Cold, cold day, and wasted food

What a cold, cold day it has been. Today was not a good day for the furnace to stop working, but it did. Just before we bought our place there was a sewer back-up in the basement, and the furnace had to be replaced. So having a new efficient furnace should have given us peace of mind that it would function for many years to come. However, this wasn't our first experience with a failed furnace during the winter. Just a few months ago less than a month after Little S was born, the new furnace, in the place we were living in at the time, broke down. We were left without heat for a weekend plus a Monday. We learned then that nothing is infallible, even if it's new.

DH was away in Toronto for work, and I was left to take care of the children. I tried fiddling with the thermostat, but when the heat just didn't come on after I turned up the temperature, I knew that something was not right. I called the service for fixing the furnace, but I didn't want to actually order any service until DH was home to assess the situation for himself. Meanwhile my goal was to keep the children warm and fed.

Luckily, I knew very well some tricks for keeping warm (or fighting the coldness) from living in Mexico. Contrary to popular belief, it's not all tropical weather in Mexico. When winter hit, it was cold and chilly. I guess it only reached down to about zero celcius, but when there is no central heating, zero is the freezing point! Eating hot foods and taking hot liquids helped quite a bit. Aside from stuffing oneself with food and drink, I found it very helpful to do jumping jacks, punches and kicks into the air until I felt warm enough to sit down for five or even ten minutes. At night I would fill an empty water bottle with warm tap water (if it were still available - water was always an iffy thing in Mexico) so that my feet would have some warm. Also at night, don't sleep directly on the flat sheets; rather, use the blanket directly on you.

Today, I made Little S chase Little R. We went around the basement touching walls and other items again and again. We made a game out of it. This was quite the environmentally friendly way to "heat up."

Enough was enough, though. We live in Canada, and in Canada we have central heating for a reason: it is absolutely necessary! So, DH called for furnace service, as we waited, I knew I had to make something for supper.

So, out of coldness, I wanted to make something warming and comforting so that my family could enjoy a warm kitchen. Using the oven at this time would have made the most sense. We would turn on the oven and the stove for cooking and close the kitchen door. The kids and DH could play in the kitchen while I cooked and heated up the room. But DH did not like that Little House on the Prairie idea. So, I decided to quickly make polenta with a tomato sauce. I had made polenta several times, and every time it always went very smoothly. Perhaps I was over confident. Perhaps I was just overly quick. I somehow put in too much salt! When I tasted it, I was disgusted. I usually leave things rather plain, but because of some experiences with making bland bread, I've been more attentive to using "enough" salt in proportion the water content of the food.

I didn't not want to waste the food (6 filtered cups of water, 2 cups of cornmeal, a splash of extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkly of sliced olives and capers), so I decided to add more water and more cornmeal to perhaps neutralize the dish. Well, it was waste times two! The food was still too salty. My choices were either to subject my family to unpalatable food, and possibly poisoning them with excessive sodium, or to compost the concoction. It was clear to me that I had sinned. My DH's grandmother had told me countless times that wasting was a sin. I know that there are countless people in this world who live off of rations that might have added up to how much I had wasted this evening.

The guilt just keeps boiling up inside me. I must stop this agony. What resolution must I come to? The food is unpalatable; the harm is done. My children and husband still need to be nourished. I must continue on. The water, the cornmeal, and everything else will return to the Earth. It is futile now to lament, yet lament I do. I must bury this experience and use it to remind me NOT to over salt. Sometimes it takes great mistakes like this one to make one to stop and think. This is a lessoned learned. I have paid for this lesson with oversalted polenta, so this food was rather not wasted, but spent.

This is what I have resolved this cold cold day... and finally, the furnacing is working again too, after we paid the service guys with money and beer. I hope that it'll be be a warm night.