Monday, November 12, 2007

A mess of a post

Hi. To make a looooong story short, I slept roughly 4 hours last night and am currently barely functioning. We've got a bit of a sleep crisis on our hands as far as Maya is concerned, but I'm not going to bore you with the details (for once).
Suffice it to say, I'm here to make my requisite post, then I'm sprinting to bed to get whatever sleep I can before Maya wakes up and the hell begins.
First of all, thanks, J and A, for the lullaby suggestions! I'm going to search for them at the iTunes store and hopefully add them to my mix.
Secondly, and utterly apropos of nothing, I'd like to tell you that I made my first two "30-minute meals" last night and tonight, courtesy of the Rachel Ray cookbook of the same name, and both were successes, though not resounding successes. I'm lazy and cheap and put off by loads of hard-to-find ingredients, so I scoured the book for the two simplest-looking recipes possible, and found "Super Sloppy Joes" and "Spinach Calzones."
S loved the calzones, which took me much longer than 30 minutes to make because I'd forgotten to defrost the spinach or acquire a second cookie sheet beforehand (I had to get one from a neighbor, who ended up bringing me a Teflon casserole dish, but oh well, I used it.) The other weird thing with this recipe is the the quantities called for didn't quite jibe with what was available at the supermarket. For instance, S (who did the shopping) couldn't find 10-oz. tubes of premade pizza dough, so he brought home a 13-oz. tube. As a result, the calzones were effing ginormous, really comical-looking, actually. Take a medium pizza, fold it in half, and there's the size of calzone we're talking about. Furthermore, the bottoms of the calzones browned much faster than the tops, which didn't seem to bother S (or Maya) but really irked me. (J, do you know why this might've happened?) Regardless, they were good calzones; I'd just make some adjustments next time I make them.
The sloppy joes---those were really and truly a 30-minute dish. Actually, you could throw those bad boys together in 25 minutes, if you were determined and had better knife skills than I do. (God, my knife skills SUCK!) Also, they were good. Nothing special, really. But satisfying, tasty. It's funny---I was nervous about them because I had in my mind what, exactly, a sloppy joe should taste like based on the ones my mom and grandma made when I was growing up. These weren't the same, but they were close enough and contained a couple of vegetables, which I liked. We had them with a garlicky broccoli-cauliflower mix.
Wow, I am so boring tonight. Oh well. Let's wrap this up, shall we?
I called the lead-test company (see prior post), whose representative advised me to take a Q-tip soaked in vinegar to the red toy piece in question. If the swab turns red, he told me, it's paint transferring to the swab, and the toy does not necessarily contain lead. Well, I did that, and the vinegary swab did NOT turn red. So then, it appears we've got a lead-tainted toy in our posession, one Maya has spent countless hours gnawing on, back when she was big into the gnawing. I'm going to make one more call to the lead-test company tomorrow to discuss this further, but I'll likely end up taking Maya SOMEWHERE for a blood-lead test. If her pediatrician won't do it, we'll find someone who will.
I'm trying VERY HARD not to panic. Yet.
Goodnight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, Rachel Ray is a big, fat liar about 30 minutes, but things do turn out delicious! Hooray for sloppy Joes and calzones. My knife skillz also suck-a culinary institute grad once tried to show me, tennis-instructor style, how to become one with the knife and all that, but my fear of sharp things and impatience with chopping won out in the end.

I can't believe that in the 21st century, we still have to worry about lead poisoning, and especially in children's toys. Good thing that mamas like you are so proactive.