bearing blog

Civil War history, or: "Where do you get your little men?"

So I am starting preliminary planning for next year's literature-based chunk of American History, from Lewis and Clark to the U.S. entry into the Great War.  

Googling around, I found this homeschooler's astonishingly detailed ten-week unit study on the Civil War.

She may have saved me a month of work! 

Seriously:  I never fail to be amazed at what families are capable of if they are interested in a subject.

Now here's what I was looking for when I stumbled on it:  Where can I get a set of military-history manipulatives?  You know, the little statues of soldiers and tanks and fortifications that I can spread out on a big map so we can re-enact battles?   Like Risk but, you know, real?  

Preferably it should come with a riding whip so we can practice sweeping them all off the map in one motion, sending our enemies' fortifications clattering to the floor.

Perhaps I need to look for the Evil Genius Supply Company... you know, the contractors who built that cool model of Fort Knox in Goldfinger.

Real tools to get for your kids.

From Popular Mechanics, which isn't afraid to recommend a Fiskars pruner and a Japanese pull-saw.

Good for them.  Kids need to learn to use real tools.  Oscar got a miter box and saw for his fourth birthday, and I still remember all the other children lining up to saw bits of wood scrap at the party.

Sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage.

The Dutch oven needed christening, and I was away from the house from three to six-thirty, so I made stuffed cabbage.

My grandmother (the original M.J.) makes cabbage rolls every New Year's, an old family recipe of her Hungarian best friend.  My late mother adored them.  I still remember an exchange that occurred once when I was home from college and visiting Grandma, some holiday when my aunt and uncle and cousins were all there:

GRANDMA:  So, Erin, how were the cabbage rolls?

ME:  What cabbage rolls?

    GRANDMA:  You know, the cabbage rolls I froze for you at New Year's and sent to you up at school.

ME:  I never got any cabbage rolls!

   GRANDMA:  But I gave them to your mother!

(All heads swivel to stare at Mom)

MOM:  Okay!  I admit it!  I ate them!

But even though they are legendary in my extended family, they are not appreciated in my nuclear family.  They are very... plain-cabbagey.   So I didn't make Grandma's stuffed cabbage today, and instead opted for a similar, but sweeter, recipe from an extremely reliable, out-of-print cookbook, 365 Easy One-Dish Meals by Natalie Haughton (Harper & Row, 1990).  This is my slightly adapted version, since I prefer currants to raisins in almost every application and I didn't have any white rice.

If you want to expand it a bit, use your meatloaf-stretching powers to make more innards.  Just remember to match the size of the stuffing to the size of the available cabbage leaf.

Sweet-and-sour Stuffed Cabbage (serves 4 people who like cabbage rolls enough to eat two each)

• 1 large head green cabbage 
• 1 pound ground beef
• 2 tablespoons finely minced onion
• 1 teaspoon salt 
• Grinds of black pepper to taste 
• 1 egg 
• 2 tablespoons rolled oats (or 1 tablespoon white rice) 
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1  - 14.5-oz can petite diced tomatoes with liquid 
• 1 - 15-oz can tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar 
• Juice of one whole lemon (1/3 to 1/2 cup) 
• 1/3 cup currants (or golden raisins) 

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.  Put a pot half full of water on to boil.  Break off 8 larger outer leaves from head of cabbage, being careful not to break them.  It's a good idea to break off a couple extra leaves just in case some of them fall apart.  When the water comes to a boil, add these cabbage leaves, cover, and cook 4 minutes, then carefully remove them from the water and drain them on paper towels.  [Energy-saving tip:  Now's a good time to put the potatoes in the pot if you're going to have mashed potatoes on the side.  The slightly cabbagey water won't hurt them.]  Arrange the cabbage leaves on a broad flat surface to be stuffed.

Meanwhile, reserve two or three more large cabbage leaves, and then shred (don't grate) the remaining cabbage with a knife, and place it in the bottom of a deep casserole or Dutch oven.  Add tomatoes with their liquid, tomato sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice, and currants; stir to blend well.  

Combine ground beef, onion, salt, pepper, egg, oats, and water in a bowl until well combined.  Divide meat mixture among the 8 or so cabbage leaves, placing near the stem end.  Fold in sides over meat and carefully roll into neat, tight little packages.  Place cabbage rolls close together, seam down, on top of tomato mixture.   Scoop some cabbage and sauce from the bottom on top to cover the rolls, add about a cup of water, and then cover the top with a blanket of extra cabbage leaves (this is my grandmother's trick to keep the casserole from drying out).

Cover with lid and bake 3 hours.  When you take the lid off, discard the blanket of browned cabbage leaves on the top (unless, like me, you prefer to eat them right away while setting the table.)  I always gently excavate the cabbage rolls and serve them on a platter, then pass all the shredded-cabbage-and-sweet-tomato-sauce in a separate bowl.  

  Potatoes, other root vegetables, and/or soft bread make very nice accompaniments.   Some people like ketchup, too. In my multi-generational experience, cabbage rejectors often enjoy the meatloaf-like oblongs that remain after the cabbage leaves have been peeled off them, so consider this possibility when planning amounts and filling-to-cabbage ratios.

A food blog slideshow....

...for the holidays, at Bon Appétit.

I noticed that too.

Sue (Desperate Irish Housewife), who was at the same Mass I was this morning, reports:

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday. Traditionally the priest wears rose-colored vestments on this day. We didn't get that at Mass today. We got purple. 

It's hard for some men to wear pink, I guess.

Heh.  Father D. is usually quite liturgically correct, but her guess fits him pretty well. Good thing the choir was on top of things with the Gaudete and all, so I didn't get disoriented.

Altercation, again.

Around 1:30 in the morning the sound of scuffling and yelling filtered through my consciousness.  I raised my head from the pillow in the darkness, confused -- was that the kids?  No -- the neighbors?  -- didn't sound like them -- ugh.  Again.

It's hard to get the muscles moving when you're wrenched out of sleep.  I wriggled out from between my sleeping husband and sleeping daughter and groped my way to the bedroom window that overlooks the street.  Peeping through the curtains, I couldn't see much, but the yelling was so loud -- obscenities, get your hands off me you %@#$, and thumping noises -- that at first I thought the fight was on our own front porch.  

I moved quickly to the bathroom to see through the other window, then back, and then finally as the last fog of sleepy confusion lifted, I saw the two people, a man and a woman, at each other's throats and screaming at each other, in the open door on the far side of an unfamiliar pickup truck parked directly across the street.  The woman's words were easy to make out, the man's just a low-register snarl.  A third person sat in the driver's seat with his door closed and his window open; all I saw of him was a tiny orange glow that went up and down, perhaps the tip of a lit cigarette, perhaps a cell phone display.

The screaming continued, first the man's voice, then the woman's, and they were hitting each other.

"What is it?" said Mark, already reaching for his phone.

"Pickup truck... three people... one's a woman I think... okay, assault is definitely happening now," I said, still moving back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom as Mark dialed 911.

Again.  

Hmm, how many times have we called 911 since we moved onto our street in south Minneapolis?  More than I can accurately estimate.  Two dozen times?  More?  Maybe.  We've been here six years or so.   

We do not call for loud parties -- hey, I am always pleased when the sound of loud voices outside is made by people who are celebrating, not angry.  We do not call for car alarms; they stop on their own eventually.   We call when people are fighting, or unconscious, or rolling in the street wailing that they've been raped, or throwing up on our lawn.  Or yelling angry words and running down the street with a handgun drawn, which, despite my unreserved support for a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment, I personally classify as "suspicious behavior."

Mark described the goings-on in a brief call to the 911 dispatcher as the fighting grew louder, the woman's voice higher-pitched, the sounds of impact against the truck more frequent.  Mark went into the bathroom, where it is darker and he would not be back-lit, to watch.  "Do you have to stand there?  The cops are coming, there's no reason to stand there," I told him.  

"If something happens, I'll be a witness.  Look, I know there's a risk."

I scooped sleeping Mary Jane from our bed and carried her away from the windows, away from the front wall, into the hallway, something I've done before.  Tyesha Edwards is never far from my mind at times like this.  She wrapped her arms around my neck, turned her face into my neck away from the light, and went back to sleep.  It seemed longer than usual before the bright blue lights moved slowly across the ceiling and the yelling stopped.

The woman's voice we could hear, friendly, instantly cheerful and calm where before it had been all obscenities and full-throated hoarse screaming.  It is absolutely amazing, the change in their tone of voice when the police show up.  We have seen this happen before.  "No, nothing's wrong officer.  No, I'm fine."  

If there had just been two of them, the one woman and the one man, I might guess we were looking at a so-called domestic dispute, even though it was taking place on my street in a vehicle I'd never seen before.  What's more likely, given the presence of a third man?  Drugs?  Some kind of prostitution thing gone awry?  (The police liaison told our block club that in our area, prostitution is more significant than drugs or other gang activity.  Used condoms show up from time to time by my garage door.  Our neighbor in the back told us he was offered "services" last year, from a woman walking down the alley as he crossed the yard from his house to his garage.)

The cop ran the license, I guess nothing serious came up, because they all drove away.  We went back to bed.

It takes me a long time to get to sleep after this kind of thing.  You'd think I'd be more used to it by now.

It's always worth mentioning.

We went out to dinner for our anniversary last night at a pleasant restaurant in St. Paul (Muffuletta, for you local folks).  I continued my tradition/policy/whatever of, when out to dinner celebrating, announcing to the waiter that we were out to dinner celebrating.  

And was rewarded with a half-bottle of bubbly on the house!  

(Italian Prosecco in a cute little bottle with a beer-bottle type cap.  I doubt it was expensive or they wouldn't have given it to us free.  We should look into buying more of that kind.)

The kids were well behaved, even though MJ wanted to visit the bathrooms many times.  Our practice of taking the kids out to a "real" restaurant once a month or so, which we began last year after an unexpectedly generous pay increase, seems to be paying off.  (So is my practice of taking little boxes of Legos everywhere.)

We ordered a big platter of what the menu called "pomme frites" for an appetizer to make the children happy.    They arrived steaming and vertical, like a salty, sizzling-hot bouquet, in a big napkin-lined metal pitcher.  The smaller kids turned up their noses at the spicy house-made catsup and the remoulade sauce, and the waiter, noticing, asked, "Shall I bring you a portion of Heinz, madam?"

Yes, please!

Mark had spent the day ice climbing and had forgotten to eat lunch, so he was starving.  I'd had an afternoon snack and wasn't.  What to do?

When the restaurant menu confuses me, my rule of thumb is to order vegetables as if I were two people and other stuff as if I were half a person.  So I had a salad of marinated beets with hazelnut and orange to start, and then for dinner I had another salad (baby greens, goat cheese, crostini with duck-liver paté) and a crab-cake appetizer.  Sparkling water is something else I've learned to order, since I don't really need more than one glass of wine, but it is still a nice touch that I don't get at home.

 Reader, it was still too much.  I was about a third of the way into the second salad when my "getting full" alarm started to vibrate gently in my consciousness, but (maybe because I was embarrassed at the prospect of ordering 3 plates and only eating parts of 2?) I kept going until I'd done some damage to everything.  I felt so stuffed and a little guilty.  And then I got a little perspective -- look, at worst I ate an extra salad.  Here I am feeling bad because I ate more beets than I needed.  Chill out, please.  It's a celebration!  Bring on the beets! 

I was full enough to know better than to eat dessert, though; that's a quick way to turn "a bit too full" into "oof, yuck."  So, while Mark and the kids chowed down on flourless chocolate torte and peppermint-stick ice cream,  I had a double espresso -- another thing that feels like a treat.

Wait a minute, this is the "neon" anniversary, right? He's sixteen years early for Fe.

This morning I came downstairs to find a little card taped to the handle of the oven.

Inside was printed, "This is the kind of love I have for you."

I smiled and opened up the oven to find a big new heavy green enameled cast iron Dutch oven.   Just like the one Margaret got for her birthday?!?  The Le Creuset one?!?!

Actually, no.  (It's the Tramontina 6.5-Qt. Cast Iron Dutch Oven, named by Cook's Illustrated as the "best value" of the Dutch ovens they reviewed in January 2007.)  This is why I smiled when I read the card, because I knew exactly what Mark meant by "the kind of love he has for me."

As he said when he came down the stairs:  "Not extravagant, but well-researched!"  

That's us.

                                                                        * * *

So:  ten years.  And on this lovely feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, too; I'm so fond of the date, in part for that reason.  Mark says 12/12 is good for him, because it's easy to remember; easy for me, too, so who am I to argue?

I'd write more, but honestly?  I'm lost for graceful words and only have blunt ones.  You know, you only get one life to live, and some stuff--if you screw it up--you don't get a do-over; so I wake up grateful every morning  (and maybe even a little bit relieved!) to realize that this one thing, the most important thing each of us ever agreed to do, has turned out so unbelievably-freaking-right. 

 

Tracking again.

After some consultation with others, I decided reluctantly that I need to go back to calorie-counting, at least for a while.  

Bleh.  I had kind of gotten the idea that I would track calories IF my weight went up and I had to drop a pound or two.  The threat of tracking calories I could therefore hold over my own head as a threat:  Don't return to your old habits or you'll have to start keeping a food diary again.  

But it's not just an arbitrary punishment.  Truth is, I need the data.  I need to know how much is the "maintaining" amount.  I need to know how many calories I eat if I "eat when I feel like it."  

The engineering estimate is "somewhere between 1330 and 1600" calories.  I'm curious about whether that matches the experiments.  Not so curious that I'm really cheerful about weighing, estimating, and tracking for the next few weeks, but (I hope) curious enough to keep me paying attention.  I hope my in-laws don't think I'm weird if I bring my kitchen scale to their house for a couple of weeks at Christmas.

Weirder than usual, I mean.

Weight this AM:  108.8.  Breakfast:  Two poached eggs, fifty grams of whole-grain toast, one teaspoon of jelly, four ounces of tomato juice, three cups black coffee.  Calories:  346.  Ergh, this is going to be annoying.

Gain mode.

I hit my goal weight of 108 on the day after Thanksgiving, and have continued to weigh every day, plotting dots on a statistical process-control chart Mark designed for me.

Not too surprisingly, considering the habits I've worked so hard to cultivate, my weight continued to go down.  A couple of days ago it went far enough down -- several consecutive readings in the 105's -- that I officially was supposed to try to gain weight.

Well, now, that's just bizarre.  I mean, I know I don't want to go anorexic, and I'd like to continue to have menstrual cycles and all, and I've BEEN shopping and there ARE NO MORE SIZES SMALLER THAN ME so unless I want to go around in a belted bathrobe, I have to stop losing weight.  "What am I supposed to do?" I asked Mark.  

He shrugged.  "I don't know.  Have ice cream before bed.  Eat an extra snack.  Whatever."

I elected to take the kids to a Vietnamese restaurant for a late lunch and to order the Stir-Fried Beef and Potato and to eat the whole thing.  And to eat some ice cream before bed.  

 I was kind of worried that this was only going to be the first day Back in my Old Habits and the next day would be the same and before you know it the 2.5 or so pounds I wanted to put back on would turn into ten. So I ate the Stir Fried Beef And Potato with some trepidation (and not a few audible YUM noises).  Same with the ice cream.  I almost didn't really want it.  I mean, once I had a couple of bites I remembered that I liked it and I finished the bowl (it was a chocolate-chip-cherry kind of flavor), but... there was a certain taking-my-medicine feeling about it, not an I'm-indulging-in-something-yummy feeling.  

And I felt kind of overstuffed and yucky afterwards.

The next morning the scale read 109.  Success!  Ok, not exactly yet, because according to my "rules" I'm not done until my five-day average reaches my target again, and I need a couple more high-ish readings to make that happen.  So today at tea time I ate some pretzels.  Felt like a LOT of pretzels.  It was maybe six or seven pretzel rods.  I'm kind of revolted thinking about it.  

Have I already gone anorexic?  I don't know.  Maybe.  It wasn't actually hard to eat the pretzels.  I like pretzels.   But it was hard to feel OK about eating, or rather, about having eaten, the pretzels.

Trust the chart, says Mark.  Trust the rules.    If your weight goes too high, just go back to the boiled egg at breakfast, the single plate at dinner, the giant pile of vegetables, and it'll go back down.  You've seen it happen.  You know it will work.

Yes, I know.  And I also know that the act of eating extra on purpose in order to gain a little bit of weight is a learning experience.  I'll see right away what difference a couple of days in "gain mode" makes, right?  I'll understand a little bit more about how my metabolism works.  I'll be able to use this information.   Right?  After a few of these tweaks -- oops, I ate too much, my weight's up a bit, gotta cut back; oops, I cut back too much, my pants are falling off again, gotta eat a little more -- after a few of these tweaks I'll understand a bit better how much I really need to eat to maintain.  Right?

Right?

That is, if it doesn't make me completely crazy.  

Maybe I should simply make a rule that if I need to gain weight I should consume all the extra calories in the form of a single, calorie-dense food, of which I can easily form a mental calibration.  Chocolate bars, say.  Or, um, proscuitto.  Or buttered toast.  No, scratch the toast, I still don't have an "off" switch for buttered toast consumption.