Split Pea Soup

Split pea soup, otherwise known as ham soup if you're talking to a 3 year old who doesn't think they like split peas, is the necessary second dish after making a ham. It's just wrong to waste a ham bone by not making it into soup. When you decide to cook a ham, you're really deciding to make a ham and split pea soup, every time. Prepare yourself for the commitment.

Spit Pea Soup

Split pea soup photographs badly, especially when it's almost gone. 

Start this at 10:00 am. It's an all day sit on the couch and keep telling people that you're busy cooking so you can't possibly do any chores kind of meal.
One ham bone, lots of ham still attached to it, the more the better.
One pound of split peas
2-3 carrots, peeled and sliced
1/2 Onion - dried or fresh and diced
2-3 Cloves of garlic - dried or fresh and diced
First you need to sort the peas. The package always says to do this and I never thought it was really necessary until I got my first rock. For some reason, about every 5 packages or so, there is a small rock that looks mostly like a pea, but doesn't taste at all like a pea. I think it's probably part of the automated picking equipment or something. They manage to get most of the rocks out, but one occasionally slips through quality control. Just pick through them in a colander, it's worth the five minutes. Place the peas and the ham bone and, well, everything else in a pot. Put in enough water to cover, or at least come close to covering, the bone. The package of peas will call for 8-10 cups of water and this is usually about right in my experience. If you need to put in more, that's ok, you can boil off the extra at the end. Now simmer the soup on low for about 5 hours covered. If you started this at 10:00 in the morning as suggested it's about 3:00 and the ham that was left on the bone is now falling off. Scoop the bone and all the ham that you can and put them on a cutting board to cool. You need to sort the edible ham from the knuckles and fat and bone and it's easier to do that when you're not swearing at them for burning you. After 20-30 minutes of cooling, sort out those previously mentioned knuckles and bone and fat that you don't really want to eat and discard them. Take the rest of the edible ham and chop it up and throw it back in. Now you need to keep simmering and stirring every half hour or so until dinner time. If you had to add more water in the beginning then simmer with the lid off for a while and boil off the extra. If things seem a bit too thick, add water to thin it out. Taste it a lot. I wouldn't add any salt or pepper until it's time to serve as the flavor seems to evolve the whole time it's cooking.
Now enjoy your soup. It's a complete meal, meat and veggies all in one pot. If you have space in your fridge, you don't even have any clean up, just let the pot cool and throw the whole thing in the fridge for leftovers. Take a break after dinner, you've been cooking all day and you deserve it.

Candy! Candy! Candy!

Holy cow. I don't know what else to say. Holy cow. The kids were bigger and more mobile this year as I mentioned in my Halloween post. This meant that we were able to cover more ground than in Halloween's past. As a direct mathematical result, they were able to collect more candy. So much in fact that the two smaller kids were having trouble carrying their plastic pumpkin buckets by the end. It was a lot of candy. I just took a moment to weigh it. We have 12 pounds of candy. Holy cow.

Loot!

It must take us a long time to finish that much candy, right? After Thanksgiving? All the way to Christmas? Nope, one week. Our Halloween candy will be gone in a week, and none of the kids will develop major blood sugar issues in that time. You see, we don't eat a lot of sweets. We have dessert after dinner 3-5 days a week, but other than that, we just don't have sweets. We don't even have them in the house usually. My 3 year old doesn't really even like sweet things most of the time. More than once he's started into a piece of cake only to say that it's too sweet and he doesn't like it. We're weird, but we have a plan. The idea is, that of all the things in the world to eat, sugar is pretty much at the bottom of the list. The hope is to instill long term habits in our kids about food. Veggies, fruits, meats, dairy, whole grain stuff, then last, refined grains and sugar. Our kids will almost certainly call this some sort of communist brainwashing someday. Trying to program them with healthy habits against their will. It's some sort of evil programing. I'm ok with that.
So what do we do with 12 pounds of candy in a week? They get to pick one piece of candy each night for dessert. Four kids, 8 nights (one week, plus Halloween night) that's 32 pieces of candy plus whatever Daddy and Mommy filch after bedtime which isn't that much. Really. If you look at the picture, they have WAY more than 32 pieces of candy in that pile. You can't just throw away candy. It would cause much weeping. That would be mean and cruel. Much more mean and cruel than I can possibly be, so we pass it on.
My sister lives in Wisconsin and runs The Naked Elm , a bakery outside Madison. If you're in the neighborhood you should go buy bread/bagels/pizza from her. For the last 6 years or so she has been the recipient, often unwilling, of our leftover Halloween candy. We box it up and ship it off and the kids are happy knowing that they've shared their Halloween loot with Aunt Biggie. In the beginning she didn't have any kids so we convinced our kids that with no kids, she didn't get any candy, so sharing with her was really nice. Now she has a two year old, so technically she should have her own source of Halloween candy, but nobody had brought this up yet. Well no one but Biggie that is. She has mentioned that disposing of 5-10 pounds of candy isn't actually as easy at it sounds, especially because all of the good chocolate has been picked out by the time we mail it. Sorry. My kids are actually excited to send the candy on to Aunt Biggie. They keep talking about the other stuff they can put in the box to send to their cousin. Someday they'll figure out that it isn't completely normal to send candy half way across the country. That will be a complicated day for me.
In the name of complete honesty, I need to admit that the first 3 years or so of Halloween we were totally against giving our kids any of the candy. After we put them to bed we would replace the candy with bags of goldfish and pretzels and fruit snacks. They never noticed that their candy had changed form during the night, and after a week everything was gone. With very small kids, we were only able to stop at 5-8 houses though so there wasn't that much candy for Mommy and Daddy to eat, so we didn't mail it to Aunt Biggie. Finally, we sort of relaxed about sugar intake and we realized that we couldn't pull off the old switcheroo without too much suspicion. They were on to us.

Ham

Ham is good. After bacon, it's probably the best part of the pig. Yet, most of us only eat a ham if it's a holiday. I was puzzling over this recently when my son asked if he could make a ham for his night making dinner. I couldn't see anything wrong with the idea, ham is good and the boy should know how to cook a ham. It's a useful life skill of sorts.
Now that I have a refrigerator full of left over ham, I see why people generally only cook them when they know that the house will be filled with relatives. A ten pound ham, even after you take out the bone, is quite a lot of meat to eat. We're working at it though.
How to cook a ham:
Most smoked hams are actually already cooked. That's my assumption anyway, because every one that I've ever bought has been. So you're not so much cooking it, as heating it up. You basically want to follow the directions on the ham, something like "cook at 325 for 20-25 minutes a pound, until 100 degrees in center".
Turn the oven to 325
Put the ham, flat/bone side down in a pan and cover with tin foil as tightly as you can.
Roast for 20-25 minutes a pound, so a 10 pound ham would take about 3.5 hours. This is an all afternoon project.
Slice and eat your ham.
That's it. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that ham is so delicious and I feel that it's dramatically under represented on the tables of America, I probably wouldn't bother writing about it. Oh, but then there are the leftovers. Aside from a turkey, nothing has leftovers as good as a ham. Ham sandwiches. Green eggs and ham. Ham steak. Various ham casseroles. And my favorite, split pea soup. Split pea soup is half the reason to have a ham actually. You need to keep your ham bone to make split pea soup, so when you clean up after the meal, don't worry too much about getting the bone clean. Any extra ham stuck to the bone will just make your split pea soup better. Put that bone in a bag and put it in the fridge, because tomorrow or the next day, you need to make soup with it. My next food post will be turning your ham bone into the nest delicious ham based meal. Stay tuned.

Edit for a bit of pork trivia: Ham comes from what you would think of as the butt of the pig, it's rear leg. Pork butt doesn't come from the butt, it comes from the shoulder and contains part of the shoulder blade. It's the thicker part of the front shoulder, or the butt of the front shoulder. The cut that comes from the lower part of the shoulder is called the picnic. I have no idea why it's called the picnic.  Impress your friends in the meat isle with that!

Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!

IT'S HALLOWEEN!
I'm very excited. I love Halloween. My kids love Halloween. They were bouncing off the walls this morning which wasn't actually very cool because they took it too far, but the being excited part is great. My 3 year old woke me up by asking me "daddy, guess what day it is?" He was very excited.
What's so great about Halloween? Candy, of course, but also running around in the dark, dressing up, getting to stay up later than makes sense on a school night, getting to have a piece of candy for desert every night for the next week! It's all awesome. The buildup to Halloween is awesome too. We start talking seriously about costumes at the beginning of September. They go back and forth and think of ideas and steal their siblings ideas and fight about it and get ideas from books and TV and each other. By the first weekend in October final decisions are made and we shop for materials. Cutting out and sewing takes place in the evenings and on the weekends. One by one the costumes get fitted and finished. If you are in preschool yours gets done early for the costume parade at school. If you're older or younger they yours might still be getting worked on the night before. Finally they're all done. Everyone transforms into what they wanted to be. My children still think the costumes are even more awesome than they imagined them. They're so sweet.
This year we had a Victorian era vampire, two bats and Batman. There was sort of a theme going on.

This is what cars saw, I'm such a bad father.

The downside of the theme is that everyone was wearing black. Largely all black. For trick-or-treating at night. Good thinking there dad. Make all of your kids invisible to passing cars. After I saw everyone dressed up it occured to me that I really should have dressed up as a light house or an air traffic controller with those light up cone thingies or just a big flashing road sign that said PLEASE DON'T RUN OVER MY KIDS! I'm quite sure that I broke several rules of Halloween dressing with the all black, but the kids did look great and they had a great time. This was the first year we were able to just trick-or-treat without being slowed down by someone with very short legs who just didn't understand what we were doing. Everyone understood, everyone hustled to the next house, everyone mostly stayed out of the road and we all made it back home safely. Later in the week I'll explain what a family that doesn't really eat sweets does with 15 lbs of candy.

Epiphanies in toilet cleaning.

Cleaning the toilet is a funny thing. Not actually funny of course, just funny to talk about.
I understand that a lot of people hate cleaning the toilet because they think it's yucky. I've had the luck (if you want to call it that) of rich and varied life experiences that have re-calibrated what is yucky to me. I won't go into detail but let's just say that cleaning the toilet doesn't even make my yucky list. Not close. I don't readily share this information though. As soon as you admit that toilets aren't that gross then everyone wants you to clean them. All the time. It's not that I don't want to clean the toilet, I just don't want to clean anything that I don't view as necessary. Which brings us to the question, what is necessary?
Daily is certainly overkill. At least I hope it's overkill for a residential toilet, if it's not then I don't envy your life. Monthly is probably not frequently enough. Probably. So how often? Once a week? Is it really dirty? Really dirty? Every two weeks? When are my inlaws coming? Maybe I'll just think about it. Ah, my wife got fed up and cleaned it herself. Looks great. Maybe it was dirty.
That has been the general mode of cleaning in the relationship. She has usually decided that the toilet needs to be cleaned before me, and rather than nagging (have I mentioned how awesome she is? I love her so much) she just does it herself and holds in the rage until is subsides. That is until recently when were having a conversation and I let it slip that I didn't understand why people were bothered by cleaning their own toilet. Nothing gross about it. I could tell instantly that I'd made a mistake. After 10 years of marriage she might have been less upset if I'd admitted that I had a secret second family. She can only hide so much rage, a little peeks out around the edges.
So I messed up. The toilet is now mine, forever. The question is not Do I clean it? but rather How do I make myself want to clean it? Depending on how old your toilet is, what your water is like, and how the toilet has been cleaned in the past, you might have a buildup of scale in the very bottom of the bowl. It' s not clear porcelain as far as the eye can see. I've seen this in quite nice clean homes so I don't feel bad about it, but when I got right down to it, it bothered me. I could clean the toilet, but I couldn't really get it clean. Time for research! All of the hippies online swear by vinegar as a toilet cleaner. They say that it disinfects, helps remove scale, and is kind to septic systems and the planet. Worth a try. I found a technique that is quite a lot like winterizing toilets in a summer house or RV. Here is.
You need to do this when you've got at least a few hours when nobody is going to need the toilet. Easier if you have more than one toilet. Otherwise I suggest right before bed when everyone is done for the night. 
1. Scrub the toilet with a brush. Try to do a good job if you can.
2. Turn the water off at the wall valve. 1/4 turn valves are awesome.
3. Flush. Hold down the handle and let all the water get out that can.
4. Plunge out excess water or just scoop it out. You want to do this because the more water you have, the more you dilute the vinegar you pour in. You want as concentrated a solution as you can reasonably get, so you want as little water as you can reasonably can get.
5. Pour in somewhere between a quart and a half gallon of vinegar. The more you're trying to fix, the more you use.
6. Dip your brush in the vinegar in the bowl and scrub more, up around the rim, get it all clean, you're disinfecting now.
7. Pour a bit of vinegar on a paper towel and clean the seat and everything else that needs to be cleaned.
8. Wait. Wait overnight if you can. The vinegar is breaking apart the scale.
9. Brush out any loosened scale, or if you're adventurous and want to be more effective, use a scouring pad to clean off as much as you can.
10. Turn the water back on and go about your life.
I've been doing this for a bit over a month now. My 25 year old toilet is almost spotless porcelain all the way down. I've taken a chore and turned it into a quest. I clean on Friday nights and I look forward to defeating a little more scale, revealing a little more porcelain, every week. When I finally get it clean I'll work at keeping the scale at bay, like a king who has repelled the barbarian hoards and now works to keep his kingdom safe.
Turning toilet cleaning from a task that I didn't really want to do into a task that I look forward to has been quite an epiphany in my own psychology of cleaning. Now if I can only find a way to discover the hidden joy of sweeping.

Sick Day

Being a sick stay at home dad is always interesting. When you have little babies especially. When my wife would get sick while she was breast feeding she could lay there in misery with a baby attached to her boob knowing that she was passing antibodies onto the cheerily flopping infant. When I got sick, I had to hold the baby just as close for feeding, but I wasn't doing anything as positive. The best I could hope for was to kiss my wife as much as possible so that she maybe she would get sick before the baby and pass on the antibodies so that I wouldn't end up with a sick baby. This is a morally reprehensible strategy, I admit, and in the best case scenario I now had a sick wife instead of a sick baby which isn't actually that great. Especially with her giving me evil accusing looks about how I got her sick. With the exception of the baby, there were no winners.

The thermometer does not confirm my illness, clearly it's broken.

It's sort of better now that the kids are older, except that they have wider exposure to illnesses. I have to deal with the illness that are going around two different school systems 20 miles apart. Most of the kids that go to preschool with my youngest have older siblings in a different system than my three older kids. My preschooler is acting as a disease vector connecting two populations. What a trooper. At least when they do get sick they're a bit easier to take care of. It's easier to comfort a 6 year old with Sesame Street and a warm blanket than it is to comfort a nine month old. It just is.
But what about when daddy gets sick? Not much you can do really. Things still need to get done, and you still need to do most of them. Still need to get the kids ready for school, still need to get them there. Still need to feed them. You just can't ignore these things. Where is my wife during this you might ask? Well, I need to be almost dead before I even think about letting her stay home. Forget about asking, that doesn't happen, not my style. She would actually stay home to take care of me long before I'd let her. I need to be stuck on the toilet sick before I can even begin to accept help. She is wonderful and takes over the evening stuff though, which I gladly accept, so I can rest. Bath time turns into daddy is curled into a ball on the couch time, which often looks to the kids like daddy is a trampoline time. Resting is hard.
Whenever I'm sick I think about the good old days at work when I could actually just be sick at home and not go to work. Then I remember that when my wife is sick and she stays home, she does that with me and the kids at home. I'll be the first to admit that being at home is often less restful than being at work. I can vividly recall the times when my clearly sick wife has stood in a haze trying to figure out if she'd get more rest at work or at home. It comes down to being nice and trying to reduce infecting her co-workers more than getting actual rest at home. Perhaps it's not so bad being a sick stay at home dad, at least I'll keep telling myself that until I feel better.

Books this week:
The Map That Changed the World, William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology - Simon Winchester
I think this is a book for geologists. Geologists that like the history of geology. That's probably a pretty small audience but for us select few, it's quite a good book. Geology is such a young science that we forget that we didn't even know how to map rocks until William Smith showed us how in 1815. We didn't even know about plate tectonics until after World War II. Considering what a huge economic impact geology has on society through mining and oil exploration, it's astonishing how much we've seemingly just figured out. William Smith was one of those great figurers, and has an interesting story to boot.

Pizza: Sourdough 2

Once you have a sourdough starter, it's time to make something. One of my favorite breads to make is pizza. Pizza? A bread? Yup, it's just a flat bread covered with yummy stuff. Easy to make, easy to eat, oh so good.
Pizza - adapted from no recipe anywhere, makes 3 pizzas from 10-14 inches.
4 cups flour
1 3/4 cups water
2 tsp salt
Either 1/4-1/2 tsp yeast or 1/4 to 1/4 cup sourdough starter.
The night before you want to make pizza, mix everything in a bowl. This is a pretty slack dough so it will be sticky. You don't really need to knead it per se, but you you want to incorporate all of the flour so you don't have any hard little unincorporated flour chunks left over. Cover the bowl with a plate or plastic wrap and sit it on the counter. Leave it there. In the morning you can turn the dough if you want. Or not. By dinner time your bowl of dough will be bubbly and huge. If it's not, then you need to add more yeast/starter next time or put the dough somewhere warmer. You want you dough quite lively, it tastes better. When it's time to bake the pizza preheat your oven as high as it will go with a pizza stone in it. You can probably make these without a pizza stone, just on a cookie sheet or pizza pan but I don't. I'm a pretty simple guy in the kitchen, I don't need many gadgets, but a pizza stone is worthwhile. Anyway, as the oven is preheating, divide the dough into 3 pieces and set them on the counter to relax. Once the oven is preheated, tear off a piece of parchment paper that's big enough to make your crust. Spread the dough out on the parchment paper to get it into a roundish shape. The sticky dough will stick to the parchment paper and this will help keep it from trying too hard to form back into a ball. Slide the parchment paper on the back of a cookie sheet (or a peel if you have one) and slide it onto the stone. Cook it for about a minute. Pull it out and flop it on a wire rack and peel the parchment paper off, reuse the paper for the other two pizzas. Now put your sauce and cheese and meat and veggies and whatever else you want on the crust. Ease the pizza back on the back of the cookie sheet and slide it off back onto the stone. Bake it until it's done. Everyone knows what a done pizza looks like. Probably 6-10 minutes. Now do it twice more and you have 3 pizzas. From the time I turn the oven on to when I pull the last pizza out, it takes me about an hour. It's not the easiest meal to make, but it's one of the yummiest.
The yeasted version and the sourdough version have a slightly different taste and texture. It's worth it to make them both at some point. 
I realize that this recipe, though it has only 4 ingredients, has quite a few steps and I'm not including pictures of any of them. If anyone ever wants to see the whole drawn out process I'd be more than happy to do that, just leave me a message in the comments and I'll make a bigger post for you. The quality of pizza you can make in your oven at home is worth putting time into. With the exception of the pizza that comes out of my sister's giant wood fired oven, my family doesn't like pizza from anywhere else. That's about the best compliment you can get.