Tag Archives: works for me wednesday

The trouble with lunch

11/19/2008 Nichole 6 Comments

Back when I was a worker bee, I ate a lot of frozen-food lunches. I stopped doing that when I started staying home, because a sandwich costs less and I could make them fresh.

That worked fine for quite awhile. But then I started getting a headache toward the end of the day and realizing that, hey! I forgot to eat lunch again. So I started buying the frozens again a few weeks ago. For some reason, it’s easier for me to remember to eat when I have to microwave something. Probably because it’s hard to maintain one’s enthusiasm about PB&J after the 312th consecutive day of them.

Naturally, though, I have a problem with frozen lunches, too. The meat in a frozen meal? I can’t handle it. It makes me a little queasy just to think about it, much less eat it. So I limit myself to the vegetarian options most of the time.

And there aren’t scads of them to choose from. But here are a few of my favorites:

Amy’s has a great array of vegetarian options, such as mattar paneer and cheese enchiladas. The brand is one of the more expensive ones, though. Fortunately, our local organic discount emporium has them pretty regularly.

Ethnic Gourmet’s Gujarati Vegetable Curry

Lean Cuisine’s butternut squash ravioli is delightful.

This was a very rambley way of saying that frozen lunches work for me. What’s your go-to lunch?

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Domestic Blitz

Taming the clutter

10/15/2008 Nichole

Rockford and I are genetically predisposed to clutter. My mom still has every piece of “artwork” I ever brought home from elementary school, and my in-laws have a letter that little 6-year-old Rockford wrote to Santa on the wall in their dining room.

I’ve kept a few things — like the kids’ ID bracelets from the hospital and Poppy’s first drawing of a person — but so far I’ve been able to restrain myself in the sentimental clutter area. My problem is recipes. I have subscriptions to a couple of recipe-heavy magazines, and a few years ago I realized I had a problem. We were moving, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the stacks and stacks and stacks of back issues that were on the cookbook shelves. Because there were things in there that I still wanted to try.

Enter today’s Works for Me solution: A recipe binder. I bought a 3-ring binder and some clear plastic inserts, and I went to work tearing out the recipes that had me holding onto the magazine. I slipped the pages into the plastic inserts and then threw the rest of the magazine into the recycle bin. Now, I try not to let more than two magazines pile up before I start the process again.

This still hasn’t prompted me to get around to trying those recipes any faster, but it’s definitely cut down on the clutter around the house.

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Domestic Blitz

Sick as a dog

08/20/2008 Nichole 8 Comments

My brother called me a few days ago and said, “I have a small blog for you to write.” I tried to type the story as he told it, but he talks really fast. So this isn’t verbatim.

A few months ago, someone gave Justin and Carrie a few giant containers of meatballs and rigatoni. The containers got pushed to the back of their refrigerator and forgotten. A few days ago, Carrie decided that they probably weren’t good anymore, so she threw them away. The bag of trash made it to the door but not quite out the door before they went to dinner.

They came home to a mess and a bloated, unhappy dog. Jack had gotten into the trash bag and eaten the giant box of months-old meatballs and half the box of rigatoni. In addition to being hugely bloated, Justin said, Jack was “lackadaisical” and wanted to do nothing but cuddle.

They were concerned. There was talk of taking Jack to the vet. Before they did that, though, Justin thought they should try to make him throw up. This is where the story “goes to the Google,” as Justin says. The first recommendation he found said to put a teaspoon of salt on the back of the dog’s tongue. Jack ate the salt. He made an awful face, but he ate it.

Justin does not recommend using salt.

The next Google suggestion suggested giving the dog 2 teaspoons of 3% hydrogen peroxide — the stuff that comes in a brown bottle. The writer strongly recommended doing this outside.

Within 30 seconds, Justin said, Jack was “in the grass, puking like he’s never puked before.” He was no longer bloated, and he was back to his normal, happy self.

The moral of the story is this: If you need to make a dog throw up, use peroxide.