HJ Waxing Moon

Content warning: Brief mentions of ED and I don't mean the penile kind. Some discussion of Feels and their relation to food choices, with some coping mechanisms that work for me. Everyone can suffer through blood sugar crashes, and there are some doctors who believe that our modern society's abuse of our pancreas is the number one reason for diabetes that shows up later in life. Whatever your opinion on this topic is somewhat immaterial for the purposes of this conversation. However, if you are dealing with a diagnosed medical issue and not simply bad habits, do ensure you speak to your doctor before taking the advice of random people on the internet. My blood sugar crashes are due to so many issues you could write a book. Eating disorder, chronic nausea, lack of appetite, chronic dehydration, medication side effects, and sheer bad habits, just to name a few. What this looks like in my daily life seems simple: I wait too long to eat. Now, as you may have already gathered, I...

I was diagnosed with chronic illness at age 17, after 2 solid years of suffering and plenty more before of pain and misery. I don't remember more than 3 days of my life when I wasn't in pain. I spent a lot of time internalizing my fear of making goals and having dreams, because when you can't plan a week ahead, how do you know what next year will bring? How do you plan for decades when you could be crippled with pain an hour from now? Having dreamed so big and fallen so far, I have learned many things. The first and foremost of which is that my home is a sanctuary, even moreso than for the average person. I need a safe, clean, comfortable home to return to at the end of the day, sometimes even the middle of the day. These days, sitting at home usually IS my day. Finding my place in keeping my home, playing the dutiful housewife who can't do much physically, has been hard. It's been allegorical to finding my place in the world at large, as I sit here wondering what...

When we were moving in, the landlord did a walkthrough with us. He assured is the bathroom tub/shower area had been thoroughly scrubbed, and the faint brownish color on the one wall of the shower was staining from over the years. You probably already know where this is going, but we're going to take a detour first. The previous tenant also apparently had a fruit fly problem. Not having proper refuse disposal or cleaning supplies, Mr. Moon being here for a week before these systems were in place only made the fruit fly issue worse. IT WAS BAD. There are no pictures. Just me freaking out for weeks. We ended up putting out bowls of vinegar with a drop of soap, and after a few days of less-than-entirely-proper cleaning and refreshing the vinegar, the fruit flies seem to have died off. Thank goodness. We did scrub the cabinets in the kitchen. The area around the handles was nasty, and the shelves were dusty and dirty. We also wiped out the fridge, though that had pretty clearly be...

Moving was a fiasco. The sticker idea didn't work, the stickers were too small. Next time, use the tape.  Very detailed labels are a lifesaver. It takes an extra few seconds to write roughly everything that was in the box, and those seconds add up. But at least include anything specifically important, like NIGHTSTAND FAN or LOCK BOX or what pieces of kitchen equipment are in each box.  The idea of packing things with clothes worked awesomely. Do that!  Have someone in charge of packing the truck who is well-rested, patient, and good at real life Tetris.  Take lots of breaks. It is OK to sit down! Sitting down to pack something doesn't count as a break.  Make sure everything is packed into boxes before the day you pick up the truck. Leave as very little as you can get away with until the last minute.  Standard-sized boxes are a life-saver. Even if you are using non-standard sized boxes, as long as you have a LOT that are the same size and shape, th...

Once upon a time, I decided I wanted to make Gumbo. I'd never had gumbo before, and I wanted to try it. So I looked up about 100 different recipes, and figured out what they all had in common: Roux, especially a peanut butter roux Mirepoix Stock, mostly chicken stock Spice Andouille sausage (in most of them) Shrimp (also in most but not all) Well, I had no idea what half of that was. So I started asking questions.  What is a roux? It's a thickening agent for sauces and soups. It's a mixture of equal parts fat and flour. You melt the fat and mix the flour into it slowly so as to avoid lumps. Works best if you sift the flour directly into the fat. You can use pretty much any fat, but lard, bacon grease and butter are preferred. All purpose flour is best, but gluten-free websites have other suggestions with good results and you can use whole wheat for some things but you may have to adjust your proportions and thickening expectancy. It is great for anything you ...

A friend on Facebook asked if anyone had ideas for freezer meals. Stuff you can make up and freeze for easy meals later. This is a project I've been working on for the last year, but felt I hadn't gotten as far as I'd have liked with it. Then I started typing... and realized just how much I'd learned! Well I spent 20 minutes writing up a list for her, and thought it might be a helpful reference for others. If I don't have a recipe for something and I'd like one from me, feel free to comment and I'll write one up. * Tip: When cooking casseroles from frozen, put them in a cold oven. It decreases the likelihood of your dish shattering.  Non-Soups: Broccoli Mac Sloppy Joes (in this house is usually lentil sloppy joe's because it's one of the vegetarian meals Pops truly LIKES) Marinara sauce (because I didn't have canning supplies until recently Sausage gravy! I love making a batch of sausage gravy and then being able to heat it up in th...

When I was in culinary school, one of the other students showed the class a trick to peeling ginger without losing any of the flavorful fresh. She used a teaspoon to gently scrape off the papery peel, leaving all of the flesh in tact. This is the same person who taught me to peel hard-boiled eggs. Crack the shell thoroughly on the counter, peel off the large end where the air bubble is, and stick a teaspoon between the shell and flesh. Move the spoon around the shell, separating the membrane from the egg white, and you may be able to pull the shell off completely, still attached to the membrane. Sometimes you have to break the membrane down the side and peel off in a flatter piece rather than an egg-shaped one, but that's ok. It saves your thumbs from little poke and slices peeling the shell by hand! Tip: When rotating the egg, lift the lead edge of the spoon into the shell. You may break the membrane early and have to slip the spoon between the shell and egg again to get the ...

My mom is a list-maker. She doesn't have any special paper that she uses, although more often than not her lists could be found on the backs of used envelopes. She makes lists for everything from a quick trip to the grocery store, to a 3-week cross-country vacation. Clothing to take, food to prepare, things to do before she leaves... These lists don't have any special place they live, either, we'd just find them lying around randomly and have no idea whether they were being used currently or not. But she always knew. So when I say I'm a list-maker, you know I come by it honestly. I have gone through two notebooks that were specifically set aside for packing lists, and countless memo pads, blank sheets out of college notebooks, and yes even the backs of used envelopes. I definitely prefer the method I've perfected, using memo pads for grocery lists and a notebook in my planner for prepping for trips, everything from an overnight out of town to the three-week bender...

In three weeks, I'm headed on vacation for three weeks to see blood- and chosen-family over the holidays. Mr. Moon will at that point be committing to commuting 13 miles each way by bike to work for what will presumably be 3 days a week if the schedule stays roughly the same, and so I'm anticipating he will be low on energy and definitely lower on time than we have right now. So we are spending these next three weeks planning ahead so that the meals while I'm gone are taken care of. Freezer meals that can be re-heated in the crockpot and oven as soups and casseroles, mostly. Things that even on the worst days, anyone can pull out and cook with less effort than picking up take-out. And only a couple that will require prepping sides to go with. Rather than make it more difficult on ourselves, it means that over the next couple weeks we will also be having some of these items for dinner. But it's a switch in thinking that I'd like to get everyone else used to doing, ...

Did you ever hear the tip about using old beer as slug bait? I hadn't, until I had something eating my cauliflower leaves and saw one on my garlic. 2+2 probably = 4. Enter: the beer that's been skunking around in the garage for a good long while, which Mr. Moon and I are too afraid to taste test in case it has in fact gone bad. A couple cups of beer set near the cauliflower and broccoli, removal of any chewed leaves, and we haven't seen any more damage to them. I did, however, have to snag Mr. Moon to help me save the garlic yesterday, as I went out to pick some herbs for the fish and saw at least a dozen munching on the garlic scapes. We used a skewer and a chopstick (I recommend the former rather than the latter) to pluck them off and drop them into the beer. Later, I stuck my head out and watched another one crawl its way into the bowl. I want to feel bad about killing living creatures, but as far as I'm concerned there are worse ways to go than drowning in beer...

I saw this around somewhere and had to try it. The idea is that you can put the white-ends of scallions in water and they will grow, and that you can just keep cutting them off and letting them regrow indefinitely. Last week sometime I took all the white ends of some scallions and put them in water. A few days later, I added some other scallions I'd used. Kept the water changed every few days, used some as needed. This is the result! It seems like it takes about 4 days to grow from nubbins to a full, useable stalk. I'm considering getting another bunch of stems to use and make starts, because what I have here I use most or all of at once and then have to wait. I'd like to have at least a couple different batches going so that I always have some available to use. *Tip: Cut them all the way down into the white part of the onion, past any spots where they split off. Otherwise they seem to grow slower and not as sturdily, the tips get brown, and you end up with some spot...

A couple weeks ago, I was so fed up with the playlist I'd been using in my car that I switched to a different one. And promptly skipped through every single track until iTunes told me I didn't have anything else in that playlist. I almost threw my phone out the window. Then I went to switch out my music to something else and I couldn't find anything that wasn't so overplayed in my head that I could even listen to it. Sounds like it's time for some new music. So I posted to Facebook, asking for some non-American artists to try out. I enjoy listening to super-poppy music in the car and while I'm cleaning because it gives me energy, so I was looking for something similar from other countries. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of British artists in the responses. I also spent some time looking for Australian top 40 hits to find some of their artists. I love Pandora for this reason. I may have only gotten a few responses, some of them even similar artists, but I coul...

Do you have allergies? I've been blessed with not just obscure food allergies (asparagus? grapes? really?) but seasonal ones. Pine trees and cottonwoods seem to be my arch nemeses, but there are some other villains in there too. An important thing to know, that I only discovered within the last year: The technical definition of an allergy is an immune response to the protein strands. When it comes to food, a reaction anything else is an intolerance. It totally explains why I don't have problems with aged balsamic vinegar that has had time to denature the proteins, but wine gives me hives (and trouble breathing). It also explains why some people have reactions to raw foods that are fine once cooked. Honestly though, this post wasn't supposed to be about food allergies. I don't know if there just weren't enough of the offensive plants in Seattle to trigger my allergies, or if they didn't even grow there at all. I know there were pine trees, but I'm not s...

One of my favorite blogs is Young House Love . Recently, Sherri & John from YHL instituted a project they call, "Dude, Get On That Already!" It's a feature of those projects that you keep meaning to get to, but just never quite do... For us, since moving in, it was the bathroom. I got it started, and little pieces were coming together here or there but... let's just say, Musical Boxes was a regular game in that room for the last month or so. I wasn't partial to the Americana decor Mum had in there, but I would have been alright if it had stayed. However, in order to help us feel more at home and welcomed, Mum insisted I make it my own. So I did! Once upon a time I had a Celestial themed bathroom and loved it, but I never really completed it. Still, when I needed a new shower curtain last year and found a Celestial one at Value Village, I couldn't pass it up! Same with this Sun basket. I had no idea how we would use it, but I knew it would look great. And h...

If there are two phrases I've heard most over the last month, it's these two. One of them is a disaster in the making, the other is the number one way to organization in our home. "Where does this live?" -- If it's in your hand, or on the counter, or on the floor, ask yourself this question. But baby steps! Pick one! I started organizing The Bachelor Pad of Mr. Moon's when I moved in by simply asking this every time I had something in my hand. Eventually, I had to pick something up off the counter or the floor, and then it would be in my hand! And then I would ask, and it would go there. If I hadn't picked it up to move it yet, then it obviously wasn't a priority yet. * Tip: If you have something that doesn't have a home, make one that's logical for it. Some blogs will tell you to designate a basket for these things, and then find homes for them when the basket is full. Problem is, I never found a home for that basket! I seemed to do much ...

There are plenty of tutorials for cast iron care across the internet, I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here. I had a great system for caring for my cast iron pans, and they have lasted me for years, and will likely get passed onto my kids. But when switching away from paper towels, I had a few hiccups in my system. I used to wipe the vegetable oil onto my cast iron with a paper towel, and though it gave me lint issues, it was how I was taught and I didn't know a better way. I tried to delegate one washcloth to being soaked in oil, but it got black and I put it in the pile with the dirty towels to get washed. Then before it got washed, I needed to season my pan again, and I ended up with three different cloths that were saturated in oil and nothing would clean it out. Worse, they had mingled with the rest of the towels and I have a bunch of towels that still don't absorb very well due to the grease content. (Cleaning those is a project for Future Heather.) Insert som...

I grew up in a house with paper towels, disposable napkins, disinfectant cleaners that were different for every project and every room, paper plates for busy weeks/camping/picnics, and lungs that burned for most of my childhood and early adult years. Last year, Mr. Moon and I didn't buy a single roll of paper towel, didn't use disposable napkins in our home, and gave away most of our cleansers to Freecyclers and roommates as they moved. Our last move, the only cleaning products we took with us was a box of borax and a bottle of vinegar (though to be fair, we were out of baking soda and needed to pick up more). How did we do it? Cloth Napkins: I had snagged a few from various restaurants through the years, and I picked up a few more at thrift stores because they matched my kitchen. With the kitchen on one floor and the TV room where we ate most of our dinners on another, we had a basket of cloth napkins in both locations for any time we needed them. Typically, we would use a na...

The packing process is really testing my commitment to eating whole foods, and not eating out. I decided -- ahead of time! knowing this would happen! Yay forethought! -- to do the best I can, and not to beat myself up over my food choices between this past week and this next one. Also any time we are away from wherever our kitchen is set up. Once moved completely and not bouncing back and forth between Portland and Seattle, I will make an effort to do better. In the meantime, I think I've been doing very well. We have a meal plan set up and all the dry ingredients necessary for the next few days' meals. The kitchen being trashed on Wednesday so that I couldn't even make myself lunch, I went to Chipotle--besides being a not-so-guilty pleasure, at least most of what they have there is natural and organic. The ingredients are identifiable, at the very least. But we got back on the home-eating bandwagon as soon as that evening and have been doing very well since. I'm proud ...