bearing blog

Chilies and other real food.

I followed a link from Instapundit to the website of Nina Planck, author of Real Food, which I have on order from Amazon.  She has these suggestions for chili peppers that intrigued me.

How do I love to eat chiles? Let me count the ways. For a snack, I go to the garden and pick a Garden Salsa, a blue-red pepper like a mild cayenne, and bite off the tip right before the hot pith starts. It's delicious to eat with a crisp apple. In the kitchen, there are dozens of jars of ground chiles and hot sauces, strings of whole peppers and baskets of fresh ones. In the fridge, there's a jar of apple cider vinegar with cut-up hot peppers for collard greens, soups or fish. Olive oil spiked with fresh chile sits on the counter. I love a side dish of anchos saut饤 in butter and olive oil-more butter and olive oil than they need. (Chicken fat is also good.) I pour the warm hot-pepper fat on rice, arugula? anything.

Peppers are not out of place in breakfast, either. With my morning egg, I have a side dish of hot peppers fried in butter, and I like a fresh chile, split-open, in peppermint tea. Roasted jalape񯠢utter is terrific on hot sweet corn, which I mention here only because I grew up eating corn for breakfast.

Why limit hot peppers to savory foods? I ate summer's last white peaches sprinkled with a scorching but sublimely fruity sauce made of savina peppers and sweet potato. I once made a wonderful mango and habanero frozen yogurt. If you can taste anything beyond the intense heat, the boxy habanero and its West Indian cousin, Scotch Bonnet, have the flavor of tropical fruit.

Yum.

In case you were wondering about the name.

Mary Jane (born last Monday, for those of you just tuning in) is named after my maternal grandmother, who goes by "M. J."  I was casting about for a potential middle name a couple of weeks before her birth, and lit upon the saint whose memorial is celebrated today, Jane Frances de Chantal.  (Technically, she was Jeanne-Francoise; eh, doesn't go so well with our German last name.)  So:  Mary Jane Frances. 

Amy Welborn features the saint's story in this post. 

Jeanne de Chantal is a saint you need to know - married (happily), mother of six children (four who survived infancy), widowed, vowed to chastity, then seeking a way in which she could follow Christ, she met Bishop Francis de Sales, (Bishop of Geneva, but in exile because of those Calvinists) and together, in 1610, they founded the Order of the Visitation.

From the Visitation Monastery in St. Louis, MO:

As a mother and mistress of an estate, Jane had been popular among her employees and servants who recognized her fairness and interest in their welfare. She often cared for the sick and fed the hungry. She put the needs of others before her own, often depriving herself of much needed rest. Managing an estate was taxing and exhausting work, demanding her attention from morning to sundown. Still, the education of her children and their welfare always was her primary concern. In all of this, Jane is a good example to lay women in today's world who often find themselves forced to handle many tasks at once. If they look to Jane, they will realize it can be done. Holiness is attainable in the busyness of everyday tasks.

According to this she is the patroness of  "forgotten people; in-law problems; loss of parents; parents separated from children; widows."

I am so jealous.

Of this.

Sanctification: instantaneous or a time-process?

At Pontifications:  The intersection of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic views on purgation of sin after death.  Seems like a good clarification of the distinctions.

Kegels.

I know I said blogging would be light, but it turns out that I am spending plenty of time lying on the couch nursing new baby Mary Jane.  And I am pretty proficient at one-handed typing.

Today, because I am tired of wetting my pants when I sneeze, I googled used Google to search for tips on strengthening pelvic floor muscles postpartum. Yes, I know the Kegel drill, but a refresher is warranted.  (Quick show of hands:  How many mothers out there, on reading the words "pelvic floor" or "Kegel," immediately and perhaps with an involuntary spasm of guilt at having neglected them, performed a few "clenches?"  You know you should be doing then 15 times each day.  Cough and give me twenty, ladies!) 

I found some suggestions here.  But even more interesting than the strengthening exercises, which can be done postpartum, are the other two recommendations (actually hypothetical recommendations under research testing that is described on this site).  One, birth via spontaneous rather than forced or controlled pushing, is uncontroversial.  But the other, self-administered prenatal perineal massage, well...

Consider that the authors of the site recommend that women begin massaging their own perineal areas at 34 weeks pregnant and continue through the end of pregnancy.  Then click here to see the diagram (warning to multigravidas:  clench first).

"Sit or lean back in a comfortable position" indeed.  I applaud the authors of the site for their mission --- after all, if we all develop this particular brand of Inner Poise we will not have to depend on the external variety --- but I have to wonder if any of them have actually attempted this maneuver when seven and a half months pregnant.

Wipe warmers.

Mind you, I don't believe in making kids suffer for suffering's sake (you know, to "toughen" them so that they learn early that Life Isn't Fair), but something in this essay rang true.

Though my wife insisted on its necessity, I could not seem to justify the immediate expense or the lasting consequences of owning what is known as a “wipe warmer.” This silly apparatus claims to “take the jolt out” of wiping a baby’s undercarriage by warming the moist “baby wipes” to a more balmy temperature. As if “room temperature” is somehow abusively cold. This is one of those shame products that you’re supposed to buy so that you don’t raise the ire of visitors to your baby nursery. (“Did you hear? The Gresses are not warming their baby wipes! Unconscionable! Don’t they know that their baby could get Sudden Sphincter Frostnip?”)

Before moving to Washington, D.C., I worked as a mountain guide in the Rocky and Cascade mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest, leading winter mountaineering and backcountry skiing excursions. On extended trips, toilet paper often consisted of carefully shaped snowballs — so I’m not at all sympathetic to the idea that my kids cannot stand a mildly cool wipe of the bum that lasts about two thirds of a second.

h/t HMS Blog.

Car trip.

Sunday we went to Mass, in the car for the first time since MJ was born.  Well, actually, we made a dry run to Dairy Queen the night before.  Good thing, too; I had forgotten how the baby always needs to nurse right when you want to go, so you have to plan to leave 20 minutes early.  And I hadn't realized what a slide-puzzle it would be to get all the kids in their car seats in the correct order in the back seat of my secondhand '93 Oldsmobile.

For the record, here's the SOP:

1. Carry baby in sling to car, accompanied by 6-year-old and 2.5-year-old.
2. While 6-year-old stands next to car, 2.5-year-old climbs into his booster seat.
3. Buckle 2.5-year-old in and admonish him not to unbuckle himself.
4. Close door (child safety lock engaged).  Walk around car to other side.
5. Remove 6-year-old's booster seat from the car and place it on the pavement.
6. Climb in and sit in 6-year-old's spot. 
7. Pull baby out of sling and put her in car seat.  Buckle her in. 
8. Get out of car.  Re-install 6-year-old's booster seat.
9. 6-year-old climbs in and buckles himself in.

The baby's car seat has to be in the middle because the boosters require shoulder belts.  Mark had the wisdom to purchase and install seat belt extenders for both boys, so the female part of the buckle doesn't get wedged down between booster seat and infant seat. 

The boys like riding where they can see their sister.  They sing to her to quiet her if she cries.  Her crying disturbs Milo.  He starts out cooing "hush, baby, hush," then as he grows more agitated begins to shout, "Shut UP, baby, shut UP!"

Bookmark this.

Ann Althouse queries her readers:

I'm trying to come up with a list of history books -- emphatically not historical novels, but solid history books -- that are written so well that one would want to read them as great literature. I mean to set a very high standard. That is, David McCullough isn't good enough....

Anyway, offer up some suggestions for someone who wants a sublime aesthetic experience while reading history.

The readers respond in droves.  Keep your Amazon wish list handy.

Imagine discovering, at age 50, that you are actually Canadian.

It happened to a local man:

Koland, by all accounts, is eligible to become a U.S. citizen. His father was born in Iowa and his mother is from British Columbia. Koland's wife, Martha, is a U.S. citizen, as are his five children.

Proving citizenship through his father is supposed to be the quickest route, but that has been tricky. His father died in 1984. Koland can't find his father's birth certificate. His mother has Alzheimer's disease and can't remember anything.

Koland also has been searching for his parents' marriage license. What he has is a yellowed photograph of a handsome man in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses, standing close to a dark-haired bride. The photo is dated Aug. 25, 1944. The location is a mystery.

Koland contacted Chisago County, where his father grew up, but it had no record of the marriage. He tried British Columbia, but there's no record there, either.

What I find interesting is that it took the government so long to catch this dastardly illegal.

Time to sing a new song.

Back in the days of the Cold War, Sting recorded a little song called "Russians."  Cheesy in a way, but also catchy, in a minor key.  It's almost a paean to mutually assured destruction as a means of uneasy peace:

What might save us, me and you

Is if the Russians love their children too.

Cheesy because --- well, of course the Russians love their children too.  Who said they didn't?

Yeah.  So.  What about this?

A HUSBAND and wife arrested in the British terror raids allegedly planned to take their six-month-old baby on a mid-air suicide mission.

Scotland Yard police are quizzing Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor over suspicions they were to use their baby's bottle to hide a liquid bomb.

The theory is one of the reasons security chiefs are now insisting mothers taste babies' milk at check-in desks before allowing them to take bottles aboard flights.

The pair are among up to 23 suspects being questioned over a plot to bring down nine airliners over five US cities, killing thousands of people in the air and on the ground.

Maybe this theory is wrong.  I hope it is.  It does sound like the sort of thing one would say if one wanted to make the enemy sound as inhuman as possible.  But... what if it is not?  And what if this couple are not isolated psychopaths, but instead hold a view that is more common than we dare to imagine?

Fighting dirty sometimes wins.  I can't think how to defend oneself against an attacker wielding a  baby.  His own baby son or daughter.

(And: Exactly how is having moms taste carried-on baby formula going to help here?  Stock it on the flight with the soda and coffee.)