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.