Out with the Old, In with the New

Goodbye 2010!

Overall, 2010 has been a good year for me - although at times it did not seem like it. I finished student teaching, became a licensed teacher, and then sat around for too many months waiting to find a teaching job. Fortunately, many other employment opportunities came my way while my teaching dreams were on hold. I started the year the way I have for the past several years - working at my dad's tax preparation business. I won't be able to give my dad as many hours in 2011, but I expect I'll find myself assembling a few tax returns come March. Near the end of March, as the taxes were rolling into their final weeks, I was finally hired as a substitute teacher, just in time to take a trip down to Indianapolis to visit my quite-pregnant sister. I had my first substitute teaching assignment on April Fool's Day - a half day of school before a long weekend - and I survived somehow.

In May, I took a week off from subbing and headed to Indianapolis for the birth of my niece. On that trip Adele helped me shell peas from the garden, and even ate a few peas for dinner. She decided, without any prompting, that the large peas were "man peas" and the tiniest peas were "baby peas." The morning after her sister was born, Adele woke up and came down the stairs asking, "My baby sister came out last night?" We're not quite sure how she knew, since her mom was in the bathtub when Adele went to bed, and the baby was not born until Adele was fast asleep. We got home from the hospital around 2 or 3 in the morning, and I don't think anyone woke Adele up to tell her. However she came to find out about it, I am still awed that my sister allowed me to be in the room to watch the whole birth (except the epidural) and will never forget that the nurse mistakenly gave Anna to me before her dad had a chance to hold her. (In my defense, I did not realize that Brian hadn't held his daughter until she was already in my arms.)

In July, my nieces came to Wisconsin for a visit, and I got to have a very special sleep-over with Adele! She ate Memaw's raspberry jam, shelled a few more peas, and went for a walk along the river.

I was disappointed not to get three teaching jobs over the course of the spring and summer, but spent four hours volunteering at a booth at the county fair hours after learning that Michael's uncle had undergone a successful liver transplant, and ended up meeting a new friend and getting a job where I actually had the opportunity to do some teaching, albeit in a museum rather than a classroom.

Over the course of the spring and summer, my dad and I grew a fairly productive garden (although the tomato crop could have been more successful) and I canned and froze a substantial amount of produce, which has been a godsend in the recent weeks when I've been too tired to cook when I get home from work. Dinner is as easy as thawing out a container of grass finished beef and garden turnip soup I made in July.

As the summer came to an end and the farmers' markets and museum closed up for the season, I was fortunate enough to get another job (for which I had not applied) at a small law firm in town as my dad recovered from knee surgery. The weekend after I started that new job Michael and I headed to Indianapolis again - this time to serve as godparents for Anna Kate. We had to rush home after the church service, so I missed seeing Anna Kate dressed up as Raggedy Ann, but she brought the costume to show me for Thanksgiving.

Work at the law firm was fairly stress free, interesting, and manageable, but I kept applying for teaching positions, and was shocked when I finally got a call, many weeks after the interview, asking if I could come in right away to start a long-term subbing position teaching English an hour and a half from home. And later that same day, I was just as shocked to get a call inviting me to interview for another long-term substitute English position - at a school only 20 minutes from my house.

I am halfway through the six weeks in Beloit, and was hired to begin in Pardeeville at the start of the second semester - so I will have exactly one weekend (during which Adele will turn 3) between jobs.

2011 is shaping up to be a good year. I will be employed full-time as a teacher until the first week of June, I have resources about companion planting and food preservation (and a new rack for my water bath canner!) and I am excited about growing a years' worth of food in the upcoming summer.

Until the garden starts growing, I have a freezer full of fruit and jam, vegetables including peas, green beans, asparagus, corn, zucchini, and tomatoes, cupboards with jars of pickles, cranberry preserves, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, and one last lonely jar of applesauce. I have many pints of chicken, beef, and turkey stock, much of which was produced using all or mostly local food.

I never got around to making resolutions for 2010, but I'm pretty proud of the way I was able to use local, real food sources for so many of my meals. One of my goals for 2011 will be to continue my efforts to wean myself off of processed, highly-traveled foods. I also want to be able to talk to other people in a coherent way about why I am making the food choices I'm making - not just so that I can be understood (right now I tend to ramble endlessly without making a lot of sense) but also so that I can introduce many of the people that I know to a much healthier, earth-friendly way of living and eating.

I am sure this post could use some significant editing, but I need to go get ready for this party! (My plan is to come back and update this post with pictures when I have time.)

Happy 2011 everyone!

Raspberry Jam Revisited

While I was inspecting my freezer earlier tonight to make sure I won't have to buy a bunch of processed food that comes in boxes while I deal with a long commute, I discovered many, many jars of freezer jam that have been waiting to be eaten.

That reminded me that I haven't posted a few Thanksgiving pictures yet.

Remember this little girl who had a big sleep-over at her aunt's house last summer?
I think I've discovered the key to making sure she'll come back again.
She allowed me to drape her with a towel on Friday so she could eat applesauce for breakfast, and the same technique worked for her raspberry jam on bread.

It didn't stop her from getting a little bit messy, though.
First she decided she was Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.

But then she turned into a clown.
Isn't she sweet?

Her sister's pretty adorable too!

Changes

Just when I had finally gotten settled into a routine working as a substitute teacher some days and as a law clerk the rest of the week, things had to go and change. On Friday morning, nine minutes before I had to be at work at the law firm, I got a call from the school district where I had interviewed several weeks earlier. The interview was so long ago that I had recently said to my husband, "obviously I didn't get that job." The assistant principal who called me started the conversation by thanking me profusely for the thank-you card I sent to her after the interview. (For the record, I also sent a thank-you card after my previous interview with this school district, and it didn't seem to help, since I wasn't offered that job.) I listened politely, planning my response to her inevitable rejection speech. She thanked me for a while, then told me the teacher who needs the long-term sub had had her baby, and then eventually got around to telling me that she was offering me the job. She wanted me to come in that day. I was sort of stunned.

Her desire to have me get in the classroom on Friday was slightly awkward, since the law firm was expecting me in five minutes. Eventually she indicated that it would be okay if I came in on Monday (tomorrow) instead. So I told her I'd be happy to take the job, and made arrangements to talk to the personnel department later. I went to the law firm, and awkwardly told my boss that this was apparently going to be my last day. (How convenient that I had arranged to bring in the leftover spice cake from Thursday's book club - what had been just a "Friday treat" could now be called a "going-away treat.") He was very gracious, and congratulated me on getting the job. (Basically my boss at the law firm was an all-around good guy who displays the complete opposite traits from all of the other lawyers I have ever worked for. Your standard, run-of-the-mill lawyer would probably say this guy gives lawyers a bad name 'cause he's not a complete and total jerk.)

On a typical day at the law firm, I would arrive to find my desk full of files covered in post-it notes reading, "See me on filing Complaint in X case" or "Legal Research on Economic Loss Doctrine." I would have a brief meeting in which he would explain what he needed, and I would get to work. On Friday, he started out in this fashion, but began setting files to the side in cases he knew I wouldn't get to in my last 8 hours with the firm. As he was starting to tell me about a task I could complete, my phone rang.

It was the personnel department calling to tell me to bring official transcripts, my social security card, and my drivers' license on Monday after I go to the Occupational Health Services for my drug screen, my TB test, and my physical.

For the record, I don't typically answer my cell phone while working, but I figured I should pick up on Friday in case it was the school district calling back about Monday. So when another unknown number called me a few hours later, I figured it was the school district calling again. I was partly right. It was a school district - a different district with a long-term sub position calling to schedule an interview. They want to interview me on Monday the 13th. I told the lady who called that I am planning to take a different position but said I'd be happy to interview for this position as well. She was not deterred so I went ahead and took the first interview slot she had.

The job I have been offered is an hour and a half from my house, during good weather and not at rush hour. I will be waking up at 4:45 in order to leave my house by 5:45 so I can get to school by 7:15-7:30. Just this week I though to myself how thankful I was that my job was within walking distance from my house, and that I did not have to wake up before 6 a.m. to be at work on time. Ha. The interview that I will have on the 13th (if I don't cancel it) is for a half-time position that is 20 minutes from my house, and I believe this position will last the rest of the school year, whereas the position I've been offered is only for 3 months.

Furthermore, there is an English teacher in town who is expecting to go on maternity leave sometime between now and April, and she has recommended me to the principal as her long-term sub. I've been trying to get a one-day subbing job for her for the last month (she's posted three but someone else was always quicker to schedule the job), and finally got one - for a couple of weeks from now, which I will likely have to cancel. In a perfect world, taking this current job will not mean giving up the opportunity to sub for her. In a less-than ideal world, I may have some hard decisions to make in the next few weeks. And that is something I have never been particularly good at.

To top this all off, it snowed on Friday night, for really the first time this season - just in time to remind me how hazardous it may be to drive those 85 miles to and from a limited term job every day. I've been a little bit stressed out, trying to figure out how I'm going to feed my family real, local, non-processed food while I'm doing all of this driving. I've really enjoyed being able to take nice homemade meals to work. But when am I going to have time to make these meals now that I'll be spending three hours a day in the car? I'm trying to remember what/when I cooked while I was student teaching, but I'm kind of drawing a blank.

I went out to check the freezer a few minutes ago. I have four six-cup containers of vegetable beef soup, two four-cup containers of Kale soup, two four-cup containers of early vegetable soup (turnips, zucchini, and I'm not sure what else), several cups of chicken stock, and two f0ur-cup containers of beef stock in the freezer.
Plus, I finally got around to making turkey stock from my Thanksgiving turkey today. (The carcass had been hanging out in my freezer since my dad carved it. I don't have pictures, but I did require my husband's help to get the whole carcass into my stock pot.) It is still simmering on the stove, but I think it will make a couple quarts worth of stock. I also have many quarts of tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce both in the freezer and in my cupboards, along with half a dozen bags of sliced zucchini, at least a dozen bags of corn, and an assortment of other frozen vegetables.
We are not going to run out of food, but we might get a little bit sick of spaghetti with zucchini and tomato sauce.

The main problem with doing any more (real, local) food shopping in the next three months is that the farmers' market that is open in the winter is an hour away. It is still possible to go, since it is on Saturday mornings, but I know that the absolute last thing I'm going to want to do on a Saturday morning is get up early and drive an hour so I can go shopping.

Clearly, I have mapped out all of the negative elements of this job opportunity. What I need to focus on, instead, is how lucky I am to have been given this opportunity! In the past few months I have received several great employment opportunities. I am grateful for all of them. While there are a few drawbacks to this job, and while I might be inclined to stick with my still-new routine, which has become comfortable over the past few weeks, I recognize that this is an incredible opportunity for me. I was so disappointed not to have gotten a teaching job this summer, when most of the people I went to school with did find jobs. I was told by a veteran English teacher here in town that I needed to add some long-term subbing assignments to my resume so that school districts would know I had experience writing units and doing long-range planning. Now I have the opportunity to do just that.

So tomorrow I go in for the health screenings, and by Friday I should be set up in the classroom.
If it doesn't work out, the attorney said I'm welcome to come back to the law firm any time.

Cooking with Kid(s)

I enjoyed having my nieces in town for Thanksgiving. I think the best part
(other than the Raggedy costume)
was the quality time I spent with Adele in the kitchen on Friday! (Making food that was homemade, but full of refined flour and white sugar - and food coloring! - not exactly Slow Food or Local Food or Real Food.)

I posted earlier about trying to figure out what to serve for breakfast to my niece that does not include eggs, oatmeal, or peanuts. My sister decided on pull-aparts - and actually got up early in the morning to make the dough, so it had plenty of time to rise.

Okay, so breakfast still wasn't ready until 10:30, and I didn't get any pictures of the process, but Adele did a great job helping me put little balls of dough rolled in butter and cinnamon sugar in my Bundt pan.

She's two, so I was afraid she'd pile all the dough on one side of the pan. Actually, she did a great job of putting the balls around the pan. When she had filled one layer of dough about halfway around the pan, she looked at her handiwork and exclaimed (I am not making this up), "oh look, it's a perfect rainbow." She was right. The balls of (brownish) dough in a semi-circle were indeed a perfect rainbow shape. She continued on with her work, and eventually the dough made a perfect circle. After the first layer, I think she got a little bit bored, and she started just throwing the dough anywhere. But it only took a little bit of rearranging before the finished product was set on top of the oven to rise again. The rolls were pretty good, although they could have had more of the butter/sugar mixture!

Later in the day I asked Adele if she wanted to make cookies with me. She and her mom do cooking "projects" at home sometimes, and she really seems to like them. Plus, Portage is a nice town but it isn't the most exciting place for two-year-olds. (We don't even have an art desk.) I got out my grandpa's Crisp Cookie recipe that my aunt gave me a few years ago, when I knew I wouldn't make it all the way to WI (from Kentucky) for Christmas, but didn't want to miss out on Grandpa's cookies. (Or the decorating that goes with it.)

Michael and I had (a little too much?) fun decorating the crisp cookies last year!
Adele helped me pick out good cookie cutters (she named the shapes as I held them up - if she didn't know what the shape was supposed to be, we didn't use that one)
hmm . . . what could this be?

She was very interested in sprinkling flour on the dough mat
and she even helped roll out the dough.
The cookies turned out pretty well by my standards - none of them were burned or undercooked, and only a few were smashed/broken.
With three pans and lots of helpers (and photographers) the job went quickly, even if it was very hot in the kitchen! Adele took a nap while the cookies cooled.

Adele sampled the cookies after her nap.
Oliver and Loki tried to convince Adele to share with them (but she didn't)
Finally, we were ready to decorate! (Aunt Dee Dee made a little mistake about what time the parade was supposed to be on Friday night - I had it in my head all day that the parade was at 5:00 but our internet was down, so I had no way of verifying this (without going downtown to look at the signs). Around 4:45 as we were piling on winter gear to go to the parade, I checked the internet again and it was working - which was a good thing because the parade was not until 6:00.) So we used the extra time to decorate the cookies.

Adele was a very good sport about wearing a kitchen towel as her "apron."
Mommy showed her how to do one, and then Adele decorated like a pro.
Okay, so she got a little bit messy . . . that's what the newspaper was for!
What's wrong with this cookie, MeMaw?He has an owie knee, just like BaPa!
I sent the decorated cookies home with them.
I wonder how long they lasted.

Success!

Thursday morning started bright and early, as I threw together a loaf of bread in the bread maker, just in case someone needed a sandwich. After showering and taking care of the dog, I peeled the potatoes, losing two fingernails and a little skin in the process - but didn't have to worry about keeping my nails nice for a wedding in two days, so I really didn't care. The potatoes soaked for four or five hours to leech some of the potassium out of them, making them healthier for my dad. In an ideal world, I would have kept some of the peels in the potatoes, but my understanding is that a lot of potassium (which is healthy for many people but doesn't mix well with certain medications) is in the peel, so down the disposal they went. I am trying to be good about keeping food scraps, but I've never hosted a big meal like this before (once I had my parents and sister up for a meal and that was a really big deal) so I was trying to keep things simple.

I chopped carrots, celery, and onions to roast the turkey on. I had six carrots from the farmers' market two Saturdays ago, and Michael picked up some celery at the grocery store. The onions are locals that have been hanging out in my kitchen for a couple of weeks.
The 16.5 lb turkey came fresh on Tuesday from a farm in southern WI.


I stuffed it with more celery and carrots, to make it nice and juicy.
I watched a show on the Food Network where the chef soaked a cheesecloth in butter then laid it over the turkey during the roasting process. My mom had heard about this technique from a friend, so I decided to give it a try. Mmm . . . a butter soaked blanket.
I had intended to get the turkey in the oven at 10:00, so I was pretty happy that I got the bird in at about 10:20. I had left plenty of time to get the bird out and the other dishes cooked before we ate at 3:00, so a 20 minute late start was nothing to be worried about.
Then I frantically started to think about appetizers, after Michael's mom and step-dad, and my little sister, my twin and her family arrived. We had WI cheese (of course), Ritz crackers (one of the few processed foods), homemade pickles, and a little plate of cream cheese topped with apple butter, pumpkin butter, and cranberry preserves. My mother-in-law and my little sister were kind enough to follow my uncertain instructions and put it together for me. The pumpkin butter was a big hit. Sorry I don't have a better picture of it - I had delegated the picture-taking at this point! My sister made a dish like this with cranberry chutney once upon a Thanksgiving, and I was inspired as a way to use up some of my pumpkin butter. My mom had the idea of serving with with bagel chips - which they do not sell in Portage, apparently. So my mom picked some up . . . and was the last person to arrive. In the meantime, my mother-in-law jumped right in to chop celery for stuffing, to wash dishes, and to basically do anything else I asked her to do. She's great, what can I say?


Of course I realized sometime after midnight on Wednesday that the turkey baster I bought last Thanksgiving had broken, and I had nothing to baste the turkey with. We improvised. I basted once, but my mother-in-law, my twin, and Michael took over from then on. The recipe I watched on TV did not talk about basting, and I hadn't really considered it, never having made an entire turkey before. (My step-father-in-law suggested I put a couple of cups of water and some chicken stock in the pan, so I did, and was glad I'd taken his advice. I was also glad to have had multiple containers of chicken stock in the freezer.)


I made a large dish of stuffing which was okay, but I think I might skip it next year. I love stuffing but I always make too much.

Michael and I had a private conference about the green bean casserole and decided to skip the lard-fried onions on the top, because the house was very warm from the oven, the stove, and the gorgeous sun beating in the non-curtained windows lining the south side of our house. (The sun was streaming right into the kitchen, so someone had to move the appetizers out of the way before they melted.)
My twin (who had previously been assigned the job of mashing the potatoes) offered to help with the mushrooms and roux. She delegated the mashing to my mother-in-law, who was happy to help, and then I think she handed the pot over to my mom for a while - right when I added the milk and butter, making the whole mashing thing a lot easier. Sorry I don't have any pictures. I have no idea what I was doing at that point! (Possibly microwaving the 2 lbs of sweet corn from the farmers' market that I'd frozen in one huge bag just for this very meal.)


It was plenty warm so even though I took the rolls out of the fridge a little late they had no trouble rising in my kitchen.


We checked the turkey right around 2:00 and it was done.

So it rested under a tinfoil tent for about half an hour, until we woke my dad up to do the carving. In the meantime, the stuffing and green beans went in the oven, and my mother-in-law and I washed the dinner plates, which have spent a lot of time in storage over the last 35 years or so.
My mom made the gravy, which I got to put in the gravy boat that matches the china from my great-great-aunt that my mom gave me as a wedding present. The rolls got a little bit dark on the bottom. I kind of forgot about them, and they probably would not have made it into the oven at all if it hadn't been for my mom - but I never told her that my oven is a bit touchy, and I like to check things a few minutes before the shortest suggested cooking time. They weren't that bad - Adele ate at least three. I served the mashed potatoes in a beautiful bowl that Michael and I got as a wedding gift from my friend Tracy - with whom I have celebrated many Thanksgivings, most of which were in Tennessee with her grandmother. After I took this picture Vern asked about cranberries, so I took the three types of cranberry out of the fridge - my mom's cranberry relish with pineapple, that her mom used to make, my mom's cranberry sauce with cinnamon, based on a different one of her grandmother's recipes, and the cranberry preserves I canned earlier this summer/fall. They were all a big hit.
We were a little bit crowded around the table(s) but everyone had enough to eat!

And later on we came back for pie - two types of apple pie from my mother-in-law, cranberry-apple from my mom (with real WI cranberries) and my pumpkin pie with whipped cream (which my mother-in-law, my twin, my mom and I all tried to whip by hand - my preferred method - but eventually I had to get out my whisk attachment for my hand blender because it was too hot in my kitchen!). I sweetened one batch of whipped cream with maple syrup, but that batch developed small dark chunks of ??? in it - so I used sugar in the next batch, just to be safe.
Adele loved her pie. Especially her second "slice" which was just a big pile of whipped cream!

And then someone dressed Anna up in her Halloween costume so I could get a picture with my Raggedies.