A big fat lady just sat on my hat (again)

(This post is a rerun from last year, posted mainly because maybe you want to make some suppli.  We do!)

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So, we celebrate Columbus Day here.  As I’ll be rehashing in the Register tomorrow, it’s not because I think he was a perfect man (there was only one of those.  We get His day off school, too), or because I think that his achievement brought unmitigated blessings to mankind.  Still and all, I’m glad to be on this continent, I’m glad to have a three-day weekend, and I love me some eye-talian food.

On the menu is bruschetta with various disgusting toppings that the kids won’t eat, mwa ha ha ha ha hahh (that was the sound of me contemplating eating it all myself), some kind of antipasto with intimidating salami, damp cheeses, muscular olives, and those awful marinated vegetables I can’t get enough of, bread sticks and probably spaghetti for the kids, probably mussels or something, suppli, cannoli with cherries and shaved chocolate, and Italian ices.  It’s possible that some wine might leap into the shopping cart all by itself, too.

As you can see, this is a pretty Americanized Italian feast.  That’s just my way of sticking it to l’uomo.  Take that, Columbus!  If you’re such a hero, how come we’re not eating . . . well, I tried and tried to think of some kind of authentic Italian food which sounds gross, but I really couldn’t.  Maybe something with, like, ox brains or something?  The worst thing I had to eat in Rome was rabbit, and that was only kind of awful because we thought it was chicken, until we realized the legs were bending the wrong way.  Oh, and there were some kind of snack food that was exactly like biodegradable packing peanuts.  Those weren’t very good — or filling, which was terribly important for a student who was living on about 70 cents a day.

Anyway, here is my recipe for suppli, which is what we had for lunch most days in Rome (one semester in college).  They cost 800 – 1,000 lire each, a few years before they switched –sniff sniff– to the Euro.  Normally, I wouldn’t touch a recipe with a secondary recipe in it, but this one is worth it, believe me!

(photo source)

SUPPLI

2 eggs

2 cups risotto (see recipe below)

4 oz. mozzarella in 1/2-inch cubes

3/4 cup bread crumbs

oil for frying

tomato sauce, if you like

Beat eggs lightly until just combined.

Add risotto and stir thoroughly, but do not mash rice.

If you want tomato sauce (this is how they were served in Rome), add it now – just enough to make it tomato-y, without thinning the mixture.

Form a ball about the size of a golf ball, make a little dent in it, stick a cube of cheese in the dent, and then add on another golf-ball sized lump of the rice mixture.  Form it all into a smooth egg shape.  Roll the whole thing in bread crumbs.  Do this until you use up all the rice mixture.

Refrigerate the balls for 30 minutes if you can, to make them easier to fry.

Heat oil to 375 degrees; preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Fry 4 or 5 balls at a time, about 5 minutes until they are golden brown.  The cheese inside should be melted.

Drain on paper towels, and keep the suppli warm in the oven while you are frying the rest — but these should be served pretty soon.

 

Risotto recipe:

7 cups chicken stock

4 Tbs butter

1/2 cup finely chopped onions

2 cups raw white rice

1/2 cup dry white wine

4 Tbs soft butter

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

Set chicken stock to simmer in a pot.

In a large pan, melt 4 Tbs. butter – cook onions until soft but not brown.

Stir in raw rice and cook 1-2 minutes until the grains glisten and are opaque.

Pour in the wine and boil until wine is absorbed.

Add 2 cups of simmering stock and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally until the liquid is almost absorbed.

Add 2 more cups of stock and cook until absorbed.

If the rice is not tender by this point, keep adding 1/2 cups of stock until it is tender.

Gently stir in the 4 Tbs soft butter and the grated cheese with a fork.

I came by it honestly.

It has come to my attention that I — I! — am the proud winner in The Crescat’s final year of her deliberately unpresitgious Cannonball Awards.  Here are the winners:

Best Blog by a Religious: Fr. Longenecker’s Standing on My Head

Best Political Blog: Adrienne’s Catholic Corner

More Catholic Than the Pope: Real Catholic TV

Best Armchair Theologian:Little Catholic Bubble

Best Visual Treat: Betty Beguiles

Most Church Militant: It’s a tie! Defend Us in Battle, and Cleansing Fire

Best New Kid on the Block: Heart For God

Best Blog by a Heretic: Bad Vestments

Best Under Appreciated Blog: Barefoot & Pregnant

Best Spiritual Treat: Blessed is the Kingdom

Bat Shit Crazy: I Have to Sit Down

Best Potpourri of Popery: Shoved to Them

Snarkiest Catholic Blog: Acts of the Apostasy

Most Hifreakinlarious: another tie! Acts of the Apostasy and The Ironic Catholic

Blog that Needs to be Updated More Often: Recovering Dissident Catholic

Yes, that’s right, I came in first, with a disturbingly wide lead, in the “Bat Shit Crazy” category.

I’m not going to argue.  All I can say is that if you knew my family, you’d know where it came from.  Case in point: a recent Facebook conversation, for which I laboriously learned how to take a screen shot (you press the “screen shot” button).

Click on the image to enlarge and behold . . . the bat shit craziness.

Anyway, many thanks to the fabulous Crescat, who could have won a fair number of these awards herself, if she weren’t too cool, and too busy moving to her new headquarters.  Don’t forget to check out her new art blog, too.

Ten Good Books (and then some) Featuring Big Families

Today I talked about ten of my favorite “big family” books, but so many more didn’t make it onto the list.  Here are the ones I included.

(I know they ought to have authors’ names, but if that’s the worst of the problems with this list, (a) it’s a frickin miracle and (b) I almost bit through my own fist in a rage, trying to get the stupid, stupid thing to stupid do what I stupid wanted it to do, and between Amazon’s clonkiness and WordPress’s persnickety proprietary nonsense, and me being in the “all irate all the time” trimester, this is how it turned out. Think of it like an adventure!)

All-Of-A-Kind Family  (the series)

Cheaper by the Dozen

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The Father Who Had 10 Children

Heckedy Peg 

It Could Always Be Worse: A Yiddish Folk Tale

Mr & Mrs Pig’s Bulk Buy and the rest of the Mrs. Pig books

Nanny McPhee (Widescreen Edition) (the movie, which is not a book, but a movie)

The Weasley family in the Harry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)

Half Magic

and the ones I wish I had had room for:

The Five Chinese Brothers

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

Five Children and It  and other E. Nesbit books

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy and the rest of the series

The Saturdays (Melendy Quartet)

and the ones I am not familiar with, but which others recommended(thanks for your help! If I weren’t such a lazy swine, I’d link back to you all, not that you need it):

Classic Starts: Five Little Peppers and How They Grew 

The Relatives Came 

A Christmas Like Helen’s

The Bear That Heard Crying 

So Many Bunnies: A Bedtime ABC and Counting Book

Ten Kids, No Pets 

The Seven Silly Eaters

McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm: Three Tall Tales

It’s Too Noisy!

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

I Remember Mama: Play in Two Acts

Savvy

Spencer’s Mountain

Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo

The Happy Hollisters series

The Wouldbegoods 

Happy Little Family (Fairchild Family Story)

The Family Minus

Come join us at the Register and add your favorites to the list!

Oh, and if perchance you are inclined to buy any of these books, my Christmas present savings fund, which we keep raiding for frivolous flights of fancy like dryer parts and, um, extra bone marrow for my poor sick grandmother, would love it if you would click through from my blog here, because I get a small percentage of each sale.  I forget if I’m supposed to mention that or not.  If you’re from the Amazon Associates program, please practice the following remark, “Aw, that dizzy broad don’t know what she’s talking about.  Nothing to see here, legal department — let’s move along.”

Yay, books!  Yay, small percentage!  Yay, big families!

And shall not loveliness be loved forever?

For show and tell yesterday, my daughter brought in these pictures:

Our dear little Shrimpy at 28 weeks, due December 9!

I won! We won! Everybody won!

Thanks so much, everyone, if you voted for me for “Funniest Blog” in the Catholic New Media Awards — I won!  I’ve been putting off announcing it because I felt a sudden, overbearing pressure to be, well, the funniest blog.  But when I sat down at the keyboard and was like, “Come on, brain!  Joke!” my brain was all, “Oh, um, ahhh!  Wocka WOCKA!”  My husband laughed, but I wasn’t sure I could put it across.

Anyway, lots of excellent choices were made:

The National Catholic Register won Best Overall Catholic Website and Best Group Blog!

Hallie Lord won Most Entertaining Blog for Betty Beguiles!

Jen Fulwiler won Everything for Most Everything Everything in the world — and I voted for her, darn it, because she’s that good!(Specifically, Conversion Diary won Best Blog By a Woman, Best Written Blog, Most Spiritual Blog, People’s Choice, Tallest Catholic Blogger, Fastest Catholic Typist, Nicest Catholic Teeth, and Most Insidious Subliminal Messages On a Catholic Blog, If You Read It Backwards While Stoned.)

The Anchoress, The Crescat, Creative Minority Report, Bad Catholic, That Strangest of Wars, and The Ironic Catholic are also favorites of mine which won awards from New Catholic Media.  Do check them out — that is, after all, the purpose of these awards:  to encourage people to read good stuff they may have missed.*

I spent all morning pushing to get a super secret project done (more details soon!), and then I went to the post-hurricane beach with the kids for several hours, in an effort to forget that people are still mad — mad! — at me for saying that Thomas Kinkade should be taken out and slowly beheaded with blunt sporks because of all the baby ducklings I hear he’s been torturing, or whatever it was I apparently said.  Then I made supper.

Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you is that I left someone off, or messed up all the links again, I’m just tired.  And if you sent me congratulations and I forgot to respond, I’m sorry — I’m just tired.  I know, we’re all tired.  We’re all Tiredest Catholic Bloggers.  We win!

*That’s to answer the implied question of my 12-year-old daughter, who just said, “Oh, you won?  And you won . . . a picture of a trophy?  Okay.”

Nose Newts

1.  Vote for me in the Catholic New Media Awards!  Voting closes Friday, August 26.  You have to register (that’s how they make sure people only vote once — you know how sneaky Catholics are), but it’s very fast and easy, and you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped me achieve something about which Vox Nova,in a statement entirely devoid of envy, snobbery, or tear-stained, puppy-kicking denial, says, “The absurdity of such awards should be self-evident.”

2. Vote for the National Catholic Register for best group blog!  Because, come on, it isthe best group blog.  Oh, and Best Overall Catholic Website, too!  Vote!  There are many other excellent blogs and podcasts worthy of your vote, too, but since I already voted, I can’t seem to see the list anymore.

3. Register Radio is coming!  Register Radio is coming!  This 30-minute program will launch on September 2, and will include all sorts of things:  news, interviews, Catholic views on entertainment and the media, and a “top blogger” spot, following up on whatever people got the most het up about in the last week.  I’ll have more information soon about how and when to listen.

4.  We finally received the replacement part for the broken kitchen faucet.  It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to fill a bucket with water from the bathtub and lug it into the kitchen in order to do dishes or clean anything, and then rinse soapy pots and pans off in the bathtub, and run the shower to get the coffee stains out of the bath toys that didn’t get put away, and constantly hear, “GET OUT OF DA BAFFWOOM, I’M FIRSTY AND I NEED A DWINK!!!!” and stuff.  For two weeks.  But I sure didn’t like it.

3.  I gots plenty more to say about Thomas Kinkade, but right now I’m so tired, I’m  having trouble completing the second half of blinking (the opening-my-eyes-again part).  Hope to follow up soon, but in the mean time, let me say that his work qualifies as shite entirely on its own merits — has nothing to do with Kinkade’s personal success or popularity, or with his personal loathsome behavior.  It’s all about the painting.  I’m willing to forgive people who enjoy his work, but I’m not willing to agree that there’s nothing to forgive.

6.  I just noticed that I numbered these paragraphs “1, 2, 3, 4, 3″ and “6.”

Seven Decorating Tips from House Horrible Magazine

We’ve had a lot of doctor’s appointments lately, so I’ve been reading a lot of dumb magazines.  My favorite features are the ones that show some enviable tableau from someone’s home, and then glibly explains how to achieve this effect.

I don’t mean to promote envy, but it occurs to me that my house is full of uncommon little scenes which you may or may not want to recreate in your own home, depending on how much crack you’re smoking.  And so I present:

Seven Quick Ways To Spruce Down Your Home

–1–

AMERICAN PRIMITIVE MEETS PRIMITIVE SCREWHEAD

This effect can be achieved by allowing your teenage daughter to be the only one in the house with her own bedroom — the trade-off being that her room is the one everyone else has to tramp through on their way to their own rooms.  Her only recourse will be to hang a sheet in front of the most sacrosanct part of her living quarters, and to make that sheet as threatening as possible.  To prep for this project, expose your child to inappropriate movies and heavy doses of sarcasm at an early age.

–2–

AT HOME WITH CHROME

These gorgeous gold footprint stencils adorning the back steps simply scream, “Yes, yes, spray paint anything you like, just let me finish this post!”  Or maybe that was me screaming.

–3–

TEACH THE CHILDREN WELL

This fin de siècle vignette captures the very moment when our family made its last stab at homeschooling, and then gave up and just taught the kids poker.  For an edgy touch, someone seems to have taken a bite out of the bulletin board.

–4–

I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THIS IS

You can achieve this effect by leaving the camera lying around unguarded.

–5–

SHOCK AND AWWWW

Classic trompe l’oeil:  to the untrained eye, it may appear that Mama went to the bathroom for a couple of minutes or an hour or two, and the little ones got into the paper plates and glue.  But in fact, what you’re really seeing here is:  “I make a fwower for you, Mama!”

–6–

NO SURFACE LEFT UN-GODZILLA’D

A progressive approach to decorating, with a twofold purpose:  one, to encourage creativity in your children; and two, to give parents plenty of practice rehearsing the phrase:  “He’s going to grow out of it at some point, right?”

–7–

NEVERENDING PARTY

You’ve heard of shabby chic?  This is happy bleak.  Tie festive balloons to your mailbox every time a kid has a birthday.  Never get around to untying them.  Feel shame daily.

Well, that’s it.  Now you know how you, too, can have . . . House Horrible.  Don’t forget to check out Conversion Diary for everyone else’s Seven Quick Takes!

Good Writing Is Not a Luxury

If there’s one thing that drives me bonkers (and there are actually about 53,429 things and counting), it’s when someone assumes that his own talent, hobby, or vocation is a moral issue for everyone else.  For instance, the women who loves decorating and cleaning and arranging is convinced that every wife and mother has a moral duty to put the beauty of her home over all other pursuits.  Or the guy who has conquered sloth and gluttony through serial triathalons is sure that the sedentary college professor is sinning because he doesn’t work out much.

Not so, hot shots.  God may be calling you to work out your salvation through one particular area of interest, but that doesn’t mean He’s calling everyone to the same thing.  Everyone has a vocation, a skill to develop for the service of God — but these skills vary as much as, of course, people do themselves.

Well, you can judge for yourself if I’m guilty of the same hobby-as-moral-imperative fallacy here when I say that it’s very important for Catholics to learn how to write.

You want pandas?

I learned something today.

I learned that it’s all very well for me to sit here in my semi-comfortable chair, pontificating about what’s wrong with this and what’s wrong with that.  But you know what?  That’s the easy way out.  Everyone can point out the problem, but no one wants to come up with the solution.

Well, that changes today.   The people have spoken.  We want a fun, child-pleasing program that will draw the kids in.  We want social consciousness.  We want empowerment of the weak and we want community invovlement.  We want non-profit, we want music and razzle dazzle.  And we want, I guess, for some reason, pandas.

Well, my friends, HERE.  YOU.  GO.

You are very welcome.  As I’ve said before, I’m basically a healer.

Seven Hot Takes

1.  Today, I offered cash to my 13-year-old daughter if she would please, please let me braid up her long, thick, wavy mane of hair, which she has been wearing down  (or even down and topped with a knit cap!) all summer.  When she heard the dollar amount, she looked startled, and then offered to let me do it for free.  Therein beats a human heart after all!

2.  The kids have been staying cool by eating ice cubes,wearing as few clothes as they can get away with, according to their station in life; and lying on their necks, gaping vacantly at reruns of Star Trek.  Star Trek is already nearly unwatchable to me, but the sight of those skin-tight polyester turtlenecks makes me want to put a pickaxe through the TV screen.

3.  When it’s very hot, the sticky, crumby, chaotic, sloppy piles of random belongings that we call a home, and which I normally find extremely tolerable and ignorable, make me INSANE.  And so, on the very days when I know I ought to be putting my feet up and drinking lots of fluids and conserving physical and emotional energy, I find myself scrambling around cleaning inside cabinets, under the oven, and around the dials on the washing machine.  This does not help.  But I can’t help it.

4.  You may recall that our house has a hose problem.  We now have a way of hooking up the hose, but I think our well tank was designed for an older, simpler time, when people were made out of paper, and didn’t consider large quantities of water something to be grasped at.

Being a mature and responsible homeowner, I have responded to the problem by deciding I really don’t care when we run out of water.

What happens is I let the kids use the hose, and I sit down to check out Facebook.  Eventually I try to do dishes or something, and discover that the water has run out.  I say, “Dammit,” and go back and check Facebook for a while.  The kids run in and out of the house as they play in the muddy grass, and I greet them with a motherly, “AGH, no hugs, get away from me, you’re all wet!  Get out, get out!  Look what you’re doing to the floor!”  (I’m pretty sure they know this means, “I love you.”)  Then I tell the kids it’s too hot to cook lunch, and they eat mustard and fig newtons or something, I don’t care.  Then I try to do the dishes again, and discover again that we’re out of water.

Then I check Facebook again, and get a “hey, how’s it going, boy it’s hot, what are you wearing” email from my husband.  Hearing from him reminds me that he’s not actually as fine as I am with not having water, and that I better go fix it before he gets home.  So I say “dammit” again, go into the basement, and push on the scummy little lever until it finds just the right spot, and water starts running again.  Then I go check Facebook.

5.  We also have a cup problem.  I shall demonstrate why with the following dialogue I just had with my seven-year-old son:

Son:  Can I make lemonade?

Me:  Uggggg, no.  Uggggg, yes.  I guess so, okay, fine, all right, yes.  Just don’t make a mess with the sugar, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Son:  Dang!  Never mind.  I forgot, all the cups are dirty.

Me:  WELL, you could WASH one!

Son:  Nah, I’ll just wait until the dirty ones get washed.

Me:  YOU KNOW WHAT!   THE REASON WE DON’T HAVE ANY CUPS IS THAT YOU LEAVE THEM LYING AROUND!  THEY DON’T JUST MAGICALLY MAKE THEIR WAY BACK TO THE SINK AND WASH THEMSELVES, YOU KNOW!  SO YOU GO OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW AND YOU GO FIND SOME OF THOSE CUPS YOU LEAVE LYING AROUND IN THE GRASS, JUST HOPING THEY’LL MAGICALLY MAKE THEIR WAY BACK TO THE SINK AND WASH THEMSELVES!  YOU GO DO THAT NOW!

Son:  That’s okay, I’ll just make lemonade later, when there are more cups.

6.  The other day, while my husband and the older kids were out seeing Harry Potter and the Curse of the Humiliating Controversy, I thought the little ones and I would replicate one of my fondest childhood memories:  making giant bubbles.  I actually bought straws, string, and extra dish detergent ahead of time, so it would be a smooth, successful project, and we would All Have Fun.

Well, it didn’t work.  Of course.  I couldn’t get the proportions of soap and water right (how is that even possible?  This is NOT HARD!), and  – I don’t know, maybe it was the wrong kind of string or something.  We eventually made maybe half a dozen respectably large bubbles, but there was an awful lot more of this

and this

than there was of bubbles.  Some of us, however, managed to have fun anyway:

7.  And then of course when there is hot weather, there is plenty of beach, and silly bathing beauties

which makes it all worthwhile.

Don’t forget to check out Conversion Diary for all the other Seven Quick Takes.

Oh, and my post today at the Register, “Safe Playgrounds and Safe Sex” may or may not generate some heat of its own — you never know.