I Have Weird Dreams

What are you looking at!?

I've fallen off the wagon, or something. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote my foodie post on a Thursday, thinking that I'd have a chance on Friday to write my regular miscellany post. Then, as it happens, I spent that whole Friday and half of the following Saturday... How shall I say this delicately? Oh, why worry? Praying to the porcelain god. That is enough to make anyone forget what they were going to blog about, let me tell you. Sadly, it was also enough to make me get queasy every time I even look at that Ratatouille Stew picture, even though I know the stew had nothing to do with the porcelain god worship.

At any rate, I haven't felt quite right ever since. Not right enough for grand adventures with little men, anyway. And the one adventure we did go on that involved playing at a playground under a bridge (yikes!?), I didn't have my camera with me. Amateur! I missed all kinds of wonderful photo ops, too. At the place we went to after the playground there was a street magician and a band and tiny dancers (mine) all very worthy of pictures. Alas.

Also, the boys and I have built our own private water park, using a garden hose, a swing set, a baby pool, and daddy's heartburn because he's the one who has to haul the water to fill the cistern. There's not much to be said about that, at least that can be repeated in polite company, but I did get some fun pictures.

I think I also forgot the brilliant things I was going to say about the new creek we found to walk in two or three weeks ago. A weekend yak-fest really mucks up blogging! So anyway, I'm going to tell you about the very strange snippet that I remember from my dreams last night, and follow it up with a whole slew of nonsequitorial pictures and call it a day.

I must be stressed out about my job, which, given the fact that I'm a part time library aid and I can't think of a less stressful job in the world (except for possibly mattress testing) seems unlikely. Maybe I've been taking hallucinogenic drugs without knowing it. I hear nutmeg, in large enough quantities, will do that to you. I do like a pinch of nutmeg on my waffles, but seriously! Never mind all that, anyway.

I didn't sleep very well last night, probably from a combination of poorly timed caffeine, unexplained aches and pains, and a bladder the size of a hummingbird's. Spending the night in a semi-wakeful state always results in my remembering bits of my dreams. In this case, I was standing with a group of my family members next to what appeared to be a flash flood of mud, which rushed past us, whirl-pooled, and then flowed back towards us in a "possible-only-in-dreams" separate current in the same stream of water. For some reason, I decided to prove this by throwing Charlie's rubber ducky into the water to see if it would come boomeranging back. This caused a panic, wherein everyone, all of whom were inexplicably wearing tuxedos, jumped into the flash flood and went wading after the ducky to catch it. I, in turn, freaked out, and the dream changed so that the flash flood was suddenly only waste deep, and after everyone had climbed out of it, it hardened into fresh asphalt.

The last thing I remember (and I really don't understand this--perhaps the dream had changed in the interim to something I was too deeply asleep to remember) is hearing a voice-over say, "And then we will perform other Dewey Decimal related magics!"

Huh?

Three pictures of something I haven't identified yet.

Thistle obsession, revisited.

Surprise! Lily!

Artsy raindrop photo.

Tall Ironweed

Two pictures of Pokeberry

Elf Village

Slaty Skimmer likes my swamp!

P.S. The fringe benefit of being out-classed by all one's genius relatives is that you can usually count on at least one of them to know the answer to whatever piece of ignorance one is willing to post in one's blog. Courtesy of Uncle Stuart, the unidentified plant is:  Physalis alkekengi or Chinese Lantern.

Ratatouille On My Mind

I am going to bore you with a recipe. There are several reasons for this:

1) I’ve actually had a request for more of hannaH’s Foodie Blogs. Of course, the requester only requested them because s/he (gender omitted to protect the guilty) finds them easy to ridicule, but que sera, etc.

2) This one worked out really well and I’m proud of it.

3) There’s only so much one can write about creek walking, no matter how fundamentally adorable one’s fellow adventurers are.

4) If I don’t write this recipe down, I’ll forget it. And if I do write it down, I’ll forget where I put it. But if I blog it and forget it, I can always ask you all about it the next time I want to make it. Brilliant!

If I continue this trend of sporadic foodie blogging, I think I’m going to need a rating scale to show difficulty/time involved in making whatever I’ve been making. To that end, I present the Merovingian Scale; where One Merovingian is the amount of time and effort a normal human being could be expected to commit to cooking supper after coming home from a hard day of screwing around on Facebook at the office--say up to 45 minutes-- and Five Merovingians is the amount of time and effort it takes a crazed Julia Child stalker to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for ten people--say 5 hours. The following recipe will rate Two Merovingians: not what you’d call “dashed together,” but no restraining orders from Julia Child either. (Yes, I know she’s dead.)

hannaH’s Ratatouille Meatball Stew

You will need:
1 small zucchini
1 small banana squash
1 small to medium eggplant
1 medium sweet yellow onion
A can of diced stewed tomatoes
A quart of V-8
A quart of water
1/4 to 1/2 box of Barilla (or other) Orzo pasta (depending on how thick you want your stew)
3 bay leaves
1 Tbs. chopped garlic (the jar kind is fine)
1 Tbs. salt
2 tsp pepper (or to taste)
1 Tbs. of olive oil
4 Tbs. of butter
1 medium egg
About 10 crackers, crushed
1 lb. (I used Jimmy Dean) sage sausage
Grated parmesan cheese and caesar or sea salt croutons for garnish

Start off by cutting off 1/3 of your onion and chopping it fine. Sauté this in one of your Tbs. of butter. Simultaneously boil your orzo as the package directs with a Tbs. of olive oil to prevent clumping.
While the orzo boils, combine sage sausage, egg, cracker crumbs, and the sautéed, finely chopped onion, and squish it all up with your hands. Set that mixture aside. Chase your five year old son or some other convenient relation around the house threatening to wipe your hands in his hair.
Chop your remaining onion coarsely, your eggplant into inch squares, your zucchini and squash into semicircles and start to sauté them with the remaining butter. Don’t forget to take the Orzo off the heat at some point before it turns into a solid block.
Dump V-8, water, bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper, canned tomatoes, and orzo into a big soup pot, and place on medium heat. If the veggies have sautéed for 5 to 8 minutes, dump them in too.
Start rolling your meat concoction into smallish (1 inch) balls, which you will brown in the veggie skillet after you dump the veggies into the stew pot. Brown the meatballs in the covered skillet on low medium heat (4ish) for about 10 to 15 minutes, rolling them occasionally by flailing the skillet around like a spasmodic.
Dump them into the stew pot. If the veggies are sufficiently cooked and the whole shebang is hot, you can eat it. Garnish with grated parmesan cheese and croutons, and pair with garlic bread and your favorite red wine, or beer.

If you’re feeling adventurous, add a half cup of cooking sherry to the above and allow it to boil a couple minutes just for kicks.

Unless you have more hands and/or presence of mind than I do, this whole business takes something on the order of an hour and fifteen minutes. I think I’ve spent that long typing this out, but Joe pronounced it extremely edible, so I’m hoping that if you try it, you like it too. I even tried to make the instructions somewhat instructive! So if it doesn't make any sense, that's probably why. Slainte, or bon apetite, or cheers, or whatever!

Conversations

Last weekend was, of course, Independence Day. I won't go into my rant just now, but I often think of the parties that happen on this particular anniversary as Alcohol Dependence Day parties, because they so often end with everyone drinking a lot and then blowing stuff up. 

Being part of a family with small kids, I wasn't around for the blowing up part, but as far as I know no one lost any valuable digits or even eyebrows at the party we went to. I have to give credit to the party throwers on this occasion. They thought of everything. They had two kiddie pools, hoola hoops, and bubble soap: excellent for keeping small children and the easily entertained (me) busy. They also had lawn games: good for creating blackmail videos of the severely inebriated. And, of course, the requisite food, music, and small boxes of percussives good for blowing your eardrums out. So my right ear is still ringing, but a good time was had by all.

This was an occasion which brought home to me in a gustatory way just how much of a factorial of the lowest common denominator I truly am. You can tell I was humbled by the fact that I am trying to pack as many ten dollar words into one sentence as possible there. But out of the spread of food available--and there was quite a spread: grilled pork loin and salmon, three different potato salads, beer bread, chocolate dipped strawberries, et cetera ad infinitum-- what thrilled me the most? These. I ate half the tray. Further proof I'm not meant to be a foodie blogger. We call that Kentucky Maki!

I took both boys to see their first ever fireworks that night. I was afraid Charlie wouldn't like it, being not a fan of loud noises unless he's the one that's making them, but in the end, it was a big hit. Charlie had a nice, long conversation with a couple sitting next to us who, it turned out, live in Norwood, which was where we lived before moving to 'Tucky. Not that any of that figured into the conversation on Charlie's end. The woman asked in a general address sort of way if fireworks must necessarily come with a "boom" or if it is put there for added effect, to which I answered that the "boom" is much like thunder and unavoidable. This prompted them to asked if I was a science teacher. I explained that when one's father is a physicist, one is bound to pick up a few things. This prompted the man to ask what my thoughts were on String Theory. I said, "I prefer the double bunny ears method, don't you? And double knots as long as they're not too tight." Abraham was wowed by the first three or four explosions, and then tried to run off to the police car that was blocking the road with lights flashing. In the end, I don't know if the actual fireworks impressed either of them, but if they're happy, I'm happy.

The actual 4th was the next day, when we all sat around recovering from having so much "fun." We tried going out to play in the sand box together, but in the sweltering heat, you get strange results, and possibly even hallucinations, vis-a-vis:

I have found that the best thing to do in ridiculous heat is go walk in the creek. Unfortunately, both Joe and Abe had recent wounds on feet and knees (see reference to "fun") and we concluded that they might get gangrene from the creek, so Charlie and I went alone. That was good, though. It gave me some time alone with my Number 1 Guy, and an opportunity to take a lot of pictures with which to annoy you. Charlie was a little annoyed too. He's pretending he likes me here, but in fact he's thinking The next chance I get, that camera is going in the water...

 Female and Male Ebony Jewelwing Damselflies

Blue Damselfly, Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

Tiger Swallowtail in a tree, Swallowtail convention

A brave crayfish and a mottled rock.

Some sort of milkweed, and no, that isn't fishing line tangled in a bush. That plant actually grew that orange stuff.

Charlie is building a dam.

This really was a banner week for us. After we had all this fun over the weekend, I gave in to the pressure of annoyingly high temperatures and humidity and decided to go to the pool. If you know me well, you know that the heat has to be bordering on nuclear for me actually to want to swim. The boys are quite amphibious, but I'm not a water person, partially because of my awesome farmerette tan and sweet poolside fashion sense, and partially just because I'd rather have bamboo chutes shoved under my thumbnails than water in my ears. At any rate, we went to the pool on Wednesday. We took a friend along, but I doubt his mom will let him go ever again once she hears how I parked facing the wrong way on the side of the road to take pictures of bugs and flowers.

Here the boys are showing me just what they think of my photography obsession:

   

Charlie does a poolside catwalk to avoid burning his... one bare foot? Where did the other flip-flop go?

Abraham the Water Monkey gives me a heart attack hanging from the pool ladder in the eight foot dive section...

On the way home from the pool, Charlie and I had one of the many great conversations we have, wherein he asks obvious questions, and I answer him as absurdly as possible.

Charlie, out of the blue: Mom, is that our house? (We are 11.683 miles from home. He knows this.)

Me: Yes. Get out.

Charlie likes this game: Mom, is that our house?

Me: No. The president lives there.

Charlie: Is that our house?

Me: Yes. Get out.

Charlie: Is that our house?

Me: No. That's where the Queen of England lives.

Charlie: Is that our house?

Me: No. It's a gopher hole.

Charlie: Are you teasin' me?

Me: No. Giant gophers.

Charlie: Mom, are you here?

Me: Nope, you're driving.

Charlie: Is that our house?

Me: Yes. Get out.

Charlie: Mom, can I have a cheeseburger?

Me: Yes. Get out. Wait. What?

Foiled again.

 

Oh, and HaPpY BeLaTeD BiRtHdAy to Uncle Stuart! I tried to send you an ecard, but I must've typoed the email address because it came back!