And yet more: Rudy Guiliani called twice to solicit our votes for Bush. One call came during dinner and the other during bedtime. How happy do you think this made me?

More on the election:

Kurt Schilling, of the "World Champion Boston Red Sox" ("Sounds good, huh?") just called to let me know that he thinks I should vote for President Bush. I'm not sure why because I hung up not too far into the call.

I've got like four seconds to post, so I'm going to keep it short. Just a couple points about the election:

1) Laura Bush called yesterday. Wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise - she just talked and talked. Very rude.

2) I was just invited by a lovely young woman named Sarah to be sure and pick up my tickets for Monday's "victory" rally in Las Vegas by tomorrow - they're free! She was really excited about! Dick Cheney will be there! In person! Did she mentioned the tickets are free! Like totally! Stop by the Nevada Republican Office as soon as possible! I felt awful telling her that her autodialer called central Virginia.

3) I voted today because I will be traveling next week. I'm kind of relieved that it's settled. For me, at least.

I've been trying, with mixed succcess, to introduce in our household the idea of the Sunday supper. You know, slightly earlier than dinner might be on other days, and perhaps even more elaborate and more lingered-over. Sometimes such a dinner salvages the day from a certain kind of malaise, when there's lots to do but everyone's out of sorts or when you're trying to be productive but nothing comes together quite as planned. We had that kind of day at our house, but sitting down to dinner erased most of our frustrations and, for the first time really since we woke up, we began to enjoy each other and relax. Even the Little Diva, who usually despairs of our intent to keep her confined to her high chair for the duration of the evening meal, was in good humor and ate all of her chickpeas and yogurt.


Part of my increased cheerfulness stemmed from the success of the corn fritters. I've never made any (actually, I had never even eaten a corn fritter in my entire life) but somehow knew they'd be great. So I kept this idea in the back of my mind for years and years and only today finally made a batch. We enjoyed them thoroughly. Not health food, to be sure, but a nice treat enjoyed with ketchup (for the Boy Wonder and my husband) or salsa (for me) and a wonderful complement to the richness of the steaks.


In my zeal to follow the recipe (which is an old one) properly and also indulge my enthusiasm for keeping dishes to a minimum I beat the required egg white to stiff peaks by hand. Big deal, you scoff? Not so, says I. As someone who is generally loathe to move one inch more than necessary my success in this venture could well mark a turning point in my approach to these kinds of activities.


Anyway, I highly recommend that you make corn fritters for yourself and see if they can't help revive you from a troublesome day. I used one can of cream corn (horrors!) and one can of kernal corn (Not-so-horrors, but still!) and combined them together with about one tablespoon of baking powder, 3/4 cup of flour and the beaten white of one large egg (beat until fairly stiff and fold gently into the other ingredients). Heat about 1/4 inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan and, when quite warm but not smoking, add the batter in large spoonfuls (the rounds should be about 2 inches in diameter in the oil). Turn fritters once on the way to getting both sides a nice golden color. Drain on paper towel lined plates and serve with your favorite condiments (I read somewhere once of people eating them with maple syrup!).


Remember my cut finger? A surgeon friend had a gander at it yesterday (I didn't go see him about it, but ran into him and he noticed the rather large bandage I had installed). His response? "DUDE! Why didn't you get this stitched? Do you have any idea how poorly this is going to heal? What the h*ll did you wrap this in? Saran?"


Well, actually, no. So he goes into this long thing about the fascia and the skin and the...I don't know, insert surgeon-speak here and now I keep watching this finger (the bandage has been removed) waiting for it to turn into this malformed digit of ill-wrapped revenge or something.

First, I need you to know that I cut my finger badly the other day and am finding typing to be more of a challenge than usual. There may be many, many more typos here than normal due to the large, bulbous bandage I'm sporting on my left ring finger. It's not a great look, and it's even less blogger-friendly. Oh well, press on I will.


I'm going to be making some marinated mushrooms this weekend. Once again, I'm aghast at the cost of the ingredients but I know the end result is so great that I'm willing to look the other way. (At least until my husband looks at the charge statement and asks "And just what did you make that cost $45?" I'll have to pay the piper then because he hates mushrooms and cannot fathom why on earth something he will never eat should create such a huge hole in the family budget. I might as well be canning mudpies for all the sense this makes to him.) The trouble with the mushrooms this year is that I know two people who absolutely adore them so I will have to be a better person and spread the mushroom love around. Both my father-in-law and my brother-in-law will find marinated mushrooms under the tree this year. This leaves precious little for me to enjoy, but is this not the spirit of the season? Assuming that I am happy with the result, I will of course share the recipe here - watch for it in a few days.


My husband has termed my recent reading "The Season of the Problematic Woman", largely because I've read biographies of both Hillary Clinton and Anne Hutchinson. Although the two women lived centuries apart and the fact that one of the portraits was admiring while the other much less so, it's amazing to me the parallels that existed in their lives. Both women are/were smart, outspoken and willing to live by their own lights in the face of dominant patriarchal cultures. They are/were also stubborn, impatient and blind to the (occasional) better outcomes that their actions might have yielded had they thought to step back. Although I have specific criticisms of each book (the title American Evita, for example, is something of a credibility issue) I recommend them both anyway. Read them together if you can - not just because I did (that was a coincidence) but because it's amazing to see how two similar women can be portrayed so differently and how the march of time hasn't changed very much about how intelligent, outspoken women with convictions are treated by their contemporaries.

In my house the holiday season starts when the November cooking magazines arrive.


This year, the holiday season started Saturday.


Bon Appetite is lovely and Gourmet is even better. Every year I pick a few new recipes to go along our holiday standards and this year I think I'll have a tough time selecting and may have to go for an all new menu. Of course, I wouldn't dream of altering my cookie repertiore - there will be gingerbread stars, shortbread, thumprints and chocolate crinkles. But first, the arrival of the magazines means I can begin to wrap the presents I've been buying and making since June and stashing in my linen closet.


The first holiday on the roster is, of course, Halloween. Long time readers may remember this time last year I was feverishly trying to finish the Boy Wonder's race car driver costume. This year he's wearing a store bought astronaut outfit, a birthday present from his grandparents. I was given a dalmation costume for the Little Diva, but it is way too big so she will celebrate the season in a pumpkin-festooned turtleneck with matching sweater. The Boy Wonder has already decided that next year he wants to be a pirate, giving me plenty of notice to stock up on sale-priced pattern and material. Very considerate, that.


Thanksgiving will be interesting. My in-laws have asked to come down for a few days. Fine with us, we haven't seen them for a while. The thing is, we have some news that we're not sure how they'll take. (And no, we're not telling you yet, so you'll just have to be patient.) We're figuring we'll get great happiness - if, in fact, they actually understand the entire situation and all its ramifications - in which case it will be all my husband's doing, or we'll get great sorrow, in which case it's all my fault. Either way it's going to be an interesting visit.


No matter what happens, the food on Thanksgiving night will be secondary. My in-laws approach food and celebrations differently than I, a situation which has caused more than its share of hurt and misunderstandings in the past. Now that we know and have accepted that our differences are not personal our shared holidays are much more comfortable. I no longer try and make meals specifically to please them and so no longer become upset that they don't notice the effort. And for their part, they don't feel that I am putting on airs when I put the food in bowls rather than place the pots on the table or buy butter instead of margarine in the decorative plastic bowl. With these truths accepted, we all get along much better.


And, appropriately so, our holidays are much more festive and full of shared joy. As well they should be, don't you think?

Well. It's been a while since I let this much time lapse between posts. I can't say what exactly I've been doing, although I have the general sense of having been very busy - too busy to post. That feels like a cop out, though. Let's just say that I've been busy having a life so I'd have things to blog about.

Much to cover today, so I'll get right to it:

1) The Boy Wonder's birthday party went beautifully. His cousins (well, all except the 6 month old) drove down from Buffalo to help celebrate and three little friends came over as well for a total of 8 kids. Parents were also invited to stay for a drink and a snack (they got cosmos, wine or beer and a variety of crostini and hummus with veggies, the kids could have these snacks as well as fruit skewers with yogurt dip and cake). The cake...oh, the cake. I don't think I've ever used to much 10X sugar at one time before last week. I'll post a photo as soon as I can deal with the dead batteries in the camera but until then I'll say only that the Boy Wonder was thrilled beyond measure and that's pretty much all I was looking for.

2) Debates? Yeah, whatever. I stopped caring right around the contraband pen/bulging suit reports. With so many ground rules it's not like they matter anyway. I simply cannot vote for a man who admits (proudly) that he does not read the papers, but rather lets other people do it for him (among other problems - this is just for starters). On the other hand, I cannot vote for a man who seems incapable of creating any real excitement or interest within himself about his own policies or ideas. Now, John Edwards is a man I could cozy up to, but there's a risk that I'd end up with 12 years of John Kerry. I may have to punt and go Green on this one. As David Cobb (look it up) points out: [Presidential Debates] “are restricted, scripted and staged events which utterly fail to perform the vital function of informing the American people about the choices they have in this election.” Couldn't agree more.

3) I've long been intrigued with something referred to by its practioners as OAMC. As in, Once a Month Cooking. The idea is that you buy a boatload of groceries and cook it all up in two frenzied days in the kitchen and then freeze it all. Every day thereafter for a month, dinner is merely a matter of thawing the day's selection and adding a simple side dish or two. I've shied away in the past, largely because the concept's most vocal online cheerleaders seem very possibly...uh, how do I say this?...crazy. There's the woman who has 224 recipes for ground beef - 16 for each of her 14 children. Then there's some other woman whose fondness for canned cream soups seems irrational at best - I swear, there's a can in just about every recipe and where there is no cream soup there seems to be grape jelly or velveeta or some other horror.

Since the Little Diva is now able to climb out of every restraining device cool baby entertainment thing we have, possibly plunging headfirst to certain doom, preparing dinner has lately taken on a rather NASCAR-quality. I run around (i.e., race) the living room, keeping her away from computer cords and house plants and periodically run into the kitchen (i.e., the pit) to quick chop an onion, start some rice or whatever. I can't be gone longer than, say, 45 seconds because in that time she just might scale the sheers and start swinging from the curtain rods. This state of affairs neither pleases me nor results in fantastic dinners.

So I thought I'd try my own version of OAMC. The websites devoted to it are rife with spreadsheets, long lists of organizational tips, testimonials of endless hours of chopping, etc., but I found the whole thing really rather simple. In about 3 hours today I made two batches of stuffed cabbage, two batches of black bean soup, two quiches and a big batch of meatballs. Tomorrow I'm going for spaghetti sauce, tagine, enchiladas, scalloped potatoes with ham and a couple dinners worth of tex-mex seasoned ground beef and perhaps a pizza dough or two. If I have time, I'm going to freeze bags of chopped carrots, celery and onions, since they are the base for just about everything I make it seems. Hey! I just thought that I've got the stuff for some stir fry, too. Hmm..have to add that to the list.

Both of my children are sleeping at the moment. I should be taking advantage of their slumber to do any number of things for which I have a deadline. A client is expecting a document to arrive at their offices Monday afternoon and there's a van load of people on the way from Buffalo as I type this who are likely expecting clean (or clean-ish) sheets on their beds and maybe even some food in the house upon their arrival. Instead, I've decided to just savor the silence and sit for a spell. There's garlic roasting for the white bean dip and the queso dip is already on the oven, yeast and sugar are doing their thing awaiting transformation into pizza dough and there's that eight pounds of confectioners' sugar sitting on the counter silently scolding me for not yet having started to decorate the Boy Wonder's space ship birthday cake. But no, it's just too nice sitting here at the keyboard, visiting blogs and generally spacing out. I may come to regret my sloth in a few hours but for now I'm pleading blissful ignorance of any possible consequences.