Kitchen Hazards

Okay this post is going to be part public service announcement, part recipe, part hilaaaaaarity.

Or not.

All you really need to be a parent is a healthy dose of common sense.

 I kid, I kid. I would never let him drink red wine while wearing a white shirt.

I did something last week that was, in hindsight, dumb, and also, probably very expensive. Learn from my mistake.

I was in the kitchen cooking an awesome recipe, which I'll have to remake and post some other time- no pics due to the event follows.

Li'l dude was happy in his Bumbo on the countertop. I gave him a small soft plastic measuring cup to play with. It's so cute to see him gnawing on it! I was all thinking "Oh I should take a picture of this and then someday when he is a world-renowned chef he'll have this picture to look back on and be like 'I think my innate cooking sense came from my mother's insistence I play with kitchen utensils' and then we'll all smile!"

But have you ever noticed that the handle of your measuring cup has a hole in it? Yep.

Totally stuck. Using my vast knowledge of medicine, I tried dunking his fist in a bowl of ice cold water to constrict the blood vessels.

Nope.

I tried lubing it off with olive oil.

Nope.

One call to the pediatrician's office later, and we were packed up on our way to the emergency department. They ended up using the ring cutter to saw it off.  Haven't gotten the bill yet, but I am guessing it would have been much much cheaper to just go buy a ring cutter. Or not even give him the measuring cup in the first place. Lesson learned.

I guess from now on I'll have to let him play with the can opener.

I kid, I kid.

Did you know how easy homemade tomato sauce can be? (I'm too lazy for a clever segue)

I had a bountiful harvest of mutants from the garden this year.

I cut away the funky spots and decided to jar some sauce. Now traditional recipes call for you to remove the skins from the tomatoes. That just seems like extra business. I eat my mashed potatoes with skins, so why not my sauce? One extra step that *is* worth the trouble is roasting your garlic.

Cut the top 1/3rd off your garlic so that the inside cloves are exposed. Make a little tin foil packet, drizzle olive oil over the garlic, and roast at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, or until cloves are golden brown.

Back to the sauce-
I diced up my tomatoes and tossed them in a large pot, along with my mashed roasted garlic and 1 cup of chopped fresh basil. I let that simmer, covered, for about an hour. I then removed the lid to let some of the water evaporate, and simmered for another 30 minutes. It will make your house smell edible.

Pour into mason jars and refrigerate. Use within a week, or freeze. My ~8 cups of tomatoes yielded 3 1/2 jars.

This is not like traditional thick marinara sauce- it is more watery, but more flavorful, if that makes sense. I paired it with thick linguini noodles. I found it was even better as leftovers, as the noodles soaked up some of the sauce.

This sauce is also great when paired with a red wine. Right, Baby?

As Seen On MY BLOG

Like most people, I’ve had my fair share of encounters with “As Seen on TV” products.

I remember being a kid when Suzanne Somers (Carol from "Step By Step" what??) started selling the THIGHMASTER. My mom bought one, and somehow it ended up in our toy box. We would do all sorts of fun things with it- mostly involving finagling it into a catapult. Eventually it got catapulted down to the Goodwill.

Then for a while I had the SOBAKAWA pillow, which was essentially a cloth sack filled with what felt like ten thousand popcorn kernels.

More recently I owned a George Foreman Grill. Every-single-girl-in-2006-had-one. In grad school my standard dinner was Foreman-grilled chicken and steamed veggies, and then a late night snack of raw cookie dough. 

Did you know that Bed Bath & Beyond has an entire section of “As Seen on TV” products? With one of their infinity 20% coupons I seem to get, any one of those things seems like an amazing opportunity to be on the cutting edge of specially-TV-advertised-technology.

Like the Veggetti.

So, back up.

A few weeks ago we went to a random farm/orchard/garden on the side of the highway. You could pick your own pickling cucumbers, broccoli, raspberries, tomatoes, apples and pumpkins. And zucchini.

Since I yanked out my garden zucchini plants mid-August, I decided to get some to try in my VEGGETTI. I grabbed some broccoli too, figuring I’d make a stir fry.

I am such a creepster.

Two zucchinis VEGGETTI-fied made a healthy amount of “noodles.” I sautéed them for just a few minutes along with chicken and other veggies. If you cook them too long, they get way too mushy.

The VEGGETTI came with a neat little recipe book too. Most of them look pretty decent. Other uses, besides zucchini, include carrots and potatoes. It was really easy to use, and it was also fun. That coming from the kid whose favorite toys included the Play-Doh Fun Factory.

There’s also the whole thing about 1 zucchini is only 33 calories, and the equivalent amount of pasta packs well over 300 calories.

Well now I am SOLD. This “As Seen on TV” stuff is just awesome.

So this happened...

Mac has been a pretty easy baby.  I think.  I have no basis for comparison I guess. But I haven’t had many moments where I’ve felt like a "Teen Mom" level of incompetent.  

Thennnnnnn yesterday afternoon happened. And as a giant preface, I chalk this up to the first-time-mom-learning-curve, which is totally a thing.

There we were, a shop-shop-shoppin’ away. Mac started fussing, which is not like him because he loves shopping, which I’ve bragged about before. Weh-hell-hell. Looked at his pants, and it was pretty obvious why he was in a wee bit o’ discomfort. Problem was, I immediately realized I didn’t have spare pants in the diaper bag.

No biggie, I reasoned. I could just tuck a blanket around his bottom half, continue onto the grocery store, and no one would notice.

Got all set up for the oh-so-classy tailgate butt wiping sesh, took off those swampy pants, and quickly realized the situation was worse than I originally thought. Plus I learned I only had six wipes.

Let me tell you- mathematicians should study how I managed to pull off that delicate wipe-here, tuck-there, fold-here, wipe-there large surface area job.

Anyway. I draw the line at having a naked diapered baby in public, plus it was chilly out, so I considered bailing on the groceries and just going home. But then I realized- TA DA! I did have a back up outfit! Sort of.

A solid two months ago I bought cute PJs for a friend who’d had a baby girl (I’m a pretty solid friend for hanging onto a gift that long). Clothes are clothes, and Mac was just happy to be clean and dry.

Is it weird that I enjoyed pretending he was a girl, if just for the 20 minutes at the grocery store? People agreed- “what a precious baby girl you have!”

Why thank you.

In the spirit of learning the hard way and vowing to make things easier in the future, here is a 4-ingredient recipe. This comes together in less than 30 minutes, oh and hey it’s pretty good for you. 

Spicy Peanut Noodles with Bok Choy

• 1 package brown rice noodles
• 1 head of bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (discard the thickest bottom 4 or so inches)
• 1 package extra firm tofu, pressed to remove excess moisture and cut into ½ inch cubes
• 1 bottle spicy peanut sauce
• 2 teaspoons olive oil

1. Heat oil in a shallow skillet over medium high heat. Add tofu. Stir occasionally until it starts to slightly brown. Add your bok choy. Cover and turn heat to low.

2. Meanwhile, heat a large stockpot with water to boil. Add brown rice noodles and cook according to package directions. Add to bok choy/tofu mix.

3. Add peanut sauce, stir to evenly coat.

Protein, vitamins, fiber. What more could I want?

Besides a pack of extra wipes and pants.