HJ Waxing Moon

The Tornado (8yo) asked for spaghetti and garlic bread for dinner. So I made herb bread and put garlic butter on it! I’ve never been a good baker but after identifying the kiddo’s milk allergy at 3.5, I knew they would need a mama who bakes dairy free stuff. So I decided to tackle the negative talent and learn how to do that. I think I’ve done pretty well. 

 So like, we moved across the country, bought a mobile home, found out the kid and I are allergic to cow milk, and Life has HAPPENED, let me tell you. I was about to start a new blog and thought, is that old one still kicking around somewhere? I didn't even have to log in. It just said OH HI YOU'RE BACK!  With the political landscape what it is right now, I'm pulling away from Meta products which means my HJ Waxing Moon FB page and Instagram where I was posting dairy free meal ideas need somewhere else to Be. And here is as good a place as any.  Be prepared for an influx of posts I guess! Yahooooo!

Monday: Philly cheesesteaks Tuesday: TACOS (like every Tuesday. This week is chicken) Wednesday: Buffalo chicken casserole in the slow cooker Thursday: Ribs & salad Friday: Family dinner at my mom’s house Saturday: Leftovers every week Sunday: Tortellini with pork sauce from leftover ribs.  Did I mention we don’t have an oven? 

Guess I should have paid more attention to the packaging. I have four different brands of broth in three different flavors, all with the quantity being NET WEIGHT not fluid ounces. My 32 oz container just had almost 5 full cups (about an ounce shy).  Might explain why my recipes have been coming out funny. Oops. 

Just meandering around some ideas because I have been super productive today and have no TV service... Trying to decide what to make for winter holiday gifts this year. I'm envious of my mother's ability to pick Just The Right Gift for people. She's put a lot of effort and thought into being good at it, and having a disposable income helps though she's also very good at doing gifts on a budget.  That's not me. I'm not bad at it, I'm just broke. As a result I have found my niche making bulk food gifts. Less personalized to the recipient but a more personalized gift of myself.  One year I made Hot Cocoa Baskets! A basket per family home with a mug per person, a selection of hot cocoa packets, decorated baggies of marshmallows and cookies. It was supposed to have chocolate-dipped spoons and jars of homemade cocoa mix, but I had a job change three weeks before Christmas and ran out of time. Averaged cost per person: $1.76.  One year we made 100 lbs of pl...

I make the distinction between art and crafts. I'm crafty, but artistic? Not so much.  I have been gathering containers to make a baby percussion kit with. He's had a colander and spoon for a couple months now, and we recently added a coffee can drum.    I had another set of "instruments" in mind.  I saved some containers, used some things I had around the house, and voila! Turned this...   Into this!    That bear needed another good scrubbing because we used oil to get the label off. It's getting bells.  Rice (some with food coloring), white beans, popcorn, buckwheat groats, chia seeds. I glued the lids shut and taped a couple for extra security.  I'll let you know how he likes them! 

If I'd known about this as a kid, my whole world would have been a lot different. You can put oatmeal in jars, add boiling water, and BOOM. BREAKFAST.   "Oh but Heather you need quick oats"/"It only works with some oats"/"You can't use other kinds of hot cereal." That's what they told me too, but they're wrong. I've tried it. I probably wouldn't use wheat berries, but any somewhat processed grain should do. Here's my recipe, you may need to tweak to your tastes. 1 pint jar 1/2 c oats 1/2 c toppings Dry sweetener if you're using it Pinch of salt Store at room temperature.  To eat: add boiling water to just below the fill line--I leave about 1/2 inch. Stir and rest for 5 minutes. Add liquid sweetener, butter, milk/cream to taste.  Cream of wheat/Farina plumps so much more than oats. I use 1/3c and no toppings.  What kind of toppings? Dried fruit like cranberries are easy & cheap Chopped or shaved nuts are great S...

I have a tendency to hoard food. There's really just no getting around it. A combination of anxiety over running out and excitement over trying new things means that I overbuy, and buy things that I don't use often. This has resulted in an overflowing pantry and further anxiety.  So every year at least once (and usually during the leaner months for hours at work), I try to challenge our household to the Eat the Larder challenge  created by NW Edible Life: try to limit grocery purchases to perishables only, and eat through the non-staples and overstocked items.  This year I'm enlisting the help of my neighbors, and putting together a couple family food boxes to gift through our Buy Nothing group.  We are already a week into it but finally life with a baby is letting me get back to blogging, since I figured out how to make it work from my phone, except pictures. Which means I can blog while nursing! Make sure you're connected to us on Facebook where I ...

Being pregnant has been a roller coaster. I've been sparing you details, hence the radio silence. One thing I struggled with early on, especially so early in recovery for a restrictive eating disorder, was eating "junk" food. It made me keenly aware how ableist and toxic our modern discussions are about food and food-health connections. I had been struggling already to follow my doctors' orders about eating whatever sounds good, however much of it feels good, whenever I want and need to. After a decade of self-imposed eating restrictions, it was a difficult adjustment. But one I needed to start before I got pregnant. Because I was already getting better at it when I was suddenly thrust into "morning" sickness and all my careful food choices became impossible to manage. I knew my OB was the right one for me when she said, and this IS a direct quote, "I don't care if you live on mashed potatoes and Sprite until the day the baby is born, just eat...

I haven't been posting because WE'RE HAVING A BABY! And growing a tiny human is exhausting.  But I'm 24 weeks along now and finally starting to get some of that second trimester energy bump, so hopefully I'll have anything to write about soon. Well I do have one thing to write about, but hopefully it will be more than that!  In the meantime, I'm basking in the pregnancy glow. 

I made a fantastic top-of-my-head Harvest Fruit Salad for thanksgiving, and everyone LOVED it. In a meal full of rich, dense, salty flavors, this salad felt like a palate-cleanser between courses. Very bright and refreshing, tart like cranberry sauce and serving a very similar purpose. Keep in mind, this recipe is a bit of a work in progress. Besides being a dump cook, I also made a recipe twice this big for 15 people and it turned out to be way too much, though no one was upset being sent home with leftovers! Scale up at about half an apple (or pear) per person, and you should be good, even with some leftovers. Salad: 2 Honey crisp apples 2 Granny Smith apples 2 Some other kind of apples (I tried to get the ones that are pink inside but no luck; make it flavorful and visually appealing) 1 Pear 3/4 cup dried cranberries 1/2 cup sliced almonds 1 cup candied walnuts, for garnish 4-6 lemons, probably Dressing: Zest of 1 lemon 1/3 to 1/2 cup canola oil (avocado or a light...

You know how I said we'd already planned half our menu for this week? Yeah. Guess what we forgot? Incidentally, this week was not difficult for menu planning at all, so I'm just going to save those ideas for next week. And it's an easy one too, I guess we just weren't feeling too complicated today. What's on the menu? Breakfasts:  Steak & eggs, Breakfast hash, english muffins, oatmeal. Lunches:  Mini pizzas, leftover soup (tortellini and Tuesday's chicken), burritos, sandwiches. Snacks:  Applesauce, fruit (oranges, grapefruit, apples & nut butter). Dinners: Monday:  Mr. Moon's hosting again so we're taking advantage of his meal being free! I'm kind of hoping they have a nice wine-free special because I'm getting a little worn out on ravioli.  [Out] Tuesday:  Thai Chicken Soup  [chicken; soup; Thai; rice cooker] Wednesday:  Spaghetti, with fresh mozzarella and homemade sauce  [vegetarian; pasta; Italian] Thursday: ...

Why was menu planning so hard this week? We were struggling to come up with something suitable for Saturday night, but kept coming up with things that were not too difficult but a higher difficulty than we wanted for a late night dinner. Which now that I say that, I'm thinking of making some sort of difficulty level for menu items. Fridays & Saturdays have the potential to be a late night, so we like to have dinner in the crockpot or at least fully prepped so all we have to do is heat it or even just walk in the door and eat. Monday & Tuesday nights we have to work around whatever Mr. Moon's evening schedule is, plus knowing there's an early morning ahead so we don't want to risk dinner being too late. On-Call shifts we basically treat as if he's working, as far as dinner prep goes. So besides just working with a "Weeknight vs. Weekend" kind of difficulty level, it's "I don't want this to take more than ten minutes" and "...

Happy Halloween! My favorite day of the year, tied with my birthday. Traditionally in my family we always had chili and hot dogs in the crockpot for Halloween. When I moved out here, I missed a year doing it. I didn't need to feed a family of people at different times, or have something ready to warm us up when we got back from trick or treating. But still, I found I was kind of sad about it. So the next year, I introduced Mr. Moon to my longstanding family tradition of chili & hot dogs as Halloween dinner. And I've done it ever since. Somehow we ended up with an easy week ahead of us, though still with plenty of home cooked meals in store. We're getting used to the new schedule, albeit with a few reservations on my part. I'm keenly aware that we're over stocked with food, and we're working together to eat through it instead of buying more, so this menu focuses a lot on Eating the Larder as it were.  What's on the menu? Breakfasts:  Oatmeal in the ...

I have a jar collection. It's a habit that borders on hoarding, in the sense that I compulsively save them because it seems a shame to get rid of something so useful, except that I actually use and cycle through my jars doing various projects. This is one of those projects. Since I'm allergic to grapes, we simply omit vermouth from any cocktails that call for them. Of course, it means the cocktails are not quite right. I got a wild idea one day to figure out what it would take to make our own, and discovered... it's actually really easy. It just required a lot of small jars. Which I happened to have on hand. There's plenty of recipes online, but it boils down to: Steep some flavorful things in a spirit. Carefully add the flavored spirits into some sort of dry wine, tasting as you go, until you get a flavor you like; the final result seems to be a goal of about 50/50 wine and vodka.  Of course, it's more complicated. For dark drinks, like Manhattans, a...

I've discussed before what my method of menu planning is. It hasn't changed much with it just being the two of us agin, except that if we don't do it, there's no one to suffer but ourselves! The basics boil down to: Know what you have in the fridge. Know what's in season/on sale. Know your schedule and be reasonable about what you can accomplish. Make the most of the time you spend cooking.  With our more-limited freezer space, I find we now focus less on freezing heat & eat foods, and more on having versatile ingredients on hand to make a variety of meals fairly quickly. Instead of making a pan of broccoli mac to put right into the oven, using freezer space for noodles that could otherwise be dry storage and ingredients that can only be used for one possible meal, we have pre-roasted chicken shredded and frozen in meal-size packages just waiting to be casserole, tacos, a pre-made pasta salad for lunches, and more. We buy foods and store them with th...

Our new schedule, as I mentioned a few days ago, included needed to re-arrange our chore schedule. I'm sure I could have sat down and worked it out myself, but part of being a team means it's important that we are BOTH included in the work that shapes our lives. It's important to both of us that even if we do each have skills and responsibilities consistent with traditional gender roles, we are making our choices together and mindfully. It's one thing to have me typing up our decisions that we make together and helping him stick to them; it's another thing altogether for me to make decisions for him when they primarily impact his schedule and responsibilities as if he has no information or opinion to contribute. It was a perfect opportunity to discuss as well what parts of our current/now-previous system were in need of improvement, and what new habits or skills we want to be incorporating. For example, we've had a bad habit of going grocery shopping and leavi...

With Mr. Moon's new promotion, there's a little bit of shuffling our lives are doing. One of those shuffles is getting a little deeper into food prep & menu planning, since our week is even more structured than it has been. He has a few hours before his actual shift where he's on-call for emergencies, so he can get up early to make breakfast but we also need to be prepared to run out the door with little notice. That's where something like oatmeal comes in! We can set it up the night before in the rice cooker then just have him wake up, pour in some liquid (if we don't soak the grains overnight) and turn it on. Hot breakfast right when I wake up, even if he had to take a cab to work. Maybe soon we will even try making our own instant oatmeal packets! What's on the menu? Breakfasts:  Oatmeal, egg sandwiches, cottage cheese & pineapple, leftover rice & beans w/ egg on top. Lunches:  Tortilla soup, turkey wraps, quesadillas. Snacks:  Power balls...

With Mr. Moon's recent promotion, and subsequent phasing out of his retail job from his schedule, we've had to completely revisit our chore schedule. This has been a bit more difficult than I expected, because of how intricately I'd weaved the chores and the rest of our lives together. But that's exactly why what we had was no longer working. Tuesdays were laundry days, but he works during the day now. Trouble is, weekdays during the day is when the laundry room has lower demand, which is why we picked it; and because Tuesday is laundry day, Monday is bathrooms day so the cloth wipes can soak overnight. So switching laundry day to, say, Thursday or Monday means unraveling everything. And laundry isn't the only thing like that! Most everything is a twice-a-week job, deeper cleaning on one day and a tidy-up on another. We'd had Friday as a day to do little bits of highly visible tidying before the weekend, populated by late nights, early mornings, at least one...

It took two weeks for the hefty restrictions of this candida cleanse to wear me down into the beginnings of a full-on breakdown, stalled only by me recognizing what was happening because it's not my first rodeo. The details of it are personal and largely irrelevant, but the big-picture effects are not. There's no chance I will say this better than others have before me. So-called healthy eating, clean eating, cleanses, dieting, and the like are not accessible to everyone. There are hundreds of essays available across the internet about the privileges of healthy eating, and the lack of access to fresh foods in poverty-stricken areas, communities of color, and by people with disabilities. We know for an unmitigated fact that dieting is bad for us, and leads to malnutrition, unhealthy eating patterns, and can trigger mildly disordered eating into full-blown dysphoria and eating disorders. It is a mark of privilege, of which I'm aware, that I even had the opportunity to try...