Follow up

11:00 pm

Apparently last night my cold combined with Nyquil cause me to snore.  The Man Who Lives in My House was making a great show of going to bed early, as I had deprived him (probably deliberately)  of his beauty rest the night before.

Me:  I'm just going to read for a long time and then I'm going to fall asleep and snore a lot.
The Man Who Lives In My House (mumbling, eyes closed):   I hope not.
Me:  There's a blanket in the closet.  Wrap up in that if you need to go sleep on the couch.
TMWLIMH (appearing half asleep):  Thanks, but if you snore, i'll just use it to smother you.
Me:   Ha! That proves it!  That was totally blogable and you're not even awake.  You don't live to make me laugh.  There's no effort.
TMWLIMH:  Yeah, it just happens, like a fart.

colds make me incompetant

My kids played legos and ate all the cookies today while I wallowed in my snotly unwellness.  My sinuses hurt, ok?  and I can only breathe stertorously through my mouth.  I am pathetic.  My neck hurts.  Perhaps I have meningitis.  Or TB. The inner edge of my right nostril is chapped and scabby.  I look as bad as I feel.  So I could only be grateful that the little darlings were not fighting.  A few cookies seemed like a small price to pay for peace.

The Man Who Lives In My House is most vexed to find that there are no cookies.

something to counter balance all the f-ing cookies.

Persimmon Salad

Ingredients:
2 persimmons
one small can of mandarin oranges
fennel bulb
shallot
toasted walnuts
pomegranate seeds
baby salad greens

Dressing:
juice of one lemon
minced garlic clove
pinch dry mustard
2 T of the juice from the mandarins
olive oil
salt

The only tricky part of this salad has to do with the persimmons. I'm told that when they're perfectly ripe, you can just eat persimmons out of hand.  However I've only ever had them from grocery stores.  They're one of those fragile fruits like figs-- they get picked while hard, so they're either unripe, or mushy and bruised most times at the market.  Eaten untreated, they have a delicious taste, followed by a horrible dry-mouth tannin effect.  To eliminate this problem, you just slice them thinly and simmer them for five minutes or so in the juice from the mandarin oranges.  This will eliminate the weird dry-mouth feel and bring out the sweetness.  When they're perfect, it's like a peach and a pumpkin had a very tasty baby.

Once you've dealt with the persimmons, slice the fennel and shallot very thinly and toss everything together with the dressing.  We had it with salmon and cous cous.  The salad stole the show.

(I should credit Marche restaurant in Eugene for the salad.  I don't know if this is an exact copy, but I had something very similar there and approximated it as closely as I could.)

Dedicated to The Hooligans' Father.

I'm reading Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, by Calvin Trillin.  I just started it.  Calvin Trillin is my new journalist/author crush.  He's a little old for me, but that's ok!  I like old guys.  Note to The Man Who Lives In My House:  You might want to start aging.  Like the rest of us.  You're going to feel very left out if you don't.

Back to the book:  the dedication is to his late wife, Alice.  Of whom Trillin says "...appears as a character in many of these pieces.  Before her death, in 2001, even the pieces that didn't mention her were written in the hopes of makeing her giggle."

Which made me feel a little weepy, and got me wondering:  The Man Who Lives In My House cracks me up quite frequently.  Does he do it on purpose?  Is this what he lives for?  I would like to think so. Or is he just funny by accident?

I asked him as soon as he got home.

"Hell, I don't know," he answered. " I'm just hoping to get blogged."

Ha!  He did it again.

Naturally amusing? 

I'm the Crazy Aunt! With a nephew to Match!

My sister Abigail (the artist!  Check her out! http://www.abigailmarble.com/)    Sent me this text of a recent conversation between her and my 3 year old nephew.  He spent a long weekend with us recently.  It is possible that the Hooligans have influenced him just a smidgen....


Mama: “Senor Cupcake, if you are eating, please stay at the table.”
Cupcake wafts about, clenching a drippy pear in fist.
Mama: “Please don’t walk around with that sticky pear. Sit at the table.”
Cupcake giggles maniacally, continues to waft.
Mama: “Last warning! I am going to count to 3, and if you can’t bring it to the table I will have to take it away.”
Cupcake furrows his brow, bolts for a far corner and snarls, “That would not be awesome.”

Industrious Sloth Mother

So last weekend, while one of us watched TV (not me), the other one put up all the Christmas lights:  both the tasteful white ones and the lurid colored ones that one of us (not me) prefers.  For all that I have a reputation for being the cranky and difficult one in our relationship, I seem to be something a pleaser.  No wonder I don't feel one bit guilty about asking him to make me a latte every morning.

Saturday afternoon several things happened:  some neighbors came and took our piano (No one practiced.  Ever.  I am a failure as a Tiger Mother, ok?  I am the opposite of a Tiger Mother.  I am a Sloth mother.  And I wanted to rearrange my living room, which necessitated getting rid of the dusty piano.) 

We made some cocoa to bring to the Christmas Tree farm, where we spent a couple of hours finding the perfect, albeit 30% too large, tree.  The larger Hooligan also seems to have found some poison oak.  Hopefully the itching will not distract him during his math test tomorrow.  After that, The Man Who Lives In My House made chocolate fondue, which we brought to a fondue dinner party.  I don't know what I was doing, probably re-arranging furniture.

Sunday morning we had to get up early for the Larger Hooligan's soccer game.  Apparently it was epic (that means good).  The smaller Hooligan and I stayed home and made christmas ornaments out of buttons and wire.  Then our friend Keri and her daughters came over and we walked through the alleys gathering green stuff to make wreaths.  We spread all these boughs and branches all over my dining room and went to town with clippers and wire.

Keri kept wanting me to show her exactly what to do, as if there were a correct way.  Ha ha, that is funny.  After a while she found her groove.  Check out her wreath:

Meanwhile the children were becoming hungry and pesky.  The Man Who Lives in My House And Makes Me A Latte Every Morning saved our sorry sloth mother asses and took them to the bagel shop for a sandwich.  He brought us sandwiches, too.  And made us a press pot of coffee.

 He really is nice. And our house is full of festivus-ness.