Uh oh... it's Friday. In Lent. What's for dinner? Recipe #1

This is going to be my weekly Lenten post for Thursdays. You'll have time to plan dinner for Friday, plus it will give me a reason to start putting up recipes again on my cooking blog (which has been sorely and sadly neglected).

Recipe #1 is soooooooo easy that you'll wonder why you've never made it before. It's one of those last-minute recipes that can be doubled with no extra work (Amen to that!).

TOMATILLO SALSA BAKED FISH

1 lb tilapia fillets
1 c tomatillo salsa
1 c shredded cheese
1/2 c crushed tortilla chips
salt and pepper
oil or non-stick spray

- Preheat oven to 450°. Wash and pat the fish dry. Line baking sheet with foil and spray with non-stick spray (or just use a non-stick sheet and oil it a bit). Season fish with salt and pepper.

- Lay fish on baking sheet and top each with about 1/4 cup salsa. Bake 12-15 minutes.

- Remove from oven and sprinkle each fillet with about 1/4 cup cheese and 1/8 cup chips and serve.

Substitutions: No tilapia on hand? Try basa or another similar fish. You can also replace the tomatillo salsa with regular salsa. Instead of the chips, you can use bread crumbs. I've said it before and I'll say it again-- any recipe (other than baked goods) that is completely inflexible has no place in my kitchen. :-)

The fish also makes great tacos for lunch the next day. Simply put some fish in a corn tortilla and add a dollop of sour cream-- fancy, easy, and delicious!

Letter #1 to my Lenten Prayer Buddy

Dear Prayer Buddy,

I have been praying for you far longer than since I found out you were "mine" to pray for this Lenten season. Something about your story touched me very early on, and I connected with you and felt a strong desire to pray for you, because somehow it also felt like praying for me.

Please know that you will have my daily prayers and my daily Lenten rosaries (this will hopefully give you extra extra graces, because it's been tough lately for me to make it past 3 decades, and I'm determined to set aside more time and really be focused and steady in my prayer life).

As Lent begins today with Ash Wednesday, I've chosen a portion of today's Responsorial Psalm as the prayer that I will say each morning for you, and for myself as well. I hope my meager prayers will be enough to effect some positive change in your life.

A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.

Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.

Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.

Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.

Blessings on you!

Lisa

Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad

...vs. any other eReaders out there about which I know nothing.

So, I feel it necessary to at least peek into the modern age, while keeping my feet firmly in the stone age.

Yes, I'm chiseling this onto a rough-hewn stone and magically it appears on the computer screen.

My birthday is approaching in the next couple of months, and I'm thinking that it would be a good time to have any family members who want to give a gift help me get something that I actually want/will use.

The problem is, I'm not sure if I really want an eReader. I'm a former high school and college English teacher! I like the smell of books. I like to underline and mark pages and run my hands all over the smooth spine.

Wait... we're still talking about books, right?

Some reservations I have:

- I rarely buy books. I usually get them from the library or someone gives me a book.

- Of the books I have purchased (which have mostly not been out of copyright, and thus would not be free), there are several that I didn't want to keep. I have been able to sell them to a used-book store and ended up reclaiming some of my cost. Not so with eBooks that I don't love.

- I know that many children's books are available in digital form, but when I read a book to C, part of the magic of snuggling and reading together is holding the book and letting her turn the pages. For H, the magic is solely in eating the book or throwing the book.

I'm hoping he wasn't switched at birth. I'm not sure any child of mine would ever eat or throw a book. Fortunately, he's the spitting image of my dad, so I'm going to assume for the time being that the book-throwing gene comes from M's side of the family. He likely had some delinquent Czech great-great-great grandfather who also enjoyed tossing books about the room.

- To prove I truly am living in the Stone Age, or at least the Dark Ages, I start to get all Fahrenheit 451 and fear that if everyone begins to purchase eReaders, and every new book is "printed" in digital format with only a few hard copies, then if some major catastrophe happens and the world loses power, we'll be left in a world without books.

My 3rd greatest fear in the world would be realized.

So, help me out. What are your pros and cons of eReaders? Which do you own, and would you buy it again? Price aside, would you use an iPad in place of a smaller eReader? Before purchasing an eReader, where/how did you get the majority of your books? Do you buy any books in hard copy now?
How likely do you think it is that my son was switched at birth? (Just kidding on that last one...)?

7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol. 11), the "Where have I been?" edition

Sweet Leila wrote me an e-mail, asking where I've been lately. I thought I'd answer her e-mail with a blog post. :)

1. Having LOTS of overnight visitors. Mom came for around a week to escape downtown Fort Worth while the Steelers were in town for the Super Bowl. She accidentally took little H's carseat back home with her, so my dad drove it down the next day and spent a few nights with us. Then, my MIL came down to watch the kids while I took care of the next Quick Take item.

2. Preparing for and having a colonoscopy. This is the 3rd one I've had in the past 10 years, and the only one where I was convinced drinking the prep solution (MoviPrep, which I referred to as MoviHell) might kill me. I kept vomiting it up at 4:30 am, and my loving husband was comically (very sleepily, in his defense) unsympathetic about my plight, telling me to 1) chug it all down at once (impossible), 2) stop throwing up in the sink (also impossible... I couldn't move), and 3) either drink it or go back to bed. Truly, this isn't meant to disparage my hubby-- he's just missing that sympathetic-to-his-wife's-pain gene. For instance, he didn't believe I was going into labor with H, since I wanted to shower and put on make-up instead of screaming; he slept through most of my active labor contractions at the hospital; and I'm pretty convinced that he thought I exaggerated all of my pregnancy and birthing pains. Ha!

3. Realizing that my online time and time I spend maintaining relationships with online "friends" (I only put this in quotes because I don't know many-- most-- of the friends in real life) is giving me an excuse to avoid forming new and maintaining old real life relationships. It was becoming unhealthy, and I decided to step back, the way I did with Facebook around a year ago. I still read many of the blogs and pop in occasionally to comment, but even needed to stop posting as frequently on my own blog because I was too interested in how many comments I had and how many people were reading.

4. Tying into #3, I've been questioning (yet again) the information on the Internet concerning my family, that I've put out there on either Facebook or this blog. I thought the other day about how I'm so glad that Facebook didn't exist when I was in college, because there are plenty of photos I'm more than happy to forget. Then, I thought about how happy I am that my mom wasn't blogging/updating every moment of my life, especially with photos of every awkward moment of my youth. Even when people take down their blogs, some of the cached posts can be found. While I don't post photos of my kids on the blog, I occasionally do on Facebook. I'm starting to think that it's not necessarily my "right" to expose them in that way, when they have no option, and when the photos may follow them, potentially for the rest of their lives. What if C runs for President someday, or H wants to start his own company? :) I think they are the ones who should be able to write their own stories, with or without photos. Thoughts on this? And would you have minded if your mom (or dad) posted thousands of pics of you online and wrote about everything before you had a chance to tell your own story?

5. Getting crafty. I've been finishing the kitchen countertops and reorganizing the kitchen, recovering the dining room chairs and our bar stools, planning some sewing projects for the kids, picking fabric to make new pillow covers for the couch and loveseat, making Valentine wreaths, and planning my spring and summer flowers, herbs, fruits, and veggies.

This took less than 5 minutes while my son was napping. I "Love" it.

These are berries from a tree in our front yard (see header). I've since added more berries and moved the wreath to the front door in case any berries fell off and H ate some. Just call me Mom of the Year.

6. Fishin' for rattlesnakes out of an old cistern. I wish I was kidding about this, but the snakeskin currently residing in my freezer confirms my story. As does this photo, with my FIL, hubby, and BIL (left to right).

I won't even explain what's going on here. Feel free to form your own opinions.

7. Trying tons of new recipes. I lost my HUGE recipe folder (ok, technically the freezer bag that I stuck all of my original and modified recipes in before I transferred them to my official recipe book.  This means I'm missing around 250 recipes) and my Macbook crashed (again), so I lost all of my bookmarks for online recipes that I like. I've decided to use this as a positive time to try new things and remodify recipes that I've made before from online recipes. I also realized that if I'd updated my cooking blog, I'd have a record of everything. Sigh. I've also been having fun with my Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book. I made a delicious boule this week and then used more of the same dough to make sticky buns for M last night, since he had a big morning today at work.

Amniotic dreams

Definition of brave: sharing some of my poetry from graduate school. This is from one of my creative writing classes during my first year of grad school, obviously before I was pregnant with my daughter. The Master's gown still hasn't happened... kids and moving managed to side-track me. However, I'm in a writing slump at the moment and thought that just putting my older words out in the world might inspire me to write again.

Amniotic Dreams

I

When I was twenty-two, my mother and I went to the San Diego Zoo. I am just like my mother, always right, always my way. We fought in the car, more like lionesses than cats and dogs, and she went into the zoo without me. It took several hours, several calls to my father, and several unheard intercom pages of “Would Linda (______) please meet her daughter at the zoo entrance” before I found her. She was staring at the sea otters with the same look of contentment I see on my husband’s face when I turn to him as morning light tiptoes across our rumpled sheets. When she saw me, she smiled and said that if Hindus are right and we Catholics are wrong, then she wants to come back as a sea otter. She said she wants to swim and flip and play in the satin-cool water all day long.

II

My mother works in a tall, shiny building, an edifice more suited to skydiving than skin diving. Not long after I was married, my husband visited my mother at her office.  He came home laughing, saying that she told him her dream of walking through the cubicle walls, and of jumping down whole flights of stairs in one leap, and of soaring through the air, right out of her office windows. I think he thinks my mother is a bit crazy. He says he knows where I get it, as if dreams are something passed through the umbilical cord like nutrients from mother to child. He laughed again at her stories and then looked at me for a response.  I was silent.

III

I am my mother’s only child, her first and last born. I think about my mother and how everyone remarks about how alike we are, how they know whose daughter I am, nudge-nudge, looking at my mother. I’m secretly jealous of her. Not in an Electra I-want-my-father sense, but in a why-are-her-dreams-so-much-better-than-mine kind of way. She dreams of open skies and lapping waves of salty water, while my dreams are full of land. My shoes hold fast to the soil, despite all my desperate efforts to leave the ground. The ocean calls to me at night by way of a sound machine, but I can only pick up the smoothly polished stones by the sea and long to enter the roar. 

IV

My mother is a middle child, a comic book shelved haphazardly between a scholarly college text and a glitzy fashion magazine. Her mother had her when she was twenty-nine, and my mother had me when she was twenty-nine. I will be twenty-nine myself in just seventeen months, Masters diploma in sight. My stomach may be rounded then with child, a living basketball stored beneath a cap and slimming black gown. Will my practical, earth-centered dreams be transferred through the womb, or will the child be like my mother, dreaming of things my own sleep-soaked brain cannot? I read a psychology journal that said embryos can dream at thirty-two weeks. If this is true, perhaps my dream-child will teach me how to leave the ground, and fly just above the glittering ocean, dipping the tips of my toes in its wetness.

 

Ultimate denial: Update

From time to time, when my daughter is at Mother's Day Out and my son is napping, I'll flip on The View because I think it acts as a barometer to the nation's attitude, given that some of the women are ultra-liberal, one or two are moderate, and one is fairly conservative.

Today, though, I was blown away by the irony of something that was said. Once ABC posts today's show, I'll be sure to link it.

Update: here's the link

The women were talking about Oprah's big revelation that she has a half-sister who was put up for adoption by Oprah's mother. The question one woman posed to the group was essentially, "Would you be upset with your mother if she did this?"

Surprisingly, only the more moderate and conservative hosts said that they would want to hear about the whole situation behind the adoption before passing any judgement.

HOWEVER, the two most liberal hosts (Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar) both thought that it was unfair that the mother had denied Oprah a sibling, and denied her the chance to have a relationship with her sister.

(Update: When I watched it again, I realized that it was Sherri Shepherd who brought up the denied relationship with a sibling, but Joy still seems to agree with this)

Seriously??? Do they not see the irony in their statement? Despite being the two most vocal supporters (on The View) of a woman's right to choose abortion, Whoopi and Joy confirmed what the pro-life movement, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa all said: abortion is wrong not only because it kills a child, but also because it deprives current or future children of their sibling.

God, turn our hearts toward You.

Do you see what I see?

Who says you can't grow fresh tomatoes in your backyard in freezing weather in January?

Not me!

Despite being devoured by deer in the Spring, my sweet little Roma plants are still doing their darnedest to produce fruit (yes, tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables)

Oh, how I love my handsome and handy hubby who build me a greenhouse from scratch a few years ago (no pre-fab anything for this guy!). My tropical flowers and plants are still hanging in, even if I've been a negligent gardener, going a few-too-many days between thorough waterings.

 My vinca liked getting a good soak. I love the way vincas look when planted with plumerias-- they complement each other nicely

 Tiny cherry tomatoes peeking through vincas, mums, and orchids

These begonias had red leaves when I bought them, and, uniquely, kept them because they were far too shaded in our yard and kept cooler in the greenhouse once the temperatures dropped. I managed to accidentally do what many gardeners attempt and fail to do! :)