29 March 2014

happy birthday, mousie.


Also known as:
Pumpkin
Little Love
Beansprout
Ellie Belly
Munchkin 
Sweet Potato
You Little Stinker

Oh, Ellie. You've taught me a lot this year.

I have learned to be grateful for my body as it carried and nourished you.

Your unrelenting obsession with mamamamama has made me so happy.

With you bouncing on my hip, clinging to my hair and squealing at the squirrels in the yard, I've learned to turn my mind away from the anxieties of the future: I can see the joy He gives me each day. I have learned to trust God by simply doing what sits in front of me.

I have learned, in fact, that I can do much more than I thought; that I am weak and needy, and yet through God's grace, I am able.

I have worked harder and thought harder because of you. (I think I have also become a lot crunchier.) In all those things I have tried to take better care of us, because I see the future in your glowing eyes.

We love you, baby girl.

21 March 2014

Weekend linkage // 7QT #30

Linked up with Conversion Diary!

1)

"You can stand there and see if you look fat. Or you can just ask me, and you are not."
-upon finding his wife critically inspecting her reflection

"It's really not that cold. No matter how much you squeak."
-as I burrowed under the covers making disapproving noises

2)

Ellie is working on clapping, which comes close to topping the list of Cutest Stuff She Has Ever Done. At first she just vaguely put her hands together (missing half the time), then she started getting better aim, and then one day she could do it with enough force to make a tiny noise. She now does it every time I put my hands together, even if it's because I am rubbing cream into my palms or adjusting my rings.

3)

A few funny things to start off the links: a man writes his own goofy obituary, a website devoted to unnecessary quotation marks, and Benedict photobombing U2.

4)

"Quit Bubble Wrapping Our Kids," a great Cato talk from Lenore Skenazy. And to follow up, an NPR piece in the same vein. See, sometimes libertarians and liberals agree? On the problem anyway. Probably not on the solution.

5)

This is a long, extremely intriguing article: "Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney." I love how we're starting to understand what autism is, how it shapes the autistic person's mind, instead of just throwing up our hands and putting him in an institution.

6)

I have been working a lot on closing the gap in my abdominal muscles (diastasis recti) that I got from pregnancy. If you too have been pregnant recently and now have an adorable sack of potatoes to lug around, here are some good suggestions for how to carry children without ruining your posture.

19 March 2014

no frigate like a book #3


Linked up with Five Favorites.

In which I tell you about some of the books I've been glad to read in the past months.

1)

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. This book is consistently hilarious, sometimes crude, and delightfully original. A New Orleans mama's boy loses himself in medieval philosophy and decides to adhere as closely as possible to its ideals of "theology and geometry": he rails against modernity in the middle of the movie theatre, solemnly loans his copy of Boethius to a hapless policeman, and carries on a furious correspondence with a lascivious beatnik determined to bring him into the twentieth century. (She fails.)

I laughed a lot. Ignatius Reilly is ridiculous, but I still admired his refusal to approve of the banal and immoral modern life, even when it made him stick out like a sore and very tactless thumb, and his determination to see everything through a different worldview, even when it made no sense to the people around him.
"You must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too."
2)

The Ditchdigger's Daughters by Yvonne S. Thornton. This was for book club, and I enjoyed it very much. (Alas, I missed the discussion due to an inconveniently timed cold.) Thornton's father was an uneducated laborer determined to see all five of his daughters earn medical degrees. Only one became a doctor-- Yvonne herself is a well-respected perinatologist and obstretrician-- but two others work in dental medicine, another has a doctorate in psychology, and another enjoys a comfortable life as a court stenographer. THeir father's work ethic and instinctive wisdom won me over almost immediately. They had quite a few adventures growing up, playing in a band together, earning the money and respectability their parents never had.

Thornton discusses the obstacles they faced as black women, but never in a self-pitying way. Those prejudices just never set the girls back; their daddy wouldn't let them. I was truly inspired by how they have doggedly overcome so many roadblocks. I think that their story shows the power of ability combined with confidence.

2)

All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg. The recollections of this Pulitzer-prize winning journalist on a hard-fought "white trash" childhood and the people who made him who he is today. Bragg's an incredible writer, but what really made this one stand out, to me, was how unapologetically Bragg chronicled his own flaws. He didn't try to make himself the hero, as most memoir writers do.  This was just the story of his family, and when he stood in a good light, he wrote that. When he stood in a bad light, he wrote that. And when he didn't figure much in the story at all, he stepped back from the stage and let others-- his remarkable momma, his unbreakable brother Sam-- take first place.
The one I wanted to be just like for the longest time was the one who beat me up every other Thursday, who chased me around and around the house with a slingshot loaded with chinaberries, who lied and told me that a sunk-in septic tank outside the house was really an unmarked grave, who rigged up a trapeze in the barn and let me go first, to test the ropes, and who hid with me under that bed in that big, hateful house, and, as tears rolled down my face, put his arm around my shoulder.
4)

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. I have already expressed my love for Cormac McCarthy, so I will spare you the paean and just say that while dark (as he usually is), this book's darkness feels true. It's not the woe-is-us absurdity of postmodernism. It comes from a place of conviction, of stubborn morality. This was the first time I realized how conservative McCarthy must be. I think he is extraordinarily sober in his analysis of mankind's potential for evil, uncompromising in how he values truth and courage, and determined in his desire for liberty.
People anymore you talk about right and wrong they're liable to smile at you. But I never had a lot of doubts about things like that . . . I hope I never do.
5)

Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin. Did I already express my love for Helprin too? Oh yes, I did. After reading four or five of his books in relatively close succession, I would say that he has two main themes: the losing but noble fight to preserve Judeo-Christian values in the West, and the supremacy of love. Much more artistically expressed of course, but that's pretty much what it all boils down to.

Memoir is presented as a collection of one man's memories, written for someone precious to read after he dies. This man is never named, which is quite amazing when you think about it. Anyway, I think you would call his life "cinematic":  Helprin excels in creating unique characters and this guy doesn't disappoint. He has been a bank robber, a mental patient, a crusader against coffee. He grew up in poverty, witnessed murder, fought in World War II, and has lived on at least four continents. Just . . . read it.
Everything starts so far back that to explain it you must begin with the beginning of the world.
Now what? I've been tackling Gods and Generals, and I already have a forever-long list of books to read, but do you have suggestions for me? Books that you just couldn't put down, or that rang in your mind long after finishing?

12 March 2014

and with them one made life itself [at The Mirror]

I wrote a guest post for The Mirror Magazine this week.
Homemaking involves far, far more than keeping the physical house. It is, at heart, creating a world. You the homemaker help to shape the kind of life lived there. Even in the way you call your children to dinner or the way you fold towels, you are determining the kind of life your family knows as good and right . . .
Through all this, in my small way, I participate in the task God has given to all humans, to "take dominion over Creation" and bring it into a useful pattern.
Go here for the rest.

10 March 2014

spatchcocked roast chicken

Shared on Simple Lives Thursday.

Yeah, I've written about chicken roasting before, and that old technique still turns out a lovely bird. But listen, if you found an easier/faster/all-around-tastier way, wouldn't you switch? I did. With this method you don't need to flip the chicken, and because of the removal of the backbone, the finished bird is easier to carve into pieces for serving. Huzzah.

If you own a hefty pair of kitchen shears-- and if you don't, for the love, make haste to put these Wusthof beauties in your Amazon cart-- a beautiful spatchcocked chicken can be on your table tonight.

---

Spatchcocked Roast Chicken

4-5 lb whole chicken
1/4 cup olive oil or melted butter
plenty of sea salt and black pepper

1) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Lightly oil a large sturdy baking sheet and set aside.
2) Get your chicken out of the fridge, remove any wrapping, and drain any juices. If the chicken's cavity contains the neck and giblets, set them aside to make stock later. Pat chicken dry with paper towels.
3) On a large cutting board, place the chicken backbone up. Using your shears, cut down either side of the backbone; with a good pair of shears you should be able to cut right through the ribs without much trouble. Remove the backbone (see picture A) and set aside with the giblets.
4) Flip your chicken over so that it's breast side up. Wiggle the legs around so that the chicken is lying quite flat and place it on the prepared baking sheet (see picture B).
5) Using your fingers, loosen the skin a bit so that the olive oil and seasonings will get to the meat. Pour olive oil evenly over chicken and season liberally with salt and pepper. At this point you can add any additional seasonings you desire; in these photos I kept it plain because I wanted to use the meat for other dishes.
6) Place the entire chicken in the preheated oven and roast for 30 minutes, at which point it will be nicely browned on top. Cover with foil and roast for 30 more minutes.
7) Now the most important step: turn off the oven but leave the chicken in there, still covered with foil. Let rest for 30 minutes before removing from the oven and serving (see picture C).

I discovered by accident that this extended resting period really takes chicken to the next level by making it incredibly tender-- one night Jared came back late from work and I just left dinner in the oven until he arrived, but lo and behold, it was actually much better than it would have been otherwise! Now I would never skip the long resting step.

This is the basic way, and it's marvelously tasty. You can dress it up as much as you want by rubbing other goodies beneath the skin of the chicken prior to roasting. Try fresh or dried herbs such as dill, parsley, or tarragon; a light pinch of red pepper flakes; several splashes of white wine; more adventurous spices like cumin and cinnamon; a squirt of Dijon; several spoonfuls of pesto . . . so on and so forth, world without end. I have found several great seasoning recipes for roast chicken in Debra Worth's e-book Much Ado About Chicken.