COVID Quarantine – Page 2 – Life Off Headset

Life skills for kids

Life Skills Bucket aka cleaning supplies. — Life Skills Bucket!

This morning, the 8 year old made herself breakfast – a fried egg and cheese breakfast sandwich. The husband has been teaching her how to do this for about a year now. It’s an ongoing process – first he started by teaching her how to toast the English muffins or bagels. Then how to spread the cream cheese or butter. Since last fall he has been working with her on how to perfectly fry an egg. (Hopefully the next step is how to throw out the eggshells. But I have to remind myself that it’s a long term adulting goal here.) We still turn on the stove for her, though in moments of enthusiasm she has done it herself – which causes me a mixture of pride and panic.

What struck me this morning, though, was how comfortable she has become with making this humble breakfast sandwich. There was a time, quite recently, when spreading the cream cheese would lead to a meltdown. But this morning, she moved quite confidently from one step to the other: butter in pan, English muffins in toaster oven, crack egg into a dish, then gently slip it into the pan, cook just so, layer a slice of cheese on top, cover to melt the cheese then slip it on to the buttered English muffin. I watched her do it, and I thought, “Huh, she’s learning some life skills!”

I’ve been trying to teach some life skills during this quarantine period – to the eight year old, at least. We are still covering basic survival instincts with the three year old and the baby. So far with the eight year old we’ve done: hand sewing (blanket stitch and whipstich), cleaning the bathroom, using [ctrl] + [x] and [ctrl] + [v]. I’ve also started on a long held goal to teach her how to write in cursive. Not really a life skill in this day and age, but there is something orderly and elegant about it that makes me sad it isn’t taught anymore. On the list also is touch typing. It boggles me that the kids spend so much time on computers in school, yet no one is teaching them how to touch type. Every time I watch my kid hunt and peck, I want to scream.

She also, of her own accord wants to learn to crochet, and has other cooking/baking things on her agenda. I do worry that the life skills on our list skew towards domestic arts and stereotypical feminine crafts. Though perhaps this skewing is more a societal construct than my own, and on the list should also be “Resist the Patriarchy (while not being a slob)”. I did throw, “Use a power tool” onto the list, just to balance things out.

A couple summers ago, I came across this list of Life Skills from the Edit Your Life Podcast, and it hits a lot of the things that I hope my child(ren) can learn. Replacing the toilet paper roll is a big one for me. I think we have that one down. Actually there are a couple things on this list that I haven’t mastered yet (“Identify freezer burn.” is one…. Though I tend to be pretty forgiving of stuff in the freezer, so perhaps that one isn’t necessary.)

Some thoughts/ tips I had about teaching my kids life skills:

Be patient – Often I get frustrated because I think, “I can do this in 5 seconds!”, but then I have to remember that I’ve had 40 years to figure things out. I do give myself a lot of “time outs” to scream into my pillow when things get irrevocably tangled or slow.

Lower your standards – The bathroom is now my daughter’s responsibility. It definitely doesn’t get as clean as when I do it, or when our cleaner does it. But I think that at least she is doing it. For me, a lot of the value is in the doing and getting done. First of all it means that I don’t have to do it, and second of all, it means that it becomes a doable task for her, which I think is empowering.

Make it routine – Once I teach the kid how to do something, there is a reasonable expectation from me that I will have her do it again. I think a lot of adulting is developing good habits (still working on that myself!) – so I want her to learn that things that will serve her again and again. So we clean every weekend. When school was in session, she would pack her own lunch and make her own breakfast. I think that is the “life” part of “life skills”.

The three year old vacuuming. Imperfectly. But it’s a start.

Guajillo Chile Enchilada Sauce

We’ve been meal planning pretty strictly these days, mostly because it helps save on trips to the grocery store. On Saturday morning, I’ll take stock of what needs to be eaten, and what we have in the fridge, freezer and pantry, and then make a list for the Husband to take to the store. (Incidentally, he was wondering if he should have a handle – like DLH for Dear Loving Husband. The jury is still out on that one. I mean, I feel like anonymity is sort of futile. It’s a developing process, I guess.) I don’t particularly feel like we are spending less on groceries – actually I feel like we are spending more. But we aren’t eating out as much, and I find meal planning calming. For someone who is paid to plan, I probably don’t do enough of it in real life.

This week I had some blue corn tortillas to use up. I had impulsively added them to our Hungry Harvest order (“Ooh! they’re blue!”), but there weren’t quite enough for me to make tacos for the whole family, so they sat in the fridge for a while. I remember reading about migas in a book and that sounded like a tasty frugal way to use them up. When I started googling, however, I came across a recipe for chilaquiles brunch casserole on the ever tasty Smitten Kitchen website, and I was sold.

Often when I meal plan, I’m pretty diligent about reading recipes to make sure I put the ingredients I need on to the Husband’s list. Not this time. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I assumed that I could just whip up the necessary enchilada sauce from tomatoes and I-don’t-know-what. So I didn’t quite have the necessary ingredients to make any one of the enchilada sauces that came up in my search. But…. I realized I could probably make something up by combining different elements from separate recipes. And then, I came across this recipe and it called for guajillo chilies, and I got very excited.

You see, the Husband likes to buy me random things from specialty grocery stores. “I don’t know what you do with it,” he’ll say presenting the mystery item to me, “but it looked interesting. I know you’ll figure it out!” Some time ago, he had bought me a bag of dried guajillo chilies, which had been languishing in our basement pantry ever since. Now, I love using things up out of the basement pantry. There is something very satisfying about it – like “We have back up reserves! And we can use it!” Never mind that currently our back up reserves is stocked with, in addition to rice and flour, Welch’s fruit snacks and Oreos. Pandemic panic buying at it’s finest.

So I gleefully liberated the guajillo chilies from the basement and improvised this enchilada sauce. And it was pretty tasty! In fact, the whole casserole was a definite hit. I am blessed with kids who are remarkably good eaters, but I always have a bit of trepidation when serving new food – kids are fickle and who knows when they will suddenly develop limited palettes?

Here’s the recipe. I am by no means a recipe writer, so it is not terribly precise. I’m definitely of the taste as you go school, and I think this combination of ingredients is pretty forgiving?

GUAJILLO CHILI ENCHILADA SAUCE

8 Guajillo Chilis
2 cups broth (I used 2 cups water with Penzy’s veggie stock paste)
2 large cloves garlic
1 onion
2 tablespoons tomatoe paste
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano

Heat guajillo chilies and unpeeled garlic in a skillet until they are warm and slightly soft. Remove chilies, cut open, discarding stems and seeds. Soak in hot water for 30-ish minutes. Toast garlic until it is soft and roasted.
Heat broth in a saucepan. Dice onion and add it to broth. Squeeze the toasted garlic in as well. Bring to a boil and simmer until onion is soft.
Whisk in tomatoe paste. Add cumin, oregano, and chilies. Cook for a bit.
Put it all in a blender and blend til smooth.
Pour back into saucepan and cook until thickened.

Weekend: Different but Same

I’ve been pondering what makes a weekend these days. When I am working, the weekends usually mean just Sunday since I often have rehearsals or shows on Saturday. And then there are the other typical weekend activities – lessons for the kids, batch cooking, birthday parties, trip downtown to a museum, sometimes even a day trip, football in front of a tv or with friends, social gatherings, church. These are often activities the Husband takes on, ref: stage managers work on Saturdays. (Sometimes I work on Sundays too, but usually I get one or the other off.)

Needless to say most of these activities are now frowned upon. But we did do some “weekend” type things these past two days. We celebrated birthdays: We drove by the houses of two friends whose kids had birthdays this week. We brought noisemakers and percussion instruments and yelled and sang happy birthday and then visited for a little bit – us sitting in our cars, and them standing in their driveway or on their sidewalks.

I took the kids on a walk down our local trail. The County has closed the road next to the trail to traffic on weekends so people can walk on the road, making social distancing along the trail more practical. It had just rained and there were plenty of puddles and mud. “We went on a muddy walk!” the three year old declared.

Husband made a big batch of chili. I get to batch bake/cook during the week, so Saturday was his day in the kitchen.

We went to church – which now means gathering in the basement for the livestream of 9am Mass. We actually “went” twice because there were technical difficulties the first time, so we streamed other services in the morning. But then we decided that we liked the atmosphere of our home church best, and we came back at 2pm when the Church had everything worked out.

We didn’t go out to the theatre, but we did stream the first half of Twelfth Night from London’s National Theatre. Despite working in the arts, I don’t see a whole lot of theatre, so I’ve been loving this series of performances. There is a flexibility and agility to theatre – both the performances and the technical aspects – that I don’t get to necessarily experience in my own work.

We cleaned. I’ve been trying to get the eight year old to clean. She now does bathrooms and windows. Somewhat imperfectly and slowly, but it’s a start. The slowness might be tied to the fact that she gets to listen to an audiobook while she cleans. Then also, on her own, she cleaned her room, including sweeping and vacuuming. When I exclaimed my surprise and delight, she said, “Well, when there is nothing else to do, you can always clean.” Not really my philosophy, but I’m glad it’s hers.

So I guess any one of these things can be done each day, but the weekend was marked by doing all of them. And also the fact that my husband didn’t work. That was nice too. We have certainly been having a lot of family time during the week these days, but I have to say as nebulous as a “weekend” is right now, it still brings on a different quality of family time.

I Baked a Cake

This week the baby turned 7 months old. So I baked a cake. The slimmest of excuses to bake a cake, but I think little things are worth celebrating these days. And cakes are worth baking. I’ve been looking through my collection of cooking magazines – Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur, Gourmet, stretching back ten years. I would like to cook from them more, partly in an effort to cull the ones that have no future with us, as they do take up quite a bit of space. Anyhow, I found a recipe for yellow cake with chocolate frosting in Cook’s Illustrated that was surprisingly unfussy. While I love the tenacity and scientific bent of Cooks Illustrated, sometimes I find the results aren’t worth that extra step or ingredient they like to throw in. Tastes are perhaps a little more subjective than their authoritarian voice allows. The cake turned out beautifully.

And while the oven was hot, I finished making at batch of Fig Newtons. (King Arthur Flour Cookbook)

So it was a full day in the kitchen. A full-messy-mountain of dirty dishes-batter on the floor-there are no plates leftover for dinner kind of day. I had many more of these days when this isolation thing started. Days where the kitchen was never clean and I went through 5 lbs of flour in one week. But lately we haven’t been able find flour in the store, so I’ve pulled back on the baking a little. And, really, maybe I only have the energy to be up to my elbows in dishes a couple days a week, rather than every day of the week.

So far in quarantine baking, I’ve made: Sourdough bread (lots of this), Chocolate Walnut Scones, Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies (really a huge amount of chocolate barely held together with a little dough), granola bars, and granola, empanadas, dinner rolls for Easter, and lots of pizza dough for our Friday night pizza/movie tradition.

It seems very cliched to panic bake during these times, but we do like our carbs here. Even the baby, who, despite my saying that she was too young for cake (never mind that I baked it for her), did manage to sneak a nibble from my mom’s plate.