I am not a foodie blogger and probably never will be. In the Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille, Remy the rat says to his brother Emile, "Do you detect that? An oaky, nuttiness?" And Emile replies, "Oh, I'm detecting nuttiness!" That's me.
I will never have as much to say about food and recipes as some writers do. I positively love writing where food takes on a personality, but I just don't have that gift. (See
Tortilla Soup,
Chocolat,
Mistress of Spices, and any books by
Sarah Addison Allen.) For one thing, I've recently been informed that my taste in cheese is lacking in class. Also, I tend to have short, obsessive love affairs with certain herbs and spices that end in tears and inedibility. First it was Sweet Marjoram. Oh, how I loved the undertone of buttery sweetness it seemed to add to recipes... but fermented marjoram? Scary. Then there was Cilantro, with its bold flamboyance. Did you know that cilantro/lime rice will mold three different colors? Currently, I am in love with Cumin, but you can see how my culinary infidelity tends to lead me astray.
That said, I have been having fun with food lately. It's amazing how easy it is to delight the male of the species, no matter the age, with food. For instance,
Bisquick is a miracle substance. I can make pancakes from scratch, but they never come out the same way twice! But if I make them with Bisquick, Joe is happy. For Charlie, it makes perfect pancakes with an element of fun-- just pour the batter into star shaped cookie cutter and
voila!-- 
goofy facial expressions!
Actually, I've been trying, on the advice of a venerated relation, to make sure my family has better food every day. This may sound like a rudimentary thing for a full-time-kid-wrangler/mom-type-person, but in fact, it is something that is struggling not to go the way of the dodo in our culture, so much so that even parenting books have begun to have to advocate
eating dinner together! Well, unfortunately for nocturnal, second-shift creatures such as ourselves, that doesn't work out so well. So, I'm working on the next best thing, as I see it.
The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I don't know if this is true. What I do know is that lasagne never hurt anybody. But who has time to make lasagne anymore! All that browning of meat, mixing of cheese and spices, boiling of noodles, layering, baking... Not even the Merovingian could make enough time for that! (To decipher cryptic movie reference, go
here, then
here.) But I have a solution!
Hannah's Cheater's Lasagna Bake:
1 box of your favorite small piece pasta (can be shells, macaroni, spirals, penne, whatever...)
1-2 lbs of meat (can be chicken, sausage, beef, or even deer, and quantity depends on your family's carnivorous attitudes)
Random spices to taste (I like cumin *big surprise*, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano)
Can or jar of your favorite spaghetti sauce
Pound of Italian cheeses (I like the bagged, pre-shreaded kind, but as I said, my taste in cheeses has been called to account)
2 eggs (optional for stick-togetherage)
3 or 4 roma tomatoes, sliced thin-ish
1 red pepper, chopped
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
Half pound of parmesan
Brown your random meat with your random spices and saute your mushrooms in butter or olive oil while your pasta boils. Dump meat, pasta, sauce, mushrooms, peppers, and cheese (and optional eggs) into a big bowl and stir it all together. Dump that concoction into a baking pan. Place roma slices artfully over the top, and cover with parmesan. Bake it for, oh, about 20 mins at 400 degrees, or whatever looks good to you. Magic.
You can see why I'm not a foodie blogger. Most people want actual detail in their recipes, instead of "whatever looks good to you" randomness. That's how I cook, though. And it usually works out. I'd prove it to you, but Joe wouldn't let me take a picture of his goofy facial expression for the blog.
My life is a mess. I don't say this melodramaticly. I think most people's lives are a mess. Entropy is a principle of physics, after all. Who can keep his life from disintegrating into a tangled mass of details, to do lists, and minutiae? That person is a mutant or a recluse or both. If you are willing to participate in society and its pressures, you've probably felt the pull to count your dollars, your minutes, your undone chores, and tally it all up to calculate the quality of your life. Our whole society is one giant vortex sweeping us up in this maelstrom of modernity. A hundred years ago, no one worried about being on time to the minute for an appointment, needed a Blackberry to keep their project lists, nor had to keep their personal finances straight with a spread sheet. It seems like modern life is sentiently designed to keep us confused about what matters. So if the messiness of life is close kin to physical law, why not embrace it? Case in point: you should see my kitchen countertops.
And why am I driven by unseen forces to think that I have to accomplish something other than keeping my family healthy and whole with my life? Why do I think I will have failed somehow if I never write a book, or publish some poems, or get my name printed next to the title "Ed?" When I look in my mental mirror, I'm content being a sometimes-crafting, house-keeping, kid-chasing, naturalist-dabbling, amateur-philosophizing, blogging library lacky. 
The upshot of all this is that I realized that what drives me most is the contrary philosophical urge to resist all this other stuff that's driving me. It's why I will stop at the side of any road anytime to take pictures of flowers and bugs, and it's partially why I have set aside Wednesday of every week for the boys' and my Once-A-Week Adventures. Because really, who cares about laundry, and editing, and looking bad in a bathing suit when you can take a few bucks and a few hours and create delight in small boys? If my life is going to be a mess, then I'd rather it be a mess somewhat like a Van Gogh painting, with lots of little bits of chicory-flower blue, Abraham-strawberry blonde, and Charlie-freckle brown.
If I get really close, my days look like a mess. But when I back up and gaze at my life, a picture resolves out of it. It's a picture I'm painting of lives, learning, and priorities; mine and hopefully theirs. I hope that my boys, when they're men, look back on days spent chasing butterflies and going to the wet playground, and see that they were not days spent in hedonism, but rather days spent with them. 
Because I think it is an excellent practice in life to engage in as many daily excercises in futility as can be found, I stayed up until after 2 a.m. this morning trying to get ahead of the game with my housekeeping. You know who really bugs me? Efficient, organized mothers. Who are these wack jobs with their neatly groomed children, their lawnicures, their play dates, and their day-planners? Alien invaders, that's who. *subsides into disgruntled muttering*
I had to get up this morning for work. Pesky work... I had to get up kind of early because I had to make crockpot venison and roasted fresh vegetables for lunch. Not my lunch. Joe's lunch. What? You don't get up at 6:30 a.m. after going to bed at 2 a.m. just to cook lunch? Wimp! 
Postscript: If you're wondering what possible connection the photos have to the paragraphs they inhabit, the answer is none whatsoever. I'm really tired and I feel no compulsion at all to make sense. Thpbbt!
I don't suppose anyone would buy a hand made greeting card line featuring pictures of thistles and delightfully curmudgeony messages? Then I have a deep and abiding passion for milkweed. You'll never see any sissy geraniums growing straight up through blacktop, by George. And the butterflies like them. That has to be a sign of class. (See previous entry wherein butterfly voluntarily climbs up my pant leg and try to ignore my shameless self-aggrandizement.)
Wild onion sprouts some funky blooms too. And you can chop the whole thing up and put it on top of your baked potato. That could be a cafe theme! The Artsy Potato. You'd eat there, right? Don't tell me if you wouldn't.
Is that a silver birch off to the right there? I passed that thing driving in the morning, and I am not kidding: it looked like the silver tree that grew on the first day of Narnia in "The Magician's Nephew." If that is an obscure literary reference, well, that is not my fault. I've read the entire seven book series 20 times. Why haven't you?
Kildeers are a Darwinian anomoly to me. In the days of foot travel, particularly when shoes were a luxury not necessarily afforaded by everyone, I can see how hiding this single egg in the stones would be a good idea. But honestly, it's time to adapt: now the only places you find rocks like this are roadsides, parking lots, and the desert. How are there still Kildeers in the world? Don't all their eggs get run over? It's not as if that whole "broken wing" trick lures away the 18-wheeler baring down on the nest. As a matter of fact, vis-a-vis the following insect pictures, I have to wonder that animal camouflage works at all...
