easy, breezy recipes (and another pregnancy pic)

A couple months ago I heard an NPR special wherein the featured guest commented that when she was pregnant, her naked body gave the impression that she had had "an ill-advised affair with an elephant." I couldn't put it better myself. To spare you further rumination on that unsightly image, I am posting a photo from a couple days ago that shows how pregnancy week 27 looked:

On top of that (those) large bump(s), I often find myself layering about six thick layers of clothing because my winter coats no longer fit. Often I just borrow Abe's favorite coat--which happens to be very roomy and cozy--but there are some days when he tentatively asks if it would be okay for him to wear it, and then I reluctantly hand it back over for his (temporary) use.

Yesterday after I came home from the gym (a totally pointless form of weight management at this stage, but it still feels like the right thing to do), I asked Abe to drop me off at the other end of Hyde Park so that I would have to do all of my errands on foot. As I walked around, I would catch glimpses of myself in store windows and simply stare. All I could think about was the ill-advised-affair-with-an-elephant phrase...but I carried on, in spite of my bounteous form.

Three hours later, I waddled back home laden with all sorts of goodies, but foremost on my mind were the items that enabled me to make this:



What is that, you ask? Well, I shall tell you! Last year I discovered this lovely salad on Mark Bittman's website. It's an orange, tapenade, and fennel salad (I sometimes substitute thyme) based on the dish served at the Zucca Magica in Nice, France. For a picture of their salad, click here: http://content.markbittman.com/photos/the-orange-tapenade-and-fennel-salad-at-the-beloved-zucca-magica-in-nice

This is soooooooooo easy, and it is so yummy that I find myself dreaming about it. The other day I fixed it four times and then woke up at 2am to make it again. All you need are four ingredients:

one navel orange
pitted Kalamata olives
fennel seeds or fresh thyme
good olive oil

Cut away the pith of the orange, and slice your orange into rounds. Chop up the olives in a food processor and dollop on top. Sprinkle fennel or thyme on top, and drizzle it all with olive oil. That's it!

Last year I tried making a lot of this salad and saving it for later, but it doesn't keep well. The orange starts to taste too oily if left to sit in the mixture too long, so it's best just to prepare this whenever you're in the mood.

Why is this salad so yummy and addictive? I think it's because you get both sweet (from the oranges) and salty (from the olives). The fennel adds some complexity to the salty-sweet thing, and the oil keeps the dish from being too acidic and briny. It also adds some welcome fat to smooth all of the flavors together. So you end up with an absolutely perfect winter dish--and it's such a nice, healthy counterpart to all of the hot cocoa and cookies that otherwise dominate the season.

One more veggie-full dish that feels really good in winter: veggie lasagna with pesto. You might already have your own favorite veggie lasagna recipe, and if you do, I would love to have it! Email, message, or comment. I've tried a bunch of different recipes, and this improvised one is my favorite so far.

Just chop up a ton of whatever kind of veggies you enjoy running into when you take a bite of lasagna. We had a ton of the following on hand, so I used these:



Then put some sauce on the bottom of the pan. You can make your own with a couple cans of tomatoes, some garlic and spices, but I am lazy and just reach for a jar (usually Barilla or Newman's. I like Classico, but I can never get their lids off--does anyone else have that problem??).


Then put some no boil lasagna noodles on top:


Now for the yummy cheese mix.  I just dumped two big containers of ricotta in a bowl and mixed that with chopped and drained frozen spinach, a big dollop of pesto, and about a cup (I know! that's a lot, but it's so good!) of Parmesan.


Spoon this on top of your noodles, along with some fresh mozzarella and a little more sauce:

Add your veggies:


And repeat. Top off with some more sauce and cheese. Cover with foil and bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. (For the last ten minutes remove foil.)

You end up with this:

And I even had enough veggies leftover to throw into a frittata for a later breakfast. For a frittata, simply saute a bunch of veggies (I used two onions on top of the other veggies) in an ovenproof skillet, and then pour an egg mixture on top. This egg mixture contained eggs, a little soy milk, basil, and some grated Swiss cheese. Cook on the stove for a couple minutes until the frittata looks set on the edges, and then pop it under the broiler until it's all puffy and golden. (It will deflate when you take it out of the pan). Slide it onto a board, and cut into wedges. Yum, yum!

 
It is once again time for me to make my pointless trek to the gym. I have been putting it off for three hours.  But I guess the good news is that when I come back, yummy things await! (Perhaps that's why these treks are so ineffective...hmmmm. I'll think more about that as I down my lunch later this afternoon.)

It's about time

Lily told me that all she wanted for Christmas was for me to write a post on our family blog.  Well, she is certainly going to get more than that for Christmas, but I think it is about time I contributed to the Darais family blog. 

First I just want to say how much I love being married to Lily.  I am a firm believer that God puts people together for a reason. On a near daily basis I find myself reflecting on how perfect she is for me and I praise God constantly for the joy she is in my life. One of my favorite things about her is that although she is constantly striving to do well and be a good person, she doesn't seem to get caught up in being overly serious about it all in the way that I do.  With her I find myself having a deeply spiritual conversation in one moment, and then laughing so hard I almost cry in the next.  She has been a breath of fresh air to a life that can at times be a little tense.

 We have been married over six months now and for me it has been a giant joy ride.  We had a beautiful wedding in Utah, weekend trips to Michigan, a backpacking trip in Utah, and honestly just lots and lots of fun time together.  One of my favorite memories from the backpacking trip was when my brothers and I told her that what appeared to be snake holes were actually tunnels to the world of the care bears.  HAHA!  Well, she didn't quite bite on that, but it was worth a shot.  She was such a good trooper!  I truly love my time with Lily. I feel I could spend all day every day with her, and there certainly are days when I do!

And now we have Lydia on the way!  What a joy that will be.  We just went to IKEA on Tuesday to get some baby furniture.  It was so much fun to go shopping with Lily and pick out things for our newest family member!

I will admit that my reaction to knowing a child is on the way has slowly moved from shock, nervous excitement and anxiety to pure joyful anticipation.  Don't get me wrong, Lily and I planned to start a family right away, and I've always wanted to be a dad, but there is a giant difference between "let's start a family" and "honey, I'm pregnant."  It took a long time for me to actually wrap my head around the idea that we are having a baby.  So many concerns about wanting to be a good father, finances and wanting to provide well, wondering if I'm ready, wondering if I'll ever feel rested again for the rest of my life, wondering if Lily and I will have as much time together etc. etc. etc.  But it's interesting; As time has passed and I've processed what is coming... as we've read children's books to Lydia and prepared the room for her......as we've talked about her and to her......I just start to feel pure joyful anticipation about expanding our family.  I've realized that I already feel a great deal of love for Lydia.  I don't necessarily feel ready, but I do feel happy!  I'm really going to try to be a great dad!

Well, I guess that's all I have for today.  I didn't have anything tremendously witty or profound to say, but I do love my wife tremendously and I wish the best to all those who have taken time out of their day to read about our family.

on blogging

In grad school, I learned the word, "meta." After one year of listening to professors and students frequently weave this word into formal and informal conversation, I am still not quite sure if I understand exactly what the word means. But if pressed to give a definition, I'd say that "meta" means to think about thinking. You consider how your personal paradigm affects your approach to a subject, and then you break down your biases and analyze your thought processes along the way.

Abe is the first person I met outside of school that used the word "meta" in normal conversation. After getting to know him better, I realized that the reason he needs this word is because his very favorite hobby--and I am not making this up--is thinking. Whenever I watch him absent-mindedly stare off into space while masticating a meal I spent hours preparing, I remind myself that he is part Greek and can't be blamed just because he likes to think about thinking.

I, on the other hand, am perfectly content to live without almost any meta in my life. The other day I found myself thinking too much as I wrote in my journal, and so I closed it and concentrated very hard on my bedroom quilt. My grandmother worked for 10 years on my quilt, and it is one of my heart-happy treasures. Looking at the gorgeous quilt solved my problems better than thinking ever could, and I went on to have a very happy day.

But sometimes--on rare occasions--I notice a theme in my thoughts. Some inarticulate question tugs at the back of my mind, forcing me to revisit a troublesome subject. My first instinct is to push it away, but the thought persists, and I find myself working through a series of questions, little by little. A little here while standing in line at the store, a little there while setting the table for dinner. Lately those troublesome questions have centered around blogging, and I woke this morning to discover the question pressed more than ever, and now I suspect--dare I admit it?--that I need to go meta on blogging.

I understand the risks! If you weren't bored to tears by the first few paragraphs, it's quite likely that by now you have decided that there are better uses for your time and have redirected to another more exciting web page. In that case, please enjoy your leisurely, meta-free time on the internet. I would do exactly the same if I were you. But at this moment, I am not you--I am me, and the me that I am wants to walk down this potentially almost certainly boring train of thought. Therefore, from this point forward I assume I am writing for myself, and I'm giving myself permission to be completely honest and introspective as I try to work out what blogging means to me.

Or what I hope it doesn't mean. The troubling question that keeps nagging at me centers on whether blogging is an exercise in narcissism or not. After all, I am projecting on screen, in words and pictures, an image about my life, my thoughts, my experiences. And, often as not, I hit the little icon at the end of the blog which publishes the post to facebook, thereby guaranteeing a spike of viewer visits to the blog. So there seem to be two pieces to blogging: the create-and-project-me part, and then the publishing part. What part of this me-centric process is justifiable--or, for that matter, even time-worthy?

At this point, my thoughts wander to other people's blogs. I love reading other people's blogs!  Many are gorgeous works of art, filled with beautiful photos depicting children, food, and loving homes. I feel inspired and reassured to know there are so many good people in the world who love their families and who take the time to document their lives in such an artistic way. Sadly, I know my blog is not like theirs. I have absolutely zero photographic talent, and so I need to find meaning for my little blog outside of the realm of aesthetic gratification.

I read other blogs by hobbyists who document amazing crafts and who teach others how to do the same. I love these blogs, too, and although I have dabbled in the creation of crafty blog entries, I know that this is not my specialty either. Up until this point in my life, crafts have played a pretty minor role in my life, and to all of the sudden create a full-blown craft blog would be out of place--not to mention impossible.

I also read funny blogs. While some of the entries here may be a little funny, more often than not, my entries are just day to day observations on my life, and that's not always particularly entertaining.

There are also political blogs, but by no stretch of the imagination is this one of those.

So what's left? And if there even is anything left, why write it?

Here's one potential answer I found this morning as I read the introduction to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Although her original intent when coining this phrase was to "help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women," the phrase is now trumpeted on bumper stickers and t-shirts as a celebration of socially deviant behavior. This is especially ironic, considering Ulrich is a practicing Mormon who started her career (now culminated in a professorship at Harvard) making the lives of seemingly "well-behaved" women into documented history.

But I digress. What interested me most about her introduction was Ulrich's explanation that the very act of documenting one's life is a choice. As she wrote her Pulitzer prize winning book about an 18th century midwife, Ulrich explains that this midwife was by no means "a mover and a shaker," but she did choose to keep a journal--and therefore chose to be a visible, documented presence in the world. That's what made her different, and that's what made her history.

A couple months ago I stopped hunting for a job. Abe and I decided together that our lives are richest when I am at home, cooking, cleaning, and creating, to the best of my ability, a kind of haven-home from the outside world. My whole life, all I have ever really wanted is to do exactly what I do these days. I love all aspects of homemaking and can even find purpose and joy in cleaning the toilet. (It sounds gross and unbelievable, but it's so true.)

But I can say that the more I sink into these domestic patterns, the less my life feels like it counts outside the walls of my home. Maybe that feeling is or isn't true, but the feeling is there either way. I often think back to the guest lecturers who spoke to us in grad school about educational reform and the importance of using education as a means of social activism, and I shudder to think what some of them might say about my present choices.

Nevertheless, this life is my choice, and furthermore, I seem to be choosing to document that through this medium. Not to make history--but, I suppose, to be visible. That motive doesn't seem noble or altruistic, but it feels pretty basic. Everyone wants their life to count, right? I know enough to understand the blogging in itself does not make my life matter, but when I can write about my experiences--humdrum as those often are--I feel a little more complete.

So I guess I have more thinking to do on this subject, because I don't feel like I've come to any conclusive answers about the purpose of blogging. I still feel ambivalent towards my blog, but I know I'm going to keep writing--regardless of whether people read or not. But for now I think I will take a break and stare at my grandmother's quilt. It really is so pretty.

how to make an envelope

Remember all those cards from last time? Well, I decided to use them as an opportunity to send out pictures of our guests from our wedding and open house, but to my dismay, the pictures were a lot bigger than the cards. So I looked online to see how to make envelopes. Here is the best link I found: http://stamping.thefuntimesguide.com/2009/03/make_envelopes.php

I remember that when I went on splits with the sister missionaries in Rome, one of the sisters showed me how she made beautiful envelopes out of magazine paper. She did this to show love to the people she missed at home, and I was touched by those simple envelopes and what they represented. When I realized I need to make my own envelopes for anyone whose card includes a photo, I decided to use my Italy calendar as a paper source. How fitting! I had 11 months of beautiful photos that seemed to beg to be made into envelopes.

So I learned how to turn this:




into this!

 By the end, I had an assortment of beautiful envelopes, like this one I am sending to my dear mother:

 And to my brother:

 And to various other loved ones:

Do you want to try? It's so easy! I loved doing this, and because I want you to have the same experience, I am going to try to explain the process.

First, place your card in the part of the calendar that you want to show on the front of your finished envelope:

Fold the calendar over the card in two directions:

 
If one flap folds over too far, you can make a third fold to decrease the size of the flap:

Now fold the other two sides of the calendar over the card:



 You should have creases that look like the picture below.  The picture shows you your next step, too, which is to cut away the corner creases of the envelope.

 

After the corners are cut, fold the bottom flap over the card, and then fold and tape the sides over the bottom:

: 

Tape the top flap down:


And voila! You have a beautiful envelope to send to someone special. I found out that I gained a whopping TWELVE pounds between my last doctor's visit and today's, so I have decided to turn the energy originally intended for Christmas cookies to envelope making instead. They aren't as yummy, but I think they convey the same message. What do you think?