The Year in Green

I know, ’tis the season to post all the “a year in the life of” posts–but this one is worth glancing at…

2010 Best of Green

Of Frugality and Greenness and being a Broke-Ass Grouch

This is one of the more thought-provoking (and funny-but-true) posts I’ve ever read:

Memo to ecovores: It’s cheaper being green

It begins:

Listen up, locavores, opportunivores, dumpster-diving fermentation fetishists, and Dave Matthews Band fans: A great many of us live by the same ecologically sound principles that you do. We, however, are not doing so because we nurture an abiding desire to “create choices” for ourselves or to “live intentionally.” We don’t have any more than a passing interest in “sustaining biodiversity.” We are known as poor people…

Definitely worth a read!

Gone Fishing

I am skipping town for a few days…and not taking my computer with me.

This will be weird.  It will also mean a slightly dormant blog until about the first of the year.

See you soon!

Christmas Breakfast: Eggnog Pumpkin Bread Pudding

The Bakerlady describes this as tasting like “Christmas on a spoon.” I can’t say I have much to argue with.

Our family tradition for Christmas breakfast, since it seems to deserve more than hurried bowls of cereal but also requires that I get up early and head back out to work early in the AM, has for the past few years been some sort of prepare-last-night-throw-into-the-oven-in-the-morning bread pudding baked french toast kind of thing.  Another tradition is that my husband prepares it, since he’s not the one who has to get up and go to work early Christmas morning after being there half to two thirds of the night before. I like both of these traditions.

This year a month or so ago I found this recipe for Pumpkin Eggnog Bread Pudding, sent my husband the link, and asked, “Hey, hon, maybe we can have this one this year?” True to his nature as a Good Kind Man, he obliged.

Delicious.  The bread pudding was sweet and custardy and would in my opinion have been a little cloying except for the perfect counterpoint of the cranberry compote, whose tartness beautifully balanced the sweetness of the pudding.  I have a couple of tweaks I’d make next time–a couple of them we did already, and a couple I’d like to try next time. I thought it was too sweet, and I thought that a nice artisan whole wheat bread might have been really nice instead of the fairly squishy and inconsequential white stuff.  And I would have added more spice…but anyway, here it is:

*****

Overnight Eggnog Pumpkin Bread Pudding (Jenn’s adaptation)

Butter an 8×11-ish baking dish.

Fill with 8 cups stale bread cubes (whole wheat baguette or other artisan multigrain would be perfect)

In a bowl mix:

• 3/4-1 cup pumpkin purée
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 5 large eggs
• 2 1/2 cups high-quality eggnog (not fat-free or low-fat)
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 3 tbs. spiced rum or brandy

Pour over bread cubes in baking dish. Press cubes down and gently fold the cubes around in the custard to ensure that they are all well-bathed

Refrigerate several hours or overnight.

Before baking, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake pudding 45 minutes or so or until a knife stuck in the center comes out clean.

Serve with spiced cranberry compote, which could also be prepared the night before.

*****

This is AMAZING. You gotta try this.  And with my adaptations (less sugar, whole wheat bread, and leaving out those 5 tbs drizzled melted butter) it’s not all THAT horribly bad for you.

Christmas is only once a year, after all…

(UPDATE New Year’s Day: This morning, with some of the leftover pumpkin, I tried making French Toast using essentially this same recipe–or a half-recipe, to be exact, because that’s how much bread we had left, cut into slices instead of cubes and cooked in a skillet on the stove–and it was very nice but not even remotely as good as the original soak-all-night version.  But it’s good to have ideas for something to do with the leftover pumpkin from the can when your recipe for something only calls for a cup!)

A moment of Christmas peace

It’s 1:15am on Christmas “morning.” The gifts are wrapped and under the tree, the kids are in bed maybe asleep and maybe not, and Norad Tracks Santa says he’s been here and gone long ago…my husband and I are nibbling on the carrots left for the reindeer and the little piece of cheese left for Santa Mouse. Soon we will start on the cookies.

I’ve had greener Christmases. This year I didn’t get to any furoshiki wrappings, and while some of the gifts came from places like The Hunger Site Store and Heifer Project International, way too many came from those other places it’s hard to avoid…My daughter is getting a gorgeous pink “princess dress” I found at the local Goodwill; each of my kids got Christmas jammies I sewed frantically for them this morning, as well as a travel neck pillow and blanket for the train ride we’re taking Sunday night.  I did okay.  And while the goodies under the tree should satisfy the childish delight in Christmas Excess, it’s an excess in the context of a couple of children who live very modestly and without tons of the latest gadgets and goodies all the time.

I have to get up in about 5 hours, so I should go to bed…I’m just really enjoying these few minutes of quiet and calm.  And clarity–blessed, sweet clarity.

For much of  my adult life, my churchgoing experiences at Christmastime have been, to all intents and purposes, the real “reason for the season.”  Somehow in the past couple of years the things of Christmas in which I take the most joy have shifted to something even deeper than my experience of my faith, something more basic and fundamental, and certainly no less holy.

Merry Christmas.  And to all a good night. And God bless us, every one.

What kind of cereal do kids like?

It’s sort of weird–given their druthers, my kids will always choose the sugary cereals.  In our house, that means the Trader Joe’s version of Honey Nut Cheerios. At their sitter’s, it means Cinnamon Toast Crunch or other way sweeter things than I ever buy.

But when we don’t buy the sweeter stuff, they are still pretty happy with ordinary Cheerios (or “Joe’s O’s”) or other lightly sweetened but not overdone cereals.  We eat a lot of Heart to Heart and other Kashi cereals, or organic puffed rice, or those lightly frosted shredded wheat squares.  And they are generally very content, even though every trip to the grocery store involves begging for Honey Nut O’s.

So I honestly wasn’t too shocked to read this article–just surprised that this was something someone is paying attention to:

Kids May Not Necessarily Want Sugary Cereals, Suggests Study

Or, in the case of my kids, they may want them but not really care if they don’t get them.

Food for thought.

 

Will this be the year of the electric car?

I hope so.

Will it be the year I get one?

Probably not.  My loyal old Subaru is still plugging along, the a/c having apparently magically fixed itself, fuel pump replaced, and probably good to go for another 100k miles. (And as we know, the greenest purchase is usually no purchase at all…)

But I can still dream…and proseletyse.

Check this out:

12 myths about electric vehicles and 4 New Year’s resolutions

This is so confusing…

Remember the Food Safety Modernization Act? The one that passed both the House and the Senate?

It was prounonced dead. Apparently sacrificed on the Republican altar of “we’re in charge now and damned if we’ll let anything happen that might make your party and by extension your president look good between now and January when we take over.”

But then, like the hero in a thriller who is somehow in the building when it blows up, it apparently rose from the dead and passed the Senate. And now I believe it has to go back to the House yet again, but they’ll pass it pretty much for sure, and then to Obama’s desk.

I can’t keep track of it all…

I’m furious with my lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.  It’s like the whole thing has completely given up any pretense of being about good governance and is just about Winning.  I know, not news–but at moments like this it ticks me off all over again.

Darken the Solstice…

Okay, the reality is that I won’t be doing this, I have a concert downtown Tuesday night.

But…

Unplugging on the Solstice sounds like a wonderful idea to me. Just turning it all off, enjoying the darkest night of the year.  For us, if we could do this, it would involve candles and hot cider and family stories…Going for a walk with the kids outside in the snow, something we almost never do in our rush-rush lives…

It sounds lovely and heavenly. Anyone going to try this? If you do, please post how it went for you so I can experience it vicariously…

When is technology too much?

It’s sort of an interesting phenomenon how so many “greenies” are also kind of techno-geeks, very attached to our digital Stuff.  On the one hand it sort of makes sense.  In a lot of cases, the tech can sort of stand in for and reduce actual paper use, and reduce transit of communication.  It makes it possible to stay in touch with friends year-round, instead of only once a year with the Generic Christmas Letter. (And despite impassioned apologetics for their continued existence, I can’t get attached to the concept of Christmas cards as a prerequisite for “personal” connection during the holidays. I continue to resist the idea that digital communication is by its very nature less “personal” than something that comes printed on paper; it’s just not true.  Ask any of those of my dear friends whom I didn’t even meet in person till we’d been online friends for upwards of 3 years. True, there is plenty of shallow and sort of meaningless digital communication, but there’s plenty of it also in day to day “in person” conversation as well.) The DVR means we can record “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and watch it several times, rather than battling our VCR to record it, which in 9 years of marriage has never quite been successful. And Norad Santa? I love it.

So technology doesn’t bother me much. I actually like it a lot.

Until, with the approach of Christmas, a celebration I have always held as very special in both an intimate and a universal way, and a time that has for me been about cherishing the beautiful timeless moments of our earthly existence, I see things like this:

Reason for season | Westmont church will offer drive-through créche

(not my Westmont, by the way…) Really? I mean, seriously? A “christmas experience” that shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes, for which you don’t even have to leave your car?

Or watch Youtube blurbs like this (though I admit on some level it’s cute, it also disturbs me a little):

Then there are those who think Christmas is lost for good. That the commercial consumerist spending bacchanal is the unequivocal winner of the “war on Christmas.”  I find there’s not much in that article I can really disagree with.

Am I being too pessimistic? Is there hope?

In the meantime–and maybe this is an answer to my above question–tomorrow evening our family will head over to the little nondenominational Christian church where my kids have after-school care, and watch our children in their first-ever Christmas pageant.  They will sing all the Christmas carols, the ones I learned when I was a kid, they will each speak their one line that they’ve been practicing for weeks,  they will be dressed up as angels and shepherds, and afterwards we will all have a pot-luck supper in the church basement.  I will yell at my husband because he will be so attached to the camcorder that he won’t actually get to see the pageant itself, someone will probably knock over a piece of scenery or forget their line, the dinner afterwards might have 4 crockpots of meatballs and no desserts because they aren’t fussing about making sure there’s a balance of food, but it will be a big noisy happy gathering of new and old friends.

Maybe the problem is that we try to make Christmas into the be-all end-all of perfection, every year trying to top the year before…maybe if we can just let Christmas be Christmas, whatever it means in our own family and community, and let the technology kind of go along with that rather than the reverse of trying to shoehorn Christmas into our hi-tech lives, we might find a little more comfort and joy?

Just a thought.