This is a combination of a about three recipes that I liked pieces of so I decided to combine them. We love the smell of this in the oven and Stephen all but licks the plate after the meal. The sauce, while not completely homemade, does a decent impersonation of sauce made from scratch but much, much faster. If you’re really lucky Kat or Sean will post in comments how they have changed this yet again to include some sort of sausage.

Tomato Sauce
1/4 c olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
2-3 14 oz. cans of Italian stewed tomatoes
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
salt, chili powder, black pepper to taste
fresh rosemary & oregano to taste
dash Worcestershire sauce

Brown onion and garlic in oil. Add all other ingredients and simmer 1/2 hour -1 hour. Add a bit of water if sauce is too thick.

Polenta
3 c milk
1 c cornmeal
1 c cold water
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 c grated Fontina
2 T butter

In a saucepan heat milk to simmering. Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl stir together the cornmeal, water and salt. Gradually add cornmeal mixture to simmering milk, stirring constantly. Cook and stir until mixture begins to simmer again, reduce heat. Cook, uncovered, over low heat about 10 minutes or until thick, stirring constantly. During last few minutes of cooking, stir in 1/2 the Fontina and butter. Mixing spoon will almost standup in cornmeal mixture by itself, that’s how you know you’re done. On flat tray covered with wax paper, spread cornmeal mixture and let stand in refrigerator at least 1 hour (the longer you let it rest at this stage the better it is). It can sit up to 24 hours in the fridge, just cover it with plastic wrap so it won’t get too dry. Cut into squares.

Assembly
1/2 c Gorgonzola
fresh rosemary
chopped parsley

Preheat oven to 400°. Spread some tomato sauce in 3-quart gratin dish, then overlap the pieces of polenta with the remaining fontina. Spoon sauce in bands over the polenta, leaving the edges exposed. Repeat. Crumble Gorgonzola over top and sprinkle with rosemary and parsley. Bake, uncovered, for about 30 minutes or until the gratin is hot and bubbly.

It came to me sometime this week that I don’t talk about cooking on the site, which is weird since I actually cook during a huge percentage of my waking time. Presently, I’m making something like nine meals a day. Eli only eats Eli-approved food and Liza has her pureed fare, and then I make adult food for Stephen and me. Sometimes Liza’s food and our food are the same–I just remove her portion before I add too many seasonings or pepper. Sometimes Eli and Liza share a banana or a pear. We never all have the same food.

I realize now that I made a mistake with Eli by not feeding him more table food when he was Liza’s age. I was afraid that table food would somehow be dangerous for him or that I had to make special baby food instead of just chopping up whatever Stephen and I were having. Since Eli only eats about four foods, I decided that I ought to keep Liza’s options open by feeding her lots of different kinds off foods now while she eats like a goat in hopes of her eating, say, ten foods when she’s Eli’s age.

Yesterday I opened a can of mandarin oranges and cut them up for Liza. She loved those slippery little things! She also had chicken, potatoes, and some Cheerios that meal. One morning she had biscuit, banana, and bacon. She really liked the bacon, although that could have had more to do with it being a non-white food than its actual taste. I’m still feeding her baby food, but if I’m making food that she can have some part of, I’m cutting it up and putting it in front of her and it’s so much fun to watch her eat.

Who knows, if she learns early to eat a few different foods maybe she can talk Eli into trying something new soon.

I got sidetracked. What I really wanted to talk about was recipes. I cook out of magazines. I have several cookbooks that I use a few recipes from. But I also have this giant fabric-covered 3-ring binder that my family put together for me when I got married. My aunts and grandma and in-laws and mom put recipes in it of foods that I grew up eating and stuff that Stephen grew up eating. I work from it all the time and use it to store things that I like and want to cook again. So when I cook something from a magazine and like what I’ve made, I rip out the page, put it in a plastic sheet protector and stick it in my notebook.

The big thing for me lately is finding recipes so that I can use up ingredients that I already have on hand. I made this stollen from Good Housekeeping yesterday and it is awesome. I had bought too much ricotta for lasagna earlier in the week, so when I saw this recipe called for ricotta I jumped on it. I used dried figs (again, had them on hand) instead of cherries and it turned out great.

The downside to magazine cooking is I usually have to have the magazine on hand. I find it very hard to use the internet for this purpose. My one shining example of this working well for me was during Christmas at my mom’s house. We had a handful of ingredients on hand and I wanted to make tetrazzini so I went to the internet and searched until I found a recipe that used the ingredients that I had. It turned out great!

I’m going to try and start putting some things up here that I cook regularly. Try them if you are interested and heckle if you aren’t. Regardless, it’ll give me something to put here when I don’t actually have any ideas of my own and I’m too tired from cooking.

Liza is now signing sentences. She’s stringing signs together and she knows what they all mean. Last night after I finished bathing her and Eli, I pulled her out to dry her off first. She looked at me and then she looked at Eli still sitting in the tub and signed “Eli” “bath” as if to say, “How come he gets to stay in the tub?!” She was quite disgusted until I handed her a rubber bath letter to chew on while I got her dressed. She now signs “more” and “eat” pretty regularly at meal times.

The other fun thing is she is vocalizing to go with some hand movements. She makes some noise that sounds amazingly like “Hi!” when she’s waving. When you call her Liza with her sign, she will sometimes wave her hand in front of her face and say something that sounds a lot like “Liza.”

Standing but no walking yet. Yes, that is the master bathroom complete with playground, thanks for asking.

Eli equals the funny. Next time you see him ask him to tell you a knock knock joke, the one about the impatient cow. It cracks me up no matter how many times in a row he tells it. Both Stephen and I have talked about his storytelling proclivities and they continue to amaze. When Stephen leaves for work now, Eli often reminds him to watch out for rocks, trees, and mudslides. Because without Eli in the car with the fireball gun to defend against those aggressors, Stephen might not make it to work in one piece.

You only have to let him talk and sooner or later he’ll bust out with something so hilarious you think you’re talking to a kid three times his age.

He also has the magical eyebrow of funny.

I predict that Eli will be in musical theater and Liza will be the next Einstein but, you know, with great hair.

Hey, look at that: while I was all sick and stuff, my text adventure Child’s Play was nominated for six XYZZY Awards, including “Best Game” and “Best Writing”. The XYZZY Awards are the IF community’s Oscar-like awards for the year’s best games by category, and I’m tickled pink to be nominated for six.

Anyone can vote for the final winners, but if you do so, please play through the games in a given category. The games are fairly short, quite good, and most come with a walkthrough or hints (including mine) so you can breeze right through them. If you play the five nominated for “Best Game” you’ll have seen the majority of nominated games right there.

Today is day number six of Stephen being ill. He manages to get up and showered and then immediately needs to rest for a few hours before lunch. Following lunch he rests for another few hours before he starts feeling really bad. He’s had fever, chills, aches, joint pain, lack of appetite, a hacking cough, congested sinuses, and random bouts of panic.

And the funniest part is when he went to the doctor to get tested for the flu, he tested negative.

Liza started running a temperature of 102° late yesterday afternoon.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

I took her to the doctor today and she has a double ear infection. Her right ear? The drum is bulging with fluid, it’s so full. The left one? It just looks the regular kind of bad.

The doctor wasn’t going to do the flu test because she can’t have anything for the flu. I asked if he would anyway so that if we do have flu at Casa Granade, Eli can get a prophylactic dose of TamiFlu.

Shocker! Her test came back positive for the flu. Eli has had his first dose and I’m picking up my prescription tomorrow.

The very best news though is Stephen says he’s feeling better! We’ll see how the fever is tonight and tomorrow.

Me? I’m taking a large dose of U2 to help me cope. I got Vertigo, Live from Chicago for Christmas and this is only the second time I’ve watched it. I’m hoping that this weekend, if everyone is feeling better, I’ll get to sneak off to the movies and see U23D.

I haven’t had a bad bout of fever in a while, the kind that would leave me shaking, but I am still weak, tire easily, and my head is so stuffed I’m surprised it doesn’t float away and leave the rest of me behind. My entire body feels disturbing and alien, which will happen to you when tiny bits of foreign DNA try to take you over. I need a good metaphor for how odd I feel right now.

I know, let’s talk about Carrot Top. He’s the red-headed prop comedian who looks like a mutant version of the Wendy’s mascot and who rose to national prominence in the 1990s, back when Pauly Shores roamed the earth.

Have you seen a recent picture of him?

Continue reading Day Five of Being Ill →

He didn’t check his email all day long yesterday.

Yesterday, in one of my brief respites from feeling terrible, I came across a mathematical analysis of Candy Land. He does an analytic analysis which assumes independent draws (i.e. you draw a card and then put it back in and reshuffle the deck) and a Monte Carlo analysis that’s much more realistic. According to Lou Scheffer, a two-person game has a mode of 31 turns.

But wait! There are other analyses! This one is an analytical solution using Maple, while this one uses MATLAB to compare Cootie, Candy Land, and Chutes and Ladders to decide which is the least painful to play. I’ve said that Candy Land is a deeply stupid and annoying game, and the last link backs me up on that — according to his analysis, of the three games, Candy Land is likely to take the longest time to play.

As Barry Wise, author of the final article, says, “This article demonstrates how Monte Carlo simulation can be used to solve a real-world, every day problem: Of these three games, which one will provide entertainment for my four-year-old yet let me retain my sanity?” And people say you can’t do anything useful with math!

I haven’t freaked out here lately about the lack of sleep I’m getting because of Liza’s lousy schedule. The good news is that I’m doing pretty well. Mostly because I go to bed every night between 9 and 10:30. Gasp!

Stephen and I have always been hard core night owls. We were bad before we married and living on East Coast time only made us worse. We regularly went to bed between midnight and 1 a.m. when we lived out there. I didn’t have to be to work until 9 a.m., so it was doable. We moved here and I didn’t work and Stephen has the unusual ability to store up sleep on the weekends so we stayed up like rock stars. Then we had Eli and I moved to sleeping when he slept, so we could still stay up late. Again, doable because overall I was getting enough sleep.

With Liza, that’s all changed. Eli gets up between 6:30 and 7. Liza wants to get up and nurse around 6 a.m. My day regularly starts around 5:45 a.m.

Let me say that again: 5:45 a.m.

In my book, that is the butt crack of dawn.

I’ve never liked getting up in the morning and for the first time in my life, I am a regular early riser. So in order not to commit hara–kiri, I now go to bed like a regular person. I’m such a mom sometimes it scares me.

The bad news is that Liza still isn’t sleeping through the night. We had two good nights this week. Two good nights when she slept, but I still woke up because I was used to her waking me up.

Then she got another cold. So we’re back to getting up to give her cold medicine two or three times a night. And then rocking to calm her down until the meds kick in.

Overall, she is better. I have to keep reminding myself of that because it seems like a never-ending ordeal. She now goes down for naps well and to bed well. No crying for any of that, usually. The problem still is when she wakes up in the night and instead of realizing it’s night time and she should go back to sleep she thinks, “Where is everybody? They must be here with me to witness my awakeness! I will scream until the one with crazy bedhead or the the one with no hair appears!”

Sometimes that comes in the form of one “Whaaa!” and she goes right back to sleep. Sometimes she takes five minutes to remember it’s still night time. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes. The times she wakes up are not on any sort of schedule so there’s no way to do the wake to sleep trick.

What I’m coming to understand about Liza is that she’s a noisy, restless sleeper. She moves around a lot in the bed. I’ve just about decided she wakes herself up, at least part of the time, by scooting into the end of the bed with her head. Last night when she started crying, I jumped up and got in there and she was writhing around with her head up against the slats. I picked her up and I’m not sure she was even awake yet. Of course, when I went to put her down because I thought she was still asleep, she was very awake!

My new trick after this cold is going to be to not have the monitor on at night. Why, you ask, do I still have the monitor on? Because I’m paranoid. I didn’t take the monitor out of Eli’s room until he started getting out of his big boy bed on his own–in other words, right before I had to move the monitor to Liza’s room. So turning the monitor off before she’s 12 seems like a huge deal to me. But I think if I start doing that, we might all start getting some better sleep.

My gentle bout of post-nasal drip that I woke up with earlier this week has turned into a full-blown viral infection. The doctor cheerfully told me that it wasn’t strep and wasn’t flu, but that it was a “flu-like viral infection” that I’d get to ride out. It’s like I went into the dealer wanting to buy a simple cold but got upsold by a smooth-talking salesman into driving home fever, sweats, and aches.

I will feel better for a while and then worse for a while. I can tell when “worse” is going to happen because I start shaking like a thirteen-year-old boy getting his first real glimpse of internet porn. With luck I’ll be done with my fever by some time tomorrow, but if not, send ibuprofin for me and a robot butler for Misty.