RECIPE: Summer Potato Salad

This potato salad recipe came to me through my friend Julie's mother-in-law, Connie. I don't know if Connie invented it or whether she found it somewhere herself. All I know is that whenever it showed up at a Fourth of July pitch-in or a 500 Race Day Party or someone's graduation open house, it started off looking like something ready for a magazine photo shoot with a sprig of dill and a cherry tomato on top in a Dutch blue serving bowl and forty minutes later, looked like a sprig of dill and a battered cherry tomato in the bottom of an empty Dutch blue serving bowl that had potato salad remnants thinly smeared around the edge, where someone had taken their nasty finger to it.

It is really, really good. So cool, creamy and rich, with that piquant bit of dill and the tiniest little bite from the green onions. I hope you'll make it and enjoy it.

This recipe makes enough potato salad for my gang to enjoy at dinner for about four or five days, although it usually doesn't last that long because we end up dipping up a spoonful here and there for lunch.

INGREDIENTS:

four large potatoes OR six medium potatoes, peeled, cooked, diced and cooled

2 stalks celery, washed and diced

4 green onions, washed and diced

1 T dried dill OR 1/4 cup fresh dill

4 hard cooked eggs, shelled and chopped

one small can ripe olives, drained

salt

freshly ground pepper

Hellmann's Mayonnaise (regular sized jar) (use Hellmann's Lite if you must)

2 T prepared mustard


DIRECTIONS:

In a large mixing bowl, add potato chunks, celery, green onions, eggs, dill and olives. Add the mustard, then begin adding the mayonnaise about a half-cup at a time and stirring. Seriously, you're going to use about 3/4 of the jar. I know. But don't be scared. You're not going to eat this in ginormous bowlsful because it's very rich and now you know why.

Add the mayo until the potato mixture is creamy. You'll know when you get there because it will look absolutely delicious. Now you need to add the salt and it will take more salt that you ever thought possible, more salt than is contained in the entire Dead Sea, it seems. Anyway, I add it about a teaspoonful at a time, stir, and taste. Keep that up until it has achieved the level of saltiness that you prefer. Then add some grinds of black pepper.

Additional Ingredients:

You can thinly slice about three radishes and add to this if you'd like some extra bite. The radishes seem to balance the buttery richness of the ripe olives very nicely. Plus, they add a cheerful little burst of color. Don't make the slices too thick, though, because they interfere with the salad's texture with a little too much crunch.

You can substitute capers for the ripe olives if you'd like, but then you have to call the green onions "scallions" instead of green onions and you have to broadly hint to whoever eats the salad that you made the mayonnaise yourself. And that you personally went to Idaho to select the potatoes, peeling them with a titanium veg peeler with a counterweighted grip that was uniquely conformed to the shape of your hand by a master kitchen tool artisan in Quebec.

RECIPE: Slow-cooker pulled pork sammidges

I have no doubt violated all known rules for barbecue with this recipe and can only feel thankful that this blog is so sparsely read that I won't have to worry about angry Texans and residents of Kansas City showing up at my front door and trying to spear me with ka-bob skewers. All I can say in my defense is that it is really good and that Aisling has stopped referring to the crock-pot as the "crap pot".

We had these sandwiches for dinner tonight in a picnickery sort of meal. I found that I couldn't wait until next week's grocery foray to buy another brisket for barbecueing, so I groped my way through the freezer and found a butcher's pack of center-cut pork chops. Yup, it was most definitely going to be a pulled pork dinner.

I wish I'd had time to make a potato salad or even a macaroni salad, but by the time I'd thought of doing either one, the time had passed for their fridge-chilling requirements. And as my husband said with a shudder, "Warm macaroni salad is just...wrong."

Instead, we had these sandwiches with frozen corn (dressed with a touch of milk, a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of sugar and some salt and pepper to approximate the taste of off-the-cob corny goodness.) Again, I wish I'd thought to make a green salad, but my mind has been on HISTO Indiana History all day today and my head is kind of clogged up with information about the Adena-Hopewell Indians and Indiana's state bird (the cardinal.) We had potato chips, making this a meal that defies everything Atkins lovers profess to be good and right with the world and its food.

RECIPE:

3 or 4 center cut pork chops

1 bottle Heinz chili sauce

1 T butter

3 Vidalia onions, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic

3 T brown sugar

1 T prepared mustard

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup of jalapeno pepper slices (optional)


DIRECTIONS:

Spray slow-cooker with nonstick spray and add enough water to just cover the bottom of the crock. Place pork chops directly into the crock; there's no need to brown them.

In a saute pan, melt the butter. Add the garlic and chopped onions; cook over medium heat for about a minute. Add bottle of chili sauce, brown sugar, mustard, salt and jalapeno peppers, if desired. Cook mixture until bubbly, stirring constantly. Pour over chops in slow cooker. Cover slow-cooker and allow pork to bake for about four hours. Remove lid from cooker and de-bone chops, pulling the meat apart with two forks. Cook for another hour or so until enough liquid has evaporated from the barbecue sauce to allow it to thicken a bit.

Serve onto hamburger buns or onion rolls with a slotted spoon.

Makes about eight sandwiches.

This pulled pork barbecue can also be served as a main course inside a big baked potato, sprinkled with shredded cheese and chopped green onion. This would be good with a green salad, too.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #12, Part 3 -- Mayonnaise and Salade Messidor

This week's assignment turned out to be very tricksy and somewhat inscrutable. Like, there is supposed to be something inside an artichoke when you cut off all the green outer leaves, right? It's not just nature's little joke, getting us to pay for these odd-looking vegetables (most of which are tipped right into the trash) only to find....nothing?

I think I'm confused about artichokes.

This week was the one I've been waiting for - the week in which we were to make homemade mayonnaise, a task I set myself to do this summer. And I can now say that I've done it! So have Meelyn and Aisling, because if there was ever a three-person task, it's mayonnaise making: One person to stir, one to pour the oil, and the third to lie back in a kitchen chair, panting and nursing a rubbery, tired arm, waiting to spell Person #1 with the stirring. We made mayonnaise from two different recipes this week. Eh bien soit, one we liked and one we didn't.

I'm sorry to say that the one we didn't like was from Le Cordon Bleu at Home. The recipe, along with the recipe for Salade Messidor, can be found on pages 30-31 of the book.

Le Cordon Bleu at Home calls for the following ingredients in their mayonnaise:

2 egg yolks

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

salt and fresh ground pepper

1 3/4 cups vegetable oil

1 tablespoon wine vinegar

The girls and I undertook this recipe on Sunday, since I wanted a little practice before putting the salade together. The technique for making mayonnaise is completely straightforward and doesn't vary from recipe to recipe: beat the egg yolks quickly, add the oil slowly. But that's really the second part of the technique. The first part of the mayonnaise-making technique is to make sure you have all your ingredients at room temperature. That's not so difficult for the oil, which I'm assuming most of us store in a kitchen cupboard, no matter what sort you're using. But the eggs, now, that's a different story. To bring your eggs to room temperature quickly if you've forgotten to get them out of the fridge ahead of time like, say, me, you can put them in a small, deep bowl with warm water to cover them. Fifteen minutes or so should do it. I learned this handy trick from The Tante Marie's Cooking School Cookbook by Mary Risley, which is another book I feel I simply must own. (Kayte already talked me into buying Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, the book she and the group from Tuesdays with Dorie blog are baking their way through, and why I did this I simply cannot fathom, as I dislike baking to a degree almost phobic in its intensity.)

The reason it's important to have all ingredients at room temperature is because mayonnaise is an emulsion of egg yolks and oil -- you need to get all the little molecules that make up these two substances to bond -- emulsify -- and they can't do it if they're at disparate temperatures. Alors, any attempt to combine cold egg yolks with room temp oil is only going to end with you sitting hunched over on a bar stool, throwing back glasses of marc with a cigarette hanging unattractively out of the side of your mouth, muttering cuss words in French.

Meelyn, Aisling and I had great success with this mayonnaise. It obediently did just what it was supposed to do. The only problem was that it was bland. We added more salt. We added more pepper. We gave it another kick of vinegar. The one thing I didn't want to do was add more Dijon mustard, because it already had a faint mustard flavor and I wanted our mayonnaise to taste like mayonnaise. It didn't seem too much to ask. Frrustrated, I went to the shelf and got out Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, Julia Child's chef d'oeuvre, to see what her take on the recipe was. I can remember my grandmother's homemade mayonnaise, and it tasted creamy and rich and wonderful, whether it went into a Hoosier potato salad or on a turkey sandwich. It didn't taste like mustard.

Julia's instructions for basic mayonnaise (she lists seven variations) can be found on page 87. Here's the list of ingredients:

3 egg yolks

1 tablespoon wine vinegar OR lemon juice (we used lemon juice)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon prepared mustard

1 1/2 to 2 1/4 cups oil, whatever kind you prefer


I found the two recipes intruguing, because they're so fundamentally similar, yet different in ways that matter a lot. To our taste, anyway. Probably the biggest difference was the use of plain salad mustard in a small amount in place of the much larger amount of Dijon mustard. As it turned out, that was what made all the difference. Julia Child's mayonnaise beat Le Cordon Bleu's hands down, baby.

The Salade Messidor was easy to put together, except for the artichokes. We used two chokes instead of the extravagant six called for in the recipe. Le Cordon Bleu at Home has a very nice section at the back of the book that gives photographic depictions of how to do things like, well, peel an artichoke. So the girls and I peeled.



And peeled.




{And p e e l e d}



When we got beneath the outer leaves, we discovered to our dismay that our artichokes were nothing but outer leaves. Inside was a flimsy little bit of leaves-plus-prickly-fluff. What the- ??!! I thought there was supposed to be something inside the silly thing. This is what I get for waiting forty-plus years to denude an artichoke of its leaves, I thought, looking at the bit of nothing in my hand. It's a judgment on me. A punishment. Now I shall never know the joy of peeling and cooking my own fresh artichoke.

Sadly, I laid my knife down on the cutting board and wept for a while. The girls sympathetically passed me a tea towel on which to dry my eyes.

There is the bottom part of the artichoke, however -- is that all there is to it? -- and our artichokes must have been sub-standard because the bottoms were about as big around as quarters. Seriously. So I am completely kerflummoxed re: artichokes. How big are artichokes supposed to be in order to get an artichoke bottom that is big enough to balance the remainder of the salad on? Does it have to be as big as my head? A basketball? The moon, for heaven's sake?

The Salade Messidor was simple to prepare, artichokes notwithstanding. It also called for celery, caulifower soaked in a bit of white vinegar, some crisp-tender green beans and some peeled, seeded tomatoes. We had a smashing success with everything else, especially with skinning the tomatoes by dunking them in boiling water and then popping them into cold water.

Once the veggies were prepared, they simply had to be stirred together with some homemade mayonnaise and served, alas for the artichoke bottoms that never were!

We found that the salad needed salt a-plenty. Once seasoned, it was flavorful in an okay kind of way, but if Le Cordon Bleu thinks it has anything over my own friend-Julie's-mother-in-law-Connie's Summer Potato Salad, they've got another pensée coming, is all I've got to say.

The girls and I served the Salade Messidor with tilapia filets baked in herb butter and the Pommes Pont Neuf from the first week's lesson on page 253 of Le Cordon Bleu at Home. Pommes Pont Neuf are nothing more than homemade french fries, but with a snazzy name that translates as "New Bridge Potatoes," you feel like you're getting a little something extra, which may cause you to use an extra amount of enthusiam when coating each hand-cut piece with Heinz tomato ketchup from the huge plastic bottle someone plunked down on the dinner table. Bon appétit, mes chéries!

Next week: Les Soupes! We'll be making Billy Bi (Mussel Soup) on page page 311

The mayonnaise wars

Ordinarily, I would consider it an act of unforgivable impertinence to disagree with Julia Child. But I like my recipe for homemade mayonnaise better than hers. So there. Let the lightning strike me, if it will. I have spoken.

Julia's recipe is widely available, like, all over the internet, so I don't feel that I'm violating any super-special secret by listing her ingredients here:

1 whole egg, at room temp
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice or white wine vinegar
1 cup olive oil, salad oil, or a mixture of both

Here are mine:

1 whole egg, at room temp (or place one egg in a cup of lukewarm water and allow to sit for 10 minutes)
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus an extra pinch or two
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup olive oil, but not extra-virgin; use the type that's called "lighter" or "light" or just plain "olive oil" for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

You may have noticed that the main differences between Julia's recipe and mine are the amount of salt (I think her recipe is bland) and the amount of lemon juice (I think her mayonnaise tastes way too lemony.) Also, I can't condone the use of regular vegetable oil or corn oil, but even canola oil gives homemade mayonnaise a taste that's....not quite quite. I find it difficult to describe, but false or cheap would probably be the best ways to put it. Canola oil just doesn't impart that rich, deep creaminess that olive oil does.

So my vast preference is for olive oil, although I don't like using extra virgin olive oil because it makes the mayonnaise taste too olivey, which, well, what else could you expect? I like to use the plain olive oil designated as "pure" or "lighter" or "lighter tasting" or sometimes even "for cooking," which has nothing to do with color or calories, but rather with what's left after the first pressing of the olives. The first pressing, of course, yields extra-virgin olive oil. The next grade is virgin olive oil and the one following is commercially graded as "pure." It's the pure olive oil that makes the best and freshest-tasting homemade mayonnaise, in my opinion.

I always use my food processor for making mayonnaise and it is foolproof, really. Just throw your egg, mustard and salt in there and whir them around until they're thick and foamy, around thirty seconds. Pour in your teaspoon of lemon juice and whiz around to combine. Follow that buy adding your olive oil with the processor running, just a wee drop at a time, to give the egg a chance to absorb the oil and emulsify. After those first few drops, you can pour the oil down the processor's spout in a slow, steady stream while the machine runs at top speed while thanking heaven that you don't have to accomplish this task with a bowl and a wire whisk. As the egg and the oil combine and thicken -- emulsify -- you should start seeing a lovely, creamy substance forming. You can see mine in the picture up there. You'll find that homemade mayonnaise is a bit more yellow than what you can buy in the store; that's not only because of the egg yolk and the mustard powder, but also because of the olive oil.

And that's your delicious, easy homemade mayonnaise with a taste that will make your tuna or chicken salad or turkey-tomato-and lettuce sandwich or your deviled eggs just stand up and holler "Magnifique!"

You might say, "But why would I want to go to all the trouble to make my own mayonnaise when it is so easy to buy at the store?"

My answers to that question are threefold:

1. Homemade mayonnaise is just a nice food. It doesn't have preservatives, so you have to use it immediately, but that's not such a bad thing because hello, preservatives? Do you ever wonder why a product made of eggs can stay in your fridge for months on end without going bad?

2. Homemade mayonnaise is very inexpensive to prepare, which makes it a great money-saver when you have to make, say, a bucket of potato salad for a picnic, or three-dozen deviled eggs.

3. Homemade mayonnaise tastes incredible, better even than Hellmann's, which is the only store mayonnaise I've tasted that comes close to the home version. You can tinker with it yourself to adjust it to your taste: maybe you'd like a pinch of sugar, or maybe you'd prefer white wine vinegar to lemon juice. You could use either less or more salt. You could make the recipe your very own and then make it whenever you need it. It's so fast and simple, why not?

I know I can be kind of preachy about mayonnaise, but I learned all this mayo-lore at my grandma's knee while we watched Julia together on television and then went out to the kitchen to play. I remember this mayonnaise best on bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches and it changed my life. I am an evangelist for homemade mayonnaise, although I'm sadly aware that most people, like my own mother, don't give a rip. "I can't taste any difference at all," she says frankly, looking bored by the whole thing.

Leave her and her feeble taste buds to the store brand, then, loaded with preservatives and with a shelf life of two thousand years, and let the rest of us experience creamy indulgence from real, pure mayonnaise. I will let her share my sandwich if she asks very, very nicely.

RECIPE: Veggie Chowder

Last night, I was going to make cream of potato soup for dinner, but I just couldn't face it. Cream of potato soup always looks so dreary to me. Just kind of plain white and wallpaper-pasty looking. Even when I put shredded carrot in it, it still just doesn't make me say, "Oooh, look at the yummy bowl of delicious souuuuup!!!" It makes me say, "Oh, great. I get to cook this hot mess again?"

But here's the thing: cream of potato soup is very good. And it is really, really inexpensive to make. And a meal that is hot, good and inexpensive is not really one I can just blithely turn away from just because I think it looks unappetizing.

So I decided to try something new and add carrot coins, peas and carrots along with the potatoes. I thought about calling it "Starch Soup" or "Carbohydrate Stew," but decided that "Veggie Chowder" sounded like a better sell. We all agreed that little chunks of ham would be good in this. (Honestly, it could probably use the protein, but it sure is cheap and easy made this way.)

VEGGIE CHOWDER

5 cups chicken broth (either homemade, canned or in bouillon cube form)
5 medium potatoes, cut into chunks
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into coins
1 teaspoon dried dill weed

1/4 cup frozen corn
1/4 cup frozen peas

1 stick butter
8 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 cups milk

In a medium saucepan, heat the chicken broth to a boil, adding in the potatoes, carrots and dill weed. Reduce the heat and allow the vegetables to simmer until they can be easily pierced with a fork. Add the corn and peas and simmer for five to ten minutes.

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat and add the flour to make a roux; cook for two minutes while stirring constantly. Add the salt and pepper; stir to combine. Add milk slowly (by the half cup), stirring the mixture smooth over a medium heat before adding more.

When all the milk has been added to the flour/butter combination, pour the chicken stock/vegetable mixture into it. Stir carefully to combine; bring to a slight simmer if necessary.

Serve immediately. Sprinkle with some paprika and add a little parsely for a garnish, if you like doing that sort of thing. A nice green salad with some sliced, hard-cooked egg (protein) would go well with this, I'm sure, but the other night, it was just to cold to even consider eating a salad.

Fear and loathing at the grocery store

Although completely unlike Hunter S. Thompson in just about all respects, I do share with him a desire to be a little bit reclusive in my personal life. This week, for instance. A lot of people would have made plans to see movies and do lunch with various friends, but the thing that appealed to me the most was to be able to just be by myself, whether staying at home or having lunch or going to a bookstore. I like to be by myself. And to tell you the truth, there are a lot of weird people out there that I'd just as soon avoid.

Like the ham lady I met at the grocery store. And poor Cody. And Melissa's mom.

I went out for breakfast this morning -- by myself -- and on the way home, decided to stop by the grocery to pick up a some things, like a bottle of sesame oil for tonight's stir fry. I traveled through the store briskly, remembering that my husband had requested cookies and that I needed a bottle of sunscreen.

I was walking with my cart through the produce section when I heard a woman call out, "Melissa!" Naturally, I didn't respond. Because my name is not Melissa. How was I to know that she was summoning me? She said again, more urgently, "MeLISSA!" and I still didn't turn around. Finally, at the end of her patience, she yelled "MUUUUH - LIH - SUUUUUUUUUUUUH!" and grabbed me by the shoulder.

I whirled around and looked at her and she immediately dropped her hand from my person, abashed. "Oh, I am so sorry," she said. "I....thought you were my daughter."

"I'm honored," I said politely.

"There's my daughter, up there," she said, suddenly seeing a young woman at the deli counter. "You look a lot like her."

I eyed the person at the deli counter and felt pleased because she did appear to be in her twenties and I....well, I'm older than that. A lot. But the thing that made me want to start giggling was the fact that this woman and her daughter were both African-American. I mean, I do have a pretty dark suntan, seeing as how it's August and all, but still. Melissa, buying some potato salad, was a very pretty cafe au lait color and I am a brunette and we were both - *ahem* - full figured women.

But still.

It was pretty funny.

Melissa's mom evidently thought it was kind of funny, too, because laughter spurted out of her and she patted me and walked off. I sincerely hope she wasn't laughing because she was all, "Now that I'm up close, how could I ever have thought that this old cow was my baby?" and thinking how she and Melissa would scream with amusement as her mother pointed me out to her on another aisle and oh, well. Some days are just like that.

When I got to the check-out stands, the lines were enormous. I had too many items to get in the express lane (even though there was another brazen hussy standing there with enough groceries to feed a refugee camp for about a month, looking belligerently around as if daring anyone to mess with her.) I was about six carts back in a slow, slow line when another store employee came out of the customer service area and said, "If some of you would like to step over to line ten, please?"

I stepped over rather briskly and so did a lady from another line. She was in front of me and had a whole enormous cart full of food, so I resigned myself to a slightly shorter wait and began filling out my check. Suddenly, I became aware that she was talking to me.

"I'm sorry?" I said, looking up from my checkbook.

"I said, 'Look at all this food I'm buying,'" she repeated. "I only came in here for about three or four things."

"That's easy to do," I said, thinking of my own days when "a few items" could suddenly add up to seventy dollars worth of impulse buying.

"I got some good deals, though," she remarked, gesturing to her bulging cart. "Like this ham. See this ham?"

"Yes," I said, obediently looking at the package of ham she was holding up.

"This ham was on sale, $2.49 for the pound."

"That was a good deal," I said, smiling one of those smiles that is friendly, but doesn't necessarily encourage further social discourse.

"You should buy you some of this ham," she persisted, fixing me with a stare with an intensity worthy of an evangelist.

Taken aback, I said, "Oh, no....that's okay."

"Seriously. You should buy some."

"No, really. I'm fine."

"I'll hold your place for you while you go get it. It's right back there, in that refrigerated bin by the lunchmeat and hot dogs."

I thought about the pound of sliced ham sitting serenely at home in my refrigerator and wondered if it would be worth it to buy more ham, just to get her off my back. I decided not to. "I really don't need any ham," I said pleasantly.

She raised her eyebrows and looked at me incredulously. "What? Don't you like ham?"

Is there some rule I don't know about? Some heretofore unnamed law that states that if you shop at Lane Bryant, you must like ham?

"I like ham," I said with a touch of frost in my voice. "But I don't want to buy any."

"I don't like ham," she said, changing sides unexpectedly. "Look, I bought all this food -- this ham and this Jimmy Dean sausage at $1.59 for a one-pound roll -- and all this other stuff, but I won't eat none of it but the bagels and cream cheese. Not a single thing."

By this time, the cashier was scanning her many purchases and the woman's attention was diverted from me to her grandson, who looked to be about thirteen and had decided not to help his grandmother unload the groceries onto the belt and instead was sitting on a bench looking sullen.

"Cody," she said indignantly, "get yourself back over here and help me."

"I don't want to," Cody responded, scratching indifferently at a mosquito bite on his arm.

Cody, I thought. Be smart. This is your chance to run.

"Fine," said his grandmother, unloading about fifteen packages of sliced ham onto the conveyor. "But you can't have any bagels."

"S'okay with me," he replied, yawning.

Suddenly, her attention swung back in my direction. "You really should get back there," she said earnestly. "That ham will go pretty fast. You don't want to miss it. Come on, Cody."

I was reminded of the exhibit of artwork from the Vatican in Cincinnati last year and how we really meant to find the time to go, but never did.

I unloaded my groceries and then made my way home, deciding that, if my choices for lunch today fell between a ham sandwich and a bowl of dog food, I would definitely go for the kibble.

Plating

I've always been the type of cook who liked a plate to look nice. My mother was always a wonderful cook when I was growing up and she taught me the finer points of both nutrition and culinary aesthetics of not serving a pale, naked boneless, skinless chicken breast shivering on a plate next to some mashed turnips and a serving of wax beans. Her meals were always hearty and filled with color, if lamentably short on desserts.

But actual plating is something I've never really done until the double-whammy of Whisk Wednesdays and Top Chef hit me. All of a sudden, I'm enjoying little finicky details like a flat-leaf parsley and grape tomato garnish, or a sprinkling of paprika and dill weed across the top of a potato salad. (I know the paprika thing is hopelessly stuck in the 1950s days of casseroles baked with chicken, noodles, cheese, cashews, pimiento-stuffed green olives and two cans of cream of mushroom soup, but I can't help it. Just be thankful that I don't make that casserole.)

Tonight we ate a simple dinner of Mexican chili, which the girls and I dished up into our faithful old Pfaltzgraff rimmed soup plates. We laid a slice of Colby-Jack cheese on the top of each bowl, threw a few corn chips on it like a group of little seafarers perched on a life raft in the middle of a bumpy red sea, and topped it off with a sprig of the aforementioned parsley. It looked very pretty, and my husband was appreciative of our efforts. Which made me sigh in relief, because he's a pickier eater than he thinks he is, and I was trying to disguise the fact that we'd run out of our usual cheddar cheese.

I'm also teaching the girls some little niceties of the table, things I left behind me from my mother's training when I had two little ones "helping" and just getting supper on the table took the organizational skills of General Patton. For some time, I've been just throwing bottles of ketchup and mustard out there, along with chips in a bag instead of a bowl, sometimes with a big plastic jug of milk acting the part of a centerpiece. It used to drive me batty when my mother put mayonnaise in a tiny dish and pickles in a tiny dish and croutons in a tiny dish. It made so much extra stuff to wash. If it had been possible to put my frayed nerve endings in a dish, it would have taken a big one.

But tonight, Meelyn, Aisling and I did what we've been trying to do and put jalapeño peppers in a tiny dish and slices of Colby-Jack on a little plate and corn chips in a medium-sized bowl. And decorated everything with parsley, because if you're going to serve your family a cheap dinner like chili made from canned ingredients, the least you can do is make everything pretty.

My husband nodded approvingly and said that everything looked very nice and congratulated me that the girls aren't growing up like wild animals with no manners. He seems to believe that all problems with child rearing can be solved by everyone's sitting down at the dinner table in the evening. Although I could tell him some stories about throwing a buttered biscuit at my father that might change his mind about that.

My personal theory includes flat-leaf parsley.

And plating.

Menu Plan Monday

Skidding in here a bit tardily on a very late Monday afternoon to post my Menu Plan Monday menus; so late, in fact, that tonight's dinner is simmering away on the stove as I type. And boy, does it smell good! I'll tell you what it is in just a minute.

The theme for this week's meals is Cheap and Even Cheaper. Last week was our spring break, and we elected to use some of our grocery money to have some treats, like the Redbox movie rentals I mentioned, plus lunch at Panera one day and some ice cream cones interspersed throughout our week. Planned beforehand, we can still eat very yummily, if not fancily.

Menu Plan for the Week of April 12, 2010

Monday - 16 Bean Soup and Skillet-Baked Cornbread

Tuesday - Refried Bean Quesadillas and tortilla chips with queso sauce

Wednesday - Beanie-Weenies and Velveeta Shells-n-Cheese

Thursday - Baked Spaghetti (leftover from Saturday and dressed up with mozzarella and pepperoni)

Friday - A trip to some restaurant that features a dollar menu. (The girls are going to a teen gathering from 6:00 - 9:00 and we'll be driving.)

On Saturday evening we had spaghetti and my homemade meat sauce with breadsticks and on Sunday we had patty melts (a very guilty pleasure), homemade potato salad and chips.

Humorless people suck

Meelyn's graduation party is coming up this Sunday, which means that it's just about time to buy all the food we're planning to serve. Lots of it can be put together this coming week, but the bulk of it will be done on Saturday. Which means that the Big Shopping Trip will happen on Friday.

Mee and I decided that the bulk of what we're buying should be purchased at the local Gordon Food Service, which is a store, like Staples, in which I could wander for hours and hours, lost to demanding clocks, text message notifications and pesky store managers who eventually want to GO HOME for the evening. Today, then, was a banner day for me because it was the day I got to go to GFS and use their Menu Wizard for the first time.

The Menu Wizard is a nifty system which involves a store employee giving you a barcode scanner, much like the one you see in the picture above. You go through the store, clicking the little trigger at the barcodes of the items you which to purchase; when you're finished, all your info is magically uploaded into one of the computers at Customer Service, and when you're done clicking, you and an employee stand there and allow the computer to reckon up, say, how much potato salad you're going to need.

As you can image, the highlight of this entire experience was getting to use that scanner gun. I was restrained enough not to point it at fellow shoppers and squeak "Pitchooo! Pitchooo!" at them, which is what I am absolutely certain Susan or Allison would have done. (Carol and Meelyn would have encouraged them to do it, and then gone to hide behind a huge display of barbecue sauce and laugh.) My restraint failed me when the store manager first handed the gizmo to me and said, "This is the Menu Wizard."

I took it from her and said with great seriousness, "Oh, gee. I'm kind of disappointed. I thought the Menu Wizard would be a person wearing a robe and a pointy hat."

She gave me a long look. "A person? In a robe? And....a pointy hat?"

"Uhm, yeah. Because, you know. Wizard." I shifted back and forth from foot to foot while she stood there, clearly waiting for me to come to some kind of point. "A wizard? Like Harry Potter? Dumbledore? Hermione? He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Called-Voldemort?"

"Oh. Well. I'm not a fan," she said crushingly. She proffered the scanner and I took it from her meekly and went off, feeling severely snubbed. I snuck a look over my shoulder and she was looking after me with a frowny face, like she thought I was going to take a wand from my purse (nine inches, pecan wood, rather whippy) and start making the packages of paper plates dance the Macarena.

So, okay. Maybe that wasn't the funniest thing I've ever said. But honestly, don't you think it's kind of worth a smile, thinking about a guy with a beard and a robe and a pointy hat sitting back in the break room, smoking a pipe and reading The Daily Prophet, just waiting for customers to come in so that he could work his magic with the sliced Virginia ham and the colby-jack cheese?

No?

Shut up.

How quickly they learn

On Thursday, my husband and I drove Meelyn and Aisling and my friend Margaret's kids (Kate, Lora and Alex) down to an evening of volleyball fun sponsored by one of the families in our homeschool group. This was Aisling's first official teen event and she was a combination of excited and nervous, especially when we got there and it turned out that most of the people there were teenage boys who loomed over her like corn stalks over a field mouse.

I have to say, it was a rare spectacle to observe Aisling being both quiet and bashful. If they could only have seen her two hours previously when I was yelling, "AISLING SHUT UP" as she attempted to make Hershey run around the coffee table in time to the martial beat of "Stars and Stripes Forever," which she was honking loudly on a nose kazoo.

Meelyn was also behaving inscrutably. The teenagers chose up sides by numbering off and Meelyn was the second server on her team. My husband and I were seated on the host's deck watching the game and we were considerably surprised to see Meelyn gently thump the ball over the net in a high arc, totally unlike her usual centimeters-above-the-net shrieking smash. We traded a look with one another and my husband shrugged one shoulder.

The other team was unable to return the ball in spite of the easy serve, so it went back to Meelyn. Again with mellow serve, so placid and tender it was practically burbling baby talk as it sailed over the net with a lacy bonnet on. The opposing team did manage to volley it back and ended up scoring a point, so Meelyn was retired.

"What was that all about?" I asked my husband.

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully, watching Mee as she jogged up to her place at the net. "Maybe she's...out of practice?"

"I was kind of hoping she'd, you know. Feed it to them." I cast a glance at the teenage boys on the opposing team, all swagger and bombast, as if they'd just scored a point off Sean Scott.

We were similarly nonplussed when she served the second time, again lobbing an easy ball over the net, much to our mystification. When the game ended, my husband called her over.

"What's the deal with those baby serves?" he asked, smiling at her sweet face with its bright eyes and pink cheeks, a faint glowing sheen on her forehead. "You're being awfully easy on them."

She beamed at us. "Daddy," she whispered, leaning closer. "I don't want to hurt them."

He laughed. "Their bodies or their pride?"

"Both!" she said, and grinned over her shoulder as she went back to the court.

Aisling, however, had no use for such social niceties. When one of the boys on Mee's team charged into her place to return the ball that she was getting ready to bump back over the net, knocking her flat to the ground in the process, Aisling was outraged when he didn't offer her a hand to help her back to her feet. The wind was slightly knocked out of her and the game stopped while she got up. "Geeeeshhh, be a gentleman and help her up," shouted one of the boys on Aisling's team.

He didn't though, and let me state that while I think helping her back up would have been nice, this is not an evil boy. He's really very nice. He was probably embarrassed that he'd lurched into her, and being an awkward teenager, he got a little flustered. I have made my share of social blunders, including standing with a bowl of potato salad and vainly trying to hold back snorting giggles when a retired general's very dignified wife fell off a picnic table's bench onto the grass back during my days as a camp counselor. So I felt very sorry for him and at least Meelyn wasn't sixty-five years old and wearing a summer dress, is all I can say.

But Aisling took it amiss. She had noticed the fact that, while the boy was very enthusiastic about the game, he was not a born volleyball player. So she took it into her curly head to teach him a sharp lesson when she came up to serve.

"I aimed it at him," she said to us later, scowling under her lowered brows with the same look she used to give me when I tried to feed her oatmeal without bananas in it some twelve years back. "I sent it right to him every single time and I scored points off him because he mowed MeeMee down and he didn't say sorry."

Oh, children learn all the time, every day, with everything they do. Sometimes it's just a bit hard to know what they're learning. And maybe why.

Whisk Wednesday Assignment #13 - Billy Bi aux Paillettes (Mussel Soup with Cheese Straws)

This week's lesson was by far the hardest and our results were mixed, but not because the recipes were bad. The recipes were just fine and I have been so pleased to read in a flurry of emails that several of my fellow Whisk Wednesdays members had great results from their efforts and thought the soup was delicious. I think everyone probably felt that the paillettes were were delicious - where can you go wrong with puff pastry and grated fresh Parmesan?

I know exactly where we went wrong with the soup. Billy Bi (pronounced "Billy Bee" and named by chef Louis Barthe at Maxim's in Paris after restaurant patron William "Billy" Brand) calls for mussels, which are not exactly thick on the ground in my little blue collar city. I was thrilled to find 2 pounds of frozen mussels from Prince Edward Island for $5.99, which I didn't feel was a bad price for a dinner component, in the seafood case at Meijer; they were pre-cleaned and pre-cooked and I felt that I'd rather handily killed two (pounds of) mussels with one fishing net or however you'd prefer to state that.

Did you catch the word "cooked" in that last paragraph?

It turns out that one of the most essential parts of this recipe was the cooking of the mussels so that their juices could be used to add a layer of flavor dimension to the soup. Without those juices, the girls and I wound up with bowls full of pleasantly flavored creamy broth. It smelled fantastic, but the mere aroma didn't translate to the taste. It was too bad.

If we have an "exotic" seafood in some other recipe, I think I'll definitely make the drive over to Kayte's city (where the girls and I do so many other things, so it will be easy to combine several errands and save gas) and go to see her new friend, the fishmonger, and get the real, fresh deal. One of the things that really stings about this recipe is that Kayte's two pounds of fresh mussels cost less than my two pounds frozen!

One thing I enjoyed about this recipe was removing the mussels from their shells, which were the most intriguing indigo-black with pearly pale blue interiors - beautiful. The mussels themselves were ugly little buggers and Meelyn sat flinching on the chair across the table from me, uttering little horrified screams.

"Why are they that awful color?" she asked, shuddering.

"Because God is the artist of all artists and that's how he made them." I flicked another mussel out of its shell with a spoon and Meelyn recoiled when it landed in my bowl with a slight splash.

"I don't like this art."

"Maybe this is art that has to be tasted to be appreciated," I mused, throwing a lovely shell into the wastebasket.

Sad, sad. It didn't happen. Everything went off just the way it should have -- the herbs and wine, the roux with the cooking liquid added and then the cream poured in -- I was very pleased, until I took that first taste.

Swallowing, I said hesitantly, "I think it needs salt."

Meelyn tasted, then Aisling. "More salt, definitely," they agreed.

I added more and gave the soup kettle a stir, then tasted a second time. "I think it still needs more."

The girls agreed, so we went another round. Finally, Meelyn said, "You know, I think it doesn't really taste like much of anything. Except maybe cream."

I knew my husband would be very disappointed if I offered him a bowl of warm herbed cream after twelve hours at work, so I hustled some leftovers out of the fridge and served barbecue sandwiches, potato salad and green beans instead. *sob!*

But then there are the paillettes, the cheese straws. Shari said we didn't have to make the cheese straws for this assignment if we didn't want to. She'd already made them in a previous lesson (I jumped into Whisk Wednesdays at Lesson 12) and didn't intend to make them again. I, who have never even made a pie crust in my entire life, thought I'd go ahead and give them a whirl. Or maybe a "roll" would be more accurate. Anyhoo, the puff pastry doesn't call for any exotic ingredients, just flour, butter, and some egg, basically. I had everything I needed already on hand, so I set forth.

I had to scrub down my kitchen counter to roll the pastry on. Before I started, I wet two tea towels and put them in the freezer for fifteen minutes to make the counter nice and cool, which I believe has something to do with the pastry not getting all hot and sticky. In this weather, I could understand perfectly. Many's the time I've wished I could lay my hot and sticky body on a nice cool counter, although come to think of it, don't they do that at the morgue?

Ewww!

Forget I said that.

I measured out the flours and made a little well in the center as Le Cordon Bleu at Home instructed me to do; the only thing bad that happened in the making of the puff pastry was when my liquidy ingredients naughtily overflowed and attempted to frolic all over my counter and run off into the utensil drawer. I firmly put a stop to that and mixed them up with the flour and started rolling.

After that initial rollout, the dough had to be wrapped and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to allow it to rest. Cooling the dough helps it lose its elasticity: the elasticity is what makes the dough tough. (Isn't it very strange to see the words "dough" and "tough" right next to each other and contemplate their pronunciations? It isn't? Okay, then. Never mind.) The butter had to be softened by placing it between two pieces of parchment or waxed paper and pounding it with the rolling pin until it was the consistency of the dough. Aisling and I had a great deal of fun doing that.

After abusing the butter, we shaped it like the dough we'd just rolled out -- into a rectangle. Then began the process I really enjoyed, which was rolling the dough, folding and turning it, refrigerating it after each two rolls-and-turns. I can't really explain why I found that to be so entertaining, but I told Kayte in an email that I was so proud of that pastry, I was practically cooing babyluv at it each time I passed the fridge.

When we made the cheese sticks, the only mistake I made (other than not having an egg for the glaze, drat it all) was in not separating the sticks in the middle of my baking sheet a little better. The ones in the middle, because they were crammed in so tightly, didn't have enough room to puff up like the ones on the outer edges. But I'm happy to report that being squashed in closely didn't affect their taste.

"Thede theez thicks are good evn do they're nod puvvy!" I said indistinctly as I carried a little tray of cheesy paillettes into the dining room, spraying my family with a delicate rain of flaky crumbs.

Julia Child states that the most important part of cooking is tasting what you've made and I believe her.

Coming next week for Whisk Wednesday -- Julienne Darblay (Creamed Leek and Potato Soup with Julienned Vegetables) page 133-134. Sounds absolutely delicious and is perhaps the very soup that caused Julia to snort laughter through her nose when she inadvertantly said, "First, you take a leek..."

Menu Plan Monday, on Tuesday but who's counting?

I am not totally certain what kind of brain cramp afflicted me yesterday, but it caused me to forget to post my menus for the week. I am so sorry about that because I know that some of you probably tossed and turned all night last night wondering what I was serving. I hope you've managed to toil thus far through Tuesday without chewing your fingernails down to the quick. Fear not, I have come to rescue you. Go on and heave your sighs of relief.

Menu Plan for the Week of August 23, 2010 -

The Last Week of Summer Break

Monday - Oven-baked Chicken Patty Sandwiches (picture a McChicken) and oven-baked potato puffs. And peas. Because we really needed something healthy. It's just that I worked all day and was really busy and didn't have time to cook something real. My husband ate two sandwiches and everyone was very complimentary and said it was the best dinner we'd had in a while so after dinner I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom and banged my head on the counter.

Tuesday - Whole wheat spaghetti with homemade Ragù Americana in the slow-cooker, served with toasted garlic bread. It's cooking right now (four hours on low, omit the water from the recipe) and the house smells like a homey trattoria.

Wednesday - Old-fashioned Hoosier bean soup with smoked sausage and corn bread baked in my iron skillet.

Thursday - I'm doing a mini-workshop on The Tempest, so there are a bunch of adults and students coming over for a pitch in. We're doing hamburger and hot dogs with all the buns and condiments and the like, plus potato chips and homemade dip. All the other families are bringing a dish and it should be a fun, fun time. Because, Shakespeare!

Friday - I wish to be taken out to eat on this night and I'm hoping for Ruby Tuesdays, but I'd settle for Bob Evans.

This past weekend, the girls and I made the last Taco Salad of the season for Saturday's dinner, and on Sunday, I made homemade noodles and plopped a gorgeous roast in the slow-cooker with some onions and carrots. The house smelled incredible all afternoon and dinner was delicious.

RECIPE: Savory Cheese Soup (reject)

This recipe hails from the June 2000 issue of Quick Cooking magazine. I have categorized it as a reject.

It scored points because of the number of fresh ingredients it included; also for the fact that all of the ingredients were easily available at ALDI, which is where I do most of our shopping.

It lost points because of the high calorie/fat content. And also that it didn't taste all that great.

My husband, Meelyn and Aisling all said they liked it, but that it needed something, namely potatoes. Which would turn it into a savory potato soup. But I already have a tried-and-true potato soup recipe that doesn't have nearly the fat and calorie content of this one, so adieu, savory soup.

I served this soup with garlic bread and a green salad.

RECIPE:
3 cans of chicken broth (or six cups of chicken stock)
1 small onion, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
1 rib of celery, chopped
1/4 cup sweet red pepper, chopped
2 T butter
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup cold water
1 8-oz package cream cheese, softened and cut into chunks
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1 12-oz can od beer

Optional toppings: croutons, bacon bits, chopped green onion

To make this soup, all you had to do was put the first eight ingredients in the slow-cooker and cook them for 7-8 hours, which seemed pretty excessive for broth, celery, onion, carrot and red pepper. After eight hours, you were to stir together the flour and water into a smooth paste and then add it to the ingredients in the slow cooker, replacing the lid and cooking until the soup thickened, which it never did. Half an hour before serving, you were to add the softened cream cheese and the shredded cheddar so that they could melt. The shredded cheddar did; the cream cheese didn't, leaving what looked like little curdled lumps in the bowls. It was not an appetizing presentation.

The resulting soup tasted just....all right. It wasn't the kind of soup that made you think that spooning dirty water out of a mud puddle would taste better, but it wasn't the kind of soup that made you think soup-ish thoughts: in my mind, a good soup is hearty, comforting and rich on the tongue, whether it's a clear soup or a cream soup. This soup didn't really do any of that, and you'd think it would, with all that cream cheese in it, wouldn't you?

The lack of heartiness is undoubtedly what inspired my husband and the girls to say it needed potatoes. I personally felt the lack of meat and wondered aloud if the addition of smoked sausage would make it better, but decided that it would only add more calories and fat; the sausage would be good, but it wouldn't be good enough to make that compensation.

Menu Plan Monday

I do have a plan for Menu Plan Monday this week -- I totally forgot to post my menus for last week, I'm not sure what planet I was living on -- but I won't be able to post it until later today. I'm substitute teaching today for a second grade teacher in one of the city schools and plan to have a fun day with the little kids; second graders are so extremely cute and helpful. It's also nice that the school is only a mile from my house. So! Until very late this afternoon, I'm signing off.

Checking back in after a lo-o-o-ng day to finally post those menus. My dedication has stunned even me. And probably my parents.

Menu Plan for the Week of May 17, 2010

Monday - Crunchy tacos garnished with leaf lettuce and grape tomatoes; corn casserole

Tuesday - Spanish Dogs and baked beans

Wednesday - Breakfast for Dinner! Pancakes and sausage....mmmm!

Thursday - Mixed grill - smoked sausage, strips of steak, pork chop and chicken breast; baked potatoes

Friday - I'm thinking we might have chicken salad on croissants on Friday. Everyone has fallen in love with the chicken salad recipe I cobbled together out of several I found online, so we might have those sandwiches with some potato chips.

Menu Plan Monday (on Wednesday, but sometimes life is like that)

On Monday, when one would ordinarily post a piece titled "Menu Plan Monday," I had a fever. With a headache. And a bad attitude. On Tuesday, more of the same, only slightly less. Today, I am better but very stupidly stayed up far too late last night reading and laughing over a book recommended by my internet friend (and fellow Hoosier) Katie H. It is called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. My bursts of snorting laughter kept disturbing my husband, who kept crossly saying, "Quit laughing. Turn off the light. Go to sleep," in a groggy voice that made him sound something like a zombie himself, so obviously I had to keep reading because I was afraid to turn out the light.

With a week like this one, I'm very glad to have my lovely slow-cooker, because it's obligingly made our dinner all three nights so far this week.

Menu Plan for the Week of August 30, 2010

Monday - Chicken Chow Mein served with rice, chow mein noodles and slivered almonds: This was a new recipe I plugged into the Meal Matrix from a 1970s-era cookbook my mom gave me. It was really delicious and made nice leftovers and reminded me of this place in Lewisville, Indiana where she and I used to go for dinner once or twice a month when I was in high school. It was a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but they had basic Hoosier cooking on the menu along with the yummiest Chicken Chow Mein ever. Memories!

Tuesday - Beef Stew with Parsley Dumplings

Wednesday - Roast Beef with Potatoes, Carrots and Onions

Thursday - Chicken Salad with Grapes and Walnuts on Croissants with potato chips - last time this season!

Friday - please o please let us be able to go out to eat because if we don't I think we may be having bean burritos and that just doesn't sound all that great right now.

I wish I could remember what I cooked for Saturday evening's dinner after church -- wait! I do remember! We ordered a pizza. And then there was Sunday? But....what did we eat? I don't know. I was starting to feel decidedly off by Sunday afternoon -- achey and lightheaded and very tired -- so I'm sure we ate something, but heaven help me if I can remember what it was.

Babysitters bye-bye

When I was in high school, I worked as a waitress in a local "steak house," a family kind of place with sticky high chairs and one of those new-fangled salad bars that boasted both real and fake bacon bits. I never did figure that one out.

The other way I made money as a high schooler was by babysitting. I sat on so many babies, toddlers and elementary-aged kids when I was a teenager, you wouldn't think I'd have ever needed another chair in my life. I babysat mainly for people who knew my mom, who was a teacher. But there were also people from church whose kids occasionally needed looking after. And, of course, there were neighborhood families.

I babysat for a quite a few lovely families, a few people whose kids were total brats, some people who paid me handsomely, and others who felt that a dollar an hour should be plenty for keeping track of two boys who needed an exorcist more than they needed a sitter.

I revenged myself on them by drinking many cans of Coke and eating my way steadily through the chips, cookies and Little Debbies in their snack cabinet.

My worst babysitting adventure happened when I sat for the sister of a woman who went to my family's church one New Year's Eve. The sister and her husband promised me, like, a king's ransom, so I went, reluctantly, arriving at six o'clock in the evening. I didn't really know them at all and their house and their kids were an unknown quantity.

It turned out that the kids, little ones who were four and six, were very nice and the house was okay. There was a goodly assortment of treats available since this was the holidays and all. The problem was that the couple, who said they'd be home by 1:00, didn't show up. Two o'clock passed. Three o'clock. Four o'clock.

My dad called and said, "What is going on? Why aren't you home? Are you okay?"

"I've eaten a half a bag of Mike Sells potato chips with french onion dip, had six Tabs, two Twinkies, a candy cane, some peanut butter fudge and a glass of eggnog. I am definitely not okay. The kids have been asleep for, like, eight hours, and no one is answering the phone at the place these people swore they'd be."

"Do you want me to come stay with you until they come home?"

"No, I think I'm okay. They have HBO and I've watched Grease three times and Fast Times at Ridgemont High twice. It's getting really hard to stay awake, but Saturday Night Fever is getting ready to come on and I think all the music will help me keep my eyes open."

There was a poignant moment of silence as my very conservative father processed my entertainment choices. "I'll be right over," he said hastily.

By the time he got there, it was four-thirty and the couple had arrived about two minutes before he did. They were absolutely slat-faced drunk, reeking of it, both of them barely able to keep to their feet long enough to exit their car and crawl to the front door. His shirt was stained with something that I didn't want to know what it was, as Aisling would say, and her dress was all crumpled and kind of askew, giving the impression of someone who'd been having sex in the back of her own station wagon about fifteen minutes before.

She looked at me with bleary Alice Cooper eyes, pawed a tangle of hair off her face, and handed me a wad of money. "Thang you so mush for....." she paused, trying to sort out from the snarl of her thoughts just why I was there. "So mush, I appreshamate, thad is to shay, thang you so mush for....."

"No problem," I replied, gingerly taking the money from her. I hadn't had any experience with drunkenness at that point in my life, but I knew enough to be certain that we were all shortly going to be ankle-deep in vomit. I wanted out of there. I wanted out of there so bad, I didn't bother to count the crumpled bills I'd taken from her hand. And then I was so tired, I didn't bother to look at the wad of money until the next day.

Ten dollars. That's how much she gave me. And that was the last time I ever babysat on New Year's Eve.

So babysitting was something that happened often during my teen years. During my sophomore year, I had a standing Saturday morning date to sit for a mom of four who needed some alone time to go to the grocery. The summers after my junior and senior years were spent working as the daytime nanny for a family whose mom was a minor Christian recording artists and a dad who was an emergency room physician.

But I was talking to a group of moms today and we all agreed that babysitting has largely gone the way of the dinosaur. Meelyn and Aisling do have a few friends who babysit a lot, but those friends all have standing gigs with people who live right on their streets. Otherwise, the market has dried up.

Most of the people we know are single-income families, and with the economy in the state it's in, couples with single incomes are staying in these days.

"We rent movies, order a pizza with the toppings we like, and send the kids to bed early," one mom said.

A mom of seven drily added, "With all these kids, we're too tired to go out on a date night anyway. My idea of a perfect evening is getting to go to bed at about nine o'clock and being able to sleep all night long."

"Meelyn and Aisling are to old for a babysitter, but there are times I'd like to hire one anyway, just to keep them upstairs so that their dad and I can have a conversation without feeling that two sets of listening ears are eavesdropping on everything we say," I complained. "Or maybe I should just invest in two sets of leg irons."

"Maybe you could get them out of the house by finding something for them to do," another mom said.

"Like babysitting!" I said happily. "Oh, wait...."

Menu Plan Monday

Here we are, right straight back on Monday again, complete with the snow and the way-below-freezing temperatures forecasted for later in the week and I think I'm going to just quit drinking coffee and start either chewing the beans or maybe injecting it straight into my veins. I wish I were a perky, cheery blogger who could turn my frown upside down and make us all a BIG BATCH OF LEMONADE out of all the lemons life has so generously been handing out lately, but I'm not your girl if you're in search of a half-full glass. It'll be half-empty, but I will sweeten it for you. Do you want real cane sugar or Splenda?

Which is why, you know, that Menu Plan Monday works so well for me. Because without this? We'd probably be eating saltine crackers topped with dirty snow for dinner every night this week. So thanks to Laura at I'm an Organizing Junkie, my family will not have to pick bits of wet leaf out of their teeth this week, even though I keep trying to tell them that it's important to have a fiber-rich diet.

Menu Plan for the week of February 2, 2010

Monday - Mom's Best Easy Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn, mini croissant rolls

Tuesday - Pulled pork sandwiches (prepared in the slow-cooker), oven-roasted potatoes, peas

Wednesday - Amish Breakfast Casserole, cinnamon toast

Thursday - Chipped beef gravy, homemade biscuits, peas

Friday - Crispy fish filets, oven-baked potato puffs, salad

This past Saturday, we ate Ragù Americana with whole-wheat pasta and garlic toast for dinner, and on Sunday, I made oven- roasted chicken breast with dressing and green beans.

Menu Plan Monday

We just got back from the grocery store, on a lean week because of the weekend we've had. On Friday, we had Aisling's Confirmation Mass, so we "stole" some of the grocery money and went out to a late dinner after Mass. We went to Golden Corral, which I know is one of the tackiest restaurants ever, but the food is really good. I had a piece of steak and a piece of tilapia that were both extremely delicious, plus their fried chicken just can't be beat. And their salad bar has bleu cheese crumbles and green olives and dried cranberries, plus these wicked good croutons, so it was well worth it.

On Saturday, the girls attended a Spring Swing dance and my husband and I volunteered to chaperone. Okay, that's a lie: I volunteered my husband and myself as chaperones. I told him, "We don't have to worry about eating anything beforehand because at the Christmas dance, there was so much food that people had to carry home leftovers."

So guess how much food there was at this dance?

We ended up scarfing down pizza in our living room at midnight, approximately twelve hours after we ate lunch.

My husband grilled pork chops yesterday and we ate them with big baked potatoes and garlic bread, but I was suffering from an awful sinus headache (thanks, Mother Nature, for all that RAIN) and didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to.

So here's the rest of the menu for the week, minus a sizeable chunk of money that went out for a celebratory dinner (planned) and a midnight pizza (unplanned.)

Menu Plan for Week of April 24, 2010

Monday - beef tacos and leftover corn casserole

Tuesday - spaghetti with meat sauce

Wednesday - Spanish Dogs (like coney dogs, except spicy) and oven-baked potato puffs

Thursday - crunchy fish filets and baked beans

Friday - nachos and refried beans

Of parental concern

Sometimes it is extra-difficult to parent teenagers. You want them to have enough life experience so that they won't flounder helplessly out there in the big world of a college campus. But then again, you want to limit that life experience in a number of crucial ways, sometimes because you remember from your own painful experiences, or also because the state of the news today and how it tends to stand your hair on end.

Along the way, as your kids make friends, you get to know those kids and their parents, and you hope as your children's friendships develop that you're going to be able to trust the friends' parents to basically have the same goals and values that you do. I mean, we've all heard about the parents who have that notion that kids are going to drink anyway, so "they might as well drink at our house where they can be safe and where we can confiscate their car keys." Which is, let me say, a FABULOUS parenting philosophy until someone wanders off and drowns in the neighbors' pool. Or falls off a second story deck onto the patio below. And just for the record, without mincing any words, if you're one of those parents, my husband and I think you're an idiot and a criminal and our kids won't be visiting.

It's fairly easy to keep your kids away from people like that, although I have to say that home schooling has probably helped us a lot in this respect; our girls' friends are mostly other home schooled kids, and the parents of their public and private schooled friends are generally the more conservative type who'd never dream of doing something as boneheaded as deliberately serving alcohol to a group of minors.

But here's a problem I've come across several times as the girls have grown older and it's one that worries me a lot. This affliction is one that besets Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, and it's one that makes me utterly helpless with anger and turns me into the kind of mother who has to tell her children "No, absolutely not. You cannot spend the night at their house" much more often than I want to.

Because it isn't my kids' fault when adults are stupid, but they're the ones who end up suffering.

The affliction I'm speaking of is this: "My kids have been raised in a Christian home and they're very devout themselves, so I know I can trust them to behave in a Christlike manner and uphold the morality of Christianity in general and our home in particular."

This is a hard one. Because I really do trust my kids. I think Meelyn and Aisling are wonderful girls and I'm with them pretty much every hour of the day (or at least in near proximity) that they're not sleeping or working. I'm completely convinced that their relationship with Jesus is real and it's a relationship they experience personally on a daily basis; He's not just someone they take notice of in passing on Sundays as they go forward to receive Communion with a casual and disinterested "Hey, Jesus. What's up?"

However, I also know they're human. And they're young. Since they're young humans, there are things that my husband and I, as responsible parents, need to be on the lookout for, to protect them. Because we don't want bad things -- including unintentional bad things -- to happen to them.

The latest problem that's come up had to do with the prom. Aisling was invited to spend the night at a friend's house to have kind of an afterglow, where several girls could sit around eating popcorn and deconstructing every single minute of the evening. The friend's family lives on the opposite side of Indianapolis, and we had plans the next day that were going to make it difficult to drive all the way to the west side of the city to get her, so I told her no, she couldn't go this time. She was disappointed, but Aisling is a good girl and she understood the logistics of our schedule the next day and didn't kick up much of a fuss.

I'm so glad we didn't let her go. Because it turned out later that the friend's parents had a boy/girl after prom sleepover that night.

I heard later from another mother that the boys slept on one floor of the house and the girls slept on another, but they were all accessible to one another, of course, because they were under the same roof of a single family dwelling, albeit a big honkin' house. But I heard from Aisling that her particular friend, the girl whose house this was, stayed up all night with her date, cozily ensconced in the family room, and talked until dawn.

First of all, let me say this: If the girl told Aisling that nothing sexual happened between her and her boyfriend there on the sofa, I feel I have no choice but to believe her. I know the girl vaguely -- she's been here a couple of times for sleepovers -- and she seems to be a very nice girl. I know a lot of people would just brush this off and say, "Well, it was definitely a provocative situation, but nothing happened so just let it slide." But I don't roll that way, I just don't and I'm too far gone in this parenting thing to start letting situations like this slide now. My point is, something could have happened so easily. Not because the girl and her boyfriend are bad kids. Not because they don't love Jesus with their whole little hearts. Not because they're (theoretically) committed to staying chaste before marriage, which is what I have always assumed other Christian parents of my generation were teaching their kids with something more enlightened than what my parents told me, which was, "Don't have sex because you might get pregnant and we'll kill you."

My beef in this boy/girl sleepover situation isn't nearly so much with the kids as with the adults.

First of all, as I told Aisling when we were discussing the decision to just have her come home after prom, is there really anything wrong with just going back to your own house and falling asleep in your own bed while drowsily recalling all the lovely events of the evening? I really deplore this part of our culture, which has been around since I was in high school, where the prom just isn't a formal dance, but a huge cultural event that calls for dinner beforehand and then the actual dance, then an after-prom party, then an early breakfast cooked by several tired mothers before everyone heads home at seven o'clock in the morning. Often there's the rental of a Hummer limo involved, and not just the one formal gown, but also the cocktail dress for the after-party and a casual outfit for breakfast. It wears me out.

Secondly, this boy/girl sleepover thing strikes me as incredibly stupid, almost as dumb as renting a room at a hotel for a bunch of prom attendees to share. And it's even dumber when the kids in question have been raised in Christian homes where the virtue of chastity has been explained and taken somewhere beyond theory and into actual practical experience as the kids have grown older. Because we all know what can happen, right? An emotionally extravagant evening like the prom, the glamour and romance of formal gowns and tuxedos and dancing in a beautiful place with lots of friends around...and then the intimacy of hours spent together unchaperoned, in the small hours of the night. We all know what can happen. WE KNOW IT.

So why put our children -- and someone else's child -- in the way of temptation? Why would an adult do that? If sex outside of marriage is wrong, and most traditional Christians agree that it is, and we've been coaching our kids to save their virginity for their future spouses (and, as a bonus, avoiding unintended pregnancy and/or disease), then why put them in a situation where their self-discipline is going to put to a test that they might not be able to endure?

It's like saying to a kid, "Look, I know you're really, really hungry. And I know that I've told you that this big dinner, this thick, juicy slice of prime rib cooked to perfection and baked potato with melting butter and a crisp, green salad with garlic croutons and the best and richest blue cheese dressing, topped off with French silk pie, this is food that is for certain occasions only, not just any time you want to sit down and indulge. But listen, I'm going to put all this food on the table in front of you and I want you to sit close enough that you can see it and smell it, but DO NOT TASTE IT. Don't even think of taking one single bite. Because that would be all kinds of wrong, and if you do, I'll be so disappointed in you and so will your dad, and not only that, it will also be a sin. So don't even think about it, all right? Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go set the table."

It's not right and it's not fair. It's wrong to do this kind of thing to teenagers. It's immoral. And no Christian person with a brain in his or her head would ever do something like this, especially if they'd have the gall to be dismayed when their fifteen year old gets pregnant. Because she was a good girl! He was a good boy! And so much was expected of them, what with how they'd been brought up and all, as Christians!

This is the concern we've had lately. And this is why Aisling, who really likes this girl, can't go to sleep over at her friend's house. Not because the friend is a bad girl, but rather because her parents can't be trusted. Their judgement isn't sound. We don't know them all that well anyway, which is a bit of a strike against them these days. But now? Now that we know they feel that there's nothing wrong with hosting boy/girl sleepovers? They are off our list, forever. Let them do their social experimenting with someone's else kids, if other someones are thoughtless enough to let them do it.

Plus, I'm really mad at them for making my job as a Christian mother even harder than it already is. They've given me one more thing that I have to say NO about in a list of no's that's already a long one. And they've let down our side, the side of Christian home schooling parents who I'd imagined before to be fairly well united on major things like this. The only bit of relief I have in the whole situation is that at least they're not Catholics. That would have just added insult to injury and this situation's already bad enough as it is.

This is one of the things we've been discussing a lot in our house lately.