1 can black beans
1 can corn
1 can rotel tomatoes (we did 1 c diced tomatoes & half a can green chilis)
1 can pinto beans (I left this out this time)
salt and pepper to taste

Blend, spice as needed (we did parsley but this would be delicious with some cilantro or a dash of cumin) and heat. We served with cheese, sour cream and cornbread. Would also be great with diced avocado and tortilla chips or over rice. Hooray, a bean recipe I like! This has me excited to try more because I really don’t like beans. Maybe we’ll try more blended bean recipes. We’ll also be trying this with dried beans we cook ourselves when I’m more ambitious. Yummy, frugal and healthy.

Warning: this post contains mildly political views.

Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer

By Jeffrey A. Miron
Special to CNN

“Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.”

I read that CNN op-ed yesterday. A lot of what Mr. Miron says makes sense on the gut level and the macroeconomic level. I also know that 10 out of 10 economists will agree that something needs fixing, though they won’t be able to agree on exactly what that fix should be. I suppose that’s why I read an opposing viewpoint published in the Economist yesterday, too. : ]

From my armchair, I like one of Mr. Miron’s basic premises especially. Home ownership is a lovely idea, but not above all other economic concerns. A family I respect very much who lives down the street from us were married for 19 years before they settled into a mortgage. Renting isn’t the end of the world, and I’m seeing dozens of families stuck in their “starter homes” because they can’t unload them for near their original value.

However, laying all this at the feet of Freddie, Fannie, and the Community Reinvestment Act is a bit of a stretch for me. It just doesn’t pass the sniff test. But then I found this this bit from a Business Week blogger which explains recent (like, in the last decade) developments more articulately than I can. BW takes a cursory look at some more recent financial inventions that have a more immediate contribution to our current mess than Fannie, Freddie, and the CRA.

The way I see it, the current problem owes a great deal of its current voracity to the motivation of the banks who got into the act chasing greed with subprime, ARM, and all that mess compounded with these weird financial inventions like credit swapping to the point that their own financial officers can’t explain exactly how they were making money (with echoes of Enron). These guys really ought to fail. As long as we support corporate personhood, we should also hold those corporations to “personal” responsibility for their actions.

It would be my hope that when the greedy dinosaurs start going extinct, that the smaller, more community-focused entities will be agile enough to continue serving their communities. Yes, I’m looking at USAA (our bank) when I say this. There’s also the adage that, if a corporation is too large to fail, then perhaps it’s too large to exist.

I also like to point out that after the market took a 777 point drop yesterday (7% of its net worth — not much compared to many other recent events — 14% for 9/11, 22% for Black Monday, 1987), it’s already rallied over 200 points this morning. These investors are a skittish lot.

Let’s go back to my armchair for a moment. Seems to me that, with the numbers floating around I’ve been reading, $700B would pay for a huge percentage of the current number of mortgages in trouble outright, rather than propping up the institutions that are foreclosing on those properties. I mean, with a mean home cost of $250k going into $700B (which is a ridiculously large and incomprehensible number when you write out all the zeroes) just about 3 million homes could be paid for free and clear. Not that I’m suggesting we buy these people’s houses free and clear, after all, they made poor choices with their finances in many cases. But we shouldn’t simply allow them to be out on the street when the banks decide they have to take all their money back, even if it’s in the form of mortgaged property.

So, then. What is the $700B actually going for? Ah yes, to buy lousy securities that are poison to these companies. It simply doesn’t make sense that the government buying out $700B of bad debt will somehow magically make that same debt profitable again.

Yes, the larger picture of gloom is the credit crunch and how local businesses will fail when banks everywhere start refusing to float loans, but once these community-focused banks peer out from behind their ramparts, they’ll pick up the ball and help keep their community entities solvent. Yes, I really believe in Jimmy Stewart’s Bailey Building and Loan, too.

The “bailout” deal I’m looking for goes something like this: 120 day moratorium on foreclosures so consumers can get their feet under them. Federal compulsion for lending banks to get out of the investment business (30-1 investments with mortgage backed securities? Get real!). Some kind of limits on executive compensation packages (and in some cases, reclaiming that money if the institution actually fails — it completely burns me that the ousted CEOs of Fannie and Freddie kept their golden parachutes). And finally, take all that money and reinvest it back into local institutions, US infrastructure, and education so we, as a country, can get back to our historical core competencies — science, engineering, medicine, and all that industrious sort of stuff that used to make us great.

What it all comes down to for us is that, there’s not too much to worry about since we’re not carrying any consumer debt. The rising price of oil affects basic living expenses more than the credit crunch, so cost of living isn’t too much of an issue (aside from trickle-down hysteria). Our household is going to continue trying to live frugally and take the long view on our existing investments.

In the meantime, if you think there’s something fishy about borrowing another $700B to apply a band-aid to a much larger problem, please contact your representatives without delay. I don’t presume to know what the fix is, but I have a strong suspicion that it’s better than the current plan.

Update:
Just got an excellent explanation from Dennis Kucinich about where the $700B comes from in my inbox. Chew on this for a minute:

Here is a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:

The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.

Confused?

This is the system. This is the standard mechanism used to expand the money supply on a daily basis not a special one designed only for the “$700 billion” transaction. People will explain this to you in many different ways, but this is what it comes down to.

Oy.

On September 21st, 2008, Sarah (Gaertner) Cook asked:

Why do you make yogurt homemade? Is it healthier? More cost-effective? Taste Better? Seems like there are other things that you do homemade that are commonly purchased items. Isn’t it difficult to homemake so many food items when you have 5 kids? Just wondering.

Kit
What a fantastic group of questions! Though I admit that the way you phrased them made me laugh, then I started thinking, the answer here is more deserves its own post. (I even asked Heidi to chime in, and she did — what a sport!)

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Now that everyone who reads our blog has had ample time to create their own homemade yogurt, I’m going to take a little time to pass along some things we’ve learned as we refine our process. In no particular order:

The longer you let your yogurt sit, the tangier it gets. We let ours sit for four to five hours.

We also sweeten ours in the jar. When doing three quarts of yogurt at a time, I add three tablespoons of vanilla and a cup of sugar. But this only nets a mild sweetness. When you add a spoonful of your favorite jam or a handful of granola, the yogurt doesn’t become overpoweringly sweet this way. Add about 1½. cups of sugar for supermarket sweet.

When making large quantities, make sure you subtract the equivalent of your yogurt culture and sugar from your initial volume of milk. Three quarts of yogurt actually means about 2½ quarts milk. I don’t include the powdered milk in that volume (1 C powdered milk per Q milk) — it dissolves. Otherwise you’ll be floating extra ziploc baggies of yogurt in your water bath. Yes. I did this.

I use the water bath method of culturing. That means I take a number of quart jars filled with the yogurt culture, cover the mouth with a square of aluminum foil, and put them into a small cooler. I pop the probe thermometer into one of the jars, then I fill up the cooler with hot water (between 105 and 120° F) to about an inch under the tops of the jars. Close the whole thing up, and wait. In four hours, I have to warm the water once. More on that later. More yogurt in the cooler improves the stability of this method. We have Newton’s First Law of Motion to thank for this:

An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an external force.

Now, an object’s tendency to stay at rest or in motion is called inertia, and inertia is directly proportional to an object’s mass, as described by the formula:

F=ma

where F is the amount of force required to get an object moving, m is the object’s mass, and a is its rate of acceleration. Mass, therefore, is the quantitative measure of an object’s inertia: the greater its mass, the less a body accelerates under a given force. The fun part is that classical newtonian physics has direct applications in cooking.

Mass is mass: it’s how much stuff you’re cooking. The force is the heat you’re applying to the food. Its acceleration is the rate at which it gets up to temperature. What is heat, after all, than the measure of the movement of the molecules of a given object? The hotter something is, the more its molecules move around. So molecules at rest tend to stay at rest until acted upon by an external source — heat! The more of any given something you have, the longer it’ll take for all of its molecules to start dancing about and get to its temperature, but more mass also means that your something will also stay at its target temperature longer.

So, while it may be a little slower to get up to target (I shoot for 109-115° F), the yogurt will also stay in the zone longer the more stuff you have in your cooler — yogurt, water, glass jars, and all.

The first law of motion is also responsible for the concept of carry-over heat in cooking as well as the impetus behind the laws of thermodynamics, but I digress.

To recharge the water, I use a little bit of tubing I saved from one of my misadventures in plumbing. When the temp drops below 109°, I siphon off one or two cups of water into a glass measuring cup, pop it in the microwave for about two minutes, then pour the water back into the cooler. The temp usually spikes to 113° and takes a couple of hours to go back to 109. Depending on your total volume, On a related note, Christopher and Mo now know how a siphon tube works, which is a good skill to know in the face of the looming energy crisis.

I think I love cooking because it’s really practical applied science.

Know what happens when you combine an adorable baby and a playdate with my kick-butt photographer sister?? You get THIS… something she snapped in the last 15 minutes of her visit. She makes it look so easy but you can bet my pictures never turn out this amazing, and then I remember she has natural talent and years of education/training/experience. I uploaded them here untouched, and I’ll post the gallery later.

UPDATE: Here is the gallery link - poor kid is worn out from his shoot, asleep on me now. Did I mention she shot these while we had 8 kids around? All six years old and under?

UPDATE II: I think we’re going to print these for a tri-frame we have in our master bedroom, after Kit does the real editing job (I was just playing more in iPhoto.)

(I bumped this because he’s so cute and I want to keep it on the front page so I can admire my sweet baby. This has nothing to do with how cute or not cute some formerly sweet babies that are now toddlers/preschoolers in my home may have been behaving today. I completely lost you on that sentence, huh? They use to be really cute. Sometimes they still are but sometimes… um, not so cute. Thus my need to wallow in the very sweetness that is my baby boy’s face, it’s insurance for him down the line so I can remember these warm and fuzzy feelings towards him.)

Serve over applesauce, yogurt, milk or eat straight. I thought we would have enough for breakfast, we may not have any left!!

4 cups oats
1 cup chopped almonds
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons sugar *leave out and skip heating step next time*
4 teaspoons vanilla extract

Spray large baking sheet with nonstick spray or use silicone mat & preheat oven to 300 degrees. Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. Combine oil, honey and sugar in small saucepan; bring to simmer over medium heat, remove from heat and add vanilla (or can microwave until sugar dissolves but watch closely for spillover.) Pour hot liquid over oat mixture; stir well. Spread granola on cookie sheet, bake until lightly brown, stirring occasionally, about 30 minutes but watch closely depending on how soft/crunchy you want it. If you want it chunky, don’t stir while baking and wait until cool to break into chunks. Store in airtight container.

Next time I’ll try it with coconut, too.

(This is one of those things that has been sitting on my desktop mocking me for long enough. I barely edited this post. It’s raw and rambling. I apologize for that a little, but I just had to get it put to bed.)

I have bipolar disorder. The official diagnosis is BP-I. I was formally diagnosed when I was 16 and had a major crash after the death of my mother in that year, but I know that I had early onset BPD. It just went unnoticed for many years. This is not surprising. The Pierces are wading in the shallow end of the gene pool when it comes to mental health, and we each had our own raging problems to deal with. It only stands to reason that I could easily escape notice. What was to notice in the first place? I was a polite kid, and bright, and really fun to be around. Except of course when I wasn’t any of those things. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not going to air out the various diagnoses of my family members — it’s not my place to do that here. What I am going to write about is what bipolar disorder is like, at least as much as I can articulate from the front row.

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For Katie!

1 1/2 cups peanut butter
1 cup butter, softened (can do little less, but not much)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 cups confectioners’ sugar (may need much less)
1+ cup semisweet chocolate chips (can stir in spoon of peanut butter for texture/smoothing, may do more than 1 cup if you like thick chocolate layer and addition of peanut butter to melting chips prevents chocolate from cracking when it chills)

Mix first three ingredients, stir in powdered sugar until consistency you like. (Can also mix in some crisp rice cereal.) It takes a bit of work to get powdered sugar in well! Spread into lightly greased 9×13 pan. Melt chocolate chips and spread on top. Chill, cut, store in freezer to snitch when kids aren’t looking.

A friend was asking about swaddle blankets and I mentioned it to Kit and this was the email he sent in response to her questions. I married the Swaddle Pro. Seriously, he does all the swaddling around here because I always do something off and the baby escapes.

I’ve had way too much time to think about swaddling over the years. I hope you don’t mind if I add some things to what Heidi was saying.

In no particular order:
Swaddlers need to be a fairly stiff fabric, very non-elastic. I’ve had the best results with natural fibers — cotton blankets are especially nice. Too much synthetic in the blend will stretch and slip and they tend to be hotter.

I didn’t like the storebought swaddlers with the little velcro tabs and all. They focus all of the stress of the swaddle at one or two points and invariably come all undone except at those two points. Fairly useless, IMO.

Bringing me to the real secret of swaddling: surface area. If you get as much contact with the blanket over as much of the length of the baby as possible, then it’ll stay more snug. Bonus points if you take that first pass around the baby and secure the end behind the baby’s back so they’re laying on the point of the blanket — lots of surface area.

It also helps if the child’s arms are wrapped up without a point of leverage. If their arms are crossed in front, they’ll totally wiggle out. If their arms are more at the side, they have a harder time of wiggling.

I’ve been enjoying reading the great ideas on the Frugal Friday post, so I thought I would take a turn posting some ideas.

These are links to breakfast recipes we’ve made that our kids love. They can all be made in batches and frozen for quick reheating later. We made many of these to prepare for Joseph’s arrival. I loved having them handy during this rough postpartum period when we’re exhausted. The kids are very NOT exhausted and for some crazy reason still expect us to feed them! All of the recipes could be made healthier (and probably less expensively) with substitutions, but I’m too tired lately to think about that. My sister makes her own sour milk to substitute for the buttermilk, you can decrease sugar and butter in the recipes by just a bit (healthier & cheaper!) and so on… play around with them, of course.

Buttermilk pancakes, Kit’s favorite to make.

Pumpkin pancakes with apple cider sauce.

Cream of wheat pancakes.

French toast sticks and “breakfast cookies.” The cookies are a granola bar adaptation.

Sweet bread or muffin recipe.
Vanilla yogurt for having with milk, yogurt or applesauce.

Enjoy!