Mendolonium

Everybody knows the phenomenon of walking into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, looking through your pantry, opening the refrigerator – again, and wondering, “What the hell am I going to make for dinner?”  Those are the kind of nights that drive us to ordering pizza or making a run to In-N-Out.  Now there’s nothing wrong with ordering pizza from time-to-time and sometimes a girl just needs a grilled cheese, fries, and a milkshake.  But, personally, I want to really crave something like pizza or fast food in order to eat it, not just succumb to random pantry syndrome.

Last week I read this article interviewing chef Tamar Adler in which she discussed the essentials of her pantry and how she uses up what’s in her fridge.   When asked what her top five pantry essentials are Chef Adler replied:  olive oil, salt, red wine vinegar, eggs and a loaf of good bread.  And she added in garlic as a sixth key ingredient.  I had to agree with the olive oil, salt, eggs, and garlic.  I would probably substitute a lemon for the red wine vinegar (that way you get the acid of the juice and the flavor of the lemon and the zest).  But I have to rather stridently disagree with the choice of bread.  Bread?  I just don’t think of bread as an ingredient.  Instead of bread I would have chosen flour.  I think that her choice of bread was telling.  American food culture glamorizes well-known chefs and the intricate food that they create at the same time that record numbers of Americans rely on food stamps.   I realize that simple, delicious breads are not exciting to most chefs nor to most home cooks – there’s a reason that isn’t a “Baguette Wars” on television.  Yet bread is a staple of the American diet.  If we want all Americans to be able to cook and eat simple, delicious, and affordable meals; we all need to know how to make a loaf of bread (and bread’s fast and easy cousin, quick breads).

I did enjoy Chef Adler’s descriptions of how she uses up what’s in her fridge in ubiquitous frittatas.  At our house we have some sort of frittata/quiche/strata about once a week.  I just wish Chef Adler had chosen some flour for her pantry.  Because while a simple loaf of bread is great, the ingredients and skills to make baguettes, boules, focaccia, muffins  are so much better.

What are your pantry essentials?

 Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a classic “Type-A” personality:  focused on being productive, ambitious, and competitive.  Having children has mellowed me a bit, however, if there is a contest I absolutely want to win it.  So you can imagine my dismay when our utility company recently began sending out “Home Energy Reports” tracking our energy usage against those of our neighbors and our household ranked a dismal #78 out of 100 neighboring homes (with #1 using the least electricity).

We have all the typical electric conveniences of a modern American home:  electric lighting (nearly all with CFL bulbs), a dishwasher (energy star), a refrigerator (energy star) ,three window air conditioners (all energy star), a TV, and a computer, but we have one thing most households around here don’t have – an electric hot water heater.  When we moved in we actually had a hookup for an electric stove as well; which we promptly changed to gas.

Electric appliances are almost unheard of in older homes in Southern California and I wonder why our 1939 house was originally built with them – perhaps the builder of our home was swayed by all the pro-electric propaganda following the opening of the Hoover dam in 1936.  (As an aside, our house had no clothes dryer; electric or gas when we moved in.  Mildred, the 94 year old, original owner that we purchased the house from had simply used a clothesline to dry her clothes all those years.  Shortly after buying the house we took down the rusting old clothesline

and put in plumbing and venting for a gas dryer.  Ironically, two years ago as part of our efforts to use less energy, I had Jeff install a new clothesline and I now try to use the power of the sun to dry our clothes as much as possible, rather than the fancy dryer.)  We’ve known for awhile that the electric hot water heater was a huge energy hog – from casual conversations with our neighbors I knew that our electric bill was significantly higher than theirs and the water heater was really the only difference between their homes and ours.  The water heater also had the old yellow and black “energy guide” sticker still affixed to it which proclaimed that it was an “energy saver” model that was estimated to use 4933 kW/yr (411 kW/month) when it was manufactured in 1994.  Water heaters become less efficient over time with sediment build-up in the tank and it is entirely possible that our water heater was using double or more its original estimated energy perhaps 10,000 kWh per year!  Primarily due to efficiency concerns, a couple of years ago we obtained price estimates for switching from the old electric hot water heater to a tankless gas heater.  Our water heater is located in a half-bathroom off of the kitchen and the plumbers frowned and spoke of venting and moving the heater outside to accommodate a gas tankless model.  In the end, the estimates came in at around $4000 and we gave up on idea of an efficient heater.  Last year, however, I heard about a new hot water heater – the GE Geospring Hybrid Heat Pump.  The Geospring uses at estimated 1856 KWh per year at a water temperature of 135 degrees (we set our heater at 120 degrees so we should see additional energy savings).  Not knowing exactly how much energy our old water heater was consuming we estimated that the new hot water heater would pay for itself in no longer than three years and as little as one year.  As a heat pump the water heater had the additional advantage of cooling the air – which would be quite welcome on the hot, west facing side of the house where the water heater sits.  With that, we took the plunge and bought the water heater in December of last year in order to qualify for a 2010 energy tax credit of 30% of the purchase price.    The water heater then proceeded to sit in our garage for the next nine and half months.  It turns out that while the new heater claimed that it could simply be swapped in place of an existing hot water heater; installation in a 1939 house with an 17 year old hot water heater wasn’t so simple.  After receiving multiple estimates for the installation ranging from $500 to $1100 Jeff spent an afternoon on youtube looking up water heater installs and perusing the aisles of Home Depot.  With $100 of supplies, including a new propane torch* to sweat copper pipe together Jeff set out last week to replace the old heater with the new.  And after 14 hours of hard labor including a foray under the house at midnight to run longer electrical lines Jeff picked up a set of new skills (anybody need a plumber?) and we had a beautiful, space-age, efficient hot water heater installed.

A week later the new hot water heater is working perfectly and I am finding that it has an additional, unexpected benefit of making me strive to be more conscious of my electric use in general.  For so long, I had known that the old energy hogging water heater was far and away our largest source of electric usage and I slacked off on trying to be more efficient with other devices.  I now find myself shutting off the air conditioners unless absolutely necessary, admonishing Thomas for standing in front of the open refrigerator, and shutting off lights like a religious calling.  I don’t know if we’ll ever get to #1 on the home energy report (my neighbors house is vacant and she is #2) but I refuse to allow myself to wallow down at #78.  And after painfully paying bi-monthly utility bills of $500 or more (that covers sewer, trash, water, and electricity for two months) for years I am actually excited to get my bill next month and see just how low we can go.  I also just realized that I have blogged about my excitement for a new appliance – I fear this officially makes me a lame grown-up.

*Bonus:  I can use the torch for creme brulee! Seriously, this is what my pastry instructor uses to brulee desserts.  Awesome.

A couple of weeks ago as Jeff and I sat snacking and discussing our “favorite” topic of conversation – schools – we heard the Pasadena police helicopter begin to buzz overhead.  I know that the helicopter serves a purpose, but I have to admit that I loathe it – I find it impossible to relax or feel safe when it drones overhead like an overgrown mosquito – the sound of the blades signaling that there is yet another criminal to pursue.  There has been a dramatic increase in crime in and around our neighborhood over the past year and it is now common to hear the helicopter circling over our house three or four times a day – annoying enough during the “short” stints of a few minutes of searching and deeply troubling when it flies above for hours – seeking but never finding its prey.  That evening a couple of weeks ago was such a night and after two hours of listening to the helicopter, checking to make sure the house was tightly locked and the alarm system armed, Jeff and I were both noticeably anxious and jumpy wondering what had transpired.

The next morning we found out the grisly details:  a young man had been shot and killed about one third of a mile from our house.  This murder followed three other shootings within half a mile of our house since January of this year.  Then there was also the armed robbery two blocks from the park on the same day of the murder and the armed robbery the week before at the park.  The week after the murder there was a stabbing on the train.  And let us not forget the burglary of our own house in January and the burglaries of dozens of other houses in the neighborhood over the past year.  The phone number to the police department is now programed into my cell phone on speed dial and I have called at least a half a dozen times this year about suspicious cars, drug deals, and kids at the park drinking and bragging about the houses they have broken into.

I distinctly recall one hot July day when Thomas was about eight months old.  Thomas was  particularly fussy and refusing to sleep and so we took him out on a late night walk.  We walked and walked in the refreshingly cool air.  Thomas didn’t fall asleep but the night refreshed us all and Jeff and I chatted happily while Thomas calmly looked around in the stroller.  We didn’t get home until after midnight.  I can’t even count the number of times we’ve taken the train to the farmers market or out to dinner and walked back home well after dark.

We won’t be doing either of those things any more.  We just don’t feel that our neighborhood is safe anymore.

We’ve been thinking about moving, applying for and interviewing for jobs out of state for a couple of years now.  And although we have both had job offers, in the end we decided that we wouldn’t be happier in those particular locations.  Now our equation for happiness has another consideration.  I don’t think that I can be fully happy living somewhere that I don’t feel safe going out after dark.  I don’t think that I can be happy hearing the helicopter overhead two, three, or four times a day.  I don’t think I can be happy when my son asks me when we leave the house, “Mama did you set the alarm, I don’t want any bad guys to get in while we’re gone.”

We don’t know exactly what to do, but we know that we can’t stay here indefinitely anymore.  In the words of one of my neighborhood friends, we need an exit strategy.  So with heavy hearts we have formulated Plan A and Plan B.  Plan A is looking at a few areas to target an intensive job search (right now Portland, Omaha, and Northern VA are under consideration with some Wisconsin and New England possibilities).  However, there is absolutely no guarantee (especially in this shitty economy) of actually finding good job(s) in those areas.  So Plan B is to consider selling our house sometime in the next year and then move to a nearby city with low crime and better schools (assuming we actually find a city with what we believe are better schools – we will be taking tours this fall).  It isn’t clear whether we would buy or rent a house under Plan B.  Both of us are still quite firm in our belief that the housing market has a great deal further to fall, yet renting might send me over the edge of sanity.  Both buying or renting a house in a safer, better school district would cost us considerably more than what we are paying now.  We could afford it – if I worked more and the kids spent more time at daycare – not something any of us want; hence the reason Plan A is our first choice.

In the end, we may be forced by circumstances to choose none of the above and simply stay here.  If it wasn’t for the crime and school issues staying here wouldn’t be keeping me up at night.  I like our house and despite the prevailing American cultural notion of “bigger is better” I am mostly content with the idea of raising three children in a two bedroom house.  In the words of one of our other neighbors who grew up in a rather ghetto area of Los Angeles – this level of crime (and worse) is a way of life in most of the world.  Maybe this is the new normal and we just have to deal with it.

I have a confession to make…

Like most of us, I enjoy a nice hot shower in the morning.  To tell the truth, enjoy isn’t a nearly a strong enough word – I revel in the nearly scalding water on a chilly morning, I love the way I am enveloped in cloud of steam, I relax as I can hear nothing but the sound of the water cascading down around me.  When I am home with the kids by myself, the shower is a quick, perfunctory affair – merely a means of getting clean and ready for the day.  But when Jeff is home in the mornings I take long, luxurious showers – peaceful with the knowledge for that for a few blissful minutes no one will bother me.   Unfortunately, my moment of zen is often rudely interrupted mere seconds after I turn off the water.  I hear the exuberant thud, thud, thud of tiny feet on the wood floor followed by a bang as a little person throws himself against the door and begins to pathetically moan, “Mama…”  I stand there dripping wet, sigh, and then quickly dress.  By the time I am brushing my hair and putting on make-up my number one fan at the door has reached a frenzy.  You would think we had been apart for 20 days, rather than 20 minutes.  Reluctantly I open the door and I then try to juggle putting in contacts and a toddler attempting to figure out if mascara is edible.  Jeff is home, but the boy wants nothing to do with him – the Mama is available now and only she will do.

For me, having children has been wonderful.  Being with them has gives me more happiness than I knew was possible.  But…for me, having children has also given me a taste of celebrity status and the stalkers to go with it.  The boys follow me around, hanging (quite often literally) on my every move.  If they had cameras I have a feeling they would be flashing at me all day long – like tiny paparazzi on the hunt.  They lie in wait for me wherever they think I might turn up:   pouncing on my bed in the morning; blocking the front door when I return home from work; outside the bathroom door while I ready.

Which brings us back to the shower.  You see, Theodore has figured out that while he hears the water running Mama is unavailable, but the moment he hears the water stop he takes it as an invitation to rejoin his long-lost Mama.  So in the interest of taking the time to properly dry myself off and choose a hairstyle other than a ponytail I have taken to stepping out of the shower and allowing the water to continue to run.  That’s right:  I, the committed environmentalist; the woman who uses cloth toilet paper for crying out loud, the woman who exhorts all of you to live sustainably, the woman who lives in a water stressed area allows perfectly good water to run down the drain just so I can get a little break.  And yes, I feel some well-placed guilt; to save energy I even turn the water all the way to cold (I don’t think Theodore’s superhero-like hearing can detect the difference the sound the water makes at different temperatures.)  But I can’t, in good conscience, continue any longer.  So this morning marked my last “extended” shower – ever.  I write about it here to keep myself honest.  From now on I’ll get ready with Theodore at my side – perhaps I can convince him to sweep the bathroom while he in there or maybe I’ll teach him the art of applying blush?

What are your most egregious environmental sins?  And is anybody willing to pledge with me to end them?