GIVEAWAY! KitchenAid Recipe Collection Cookbook

As I said yesterday, I received a free cookbook from the World of Whirlpool Blogger Ambassador event.  I would like to give this cookbook away to one of you!

Don't get me wrong, it's a great cookbook.  It's just that I have one small cabinet for cookbooks in my kitchen, and it is overflowing to the point that cookbooks are stacked on top of other cookbooks, and it's utter chaos.  I promised myself I would not get any more cookbooks, and then I bought another one anyway, so now I have to put the kibosh on cookbooks for myself. 

And my utter disorganization means you can WIN! 

Here's a bad picture I took of the cookbook:

And here's a link to the Amazon page on this same cookbook, so you can read all about it. 

It has over 400 recipes, divided into 20 tabbed categories. 

And as a special bonus, I'm throwing in the teabag I took from the lunch.  It's a really pretty teabag.  It's a three-dimensional pyramid shape with with pretty herbs inside that look like flowers.  Here's a picture of the box that the bags came from:

 

So ... you can win the cookbook and the pilfered teabag by leaving a comment answering the following question:

What is your favorite kitchen tool/appliance/gadget and why? 

(If you're like me and have more than one favorite, just pick one.) 

Make sure your actual name or screen name is somewhere in the comment.  If you use the "Anonymous"  comment feature, make sure you sign your name at the bottom. 


The contest is open until Saturday, May 7 at midnight.  At that time I will use random.org to generate a random number, and the person who left that comment number will win!  I'll notify you of the winner on this blog, and ask that person to email me with his/her name and address.  


This contest is open to everyone except people who live with me in the house with the overflowing cookbook cabinet.  One entry per person, please.  


Oh, and this is my first time doing a contest, so I apologize in advance if I screw it up. 

 

It's about kitchen appliances. And risotto. Because those are things I like.

So, by some amazing stroke of luck, I got on the invite list to attend a Blogger Ambassador event at the Whirlpool studios in downtown Chicago.  Like, seriously, there were important bloggers there, people who have written books and organized conferences.  And then ... little old me.

Little Old Me was nervous coming in, because that initial moment where you just step in and don't know what to do is awkward.  (No joke, I've also read that it's this sort of awkwardness that causes kids to sometimes cry, run away, or argue at the beginning of a playdate.  Unfortunately I didn't feel any of those options was socially acceptable for me.)

Fortunately the Whirlpool people broke the ice by offering us tours of their clock tower.  Which meant I could make a lame Back to the Future reference about a clock tower, and I'm sure that so dazzled the other bloggers that the ice had instantly been broken!  Or something.

Anyway, I am not as interested in architecture as I am in kitchen appliances, but from what I could gather, the Whirlpool corporation had renovated the clock tower when they moved into the building (which is the Reid Murdoch Building, which also houses Encyclopedia Brittanica.)  Whirlpool was founded in 1911 (hence their big 100th anniversary celebration), and the building was built shortly thereafter, so it was important for the company that the architecture reflect the style of the 1910s.  So you can see in this picture, which is an employee lounge under the clock tower, that they left some of the original brick exposed:

And this is inside the clock tower:

The clock tower floor had an amazing view of the Chicago River:

But finally!  Enough architecture, and onto the appliances.  This here is the very first Kitchen Aid stand mixer, produced in 1919:

The appliances in this next picture reminded me of the ones we had growing up (avocado green!), so my guess is they were from the 1970s era. 

And then we got a brief preview of some of their newer appliances.  This is a really nice slow-cooker that I kind of want:

This next photo shows the newest color of the Kitchen Aid mixer, Raspberry Ice.  (I really think it would make a nice fruit cocktail with my mixer, which is the Boysenberry color.)  The Raspberry Ice color was designed to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the Cook for the Cure Program, Whirlpool's commitment to raising funds for breast cancer research. 

The studio had multiple model kitchens, any of which I might like to have as my real kitchen:

There was another room that modeled the line of garage products.  They make a special refrigerator that is specifically designed to handle the extreme temperatures of a garage, and is energy-efficient.  Also it has a cool garage-style exterior:

After the garage, it was time to eat!  You can imagine that in a studio with state-of-the-art appliances and a fully scientific test kitchen, they weren't just going to bring in the sandwich tray from Subway.  Here's a shot of my meal:

I swore I would be a good Weight Watcher and not have any alcohol.  But then they had a mimosa bar, and one of the options was a blue raspberry flavor.  And you know my drink axiom: "blue is always better."  (That must be why I shoved the drink in front of my meal, instead of to the back right as is customary.) 

And because I know everybody loves multiple pictures of food, here are some close-ups.  Featured here are the macaroni and cheese with brie and bacon (umm, yeah), the risotto, and some items from the cheese/cracker/vegetable plate. 

I had to single out the Caesar salad, because the chef took a brush and painted the dressing on each plate, then on each separate leaf of lettuce:

 This was a turkey panini and the most delicious artichoke bisque (drizzled with olive oil and dehydrated kalamata olives), and also that mimosa again:

As you can see, none of this stuff was Weight Watchers-friendly.  But although the food was very rich, the portions were small, which I think is the principle behind that book French Women Don't Get Fat. (I didn't read it.)  And also, since I know you were concerned, let me note that I took all 49 of my weekly bonus Weight Watcher points for this meal. 

So, now that we were properly sated, we went for the cooking demonstrations.  This first woman had  a fancy computer hooked up to her oven, which showed us the rapid decrease in oven temperature when you open up your oven to put something in it.

 

 

That same woman showed us how cookies turn out when baked on different kinds of cookie sheets (bottom line: a reflective aluminum sheet is the best) and showed us how to clean a ceramic electric range-top stove.  It turns out that (shocker) my methods of spraying the range with Windex and using a metal spatula to scrap off crud are not the best way to clean a ceramic stove.  You are supposed to use a special cleaner designed for that specific type of stove, an abrasive sponge, and then a razor blade scraper where the blade is cut at a 30-degree angle.  (Obviously you should just buy a razor scraper designed specifically for scraping the electric range top.  Nobody's expecting you to bust out a sharpener and a protractor.)

Next we moved on to another demo kitchen, where we learned about induction cooking.  Truthfully, whenever I hear the term induction, I think about inducing labor, so I assumed maybe we might be cooking with Pitocin ... ?  No but really, although I had a vague recollection of my 8th grade science class lesson on different types of energy transfer, I couldn't remember what induction meant.  So I nodded along and smiled, and then later looked it up on Wikipedia.  From what I can gather, induction means that a coil below the surface of the burner generates a current which, while not heat-producing itself, induces heat production in a certain type of pot (a ferromagnetic pot, if you really wanted to know).  You could read the whole Wikipedia entry on induction cooking here, but the upshot is that the surface of your burner will not be hot to the touch when you turn it on.  (If you heat up a pot on an induction burner, the surface of the stove will be hot right after you remove the pot, because the pot will have transferred some heat to the surface.  I know this is way more information than you wanted to know, but I felt the need to provide this warning so nobody gets burned.) 

Induction cooking is also much faster than cooking on electric or gas stoves, like for example you can boil a pot of water 50% faster than on an electric stove.  It is, therefore, much more energy-efficient.  Apparently induction cooking has been all the rage in Europe for years, but it is just not becoming popular in America.  Here's a picture of the demo of the induction stove:

Next we visited the laundry studio, where we met a guy whose job it is to study detergent effectiveness and stain removal.  Also I think maybe he played the dad on Family Matters. 

Bottom line on the laundry demo: I'm doing everything wrong.  I use non-HE detergent with my HE washer, I use too much detergent, and I don't rub in my stain pre-treater before washing.

Following the laundry demo, it was time for that dessert I said I would not eat.  Hahahaha!  Behold, creme brulee, a chocolate-dipped strawberry, and a chocolate-chip cookie:

Before we left, we each got a gift bag containing a rubber spatula, a bottle of appliance cleaner, cleaning wipes for your washing machine (you have to clean a washing machine?), and a wine stopper.  Unfortunately, they didn't give me that washer/dryer to give away on my blog.  (Or, well, they did, but I couldn't carry them on the train.)  But they did give me a cookbook that I'm going to give away!  I'll announce that in a separate post so it stands out more. 

Thanks, Whirlpool Corporation, for a really fun and interesting day! 

Well

I went to Weight Watchers this morning, and I had lost 5.6 pounds.  People congratulated me, and I explained to them that this past week had been like a well-controlled experiment.  There had not been one second of cheating, because I knew I couldn't stand to have another week where I gained because there had been a few instances of cheating. 

I wish I could be that disciplined every week.  But sometimes eating situations come up that are outside of my control.  For example ...

Tomorrow the good people at the Whirlpool corporation have invited me to attend a free lunch in downtown Chicago.  They'll probably give me a free washing machine to give away on my blog, right?  Right?  Anyway, I am excited to get another blog perk, but I'm nervous about my ability to be a good eater at the lunch.  I have a huge problem with nervous eating in situations where I feel uncomfortable, and lunches where I don't know anybody qualify as big-time uncomfortable situations for me.  I thought about taking a marker and straight-out writing "NO DESSERT" on the back of my hand, but that seems tacky.  I don't want to ruin my beautiful hands with the super-cool "crackle polish" manicure I got today.  Random Internet reference photo of somebody with nicer-looking nails wearing the polish:

Anyway, so I think maybe I'll wear my bracelet that says Hope in different languages, as a secret signal to myself that there is hope for my weight-loss if I skip dessert. 

In completely different news, we finally got my kid's Little Tikes race car bed put together.  The assembly only required 8 screws, and I couldn't get two of them in to save my life.  I was beyond frustrated.  Finally my stepdad figured out the problem and solved it, and then finally my husband went out and bought a mattress for it.  And so with the shopping, the waiting for delivery, the removal from the big-ass box, the getting rid of the big-ass box, the pain-in-the-ass assembly, and the effort to find the perfect mattress ... about half the battle was complete.  The other half involved getting Nathan to sleep in the dang thing.  The first night, which was Saturday, he fell asleep right away, but came to sleep in our bed at 4 a.m.  The second night, last night, it was a major production to get him to fall asleep, but then he was there all night.  So if we could just get him to go to sleep quickly and stay asleep all night, we'd be golden.

And I'm loving not having him in my bed in the evenings.  I can go in there and read or watch TV without freaking out that the lights and noise will wake him up.  And, as I said awhile back, it's better for me to be hanging out upstairs at night, versus downstairs where all the food is kept. 

That's the news from here.  I'll be back at you guys tomorrow with that free washing machine giveaway, I'm sure. 

Super Ima Sunday Check-In: Big Fat Failure Edition

Remember last week, when I said my goal was to spend one hour a day working on semi-professional-ish activities?

Guess how many days I achieved that goal this week?

Zero.

I mean, I guess I did finally sign up for Blogcritics, and I finally put my Google Adsense ID in Technorati. And speaking of Google Adsense, they did send me a postcard in the mail saying I had to give them my address so they could mail me the $6.50 I have earned in ad revenues since December. Which is kind of a sad amount, except, I kid you not, it's the most I've earned since quitting my full-time job in October 2008. Anyway, I spent 20 minutes getting my Adsense account straightened out, and I spent maybe another 20 on careerbuilder.com looking at job listings. So, figuring generously, I maybe spent an hour this entire week on professional-ish tasks, and many of those were just because the Adsense interface wasn't all that compatible with Firefox and it took me many minutes of frustration before I figured out I might as well switch over to Explorer.

The thing is, I just didn't feel like I had that much time this week for professional-ish activities. And I mean, it was a big week for time- and energy-consuming tasks. I went to the gym five times. Three of those days I swam, for a total of 5 miles swum this week! Twice I did a run/walk interval program on the treadmill, also for a total of 5 miles. Plus I did two good weight workouts with Trainer Jill.

And getting back into Weight Watchers for serious, that was time-consuming, too. I swear, I felt like I spent at least an hour per day cooking or measuring out portions.

Plus my parents came, which necessitated clean-up and a lot of extra time and effort to make sure people got fed.

And it was Easter, so there were eggs to dye, baskets to fill, and a big fat meal that seemed like a lot of extra work.

Then there's just all the usual stuff -- preschool and playdates and the library -- that all seems to add up to long days where I'm outside the house and/or otherwise occupied. In the end, I just don't find the time to do anything professional.

Or so I like to tell myself. In actuality, I'm scared and overwhelmed when it comes to the idea of dipping back into professional life, and when forced to confront some sort of foray-into-professional-activity, I find some other task to distract me. I just have no idea what I want to do or how in the hell to go about doing it. Like all moms, I'd like to find a part-time job that is flexible, fulfilling, and well-paying. You know, something that allows me to be creative, like perhaps taking artistic photographs of those pigs flying by outside the windows.

So, I have failed on the professional front this week. This failure, of course, makes me feel very guilty. I just have the one kid, I mean come on, I should be able to find time to make some extra money on the side, have a career, blah, blah, blah.

Except, lately when I get down about not doing more or not having it all, I have started to focus on all the stuff I am doing. I do all the laundry, cook homemade dinners most nights of the week (with separate items for each person to accommodate food preferences), clean my own house, care for my kid 24/7 (or, okay, when he isn't at preschool or his high school or whatever ... or sleeping), and work out at the gym most days.

The thing is, cleaning my own house and making from-scratch meals are not necessarily my top priorities, and I'm not typing this to be one of those holier-than-thou sanctimommy types who espouses traditional gender roles or brags about how much better she is than other moms. I used to have a cleaning person when I worked. I loved the cleaning person, and I love the idea of cleaning people. It's just that the cleaning person seemed like a logical expense to cut when I quit working, and of course no longer working meant that I now had time to clean more.

I make the from-scratch meals largely for health and dieting reasons. Otherwise we'd probably eat mac 'n cheese most nights.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that if I were to work more in a professional capacity, I would give up a lot in terms of cooking and housework. And I'd be fine with giving those things up in favor of working for money (as I said, they aren't my top priorities), but I just need to remind myself that I would have to give something(s) up, which means that even if I were working more I wouldn't be having it all or doing it all. I could either do all of this or all of that, or some of this and some of that, but I can't do all of this and all of that.

Did that make any sense?

But anyway, all alleged personal enlightenment aside, I have come out of this week with no clear direction or any answers on the career front. I don't know where to go from here in terms of this week's goals. So, once again, I'm not really going to set any. I think I'm just going to work on reflection and self-awareness and all those stupid Oprah-esque buzzwords. I'm going to try to become more comfortable with myself and my decisions. None of this reflection and acceptance stuff constitutes an actual goal, because there's nothing really measurable involved. But, you know, that's a summary of the general path I want my week to take when it comes to taking care of myself.

Don't forget to go over and visit the original Super Ima, Leigh Ann!

Easter

This Easter we are lucky to have my mom and stepdad visiting, so we don't have to celebrate with just our small family. Not that I don't love my nuclear family, but it's a lot of work to make a big Easter meal when Bill hates half the foods and Nathan hates all of them. So this year we at least had a couple more eaters at our house.

First up, the coloring of the eggs on Saturday. When my mom warned him that he might want to change his shirt so he didn't get his nice shirt stained with egg dye, he opted to just go shirtless instead. So we look a little white trash in these pictures.

Easter morning we all miraculously slept in until 10 a.m.! And the Easter Bunny had come!

Nathan wanted to have a basket for his two Pooh bears (Squishy-Nose Pooh and Bangy-Nose Pooh). He made cards for both Poohs, which I stuck in the basket. Also the Easter Bunny brought them each a small container of honey, as shown:

Nathan was excited about everything in his basket, including these "marshmallow cheeps."

Leia examined the contents of her basket: cat treats, a pet hair remover, and a mug with a cat on it. Cats love mugs.

My stepdad, who I call Uncle Dan (even though he is not my uncle) loves the chocolate/peanut butter combo. Here he is with his Reese's eggs.

After baskets, Nathan hunted for Easter eggs:

When all the eggs were found, my mom and I cooked while the boys played Pitch Car in the living room.

And also Penguin Pile-Up:

The last time my mom and stepdad came for Easter, Nathan was 6 weeks old. My mom got him the most adorable bunny outfit to wear for Easter. This year I dug up the outfit and dressed a teddy bear in it, holding the picture of Nathan wearing it.

Before dinner, I researched the Weight Watchers points values for the items on the table, and wrote up a plan for what to eat. Then I brought my annoying measuring cups to the table. Here's a picture of my place at the table, before we ate:

My family's Easter tradition is to make jello eggs. My mom's aunt used to start collecting real egg shells (with the innards blown out) right after Christmas, then filling them up with jello for Easter. Right before Easter dinner, all the women in the family would shell the eggs and make a pretty garden of jello eggs with cubes of lime jello as the grass. It felt like a special rite of passage the year I got to join in, even though in actuality shelling all those jello eggs was a big pain. Now that the jello egg aunt is no longer with us, we carry on the tradition, but we have plastic egg molds instead.

The jello eggs always look really pretty:



Oh and also, Nathan was thrilled to come to the table for Easter dinner:

Everybody else was a little bit happier:

The meal was turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy, fruit, pasta salad, jello eggs, asparagus, and crescent rolls. Here's a picture of my plate after I measured everything out. That's a 20-point Weight Watchers meal. Fortunately I had been ridiculously disciplined this entire week, so I had my 49 bonus weekly points left to spend.

I also like how the crescent roll is like a sombrero for my plate.

For dessert I made two pies, strawberry pie and margarita pie. I got both pie recipes off the Weight Watchers website, so they were diet-friendly. The margarita one had actual tequila and triple sec in it (plus lime juice and ice cream), so it tasted just like a margarita.

I hope you all had a meaningful Easter, Passover, or Sunday!

Pirate Egg Hunt!

On Thursday night I took Nathan to the Egg Marks the Spot egg hunt at Bellaboo's Play and Discovery Center, which you might recall is the children's museum in Northwest Indiana where we had Nathan's birthday party. It was a pirate theme, and kids were supposed to dress up like pirates. I made this hat using an online tutorial, a cereal box, and a random piece of foam I had left over from some other project I intended to do and never did. I think I did okay for a non-crafty person.

As you can see, the child has achieved the developmental milestone known as the "cheesy forced picture smile" stage

First up: designing your own treasure map.

The kid was obsessed with this map. While all the other kids were up doing some sort of lively pirate dance, he was sitting there on the floor studying the map. (I might remind you that he made this map himself, and that it had absolutely no resemblance to any real place, unless there's a place somewhere that consists of water, red scribbles, and a "T" to mark the spot for the treasure.) Anyway, as he sat there in silence studying a map while the others danced, all I could think was, OMG, he is his father, a fact that was confirmed later when Bill told me a story about he spent hours poring over a treasure map that he was given on a family vacation once, presumably while his two brothers beat up on him.

The map also makes a good telescope.

I could tell he was overwhelmed when we first entered the room. (The same party room, I might note, where 4 out of our 8 party guests entered and immediately started crying. Is this room emitting some horrible high-pitched noise that only children under 5 can hear?) Anyway Nathan finally warmed up and participated in one game, the Octopus Ring Toss.

Finally the egg hunt commenced, and the entire museum was just littered with colorful plastic eggs containing wholesome, non-edible prizes like necklaces, 80s-style plastic bracelets, pirate-themed Silly Bandz, and stickers. You were supposed to put the stickers on your treasure map:

I snapped this shot just as he was expressing disappointment over a girl taking an egg he wanted. You can see why he was so disappointed, since clearly there were so few eggs.

Oh look, he's rebounded.

So the deal was that after you opened an egg, you were supposed to put the shells in the bins, which represented the Magic Sea Witch's pool. The rule was that you were supposed to hunt for one egg at a time, empty it, and then put the shell in the bin. Of course, since a large group of children was involved, this plan was shot straight to hell. Every kid hoarded as big a handful of eggs as he or she could carry, then opened up the eggs and dropped the shells on the floor. The result was that at the end, all that was left to find were empty shells, and parents were nagging kids to help clean up. For possibly the first time ever, my kid willingly cleaned up without any protest, so of course I had to photograph the moment:

It was in the Water Play Room, hence the smock. I don't make him wear that all the time.

When the hunt was over, Nathan wanted to play in the Soft Play Area, which is basically an overly-obnoxious, buzz-wordy name for a jungle gym with a ball pit. It's no wonder that a generation of parents who worry about "Nature Deficit Disorder" and know their children's reading lexiles would need to send their kids to a place called a Soft Play Area, when in the 1980s the same area would be called a jungle gym or Chuck E. Cheese.

Next we went to the cooking area, where the recipe that day was "eggels," which were bagels decorated like Easter eggs using colorful cream cheese.

At the end, the Sea Witch had a magical surprise: She had transformed all the egg shells into beach balls for a special beach ball dance party!

I'm pretty sure we'll have a similar picture of him in 15 years when he's at a drunken spring break party in Cabo.

What stood out to me from this whole experience was how I genuinely had fun with Nathan. I mean, yes, I have had fun with him before. But so often I have taken him to kids' events where he just isn't quite old enough, and he gets overwhelmed and frazzled and I'm disappointed. Or else I'm so excited about The Big Exciting Thing That is the Point of the Activity, and then Nathan's favorite thing is the drinking fountain on the side next to the restroom. (Which, I know, all of these disappointments are related to my unrealistic expectations, but they're disappointing nonetheless.) But finally with the egg hunt, it seemed like he understood the purpose of the event, and did what he was supposed to, and got excited about it. It truly somehow felt like a turning point to me, one that I'm really happy about. It's like maybe, sort of, somehow, he is taking the first step to becoming an actual person.