Read the First Chapter of The Dignity of Dependence
(When you submit your Mutual Dependence bingo boards)
In one month, The Dignity of Dependence comes out! I hope that, for many of you, that means a copy will be arriving on your doorstep or at your local library by request.
I hope I see some of you in NYC on Oct 2nd and others in DC on Oct 7th. The full book tour schedule is here.
And two of you can read the book early!
Now that August is over, it’s time to submit your Mutual Dependence Bingo Boards. Everyone with a bingo will get the first chapter emailed to you by the end of the week.
Two of you will get the whole book mailed to you.
For the purposes of the drawing, I’m asking in the google form whether you’re up to post a review when the book comes out. If you think you’re likely to be able to, you get two entries in the drawing. If not, your bingo board will get you one entry, and you’re still able to win.
In my final board, I had three bingos (you only need one). Looking over the month as a whole, I’m most grateful that I now have A Regular Call With a Friend set to continue in September.
I notched a Fail at Something when my husband and I chatted about the ways our garden got away from us. The basil is still going strong, but we lost most of the flowers we picked out with our girls to plant, and never really got the strawberries going at all.
Still, I’m glad we tried. The marigolds are flourishing despite our neglect, so we’ll put in more next year, and I’ll keep trying the strawberries until one summer I succeed.
Elizabeth is looking for suggestions for how to be ready to stretch a meal for unexpected guests:
Preportioned cookie dough in the freezer is perfect. I should definitely brainstorm this for a sticky note reference on my fridge. For that dinner, we eked things out with a quick pot of white rice. Often I have a loaf of bread on hand that can stretch a meal, but I can't exactly whip up a new one in 20 minutes. Anyone have other good ideas?
For my part, putting out cheese and crackers or carrots and hummus is my strategy for making people a little less hungry if I don’t have as much main to go around.
I can also get a skillet cookie in the over during dinner and then I feel like no one’s too sad if there wasn’t quite the ideal amount of entree.
Erin had a fun custom square to substitute for the “take care of a pet” option:
"Scavenge a whole project [from the community]." I decided my kitchen needed a new wall-mounted shelf ASAP, had a vision, and hit up the neighbourhood Slack channel to see if anyone had shelf brackets in their basement. Later that day I had some! I also know for a fact another community friend has a massive hoard of scrap wood she is looking to offload, so I'm one Wood Scrap Pickup away from having the stuff for my shelves! Free materials AND helping friends clean out their basements!
I want to hear a lot more about the neighborhood Slack channel! My neighborhood has two parish-linked listserves—one for men, one for women.
I love when there’s something in your house that always calls back the memory of the help you received. Now that the weather is nice, our kids have been on the Swinging Bench That Uncle Ellis Helped Build (that’s pretty much it’s full name).
So, don’t forget to send in your bingo boards, and tell me:
Re stretching a meal, two ideas: 1) think of dinners you can make with shelf-stable ingredients, and 2) plan on stocking your freezer.
1) You can pretty easily modify a stir-fry for unexpected guests (and for most allergies). Get some jarred sauce, then you need protein (meat, eggs, peanuts, cashews, canned beans, canned fish), and you need veggies (we often use a bag of frozen veggies, and you can clean out the random odds and ends in your fridge, too). Put everything in the skillet (think carefully about timing, since you do want any meat to be safely cooked, and raw carrots will take longer to cook than, say, fresh spinach). Serve over rice. A lot of these things you can keep in your freezer/pantry relatively long-term and have them magically available for doubling a meal.
Along these lines, we sometimes do a sheet pan with italian (or other) sausage, peppers, onions, etc.. Those things are less shelf-stable but they don't go bad in three days, so it's fairly easy to keep extras on hand (and use them up with other meals before they're bad).
We don't normally make separate food for kids, but if we have frozen chicken nuggets or something on hand, then the kids can eat those and there's more adult food for the adults.
2) Sometimes I'm better at this than other times but when I'm in the groove it works well. I like having a freezer stocked with leftovers that I can warm up for lunch later (or have on hand to give away, if a friend has a baby during a time when I'm really busy). One way to do this is to plan to make double what your family needs and freeze half of it. If you're already planning on this, you'll have enough to make for unexpected guests (and then just not stock your freezer that time).
Strawberries are better each year, so not all is lost!
- Sincerely, a woman who had a baby last summer and neglected the strawberries....this year brought plenty of abundance into sticky toddler hands!