Tag: throwing up

What’s for supper? Vol. 116: Cream of what?

Our week started off not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a splat. Yarr, they warr pukin’. Only a few kids started throwing up, but we figured it was only a matter of time before the upchuck duet became a whole-family vomit chorale.

The way this goes, though, is that only a few people are sick at a time; so I tried to plan the menu with meals that would be okay for people recovering from a stomach bug, food that people who were perfectly healthy wouldn’t hate, and food that, well, wasn’t red. Because. You know.

So here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Hamburgers and chips. 
This was, of course, before the plague descended and we still lived like upright men and women.

***

SUNDAY
Grilled chicken with salad

No tasty toasted nuts, no stinky cheeses, no dried fruit, no buttery, herbed croutons. Just grilled chicken on greens with cukes.

***

MONDAY
Cream of wheat, homemade applesauce

I do love filling the house with the nostalgic smell of applesauce as it slowly burbles away on the stove, but I was going to be in and out all day. So I speeded things up by using the Instant Pot . Or so I thought.

I quartered about 12 pounds of apples and cut out the stems and cores, but left the skins on, for flavor and color. Then I put the apples in the pot, filling probably 3/4 of my 8 quart IP (affiliate link!) with about a cup-and-a-half of water. I set it for eight or nine minutes, then did a quick release. There was tons of water left, so I strained that out and kept in a sipping jar, where it was lovely and dusky rose, almost like a light syrup or cider.

Then I remembered I had thrown out my trusty food mill (affiliate link!), because I never make applesauce anymore. So I dumped the apples in a colander and tried to press the applesauce through the holes while straining the peels. That didn’t work. It just made more apple juice. So I thought maybe I could put everything in a blender (affiliate link!) and just maybe blend the peels right it. Then I remembered our blender base is lost. So I put it in the standing mixer with the whisk attachment . . .

At this point, I had used six bowls, eleven pots, two jars, a colander, a blender, a spoon, a spatula, two saucepans, a defibrillator, a whisk, a miniature postage scale, one mug, four duck eggs, and a centrifuge  we got at a rummage sale (affiliate link!).

. . . I put it in the standing mixer bowl, I say, with the whisk attachment, and let it go. Believe it or not, this worked, sort of. The whisk gathered in most of the peels and trapped them inside itself, leaving beautiful pink fragrant applesauce for my poor sick children. I stirred in a bit of butter and some cinnamon. I took the whisk and retreated to my bed, where I ate all the hot peels because I was feeling sad.

We also had cream of wheat.

***

TUESDAY
French toast casserole. 

I had purposely bought lots of extra bread. I didn’t follow a recipe, but just tore up a few loaves, then beat up a bunch of eggs and milk, added sugar and vanilla, stirred the egg stuff into the bread, put it in a buttered pan, sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on top, and baked it at 350 for 25 minutes or so. They ate a bit of it, the little bastards.

***

WEDNESDAY
Beef barley soup, hot pretzels

Beef barley soup would not be a lot of fun to clean up if someone threw it up, but at least it’s not a cream soup. I was in a hurry, so I chunked everything in at once: Cubed beef, diced carrots and onions, salt, pepper, minced garlic, olive oil. A little browning, then I added a whole lot of beef broth, somewhat less red wine, a few cans of diced tomatoes and juice, and a bunch of sliced mushrooms. Then I let it simmer on the “slow cook” setting of the Instant Pot.

When it was almost supper, I opened it, added in a pouch of mixed grains (I think it was barley, spelt, farro, and bunk, and fwap) and set the IP to “high” for eleven minutes. Just totally winging it. I don’t know how to use that thing. It cooked the soup.

***

THURSDAY
At this point, I noticed that nobody had really gotten sick. Just a couple of jerks throwing up early on for no reason at all. We had chicken burgers and mashed potatoes and frozen vegetables. They made snowmen with the mashed potatoes. What did I care?

***

FRIDAY
I suppose mac and cheese. I have to return that defibrillator I borrowed, though.

Image: By myself (Picture of a wallpainting in a Laotian monastery) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

At the Register: The Evil Child’s Guide to Holy Week

Parents say “Holy Week”; kids hear “Whatcha got?”

7 Humiliatingly Slow Takes with Huffing and Puffing Afterward

1.  I don’t know how successfully I’ve hidden this in the few photos of myself that I’ve put online, but I am 5’5″ and in the last fifteen years, I’ve put on average of seven pounds of permanent weight for each baby.  This is what happens when all you do is sit down.

2.  I was having stabbing pain, excruciating burning from my lower back down to my toes, tingling, numbness, and general unpredictable sciatic misery, which finally sent me to the doctor, because I couldn’t believe that I could become that debilitated just from doing nothing.  The x-ray revealed that I have “mild to moderate degeneration” between the discs of my spine, brought on by age, weight gain, and inactivity, or, in layman’s terms, being a loser.  I am adding that phrase,  “mild to moderate degeneration,” to my list of possible new names for the new blog I’ll never start.  Other possibilities I’ve gathered over the years include what Mark Shea called me one time (“History’s Greatest Monster”), what an outraged reader told my editor (“Fisher Is Unrepentant!”), and what my mechanic wrote about the van (“Misfires Badly Under Any Significant Load”).

3.  A sad little drama recently played out in a shopping plaza nearby.  First there was nothing but a Curves Gym.  Then Five Guys Burger and Fries moved in next door.  Curves held out for a while, but one day the windows went dark, and they packed up and moved away, presumably shaking their chubby fists in rage, with an embarrassing amount of flappy movement around the upper arm area, as they went.  And then, in the space where Curves used to be, Rick’s Gourmet Ice Cream moved in.

4.  This is not going to become one of those tedious blogs that does nothing but record how many reps or grams or kilos or whatever (wait, I think I’m talking about cocaine now) of cardio I accomplished and which variety of kale I like to add to my puke smoothie.  (Sorry, I just friggin hate the whole smoothie thing.  You still have teeth, people.  Use ‘em.)  I will try not to make a big deal out of it unless I think it would be genuinely interesting to someone besides myself and my doctor.

5.  I picked out an exercise DVD that looked like a reasonable place to start.  Today, I did it for the first time, and had two shocks:  one is that it’s designed for senior citizens; and two, it wasn’t easy to keep up.  Argh.  Yep, ol’ Jane Fonda is going on and on about her titanium hip and how great it is that we’re doing so much to combat memory loss, and I’m screaming on the inside “ISN’T TWENTY MINUTES UP YET, YOU HOLLOW CHEEKED BITCH?”

6.  I used to be able to run five miles.  Cursing the whole way, but still, I used to be able to do it.  Now, I can’t even curse for five miles straight, running or not.  I don’t even have profanity stamina anymore.

7.  In the week that has passed since I wrote #1-6, I have put off reading what Pope Francis said about people who complain about 73 distinct times. Because look,  I got the flu, which meant that I was too weak and feverish to do my back exercises, which meant that I couldn’t sleep because of back pain, which meant that the baby decided this would be a fine time to give up sleeping.  Like, just quit, flat out.  She goes to bed at the normal time, but wakes up at 1:30, ready to play.  The next two hours are spent with constructive thoughts like, “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME” and “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION” and “I THINK I HAVE TWO FRIENDS NAMED LYDIA BUT MAYBE ONLY ONE I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THAT BECAUSE THERE IS THAT ONE LYDIA BUT THEN THERE IS THAT OTHER ONE ALSO AND THAT MAKES TWO BUT ON THE OTHER HAND I’M NOT SURE HOW MANY FRIENDS I HAVE NAMED LYDIA.”  (See, fever.)  Then I went to throw up, but my back hurt too much to reach the toilet.  Also, I took a shower and it turned out the soap had a bug on it, and I was washing myself with bug.

And THAT’S why I say sometimes it’s okay to just go through your medicine chest and see what you can find.  Because, sheesh.

For someone with real problems, NOT brought on by being a loser, check out our 7 Quick Takes host, Jen Fulwiler.

Christmas Group Shot

Silly me, I thought we would never get around to taking a group photo this year, but there we all are!  I guess this is God’s way of telling us to slow down and have ourselves a streppy little New Year.  Also, He hates us.

Oh, just kidding!  If He hated us, the pharmacy would have run out of penicillin before our order was complete.  Oh, wait, it did.

Meh, it could be worse.  My husband isn’t working this weekend, so we can all have one last chance to enjoy a good old-fashioned family vacation together, sitting around the fire and sipping our disgusting pink medicine, trading good old stories about what we imagined we saw on the ceiling when the fever was at its peak, and tapping out the rhythm of our favorite old songs.  Can’t sing.  Throat hurts.

Really, really, it’s not that bad!  The worst part is the crushing guilt I feel when I think about all those friends and family eating all that fudge and peanut brittle and buckeyes I made with my own, two, plague-ridden hands. . .