Cerebrate Good Times

I don't know if I would categorize myself as a  great  cook, but as the primary meal prepper for our family for 15 years I feel reasonably confident in my abilities. But there are some corners I cut. So here are my kitchen confessions. I often use regular vegetable oil instead of olive oil. I use paper towels for pretty much everything, including plates sometimes. I haven't purchased ground beef in... 8 or 9 years? We exclusively use ground turkey. It started as a cost-savings thing, but now we just like it and I feel it's healthier. My chicken parmesan recipe is super simple. I just bread it with a mixture of bread crumbs and parmesan. I don't even pound the chicken flat. I use Prego spaghetti sauce, but I add shredded cheddar and ground turkey. And parmesan, of course. It's really good. One of my favorite lunches is just plain spaghetti noodles with butter and parmesan. That's three parmesan items in a row. But can you ever really have enough par...

Full disclosure: I stole that title from an episode of Futurama. We've had a teenager now for about four months. That still feels surreal to me. In some ways it's what I expected, and in others it's not. Samuel is the same good person he has always been. He cares deeply about things, has a keen sense of justice, and makes intelligent observations about the world around him. But it does seem like puberty hit hime like a truck. He's already 5' 6", which I think is about 6 inches taller than I was at his age. He's struggling with terrible acne, as both his parents did, and we're in the process of getting him the industrial-grade meds to deal with it. His biggest challenge right now is that he takes FOREVER to do ANYTHING. When I was his age I was going like a maniac. I was still smart enough to get my homework done without too much work, or I at least did a half-hearted job at everything. But I got it done. Every night he seems to take hours to even ...