New foods!

It is like pulling teeth to get my Imp to try new foods.  I think I've found the trick though: he's more likely to try something if I tell him it's spicy.  

Case in point: we got him to try pad thai, recently, by calling it "spicy spaghetti."  He tried it, and liked it well enough to ask me to learn how to make it so I could teach him.  

Last night was another new food: buffalo chicken dip.  I started with a recipe found online, but ended up modifying it a little bit.  I'll probably half the recipe, more or less, next time I make it, and will just make it on the stove top.  

Hot Buffalo Chicken Dip

2 cans chicken, drained
2 bricks cream cheese (I used reduced fat, and thank God I did)
3/4 c shredded cheddar (grate it yourself so the dip doesn't turn out gritty if texture bothers you)
1 c ranch dressing
3/4 c buffalo sauce
1/4 c Louisiana hot sauce (optional--if you need more heat to be happy with it)

Drain chicken (my cats demanded some of the chicken water, so I drained a little into paper bowls for them), dump in crock pot, break up a bit.  Dump in cream cheese, cheddar, ranch, and buffalo sauce, and turn the crock pot on low.  Go back in an hour or so, depending on your crock pot (mine runs way too hot on all settings), and start the process of mixing it up.   It's ready when it's fully incorporated and hot all the way through.  It's good with Freetos, tortilla chips, celery sticks.  Probably would be good with club crackers, but I can't vouch for that, since I can't have those anymore. 

The picky kid ate probably a cup of dip, last night.  He only stopped because it was starting to make him queasy (as much cheese as is in it, I'm not surprised).  I had maybe half a cup...and a bottle of hard cider to mitigate the gallbladder attack I knew would follow.  

It was worth it.  This recipe turned out good.

Derp. Forgot to annouce.

 Light Up the Night dropped live on Wednesday.  It's available to purchase, or to borrow through KU.  

Eggs...and abject stupidity

 So.  

Eggs.  

They're something of a staple.  You use eggs for breakfast, for making cookies, for adding into recipes.  Eggs are just...they're ubiquitous.  They're in a lot of things.  They're supposed to be some of the cheapest protein out there.  

We use a lot of eggs in this house.  A lot.  Spouse eats French Toast egg muffins for breakfast on work days; Imp eats fried egg sandwiches with hot sauce for school day breakfasts (and on Sunday before church).  I make cookies, cornbread, and gluten free bread--all of which use eggs.  Two of them, each time.  I also have a recipe that uses four to make a can of spinach palatable (basically turns nasty, slimy canned spinach into spanikopita filling).  So, yeah--we use a lot of eggs in this household. I get them in the big boxes (5 dozen) from Walmart about every three weeks or so.  

I got groceries Friday.  The box of eggs had jumped from $10/box to a bit over $18.  Yeah.  Major jump.  I got them at Sam's Club instead, for a bit more than $13 for the same size of box.  (That had gone up, too, just not as much as Walmart.)  

Yesterday, I ran across a news story about yet another food recall.  I'm sure you'll remember the great lunch meat recall for listeria?  Back in July?  Where they went screeching that lunch meat would kill you because of this particular bacteria? 

Yeah.  When I got pregnant for the first time in 2008?  I was cautioned that lunch meat can carry listeria, and that since I was pregnant, I would be particularly susceptible to it.  And that I needed to take lunch meat I got and heat it to steaming in the microwave, then put it in a new, clean container, before I put it back in the fridge.  And then it'd be safe.    

There was no need for a panic and recall.  It's stupidly simple to mitigate the risks.  All that was really necessary was a public service announcement.  

Back to the eggs.  They're the current recall.  Because salmonella.  

Wait just a damn fucking minute, here.  Eggs have always risked salmonella contamination.  It's one of the reasons you're not supposed to eat raw cookie dough.*  I have never been unaware of the possibility.  And I've never had a case of salmonella from eggs.  Wanna know why? 

I wash the fucking eggs.  And then I cook the fucking eggs.  

Again: a recall is not necessary.  All that should have been done was to draft a PSA.  Here, I can do it for them: 

Attention: this is a public service announcement from the FDA and CDC.  Recently, there has been a multi-state outbreak in cases of salmonella food poisoning that has been linked to eggs.  Salmonella is a dangerous food-borne illness that can be controlled with a few, simple steps.  Step one: wash the outer shell of the egg with soap and warm water before you crack the eggs for use.  Step two: cook the eggs until the yolk is set.  These two steps will prevent you from contracting salmonella from eggs.  We will not issue a recall for egg-borne salmonella.  Thank you.

Then...leave the eggs alone.  Leave them on the shelves.  Stop fucking treating the American public like toddlers.  If people ignore the PSA's instructions and end up killing themselves with salmonella?  Awesome.  Each easily avoidable death is one fewer stupid fucker voting.  And breeding.  And encouraging the government to treat the rest of us--you know, the ones with brains in our heads--like toddlers.  

Stop issuing food recalls for things that the consumer should be responsible for mitigating for ourselves.  Save them for the arsenic-tainted apple juice, or the metal-shavings-tainted chicken nuggets. 

Incoming!

Got a new novella dropping live, next month.  On the 18th.  Light Up the Night. You can preorder now, if it looks interesting:

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

When it drops live, it'll be available to borrow Kindle Unlimited. 

There will be more announced in coming weeks, too.  Cheers!

School is back in session.

 Last week was a half-week.  Monday saw "Back to School Night," where the kids take their supplies to their classrooms/lockers, and pick up their schedules (for secondary).  Pixie (who's now much taller than me) is in 8th grade, this year, and Imp...Imp is in high school.  

I'm really, really proud of that.  

I actually wrote this past summer.  Yeah, the housework went to shit, but I wrote.  I finished a short novel, a novella, and am about 2/3 of the way done with another collection of short stories.  

And since school has been back in session, I managed to get the revisions done on the short novel and get it sent out to one of my beta readers.  The novella?  Beta reader finished it, and I've got it up for pre-order.  It'll pop live in mid-September, at which point it'll be available to borrow KU.  

I'm thankful the kids are back in school.  They've got their own friend groups that they hang around with in school, and they don't spend their time abrading each other's nerves...and mine.

Milestones

The kids are hitting them.  They're both teens, now, which means I've gotten them into the adulthood-training stages.  I'm actually really proud of them.  They are, by and large, really good kids, even in the throes of puberty hormones. 

Imp has his learner's permit, and Other Half is working on teaching him how to drive.  Yes, he's really that old, now.  And is going into high school next year, with a couple of ideas of what he wants to do with his life.  He wants to learn welding.  I think it suits him, because it's as much art as science, and it's a skill that will support him quite well.  He also wants to learn to make pizza.  And run a food truck with a friend or two.  We're...working on that.  I've got him started on learning to make pizza from scratch, since that's what I do for them on Fridays anyway.  He can assist me, then take over when I think he's ready.  It'll probably be slightly before he thinks he is.  

Pixie is also a teenager, now.  She's working on learning how to cook from scratch, too.  She can make from-scratch oil biscuits, helps make bread (both in the bread maker and my gluten free bread), cookies, and wacky cakes.  She's still not sure what she wants to do for a job, but that's okay--she's only thirteen.  She's positive, though, that she wants to get married and have a family.  

The kids have four and five more years, respectively, of learning to run their own households, then some more time paying rent in mine* before they'll be moving out.  

Next month is Other Half and my 20th anniversary of marriage; we've been together for longer than that.  

Next February--so, eight months and a bit from now--will mark ten years that I've been on a wheat-free diet.  I routinely test that, hoping that the intolerance will clear up, but...yeah, it really seems like that isn't going to happen.  Last year, I started working on learning to make bread with rice flour.  And then, I started grinding rice for flour, starting with my blender.  Then I got a manual grain mill, and recently, I got an electric one.  I've learned a lot about gluten free baking, mostly in the last two or three months, since flour isn't so very expensive, now.  

Five years from now, we won't be having to save every single penny we possibly can to just be able to pay tuition; at that point, there's a lot I want to do for my house.  Yeah, our tax returns will be less without the child tax credit available...but that has always gone to pay tuition, from the time they started school.  Once it's gone, I won't really miss it because I've never really had it. And while yes, we are planning on donating some to the school to repay them for the years they've given us a tuition break, it won't be on a deprivation level like tuition alone--even the discounted tuition--keeps us on. 

*The rent the kids pay to me will go into a separate savings account, so that they can afford to move out: First and last months' rents, deposits, utilities deposits...it actually costs in the mid four digits for people to be able to move from their parents' home...or from one apartment to another. 

Well. *That* happened.

Monday.  Woke up feeling stiff and achy; day got progressively worse from there.  Doctor's appointment right before picking the kids up from school, got there barely in time to park before Imp was climbing into the back seat.  

Evening went like they always do, and then kids went to bed, and I got a LARGE bourbon.  Because I wasn't going to sleep without help.  The storm hit around the time I went to bed, and hit in earnest about the time I managed to drift off, just before midnight.  

And then the power went out.  And the sirens went off.  We got the kids and pets gathered up and huddled  in the bathroom, listening to a battery-operated transistor radio until the all-clear sounded about half an hour later.

Shuffled the kids back to bed, and Other Half took a flashlight and went out to see if anything had damaged the roof, as best he could.  Still no power--all of the local lights were out.  We could tell we'd lost some limbs from the trees, but not how many.  

Went back to bed, and slept for the rest of the night, until the alarm on the cell phone went off.  

Still no power.  But we had light--the sun was starting to come up.  The driveway had a limb across right behind the cars, and there were limbs laying on the roof.  And on the fence into the dog's yard.  And...yeah.  

Other Half got a text that there would be a delayed start for the kids' school day, and let me know.  Then he headed to work.  I waited, then took the kids to try to get them to school...and the road was blocked.  "Road closed."  And I could see why (both for the road block, and for the lack of power to the area): there were no poles left standing as far as I could see down the north side of the road.  

Turns out, that storm?  The sirens?  Was an F1 tornado.  It went through between the little side road that connects our street to the next big east-west artery through town.  Lots of trees down along that little road, too.  Went down it, around the next street, then up the north-south back street that the college backs onto.  

...and there was a road closed sign preventing a left turn.  No way to get the kids to school.  Dog was out of food, so we went to Walmart to grab a bag.  Went home.  

School closed, Imp's band concert postponed.  Road--and school--stayed closed through Wednesday.  Power came back about lunch time on Wednesday, or maybe a little before.*  Still no internet.  Cable co-ax had been taken out with the power lines. But the power was back, and the city had semi-opened up the road around the school, so...the kids went back yesterday.  Internet came back yesterday right before I had to go get them.  

I'm glad I'd left five minutes early--the city'd closed the street between us and the school again, and I had to go the long way 'round.  

So, yesterday and today have been spent scrambling to get caught up on what I didn't get done Tuesday (dishes and some housework) and yesterday (the admin stuff for the household that requires internet access...and the admin stuff for writing that also requires internet access). 

Since May started, I'd estimate we've probably had about four or five inches of rain, going by the standing water in the low spots in the yard, where the saturated soil just couldn't take anymore.  We're supposed to get some dry time...but not much.  It's supposed to start back up Sunday night.  

Missouri in severe weather season.  Fun times.  Be sure your radios have batteries, your cell phones are charged, and your generators (should you have them) are ready to go. 

*Wednesday afternoon, there was another nasty storm system move through; however, the tornadoes that one spawned were south of us. The kids, pets, and I still spent a good chunk of the afternoon huddled in the innermost room without windows, thankful it was a bathroom not a closet.