Café conversation
Hums
Over light jazz music
Nobody has
Ever
Actually
Listened to.
Espresso machine
Hisses and gurgles.
Trim flat white and
A chocolate latte!
Laptops
Mark the places
Where the
Officeless
Use the clamour
Of public space
To find quiet.
Two rejections of the latest novel, and a $65 parking ticket…must be time to bake some cake! A slice of cake and a cup of tea makes everything better, right?
I eat them almost every night in dinner, and usually with lunch, and often in between meals, too. Nothing satisfies my munchies like the sweet juicy crunch of a carrot. I know I’d automatically reach for cake over carrots, if I could get it, but cake is like riding the crest of a big wave on your boogie board—a thrill while it lasts, but pretty soon you’re going to be washed up on the sand. Cake’s sugar crash can be brutal, but carrots are both satisfying and sustaining.
I could go on about carrots’ nutritional values—how they contain lots of vitamin A, C, and K, how they are low in calories and high in fibre. But frankly, I don’t care. They are delicious and satisfy my snacking cravings; who cares about the rest?
I grow a lot of carrots, but never enough to get us through the year. My favourite variety is Touchon, a sweet orange carrot that grows beautifully in my garden. I also plant Purple Dragon, Solar Yellow, and Nutri-Red, just for fun and variety.
I love braised carrots, roasted carrots, grilled carrots, carrots in soup, carrots in my macaroni and cheese, and carrots in salad. But mostly I love carrot sticks, eaten any time of day or night, whenever I’m feeling a little peckish.
This week marked the end of this year’s milking season, and the beginning of next year’s.
We’ve been in the tail end of the milking season for a while now—the low-stress time when I could quit at any time and dry off the goats. Usually I quit milking when the weather turns bad in mid April. This year has been so mild, I’ve just kept going. But the goats needed worming, and rather than throw away milk for a couple of weeks while the medicine passed through, I decided it was time to end the milking season.
Besides, it’s time to start thinking about next year! The does are coming into season now, and it’s time for their annual visit to the buck. I have retired my old girl, Artemis, so she’s hanging out in the paddock with this year’s kids, but my young Toggenburg, Ixcacao, is spending the next three weeks boarding with the local breeder’s two bucks. Hopefully she’ll come home in kid, and I’ll start all over again, preparing for milking in the spring.
In the meantime, I will enjoy the excuse to sleep in a little in the mornings!
I want to open a gym. I’ll call it the Habitat gym. But instead of rowing machines, treadmills and weights, my gym will have shovels, hammers and hoes. Members will get fit by growing food for the local food bank, or by building low-cost housing or community amenities.
Trainers will match the job to the member—Want to work on your cardiovascular fitness? You’ll fetch tools and materials for the work crews, running back and forth from shed to building site or garden. Keen on weight training? You’ll be mixing cement or turning soil. Just want some gentle stretching and strengthening? You can weed or paint.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could capture all the human energy wasted every year at the gym and funnel it into meaningful projects that help others? Not only would people stay fit, they might be more likely to stick with their exercise regime if they know that what they are doing is meaningful and not just drudgery, if at the end of a year long gym membership, they count their success not just in pounds shed or muscle mass gained, but also in people fed and housed. If all that energy expended at the gym were harnessed for good, think what we could accomplish!
As my husband’s new shop takes shape, I am gradually moving my gardening things into their new home in the old shop. Yesterday, my daughter and I arranged the large hand tools, each with its own spot on the wall of the shed. She even drew each tool on the wall in its designated spot, so that they would always be put away in the right places. It is the first time I have ever had my tools neatly arranged, so they aren’t snarled in a hopeless tangle of rake tines whenever I need something. Of course, it only works if the tools are put away. Now, where did that sword go?…
Growing up, I remember macaroni and cheese as something that was bright orange and came out of a box. Of course, I loved it. But as an adult, I have a hard time serving that sort of stuff to my family.
So, I started making mac and cheese using Joy of Cooking’s Baked Macaroni recipe, but there’s not much in it—it’s good, but not terribly interesting or nutritious. I began tinkering, and came up with Not Yo Mamma’s Mac and Cheese. My kids, of course, point out that it is their mamma’s mac and cheese, but the name stuck anyway.
This recipe makes a generous meal for our family of four, with lots of leftovers for lunch the next day.
500 g package elbow macaroni
2 large carrots, diced
1 ½ cups fresh or frozen peas (thawed if frozen)
1 ½ cups fresh or frozen corn (thawed if frozen)
1 onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
1 ½ cups grated cheese (pick your favourite)
3 eggs
1 cup milk
bread crumbs
butter
salt and pepper to taste
Cook the macaroni. While macaroni is boiling, boil the carrots until just tender. Sauté the onion and celery in olive oil or butter until the onion is translucent. Add vegetables and cook just a few minutes longer, until everything is warm through. Mix in the parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.
Scald the milk, and beat in the eggs.
In a well-buttered casserole dish, layer macaroni, vegetables, and cheese, ending with a layer of cheese. Pour the egg mixture over the top. Sprinkle generously with bread crumbs and dot with butter. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for 30 minutes, until the egg is firm in the centre.
For the record, peri-menopause sucks. You know, for the first year of it, you think you’re just going mad, and wonder when’s a good time to call a psychiatrist. Then you figure out you’re just hormonal, and you can start to laugh it off. But the problem is that it keeps changing the rules without consulting you. Just when you think you’ve got the whole thing under control, it finds some new way to torture you. After eight years of it, I thought I had it pretty well sussed, but I’ve had some doozy hormonal storms lately. My goal is always to appear normal during them, but it’s not always possible with these super-storms. Here’s a little reflection on my day today…
Rage.
Pure,
White,
All-consuming.
I force myself to polite distance.
I do not look into
Anyone’s eyes.
I speak in short words.
I eat little,
Taking small bites,
Chewing slowly.
I am afraid
The rage will burst out
If I open my mouth.
If I allow myself to feel
Anything.
I scream
All day
Behind closed lips.
Only the straight jacket
Of iron will
Forcing me to smile
And speak softly
To the children.
I wait,
Knowing the rage is not mine
Knowing it will burn off
In a hot flash
Or dissipate
While I have my back turned.
Leaving me wasted,
Fragile,
Supported only by the taught nerves
It left behind.
The boys in the family don’t care for sushi, so it’s not often I get to eat it. But now and again when my daughter and I are out, we’ll take advantage of the opportunity to eat sushi without them.
Facing another Friday dinner of cheese sandwiches between band practices, I decided it was time for a sushi splurge—vege tempura today, a rather different take on vegetarian sushi from the ubiquitous avocado and carrot filled ones. Sort of a cross between sushi and fish and chips. Not bad, actually, and a nice change from cheese sandwiches.
No one cooks in novel.
This isn’t strictly true, but in general, no one cooks, uses the toilet (except for in middle grade novels of a certain type…), washes the dishes, brushes their teeth, or cleans the house. These are ordinary, everyday activities—who wants to read about them?
__________________
Toby crept into the bathroom shortly after midnight. The house was dark and silent. But, wait, there was a dark form ahead of him. He flicked on the light. A bloodcurdling scream rent the air as he saw his sister on the toilet.
__________________
Carla was chopping onions…again. She didn’t even know what she was going to cook, yet, but she knew it would have onions. Chopping them gave her time to think, to plan. But she wasn’t planning dinner. When her husband came home from work and stepped up behind her to give her his standard peck on the top of the head greeting, she turned and plunged her knife into his chest.
__________________
Still waking up, Jason washed his face, then grabbed his toothbrush. He flicked open the toothpaste and squeezed, but what came out of the tube was not minty paste. Instead, it was foul and dark, and melted the toothbrush when it touched it.
__________________
OK, maybe it’s good our day-to-day lives aren’t worthy of a novel. Remember that the next time you think life is too boring.
Robinne Weiss 