The Caboodle

Upon first inspection to the unsuspecting male, this might seem to be an ordinary, albeit pink, little box.  But any female born circa 1980 would beg to differ.  When I found my old Caboodle tucked away in a bathroom at my parents' house, I was instantly transported to the time of  scrunchies, crimping irons, and Aquanet hairspray.  Oh to be a girl in the 80s!  Home perm?  Oh yes.  Gravity-defying bangs?  You betcha.

I had no immediate use for my Caboodle, yet I couldn't bear the thought of throwing it out.  By happenstance, around the same time, Jeff let drop that he was looking for a storage bin for his soldering supplies.  But could he really bear to store his manly tools in a box that once held a collection of Wet n Wild nail polish?



Good thing he is secure in his manhood.  And I love him for it.

I'm Still Here, El Guapo

We're back after a four month blogging hiatus, and what a whirlwind these past four months have been.  We started casually talking about moving, with hopes of finding a new house in the next couple years before Anna starts school.  We thought, why not have a look at a few houses?  Who knew that in our first DAY of visiting houses that we would find the one?.  Apparently, we're the kind of people who take three years to buy a couch, but one day to buy a house.

our awesome realtor, wheeling and dealing to make this house ours

The harder part was/is selling our old house.   First we had to prepare it for staging.  This meant removing 75% of the furniture from the house, though really that meant removing 100% of useful furniture and leaving only decorative display tables and wicker baskets.  Then our realtor hired a professional stager.  The stager continued on the theme of rendering the house unlivable by replacing kitchen appliances with fake orchids and placing breakable knicknacks in low places.  For an entire month, we had to pull the coffeemaker out of the oven in the morning and go to the garage to toast bread.

this is how it looks all the time, really

This was all while going about daily life with a toddler, who has an affinity for scattering toys to the farthest corners of the house, and a baby, who insists on feeding herself and does so with exuberance.  Every morning, the beautifully staged house would last about 10 minutes before being returned to its natural state.  Whenever a realtor would call wanting to show the house, I would fly into a cleaning frenzy while the kids attempted to undo my efforts.  Did I mention that they were also on totally opposite napping schedules, meaning that any time of day that someone wanted to see the house, one of the kids would have to be rudely awoken from a nap?  If I had known how difficult this whole process would be, I would've said, "Forget it, dream house.  You're pretty great, but this might be the death of me."

In the end, we survived the house showings (though it's still on the market), survived a nail-biting multiple offer scenario on the new house (thank you, Jesus!), survived a move (just barely),  and here we are.  After the move, Anna told us, "I want to stay here in the new house forever."  We couldn't agree more.

the new house's treehouse

The new house is rife with possibilities and just crying out for projects, so we hope to get some of them up on the blog soon.  First up is putting Tess' room together.  After living in our closet for the first year of her life, she deserves some guilt-ridden overcompensation in the form of a really cute room.

Cloth Diapers and the Poop-ocalypse

Like many Seattle-ites and other parents out there, we jumped on the cloth diaper bandwagon when our firstborn made her entrance into the world.  For all the benefits (saving money, sending less junk to landfills, getting to outfit your baby in cute diaper covers, blah blah blah), there’s no getting around one glaring downside.   You will be washing out a lot of poop.  A few years back, our then-single and childless friend Jeremy expressed shock and disgust that we washed cloth diapers in the same laundry machine that we use on our regular clothes.  Is that disgusting?  Maybe to non-parents.  But Jeremy's day is coming soon, for he and his wife Chrissie are expecting a little bundle of joy, AND they're planning on using cloth.  Yippee!  So this post is dedicated to Jeremy and all parents who are considering cloth but aren't so excited about the prospect of handling poop.

In the pre-kid era, Jeff and I considered ourselves somewhat immune to the yuckiness of poop.  After all, Jeff grew up on a mini-farm and once almost drowned in a lagoon of cow manure.  And while I wasn’t literally up to my neck in poop, I have done my fair share of gastroenterology rotations in med school and residency.  Not to mention working as a nanny before that.  But nothing could prepare us for the sheer magnitude and variance of the poop that parenthood would bring.

I remember the early days of Anna’s life, when she would leave tiny streaks of sticky newborn poo on her diapers, and we would naively congratulate ourselves on our fortitude for not being grossed out by diapers like so many parents we knew.  Then in the coming weeks, she impressed us with her, well, productivity.  And explosivity.  Jeff developed a rating scale to quickly communicate the magnitude of her output, ranging from a 1 (barely necessitating a diaper change) to a 10 (full soilage of diaper, outfit, surrounding environment, and caretaker, thus necessitating a load of laundry, a shower, and a glass of wine).  This is also known as the poop-ocalypse.  Yet we still patted ourselves on the back for handling her mustardy breastmilk poo-poo with hardly a second thought.  But, oh, did we have another thing coming.  Enter solid foods and a new realm of utterly foul diapers.  Suddenly our pro-cloth diaper stance began to waver. If we were going to make it to the potty training stage with cloth diapers, we were going to have to add some anti-poop weapons to our arsenal.  Here were our weapons of choice:

Weapon #1: The disposable diaper liner.  These little papers resemble a dryer sheet that goes inside the cloth diaper.  If the baby leaves a little present, the liner can easily be dumped into the toilet and flushed down.  While great in theory, these failed the practicality test, since they cost up to 5-10 cents a piece (seriously? for a sheet of beefed up toilet paper?).  We didn't use these for long.



Weapon #2: The diaper sprayer.  We hit a freecycle jackpot on this one!  This hooks up to the toilet and sprays poop off the diaper into the toilet bowl so you don’t have to do the whole “dunk and swirl” business.  Caution advised, my friend, spray downward.  Downward!

Weapon #3: The potty chair.  At 8 months of age, Anna decided to go poop every time she sat in her high chair for dinner (oh she’s going to love this story when she’s a teenager).  Seriously, every single day.   Invariably, our hot dinner would grow tepid as one of us left to deal with a poopy diaper.  After a few weeks of this, we decided that enough was enough and in frustration, plunked her on the potty chair to let her do her business.  Who knew she would love it so much that she would then refuse to poop in diapers from then on?  We started the same thing with Tess around 7 months, when she could sit on the potty without falling off.  Boy does she love using that potty chair!  Unfortunately, it hasn't solved the problem of cold dinners (tonight BOTH of the girls interrupted dinner to use the toilet), but it sure has cut down on dirty diapers.

Parents: how do YOU handle cloth diapers and the poop-ocalypse?

For the Love of Dairy, Part 3: Blessed Are the (Goat) Cheesemakers

In the bleary postpartum haze following baby Tess’ birth, I was struck with sudden inspiration.  We would learn to make cheese.  Cheese, you ask?  Cheese?!?  Somewhere between dead-of-the-night feedings of a newborn and endless stories and trips to the park with a toddler, cheesemaking sprung to the top of my must-do list.  Blame it on hormones.

Jeff read an article in Make about making goat cheese, so we decided to give it a go.  Since we weren’t hitting the clubs much those days, we planned the experiment for a home date night.  Yes, pretty wild bunch we are.  Due to our failure to plan ahead, we made the mistake of doing steps 1-4 on our date night, which took a grand total of 5 minutes.  We spent the rest of the date night twiddling out thumbs and struggling to stay awake until a respectable time to go to bed (say, 8:30pm or so).  Then I had to do the more labor-intensive steps 5-9 involving cheesecloth and large amounts of liquids while holding Tess in one arm, when Jeff was at work the next day.  Oops.

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Supplies:
1 gallon goat milk
¼ c buttermilk
rennet (can buy in specialty stores or online)
1 ½ tsp salt
dried herbs (we used garlic and dill)
cheesecloth or clean handkerchief
large stainless steel pot with lid
colander
thermometer

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Instructions:
1. Sterilize the pot by boiling ¼ cup of water for 5 minutes with the lid on, then discard the water.
2. Combine the goat milk and the buttermilk in the pot, and heat to room temp (65F) over a low flame.
3. Prepare the rennet following the package directions, then add to the pot.  Stir well to combine.
4. Let the mixture sit undisturbed at room temp overnight- no jiggling! no prodding!

5. Go to bed.  Pray that the baby will sleep for 3 hours in a row.

6. In about 12 hours, the milk should have formed a curd (i.e. be slice-able with a knife).  If not, let it sit a few more hours.

7. Boil the cheesecloth to sterilize it, and spread it in a colander.

8. Cut the curd into 1” cubes with a long knife, and scoop them into the cheesecloth.

9. Gather the corners of the cloth and secure with a rubber band.  Set the colander over a bowl in the fridge, and let the whey drain overnight.  Be sure a check the bowl before you go to bed, as it might be overflowing.

10. Go to bed again.  Lower your standards and hope for a 2 hour stretch of sleep.

11. When the cheese is done draining, it will be the consistency of whipped cream cheese.  Add salt and herbs of choice.

12. Bring to a party to impress your friends.  Or eat it all by yourself during a middle-of-the-night feeding.  Really, nobody will know.

For the Love of Dairy, Part 2: Yogurt in the Slow Cooker

In the past month, four of my coworkers have joined the homemade yogurt revolution.  Three have become converts.  One continues to waver on the fence after several botched attempts.  She plaintively asked what could be going wrong, as she sheepishly produced a Yoplait from her lunch bag.  Upon further investigation, it turns out that she had strayed from the original formula and was heating the milk in a saucepan or in a rice cooker.  Why?  No jars, she said.  Not even a single empty PB or spaghetti sauce jar languishing in the recycle bin?  No.  Well, never fear, here is a jar-free and foolproof way to make delicious yogurt at home with your trusty slow cooker.



Supplies:

a slow cooker

1/2 gallon of milk (2% or whole)

1/2 cup of yogurt starter (any plain yogurt with live, active cultures)

a beach towel or blanket

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Instructions:

Pour 1/2 gallon of milk  in the slow cooker and place the lid on top

Turn on low for 2.5 hours

Turn off, leaving lid on for 3 hours.  At this point, the milk should be roughly 90-110 deg F.

Gently stir in about a half cup of starter and replace lid

Wrap in a large beach towel or blanket for 6-12 hours, leaving undisturbed



Transfer to containers and chill in the fridge.

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That's it!  Be sure to set aside half a cup to use as the starter for your next batch before digging in.  The yogurt might seem a little soft at first, but after cooling in the fridge, should firm up a bit.  If it's still too runny, you have the option of pouring it into a coffee-filter lined colander to drain some whey off.  This yields thicker, almost Greek-style yogurt, but is messy and cumbersome.  Or next time, I've heard you can add some dry milk powder in at the step when you mix in the starter, though I've never tried this.

This method is super easy and requires very little active time, but I prefer the jars method because it doesn't require scooping out and transferring the yogurt, which I think makes it runnier.  The jars also allows for making different types of yogurt at the same time, like 2% for the grownups and whole milk for the baby.  And you don't have to spend time transferring yogurt and then washing a big heavy slow cooker pot.  Instead, if your baby is anything like our baby Anna was (see above), you can spend that extra time washing off the white hand of Saruman from your baby's hair after she digs into that delicious yogurt you just made.

For the Love of Dairy, Part I: Homemade Yogurt

In my opinion, the ideal do-it-yourself cooking endeavor should encompass at least three out of four traits: taste better, be more nutritious, save money, or be relatively easy.

Example #1: Rotisserie chicken. (insert loud buzzer sound)  Zero out of four.  Even with hours in the kitchen, I could never make one as delicious as the $4.99 Costco kind.

Example #2:  Ravioli. (repeat angry buzzing sound).  Maybe one out of four at most.  Do people really make this from scratch?  Non-Italians, I mean?  If so, props to you.  And feel free to drop by any time to "show" us how.

Example #3: Yogurt. (insert happy dinging sound)  Four for four!  Homemade yogurt is so delicious, healthy, and simple.  Really.  You might be thinking to yourself, "Make your own yogurt?  Next she's going to tell me to milk my own cow."  But before you dismiss me as a granola-loving, butter-churning, commune-living pseudo hippie, hear me out.

I first started making yogurt a couple years ago to save some money, as our little household was going through a good half-gallon or more a week, but soon I found that I really did prefer the taste of homemade to store-bought.  I was shocked at the amount of sugar, often in the form of high fructose corn syrup, companies managed to pack into those little cups.  After reading about yogurt making here, I went to town.  It might sound complicated, but trust me, if you can boil water, you can make yogurt.

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Supplies:


3 or 4 glass jars with lids—canning jars are great but any sturdy glass jar will work
a large pot
a dishtowel
a picnic cooler
milk—I’ve had success with 2% and whole, never tried skim or 1% but they might work
1 cup of yogurt starter—basically a plain yogurt with live active cultures.  My favorite is Trader Joe’s European style yogurt.  I've also had good results with Brown Cow, Tillamook, and Mountain High.

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The basic gist:

Heat the milk to 185 degrees to sterilize
Cool to 90-110 degrees
Add yogurt starter (i.e. yogurt with live cultures)
Incubate at 90-110 degrees for 4-24 hours

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The detailed instructions:

Fill the jars with milk, and place them in the pot over a dishtowel, tucking the towel in between the jars a little so they don’t knock together and break.  Fill the pot with water.

Bring the water to a boil and allow the milk to reach 185 degrees.  If you don’t have a thermometer, you can tell it’s ready when the milk forms a skin on top.



Remove the jars from the heat and set on the counter, skim the skin off the milk, and place the lids on.  Place the lid on the pot to keep the water warm.  Take the yogurt starter out of the fridge now to let it warm up a little.

Allow the milk to cool on the counter to somewhere between 90-110 degrees (in our house this usually takes about 60-90 minutes).  Some sites recommend putting the jars in an ice water bath to cool faster, but I have broken more than one jar this way, and a quart of milk exploding in the kitchen really takes the fun out of this whole endeavor.  If you don’t have a thermometer, you can tell the milk is ready when you’re able to hold the jar in your hand without burning yourself, but it still feels pretty warm.

Add the yogurt starter, roughly 2 tablespoons per quart of milk, taking care not to stir too vigorously.  Just a couple figure 8s with the spoon will do.



Place the jars and the pot of water (or at least a big jarful) in a picnic cooler surrounded by a towel for 4-24 hours.  The goal is to keep it at 90-110 degrees for incubation, though I've never measured.  Resist the urge to peek too often; the yogurt sets better if undisturbed, and you don't want your heat to escape.  I usually put the yogurt in at bedtime and pull it out in the morning.   With a toddler and an infant, I’ll let you guess how long that span of time is.  Good thing yogurt is hard to mess up.

That's it!  Now you have pure, unadulterated yogurt to devour.

Note: If you are lactose-intolerant like me, you might be happy to learn that many yogurts have low lactose content and are more easily digested than, say, a cup of cow's milk.  I am still on the quest for a truly lactose-FREE homemade yogurt product, though.  Trial #1 with soy milk was a total fail.  One bite and I nearly threw up in the sink.  Trial #2 with lactose-free milk yielded a yogurt with a delicious flavor but a texture that was alarmingly like mucus.  The quest continues . . .

For the Love of Dairy

Ours was a classic case of opposites attract, a story as old as the Montagues and Capulets, the Sharks and the Jets.  Only the trait that threatened to divide us was not social class, race, nor loyalty, but . . . dairy.  Though, a seemingly minor difference, the affinity to or abhorrence of milk products runs deep in our lineage.

Jeff's dad grew up on a farm in Minnesota, yet even after leaving to earn degrees in education, he continued  to keep company with a bovine crew.  Even to this day, though his day job is far from the farm, he continues to milk cows on weekends.  Mostly for fun.  If one were to peruse my in-laws' magazine racks, one would find not only the requisite Good Housekeeping and Readers Digests, but issues of Hoard's Dairyman, complete with Playboy-esque centerfolds of cows, strutting in their bovine beauty.  Then there is the stuffed cow collection.  But don't be fooled into thinking they only love cows as people, er, as cows.  They love it all: steak, burgers, roasts, milk, cheese, sour cream, butter.  Jeff's entire extended family on his mother's side partakes in the ritual of Saturday night hamburgers.  That's right; they eat hamburgers EVERY week.  Oh yes, that family loves cows.



My family, on the other hand, shares a dairy aversion common to much of the entire continent of Asia.

So when this lactose-intolerant girl met a lover-of-all-things-that-come-from-a-cow guy, someone had to give.  Jeff discovered liquid lactase enzyme, similar to Lactaid pills but in a liquid form that can be added directly to milk to digest the lactose prior to consumption.  For some reason this was unavailable in the U.S. and must be mail-ordered from Canada.  A few drops of liquid lactase into a gallon of milk and presto chango!  Lactose-free milk for a fraction of the price of store-bought.  It was all smooth sailing for a while there, until we received a batch that was undeniably a dud.  The bottled enzyme was no longer functional.  Don’t ask me how I know; just trust me on that one.  After that, I was a little gunshy to try Canadian mail-order pharmaceuticals again.

Eventually, we came to peace with the fact that though cows'  milk and I may never get along, there are plenty of other dairy products to enjoy (with the help of a Costco-sized box of lactase pills).  Over the years, what began for me as an aversion to dairy became a tolerance, then a full-fledged love affair, and now somewhat of a hobby as well.  Nowadays I cannot imagine a fridge without, say, yogurt and gorgonzola cheese.   (As an aside, how many different dairy products can you spot in our fridge above?)  In the next few months we will be featuring a do-it-yourself dairy series sharing some of our favorite homemade recipes for yogurt, Neufchatel, mozzarella, goat cheese, and (best of all) ice cream.  So buddy up with your local cow and stay tuned . . .