Happy Hanuchristmakwanzivus.
Family and travel. No posts today.
Make the most of the holiday.
Cheap Lo Mein
- Image via Wikipedia
I’ve never been a fan of making Chinese food. It always seems to involve ingredients I don’t stock and several hours of prep work. It’s not usually worth the hassle. Several months ago, I began to notice that, when we went out for Chinese, all of my kids had the same favorite dish: lo mein. It would be nice to be able to have the dish without having to pay restaurant prices, so I did some research and came up with a quick, easy, and cheap recipe for lo mein. It takes 3 dishes and 20 minutes.
Lo mein has 3 components: noodles, sauce, and the rest.
Noodles
I use spaghetti noodles. I leave them a bit al dente, because they will spend some time in the hot lo mein sauce, which will cook them a bit more. 1 box of noodles is enough for two meals for my family of 5.
Sauce
- Chicken broth, 4 cups
- Rice wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons
- Sesame oil, 2 tablespoons
- Red pepper flakes to taste, about 1 teaspoon
- Soy sauce, 1/4 cup
- Sugar, 1 teaspoon
Mix it all in a bowl, then wisk until the sugar is dissolved. Nuke until hot. I do this while the wok is heating up and the noodles are cooking, so the pepper flavor has a better chance to blend with the liquid.
The Rest
- Sesame oil
- Minced garlic
- 1 Onion, cut to whatever size you like
- Protein, chopped
- Vegetables, chopped
- Ginger powder, to taste
Chop everything first. When you start cooking, you will be busy cooking, not prepping.
Get the pan hot. Splash in some oil, then toss in the meat when the oil is hot. I usually use chicken, but any meat you like–or even no meat at all–will work.
When the meat is almost completely cooked, add the onions and ginger. Stir constantly.
When the onions are barely translucent, start adding the vegetables, in the order they will take to cook. You can use any vegetable you want. Broccoli, carrots, and peas work well. Whenever the grocery store has a sale on stir-fry vegetable packs, we stock up for about $2/bag. Just defrost ’em before you start cooking, so it’s possible to chop them up, and they work great. Otherwise, any vegetables you have on hand will work. Add them, and stir constantly.
At some point, toss in a spoonful of minced garlic. When depends on how much garlic you want to taste. The earlier you add it, the tamer the flavor.
When it’s all cooked, spoon in some lo mein sauce and toss to coat. Remove from heat.
Serve
Spoon the rest of the sauce over the noodles and toss. You will have extra sauce, so don’t add it all at once. You want the noodles coated, not floating.
Combine the noodles with the stir-fry and serve.
If you buy the noodles, vegetables, and meat on sale, this meal costs about $10 to make. Like I said, that’s two complete meals for 5 people, 3 of whom have adult appetites. The rice wine vinegar and sesame oil aren’t cheap, but you don’t use much, so the cost per meal is negligible.
Friends and Acquaintances
“Friends help you move. Good friends help you move bodies.”
-unknown
Some people have dozens of friends. I’m not that guy.
I have 6.
Everybody in the world can be divided into 4 categories.
- Strangers. A xenophobe’s nightmare. These are the people you don’t know, whether they are passing you on the sidewalk, or newborns on the opposite side of the world.
- Acquaintances. These are the people you’ve met, mostly in passing. They tend not to have much effect on your life. You may pass a friendly bus ride in conversation, but it’s nothing that sticks. A waitress, the clerk at the store, a friend’s latest date; these are the people you interact with for just a moment and rarely think about further.
- Friendlies. Most people call these folks friends. I don’t. I’m friendly with them, hence the name, but it’s not true friendship. Often, they are either my wife’s friends, or my friends’ wives. Sometimes, they are a friend of a friend that I only see at parties, or a coworker that I get along with, but never see outside of work. We’re friendly, but not obliged. I may help with some things, but it’s not necessarily a priority. I’ll go to a funeral, but probably won’t help plan it.
- Friends. To me, calling someone a friend is a big deal. I’m willing to do a lot for my friends. They are able to command large amounts of my time, and ask any number of favors. If needed, I’ll open my home or help demolish their’s. Loyalty, honesty, trust, respect, and companionship are all a part of my definition of a friend. If a friend needs help, I’ll come running. In return, I expect the same.
Family tends to fall into the same analogous categories.
It sounds cold, but I hesitate to let people graduate into the final category. My wife used to try to “set me up” with people that she thought I’d like to be friends with, thinking I was sad to have so few friends. It took years for her to realize that I was happy. It’s a matter of quality over quantity. Most of the friends I have, I’ve had for 10 years or more. I’ve known each of them for at least 5 years, not that time is a requirement.
Moving people into the “friends” category is a lot like dating. You get along, so you invite the potential friends out for a drink, one on one. You feel them out to see if they are compatible. You meet their families, share some food, build some history. If it all works out, eventually, you consider them a true friend, even if you couldn’t mark the date of the transition.
You wouldn’t marry everyone you date, so why would turn everyone you basically get along with into a friend?
Do you have a lot of friends? What marks friendship for you?
Becoming a Landlord
Over the weekend, I had some family and friends over to my mother-in-law’s house to price things–thousands of things–for the upcoming garage/estate sale. If you’ve ever felt a need to own 30 identical paring knives, you should stop by.
While we were over there, I had my contractor look at the house (Thanks, Dad!). Shortly after the sale, we want to start working to bring the house up to date.
Here’s the list of repairs so far:
- Replace storm windows all around the house, since all of them have had the screens and screen frames vanish.
- Trim the windows that are missing trim and replace the trim on the windows that have oddly colored trim.
- Put locks on all of the windows.
- Trim the window between the kitchen and the living room that used to be an actual window. Add a shutter.
- Trim the archway between the dining room and living room.
- New linoleum in the kitchen.
- Remove two cabinets in the kitchen to open up counter space.
- New ceiling panels in the kitchen.
- Sheetrock and plaster repair all over the main floor.
- Remove linoleum from the dining room.
- Sand/buff/varnish hardwood floors under the dining room’s linoleum.
- Replace attic access panel.
- Seal bathtub surround.
- Replace front screen door.
- Replace back door
- Install ceiling tiles in basement.
- Finish basement bathroom.
- Finish basement walls. They are sheetrocked, but not mudded, taped, or painted.
- Paint basement floor.
- Paint basement steps.
- Paint the entire main floor.
- Install spare cabinets in the basement for a utility area near the washer and dryer.
While that’s happening, we’re having the outside landscaped. We also need to take the city-mandated landlord class and file for the business license that will allow us to rent a property that we aren’t inhabiting.
The good news is that we have potential renters already. Assuming they are still ready to shack up when her lease is up in February, we won’t have a tenant hunt. My wife has known the couple for years and is positive they’ll be responsible people. If not, that’s what a security deposit is for.
My Favorite Present
My favorite Christmas present this year was the one I gave to my 13 year old son.
Allow me to walk you through his evening….
First, he opened one of his presents. It was just a small box, about 3 inches by 4. A Japanese puzzle box. Inside the box was a note that read:
Closed off in the smallest room you will find a clue to bring you closer to your prize.
When he checked the cabinet below the sink in our basement bathroom, he found another note that sent him to my business website one a page with a url that contained “the square of my children”. When he eventually figured out that I meant their ages, not their quantity, he found a clue on my website.
This lead him to a section of his Minecraft server. It’s effectively a no-man’s land because he and his friends set off a nuke and turned it into a giant pit. They fall down and die there. Inside the pit was a cave. Inside the cave was a clue. The clue read:
Grandma and Grandpa love you.
What do you do when someone says they love you? You either get scared of the commitment and end a perfectly good relationship, or you say “I love you, too”. When the kid finally called his grandparents to tell them he loves them, they told him to give his parents a kiss.
I’m a jerk.
He came over and gave me a hug and a kiss. I handed him a piece of paper. When he looked at it, he asked if it was supposed to be torn in half. I reminded him that he has two parents, so Mom got a hug and a kiss, too. The resulting clue read:
The Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
Naturally, this points to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but the boy hadn’t read far enough into the book to understand the reference, so he had to hit google. After spending time looking for chapter 42, he finally thought to look at page 42, which had this clue:
My Little Pegasus
Two steps to the right
Two steps forward
Two steps up
This clue started at the My Little Pony I set next to a Pegasus in my daughters’ room. The boy was in dense mode because he had to ask his sister what a Pegasus was. She also had to suggest he open the closet door when one step forward made him bump his nose on it.
For all of that work, he got the Ticket to Ride game. He laughed the entire way through the treasure hunt, then decided he hated the whole process. However, for two nights running, he’s stopped the video games to play his new game with his family.
It’s a present he’ll remember forever.
Not the Center of the Universe
On Sunday, I dropped Punk #3 off at a birthday party. She walked into the yard, saw her friends and took off running. I confirmed times with the birthday girl’s mother and left. I went home and had Punk #2 help me with repairs to Coffin #1. It is Halloween season, after all.
When I came back two hours later, they had just finished eating cake and were about to open up presents, so I got to hang around for a while.
I noticed some amazing things:
- Fully 75% of this family’s living room was devoted to play space for the kid. As you walk in the front door, you get to see a giant pile of toys and kid-craft crap. Most of what is traditionally a gathering area was taken over by kid.
- Of the dozen or so children who came to the party, close to half of the parents stayed. Really, is your precious little snowflake so endangered by her friends that you can’t come up with something better to do that watch her play with her friends and ignore you for two hours while under the supervision of the resident parent?
- Clowns. Ok, it wasn’t technically a clown, but a guy named Mr. Fun who hands out whoopie cushions and entertains kids while wearing odd clothes counts as a clown, to me. I get it, you want your special little snowflake to have a memorable birthday, but if every party is big and over-the-top, which one will she remember? Maybe she’ll only remember a sense of entitlement.
I very firmly believe that children should not be raised to feel like they are the center of the universe. Not even to Mom & Dad. They need to know that we have lives and interests that aren’t them.
Mothers and fathers NEED to have lives and interests that are entirely separate from their children. If your entire focus for 20+years is on the lives of your little brats, what is going to happen to you when they move out? Are you prepared to abandon two decades of self-training and suddenly become your own person again?
Husbands and wives need to have time to themselves that excludes the children. When the monsters finally leave, you need to be able to have a relationship that doesn’t revolve around who spilled what where and who’s turn is it to clean it up.
Children are not–and should not be–the focal point of a household. Leave them at a birthday party. Let them find a way to entertain themselves for a few hours. Go on a date.
I promise you, letting your kids see their parents happily doing things together–even if it’s gleefully leaving them with a sitter–will do more for their long-term well-being than knowing you’re standing in the corner at a birthday party watching her fake a fart with a 25 cent toy.
Let her be independent. Let her know that other priorities do exist for other people. Let her fall down and scrape her knees. Let her figure out how things work for herself.
That is life, after all. Let her live it and don’t forget to live it for yourself.
