I’ve been thinking about Easter and its religious significance, and I wanted to make this year’s celebration a more personal and spiritual experience for myself.  So, when I read Eric Hunstman’s article (here) on how his family observes Easter, I jumped on his tradition of reading in the New Testament each day of the week before Easter about that day on the last week of the Savior’s mortal life.  For each day of the week, he’s posted a simple list of scripture references from the four Gospels detailing what happened on the correlative day of the week of the first Easter.  I’m sure this isn’t a new idea and that I could probably find a similar list in the LDS Bible Dictionary or by googling it, but that’s where I found it and I give him credit.

Each day’s reading so far has only taken a few minutes to read, and I’ve found myself coming away wanting to know and understand more.  So I checked out the New Testament institute manual lessons about that time period here.  It’s really helpful to have the added context of maps and historical details and discussions of how the passages of scripture relate to each other.  I definitely recommend spending the extra time reading about the events of Easter there.

Easter and Passover overlap this year, and I’ve been thinking about their intertwined messages.  Since I was a little girl when we lived in Israel, my parents have participated in a Passover seder every year.  I haven’t been able to join them in a long time, but I remember our seders as some of the most meaningful celebrations of my life.  I miss them!  I really should find a community seder to attend someday.  I wonder if Colin would want to go with me.  I just looked it up and there’s one in Berkeley tomorrow.   That would be a totally appropriate Family Home Evening…but it’s $45 each!  Eeek.   And how would I explain the wine to my kids… and our no alcohol thing to the hosts?  Maybe another year.  And I have a box of Matzah in the cupboard for my own mini-celebration of the Exodus.   There is a lot to be grateful for this week.

Speaking of Family Home Evening, we should have an Easter FHE tomorrow.  If we do, and it were to go the way I planned it (it never does), this is how I’d do it:

Song: Did Jesus Really Live Again?

Prayer

Lesson: Watch the DVD of “To This End Was I Born” (or on YouTube here), or the shorter “Lamb of God” video if we have less time

Talk about what we saw.  Discuss how the symbols of eggs and flowers and Spring itself point to Jesus Christ and the resurrection.

Activity: Dyeing eggs is an obvious one.  Or we could perform our talents for our family reunion talent show–Grandma wants at least one of the kids to recite the 13th Article of Faith. I’m not totally confident that any of them will be able overcome their stage fright, but maybe practicing would help.

Song: I Know That My Redeemer Lives

Prayer

Refreshments:  How about these cute little chocolate “nests” with jellybeans for eggs?  They look super easy.  They have the added advantage of being gluten-free, which is good because we found out a couple of months ago that Colin is gluten-intolerant so he has to eat food that has no wheat in it.  If we wanted to get more complicated, I’ll bet we could use our favorite 5 Minute Cookies recipe to make the nests.

Simpler, we could just distribute Peeps.  I’m not all that into them taste-wise, but have to admit they are cute.  And it would get the kids in bed sooner.

Possibly more yummy, but certainly less dessert-y, would be deviled eggs.

Hey, these bunnies are adorable and look easy and kid friendly!

Can you tell I like dessert?

The point of this background is that I grew up celebrating a lot of Jewish holidays in an orthodox fashion and now I like to squeeze them into my own little family’s life here and there.  When we moved back to the States, our family continued to occasionally and mostly casually celebrate some of these holidays in a modified fashion.  I think my parents still have a Bushman-style Passover seder every year.

For months I’ve been meaning to make latkes, the Hanukkah classic, which are basically hashbrown pancakes.  We always ate them with sour cream and applesauce growing up, and I think that’s an Israeli/Jewish thing we picked up.  Finally, seeing the holiday was this week, I managed to gear up the energy to grate a bunch of potatoes and fry them up last night.  They didn’t turn out very well, actually, I think because I couldn’t get the electric skillet hot enough.  And I skimped on the oil.  So they ended up greasy and not crisp.  Better luck next time.  The brussels sprouts and chicken sausage I served with them were a bigger hit with the adults, but the kids loved the potato pancakes.  What is it with kids and round, flat foods with toppings?  Maybe I should start calling more things pancakes!

Hanukkah is a celebration of a miracle involving oil.  Israel had been occupied by the Seleucid empire (Syrian-Greek), who were somewhat successful in their efforts to unify their empire by wiping out all religions but one–the idol-worshiping Hellenistic religion.  They had conquered Jerusalem and vandalized the temple there, carrying away many sacred items (including the golden menorah) and placing their own idols inside.    A small band of Jewish men, the Maccabees, fought off a huge Syrian army and won back the city of Jerusalem and the temple.  They fashioned a new menorah and rededicated the temple, but discovered that there was only one day worth of properly prepared and oil for the menorah, which was required to burn without interruption.  God miraculously made that one day’s worth of oil burn the entire eight days required to prepare new oil for the lamp.

Homemade sufganiyah. Yum!

The miracle is about oil, so oily foods are eaten to commemorate it.  And, apart from latkes, my favorite Hanukkah food growing up was sufganiyot.  Sufganiyot are deep-fried jelly donuts with powdered sugar on top, and I remember eating these and getting powdered sugar all over everything, including up my nose.  And I loved it!  I’d never made donuts before on my own, but I felt inspired by my hanukkah-y dinner to try it.  I found a recipe online here and made the dough before dinner.  After dinner, the kids and I rolled out the dough, cut it, and fried it.  Then I tried to put some of the blackberry jam I made this summer inside with a ziplock and a frosting tip, which didn’t work at all.  I guess the jam was too liquid, because it just kept draining out before I could get it into the donuts.  So, we dipped them in powdered sugar and ate.  And some of the donuts were raw in the middle (that’s what I get for frying without a thermometer), but the smaller ones were great!

Some of our sufganiyot

Degen discovered that you can cut donuts into other shapes–like a Christmas tree and an angel–and they stay that shape when you fry them!  And thus we got Christmas Sufganiyot (I’m hoping that doesn’t offend anyone).   Does Heidi look happy, or what?

Degen created this angel-shaped donut

Heidi this morning at breakfast, enjoying her donut

We invited five girls and three are coming, plus Colin’s sister Kim.  Maggie’s counting her among her invitees (unlike the moms of the other girls), and I’m not sure how Kim’s going to react to Maggie’s plans to have her sit at the table with them.  Hopefully she’ll love it!  All the girls have been invited to wear their “princess dresses,” whatever that means to them, and Maggie doesn’t yet know that Kim will be coming as Snow White!  It’ll be interesting to see whether Kim comes “in character” (she used to be various princesses on Disney cruise lines so she really knows how it’s done) and whether Maggie will be excited to see Snow White or disturbed if Kim insists that her name is Snow White.  Four is such an unpredictable age….sometimes.

We’re serving “Pink Pink Lemonade,” as Maggie calls it.  I bought a can of pink lemonade concentrate and another of raspberry lemonade concentrate and asked her which she wanted, and she said she wanted the pink one.  Later I explained that raspberry lemonade is pink, too.  Then she got all excited and said we could mix them and then we’d have “pink pink lemonade!”  We’ll have peanut butter and jam sandwiches, cut into heart shapes, and cucumber sandwiches, cut into triangles.  And I made chocolate covered strawberries this afternoon, so I think they’ll like that (moms too!).  And we have a honeydew melon and grapes in the fridge, so if there’s time I may make melon balls and skewer them and the grapes with toothpicks for fun.

Yesterday I baked the cake, which I have yet to decorate.  My mom made me doll cakes when I was growing up and I adored them!  She gave me her cake pan this summer when we were visiting and now Maggie wants one.  I’m excited and nervous–I’m not half the cake decorator my mother is, and that’s not false modesty.  But I would love to make Maggie feel as good as I did when I got those beautiful cakes and it’ll be a fun challenge.  I want it to look something like this one from my fourth birthday, only in pink.

The one thing Maggie asked for specifically is a pinata.  I know, it doesn’t seem very princess-y to hit a candy-filled container with a bat while blindfolded, but Degen had one and Dora the Explorer had one, and she wants one.  And guess where I found a PRINCESS PINATA… At the dollar store!   How could I say no when I could give her her dream for $1?  So, we’re going to play musical statues and hit the pinata as activities (Maggie wanted to do “pin the tiara on the princess” earlier, but I’m hoping she’s forgotten about that).

I’ve got pink and white streamers for decorating the deck in the morning and I talked to the florist at the grocery store this morning and she said that they arrive at 6am, so we might do some helium balloons with those streamers if I’m feeling particularly relaxed.  If not, no one will know they were a possibility.

The favors will be the candy and toys (dollar store necklaces, ring pops, fun size twix and reeses, and some dollar store princess watches) from the pinata, plus a couple of princess-y accessories set next to their places at the table.  We’ve got dollar store tiaras (4/$1) and plastic jewel earrings (also 4 pairs/$1) and scepter wands (8/$1).  And I’ve still got to have Maggie decorate those white paper bags for the girls to take their things home in.  I hope I don’t forget!

I still haven’t talked to Maggie about what she’s going to wear for her princess outfit, though I’m counting on her going for her fairy princess costume from last Halloween or for a church dress.  And Degen protests that he’s definitely NOT a prince, though he does want to participate in the birthday festivities…so we’ll see how that goes.  I think Heidi will happily put on a pretty dress.  Oooohh…maybe I should do light pink icing on that cake since we’re having princesses in fancy dresses over.  I wonder if that’s why Mom chose yellow for my cake–I’ll bet it washes out easier.

I also need to make a Happy Birthday banner for the kitchen for Saturday (a Bushman tradition, those banners), plus maybe a sign for the front door for Friday.   And I suppose this evening I could cut some flowers in the garden for the tables. And I should set out chairs for the adults on the deck as well as the kids.  And I should have Colin help Maggie pick out a playlist on his iPod of music for the musical statues game.  Oh!  And I just read this idea to pre-scoop ice cream into paper cupcake liners that I may do.  I hate scooping ice cream under pressure.

Hopefully I’ll remember everything.  I’m planning on taking a photo of all the girls together in their princess finery and then printing the photo out and having Maggie help me write thank you notes on the back.  But if I’m going to do that, I have to remember to TAKE the photo!

Here’s my party schedule:

Kids arrive, play musical statues

Sit down at tables: tiaras, earrings,

Snow White arrives: lemonade & sandwiches

Pinata

Cake and ice cream

Open presents

Hopefully that will take up our hour and a half and the girls will go home happy and content.

For those of you researching for princess party ideas online like I was, here are some other good and inexpensive ideas I came across, but that I’m not going to do…

Favors: glitter, feather boas, lip balm, light colored nail polish, princess stickers

Activities: Make crowns, decorate cupcakes, play princess dress-up with goodwill prom dresses and mom’s accessories (or make it a relay!), string candy necklaces, practice walking with books on your head like a princess, build cookie castles (like gingerbread houses)

Food: cheese cubes on toothpicks, cream cheese and jam sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, anything cut into a heart or crown shape with cookie cutters, frosted sugar cookies with sugar glitter, olives (4 year old princesses look lovely with hands bedecked in olives), cupcakes, castle cake

Decorations: red carpet (made of tulle or felt or tissue paper or plastic tablecloth), “welcome to the castle” or “Last Name Kingdom” sign at entrance, tulle canopy

Long before I read Seth Godin’s How to Title Stuff or Alex Witze’s SAA: How to title your paper I myself went to college, and there spent a lot of time mocking firsthand the evolution of sassy subtitles.  Back in the day you would write a man’s title for your paper: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”  There was only one subtitle, which was “My paper,” and beyond 6th grade it was implied.  Now every paper has a subtitle, and every student apparently plays Rock Paper Scissors to decide on which line to put the real title and on which to put the joke-title.  The youngest undergraduates  have never seen a real title on either line.  The portfolio-generation only knows to put their name and an unpronounceable symbol representing their feelings.  Even the Ph.D.s don’t go beyond “Tom Saw… what?: Visual Imagery in Twain’s Eleventh Book.”  And when those kids get out of school and quit writing papers gratia commentarii, they title everything in the only way they know how.  Grown up they wield a billion dollars to take a drug to market, then name it Abilify or The Purple Pill.  Demonstrative names are passé–marketing requires feelings and impressions.  Cars, chidren, recipes…

Imitating one’s grandma or her pies is old fashioned now. So for every child named “Boyce” there is a correlative apple pie christened “Freestyle Fuji: The Motion Streusel.”  If you look in a recipe book for “apple pie,” more often than not you’ll be sent to the impressionistically “apple pie -ish” section (because who looks under “freestyle”?)  If it’s a hip book, nothing in that section will use the word “pie,” and rarely will it use the word “apple.”  Ask a waitress what kind of pies they have for dessert and she’s just as likely to say “Rustic Autumn” as “apple.”   A bit of that is understandable–specialization generates perceived value, funky ingredients generate perceived value, and everyone wants a memorable name to prove that imitating oneself is the highest form of self-flattery.  The naming schemes that once were reserved for restaurants in San Francisco (“Slalom”, “Maisonchienne”, “Shack!”) have now mated with your friendly neighborhood meatloaf.

As such I remind the world of the following dessert-taxonomy equation from the Bethanyology Manual of Style:

Author + Adjective1 + Main Ingredient by Weight + Adjective2
* There must be at least one adjective, and at least one adjective must reference a desciptor, common to the region, of the style of cooking.

The BMOS taxonomy is what most cookbook publishers use, partially because it allows a lot of leverage.  So “Grandma Becky’s Rustic Rhubarb Flambé” is pretty far out there, but no less legal than “Mary’s fried chicken.”  The moving streusel referenced above is more properly rendered “Slalom’s Fuji Apple Pie.”  (Some restaurant review guides, in 2009, will allow “Slalom presents… Fuji Apple Pie.)  But notice the name, which shows humility because it does not vainly pretend that this is the definitive pie, but Slalom’s entry into an established and rotund corpus.  Subtitles are still allowed, as are descriptors on a menu, so you do have quite a wide range of freedom if your marketing absolutely needs something bastardized.

If you have any questions or are interested in having your menu audited and certified, please contact us below.

I fed my kids and myself waffles for dinner tonight.  Not homemade waffles, which are superior to anything else in every way except prep time/effort.  We ate Eggo waffles for dinner, with syrup on top.  Not pure maple syrup, but a simple sugar syrup flavored with immitation maple flavoring that I made myself a while back. I remember when I was little I always wanted to fill each individual waffle hole with syrup before eating and hardly ever got to do it before Mom or Dad stopped me, protesting the amount of sugar and the number of diners left to share the syrup with.  “Save some fore Virginia!”  Did I do that tonight?  No, but I remembered it while I ate and it made me smile to think that I could do it if I wanted to.

This unhealthy fare was a celebration, or perhaps an adamant denial, in honor of my bloodwork results from my prenatal doctor appointment last week that I found online today when I logged in to my insurance web page for the first time.  My blood sugar was a point over normal on my gestational diabetes glucose one-hour screening test.  Very likely when my OB gets back from vacation tomorrow she’ll be calling me to let me know I have to go in to take the 3-hour version of the glucose intolerance test, and I consider it even more likely that I’ll test positive for gestational diabetes.  And that means no waffles with syrup for a few months unless I’m willing to starve one morning in favor of a few bites of one of my favorite foods.

So, before the diagnosis is official, and before that placenta gets big enough to cause serious blood sugar spiking, I had myself a good stack of waffles.  I miss breakfast food when I’m on a diabetes diet.  For breakfast on that diet, I can have a total meal of about one Eggo with a dollop of Cool Whip (no syrup) if I want to go the waffle route.  Or half a cup of breakfast cereal with half a cup of milk.  I can have all the eggs and bacon and sausage I want, but through some sad twist of irony eggs and bacon and sausage all make me nauseous to one degree or another during most of my pregnancy.  Strawberries and cantaloupe are better choices with larger volumes allowed, but I sure miss those breakfast grains.

I get that an official diagnosis won’t change whether I actually have it now or not.  It’s still not good for me, diabetes or not, to have that much sugar.  And posting this confession will hardly do anything for my arguments against the nearly intolerable fasting glucose intolerance test involving the stupidity of having a possibly diabetic person drink a huge amount of glucose and shocking her sugar-processing system.  But my waffle eating ritual calmed my misgivings about whether I can stand going through this process again.  I really don’t want any more waffles.  I think I can probably actually survive the next six months on a small brownie square interspersed here and there among my healthier alternatives.  I am steeled for the news, prepared as much as I can be.

P.S. I also ate an artichoke with my waffles.  I feel pretty good about that.

So what’s for breakfast?  Wheat Thins.  I’m having room-temperature crackers for breakfast.  Crackers I have to ask my kids for permission to eat.  Degen holds the box, I say “May I please have some more?” and he carefully considers his answer each time before answering “uuuuuhhh..sure!” and handing me one cracker (sometimes one half-eaten cracker).  In all fairness, while I was typing the above he got impatient waiting for my plea and said “You want some more?”  When I answered affirmatively, he of course gave me one more cracker.  He’s really very generous for a three year old.

I’m sitting here trying to think of foods that sound good enough to eat.  Donuts…with chocolate frosting on top.  Strawberries.  Waffles with syrup.  Cantaloupe.  I could probably eat a burrito or chicken noodle soup.  And I can’t think of anything else.  I don’t really have cravings when I’m pregnant–I have foods I don’t hate.  And that list of foods gets smaller and smaller with each pregnancy because the foods I binged on in the last pregnancy are particularly disgusting to me this time around.   Hopefully I won’t have so many kids that I run out of foods to not hate!

I’m not really trying as hard as I “should” to keep the carbs to a minimum right now.  With my history of gestational diabetes I’m sure my doctor would say that putting waffles with syrup or donuts on my list of foods I can eat is totally inappropriate.  And keeping up with my exercise routine would be especially helpful right now, too.  The stress of moving and morning sickness, however, say otherwise.  Maybe I’ll try to take the kids swimming later today…

Today, April 30th, is 31 cent scoop night at Baskin Robbins!  Really!  See their web page here if you don’t believe me.  To honor the nation’s firefighters, selected Baskin Robbins stores sell small ice cream scoops for 31 cents tonight from 5pm to 10pm, and they donate $100,000 to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.   Isn’t that lovely?  I’m thinking since they have a no-sugar-added chocolate chocolate chip flavor that just fits into my 30-grams-of-carbs evening snack, we might be on our way over there tonight.

Speaking from some experience with cooking only with stored food, it’s important to store some food and learn how to cook with it.  Even if you only eat out every day and every meal and have a tiny apartment, it’s worth having some backup food just in case you have a natural disaster or unemployment hit your family longer or harder than you expect.  Even when we’re running low on money, I’ve tried to keep a well-stocked pantry with canned fruits, veggies (tomato products are a staple in our house), beans (I try to store a lot of beans since they’re high protein, low carb, and high fiber and our resident diabetic shouldn’t do too much in the way of carbs), and packages of pasta, dry beans, rice, flour, sugar, some dry milk powder, spices, baking powder, baking soda, and yeast.  Some weeks are a lot better than others in our pantry, but I do make some effort.

When we’ve run out of money and had to live on our food storage for a while, the things I miss most are milk, cheese, and eggs.  Powdered milk isn’t as yummy as fresh when you drink it or put it in cereal, though it’s hard to tell the difference when you mix them 1/2 and 1/2, but it’s great in anything cooked.  I’ve never tried to store more than a week or two worth of cheese or eggs, but I recently found out you can buy them dehydrated and would like to get some one of these days. We also missed fresh fruit and veggies, but it helped that we had a lot of canned ones (and things like jello).  Storing things like cake mixes, instant pudding, and other sweets and “comfort foods” helped too, since we only have to survive on food storage when we’re stressed out and having favorite foods around helps make things seem a little less unbearable.

I don’t have a wheat grinder (one of those “someday” items that I’d love to buy myself), but I saw my mom make pancakes with whole wheat kernels in the blender once.  I found a recipe for banana bread today that called for whole wheat flour and I thought “I wonder if I could just blend up some of my wheat in that can in the closet and use that in the recipe?”  I didn’t ever get around to trying it, but while I was trying to look it up, I came across a really neat site called Walton Feed where they sell dehydrated foods and have lots of ideas on how compile a food storage and then use it on a regular basis.  They even have a pita recipe that sounds promising.  Another post on pita coming soon…

What about the rest of the description?  Well, the same cut of meat can be called a bunch of things.  In Googling how to cook my roast, I discovered a lovely site that may prove to solve my meat-labeling issues: The Cook’s Thesaurus.  Google took me to a page within this site that provided a reasonable explanation to this (and other) food jargon issue.  Here’s what it had to say about my roast:

The chuck section comes from the shoulder and neck of the beef, and it yields some of the most flavorful and economical cuts of meat.  The downside is that these cuts tend to be tough and fatty, and they have more than their fair share of bone and gristle.  It’s usually best to cook them slowly in a liquid.

shoulder roast = shoulder pot roast = English roast   Notes: This boneless cut is located right behind the arm roast on the carcass.  It’s rather tough, so it’s usually cooked in a liquid.   Substitutes: arm roast OR bottom round OR cross rib roast

Isn’t that lovely?!  Now I know how to cook it and what other names could be used for it.  And if I ever want to cook it again and can’t find a store that sells it under the “English Roast” name, I’ll be able to ask a butcher for the equivalent or a substitute in an educated way.

Speaking of butchers, there’s nothing worse than talking to a butcher you don’t know about something neither of you may know anything about.  I admit, I don’t know my meat-mongers at all. But I always wonder as I pass the meat counter whether they really know anything about meat (or cooking meat) beyond how to cut it.   They seem to always be hiding out, nearly out of sight, behind the counter just hoping that no one will bug them.  They also seem to usually be really short, skinny people who may or may not speak English.  Probably my love for Fiddler on the Roof has tainted my ideal of “the great butcher” by making me think that a butcher has to be a big, muscular, dominant man with an impressive personal presence exuding expertise in the field of all things meaty.  Why can’t I have a Lazar Wolf butcher? If you’ve never seen the movie, you can see Lazar Wolf at work about 2 minutes into this video:

Silly side note: Isn’t “thesaurus” a funny word?  It’s like the name of a dinosaur.  Or THE dinosaur.  Hmmmm…

What about the rest of the description?  Well, the same cut of meat can be called a bunch of things.  In Googling how to cook my roast, I discovered a lovely site that may prove to solve my meat-labeling issues: The Cook’s Thesaurus.  Google took me to a page within this site that provided a reasonable explanation to this (and other) food jargon issue.  Here’s what it had to say about my roast:

The chuck section comes from the shoulder and neck of the beef, and it yields some of the most flavorful and economical cuts of meat.  The downside is that these cuts tend to be tough and fatty, and they have more than their fair share of bone and gristle.  It’s usually best to cook them slowly in a liquid.

shoulder roast = shoulder pot roast = English roast   Notes: This boneless cut is located right behind the arm roast on the carcass.  It’s rather tough, so it’s usually cooked in a liquid.   Substitutes: arm roast OR bottom round OR cross rib roast

Isn’t that lovely?!  Now I know how to cook it and what other names could be used for it.  And if I ever want to cook it again and can’t find a store that sells it under the “English Roast” name, I’ll be able to ask a butcher for the equivalent or a substitute in an educated way.

Speaking of butchers, there’s nothing worse than talking to a butcher you don’t know about something neither of you may know anything about.  I admit, I don’t know my meat-mongers at all. But I always wonder as I pass the meat counter whether they really know anything about meat (or cooking meat) beyond how to cut it.   They seem to always be hiding out, nearly out of sight, behind the counter just hoping that no one will bug them.  They also seem to usually be really short, skinny people who may or may not speak English.  Probably my love for Fiddler on the Roof has tainted my ideal of “the great butcher” by making me think that a butcher has to be a big, muscular, dominant man with an impressive personal presence exuding expertise in the field of all things meaty.  Why can’t I have a Lazar Wolf butcher? If you’ve never seen the movie, you can see Lazar Wolf at work about 2 minutes into this video:

Silly side note: Isn’t “thesaurus” a funny word?  It’s like the name of a dinosaur.  Or THE dinosaur.  Hmmmm…