Lessons from dinner, and other just-got-home ramblings.

Saved as a draft for several months... sorry guys! :-)

So, it's December, and we are back in Germany! I really do intend to blog about more of the adventures we had before we got back; sadly, many of them involved a very sick baby and packing and trips that didn't turn out quite the way we planned, but that's okay. All's well now.

As I was making dinner yesterday, I discovered something: you know how you can give yourself a little burn if you hold a piece of ice too long? You know freezer burn, that stuff that makes ice cream taste funny? Well, my friends, you'd never believe it, but freezer burn cooked the edges of my frozen chicken. I got it out of the bag, thinking "I don't remember leaving this much chicken in here... 6 months shouldn't hurt it, it was frozen the whole time..." And then I noticed that the edges looked cooked, under the ice build-up. Science! Who knew! :-D (Also, I cooked it and put it in chicken pot pie, and it was fine. There were two edges that would have been really chewy, and those I cut off and put in the bio recycling.)

Also, M is at the age where she wants to HELP. Usually I find her something safe to stir and she's happy, but lately she really wants to stir the thing I am stirring. :-) Nice try, Mom.

Have I ever explained, for those of you who don't know, about our German trash laws? We separate all trash into 4 categories: bio trash (food, basically... anything that would make clean compost... dead potted plants, for example, not that I have ever had to do that much...), paper, packaging (of the non-paper kind: most plastics, aluminum foil, tin cans, Styrofoam—anything like that that can be rinsed out), and regular trash (everything else). Oh, and we have to recycle glass; it doesn't fall into the other categories, and it doesn't get picked up by the sanitation department like everything else does, but it's not a big deal. We have a big glass-recycling container just down the street.

Also, I am pleased to say that I love our German house just as much now as I did before. We had a good little apartment in Arizona, but it's so nice to be home with our own real beds, and cooler weather, and good friends whom we missed, and more toys and books for M, and my kitchen full of everything I need to really do some good.

Now, let's see if we can make it through M learning to walk with all-tile floors... and much-in-need-of-childproofing stairs...


No, Mommy, it'll be fine! I'll be really careful!