Friday afternoon I was craving a tasty glass of wine, as is usually the case when the weekend is fast approaching. We had D’s holiday party at daycare first, so afterward I dropped D and R at home and ran up to the grocery store to peruse their selection. (side note – D wanted nothing to do with Santa at the party, so unfortunately we have no cute pictures. so sorry)
I was in the mood for a white – cool, refreshing, and probably on the sweeter side. Yes, I like sweet wines. So what? I ended up picking up 3 bottles – a moscato (there’s the sweet stuff), a white blend from Napa, and a cabernet sauvignon. And no, I wasn’t planning on drinking all of them that night, thank you very much. I had simply noticed our wine rack was perilously low so I thought I’d stock up.
I’d never had any of the 3 I selected, so I was excited to try them. I love getting new wines – it’s like a little adventure, never quite knowing what kind of genie is going to come out of the bottle. Some pleasantly surprise, some horribly disappoint, but I always like to add to my repertoire.
So anyway, I chose to go with the moscato first. It was from Naked Grape, and I had seen it at a store last weekend and still wanted to try it. I’m very glad I did. It was light, sweetly tasted of peaches, and was exactly what I wanted.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Naked Grape, and would definitely try their other varieties. If you like moscatos, I highly recommend this one. As for the other 2 bottles I bought, I never got a chance to tap into them this weekend. I’ll certainly take you with me, though, as I continue my wine tasting journey with those.
We’re underway in Week in My Life, and this is pretty fun. In case you need a refresher of what this week’s all about, you can read yesterday’s recap here or check out the full guidelines over at Adventuroo. Now let’s continue…
R picked D up from daycare today on her bike taxi and took her to the park since it was another beautiful afternoon, but she was ready to be done over there before I was able to meet them after work, shortly after 4:30 again. So once I got home, D and I had some silly time together and I relaxed for a minute while Daddy watched his afternoon sports shows and she had some snacks. Then I had to make up for missing the park with some outside play time of our own. She even got to pet a puppy as it walked by – her favorite!
Dinner time for D came at 5:00 tonight and consisted of a delicious menu of mac and cheese, banana, and some fresh tomato from our garden that was leftover from Daddy’s dinner sandwich. Once sufficiently messy (and full), it was definitely time for a bath.
After her long night at the ball park last night, D started acting pretty sleepy shortly after 6:00, which didn’t surprise me at all. So I filled up a bottle, let her play a little while longer while I cleaned up the kitchen and bathroom and got changed out of my work clothes, then she got up on the couch with Daddy for the bedtime wind-down.
That didn’t last long, however, and she was soon back up and cruising around the living room – “helping” me write this post, checking out what shows we were catching up on from the DVR, and reading books.
Finally at 7:30 it was time to try for bed again, so back up on the couch with Daddy she went. She drank her milk for about 5 minutes before she started coughing again, so R just put her in bed awake (which, *fingers crossed*, has been working ok lately). We heard one small cry as he left her room, then all was silent in baby dream land. Ahh… Time for Mommy’s dinner (leftover R’s homemade sweet and sour pork – yum!) and a glass of her favorite, Hallowine.
R went to watch baseball in the bedroom at 8:00, which meant I then had the tv all to myself for the rest of the night! So I promptly turned on E! to watch Kim Kardashian’s wedding special. As you may remember, I NEVER get to control the tv in our house. So when I do, I go big. Now that’s the perfect way to end this Tuesday. Cheers!
(yes, that’s the same pj t-shirt from last night to go with the shine on my forehead. don’t hate.)
One word: sous-vide (or 2 words, depending on if you use the hyphen or not)
Say what? Sous-vide – it’s R’s new culinary experiment, and it was a screaming success. He’s been wanting to test out this cooking method for weeks now, and last night was the debut. Basically you vacuum seal food in plastic bags then cook it in a water bath to your desired temperature. I’ve mainly heard him talk about it for steaks, but I’m pretty sure you can cook other foods this way too. (for reference: sous-vide)
He’s spent a lot of time buying parts to make the temperature control for the water, figuring out which vessel would work best to maintain the water temperature once reached with little variation, and finding the right heating element. I was so happy that this worked, because I know how much effort he’s put into it and would have hated to see it fail and ruin the steaks. Yesterday he got a ribeye and NY strip for himself and 2 filets for me, and last night was our first round of steak sous-vide (part 2 coming on Sunday). Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the setup to show you what this process looks like, but here you can see the amazeballs final result:
Sous-vide = perfection
The steaks turned out spectacularly! Every single millimeter of meat was done to exactly medium rare – how often does that happen? It was tender, it was juicy, it was like tasting rainbows bite-by-bite. Apparently the magic of this system is that you can cook the steaks hours and hours ahead of time, and the water bath will keep them exactly at the doneness that you want. Then when it’s time to eat, you take them out of their bags, flash sear them on each side, and voila! Soup’s on! For a side he made twice baked potatoes with more of his homemade lardons on top. Yes please, and thank you very much.
And don’t forget the wine. We paired one of our old go-to favorites with this meal, Bogle Cabernet Sauvignon.
Bogle Cab
I have totally dumbed-down the explanation of this fine art, mainly because I’m dumb and need simple explanations to figure most things out, especially in the kitchen. But that’s the jist of it, and the final products are outstanding. I’m sure R could expound on the intricacies and whys and hows of it for you, but alas, you’re stuck with me. Keep an eye on TinySausage, though – I’m sure this one will make for a new post soon.
And of course, TGIF!!! We’re meeting up with friends for happy hour today at a new bar downtown, and I, for one, am stoked! This has been a week, and mama needs a cocktail. Have a great weekend, and a very Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there!
So this whole milk drying-up procedure has turned out to be much more painful than I expected. Remember how I thought that since my pumping had slowed down so much recently my risk of exploding boobs was pretty much gone? Yeah, I was wrong. Everything I read said that in order to get your milk supply to end you need to stop pumping/nursing entirely, so even my every-other-day pumping was making my body think I still needed to keep producing. I thought I was just teaching my body to produce less and less until finally it would simply get the hint that I no longer needed any milk. Apparently I was mistaken. So this weekend I decided it was time to stop for good, and I haven’t pumped since Thursday morning.
And I want to rip my boobs right off my chest. Actually just the right one; the left one has been behaving nicely. But righty? My god it’s being a turd. Full, hard, extremely sore, just all around unbearable. I’ve been popping ibuprofen like it’s my job since Saturday because I can finally take it again and it’s the recommended pain reliever for going through this process, but it hasn’t been doing much that I can tell.
What has been helping, though, is cabbage. What? Yes, cabbage. Everywhere I looked for how to go about doing this warned of the engorgement I would experience (they were right!) and recommended putting cabbage leaves on my boobs to relieve the pain of the swelling. Har – yeah I don’t think so. Raw cabbage leaves? In my bra? You’re crazy. Nope, you’re a genius! That shit saved my sanity this weekend. I’m not kidding, from the very first leaf against my skin I wanted to cry with joy and relief. For all the sites I read that suggested this I still can’t tell you what exactly is in the cabbage that helps, but I am now a believer. If Mr. Cabbage told me the world was ending tomorrow night at 6:00, I might actually listen, that’s how much of a cabbage convert I have become. You take raw green cabbage leaves, either slice off the top edge of the big veins in them or smash them down with a rolling pin (i chose the latter), and put them on your boobs for about half an hour or until whenever they’re wilted. I just wore a sports bra so they were easy to put in and remove, and I plowed through almost an entire head of cabbage in two days. The colder they are to start the better, and seriously as soon as you put the leaves on it’s instant relief. They don’t actually reduce the engorgement that much since they don’t do anything to make the milk dry up, but just like ice packs work, the cold compress on your skin does help take a little of the swelling down and provide some pain relief. And I guess women have been using this remedy since the 1800s, so who am I to judge? Bring on the cabbage!
I’ve also read that it may take up to a week or two for the milk to finally be dried up, and if that proves to be true too I may just have to be locked away by the end. I can’t even describe the level of discomfort, for although I’ve felt it before when I would go too long without nursing or pumping, knowing that I can’t relieve the engorgement or else I’ll have to start this cycle all over makes me a little crazy. If the pain gets too awful or I start running a fever I’m supposed to call the doctor at that point, so let’s hope it doesn’t get to that. I did have to express a little by hand last night before the right one exploded, which is such a fun endeavor all in itself. I tell ya, the human body? It’s a crazy machine.
To switch topics to try and take my mind off the boobage pain, let me tell you how my 5k went. I rocked it!! My original goal was to break 30:00, which, after I ran the route earlier last week I knew I’d be able to pull off. So then I had the 27:00 mark in my head. I secretly wanted to break 27:00, but the whole time I was running I kept telling myself I’d be happy with 28:00 something and felt like that’s the pace I was holding. Imagine my surprise when I crossed the finish line and my watch read 26:57!!! (it wasn’t an officially timed race so i used my watch instead of their clock) I mapped out the race route and it actually was 3.24 miles, so that’s an 8:18 pace! Holy shit. The whole time I was running I couldn’t believe my legs were holding in as well as they were, but I had no idea I was going that fast. Well, fast for me, I should say. So I was very happy about that.
Then Saturday night R smoked another scrumptious rack of ribs and we enjoyed 2 bottles of wine. These:
Kung Fu Girl RieslingLeese Fitch Zinfandel
Both were quite tasty. The zin was pretty sweet for a red zinfandel, which I love, and the riesling was nice and light, tasting very much of pears. Last night R used his new pizza stone and pizza peel and made 2 homemade pizzas for dinner. They were both on whole wheat crust, and one was topped with his homemade bacon and cheese, and the other was topped with pepperoni and cheese. Need I even say it? Delicious!! Unfortunately he didn’t take pictures of any of the food this weekend, so you’ll just have to imagine the savory delicacies yourselves.
I apologize – I am remiss in my food reporting duties here. I totally forgot about the culinary highlight of the weekend…
R bought lobster tails Friday night – hooray!! We met at the Milwaukee Art Museum Friday afternoon after work to check out the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit as this was the last weekend of the tour, and he swung by the Milwaukee Public Market on his way to pick up the frozen delicacies. These he steamed and served with drawn butter (because really, what is lobster without the clarified butter?), then concocted another fantastic batch of his mushroom risotto. But what catapulted this risotto into stratospheric status was the topping – homemade bacon! Yes, R now makes his own bacon too. If you’re interested, he is cataloging all of his charcuterie endeavors in a new blog, TinySausage.
We paired 2 great bottles of riesling with the meal, but unfortunately I didn’t take note of the names.
Completely unrelated to our magnificent regular ol’ Friday night meal, check out this bloody mary! It’s from INdustri Cafe in Walker’s Point. I’ve never been there, but since garnish is my favorite part of a bloody, I will definitely be going to get one of these! Is that a block of cheese on top?? ::i die::
No, I’m not tokin’ it up today at all, but I always just giggle a little when this day rolls around. 😉
Completely unrelated to my post title, what I really wanted to do here was brag about my husband again and his ridiculous cooking skillz. What was on the menu last night, you ask? Oh, just some more homemade brisket/green pepper/Colby jack burgers with 25 year balsamic vinegar ketchup and a side of mushroom/peppers risotto (grated parmesan on all, yum!). We were out of buns so the toasted bread ended up being a tasty touch. What was the occasion? Tuesday. 🙂
Scrumptious!
I really am spoiled by R’s cooking. I wasn’t lying when I said if it were up to me we’d be living on bowls of cereal and pb&js, so I totally lucked out in the culinary department with this guy. He’s trying to clean out the fridge and get all of our meals back to basics – meat and potatoes (or veggies of some sort), nothing fake or phony, little to no processed foods, local ingredients as often as possible.
R grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s 100% a meat and potatoes guy. He loves making his mom’s recipes on which he grew up too, and I have come to fall in love with pretty much all of them. They’re delicious, hearty, healthy, easy – what more could I want? Their farm is no longer a functioning dairy producer, but his dad still butchers hogs every so often, so we reap the benefits of that as well. 75 lbs. of fresh pork from your home for free? Sign me up! I’ll make room for it in the basement freezer amongst all the bags of breast milk. 🙂
Are you familiar with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? It’s a campaign to get America to eat healthier, fresh not processed, specifically targeting kids and schools. Now with D in the mix, the importance of good food and proper nutrition is even more in the forefront of our daily lives. R has taken his cue largely from Jamie’s show, and it’s fantastic. Check out his site and sign the petition – it really is an awesome idea and cause: http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution/home
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the best part. R declared yesterday his personal spring break, so he opened a bottle of my favorite wine to go with dinner. It was a heavenly treat for a plain ol’ Tuesday night.
