Red Cedar

Having skipped December due to the erratic nature of holiday-eating, I am back with a month of meal-planning to kick off the new year!

Some of these recipes might *sound* elaborate, but for the most part they are not (and if they require more prep or cooking time I have scheduled them for weekends or will put ingredients together ahead of time). Meal plans help me to cook food that is healthier and more interesting, ensure variety in our diet, and cut way down on food waste. Additionally, planning has eliminated impulse food buys and cut the grocery bill in half (I notice a significant difference on weeks that I have a list in hand versus when I don’t).  If getting organized around after work dinners is a resolution for you – I highly recommend getting started – keeping your own schedule, food parameters and interests in mind.

In the last few weeks I’ve started using the site/app Pepperplate to collect and organize recipes as well as put them into a planner and create shopping lists. It takes some time to get set-up with the recipe collection, but once you get going, I can imagine this to be really helpful (I’m hoping by February I can do my entire month of meal planning using the site).

Here is what we are eating in January:

Wednesday: 1 Whatever is in the fridge and still edible when we get home from Victoria
Thursday: 2 Sweet Potato and Quinoa Salad, w/ grilled chicken breast
Friday: 3 Lentil Soup, w/bread & greens on the side
Saturday: 4 Portuguese Fish Supper
Sunday: 5 (Band Practice) Baked whole salmon, wild mushroom risotto, caesar salad
Monday: 6 Turkey Tetrazinni made with brown rice w/roasted vegetables
Tuesday: 7 Penne with Roasted Tomatoes, Garlic, and White Beans w/cold sliced vegetables
Wednesday: 8 West African Peanut Soup with Chicken
Thursday: 9 Pork Chops with Fennel and Caper Sauce w/steamed green beans
Friday: 10 Leftovers
Saturday: 11 Venison Pot pie w/green salad
Sunday: 12 (Band Practice – Dinner TBD)
Monday: 13 Polenta Pizza with Spinach, Mushrooms, Bacon & Tomatoes w/
Tuesday: 14 Roasted Salmon with Shallot Grapefruit sauce w/steamed potatoes and carrots
Wednesday: 15 Pork Ragu w/green salad (cook pork shoulder on Monday in advance)
Thursday: 16 Red Lentil Curry w/brown basmati and cold sliced veggies
Friday: 17 Leftovers from earlier in the week
Saturday: 18 Out
Sunday: 19 (Band Practice) Chicken and Veggie Pot Pie
Monday: 20 Portuguese One Pot Chicken and Potatoes
Tuesday: 21 Skillet Gnocchi with Chard and White Beans w/sliced tomato salad (cook Barley for next night)
Wednesday: 22 Mushroom Barley Salad w/Grilled Italian Sausage
Thursday: 23 Leftovers
Friday: 24 Mexican Beans and Rice w/fresh chopped peppers, tomatoes, avocado
Saturday: 25 Seared Duck Breast with Amarula w/roasted yams and potatoes and green salad
Sunday: 26 (Band Practice – Dinner TBD)
Monday: 27 Turkey Rice Soup
Tuesday: 28 Pork and Plums w/spinach/walnut salad
Wednesday: 29 (Salon – Dinner for twenty) Vegetarian and Meat Lasagnas, Caesar Salad, Bread w pudding for dessert
Thursday: 30 Chinese Beef and Broccoli
Friday: 31 Leftovers from earlier in the week

Finally get to share the Christmas gifts I made this year — eight in total — which is less than I would have liked to accomplish (really wanted to make a sweater for my partner but that will have to be a birthday gift as well). Pretty happy with my first amigurumi critters (niece and nephew are getting those today) — looking forward to a lot more making in 2014!

It’s amazing how events overtake us towards the middle of December, isn’t it? I mean, just two weeks ago I was in the interior woods in -30 weather having a massive bonfire, and today I am sitting and fretting about getting the last Christmas present finished for my nephew and realizing that I haven’t even posted any photos of the Big Burn yet!

To recap (if you are not a regular reader): Me, my partner and two friends bought a very scraggly and sloped third of an acre in the interior of BC this past June. We are now working on getting it prepped to build a fairly rustic cabin (having nearly finished the outhouse this fall), which has involved a backhoe and a lot of hand clearing. This clearing and a collapsed cabin resulted in a monumental pile of debris which needed burning once there was enough snow on the ground…. and that happy event came together the first weekend of December.

To facilitate this massive fire, we cooked up a big pot of beans, bought a lot of beer  and diesel and invited several friends to join us – friends who were instrumental in helping keep the fire going in the cold. And wow, it was cold. So The Big Burncold that the beers we opened froze in our hands before we could finish drinking them! So cold that every time you stepped away from the fire the snot immediately froze in your nose!

But it was also clear, and not windy – which meant it was beautiful weather for a fire and even though some tree trunks caught a little bit, the frozen-ness of it all stopped the fire from spreading beyond its perimeter.

We are one more stage down on getting the lot prepped for clearing – now onto the paperwork for permits!

Since starting grad school I have fallen seriously out of practice with recreational reading. So out of practice that recently for a “light read” I picked up Albert Camus’ The Plague – an existential novel about a town quarantined due to the plague which serves as an allegory for all of life in the shadow of the certain death we all face. Yup. That’s some light reading right there.

It’s not like I have a bunch of fiction sitting on my “to-read” pile right now either. I stopped purchasing reading material some time ago in deference to the public library (cheaper! awesome selection! less wasteful!) – but school keeps getting in the way and, I have returned almost all my “fun” reading to the library on its return date, unread.

Thus it appears that I need to re-arm my personal library if I am to get any recreational reading in over the next semester of school. I feel out of touch on the fiction front these days but after asking my Facebook posse this is the list of books I’ve decided to read over the next couple of months:

• Wild, Cheryl Strayed (I started this Thursday and am loving it).
• A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
• The Orenda, Joseph Boyden
• The Luminaries,  Elaine Catton
• Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
• We are Water, Wally Lamb
• Tomato Red, Daniel Woodrell
• Longbourn, Jo Baker
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
• The Circle, Dave Eggers
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

This list alone is one of the reasons I am glad not to be entering into sixty-hour weeks in 2014! The best thing about lapsing on the reading front is that now there are so many great books waiting for me. So although it is too early for new year’s resolutions – this list stands as some kind of commitment to myself, and my need for good literature in my life always.

Yesterday, I received a rejection letter. That is –  a letter telling me that although I was a stellar candidate, I had not got the job I interviewed for last Friday. (That interview, incidentally, took up so much brain space once it was scheduled that I haven’t been posting here, never mind the fact I have so much to share with you!)

The job was for a large organization whose mission I support wholeheartedly, it paid a 1/3 more than I am currently making, and it drew directly on the skill set that I have spent the last twenty years developing. By all rights I should be crushed right now, for this position would have once represented my “dream” job which is why my friend inside recruited me to apply for it several months ago.

But instead of feeling spurned, or self-hating when the note arrived in my inbox yesterday – I felt incredibly, unmistakably, relieved. As in, happy to see the rejection confirmed!

And why is that? Because during the interview they quite candidly told me that the expected hours of work for the next year or so would be sixty (or more) per week, with some indeterminate amount of travel. SIXTY hours per week! For the record, I currently work thirty hours per week as I reduced my schedule when I started grad school two years ago. I knew that this organization would want me to work a lot more – say, perhaps, fifty hours per week – and that would include weekends/evenings plus travel. But when an interview starts out with sixty hours per week as a minimum, you know it’s going to be that plus more.

Five years ago, those kinds of hours wouldn’t have deterred me – as I spent most of my life on the road for my union, plus worked a full time job. Back when I met Brian, I was frequently occupied for 50 or more hours per week between travel and work, which is just one of the reasons our dating progressed at a leisure pace in the beginning – I was never around! And when I was around, I was pretty exhausted from time changes and nights spent at meetings and in hotel rooms.

But this interview situation caused me to confront the fact that my life has changed since those days, and I no longer possess the drive to work for anyone or anything the way I once did. And it’s mostly not even about the fact that I have a family now (husband and teenager are able to take care of themselves!), but a lot more to do with the fact that my life is rich with activities and possibilities – all of which I would have to give up if I turned to working in all my waking hours.

And that is what I can’t imagine – having to turn away from our new piece of land and the cabin build, sewing, crochet, reading, grad school, gardening, friends, community organizing, playing music, camping, throwing fabulous parties, loving, cooking, meditating, hiking, writing, hanging with the niece and nephew, keeping house, and trying out new things all the time – in order to simply work. Work for a cause, yes. Work for an organization I support, yes. But work, nonetheless.

Which is not how I want to spend *all* my time. Some of my time, of course. I accept the necessity of work and I’m lucky to have a good and well-paid position that allows me to work less than full-time so I can pursue my *life* in the hours when I do not belong to someone else.

I don’t deride anyone who takes their main life sustenance from work, but as I grow into an exuberant middle-age, I realize that I am not a person who wants every waking hour to be spent in the employ of someone else. Nor do I have a single burning passion of my own to turn into a business. I am a generalist at life! Which means I have to do a little of everything in order to be satisfied, and it also means I pick up a lot of skills, abilities and knowledge along the way. (I used to be ashamed of my generalist nature, but no longer!)

In any case, I was relieved to get the note that said I was not wanted for 60+ hours of service per week because it meant I didn’t even get to make the decision  in the end. I was 99.9% sure I would turn it down…… but there was always a chance that .1% of me would win out…. the smidgen that still believes there is a dream job for me out there if only I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit more of myself. It is that .1% that makes me crazy, much of the time, that questions why I don’t have a clearer vocation or higher calling…..

So grateful I have a whole life of good things to counterbalance that tiny, crazy part of me!