My daughter and I were out doing the food shopping recently and we stopped at the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. (Haley likes their coffee.) She wanted a doughnut but they didn’t have any. So, she asked for hash browns and the voice, a young person, said “I’m sorry. We’re really short-staffed and we can’t cook anything.”
I said, just casually, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. That must be making your day really hard.” She told the manager. Get this. They comped Haley’s coffee because we were the only people who had been nice to them that whole day.
And that’s all I’ll say about that.
If you live in the eastern US, you may be feeling a little down today because Phil has doomed us to another six weeks of winter. Here in Pittsburgh it has been a shockingly snowy winter; already this year we’ve more than doubled last winter’s total snowfall. It feels some days like we’re hibernating, settled in our winter nests, awaiting the warming breezes of spring.
After a disastrous four months of virtual learning, Ian and I decided to begin a new journey. In January, we moved to homeschooling for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year. I mean no disrespect to any of his teachers or the administrators trying to figure out how to help students learn this school year. We simply came to the realization that Ian could not be successful in the current learning construct.
It has been a remarkably positive experience for both of us thus far. We’re lucky to be living in interesting times, as they say; so our civics lessons always run over. We both dislike math so we bless Khan Academy for helping us over the hurdle of geometry. The Khan Academy site has also supported Ian’s science requirements gracefully.
Ian wants to stop talking about sentence structure (hehe) but we’re really enjoying our literature discussions. This week, we’re reading books that have been re-told as movies. He’s reading Stardust. I’m reading Chocolat. We’ll be discussing them next week and picking out our next books from the stack I’ve already put together.
Having far too many books has been helpful on this journey. We’ve pulled from the shelves for our civil war/confederacy discussions, our review of sentence structure and the roles of passive/active language, our early budget creation, even our discussions about propaganda.
We had our first conflict when I tried to do a combined civics/poetry lesson using the inaugural poems by Jericho Brown (in the NYT) and Amanda Gorman. We watched the inauguration live, including Ms Gorman’s moving reading of The Hill We Climb; but when I planned to review the role of poetry and those poems in particular, Ian staged a protest, stating emphatically that he has no particular love for poetry and no desire to review either the messages in those poems or the means by which those poets communicated their thoughts. He was both more direct and less polite than I’m being. It made me think again that we don’t pay teachers even half what they deserve for their efforts.
As we sit together every morning, however, I watch his eyes light up before he laughs and I listen to him sing softly to himself while he works on a problem and I am thankful for all of the decisions that brought us to this particular moment, to this opportunity to be here, now, embracing the slower pace of our lives and the strengthening bond of our relationship.
Writing has been more of a challenge, as I expected. I carve out some time every day to work on my current WIP but teaching is intellectually and emotionally draining which means less daily progress on the WIP! I used to complete four full verses daily for the book but now I’m happy to get one *mostly* done each day. Mary Oliver’s exploration of grief has helped a lot and has inspired me to do some exploring myself.
We continue to cook. Last week, for National Chocolate Cake day, I made half of a dark chocolate layer cake (it’s made with boiling water — MOIST!) with chocolate buttercream frosting and shared half of that with our next door neighbors.
They’re in their 90s and don’t make many treats anymore. The cake was a big hit but Mr Neighbor especially likes it when I share homemade cookies. I gave them a gift bag of Christmas cookies over the holidays — buckeyes, ginger snaps, frosted nutmeg cookies, decorated sugar cookies, etc — and his wife texted me that she didn’t get to eat any! Mrs Neighbor said she was inspired to make Scottish shortbread. She’s from Scotland so when I say that shortbread SMASHED, I suspect you get what I mean.
My current favorite recipe is heavy cream biscuits. They are tender and flaky, heavenly with the spicy winter stew that simmered on our stove all afternoon today.
Stay safe. Wear your mask. Be kind.
Update: Here are the recipe details for the foods I mentioned.
Beef Stew — I add approximately 1/4 cup of dark soy sauce and 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce with the beef stock/bouillon/better than bouillon and I simmer it for 2 full hours before adding the veggies. Sometimes, I also add a hearty shake of Penzey’s Black and Red Pepper (a spicy black and cayenne pepper mix).
Heavy Cream Biscuits — After trying a zillion different biscuit recipes, I stumbled on this one in a cooking subreddit. It’s a Kenji sausage gravy and biscuits video. The biscuit recipe is the first five minutes of the video. I’ve never made the sausage gravy but the biscuits have turned out perfectly every time. We cut them in half and ladle the stew on top.
Dark Chocolate Cake — I halve the recipe, making a single 9″ layer that I then cut in half to make a half layer cake.
Buttercream Frosting — This is identical to the Hershey frosting recipe we used when I was little. Still my favorite! Don’t forget to halve this if you’re making a smaller cake.
