Experiment hiatus: the list and YOU

For those of you who have known me for any length of time, know that I have a tendency to dive head-first, eyes closed, mouth screaming into whatever new-fangled idea I cooked up. Then, in anywhere from a few hours to a few months, the novelty wears off and my awesomely awesome idea fizzles.

That will not happen with this blog.

I'm writing this more for me than anything else. I feel the need to explain why there has been a several week silence from Kristin's cyberspace, because I need to convince myself that this time will be different.

At any rate, it has been an exhausting and exciting few weeks. We traveled over 1300 miles by car, cycled between sick kids and sick husband, Nick officially finished his first year of graduate school, I took my first trip to Chicago and ended up completing some unexpected short-term consulting work for my former employer. Whew.

Experiment #3: Puffy Fingerpaint

I love shopping with my dad.

I think I just heard an audible gasp from everyone who has ever met either my dad or me. I am pretty sure that the only time the words “love” and “shopping” are uttered together in a sentence by either of us is to say, “I love it when the stores are closed and there is no possible way I can go shopping.” I just really hate shopping and so does my dad.

 

But shopping with my dad is awesome for two reasons:

1. We have the same attention span for shopping (30 minutes max).
2. We shop by feel.

The three times I have gone shopping with my dad, he would come back to the dressing room with a small pile of clothes - none of them matching (or even distantly coordinating), but all soft, smooth or silky. I like my clothes to look good, but I really like them to feel good.

I'm just a highly tactile person.  I like to knead dough, work with clay, walk barefoot, twirl my hair, wiggle in the sand, and play in the dirt. I have apparently passed this obsession on to my daughter. So at our house, we try to do lots of "hands-on" activitites.

Tactile stimulation is more than just a way to occupy a preschooler's time. It is now being recognized as a legitimate therapeutic treatment with exceptional benefits for everyone from preemies to Alzheimer patients. Modeling letters out of clay is used as a treatment for dyslexia. It has even been suggested that since serotonin, a brain chemical linked to depression, is more present when an individual is active, even fine motor movements can improve mood and combat depression (B.L. Jacobs, Princeton University).

Experiment #2: Homemade Granola

With my husband's plunge into graduate school this past year and his constant 12+ hour days away from home, I have had to learn how to cook. I do not like to cook. Growing up, I did lots of baking with my mom. Baking is therapeutic. Relaxing. Fun.

But cooking? Ugh.

I realize now that my hefty disdain for cooking is primarily because I just never learned how to cook. I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing and have no innate cooking sense to guide me. As you might imagine, I am not very good at it. And, childish though it may seem, I do not like doing things I can't do well.

But, one cannot raise a healthy family on cheesy eggs, tuna melts and spaghetti (the three meals I "cooked" before this year). So in an attempt to remedy my complete lack of culinary knowledge, I started reading (gasp!) cookbooks and cooking magazines. Amid the tedious steps for creating perfect pastas, pizzas, peanut sauce and potstickers, I stumbled upon Bobby Flay's fantastic recipe for "mango agave granola" in Food Network magazine. My beautiful baking gem among the cooking chaos.

Therefore, in an effort to ignore the fact that I have yet to master even one cooking recipe, I am going to blog about something I get to bake.

Experiment #1: Maseca! - Making Corn Tortillas

I am initiating my blogging experimentation with the rather uninspiring tortilla. The tortilla has earned this honor because of the sheer number of tortillas consumed at our house. My husband eats them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One package of 8 lasts about 2 days. So the choice became buy the cheapo tortillas that look the same whether they are 2 days or 2 years old, or spend a fortune on fresh ones.

Back in the day, I spent a semester living with host families and conducting research in rural Costa Rica. Amid the tropical heat, suffocating humidity and diesel buses, I fell in love with the country, the people and their homemade corn tortillas. My host mother in Guápiles (who was a single, working mother of two) always found time to pull out her bag of Maseca corn flour and make her own tortillas, over the stove, without air conditioning. Inspired by her dedication and compelled by their crack-like addictive flavor, I bought a small bag of Maseca corn flour to bring back with me to my dorm room. I imagined padding down to the dorm kitchen for midnight study breaks of warm tortillas dripping with melted cheese. Five years later, as my husband and I were packing our apartment to move across the country, I rediscovered my slumped Maseca bag, abandoned, unopened and long since expired. The dream of the homemade tortilla was lost until a couple months ago when my eyes happened to graze a bag of Maseca in the grocery store. The memory was jogged. I was intrigued. Now, almost a decade after my introduction to these delicious snacks, I am finally attempting to make my own corn tortillas. They are pretty healthy and darn tasty.

Goal: To make 8 homemade corn tortillas (4 servings)

Time to Completion: 20 minutes, including setup and cleanup. Time is less if you have a larger pan. Each additional tortilla adds between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. 

Cost Comparison: 
1 package of 8 corn tortillas cost $1.75 - $4.50. That's $0.22 - $0.56 per tortilla.
 8 homemade Maseca corn tortillas cost $0.22. That's under $0.03 per tortilla. One 4.4 lb bag of Maseca flour costs approximately $3.60 and makes 132 tortillas. 

Tortilla making is mostly kid-compatible (except for the cooking part) for kids 2 years and older and allows for only minimal, if any, multitasking.

Equipment:

Large mixing bowl

Rolling pin (or if you are fancy shmancy, a tortilla press)

Plastic wrap
Measuring cups and spoons
A fork for mixing
A damp towel or paper towel

At least a 10 inch frypan of some sort. I use an enameled cast iron frypan similar to this one.

Stove or some hot, cooking surface

1 cup of Maseca corn flour
2/3 cup + 3 tablespoons of water

1/8 tsp salt

¼ lime (optional – add a few cents to the total cost)
        
Directions:
For the most part, I followed the directions on the back of the bag. Turn on your burner (I set it between the 6 and 7 - medium high) and, if you are using a cast iron pan, put your pan on to heat up. I found out the hard way that you cannot put the tortillas on my pan until it is hot enough or they will stick and burn.

Preparation is the perfect time to involve kids, especially tactile ones. Dump all the ingredients (except the 3 tbsp of water) into the mixing bowl and mix together with the fork. The flour should form little crumbly balls. If you still have powdery flour along the sides, add the extra 3 tbsp of water. If you want, you can add the water one tbsp at a time as indicated on the bag. I have found that in the multitude of times I have made the tortillas, the 3 tbsp is a perfect extra amount of water, even if I am making more than 8 tortillas. I am not sure why, but there you go. I add lime juice to mine, because I love the flavor. If you forgo the lime, you may need extra water.

Then you (or your eager mini-chefs) can smoosh the dough together and knead it until it sticks into one big blob. To make 8 tortillas, I break the blob in half, each half in half again, and again until you get 8 relatively even blobs. Roll the blobs in to balls and put them in the bottom of your mixing bowl and cover the balls with a scantly damp towel. NOTE: Here is where you can modify the moisture of the dough. If your dough is too crumbly, place them under a more damp towel for a few minutes. If they get too wet, take the towel off and let them air dry for a bit. I learned the hard way that having tortillas too damp makes them stick to the pan and too dry makes them crumble when you eat them.

Place a ball in a long sheet of plastic wrap and fold the plastic over. Smoosh the ball down with your hand to make it pancake-like then roll with a rolling pin until it is about 1/16 inch thick, or about the thickness of a DVD. If you get it too thick, it will be less pliable when eating it. They aren't beautifully round without a tortilla press, but they taste just the same.

Carefully pull the flattened dough off the plastic wrap and put it on an ungreased pan for around 50 seconds. My tortillas just start to curl up on the edges and sometimes slide easily on the pan when done. Then flip the tortilla over and cook for 45 seconds on the second side. You may have to adjust the time as you go. Usually by the end, I am cooking them for less time. Mine usually have very light golden spots on them. You can even wash out the bowl and wipe down the counter while your tortillas are cooking.

They are most pliable when warm, but are great cold, too. You can keep them in a sealed container or bag for a week in the fridge. Ours never last more than two days. In fact, they were gone before I could get a finished product picture.

I can do it myself!

When I was a toddler, my parents bought me this book:

It quickly became a favorite. When I got married, my dad brought the well-loved book to the reception and in his seemingly endless toast (which friends and family lovingly refer to as “the filibuster”), he graciously bestowed it upon my poor unwitting husband, Nick. As well as he knew me, Nick had not yet experienced the full magnitude of my intensely fierce and (I can now admit this) exceedingly annoying need to do things myself. Over the past 6 years, I have commended myself on my progress in becoming less militant about not accepting help. “I have matured!” I say, patting myself smugly on the back. Or have I…

Last month, I was carrying three bags, two heavy car seats and my 8-month-old daughter while simultaneously pushing my 3-year-old in a laden down stroller and pulling a rolling suitcase through a crowded airport. My kind father (who, in my defense, was carrying a substantial amount of luggage himself) asked if he could help me carry something.

I glared at him, feeling a piercing annoyance swell. After 3 decades, did he really still think I was incapable of taking care of myself? Really? What was wrong with him? He was deliberately trying to make me feel incompetent! 30 years old, two kids, and he was still treating me like a child! Somewhere between the snippy, “I’m fine dad. Just get the door,” and the exaggeratedly exasperated sigh that followed his innocent question, I realized the absurdity of my mental interchange. Clearly, I still have a long way to go (at this very moment, I can actually hear my dad chuckling from 500 miles away).

The Plunge

We recently celebrated my departure from the income-generating world and migration to living exclusively on Nick’s graduate student stipend. I have worked partially or entirely from home for the past 4 years. It was determined that it was now in everyone’s best interest if I gave up the work so I could sleep more than 4 hours a night and spend the other 20 hours in a civilized mood. It was a financially terrifying step and an ego bruiser to admit that I just couldn’t do it all.

My first day of unemployment, both girls miraculously fell asleep at the same time (an event that has yet to be recreated). I frantically finished cleaning up from lunch and raced to the computer to grab some work time. “Oh yeah!” I remembered. “No work! ME time!” So I walked outside to our backyard. I stopped. I looked around. What should I do? Laundry was done. Dishes washed. House picked up. I guess I could use a toothbrush to scrub the grout around the bathtub. I felt…lost. Unhinged. Useless. I sat down as a rush of panic slapped me in the face. It had been so long since I had a chunk of time that was all mine where I didn’t have mounds of unfinished work hovering over me in a guilt inducing cloud. For thirty horrifying minutes, I sat listlessly in the yard and pulled apart blades of grass. Then the baby sneezed. I bolted up and raced inside to grab her, invigorated. I had something to do!

That night I sat down to think. I have always dreamed of being entirely self-sufficient. I even had a list of 54 things I wanted to learn to do myself. Consequently, I had accumulated lots of little half-started projects over the years that I never seemed to have time to finish: the first chapter of a children’s book, a sweater sleeve on knitting needles and piles of beautiful and luxurious yarn, quilt pieces for a baby blanket for a now 8-year old child, paints and canvases, 5 pages in my wedding scrapbook, three overflowing recipe boxes full of directions to make “from scratch” foods, an abandoned pile of lumber and some neat-looking power tools, a digital SLR camera and half a dozen lenses…

But where to start? How to start? I was paralyzed by too many options. It was then I decided that I needed a plan of attack. Something to direct me and give purpose to these “selfish” pursuits. Without something to direct my time, I saw my unfruitful future of sitting for mindless hours watching The Cosby Show on Netflix.

The Experiment

To honor this fantastically freeing and tremendously terrifying phase of life, I decided to embrace my power of stubborn self-reliance and harness it to pursue a mastery of feasible, cost- and time-effective self-sufficient activities. I want to challenge myself with public accountability. This blog is dedicated to chronicling my pursuit of self-sufficiency with the following purposes:

Minimize spending. Nick and I recently sat down to revamp our now scantily clad budget, a terrifying, tedious and daunting task that we had been successfully avoiding for several weeks. After four hours of blood, sweat and tears, we sat together on the floor, wide-eyed and silent. “Well, that’s depressing,” Nick mumbled. After a few days of panic, despair and whiny self-pity, we knew we needed to change our habits to avoid accruing a mortgage-worth of student debt over the next 6 years of Nick’s doctoral training. Make more at home, buy less. But are doing things myself actually cheaper? I want to find out what activities will really minimize our spending over the long haul.

Maximize time. Let’s just be brutally honest. There’s a reason why more people don’t churn their own butter, use cloth diapers or grow their own food. It takes time and effort. But how much? Is it more time and effort to do things like Grandma? Before using cloth diapers, I would have sworn they were more work. 3 years and two cloth diapered kids later, I can say the work just about equals out. But I realize there are some things that are just not going to be worth the extra time spent for the money saved. I want to know what those things are, so I don’t waste my time. 

Save the planet! We recently took a family trip to one of our new favorite places: the city dump. Lest you judge too harshly, we frequent the dump to shlep the deliciously earthy smelling compost for use in our garden. On this particular occasion, the temperature was tiptoeing around 90 degrees and the breeze sent intermittent wafts of stench from the actual dump portion. “Phfeww! What is that stinky smell?” my three-year-old Nora wanted to know. So we wandered over to see the heavy machinery rolling viciously over the acres and acres of stinking garbage. I explained to Nora that this is why we recycle and compost and reuse things rather than throwing them away, all the while thinking guiltily about the plastic peanut butter jar I had thrown away that morning because I was too lazy to clean it out. Ironically, that night, Nora chose to read the story of creation in her kids’ Bible illustrating that God’s first job for man was to care for the plants and animals and the earth. I think of all the waste created in the name of convenience and want to do my part to remedy that with my new found time.

Engage the offspring. Nora is an extreme extrovert. She just cannot be alone. Ever. As an infant (and even to a large degree now), she couldn’t even sleep unless she was in physical contact with another human body. Now I truly love spending time with my creative, energetic and astute child, but as an extreme introvert, she exhausts me. I need to plan engaging activities with her in mind. With rare exception, if I can’t do it with Nora, it won’t get done.

Chronicle the journey. I am terrible at documentation. I weep to think of the creative wisdom lost forever because I didn’t write down what I did or lost the scrap of paper I wrote it on. I also rarely pay attention to time. I am notorious for getting partway into an ambitious project and having to stop because I discover that it is already10 minutes past bedtime and Nora is dancing maniacally in the flour she dumped all over the floor and Madeline is smearing her food through her hair and shrieking. Creating a blog will force me to be a responsible adult. Right? 

Rekindle the creativity. Writing is my life, my escape, my soul’s fuel, my passion. It is how I think, create, connect and pray. I spent the last four years doing exclusively technical and scientific writing. For me, it was like subsisting only on oatmeal and vitamin supplements – you can survive, but the joy of eating is gone. I want to reclaim that joy. But like a runner after a 4 year hiatus, it takes me a lot of work to get back in creative writing shape. And motivation to do the workouts.

Amass existing knowledge. I don’t plan to reinvent the wheel. Along with trying out my own ideas, I plan to research what has already been done, try it at home and give credit where credit is due. I want to have a repository of all that knowledge at my fingertips.

In Conclusion…

Rather than fight with my nature, I have decided to embrace my annoyingly stubborn need to do things myself. However, lest you think I am still a toddler stuck in a soon-to-be-nearing-middle-age adult body, I have done some growing. When our second child, Madeline, was six weeks old, we took her to the doctor to treat suspected pink-eye and instead discovered she had a life-threatening congenital heart defect. She was admitted to the hospital immediately and had an awesomely successful open-heart surgery a week later. We had just moved to a new town, so I had to humble myself and accept the help of not only friends and family, but casual acquaintances. It was strange at first, accepting help from people I barely knew and knowing I may never be able to repay them. It’s a little like making your hands talk like Bert and Ernie for your kid in public. At first you feel really awkward. It's embarrassing. You just know people are judging. But gradually you realize that letting go and giving in is freeing. Exulting. And it actually brings joy to everyone (even if your voices don't sound at all like Bert and Ernie).