She Ran to Him

She ran to him, knowing, what no one else knew

(Knowing he would carry her)

She ran to him, knowing, what she was too young to know

(too small to see, too new to know)

That he would hold her thumb, kiss it

 

She ran to him, with overweening arrogance, unconceivable presumptiousness

un-justified pride

Knowing he would comfort her

She ran to him, with wisdom beyond the Hokhmim

Knowing he would cuddle her

 

And so the child came crying

Demanding the kiss of God

And so the toddler came indignant

Ordering the arms of God

 

And so the kingdom cometh

For so does it come

And so the child enters

For she is too young, she knows 

I wrote this almost fifteen years ago. I found it on my old college days blog. Thought I would put it up. It is a riff on pondering what it means to "become a little child" to God.

"Unless ye receive the kingdom of God as a little child, ye shall not enter it."

I wrote this from experience with little siblings. Now from the last 14 years experience with my own 8 little children, I would say their defining characteristic is their demand for love. They know it, and they expect it.

All Dinner Meals for Meal-Planning

 Dinners List so I can have it all in one place. These shall become links when I actually write the recipes down.

Basic Principle is have a   Protein + Vegetable + Carb, so that I can keep my prediabetes in check, by controlling how much I eat of each. 

Hacks for making the Carbs less crashy---

1. Twice cooked carbs 
1. Instantpot precooked potatoes [8 min, 1 cup water] that get fried in butter/beef fat. 
2. Pre-cooked rice heated up again, or fried in a risotto or stir fry
2. Cauliflower risottos that are very very good. [shredded in the food processor, cooked in olive oil/butter, then add in butter/cream cheese/spices. It's actually even better than rice risotto IMHO]
3. Eating my curries & sauces over Green Beans instead of rice with EXTRA tomato chutney [fresh salsa]

Remember, salads can become cabbage salads, or be swapped out with hot cooked (from frozen) vegetables if you make it further from the grocery shopping date.

Chicken Breast

• Basil Lime Chicken Breast [Oven or Grill] + 
• "Factor Meal" Sour Cream Salsa Chicken Breasts + Cauliflower Risotto + Green Beans
• Fajita Chicken + Onions & Bell Peppers
• Tikka Masala Chicken + Green Beans + Fresh Salsa
• Orange Chicken [Gen Tso's Chicken]

      

  Chicken bone-in

          Bone in chicken [cheap in the 10 pound frozen bags]

• Chicken Enchilada casserole + Fresh Salsa + Salad + Sour Cream
• Crockpot Shredded Chicken Tacos with Black Beans and Cheese + Salad + Fresh Salsa
• BIR curry Chicken + Lentils + Fresh Salsa + Green Beans + Indian Cauliflower Risotto
• Bone Broth Chicken Soup
• Oven Roasted [or Grill] "Turkish" chicken + Stovetop Brocolli + Rice// Cauliflower Risotto
• ?Barbecue Chicken [frozen leg quarters, 5-7 hrs in barbecue sauce, slowcooker]
• ?Barbacoa Chicken OR Taco Chicken [frozen leg quarters, 5-7 hrs in barbecue sauce, slowcooker]

Beef 

• Marinated Stovetop Steaks [or Grilled Steaks] + Loaded Potatoes + Green Beans + Bell Peppers
• Hobbit Stew
• Meuk-Guk
• Russian Beef Soup
• Instant-Pot Pulled Beef [Barbacoa or Barbecue] [because of our sweet little Ana] + Bell Peppers + Dinner Rolls
• Philly Cheese steaks
• Mary Ann's Beef & Lentils
• Steak Fajitas w/ bell peppers and onions

Ground Beef 

• InstantPot Fauxsagnia
• Tacos + Fresh Salsa
• Smashburgers
• ?Sherri's White Bean Chili + Salad
• Grilled Burgers from Samsclub [when we have a gas grill...]

Lentils/Beans [so easy to mealprep]

• Favorite Indian Lentil Recipe + Raita + Fresh Salsa + [Pomegranates, and Dark Chocolate, and Tea]
• Whole Spices Indian Curry
• Nut Curry
• BIR green curry [get the right name]
• BIR Beef + Lentils, Vindaloo Curry
• Prep a big batch of refried beans and freeze for Taco Tuesdays
• Falafel & Hummus + Cilantro Raita + Fresh Tomatoes & Salad + Flatbread

Fish

• Canned Sardines/Mackerel with "Factor Meal" sauce [Sour Cream Fresh Salsa Sauce] and capers...so good
• Canned Sardines with Salsa Verde [tomatillos n onions] and Sour cream (do not overcook tomatillos)
• Tilapia Fillets + Butter-Fried precooked potatoes + Green Beans/Brocolli
• Tuna Fish sandwiches or chip-dip [made with Ninja blender-egg-may replacement], and chips

Cheese/Eggs 

• Instantpot Mac n Cheese + Peas +
• Fettecini Alfredo + [Meat Roast/Ham] + Cauliflower Mushroom Rissotto + Green Beans
• Grilled Cheese Sandwiches + Tomato Soup +
• Cheesy Taters [Ye Olde Standby] FANCY if its in the toaster oven
• Bibimbap + Korean Spinach + Kongnamul +

    Pork 

Only really if our sweet little Ana changes her mind....

• Barbecue Pulled Pork + Rolls + Green Beans [Make some barbecue chicken for Ana]
• Korean Style [Bulkogi style marinade] Pork + Rice + Kongnamul & Korean Spinach [make some 
• Sundry delicious looking Pork-Chop Recipes, yet untried

Once A month grocery plan

 For this to work, you need to have a very clean and organized freezer. No dead-space of freezer-burned bags of unrecognizable leftovers you are afraid to try to autopsy. No Turkeys from last years Thanksgiving sale, taking up space.

With 8 kids +2 parents, I think it would take a up my 25 cubic foot refrigerater/freezer, plus some in my standing freezer. I am curious to try this out more ways.

I used to do something similar to this, when grocery shopping was a fraught ordeal with 5 little kids. We did a 2 week grocery plan, with my husband running out to get just milk on the off-weeks.

I wrote this out for my sister who lives in the country 45 minutes away from her main grocery store, and 15 min from a more expensive grocery store, which is best just to get milk.

Once A month/Every Two Weeks grocery plan

Plan for 5 good dinners a week. [2 left over nights]. So that comes out to about 20-25 meals. Here is my master list of dinners we like.

Prep 5 dinners per category, so 25 gallon Ziploc bags, in the freezer ready for instantpot cooking. [Or crockpot]

Dinners with side of FROZEN VEG, and raw crunchy veg.

• Chicken [Prep 5 dinners from this from X pounds]
• Beef [Prep 5 dinners from this from X pounds]
• Ground Beef
• Lentils/Beans
• Fish/Cheese/Eggs 

Sample Grocery List [staples]

These aren't including stuff you normally stock up on, like vanilla extract, lentils, tomato paste etc.

• DAIRY [keeps well, coldest part of the fridge at the top]
• Butter [we use LOTS for all the growing brains]--[also freezes well]
• Cottage Cheese
• Sour Cream/Heavy Cream 
• Milk for Yogurt-making
• Yogurt, if you don't have any, yogurt for starter. You can freeze yogurt starter in batches. [the bacteria freezes fine] "Icelandic Provisions" introduced when the boiled milk hits 120 is the best. Dannon is good too. The key is to do the boil function on the milk, and introduce the starter when its at 120-115, and whisk it well.
• Milk---it takes up a lot of space, and expires. We drink about 1 gal/day. More on this later.
• Fresh Vegetables
• Leafy Vegs [need to eat within 3 days of purchase]
• Tomatoes [need to eat within 1 week of purchase]
• Bell Peppers [need to eat within 1 week of purchase]
• Cauliflower [need to eat within 1 week of purchase]
• Cucumbers [need to eat within 1 week of purchase]
• Celery [need to eat within 1 week of purchase]
• Carrots [will last the month]
• Red Cabbage, Beets [will last the month], 
• Onions, garlic, ginger [will last the month, also can freeze]
• Potatoes [if it is a hot summer, you will want to eat these in the first 2 weeks from purchase. Or cook in the instant pot, and then store in a tupperware in the coldest top back of the fridge]
• Frozen Vegetables
• Frozen Green Beans
• Frozen Brocolli
• Frozen Peas
• [Frozen Cauliflower]
• CHEESE [freezes well, esp the shredded stuff you want to freeze so it doesnt mold]
• Cheddar
• Mozzarella
• MEAT
• Chicken [bone in legs or thighs are usually cheapest, in 10 lb bags]
• Beef
• Ground Beef
• Canned Sardines
• Canned Tuna
• Frozen Tilapia
• Eggs [Can hardboil, or blanch, to lengthen storage, but I have found my eggs will last a month just fine. But you've got chickens!]
• Flour, Yeast, Sugar Salt [make your bread]

You can freeze butter, cheese, etc. Frozen Veggies are happy to live in the freezer for a few  months. And you must freeze the meat as soon as you get home, anyways. Get it out of the plastic and styrofoam trays, rinse it, salt it, and seal it in ziplocs and put in the freezer, to be thawed when needed.

So you really only need to go to the grocery store once a month for most meats if you are very organized with your freezer.  

The two biggest choke-points are fresh veggies and milk. More on this later.

Breakfasts

• First Week Breakfasts  [first week, for crunchy raw veggies]
• Fresh Veggies with a home-made hummus dip, or cheese dip.
• Tomato-mozz-basil slices.
• Devilled eggs and celery sticks.
• Cottage cheese or Yogurt with frozen berries/nuts for parfait, OR make Buercher Muesli
•  Custard or Ninja Egg Pudding
• Hummus or Cheese dip ['pub cheese' you can also make this yourself] and crunchy Vegs [cucumber, baby carrots, bell pepper, Celery]
• Scrambled eggs on toast
• Cast-Iron fried dinner Leftovers aka “Hash” [can use ninja blender to blend up leftover meat, potatoes, vegetables] + fried eggs on the side.

Lunches [side of fresh raw crunchy veg]

• Kyudumbap + Cabbage Salad
• Cheesey bread [fried in butter if feeling fancy] + Cabbage Salad
• Cheesey potatoes [precooked potatoes in fridge] + Cabbage Salad
• Fried Rice [dinner leftovers in a frying pan] + Cabbage Salad
• Hardboiled eggs + veg assortment
• Any of the ‘breakfast’ items here + Cabbage Salad

STAPLES TO KEEP IN THE FRIDGE

1.      Instantpot cooked potatoes, in fridge, to be fried [cut in half, fry in butter or lard, sprinkle with garlic salt]
2.      CABBAGE SALAD
3.      Hardboiled eggs [can do the Korean Pickled eggs, if your kids like them]
4.      Sauerkraut/Kimchi/KimchiKraut
6.      Freezer stocked with Green Beans, Peas, Brocolli [winco]
7.      FREEZER BAG to collect bones, FOR stock
8.      FREEZER BAG to collect leftovers---for hash, and for fried rice

Remember...THE FREEZER IS YOUR BEST FRIEND

Other Staples to have on hand

Xylitol mints for teeth

The Main Challenges

Milk. It takes up space and does not freeze well. Even when I did the 'every 2 week grocery plan', Josh had to run out on the off-weeks and buy 6 gallons of milk. [our weekly milk usage, and usually all we could fit in the fridge.] This is where its good to have a plan to get milk on the off-weeks if possible. If this isn't an option, I think its possible to buy 12 gallons for 2 weeks, and consume all your milk as yogurt in the 2nd week. Or just eat lots of cheese in the intervening milk-less weeks.

Fresh Vegetables. The leafy ones [lettuce, fresh spinach] must be eaten within 3 days of buying. Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Celery, and Bellpeppers last maybe a week, depending. Cabbage and Carrots will last you the longest, up to a month [or more]. But thats a lot of cabbage and carrots to eat. You can get really creative with different cabbage salads. Hot Vegetables [cooked brocolli, buttered green beans, peas, frozen spinach---all from frozen vegs---can be eaten whenever. So you could end up with a system where the first week is the fresh crunchy vegetable week, and the remaining 3 weeks are lots of cabbage salad, carrots sticks, and Hot Vegetables (cooked frozen vegetables, in garlic and olive oil).]

OR....drumroll....the garden. It's amazing what you can get even out of a tiny garden.

You will get the best reward from your work with Herbs, Leafy Greens, and Tomatoes

Grow. 

Winter Garden

Leafy Greens [Spinach, Kale, Lettuce] by the truckload

Chives, Herbs, etc.

Cucumbers

[Hothouse] Tomatoes

[if you have space and time, all the other interesting stuff, beets to pickle, celery, carrots, brocolli, cabbage, etc. These tend to be cheaper than over veg at the grocery store, and easy to store like cabbage, or easy to freeze like brocolli, so I am less motivated to figure them out]

Summer Garden

Tomatoes

Bell Peppers

Gennip [sesame leaves...so delicious for everything]

Greens---new zealand spinach, Swiss Chard, some varieties of kale, Malabar spinach

Basil by the truckload---make into pestos for the winter

Yardlong beans [can take the  heat]

Armenian Cucumber/Snake Melon [cucumber that wont' go bitter]

Zuchini by the truckload

Two Poems written at 30,000 ft

 I flew to my sister's wedding, after not flying for about 7 years. I don't know if it was being refilled with kind stranger's blood ten times 2023, or if it is approaching middle age, but people feel so much more...precious. 

The people all around me, strangers, moving along. Sometimes it hits me just how vulnerable we are, our lives suspended over death by miracles we are not aware of. A few pumps of a heart muscle, a mis-timed squirt of air or oxygen...we can be broken so easily. 

Bustling about with our big plans and our daily worries, unaware, so fragile, precious, and human.

[Leaving]

I fly above the world

in a tube of tin

fragile wings outstretched,

caught in the wind

Silent humanity,

crushed within

A life-time of memories---hopes won or lost

Written in a kilogram of greymatter, 

packaged in wrinkled flesh and textiles.

An aging lady reads a romance

its crisp pages never to be turned again.

A middle aged man, potentials collapsed into a suit

 curly hair thinning, tinged with grey, 

with eager eyes consumes the free flight training

meticulously takes the quiz---how to bank, turn, landing, takeoff---

bound back to earth.

All yearnings of our souls, inchoate

Mute children, yearning for words [within]

each of us, elbows carefully at our sides

avoiding each-other's eyes.

My deep apologies for the bad metallurgy that I reduced my aircraft to, in an attempt to rhyme.

The man on my left felt like a Jewish businessman, carefully wearing a nice suit, probably on his way to some business meeting, probably. In boredom he fired up the screen, eschewed movies, and was taking a free pilot course complete with multiple choice-quizzes on piloting terminology and techniques. Banking and turning, when to put the flaps down, etc. He was going through the quizzes, with the eagerness of a preteen who has just discovered they can become a pilot. He had very curly hair, tinted with grey, thinning out. He looked about 40 or 45, when paths have long been chosen, careers have been baked in, and there isn't enough time to re-orient. But it was so easy to see the child in him...what he must have once looked like----a mop of curly hair over bright curious eyes, studying the world. But now middle aged, and all bound up in the respectable suit... it didn't seem to fit his true soul. As if he wore it almost like an ill-fitting uniform, that a good child donned to do the job required of him.

The woman's romance novel was some strange exploration into a possible ghost story or a widow or something, but falling in love with some poor guy who went by they/them. It wasn't your typical harlequin, I think, but it also was all about experiencing a romance, kiss, etc, that wasn't your own. It was odd. It felt like the sort of book one would never re-read. The sort of thing a moody writer writes in desperation trying to squeeze wind and kisses and sunsets out of a computer word-document. There's a sort of pathos to it, the graphic description of kisses, the attempt to summon up hypothetical beach sunsets that you haven't actually experienced enough of. As if your mind was a computer generator, hashing out fuzzy images of Microsoft back-drop screens, with ourselves crudely photoshopped into...longing for life. For wind. Hunched in a air-conditioned room, staring into an LCD monitor that is attempting to reconstitute the photons of a foreign sunset, looking for filling the hunger in our souls.

[Returning]

In a tube of hammered steel,

Frantically riding the wind

Rushing forward, jolting in its turbulence

Packed in, we neatly keep

Our elbows tucked, our heads forward, 

Furtive glances to catch

Bits of souls of the others, glinting though---

A ring, luggage patch, phone screen backdrop, half of a tattoo

What signs of loves, quirks, ideologies and selfhood chosen?

We collect in odd assortment in our pockets, during this mad race toward eternity

The tired middle-aged Indian man [strong, grey-frosted]

beside pulls down the shutter

closing his eyes.

We sit in darkness, lit by light-shadows of sudden brightness,

the few young window-dwellers who 

still sit by unshuttered portholes,

hungry eyes drinking in the sight.

Older ones outnumber them

Lean back weary arms crossed,

Seeking sleep

The attendant comes,

like good children we wait quietly,

sitting in our seats, eager anticipation,

hoping not to be passed over.

I nod off, coming to, afraid I have

missed the awaited treat

The tattooed curly haired beauty next to me,

handing the precious pretzel packets to me in shy solidarity.

I pass it to the Indian man beside me.

In silent fellowship we eat our pretzel packets,

Together

Ginger ale, tomato juice, and a whiskey

In silent communion we consume.

And then wait together.

Jolting again

Through the rough wind, invisible

Trusting that the darkened tube is still

sailing toward the earth

Towards that place

Where familiar faces and voices await us,

Home

There was something that almost made me cry, how we suddenly all became little children. The glamorous well-dressed curly-haired tattooed girl next to me, who probably doesn't agree with me on politics or religion or anything, waking me up so I didn't miss the snack. We may have all been in kindergarten, looking out for each other. I feel like I love her so much. With the love of a 6 year old who just was saved from snack-less-ness by the other 6 year old. Words may have ruined it, we would have disagreed about everything. But there was something about that silence, as if our souls were all lined up, silence stripping away our self-created identities, and just children inside. May God bless her abundantly.