Little Bro takes a Wife

Almost 7 years ago, when this blog was spankin' fresh and new, I posted that my big bro Andrew married Monica, making our family a bit bigger and much better. On August 15, Chris married his beautiful bride Jenny at the Orthodox Cathedral in Minneapolis...

Special moment alert! My handsome firstborn ushered me into the church. He took his ushering duties very seriously.

Sadly, my mom was unable to attend the ceremony, having just gotten out of the hospital after a nearly week-long stay to treat a pulmonary embolism (scary as heck!). She has recovered to a mostly normal state now. So here's Jenny and Chris with dad...

Not sure how, but my lucky bros and I all managed to marry up. It is wonderful to welcome Jenny into our family. Isn't the church lovely? It had just been repainted and renovated.

Rounding out August, Adrienne turned 14 a few days ago...yikes! She'll be a freshman this year. Like last year, she picked out most of her gifts herself at the mall. Some make-up, hair junk, and clothes, including t-shirts for Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. We redid her bedroom earlier this summer by way of a fresh coat of paint and new furniture. She was tired of the pale pink walls, so it's now a bluish-purple room with a white daybed and dresser. Fancy schmancy!

more about vegetables

Because, could there be a more exciting topic? In this week's farm share were these crayziee things:

So I thought, a weird white carrot? They do come in other colors, says the internet. Parsnips maybe? Most pics of those have them fatter on the top, though. My guess is skinny slightly under ripe parsnips. Dunno how I can figure out how to cook them if I don't know for sure what they are.

Also in the box was a giant yam. A really big one, almost football sized.  Almost...more like Tom Brady sized. I followed a recipe for some baked yam fries. At dinner I told the kids how that one yam made a whole pizza pan of fries. Michael said he thought this is a vegetable? I said "It is a vegetable... uh, are you thinking of a yak?" He said "So what's a yam?" When I'd been saying yam, he was thinking meat, and yet the yam fries looked decidedly un-meatlike. That's how strange the kids find this experience - if we're eating such peculiar vegetables, why not Himalayan cows?

*note that the internet says us ignorant North Americans often actually mean sweet potato when we say yam. Wiki proclaims "Yams are a monocot (a plant having one embryonic seed leaf) and from the Dioscoreaceae family. Sweet Potatoes are a dicot (a plant having two embryonic seed leaves) and are from the Convolvulacea family. They are therefore about as distant as two flowering plants can be."
Emphasis mine. For shame America!

Walking Dead withdrawal

Nate and I started watching The Walking Dead on Netflix several months ago, and finished a while back. Haven't yet figured out what will take it's place at 9:00 p.m. when the kids are safely banished to their rooms. We don't have cable, so have to wait for the new season to hit Netflix near the release of the next one. Except for things like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was released on Netflix, so there ya go. UKS was pretty good, but we liked The IT Crowd even better (from across the pond) which I don't recall how we stumbled upon...but we finished all three shows recently and are suffering the first world problem of TV show limbo. Oh the horror. Life is so bleak when there are no new gory zombie episodes awaiting you at the close of the day.

And you know what else is horrible? Zucchini. And summer squash. At least to our poor kids, who are forced to eat lots of veggies this summer, 'cuz we bought a CSA share from our local garden center thing. A half bushel every week of a variety of healthy grub. Some of the stuff gets soft in the fridge while I'm trying to figure out what the sam hill to do with it. A couple times I've ended up letting the kids chuck stuff like dirty old beets off the deck. Life is too short to eat beets.

Anyhoo, I scrounge around Pinterest for recipe ideas, but that gets old. I just want the recipe, not 12 paragraphs interspersed with scads of photos of food in various stages of preparation. Sure, some things are tricky to make so photos & details are fine then, but, it's usually overboard. I'm gonna go ahead and scroll over that story of how you came to post that snickerdoodle cream cheese bar recipe 'cuz you happened upon kangaroos at the zoo the other day and their charming shade of hair color reminded you of that delicious cinnamon-y treat you haven't made in a while blah de blah. Blah. And the commenters can be just as bad. Roughly 56 consecutive versions of "Oh this looks divine! Can't wait to try it!!!" Well maybe that strokes the ego of the blog author a bit, but I want hard data. Did it turn out? Did you make changes? Get back to me when you've actually made the darn thing and can post some useful information! Okay, I'm not actually super bitter about it, but I don't think my sarcasm is entirely unwarranted.