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Sourdough experimentation and the efficient foodie.

I continue to play around with the sourdough starter I ordered a few weeks ago, and am pleased to report that I have not killed it yet.  I've made a couple of successful loaves of traditional sourdough -- mind you, they are still denser than yeast-risen bread -- and also a few big failures (not so bad since they make yummy melba toast).   The add-some-sourdough-to-my-normal-bread-machine-bread technique is robustly successful.

But I have to tell you, I am not actually focused on producing the "perfect" loaf of sourdough bread yet, tweaking recipes to get the best texture and flavor.  I am a foodie, there is no getting around it; but I aspire to being an efficient foodie.   

You can start with the perfect recipes, and organize your life around your trips to the greenmarket, co-op, and Penzey's, around the cycle of driving out to the farm to pick up your free-range chickens (with extra feet) and bringing them home to skim off the foam as they simmer gently on the stovetop with leeks, carrots, and bouquet garni, and around the resting/kneading schedule of your home-baked rustic loaves, and the garden with its bounty of pole beans and heirloom tomatoes and pots of herbs, and you will produce wonderful food and your friends will toast you at your dinner parties.  Sounds like a nice life. Possibly describes my retirement, or at least it would if I wasn't married.  (I wonder if those mountaintop yurts have six-burner gas stoves?)

Me, I have this life that I am already living, and so my very first consideration -- this is how I do ANYTHING new, it was the same thing when I took up swimming or baking muffins for breakfast -- is -- can I figure out a process that, given the constraints I live in, produces acceptably reproducible results?

Because if I can't come up with a process, it doesn't matter how outstanding the results, I won't repeat them.

On the other hand, a workable process can be tweaked to improve the product quality.  Process first; formulation later.

So anyway, the sourdough.   After the weekly refreshing and after setting some back in my fridge for later, I'm left with approximately 2 cups of fresh sourdough batter, typically first thing in the morning.  Right now I'm keeping two strains going (in case I kill one in my inexperience -- I'll go down to one later) so I produce the two cups of batter two times per week.  You could call this the input to my process.  Given two cups of fresh sourdough batter in the morning, what can I make from it?

One possibility for the two cups of batter is working pretty well.  It's this:  one cup goes in a loaf of "normal" bread machine bread, the other cup goes into a loaf of traditional sourdough (and the loaf isn't actually produced until the next day).    

I also need something to do with two cups of batter, other than adding enough other ingredients to bake two loaves of the same bread with it (which makes more bread than my family can eat).  There are a number of possibilities open to me here.   I could figure out a way to turn the whole bowl into pancakes or waffles, for one thing.  (I'm a little underwhelmed by sourdough bran muffins so far).   I plan to try sourdough bagels or soft pretzels at some point.  

But what would really be easiest -- if it would work -- is to get 2 cups of fresh batter into 1 loaf of traditional sourdough, and so that's what I tried for the first time this week, with plain 100% whole wheat.  

With no recipe to guide me, I stirred a cup and a half of whole wheat flour into the batter and let that rest a while, then later added oil, sugar, salt, and gluten (I was going for a plain sort of loaf) and let that rest overnight before shaping it. 

I am discovering something about sourdough:  The dough can change dramatically during resting time, and generally gets more "batter-y" the longer it sits.  I think the bugs break down a lot of the gluten, or something like that, because what was a dough last night was more like a batter this morning.  I couldn't knead it so much as roll it around on a pile of flour on the bread board.  So I worked enough AP flour into it so it could hold its shape a bit, put it on a cornmealed baking sheet, and stuck it in the oven.  We'll see if I rescued it.

I'm thinking that if I start with two cups of sourdough rather than one, I probably don't need to ferment it as long, duh, because there's already twice as much live culture in the dough to begin with.  And if that's so, maybe I'll have an advantage.  Maybe I'll get lots of sour flavor out of a faster-to-bake dough.  But, I will have to wait till next week to see.

(Christy P is experimenting with the same starter here.)

(Previous sourdough posts are:

sourdough, how were the sourdough waffles?, what to do with a rye sourdough baguette that's too dense and didn't rise, sourdough not-fail!, success with a classic sourdough rye.) 

Morning organizing project.

I haven't attacked anything around here in a long time, and woke up early to sleeping children, so I decided to try to put together an organized meal planning/grocery shopping binder.

You would think I would already have this, wouldn't you, given my detailed menu planning algorithm?  I don't.  I have all the necessary stuff, but it's either saved in files on my computer or scattered around the house.  Let's pull it together today.

First thing I did was print off my aisle-by-aisle grocery list and stick it in a page protector for reference and as a photocopy master.   (Here's a file so you can see what it looks like:  Grocery list.ods  -- Warning, it's probably not useful to you as is unless you shop at the same South Minneapolis Cub Foods that I do) 

Next thing I did was to get out the box in which I have been saving weekly menu plans for a long time, and sorted them out from the other random stuff I've tossed in there (printed recipes, receipts, junk) along the way.  I counted them:  I have about 30 weeks of menus.  

The next step is to mine data from the menu plans.  More later...

11:11 AM.  I have mined data from my menu plans.  

It is interesting to see which meals repeat frequently.  In thirty weeks of menu plans, we saw repeats of

• Some kind of meat or burgers on the grill (8)
• Emergency chili (6)
• Homemade pizza of some kind or another (5)
• Spaghetti and meatballs (5)
• Rice-cooker rice and beans (5)
• French-style split pea soup with ham in the crock pot (5)
• Embellished scrambled eggs (5)
• Taco salad (4)
• Chile-cheese egg puff (4)
• Vegetarian Mexican-flavor lasagna (3)
• Salmon patties (3)
• Ground beef gyros (3)
• Egg salad sandwiches (3)
• Spicy tomato soup (3)
• Chicken mole enchilada casserole (2)
• Skillet chicken fajitas (2)
• Pasta salad with tuna, capers, tomatoes, mint (2)
• Minestrone soup (2)
• Green fettucine with squash, sage, chickpeas, onion, parmesan (2)
• Judy's taco soup (2)
• Stuffed peppers (2)

There are a few other obvious-to-me family favorites that didn't appear on the list at all, don't know why.  Calzones, for one thing, and spinach-ricotta pie, and chicken-and-noodles; hummus and cut vegetables, and chicken-pepper-cashew stirfry with hoisin sauce.  But this sampler should help.  I printed it out.  And then I threw away the piles of meal plans!

11:43 AM.  Actually, before I threw them away, I also mined a list of lunches I've brought to feed 6-10 kids and 2-3 moms with minimal fuss and complaining.  That list (for the 30 weeks) is shorter.  

• Taco soup
• Tuna, pasta, olives, tomatoes, peas (assemble your own)
• Summer sausage, pickles, fruit, salad greens
• Seasoned cooked ground beef, pitas, sliced cucumber, yogurt
• Canned Amy's alphabet soup, served variously with crackers, pretzels, or homemade bread
• Mini bagels with cream cheese, olives, salami (assemble your own); lox for the moms; grapes
• Pasta with chili and cheese or just cheese; fruit
• Hot dogs baked in sauerkraut, served with or without sauerkraut in buns; fruit
• Mini pizzas with sauce, cheese, pepperoni, olives (assemble your own); applesauce
• Baked potatoes with yogurt, ham cubes, and cheese (assemble your own); canned beets
• Sloppy joes, English muffins, canned fruit
• Salad with choice of toppings from salsa, cheese, corn, beans, chicken, yogurt, tortilla chips
• Tuna salad with mayo, pickles, and olives, served with crackers
• Pasta with red meat sauce and cheese or just cheese, green beans
• Frozen pizzas and applesauce
• Plain rice, chicken, and soy sauce with frozen mixed vegetables

Hannah has perfected a crispy salmon loaf that all ten children love, but that's her territory...

Just sourdough.

The first time I put sourdough starter in my bread machine, I just substituted it into my regular bread machine recipe for some of the flour and water -- I didn't reduce the commercial yeast at all.  The result was a loaf that looked like a regular loaf of bread, tasted like a regular loaf of bread, but had a wonderfully improved texture. 

In the second loaf, I decided I'd find out what happens if I don't add any commercial yeast.  (Added:  Recipe exactly the same as the first loaf in the link above except with no added yeast).

Traditional sourdoughs typically require a longer rise than commercially-leavened yeast breads, and bread machines are designed for the latter; so usually, it's not recommended to bake sourdough in a bread machine.  Indeed, the loaf that came out was very short and dense:

But it was nicely domed and browned, with a quite sour flavor.  You can tell that the only thing wrong with it is it didn't rise long enough.

Off the top of my head, there are a couple of things I could try.

 - Use more starter-plus-sugar and less dry flour and water.  I don't know if that would work or not.

 - Try an in-between amount of added yeast, see if I can get away with less of it, and get the nice sour flavor plus the rising boost of the commercial yeast.

- Crazy thought here, I know -- but this bread is still pretty sour.  What if I put some baking soda in it?

 - Try (but in the bread machine) the recipe in the instructions that came with my sourdough starter, which involves a double-refreshing of the yeast:  once to feed it and produce fresh starter, then again to produce the right amount of dough for a batch.  I will get around to this eventually.

- Hand shape the dough and let it rise a long time (probably the best suited to produce good sourdough).  I haven't done this very much to produce everyday bread, because it just doesn't fit into my lifestyle neatly enough compared to letting the bread machine do the baking.  I can, however, exploit the bread machine to mix the dough and finish it at a pre-set time.

- Incorporate it into one of the no-knead Dutch oven breads, like this one that Christy sent me some time ago -- not a bread machine bread, but with some planning ahead produces a special loaf with little effort.

- Try a dark rye bread, or another German-style bread like an adaptation of this wheat bread or this white rye or (ooh look a recipe for Scandinavian rye crisp bread), sorry, where was I?, oh yes.  The point here would not be to make it rise higher, but to find a recipe that would make a pleasant dense loaf -- one that would make it seem a feature, not a bug.   

Meanwhile, I have this 1 and 1/2 pound loaf of dense sourdough, and I am the only one who wants to eat it.  This is kind of a problem.    Hannah reports to me that the really dense sourdough she used to make with the same culture made excellent cheese toast, but I'm not sure the kids, or Mark, will eat it.  I am thinking I might slice that loaf very thin, toast it slowly in a low oven, and call it Melba toast...

Added:  My next loaf this afternoon will be another honey oatmeal "household staple" loaf, you know, for my family to make PB&J with.  After that I'll do another experimental sourdough.  Looking forward to using the sourdough in some raisin bran muffins on Tuesday.

I don't think I'm quite ready to try this at home.

How some guy got his electric oven to get up to 850 degrees Fahrenheit so he could make Neapolitan pizza at home.

 The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning  cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside.  So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked.   Brick ovens are domed shaped.  Heat rises. There is more heat on top than on the bottom.  A brick oven with a floor of 800F might have a ceiling of 1200F or more, just a foot above.  This is essential.  The top of the pizza is wet and not in direct contact with the stone, so it will cook slower. Therefore, to cook evenly, the top of the oven should be hotter than the stone.  To achieve this, I cover the pizza stone top and bottom with loose fitting foil.  This keeps it cool as the rest of the oven heats up.  When I  take a digital read of the stone, I point it at the foil and it actually reads the heat reflected from the top of the oven. When it hits 850, I take the foil off the top with tongs and then read the stone. It's about 700-725.  Now I make my pizza.  As I prep, the oven will get up to 800Floor, 900+ Top.  Perfect for pizza.

Recipes, photographs, and advice on how to keep your glass oven door window from shattering if you drip sauce on it, also included.  FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY.  DO NOT SUE ME FOR REPOSTING THIS IF YOU BURN DOWN YOUR KITCHEN.

"Strategies for time management and staying on track."

A few months ago I got an e-mail from a reader which I meant to turn into a blog post:

Right now I am having a *really* hard time getting anything done in terms of housework, cooking, and homeschooling because my youngest  is so demanding. We're managing, and my kids are still ahead of their peers, but I'm just seeking some reassurance that I'll be able to focus a little better as the baby gets older, and/or some tips on making the most of my time. The youngest will soon be transitioning to one nap, and I guess I will have to really plan ahead well so that I can use that time both for "schoolwork" and dinner preparation.

 But since you seem to have a few more things figured out than I do, I'd love to hear about some of your strategies for time management and staying on track!

Here's some of what I wrote back:

The first thing you need to know is that I love to make lists and have good ideas more than I love to clean and pick up. So if you imagine that because I wrote a cool list or two, I must have a really neat and tidy house and must be really organized, well, that's just not so. I think I am tidier than average, and I think part of this is because clutter bothers me, so I am pretty well in the habit of doing a quick tidy-up of all the parts of the house I can SEE before I attack anything that requires my brain, such as schooling.

Here are a few thoughts that come to mind...

-- Thought one. Don't count on the naps. It is a trap. Never plan your day so that anything essential has to get done "during nap time."  The exception, I guess, is if you have successfully trained your baby to go down for naps at set times (e.g., you plunk them in a crib and walk away for 90 minutes).  Eventually, naps change, and some days they don't happen, and some days they happen earlier or later than you want. 

-- Thought two. Streamline, streamline, streamline. The easiest place to streamline is dinner preparation. I love to cook. I used to make elaborate meals several days a week, and revel in discovering new techniques, tools, and exotic new ingredients. I still cook that way on weekends sometimes, but now I revel in discovering ways to make dinner simple while still enjoying the variety that keeps it interesting for me. I have a dinner planning algorithm on my blog that you can check out if you want -- the key is, when planning ahead, to match the type of cooking (cold sandwiches? quick pasta? slow cooker?) with the kind of day you are expecting. A lot of people think of ingredients first, but for efficiency, it's best to think first of the kind of cooking you have time and opportunity for.   (Another excellent series on menu planning is hosted by Leila at Like Mother, Like Daughter -- check out the right sidebar for the complete list of posts and worksheets.)

A bonus you get from dinner streamlining is that with a little advance planning you can give yourself a whole week or two of extremely simple and quick meals -- very nice for the first two weeks of school, or for spring cleaning, or just to help you feel like you've got a handle on things. Think of all the things you

can make: What recipes do you know that are the least work for a day when you're home all day and busy -- maybe a pot of soup that just needs stirring every once in a while? How about recipes that require NO work

during the hour right before dinner (casseroles baking in the oven?)  What if you're gone all day running errands? What if you've got time to make dinner in the morning but not in the late afternoon? See what I

mean? Tailor the dinner to the rest of your life, don't match your life to suit your dinner.

-- Thought three. You can also streamline housekeeping. I love Flylady from the bottom of my heart, but honey, I'm NEVER going to clean out the light diffusing globes on my ceiling. Develop (over time) a BARE MINIMUM LIST. What is the bare minimum to keep visitors from passing out and CPS from taking your children? What is the bare minimum that preserves your marriage and keeps you from going crazy? Know what it is. And when life gets hectic, cut back to that minimum. 

For me, I do almost nothing that doesn't fit into these categories:

1. it removes filth (i.e., anything germy, rotting, or that attracts insects); 
2. it keeps things in *necessary order* (i.e., if I need to find it, it needs to be in place; if I need to work there, I need a clear space --hey that rhymes!); 
3. if I don't do it it drives me or my husband crazy; 
4. I need to teach the children to do it, by example or by direct instruction.

My daily goals are something like, do one load of laundry; everybody makes their beds; stay on top of the kitchen; wipe down each bathroom. And my husband and I clean the kitchen and tidy the first floor each

night when the boys are in bed, sometimes over a glass of wine, as we catch up with each other about our day. 

One thing that makes life a lot easier for me now, and that will probably happen for you in time, is that my 8yo is capable of doing much of his schoolwork independently. I have it arranged so that 3 days a week I give him a to-do list (in fact, my school record book is just a bunch of bound to-do lists!) and he is supposed to do almost all of his work by himself, coming to me with questions or to have the work

checked.  When he comes to me, I do my level best to put down what I'm doing and attend to him immediately. (The other two days a week I work with him more directly on subjects that require more interaction.) My 5yo needs short bursts (20 min) of my full attention several times a day, and I fit those in when I can, usually one of them in the early morning because he and I are the early birds of the family. 

And I haven't yet mentioned that my big vice is relying on videos for the others when I absolutely need to grab one on one time with one of the children. I try to have videos around that don't make me feel too

guilty -- nature movies, Signing Time, etc. 

This afternoon's project: Defragging the schoolroom.

View from the front door of my house:

View from the living room:

I know what you're thinking:  that I took some pictures midway through reorganizing the schoolroom.  Those big cleaning projects sure can make a mess!

Except this is the "before I start" picture.  We've been living with this pile for a week or so.  The only thing I've done so far is go up to the attic to clear off a couple of spaces on the shelves to store stuff that will come out of this room.

Wish me luck.

More on cleaning up after yourself: Refusal to commit.

Remember when a few days ago I wrote a post called "Number Five Subdivided" about seven ways to clean up after yourself?  And how I said that I don't do any of these things regularly but that I was inspired to try them?

Well, I have been trying them!  And do you know what, I think I am really on to something!

I've mostly been working on these (see the original post for details):

• Clean up after dressing and undressing
• Clean up after going somewhere in the car 
• Begin cooking with these seven items available:  apron, dishwasher, soapy sink, trash can, dishcloth, two towels 
• Keep the kitchen sink empty (from the original article that inspired me)  

I have been surprised at how quickly they've become second nature, and how much they've cut down on the general visual clutter in my household AND the size of the cleanup after dinner.  There is a lot of bang-for-the-buck in these things (counting the original seven from the original article too).

As I have gone through my day making some of these changes, I realized there's a pattern to the habit of not-cleaning-up-after-yourself, whether it's in the car, in the kitchen, in the closet, or in the office.

It's this:  Refusal to commit.

Take measuring cups, for instance.  Let's say I'm making dinner and I measure a cup of stock and add it to my pot.  Now I have to do something with this measuring cup.  Do I wash it, or do I set it aside on the counter?

If the very next thing I have to do is measure a quarter-cup of soy sauce for the same pot, of course, it would waste time and water to wash the measuring cup, right?  But on the other hand, if I know I won't be measuring any more liquids while I cook this evening, I may as well wash it (or put it in the dishwasher) right away, leaving the counter a bit clearer and one less thing to put away later.

Of course, lots of times I'm not sure if I'm going to need the measuring cup again.  So I set it down on the counter and leave it there in case I might need it. 

See?  Refusal to commit.  I don't know for sure whether I will save more work by washing it or by not washing it, so I leave it till later.  

What am I afraid of?  That I will need to measure something else and will have to use a clean measuring cup for it?  Will I say to myself "Damn!  If only I had known before I washed that cup that those ten seconds would be in vain!"  Or (let's get real here) am I afraid of the effort of retrieving the dirty measuring cup from the top rack of the dishwasher, should I need it?

Refusal to commit!

The same thing happens in the closet.  Why do I take off a pair of not-actually-dirty jeans and toss it on the floor NEXT to the basket, or roll it up and stuff it on a shelf, instead of putting it IN the dirty-clothes basket or putting it away in the drawer?

Because I might decide to wear them again in a day or two! 

 If I don't get around to wearing them, then they could go in the laundry.  But if I put them in the dirty laundry, they might get dirty from contact with dirty clothes.  So why don't I hang them up or fold them into a drawer?  I guess deep down I think that because they've been worn once, they might "contaminate" my clean clothes!  For a while I contemplated creating a special separate "purgatory" section of my closet just for clothes I've worn once and could still wear again.   Finally it struck me -- this is ridiculous.  If something is clean enough for me to put on my body and wear out into the world, it is surely clean enough to hang next to freshly washed clothing, no?   If I'm really worried that something is going to contaminate my clean jeans -- what, does it smell funny or something? -- don't I deserve to WASH it before I put it on my body?  

Commit!  If it's not wearable, put it in the laundry; if it's wearable, hang it up or fold it away.  So simple.

All kinds of clutter come from this basic refusal to commit.   How many items in your house go unused?   We refuse to commit to a life with it, and we refuse to commit to a life without it; so instead of giving it away or getting rid of it, and instead of making changes that would allow us to use and enjoy it more easily, it just sits there taking up space.  

Refusal to commit also encompasses the refusal to accept the clean-up time as an integral part of any task.  Why, if we admitted that it really takes 45 minutes to make dinner (counting cleaning up as you go), instead of 30 minutes (not counting cleaning as you go), we'd have to start making dinner 15 minutes early!  I might have to sacrifice some of my blog reading!  And yet, that refusal to commit the necessary time can create a separate chore  where before there was none.

We're doing paperwork in the office and as each bill gets paid, the stack of papers to be filed grows.  It would take a few seconds to slot each paper into the right spot in the filing cabinet -- but it's so much more urgent to "get the bills paid" (meaning the part where you put the checks in the envelopes and the part where you put the envelopes out at the mailbox) -- and won't it "save work" to save all the filing for the end?  It might save some work, you don't know!  You refuse to commit the few extra seconds to file each paper because it MIGHT be faster to file them "all at once," and then you're left with an unhappy pile at the end... but that now becomes part of a different chore, called "cleaning up the office."  Maybe somebody else will get stuck with that one... in a month or two...

I have found that if I stay aware of what I'm doing -- You're leaving this thing here because you're worried you'll want to use it again and then the work of putting it away will have been "wasted!"  -- or --- You're leaving this mess on the table because you're hoping that you'll have some excuse not to do it later and then Mark will have to clean it up!  --- I can kind of shame myself into cleaning up after myself!  

Remarkable!

 (Credit where credit's due:  The original spark of this idea came from a book I read a couple of weeks ago by professional and semi-celebrity organizer Peter Walsh, whose point about "committing" to dirty or clean laundry rattled around in my head until I realized it was generally applicable to all sorts of clutter and cleanup.)

Focusing on just one thing: it doesn't have to mean everything else falls apart.

One of my biggest reasons for taking up swimming is that it's kind of an all-in-one exercise:  you get some cardio, and because of the resistance of the water you get some strength training too.  You can get better cardio through running, and you can get better strength training by weight lifting, but it's hard to find a single exercise that combines the two quite so well.  And so, even though swimming is time-inefficient in some ways (because of changing and travel, I have to commit at least 75 minutes for a 40-minute swim), in other ways it is very efficient (strength and cardio simultaneously:  two workouts in one).

14 months or so later, my upper arms and my core are stronger than they've ever been before.  I even have muscles!  Girly muscles, sure, but they are definitely there, my biceps, triceps, and the muscles across the wings of my back. 

Bu my legs haven't seemed to strengthen quite as fast, so I was contemplating some targeted strength training, just a few minutes at the beginning or end of my workouts.  Maybe some squats, or resistance bands?  A week ago I stopped in at the fitness desk in the Y to pick up a brochure for personal training, and the fitness director asked if I had any questions.

"Well, I swim, but I've been wanting to increase my leg strength, so..."

He asked a few directed questions.  How often did I swim?  What strokes?  Did I do flip turns? (No, not really, I have a sort of made-up underwater turn) But do I push off with my legs against the wall at the end of my turns?

"Yes---"

"And how far do you glide after you push off?   Do you glide out as far as the backstroke rope?"

"Five yards?  I -- I don't know if I do or not!  I've never noticed!"

"Well!" he said, smiling.  "Next time, find out.  Try to push off so you glide out as far as you possibly can.  You should be able to glide out at least as far as the rope.  Then come back and let me know how you did.  You shouldn't have to add separate strength training."

"No charge?"

"No charge."

I wrote down his suggestions on a Post-it note and stuck it to my YMCA picture ID.  

A few days later I tried it.  I could push off to nearly five yards at the beginning of the workout, but the glide distance got shorter and shorter as the workout progressed.  (One annoying habit I'll have to break:  Every time I pushed off hard, with a little grunt of effort, I involuntarily squinched up my eyes, broke the seal under my goggles, and got an eyeful of pool water.)

I worked hard at it anyway, all my focus throughout the workout on pushing off.  And when I finished my cooldown, emerged from the water, and picked up my stopwatch I discovered something amazing:  I'd shaved nearly seven minutes off my workout.  Instead of 46 minutes, I'd finished the same distance in a little more than 39 minutes.

This is something I hadn't been able to do in months of generally "trying to go faster."

A lot of times we think that if we focus on just one thing, "all the rest of it" is going to fall apart.  This didn't happen here:  I focused on one thing, and apparently I improved generally.  

I mused about it on the way home.  

I can certainly remember a few days when I announced, e.g.,  "I am going to focus on LAUNDRY today" and by 5 pm, though the clothes were all clean and hanging in the closets,  I was knee-deep in clutter, hungry children, and unfinished schoolwork.    

What's different here? 

Even though I had been focusing on one little improvement -- pushing HARD off the wall -- I, of course, didn't stop all the rest of the "work" in my workout.  I still had to trundle from one end of the pool to the other, executing all the other tasks on my list.  I would guess that a lot of the time I wasn't working very hard on things like my breaststroke timing or slicing my hand at the right angle into the water, but I can't be sure because I wasn't thinking about any of those things at all.  I guess you could say that I "went through the motions" in all the other parts of my workout.  What's next on the list?  Swim a paced 200-yard front crawl?  OK -- check.  The only thing I have to think about is the pushoffs.  

Focusing on one thing does not have to mean "I'm just going to do this one thing and ignore the rest of my work."  It can mean "I am going to put this thing at the top of my priority list."  It can mean "I am not going to waste mental energy on anything but this one thing."  It can mean "In everything else today I will just go through the motions; on this one thing I will lavish my full attention."  

Maybe "my full intention" is a better phrase.  

I wonder if I can import this insight into other areas of my life.  Focus on one thing at a time, perhaps in short bursts, but keep swimming all along.

Seven things to teach your children so they can clean up after themselves.

Here is an encore to my "seven ways to clean up after yourself" post.  With my kids ages 2, 5, and 8, it has so far not worked to have regular "chores" in the sense of tasks that are completed independently, without direction, each day.  Instead we have a sort of family cleaning time, a couple times a day, in which I send them on mini-missions.  

It occurred to me that young children need specific instruction in certain tasks before you can expect them to be able to do them without help, let alone without being asked!

Seven Cleaning-Up-After-Yourself Skills that must be taught

1. How to make a bed
2. How to hang clothes on a peg, hook, or hanger 
3. How to pick up everything from a given area and put it in a single bin or basket, to be sorted and put away by someone else
4. How to pick up one class of items from the floor in one room (e.g., given a floor with all kinds of things on it, to be able to find and pick up "all the crayons" or "all the blocks") and put it in a single basket 
5. How to clean up spilled liquid or crumbs
6. How to put a book away in a bookshelf, using a bookend
7. How to scrape a dirty dish into the garbage (or pour out a cup into the sink) and then put it in the dishwasher or sink

A child who knows how to do these seven things is ready to be taught to make his own bed, to look after dirty and clean clothes, to pick up books and toys, to clean up his own or others' dishes after meals, and to clean up many of his own accidental spills.  It's not everything you need, but it's a start.

Number five subdivided.

A couple of weeks ago Jen posted a link to a list of 7 things to do to keep your house running smoothly.  Here is what Jen wrote about it:

I thought this was a great list of a few very simple things you can do to keep your house running smoothly. (Although I thought #5 wasn't quite as solid as the others. If I that were easily doable for me I wouldn't need to be reading lists like that in the first place!) :)

Well, I love lists, and I love tweaking my systems, and I wondered what this mysterious #5 was, so I took a look at the original article, from a site tantalizingly named "Totally Together Journal," whose author apparently has a book coming out in which all of the magic seven things (presumably including #5) are spelled out in detail.

Here are the seven:

Number 1: Make Beds Right Away
Number 2: Do One Complete Load of Laundry
Number 3: Empty All Garbage Cans
Number 4: Keep Your Kitchen Sink Empty
Number 5: Clean Up After Yourself and Help Children Do the Same
Number 6: Bathroom Wipe-Down
Number 7: Before Bed 10-Minute Clean Up

Ah, I see why Jen's troubled by number 5.  It's not quite as self-contained as the others, is it?

Anyway, I took this as a sort of challenge and decided to break #5 into seven things, too.  My criteria were that the seven things were not to include anything covered in Nos. 1-4 and 6-7.  (So, even though making your bed is arguably a sort of cleaning up after yourself, and wiping down the bathroom afterwards is too, I didn't write it down.)

Here is what I came up with.  I actually came up with more, but restricted the list to seven.  No reason.  Seven's a nice number.  Thanks to Mr. Covey, it's now got an almost religious-numerology-type association with "effectiveness."

Now "cleaning up after yourself" is not the same thing as "cleaning."  As Jen perceptively noted, "cleaning" is something you have to do periodically because you or other people in your household have failed to "clean up after themselves."  The basic concepts in cleaning up after yourself are pretty simple.  (These are not the seven things.  These are concepts I used to try to develop the seven things.)  They are:

• if you're going to use a thing or an area again, you should make it ready for use.
• if you're not going to use it again, you should discard it (the meaning of "discard" varying with the thing,  encompassing concepts of recycling, trash, putting in the laundry, and charitable giving)
• take steps in advance to reduce soiling stuff or transferring mess or dirt to more things
• clean soiled stuff as you go through a task 
• include "cleaning up" as an integral part of doing any task at all, so that (for instance) you allow enough time for it 
• never assume that someone else will take care of the mess you've made if you don't either do it yourself or delegate it immediately.

Does that cover everything?  

So these are the seven things I came up with.  (Note:  I do not do any of these things regularly, even though I ought to.)  As a bonus feature, the three kitchen things will also lessen your risk of food contamination and subsequent illness, no?

1. Clean up after dressing and undressing.  If an item is clean enough to wear again, hang it up or put it folded away immediately; if it's not, put it into the laundry stream.  Commit to one or the other, don't just throw it on a chair.
2. Clean up after going somewhere in the car.  Take everything out of your car every time you come home, except stuff that is supposed to stay there permanently (maps, emergency kits) and stuff that's ready to go for the next car trip (which should be well corralled).  Encourage habits that make this easier, like kids keeping their stuff in bags, having a trash container, etc. 
3.  Clean up each item on your to-do list as you finish it.  Paying the bills?  Don't save a pile of stuff to be filed, file each item as you finish it.  Doing schoolwork?  Put away all the materials you used for each subject before you start a new one.  
4. Clean up the office, desk, schoolroom, or wherever you do your paperwork after the work session is done.  Sweep up pencil shavings, clear the surfaces, ready it for the next use.  Homeschoolers, get that schoolroom ready for the next day.
5. Keep the kitchen surfaces clean while you're cooking.  Don't put dirty spoons on the counter or balance the whisk on the edge of the pot where it will fall and spray beaten egg everywhere.  Put it on a plate that can be washed, or sometimes disposable stuff like newspaper/foil/wax paper. 
6.  Begin cooking with these seven items ready for use (not hidden away in a cabinet):  (1) apron (2) empty dishwasher (3)  sink full of hot-but-not-scalding soapy water (4) trash can (5) dishrag (6) clean dry towel for dishes (7) clean dry towel for your hands.   You'll be able to quickly clean things, including your hands, rather than let them spread gunk all over the kitchen.
7. Plan to use kitchen workstations so you move around less with messy stuff.  Crack eggs within reach of the trash can, work with raw meat next to the sink,  chop vegetables for sautéeing right next to the stove with the pan ready.

 I'm inspired to try some of this, aren't you?  (The eighth one was going to be NEVER LET YOUR KIDS HELP YOU COOK so I'm glad I stopped early.)

UPDATE:  Seven things to teach your children so they can clean up after themselves.