Possibly the easiest thing to cook in the world. Really.

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Tomato sauce

For not being remotely Italian, I’m a bit of a pasta freak, to put it mildly. I would eat it twice a day. But I don’t. I try to exercise a little restraint and maybe serve up some noodle-y goodness about once a week.

And then I found this recipe and that resolution might go out the window. Basically, I was searching around for a bunch of other stuff when I came across Marcella Hazan‘s secret tomato sauce. In fact, I found it in multiple places, like here and here. They write a bit more eloquently about the subject. And for less than $2, I figured even if I hated it, I couldn’t go wrong.

So here’s the recipe:

1-28 oz./796mL can of best quality whole, peeled tomatoes.

5 Tbsp. butter

1 – medium onion, peeled and cut in half

Salt to taste

Put the onions in your pan, cut side down and then dump everything else in. I like to start with a little bit of salt and then I added a bit more later after I’d tasted it. It looked something like this:

 

Pretty, right? Let this simmer on low for 35-50 minutes. I went with around 45 minutes. Periodically break up the tomatoes and it cooks down. You’re on the right track if it starts to look like this:

 

Lip-smacking is a perfectly acceptable response. When the simmer was done, I just discarded the onions, checked the seasoning and then tossed with some spaghetti (and a little of the pasta water) that I set on the stove before the sauce was done. We topped with real parmesan and fresh cucumbers and green things from our container garden rounded out the plate.

The verdict: An easy, velvety tomato sauce with highly addictive properties. That left me time to push my babies on the swing outside while it was cooking. You will do this forever.

Related articles

• At 88, Marcella Hazan finds new audience online (miamiherald.com)

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I build stuff

I’m not necessarily the girliest girl on the planet. In fact, I rather resent the label. However, my pursuits have tended towards the more academic or artistic rather than things that require power tools. Which is pretty silly, considering that one of my favourite classes in grades 7 & 8 was shop class. I made all kinds of goofy stuff: a gum ball machine (which I gave to my grandfather – I wonder where it went?), a flower shaped piggy bank out of wood and acrylic, a profile of myself out of cedar, key chains and probably more.  So, basically, crap, but it was my crap and I got to use all kinds of fun machines to make it.

Recently, I’ve taking to building a bit of furniture, here and there. At first, I’d find plans and then make my husband do it. He built a lovely outdoor table and a dresser for our room. Which was awesome. But then I’d badger him into building something else. Which got boring. So last summer, I made a couch for our back patio. And a few weeks ago, I made a bookcase for Little m’s room.  I had help because I needed an extra pair of hands to hold certain joints together while I used the drill or vice versa.

And here it is:

 

Now if she’ll only stay like that.

Basically, my daughter had outgrown her baby bookcase. It was an Ikea dealie, (kind of like this, if it was just the bottom portion with the scrolled top) 2 shelves and oddly tall for her books without managing to hold very much. We got it in Germany and made do for a while, as her book collection grew. When we moved her, I tried using storage cubes from Target to help he keep it looking tidy and to prevent the dog from munching on book spine glue. And the whole idea failed pretty miserably. If everything was actually put away, then the basket was too heavy for her to move in or out of the bookshelf. And the Ella the Wonderdog decided that the teal-coloured one looked delicious and snacked on the corner.

So once school was over for the semester and I’d mentally gotten over that, I betook myself to Lowes with two little people in tow and came away with MDF (medium density fiberboard), lots of screws, a few pine boards and an iron will. Or something like that. I’d gotten plan’s from Ana White’s website (She’s an Alaskan housewife who’s currently building a house from scratch for her mother and mother-in-law. And she’s probably a size 0. And she wield’s a mean power drill.) FOR FREE. The lovely people at Lowes cut the MDF to manageable sizes for me and Mr. T. made all the rest of my cuts at home. I don’t like circular saws and until with get a miter saw, chopping things out in the Man Cave is his job. I pre-drilled everything with my Kreg Jig (which I found out later, doesn’t really work well with MDF) and using copious amounts of glue and a handsome man to hold things, screwed the thing together.

The finishing part is both my most favourite and least favourite part. I love picking colours and imagining what it will look like. I hate sanding and filling holes and priming and painting multiple coats. One coat = fun! Three coats = crabby patties. My patio became a painting crazy place for about a week. No little people were permitted to scooter or bike ride on the premises. Even Ella the Wonderdog thought me encroaching on her outside bed space for that long was a bit much. The white is Glidden’s Parchment and the pink-red is Behr’s Firefly red – Little m pulled it out of her duvet cover. But it’s finally finished and now the bookcase is firmly ensconced in my daughter’s room and holds so much more junk. Erm. Treasures. There’s now a place for shoes and a place for puppets and a place for small art pages, in additions to more places for books.

Now, onto the boy’s room.

My so-called horn life

It’s Friday, I’m armed with a cup of Lady Grey, so let’s begin.

I am a horn player. That’s my job. As a professional. I have been known to fend off questions like “Can you get paid for that?”. I used to get offended. Now, it’s an increasingly relevant question.

This is my baby, Hillary. Before the epic cleaning and restoration a few weeks ago.

I am also a freelancer. I play with a bunch of orchestras in the Southwest. Some dear sweet people think that if I’m about to go play with an orchestra, I must have joined the orchestra. Which I suppose is technically true, but only for the few days that I’m there. I don’t have a permanent job with an orchestra, and right now, that’s ok.

But I’m aiming for permanent orchestral and teaching jobs in the near future. After all, there are no more degrees after the doctoral level. Unless I didn’t actually want to be employed at some point. The Ivory Tower is getting a bit faded and old at this point. So, I’m putting myself in the audition pool. I’m currently developing a plan for which auditions I’ll take and what jobs I want. This probably sounds limiting in an already narrow field. But it makes no sense for me to take every audition because it’s there. That’s exhausting and nerve-racking and did I mention expensive?

So, I’m going to start posting audition related material, sometimes from the American Federation of Musicians and various other sites on my Horn Stuff page. I may even be taking some of the auditions I’ll have listed. I will not be taking all of them. Not so long a go, the Associate Principal Horn of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra used to do this and it was neat to see what things were open and auditioning all over the world. Unfortunately, she took her page down for a number of personal reasons. She’d also posted past audition lists from the last 25 or so years and it was a really valuable resource. I’m hoping to create something similar for my own and general use.

And if anyone is interested, there was a terribly accurate portrayal of the audition process from the Boston Symphony Orchestra a few weeks ago in Boston Magazine. It’s pretty close to Olympic athletes undergo. You can read the article at the link below.

Related articles

• The Audition (metafilter.com)

Sometimes it’s hard to be little

My son fell asleep in my arms a few nights ago. He didn’t even make it to stories and songs. As part of our pre-bedtime routine, he curled up in my lap in the rocking chair and within about 3 minutes, his eyes were shut tightly and his arms fell slack and loose.

Little c. Gentleman, scholar and generally agreeable little fellow. Except for sometimes.

13 hours previously…

It’s 6 o’clock. AM. My son is shouting for me. “Mummy. Muuuummy.  MUMMY. MUUUUUUMMY!” And so it goes. If I’m not there with any degree of promptness (and let’s face, most mornings I’m not) his cry changes. “Daddy. Daddy! Daaaaaaddy. DADDY. DAAAAAAADDY!” My husband rises and brings him back to our bed for a snuggle. “I some cheerios” comes out haltingly, but faster that we want it to. Meltdown begins when we don’t move immediately.

We make it through a fine breakfast of eggs, sausages, toast and coffee (for the big people, not the little people). The demands start as soon as my husband is out the door. “Mummy, I some ‘nack? ‘Nack? Please? PLEASE!?!? It had only been 15 minutes since he’d finished breakfast. A banana pacifies him for a little while and he’s off to play with his sister.

We have swimming lessons this morning. Not because I’m thinking he’s the next Michael Phelps or anything, but simply because I want him to be comfortable in the water. His big sister goes at the same time so he’s fairly amenable to getting in the car and actually heading to the pool. Once he actually at the pool and in his swimsuit, things change a bit, though. I don’t think he’s actually afraid of the water. I do think he’s trying to see how much autonomy he has.

“Do you want to go in the water on the stairs”

“No.”

“How about jumping in? You loved that yesterday.”

“No.”

“Ok. Let’s walk down the ramp.”

“Noooooooooo.”

My wistful, slightly gingery-haired little boy is not impressed by the gurgling babies and toddler, nor their cooing parents. He (thinks he) is more articulate than all of them.

“I no want to. I no want it. I go home.”

I give up on trying to get his consent and pick him. We wade into the pool. He’s fine and then he counters,

“I go potty, Mama. I need a potty.”

Of course. We’ve been playing this potty thing for a few weeks now, but the one time he asks to go in public is while we’re in a waist-deep public pool. I take him to the potty. By the time, we get back (and he wasn’t lying, by the way), the toddler class has moved to the warming pool.

“But I go other pool. I phwide.”

This was pretty indicative to not only the rest of swimming but the day as well.  We were never in the right pool, never doing the right thing, never playing with the right toy, never eating the right thing. He didn’t eat much lunch. He didn’t nap. He didn’t want to read. He ate a tube of lipstick and smeared the remaining contents all over the bathroom cabinets, which I’d just painted. He didn’t eat a bite of supper. He managed to terrorize Ella the Wonderdog to the degree that she barricaded herself in her crate – pretty much unheard of behaviour for the most kid-tolerant dog on the planet.

So as I’m sitting in the rocking chair at 6:30 with this warm, floppy body curled close to my chest, my husband and I start to talk about how hard the day had been for me and how I was so worn out and how tired I was and what a fight it had been for me to get him to do anything and me me me me me me me ME. Then I stopped. I am not the only person in this relationship. And it really wasn’t me having a hard day, even though yes, I was frustrated sometimes. It was him. He’d had a bad day. He hadn’t had enough sleep. He’d been more interested than watching, rather than doing at swim class. He’d been curious and put in time out for the privilege. And as I rocked him a little more, I felt it – a bit of a fever, maybe teeth? Maybe just tired? Who knows? My husband encouraged me to put him to bed, take a rest.  And he was right. But I couldn’t . After a day like we’d had – not an earth-shatteringly bad day, but not full of rainbows and unicorns either – I needed to hold him. To be quiet with him. To let him know that he was loved, that he was safe and that he wasn’t alone in this. For him? For me? I don’t know. And I don’t care.

I am not fat.

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Health, Physical exercise

I am not fat.

Not by any stretch of the imagination. My BMI is well within the healthy range, my dress size is within the single digits. We eat healthy food 90-95% of the time with lots of variety and colour.

Despite this, I am not healthy.  At least not as healthy as I want to be. And there’s something slightly intangible about it. I can change certain things about how I live and it will get better. I’ll have more energy. My mood will generally improve. I’ll be less stressed out. But none of this adds up to a plan. To making the women that I see on the cover of Women’s Health or Shape a reality in my own body, even in a  small way.

Women’s Health magazine, May 2009 issue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But I am lazy. That much I know. I am not as active as I should be, for my health or my children or my playing. I can blame this on a lot of things: children, schedule, commuting, school, old lower back injury, heat. Just to name a few.

I am also not stupid. And I know that exercise will and does make me feel better about any number of things: my children, my body, commuting, school, old lower back injury. There some obvious overlap there.

I am not alone in this. So why is it so hard to get moving and keep moving? There’s a couple of reasons, for me anyway. Or maybe I should call them attitudes. So let’s begin, because maybe seeing them all laid bare, in stark black and white blog-ese, will be a reckoning of sorts.

1. The gym is too far from my house. It’s actually about 5 miles. 10 miles/16 kms, round trip. And it seems so silly to drive all that way and get on a stationary bike for 45 minutes.

2. I hate the gym. Yes, yes I do. It’s stinky and smelly. The ceiling is too low in the cardio room. The locker rooms can’t even be charitably called industrial chic. The rooms are labyrinthine and it’s hard to find my way around. They have annoying things on their televisions. The classes they offer aren’t my cup of tea.

3. I get bored. My mind turns into the most appalling mush while I’m at the gym and I’m conscious of it. Since those stupid little ear buds hurt my ears and I’m thus far too cheap to buy headphones that don’t, I’m stuck in a boring, silent world, looking at my wobbly bits bounce in the mirror.

4. I have no time. Ah, yes the busy-ness trap. It’s a fact that that I’m chasing after two little kids, have an hour and a half commute to school (when it’s in session), don’t practice enough and don’t spend enough quality time with my husband. It’s also true that I spend too much time online. Like right now.

5. I hate being hot. I know I live in the desert, but I’m Canadian, after all. I don’t actually mind the sweating part if there’s a cool breeze (read: fan or AC) to help evaporate the goop.

So what do I like about exercise? I like how I feel afterwards. I like that my confidence in my body rises, not just in how I look but what I can do. I like how open my lungs are when I play my horn. I like not having muffin top. I like groaning about how sore I am after a particularly satisfying workout. I would like to stop wearing my maternity pajama bottoms (There. I said it.).

So I’m going to try doing something tangible. Something new every week.  This week it’s daily ab workouts. Three times a day, which sounds really ambitious.  All I’m going to do is to split up what I would have done pre-children into three mini sessions. And now it doesn’t sound so ambitious. But I’m ok with that.

Free concerts! From the comfort of your couch!

Tickets to the DSO (Photo credit: cletch)

How awesome is this? I was listening to/watching the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play Mozart Piano concerto No. 22 with Emmanuel Ax and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with Leonard Slatkin conducting. For free. In the desert. Where I can wave at Mexico from my house. I’ve never stepped foot in Detroit Symphony Hall but I got to listen to a fabulous concert on my computer as I did a little painting. Basically, a few months ago, I signed up for a free subscription to watch the DSO online when they had special concerts that would be broadcast live, in conjunction with Detroit Public Television. Unfortunately for me, it was a live deal, so if I wanted to watch, I had to actually be home during the concert, which pretty music never happened. But I would get emails from the DSO telling me about all the fabulous stuff they’d be playing and I’d sigh and say,” Oh, I wish I could hear that.” Until today. When I got an email inviting me to hear an encore broadcast of a concert from last February on demand. Basically, they made the Mahler 5 concert available from July 20-23, so theoretically, you could watch that sucker at any time of day: while eating dinner, scrubbing your toilets or having a cup of tea. To name a few.

So why do I like this so much? A bunch of reasons. The orchestra sounds great, the principal horn, Karl Pittuch, is fabulous in the 3rd movement of the Mahler and the user interface is pretty easy to understand. When you log on to the concert, it asks for some basic info like your name, where you live and how many people are watching but I don’t think that’s too invasive and quite frankly, is a small price to pay for a free concert. I also love how they’ve modeled intermission chats with Slatkin and a Mahler expert after the halftime commentary that you’d see during a football or hockey game. Detroit is such a hockey town, so this makes a lot of sense. Even if I didn’t want to watch that bit, I can fast forward through it because it’s not live. I don’t have to get a babysitter, drive at least an hour and pay to park my car to get to the nearest concert hall. And I particularly like that I can expose the Little People to live classical music in short bits if I want, all in an environment where they won’t be disturbing anyone if they wiggle or ask questions.  That last bit might be my favourite.

The other part of me wonders how they can afford to do this for free. The DSO recently had a long, drawn-out musician strike and was on the verge of a financial catastrophe. They do recommend (nicely) sending a donation if you hear something you like, but I have a feeling that this is a precursor to paying for the content, much like what the Berlin Philharmoniker is doing. The difference is, while some of us are willing to pay for concerts in Berlin from half a world away, how many of us would do the same for the orchestra from Motown, no matter how excellent? Does music have to be an exotic commodity for us to pay up? Or can we support things closer to home?

I wish them luck with this. I’ll be tuning in when I can, along with the Little People in short bursts.

Related articles

• Symphony Gets Creative, Surpasses Fundraising Goal (detroit.cbslocal.com)

Das Haus

Since I’ve baked a little, I guess I should probably write a bit about where I live.

This is my house. The place where all the chaos magic happens.

I can just hear it in my head: “Little boxes, little boxes, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky…and they all look just the same.” That’s because the houses in our little subdivision really do all look pretty much the same. IMHO, we happen to have a slightly better landscape design but it wasn’t any of our doing. The previous owner was a landscaping guy and did pretty much everything. And because of the prickly nature of desert wilderness, I’m eternally grateful to him.

There’s a pond just under the front window and we keep a variety of kitschy critters. OK, three. What’s home ownership without lawn ornaments or their spiritual equivalent?

This is Friederich and he came all the way from Germany with us.

Rather aristocratic, I’d say. His companions on the waterfront are less high brow, but probably friendlier. Friederich almost didn’t make the moving truck when we left Deutschland.  After everything that had happened with preparing for a transcontinental move, running around after a (then) 2 years and lugging a newborn baby, one would have thought I’d have just let it go. But no. I was not moving halfway across the ocean without my frog from Tchibo. (For anyone that doesn’t know Tchibo – it’s a fabulous German thing. On any given day you can get a cup of coffee, a pastry and a hair dryer…or perhaps a baby sleep sack … or maybe a set of golf clubs. For not a lot of geld/money. You never knew what would be there until  you went in – it was different every week.) The movers graciously made a box to fit him and unceremoniously squished him into one of the moving crates.

And now on to the back of the house.

Yes. Grass in the desert. Which don’t have to water right now because of the ‘monsoon’ that’s currently upon us. I’m ever so grateful for this grass – in a desert there’s not much green..or at least there shouldn’t be. And even though it’s indulgent, it’s a soft place for little people’s bottoms to land or for their feet to run. Because the rest of the year is not so friendly to soft skin. It really isn’t a garden.  It’s definitely a yard (although we’re doing a bit of suburban farming – more on that later). But it’s got…well, to put it mildly, a view.

Here it is:

Not bad. Probably the saving grace of the town in which we live. 90% of the time, it doesn’t look like this – there’s usually bright blue skies and a strong sunlight. Which is fine, unless you burn in 5 minutes. The sunlight actually makes you appreciate the rain and the clouds, especially when it looks like they might join forces and do something productive. Also, the mesquite doesn’t usually look like that either.  But it doesn’t take much water to help perks them up into a real green, although I’m pretty sure that Irish people would think that statement hilarious.

So that’s our coordinates. We’ve been here just over a year and half and it’s only now that I’m getting used to it. I’m not sure that the exterior of my current dwelling is home or will ever be. I think I’m actually ok with that. It’s a little piece of earth.  A normally dry, dusty, brown piece of earth. But a piece, nonetheless.

Breaking Bread

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baking, bread, food

I’ve heard from many sources (although mostly from my mother) that a house isn’t really a home until you baked something in the oven. So, in order to make this, well, less of a personal web-log on a screen and more of a blog, I’m going to bake something. Specifically bread.  Because It’s carbolicious and I like to live dangerously.

So good. So simple. So crazy hard to get right.

I’ve been experimenting with bread making for a while.  My husband enthusiastically ate my initial endeavours, but honestly that man will eat just about anything, so I didn’t really know how good it was. Then I started to get better. I have a few things going against me though: we live in the desert (ergo, there is no humidity and everything, and I mean everything is drier than what I’m used to) and our altitude is over 4800 feet or roughly 1500 meters. So anything that I thought I knew about bread or that I vaguely remembered my mother/aunt/grandmother tell me about baking bread was out the window. Defenestrated, if you will. And all those fantastic bread/bun/kringla recipes of my childhood simply don’t work.

So here’s what I do (and I know as soon as we leave this place my method will have gone to pot). Bread needs 5 things: Water, honey, yeast, salt and flour. The flour has been the stickiest point for me because flour in the US is nothing like what I grew up with. Ah, Robin Hood flour..I miss thee. I use King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour.  Nothing else works up here in the high desert. Unless I wanted to add gluten or something and that seems like entirely too much work.

Stir roughly 1 tablespoon of honey into 1 cup tepid/warm-ish water. Pour this over 1 tablespoon active dry yeast that you’ve already got in a cereal bowl or equivalent. I don’t mix this because I am lazy.  Then I go have a cup of tea or coffee for about 15 minutes until the yeasties have turned all fuzzy and foamy.

Dump yeast mixture, 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt and two more cups of tepid water into    a Bosch Kitchen machine (or similar) with the dough hook attachment already on. Then add three cups of the bread flour. I mix this until it forms a soupy, pasty-coloured bog and then I let that rest for a few minutes. After that I add the rest of my flour.  Most days, that means about another 3 and 3/4 cups, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. Basically once it pulls off the side of the walls of the mixing bowl, I usually think I’m pretty much there.  I let the Bosch knead the dough for another two minutes and then turn the dough out into an oiled bowl. Let rise until to double in size (about an hour on the counter). I take the dough out, give it a light knead and then form it into loaves. Sometimes it actually goes in loaf pans (what I did today) but more often I’ve been making more french bread-type versions on a jelly roll pan. Let those suckers rise again, but not too long up where I live because they can fall like crazy if it gets too out of hand. I’ll emphasize again that this is a high altitude bread recipe.

I bake my bread at 450F/230C. Hot? Yes. But I also put a pan of steaming water on the rack underneath my bread so I can get a crunchy crust on it. The temp and the steam are supposed to work together to do this. This is also a high water content bread, so that’s part of the equation. I’m still figuring this part out, but that’s my routine for now. Until I tweak it again. The great thing about this is that I learn a little bit more about the process every time I make it. And that I’ll never be done figuring it out.

Composing a Life

I’ve been stalking a few blogs for the past couple of years and it was mainly a vehicle to consume something that someone else created. It was not something I’d ever consider doing, though. Not ever. Even in a bazillion years.

But here I am, writing things on the inter-webs. In public. Mainly because I’ve got a lot on my mind and a lot of things that I do or have become. For instance, in any given week I’m a woman, wife, mother, daughter, sister, professional musician, horn player, pianist, teacher and doctoral student. If I have time and/or energy, I can add artist, painter, design enthusiast, occasional diy-er, student of photography, baker, cook, singer, black-thumbed gardener and summer rain watcher. I can also get spiritual but I’m not sure that this is the best place to get into that.

A few years ago I read Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life and was fascinated by  how she describes creativity and adaptation in women’s lives. My own life has been composed and woven, sometimes with and without my permission. And sometimes the discontinuities I have experienced in my life have gone on to become tremendous creative opportunities. Modern life is complex and worthy of reflection but it’s also worthy of living and doing. Intentionally, if possible.

So, I’m doing. I’m going to write and create and put some of my thoughts out there for the masses to see. Even if only my mother reads it. Even if I get a virtual pie to the face instead of warm bloggy fuzzies.

This is Ella the Wonder Dog.
It always helps to start things off with a cutesy-wootsy pup, right?

Let’s see what happens, shall we?