Dinner: travesty or triumph # 140206

So, we've established that my housekeeping skills are sub-par. What we haven't discussed of late are my cooking skills. 
It took me a long time to not hate cooking. I had to change my perception of what cooking meant. I had to undo the association of housewifery and exchange it with a more fundamental approach before I could begin to undo the loathing I would feel towards my stove and oven.
A most un-housewife occupation.  I began to look at cooking at its most stripped down self. I chose to be a novice chemist, versus a hack housewife with crappy cooking. Chemistry.  Cooking is nothing more than chemistry.  Knowing which spices will interact well with others and how their properties change when heat is applied and even how heat is applied and how much heat is applied - it is all chemistry.  It's like knowing that CO is going to kill you but CO2 is what we exhale.
It can be subtle,  rosemary and thyme on chicken,  but only rosemary on beef or, mustard powder for deviled eggs but not scrambled eggs. Or huge, always chop your veggies before cutting any meat with the same knife or cutting board unless there's a cute doctor in the ER who's number you think you can win while exploding from both ends simultaneously.  
Cooking = chemistry.
There have been the culinary equivalents of toxic chemicals to have been ladled onto our plates, many of which my loving husband has at least tried to swallow and just as many that even our dogs wouldn't eat... an Asian inspired ginger pork roast comes to mind. But each and every one of those culinary disasters were hard won lessons in chemistry (vinegar is not the best marinade,  contrary to popular belief as proven by that poor catastrophe of ginger pork).
So, despite my ineptitude at consistently dusting the blades on our ceiling fans, I've become a pretty good cook. I mean culinary chemist. On tonight's menu, lightly breaded baked chicken breast with sautéed mushrooms and broken lasagna with peppers and capers in a lemon garlic and olive oil sauce. It. Was. Good. Yum.
Chemistry can be so yummy.
Just don't ask me to bake, that kind of advanced molecular chemistry continues to elude me unless it comes from a box.

Superbowl XLVIII

Superbowl Sunday.  When the grocery store is a ghost town,  fried cheese laden food is the cuisine and many people all over won't be grateful for anything.  A night where a coin toss can win you money. A night that comes with so much heraldry and pomp and circumstance you'd think we were celebrating our nation's birthday,  the anniversary of our independence and freedom,  or some other historical magnificence.  But no, we are watching grown men throw around an oblong ball made of pig skin, chasing each other up and down a field.  Don't get me wrong, I love a great football game.  But, our only TV is in our basement living room and as I am a deplorable housewife the room is so unkempt there is only one place to sit. Being the otherwise amazing wife that I am, I surrender the one and only seat to my husband and find satisfaction with his periodic runs upstairs to tell me how the game is going. In the meantime,  I'm spending Superbowl 48 nursing a baby who likes to kick me while breastfeeding and watching season 8 of 'how I met your mother' on Netflix.  It's all good.

New, new mom multitasking trick #140201

There are so many adjustments to consider in motherhood.  Not the least of which is you have no time, or privacy,  to do the things that need to get done.  No matter how physiological or 'housekeepical' (yes, I know there is no such word, but it's my blog I can make up words if I want) those NEEDS are you now have a little person whose needs constantly trump your own.
Or at least that's how it works in my house because my baby is the toughest boss I've ever had. So I've learned to multitask.
Well, truthfully,  before I was cast out to fend for myself among the jungle I call housekeeping,  I had a few good, grown-up jobs that required long attention span and the ability to multitask. As in, telephone call about one project while emailing a different colleague about a different project while sorting the filing kind of multitasking.
I was pretty good at it so multitasking became my solution to a very serious problem.  How do I continue to maintain the housekeeping,  even at the mediocre level to which I've learned, and trained the husband,  to accept as passable and good-enough-because-why-does-the-floor-need-to-be-clean-enough-to-eat-off-of-if-we-would-Never-eat-off-of-the-floor-anyway? So, I multitask. 
Of all the wonderful things they teach and prepare you for those first days in the hospital post baby they don't tell you that you have committed to an unspoken agreement that you forfeit any once sacred alone time you took for granted pre-baby.
So, during a time I would have once relaxed and perhaps read a book or a magazine (seriously,  who doesn't) I have had to utilize in other ways.
My sacred time is no longer sacred. Because I need to multitask if anything is going to get done.
My new reality is constantly expanding.  And, yes, my new new mom multitasking trick is folding laundry while on the potty. Because,  well,  because, it's two things I can do at the same time.  These are the things they don't tell you about... so I might as well will.