04.04.2010 Things Aren’t Always What They Seem April 11, 2010

Today was Easter, the important Christian holiday of small toys, chocolate, lots of eggs. fertile bunnies, pastel colors, and fancy hats. And Jesus. There’s something about Jesus in there, right? Just kidding – I went to Catholic school, I know the deal.

Today was also significant for the blow that I struck against my formerly-held ideas about myself. I think everyone has those persistent thoughts that come from the offhand comments of others, or perceptions about what is good and bad that are formed in a million different ways. In no particular order, here are some of mine:

• I’m a picky eater
• I have a black thumb
• I’m shy
• I’m not athletic

It’s funny how sitting here, right at this moment, I would agree that all of the above statements are true about me. This is despite some evidence to the contrary:

• I love to cook all different types of food, and I have dined at some amazing restaurants and eaten their tasting menus without any special requests.
• I taught undergraduate psychology classes for a few years, and one of the things that excites me the most about my current job is doing trainings. My profession at its core requires me to make connections with people.
• I have run a marathon.

And as of today, this last one is true:

• I have started a vegetable garden.

I’m not exactly sure why I hold on to these things about myself that aren’t accurate or helpful. I am happy to knock another one off my list. Wish me luck.

So, Fabulous Thing #94: Growing.

04.03.2010 Nurture April 9, 2010

There is an instinct I have, totally separate from anything I might have learned in my professional training and practice, to give people who are going through a hard time a wardrobe makeover, a day in the sun, and a good meal with a lot of vegetables. I am not so naive that I think this will make everything better instantly, but I feel like it’s a good base to start from.

There is a young woman in my life whose life needs a little fixing up. Today, she came to visit. I gave her some of my clothes, including some shirts in brighter colors than the black hooded sweatshirts she usually wears. We had a lunch picnic at the beach, and she laughed a little chasing my son around the grass. Her calzone had broccoli in it.

I hugged her goodbye, and made a plan for soon. I wanted to slip her in my pocket and carry her around with me to keep her safe, but I let her go for now. At least she got some vegetables.

So, Fabulous Thing #93: Laying a foundation.

04.02.2010 Kind Soul April 5, 2010

I had a heart-stopping moment today when I opened up my wallet to pay for a purchase with my debit card and realized it wasn’t in its usual spot at the top of Plastic Card Row. The other usual suspects were there – the  CapitalOne Card with the beach scene on it, the library card, the customer rewards cards for various places…but no debit card.

I immediately realized that I must have left it in the drive-up ATM I had stopped at earlier in the day. I am so accustomed to using my debit card to make point-of-purchase transactions that I think I sort of spaced on how the whole ATM deal works, and drove away once I had cash in hand.

I went back to the bank and went inside with my fingers crossed. I explained my situation to the teller and she said that someone had turned in my card. Hooray! She asked for ID, got my debit card out of the vault, and gave it back to me. She also gave me the tip that I should stick with the drive-up ATMs that are on the wall of the bank itself, not the ones in the outside lanes, because in case this happened again the card would just be sucked inside the bank and not left out or shredded by the machine.

Two kind souls, really. One is whoever took the minute to park their car and go inside the bank to turn in my card instead of trying to use it or just discarding it, and the other was the teller at the bank who gave me the inside scoop on ATMs and wished me a happy Easter as I left.

For the record, and for whatever possible positive press this might give them, the bank was Coventry Credit Union. We have been thinking about leaving Bank of America for a while now, and this experience with their good customer service (to someone who wasn’t even a customer) might have pushed CCU ahead of the pack of potential banks to switch to. One good turn deserves another, right?

So, Fabulous Thing #92: Crossing paths with the right people.

04.01.2010 Lush-ous April 5, 2010

One thing that has made my life a little more fabulous over the past few years is discovering the simple pleasures that LUSH products have the power to give. Ocean Salt and Handy Gurugu were my gateway drugs. I swear that Vanishing Cream is responsible for my C-section scar being practically nonexistent a year after it was created. I took a Sex Bomb on vacation last year, and it was the best bath I’d had in a while.

The actual products aside, the best thing about going to a LUSH store is that you always get like six free gifts when you buy stuff. That’s how they get you. An extra Bath Bomb here, a massage bar there, and before you know it you are hooked on a new seasonal scrub or foot cream.

Because my husband is a kind and thoughtful sort of man, he braves the wall of scent that you must break through to enter a LUSH store to get me nice treats from time to time (the Fair Trade Foot Lotion is a staple now, thanks to him). He always gets like ten extra samples, probably because the women at the store also think that he is a kind and thoughtful sort of man and want to reward him for being so (or they know how to spot a man who is besotted enough with his wife to shell out that sort of money for fancy soap and foot cream). A week or so ago, he was at the mall and picked me up some nice soap, Alkmaar and Figs and Leaves, and got a sample of Dream Cream along with some other things thrown in.

Tonight, I took a shower after letting Jillian Michaels kick my ass around the living room for a while, and decided to soothe my sore muscles by using the Dream Cream instead of my regular old CVS generic lotion. Well. I am forever spoiled for regular old lotion. It wasn’t too greasy, it had a light scent that was really pleasant, and it made my skin feel like silk. Maybe my husband isn’t completely altruistic after all…

So, Fabulous Thing #91: Dream Cream.

Recipe: Honey Wheat Bread in the Breadmaker April 4, 2010

A few weeks ago, I was walking into my office when I saw a coworker carrying in a bread machine. I asked her if she was planning on making fresh bread for her sandwiches every day, and she replied that she was decluttering her kitchen (perhaps a fellow Apartment Therapy Spring Curer?) and figured that someone at our office would want it. She was right! I took it from her and stashed it in my car.

I have been wanting a breadmaker for a while, but the cost for buying even a used one was hard to justify, since we don’t eat that much bread and it seemed like it would take a while to break even on the expenditure. But a free breadmaker? Sold!

The recipes that came with it were sort of disappointing, containing a lot of sugar and shortening and butter – not really what I was looking for. I found Bread-Maker.net, and a recipe for Honey Wheat Bread that I modified slightly, and crossed my fingers as I pressed “Start.”

Ingredients:

• 1 1/8 cups warm water at 110°F
• 3 tablespoons honey
• 1/3 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 cups whole-wheat flour
• 1 1/4 cups bread flour
• 1/2 cup ground flax seed meal
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Pour the water, oil, and honey into the well of the breadmaker. Add the flour and the flax seed meal, making a volcano in the middle of the wet ingredients. Add the salt and the yeast in the crater. Snap the well into place, and select the light color setting.

The original recipe also called for the wheat bread setting, which adds 40 minutes to the total cooking time. By accident, I started it with the timer at 3 hours instead of 3 hours and 40 minutes. The booklet that came with the breadmaker warned that dire things would happen if I attempted to stop and re-start, so I didn’t. The whole house smelled of yeasty goodness for a few hours, and the bread was fantastic, with a nice crust and crumb.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Minestrone April 4, 2010

Like just about everything I make, this soup has a lot of variations, usually depending on what I have on hand. This is what it looked like today:

• 1 pound of ground turkey, browned on the stovetop then dumped into the crockpot
• 1 cup of low sodium chicken broth that I had leftover from making the risotto last week
• 2 28 ounce cans of diced tomatoes
• 5 good sized carrots, peeled and cut into 2 inch lengths
• 1/3 of a bag of frozen green beans
• 1/3 of a bag of frozen peas
• 1 15.5 ounce can of red kidney beans, drained
• 1 15.5 ounce can of black beans, drained
• Two garlic cloves, peeled and smashed with the broad edge of a knife
• Italian seasoning (basil, oregano, marjoram)
• Ground black pepper and salt
• Red pepper flakes
• Fresh Italian parsley (had a bunch I needed to use)

Combine all of the above ingredients except the parsley in a large crockpot, seasoning to taste as you cook. Add water if needed to ensure a loose broth. Cook on low for at least 4 and up to 8 hours, add fresh parsley at the end. If there is enough room, I add a cup of a small cut of pasta about an hour before we eat, like small elbows or orzo. If you don’t have any stock, adding a half of an onion chopped up adds a nice depth of flavor. Freezes beautifully.

03.31.2010 Flood Day April 4, 2010

Usually in this neck of the woods, we have snow days. Today, due to the unprecedented amount of rain that has fallen over the past few days so close on the heels of our last big rainstorm, we had a flood day. Large sections of the major highway in Rhode Island were closed, making it essentially impossible to get into the city from where we live.

It felt really strange, staying home despite clear skies and moderate temperatures. I tried to get some work done from home, and for you to understand what that must have been like for me I want you to go strap 20 pounds worth of those animatronic flowers and Santa Clauses and whatnot that sing and wriggle with the slightest noise or movement onto your leg, enlist a hyperactive dog to dance around your feet and manage to put himself exactly where you want to step, find a cat to dip a paw in every glass of water you try to set down and shake it all over your papers, and get someone to go round and ring your doorbell with a package you need to sign for at the exact moment someone calls you with an important work matter to sort out.

So of course, I decided that it was a good day to make Minestrone Soup in the slow cooker and some Honey Wheat Bread in the breadmaker. It is actually less crazy than you think, since the soup was essentially put together bit by bit around naptime and a few enchanting minutes spent emptying all of the unlocked cabinets of their contents. The bread was a little trickier, but as long as you keep the yeast away from the wet ingredients it can also sit for a bit before starting up the process.

By the end of the day, when my husband got home (after driving all around the state to get back here) and my son had had just about enough of his stinky old mama, it was fantastic to have dinner already done. I pulled the bread from the breadmaker and we ate it still warm with bowls of the soup. Don’t ask how much work I got done.

So, Fabulous Thing #90: Putting my convenience appliances to good use.

03.30.2010 What Didn’t Happen April 1, 2010

Today, I wasn’t here:

and this isn’t my street:

and that’s not my car:

and even though we are wet and tired, we are all safe and sound. Today, that’s pretty fabulous.

So, Fabulous Thing #89: Surviving the Rhode Island Flood.

03.29.2010 Progress April 1, 2010

Remember how I started that whole Apartment Therapy Spring Cure a few weeks ago? Today, I feel like I am starting to reap the benefits.

I just finished the second week, where the concentration was on deep cleaning the kitchen and creating an Outbox. Getting the prompt and having a deadline to scrub out my fridge and restore order to the cabinets was helpful, and it felt really good this morning to open the refrigerator door and see sparkling shelves and nothing scary at all.

But the Outbox concept is fabulous. The basic idea is to go through each room and pull out things that just aren’t working where they are, in function or in form. You then move those items to a designated box or area – not to discard, but just to reconsider and decide on later in the process.

This morning, I realized that I am moving through my home with new eyes. I am starting to let go of the guilt that keeps some things around, the guilt that comes from being the recipient of a well-intentioned gift that is very lovely in theory, but in the way and a dust-collector in practice. I am starting to realize that the stress of the random basket that holds pens and pennies and batteries of questionable charge and miscellaneous Allen wrenches is weighing me down, and I feel so much lighter now that it has vacated its accusatory perch on the kitchen peninsula.

I have also pulled out things from one room that would really work well in another, and I never would have made that change if not nudged into it by this process. I believe that physical spaces have energy and flow to them, and it is amazing how that can be discoverd or restored with a few small changes.

Today, as I looked around at my newly-edited space and added a few more things to the Outbox as I went about my daily routine, I started to get a little bit of a crush on my house again. I don’t know if it’s going to be a long-term thing, or maybe just a summer romance, but it’s nice to have that spark back.

So, Fabulous Thing #88: Discovering that less can give you way, way more.

03.28.2010 This Just About Sums It Up April 1, 2010

Sunday was the day for housecleaning at Chez Fabulous. This is how we amused the kid (and ourselves) while we did our chores:

I hope this is a trend that continues.

So, Fabulous Thing #87: Channeling my inner Tom Sawyer.