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.

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.

End of the Zucchini?

With the recent cold spell that seems to have spread across the country as far as all of the blogs I read, I wonder how much longer my garden will be producing. Frankly, at this point, I'm excited about the cool weather, and I'm not too worried about reduced productivity out in the yard. Next year I have a few ideas about what to do differently. One thing I don't plan to change is the number of zucchini plants I grow. Okay, there was a time in July that I was trying to give shiny green baseball-bat-sized zucchinis away to friends and family, but overall they've been good to me this summer. It turns out that zucchini is not only a great ingredient for simmering pots of vegetables and soups, but it's also become my go-to fast food meal.

I spent some time in the garden yesterday, and brought home several extra-large zucchinis, as well as a few small tender ones. (My sister in Indianapolis requested a few zucchini from the garden too, so my dad headed south with a couple of nice ones today.)
The little ones became dinner - maybe the last sauteed fresh zucchini of the season.
The large ones became shredded and sliced frozen zucchini, ready to be turned into cookies, bread, muffins, or soup when the ground is coated with frost and the trees are bare.
I had over 17 lbs of zucchini in my fridge before I got started this morning.
I froze 8 two-cup bags of sliced zucchini and one 3-cup bag of shredded zucchini. I had originally intended to shred more, but my good grater was in the dishwasher and I didn't want to wait for it, because I had other plans for the day . . .

CSA Beef Soup

This week in our CSA newsletter I read we would be receiving leeks, carrots, green or yellow beans, fennel, potatoes, tomatoes, etc. I wasn't sure what to do with the fennel, but fortunately our CSA newsletter suggested that fennel is sometimes used instead of celery in soups. Whoohoo! I finally had enough of the right CSA veggies to make a batch of soup. I just had to decide whether I wanted to make beef soup (with non-local, non-organic, grocery-store beef) or chicken soup (with Smart Chicken, which comes from the grocery store but isn't fed antibiotics). I really wanted to use as many of these veggies (and the zucchini hanging out in my fridge, and the corn I mentioned in this post) as possible. But I'm kind of a purist about my chicken soup - chicken, onions, carrots, celery, egg noodles. Maybe rice instead of the egg noodles if I'm feeling feisty. So I bought the beef. I also bought a few more local onions at the grocery store, to make sure I'd have enough. And I bought Dole celery from who-knows-where because I have a very difficult time finding celery locally, and, since I used all of my celery seed making pickles earlier this summer, I didn't have a very good substitute - and, in my humble opinion, it's not really stock without celery, even if our CSA farmer says fennel can be used as a substitute. (I had one bulb of fennel. I was planning to make an 8-quart pot full of soup. You do the math.)

Chopping carrots, celery, and onion are soothing, easy tasks I could practically do in my sleep. (Have you seen that commercial for some pre-chopped, pre-sauced frozen veggies that suggests that the last thing a person wants to do when he/she (really she) gets home from work is chop vegetables? It makes me laugh. I find chopping to be pretty therapeutic, but that's just me.)

When I got to the fennel, though, I was a little bit stuck. I found this website, which helped a little bit. Pictures would have been more helpful, but what can you do?

Next I had to figure out the leeks. I tried to make soup with leeks this spring, but had a "leek leak" on my way home from the Farmers' Market. So I've never had a leek in my kitchen before. I wasn't sure how much of the leek to use. All I knew was that leeks are very dirty inside and need to be washed very carefully. (I found the same was true with the fennel, by the way.) I googled "how to cook with leeks" and found this blog.
I rinsed them in the sink, then in a separate bowl of water.
This was the rinse water after I was done.
I sliced the leeks then separated the layers, soaking them in a third rinse (not pictured).
I'd use them again.

I used my Betty Crocker recipes for "beef and broth" and "vegetable beef soup." I don't know why I used the recipes - usually I just throw beef, spices, and vegetables into a pot. I considered soup recipes in two different books, but stuck with Betty Crocker. I tell ya, that lady doesn't get enough credit these days. While my other (fancy, gourmet) cookbooks told me to open a can of black-eyed peas, Ms. Crocker told me to cut corn off the cob and to shell the peas, noting parenthetically that I could use frozen vegetables if I needed to. I skipped the frozen peas because there were plenty of other vegetables in the soup, and I may have a hankering for peas in January.

I tripled the amount of liquid, doubled the seasonings, and kept the same amount of soup bones/beef called for in the broth recipe. I usually use more water than the recipe calls for, because I always intend to freeze soup when I make it (although the chicken soup has only made it to the freezer once) and I want to be sure I have enough broth. Also, I'm notoriously bad about measuring ingredients. I mentioned that in my very first post. I just chop what I have and throw it in the pot. Keep reading to see where that got me today . . .

For the stock I chopped:
a handful of baby carrots that I grabbed as "extras" from our CSA yesterday
four ribs of celery
a few small onions from the CSA (one to two ounces each)
one local onion from the grocery store (about six ounces)
fennel (fronds and bulb)
leeks
and dried rosemary from our CSA.
Early stock pot
After simmering for 3+ hours

The recipe also includes bay leaves, peppercorns, whole cloves, salt, parsley (I was going to use the carrot tops but they looked like they'd seen better days) and thyme, but I can't find my thyme . . .
I ended up with 20 cups of broth. (This is an 8.5 quart pot.) (I started with between 20 and 24 cups of water.)

For the soup I chopped:
two bags of carrots from our CSA (maybe 3/4 of a pound total?)
two bags of mixed green and yellow beans from the CSA

the rest of the fennel fronds and bulb from the CSA
the rest of the leeks from the CSA
one slicing tomato and four roma tomatoes from the CSA
three ears of corn (Okay I didn't chop this. I cut it off the cob) from a farmer who knows our CSA farmer
One local onion from the store.
The rest of the bag of celery from a monoculture Dole farm in Arizona.
I skipped the peas and potatoes that the recipe called for. I had potatoes but they don't freeze well and also this is what my pot looked like after I added the above ingredients:
and this when it started to simmer . . .
which is also why I didn't add the zucchini in my fridge.

(I added about 16 cups of vegetables to the broth. I'm not sure how they all fit in that pot. The recipe I was using called for 7.5 cups of vegetables, and since I was at least trying to double the recipe, I think I ended up with a good meat-veggie-broth ratio. I just need a bigger pot. I actually took about 4 cups of soup out of this pot and cooked it separately for a while, till it had cooked down a bit.)

We ate soup for dinner:
And I froze the leftovers:
and life was good!