Alright, so, if anyone is actually still left reading this after my cinematic endeavours… I will now attempt to bore you to tears with my mad soupmaking skillz!
I mentioned yesterday that I’d baked a ham. Well, although Rob has been putting a dent in it, there is quite a bit of that ham left. I’m not a huge ham fan, and didn’t want to still be eating ham in two weeks, so I decided that I would make at least some of it into a soup. I made my mom’s mom’s split pea and ham soup. Which, although I don’t love ham, I love this soup. And since no one else will eat it (Rob has an aversion to peas, to put it lightly), it’s all mine!!!!!
So… here’s the recipe (sort of).
Take 1 lb (about 1 package, if you get the 450 g. packages, which is what we have here) of dried split peas. I have never seen it done with anything but the yellow ones, but I suppose if you wanted, you could use the green ones. Put them in a bowl and put cold water on them. This is just for cleaning them – because sometimes? They still have like, pebbles and sticks in them. The sticks/pebbles/whatever usually float to the top. I’ve never found any, but it’s how I learned to do things and you never know what might happen. Then strain them out in a colander or whatever.
Next take the peas and put them in a pot. Cover them with about 8 cups of water. Boil it up. I let it get to a boil, then I put it on simmer for like… an hour. Check on it now and then (I set a timer to go off every 10 or so minutes). At some point after the first 10 minutes, I threw in the big honkin’ bone from the ham. If you don’t have a ham bone, you can just put in some cut up ham. After about half an hour the peas should be totally mooshy and actually not look pea-like at all anymore – they’re all just a thick liquid. That is good. Take the ham bone out. Cut the ham off it and put it back in the soup. Give the bone to your dog (or the wiener dog across the street from you). If you like onion and celery and carrots, then dice up some onion and celery and carrot and put them in the soup. Keep it simmering (and keep stirring it every once in awhile) for the next half hour, hour. Put in some pepper. I don’t add salt because ham is salty enough. About halfway through I ended up putting in another 2 cups of water because it was thickening up like crazy.
Rob did end up going to sleep for about another half hour. I’m watching MASH and baking a ham. We were going to go to the mall to window-shop for Christmas gift ideas (super early! I know!) (well, super early for ME, maybe not so much for those of you who finish all your shopping in April) but decided agin that when we realized that in one of our local malls, basically there’s a grocery store and a bunch of empty spaces just waiting for retail franchises to appear. The other mall has like, a Telus store, a Claire’s, and Zellers (AKA Canadian Walmart).
So, speaking of that ham. I’ve never baked a ham before. I’m very afraid.
It’s so early in the morning! Rob and I both woke up at 7 am.
WE DO NOT LIKE THIS.
Rob, however, is now making noises about going back to bed. I’m… not. I’m AWAKE!
my 4th (5th?) post during a one-hour period. Sorry ’bout that, folks.
I was all pissed off last night because I need to take a medication. Our insurance doesn’t cover this medication, so we pay out of pocket for it. $12 per pill. Granted I only need six pills a month but that’s still $70+ dollars that on our budget, we could really use elsewhere. So I was spouting off at Rob about how all this crap stresses me out and I thought it would be a good idea to move far far away (because if you move far far away, stressful crap doesn’t follow you? heh. yeah I’m logical). Then he clued in (because I’d been drooling over some beautiful photosonline and listening to this song on an endless loop), and said to me “You know, even if we move to NC health insurance will still be something we have to deal with”.
So as a teacher there are many little “extra” things that I have to do sometimes with my classes. For example, a couple of weeks ago I had to go through the school’s lockdown procedures with my homeroom. Just to tell them that in case of an intruder, or an incident in the neighbourhood or a severe weather warning etc. etc. etc. what would happen. The bottom line is that they are to go to one of the “safe zones” in the school and wait until the lockdown was over.
Most of the kids were fine with it. Then there were a couple who were muttering about how they were going to start bringing self defense products to school (I quickly put the kibosh on that one).
But I had to hold back laughter when one of the (bigger, ‘badass’-er) guys in my class raised his hand and with all seriousness and somewhat nervously asked,
Our house is all pretty utilitarian, architecturally. I mean it’s on a former Air Force base. It’s not as though the people building it were thinking “Oh, a family will live here for 20 years, let’s make it homey” – more like 20 months (at most). I don’t mind, though. We’ve decorated, and made it our own. But then I go to websites and drool over the beautiful maxim lighting page and see some of the lighting options they have there (this one in particular calls to me, except I don’t like the frilly edges of the lampshades) and I think of how much more we could do with the place. And then I remember that knowing me, what would happen is that we would pay some crazy price for a ceiling lamp, and then it would stay in the box for three years, because neither of us would know how to put it up and we’re both kind of lazy.
Does anyone remember the episode of ‘kate and alli‘ (allie? ally?) where they are going to get kicked out of their apartment (I think) because they’re two families living in a one-family home?
Wait.
Does anyone even really remember the show ‘kate and allie?’ (I’m settling on allie). Anyway I don’t remember much of the show because I was only like, 7 or 8, but I remember this episode because there’s one part where they’re talking about pretending to be a gay family and one of them says something like “I realize I haven’t used my heterosexuality much lately but…”.
I remember this because that’s when I asked my Mom what ‘heterosexuality’ meant. I don’t remember her answer, but I remember the surprised look on her face.
