Holy Thursday morning box and a honey of a birthday cake

Ready to commemorate the Mystical Supper and the Washing of the Feet on Holy Thursday morning, with Jane G. Meyer's books, The Man and the Vine and The Woman and the Wheat, as well as a box with the icon of the Mystical Supper.  There's a little icon for the Washing of the Feet, too.  We reviewed the story of the Supper in the Children's Bible Reader as well as Tomie de Paola's Book of Bible Stories, but there's only so much I can carry into the church.  We didn't read through the Meyer books properly, but looked at all the pictures and read a few pages from each.  I think these two books will be definitely something for both children to grow into.  I just have to remind myself to be patient.

Lucia's box just has a new laminated icon and two of the ones she likes best.

The High Priestly Prayer (in the garden of Gethsemane) and the Betrayal would be on Holy Thursday, too, according to the Synaxarion, but I am putting those things in the box for the evening service, which is quite long.

Also, tomorrow will be Lucia's first birthday, so Fr. Peter and I made a cake (we are soo tired, and kinda leaned on each other for help in doubling the recipe).  According to prevailing wisdom, a baby should not have honey before her first birthday.  So she gets a lemon honey cake* shaped like a honeycomb.

*We attempted to lentenize it, using water for milk, 3/4 applesauce and 1/4 Crisco for butter, and the usual egg substitute from the monastery cookbook.  Haven't tasted it yet, but the whole house smells lovely.  I'm so glad I picked up a lemon and a lime on a whim!  (We're not doing the glaze, just the cake, and the shaved lemon and lime look a little embarrassed being bald on the counter.)

Meal Plan

While reading posts in Google Reader, I often pause on Mary @ Evlogia's posts, finding them relevant to my current life, or inspiring to some future project. (Most things are on hold, now that we are gearing up for a move this month. The assignment is still not official, so that's all I'll say.)

On the Thursday before last week, I read this post and fell head over heels in love with the idea of a seasonal* meal plan. Mary's meal plans repeat each week within the season, so her family eats the same week's meals (no, not like that) from the Sunday of St. Thomas through the Sunday of All Saints. Then, for the Apostles' Fast, they'll eat using a different meal plan—but one which stays the same week to week within that season.

*Liturgical seasons, that is, fasting for fasts, and feasting for festal seasons.

There are not enough superlatives to describe how awesomely wonderful this is to me. I am struggling with eating vegetables, eating nourishing food, eating varied food**, and preparing meals. I want Teddy to have these things be normal to him, but that means I have to work hard at it now. (Okay, I'd like for these things to be normal for me, too, but that's not as inspiring. Teddy is much cuter.)

**My first academic year at ND included about eight months of lunches and dinners based around chicken patties. And I'm not exaggerating.

So I wrote down all the things we like to eat (feasting-wise) which I could think of off the top of my head, and noticed that three of them (hamburgers, tasty Romanian soup, and seven-layer dip) last for more than one meal. Even with that, it was a bit of a struggle to stretch across to a full 14 lunch and dinner meals, with nothing but the main repeating entree ... well, repeating. Fr. Peter chose seven-layer dip because we'd just had a week of soup, and I don't know whether he will want to have seven-layer dip for weeks and weeks, but so far it is MARVELOUS. I made it on Saturday after the yard sale, and—guess what!—lunch was already made for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday!

This past Sunday we were so exhausted from the yard sale that I didn't have time to sit down and grind out a meal plan—BUT I ALREADY KNEW WHAT WE WERE GOING TO EAT BECAUSE I REMEMBERED IT FROM LAST WEEK!

Okay, we have a PTO board meeting, paraklesis, and shopping tonight, and fish is on the menu (my one stretch, even though it's Costco fishsticks for me and salmon burgers with garlic for the more adventurous men), and it takes a while. I just wanted everyone to know how awesome this seasonal* thing is.

Thank you, Mary.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I am currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for our parish book club. (We have a choice between this and No Impact Man, but, since I suggested that one, I'd already read it.) The focus of this book is on eating locally, and the easiest way to do that is to grown one's own food.

I like the ideas in this book as well, and, as usual, they have made me think about how to make similar changes in my life. And this, understandable to those who know me and can join in, makes me laugh. First off, I don't like vegetables. I grew up a picky eater and am slowly attempting to try new foods. For instance, I turned 30 on March 21 this year, and today was my first taste (that I know of) of beets. (They are not quivering blobs of blood after all, but taste, unsurprisingly, like red tubers.) I even ate fish without turning a hair. (I only started admitting to the idea of liking fish less than three years ago, when we moved here and Presvytera Vasso made salmon for us.)

So I've made a rough plan of preparation for starting a vegetable garden (a long-term goal of mine).

Learn to:
• Eat vegetables.
• Cook vegetables.
• Store vegetables (freeze-dry, can, etc.).
• Harvest vegetables. (I don't actually know how to tell when things are *ready*, which is probably important.)
• Take care of plants (weeding, not killing from over-/under-watering, or bugs and disease, mulch, and plenty of things I'm sure I don't know yet).
• Plant things.

Oh, well, I've run out of thoughts and need to rush out to Bridegroom service tonight. Have a blessed and profitable Holy Week, y'all!

Birthday 29

Now I'm in my prime.

I just wanted to say how nice my birthday was. Thanks to facebook (early) and my sisters (late), I got to extend my birthday sense of festivity beyond the usual 24-hours. (A la pre- and post-feast, as Emma points out. Hmm. Her husband is in his prime, too. A different prime, but still.)

Fr. Peter and Teddy and I, after breakfast, went to a middle school whose music program was having a rummage sale. (Yay to checking craigslist!) For about twelve dollars—I was spending, not counting, so that's Fr. Peter's estimate—I bagged (literally, because Fr. Peter was smart and got the tote bags from the trunk of the car) about two feet of books, a popsicle-making kit, and a penguin marionette. Most of the books are at least nominally for Teddy, although when we came home I plowed through four of them, and am in the middle of the fifth.

Aaaahhh. Books.

I think I will have some more of the lenten (so I can share!) applesauce cake (new-to-me-recipe from Khouria Virginia Massouh from last Sunday's pan-Orthodox vespers) I made on Friday and rest my feet up. I will stop posting before I run out of parentheses (horrors!).

Kolaches

Hopefully, this will be the last catch-up post on this blog. (There's two in line for the baby blog, though.)

Recently, my "nesting" skills steered me toward the kitchen. So I made kolaches*. I mistakenly thought we had enough cream cheese, but we only had 8 oz., and the cream cheese filling recipe I wanted to try called for 16 oz., which wouldn't have been a problem except that it's hard to halve one egg.

*The missing ingredient in the directions is the scalded and cooled milk, which I assumed should be mixed in at the beginning.

So, since I've been craving peaches and yogurt (not together), we had lots of peaches on hand. So I found a recipe online and halved it (after looking up how many peaches were in a bushel) and made my own peach filling from scratch. I used about half of it in the kolaches, but was confident that my sweet-loving husband would take care of the extra. (I think he ended up being more delighted with the extra filling than with the kolaches themselves.)

Things I learned: Even at a low temperature and for a short time, do not bake things on the lowest rack. You cannot completely clean off burnt peach filling from your cookie sheets. Extra egg whites can easily fit into the brownies you make afterwards. (I got carried away.) Scraping off the burnt bottoms of two trays of kolaches is well worth the effort. Toasting kolaches and covering them with ice cream is reward enough to the labor (and heat) involved in making them in the first place.

And now I have cream cheese.

Cleaning and Baklava

A little garden on our bedroom windowsill.

In about twenty minutes, Vassi will head over and start teaching me to make baklava. (This is part of the payment for the railing down the hill to the lower married student housing parking lot; Southeast Railing donated much of it, but the owner said he would like that one Greek pastry with the honey and nuts.)

Some preparations for baklava.

In preparation, we obviously needed to clean the kitchen ... rather drastically, since there will be at least two people working in there and there's almost no counter space. Also, about a week or two ago, we (okay, I) decided (it was necessary) to rearrange the living room. Following FlyLady's ideals, I decided it wouldn't be worth my time to rearrange the clutter. I went through (with Dn. Virgil's help) several boxes, pulling things out of drawers (where I'd thrown them for unannounced company, or when I was tired of looking at them). I got rid of 5 boxes' worth of unecessary papers.* We still have more to go (which were unearthed today), but it's wonderfully liberating, and now there's room.

*If you don't have answers to things like: "Why am I keeping two copies of Notre Dame commencement exercise booklets wherein there are three names of people I know?" then you are allowed to get rid of it. Even then, it was still hard. I'm *good* at keeping.

We turned Dn. Virgil's desk around, moved mine into the corner (previously storage) with the (so lovely!**) filing cabinet. The couch went where my desk went. The comfy chair and ottoman went where the couch was, opening up the icon corner.

** Yes, I'm a dork, but it was a great Christmas present, and I can have an "away" in which to put things!








Top left: Dn. Virgil's corner; top right: my corner; bottom right: couch; bottom left: our new "mail station"; center: comfy chair and framed Panagia icon sketch (by the teacher of last summer's iconography class).

Dn. Virgil has been fully on board, cleaning the kitchen and his corner looks amazing. He's taken out lots of trash (although I was out the door first, having followed (again) FlyLady's advice on getting dressed to lace-up shoes). He clarified the bookshelves in the living room, and taken loads of things downstairs to storage (ready for the move or to be sorted later after further consideration). Also this past week, he's prepared my first computer (Cicero) to be given away by moving all the files and miscellany onto his computer and checking the 3.5" disks (you know, in case I need old papers from classes I don't even remember). I'm not emotionally ready to give away my old computer, but I'm not using it, and someone else may need it, and I don't want to have to move it.

Also this morning, when Dn. Virgil was taking out a towel to shake out on the balcony, we saw deer (he saw six, and I got a picture of one on the camera and saw three at a time) moving through the woods.

My "shot" of a deer.

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Later: The baklava has been layered and is in the fridge, cooling. All the cleaning and baking involved lots of standing, and I am thus exhaustifyied.

Christmas 2006

This year, Christmas was on a Monday, leading for a pleasant weekend.

On Friday, I took the day off. I went to church in the morning for the Christmas Hours. Afterwards, I stayed for confession with Fr. Philip. Then I went home for Virgil and we went west to get passport photos of me taken (for my passport renewal application), have the car inspected, and grocery shopping. Christmas grocery shopping.

On Saturday, we had baking. I was in a snippy mood and, I think, pretty much stayed in bed reading all day. Dn. Virgil slaved away in the kitchen for about eight hours. I did come out of my cave to help in a plumbing emergency* and to stir the kolache mixture. We ended up with eleven loaves of cozonac (pl. "cozonaci" sounds like "cozonach" with a "ch" like in "cheese") and some kolaches.

*We've decided not to use the garbage disposal for eggshells. At least, not when using a recipe which calls for 36 eggs. Never mind additional eggs for the kolaches.

On Sunday after we got home from church in Arlington, we had cooking. We made a couple of kinds of sausage which I can't pronounce but I can definitely eat, and schnitzel (or rather, şniţel, since this kind is Romanian). My job was keeping the counters clean, providing lots of plates (unbeaten, unbattered, uncooked, and uneaten—all separated), and beating the heck out of lots of chicken. Yep. You need heckless chicken for şniţel.