The Lonely Hearts Food Club, or, How I Learned to Eat My Feelings

When Corey and I are wandering around this house alone, we try to find ways to placate our lonely hearts by taking full advantage of the things that we cannot do at all or cannot do with ease when Jake and Landen are home. Our movie theater is showing each installment of The Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition on Tuesday nights in June. It's a four-hour commitment for which we don't have to hire a sitter or beg my sister to come over. And, we eat some yummy shit for supper at night. 

Wasabi Vinaigrette

This is some serious salad dressing. We do not eat this when the children are home because while Landen likes spicy food, he does not voluntarily or pleasantly eat salad. Jake loves salad, but only with a creamy dressing. It's too much trouble for me to make three variations of a salad meal, so I just save this for when the Grown-Ups are all alone. I put it with baby greens, but it would be great with spinach. I also use goat cheese crumbles (not feta) and I've used strawberries and mandarin oranges, both delicious. You can grill your chicken anyway you like, but I do mine for this salad with store-bought Chinese five-spice and poultry seasoning. 

This is based on the recipe of a boisterous Food Network chef, but I hated the end result, so I remade it with my own tweaks and additional ingredients, and that's the one you get.

1 tsp wasabi paste (available in a tube in your grocer's Asian food section)

1 tbsp honey

1/2 tsp minced ginger (I grate it with my zester)

1/2 tsp minced garlic (I also grate this with my zester)

2 tbsp rice vinegar (If you're my mom, you'll use whatever vinegar you have)

2 tbsp soy sauce (I use light)

6 tbsp olive oil

Pinches of kosher salt and fresh ground pepper

Put all the ingredients in a jar and shake the hell out of it. I like to refrigerate it for an hour or so before eating, and make sure you shake the bastard with all you got again. It should be yellow. 

Peanut Butter Noodles

My children HATE this. I think you have to be of a more advanced age in order to conceive of peanut butter as more than the partner of jelly or the center of your favorite chocolate candy. Peanut butter sauce does not make sense on their young taste buds. It makes hella good sense to ours, so we eat it almost every time they're out of town.

If you're planning ahead, you'll cook this the night after you eat the above salad, and cook enough chicken breasts for the salad to slice into the noodles tonight. 

1/2 lb pasta (I use thick spaghetti or linguine, but you can use Chinese egg noodles if you can find them.)

2 sliced chicken breasts, or about 8-10 ounces of chicken

2 garlic cloves, peeled

1 1-inch cube of fresh peeled ginger

1/2 cup smooth peanut butter

1/3 cup soy sauce (again, I use light.)

2 tbsp dark brown sugar (Does light brown sugar have a use?)

1 tbsp rice vinegar (My mother hates peanut butter, so she would never make this.)

3/4 tsp crushed red pepper (If you don't like spicy food, leave this out.)

1/4 cup HOT, not boiling, water

six green onions

Cook the pasta however you like it. While it's cooking, get out your blender. I do this on the "chop" setting, but I'm not sure it makes a difference. Drop in the garlic and the ginger while the motor is running (this is cooking for lazy people, because you don't have to chop OR grate it yourself.) When the chopping is complete, stop the machine (it's important) and add the soy sauce, brown sugar, vinegar and red pepper. Process until smooth. Add the peanut butter, which your blender is not going to like. It's okay, because after you get it working on the peanut butter, you will add the HOT water, and that will make your blender work like it's supposed to. I recommend not removing the lid completely when you add the water. When the pasta is done, drain it and put the hot pasta with the sauce, the sliced chicken and the green onions into the pot and heat on low until everything is hot. I have to make my bowl first and then get out of the way while Corey eats the rest.

Steakhouse Steaks

Jake and Landen LOVE steaks, but nice filets are $20-25 EACH in the big city, so they don't get the highest quality cuts of meat often. They would love to eat this weekly, but I think I've only done it for them once. Corey and I enjoy this with pasta tossed with garlic and oil or mashed potatoes and our favorite adult beverage. This is courtesy of Ina Garten, and she's no fool on these steaks, I promise. Ruth's Chris doesn't need to charge you double. You can do this at home.

MAKE SURE YOU START YOUR FAN BEFORE COOKING AND KICK UP THE VENTILATION IN YOUR KITCHEN!

I buy 2 filet mignons, each 1 1/2 to 2 inches thick and 8-10 ounces. Your meat needs to be room temperature when you cook it, so set them on a plate about an hour before you want to start cooking. While they are sitting, rub them in olive oil and cover all sides with kosher or sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper. This flies in the face of how my dad cooks his steaks, wonderfully seasoned with no oil and no salt, but I promise for these, it's necessary. Also, regular table salt will make your meat super-tough. You have to use sea salt or kosher. Preheat your oven to 400-degrees. Heat a cast iron skillet on med-high for 5 to 7 minutes. When the pan is extremely hot (starting to smoke) add the steaks and sear evenly on all sides for no more than two minutes per side. Once they are completely seared, you can 1) put the steaks directly into the oven in the skillet, or to minimize the smoke level in your house, 2) put them on a foil-lined baking sheet that has been in the oven while you pre-heated it. Put 1 tbsp of salted butter on each filet and put them in the oven. I'll give you a minute to absorb the impact of what I just told you to do. 

Steak temperatures are really finicky, and the cook time is entirely dependent on the thickness of your steak. I put my digital meat thermometer in from the side starting at eight minutes. I like medium (which is about 10 minutes for a 2-inch thick steak) and Corey likes medium rare (which is about eight minutes for a 2-inch thick steak.) Read whatever YOUR particular meat thermometer says is the temperature for steak the way you like it. You should take them out about five degrees lower than what you want, because the final step is to remove the steaks and let them sit, crackling in their juices and the butter, under a foil tent, for five to ten minutes. That will cook them a leetle bit more. This will be the longest 5-10 minutes of your life, but it's okay. At the conclusion of this process, you will realize that you never need to pay $45 for a restaurant steak because you just figured out how to serve this at home. Your husband will want to Buy You Things. You are being a splurger and economical at the same time (if you don't eat this all the time or feed it to your growing family.)

If this overwhelms you, it's fine. Stop by the Fresh Market on your way to my house, grab a thick filet for me and for you and come over. I'll cook it for us.

I think Landen is afraid his dad and I have too much fun when he's not here, so please don't tell him about the damn steaks. 

One final thing - this lad right here is loving all the extra attention from being the only baby in the house. Can you tell?

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Bowling with my homies

If you did not pick up on that reference to one of the silliest movies ever, Clueless starring Alicia Silverstone ("Wait, I love Josh!"), you should not be here.

Last Saturday, after the boys (even the big one) had bummed around the house all week, the matriarch decided that we needed a fun outing. I needed for it to be an indoor outing, because it was 100-degrees outside at noon. Corey needed for it to be a cost-efficient-for-a-family-of-four outing, because poor guy finally got to fix the rearview mirror on his car last week. We considered Celebration Station, Chuck-E-Cheese and All-Star Bowling, and ultimately decided on lunch, bowling and arcade games at All-Star Bowling.

Forgive the poor pictures. I took all of them on my phone.

I was de-lighted to eat lunch at the bowling alley, because a couple times a year, I need cheesy nachos with soggy chips and oily cheese, and hark! They have that exact thing at the bowling alley. So, Phase One was lunch, which always ends with a staring contest in not-our-home eating establishments.

Landen says a staring contest means you don't blink, but Corey can stare into infinity, so I think Landen just uses that as his tactic for beating Corey.

Jake cannot hold a stare for a long period of time, so this contest took about as long as taking the picture did.

I had to stop taking pictures when they turned off the overhead lights, turned on the smoke and neon lights and cranked the music, which was pretty cool for a Saturday afternoon. And, the last time I was in a bowling alley, you could smoke in them. You cannot anymore, which just left my intense fear of germs to keep me from relaxing into the afternoon. I stopped counting how many times I made the boys go wash their hands. All I could think about was what one of those germ lights would show on the holes of a bowling ball. 

They put the bumpers up for the boys, but not for me. I asked.

I was not able to get a picture of Landen and Corey standing next to each other, which is hilarious to me, because Landen from the back is Corey, shrunken.

Watching both the boys bowl was extremely entertaining. Corey told them that you're supposed to back up to the end of the wood floor, walk forward and roll the ball out at the line. Jake's interpretation of this was to run forward, screech to a halt with both feet over the line, into the lane, and combo roll/throw the bowling ball.

Landen bowled like I did when I was little. He throws that sumbitch, and it literally zig-zags down the lane eating each bumper at least twice.

After Jake's ball connects with any pins, he spins around and jumps into the air. That does not capture well on a camera phone.

Landen is a fierce competitor and a terrible, terrible bowler. See above description of his launch of the bowling ball.

Once we established that we were going bowling, we were all informed by Corey that he would be housing us all, as he was a wicked good bowler. I had very low performance expectations for my own bowling skills, having last been bowling the night of my senior prom, and sucking royally at it then. But imagine my delight when the first round ended like this:

Nell - 95

Landen - 88

Jake - 87

Corey - 76

Everybody's scores were shitty, but I won, I won, I won, I won! Until I pointed out to Corey, who is left handed, that when he aimed in the center, his ball kept going left, so maybe he should aim more right. This greatly improved his score, and I take complete and total credit for my stellar coaching. I've never tried coaching bowling, but I think it could be an alternate career for me. Since I have The World's Worst Hand-Eye Coordination, I can't aim for shit. I'm also afraid of falling down, so I don't do that whole "walk up and roll the ball in one fluid movement" that Corey advocates. Punchline is I'm not being invited to a bowling league anytime soon. 

The second round came out like this. You will notice that Corey is still doing no housing. His doppelganger with the violent throw and the professional use of the bumpers was doing the housing:

Landen - 191

Nell - 177

Corey - 176

Jake - 153

We bought two hours of bowling, and that was actually ridiculous. It took us 30 minutes to bowl a set, or whateverthehell you call it when everybody bowls ten turns, and we got bored after three. The final round was the one Corey won:

Corey - 283

Nell - 279

Landen - 274

Jake - 244

We turned in our shoes and went to go waste money in the arcade. The environment was shitty for pictures, because they still had all the neon party lights raring in the theatre.

Terminator:Salvation. None of the spawn of Corey Allbritton can pass a game controller, especially if it's a gun.

Corey is, unfortunately, wicked good at air hockey.

Jake didn't weigh enough to tilt the motorcycle himself, so Corey had to help him. I had a glimpse into my future spiral into substance abuse watching Landen simulate driving a motorcycle.

A good time was had by all, even me. Jake and Landen said it was the best afternoon of their lives, even better than their days at the beach, which is exactly the way you want your kids to remember you (i.e. the Source of The Most Fun Ever) before they go off for two weeks of East Coast adventures with their grandparents.
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Does this count as child care for tax purposes?

This week, Corey is home with the boys. They are attending St. Jude bible school in the mornings all week. The first day they came home with leather (bracelet for Jake, cross for Landen) that they stamped their named into with metal stamps and hammers. Yesterday Landen brought home an anorexic phallus of a candle. I'm sorry. I know no other way to describe it. Today I got a small cardboard flowerpot with a Ducati drawn on it (Jesus loves motorcycles. You didn't know?) and a beaded cross necklace. Jake has marker all over his hands, but he hasn't brought me any crafts since Monday.

In the afternoons, there is video-game playing and errand-running and movie watching. Today they cleaned out their closet, where all the toys live, to give toys to little kids whose parents can't afford to buy them. I was not here for this process, but I can report empty bins and less clutter in the closet. Corey said Jake got kinda into it, and Landen wanted to keep everything. He threw away everything they haven't fooled with in a year (mostly Ben 10 and Power Rangers) and anything broken, whether they wanted to keep it or not. I suspect we lost quite a few Transformers in this last category of purge.

This is what you wear at our house during summer vacation if your name is Jake Allbritton.

Let me break it down for you, top to bottom. His hat is a boonie cap he got from his dad when he got back from Iraq. The bathrobe is FLEECE, and for the life of me I cannot get him to understand how fleece is not a summer fabric. The gloves are Darth Vader gloves from a full Star Wars costume set. The satchel is a prop from an Indiana Jones costume. There is a belt on this robe, but he prefers to cinch it with his brown leather braided belt. There is no name for this outfit. Oh, and underneath? Underwear. This is what he puts on when he gets home from bible school or summer camp, and he takes it all off (and puts all the elements in the proper places) before he gets in the shower.

Tuesday night Corey and I went to see the extended version of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was showing at our movie theatre for one night only. (Next Tuesday is The Two Towers and the Tuesday after that is, you guessed it, Return of the King.) Cydney and Justin came to babysit. When we got home, we learned that a game of Trouble had gotten heated and Landen got so angry (he was losing) that he tried to flip the board over. Justin caught it and the game continued. Landen did not learn sportsmanship in Pre-K, and his dad has thrown him out of more board games than he's ever finished. Anyway, they were already asleep when we got home and learned of The Incident, so it was not until this morning that he learned his punishment for unsportsmanlike conduct would be cleaning the toilets.

Why?

Because nobody wants to clean toilets, and nobody wants to play games with Landen. Corey put gloves on him and sprayed the toilets with Kaboom! and sent him to scrub all three of them.

And dammit if he didn't say he liked doing it. He is wearing the bottom part of a Star Wars costume and a Chicago Bulls t-shirt. I have glimpses into the fights I will endure trying to get them to dress appropriately in junior high and high school.

Today I got up early in the morning and headed to New Orleans for Tobacco-Free Living meetings, which ended at 2:30. There are a couple of us leaving, so we had cake and everybody signed a card for me. I could do good-byes - this was the last time we would all be together before I'm outie on June 30th - so I hope they all forgive me for just sneaking out. I headed over to City Hall to start on my paperwork and meet with my almost-boss and left there at 6:45. I'm trying to hold out until the boys go to sleep before I crash. These two New Orleans days per week are going to take some adjusting to, because my ass is dragging.

Corey fared well holding down the fort all by himself, though Landen told me he had a headache and Dad wasn't a very good nurse. Jake asked of my whereabouts three times all day. Corey said Landen asked where I was and when I was coming home every time the thought in his head changed, to the point where Corey forbade him to ask it again. Landen is in a stage where he does not like when one of us is not here. He fights sleep with claims of various ailments - stomachache, headache - but miraculously falls asleep fine when we're both home. Tonight was the first night this week we've both been home at bedtime, and we didn't hear a peep from him after we tucked them in.

On Monday, they leave for two weeks on the East Coast with their grandparents, so this weekend I'm going to soak in as much of them as I can. Two weeks is a long time to go without children and only your husband and dog for company. Whatever will become of me?
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The trying times of Landen Allbritton (and other updates)

The boys are spending the summer in a hodge podge schedule of YMCA summer camp, traveling with their grandparents, attending Vacation Bible School at our new church/their new school and bumming around the house with their dad, who took a total of three weeks off this summer. Last week was their first week at summer camp. They hated it. Well, to be fair, Jake did not enjoy it but he said it was not as bad as he thought it was going to be. He already knows a kid in his age group, and he made a friend. Landen hated every single day of it, even though he made three friends and wants them all to come sleep over.

This was actually taken before summer started. Jake's hair is growing out because at ten you start to defy your parents by thinking for yourself and forming your own opinions about what you would like to look like. I've convinced their dad to temporarily indulge them in this.

Practicing for their swim test at the big lap pool at the Y. You have to take a swim test the first day of summer camp to show that you are worthy of the covetous Green Armband and do not have to wear a lifejacket and stay in the shallow end.

If I could afford to send Jake Allbritton to camp every single day this summer, I would. I cannot think of a single thing we've done for the boy in the last year that yields the positive results that summer camp does. I have read countless articles that extoll the benefits of physical activity for kids with ADHD. During the school year, he plays at recess and on the weekends we make him get away from the computer and the TV and play. That's minimal physical activity. I've written how well he does when he's in Jena or in Florida at Corey's mom's house where there's a big yard and lots of activity. But y'all, summer camp in 100-degree heat wears that boy slap out and he is the model of charm, good behavior and high spirits when we get him home at night. They run and sweat the poor impulse control and the hyperactivity plum out of him. He's so pleasant and congenial and happy. He's even started eating things he did not eat before and drinking water, which he would choose thirst over last month. We're in a Summer of Agreeable, I suppose.

Jake, chillin' at bedtime. P.S. Lily no longer comes downstairs to sleep with me anymore. She sleeps with the boys, which makes her almost entirely an upstairs cat.

Landen is having a tough time. If there's a cure for eight-year-old-smartass, I beg someone to send it here. I'm assured by the psychologist they see that this is normal behavior for his age, but when he starts the lamenting about how no one likes him and we want him to leave, it's easy for my Pissed Off to leave me for Coddling. Landen cannot help but to argue with me when I correct him and loves to cut my ass off with an exasperated and loud "I KNOW" or "OKAY" when I'm talking to him. This gets television and video games taken away from him. He's had to go to bed earlier than Jake. His dad whips his ass. Apparently, my Landen cannot help it. Nor can he tell me how I can help him help himself. 

Last week he did not get to take his swim test and had to wear a life jacket and stay in the shallow end. Then he got in trouble for badgering the SHIT out of the counselors to let him take the swim test. He ran into a fence and gave himself a slight black eye. He did make three friends. Today I drove up and when the counselor called for him to put down the hula-hoop and get his stuff together, I watched him from the car and heard him from my open window yell at the counselor, the same way he yells at me at home. I will not have that shit. I had to white-knuckle the wheel to keep from jerking him across the parking lot by that really soft and tender armskin. I was also too furious and embarrassed to drive and had to pull over to call and summon his dad home now. 'Twasn't pretty when he arrived home.

Landen, who is, as I post this picture, upstairs with this very same look on his face convinced that lightning is going to hit the house and kill us all. I told him that if lightning hits the house, it will fry all our TVs and the lights will go out, so ready the flashlight. I think frying in a lightning storm would be the better alternative to him than losing a TV.

Next week they are doing VBS at St. Jude and staying home with Corey all week. I'm sure some fun shit will go down, but I'm most excited that Corey is going to make them clean out their tragedy of a closet. It's a small walk-in, and ALL the toys are in there. I told them that somewhere there is a four-year-old boy whose parents cannot afford to buy him Power Rangers action figures and that Baby Jesus wants the Allbrittons to give him the pristine conditioned collection they are too old to play with. This theory applies to half the shit in that closet. What better way to compliment a week of bible school than with charitable giving? 

Last note: if you have not read Tina Fey's Bossypants, please do so immediately. I convulse with laughter every time I pick it up.

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