As I sit here writing this post, my stomach is filled to the brim.  I couldn’t eat another bite.  I’ve indulged in turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, stuffing, Asian salad, chocolate rugalech, pumpkin chocolate chip cake, and dark chocolate peanut butter banana ice cream.  I can’t eat any more.  I can’t even think about food.

Ok, maybe I can think about food a little bit.  Thanksgiving, to me, always means certain dishes.  It just doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving otherwise.  Of course, one is turkey and another is stuffing.  The dish that most says “Thanksgiving” to me, though, is sweet potato casserole.

Growing up, my mother and I seemed to have a ritual.  Every year, she would make a sweet potato casserole topped with marshmallows.  Every year, I would eat the marshmallows and leave the “yucky” sweet potatoes behind.  Every year, my mom would bug me to try a little bit of sweet potato.  I never would.

One year, I had enough of being bugged.  I decided to just give in, take a taste, and show my mother just how disgusting those sweet potatoes were.  I took a small bite and… loved them!  I couldn’t believe how great they tasted.  I went from skimming the casserole for the marshmallows to eating the whole thing.  (My portion, that is, not the entire casserole.)

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What Thanksgiving food brings back memories?

P.S. If you haven’t already, go visit FollowerHQ and let me know what you think of my Twitter application.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #115

Yesterday, B and I began cooking some of the desserts for our Thanksgiving meal.  B made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake.  I made Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Ice Cream.  We will soon head out to B’s parents’ house where we will spend the day playing, watching movies, and cooking the rest of the food for our meal tonight.

Here’s wishing you and your family a very Happy Thanksgiving!

The news programs and blog sites have been a buzz recently about Congress declaring Pizza a vegetable.  Not some eggplant, pepper, spinach, and broccoli laden version of pizza.  What was being referenced was your typical school lunch slice of pizza.

I have bad memories of school lunch pizza.  I clearly remember a girl taking her fist and punching her pizza.  The indentation she made was clearly visible… until the pizza began to “recover.”  It morphed its shape back to the pre-fist-punch shape.  This pizza apparently had healing capabilities or was cooked with a liberal dosage of rubber.  Possibly the latter considering that kids also used to bounce the meatballs around the lunch room.  (I wish I was joking.  And, yes, I usually brown-bagged it.)

So pizza a veggie?

Well, despite the reactionary tone, Congress didn’t exactly make this declaration.  They did do something nefarious to anyone who wants kids to get nutritious school lunches, though.   Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste counts as if it had the same nutritional value as a half cup of vegetables.  Most other veggies need to be half of cup’s worth before they are counted as a serving.  The Obama administration wanted to remove the tomato paste exception.  Congress blocked this.

Some, mostly the food companies, hailed the decision pointing to the fiber and other nutrients that tomato paste contains.  I’ve used it in my cooking from time to time, too.  So I wondered.  How nutritious is it?

The Washington Post tried stacking tomato paste against various fruits.  They found it fared pretty well.  Still, they pointed out, fruits and veggies vary wildly in their nutritional content.  As they put it: “A half-cup of avocado is quite nutritionally different from a half-cup of zucchini.”

I got to thinking that the best thing to compare tomato paste with are actual tomatoes.  After all, tomato paste isn’t claiming to be zucchini or spinach or apples or oranges.  So why stack it up against those.  Let’s see how 1/8th cup of tomato paste compares to 1/2 cup of tomatoes.  Thankfully, Calorie King let me easily look this information up.

So 2 tablespoons (1/8th of a cup) of tomato paste contains nearly twice the calories and much more sodium as the “equivalent” (as defined by Congress) amount of chopped tomatoes.  (They could use low sodium tomato paste, but let’s be honest here.  They’ll likely use the regular stuff.)  It also has nearly twice the sugar, twice the carbs and none of the calcium.  Tomato paste does best chopped tomatoes when it comes to potassium and slightly beats it out in dietary fiber.  Still, I don’t think the calorie/sodium/sugar tradeoff is worth less than 1 gram of added fiber.

Tomato paste clearly doesn’t stack up, but perhaps it has more vitamins?  Calorie King didn’t display this information, so I found another website, Self Nutrition Data, that did.

Here is the nutrition data for 1/2 cup of tomato paste.  (They didn’t let me modify the amounts.)

Now, here is the information for 1 cup of chopped tomatoes.

They look sort of the same until you realize that you need to divide the tomato paste percentages by 4 and the chopped tomato percentages by 2.  Here’s a handy chart with the final “serving size” percentages:

You can see that tomato paste still falls short in vitamins A and C.  It has a slight lead in calcium which is interesting given that Calorie King showed it as having 0mg.  (I’m guessing that was due to rounding for a 1/8th cup serving.)  It also has a decent lead in iron.

So, should pizza (or, more accurately, tomato paste) be defined as a vegetable.  Most certainly not.  First of all, there is the nutritional data that I showed above.  Perhaps, the best reason comes from NHL, though.  My third grade son, upon hearing this, declared: “But tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!”  He’s right.  They are.  You might as well declare apple pie a veggie.  Perhaps we need to hire Jeff Foxworthy to run a special of his TV game show for Congressfolks.  We’ll call it: Are You Smarter Than A Third Grader?

When blogging, it can be discouraging to post day after day and see little to no comments.  Almost worse than no comments, however, are tons of comments.  Tons of spam comments, that is.  Since I last deleted the spam comments (on November 9th), this blog has gotten over 1,600 spam comments.  That’s over 130 per day or 1 spam comment every 11 minutes!  Here’s a graph of my spam comments day to day.

That big red line shows how many spam comments I got daily.  The green line hugging zero?  Those are my non-spam comments.  If only I could transform spam comments into real comments, I’d have more comments than I could reply to.  Of course, if I had that ability, I think I’d use it on all of those “Nigerian Princes” and “European Lotteries” that keep e-mailing me.

Thankfully, Akismet snags most of the spam comments.  Sadly, some slip through.  This means that spammy comments are visible on my blog until I take them down.  I think I need to find some WordPress plugins to help reduce my spam load.

What do you do to reduce spam comments?  Also, any guesses on how many spam comments this post will get?

My parents came for a visit this weekend.  Unfortunately, given economic circumstances (on both ends) and the distance between us, we don’t get to see each other as often as I’d like.  The boys kept getting more and more excited as “Bubbe-and-Grandpa day” drew nearer.  Finally, the day arrived and the boys couldn’t have been happier.  Here are a few highlights from their visit (in no particular order):

Wii Bowling

While enjoying some downtime at our house, we started up the Nintendo Wii.  My mother, who I never think of as a gamer, opted to play a game of Wii Bowling with the boys and me.  The end score was quite impressive.  (As usual, click on the photo to enlarge.)

“Snoopy” was my mother.  That 121 score?  That was JSL!  He was rocking the virtual bowling alley with two strikes and three spares.  He even beat his older brother (who came in with a not-too-shabby 113).

Beating Up My Dad

Ok, this sounds bad, but it really isn’t.  After Wii Bowling was done, we loaded Wii Boxing and I handed the Wiimote to my dad.  Then, he and I duked it out.  I won, but he got some good punches in.  I don’t think he expected a simple video game to give his arms such a workout.

Toy Story Mania

After coming back from lunch (and some shopping), we went back to my house.  Killing time before I had to start dinner, I put Toy Story Mania into the Wii.  This time, NHL, my father and I played.  We all had fun playing the various Toy Story-based carnival games.  For the record, I won easily.  Got nearly my father’s and NHL’s score combined.  Part of that was probably because, due to a quirk in the game, I got to play solo in a lot of games.  This gave me exclusive access to the point generating activities instead of sharing them with another player.

Knitting Bonding

My mother mentioned that she wanted to learn how to knit a scarf.  I pointed out that B has knitted a few.  At the time, she was in the middle of two scarf-knitting projects.  While the boys, my dad and I occupied ourselves with other activities, my wife and mother bonded over knit-pearl.

“Cooking” Dinner

I wanted to show my parents my cooking skills.  I didn’t actually wind up getting the chance to do this.  Instead, we went to BJ’s and bought frozen/refrigerated dishes to heat up and serve.  Still, eating dinner at home with my parents versus in a restaurant was a nice experience.

Cake Wrecks

I showed my parents the Cake Wrecks book and they kept laughing.  When I left it on the table to check on dinner, I saw them flipping through the pages laughing at all of the mangled cakes.  I need to remember to e-mail them the URL for the Cake Wrecks blog.

Cupcakes

We stopped by the new Fluffalicious store and got some delicious cupcakes for dessert.  It was quite the yummy stop to make (and one I think we’ll be making quite a few more times in the near future).

The whole weekend was so much fun that I (*gasp*) forgot to take photos!  We got photos of cupcakes and the like, but realized that we didn’t get a picture of my parents with the boys.  Luckily, just before my parents left to go home, we were able to snag this photo of us.  (B’s manning the camera – and trying to avoid cars in the parking lot it was taken in.)

I miss my parents already and hope we get to see them again sometime soon.

There are days when the various pressures I face get to be too much.  Though I try to keep a strong, stable face to the world, I’ll often feel like I just want to retreat to a dark corner and cry for a few hours.  With that feeling invariably comes a small voice that tells me “Real men don’t cry.  Real men hide their feelings and show as little emotion as possible.”

I know that society tells us that men who cry are wimps and guys who push their feelings down deep are strong, but I think it’s the other way around.  I’ve done the whole hide-what-you-are feeling thing.  It doesn’t make you strong.  It just makes bad feelings fester in you until they either explode or poison you (or your relationships).  I think men who are comfortable enough to cry are the stronger of the two groups.  They’re the ones who stand up to the Real Man Stereotype and shatter it.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you think any less of a man if he admits that he cries?  Also, have you ever felt like hiding in a dark corner and crying?  What do you do when you feel this way?

P.S. If you haven’t already, go visit FollowerHQ and let me know what you think of my Twitter application.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #114

We have a nice, big room upstairs.  We wanted to use it as a playroom.  Unfortunately, for the longest time, the boys couldn’t play in it because the room was just too disorganized and messy.  I had already begun tiding it up when I was contacted by Mom Central about the Brother P-Touch.  It seemed like the perfect compliment to our organizational project.

By the time the P-Touch arrived, I had already mostly organized the playroom.  Of course, it still had plenty of room for improvement.

Using a gift card provided by Mom Central and Brother P-Touch for the organizational project, I went to Target and purchased some Rubbermaid storage bins of various sizes and a metal shelving unit.  We had shied away from these kinds of units before, worried that they would topple over on the kids.  This particular unit, however, is one that B’s father has used to keep his many plants.  It is very sturdy, so we got one for our playroom.

Before long, the mess of puzzles, games and other toys were tamed.  I couldn’t affix labels to the metal shelves, so I purchased some luggage tags.  After putting the labels on these, I hung them on each shelf to show just what belonged there.

The storage bins were used to store toys such as Legos (previously jumbled in a much older storage bin whose lid didn’t fit on right, Lego figures (tossed in with the Legos and thus often lost), and Hexbug tracks.

This has really helped us out.  Not only do we have a playroom that the kids can use, but we’ve been able to move more toys into it.  This means less toys downstairs to clutter the living room or the boys’ room.  While before the boys were content to stay downstairs on the couch watching TV, they’ll beg to go upstairs now.  (Despite the fact that the TV up there doesn’t get cable.)  They have no problem putting toys away upstairs (since the “homes” for each toy is so clearly labeled.

As for the Brother P-Touch, I found it very easy to operate.  After the first labels came out with tiny type, I explored the settings and found that there are plenty of options.  You can change the font size, bolding, the font itself and more.  After about three minutes, I was able to produce labels that looked just like I wanted them to look.  It’s a simple machine, but one with many options.  The previous label makers I’ve used, were from a decade or two ago.  It’s interesting to see how far they’ve progressed.

Disclaimer: I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Brother P-Touch and received a product and gift card to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

There are three stories swirling around in my head that I want to blog about.  They might not seem related, but I believe they are.  The first relates to the Penn State story.  By now, everyone knows the details.  Jerry Sandusky is alleged to have abused a number of children and Joe Paterno allegedly knew this was happening but didn’t contact police.  Instead, he contacted University higher-ups who opted to keep things quiet.

Listening to this story, I can’t help but think about my experiences with bullying and how they seem similar.  Bullies will often dictate the terms of the bully-bullied exchanges.  They will tell the bullied that they can’t tell anyone or else.  It’s a way of gaining additional power over your victim.  Besides, if you set the rules, you’re assured that you will always win.

When one is bullied or when one is confronting a respected icon, the social pressure is very similar.  There is constant pressure to keep quiet.  To mind your own business and not get involved or, if you are involved, to not seek outside help.  After all, those are the rules and you must obey the rules!

Even after I escaped my bullying scenario, I felt this pressure.  One time in college, I returned to my dorm room to see a door open and a guy and a girl play-fighting.  The guy got her into a hold she couldn’t escape from and she called to ask for my help.  I started to go in that direction and the guy told me to leave them alone.  I immediately turned around and headed into my room.

While I don’t think anything bad happened, I still, to this day, regret that decision.  Someone asked me for help (even if it was just play-fighting) and I should have helped.  While I can’t correct past mistakes, I can prevent future ones.  I can learn not to give into societal pressures to keep quiet and I can teach my boys the same lesson.

The second story on my mind involves a ten year old girl who committed suicide after being bullied.  I shudder at the thought of this happening to my boys.  When I was bullied, I believed that I had to handle it myself.  I didn’t think that I could talk to my parents or teachers about it.  That isolation got to be almost more than I could bear at times.  I would dread going to school because of the mental torture that that building held for me.  I never got to the point where I considered ending my life, however.  We’ve already spoken to NHL about bullying as, sadly, he’s experienced it first hand.  How do you talk to your eight-year old about suicide, though?

In the final story, a special needs child who was bullied by her teachers.  The teachers, principal, and even superintendent called the girl a liar for the “stories” she told about the teachers’ tormenting behaviors.  The superintendant even had the gall to tell the father that he was bordering on slander and harassment by making these claims.  Their investigations, they asserted, showed that these were made up stories that the girl was telling.  (Never mind that their “investigation” consisted of nothing more than asking the accused teachers what happened.)

Thankfully, the father didn’t back down.  He hid an audio recording device on his daughter and recorded 7 hours of verbal abuse.  Once presented with recordings, the school finally acted.

How do these three stories tie together?  I think they all illustrate how we need to react and teach our kids to respond to bullying.  First, we can’t allow ourselves to be silenced by societal pressure.  If you are being bullied, speak up.  If you know someone who is being bullied speak up.  Break those bully-set rules and get loud about the abuse.

Secondly, we need to support our children when they are bullied.  Not just in our actions to resolve the bullying situations, but also by sitting down with our kids and talking about what was happening.  The more support our kids receive, the better they’ll be able to deal with the situation.

Finally, never give up.  If the teacher won’t act, talk to the principal.  If the principal turns a blind eye, go to the superintendent.  Keep going higher and making more noise.  Threaten to go to the press.  Follow through.  Don’t take “no” for an answer.

Here’s hoping that no more people keep quiet, that no more boys or girls take their own lives, and that no more kids need to grow up knowing the torture that is being bullied.

Three weeks ago, B and I got to experience that all-too-rare event known as “date night.”  We ditched dropped the kids off at B’s parents’ house and went to Outback Steakhouse.

I had called ahead, but, due to circumstances beyond our control, we wound up arriving about an hour later than our reservation.  Even so, we were seated rather quickly.

After placing our order, we were presented with two big loaves of bread.  I knew we had a big meal ahead of us, but it still took all of my willpower not to devour this bread.  I took a little taste, but that made it worse.  It tasted so good!

Before long, our appetizer, Spinach Artichoke Dip, arrived.  This tasted heavenly.  The dip itself was wonderful, but the addition of the garlic toast pieces was incredible.

Next up was the main course.  B got steak with shrimp and a baked potato.  I had a mahi dish with rice and veggies.

I can’t speak for B’s dish, but mine was very tasty.  I wound up finishing all of mine up while B had some of her meat (and the rest of the bread) packed up to eat for lunch the next day.

When it came time for dessert, we were too stuffed to eat any more.  Still, we ordered the Sweet Adventure Sampler Trio.  This comes with samples of three different desserts.  And by samples, I mean what might be regular sized portions of each dessert anywhere else.  Since we were full, though, we ordered it to go.  I was quite amazed when our server showed us how they had packaged the desserts.  Each segment of the desserts was in a different container.  (I’ve got to apologize for the overexposure of some of these shots.  The white packaging made photographs hard to take.)

First up was the Chocolate Thunder from Down Under: A chocolate pecan brownie topped with vanilla ice cream, warm chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.

Once combined, they formed this delicious dessert:

After this was the carrot cake (with coconut and pecans) and the classic cheesecake.

Both of these were good, but the brownie was by far my favorite.  All in all, we had a great time at Outback Steakhouse.  While steak is not my thing, they have enough other options that I look forward to going back there again.

Disclaimer: B received a coupon for a free steak from an online promotion and I received an Outback Steakhouse gift certificate during a blog tour.