bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Short ribs.

    My favorite cut of beef for the slow cooker:  short ribs.  Browned under the broiler and dropped into the crock pot, they don't look appetizing at all — so fatty, and so full of connective tissue and clunky rib bones.  Add a cup or so of a barbecue-type sauce, and nine hours later all that connective tissue and fat has melted into a rich gelatinous sheen that coats the beef, falling into shreds between the tongs.

     
    "Easiest Beef Short Ribs" is the title of this recipe from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, which I'm paraphrasing here and altering slightly to match what I did this evening.  We served this over very plain, very soft polenta — just cornmeal, water, and salt — and the combination was absolutely luxurious.

    1 Tbsp olive oil
    1 big yellow onion finely chopped
    3/4 c ketchup
    1/4 c soy sauce
    3 Tbsp cider vinegar
    3 Tbsp packed brown sugar
    2.5 to 4 lbs beef short ribs

    Sauté the onion in the oil till softened.  Add ketchup, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar; stir and heat 5 minutes.

    Broil the ribs till well browned.  Stick 'em in the slow cooker and pour the sauce on top.  Cook on Low 7-9 hours.

    Transfer the meat to a dish, shredding or slicing the meat and removing bone and gristle.  Let the sauce cool a bit.

    Here the recipe suggests spooning extra fat off the top and pouring the sauce over.  But what I did is strain the sauce into a gravy separator, reserving the onion solids and tossing them with the meat, and cooking down the (somewhat – I can't wait forever) defatted gravy with a little cornstarch.  As I said above, I served it over polenta, which I made in the other crockpot.  Mashed potatoes would be the next best thing.

    On the side, you don't want anything too rich.  I had grated raw carrot dressed with lemon and salt, sliced raw red bell peppers, and steamed Brussels sprouts.  

    Enjoy.  I know I had a little too much of it!

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  • Report card.

    I wanted to get into the habit of providing quarterly evaluations for Oscar for our records and to give him some feedback on how things are going.  I hemmed and hawed about percentages, numbers, letter grades, and so on, and finally decided just to write out an evaluation in text.  So, for example, in handwriting (the subject I guess he'd care the least about his evaluation winding up on the Internet),

    In 9 weeks, Oscar has completed Lessons 1-6 as
    assigned. His writing is legible and quite neat when he takes care,
    less neat when he hurries. He needs practice on  capital letters and
    on connecting the letters b, o, v, r, w     with the other letters.   


    I was glad I took the time to do it, because the act of reflecting on how much we've accomplished in nine weeks made me feel a lot better about making the last two weeks half-weeks so I could clean my house.  Also, actually examining our progress instead of relying on my vague unstated impressions helped me find a couple of places where we have quite a bit of room for improvement.  For example, based on how Latin is going, I've decided to slow down and do one lesson in two weeks rather than one.  And I've realized we ought to be doing math faster, so I'm going to buckle down and try for four lessons per week.  

    I handed a copy of my "report card" to Mark and told him to read it and go over the contents with Oscar.  They're upstairs discussing it right now.  It's funny, some parents have to play "good cop bad cop" with their kids; sometimes it seems we have to play "I'm the teacher, you're the parent."

    Conferences can be pretty fun that way, of course.

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  • Weight maintenance.

    That’s the name of my newest of two categories.  [Update.  I’ve since recategorized.]

     

    I am not at goal yet — that’s 108 lbs, BMI of 22 for my height of 4’11”, as I noted in the comments to this post after MrsDarwin asked for a reminder.  The average of my last five daily weighings is 111, so let’s say that’s where I am.

     

    But it’s probably time to make that category.  Because it’s time for the transition to begin.

     

    The secret of the transition is to realize there is no transition, not really.  I would like to say that I can never go back.  Instead, it’s apparent that I am free to go back — to my old ways — to a life of finishing a medium pizza by myself at one sitting, to a life where I both fill up on appetizers and eat a full dinner, to a life where the feeling of full-to-bursting is the only way I know I’ve eaten “enough,” to a life where I eat when I’m already full, faster and more food than politeness requires, to a life where indulging once becomes indulging twice, three times, again.

     

    Free to go back, and free to be back where I was a year ago.

     

    And equally free not to go back.

     

    So.  With the help of the sacraments — and I mean this one hundred percent, because two crucial turning points have been one meeting in the Eucharist and one meeting in the confessional — I firmly resolve to transition to… no transition at all.

     

    Anyway, I’ll continue to post on weight loss under both categories for a while, but I intend to switch to the new weight maintenance category before long.

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    1 comment on Weight maintenance.

  • Why does your little girl like to play “princess?”

    Virginia Postrel at the very cool DeepGlamour.net wants you to find out.

    Peggy Orenstein's 2006 NYT Magazine story is the most in-depth examination of the question (and the business) that I've found. It's a good read, but ultimately unsatisfying. Orenstein brings too many political preconceptions to the topic and, while she quotes her princess-loving daughter to good narrative effect, she offers almost no information about what girls who play princess themselves think it means to be a princess.

    For my book research, I'd like to hear from the little princesses themselves. Ideally, I'd find some brilliant, scientifically rigorous research by a child psychologist. But I haven't so far. So, since preschoolers are not the easiest interview subjects, I'm enlisting adults who know little princesses (preferably those older and more articulate than Anna Margaret) to ask them for me–Why do you like to be a princess? What does it mean to be a princess?–and write down the answers. 


    Because I think it's awesome that somebody actually wants to listen to children, rather than to grown-up pundits who assume they know what children think, I'm linking.  Go ask your little princess, tell Ms. Postrel, and pass it on.

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  • Volume.

    Along the way while I was losing all that weight this year, I kept picking up new diet books, mostly just to keep myself obsessing about it since that seemed to work so well.  (I'm obsessing less now — and the rate of loss has slowed considerably.  I  stand at 112, a couple of weeks after standing at 113.)  I also hoped that some of them would contain some tips and tricks that I could adopt here and there.

    One of those books was The Volumetrics Eating Plan.  There is not much extra wisdom to be gained from the diet advice.  It suggests eating fewer calories by consuming more vegetables and fiber and lowering fat content. (One nice difference: it recommends using enough fat in meals to help you feel happy and satisfied, and dropping the extra that you won't notice.  I appreciate that acknowledgment that going fat-free is not much fun and probably not worth the trouble for a lot of us.)  

     

    Its new concept, though, I've been happy to add to my toolbox.  This is — plump your recipes up with lots of veggies, so they get bigger and more filling on fewer calories.  It's kind of obvious, but some of the recipes and photos in the book helped me think of some new and easy ways to do it.  

    Adding veggies to stuff to make it bigger is the easy part.  For example, yesterday Hannah brought noodles, beef, and some chopped vegetables to make lo mein for the kids' lunch.  We fed it to them as-is, but I also happened to have some raw-cabbage slaw in my fridge with only a vinegar-sugar dressing on it — we diluted our lo mein with a couple of cups of that.  It was great.  

    It also gave me the idea to replace things with green vegetables.  So, last week, I put my  chili on top of  cooked green beans instead of on top of a big old hunk of corn bread — I did crumble some of the corn bread on the top, which did away with the poor-me-I-get-no-corn-bread feeling.

    And you can do it backwards too — add stuff to your veggies to turn it into a meal.   I had some leftover roast broccoli/carrots/summer squash from a potluck a couple of days ago, and I added a little bit of cooked pasta, salad dressing, and grated parm to turn it into a fantastic pasta salad (really more of a veg salad with a little pasta).

    Anyway, it's maybe a better book to leaf through in the bookstore than to buy, but I did find it more than a little helpful.

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  • Baked bean sandwich.

    One of my new favorite vegetarian dinners is slow-cooked baked beans — you know, the sweet kind with molasses and maple syrup — Boston brown bread (more maple syrup in that), and veggies, preferably including cabbage of some kind.  We had it last night. I stir-fried the cabbage with onion, and steamed green beans to serve on the side.

    The baked beans take some planning.  The small white beans have to be soaked overnight, then cooked for a couple of hours in plain water in the slow cooker.  Then I drain the beans and put them into the slow cooker — at about 9 pm — with ketchup, maple syrup, molasses, a peeled onion studded with a few cloves, salt, 1 tsp baking soda, and pepper.  I top it off with boiling water from the kettle, a half-inch past the top of the beans.  It cooks on low all night and all the next day. By dinner time — twenty hours after I started the cooker, and two days after I put the beans in to soak — the top is crusty brown caramel and the middle is soft and mushy, and it's sweet all the way through.

    I suppose I could serve it with meat, and my choice would be a grilled ham steak, but why bother?  The kids eat the brown bread and the beans, and everyone's full and happy by the end of the evening.

     Today I'm going to have a baked bean sandwich for lunch.  Some yummy ideas in there.  I can't decide — should I mix it with celery, onion, and walnuts, and eat it cold, or warm it up and spread it on bread and eat it open faced with a fried egg on top?  The bacon sounds good, but I'm not planning on bacon today.  Whatever — I intend to enjoy it.

    UPDATE:  I went with the celery/onion/nuts version, using pecans.  Indeed, very yummy.  I think there is no way I will be hungry again before dinner.

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  • More reactions.

    I'm kind of collecting reasoned reactions from around the blogosphere.  DarwinCatholic has one worth highlighting for its thoughtfulness.  I especially agree with his admonitions to the GOP:


    There is still a constituency (even in "blue" states) for social conservatism, but a significant number of those who hold traditional views on social issues are Hispanic or African American. The GOP would be especially wise to find a way to appeal to socially conservative Hispanics. The best way of doing this would probably be getting behind an agenda of massively simplifying the immigration process, increasing immigration quotas (especially for Central and South America), and at then enforcing the law rigorously.

    Conservatives need to find a way to seem like they care (and the amounts of time and money conservatives put into social issues show that they do care) without advocating big government solutions to local problems. Bush simply went the big government route, with programs like No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Drug Benefit. What we need is instead an approach to a range of "safety net" issues which, like charter school and vouchers have done for education, can be a national issue yet a force towards localization.


    As an aside, on this other line:


    I must admit, as a 29-year-old who grew up in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles, I've figured for basically all my life that it's simply a matter of time till we had our first black president, our first hispanic president, our first female president, etc. 


    I'm 34 and I've always figured the same way.    I think it's really important, though, to acknowledge that older Americans have a longer experience of relative color-sensitivity and a shorter experience of relative color-blindness.   When you expect discrimination, you have different inputs into your moral calculus.  (My own very liberal mom, who came of age in the mid-60s, told me once that interracial marriage was a bad idea, because society would not treat the children of those marriages justly.)  And there's a difference between "figuring it's simply a matter of time" and "expecting to see it in your own lifetime."  I suspect that a lot of the celebration has to do with the latter.  I mean, it's simply a matter of time till the next New Year's Eve or till my tenth wedding anniversary, but I'll still raise a glass to toast each when it comes.

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  • Something that jumped out at me in a story about the new First Family.

    In the Strib this a.m.

    "When the girls and their mother have needed an escape, they could retreat to the backyards of longtime friends, where they jumped rope or turned up the volume on their iPods and danced with abandon to songs by Soulja Boy and Beyonce. Michelle Obama, a creature of the South Side and of habit, has spent nearly every Saturday for the past 10 years with the same two friends and their collective brood of children.


    "Now, all of that must change."


    Good for her, and for her kids, for having those connections.  I hope they maintain them, somehow, over the next few years.

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  • It’s so nice to see that at least one election went my way.

    From John Scalzi's Whatever, recently added to my LBILTRTKMHOOTEC* collection.  "Just sent to me, the result of the most important election last night."

    Baconvsfries_2

    Now there's a result I can get behind.

    *lefty blogs I like to read to keep my head out of the echo chamber

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  • Jen nails it.

    "How would you know?"


    … [T]he advice I would offer to my children, and to my children's children:
    Every decade or so, take a look around the society in which you live, and ask yourself if there is any group of human beings who are seen as something less than human. A big tipoff is if dehumanizing words — terms other than "man," "woman," "child," "baby," or "person" — are used to describe any category of people.

    And if you ever see that going on, you might be in the midst of something gravely evil.

    Yes.  

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  • Another meal-sharing idea.

    One of the things Hannah and I do on Tuesdays is make dinner.  She plans it and buys the groceries; we make it together, at her house (since right now our schedule has me at her place every week); and I take my family's share home.

    We used to alternate weeks, one at my house and the next at hers, and we figured that made us even.  When we switched to all Tuesdays at Hannah's, we agreed that I'd compensate her for the extra planning and cost two ways:  (1) I'd bring lunch and tea-snack, and (2) I'd give her a dinner's worth of meat out of my freezer each week.   It works pretty well.  I miss doing the planning every other week, and making stuff together that my family loves but that I hate to do single-handed — e.g. calzones and samosas — but what goes around comes around, and sooner or later we'll have some other arrangement.

    Yesterday, not long after we'd all enjoyed the crockpot full of hot dogs and sauerkraut I'd brought for lunch, Hannah was about to thaw meat for a lasagna that we were to make together.  I opened her fridge, looking for the ricotta, and saw about a quart of chili left over from Ben's birthday party on Sunday.  There were still two pans of the accompanying cornbread on the counter.  "Hey Hannah!"  I called down the stairs.  "Before you get the meat out, I have a proposal."

    "What?"

    "How about I just take all that leftover chili  home in my crockpot?  And the corn bread?  And a bag of frozen vegetables?"

    "All right!" she called up.  "We've been eating that stuff for days!  My family'll eat crackers and summer sausage tonight!"

    That was easy.

    It got me thinking.  One of the reasons Hannah and I usually make dinner together on Tuesdays is because it's a pleasant job for us to do together.  We like chopping and stirring as we discuss the weekend past and the rest of the week ahead.  And it's kind of fun to discover new recipes together — foodies that we are.   It's also great because, dinner freshly made, we don't have to end our day together early just so we can each put dinner on the table.   I hope we don't have to  change our schedule anytime soon.  But yesterday, pressed for time because each of us spent more than an hour voting (that's another story), I was content to serve my family her family's seconds.  (Fortified a bit with an extra can of chili beans.)

    She warned me it was really bland chili, made to suit her kids' tastes.  She was right, it was really bland, but in a really satisfying, stick to your ribs, bean-stuffed, comfort-food way.  We ate it all, yum, and my family drenched the corn bread with honey and ate that too.  I poured my chili atop the slender cooked green beans, crumbled the cornbread on top, and couldn't finish it all, it was so filling.

    Anyway, I was thinking — another model for families who get together in the afternoon, if they don't have time to actually cook together, could be the Leftover Swap.  

    Let's say Jane gets together with her friend Sue every Wednesday afternoon for a cup of tea.  On Tuesday night, Jane's family eats lasagna, salad and green beans on the side.  Meanwhile, Sue cooks up a brimming pot of chicken vegetable soup, with fruit salad and saltine crackers.

     On Wednesday, Jane brings the lasagna, plus extra bagged salad and bagged frozen green beans to Sue's house.  They have their tea, the children play.  At five Jane goes home with Sue's leftover chicken soup and fruit salad and the extra box of crackers that Sue remembered to buy at the store.  Sue pops the lasagna in the oven, tosses the salad with her own favorite dressing, and boils the green beans for a quick side dish.

    I like it.  You each cook once and eat leftovers, but since they're somebody else's leftovers, they're not the same thing you had last night.  I think it would work best with a regular arrangement, but you could also do it for get togethers planned only one day ahead; I bet everybody reading this could make at least one full meal, on short notice, with enough to share for another family.  Heck, I probably have enough Spanish rice in my crockpot right now to feed two families, at least if they didn't have any teenage boys.

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  • Getting it together.

    Yesterday Hannah and I sat down with our end-of-day cup of tea and grinned at each other.

    What a great day.  Already we're seeing results.

    We agreed that the most important ingredient of our new, togetherness-focused schooling day is me spending time teaching her kids, and her spending time teaching mine.  Those stitches tend to draw us all together.  It's challenging, but we're learning so much about each other.  And although there was some pushback the first couple of times, I'm already seeing her Ben's shy grin a lot more brightly than I was just a couple of weeks ago, and she's already seeing my Milo respond cheerfully to his reading lessons with her.

    Milo and Silas, our second-borns, are starting a new identity as "study buddies," now that we are doing their lessons together.  They are not at the same level; but we sit them next to each other, and they take turns each doing one page of their reading lessons.  They share a pencil between them, passing it back and forth.  They listen and watch as the other does math, roughly the same level, one with Saxon and the other with Singapore Math.  They had Bible stories together yesterday; Hannah discussed the Beatitudes with them while I guided Ben and Oscar through Latin drill (each at his own level).

    And…

    And…

    There's so much less fighting!  Everyone is getting along better.  I'm not making it up — we are seeing results already.

    Today it felt for the first time not like a scarily difficult thing — what we're doing now, me teaching hers and her teaching mine and drawing everybody together — but like an exciting new challenge.

    Possibly some of that feeling came from the extra coffee in the middle of the day.

    But I think it's real.

    Ben wrote out the sentence I dictated to the bigger boys today without complaint — and he accepted my corrections of his spelling, capitalization, and mechanics and recopied it without hesitation!  Hannah assures me this is a big deal.  Oscar complains less about his workload when we write the to-do list for "Ben and Oscar" than when he's got his own and Ben's got his.  Both of them listened with rapt attention today to our American History book — several chapters from a biography of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas — even though the chapters were mostly about debates before the Spanish court.  They paid attention!  I asked questions — and at least one of them knew the answers!

    And we both agreed, too, that the effort to connect with each of the children — mostly each other's children — is spilling over into our own families.  Things are better in our own homes.  We are so continuing this into the future.  Every day it is getting easier.

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