Messengers To Us From the Hallows

hydrangeas from friends

"Somehow we have gotten swept into a millrace, and it's nonstop flailing and thrashing just to keep ourselves from drowning.  The sheer necessities of modern life sweep us farther and farther from any sense that it is all hallowed, really. What are we to do?

There are various things we could do no doubt.  We could resign ourselves to the millrace and abandon any thought of anything but the flailing.  Or we could take some drastic step like moving to a farm in Vermont or an island in the Aegean, hoping thereby to find some peace and quiet where we would be able to recollect ourselves and do things right.  A third possibility would be to accept the fact that life comes tumbling at us nowadays but that it is nonetheless possible for us to see our ordinary daily routines as proceeding among the hallows, so to speak; and by stirring up in our minds the things that we vaguely acknowledge anyway, to begin to hallow those routines by doing once more what men have always done with things to hallow them; namely, offering them up in oblation to God, as literally as Abel offered up sacrifices from his ordinary routine of work.

I would like to suggest that at least one place (among others) which may be hallowed anew as the place where the celebration of all the mysteries may occur, and where all of life may be offered up in oblation to the Most High, is the family household.  Within these four walls, under this roof, the lamps are lighted.  The offering is here, the vigil is here, the feast is here, the faithful are here.  All the eating and drinking, and the working and playing, and the discipline and serving and loving that go on here - they are all holy.  For these common routines of ordinary life are not only necessities and functions:  they are also messengers to us from the hallows.  Nay, more than messengers, they are those hallows, set hourly before us in visible, touchable, light-of-day forms."

from Hallowed Be This House by Thomas Howard, quoted in Disciplines for the Inner Life by Bob Benson Sr. and Michael W. Benson

a backyard bouquet from Ben

The Week in Packed Lunches

Monday: 
I packed gado gado for myself, husband, and both children.  It was left from Sunday, so there was no additional prep to do. Gado gado is meant to be eaten at room temperature - perfect packed lunch!  I put a layer of brown rice, roasted carrots, green beans with sesame salt, diced cucumbers, chopped red bell pepper, and bean sprouts with a dollop of peanut sauce on top.  Dessert was a black bean brownie.  Pretty, travels well, and nutritious.

Packed my husband's in a quart jar with the peanut sauce on top.  By lunchtime, the peanut sauce has gone nicely throughout, and he ate it from the jar.  I only had a very cutesy jar cozy for a quart-size jar, so I whipped up a plainer felt one that evening.  I put a handle on it because the felt/jar combo was quite slippery.

Tuesday:
Gado gado for the kids again:  rice, broccoli, red peppers, bean sprouts, cilantro, peanut sauce.  Wasabi peas on the side (the kids are currently in love with them).  I rarely pack the same lunch in a row because we usually don't have that many leftovers - curious to see what they say.

Last week's shepherd's pie and an apple for my husband.  In the tiffin. I picked this up at a local discount store for $11 a while back.  It's great: doesn't leak, no plastic, and travels well.

I'm not telling you what I ate at home - I eat weird scraps and read novels, very happily, when I'm alone.

Wednesday:
What happened with the same lunch for Genevieve on Tuesday is that she didn't eat it. So I gave her the choice of eating her gado gado for supper or Wednesday school lunch.  She chose today. I'm not saying this is the ideal way to handle this, but we talk about how we don't waste food.  Also, carrot cake muffin for her.
For Ben, hummus sandwich, grape tomatoes from the back yard, carrot cake muffin.


Thursday:
Kids:  red beet egg, hummus sandwich, applesauce
Adults: red beet egg, sourdough bread, Swiss cheese, apple (and someone bought ice cream during her work day)

Friday:
Children want to get school lunch pizza on Fridays.  That's cool.  For one day a week, I don't mind a break and the school-lunch crap.

Husband: leftover taco beans from taco salad supper; rest of rice from gado gado. Green salad with 1000 island (down the side!). Blueberry muffin from freezer.  Apple.

Thanks to Carrie for the original idea of the week in meals!  I thought a real snapshot of packed lunches would be helpful to us all.  I'm going to try to write more about packed lunches on the blog - they're a big part of our week and we could all use ideas and tips.

The Navy Dress

At a bargain fabric store, I spied this polka-dotted navy cotton.  It has a gorgeous weight and feel.  It was $2.50 a yard.  I bought everything they had - a little over 2 yards, I think - and much less than most of my dress patterns required.  I could not find any more of the fabric online and I had no interest in a skirt, a blouse, or another navy dress for Genevieve.  No, I must have a sleeveless dress, and I must have it now, even though I'm getting my cold-weather clothes out.

I love his sandals and socks - like a little vintage boy.

So I cut a dress on the fabric width, instead of length, and sewed on a few inches to make the dress long enough.  The vision I had in mind was a simple, almost elegant dress, that could be dressed up or down.  However, the panel did not lay right with the dress (I knew it was going to be a challenge), so I squeezed out a few more inches of the scraps and turned the bottom panel into a ruffle.  Sure, it's cute, but it's not my original vision and I'm still disappointed.

My favorite detail of the dress is the button.  I could only easily get a 22" zipper instead of the 24" zipper that the pattern specified, so I kept the extra 2" and turned it into a keyhole and put in a tiny elastic loop and a sweet vintage button.

The dress can be worn unbelted because it doesn't have belt loops, but I much prefer the waist definition from a belt.  Rebecca gave me the idea to use nice ribbon, but then I couldn't decide between two in my stash, so I sewed them together!  A reversible belt on D-rings.  My husband also helped me drill holes in some other belt options (fuschia! mustard! red!), because most of the time, my belted waistlines are not at my true waist, so my belts were too big.

But I think this dress will be a real workhorse in my wardrobe. I wore it Sunday like a summer dress, and put tights and a cardi with it Monday to the office.

Thanks to my husband for most of the photos on this post.

 

Batch Cooking For the 6pm Days

My schedule changed overnight (okay, one week from job offer to start date).  Suddenly, two days a week, we all screeched home at 6pm, supperless.  And typically, we start the bedtime drag at 7pm, with the schoolkids in bed by 8pm.  So, it didn't make sense to start dinner preparations at 6pm. We needed something to - poof - appear on the table at 6pm, ready to eat.

So what I do is cook double the amount of food I normally cook on the days I'm home.  Some of it hangs out in the fridge for the 6pm days, to be reheated in the microwave, and the rest is packaged into the freezer to be defrosted for other 6pm days.

I've read where some people do an enormous batch cook on one day a month and make their meals for the rest of the month.  That alternately overwhelms me and bores me.

Here, I am making a double batch of BBQ (as it's called around here - the rest of the world calls it sloppy joe).  I subbed in cooked lentils for the fourth pound of ground beef.  I also experimented with putting all the ingredients in the slow cooker, not pre-cooking or frying anything first, and cooking it on high for about 5 hours.  The texture was very soft and soupy.  Not terrible, but I now know I prefer the stovetop method.

Mennonite Community Cookbook

I split it into four portions, and we had one for supper. The other three went in the freezer.

All the schedule pieces that flew up into the air in August are slowly settling into place.  We are happy.  We generally have homemade, hot suppers that almost appear on the table at 6pm.  There is generally clean laundry. The house generally gets vacuumed. I get time at home alone while the rest of the family is out in the world learning and working (bonus:  with everyone away more, the house is less dirty!).

But I'll take any 6pm supper tips you want to offer. . .

The New Piano

If you have ever moved an old piano, you know it is an ordeal.  That's why most old pianos are free to whomever has the brawn to handle them.  Our new piano came to us as an offer we couldn't refuse, but the whole process was fraught with problems.

My husband and I bought our gorgeous old Schiller cabinet grand piano for $25 early in our marriage.  It had to be tuned to itself which wasn't a problem until we cajoled the renters after us into keeping the piano for six months until we could move it into the house we'd bought.  The guy was a guitarist, so it was very annoying to him that the piano was a whole step flat. Oh.

  When it was time to move the Schiller, it had to be turned on end to get it through the front door of our new house.  Then, my husband's best friend, a professional musician, warned us that we were ruining our children's pitch, and the piano tuner said it couldn't be tuned again. 

So, when my uncle called in August and said he was getting rid of his piano, we gritted our teeth and said yes.

The Schiller being turned on end to leave.

We had to off-load our beautiful, but not very musical, old Schiller piano.  We tried in various ways (and my husband discovered that our piano, restored, was valued around $9000).  Finally, the night before the new piano was coming, he disassembled the Schiller into its parts for wood, metal, and beautiful bric-a-brac.  I helpfully stayed out of the dining room.

The new piano is now here - less majestic, less mellifluous, but eminently paintable when we have the time.  And yes, it can be tuned.  Notice how I skipped the trying details of the move? I fed everybody pancakes, bacon, and coffee. That was helpful.

 Piano lessons got scrambled in the process (this was the beginning of August - I'm trying to catch up with my life), but Genevieve and I got started again once we got the homework-beast tamed.

Now, the problem is that Genevieve is struggling with this phase of piano lessons and I can't work out a new way to explain things, so she's very reluctant to practice her songs.  She is still at the pinao, though, because she has just figured out all by herself how to sound out some simple melodies she loves.  So I'm taking that as a sign of progress, and hoping we creep along with our thin patience until she can actually read music.

 I proposed to my husband that we paint the piano dark, deep, bottle-green.  But I'm not looking for projects right now, so I think the piano looks just fine.

Hot Pepper "Jam"

It didn't "jam" (gel).  I was annoyed, but I knew how to fix it from Marisa's instructions.  Last year, I had a batch of blackberry jam that didn't gel, and I successfully fixed it with Marisa's method.

But this jam did not respond to the treatment.

Plus, it is fiery due to some unholy hot peppers friends gave us. These peppers have burned my lungs and mouth badly, but I refuse to compost them.  I stuffed their butts in a jar with brine and I'm fermenting them in the basement to see if I can make a useable (read: not lethal) hot sauce.

 

(Change the topic for a minute to contemplate the tarnished silver tray of pumpkins we currently have on our table; charming, until I recall that this is the total grand harvest of our backyard vines.  Pfft.)

I have other projects on the go, so I simply stuffed the spicy, runny jam (the recipe is here) in my canning storage and moved on.  Perhaps you have some ideas of what I can do with it. . .

The Rick Rack Hotpads

Chalk this one up to Pinterest.  I saw a vintage hotpad on there that never left my mind.

I re-created it with my vintage cutter quilt, brown rick rack, and brown embroidery floss.  This might be my most-favorite use of rick rack yet.

This pair is in the shop.  But I might have to make a set for myself!