Snowed In

Okay, if this bird is snowed in like we are, rather than out of town for the winter, then he/she is in some serious trouble. We could easily get out and go if we really wanted to, but why would we do something like that? It's so nice inside, and so nice to be able to stay inside. We've appreciated the chance to clean up the house a bit, do laundry, clear out the clothes that don't fit the girls any more, that kind of thing.

It's also been wonderful to spend time with the girls, just goofing off.

Our older daughter looks sad to be trapped inside... of an ornament.

And in another variation on the picture within a picture idea, we see the other apple of her daddy's eye also loves the Christmas ornaments, especially... that one!






Here's hoping these two will be making beautiful music together for many years to come (first, they'll have to actually learn how to make music, as distinct from random, pitched noise, but it's a nice picture, anyway...).

(photo credits: the four best photos here come from Lauren Coil-Sherck)

Deck the Walls

Some days are, themselves, gifts. Yesterday evening--thanks in no small part to a massive storm sweeping into our area--certainly felt like just such a gift.

We'd been set up to have something very different, as I was scheduled for duty in the barrack last night and Lauren was scheduled to be at a Quiz Bowl tournament up in Michigan all day today. In other words, we weren't going to be seeing much of one another most of the weekend. But the impending Midwestern Snowpocalypse--and a scheduling snafu--changed all that.

To make a long, kind of complicated, and boring story a bit shorter, a colleague took my duty--saving me not only from the five hours away from my family but also from driving through whatever snow there would be at midnight. And thanks to the snow, Lauren's Quiz Bowl tournament was preemptively cancelled. In other words, the universe conspired to give us an evening together, unfettered by the prospect of one of us having to get up early and make a potentially-harrowing drive through the white and drifted snow.

So I made a dinner that combined leftover pork steak with new sweet potato hash browns (made in a waffle iron!), then I went out for a bit of shopping to stock up on some foodstuffs and buy some more Christmas decorations. What followed was a night of decking the halls walls to a playlist of Christmas tunes which did not, in fact, include "Deck the Halls."

Our tree has been decorated for a while now, and the snowmen have been occupying the window in peaceful protest, but Lauren just put up the "JOY" and I put up the garland all around the perimeter of our dining room. Mother Nature brought all the white decorations in the background.

Lauren put together this scene of winter tranquility--lacking a fireplace, she built and decorated one. Having extra lighted garlands, she festooned the china cabinet with winter cheer. Inside the china cabinet, on the right side, you might just be able to make out Mickey and Minnie, part of a Disney band that we're rapidly collecting: each of the characters has a song he or she plays, and as you add more of them, they'll play along with each others' songs. Get all five together and you've got a rockin' Christmas band (the last two should arrive Monday). And in the bottom right is a gadget I picked up in my shopping that allows us to have three outlets on remote control, turning our lights on with the click of a button.

And if you haven't already seen her, you can play "Where's Waldo?" with our "Elf on the Shelf," Minga Madinga. So I guess you'd be playing "Where's Minga?"

And now we're primed to have another gift of a day today: as Lauren said, getting this Saturday freed up like this might actually be better than a snow day on a weekday (which, after all, we'll pretty much never, ever get, teaching at a boarding school).

All I Want For Christmas Is...

A few weeks ago, when I arrived at my mother's house a couple day's before Thanksgiving, she barely let me in the door before she started asking what I wanted for Christmas. And the thing is... I had no idea.

Long gone are the days when I would have a number of items whose value roughly equaled the GDP of some small countries circled in the Sears and/or JC Penny catalogs the day after they arrived. It's not exactly because I have everything I'll ever want, it's just, well, let's think about it a bit here:

1. I've got well over 100 books on my various wishlists at Amazon (it's public, so you're all welcome to buy me anything on there!)... but I've already got dozens of books in my possession that I haven't read--but would like to--if I had time.
2. I love board games. Love 'em. Especially the more complicated, "Euro" style games. But besides lacking the time to play them, just as I lack the time to do all the reading I would like to do, I also lack a group of gamers in my area who would be as psyched to play those games with me as I am. Or as I would be, if I had time, which I don't.
3. Oh, I know something I do have time for that I need... a new car! Something more fuel efficient to drive on the days when Lauren and I have to drive separately. Oh, but even this Santa didn't do cars:

4. And if a car's out, I guess it would be a bit much to ask for Santa to take care of the cost of the work we need to have done on our basement after the New Year, huh?

So I guess what it comes down to is that the things I really want for Christmas this year are 1) time and 2) piles of cash. Really, is that so much to ask?

::sigh:: It was easier when I could just circle things in the catalog, as I'm reminded by watching my almost-four-year-old. If you've got a few hours, ask her to walk you through what she wants. If you've only got 15 seconds, she could probably point out in the catalog everything she doesn't want. 

Actually, the sub-zero weather did give me an idea for a reasonable enough Christmas gift, which I passed along to me mum: I'd like a trench coat that would be nice enough to wear over my jacket and tie to work (I'm thinking black leather). And speaking of clothes, call me crazy, but I'm thinking my next pair of dress shoes for work might be these:

Or maybe these:

These "minimalist" (i.e. flat, with a thin sole) shoes are both made by Vivobarefoot. I'd lean toward the first one as a bit dressier, but since I'll probably end up buying them myself, I'd lean toward the second, which is just over half the price of the other.

So there we are. Christmas list made.

Living High On the Hog

I've already come perilously close to re-branding my blog as "your Holidailies source for home chocolate-making," so now I'll make a 90-degree turn, building off another aspect of my previous post, at the risk of this blog becoming "your Holidailies source for all foods pork-ish." Then again, I guess I could do worse than being the chocolate and pork guru, right?

Growing up, it seemed like pigs could only end up one of four ways: bacon, sausage, ham, and pork chops. Plus restaurants seemed to have access to the ribs of pigs, as well as some kind of fantastic pulling technology. In the home, though, it was pork chops. And since the FDA word was law in our household, our pork chops were cooked to within an inch of their lives, to make sure that ours were safe.

One of the big expansions of my porcine horizon came when I married into a family with roots in St. Louis, where pork steaks are apparently commonplace. I have always been a fan of any and every steak I've had the pleasure of meeting (and eating), so I was intrigued when my father-in-law first threw pork steaks on the grill. Swine has never been so fine.

And now that we get a half-hog from our farmer each year, we go through several packages of pork steaks each year, and we also get chops that are much thicker than anything my mother ever cooked. Also, we thumb our nose at the FDA guidelines in favor of some juicy, porky goodness.

One of my favorite ways of cooking pork steaks or chops--other than grilling--is shared below. It's simple, it's delicious, and as you'll see, it's pretty versatile. You can use steaks or chops; you can use soy sauce, or you can go soy-free and use coconut aminos; you can use green onions, or you can use pretty much any other onion (yellow, white, red, sweet... whatever!); and although it's not listed in the recipe, this recipe is also pretty awesome with mushrooms added into it, too.

Pork Steaks

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup soy sauce or coconut aminos (Paleo and/or soy-free option)

1 bunch green onions (or one--or more--onions)

2 cloves garlic, minced

6 pork butt steaks (or chops) (truthfully, I can only fit two big steaks or four chops in a skillet)

Melt butter in a skillet, and mix in the soy sauce. Saute the green onions and garlic until lightly browned. If using "regular" onions, I would saute in butter for a while first, then add the garlic and coconut aminos (or soy sauce).

Place the pork steaks in the skillet, cover, and cook 8 to 10 minutes on each side. Remove cover, and continue cooking 10 minutes or so, to your preferred internal temperature. of 160 degrees F (70 degrees C).

Pigging Out On Chocolate

Okay, seriously: I'm not turning this blog into "all about home chocolate-making." But please bear with me--a pun you'll understand if you've read the previous posts--as I say one last thing. You see, although I've settled into coconut oil as my preferred fat, I did decide a few weeks ago that I wanted to give at least one more fat a try. There are some fats that are just so darned appealing that they deserve a place in any fat-based experimentation that one chooses to do.

Thus, for the past couple weeks, I have been saving my bacon grease. And while it's something of a sacrifice not to have my daily eggs or omelet floating on an ocean of bacon fat, and then drizzling what isn't absorbed over the finished product, well, what can I say? Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good. The greater good flavor, I mean.

So I recently experimented with making this chocolate (though the directions I give are slightly better in the peanut butter version) but using mostly bacon grease instead of either coconut oil or butter. As it turned out, the flavor was only mildly bacony (or porkish, if you prefer), but I did quite like the texture--a bit creamier than either coconut oil or butter. And considering the cost of coconut oil or pastured butter, it felt good to be getting my fat source "for free" (or, anyway, for the inconvenience of not having eaten--or drank--it for breakfast).

I should note that I actually ended up using a mix of bacon grease and coconut oil, because I didn't have enough of the former--but then, does anyone, ever, really?

Peanut Butter Bears... er, BARS

At the risk of becoming a one-trick pony, I'm returning to the world of homemade chocolates, which I wrote about way back in October (which is to say, the post before last). As noted there, I was looking forward to experimenting with different fats and sugars to create the optimum dark chocolate experience (for the record, I've gravitated toward coconut oil and maple syrup).

My experiments, however, have moved in a different direction. A delicious, delicious direction that might help, in some small way, to bring peanut butter more firmly into the world of low-carb deliciousness.

There's a product, which is actually meant more for the low-fat crowd than the low-carbers of the world: it's called PB2, and the basic idea is that they take peanuts and squeeze out all the fat. Fat which, on a low-carb diet, isn't really a big deal (we're more concerned with added sugar). And there is some of that--the ingredient list for PB2 is roasted peanuts, sugar, and salt. The reason I went in this direction was because 1) my wife had already bought this product and 2) since it's powdered, I suspected that I could use it in a way similar to cocoa powder in my chocolate recipe.

And it turns out that, yes, I could. While it does seem counter-intuitive to take a product that had the fat removed and add fat back in, besides the convenience of using a tried and true recipe with little adjustment, there's the further advantage of getting a really healthy fat in there. The result looked something like this:

1/4 c. coconut oil (or other fat source), melted
1 T. or less raw honey or pure maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla
a pinch of salt

1/2 c. PB2

Melt your fat in the microwave, mix in your sweetener, vanilla, and salt. Mix in the PB2 and pour into cute little silicone bear molds or other vessel for forming bars. A food scale can help to get bars to be a consistent size. Place in a freezer to harden them. Leave in freezer or move to fridge.

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After making these bears--which tasted rather like peanut butter fudge--I took my candy-making a step further, seeking a peanut butter cup for the low-carber. My wife wasn't a big fan--too little sugar overall--but I quite liked my dark chocolate peanut butter cup bears.

My method was simply to make a batch of the dark chocolate and of the peanut butter treats above, then I put a silicone mold onto a food scale. I put around 7g of the chocolate on the bottom, then 15g of peanut butter, and then 7g more on top--that last chocolate, as it happened, didn't really form a distinct layer: it blended into a sort of swirl, but I was pretty happy with the result. 

So happy, in fact, that I probably won't make this again.

You see, treats like this are just a bit too appealing. Eating 25g--or even 50g--of dark chocolate peanut butter bears fits fine into a low-carb diet. Eating the 200g or so that the recipe makes, all in one sitting? Not so much.

It's worth noting that, unless you're deep into a low-carb diet, this probably won't taste "sweet" with the amount of maple syrup that I used--you could, of course, use more, if carbs aren't really your concern. You could also put down the first chocolate layer and the peanut butter, freeze that for a while, and then finish each with a final layer, which would make it just that much more like a peanut butter cup.

But my sense is that there ain't nobody got time for that.

Why I Won't Be Doing Holidailies This Year

I signed up for Holidailies with the best of intentions... for quite a few years now, Holidailies has been the one consistent month of blogging that I've done in any given calendar year. So I signed up for it again, determined to knock out one more good month out of 12.

And then life got in the way. So it looks like this post will be a cascade of reasons why I'm not going to succeed at Holidailies this year:

• My wife and I both work full-time in education--a career that can easily take every spare moment you have.
• We have kids who are nearly 4 years old and 20 months (today!), which can easily take every spare moment you have.
• We bought a house last spring. Speaking of things that can take up spare moments, home ownership is somewhere near the top of that list.
• My wife is working on her Master's degree. Did I say something about spare moments?
• And our lovely new house is at least 15 minutes from the school where we work (compared to a 2-minute drive before this and a 2-minute walk before that). 

So yeah: Holidailies probably isn't happening this year.

But even as I type that--even as I thought about it before I started typing any of this, a defiant streak arose within me, a streak that wants to find a way to carve out just a little writing time every day over the course of this month. It's going to be hard: I should try to keep these short, because I don't have much time to devote to them, but as Blaise Pascal said: Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.To paraphrase: I would have written a shorter blog post, but I didn't have time.

But we'll see: maybe I can pull some worthwhile writing out of this month; as a parent and a teacher, I know for a fact that stranger things have happened.