Livingston, I Presume

Say cheesy

It used to be really easy to get great pictures of Connery:

He was like the human equivalent of the point and shoot--all I had to do was take a couple of pictures and I could be guaranteed that most of them would be great. Then, of course, we hit the mugging age and all bets were off:

All I have to do is grab the camera to witness him plastering on the world's cheesiest grin. Lately I have been trying to take pictures while he talks so as to avoid the above. Results are mixed:

I think I asked him to say something random, like "pickles and ice cream." Then I tried to catch him unawares and inadvertently ended up getting a sneak preview of Connery, The Teenage Years:

And then I unleashed magic words of joy. "Say, 'Weekend at Nana's!'" I said:

Problem solved.

Favorite Recipe Friday: A Cabbage Trio for Jill

Jill, one of my residents during my RA days at UM and a Facebook friend, requested some cabbage recipes yesterday, so I thought I'd oblige and share them with a wider audience as well.

The first recipe I thought of when she mentioned cabbage was one of our family favorites: Scalloped Cabbage. We often make it for Thanksgiving and other special occasions, and I personally have made it in at least four states and three countries. It's just that good. If my recollection is correct, the recipe came from a great little Montana cookbook called The Best of Friends.

Scalloped Cabbage

4 c. shredded cabbage
1/4 c. butter
1/4 c. flour
2 c. milk
salt and pepper
nutmeg
3/4 c. shredded cheddar cheese
1 c. fine bread crumbs
1/4 c. melted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Cook the cabbage in boiling water to cover, 7 to 8 minutes. While that is cooking, melt butter and whisk in flour until well blended and bubbly. Remove from heat and add milk. Return to heat and cook, stirring constantly until thickened. Add cheese. Remove from heat and add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste. In a separate bowl, combine bread crumbs and melted butter. Combine cheese sauce and drained cabbage in a ceramic baking dish. Top with buttered bread crumbs. Bake for 20 minutes or until bubbly.

The next recipe is a sort of bastardized goulash that turns out great in a crock pot, and the leftovers are just as yummy. We usually serve it over egg noodles, but you could probably try it on rice or even on its own as a stew. It's based on a Woman's Day recipe from 2005.

Hungarian Beef Stew

1 T. butter
1 1/4 lb. lean beef chuck for stew, cut in 3/4-inch cubes
1 lb. carrots, sliced
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
3 c. shredded cabbage
2 c. water (or 1/2 c. red wine and 1 1/2 c. water)
1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste
1 envelope onion-mushroom soup mix
1 T. sweet paprika
1 c. sour cream

Melt butter in a heavy pan and add beef. Brown, but do not cook through. Remove beef from pan and put into crock pot. Add onions to the pan and cook briefly until they are slightly softened. Add onions to crock pot. Deglaze pan with wine/water or just water and pour into crock pot. Add remaining ingredients (except for sour cream) and stir to combine. Cover and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours, or until beef it tender. Turn off cooker and stir in sour cream. Serve immediately.

The final recipe is not one I promised to Jill, but I thought I'd throw it in since neither the scalloped cabbage nor the beef stew are particularly summer-barbecue-friendly. Plus, since I knew her in college, I figured something with ramen would be appropriate. The Chinese Cabbage Salad is a pretty standard dish but is also very tasty and convenient. The recipe calls for half-heads of cabbage, but I often buy bagged coleslaw for ease.

Chinese Cabbage Salad

1/2 head red cabbage, shredded
1/2 head green cabbage, shredded
2 T. slivered almonds, toasted
2 T. sesame seeds, toasted
1 pkg. ramen noodles, broken up, seasoning packet saved out
1/3 c. vegetable oil
1/3 c. cider vinegar
2 T. sugar
1 ramen seasoning packet

Combine cabbage, almonds, sesame seeds, and ramen noodles in a large bowl. In a separate container, mix dressing--oil, vinegar, sugar, and ramen packet. Combine and chill for several hours.

Please, no more second amendment jokes!

Sarah Haskins provides another brilliant Target: Women, this one on Michelle Obama's arms. It's awesome, as usual.

Happy graduation to me!

For 11 years, the most tangible reminder that I have of the two years I spent earning my master's degree at Yale has been the monthly bill I get from the Bursar's Office reminding me to pay my student loan. This weekend, all that changed when my parents showed up with my graduation gift.

Behold my new desk, engineered and handcrafted by my father and totally worth the decade-plus wait:

There are many amazing things about this desk: its quarter-sawn oak, its walnut accents, its six layers of finish, its unbelievable quality (especially to me, who owns mostly furniture from IKEA), but what is most amazing is that my dad made this for me based on a picture I found on the Internet. Not plans, mind you, but a picture that I saw of a desk that I liked. He can take a picture and make it into reality, and that, my friends, is just not normal. He already has a master's degree, my dad, but he should get another one for sheer ingenuity.

Please do not fail to notice the lamp:

Lovingly selected by my mother, who is always anxious for me to have proper lighting--so much so that probably half of my home's light fixtures and lamps are gifts from her--the lamp goes perfectly with the  desk:

You know, the picture doesn't even begin to do it justice. So consider yourself invited to my office anytime. You can come and have a cup of coffee and see and touch and smell my desk. I know that sounds weird, but once you've done it, you'll understand why I'm offering.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Edited to add: As my mother is quite correct to note in comments, it's not that the desk took 11 years to make. It's more that it took 10 of those 11 years for me to stop moving every two years, which would indeed make having a desk like this not so much a joy as a burden. Not to mention that they have stored a great deal of my crap over the years and probably did not want to end up with this in their basement.

I am not an animal, and neither are my kids

Here I was getting ready to go to bed when I stumbled upon a truly appalling discussion on one of my favorite fashion blogs, Manolo for the Big Girl. Plumcake describes (in a mostly humorous way) her bad experience with a crowd of ill-behaved children and ends her (mostly good-natured) post with this question: What is YOUR child-related pet peeve and what, in your non-legally-punishable fantasy would you do about it?

Apparently the readers of Manolo for the Big Girl have been anxiously awaiting their chance to unleash their inner child hater.

Here are the thoughts of a commenter called Jennie:

I think all establishments, retail, culinary, and open to the public ought to have a brat check and it should be mandatory. A sound proof padded stall should work. That or the breeder should control said demon(s). I was in a nice restaurant a few days ago hoping to enjoy a lovely glass or 5 and a moderately pricy meal with friends. In comes the couple towing juniorzilla. They strap the snotty, drooling, gifted child in and give him all of the table accessories to throw all over the place and at everyone. Said yard ape then screamed and kicked until mommy dearest gave it something else inappropiate to throw. Instead of being able to stay and enjoy, we left as soon as possible, our Manolos and Jimmy Choos slipping in the sugar, salt, drool, and other fluids leaked by this precious tot.

Let's unpack that, shall we? We've got kids as "brats", "demons", "juniorzillas", "yard apes", and "it". Parents are now "breeders" or "mommy dearest". Great stuff, Jennie. I hope you remember this post someday if you do ever breed. May it bring you a great flush of shame to go with your self-righteous anger.

Then we have HurricaneDeck, apparently channeling Aunt Marge:

I really wish I could do the same to children as I do to my dogs - pick them up by the scruff of the neck, give them a firm “NO!” and them put them in their kennel for the rest of the day.

Because kids are, really, just dumb animals, right?

But the topper is JayKay, who brings some really great fat-hate to go along with her whopping side of judgment, because she totally knows what this family does 24 hours a day because she lives above them:

My fiance and I live above two of the most UNRULY, WILD, UNDISCIPLINED, CIRCUS ANIMAL children on the entire face of the Earth.

First of all, they’re both fat. I blame the parents for this one. Nothing worse than fat kids who are not allowed out to “play”, but the PS3 is on for, like, 4+ hours a day...

Indeed, JayKay, there is nothing worse than fat kids. I'll bet they relish the time they have outside being judged by people like you. And boy, do I love seeing that kind of language on a blog designed to empower women who fall outside of the "mainstream" fashion because of their size.

The kids are totally overfed, understimulated (because video games don’t count) and totally undisciplined. There have been many days where I want to take a knitting needle and yarn and go downstairs, push my way past their fat, constant cigarette smoking “dad” and practice my suturing technique on their fast food guzzling yell-holes.

I'm sure she knows exactly what they eat and do all the time. Or maybe she just imagines that she does because everyone knows that all fat people play video games and guzzle fast food all day. Extra points for the vivid violent imagery of stabbing them. Because six- and eight-year-old children totally deserve physical abuse for being loud and fat.

Look, I know that there are bad seeds out there. I know that I am the first one to give the stink-eye when a parent has a kid out doing something that no kid could reasonably be expected to handle well. And I am grateful that my generation has really made strides in making "breeding" a totally optional part of life. I would say that more of my friends are "childfree by choice" than have chosen to have kids, and that's great. People who don't want kids shouldn't have them. There are way too many couples out there who have kids because "that's what people do". That's not a good reason to bring another life into the world.

But just because someone doesn't want to have kids does not give them the right to bag on people who do--and definitely does not make it OK to dehumanize kids and advocate violence, even in a joking way. I'm not a "breeder"--I'm a person, just like you, who has happened to choose to have children. I support my children and love them and do my level goddamn best to make sure that they are well behaved and polite and in a position to someday make great contributions to society.

Good parenting is hard fucking work and the only time you'll ever think you can be a perfect parent is before you have kids. The rest of us, the ones who already have our "spawn", well, we're just trying to make things work in a society that does fuck-all to support families while simultaneously demanding that we raise thin, attractive, quiet children who never drop Cheerios or run in their own homes.

Regulate 'em high

At the risk of sounding like a letter from a far different publication, I’ll just say it: I never thought it would happen to me.

After all, I pay my bills on time. I don’t abuse credit. I play by the rules. And while I have heard stories of credit card issuers slashing customer limits and changing terms willy-nilly, I figured that my excellent credit score and I would be just fine. Wrong.

First, one of our credit card companies—a national bank that just happens to have taken billions in taxpayer bailout money—informed us that they would be raising the “fixed” interest rate on our balance. This is a card we use sparingly and have always paid over the minimum balance required, but it still had a substantial balance. We could avoid this rate hike by canceling the card, meaning a hit on our credit score.

We tried the standard technique of calling the company and asking them to revisit the rate change. After all, we are good customers and have been for almost five years. To say that they were not interested in retaining us would be an understatement. They couldn’t close the account fast enough. So we paid off the balance, and the closure left us two credit cards, both of which had completely open credit lines. We figured that would be enough to maintain our credit score and protect us in case of an emergency.

The emergency happened just a few weeks later, when my husband was involved in the car crash I wrote about last month. We had to come up with a substantial (for us) sum of money to add to the insurance settlement so that we could fix the car. Figuring that this was just the sort of dire circumstance that credit cards were meant to handle, we wrote an “access check”—one of the many cash advance checks that we’ve received from this national issuer (and bailout recipient) on a regular basis since I got the card in 1995—that promised 0 percent interest until March 2010.

Two weeks later, we received notification from the company that they had refused payment of the check and slapped us with a $39 fee for the attempt. Gentle readers, we had a $24,700 open line of credit on this card, more than 10 times what we needed to cover our check to the trusted body shop guy—or so we thought.

Turns out they had canceled our card for inactivity the day after we wrote the check. We received no notification that the card was in danger of cancellation, nor did we receive anything informing us that the account had been closed. But I’ll tell you what we did receive from them, the day before we got the refused check letter and dated three days after the account had supposedly been closed: more access checks, exhorting us to spend, spend, spend our $24,700 in credit!

We talked to managers, wrote to VPs, sent a registered letter to the CEO—and received not a single response from any of them other than a canned, repeated “We understand your frustration.” Not likely. After all, it wasn’t they who had inadvertently written a bum check to a local business in a town of 7,500 people.

Lately there have been calls from the White House and Congress to regulate the credit card industry, and my experiences have left me with the conviction that change can’t happen fast enough. If being a good customer and a responsible consumer can’t protect people, then it’s time for someone else to help us out.

In the meantime, I will keep my credit cards closer—as in issued by a local bank instead of a national corporation. In the decade or more I’ve held a credit union credit card, I have never been hit with a rate hike or encountered any problem that couldn’t be solved by a quick call to the loan department. That’s the kind of service everyone should be able to expect.

NB: A version of this column appeared in today's issue of Business to Business.

Favorite Recipe Friday: Mom's "Biskiff" Tomato Soup

Hooray, hooray the First of May! Summer food starts today! Or at least it would if it had not been 20 degrees outside when I got upstairs to start the day. I'm sorry, but I can't switch yet from winter stews and soups when there's still frost and snow on the ground. So if you're in Montana, you will still be able to enjoy this recipe. If you're somewhere warmer, you can just file it away for fall.

The name "Biskiff" comes from my early childhood mispronunciation of Bisque of Tomato soup, which I can plainly (and unhappily) remember my babysitter serving for lunch. It had chunks of onions and tomatoes in it, which earned my five-year-old scorn, and was probably homemade. Being an ungrateful brat, I was partial to heavily processed alternatives like Campbell's soups and Kraft macaroni and cheese. I still have a perverse fondness for such things occasionally, although they never taste as good as I remember. (And I have utterly failed in instilling any kind of appreciation for them in Connery. We bought him Spaghettios one day as a "special treat!" and he took a very polite bite and said, "These don't taste like anything!" Then he asked for something else to eat. More sophisticated palate than either of his parents, who happily--if a little red-face-edly--ate his leftovers.)

Anyway, this is yet another recipe from my mom, who pulled it out to great acclaim when she came to stay with us in Prague after Connery was born. There is no canned soup in the Czech Republic, or at least no canned soup I cared to eat, so our lives had been bereft of the life-giving combination of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches until my mom made this one day. And I can honestly say that this soup kicks Campbell's ass.

Mom's "Biskiff" Tomato Soup

1/4 yellow onion, diced finely
2 T. butter
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 c. chicken or vegie broth
1 bay leaf
1 t. sugar
1-2 c. milk

Saute onions in 1 T. of the butter until translucent and tender (unless you like more agressive onions). Add tomatoes, broth, bay leaf, and sugar and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Puree in a blender (or puree half, if you like Biskiff-y chunks in your soup) and return to stove on low heat. Add milk and heat through, taking care not to boil. Add the remaining 1 T. of butter and allow to melt. Serve immediately, preferably with a toasted cheese or tuna sandwich.