself, to look out from the casement where there are no stars. Give me the power, when the very joy that was set before me is gone, to stand unconquered amid the night, and say, "To the eye of my Father it is perhaps shining still." I shall reach the climax of strength when I have learned to wait for hope. --George Matheson

Whatchagot Ramen soup

A friend gave me a large sack of chicken Top Ramen, and I've discovered that you can do all kinds of stuff with it.

For instance, you can add stuff to it and make a halfway decent soup.

My recipe tonight was mostly Whatchagot Stew. I happened to have on hand:

Top Ramen
1 can mixed vegetables
Leftover Fried Potatoes
Cooked beans (about 1 cup)

I was going to use 2 packs of Top Ramen, so I heated up 4 cups of water and dumped in both flavoring packets.

Yes, I know you should use bouillon or chicken broth instead of the flavor packets. But I'm out of chicken bouillon. And I'm putting in potatoes! Potatoes suck up the salt, right? Right?

Anyway, after all of the above had come to a boil, I added the noodles and simmered it until they were soft.

It made some pretty tasty soup. The kids ate it all up.

Also, the noodles together with the beans make a complete protein, so you don't even need to add meat. I'm getting better at this!

Holy smokes! Roasted veggies

This stuff was so good, I ate it all up before I remembered to take a photo.

Anyway, I made roasted veggies with fettuccine pasta tonight for dinner.

I'd been reading a lot of food bloggers who talk about all the ways to roast veggies. Basically, you cut up your veggies, toss them with oil, salt and pepper, spread them on a cookie sheet, and bake for 30 minutes at 350, or 20 minutes at 400-450, or 10 minutes at 500.

What veggies or other flavorings you use seem to vary according to the tastes of individuals and what was on sale at the farmer's market, or what was being produced by the truckload by the single squash plant in the garden.

Anyway, my Mom gave me a couple bags of bell peppers, chili peppers, jalapenos, and tomatoes last time I was over there. It was originally to make salsa. I made salsa, and it was indeed good, but I had some veggies left over.

So this afternoon I made a marinade of:

1 cup water
1 Tablespoon cider vinegar
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp basil
1 tsp kosher salt
1 minced garlic clove (1 tsp powdered?)
small handful of diced onion (2 tsp minced?)
1/2 tsp black pepper

Then I just chopped my two small tomatoes, two small bell peppers, a jalapeno and a chili, because I was doubtful about their actual heat content. I tossed them all in a bag with the marinade and let it sit for an hour.

Notice there's no oil. It's because I ran out. But in my research, I discovered that if you cook veggies in the oven without oil on them, the outside of the vegetable stays at 212 degrees, no matter the heat of the oven, and all the moisture inside dries out, leaving you with limp, grody vegetables. (Quoted verbatim from Gluten-Free Girl.)

So I did the next best thing.

I stir-fried them in melted butter before putting them on the cookie sheet. And it wasn't butter. It was that mysterious butter-like substance called Blue Bonnet. Some sort of weird vegetable oil spread like margarine, I think. Anyway, I only fried it for about a minute. Just long enough to toss everything real good.

Then I spread out my veggies on a cookie sheet and hosed them down with a layer of cooking spray, just to be safe.

Twenty minutes later they smelled divine. I don't like mixed vegetables, as a rule. Especially not when raw tomatoes are involved. But man, this came off that cookie sheet with delicious black burned specks all over it, and the vinegar marinade had instilled a deep tang, and the butter stir-fry had turned to a browned butter coating.

We tossed it with fettuccine noodles, some Parmesan and some diced cubes of Colby Jack, sucked it down, and looked for more.

I need to start making a lot more noodles, for one thing.

And Mom, I need more veggies. I'll even take squash. As long as I peel the zucchini, nobody will know what it is! *rubs hands together*

Playing outside

Our 100 degree weather dropped down into the 90s, so the munchkins have been able to play outside in the cool mornings.

Alex was carrying in his toys and singing. They may not be all smiles in these pictures, but that's because they were so very busy playing. Playing is serious business.

Spelt bread

Well, it's not technically spelt bread. It's spelt mixed with white flour.

Spelt is a nice grain that is related to wheat, but it has a nuttier taste. (Ever notice that brown rice, whole wheat flour, and any kind of other grain all taste "nutty"? It's like the grain version of "Tastes like chicken".)

Personally, I think spelt tastes like popcorn.

My mom had a big jar of whole spelt in the back of her pantry, and she generously gave me some. I've been grinding it in my blender and adding it to my bread in place of whole wheat flour. It contains gluten, but it's more delicate than wheat gluten, so everybody says not to knead it longer than 4 minutes or it will collapse.

I made mine half spelt half white wheat, kneaded it about ten minutes and had no problems.

The trouble is, the bread has such a nice popcorn overtone that the kids are eating it up. Alex has about 5 pieces of toast with his eggs every morning (slathered in butter and jam, so that might have something to do with it).

I guess I'll just have to make some more. :-)

The recipe is just a general bread recipe from Betty Crocker. You can find millions of bread recipes, and the only thing I changed was altering my usual half white half whole wheat to half white half spelt flour.