I hope you are sitting down. If you aren't, then you should do so now. I know this is the kind of thing a person should say face to face, but I couldn't wait. Also, I was afraid I would get nervous and end up stumbling through my words.
So, here goes. We're having a baby!!! Yes, you read it correctly, a BABY. I didn't want to tell you until I was sure, and now I'm sure. You are going to be a daddy. Yeah! You may have already guessed by the way I have been floating in mid air these past few days. I am so happy. You have made me so happy.
Before we get carried away with doctors visits, nurseries, names, and all of the other overwhelming stuff, I wanted to thank you. Thank you for this special gift. You have made my dreams come true. You are going to be such a good father and I know your child will love you as much as I do. You are such a special man and I am blessed to have you as my future husband..
Congratulations, Daddy.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Elbows & Ground Beef
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 (29 ounce) cans tomato sauce
1 (16 ounce) package macaroni
Directions
Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain.
In a Dutch oven, brown ground beef over medium heat. Add chopped onion, and cook until onion is soft. Add green pepper and tomato sauce; cook until pepper is soft.
Serve sauce over pasta.
1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 (29 ounce) cans tomato sauce
1 (16 ounce) package macaroni
Directions
Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain.
In a Dutch oven, brown ground beef over medium heat. Add chopped onion, and cook until onion is soft. Add green pepper and tomato sauce; cook until pepper is soft.
Serve sauce over pasta.
Buffalo Tilapia
Ingredients:
1 tilapia filet
1 tsp buffalo sauce
1 tsp corn meal
1 TBSP panko bread crumbs
cooking spray
Directions:
Spread the sauce over top side of the tilapia with a pastry brush. Sprinkle with half of the corn meal and half of the panko. Flip over and repeat with the other half.
Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray, place tilapia filets spread apart and spray the tops with cooking spray.
Bake in a 400 degree oven until browned, about 20-25 minutes.
1 tilapia filet
1 tsp buffalo sauce
1 tsp corn meal
1 TBSP panko bread crumbs
cooking spray
Directions:
Spread the sauce over top side of the tilapia with a pastry brush. Sprinkle with half of the corn meal and half of the panko. Flip over and repeat with the other half.
Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray, place tilapia filets spread apart and spray the tops with cooking spray.
Bake in a 400 degree oven until browned, about 20-25 minutes.
Beef & Onion Cheese Ball
Ingredients
Serves: 24
3 - 8 ounce packages of cream cheese, softened(reduced fat is fine)
1.5 teaspoons garlic powder (not garlic salt!)
1.5 teaspoons Accent(R) Seasoning
3 green onions, sliced finely or chopped.
1 jar dried beef, chopped and rinsed to remove salt.
Preparation method
Prep: 2 hours 15 mins
1.
Mix cream cheese, garlic powder, accent, green onions and 1/2 of the chopped beef. Form into one or two cheese balls. Roll in remaining dried beef to coat. Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving.
Serves: 24
3 - 8 ounce packages of cream cheese, softened(reduced fat is fine)
1.5 teaspoons garlic powder (not garlic salt!)
1.5 teaspoons Accent(R) Seasoning
3 green onions, sliced finely or chopped.
1 jar dried beef, chopped and rinsed to remove salt.
Preparation method
Prep: 2 hours 15 mins
1.
Mix cream cheese, garlic powder, accent, green onions and 1/2 of the chopped beef. Form into one or two cheese balls. Roll in remaining dried beef to coat. Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
The Long Goodbye
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide & become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. And because my mother was relatively young -64- I feel robbed of 20 years with her I'd always imagined having.
In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. But I was not ok. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. At one point, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Why had I not known that this was what life really amounted to?
I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother's death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends & family, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. And I found no relief in that worn-out refrain that at least my mother was "no longer suffering".
Mainly, I thought one thing: My mother is dead & I want her back.
When we talk about love, we go back to the start. But this is the story of an ending, of death, & it has no beginning. That's what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.
There is my mother, & then, suddenly, there is her cancer. It begins with a phone call, a scan, a shock. Disbelief reigns. There would be no surgery. The disease had spread too far.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, it's transactions are exquisitely personal. My grief, I know, has been shaped by the particular person my mother was to me, and by the fact that she died at 64 (the same age my father was when he died). Then, too, I was bound up with her in ways that strecthed beyond our relationship. I now live in the house where I grew up. I always see things that remind me of her.
As I write this, I am hit by a feeling of error, a sense that during my early twenties, when I thought my mother never quiter understood me, it was I who saw her incompletely. I took for granted so many of her seemingly casual qualities.
So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen - it's more like a threat, an anxiety. Other people got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.
Those were strange, delirious days.They'd give her morphine for the pain, but the moment they got it under control, it would intensify, & she'd begin moaning again. When she did wake she was irritable. I kept asking the nurses to give her more morphine. And the nurse said "If she's in hospice, they'll give her more drugs, they'll minimize her pain, but she might die."
I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail - that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on & off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family should, dying where it was hard for your family to be with you & where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die.
"Hey baby!"
These are the last words I hear her say. Then she closes her eyes again. Instead of words there comes a horrible pain - pain of a kind I have never witnessed, a shuddering, bone-deep pain that swallows her up whenever the hospice nurse moves her or washes her or when we roll her on her side to change her & get her blood circulating.
In the last few days, she begins to look very young. Her face has lost so much weight, the bones show through like a child's. I hold her hand. I smooth her face. Her skin has begun to feel waxy; my fingers slide dully over it.
As she dies, she opens her eyes, looks at us, & takes one final rattling breath. She has chosen to look at us, to say "Goodbye, I love you, goodbye".
I think she had the most beautiful smile in the world. And she was very warm to lie next to, soft, like a blanket.
And so we sat with my mother's body, holding her hands. I kept touching her face, which was rubbery but still hers, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. For 20 minutes she was warm & she didn't look dead. She didn't look alive either. But she didn't have the glazed, absent expression I had expected. Her being seemed present. I could feel it hovering at the ceiling of the room, changing, but not gone. In a daze, I said goodbye. I kissed my mother's forehaed - waxy, the way it had been for days now. I said, "You were very brave, & I love you".
What had actually happened still seemed implausible: A person was present your entire life, & then one day she disappeared & never came back. It resisted belief. Even when a death is foreseen, I was surprised to find, it still feels sudden - an instant that could have gone differently.
A death from a long illness is different from a sudden death. I have experienced both of those with each of my parents. It gives you time to say goodbye & time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. A friend said that my mother's death had surely been easier to bear because I had known it was coming. I almost bit her head off! Easier to bear compared to what?
It is human to want our friends & family to recover from pain, to look for a silver lining - or so I reminded myself. But when people stop mentioning the dead person's name to you, the silence can seem worse than the pain of hearing those familiar, beloved syllables. After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally.
In the weeks after my mother's death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two. I was consukmed by memories of seemingly trivial things.
She is gone, & I will be, too, one day. There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.
I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye. I think about all the things I never said along the way, about how much her example meant to me. The bond between a mother & a child is so unlike any other that it is categorically irreplaceable.
In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. But I was not ok. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. At one point, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Why had I not known that this was what life really amounted to?
I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother's death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends & family, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. And I found no relief in that worn-out refrain that at least my mother was "no longer suffering".
Mainly, I thought one thing: My mother is dead & I want her back.
When we talk about love, we go back to the start. But this is the story of an ending, of death, & it has no beginning. That's what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.
There is my mother, & then, suddenly, there is her cancer. It begins with a phone call, a scan, a shock. Disbelief reigns. There would be no surgery. The disease had spread too far.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, it's transactions are exquisitely personal. My grief, I know, has been shaped by the particular person my mother was to me, and by the fact that she died at 64 (the same age my father was when he died). Then, too, I was bound up with her in ways that strecthed beyond our relationship. I now live in the house where I grew up. I always see things that remind me of her.
As I write this, I am hit by a feeling of error, a sense that during my early twenties, when I thought my mother never quiter understood me, it was I who saw her incompletely. I took for granted so many of her seemingly casual qualities.
So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen - it's more like a threat, an anxiety. Other people got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.
Those were strange, delirious days.They'd give her morphine for the pain, but the moment they got it under control, it would intensify, & she'd begin moaning again. When she did wake she was irritable. I kept asking the nurses to give her more morphine. And the nurse said "If she's in hospice, they'll give her more drugs, they'll minimize her pain, but she might die."
I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail - that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on & off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family should, dying where it was hard for your family to be with you & where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die.
"Hey baby!"
These are the last words I hear her say. Then she closes her eyes again. Instead of words there comes a horrible pain - pain of a kind I have never witnessed, a shuddering, bone-deep pain that swallows her up whenever the hospice nurse moves her or washes her or when we roll her on her side to change her & get her blood circulating.
In the last few days, she begins to look very young. Her face has lost so much weight, the bones show through like a child's. I hold her hand. I smooth her face. Her skin has begun to feel waxy; my fingers slide dully over it.
As she dies, she opens her eyes, looks at us, & takes one final rattling breath. She has chosen to look at us, to say "Goodbye, I love you, goodbye".
I think she had the most beautiful smile in the world. And she was very warm to lie next to, soft, like a blanket.
And so we sat with my mother's body, holding her hands. I kept touching her face, which was rubbery but still hers, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. For 20 minutes she was warm & she didn't look dead. She didn't look alive either. But she didn't have the glazed, absent expression I had expected. Her being seemed present. I could feel it hovering at the ceiling of the room, changing, but not gone. In a daze, I said goodbye. I kissed my mother's forehaed - waxy, the way it had been for days now. I said, "You were very brave, & I love you".
What had actually happened still seemed implausible: A person was present your entire life, & then one day she disappeared & never came back. It resisted belief. Even when a death is foreseen, I was surprised to find, it still feels sudden - an instant that could have gone differently.
A death from a long illness is different from a sudden death. I have experienced both of those with each of my parents. It gives you time to say goodbye & time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. A friend said that my mother's death had surely been easier to bear because I had known it was coming. I almost bit her head off! Easier to bear compared to what?
It is human to want our friends & family to recover from pain, to look for a silver lining - or so I reminded myself. But when people stop mentioning the dead person's name to you, the silence can seem worse than the pain of hearing those familiar, beloved syllables. After a loss, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally.
In the weeks after my mother's death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two. I was consukmed by memories of seemingly trivial things.
She is gone, & I will be, too, one day. There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.
I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye. I think about all the things I never said along the way, about how much her example meant to me. The bond between a mother & a child is so unlike any other that it is categorically irreplaceable.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Chicken Creole
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 stalk celery, sliced thin
1 green bell pepper, minced
2 (16 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the garlic, onion, celery and bell pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until tender (about 4 minutes). Add the tomatoes, bay leaf, salt and cayenne pepper. Cook this Creole sauce 3 minutes longer, stirring often.
Arrange the chicken breasts in an 8 x 11 inch baking dish. Pour the Creole sauce over the chicken.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the chicken is tender and white throughout.
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 stalk celery, sliced thin
1 green bell pepper, minced
2 (16 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the garlic, onion, celery and bell pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until tender (about 4 minutes). Add the tomatoes, bay leaf, salt and cayenne pepper. Cook this Creole sauce 3 minutes longer, stirring often.
Arrange the chicken breasts in an 8 x 11 inch baking dish. Pour the Creole sauce over the chicken.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the chicken is tender and white throughout.
Deviled Crab
Ingredients
1 3/4 pounds crabmeat
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
3/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 cup dry bread crumbs
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups clam juice
1/2 cup white wine
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh basil, minced
Directions
In a mixing bowl, place the crabmeat, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and hot pepper sauce. Mix thoroughly.
Shape the crab mixture into cakes and roll in bread crumbs.
In a medium skillet, heat 4 tablespoons of oil over medium heat. Saute the cakes about 5 minutes. Turn, then cook for another 5 minutes or until golden brown.
For the sauce: In a 1.5 quart saucepan, heat the 1 tablespoon of oil and 1 tablespoon of butter. slowly add the flour to the oil, stirring constantly. Cook for 5 minutes.
Slowly add the clam juice, whisking constantly and vigorously. Pour in white wine, black pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes. Bring to a simmer. Then add cream, parsley, and basil. Simmer, but do not boil. Mixture is done when thick enough to evenly coat the back of a spoon.
Serve the sauce over the crab cakes.
1 3/4 pounds crabmeat
1/8 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
3/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 cup dry bread crumbs
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups clam juice
1/2 cup white wine
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh basil, minced
Directions
In a mixing bowl, place the crabmeat, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and hot pepper sauce. Mix thoroughly.
Shape the crab mixture into cakes and roll in bread crumbs.
In a medium skillet, heat 4 tablespoons of oil over medium heat. Saute the cakes about 5 minutes. Turn, then cook for another 5 minutes or until golden brown.
For the sauce: In a 1.5 quart saucepan, heat the 1 tablespoon of oil and 1 tablespoon of butter. slowly add the flour to the oil, stirring constantly. Cook for 5 minutes.
Slowly add the clam juice, whisking constantly and vigorously. Pour in white wine, black pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes. Bring to a simmer. Then add cream, parsley, and basil. Simmer, but do not boil. Mixture is done when thick enough to evenly coat the back of a spoon.
Serve the sauce over the crab cakes.
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