At long last, something worth blogging about

We just got back from camping overnight in Shenandoah National Park. We've been anxiously watching the weather for weeks, hoping that we could catch that elusive point on the calender when it was warm enough to be out all night but I wasn't yet pregnant enough to preclude such an outing. Here at the end of April (29 weeks gestation and counting), those points finally coincided.

We drove out yesterday afternoon and were told when we got to the park that the closest open campsite was 50 miles away (with a speed limit of 35mph all through the park) and that there may or may not be spots available. Having packed up all our camping goods, not eager to drive back to Reston in a car without air conditioning, and hungry for hot dogs and s'mores, we decided to press on, and after about an hour and a half of driving through the steadily-cooling evening air were rewarded with a one of the last spots available. Surprisingly, it was a great spot, relatively secluded yet close to the bathrooms. We (okay, Matt) drove in, set up camp, and collected firewood, then set to work grilling hot dogs.

I don't even know if I can remember the last time I ate a hot dog. I was a vegetarian between the ages of 13 and 21, and I can't remember having had one since then. I remember as a child I hated hot dogs that had been grilled (I don't think I've ever had one that was actually cooked over an open fire) and anytime we went to a cookout, either peeling off the blackened skin or begging my mom just to boil mine on the stove.

What can I say--my palate must have matured since then, because I wolfed down more organic nitrite-free beef hot dogs than I care to admit. I still prefer them roasted as opposed to blackened, but boy, were they good. The second course, obviously, consisted of s'mores. By this point the light was fading, and so we sat around the fire and read by flashlight, enjoying the lovely warm evening.

We had packed an air mattress to buffer the effects of being seven months' pregnant and sleeping on the ground, but unfortunately we found as we inflated it that it was peppered with tiny holes. (Last summer, we would have found the idea of paying for a drive-up campsite, sleeping on an air mattress, and using fully functioning indoor bathrooms total anathema to the whole idea of camping, but I'm also in very different shape than I was last summer, and we're guessing this isn't the first time parenthood will force us to change our tune about something.) We got out the patch kit and placed several patches, but were feeling less than optimistic as we drifted off to sleep on it. Sure enough, we woke up an hour or two later with our butts touching ground. We let the rest of the air out and went back to sleep--not a hugely restful sleep, as I had to switch sides about every hour because my hip would go numb, but I woke up no more stiff or sore than I am when I get out of bed in the morning, for which I was thankful. My back and pelvic pain actually seem to be aggravated by soft surfaces, and so I'm wondering whether I wouldn't have been in worse shape had we gone the whole night on the air mattress.

We woke up between 5:30 and 6, just in time to catch the sunrise and a ton of deer grazing. We enjoyed the lack of other cars on the way down the mountain, and also managed to catch a glimpse (and a slightly fuzzy picture) of this guy:

A BOBCAT! What fun.

Not ready to call it quits quite yet, we drifted back to the highway via a couple of small towns (Sperryville and Washington), both of which were sleepy and charming and made us want to move out to the country to live in a little town in the shadow of the mountains ourselves. Maybe someday...

Memo to the baby: Don't say we never took you anywhere

Oh, won't you stay (just a little bit longer)?

To which we have answered: yes.

When I started midwifery school at Frontier, the plan was originally for me to do my clinicals back in the midwest, most likely at the birth center in Wisconsin close to where Matt grew up. (This is not to be confused with the original plan, which brought us out here, which was to live in DC so I could attend law school, or the subsequent plan, which was to live in Reston and I would attend Shenandoah. Or the plan in which we never intended to have children, or the one in which we planned to have them after I finished grad school. We're on plan C or D or F or X by now...) Our current lease is up in February 2010 and I will most likely (though again, the best laid plans...) start midwifery clinicals sometime that spring. It seemed like a good time to plan to move back closer to our families of origin.

But, as seems to happen so often with us, things haven't really worked out that way. I haven't been able to get any kind of commitment from that birth center, and our attempts to find promising-looking jobs in that area haven't yielded much. We've concluded that in this economy, even a nursing job (particularly a flexible, hourly, labor and delivery nursing job) isn't going to be easy to find either, especially as I will come with the restrictions of school and motherhood firmly attached to me.

The more we thought about it and talked about it and prayed about it, the more it seemed like something was telling us to stay put for awhile. Not that this is something we're especially good at. And technically, we're actually not staying put: one of the factors that made us feel most like staying in Reston was a giant open door was the fact that our landlords let us know that due to the down economy, we could move into a 2-bedroom apartment for less than we're currently paying for a one-bedroom. Well, boy, that's a no-brainer. We had already begun to feel extremely crowded by all of the things we'd been fortunate enough to acquire for the baby, and having a whole extra room to put them in seemed almost too good to be true.

So the plan is to move to a bigger apartment. In less than a month. And do my clinicals somewhere around here, which means we'll likely be Restonians until at least the end of 2010. After that...who knows?

Certainly not us.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Streusel

Last weekend, we discovered this little gem in the Betty Crocker cookbook. It's actually a combination of two recipes: the sour cream coffee cake and the streusel coffee cake. She also includes an amazing-looking upside-down cake version with caramelized apples on the bottom, and I think we'll be making that this weekend.

This is awesome with a cup of coffee or a glass of milk or just straight up out of the pan.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake with StreuselAdapted from Betty Crocker

Cake:
1-1/2 cups sugar (I decreased to 1 cup)
3/4 cup butter
3 eggs
1-1/2 tsp vanilla
3 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour (we used 100% white whole wheat)
1-1/2 tsp baking soda
1-1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups sour cream (we used 1 cup yogurt + 1/2 cup sour cream)

Streusel (I doubled the whole thing because I like to have plenty of topping):
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
3 T butter

Mix all ingredients until crumbly.

Heat oven to 350. Grease pan (we used a 13x9). Beat sugar, eggs, butter, and vanilla in large bowl on medium for 2 minutes. Beat in flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt alternately with sour cream and/or yogurt. Layer alternately with streusel topping, ending with the streusel. Bake 35-45 minutes or until done in center.

We also whipped up a little powdered sugar glaze (about a cup of powdered sugar to 3-4 tablespoons of hot water, whisked until smooth) and drizzled that over the top, because it reminds me of my mom's coffee cake (which I affectionately titled "binge cake"). This version is a little hearter and denser due to the whole-wheat flour, but it still has that unmistakeably delicious yellow-cake flavor and the pockets Yum!

Saving money on bulk tea

photo by Powerhouse Museum

Matt and I are big fans of tea. Almost every evening we have a cup after dinner, and we often have one in the morning too. Traditional Medicinals is our favorite brand, and we've long been loyal to their Pregnancy Tea and Lavender with Chamomile versions. They're decently priced from Amazon--about $25 for 6 boxes of 16 bags, which comes out to about $0.25 a cup--but when you have two people drinking it once or twice a day, that's anywhere from $15 and upward a month, which gets pricey. The other thing we never liked was having to throw away our teabags (which you can compost, if you have a compost heap) and recycle so much packaging.

Enter the Bulk Herb Store, which I learned about from Tammy's Recipes. They have awesome prices on bulk herbs, by far the best we've found. They also have a Mama's Red Raspberry Leaf Brew, which contains alfalfa and nettles and peppermint (in addition to red raspberry leaves) and is practically identical to Traditional Medicinals' Pregnancy Tea. It's sold for $7.20 per half pound (8 oz), and by weighing a TM teabag I determined that there's less than 1/10 of an ounce of tea in each teabag. That means that a half pound of loose tea should yield over 80 cups of tea, at a cost of around $0.09 a cup. The lavender chamomile tea is comprised of those two herbs, plus lemon balm, which we ordered from the Bulk Herb Store at the following cost:

Lavender flowers 1/2 lb ($3.55)
Lemon Balm 1/2 lb ($6.40)
Chamomile flowers 1/2 lb ($4.20)

So we paid under $15 for a pound and a half of herbs, which should yield about 240 cups of tea, dropping the cost of that particular beverage to around $0.05 a cup. From what I can tell, adding on $8 for shipping takes our average cost per cup back up to $0.09 for both kinds of tea--still over a 50% savings from teabags, and we create a lot less waste in the process. Plus it's kind of fun to mix up our own loose-leaf tea; we have both a tea ball and a tea infuser which both work quite well.

Spring is here!

We had the world's most gorgeous, sunny, 65-degree weekend, and all of the flowering trees have really popped. Unfortunately, I spent more time writhing in pain from back and pelvic discomfort than enjoying the weather, which was incredibly disheartening. However, we still managed to have some good times, including eating all our meals out on the patio (with our awesome free-off-Freecycle patio set), grilling hamburgers, and hanging out close to home. This morning we made a half batch of crepes (which we realized was really a very respectable amount of food for two people), and tonight we made chicken stew over biscuits.


We also scored a 4-liter mason jar (which will be perfect for the bulk beans, popcorn, or flour we've got coming from our co-op this week) off Freecycle, and on the way to pick it up, we passed a Kelty Meadow Baby Carrier sitting near the curb with a "FREE" sign on it. SCORE! We've been hoping for a framed baby carrier we could use to take the baby hiking, and now one has found us. Between the pelvic pain and the extra weight I'm carrying around these days, any step toward becoming active again is incredibly exciting to me...

Enchilada Casserole

I keep saying this is on the menu, but until now I haven't ever finalized a recipe, and so I make it a little differently every time. It's loosely based on this recipe (as you can see, very loosely, since the base for that one is chicken, not beans). It's delicious, easy, relatively healthy, and totally becoming a new favorite of ours.Here's what it looks like these days:

Bean & Cheese Enchilada Casserole

1 12-oz bottle of enchilada sauce (I used Trader Joe's; you can make your own, but when we tried, we bought our chili powder from the Mexican grocery and ended up unwittingly using 1/4 cup of what must have been straight cayenne pepper. You can imagine how inedibly hot that was. Unable to find the real thing, I'm settling for a $2 bottle)
15 oz refried beans (or 1 can--I used Trader Joe's Refried Black Beans with Jalapenos, but you can certainly make your own, which we have before)
8 oz sour cream
1 cup frozen corn
~15-30 oz cooked kidney or black beans (or 1 can of each)--depending on how beany you want it
2 cups cheddar cheese, grated
8 whole-wheat tortillas

Combine enchilada sauce, sour cream, and refried beans over medium heat until blended. Add 1 cup cheddar cheese and stir until melted. Stir in corn and beans.

Drain and rinse kidney/black beans if using canned.

Layer in a 13×9 pan, starting with a layer of sauce, tortillas (2 to a layer), etc x 4 layers, topping with remaining 1 cup of cheese. Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes until heated through and cheese is melted and bubbly.

Olive-Garden-Style Pasta Fagioli Soup

I made so many edits here that I debated just posting our version, but in case you're looking for as close as you can get to the real thing, here's the actual "copycat" recipe in its entirety. The version we made was really tasty, and close enough for us. As you can see, one of the benefits of making it at home is that you don't have to say "when" to the grated cheese until you're really ready--rather than letting the waiter embarrass you into saying "stop" after he's grated a polite amount. Served with a green salad and bread and butter, this was an awesome and filling dinner.

Olive-Garden-Style Pasta Fagioli Soup

1 pound ground beef (we used 1/4 pork sausage)

1 small onion, diced (1 cup) (I omitted this because we didn't have one)
1 large carrot, julienned (1 cup)
3 stalks celery, chopped (1 cup)
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 14.5-ounce cans diced tomatoes (instead of this and the next two ingredients, I just used about 40 oz of canned whole roma tomatoes in sauce, pureed)
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce (I omitted this)
1 12-ounce can V-8 juice (I omitted this)
1 15-ounce can red kidney beans (with liquid) (I didn't have these so I used twice as many navy beans, below)
1 15-ounce can great northern beans (with liquid)
1 tablespoon white vinegar (I omitted this--it seemed tart enough already)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/2 pound (1/2 pkg.) ditali pasta (we ended up using whole wheat rings--sort like Spaghetti-O pasta)

1. Brown the ground beef in a large saucepan or pot over medium heat.
Drain off most of the fat. (I didn't.)
2. Add onion, carrot, celery and garlic and sauté for 10 minutes.
3. Add remaining ingredients, except pasta, and simmer for 1 hour.
4. About 50 minutes into simmer time, cook the pasta in 1 1/2 to 2
quarts of boiling water over high heat. Cook for 10 minutes or just
until pasta is al dente, or slightly tough. Drain.
5. Add the pasta to the large pot of soup. Simmer for 5-10 minutes
and serve.
I also threw in about a cup of frozen spinach at the end.
Serves 8.