Archive: May 2008

It’s Friday, at last!
I have a three-day weekend,
Which makes my heart soar.

JG planned ahead
To take the day off today,
And he walked Ted! Swoon.

Getting to sleep in
Is so exciting to me.
Is that sad, or what?

Fun green shoes, good hair,
And not having to carpool
All make me happy.

It’s gorgeous outside!
I sing my commute away,
Sunglasses in place.

My floor is quiet.
My boss is working from home.
I don’t mind one bit.

Have I ever had
A good mood in the morning?
It’s nice, for a change.

This week, we made a discovery that was none too surprising after our recent birthday celebration: peanut butter upsets Ted’s stomach. Sigh.

I met a friend for dinner the other night, and JG filled the little Kong toy with peanut butter in an effort to pacify Ted’s need to chew. Our magazine holder is no match for Ted’s teeth, and it’s hard to distract him from a particularly tasty piece of wood, so JG went with the peanut butter. When I got home, I took over Ted duty and we watched the DVRed second hour of the season finale of House. In the last ten minutes of the episode, Ted became very quiet, and I heard the stomach grumble of impending doom. My own stomach lurched, and I pressed my hand to my mouth and looked away.

Thankfully, JG’s stomach is not as weak as mine, and he monitored Ted while I was busy turning green. I held Ted afterward (again!) while JG found a replacement towel for the couch blanket. My own disgust aside, the situation wasn’t so bad. I’m a little disappointed that Ted can’t handle peanut butter, but if nothing else, my insistence that he sits on a blanket while on the couch has been strongly reinforced by the, uh, evidence. The upset stomach explained the lack of eating that day and the heightened crankiness and chewing. Really, it’s just good that we know now about the peanut butter intolerance. And that I would be completely useless if some child were to be sick in my presence.

I handled Ted very gingerly afterward, fearing any aftershocks of stomach tectonics, but he appeared to be fully recovered. In Ted’s book, there’s not much that a tummy rub doesn’t fix, I guess.

Get your daily dog dose with Smalls, Kaya, Rufus, Ben, Bailey, Gus, and Zapp!

Between second grade and senior year of high school, my dad took me up to Maine every fall for a Father-Daughter Weekend at a camp that was affiliated with our church. Toward the end, we had to battle with band competitions and SATs, but we managed to keep up the tradition, perhaps out of sheer determination. In the first years, Dad and I took off after school on that Friday, and he equipped me with a list of landmarks, a pencil, and his digital watch. It was my job to record the time when we passed each spot on the list, which also showed last year’s time for each landmark, plus this year’s estimated time, adjusted according to the previous year’s data. I dutifully took down the time when we got on and off the Mass Pike, stopped at Bob’s Clam Hut, and finally arrived at the camp. Looking back, I wonder if this job was simply a tactic to keep me occupied during the trip, but I don’t put it past my dad to actually keep a record of our progress over the years.

For these weekends, Dad and I stayed in rustic cabins, ate hearty food at the dining hall, and participated in typical camp activities. We played tetherball, threw a Frisbee, and played checkers. Dad took countless pictures. Every year, we made some funky woodcraft including a birdhouse, a trivet, an inspirational plaque, a kite, and a wooden chest featuring my shaky wood-burning. When we got home, Mom always put on a good show of how nice the knick knack was, and it would stay out on display somewhere until I inevitably forgot about it a month later.

There was a tradition of making campfire meals for one of the lunches. We’d pile ground beef, potatoes, carrots, onion, and whatever else into a foil packet, and then throw it into the fire to cook. It was always a toss-up when distinguishing our charred parcels from anyone else’s, and if everything was cooked through, that was a bonus. Over the course of ten years with campfire meals, Dad honed his technique. He learned to bring his own (sharp) pocketknife, slice the potatoes thinly, make a thin meat patty, scatter cheese across the whole deal, and season liberally. Our lunches were the envy of our group for the last four years, and Dad was pretty pleased with himself.

One year, Dad and I signed up for canoeing as one of our afternoon activities. He put me in the stern of the boat to let me steer, as he put it, and we paddled around the lake without incident. Toward the end of the assigned hour, we prepared to paddle back to the boat house, but a strange wind kicked up and we were unable to fight it.  I wasn’t quite a powerless paddler, but we were no match for the gust, and we ended up drifting to a far bank.  We heard our names echo across the lake in mortifying proof that our absence was noticed, and Dad hastily tied up the canoe and grabbed my hand roughly.  He led me along the lake back to camp, and I did not take too kindly to the rough terrain and quick clip.  My slip-on Keds were hardly suitable footwear, and I was still wearing a life preserver!  Dad hauled me to the camp office to assure the camp director, a long-time friend, that we were fine, who nodded sagely at our description of our plight.  “Yeah,” he said, “if you don’t have the bulk of the weight in the back of the canoe, the wind can really push you around.”  Good to know.

On the drive back home to Connecticut, Dad always tried to persuade me that the speed limit correlated with the number of the exit we were passing, which was never less than 80.  During one ride, I remember bombarding Dad, a civil engineer and bridge inspector at the time, about asphalt and concrete.  Why was the road different colors in the different states?  How long did it take the pavement to dry?  What did they put on the top of bridges?  For a couple of hours, Dad answered my questions and showed me how they went back to his job.  Odd though it may seem, that ride home still sticks out in my memory, and I think of it every time I see a change in the road between along an interstate.  At the end of the day, when we arrived back home with duffle bags of laundry, Mom made a big to-do at the latest addition to her woodcraft collection, Dad set aside his rolls of film for developing, and we all looked ahead to the Father-Daughter Weekend next year.

Before I launch into my newest foray for the quest for delicious pasta salads, I offer a gentle reminder to anyone who is interested in trading out accessories to check out the details on the Great Accessories Swap, conceived by the lovely Erin. What’s better than getting new fun jewelry? Oh, I know! It’s getting new fun jewelry and getting rid of things you don’t wear — all for free!

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The most recent experiment in my effort to find new pasta salads (or, “summer casseroles,” as we like to say) was a pasta primavera salad, recipe courtesy of Deb. In short, this salad is a winner. The recipe, though seemingly complicated at my first glance, boils down to four steps:

1. Cook pasta, mix with onion and olive oil.
2. Blanch peas, shock in ice water.
3. Chop up everything else.
4. Mix.

Ta-da! Four steps and you’ve got a lovely, delicious salad for your dinner needs. Even better, you’ve created a “one-pot meal,” so to speak, because the salad is a balanced combination of carbohydrates and vegetables, with a bit of protein thrown in. Heck, if you want to make it vegetarian, omit the proscuitto, and I’m sure it’ll be delicious. Just toss a bit more salt in there to make up for the lack of, uh, salted meat. I made up a batch last week, and then we ate it for a pre-climbing meal the next day. Light but still filling, it gave us energy without weighing us down. We declared it a keeper, and this recipe has a place of prominence in its very own plastic sleeve in the recipe binder, under “Soups and Sides.”

That said, I made a few small modifications when I tried out this recipe. When comparing my photos of the salad to Deb’s, it will be obvious that I did not use fettuccine, substituting tri-color rotini instead. JG and I both prefer what we call “stabby pasta” (i.e. short-cut pasta) to “twirly pasta,” and that may or may not be related to my tendency to spatter sauce all over myself while twirling recalcitrant strands. So, for us, the rotini worked out just fine, and I liked how colorful it was. Besides, our grocery store doesn’t carry green fettuccine, so what was I to do? Please also excuse the fact that absolutely nothing is julienned, as the recipe states; I am too attached to my fingertips to attempt anything crazy like that. In the herbage department, I used rosemary because we had it on hand. It was delicious, but I think I’d like to toss in some chives next time, as well. I used apple cider vinegar because we didn’t have any of the raspberry variety. Oh, and I forgot the olives. Darn.

I know, did I follow the recipe at all? But, hey! The salad turned out great, regardless of my perhaps-ill-advised finagling. Also:

• Be warned that the recipe as listed makes a whole heck of a lot of salad. My biggest mixing bowl could not contain the bounds of the growing pile of foodstuffs that I had to somehow mix without spilling it all over my counters. I know already that our love of this salad will not outlast the shelf life of the leftovers in the fridge, and that’s a little sad. I think I’ll save this dish for a crowd of at least 8, if not 12, people or halve it for JG and me.
• A lot of the bulk was attributed to the snow peas and sugar snap peas: over a pound, in total. I will cut the snow peas entirely next time, which will also drastically decrease the cost of the ingredients.
• The recipe calls for Parmesan cheese, but JG tossed in a bit of feta that we had lying around, and it was a nice addition. I will definitely incorporate feta from the start, but that will affect the salt content, I think.

The moral of the story is: go forth and make this pasta salad. It’s tasty, pretty, and simple, just how warm-weather eats should be.