‘Questions’ Archives

How do you get your motivation back?

Here’s what I’ve been doing since I finished up Laundrysplosion 2010:

[crickets chirp; obligatory tumbleweed rolls by]

Okay, it’s only been a couple of days, and to be fair, those days have been gray and rainy (giving me an excuse for some much needed catching-up with my down comforter).

The first rainy day was quite nice, but after three days, I was starting to get crabby about it: I had stuff to do, that needed to get done, but I couldn’t find it in myself to get up and do it.

Instead, I was frittering my day away (hello, stupid Facebook games!) until suddenly, it was late afternoon, I hadn’t done anything much, I still had no motivation and now I was annoyed/depressed about having wasted most of the day.

So… what sort of little tricks do you employ when you can’t seem to get started?

Do you set a timer for 15 minutes and tell yourself you’ll conquer a chore for at least that long? Do you bribe yourself with a small reward during or after a task? (Self-bribery via potato chips is what got me through several laundromat trips last week.)

Leave your suggestions in the comments below — check in with the gezellig-girl.com Facebook page to see my top picks.

Tags: my actual life, tips and tricks
Category Questions |

Calling all vegetarians…

About a month ago, my kid announced she was now a vegetarian.

She has made this proclamation before, although I suspect some of those announcements were part of a scheme to get me to buy some vegetable I’d recently declared to be out of season (e.g. asparagus), because said announcement was often followed by something like, “I just really love asparagus…”

In the past, she’s lasted a week or so, before, in her own words, “going back to being a meatatarian,” but this time it seems to have stuck, which is fine with us, her parents. Before we were parents, we were both vegetarians for years (and yes, we did serve a vegetarian meal at our wedding almost 10 years ago). We only broke away from full-time vegetarianism because I really, desperately wanted meat while pregnant with said kid (the irony is not lost on me). While pregnant, I ate enough roast beef sandwiches to make me think I might possibly give birth to a wolf pup.

Fast-forward to the present day and for the past couple years, we’ve only been eating meat once a week or so anyway, but this kid is really standing firm on her full-time vegetarian beliefs. (“I just feel bad for cows,” she says.)

Here’s where I need your help: I really need some new vegetarian recipes.

I kept a couple vegetarian cookbooks around even once I stopped being a full-time vegetarian, but in most cases, I’ve had these cookbooks for 10+ years already—if I was going to cook something out of them, I’ve probably already made it, tweaked it, and gotten sick of it by now.

My only caveat: an absolute minimum of soy products and/or vegetarian “fake” food. Things like soy “chick’n” nuggets, nutritional yeast “cheese,” seitan loaf… no thanks. Not because I believe there’s anything bad or inferior about them; I just don’t like them. Beans, eggs, milk, cheese, et cetera are all fine. Vegan cookbooks (like the excellent Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, which I really should buy already) are good too, as are recipe collections online.

So… help a vegetarian kid (and her mother) out? Leave your cookbook suggestions in the comments below.

Tags: my kid, vegetarianism
Category Life in Maison Gezellig, Questions, Vegetarian Recipes |

I (h)ate lunch.

Lunch is the bane of my existence.

Well. One of them, at least.

We’re not really breakfast people here—-largely because we’re really really not morning people. Still, on the rare times we do eat it, it’s either a very simple, like coffee and cereal, or it’s a fun occasion like Christmas morning, which calls for something like caramelized french toast.

But lunch? Lunch is the meal that makes me stare into the fridge with a mix of irritation, dread, and disgust.

For starters, I hate leftovers. Haaaaaaate them. Unless a meal is exceptional—-something omfg this is greatest frigging thing I have ever made—-then I am not going to want to eat it again within 24 hours.

Secondly, lunch forces me to think about dinner, which, at 11am, I am just not ready to do. Much like my hatred of leftovers, I can’t deal with eating two similar meals in the same day. If I eat pasta for lunch, I don’t want something with rice later.

Added to all this is the fact that working from home means, well, I have work to do, so anything that takes more than an hour to prepare/consume/clean up is right out (and before you suggest it, I burnt out on sandwiches of all sorts ages ago).

Where does this take me, your favorite food blogger? To some very un-food-bloggery foods, to be sure. Although I do have days of righteous lunches of a salad or some creative use of leftovers I can tolerate, I will readily (if not too publicly) admit to too many lunches of Celeste Pizza for One or mystery ramen from Chinatown, as pictured above.

So, stay-at-home parents, freelancers and the unemployed (or anyone who has to make their own lunch day after day), I ask you: how do you avoid lunch-making exhaustion?

Tags: food shame, lunch, weird food from chinatown
Category Life in Maison Gezellig, Questions |

My secret (breakfast) food shame:

My last secret food shame post is over two years old (and is the most commented post on this blog), so I think it’s time to confess another:

Not even Golden Grahams but knockoff Malt-O-Meal version Golden Grahams. “Don’t eat the fake Golden Grahams,” my husband will warn my kid. “They’re Mama’s. And you don’t want to mess with her cereal.”

What’s your secret cereal shame?

Category Questions |

Summer brings a lot of things to NYC.

Some of these things are good.

Public pools. Outdoor movies. The free ferry to Governors Island, with its green lawns and panoramic views of the city, like so:

Gosh, isn’t that nice? Go ahead, click the photo to see it up close.

Well, come on back from your happy place now, because summer also brings some not-so-good things to NYC. No, not the constant smell of wee…. something worse.

Roaches.

As much as I despise them, I have three cats and a kid who still likes to play on the kitchen floor. Spraying a bunch of poison around
is out of the question.

What else to do?

Here’s some of the all- (or mostly-)natural things I’ve done to get rid of roaches.

Clean up. This one is obvious, but it bears repeating. Of course, I have yet to figure out how to clean behind the stove or fridge, so this can only go so far.

Bay leaves. I’m sure this would work better if I had a bay laurel tree, but dried bay leaves from the supermarket will drive roaches away. They need to replaced fairly often to keep working, though.

Catnip. This works the best of anything I’ve tried so far. I put some into fill-your-own tea bags and then stash them throughout the kitchen.

Spraying soapy water on bugs. Okay. This works — on all bugs, as a matter of fact — but for an incredibly gross reason. Soap dissolves the “glue” that keeps a bug’s exoskeleton together… leaving you with a disassembled insect. Barf.

Borax. (Or boric acid, although it’s more toxic and harder to find.) Mix borax with virtually anything and dump the powder into the cracks and crevices. I’ve tried borax with cocoa powder and sugar, but I’ve seen suggestions for cornstarch, flour, white rice, sweetened condensed milk — one site suggested putting chopped onion in it but I’ll be damned if I’m doing any food prep for bugs.

These have worked for me so far, but I’m constantly collecting more ideas, in case things ever get worse. I hear mint and cedar work well, although I haven’t tried it. Also, cucumber and garlic, but isn’t just leaving bits of food out to spoil?

Fellow New Yorkers (and other city dwellers), have you tried to get rid of bugs in your kitchen? What worked?

You say you hate bugs but love this blog? Become a fan of gezellig-girl.com on Facebook.

Category Green is Gezellig, Questions, Science! |