Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I have to confess–I started A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius quite a while ago.

Then the summer happened.

The kiddos and I went to Idaho to visit family the last week of June–and then just bounced around more family events in Utah for most of July.  I opted to take short books on our trip, since there’s a limit to the amount of focus and time you find while you’re on vacation with your two-year-old, and then Real Friends finally came in at the library with no chance of being renewable, and THEN I started A School for Brides on the treadmill.  (Not to mention the fact that I had to tuck a couple of books I actually owned in there as well.)  I finally recommitted myself to it, however, and oh! how I laughed!  Arthur Bean is funny, funny, funny; he’s also grieving over his mother, intent on winning a short story contest so that he can be a published author, and pining after the lovely Kennedy Laurel, who possibly ended ONE emailed sentence with a period in the course of 268 pages.  (She favors the exclamation point for any and [almost!] every occasion.)  These three driving forces lead him to a plethora of questionable, unfortunate, and/or downright terrible choices, but they also make for some fabulous comedic writing.   As an English teacher, I frequently cringed at those choices, but it was impossible not to laugh anyway.

Stacey Matson, however, accomplishes more than just comedy; she manages to make a frequently arrogant and selfish main character sympathetic.  (Although to be fair, Arthur’s selfish in the way that most junior high students are selfish.  I imagine a reading audience of his peers are likely to empathize with him.)  She also manages to flesh out minor characters with very few words.  If you’re looking for a comic novel with noticeable depth for your junior high student, don’t miss this one.  It’s an especially nice choice for boys, since it should have appeal in beautifully non-bodily oriented ways, but girls will likely get a kick out of it as well.  I’m currently waiting for my library to respond to my “suggest a purchase” request for Matson’s other Arthur Bean novels…

You know those nights when you want to try something new for dinner but don’t want to work terribly hard at it?  Yeah, I had one of those last week (okay, at LEAST one), which led me to Pinterest.  I searched my pins for “bacon,” because I had a memory of one or two biscuit-y bake-ish recipes involving bacon that sounded appealing; I never got to anything of the sort, because when I saw this Brown Sugar Pancakes with Bacon Maple Butter recipe it was love at first sight. Because bacon.  And brown sugar.  And maple.  And butter.  Could a recipe BE any more perfect?  (Just channeling a little Chandler.)

Nope.  Nope, it couldn’t.  These things were AMAZING, folks.  I used half whole wheat, half white flour, and the pancakes were beautiful–everything you could ever want in a pancake, PLUS a lovely little brown sugar undercurrent.  The bacon maple butter was salty and buttery and a little bit smoky and subtly sweet, and I could have used twice what I did on every pancake and loved it still.  (Some small shred of common sense reminded me that butter is pricey lately and my cholesterol isn’t stellar.)  My kiddos made impressively short work of them–as did I–and I’m already dreaming about having them again.

Mmmmmm. 

Okay, six if you count salt and pepper, but still.  I was expecting this Hawaiian Chicken Bake to be an acceptable dinner, but not amazing, because nothing this easy is ever actually that amazing, right?

Wrong.

Oh, the goodness!  The chicken was moist and flavorful, the melted, bubbly cheese was lovely in its own right, and I got rid of a can of pineapple slices that was older than at least two of my children.  What’s not to love?  I made sure to salt and pepper the chicken itself before sticking it in the pan–the Food Network has taught me that much–and I left Provolone off of one piece of chicken for my oldest, who doesn’t care much for strong cheeses.  (Why waste not-cheap, good Provolone on the unappreciative?)  Bam!  Dinner!  Everyone gave it a thumbs up, too.  Who doesn’t love four ingredient goodness?

Note:  If your chicken breasts are thinly sliced, cut the second round of cooking time down–and enjoy your dinner that much sooner.

I picked up Waiting to Waltz for almost nothing at the BYU Bookstore a few years ago, because I’ve enjoyed multiple books by Cynthia Rylant AND she’s a Newbery Author.  (I pretty much couldn’t resist the deal.)  I tend to love memoirs, and Rylant’s free verse vignettes of her small town childhood were well done. All of them were interesting, and I even loved a few of them.  Overall, though, I think contemporary poetry is a lot like jazz for me; except for specific exceptions, I respect it as an art form while not truly relating to most of it.  (Except for verse novels–I love those.  Perhaps because I love novels?)  Poetry lovers should definitely give this a try, and fans of Rylant should enjoy it.  I enjoyed reading it myself–if somewhat more mildly than I expected–but I’m unlikely to read it again.

Okay, that’s a short, stilted review, but it was a short, short book.  If it sounds like your thing, it probably will be–so there you have it!

I was scrolling through my Pasta board on Pinterest this afternoon, looking for a dinner idea that didn’t involve thawing hunks of meat, when I came across this BLT Skillet.  Hey, I thought.  Bacon thaws quickly…and so my dinner plan was born.  I sent my oldest to cadge a garden tomato or two from our neighbors–our plants are just starting to produce, and I only had one left after Sunday’s dinner–and set the bacon outside in the shade, because it hit triple digits today.  I even scrounged up some linguine, which I normally avoid because it’s so hard for toddlers to get it to their mouths instead of all over themselves, because you can only eat so much penne and rotini, you know?  (It wasn’t whole wheat like the recipe called for, but it was linguine!)

Now, since the recipe only guaranteed two servings, I decided I’d better triple it, which is where the distraction enters in.  I cooked up the whole pound of bacon but managed to remember to save a quarter of it for another time; I cooked up the whole pound of linguine, as well, and then thoughtlessly dumped it into my skillet and stirred.  As I stirred, I noted that the pasta seemed to be overwhelming the rest of the skillet ingredients; by the time I realized that an extra four ounces of pasta was the likely culprit, I’d stirred enough that trying to remove any wasn’t worth it.

Ah, well.

The good news is that it was tasty–the two-year-old took a bite or two and proclaimed “I YIKE this dinner!”–especially with the fresh parsley and real Parmesan. It was drier and stickier than it should have been, of course, but I finally just added the rest of the lemon’s juice to mine, and even before that I was enjoying it.  If you have garden tomatoes and parsley that need using, try this for dinner.  Just pay attention to what you’re putting in as you make it!