Random MomBlog

The last time I made this, my father-in-law (I didn’t even know if he liked spinach!) said he loved it, but it needed more spinach. He’s from meat-and-potatoes Wisconsin, but he’s always had his meat and potatoes with a salad too. So this time I doubled again* the amount of spinach, and I hope this ratio works for us. This recipe as written serves my family: Daddy and Mommy eat all of our spinach, and there’s enough chicken to share with our two hungry sons who like chicken but are small enough that they don’t need their own serving from this recipe. Plus the boys just think food tastes better when it comes off our plates. No, neither of them eat spinach yet. I loved spinach, even as a small girl, and even more the other dark leafy greens, so I’m not worried yet.

*Almost all meat-and-veggie recipes taste better to me if I double the amount of veggies or halve the amount of meat. I’m pretty sure this recipe has already had at least one doubling, which is why it goes in a baking pan with high sides!

Baked garbanzo flour (mixed with olive oil or chicken stock) is a surprisingly good cheese sauce substitute! It even has protein, and a lot less fat than cheese.

I almost called this recipe “Vegan Chicken Florentine” because it is dairy-free and egg-free, but then I remembered the chicken … hehe … oops! But it is GFCF (not that the original had gluten either, but this version is gluten-free and casein-free) so it works around Cale’s allergies.

This is an easy make-ahead recipe: I do all of the steps except baking the chicken (sometimes I butterfly it and try to have the chicken breasts “hug” the spinach, but as I said, we like more spinach than you can even pretend to stuff inside the chicken, so the chicken is a topping on a bed of delicious spinach). I take it over to the in-laws, leave the boys to play (Karston said today that he doesn’t get to visit Opa and Grammy often enough), go to work, and return to a yummy meal that I know is allergy-safe for me and Cale to eat. Making three dinners tonight (chicken soup for Daddy who has the cold that the boys have, chicken stir-fry for me, and chicken florentine for tomorrow) was a challenge, but at least mine was just combining and heating leftovers.

Come to think of it, I guess that chicken soup was da bomb! Daddy went back for seconds, if not thirds, and this cold has removed his appetite (not that he ever had much). Chicken soup with tiny pastina stars made by a food lover is pretty tasty … homemade stock + chicken breast + grated carrot + sliced celery + a handful of frozen peas + a few diced onions from the florentine + a sprinkle of adobo seasoning + pastina added at the end so it doesn’t get over-cooked, boiled until done. Simple, and good enough for someone who’s sick and not hungry to go back for more.

Well, I just tried a Krups coffee grinder to turn flax seeds into flax seed meal, and it works! Fast too! One tablespoon of flax seeds turned into two tablespoons of meal, so that’s an easy conversion to remember. I wish I had thought to use when I mixed the spices (coarse sea salt, dried rosemary from my bush, and coarsely ground black pepper) for my chicken florentine by hand with mortar and pestle. If the Krups can pulverize rosemary too, that would be awesome! I bet it can. I like the flavor of rosemary (in moderation), but I don’t like finding little sticks of rosemary in my food.

At first I tried to use it like my food processor, where five two-second bursts yield better results than one ten-second burst, but since I want the flax seed finely pulverized, the continuous run (instead of short bursts) is more effective. It’s not hard at all to clean with a paper towel either.

This morning I was struck by how some of the … ah … college experience does prepare you for life. There’s the experience of hugging toilet, as I was doing this morning. Only this time, as a parent, I was hugging my small child with tummy hurting sitting on the toilet to go poop. When he doesn’t feel well, he can get a hug anywhere. And all-nighters? That’s obvious to anyone who’s had a sick kid. And here I thought I had outgrown my days of hugging the toilet!

The (comfy slacker) knit pants I’m wearing today have vertical-entry on-seam pockets. I’ve got nothing against on-seam pockets, except these are also short, shallow pockets that aren’t deep enough. And when I say my pockets aren’t deep enough, I mean that my cell phone and my keys have fallen out! Worse yet, I even lost my building-entry badge that I clipped to the pocket because the pockets are so shallow that the bottom of the pocket pushed on the clip until it popped off!

These pants may be comfortable, but I don’t think I’ll keep them too long, at least not as wear-to-work on meeting-free days.

If these pockets had a horizontal entry, items wouldn’t fall out so easily. If these pockets were deeper, again it wouldn’t be a problem because the opening would again be above the stuff stored in the pocket. But short vertical pockets are truly dangerous because it’s so tempting to use your pockets as, well, pockets to store essential items, and this short-vertical configuration kicks out everything.

Bad, bad pockets.

At Karston’s preschool, the teachers carefully dash out the name for each child to trace on the daily artwork. Tedious! Karston is learning to write his name, and I’d love to build on that at home, but I know I’m not going to draft all this tracing for him when I’m sure there’s a font for it … I found free trace fonts @ fontspace.com with the Print Clearly and Trace fonts. Much better!

I looked at The Post-Punk Kitchen for a butter or margarine to oil conversion (1/2 cup/1 stick of those to 1/3 cup oil). Also, when I use Ener-G Egg Replacer, I use the whisk attachment on my mixer to whip it into a meringue-like froth before using it, and I’ve never noticed the chalk-y taste. Another tip is that chocolate chips don’t “stick” to oil batters, so use fewer than in the chips-laden original. I also replace brown sugar with slightly less white sugar and a dollop of molasses. So here’s what I did:

I either left the cookies in too long (the kids were wild), or I need to drop the temperature to 300 °F for the oil substitution. Or perhaps I should use a combination of apple sauce (to hold moisture) and oil (to transport yummy flavor)? OK, this is still a work in progress, but completely edible as is too. The cookies also wanted to stick to the pan, so I either should have removed them sooner or I should have greased the cookie sheet. But still mighty tasty! These are my favorite cookies …

Running anaconda 11.4.1.62, the MythDora system installer - please wait...
/usr/bin/python: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.5.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
install exited abnormally [1/1]
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
	/mnt/runtime done
	disabling /dev/loop0 LOOP_CLR_FD failed: 6
	/proc done
	/dev/pts done
	/sys done
	/mnt/stage2 done
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
you may safely reboot your system

My current theory as to why I can’t install MythDora from DVD or CD or LiveCD is that I have bad burns from OS X. Maybe it doesn’t set all the right “bootable DVD” signals so that something (including libpython) isn’t extracted or mounted at boot. I believe the error message because I can’t find libpython when I mount the image in OS X.

The other possible theory is that the hardware I’m using is just that screwy. Linux is strongest on slightly older hardware (so that someone has written the drivers for it), so I asked for a cast-off. This cast-off, it was finally admitted to me, is unwanted because it was not stable as a Windows XP box. I’ve got another cast-off (same reason, but different-enough hardware to try again) to try.

Argh.

Today I learned two tricks for the replace() function in Javascript.

1. Use $? for the found pattern, and
2. use (parentheses) within your regular expression if you want to refer to what it matched by $number in the replacement.

I needed the sub-string ‘.A.‘ to be zero-padded into ‘.0A.‘ instead. However, I wasn’t positive enough that the only character that needed zero-padding would be an A, so I wanted to match the general case of any single character between dots.

So that means I could match any single character between dots and give a long-winded message: output = input.replace(/\.(.)\./g, "replace> $& <replace "); or more to the point: output = input.replace(/\.(\w)\./g, ".0$1.");

I can use either ‘.‘ (traditional Unix regexp for a single character) or ‘\w‘ (PCRE for any non-whitespace character) to match A with my expected input.

The Drag a link to Tagger into the Finder toolbar screenshot was driving me nuts because it’s not that simple. I dragged, and the link just bounced back to the application. So I tried some keyboard combinations (since the screenshot indicates that it’s possible), and sure enough, COMMAND-OPTION is the magic pre-drop key combination! Of course, now I’m used to it in my Finder sidebar, so I don’t need it in my toolbar, but it’s nice to know I can do that when I want.

So I had some Bob’s Red Mill garbanzo flour that includes a recipe for hummus on the back. Starting with finely ground garbanzo flour seems a lot easier than grinding my own chickpeas to the properly smooth texture! I was also tempted by this hummus cracker recipe so something had to happen eventually.

The first time, I scaled down the hummus recipe to make only the 1/2 cup needed for the crackers, and I left out the tahini because I didn’t have (or want!) any. What I learned from this batch of hummus answers one of those little mysteries: why is some hummus so amazingly good, and why does the rest taste horrible like dirt? The answer is that cooked garbanzos are tasty, and raw garbanzos are ick ptooey. Cook the mixture again after adding the garbanzo flour, and it improves greatly!

On to the crackers, first time! I used olive oil instead of canola oil. Even adding extra flour, the crackers still were too wet to roll out, but after baking, the clumps tasted pretty good! Worth making again.

The second time I made 1/2 cup hummus from the Bob’s recipe much as before, except I put all the liquids (lemon juice and texas pete) in the 1/2 cup measuring cup, and topped it off to 1/2 cup total. I also skipped the olive oil in the hummus this time around (it still tasted mostly ok, suggesting I can skip the tahini and cut back on the olive oil, and still get enjoyable lower-fat hummus), and just added the olive oil for the crackers part of the recipe. This time I had crackers that I could roll out to a uniform thinness before baking on a silicon baking sheet.

The report is still yummy crackers, and more cracker-like with the much drier hummus. I’m inspired to try this with refried beans! I had never considered making my own crackers until Cale had allergies to most commercial crackers, but it’s not hard to make these crackers and they taste great! The one drawback (ahem) is that I get some remarkable gas from just two small crackers, so I probably need to cook the garbanzo beans even longer to tone down that effect. Or perhaps this is inherent in the garbanzo flour, although I suspect not since I don’t remember gas from the vegan calzones made with it.