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Christmas Recipe: Crockpot scalloped potatoes, hold the canned soup

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On Christmas Eve the choir performs twice, once at the 8:30  p.m. service and then again at the 11:00 service, a full-throttle bells-and-smells Eucharist. In between the two events we entertain ourselves with a  potluck dinner.

Since M’hijito and I are entertaining 15 people at my house on Christmas Day and since SDXB will be spending Christmas Eve here, I cast about for something to take to the potluck that wouldn’t require much work. The crockpot is the likeliest candidate for a work-saving tool here, but I’m not fond of recipes that entail dumping canned mushroom soup (icky!) over chicken and cooking it to death. So I think I’m going to adapt and combine a couple of recipes to create a fresh variation on scalloped potatoes for the crockpot.

See the update of this recipe here.

Check this out:

2 pounds potatoes, sliced
1 large yellow onion, julienned
butter
olive oil
about 2 cups flavorful white sauce (see below)
1 cup shredded gruyère cheese
paprika or New Mexico red pepper flakes (mild)
finely chopped parsley
salt and pepper

To julienne the onion, peel it and slice it vertically, then slice again vertically, at a 90-degree angle to the original slices. Skim a frying pan with olive oil. Carmelize the onions by sautéeing them gently until they’re lovely and brown. Season mildly with salt and pepper to taste.

Grease the inside of the crockpot container generously with butter or olive oil.

Layer the sliced potatoes and the carmelized onions into the pot. Spread the white sauce evenly over the top. Dot generously with butter, then add more pepper and, if desired, salt. Cover the pot and cook the potatoes on low for seven or eight hours or on high for three to four hours. About a half-hour before serving, remove the lid and sprinkle with cheese and a little paprika for color. Replace the lid and allow the potatoes to continue cooking until the cheese is melted in. Finally, sprinkle minced fresh parsley over the top.

To make 2 cups white sauce:
See the comments for a discussion of the sauce!

4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons white flour
2 cups milk, or combination of milk and good chicken or beef stock
dollop of sherry
nutmeg
salt and pepper
paprika (optional)

Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add flour and stir well to combine. Cook gently over medium-low  heat until the butter and flour foam up. Don’t allow the flour to brown.

Add the stock and stir over medium-high heat until them sauce is hot and thickened. Add nutmeg to taste: 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. Add a couple tablespoons of dry sherry. Add salt and pepper to taste. A little paprika will give the sauce some extra zing.

Mwa ha ha! For the last potluck, someone got to the sign-up sheet before me and claimed the very dish I planned to bring. Last night, though, I managed to grab the sheet first. While this will not be as staggeringly impressive as Cheryl and Doug’s traditional home-smoked salmon, it should at least be reasonably tasty.

Image: Vicente Gil, Adoração dos Magos. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

w00t! Free flu shots!!

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Dang! I thought the community college was charging $20 for the H1N1 shots they were dispensing today. Barreled in there this afternoon and learned they’re free! Even if you’re not a full-time employee. That’s amazing…GDU never did anything like that.

I had to pay $20 for the regular seasonal flu shot last fall, ’cause Cigna, GDU’s new EPO provider, wouldn’t cover it unless you drove downtown to attend their flu shot clinic. Yeah. Right. My time is worth more than twenty bucks.

Even someone off the street could’ve gotten the shot for free, if they’d known about it…they didn’t ask for ID, and the form you had to fill out was just a disclaimer warning you not to take it if you’re allergic to eggs or have certain ailments.

So that was pretty amazing.

Got another nice deal, though not free, at Safeway yesterday: tough old skirt steaks for $1.77 a pound. Had it ground up into enough hamburger to last Cassie the Corgi for another month or two.

An hour & a half before choir practice: think I’ll grill some of it for myself over some fine mesquite charcoal.

Cheapskate heaven. 🙂

On the first day of freedom…

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The students’ grades posted, the GDU office all but shuttered, and editorial work wound down to one entertaining detective novel to read, the question arises: What next?

So many what nexts: I can think of so much to fill my time I expect to be a great deal busier than I was while trudging in the traces.

• Just e-mailed a friend at the West campus (still there, poor dear!) to see if she’d like to go out to lunch or coffee, since I have to schlep a $500 check from the detective-novel publisher over to the credit union, which is on the campus.

• The community college is dispensing H1N1 flu shots. They even gave me an appointment: 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. Not convinced I need this, since I think I came down with the swine flu last June. However, in the past before I started getting an annual immunization, I invariably came down with the bug in the second semester. So: better safe than etceteraed.

• Gotta prune the roses!

• Gotta tend to the pool, which has been sitting dormant quietly for a while.

• Gotta go outside in the frosty morning and admire the sunrise, which just now is turning the sky brilliant coral.

• Want to spend some time playing with the new computer. Wrapping things up has consumed so much time and energy, I haven’t even had time to look at it.

• Then it’s off to choir practice.

Check out this lovely thing. Not being an all-male choir, we didn’t sound like this when we sang it last week. But we were good. Very, very good.

My RA and my editorial assistant are machinating a proposal to resuscitate our operation, only house it in the President’s or the Provost’s office. They’re going to meet with a faculty member today about this scheme. Since I happen to know, from other sources, that faculty member has been in the President’s office with a couple of colleagues engaged in their own machinations, it’ll be interesting to see how this falls out.

In academe, as (I imagine) in the real world, a well-timed coincidence can create all sorts of little miracles. My own career at GDU was launched when I happened to stumble into the West campus looking to teach a feature-writing course part-time, bearing a Ph.D. and 15 years of magazine journalism experience, at a moment when the American Studies faculty were craving to found a “professional” writing program. Presto-changeo! Not only a full-time job but a program to direct!

So anything’s possible. If they ask the right people at the right time, they just might open a door for themselves.

A friend seemed to feel I should be exercised because there is some indication that my little empire is about to be co-opted, whether by the young people or, more to the point, by my former colleagues who so conspicuously surfaced in the Presidential Presence. Don’t think so.

GDU is so behind me, I just do not care what anyone out there does, or why, or how. If they offered me a job now, I don’t think I’d even consider taking it. And if any of the underlings can revive the office, more power to them. And…good luck to them.

So back to what next. Long-term, I’d like to…

…write one of these detective  novels.
…rewrite the novel I wrote several years ago, changing the gender of one of the main characters and thereby thickening the plot no end.
…take voice lessons.
…learn to read music.
…take painting lessons.
…sign up for yoga classes.
…volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden.
…volunteer to usher at the Herberger, by way of getting in to the plays for free.
…start hiking in the desert again.
…take the dog to agility training.
…learn XHTML and CSS.
…go back to Santa Fe.

But right this minute I’ve gotta get off my chair and go for the morning walk.

The joy of students

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Students can be such a pain sometimes, you tend to forget how splendid they are, even the ones whose minds your subject escapes.

Early this semester I winced when Disability Resources sent a notice saying a student with Asperger’s Syndrome had signed up for one of my classes. Ungraciously, selfishly I thought, “Argh! More work, less pay!”

We must stop with the ungraciousness and the selfishness.

This extraordinary young man, who does indeed face some daunting challenges, has made himself one of my all-time favorite students. Polite, sweet-natured, attentive, and observant, he is an altogether brillliant young person. He turns in meticulously edited, meticulously organized, yea verily meticulously perfect papers. No, they’re not plagiarized (trust me: I checked). The things are works of art. His final paper almost reaches the professional level in quality; he’s certainly writing on the graduate school level. He wants to be a physicist, or maybe an astronomer. The kid’s a natural: let’s hope he makes it.

Then there’s Joe the Plumber. Yeah: a real plumber. A big, bluff red-necked bruiser in his late 30s or early 40s, this guy realized there had to be a better way to make a living than fixing pipes, so he’s come back to school for a degree or two in business. English will never be his strong suit, but by steady persistence (and a bodacious sense of humor) he’s nailed an A in the class. As yesterday’s final session was wrapping up, he wanted to be sure every item in the online grade sheet was filled in correctly, because, he said, “My mother is not gunna believe this!”

“Why?” I asked.

“I  never got an A in high school.”

🙂 “Well. Tell her you’re a late bloomer.”

And we have Sally Bowles, a pole dancer. Her mother thinks she’s a cocktail waitress in a chain restaurant and highly disapproves of that. Little does she know the girl supports her three-year-old by taking off her clothes in men’s clubs.

You can make a lot of money taking off your clothes in men’s clubs, even without having to perform any extracurricular services. She earns more in a single evening than I do teaching her English course over two weeks. Women we think of as “hard” are surprisingly fragile, though. Her toughness is a façade hiding a dangerous vulnerability.

Men can be vulnerable, too. The ex-Marine planning to re-up in the Army after he finishes at the junior college carries his fierceness as a Roman soldier carried his shield, something to bounce off the arrows, swords, and lances of disappointment and careless humanity.

They’re all like that, one way or another: dodging the slings and arrows. Gotta lov’em!

Freedom!

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w00t! I’m never going back to work at GDU again. Over at the community college, the last of the student papers are graded, and all that remains is to meet one class this afternoon to return their papers. I’m waiting till this evening to post grades, because there’s still a shot my marvelously brilliant but distracted Asperger’s student will turn in a final draft (I gave a couple of foot-draggers until today to finish).

LOL! This kid is so amazing that even if I grade from the work-in-progress he turned in by way of proving that he is working on it, he’ll finish with a strong B.

Moving on: by this evening, I am going to be free of any sort of slave labor (except for copyediting another detective novel….heh heh heh heh!) for an ENTIRE MONTH.

Yesh.

I had forgotten how lovely winter breaks and summer vacations are. The only thing hanging over my head between now and the middle of January will be designing next semester’s courses. And I’m actually looking forward to that, because I have some highly creative new ideas.

Springing free from the Great Desert University is an enormous relief. One of the other things I’d lost sight of is how toxic that place is. I do not know one soul who works there who is happy in her or his job. At least one therapist in the city has a practice that consists almost entirely of GDU employees.

Imagine: a shrink who specializes in treating employees of a single organization. Does that tell you something, or does that tell you something?

427px-Guerin_Morpheus&Iris1811

The god of Sleep has returned to my precincts. I’m sleeping through almost every night undisturbed! It’s literally been years since I’ve had a full night’s sleep, one that wasn’t interrupted by a spate of wakefulness between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. Matter of fact, that was the genesis of Funny about Money: nothin’ else to do in the wee hours but read blog posts and write a few of my own.

And since, for the first time since the memory of Person runneth not to the contrary, I feel rested when I wake up in the morning, I’m not irritable and on edge all day, I feel no desire for a drink every afternoon, and navigating our homicidal streets no longer reduces  me to screaming rage.

Do I worry about money? A little. But I know I’ll get by at least through 2010. By this time next year, I should be well accustomed to living on a third of what I earned at GDU, and if that’s the case, I can go along forever on Social Security, part-time teaching, editing, and a very small drawdown (if any!) from savings.

Yesterday’s guest post by Revanche struck a chord, when she remarked on her surprise at realizing how much she revels in freedom from the workplace. Right on, lady!

I think a lot of wage slaves who trudge into an office, factory, or retail store stay on the gerbil wheel for one reason and one reason only: health insurance. It certainly was true for me: shortly after I divorced I realized that once the COBRA ran out (my ex- covered that, as part of the agreement), I would be uninsured and unable to afford my own insurance. That mooted the prospect of freelancing, which, in my financial naïveté at the time, I imagined would support me. Several times during my tenure at GDU, I thought I should quit the damn job and go back to freelance writing and editing, but the reality was that I could not get insurance to cover me fully and even if I could, nothing was affordable.

Insurers dream up every reason from Hell to short you on coverage. In my case, I was told  that because I had a “diagnosis” that I had never heard of—something a doctor had innocently noted on my record but thought so minor he didn’t bother to tell me about it—Blue Cross would not cover any broken bones, back pain, or muscle spasms. This meant that a good car wreck would bankrupt me. And good car wrecks are commonplace around here. In any event, the cost was prohibitive. If I wanted to be able to go to a doctor, I had to keep working for GDU. Which of course was what was sending me to doctors…

Starting in January, the discounted COBRA will carry me through to Medicare. Though Medicare costs about 11 times more than GDU’s EPO does, it still is not beyond reason. The state of Arizona’s health insurance is so cheap (and you get what you pay for, BTW) that it far underprices what most Americans pay for group insurance, and so Medicare probably looks like a bargain for most folks.

Once government-provided health insurance is in place (if it ever gets past the retrograde types who are resisting it), I wonder what effect that will have on the labor force.

I suspect a lot of people figure they could get by with self-employment or in part-time jobs, but keep trudging because they can’t afford health insurance and are unwilling to go bare. How many workers who dream of jumping off the treadmill will do it, once that barrier falls?

I know I would have left GDU a long time ago if affordable public insurance had been an option. Why would anyone put herself through a lifetime of misery if there were a reasonable way to get out of it?

Maybe this is the reason the right-wingers oppose a public option: they know darned well the more self-starting wage slaves will flee if we don’t have to stay in the traces to get medical care when we’re sick.

What’s freedom worth to you? If you had access to decent, affordable health insurance and you could earn enough to cover your living costs on your own or through light part-time work, would you quit your full-time job—even if it meant cutting back on your lifestyle a bit?

Image: Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Morpheus and Iris. Public Domain.

Revanche on the secret joy of unemployment

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Today we have a guest post by Revanche, proprietor of one of my favorite PF blogs, A Gai Shan Life. Enjoy!

VH asked me how I’m dealing with unemployment now that I’m well in, and I had to think about it.

Most notably, believe it or not, is the fact that I was laid off almost six months ago and my head has not yet exploded.

It should have, considering the degree to which I obsessed over every possible detail of pending unemployment in the months prior to L-day (all the gory details of which you can find blogged between the dates of July 2008 and June 2009). But it didn’t.

In all my planning and calculating, plotting and planning, résumé-building and interview scheduling, I utterly underestimated the sheer freedom that comes with unemployment.

Not the freedom of just staying at home all day in my pajamas, if I please. [Don’t ask me if that’s ever happened, please. Let me have some dignity.] The kind of nearly spiritual freedom, relief really, that comes of knowing that my time shackled to that job out of a sense of responsibility to provide for my family, to do the right thing, to be grateful for the job I had in this economy, was over. Out of a job though I am, I’m also free of the company and of the kind of people who believed in lying, cheating and scamming. Not my kind of folk.

Flying utterly in the face of my workaholic tendencies, I’ve discovered an odd and unnatural secret of unemployment: if you have some financial security, it can actually be refreshing. Who knew?

Whether or not you know me, that sounds like crazy talk.

I assure you, I haven’t lost my mind. I hate not having a steady, full-fledged income, I hate not contributing to my retirement accounts, I hate that I haven’t deposited money into my savings accounts in massive chunks in oh-so-long. And this time has been filled with working on projects, seeking out challenging employment opportunities and interviewing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t admit that I’ve also discovered the wonders of having the time to travel (New York, San Francisco, San Diego), travel (New York), and travel (Hawaii). I haven’t ever had this kind of freedom to hit the road, I could not have jumped in the car and gone to a friend in need while fully employed, and I haven’t ever been able to take classes without wedging it into 12-hour workdays (before, during or after college). These things are important to me, and without this breather, I doubt that my life plan would ever have allowed for discovering new cities, or the commitment to taking care of ill or grieving friends. And with certain health issues, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve realized I’m allowed to rest instead of forcing myself to face another 18-hour-day despite my body’s pleas for surcease.

The cost of this freedom, all the deprivations of earlier years, was completely worth it. That’s easy to say now because 1) I don’t feel them anymore, and 2) I’m practically living in the lap of luxury now thanks to how I lived before. What’s that saying, “Live like no one else will, so you can live like no one else can”? That little truism is absolutely true. It wasn’t easy being sensible about every penny I spent, and I can’t discount the unemployment income and subsidized COBRA, which have both gone a long way in stretching out my savings as well. But I’m able to look for the next best career step, pay my bills, stay out of debt, and still do good things. That is well worth the extra six to twelve months spent in the next best thing to Dante’s Inferno.

So how am I doing? Right now, though VH occasionally twits me 😉 about stacking up enough cash to be the envy of fellow unemployeds, I’m nervous about the future. I’d be a fool not to be—in this economy? With these pseudo-if-not-real hiring freezes? Since last week, I’ve seen three more friends lose their jobs and another floundering to keep his business open. Times remain very tough, economic indicators notwithstanding.

Still, I’m not allowing fear to paralyze me. I’m working hard to find my next new path and get well, and I’m also trying to stay in the moment and enjoy a little of what I’ve earned. We’ll see how I fare in the next six months as benefits start to run out. I certainly hope to have landed a job by that time.