Fixin' Supper

I’m off on a quest to read a book a week in 2010. In classic overachiever mode here, I’m going to start with the book I read the week of Christmas 2009, In Defense of Food.

Some of you may be shocked I haven’t read this book already, since it ties in with a lot of what I believe about how we should eat. Honestly, when it came out, I read the reviews and thought, Yep, I agree, and didn’t feel the need to read it right away since I suspected Michael Pollan was just preaching to my choir.

But Ashby received the book for Christmas this year, and I quickly appropriated it.

I did enjoy it, and I highly recommend it to you if you are interested in the food-industrial complex or if you’re trying to eat healthy and local. Pollan does a nice job of de-myth-ifying lots of what we believe about food, showing us how conventional wisdom came to be — why we think eating low-fat is good, or why we think carbs are bad — and showing that many of these common assumptions are half-truths at best.

I found one thing frustrating about the book, though. While Pollan spends a lot of time debunking common food assumptions, he does not devote time to his own original research about food. And he’s up front about that, by the way — it’s not a hidden agenda. But I just found myself wanting the same rigor applied to what we ought to know about food, as he applies to that which we think we know, but don’t.

Ah, but part of his point is that we haven’t done the research, and/or don’t yet have the technology, to understand how food really works. At any rate, I found this book a nice companion to Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, long my bible for food-related questions.

I am an honest-to-goodness freak about food safety. I am incredibly particular about how I handle and cook meat and egg dishes in particular. I’ve even been known to throw out my favorite leftovers if I realize I’ve let them sit on the counter just 30 minutes too long before refrigerating them.

And so for years, I have not made my favorite childhood dessert — lemon icebox pie. Because the recipes I’ve found for it all called for raw eggs. Try though I might to convince myself, I knew that the 15 minutes in the oven to brown the meringue weren’t enough to cook the eggs in the pie underneath, as well. [Though they are enough to make the egg whites in the meringue safe.]

That’s why I was so delighted to stumble across this article from the Louisiana Extension service — it tells you how to adapt traditional recipes with raw eggs for today’s salmonella-laden world.

It may be December, but I’m thinking I’ll give lemon icebox pie a try next week. It’s been way too long!

I moved into this house 4.5 years ago. It was a pretty easy move, stuff-wise, because I hired movers. And though they did tear up the floor at my old house getting the washer out, they only messed up one of my possessions — they broke one caster on a 2-drawer filing cabinet I have.

It’s a cabinet I actually use as a desk drawer, so I open it several times a day. And for 4.5 years, it’s wobbled every time I do that.

Because it wasn’t until today, when I was at Office Depot picking up a new filing cabinet [because I have even more stuff to file than before] that I realized that I could just remove all of the casters from my broken cabinet. Thus un-breaking it. It’s not like I even needed to roll it anywhere.

I hate to admit things like that out loud. All I can say in my defense is that I never have actually thought directly about it before, beyond thinking [every single damn time I open and close the drawer]: That sure is annoying.

Yesterday, the 4yo shared this Christmas story with me. I thought you might like it, too.

Mama, did you know Santa was born in Guatemala? Just like me! He lived there before his mama came to pick him up. And then she did, and he lives at the North Pole now.

In fact, I got to visit Santa at the North Pole before you came to pick me up. [Ed. note: Plausible, since he was born in July and came home in March....he had to celebrate that first Christmas somehow, right?] I took the Polar Express to the North Pole and then came back to Guatemala. My foster mom went with me.

Merry Christmas!

I asked Ashby a couple of weeks ago what he wanted for his birthday, and all he said was, “Red velvet cake.” I figured out some presents, but I knew we had to deliver on that cake, as well.

As much as I love red velvet, I’m not sure I’ve ever made it before. I may have made it one other time…I have some vague memories of not being entirely pleased with a recipe. However, I do remember soliciting red velvet cake recipes several years ago, and my friend Summer sent me her mother’s.

I spent some time on Thursday comparing 3 different red velvet recipes I have. I ended up deciding Summer’s mom’s was going to be the best. But she had a buttercream frosting recipe with it, and I knew Ashby loved cream cheese frosting, so I substituted that from another recipe.

The cake was a big hit. Here’s how we did it.

Red Velvet Cake
2 sticks butter
1 1/2 c. sugar
2 eggs
2 oz. red food coloring
1 t. vanilla
3 T. cocoa powder
1 t. salt
1 c. buttermilk
2 1/4 c. flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. vinegar

Cream sugar, eggs and butter. Mix in food coloring and vanilla. Mix together cocoa, flour and salt. Beat in buttermilk and flour mix alternately. Combine soda and vinegar and mix in. Beat 2-3 minutes.

Bake at 350° for 30 minutes in 3 8″ well-buttered pans. Cool completely in pans before frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting
1 stick butter
8 oz. cream cheese
1 lb. powdered sugar
1/2 t. vanilla
1 c. chopped nuts

Cream butter and cream cheese. Sift in powdered sugar and beat well. Add vanilla and nuts [which we didn't use].

When I started this blog, I was looking for a topic unrelated to my work that I could write about every day, so I choose cooking. For a long time, I wrote almost exclusively about cooking, sharing lots of recipes and my thoughts on food in general.

In the past couple of years, I’ve been a lot more sporadic about blogging here, for several reasons. I’m using Facebook for lots of friend connections [and indeed, I cross-post Fixin' Supper there and often get more comments there than here on www.fixinsupper.com] and Twitter for daily commentary. I’ve moved my professional blogging to my company site, Creekmore Consulting. And I’m really busy, what with having 3 kids now and running my own company.

But I’m reluctant to let this go. So now I’m thinking hard about what to do with Fixin’ Supper. I’m contemplating returning to my roots and focusing lots more on food and cooking again, perhaps with a regular publishing schedule. If you’re out there reading this, I’d be curious about your thoughts. What makes you read Fixin’ Supper? What do you like best? What do you dislike? [You can comment below or email me at lcreekmo at gmail dot com.]

Thanks for any ideas you want to share. I’ll keep you updated on my thoughts.

So we have these two stray dogs that hang around our front yard all the time. Absolutely drives me crazy. They are aided and abetted by our tender-hearted neighbor, who leaves water and food out for them. And yet, they snooze the day away in my yard, not hers.

It’s not a big a problem as it could be, since our back yard is fenced and that’s where the kids play. But I do worry that having these stray dogs there will inspire our dog to try to leave the yard whenever we open the gate.

I’ve contemplated calling animal control about them, but these are wily dogs who only appear when animal control is closed. And I am just tender-hearted enough to dislike the idea of sending them to a kill shelter when they are clearly just worn-out old stray dogs who enjoy the shade in our yard. So mostly, I’m just annoyed by them with no real way to resolve the situation.

Today, we drove up into the drive and the 4yo and I had a discussion that offered some alternative ideas.

Me: I’m so annoyed. Look, those dogs are here again.
4yo: I hate them!
Me: Do they bother you too? [Thinking, I am going to have to do something about this. We can't have the 4yo being scared at his own house.]
4yo: Yes. I don’t like them.
Slight pause.
4yo, with the enthusiasm born of a brilliant idea: Maybe we can have Sally fight them! [Sally is our 14yo, very slow, gentle, and passive dog. No aggressive. Just passive.]
Me: I don’t think that’s a good idea somehow.
4yo: I know! We can have those two dogs go chase a CAT! [With such enthusiasm, again, that it was clear the point was to catch and dismember the cat.]

Let me know if you need a new perspective on your situation. We can rent him out.

I’ve lived in Davidson County for 20 years now. I enjoy living in the heart of the city, right in the middle of the action. I like the advantages of a large urban area, the services and the businesses that you can’t find in a smaller town. The culture.

So much so that for years, I’ve taunted friends who moved to Williamson County when their kids turned 5. [It's a real phenomenon.] Talked about how white-bread our southern neighbor is. How these friends were giving up, taking the easy way out.

Yet now, I am trying hard to figure out a good reason to stay in Davidson County, and I’m having trouble coming up with one. I’m just going to put this out there in hopes that you can help. Tell me where I’m wrong.

No one would argue that our education spending is anemic. In fact, it’s pretty good. But we have a student population with significant challenges in our county’s public schools, challenges which require greater funding. We have a high English language learner population. The poverty rate among Davidson County public schoolchildren is dramatically higher than the county’s rate, because so many middle and upper class families aren’t in the public schools. Last year’s budget woes eliminated real classroom teachers, not just theoretical teaching positions. While I am sometimes encouraged by Dr. Register’s work, I see too many daily examples of poor decisionmaking in the Metro schools to remain heartened for long. And, I have a 5th grader, a 4yo and a 6 month old. So this remains my personal problem for at least 18 more years.

Right now, my family lives 1 1/2 blocks outside [OK I'm biased; the 10yo is a proud graduate] of the best elementary school zone in Davidson County. We were in the zone when I bought the house — that’s why I bought it. Zone changed the next year. I am not even remotely comfortable with what I’m hearing or reading about the school we are zoned for, though I do still need to check it out in person.

A larger problem is that our family is too big for our house. Our 3 kids are spaced just so in gender and age that it would really be best for each to have his or her own bedroom. And in our hip, urban neighborhood, homes with 4 bedrooms are still awfully expensive, even in this economy. For several years now, you’ve been able to get more house for your money in certain parts of Green Hills and definitely in Bellevue, and that’s still the case.

And so for a while, I thought we’d just have to move to the southwestern part of the county. It’s not hip nor nearly so urban, but still not too far out, and we’d get the house our family needed. In a good school district.

But lately? I am trying to wrap my head around it, but I think it makes more sense to move to Brentwood. Here’s why:
* Good schools. Period.
* Good housing value for the dollar is available in some parts of northern Williamson County.
* I don’t hear any bitching in Williamson County about spending on parks and schools. From the outside, those “amenities” of the community seem to be highly valued by a large part of the population.
* They aren’t talking about mortgaging the city or county’s future on a convention center that is difficult to demonstrate the concrete value of. No doubt making it even more difficult to spend on parks and schools in the future than it is now.

There are some downsides, for sure. I’ll be a political minority, but I get along with most everyone. I do know all my elected officials here, and that is nice, but when the awfully smart folks I vote for aren’t able to stop these fool-headed actions by others, I guess that’s not doing me a lot of good, is it?

Sorry if I sound kind of depressed about this. I’m not really — I’m annoyed. Annoyed that housing prices are so high in this neighborhood I love. [It's happened since the local school opened and was immediately so wonderful.] Annoyed that our Metro government is so obsessed with this convention center. Annoyed that my realistic choice is moving so far away.

Well, before the FTC lost its mind today, I’d planned to tell you that I’d received a review copy of Marcus Buckingham’s new book from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, and that in exchange, I’d agreed to post my review of the book on this date.

I suspect I would even have mentioned that if you buy the book from Amazon at this link, I’ll make a few cents.

Now, I’d really prefer to spend my time railing on the FTC, but I’m going to tell you about the book first, then go over to my other site for the FTC rant.

I’m a Marcus Buckingham fan from way back. I am not generally a fan of the whole self-help genre, but at some point, someone convinced me to pick up his book, “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” and I found it an incredibly helpful personal and professional development tool.

I haven’t read any of Buckingham’s other books, but they all seem to play on the same theme. In the newest book, Find Your Strongest Life, he focuses on the roles women play, and what we find satisfying and draining about our daily lives.

I will tell you up front, I had my feminist back up, and I was prepared to be offended at the slightest provocation. And perhaps in the end, what I learned was that I should scold myself for thinking a man wouldn’t have something useful to say about women’s roles in our society.

I think Buckingham is really good at two things:

• Helping you clarify who you are and what you do well
• Giving you simple tools to make that role more satisfying

If you’re looking for an in-depth psychological analysis, you won’t find it here. But you will find practical steps you can use today, this week, in taking better control of your life.

And really, that’s what his books come down to for me: Figuring out who you are, and feeling empowered to act on that knowledge.

In fact, I found myself thinking at several times throughout the book, that he really could have pitched it to people, and not just to women. I know plenty of men who feel powerless to change their lives. And that’s what a lot of the book is about: Determining where you are most powerful, most at ease, and making more of that happen.

Who should read this book: People who are looking for a clearer direction in their lives, or who don’t feel fulfilled in their current career choices.

Who won’t like it: People who don’t care for self-help/personal development.

The 4yo has a little figurine that’s supposed to be Noah. He came in a set with an ark and some other stuff. He’s elderly and white.

Today, the 4yo brought Noah with us on the ride to school. And he was happily chattering away to Noah in the back of the van, when suddenly I caught a snippet and felt compelled to interrupt.

4yo: “And the parents killed people.”

Me: “WHAT???”

4yo: “I said, the parents killed people.”

Me [racing in my head to think, I can't say parents don't kill people, because sometimes they do. But heaven forbid, does he think that's normal? What the hell am I supposed to say??]: “Well, let’s hope not!” [and thinking, that sounded lame.]

4yo: “God is going to kill them.”

Me: “Now, I know that God does not kill people.”

4yo, in his most exasperated tone: “Mom, it’s just a story.”

He then proceeded with several minutes of what God does and doesn’t like. For the record, God likes mommies, daddies, babies, boys named with the 4yo’s name, trees, ladders and houses. God does NOT like older sisters, motorcycles or steps.

You heard it here first.