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Quiche au thon, from an American fridge.

I really need to recipeblog more, if for no other reason than it keeps the posts coming (has it really been eleven days?)  Anyway, Lent is coming, and I've got a good meatless recipe for you.  

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I'm in a very busy time of life.  I know, we're all busy, but I'm convinced that I'm in one of the busiest times of the arc of my entire life as a parent, thanks to lifestyle choices that have me homeschooling a preschooler, a second grader, a sixth grader, an eighth grader, and a high school senior all at once.  Many things that are not just enjoyable, but objectively good for me, have gone by the wayside:  getting to the gym more than once or twice a week; reading novels; cooking dinner.

It turns out that I can get by on planning cooking three and a half dinners a week.  What happened to the other three and a half?

• Saturdays, one of the kids makes dinner.  They take turns.  This week, the 8th-grader got a hankering for sausage ragù, so he announced that he would be making that.  I am not complaining, though I did strongly suggest that he make a very light side dish to go next to it, like fresh grapes, or plain green beans.  Caesar salad--his first choice--would be a bit much.
• Sundays, we have "plate"--or you could call it smörgåsbord--or charcuterie.  Cured meats, cheeses, crackers, maybe a baguette with spreads, veggies and hummus.  Occasionally we swap it out for raclette.  
• Mondays, I'm at H's, and she and I take turns making dinner.  That's the half-dinner.  I am not even sure this should count, as about three-quarters of the time I make the same pot of emergency chili in her crockpot.
• Wednesdays Mark goes to the grocery store, and so Wednesday is Leftover Night.

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I interpret "leftovers" broadly. 

No one is allowed to open new packages on leftover night, except insofar as is necessary to contribute ingredients to other dishes made out of leftovers.

 If there are enough refrigerated containers of partial meals that weren't entirely eaten to feed our children (plus H.'s children who stop by between choir and climbing practice), then those things go out on the counter and that's that. 

If that isn't quite enough I will conjure a fresh loaf of bread from the bread machine, and set out butter and peanut butter and jam.  Perhaps I'll put out cheese and crackers or vegetables and hummus, if it's already opened.

If that isn't quite enough either, I will make something out of eggs. 

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Tonight I had only a little bit of soup left over, so I made something out of eggs.  I had a single refrigerated pie crust that's been in the fridge since, I think, Thanksgiving.  I also had an elderly half-jar of sun-dried tomatoes to use.

I took some inspiration from a recipe on a French cooking website that I subscribe to on Facebook, but engaged in some serious substituting--remember, the name of the game was using up leftovers. 

The result was very good--probably more appealing to the children, with the mildness of mozzarella cheese, than the original might have been.

Quiche au Thon aux Restes

• One pie crust or pȃte feuilleté (whatever you have on hand or like to make)
• About 1.5 Tbsp dijon mustard
• One 5-oz can tuna in oil, ideally a better-quality tuna in better-quality oil (mine was Italian wild-caught yellowfin in olive oil)
• About four halves, or the equivalent, from a jar of oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup cream, or however much cream you have plus whole milk to make a cup.  Sour cream or Greek yogurt will probably also work if thinned with some milk
• Shredded mozzarella cheese, a couple of handfuls
• Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400° F.   Unroll the pie crust into a pie dish according to package directions or recipe for a single-crust pie.  

Smear the mustard all over the bottom of the pie crust; use enough mustard to cover with a thin layer.  If you really like mustard, go to town, but don't overdo it.

Drain the tuna, flake it with a fork, and cover the pie bottom evenly with tuna flakes.

Use a knife to chop or sliver the sun-dried tomatoes (if they are already in slivers, just use those as-is) and distribute over the tuna.  Again, if you love sun-dried tomatoes, go crazy if you want.  I found that four half-tomatoes was enough.

Sprinkle about a half-handful of the mozzarella over the contents in the pie crust.

Beat the eggs and the cream with salt and pepper, and pour over all.

Then add more mozzarella, until it looks like the pie crust is full-ish.  Really, it doesn't matter how much you add.  It's mozzarella.  It'll be cheesier if you add more, and eggier if you add less.  Don't stress.

(If you have a little parmesan, comté, or gruyère, I'm sure it would be fine also.)

Bake near the top of the oven for... I don't know... twenty minutes?  Twenty-five?  I forgot to set my timer.  It got a little brown.  You should always check a quiche, because sometimes the crust gets too brown before the eggs are fully set; and if that starts to happen, put on a silicone pie guard, or make one out of aluminum foil.

Cool until just a bit warmer than room temperature and enjoy.

With leftovers.

I found that the creamy eggs softened the salty, mustardy tuna and the acid tang from the tomatoes, and made for a balanced dish.  Mozzarella, of course, hardly makes itself noticeable; with tuna, I prefer a cheese that fades into the background, because I think that tuna and cheese often fight with each other except in very specific contexts (e.g. classic American diner tuna melts).  But the Italian olive-oil-packed tuna has an assertive flavor, not the tinny taste of Chicken-of-the-sea, that stands up to it.  Made with heavy cream, it's rich and yet simple, and the mozzarella raises the protein content and holds it together without getting in the way at all.  Puff pastry or a homemade butter crust would make this even better, but a refrigerated rolled pie crust did not noticeably detract (and made the whole thing very quick and easy).

Bullet journal for young teens, II.

In the last post I wrote about transitioning my 14yo homeschooled eighth-grader from managing his assignments with a daily to-do sheet filled out by me, to a bullet journal.  I described how I sat down with him on a Monday and showed him how to set it up.  

On that Monday, I went through the following steps with him:

1. numbered the pages
2. made a two-page-spread Weekly Log, left side undated, right side divided into days
3. entered his assignments for the upcoming week on the undated side of the Weekly Lig
4. put check boxes next to all the to-do items
5. started a Key for him
6. showed him how to migrate tasks from the undated list forward to specific days
7. made an undated Future Log for tasks to do “sometime”
8. showed him how to migrate a non-urgent task back from the weekly list to the Future Log
9. made an Index

Later in the week, as he worked with the bullet journal and completed tasks, we added more features.

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10.  “Go back to the blank page 9 and label it ‘Next 5 Weeks.’  This part of a bullet journal is usually called the Monthly Log, but we are going to organize things on a weekly basis because that’s how I do your school assignments.”

He flipped back and labeled the top of the page, and then I showed him how to date each line of the page, starting with Monday of this week and ending with Sunday of the fifth week out.

"This is like the Future Log, except that it has specific dates for the next month or so.  We’ll make a new one after four weeks.  If you are looking at your Weekly Log and you decide that one of the tasks is something you would like to do, say, next Tuesday, you can migrate it back here and write it on Tuesday.”

11.  “Let’s enter some things from the family calendar on the Five-Week Log.”  I pulled up my Google Calendar on my phone and showed him.  He wrote down a couple of upcoming Scout events and two days he was scheduled to serve Mass.  

I added, on the last Monday, “make a new ‘next 5 weeks’ page.”

 

12.  “What if you decide you want to do something in a couple of months, say in March?  For that we need to make a dated page on your Future Log.”  I sent him back to the Future Log and had him copy a simple twelve-month calendar onto the facing page.  We added a couple of events to it.

 

“Here’s an important rule to keep the journal simple and uncluttered:  Don’t put tasks on a month unless you are sure you will do them that month.  Don’t put tasks on a day unless you are sure you will do them that day.  Tasks can stay on the undated lists and be checked off from there.”

13.  “Let’s go through your Weekly Log so far and update it.”  He turned back to the weekly page with the assignments I had added on Monday, both in the undated list and in specific days.  Some of the items were checked off, some not.  

I went down the list with him:

 “Did you do this one yet?” 

“Yeah.”

”Fill in the box.  Okay, what about this one, is it done yet?”

”No, I don’t have to do that one till tomorrow.”

”Okay, are you going to really have to do it tomorrow?  Or can it wait till the weekend if you run out of time?”

”I really have to do it tomorrow.”

”Okay, let’s migrate it to the tomorrow list.”  

He added the “migrate forward” symbol and rewrote the task in tomorrow’s day box.

We ran down the list, updating, and adding a few new tasks.  “The idea behind this key is that by the time you make a new weekly list on Monday, you won’t have any more empty check boxes on this week’s list. You don’t have to have actually done everything.  The main thing is you won’t have lost track of any tasks.  You’ll either have completed the task, moved it to another list, or deleted it, and in all of those cases you will have marked the check box.”

14.  “We’re nearly through the week, and there’s still stuff to do.  Let’s mark all the remaining schoolwork items as Urgent.”  I got a red pen and put an exclamation point next to all these items, without changing the checkboxes.

”So we won’t put these on the day lists, because you are free to do them any day this week you want, including over the weekend.  But let’s require you, on Friday, to make a plan to do whatever’s left of these.”  

I wrote “make a plan to do all the ! before bedtime” in Friday’s block.

”This way, we haven’t cluttered up your days with all the tasks that are still outstanding now, but if there are some left on Friday you’ll need to decide what to do with each one then.”

By now the weekly log looked like this:

 

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How did it go?  So far, pretty well, I think.  I saw him carrying it around and writing in it.  I used a paperclip to fasten his science quiz inside the front cover on Friday, just like I used to clip the quiz under his to-do sheet on his to-do clipboard before, and that worked really well.  I wish there was a little more room to write the exact assignments, like the math problem numbers; maybe this means we will have to expand the undated weekly log to a whole two-page spread and go to individual daily logs, I don’t know.  We will be tweaking the layout as we go.

One pleasant surprise:  the boy in question seems very positive about this new development, even eager.  I get the impression that he now regards the weekly sheets I made for him all through middle school as a thing of childhood to be put away, and the bullet journal as a manlier thing.  Something that sets him apart from his younger sister and puts him in the company of his older brother now taking college classes.

A test of this will come on Monday, when we set up the second weekly log.  Will it be too boring and repetitive?  Will he balk at migrating tasks by rewriting them?  Or will it still be interesting?  And will he have gotten things done?  

Come to think of it, I’d better check that last bit on Sunday night, while there’s still time left in the week.

 

 

Bullet journaling: Teaching the method to an easily distractible teen.

I write my middle schoolers’ assignments on a weekly to-do form.  Each entry is assigned on a particular day (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday—the other days, we coschool).  They check the assignments off as they are done.  Chores go there too.  At the end of the week, I file the to-do list away as my record of what got done.

When my oldest started high school, we simply dropped the to-do list, and I started giving him assignments weekly.  That worked pretty well—he’s always been a responsible one—but not as well as I would have liked, at least at first.  

As my current 14yo enters the second half of his eighth grade year, I want to lead him a little more intentionally through learning to keep track of his own assignments.  It seemed to me that the bullet journal is a good place to start for this one:

• He’s a very physically active, kinetic sort of teenager, easily attracted from his work and never sitting still.  He craves novelty.  A planner page that can’t be changed is a planner page he’ll get bored with.
• He doodles on absolutely every piece of paper you put in front of him.   Extra blank paper will help.
• He has been developing his power to stay on task through distractions and interruptions by practicing the pomodoro technique, at my encouragement*.  This involves making a little check mark on paper when an interruption or distraction comes along, as a way to sort of satisfy the urge, and perhaps writing down the thought or desire so one can come back to it; and keeping track of how many cycles of 25-minute work periods and 5-minute rest periods one accomplishes.  So it helps to have extra blank paper for this, too.

*Tip for helping a distractible young person learn the pomodoro technique: Immediately reward them with a piece of candy upon completion of each pomodoro.  

Besides all these, I had been watching some videos promoting bullet journaling as a good technique to help the ADHD brain manage tasks.  A child psychologist evaluated the 14yo over the summer and did not diagnose him with ADHD, but we were advised that he has a few things in common with kids who do receive that diagnosis, and I thought that the video advice might apply to him.

I had a nice new graph paper composition book, the kind I like best, lying around waiting to be used for something.  So I snagged it, along with some pens and a ruler, and waited for an opportune time.

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Before I sat down with him I put some thought into how I would introduce it.   I didn’t want to overwhelm him with too much information at once, so I decided that we would set it up over several days, and start with the absolute minimum.   I drew up some dummy example pages, made from photocopied blanks, as I planned them. Here is what I settled on:

• Page 1: blank
• Pages 2–3:  Index
• Pages 4–5:  Blank for now in case we need to add something
• Pages 6–7:  Future log, generic on the left, monthly on the right:

 

 

• Pages 8–9:  Sort of a monthly log, generic on the left, dated on the right; only instead of a calendar month, it’s just going to be for the next five weeks, Monday-through-Sunday.

• Pages 10–11:  The first weekly log.  The left page would be where I would write the week’s assignments, to start a to-do list.  The right side would be divided up into the days of the week.

For the time being, no daily logs.  I figured I would only introduce those as they became necessary.

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On the first day of the second semester I sat down with him, the notebook, and writing supplies.  I explained that instead of to-do lists every day, we were going to start practicing time management weekly.  "I will write your weekly assignments in your notebook on Monday mornings," I explained.  "You'll check them off as you go.  Then, at the end of the week I'll photocopy your list and save that for my records, and you'll keep the notebook from week to week."

Here's how I told him to set it up:

1.  "Number the first twenty pages or so."  No point in going crazy and numbering the whole book at once; when we run past the first twenty, we'll number another few.

2.  "Turn to the spread on pages 10 and 11, and copy the weekly log."  I had him copy it exactly:  ruled lines, dates, and all.  He had a mostly-blank page on the left, and a space for each of the next seven days on the right. 

3.  "I'll write your week's assignments on the left side of the page."  I fetched my own pen and my school schedule, and with him watching I wrote out his list of assignments on the undated side.  I wrote them organized by subject, which is how they come out of my brain:  first the week's three history assignments, then the week's three science assignments, and so on.  

"I was thinking, sometime I want to learn to make scones," he suddenly interrupted me.

"Good thought!" I said, and added "make scones" to the bottom of the list.  Aha, I thought, I can use this later.

4.  "For each of these tasks we'll make a check box, just like the ones you're used to having on your to-do list."  I drew a little square to the left of all the tasks (including "make scones").  

5.  "When you finish a task, fill in the box completely.  Here, let's start a key so you can see what you're doing."  I grabbed a pad of large-format sticky notes and wrote:

6.  "If there's anything that you already know you absolutely have to do on a particular day—say, this science quiz that you'll take on Friday—we're going to migrate it to that day."  I went down the list and found the science quiz, and showed him where to copy it into the Friday box.  And then I showed him how to fill the weekly check box with the "migrated forward" symbol, and added it to the key:

I had him migrate a few more things to specific days.  While he was at it, I had him add some new dated events that we thought of:  confirmation class on Wednesday, for instance, and painting, which we only do on Fridays.

7.  "Now turn back to page 6 and label the very top of that page 'Future Log.'"  He went back and wrote that down.  I didn't have him add the twelve-month calendar just yet.

8.  "If there's anything on your weekly list that you realize you're not going to get to this week, but you still want to get around to it sometime, you'll migrate it back to your Future Log."  

He looked confused, so I said:  "Look, let's talk about those scones you mentioned, okay?  Let's say you won't have time this week to make scones, but you still want to do them sometime and you don't want to forget that you had the idea."

"Okay..."

"Go back to your Future Log and put an entry for 'make scones.'"

He did this.  Then I brought him back to his weekly log and showed him how to make the "migrated back" symbol in the check box.  And the we added it to the key:

9.  "The last thing to do today is make an Index."  I had him go back to page 2, label it Index, and add the following entries:

Future Log p. 6

Jan. 15-21 p. 10–11

And that was the end of our first session with the teenaged bullet journal.  Tune in next time for the introduction of the monthly-ish log and a summary of how it all went.  And possibly a recipe.

 

 

Intrusion of someone else's schedule.

Maybe the thing that Mark and I love best about homeschooling all the children is that we set our own schedule.  Nobody tells us how much time we get to spend with our own children.  Nobody tells us how much homework we have to supervise each night.  Nobody tells us when we are allowed to go on vacations, or when we have to come home.  We decide when to get up in the morning and when to go to bed.

All that is about to change this coming week, and I'm bracing myself for it.

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My oldest is a high school senior, and in this last semester of school-at-home he has elected to take a few college courses at the state's flagship university, for which he'll get both high school and college credit.   Our main motivation for encouraging this is to get him used to rigid demands on his time, after twelve and a half years of flexibility and personal attention, before he has to jump right into full time college next year.

Q.  Why didn't he start in the fall and get two semesters' experience? 

A.  Because we wanted to take a long family trip in September.  

Priorities.

          

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 So I'm sitting here making a spring-semester daily schedule for the rest of us, for the first time ever; up till now, our schedules were always good for a full year.  I'm deleting the two meetings a week I had in the fall with our oldest to teach him Calculus II; I'm deleting our once-weekly meeting for Religion; I'm moving Physics II to the afternoons.  He won't have English with H. anymore, although we'll still do Latin IV together on our coschooling days, along with H's oldest who is otherwise a full-time college student himself now.

Besides Latin IV and Physics II with me (twice a week each), he'll be taking microeconomics, calculus (again), and contemporary literature, for ten college credits.   I heartily approve of this schedule.  I think it will be challenging but not overwhelming.  I am glad he is taking economics from someone who is not me.  I am glad that H. concentrated on composition for the first half of his senior year, and am satisfied that contemporary literature will slot nicely and with novelty into a high school curriculum intentionally dominated by classic works.

He will have to be on campus by eight a.m. most days, nine a.m. the others; conveniently, Mark can drive him there on the way to work, much as he used to drive me while I was in my Ph.D. program at the same university.  He can get home on the bus most days.  On Mondays I will fetch him from campus on my way to H.'s.  On Thursdays H.'s son will fetch him on the way to my house.  We shall see how well this commuting plan works.

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We are going to have to take our ski trip during Spring Break this year, instead of in February, and we can't take any extra time to drive leisurely.   This fact keeps blowing my mind.

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 Another thing that's different:  I am going to have to assign him fewer chores than his siblings this semester, despite the fact that he is by far the most competent chore-performer in the house. 

Currently, he does a lot of child care, lunch-making, dishes, and daily sweeping-up, as well as the monthly pickup we have to do before the professional housecleaner arrives, the occasional cooked dinner, and assistance with some household project of his dad's. 

(Not to mention reaching a lot of things from high shelves for me.)

This aspect of his absence is going to be really difficult, so habituated am I to yelping to him for help all day long.   I've calculated:  He really should be spending forty hours a week on his studies, if you add up class time and homework time and commuting, and include the two high school courses he's still taking from me.  

We'll still be requiring him to do some chores, of course; they're part of living in a family.  But we are going to have to dial it back.  I'll probably have a talk with Mark and work out how many hours a week is a reasonable amount for a full-time student living at home to contribute (mental note:  should be at least as much time as he spends playing online games), and from that derive a list of which responsibilities he should keep and which I should dole down the line to his younger siblings.   

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The silver lining:  I, too, have to ease into the time when my young right-hand man heads off into the next chapter of life.  I'm really excited for him.  I can't wait to hear how his classes are going.  I'm pleased, vicariously, at the thought of this firstborn launching into the world.  I remember well the intoxication of leaving home and finally having power over my life, my environment---indeed, over my schedule. 

I'm so happy for him that he is finally going to be able to pass into that part of life.  Even if, temporarily, I have to live with his schedule for a while first.