petty larceny

i work in one of those old art deco buildings in downtown. a lot of the office spaces are vacant in the building. entire floors are unoccupied.

every monday morning, a flower company delivers a big fresh floral arrangement to the front lobby to sit on a table between the elevators. it sits there all week until it gets replaced the following monday.

every sunday night, i walk past the flower arrangement on my way home and think about what happens to the flowers when they get replaced the next morning. then a few monday mornings ago i saw the flower guy dumping all the flowers into the dumpster, putting the vase into his van to reuse.

so last night on my way out of the building, i swiped the flowers, left the vase. they're now sitting on my kitchen table in my own vase, and the new flowers have already been delivered downstairs so no one's the wiser, except for the flower guy, who's probably wondering what happened to his old arrangement. they'll be good for at least 4 or 5 more days, and then i'll compost them.

i feel sort of bad about it. but yet so good.

chicken parmesan pasta

the cast of characters:

3-4 boneless chicken breasts

1 cup unseasoned bread crumbs

1/2 cup flour

1 egg

1/4-1/2 cup chopped red onion

2-3 cloves chopped garlic

olive oil

1/4 cup milk

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/2 package bowtie pasta

28-oz can crushed tomatoes

bay leaf

dried basil, oregano, tarragon, rosemary, parsley, sage - whatever you've got.  even some generic-named "italian seasoning" will work.

garlic salt

black pepper

salt

the instructions:

start by putting on a pot of salted water to boil for the pasta, but don't add the pasta yet.  i think salting the water is essential to good pasta.

then drizzle some olive oil in a large pan and start heating it up.  

chop up the red onion and the garlic, and throw them in the olive oil to start cooking.

next, start the pasta sauce by pouring the 28oz can of tomato sauce into a large saucepan.

add a WHOLE BUNCH of the dried spices i listed above.  and then add a WHOLE BUNCH MORE.  there's no such thing as too many green herbs in tomato sauce.  especially oregano.  if i could get away with it, i would use oregano in a 1:1 ratio.  in everything.  

  below are the usual suspects in my pasta sauce.  i never bother with pre-made pasta sauce because homemade is so easy and so much better.  pre-made pasta sauce is also FULL of sugar, which is not only bad for you, but i think it also tastes weird and i end up oversalting it to compensate for the sugaryness.  so don't be afraid - add them all.  otherwise you'll end up with bland pasta sauce and you'll go back to ragu and i'll be sad.

dump all the spices into your crushed tomatoes, along with some garlic salt and pepper.  stir.  

by now your onions and garlic have smelled up the house and are nice and translucent, so dump those in, stir again, put a lid on it, and let it simmer.

now, take out a brick of parmesan cheese and grate about thiiiiiis much:

(isn't it cool how my cutting board  is designed to fit inside the rim of my sink? uber handy.)

leave the parmesan for a minute (if you can - hands off!) and add your bowtie pasta to the water, which should be boiling nicely by now.

then take out your chicken breasts (thawed, of course).  

beat them until they're about 1/4" thick and cut them up into quick-cooking cutlets. 

(the parmesan breading will cook quickly so to avoid overbrowning, 

you need thin cuts of chicken that will also cook quickly.)

breading the chicken goes in three steps.

Step 1: dredge the chicken in flour that has pepper and garlic salt stirred into it.

don't skip this step or the bread crumbs won't stick 

to your chicken and you'll end up with a mess in the pan.

Step 2:  now dredge the chicken in a mixture of the egg and milk 

that have been whisked together with a fork:

(yeah, i know my bowl is chipped.  i love these bowls.)

Step 3:  dredge the chicken in the breadcrumb/parmesan mixture.

to make the breadcrumb/parmesan mixture, combine the breadcrumbs, most of the parmesan that you grated a minute ago, and some more herbs (i used tarragon, oregano, and basil).

after you dredge the chicken in each of the three mixtures above, 

your fingers will look like this:

resist the urge to lick your fingers.  they're covered with raw chicken juice.  gross!

(one time Princess was "helping" me cook dinner when she was about 4 1/2, and curious about the raw chicken i had set on the countertop, she stuck her finger out, ran it over the chicken, and stuck her finger in her mouth before i could say, "nooooooO!"  she survived.)

anyway, stick each piece of chicken in the pan you used earlier to cook the onion and garlic.  no need to wash it out.  although you should add some more olive oil before you add the chicken.

cook for about 6 minutes per side?  that's phrased as a question because i really can't remember how long i cooked them.  long enough for the breading to get well browned.  DON'T MESS WITH IT TOO MUCH OR THE BREADING WILL COME OFF IN THE PAN, and then you'll have to eat the cheesy bits of fried breading out of the bottom of the pan later and everyone knows that's just a tragedy.  ahem.

while the chicken is cooking, go out to the makeshift herb table designed to keep the animals out of the plants.  (do you ever notice how many shots i have that include the back of the dog's head?  it's because she always has to be one step ahead of me, whatever i'm doing.)

pinch off 2 or 3 basil leaves, come back in, and chop 'em up.  

(that's the reserved bit of parmesan from earlier.)

by now you should've flipped your chicken and it should be almost done.

(i did mine in two batches.)

so take your pasta off the stove, drain, and toss with olive oil 

to keep it from getting all sticky-gummy.

put some pasta in a dish, pour some sauce over it, lay a piece of chicken on top, 

and garnish with parmesan and fresh basil.

if yours doesn't come out looking like ^that^ then, dude, i don't know what to tell you.  call me.

serve with a big glass of sweet tea because it doesn't matter 

what genre of cuisine we're cooking, 

we're still in oklahoma.

eco footprint

earth day is approaching!  it's this tuesday, april 22.

in honor, i found this website that has a quick, interesting quiz to calculate your eco footprint.

i'm not telling you what mine was, because even though i try to live as green as possible, it was embarrassingly high.

spring

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

~George Bernard Shaw, 1932

this was what the corner of our back yard looked like last weekend:

here is J building the frame for the garden:

now we have this!

learning how to plant onions:

J is going to build me a shelf in that corner of the fence 

so that i can get my potted herbs off the ground:

corn, tomatoes, onions, carrots

jalapenos, cayenne peppers, banana peppers, bell peppers

some sort of crazy hot jamaican habanero that jake picked out

(package: "handle with gloves")

squash, watermelon, and pumpkin vines to grow around the outside.

wish us luck!

flds

i've been restraining myself from posting on this, but i can't hold back any longer.

first of all, regarding polygamy - i will reiterate my largely unpopular liberal position that i question the constitionality of the marriage contract in general. there is no rational reason for the government to restrict marriage as a civil contract based on gender, race, sexual orientation or the number of participants. as the conservatives like to constantly remind us, marriage is something that is based in religion - i agree! and as such, it should be left up to the churches. i find it offensive that the government is engaged in the business of selling marriage licenses to some and not others based SOLELY upon mainstream christian principles. the separation of church and state is becoming frighteningly nonexistent.

okay, now that we have that out of the way: i'm sorry, but i fail to see how people practicing polygamy is any different from the scores of unwed mothers who have multiple children by different fathers, or men who father children by different women to whom they are not married. they pose the exact same economic "threat" to the stability of our welfare system, and while we do generally find their situations to be grating, they are not met with the same sort of disdain and contempt that we show for polygamists - instead, we shower them with social services. we need to remember that just because polygamy is an alternative and unpopular lifestyle doesn't mean it's any more "damaging" to these children than the millions of other unmarried or single-parent households in this country (and i say "damaging" in quotation makes because i question the very validity of those statistics that tell us that single-parent children are at elevated risks for x, y, and z problems. you'll never convince me that a child in a happy single-parent household is worse off than a child in an unhappy two-parent household).

now, with regard to the specific situation going on in Texas right now: i think people are missing the point here. polygamy does not always equal child abuse. child abuse does not always equal polygamy. just because they are both alleged to have occurred here doesn't mean that they're inextricably linked. these are two different issues that need to be addressed separately. so why has the uproar suddenly become about polygamy when the real, separate, pressing issue is the well-being of the 400+ children who are now at the whim of the dubiously motivated Texas legal system?

the first priority in this situation should be to figure out if these children were abused, one by one. if not, they need to be returned to their families. we can sort out the "legality" of their parent's social arrangements later. for me, that part is really irrelevant right now.

don't get me wrong - if underage marriages are occurring, then that is clearly inappropriate and illegal behavior. i do not and will never and am not implying that child abuse in any form is ever acceptable. but i still don't think that the underage marriage issue is forever linked to polygamy. two different issues. and for that matter, my reading of the reports in this case has been that the "risk of abuse" here has always been about the underage marriage of girls aged 12, 13, 14. now to throw out a little bit of legal stuff here, the standard for removing a child from a home without a hearing is "imminent risk of harm." at least in oklahoma, and i think texas follows a similar standard. now put all that together and tell me how texas has justified taking custody of girls who fall far under the age group at risk? where's the imminent harm there? and where's the imminent harm for all the boys they also removed? hmm?

the fact that the state of texas has snatched hundreds of children away from their families on the grounds that they may have been abused is horrifying to me, and it should be to every parent who reads this. has this country turned into "minority report?" every child every DAY faces a risk of abuse - at school, at church, at daycare, at the park, at home. if i get pulled over speeding on the way home, are they now going to arrest me on the grounds that i may have caused an accident in the future?

a phone call by a STILL UNIDENTIFIED and POSSIBLY NONEXISTENT woman was sufficient grounds to remove hundreds of children en masse from their homes with NO proof of abuse - do you see how easy it has become for the government to step into our lives and break up our families? where is the due process in this equation?? but yet we think it's all okay under these circumstance because the parents belonged to some sort of non-mainstream religion.

those parents - those children - have constitutional rights, too, and we're trampling all over them.

have a grammatically correct friday!

an oldie but goodie flickr photo set: The Gallery of "Quotation Mark" Abuse.

sisters

today J called me because Princess had something she wanted to tell me. he put her on the phone and she said, "today i had TWO snacks at school, and i saved one of them to bring home because i want to give it to my SISTER."

does that not make your heart just melt? granted, i'm not sure how the baby's going to take to four-month-old fruit snacks when it's born, but that's still about the sweetest thing i've heard all year.

clotheshorse

when i was planning for this baby, i thought about the usual things: delivery costs, supplemental insurance, diapers, daycare. it did not even occur to me how much an ENTIRELY NEW WARDROBE would cost.

i just spent another $150 on clothes i neither like nor want. i have an entire closet full of clothes i adore, and i can't wear any of them. instead, i have to rotate between the handful of maternity pieces i've bought. i'm already sick of them. i'm used to having a very large, varied wardrobe. i love clothes.

but i have NO motivation to go shop for maternity clothes, much less fork over my hard-earned cash for them, especially in the midst of termite damage in the nursery and hail damage to our cars. they're ugly. and most important, they're temporary.

this morning i was in really desperate shape. i realized that i really need to get it in gear and buy some more stuff now that i officially can no longer get away with wearing pre-baby pieces. so i got to work and logged on to oldnavy.com because i'd heard they have some cheap maternity stuff. i was greeted with this (click for bigger if you want a higher resolution view of their pin-thin arms and protruding collarbones):

WHAT PREGNANT WOMAN HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THAT LOOKS LIKE THAT??? way to go, old navy. i hate you now. i thought i'd spare myself the annoyance of going to The Mall and dealing with the salesgirls at motherhood maternity who insist on calling me "honey" (last time i was in there, i actually asked the girl to cut it out--i'm probably the least tolerant of patronizing attitudes that i will ever be in my life--isn't it enough that i have to suffer the supreme indignity of empire waist shirts?). so instead i get online to have maternity stuff shipped to me, and i'm greeted with the summery image of a couple of 19-year-old size 2 models with pillows stuffed under their shirts.

whatever.

It's a GIRL!

and to answer some commonly asked questions, i will post in blog-form an email that i wrote to my friend jessalynn this morning, which actually covered a lot of stuff people have been asking:

the nursery is going to be in our former guest bedroom/office. it's in a transitional phase right now and there will still have to be some office stuff in there once the baby's born because there is some stuff (like J's computer) that we simply have no where else to put. last weekend we were moving some furniture around in that room and discovered that we have termites, so we also have to have that treated next week before we can do any more real work on the room. oh, well, more time for gardening, which also needs to be done.

originally, frugal me was going to use the bedding from Princess's nursery, which a discontinued Carter's pattern, based upon some John Lennon drawings.

it's very nursery-like and also gender neutral. but then i was in the room the other day and realized how BARE the walls are. i don't really want to get into painting, and i can't easily find any good matching wall hangings because this pattern has been discontinued. And THEN I saw THIS and I think it's much more me:

we borrowed a crib from J's mom, and it's old and not a beautiful dark wood like above, but it will work, and I'm just going to use an old dresser for now. we'll buy all new furniture when the baby is ready for a twin size bed, we'll get an entire bedroom suite then that will see her through childhood. i don't see any use in buying a changing table and other things that we'll only use for a year or two. as much as i'd love to have a beautiful, perfectly put together nursery, there are better things we can put that money toward right now. things like termite control.

as far as registering goes, we still have a lot of Princess's baby stuff, so when i get the nursery set up in the next few weeks i will inventory what we have, and also J's older brother and his wife have some stuff we might use, so once i figure out what i have and what i need, i will register then. probably just at Babies-R-Us.m at Pottery Barn Kids, but then again if you're not registering for furniture and nursery linens there, there's not a whole lot more left in that store to register for.

target has super-cute stuff but i've heard awful stuff about their registries. i discovered their new return policy last year when i went to exchange two outfits Princess had received for her birthday. i wanted the same outfits in one size smaller, but apparently you are allowed only $20 worth of receiptless returns or exchanges per YEAR. this is compounded by the fact that their registry has glitches and does not automatically update, so things aren't always removed from the registry when they're purchased and people keep buying them. the result is that you end up with duplicate gifts, and you can't return OR EVEN EXCHANGE them unless the gift-giver has included a gift receipt - even when the gift clearly came off your registry. you are just 100% stuck with two of the same item, which they suggest you "donate to goodwill." and i don't want to be put in the position of having to ask people for receipts - it's so rude.

also, we are not even remotely close to having a name picked out yet. we haven't even decided on the last name. we brought out the baby naming books last night and started making lists, but nothing has jumped out at me. it took me two months to name Gatsby, and this baby is due in four, so that does not bode well.

i think that's all for now. have a great weekend!

the weekend edition

this morning at 7:30 a.m. i was greeted by a 5-year-old in ladybug pajamas, wings, and a tiara:

(please ignore the Bad Dog in the foreground. actually, she's been better lately, but she's still on my D list.) we all got up and made blueberry pancakes and bacon (or at least i did while they danced around the house to van morrison's "astral weeks"). J likes his pancakes with syrup and peanut butter. i'm a purist - butter and syrup only, please. Princess likes them full-on loaded the way that my stepdad taught her - butter, peanut butter, syrup, and bananas.

after such a ridiculous breakfast, i made a light dinner tonight. i'm SO into spring food right now it's ridiculous. here i made a salad with lettuce, walnuts, feta cheese, strawberries, and purple onion, served in my great-grandmother's milk glass bowl:

freaking YUM. strawberries always remind me of my aunt patti. i used to go visit my cousins amber and jessie every summer as a kid (they were older and i totally idolized them). aunt patti ALWAYS had this amazing strawberry shampoo that we NEVER had at home, and her long, long blonde hair always smelled of it. it was like the most decadent shampoo ever created - i wanted to SWIM in it. she also cans the most amazing strawberry jam. not to mention that all these impressions were made on me during the height of my strawberry shortcake obsession, and as a result, i can never eat a strawberry without thinking of aunt patti.

i digress. tonight i also threw together this pasta salad. i'll post the recipe below - it was great.

i served the salads with some sandwiches. in our house, this means setting out a big hunk of unsliced peppered turkey breast on a cutting board, two or three kinds of bread/rolls (today we had sesame seed hoagie buns and onion rolls, plus good old home pride wheat for Princess), and a couple of kinds of sliced cheese, plus sliced tomato, sliced onion, and lettuce. also set out are pickles, pickled okra, pickled tomatoes, whatever, and all of the sandwich accoutrement that i have in the fridge (dijon & yellow mustards and miracle whip, usually). then everyone figures it out on their own.

after dinner J worked some more with Princess, who is learning how to ride her bike without the training wheels. scary stuff.

do you SEE all that padding? granted, she's going to bed tonight completely and utterly unscathed which i'm happy about, but i have yet to see a bruise, scrape, or scab on that child that even approaches the monstrosities that covered my legs when i was a child. the 80s were dangerous, man. not a knee pad or a helmet to be had, and we had to learn how to ride our bikes going uphill both ways and wearing NEON. tsk tsk. hard times.

Margaret's Saturday Pasta Salad

• 1 small jar or can artichoke hearts, drained and rinsed (the artichoke hearts, that is, not the jar or can)
• 1/2 small can chopped black olives (i used the other 1/2 of the olives to spread on my sandwich with some dijon mustard and a little miracle whip for a sort of olive spread - yum)
• 1 small jar alessi pesto sauce (i was going to make my own, but discovered that the local grocery store carries pine nuts but NOT fresh basil. what??)
• 1 package cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered (whatever you feel like, man)
• 1/2 package bow tie pasta, boiled in well-salted water
• 2-3 tablespoons minced garlic (optional)
• squeeze of fresh lemon juice (optional)
• 1 small package feta cheese
• a brick of parmesan for garnish (do not even bother with the stuff in the green can. that's fine for pizza, but keep it far away from my pasta salad recipe, kthnxbai.)

combine all in a bowl except the parmesan. real parmesan cheese is my FAVORITE cheese, but you don't need to know that for this recipe so if you're writing this down, skip this part. chill 1 hour to overnight. if you're going to use the whole bag of pasta, then double everything else, because no one likes bland pasta salad. you have to use plenty of garlicky pesto to give it kick.

when ready to serve, pull out your potato peeler and run it over the edge of your brick of parmesan to make some nice cheesy curls on top, and also maybe a little cracked black pepper.

18 weeks

here i am today at 18 weeks.  my shirt says "earth mother."  :)

it is very hard to fight the dieting urge.  i'm 5 months, but i feel like i look like 7!  for a trip down memory lane, here's me back at 6 weeks:

yeah.  i try not to look at that picture too often.  

memories

like the corners of my mind

misty water colored memories

of the way i was

god, that was cheesy, i apologize.  and seriously. i embrace these changes.  right?  no.  i do.  i embrace it.  right.

17 weeks

in the back yard after the storm tonight:

polka dots are tragically unflattering.  also, do my arms not look freakishly long to anyone else?  my proportions are all thrown off.

springtime

a picture of Princess that i took last weekend:

it's hard to believe that she'll be 6 in the fall, or that i've been around her for half her life. she is SO ready to be a big sister - she talks about it nonstop: "it's not TOO long 'til the baby gets here." it's hard to tell whether that's a statement or a question - both, probably. we just keep telling her that the baby will be here around her birthday, but she also has zero concept of how far away her birthday is. *sigh* oh, to be a preschooler again.

read

it occurs to me that i'm not really reading the book down there on the right-hand column anymore. it's still sitting on my nightstand, but i haven't picked it up in months.

i don't read a lot of books these days - i do most of my reading online. if you want to know what i'm reading, click on my links. plus cnn.com and msn.com. i visit most of them daily. or more than daily. except god.vishnu.whatever because he never updates. *ahem*

more later. i think i might have some pictures to post tonight. if you're good.