Bacon and onions, yum.

Toss with some beaten eggs and good parmesan and/or romano, and you’ve got linguini carbonara.  The heat of the just-cooked pasta cooks the eggs as a sauce or coating rather than scrambling them.

Sounds yummy! And easy lol! I need some new easy yummy things to make. This working mommy thing kinda sucks lol. After the holidays it should get easier, I hope. If my legs don’t fall off first!

One of the ways to ensure that the house is clean is to invite someone over for dinner.

Truer words were never spoken.  My wife is a total slob, and one of the best ways to get her to help with the housework is to invite people over.

Also - a second vote for pasta carbonara, but substitute about 4 cloves of garlic for the onions.

The egg thing would take some practice, I think. I can just imagine the gooey mess if it isn’t done properly. I’ll have to set up an experimental session to try that until I get it. Sounds really good! And the garlic? That sounds awfully good, too. Oh my. Having not been thrilled about cooking for some time, I’m suddenly being bitten by the bug again.

Re Cleaning—I used to have a lot of difficulties with the lad over who was responsible for cleaning. One memorable day he even complained that the house wasn’t neat enough for his friends. And actually apologized to a friend that the house wasn’t like something out of the pages of Architecural Digest.

Wellllll....that was his first real lesson that Mom is NOT synonomous with Maid. And that he has two perfectly good legs and two perfectly good arms with hands attached. And he lives here, shares in the mess making, and fully shares in the cleaning. If he chooses not to help clean, he accepts half the responsibility for anything less than what he feels is perfection. It has been effective (except for his room). He and the Swiffer Duster are good buddies now. When he expects friends over, he gets the blood pumping and cleans up in record time. And he’s realized that two people cleaning makes it go a whole lot faster.

I do have hopes that this habit will carry over into marriage someday.

We have, at least, reached a compromise: His room is his business and if he requires a shovel to find the floor, I don’t care as long as the bedroom door stays closed. But nothing had better start overflowing out of his bedroom into the rest of the house. That means war. And so far, that has worked amazingly well. He has one place where he can indulge his inner slob and the rest of the house is half his responsibility to keep clean. I really am surprised at how well that works. There are no more jackets, shoes, bags, books, shirts, socks, etc. dumped in the living room. It’s sort of like a miracle.