I'm definitely not pregnant this month...but Samhain was awesome.

So, Aunt Flo is here, for sure.  She arrived on time, with cramps, and she's still here.  Sigh.

I suppose I shouldn't really be disappointed.  Last night, I continued my usual Samhain holiday tradition of divination with my friends.  It's really the best night for it, when the veil between worlds is thinnest.  I get the best and clearest answers (usually) around this time of year.  So I asked if I needed to change anything in my quest to become pregnant with my daughter, and the answer I got was just to be patient.  More than that, my best friend piped up that she'd seen something on the news about the problems pregnant women were having with swine flu.  I figured that they were just getting worse cases than normal, maybe needing help breathing or needing extra fluids and monitoring during their illness.  No, I guess some of them are actually losing their babies.  Yikes!  So, it seems that perhaps something is keeping me from getting pregnant while it's dangerous to do so.  Well, yay them....and I need to learn to calm down about the baby who will undoubtably find her way into my life sooner or later.

I also need to avoid the baby aisle at Target.  All the pink and purple baby booties, hats, onesies, bibs and toys are making me a bit too excited about getting pregnant, and I need to chill out and focus on my health and timing my ovulation right now.  At least I've had enough months to really know, within about 3 hours, when I'm ovulating in a given month.

Anyway, this was all a little too distracting while Samhain was going on.  I love Samhain.  It's my favorite holiday, bar none, of the year.  Christmas/Yule has nothing on Samhain/Halloween and everything else falls so distantly behind that they aren't even in the same category.  I usually spend all month getting ready for it, but this month swine flu interfered.  Regardless, it was still a great Samhain, and an improvement was made this year that I'd like to make into a permanent tradition.  My coven and I celebrated Samhain on the 30th, having our religious celebration and feast separate from the secular, but still fun and important, trick-or-treating and Halloween party of the 31st.  It took so much pressure off to have the two on separate days that  can't imagine willingly going back to trying to cram it all into one day again.

For our Samhain feast every year, we make a stuffed pumpkin.  It's yummy, and looks really cool on the table.  But the first year, when we put way more spices in than the recipe called for, it was the best.  So every year we've added more and more spices to try to get it back to the amazing concoction we first experienced.  Finally, I changed the turkey sausage and ground turkey part of the recipe to good, old fashioned pork sausage.  We've long since decided that the golden raisins in the recipe were worth ditching, and voila....we revamped the awesome Stuffed Pumpkin recipe from The Wicca Cookbook by Jamie Wood and Tara Seefeldt and made it our own.  Here's our version:

Samhain Stuffed Pumpkin

1 medium cooking pumpkin, about 10 inches in diameter
2 large yellow bell peppers, diced
3 lbs mild italian pork sausage
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1/2 c. sliced green olives with pimentos
2 tbs olive oil
2 tsp minced fresh oregano
2 tsp poultry seasoning
1 tsp salt
2 tsp vinegar
1 tsp black pepper (we like pepper a lot)
4 cloves pressed garlic
1 14 oz can skinned tomatoes, diced
3 large eggs, beaten

Cut the top off of the pumpkin, clean and remove the seeds and pumpkin guts.  Place the pumpkin in a pot and fill the inside of the pumpkin and surround it with water.  Put 1/4 tsp of salt in the pumpkin and another 1/4 tsp in the surrounding water.  Bring the pot to a boil, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the inside of the pumpkin is just tender.  This is the touchiest part of the entire process.  Make sure the bottom of the pumpkin doesn't become mush.  The topmost part will not be as well cooked as the rest.  Keep in mind that the pumpkin will pend another hour in the oven, so it should not be completely cooked yet.  Drain the pumpkin and set it aside.  Cook and slice 1/2 lb of the pork sausage and set aside. Remove the casing from the rest of the sausage, and cook with bell peppers, black pepper, onions and poultry seasoning in a large frying pan with 1 tbsp of the olive oil.  Cook until the sausage is just done, and set the pan aside.
In a large bowl, mix the chopped sausage, oregano, garlic, olives, tomatoes, vinegar, and the rest of the salt and olive oil.  Add to the pan, and cook on medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Remove from heat and allow to cool completely before stirring in eggs.  Fill the pumpkin with the stuffing and cover the top of the pumpkin with aluminum foil.  Bake on a greased baking sheet at 350 degrees for 1 hour.
Before serving, remove the aluminum foil and replace the original pumpkin top.  You may also want to "carve" a face into the pumpkin by drawing with knife and a very light touch on the cooked pumpkin and peeling the rind away from the pumpkin flesh.  Enjoy!

My son was Calvin for Halloween.  It was a really easy costume, except that making Hobbes was a biatch.  As all true fans of Bill Watterson know, only two calendars, one very rare T-shirt and one very rare book were ever made with Bill Watterson's merchandising permission (other than the comics, of course.)  Yes, this means the pictures of Calvin peeing on a Ford logo that you see at every stoplight is illegal or manufactured ridiculously under another name.  Watterson was concerned that mass merchandising would degrade the comic and his message, and as  fellow artist, I respect that.  Anyway, this means that there is no official Hobbes pattern out there, and that if you find one that costs money, it's illegal.  So, I had to improvise and make a Hobbes doll sans pattern.  It came out okay.  I mean, you can recognize him as Hobbes.  His head is just longer and thinner than it should be.  Oh well.  My son was cute as a button trick-or-treating, and he had a great time, and that's all that matters.

My husband's idea for pumpkin carving this year was deliciously geeky.  I guess this is how it works in my house.  He thinks up the idea, and I carry it out.  That's how the last two pumpkins were carved, and that's probably how it'll continue to be.  Anyway, our emoticon pumpkin was a hit amongst our friends.  Check it out.  Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain everyone!

I'm 30!

I turned 30 two days ago.  I don't feel any different, except that now I feel the need for daily exercise, which is probably a good thing.  To be fair, this started a couple of weeks ago, not just with my birthday, but I am really getting concerned about my body staying healthy and flexible so that I can hike, climb, dance, and just play with my kids as they get older.

It's weird to think about the goals I once had for myself by this age.  I was certainly going to be done having my four children by now, I was going to be a successful veterinarian who had graduated from UC Davis, I would be happily married and living in an awesome house in Pacific Beach (in San Diego) with my husband, and of course we were both going to be thin and fit beach-goers who surfed at least twice a week when the waves would permit.  Crazy, huh?  Yeah, I know that NOW, but I was raised to believe that I was capable of anything I set my mind to.  I also had a mother who had given birth to 6 children by the time she was 30, so I figured it wouldn't be hard to have 4 children with a decent amount of time spaced between each.  Sigh...naivety.  

So, I made myself a corn-free triple chocolate birthday cake that turned out pretty yummy.  I think I'd change the mousse filling next time and make it sweeter, but my best friend disagrees.  She thinks the richness of a whipped dark chocolate ganache is perfect.  Anyway, here's my yummy recipe for a delicious, moist chocolate cake.  Bonus: it's a one-bowl recipe!  I love making tasty food with minimal clean-up!

One-Bowl Moist Chocolate Cake

2 c. white sugar

1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour

3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder (I use Featherweight brand so it's corn-free)

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

2 eggs

1 c. milk

1/2 c. vegetable oil (use canola, soybean, or another non-corn oil)

2 tsp. vanilla extract (I use my homemade vanilla.  Recipe on bottom)

1 c. boiling water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C.)  Grease and flour two 9-inch round pans.  In a large bowl, mix all dry ingredients.  Add eggs, oil, milk, and vanilla and mix with mixer for 2 min.  Stir in the boiling water last.  Batter will be thin.  Pour evenly into two pans.  (This makes 6 cups of batter, for those of you, like me, who have only one 9 inch round pan that you have to clean and re-use to make a layer cake!)  Bake for 30 minutes until cake tests done with a toothpick.  Cool completely before frosting.

Corn-free Vanilla Extract

one 750 ml bottle of potato vodka

2 vanilla beans

Put the vanilla beans in the potato vodka and wait at least 3 weeks.  I waited 6, and mine tasted great!  It will not be as dark as the vanilla extract you buy in the store, but it tastes fine and it's way cheaper.  No one has noticed a difference in my house!

My birthday was fun, even though it happened midweek and only a couple of people could join me for cake.  My son was unusually well-behaved (unlike now...he's hanging off my shirt and pulling on me as I type,) and my husband and I (sans child) ate at The Keg, which is a really tasty steakhouse.

Warning: TMI ahead

My 30th birthday had one surprise left at bedtime.  Let me just say that this has never happened to me before, and I thought that if I could do such a thing that I would've discovered it before now.  I'm one of those women who is blessed with vaginal orgasms.  I can have amazing, multiple orgasms with penetrative sex, not just oral.  It's nice.  In fact, I didn't know that not all women were like me until my mid-20's.  It made me sad to think that not everyone could do what I took for granted.  Anyway, I have to say that the one thing I was thankful for, besides said orgasms, was that I was not a female ejaculator.  Those women, rare as they are, have to deal with the most unpleasant part of sex for a man: the messy clean-up.  So, surprise, surprise, I received an interesting gift that night.  Yes, I squirted.  It was lame.  I was not pleased.  More than that, I was really shocked and so was my husband!  I thought that the women who did make such messes only did so for an extraordinary orgasmic experience.  Not so.  I mean, it was good.  It was really good, in fact.  But it wasn't the best, not by a long shot.  The best orgasms I've ever had are still from my second trimester of pregnancy.  Those were mind-blowingly incredible!  This was just an 8 out of 10.  Weird.

In short, I think the universe has a strange sense of humor.  Happy Birthday!  Now go wash your sheets.