Author Archives: Andrea Middleton

Currently at Reddit, I spent 10 years as a community organizer on the WordPress open source project. I'm also an avid reader, wine enthusiast, and parent of two.

Cooking class at Bob’s Red Mill

  So excited to learn how to cook these Thai street foods! Unfortunately they just announced that cooking school will go on hiatus after June so the Mill can focus on growing their dinner crowd.  Well, maybe I’ll sneak one more in before they discontinue classes.

Street harassment and Shauna Hunt

Trigger warning: explicit language and sexual harassment

TIL there’s a meme in which men heckle TV reporters when they were filming live, by jumping into the shot and saying “fuck her right in the pussy” into the microphone. It’s pretty widespread, as you can see in the montage in this report, and last week, CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt got fed up and confronted some men after having just been harassed by one of them. Here’s the raw video.

One of the men who made harassing remarks to Shauna Hunt during this interchange lost his job late last week, and Tabatha Southey has a great article about the reaction to that, called The vulgar heckling incident: Let me spell it out for you.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here’s one passage I think is especially fantastic:

There will be, of course, wails about free speech from people who do not understand that the concept of free speech includes the right to say, “You’re an idiot.”

Also, I don’t care that this lame, tired stunt is occasionally done with male reporters as well. That hardly redeems it: Shouting sexually explicit things is sexual harassment.

“Surely there was some way this could have been handled without Mr. Simoes losing his job?” some have said. Likely, yes, but that wasn’t Hydro One’s call. And Hydro One is not Mr. Simoes’s parent or his therapist. It’s not nanny-Hydro One, and they’re not obliged to coach or reform him or employ him, and there’s no question the man made himself, through considerable effort, not a momentary one-line lapse, a liability.

Hydro One has other employees to consider, people who might not feel comfortable working under or beside a man who has made it clear that sexually harassing women while they work is something fun that he’s entitled to do, and if they object they are failing in their duty to feel grateful they don’t have a vibrator in their ear.

I’m not sure whether or not to be pleased that I’m raising my kids in a world in which harassing women *might* get you in serious trouble (none of the men in that montage were confronted or prosecuted, to the best of my knowledge), though I guess it’s better than the world I was raised in. Here’s hoping we keep doing better at holding people accountable for their actions.

And gigantic kudos to Shauna Hunt, whose brave example will (hopefully) encourage more people to confront harassers.

The care and feeding of Chez Nous

This weekend was a quiet one, with lots of spring cleaning and a heaping helping of household (and teardrop trailer) maintenance. What with the bereavement last month and then all the carpe diem-ing we’ve been doing since, our home and garden have been getting more and more grubby. When we gross out even ourselves, steps must be taken. So! Cue the spring cleaning music (lately, we clean tothe soundtrack of Guardians of the Galaxy).

It’s shocking how quickly weeds come up in this pea-gravel walkway.
Profusion!
One of our three small oases of grass.

And it’s spring, so all green things are growing like crazy, including all the weeds and the grass. We don’t have too much lawn, but we have enough weeds to make up for it. But wow, the payoff! We didn’t buy this house for the stunning and lovingly nurtured landscape, but I’m getting more pleasure out of our plants than I ever thought I would. This spring has been a wonderful journey of discovery, learning what blooms what color, and when. (Hint: everything, usually white, and all the time.)

Our handcrafted, artisan teardrop trailer.
Our handcrafted, artisan teardrop trailer.

We go on our first camping of the season in about a month, and the trailer needed some pretty significant maintenance before we could take it out. If you’re not familiar with our teardrop trailer, Tom built it with his own hands, from the axle up (with the help of some good friends on the interior woodwork). It gives us a watertight (now — good work, Tom!) spot to sleep when we camp, though it’s kind of claustrophobic in there with all 4 of us — this summer I think we’ll put the kids in the trailer and Tom and I will sleep in a tent nearby. The back hatch serves as a galley, and it’s nice to be able to lock all the food down, good and tight, now that we’re camping in Bear Country. (Is the coast still Bear Country? The raccoons are fierce enough, if not.)

We also did some springtime storm window shifting; the storm door in the front got a screen instead of glass, and I opened the storm windows in the bedrooms to expose the screens and allow us to get more of this gorgeous spring air in the house.

This doesn’t look any different with the screen on, actually. 😉
I wish I had taken a “before” picture. But seriously, these railings are so clean!

Then I washed a few windows and scrubbed down the railing on the back porch. It’s overhung by a very bloomy-polleny tree, and the mold/mildew/dirt on the weird coated wood was getting really bad. As you might spot, some moisture has penetrated the weird coating, and we’re going to have to replace at least the railings after this season, I think. But now I’ll have an even more idyllic place to work on sunny days, and there’s nothing wrong with THAT!

And of course on top of all that we had all the laundry and all the dishes and all the floors. I’m heading down to the basement in a few minutes to fold my way through a pile of laundry that registers on the Everest scale, as soon as I have confidence that the kids are closer to sleep. While Tom and I were busy with all of these chores, they either helped clean (their rooms and the toys in the basement) or played together, largely entertaining themselves. We’re ridiculously lucky to have two kids who enjoy each other so much.  With chores done, sun setting, bread baking, and kids sleeping, I’m hyper-aware right now that some people are muchly much-much more unlucky than us. #seussblessed

Selling some old stuff

 We have a bunch of baby/toddler stuff that we’re selling on Craigslist this weekend, and the kids are entirely unhappy about it:

Amelia: “Mom, you need to ask Baxter’s permission before you sell his bed!” (He’s been sleeping on a new twin bed for over a week now, btw.)

Bax: “But Mom, we LOVE our stwoller!”

Amelia: “Mom, did you know that all these things have our memories inside them?”

I’ve promised them that we can keep pictures of everything so we can still remember them. Hoarders evidently breed hoarders. 🙂

My new cookbook, and reflections on Make Your Own Dinner night

I bought myself a little something.  IMG_5421
I have just about cooked Time for Dinner — of which Jenny Rosenstrach was one of three authors — into oblivion. It’s my most-recommended cookbook to anyone with kids. Things needed freshening up on the meal plan around here, so I picked up one of Jenny’s newer books. If you don’t already read her blog, Dinner A Love Story, I suggest you add it to your food blog rotation, pronto.

I’ve cooked two recipes this week from Dinner: The Playbook, and they’ve been very well-received! The Slow-Cooker Korean Short Ribs were a huge hit, and the whole house smelled amazesauce all day because of the crockpot. I made sesame broccoli to go alongside, and served it over the Goya-infused rice I made for beans-and-rice night the day before. Yumtastic! Amelia had thirds. It makes a lot of meat, so I froze the leftovers to use later in Lettuce Hand Rolls (also known as “make your own dinner”) next week. I do like a flexible prepared protein!

Slow-Cooker Korean Short Ribs over yellow rice. Also, sesame broccoli. That’s a green plate, huh?
Here’s what the inside of the book looks like.

Then on Wednesday night I made the chorizo tacos. I used a really mild Longaniza for the chorizo, actually, since my kids are horrified by anything spicy ( and it was the only link style chorizo I could find at the grocery store).

Yogurt-lime-cilantro sauce, shredded cabbage, avocado, longaniza, and corn tortilla ready to be filled with delicious.
My taco *kind* of looked like this, when assembled.

This was a minefield of “I don’t like that” for the kids — avocado, raw cabbage, and yogurt sauces are all highly suspect among my littles — but I tried something new and it was brilliantly successful. I assembled a taco with all the ingredients (made them watch), took a bite, made appropriate yummy noises, and then offered them each a bite of my taco. They both liked the bite they took, and when I offered to make them a taco just like mine (with all the “icky” components!), they eagerly said yes. They both ate the whole taco I made for them, and then they started making their own combinations. Did those combinations include avocado, raw cabbage, and yogurt sauce? No. But they got to taste how all of the ingredients work together, and I think that’s a win. 🙂

 The concept of “make your own dinner” is one I adopted from Time for Dinner.  I put a bunch of bowls of ingredients on the table, and everyone can assemble their own perfect meal — is a huge hit with my family. It exposes the kids to lots of flavors but reduces the amount of New Food left on their plates. We do multiple versions of this now: lettuce hand rolls, as mentioned, tostadas (which we had last night), baked potato bar, sesame noodles… and I think I’ll add the chorizo tacos to our rotation with a few edits (I’m the only one in my house who likes corn tortillas, put a bowl of cheese out and maybe some refried beans). If you have a table full of picky eaters at your house, I highly recommend “make your own dinner” night in all its many guises. It does produce more dishes than simply plating the kids’ food in the kitchen, and that is a total drawback, but I think it’s worth it.

Glowsmash

  First thing in the morning, Baxter walks out of his room holding the purple horse stuffie.

“Mama, dis is Glowsmash!”

“It’s name is Glowsmash? That’s quite a name.”

“Yeah.

“And her can fly. See?” (hurls stuffie across the room) “Wow, her can fly SO FAR!”