Ooohhh Florence

I don't really have anything to say tonight, but I'm feeling lonely and don't really have anybody to talk to, so I'll let my fingers talk to my laptop, I guess.
Brad and I (and the boys) went to Florence yesterday to a dinner with Carolyn's parents, sister, husband, kids and a few of her friends...it was really kind of awesome...as awesome as anything like that can go, anyway.  Everybody was really upbeat, and people broke out the 20+ year old photographs and told stories.  Carolyn & Jody's 2 youngest kids got to hold Liam, and a girl that beat the everlasting shit out of me in the 10th grade friended me on facebook.  Then we went out to a bar (owned by one of my hub's old friends) with Liz (one of my hub's ex girlfriends) and we really had fun.  I think it's the first time in a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG time (ok, maybe forever) that I've had fun in Florence. 
Right now I'm back home, I just drank a beer and I'm feeling....I don't know...edgy.  Being out and around people (once I got over the initial horror about being out and around people) was lovely.  I'd forgotten how to talk in complete sentences to people that talk back.  And my kid...siiiiiiiiiiiiigh....there were a few other kids there, one was only a month older than Dylan, and a 3 or 4 year old, and a 4 or 5 year old...they were all running around playing with each other, and my child kind of stood there watching them play and smiling.  It made my heart ache.  I really really REALLY don't want my kid to be as socially awkward as I was/am. I was never around other kids until I was 3, and I never really felt comfortable around people.  Ever.  I don't want my kid to be awkward.  I want him to be able to interact with people his own age.  But I don't know how to fix this.  I want to put him into some sort of social thing but we can't afford any of them.  I don't have any local friends with kids my kid's age.  I don't know how to keep him from being like me...34 and talking to an anonymous blog at 11pm.
He did eventually play with Carla's little boy, but there was a good 20 minutes where I watched him and just wanted to cry.  I went to my friend Anne's house last week and Dylan was watching her son (who's a tween) and his friends ramble about in the kitchen...watching from the outside looking in, which is what I've always done.  God it hurt to watch.
In not so morbid news, my BFF has started her own blog, and always one to out-do me, she's way too fancy for gmail blogging and has set up her own site for real...smarty pants.  She asked me to write up one of my recipes for her site, and so I did.  She still hasn't POSTED the damn thing yet, but she's a slow-poke sometimes with things like that.  But anyway, she has some crazy intricate recipes on her site, so if you're feeling kitchen-ly masochistic, check her out: http://stuffandbother.com/blog/
And my food porn for the last few days: I cooked a chicken in the crock pot, and made caramelized turnips to go with it (and leftover risotto).  I also made crock pot fajitas, and made my own tortillas with which to eat said fajitas.
Yum.
Oh, and berry empanadas for dessert (served with ice cream and a splash of the berry filling as topping)

And the potty training has begun!!!

I made lasagna on Valentine's day.  I decided that even though Brad had to work and I knew he wouldn't get home until after midnight, and we're not exactly fans of Valentine's day, I figured what the hell...?
Also, my uncle recently relocated down here, and this was his first Valentine's day solo, so I figured that I'd cook a lasagna for him as well.  And so I did.
Remember how I said we're all poor and stuff?  Yeah.  Ricotta is expensive.  So is Italian cheese mix.  So I rooted around my pantry & fridge and decided that I could TOTALLY do this without anything but the Parmesan that I had on hand.  I'm also not eating red meat, and I think ground turkey is disgusting, so I substituted chicken thighs, which I had in the freezer.
So I made a meat sauce with thighs, sausage, canned tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic.  Yeah.  That part was amazing.  I'm also stepping slowly out of the PPD fog, so I decided that with this excess energy that I had, I was going to make my own pasta noodles too.  So I did.  MMMMMMMMM...if you've never made your own pasta, I HIGHLY suggest it over the dried shit from the store.  Home made comes out creamy and soft and...just...good.  (And it doesn't have preservatives and other weird stuff like that in it!) In lieu of the ricotta/mozerella/parm mixture that I have always made in the past, I made a bechamel sauce and instead of nutmeg, I used garam marsala (for a kind of sicilian flavor...I freaking LOVE pasta with garam marsala!)
It ended up really really REALLY good...and not as heavy.  For once, after eating lasagna, I didn't feel like I had a brick sitting on my intestine. 
That was my Valentine's day.  Brad came home with a bottle of wine and a mini orchid and I cooked him a ton of yummy food.  Win-win.
I've decided to go on a "diet." Sort of.  I already don't eat very much, honestly.  I'll eat one *meal* a day, and then snack or eat small meals the rest of the day.  Every once in a while (when I can rally myself to leave the house, so you KNOW it isn't frequent) I'll eat fast food.  Blech.  That's not very often.  So I joined choosemyplate.gov
You can set  up a profile, and you enter in all of the food you eat, it tells you your goals and where you are on your goals...for example, right now, I'm at 83% of my suggested vegetable intake, and 18% of my protein.  I told it I was a breastfeeding woman and it informed me that I SHOULD be eating about 2200 calories a day.  I told it that I wanted to lose weight and it recalculated me down to 2000 calories a day.  This is pure insanity, because for the week that I've been doing it, I haven't gotten about 1500 calories until yesterday, and that was after eating a steak and drinking 2 glasses of wine.  I haven't come CLOSE to 2000 calories in god only knows how long.  And yet I'm not losing weight.  This is super frustrating to me. 
I exercise when I can (which until last Tuesday was every day for at least20-30 minutes of bodyweight exercises and/or kickboxing and/or pilates) on Tuesday I pulled a muscle in my leg kicking the shit out of air.  Yay me.
Protip: when you're kickboxing, pay attention to form.  Don't just flail about because you're tired and frustrated and want to get your 30 minutes in regardless of the fact that your evil child is shrieking at you because he woke up from his nap 45 minutes early....Yeah.  Oops.
So today is the first day that I've been able to walk on my right leg without limping and wincing, so I'll start working out again tomorrow, I guess.  Bah.  Meanwhile, I'm watching what I've been eating, and I've decided that the BEST way to do this is to go on a whole foods diet.  No more processed anything.  This is a lot harder than it sounds.  But I've done pretty well since Saturday. 
Saturday I cooked a beet risotto, Italian-style sweet & sour pork, and sauteed beet greens.  It was super fantastic.  For breakfast yesterday I ate a bowl of oatmeal, for lunch when Brad let me run away from the boys for a couple of hours, I ate a taco salad from Barberitos (they actually use REAL ingredients...so it was basically just spinach leaves, olives, cheese, guacamole and pico.  For dinner we had mashed potatoes, steak and a big salad.  For breakfast this morning I made apple pancakes, scrambled eggs with spinach and for lunch leftover salad.  For dinner tonight I'm making a whole roasted chicken. 
This is do-able. 
At the same time, however, I've decided to start seriously potty-training Dylan.  He's 20 months old and he knows the words...he occasionally grabs his crotch when he pees and he HATES being in a dirty diaper.  So all day today he's been pants-less.  He's peed on the floor like 3 times and while he'll chill out and sit on his potty chair, he hasn't actually GONE in it yet.  He just got up from his nap, so as soon as he's done with lunch, the diaper comes off again.  This is going to be interesting.  Thank god we have hardwood floors and not carpet.  Yuk.
So that's all for now, I guess...
Attached are my lasagna pictures and my pork & risotto pictures.  Enjoy!

Food

Freaking allergy season.  Actually, I should say: freaking not-allergy season.  I'm tired of snot and sneezing and sinus headaches.  It's only February...I'm going to drop dead by spring.  I suppose I could take meds...but yeah.  I'm psycho and I won't while I'm breastfeeding.  So whine whine whine.....
So for my wine-guzzling people (speaking of whine) : ever wonder what the hell is ACTUALLY meant by "citrus overtones" or "hint of ripe berries" in wine descriptions?  That used to bug me...like I'd drink wine and be all "yum", "that tastes like a barn door" or "holy hell that would taste lovely poured over my pancakes" and that was about as refined as my palette got.  Then I worked at a wine shop for a few months and one of the wineaux people told me to buy a jug of cheap-ass white or red wine (and we're talking box wine or one of those god-awful jugs) and drop a piece of fruit in it and let it sit for a few minutes.  And when you take a drink, that slightly infused flavor is what is meant by "citrus overtones" or "crisp apple" or whatever.  So I experimented.  A lot.  And what I discovered was that if you dropped a piece of complimentary fruit into a glass of decent (but not fantastic wine) it will enhance the flavor.  MMmmmm...you can TOTALLY get away with drinking $5 wine without having to scrape your tongue with sandpaper after every sip!
So we had a bottle of cheap sparkling wine left over from New Years (I'd intended to make mimosas but lost motivation after one bottle.  There's just something self-limiting about drinking something THAT sweet and alcoholic that early in the day...) and we also had some blackberries that were not quite as juicy as they should be.  So I combined them, and all of a sudden, my $5 spumante was drinkable, and my less-than-plump blackberries were sweet and (dare I say) moist!  Plus, it's pretty.  So ignore the fingerprints on my glass (yeah, I'm barbaric and put my grubby fingers on the glass...)  

So then I decided to make chicken cacciatore with pasta for dinner with some roasted kale.
And that was my evening, I suppose.  Exciting, right?  I'm still tunneling through the fog of sleep deprivation and PPD, I guess.  It's amazing sometimes that I manage to eat anything other than frozen pizza and Ramen.  The fog IS clearing though, so I should be able to write more frequently.  Yippee!
 

Random Thoughts

I battled an ice storm last weekend.  In a Jetta full of children.  (In a Jetta, 2 kids FEELS like a car filled to the brim with children...)  The one good thing about this storm is that the Weather Channel in its infinite wisdom decided to name the stupid thing Khan.  The good thing about this is that when I got overwhelmed or frustrated on the road, I got to shake my fist at the sky and scream "KHHHHAAAAANNNNNN!" and it made sense, in a way.  Yeah, I'm THAT kind of nerd.
The reason I battled the ice storm isn't so grand.  I ran like a whipped dog to my BFF's house in Winston-Salem...I went to her house on a whim because the boy and I had gotten to that crucial point of child-rearing whereupon the sleep deprivation and frustration has boiled over into that state...that god awful state...of screaming at each other for saying "good morning."  For real, it was bad -- I adore my husband & I know he tolerates me, but I was taking everything as an attack, and he was so frustrated with me that it was just...intolerable. 
So I decided "fuck travel restrictions!  I'm going to a place where I can wake up, hand one or both kids off and go back to sleep!!"  And at the same time, Brad could sleep in a house sans-caterwauling babies.  Win-win.
Well.  I left on Wednesday. 
I'm not one of those people that can troll Facebook while driving, especially not with my kids in the car, so when I got the text from 2 friends (almost simultaneously) that Carolyn had died, I almost wrecked my car.  I actually took the next exit and got as many details as I could via text and then frantically called Brad, hoping to everything that I hold holy that I could reach him before he read about the death of a girl that was one of his bestest friends for a solid chunk of his youth on fucking Facebook.  I managed to get him before he read about it, and he acted predictably. 
"What?"  Turned into "Are you sure?" Turned into a very calm, very quiet "I really can't process this right now.  I need a minute..." and thus the call ended.  Then I had to tell Amyme.  That prompted an explosion of "What the fuck do you MEAN, Carolyn died?" from her desk at work, unfortunately. 
Then I had the last 45 minutes to drive to Winston-Salem to freak out on my own. 
Carolyn and I were never "friends."  But I WAS friends with her little sister, and I was friends with a ton of people that we had in common.  We ran in similar circles.  We ran into each other frequently, and let me tell you...I was queen asshole supreme.  I'm shocked to my toes constantly that I had any friends at the time, much less that anybody from that period of my life will STILL talk to me...and this girl Carolyn was ALWAYS nice to me, even when I totally didn't deserve it.  I hated so many people that were my "friends" in that town, and yet, I always kind of admired her.  She was a bad-ass without being a cunt.  She was genuinely sweet without being fake or flaky.  And she was gone.  Just...just gone, and there was nobody to blame.  People my age just aren't SUPPOSED to die from natural causes.  It's just not fair.  And as Kevin put it at the bar later, "Man...Carolyn was such a good girl.  She's gone too soon, but the assholes just seem to live forever."
So there was no question that I was going to leave WS early and drive down to Florence for the funeral. 
AAAAAAAANNND the ice storm started on Friday morning as I was groggily waking up. 
So that's the super long version of why I had to battle an ice storm and why I got to shake my fist at the heavens and shout "KHHHAAAAAANNNN!" And why I ended up in Florence at a funeral.

While in town, a bunch of us geriatric punk rockers met up and it was just WEIRD to me to hear so many seemingly strange political views espoused by my friends that had at one point all been so staunchly anti-establishment.  From the 2nd amendment "I NEEEEEEEEEED AN AK47 BECAUSE IT'S MY RIIIIGHT TO HAVE ONE" argument to "OWS people are just homeless idiots that hate capitalism," I was just kind of stunned...

But enough about that.
I cooked Pastel de Choclo...a kind of Chilean shepherd's pie...for dinner last night.  It was tasty as hell.  (Photo attached)
And Amyme taught my kid to blow kisses (and catch blown kisses) while we were up there, and Liam is actually starting to stay awake during the day and sleep more at night.  I've still got horrid PPD but I think I'm starting to punch through it (for example I didn't yell at Brad at all today and I only cried once, and that was because I miss my dad & think it's fucking stupid that he had to die and my kids will never know him.  Asshole.)
I managed to clean most of the house, did a load of laundry, and I haven't wanted to punt Liam across the yard at all today.  I would, however, scalp a nun for a glass of wine right now, so I'm patiently waiting for Brad to get off work and (hopefully) bring me a bottle of something red and tasty.

G'night all...

It's not a very good picture, but that's the pie.

Boil chicken & shred it.  Boil an egg & chop it.  Set both aside until later.
Saute (in oil & butter) some onions and some garlic until nice and fragrant.  Add about a tsp of cumin & 1/2 tsp of cinnamon, stir until well mixed.  Add 2 cups of chicken broth and 2 tbsp of tomato paste, bring to boil & boil until it thickens.  Add shredded chicken, salt, pepper & cilantro, mix well & remove from heat.  Toss in a casserole dish 
Grind up about 2 cups of corn until it's not quite smooth, toss in a skillet with butter.  Add about a cup of milk & a tbsp or 2 of either corn meal or flour (depending on the texture that you want). Add about a tbsp of basil. Remove from heat once it thickens to a kind of oatmeal-ish consistency. 
On top of the chicken mix, you can put either (depending on what kind of flavor you want): your chopped egg & lima beans & corn, or your chopped eggs, capers & dried fruit.  (I did the vegetables in mine, but I've done dried apricots in the past)  On top of the egg layer, pour the corn mush & bake at 350 until bubbly & heated through. 
I garnished mine with more basil.
It is a really unique tasting dish...and really really good.