bearing blog

I'm posting reruns this week.  Today's post is from August 2007.

And before we get into it – Don't forget about the homeschooling space Flickr pool contest.   Coming up soon!

————

DarwinCatholic has a post pointing to a report of an intriguing study.  Convenience foods don't help you get dinner on the table faster — they help you get more elaborate dinners on the table.

Interesting!  But I want to know what is meant by "prepackaged convenience food."  The article says that convenience foods "tend to be high in preservatives, unhealthy fats and sodium. tend to be high in preservatives, unhealthy fats and sodium."  But then, at the end of the article, a short list of examples from a "convenience" dinner includes "prebagged salad" and "bagged dinner rolls," while a "from scratch" dinner includes "bread."   (The "convenience" dinner also included "macaroni and cheese."  I guess I'm to infer that it came from a box; perhaps the reporter, like one of my mother's amazed co-workers on seeing Mom's lunchtime leftovers, doesn't know there's any other kind?)

I got a copy of the text of the article, which is Beck ME, "Dinner preparation in the modern United States," British Food Journal v.109 n.7 pp.531-547 (2007).  Here Beck defines her terms:

Commercial foods, as the term is used here, are either purchased as ready-to-eat or prepared by the home cook entirely according to package directions.  "Commercial foods" are similar to "convenience foods", formally defined elsewhere as "fully or partially prepared foods in which significant preparation time, culinary skills, or energy inputs have been transferred from the home kitchen to the food processor and distributor" (Capps et al., 1985).   Time saving is not considered in this definition of commercial foods, because time can be measured independently.  Emphasized instead is the lack of independent handling and preparation… Such foods are often highly processed, because increased processing tends to remove the possibility of independent decisions in dish completion.

I was wondering if canned single ingredients, like tomatoes or tuna, counted as convenience/commercial food.   It turns out that they are:

The following items were not considered to be commercial ingredients for the purposes of this analysis:  spices, seasonings, or marinades; dairy products…; dried pasta; ready-made tortillas…; and frozen edamame (soybeans) in their pods.  Commercial items include prepared meats such as hot dogs and pepperoni as well as vegetarian versions… They also include purchased tomato or alfredo sauces, rice in flavored rice mixes and pre-measured boil-in bags (but not non-instant rice purchased loose in larger quantities), and frozen or canned vegetables (which are processed to the extent that they may be simply heated and served, without washing, trimming, or adding other ingredients).

What's with the amnesty for the frozen edamame?  Is it because they have pods?  Every restaurant that I know of serves it up in the pods as a finger food, kind of like shell-your-own-peanuts.   And what about the tortillas?  Sliced sandwich bread doesn't count as non-commercial [I presume — you would think they would mention it], but tortillas are OK? 

Here's a fascinating paragraph from the journal article:

Families in our study often served extra dishes to please individual family members who did not like the rest of the meal.  In their study of Italian-American families, Goode et al. (1984, p. 199) noted, "The way of handling the strong likes and dislikes of non-influential family members is to make them supplementary dishes or serve them leftovers" and argue that it is "a distinctly modern American pattern."  Other researchers have found that such accommodations to individual tastes are an accepted part of meal preparation in Italy, although they are often considered frustrating or annoying in the USA (Ochs et al., 1996).   Some parents in this study approached such requests with flat refusal or open resentment while acquiescing.

I was amused by the Goode et al. quote — "non-influential family members?"  Is that just code for "little kids?"  If so, how non-influential could they be if they got the cook to make something special just for them?  Anyway, since one of the points of the study is that people who don't use prepared food make simpler dinners with less dishes, a corollary here seems to be that if you make food from scratch you're less likely to make sure that picky Junior gets peanut butter AGAIN while the rest of the family eats moussaka.

I'm posting reruns this week.   Today's post is from October 2007.

——-

Every once in a while I have to step outside myself and take a critical look at how I'm feeling about this stay-at-home-mom thing.   It's a checkup, an "Are you still okay with this?  Haven't snapped yet?"   So far the answer is "Fine, thanks, no regrets, can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing."  I keep checking because intellectually I still find it a bit hard to believe that I can really be content in this life — two dozen years of jobs = exciting, motherhood = stifling conditioning dies hard.   When I first found myself at home, which happened before my PhD diploma even arrived in the mail, I must have asked myself every day or two.  The need to peek is getting less and less frequent as the months and now years (a bit more than 3) go by.  Maybe every two or three months now.  I guess I'm very slowly getting over myself.

One part of this examination is the question — Why am I content?  This is an interesting question because the answer keeps changing.  It seemed at first to be because I was getting a badly needed break from working so damn hard, like I was on vacation with my kids.  After a few months of that, the answer seemed to change; now I was content because I recognized that my chosen field didn't suit me, nor I it; it was good to be at home, where I could get my head together and figure out what I was really going to do with my life.   A few more years in and it is finally sinking in that this is what I am doing with my life.  Whether it's what I should be doing is kind of irrelevant; every morning I wake up and I do a certain set of things, and what they make me is a parent at home, a homemaker, a homeschooler.

Not someone on vacation (though many days still feel that way) and not someone taking time off from real life.  This is my real life.  Sometimes I like to imagine that I can go back in time and find myself when I was a senior in high school and tell her what lies in store.  I have some bad news and some good news.  Well, actually, most of it is really good news, but it's not going to sound good from where you're sitting, Little Miss Excellent SAT Scores.  Heh.

So I guess the question why am I content is even more interesting than before, to me anyway, because the answer used to be because this bizarre situation I find myself in is not really my real life, and since then I've realized that I was wrong, it's a permanent condition.  I don't have to answer it, it's wonderful enough that I am content, but I still keep holding this curiosity that is Erin-at-home-at-peace up to the light and squinting at it, looking for the flaw. 

I don't do it for very long, though, and each time less.  Eventually some perspective intrudes.  I should be embarrassed to be so self-absorbed.  The world is full of people who have dull, or difficult, or physically exhausting, or hateful, or painful, or treacherous jobs because they have to.  My "job" (whatever some may think) is not any of those things, at least no more than life must be once in a while.  All I need to remember:  How it would be to want to stay home with my kids and be unable to.   It's a swift kick in the butt that makes me especially thankful I'm where I am.

Rerunning old posts this week so I can get ready for school.  Today's post is from July 2007.

————

I played euchre in college.  Euchre is a four-person partnered card game, I started to write, trying to briefly summarize the rules, but now I'm giving up – here is the Wikipedia article if you need to know more.   It's one of those games that comes in endless variations.   Did I play Ace-no-face?  No thank you.  Screw-the-dealer?  Absolutely.   Nell-O?  Only in Kentucky.

In euchre, as in many card games, there's a certain etiquette, passed down in lore from player to player.  In central Ohio, for example, one emits a moo when one achieves nine points.  Message: I'm in the barn!  The most serious breach of etiquette — not including rule violations such as reneging — is summed up in the maxim Never trump your partner's ace.   Another piece of advice is Count on your partner to take one trick.

The bit of advice I remember most is If you can take a trick, take it.  (Wikipedia, helpfully, has anarticle about tricks.)  It's an important piece of advice for a beginner who might otherwise try to hold on to the "good" cards or who might be intimidated into leaning on the partner a bit too much.  The idea is simple:  When play comes around to you, and you see that you can play a high enough card — here, in this hand, this trick, right now — play it.  You might want to consider your move carefully — Don't, because you're holding up the game.  You might hope you'll look smart and strategic if you hold onto your good card and "throw off" now (play a low card that won't take this trick), saving the good card until the perfect time.  Don't — that time might not come, and you're not going to look so smart when everyone finds out that you could have taken a trick and didn't.  You might think that your partner will enjoy playing his high card here.   Don't yield to him yet (unless you're thinking of trumping his ace, of course) — remember, your partner is counting on you to take at least one.

I find that If you can take a trick, take it is a pretty good rule of thumb for housekeeping, and indeed for life in general.   It's not so overwhelming as a plan to win the whole game, or even a hand of the game (five tricks in a hand, three to ten hands in a game).   A trick is a tiny little victory.  Tricks add up to hands,  and hands add up to a win, so these tiny little victories matter.  On each one — and you rarely know while you're in it — the whole game might turn.   At the same time, though, when you see you can't take one, you let it go.    Just let it go.  Maybe your partner can play the card that'll take it, but if not — it's only one trick.

So if I'm passing through the kitchen on my way to the stairs and there's my husband's shoes on the floor and I could take two steps out of my way to grab 'em and take 'em up to the closet with me — or I might not – if I can take a trick, take it.  My partner can count on me for this one.  Up they go. 

Or if there's a mess on the floor under the baby's high chair, and I have a few minutes, but I'm thinkingLater on I'll be scrubbing the whole floor so why bother cleaning that up now? – I remember that I don't really know if I'm going to have that time, I don't know if I will win the whole hand, but I can take this trick. 

Or if I happen to be in the bathroom and it occurs to me that while I'm in here I could get a wipe from under the sink and quickly get the worst of the spots off the floor — that realization, plus the brief seconds of extra time I could use for it, is the "high enough card" to take that trick.  No point saving it for later; when the trump cards come out it'll be worthless.  If I can take a trick, take it.  Twenty seconds later I leave the bathroom a little bit cleaner than it was.

Or if I happen to be in a friend's bathroom, for that matter, if she has company, and I notice that her kids have left a little present smeared on the side of the toilet.  No, she would not expect me to clean it up.  I could go out and tell her quietly, "Hey, your toilet needs attention before your guests see it."  But the container of antibacterial wipes is just sitting there where I can see it.  So is some soap to wash my hands with.   You've heard the answer to But who is my neighbor?  Well, who is my partner in this game, hm?  Anybody who can count on me to take a trick, right?  Twenty seconds later I leave her bathroom a little bit cleaner than it was.

I find myself applying it to housecleaning because those particular opportunities for tiny victories are the ones I'm both likely to encounter and likely to let slip by.  But everyone's jobs, everyone's relationships, everyone's game has these little decisions.  Sooner or later play comes around to you, and you have a certain set of cards, and you have to decide whether to throw off.  If you think too hard you're holding up the game — that's why we have the rules of thumb.  If you can take a trick, take it.

What kind of tricks can you take today?

Don't forget about the homeschooling space Flickr pool contest.

This week I'm rerunning old posts.  (The first day of school looms.)  Today's  post is from July 2007.

————

This morning I placed a polyethylene bag full of fresh string beans on the kitchen counter in front of me.   I set a metal colander at my right hand.  I tore open the bag of beans.  With my left hand I picked up one bean and examined it briefly, turning it in my two hands until my left (dominant) hand grasped the stem end.  I pinched the bean just below the stem, between my index fingernail and the pad of my thumb; my left hand then held an amputated green-bean stem and my right hand held the long end of the bean.  I dropped the stem onto the counter and grasped the bean again, holding both ends, then broke it in half.  I passed the half held in my left hand to my right hand and with my right hand dropped both beans into the colander.  I picked up another bean.  The piles of stems to the left and beans to the right grew slowly.

There were about two and a half pounds of green beans to trim.  It's not a bad job; the mind can wander.  Today I thought about the way I was doing it.  Could I be more efficient?  I tried speeding up and dropped a bean.  No good.  I went over each step in my mind:

1. pick up random bean in left hand
2. grasp bean with right hand
3. rotate bean into position
4. pinch stem off bean
5. throw stem to the left
6. grasp end of bean with left hand
7. break bean with both hands
8. pass bean halves to right hand
9. put bean halves in colander to the right

Could I go faster if I pinched the stem off with my right hand?  I tried it for a couple of beans and concluded that my first unconscious choice, left-handed stem-pinching, had been the most reproducibly successful one; right-handed, I take off more stem than I usually want.  (Of course, I mused as I turned a bean between my fingers, it's not appropriate to think of the stem-removal operation as "left-handed" or "right-handed."  One hand steadies the bean, the other hand pinches the stem, and the person that manages the hands distributes the tasks as best as she can.)

Then I turned my attention to breaking the bean in half.  I realized that if I could alter step 7 by somehow breaking each bean in half with one hand — my right hand — I could eliminate steps 6 and 8.   After a little experimentation and practice, I was able to develop a one-handed, non-dominant-hand bean-snap.   

Pleased, I went on with the beans.  I did seem to be going faster.   But the question dogged me… was I going optimally fast?

As I worked, I realized with irritation that I was needlessly over-handling the beans.  I had learned in my earlier stem-pinching experiments that I could not eliminate step 2 without undesirable results.  One-handed stem-removal was a path that I had already tried and found wanting.  But why, I thought, did I have to rotate the bean between picking up the bean and pinching off the stem?  I have some control over the bean-choosing, bean-picking process, don't I?  Why not just pick up the bean more carefully, so that it's already in position in my left hand by the time my right hand arrives to grasp it? 

I happen to have a pretty good machine vision system, at least when I remember to put on my glasses, so it was trivial to develop a new bean-choosing algorithm.  It only took a little bit more attention, and less time, to watch my left hand as it dipped into the bag of beans (which I was beginning to see as an ensemble of rigid rods having a certain distribution of lengths, diameters, orientations, etc.), and to pick up each bean between index fingernail and thumb, positioned at the point where I wished to sever the stem, and with my wrist oriented in such a way that when I brought hand and wrist back to a neutral position, they would naturally rotate the bean so that at the very moment my right hand grasped it I could sever the stem.

Grabbing the beans in position took more attention than I realized, especially as the number of easy-to-grab bean stems dwindled, but I quickly saw the superiority of the new system.  I had reduced the number of physical steps to six:

1. pick up bean carefully in position in left hand
2. grasp bean in right hand
3. pinch stem off bean
4. throw stem to the left
5. snap bean in right hand
6. throw bean halves into the colander

Only one of the steps, number one, had gotten significantly more complicated, and all of the complication was in processing.  I have plenty of memory and my processor speed is high compared to my bean-handling speed, so this was hardly a trade-off.  I suppose I don't get to let my mind wander quite as much.

That might not be a bad thing, now that I think about it.

This week I'm rerunning old posts.  Today's is from June 2006.

—————–

"How was work today?"

"Today I learned that the most expensive peanut butter sold in the United States costs six hundred dollars a pound."

Choosy moms, apparently, choose NIST SRM-2387.

I'm posting reruns this week.  Today's post is from June 2007.

———

Regarding being raised Catholic vs. being a convert – I said I was going to mention an insight I'd been chewing on, and then Amber sidetracked me into the last post, which led to some good comments (thanks commenters).   

Just a day or two ago I came across B16's commentary, in Jesus of Nazareth, on the parable of the two brothers, aka the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15).  I had always read the two brothers first as the story-on-its-face, and also as representing the pagan world and faithful Israel.  Indeed B16 discusses this common and traditional interpretation.  But he also goes on to describe another angle:

…[W]hat Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel…but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are "en regle," at rights with God… In this connection, Grelot puts emphasis on the sentence "I never disobeyed one of your commandments."  For them, more than anything else God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him.  But God is greater:  They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of Love.  This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble.

Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon:  Their bitterness toward God's goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience… There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with.  They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother… They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sonship.  They, too, are still in need of a path; they can find it if they simply admit that God is right and accept his feast as their own.  In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.  (pp. 210-211)

It's kind of cliche (and almost new-agey sounding) to write that everybody needs to find their own way, but here is Benedict coming right out and saying it:  They, too, are still in need of a path.  Everybody needs to make a journey of conversion.  Without that, living the righteous life is just a bunch of rules that somebody else foisted on you because you happened to be born into one family and not into another.  And it's pretty discouraging when you find out that following the rules doesn't always get you where you think it ought to get you in this life.

Benedict points out that the elder brother's response is not given to us.  It's left open whether he  stomped off angrily, refusing to have anything to do with such an unfair dad, or whether he accepted the father's generosity and joined in the rejoicing.  Maybe he went off to try out being prodigal himself.

But at least it gives me a model to think of the position that the "cradle Catholics" that are my children might be in. 

Thoughts?

This is just a reminder that Dorian Speed and I are sponsoring a little Flickr photostream contest along the theme, "How does your schooling space fit into your home?"

Dorian's post explaining the rules and two ways to submit a photo, here.  Photo pool with samples here, including some from me.

For example, I included this one:

with the caption:

This is my schoolroom.  

My husband made the desks; they are really just boxes.  The gray metal rolling drawer units are from IKEA, about $25 each. The junior office chairs are also from IKEA.

The desks are lightweight and easily moved.  We sometimes put them together to make a big table.  I have four altogether (one is just barely visible around the corner).

Originally the submission deadline was going to be Sunday, August 21, but we had some trouble getting the photostream set up (I'm a Flickr newbie) and so the deadline will probably be extended to August 31.

Please caption your photos — we want to know what we're looking at!