What do you really need for a “newborn starter kit”? - You really need to read the comments on this one. Listen to the podcasts in the later comments from the Mean Mommy’s Club. Hopefully their archives are still online.

I’ve been a fan of the classic three bean salad since I was a kid. The taste brings me back to childhood picnics and lunch at my aunt’s house on their deck or just in the back yard. I didn’t set out to make it, but I discovered the ingredients in my house quite by accident.

Yesterday morning we descended upon amazing Falls Church Farmer’s Market and stormed the produce sellers. We had limited time, as we were soon off to a birthday party. I was certain the green beans and shelled green peas I bought last week at Giant were bad. So I picked up more green beans and what I thought were peas. Actually, what I bought were green black eyed peas (so technically the guy didn’t lie to me).

I was surprised to discover the Giant produce had survived in the chill chest for a whole week. And this launched the conundrum, “What the heck am I going to do with three kinds of beans?”

3…

beans…

…flashback to childhood…

3 Alternative Bean Salad was born in that moment and the ladies at tonight’s 4th of July dinner gave it such rave reviews that I’m not even going to wait and tinker before publishing the recipe.

Fresh green beans

Fresh sweet green peas

Fresh (green?) black eyed peas (**see note at bottom**)

1/2 cup rice wine vinegar

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil (the good stuff)

1/4 cup sugar

Salt & pepper to taste (I used about 1 tsp kosher salt and a few grinds of while and green peppercorns. My battery operated black pepper grinder was offline for battery replacement and the baby was sleeping. I can never replace the batteries in the thing without making a racket and cursing a whole lot, so I opted for the manual grinders.)

Dijon mustard (I used about 1.5 tsp of the good stuff)

Hot sauce to taste (I used about 6 shakes of a Goya habanero blend)

Fresh Cilantro

Lime Juice (I used bottle, but fresh is always best)

Prep:

Take each of the beans and do the following to them separately:

1. Prepare an ice water bath and find a strainer that will fit in it.
2. Clean them in a strainer under running water
3. For the green beans, remove the unwanted head and tail bits. Leave them as long as you can.
4. Steam them so they’re cooked al dente. For me, this is about 10 minutes in my electric steamer.
5. When the steaming is done immediately put them back in a strainer and put them in the ice water bath you prepared beforehand.
6. Strain and dry the beans then refrigerate.

When all of your beans are ready, select about 1 cup of each. Chop the green beans into 1/2″ to 1″ pieces. Put all the beans into your desired storage container. I used a 4 cup oval tupperware unit I’ve had for over a decade.

Make the juice:

Put the vinegar in a mixing bowl. Slowly add the olive oil while whisking. When done keep whisking until well mixed. (If the baby hadn’t been asleep I’d have used the stick blender with the food processor attachment. But she was, so I whisked by hand. Oy! What a pain) Add the rest of the ingredients except the cilantro and whisk in until throughly mixed.

Pour the juice over the beans. Cover. (Hopefully you’re using an air tight container otherwise shaking and mixing is going to get messy, in which case you want a rain coat and a trip outdoors.)

Chop the cilantro fine and add to the bean mix and juice.

Shake the beans in the juice for 30 to 61 seconds. Put in the fridge. Check back in an hour and do shake again.

About an hour later, serve to discerning guests (or your family).

————–

**** Note: I’ve never seen fresh black eyed peas before. Since the dried variety are always white, I expected fresh ones to be white as well. Mine weren’t, they were green. It is quite possible these are mutant zombie ninja green black eyed peas in which case I’m probably in big trouble. However, it is equally possible that they are some known and inoffensive type of black eyed pea I’ve never heard of before. Maybe one of you nice people will comment on the color of fresh black eyed peas and clue me in. It’s not like I’m connected to the world’s largest and most up to date information source ever in the history of mankind. So I need your help.

I made three files so you can download the one that’s right for your net connect.

Eliza’s First Laugh: Large (50 MB) / Medium (21 MB) / Mobile (11 MB – great for iPhone/iPod)

[Updated 2/18] – I’ve added a like to YouTube. Some people were having problems downloading the files and playing them. Most notably my Dad. What’s the point of posting baby videos if our parents can’t see them? Click here for the YouTube version of Eliza’s First Laugh.

The most notable etiquette item that stuck in my mind was Thank You notes. The outpouring of kindness and generosity at the baby shower really blew me away. I am still in awe regarding the overwhelming turn out and things people sent to help little Eliza’s get a good start on life. I spent weeks writing Thank You notes, signing them, and sending them out. Natalie Morris did a big batch for us, which really blew me away. She’s been such a great help.

But after the Thank You notes went out, I got a letter from my Aunt Lenny. You need to know some things about my relationship with her. Where my mom was ADD, my aunt is OCD and as a child I could mess things up or break them the second my aunt’s back was turned. Lenny and I have never really communicated directly, most of our conversation goes through third parties. So I was a little surprised and delighted to get a letter from her. Among the other things in the letter there was a simple note written on a post-it sized piece of paper. It said, “When you send out Birth Announcements make sure you include the people on this list…”

Up until this point I hadn’t really considered the need to send out birth announcements. I sent out invites to the baby shower, posted the birth on Twitter, and emailed 1/2 the known universe. As you might expect, I’m now consumed with the idea of getting the baby announcements sent out. And so, having learned to avoid anything requiring extensive amounts of time to assemble I set about looking for printable birth announcements on the web.

Most of my original findings were in two classes, neither of which interested me. The first was online printing services which would pre-print your custom announcements. The second was large kits which included ribbons, bows, multiple pieces, colors, and types of papers, and therefore required a minute or two per announcement to assemble. Both of these choices were terribly expensive, ranging from $1.25 all the way up to $4 or $5 each. Since I have about 50 names on my list, and Martha probably has about the same, we were looking at a minimum of $125 for 100 invites which we still had to address. Then we had to add shipping to get them to us and postage to send them out. That would round the total to about $175 minimum.

After much searching and modifying my google search terms, I finally found a site that offers blank cards and envelopes in bulk. My Expression offers a small but nice selection of cards which can be ordered blank in bulk for less. We purchased 100 cards and envelopes for less than $60. That includes shipping. I’ll try to post more when they arrive, but they look very nice. Hopefully the picture on the web will meet my expectations.

Once we have the cards we’ll be able to print our own announcement text and then print the envelopes. I plan to include a photo of Eliza Rose in the announcement. Once Martha and I select a photo, I plan on using some of the “50 free photos” trial offers that you see from certain shutterbug websites. If I can find 2 such offers I can get 100 5×7 prints to put in with my 5.5 x 7.75 announcements.

I’d rather not pay someone $0.25 per envelope and $0.50 per card to have them print on blank stock, when I have printers at home which can do the same job. I’d rather take that money and put it in an IRA or 529 Education Savings Plan.

Even thought I’m going to be doing some of the work at home, I’ve limited myself to printing the cards, addressing the envelopes, stuffing the envelopes, and affixing stamps. As much as that sounds like a ton of work, most of it will be done by the old Epson printer I just picked up off FreeCycle. The end result will be a nice birth announcement at less than half the cost with very little assembly work. That’s a win-win situation to me.

[Show as slideshow]

Bought it on a 6 year loan, paid it off in 4.5 years. Got rid of it when I won a Pontiac Aztek. Sold both of them and bought Famous Blue, my ’05 Prius.

It’s been a long journey of ups and downs filled with doctor’s visits, medicine, surgery, grief, and hope. Suffice it to say that we got a lot of help along the way and are still receiving it daily. We’ll post more about our surrogacy journey later. For now we present you with a very early portrait of our little human. We aren’t even sure what sex he/she is but healthy is all that matters.

Here’s Jesse’s obituary.

-Paul

Electile Dysfunction : The inability to become aroused over any of the choices for president put forth by either party in the 2008 election year.

I need to pay better attention to some things. I really do. Who goes on a birding trip and forgets their birding camera? Yours truly, that who.

As soon as I figured it out I jumped on the Coconut Telegraph and started beating the jungle drums. The tribe woke up on Tweeter and Skype and came to my rescue. Marc, a.k.a. Grailwolf, offered to pick the camera up from home and ship it to me in Asia. Marc is a brave man, and is now learning how far down the rabbit hole you go when engaging in international shipping.

The hope is that the camera will meet me in Japan. It’s an expensive mistake, but not as bad as if I had to buy a whole new one. We’ll be bringing home a nice gift for Marc and his new bride Heather. They asked for a Japanese school girl. I don’t know what the limit is on those, we’ve got 3 requests now. I wonder if I can get them in the duty free shop.

Got to Japan and was able to get free Internet from the ANA airlines lounge which I think was a level below where I was charging my laptop. Not great throughput, but enough to get email and see that Mark and Marc had been in contact and all was being taken care of.

Martha and I had sushi in Narita Airport in Japan. Oh man, it was awesome. It was fresh and flavorful, and very close to the best I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to taste it outside the airport. My assumption is that airport sushi should be a 6-8 on a scale of 1-10. Which means it can be a whole lot better outside the airport.

The trip to Taiwan was a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Didn’t realize Taiwan is 1 hour behind Japan. So our 3.5 hour trip became 2.5 hours. We caught a gypsy cab to the hotel. For a while I thought we were being taken for a ride, but the cost was reasonable and even though I thought we were going in circles, we weren’t. The hotel was nice, and we dealt with the first leg of adjusting to the new time zone.

OK. The hotel was better than nice. It was actually pretty cool. And fried eggs on the American Breakfast side of the buffet were a delight. The hotel staff were amazing. They got us a cab to the bullet train to Taichung and let us pre-pay. The train hit a top speed around 300 Kph. That’s about 186 Mph! It was so smooth and fast it was awesome and very very clean.

Mark Forman met us at the station and took us to our hotel. Then we toured a city south of Taichung where they do a lot of fishing. That’s were the current batch of Flickr Photos were taken. Today we’re supposed to hit the electronics markets. Mark and I are going to see if maybe we can’t think of doing some things to introduce some products into the US market. Who knows, maybe we’ll find the next Tickle Me Elmo.

Flickr Link