Fixing Our Kenmore HE Front Load Washer

or, Part 327 in a continuing series, "Really Annoying [stuff] that Happens to Me When My Husband Is Out of Town."

Our washer has always been somewhat problematic. Like most front-loaders, it has a persistent musty odor that seeps into the clothes if you leave them in for more than a couple of hours. (If you don't ever leave clothes in for more than a couple of hours, you're reading the wrong blog.)

Unfortunately an errant Pull-Up left in my youngest child's laundry put my washer over the edge last week. When I opened the washer door, I was assailed by the smell of sewer water. Even after I ran the load again, the clothes were stinky and soppy. I tried to run a "Drain and Rinse" load, and generated an "F" warning with two minutes to go.

Something was horribly wrong.

I searched the internet and learned that my "F" warning at two minutes was actually an "F2" warning that my washer wasn't draining properly. Another search yielded brilliant directions on how to clean out the filter, which is apparently a common problem.

These directions were clear, concise, and incredibly effective. I'll include them in a separate post with my photos and rough but hopefully helpful video.

Huge thanks to BigChiefM1 (really) for helping me out. I've probably saved $200 on a repair man, and I've spared myself the mortification of anyone seeing my messy laundry room.

Phew!

Eat and Meet - March 10

Bloggers for Good is sponsoring its next meetup and benefit Wednesday, March 10 at the new Buffalo Wild Wings in Ashburn near Wegmans.

Our event will benefit the Loudoun Museum, a great local resource that has suffered lately due to budget cuts and a mold issue. They will be reopening this spring in their repaired historic Leesburg location.

Buffalo Wild Wings will generously donate a percentage of all food sales to the Loudoun Museum all day March 10. Just mention Bloggers for Good or the Loudoun Museum.

If you haven't been to a BFG event before, you should come! They are a non-intimidating forum for meeting other bloggers. If you're a writer, a reader, or merely put up with those of us who are, it would be great to meet you in person. These bloggers are a friendly and interesting group!

Please spread the word and join us on March 10! See you there!

More Butter, More Better

I made good on my resolution to try some Julia Child recipes. My first endeavor: page 210 -- Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons, or "Fish Filets Poached in White Wine with Mushrooms." I must say that Julia and I outdid ourselves.

Or was it just all that butter? Mmm...

I was very strategic about my fish dish for several reasons. First of all, I didn't know what the deuce I was doing, so I was treading lightly. Julia, though knowledgable and conscientious, mistakenly assumes that her readers have a clue. To my consternation she had left out a few key directions, such as what temperature to cook the fish. I read the fish chapter introduction and my recipe several times, then consulted guides from Wegmans and Google (one poaches fish in a 180 degree oven - thanks ComfyCook154!).

The friendly folks at Wegmans instructed me on the correct cheese, fish and wine to use. Some ingredients suffered from passing years and availability. As Julia warned me, it's hard to find true sole in the US, so we (Julia, the Wegmans fish lady, and I) agreed to use flounder. The Wegmans wine specialist made an excellent recommendation to use White Bordeaux Mouton Cadet, which was great in the sauce and with the meal.

Another reason for my careful strategery was the cost of the meal. The fish alone was $14. When you factor in the cost of wine, cheese, pounds of butter and other ingredients, the meal added up to a larger than usual culinary investment.

I warned SJ that I was going to be making kitchen miracles happen, so he fed the kids and stayed out of my way. By 7:00 the electric babysitter was entertaining the kids and we sat down to a delightful meal, if I do say so myself: well-cooked fish with a white sauce that butter, lemon, and wine flavors. Per Julia's instructions, the fish was paired simply with whole wheat couscous and the wine, so as not to distract from the main attraction. We skipped the planned salad course and finished with delicious Trader Joe's Lava Cakes topped with leftover whipped cream.

I'm daydreaming about the butter like a new lover (like on my honeymoon, Mom.) Like most health-conscious cooks, I try to avoid copious amounts of fats and sugar, but let's consider the facts. Butter tastes good. Really good. Butter scratches a primal itch like nothing else. A couple of bites of that sauce and I was channeling Tracey Morgan rather than Julia Child; I wanted to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

And let's don't forget that Julia Child lived to be a buttery 91 years old. How could something so right possibly be wrong?

After this French food experience, I'm thinking like an ancient Greek: the key is moderation in all things. Part of Julia Child's cultural significance was to encourage Americans to embrace food, not fear it. Nutritionists today are coming back to this idea, and a lot of them blame the American obesity epidemic on the low-fat diet trend of the past thirty years. You're going to scratch your itch somewhere, they say. Better a little fat now and then than the processed crap we eat.

I'm no expert (I thought agave was a good idea only to find out yesterday that it's secretly poisoning my liver,) but I can say that having a rich French meal was a rare treat. After my first essay into Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I think I might start taking the road more buttered.

Manifest Destiny

Guy Ritchie gave a lovely -- if obvious -- compliment to his ex-wife, Madonna, in a recent issue of Esquire.

"She's a manifester, if there ever was one...First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen."

I like this idea of being a manifester. A manifester identifies a goal, states it, and then makes it happen. The process has to happen in this order; you won't reach your goal by accident.

I would like to be a manifester too. The problem is that I can occasionally be a bit flighty about my goals. I am easily caught up in the latest trend, which is usually introduced to me by Oprah. While this might make me an interesting blogger, dinner companion, or focus group member, it's not great for manifesting.

My husband describes this phenomenon with terms like "gnat-like," "ADD," and "look, something shiny!" I prefer to use the more clinical term of "Itinerant Enthusiasm Syndrome."

Despite SJ's occasionally insensitive terminology, he is actually quite adept in dealing with my IES. Much like dealing with a sleepwalker, a red wine spill, or an angry bear, there are best practices involved when dealing with an IES sufferer. Most importantly, one must never remind a itinerant enthusiast of her past interests; mentioning hot yoga, Dr. Oz's diet, or her partially-finished education degree (or her completely finished history degree, for that matter), will only provoke her.

I believe that through diet and medication I have my IES under control. That's why I am confident that my latest interest represents true love, rather than mere infatuation, and I am ready to start manifesting this goal: I am going to attend the Cordon Bleu school in Paris and pursue its Pâtisserie Diploma. While there, I will blog about my experience and ultimately publish my reflections in a popular and amusing memoir (thus both documenting the experience and enabling a tax write-off.)

Yes, there are obstacles in my way. The first is that I do not currently live in Paris, nor do I have any reasonable way of paying the pricy tuition for both my program and for the private international schools that my three children will require. We have nowhere to live in Paris, a mortgage to maintain in Virginia, and my husband has no Parisian job prospects.

Luckily I am only in step one of my manifestation process, so I will work on solving these problems at a later date.

As usual, SJ sagely agreed that this seems like a perfectly reasonable plan and that this was in no way linked to the fact that I just watched Julie and Julia and am somehow gripped by a blogging/French food/Julia Child frenzy. Or that I am influenced by cabin fever caused by two weeks of canceled school and forty inches of snow.

I love that man.

Pardon the mixed metaphor, but I know that if I manifest this, it will come. After all, nobody thought coupons and I would make it, and look at us now.

Paris, here I come.

Older, Wiser, Better

Jul

ie and Julia is an enjoyable, light-hearted movie with several things going for it. There are strong performances, compelling characters, and a talented writer/director - Nora Ephron who, despite some missteps along the way, has held my allegiance since I saw When Harry Met Sally in 1989. The secret sauce, though, is the life of Julia Child, luminously portrayed by Meryl Streep.

Before this movie (and the press surrounding it) I knew of Julia Child merely as a very tall, yodel-voiced, easily mockable PBS chef, whose recipes would clog your arteries simply by reading them. I didn't know about her fascinating life that started in Pasadena, California and took her all over the world as an OSS agent before marrying her devoted husband, Paul. I knew nothing about her passionate marriage, her influence on American cooking, or her role as a cultural icon.

I am struck by the way Julia found her professional calling by combining her interests, her talents, and her hard work without sacrificing her family life. With her husband's support -- and apparently a lot of nooners -- she was able to pursue both a happy home and a fulfilling career -- a career that transforming her passion for food into a vocation.

The hardest step is probably the first one: finding one's passion.

Julia Child didn't find her calling until she was lucky and wise enough to recognize it; she was a late bloomer. She arrived in France at age 37 following her marriage and foreign service. Searching for a pastime, she tried several hobbies before enrolling in a cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu academy in Paris. An ardent admirer of French cuisine and a natural teacher, she sought to bring French cooking to "servantless American cooks," and with two friends wrote her masterpiece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ten years in the making, it was published in 1961, and her American television show premiered the following year, when she was 49 years old.

A few fortunate people know what they want to be when they grow up at an early age. I am the roughly the same age that Julia was when she arrived in France, and I'm only just getting a vague sense of it. Being this age provides the perspective, financial comfort (it's hard to wax philosophical when you're working three jobs to pay the rent), and self awareness needed to steer (nudge?) our lives in the right direction. After this long I know what makes me tick and what I never get tired of. Over time, infatuations fall away (whither thou, worm composting?) and the list narrows itself: I love to teach, perform, (try to) be funny, communicate, eat, and solve problems.

With any luck I'll soon solidify my list and move on to step two, Implementation -- I'll figure out how to get my career more in synch with these passions. Shouldn't take more than another forty years or so...

Julia Child's inspiring life represents the alchemical potential of combining passion with profession. Her life points out that when we combine our wisdom, experience, talents, and hard work, we may be just getting started.

Despite what you read in magazines and see in most movies, opportunity doesn't end at age twenty-five anymore. It never really did.

Julia, Betsy, and Moi

I finally watched Julie and Julia this weekend. It was, literally, great food for thought; the Julia sections, which focus on Julia Child, were inspiring. Meryl Streep's depiction of her is completely endearing; I didn't know before that Julia was such a lover of food and of life, with an infectious enthusiasm and positive attitude. It was easy for me to identify with parts of her story; like Julia, I loved living in France and tried hard to soak up what was good about French life.

I am also now the same age as Julia when she arrived in France. It was a turning point in her life, when she turned her love for food into a calling. She had been an accomplished foreign service agent and a loving wife, but it only when she applied herself professionally to her passion that she found her greatest success and fulfillment. It is fitting that her awakening happened in a country where cake can symbolize a revolution and a cookie can inspire classic literature.

I am also a fan of French cuisine, although my dietary restrictions (no red meat), slight squeamishness (I will not be deboning any ducks), and sweet tooth have focused my interest on desserts, and to pastries in particular. There is nothing like French pastry. Other countries may try, others don't bother (looking at you, Hungary), but nothing beats la pâtisserie française.

Watching Julie and Julia, I was inspired to try one of Julia's pastry recipes. I grabbed my laptop and was searching for her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking on Amazon when I remembered the stack of cookbooks we inherited from my late mother-in-law. I ran to the cupboard and returned with a worn 1967 edition just as Julia/Meryl Streep was excitedly unwrapping her first edition on screen. It brought tears to my eyes as I held the same book in my hands, and thought of the three women involved in this moment.

For Julia, the book was the culmination of years of hard work, as well as the embodiment of her love of France, her talent, and the support of her adoring husband.

I wondered about my mother-in-law, Betsy, whom I never met. I assume that Betsy bought the book (the $10 price tag from Dayton's is still affixed to the cover) in an effort to please herself and her young family. Just like me, she optimistically reached out for this cookbook to experience something new and wonderful. The book is only slightly worn, so I'm guessing that practicality usually won over culinary ambition -- raising four children doesn't leave much time for gourmet cooking -- though the only handwritten notes I've found so far are modifications for Lobster Thermidor in her neat, penciled script. Her lobster effort underscores what I already knew -- Betsy was not intimidated by a challenge.

For my part, I had arrived at this book thanks to both of these predecessors, inspired by one and enabled by the other. How striking to hold a double legacy in my hands - evidence of their hope, work, and determination.

It is profoundly sad to have to get to know someone by the clues they left behind, yet I count myself lucky to be held up and pushed forward by these two amazing women, even after they are gone.