Today was a miserable day.  I have fibromyalgia, just diagnosed a few months ago after years of not knowing what was wrong.  I woke up feeling terrible, and it only got worse.  It's frustrating not knowing what days will be ok and what days will be awful!  With fibro, there really aren't good days.  I have been trying to exercise lately, and that's what worsened it last time, so I'm wondering if that has something to do with it.

Anyway, my nephew and brother-in-law came today to go out on our boat.  I stayed back, but my husband, son, and stepdaughter went.  When they came home, the boys were playing together in my son's room until for some reason,I heard them outside my bedroom door.  Or, more accurately, I heard my son (six) telling his four-year-old cousin: "Two more minutes."  Then my son came into my room and said, "I put Chris in timeout because he broke my toy."  I had to turn my head away so he wouldn't see me laughing!  Somehow, I managed to explain that only parents could put kids in timeout and told him to go let him out.  Chris, for his part, took his punishment quite well!


Peach Pie

You don't want to be in timeout when this is served!

Slightly adapted from allrecipes.com with much help from reviewers on that website!

INGREDIENTS:
10 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced*
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter, softened
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie

DIRECTIONS:
1. Mix flour, white sugar, brown sugar, butter, cornstarch, and cinnamon until the mixture resembles crumbs.
2. Add the peaches to the flour mixture and stir to coat.
3.    Grease a 9-inch pie plate with butter, and place one crust in the bottom.  Spoon the peach mixture into the pan.
4.    Place the second crust on top of the mixture, and crimp the edges.  Score the top of the pie.
5. Bake 15 minutes at 400 degrees, and 30 minutes at 350 degrees F, or until the crust is golden. About 30 minutes into baking time, check the edges of the crust.  If they are starting to brown faster than the rest of the pie, take the pie out, use strips of aluminum foil to cover the edges, and then return the pie to the oven.
6.     Once the pie is done, turn the oven off and leave the pie in the oven for two hours to set.

Serve with ice cream and/or whipped cream, if desired.  If you have leftovers, store them in the fridge.

*To peel the peaches: Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Make an X on the bottom of each peach using a knife.  Working with two to three peaches at a time, gently place in the boiling water and boil for 30-45 seconds.  The edges where you made the X should start to come up when the peach is ready, but if this does not happen, be sure to take it out anyway by 45 seconds so the peach doesn't overcook.  Immediately place the peaches into a bowl of ice water.  Once the peaches have cooled in the ice water, take them out and, starting at the X, use your fingers to peel the peaches.  The skin should come right off.

If you have really juicy peaches, you might want to use a bit more cornstarch to thicken the mixture and you definitely want to let the pie sit in the oven as directed in step 6.  My pie was still pretty juicy, but I actually liked it like that!  It will also harden up in the fridge and stay that way when you heat up leftovers.

My son has liked cooking for a while now, although he is not always a fan of, let's say, traditional food.  His preschool offered cooking class when he was about three or four years old.  It was one of the teachers making things like ants on a stick with the kids.  My son was dying to participate, but it cost ten dollars per class, and there were eight classes.  I had already splurged to sign him up for an animal class, and I could barely afford that as the broke, young mom that I was.  Actually, I still am a broke, young mom, but I guess that's beside the point.

But, he was so excited about it, and back in the day, we were super healthy (once again, that's a term that's relative from one person to another).  That was when I had taken an environmental science class and I was in my environmentalist stage that was referenced to in the last post.  I devoted countless hours to reading about pesticides in our food and nutrition in general, and I started cooking every night and making delicious, healthy meals for my sweet little buttercup.  Along with those meals came an unwanted side dish of anxiety.  I started worrying about everything that went in our mouths, worries that were compounded by the fact that I couldn't afford organic food.  My son might have been getting his fruits and vegetables, but what did that matter, since the pesticides were going to kill him!  Eventually, I wound up going in the opposite direction, and deciding that if I couldn't do it right, I wouldn't bother at all, which led to my two month cycles of healthy/not healthy.  

Before all that on again, off again nonsense started, when my little guy was still little and yearning for cooking class, I decided to make our own cooking class so he wouldn't feel as left out.  It's funny how now, he wouldn't even remember that, but back then it was such a big deal that he couldn't go to cooking class.  I got him helping with dinner.  He would take his butter knife and slice up vegetables, dump parmesan cheese in to the meatball mix, and stir the batter for muffins.  

Now he is six years old, and he still does cooking class, although it's different now.  These days, it involves taking every liquid from the refrigerator and pouring some into a bowl to make one disgusting, inedible creation that I have to hold my nose to clean up.  Since he loves it, I let him do it. 

For the past few days, he has been involved more with cooking actual meals.  We went peach picking the other day, so we made peach pie last night, and he helped the whole time.  Usually he gets bored after a little while, but this time, he was a bit more invested in the peaches.  

The biggest surprise was when he drank- and liked- this morning's green smoothie.  I decided to make our regular smoothie but add in the spinach and kale...since it's a green smoothie.  And I put in a peach.  When you have six pounds of peaches, you sneak a peach in anywhere you can!

Raspberry Banana (And Peach) Green Smoothie

Ingredients

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 cup kale

1 cup spinach

1 frozen banana, cut into small pieces

1/4 cup frozen raspberries

1 small peach, cut into one-inch pieces

1 tablespoon flax seeds

Just mix all the ingredients in the blender.  I use ice crush and then liquefy.

Notes

For recipes like this, I don't bother using measuring cups, I just eyeball it.  I really don't think it's necessary to add extra dishes for something like a smoothie.  Just grab a handful of kale and a handful of spinach, throw in a bunch of raspberries, and spoon out the amount of yogurt you think it needs!

Before I added the peach, it was a nasty brown color, thanks to the mix of kale, spinach, and raspberries.  It turned green once I put the peach in.  It really tasted just like the smoothies my son and I usually make, which is everything but the greens!

When I was 13, my favorite band was O-Town.  Don't remember them?  If you blinked, you would have missed them.  They were on some band reality show, the kind that was popular back then (way back 12 years ago).  I was instantly smitten, madly in love with Erik Michael Estrada, one of the members.  While other girls went for Ashley Parker Angel (yes, he's a guy...and why did they all go by three names?), I adored all things Spanish back then, and Erik was no exception.  There were three other guys in the band, but I don't remember their names at all.

One of their popular songs, and one of my favorites, which I definitely did not listen to on repeat literally hundreds of times in a row, was "All or Nothing."  Now, I do not think (for real this time.  Note: I overuse parentheses.  They're like my favorite things ever.  I had to stop myself like ten times while writing this because I wanted to use more.  I would use them every sentence if I could.  Well, I guess I could if I really want to.  But I won't.  I promise. Where was I?) there is any connection between the song and my current state, but all or nothing has become the tagline for my life.  If things can't be perfect, they won't be done at all.  For example, my house.  It's either an absolute, can't have company over, wouldn't call the police in an emergency, disaster, or it's spotless.  Same with my car.  Nobody can put their feet down at the moment because of all the half full water bottles sitting on the floor.  That leads me to another thing.  Environmentalism.  Since I can't afford organic foods, special light bulbs, and tons of cloth napkins and microfiber clothes, I pretty much gave up on it.  Including water bottles.  A few years ago, I was aghast at the amount of people who bought plastic water bottles and drove SUVs.  SUVs!  A work of the devil! Think of the carbon footprint!  Yes, you can join me in my time travel to slap my sanctimonious twenty-year-old self.  I do recycle, but that's the extent of my environmentalism these days.  

At work, I always give it all.  And everything has to be PERFECT.  The disparity between the condition of my house most of the time and my organization skills at work is crazy.  

But, perhaps most of all, this all or nothing mentality is most evident in my diet.  It's either going to be PERFECT- which is different for everybody these days, but to me basically means following the food plate, except maybe a few less grains!- or it's going to be junk.  Yes, I am now using dashes instead of parentheses.  Like, cookies for lunch, candy for snack, ice cream for dinner junk.  What I really want to do is find the balance between all and nothing, the almost healthy balance.  Some days that might mean more junk, some days that might mean mostly healthy.  But, as long as my diet is healthy overall, or almost healthy, it will be probably be better than two month cycles of complete junk and extreme perfectionism.  I wonder how long this will last!?

Green Smoothie

1 cup spinach

1 cup kale 

1 banana, broken into thirds, can be frozen

1 peach, cut into 1" pieces

1 apple, cut into 1" pieces

1/4 cup orange juice

1 tbsp flax 

4-5 ice cubes, can omit if using a frozen banana

Put all of the ingredients into the blender.  Using the ice crush button, then the liquefy button, mix until smooth and you can't really see spinach and kale leaves anymore.  

1 serving, 395 calories   

I was very, very skeptical about this.  It wasn't the best thing I ever tasted, but it didn't taste too much like spinach and kale.  I used 1/2 cup of orange juice, but I thought that was too much, so hopefully 1/4 cup is better.  I might even omit it.  I guess I'm going to suck at food blogging if I don't even test the final recipes I post!  I will probably start posting pictures of the food, although I have a plain old point and shoot camera and no artistic skills whatsoever.  And no nice dishes.  Maybe one day!  

I'm going to play around with green smoothies, since this will help me get the veggies in, especially the leafy greens!  I should also probably mention that I did the calorie count myself using Google, so it may not be totally accurate.  I probably won't do calorie counts most of the time!