First of all, my apologies to everyone for my blog issue. I had a few e-mails from people wondering if David forbid me to blog again after my post about him. But not to worry because he never reads it. It’s good to know that I was missed, even thou most of the e-mails came from family and friends and my “closet fan Mark”, who expressed his concern about me posting recipes because he doesn’t cook and won’t be able to relate. I say, “Mark, try it. It may just be the cheapest marriage counseling you’ve ever had, or if you’re single, knowing how to cook is considered an asset by us women folk.”

Secondly, it’s 10:30 pm and I’m writing this post while I’m eating the entire top layer of a box of Pot Of Gold, and no, not a little box. And I’m even eating the ones I hate. I love Christmas.

I had some new friends over for dinner through the week and because we all have young kids and it was a school night we were eating at 6pm. I get home at 5:30. The only sensible thing to do was to make my meal the night before. It’s seems very organized of me but it’s really just laziness. So I’m posting my “everyone loves, especially kids, chicken Parmesan” which is a great make ahead meal. My friend Crystal Campbell told me that her son still talks about it a few years later. It’s so easy and so good.

Chicken Parmesan
Great for a big group. I often make a bunch and then freeze half.
4-6 chicken breasts (boneless skinless)
2 cups bread crumbs
1/4 cup dried summer savory
1 tsp salt
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup freshly graded parmesan cheese
3 eggs whisked in a bowl
really good mozza cheese slices
1/4 cup freshly ground parmesan cheese for the topping
pasta sauce (home made or bottled)

Place chicken on waxed paper and top with another slice of paper. Pound the chicken with a wooden meat tenderizer, or if you don’t have one, just use a rolling pin. I have one but Colin used it to dig a hole in my garden to bury my jewelry when he was playing pirates. We stopped asking why he does what he does. Cover the chicken with the flour, then the egg mixture. Mix the bread crumbs with the salt, pepper and the summer savory and place the egg soaked chicken in that. I find it easier to set up a little Chicken Parmesan sweatshop.

It’s messy, but well worth it!

Fry the chicken on each side until brown in oil. Drain on paper towel. Repeat with all of the chicken. Once it has drained of most of the oil, place in a casserole dish and top with the slices of mozza cheese.

I left one of the chicken breasts out just incase one of the kids didn’t like the pasta sauce.

Top with the pasta sauce and then with parmesan cheese. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes at 350.

Home made pasta sauce

Bottled sauce is good, but making your own sauce you can control the sugar and sneak in vegetables that your kids won’t know they are eating. It isn’t hard to make but does require time to chop and simmer. I always use half and freeze the rest.

1 carrot grated
1 celery stick
1 Spanish onion diced
1 cloves of garlic
2 cans of diced tomatoes or crushed
1Tbsp salt
1Tbsp pepper
2Tbsp oregano
1Tbsp dried basin
2 Tbps olive oil
2 Tbps brown sugar
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup tomatoes paste
diced green pepper and mushrooms if you wish

Heat oil and sauté the garlic, add onion and sweat. Once the onion is transparent add the carrot and celery. Cook for 2 mins. Add other vegetables if using. Stir in the tomato paste Add the tomatoes and their juices. Add all other ingredients except the sugar. Simmer with the lid on for an hour. Add the sugar. You may need to add more depending on the acidy of the tomatoes.

And you know, if you’re lacking time or tomatoes, bottled sauce is fine. But check the sugar content on the bottle.

The perfect side dish to go with the chicken is pasta, and I make a crazy easy sauce that is always a hit!

Boiled noodles and sauce

Melt 2 Tbsp of butter, sprinkle in 2 Tbsp flour stir and cook for 1 minute. Add 2 cups of scolded milk and whisk for a minute. Add a sprinkle of nutmeg, pepper and salt is a must. Add a bit of parsley and ½ cup Parmesan cheese or a tsp of graded lemon zest. Stir in noodles.

I didn’t take any pictures of our guests because they are new friends and I didn’t want to freak them out.
And of course, tis the season for drinks, and I would be remised if I didn’t add one. Lets see, I should go make one, so I can post a picture. I’m just selfless like that.

HOT SPICED APPLE CIDER
2 qts. sweet apple cider
1 tsp. whole cloves
1 tsp. whole allspice
2 cinnamon sticks
1/3 c. lightly packed brown sugar
pinch salt
Bring ingredients to a boil. Simmer 15 minutes. Remove spices. Serve hot in mugs with an ounce of your best amber rum, I’d suggest Appletons with a cinnamon stick and/or a toothpick with slices of orange and raisons marinated in rum. YUM!

Don’t miss next weeks! You’ll die! Well, you won’t really die, but you will be slightly aroused!

Christmas is less than 5 weeks away. Gulp. I know this because we have one of those annoying girls in the office who every few weeks goes on the intercom and will inform us on how many pay checks there are before Christmas. I bet you have a “Michelle” in your office too.

In the spirit of the holidays, I thought that I’d take a break from humiliating my children and divulging my husbands health history and instead I’ve decided to devote my posts between now and Christmas to the Holidays. Things like my favorite food, booze, times with friend and even some of the things I love to do with my family at Christmas.

Times-a-wastin’, so let’s get started.

I love having people over for dinner, but often I find that everyone is so gosh darn busy with staff Christmas parties and dysfunctional family reunions that it’s much easier having people over for a lunch, after a Sunday church service for instance (please Lord, don’t strike me dead for fibbing in my blog).

I love serving soup and salad for lunch. Serving a salad buffet is a great way to appease the fussy types because they can make their own. That’s important with my type of salad because I think a good salad has many different flavors that might offend some people. Here I had avocado, roasted red peppers, tomatoes, spiced olives (I’ll share the recipe in an appetizer blog in December), and my new favorite salad addition.

They’re goat cheese balls. Just roll them in bit size balls and coat them in either poppy seeds or sesame seeds. Make sure you toast the poppy seeds and the sesame seeds first. I find they’re a bit stale if you don’t.

My 7 year old loved them and said he now likes goat cheese even more than blue cheese. This is the same kid who, when we went apple picking in the Valley last fall, announced that he only wanted to pick Galas. I thought I would love having a kid who has a sophisticated palette, and then I discovered he ate my entire bottle of olives and I had no choice but to put a gherkin in my martini. True story.

My friends who have had my standard salad will be happy to know that I am finally sharing my salad dressing recipe that I only kept to myself because it tastes a lot harder than it actually is and I really don’t have a recipe. But in an effort to be accurate I actually brought out the measuring cups and spoons. It’s an easy dressing and you always have the ingredients on hand.

Tina’s Good and Easy

Dressing

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

¼ cup rice vinegar

1 Tbsp dijon mustard

1 Tbsp honey
lemon juice

1 clove of garlic

1 Tbsp scallion

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp pepper.

Put all the ingredients except the oil in a blender for a few minutes and while it is blending add the oil in a slow steady stream. Add a blop of sour cream or plain yogurt if you like it creamier. That’s it. Taste it, if you find it’s too tangy add more honey, if it’s too sweet add more lemon. And I served the dressing in my favorite little pitcher for creamer. That was served atop a fondue plate that has a bunch of little dishes where I put all the salad ingredients. I’m all about multi purpose.

The soup was squash soup, my favorite soup. And it’s ridiculously easy.

Squash Soup

One Buttercup squash

One box of chicken stock

One leak

1 Tbsp olive oil

One clove of garlic

Salt, pepper, bay leaf

½ teaspoon cumin

Split the squash in half and remove seeds and place flesh down in a glass baking dish with a splash of water and cover with foil. Bake for an hour at 350. In the mean time, saute the sliced white part of the leaks in the oil until opaque, about 10 minutes, add the garlic and cook for another few minutes. Add the stock and herbs and spices. You should be able to easily tear the skin off of the flesh or scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Add the squash to the stock. Cover and cook for 40 minutes. Remove the bay leaf and blend. Put through a sieve to ensure it has no lumps. Serve with a dollop of sour cream or herb of your choice.

I’ll admit, I can’t make bread. But we’re lucky, we have some really great bakeries in our area, and who am I to think I could do a better job than them. But I do make herb butters to go along with the bread that I don’t make. For this lunch I made a roasted garlic butter and a herb butter.

And for those who say you can’t drink at lunch, I say nothing, because I think you’re just an urban myth. Here is the recipe for my favorite lunchtime girlie drink. If you’re not up for a full fledge martini for lunch replace the booze for soda water, but really now, what a shame.

Poma-gratini

1 once vodka

½ ounce triple sec

1 ounces pomegranate juice

Squeeze of lime.

Splash of soda water

Add pomegranate seeds and a slice of lime. For a fun presentation I actually put seeds in the ice cube tray before I freeze them and yes, this is fun for me. Sad? Perhaps.

So off you go and entertain this holiday. It only happens once a year, so go ahead, have vodka in your drink.

You’ll require a bit of history for this one.

My husband has an anxiety disorder.  I’m blogging about it because this isn’t as abnormal as some may think.  In fact it’s the number one mental illness in North America.  But that doesn’t make it suck any less. 

When David and I first met, he was a student in Orlando Florida going to The Golf Academy of the South and I was going to UCCB in Cape Breton.  He’d come home a few times a year and I’d visit him a couple of times a year too.  While I visited him we’d party from Daytona to Pleasure Island and I’d tag along while he golfed at courses from Bay Hill to Windermere.  I was his gallery of one.  He proposed to me while we dined at the Five Fishermen in Halifax and would later celebrate at the Sheridan (actually, that was his second proposal to me.  We had a little Ross and Rachel break). 

I felt like our life together was starting out better than I could have ever dreamed.

All the while David suffered in silence from a mental demon that no one understood, not even him.   When we settled back here in Mahone Bay, no one was happier than David.  He was in his zone.  The perimeters where he felt most comfortable and when he ventured outside the zone his heart would race, he’d sweat, and without sounding too dramatic, he felt like he was going to die.  In fact once he felt like he was having a heart attack and had to have an EKG.  

The signs were there.  When David was a young boy traveling all over the world with his family, he always knew where the hospitals were.  He’d look for the H sign. I remember marveling at his sense of direction while in we vacationed in New York.  Only now do I know that that’s a sign of being prepared for an onset of panic.

He never ventures in an elevator.  He even recalls dragging a luggage trolley up 17 flights of stairs.   Even after the birth of our son, David lovingly packed up my flowers, gifts and cards and our day old son, wheeled us into the elevator where he hit the button for the main floor and ran down the stairs to meet us.  Awe… the feeling of being a single mother with a newborn.

David now refused to travel.  I go on trips alone.  Take my kids camping alone. Skiing alone. Mooseheads Hockey Games alone. We’ve said no to dinner parties and family functions. We counteract that by entertaining a lot because he doesn’t panic at home.   I know I can’t change him.  If he could be changed, he would be.  I’ve sat in countless therapy session with him, I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the shows, I’ve heard the tapes.   He’s worth it.

Keep in mind I am probably the most fearless and flexible person I know.  I’m up for anything anytime; I’ll drive in any weather conditions, and have even been know for deciding at 5pm to drive to Fredericton to surprise a boyfriend and bought a plane ticket on a Wednesday to visit my friend Jen in Ottawa for that Friday.  And yes, I’ve done some stupid things on a whim.  Like the time that Nadia and I drove 22 hours to surprise Jen in Brockville Ontario.  We drove the entire way to her apartment only to realize while standing in the locked apartment foyer that neither of us had a clue what apartment number she was in.  She found us while she was going for a walk.  We were laughing hysterically because of sleep depravation trying to figure out how to find her.   So being anxious about something that doesn’t exist is foreign to me.  After all, you never hear someone dieing of a panic attack.

But having said all that, I know it’s real.  I see the panic in his eye.  It scares me just as much as it does him.  And while I can’t at all relate, I try and remember what it’s like for me to walk into Winners and see a beautiful sweater, walking closer and closer and spot someone exactly my size eyeing it too, only she is closer than me and she’s reaching for it, and it’s like I’m walking but I’m not going forward and of my God, I feel like I might get in a sweater fight in the middle of Winners.  So yes, his feeling is real and I know he feels helpless.

I’ve pretended for along time that I’m ok with this.  That as long as it doesn’t directly affect me, than I can live with it.  I have no choice.  I can’t make him better.  I’ve always said that it affects other people more than it affects me.  Other people crinkle their noses and give us that confused look.  Like the time when we were waiting to see his therapist at the Mental Health Clinic and one of David’s childhood acquaintance looked at him and shouted in a busy waiting room, “David Hennigar, what the hell are you doin here?”  FYI- never ask, “what are you doing here” when: in the contraceptive isle at the drug store, at a brothel OR in the waiting room of a therapist office.  Trust me.  

But if I’m being completely honest, and I’ve always been in this blog, so why stop now, I am affected by his panic.  My kids miss out on being with their Dad, and I miss out experiencing my life with my husband.  But such is marriage: all the goods outweigh the bads.

I’m sure some are wondering why I’m writing all of this in a blog for the whole world to read.  In almost 100 posts this is the first time I have ever mentioned it.  I’m actually kind of anxious about writing it.  I’ve done a lot of research about anxiety, and read a blog by someone who suffers from it. I never hear much from the spouses so I don’t know if it’s normal to feel this helpless.

So if anyone is out there who’s been here, where I am, know this: there is no shame in seeing a shrink, your spouse probably feels worse about the situation than you do and red wine always usually helps.  And they’ve actually made great bottle openers if you find that you’ve developed Carpel Tunnel on account of the constant twisting of your wrist from removing corks. 

Of course a good sense of humor never hurts either.

The only thing I love more than a handy man is my husband.

Ok, so he’s not the handiest man in the world, but he’s resourceful which is almost as good.  Maybe he can’t install a toilet, but he knows a guy who can, and David has a cold case of beer with his name on it.

I remember late one stormy winter night when our son was sick and we were scared.  David threw him in the truck and drove to Dr. McNeills house who lives only a few blocks away.  Dr McNeil isn’t our doctor, but happens to be one of the most respected pediatricians around.  David plowed his snow-covered driveway, and when Dr. McNeil came out to thank him, David presented our sick child.  We wouldn’t have received better care if we had flown to the Toronto Hospital For Sick Kids.  David came home 15 minutes later with a prescription, an appointment for the following Monday and check for $30 for plowing the driveway. 

So when David’s friend and fellow car enthusiast who, just so happens to be a carpenter, wanted to buy David’s old engine, David said, “Tell ya what?  I’ll give you my old engine if you get my wife off my back and refinish the ceiling of our porch with pine tongue-and-groove that she’s been nagging me to do for over a year.  Maybe then she’ll stop threatening to hire the hunky handyman with the six-pack abs who she’s heard works without his shirt on.”  Or at least that is what I imagine he said. 

The only thing that I find more attractive than a handyman is a barterer.

The next weekend Jeff and David spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon working on the porch while I watched from the living room window in pure erotica. 

Now if only he knew a guy who loves to change the litter box.  Maybe it’s best that he doesn’t.   Our marriage can’t handle that much temptation.  

The porch ceiling pre-barter.   

And my hardworking David.  I’m all a-fever.  

The after, lights will come.  Any electricians out there like cold beer?? 

I’m so glad Halloween is over!  It’s just the messiest and most wasteful event of the year. Only an hour after we got home from trick or treating, I had picked up about 2 dozen little chocolate bar wrappers, and don’t even get me started on what the kids ate.

A few days before Halloween, we were talking about where we were going to go trick or treating this Halloween and Evan said he was going to go to every house in Mahone Bay except for our “mean neighbor’s house”.  We have a neighbor that some of the neighborhood kids are afraid of and we have no idea why.

Shamefully I have never met this neighbor, but David has and said he was very nice.  But I suppose living across the street from a “bad guy” adds some excitement to living in a town whose average age is 100.  Click to see our video.

Evan and I were driving to the Hockey rink when he said this:

Hay Mamma…..oh never mind.  You’ll never let me.”

Now-  I knew exactly what his strategy was in saying this.  I knew because as a kid, I have done it several times.  In fact, even as an adult I have done this to my husband.

So I knew full well not to say, “Come on Evan, ask me.”  Instead I said “You’re probably right.” and the look of disappointment on his face made me want to have this go his way, but not entirely.

Later that night he said this:

Oh Mamma…Did you think about it yet?”

Again, I knew this strategy too.  If he could convince me that he already asked me and that I was already considering it, than maybe, just maybe, I’ll let him do it.  So I said   “But I’m not thinking about anything.”

“Yeah you are, you are thinking about letting me go trick or treating with Connor.”

“And him mom?”

“No just us.”

“No, Evan!”

“But Mitchell gets to go just with his friends.” Mitchell is Connors older brother and he’s 13.

“Evan, he’s 13.  When you’re 13 you can go trick or treating just with your friends.”

“Ah, Momma, 7 plus 7 is 14.  I’m 7 and Connor’s 7 and together we’re 14.”

We did end up going trick or treating with Connor and Brendon, but with their Dad and me and a slew of other people.

Some families ration the candy letting their kids eat a few pieces here and a few pieces there, but the rule in our house is: eat as much of the candy as you can for 24 hours because when you wake up on November 2, all the candy is gone.  And usually I wake up with a tummy ache.