Equal Parts Shrimp and Spinach (read on! really!)

The latest contestant in the Quickest, Healthiest, Easiest Dinner is this:

Shrimp Saag

1 teaspoon olive oil

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 teaspoon curry powder (or to taste)

1 pound frozen spinach

1/2 cup milk or cream

1 pound shell-on frozen shrimp

salt to taste

1 tablespoon butter (optional)

First, start the rice cooker. Then, dump the frozen shrimp in a big bowl of cold water to thaw. In a medium lidded saucepan, saute the garlic, ginger, and onion in olive oil until golden and fragrant. Add the curry powder and let it toast for a few seconds, then dump in the whole bag of frozen spinach and the milk or cream and put the lid on. Bring to a simmer. While that's heating, drain and peel the shrimp and set them aside. Puree the hot spinach mixture (an immersion blender works great here), and add the peeled shrimp. Cook until they're pink and curled, and then taste. Add more curry or some salt if you like, and if it tastes a little meager, stir in some butter.

The shrimp can, of course, be substituted for at will: leftover meat, canned chickpeas, paneer (where do you get paneer, anyway?), etc.

Heat Wave

A comb made of ice. That's what I need. Can't you imagine it? A re-usable plastic handle, a comb-shaped ice mold for the freezer, and an improvement (quicker! colder!) on the tedious two-step process of running your head under the faucet and then combing your hair.

Until that product comes out of R&D, I'll be running ice cubes over my head, which is surprisingly effective (soak your hairline first, work back from there). However, it's only appropriate for fellow heat-wave sufferers who have reached the point that cooling trumps all other considerations, namely, don't let's look like freaks.

This heat doesn't keep Cleo from wanting to run around outside wearing a fleece jacket. I'm not sure what her goal was with that idea, so I suggested instead that she play naked in the wading pool in the shade, and that was an acceptable alternative. So yesterday, she had an hour-long intensive course in fluid dynamics while I sipped my iced coffee with my feet in cold water. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon.

Vietnamese Salad

Cabbage is cheap, long-lasting, full of good vitamins and fiber, and can be delicious, but it suffers from an image problem. It never looks very available in the market-- it's so pale and hard and undelicious looking and once you've smelled overcooked cabbage, it's hard to forget it. Luckily, it's pretty easy to overcome. Here's last night's dinner.

Vietnamese Salad

1/3 cup fish sauce

1/4 cup sugar (white or brown)

2 teaspoons roughly chopped ginger

1 garlic clove, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon chili-garlic paste (or some fresh chilies)

juice of one lime

one small cabbage, thinly sliced

one red pepper, thinly sliced

two carrots, julienned

three scallions, sliced

one handful basil, chopped

one handful mint, chopped

3/4 cup roasted peanuts, chopped

Heat fish sauce and sugar together and stir until sugar dissolves. Add ginger, garlic, chili paste, and lime juice. It will smell awful, but persevere. Blend until garlic and ginger are pretty well pulverized. Mix cabbage, peppers, basil, mint and dressing together. Scatter roasted peanuts over each serving.

We had this with rice noodles and roasted salmon. Delicious and quick.

Baby of the Month is... Mae!

I'm in the part of my life when there are a lot of new babies around. A couple times a year, I'll get the emailed photo of a red-faced little loaf of bread and a mother with the classic thousand-yard stare (softened by a sheen of pride and love). I have not yet forgotten what it felt like to be that woman, so my second thought (after "Oh, yay!") is, "They must be exhausted! I should bring them some food!"

Sometimes I get my act together and do it, but other times I'm just stymied by indecision. What's the right thing to bring? If I don't know them well enough to have their dietary preferences memorized, I'm stumped, and don't feel like I should interrupt their newborn bliss/exhaustion with annoying questions about food. The other factor is that new-baby-time doesn't often coincide with regular-meals time. So I want to bring something that can be eaten right out of the fridge, warmed up or not. And also delicious. And I'm busy these days, so easy is also good. Now maybe you can see how it happens that these babies are often walking around before I can make up my mind about what I should bring their poor parents for dinner.

Well, I finally have a fairly good solution. And I'm immortalizing it here so that I won't forget. It's Peanut-Sesame Noodles with Vegetables. It's vegan, so it takes care of vegetarian, dairy-free, kosher, halal, no red meat, no pork, no shellfish, and lots of other strictures. The only people who can't eat it are people who can't have gluten, people who can't have peanuts, and people who don't like delicious food. I generally deliver it in several containers (noodles, veg, and sauce) so people can always eat the parts they want and not the parts they don't.

And it's delicious, as implied above. For years, I tried to figure out a good peanut-sesame sauce, and they were always too gloopy. And once mixed with cooked pasta, they became both gloopy and sticky. Bleah. But this one cracks the code. The answer? Water. Duh. The sauce is adapted from Smitten Kitchen's recipe here.

Welcome Home Noodles

vegetables:
red peppers
steamed zucchini
steamed carrots
steamed green beans

topping/garnish:
fresh basil, mint, bean sprouts, scallions

sauce:
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup warm water
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 good squirt sriracha sauce

noodles:
KaMe brand "plain chinese noodles" or similar wheat noodles

Combine all the sauce ingredients and give them a good whiz with an immersion blender, if you have one (and do-- have one, I mean. They're awesome). Let the sauce sit while you cook the noodles and prep the vegetables.

About those vegetables:

You could obviously use almost anything, and this is a great recipe for seasonal adaptation. If you're pressed for time, go through the salad bar at the grocery store, and get all the credit for about half the work.

About the noodles:
The package I had said to cook them for five minutes, but they would have been way too soggy if I had. I ended up boiling them for two or two and a half minutes and they were great. The key is to taste frequently. Soggy=bad. The next trick is to rinse the cooked noodles very well with cold water. This washes all the loose starch off the noodles, the stuff that will turn things into a sticky mess later if it's still hanging around making trouble. So, rinse! Immersing and swishing the noodles in several changes of clean cold water is the best way, but a nice long shower in the colander is better than nothing, and quite a bit quicker. Once they're rinsed, let them drain well, even going so far (if you have time) as to spread them out on a clean kitchen towel for a while, so that they don't sit in that water, absorb it, and sog right up. After they're washed and dried, toss them with a little sesame oil so they don't stick together, and put them in a container (if this is a meal for delivery).

About containers:
We've just made the switch to all-glass in our house, and I think it's a good thing to do for the health of families and planets both, but I still think new-baby dinners are an excellent application for disposable plastic containers. If the new family can just pitch (or rinse and re-use) the things and move on to the next urgent item, everyone's happy. We had someone's lidded casserole dish for eight months after Cleo was born, until she mentioned it to me and I blushed, dug it up, and gave it back. Oops.

Pack up the noodles, sauce, vegetables, and garnish in their own containers, and drop the dinner off with the new family with my heartfelt congratulations and commiseration. If they're having a particularly hard time, include take-out chopsticks, plastic forks, and paper plates and napkins.

PS: Fonts are now fixed! And some grammar and stuff. Thanks, in-house team!

Easter

We celebrated Easter by strewing a dozen colored eggs over the back yard and then pointing them out to Cleo and her best friend Levi. They humored us and collected them cooperatively, but didn't understand why exactly these balls were funny shaped and not at all bouncy. Then we had some snacks and ran around the yard and that was Easter.

It's nice that we've had a couple of years to really nail down our various holiday traditions before Cleo starts noticing, because we don't really have a default plan. We come from different traditions, but we do agree that it's important to mark holidays and festivals as a family. We just have to settle the particulars. Luckily, we also agree on some general values: celebratory meals = good; candy-crazed kids = less good; a sense of gratitude and loving-kindness = good; a sense of entitlement and materalism = less good; homemade decorations = good; lots of plastic junk that has to be stored somewhere 11 months of the year = less good. So we've been keeping our ears perked up for holiday celebrations that fit into our style. For future Easters, I think we may incorporate some of these ideas:

bunny treats

civilized egg hunt

Happy Easter, everyone!

The Days These Days: Nineteen Months Old

Cleo wakes up at 4:15. I wish there were some other, less brutal way to say that, but let's just stick to the plain truth. We've tried earlier bedtimes, later bedtimes, ignoring her, bringing her into bed with us (and all of these things with a reasonable degree of consistency, in their turn). But it seems like the hard-wired alarm clock in her head will not be reprogrammed. Our current strategy is to let her think about the day to come until five o'clock (which she does by alternately crying, sitting quietly, and calling Mama-Mama-Mama Dada-Dada-Dada). It's a combination of denial and resolve. It's not really getting us anything but another 45 minutes of dozing.

At five, her dear, dearest Dada gets up and they start the day. I am happily unaware of what exactly goes on between five and seven, although I know it involves dishes and oatmeal and honey.

"Why do we put honey on our oatmeal?"

"Ummy!"

"That's right! Because it's yummy!"

Then they come upstairs. The first thing I'm aware of is Cleo saying, "Uppa dairs!" And the answering, "Yep, up the stairs! Let's go get Mama!" And then the feet come running down the hall and the door gets pushed open. They've been practicing saying, "Good morning, Mama!" It's going well, but this morning, she came in and he said, "What were we going to say to Mama?" And she said, very proudly, "Mo', pease!" So I told her how nice it is to say please, and how she's such a polite little girl, and also good morning.

Then I have half an hour to put myself together for the day and have breakfast, and Cleo has half an hour to alternately play and ask for bites of my oatmeal. This girl is made of oatmeal. She likes it not only the Dada way (milk, butter, honey) but also plain, and even the Mama way (butter, salt and pepper).

Then we all brush our teeth together. This is a relatively new part of the routine, partly because we're lazy and partly because she still only has four teeth, and why stress about brushing what's largely still theoretical. She's into it. It took some cajoling and a few days of whole-family-tooth-brushing before she came around, but now she asks to "Buss teef" whenever she catches a glimpse of the Elmo toothbrush (a helpful item in the campaign for dental hygiene).

Then we kiss good old Dada goodbye and he goes upstairs to work ("Uppa dairs! Uppa Dada!" She's working it out.) We often go to the grocery store at this point in the day, because although it's mid-morning in Cleoland, the store is just opening and it's nice and empty. There are usually just enough people that we can have some nice chats and lots of waving. If it's Tuesday or Thursday, there are four and a half hours of school to be had, and Cleo is loving it. Her teachers are delightful, and have that toddler magic all figured out. In other words, they know it's very important that Elmo get his diaper changed, and that we pile all the babies up in the crib so that they can have a nap. It's a wonderful feeling to have some time to myself while I know that Cleo's enjoying herself in a warm, friendly place with people she likes.

After school, it's naptime. These days, that means a bottle of milk (guk), a book (guk), and a pacifier (bab-doot). Hey, we can understand her. Usually. She sleeps for an hour, then wakes up and cries, and then one of us (weekdays=me, weekends=him) will sit in the glider in her room and hold her and she'll sleep another hour. This routine is under the same heading as morning wake-up time: Not Ideal/Not Insufferable, It's Been Worse/It'll Get Better. Since she doesn't seem to mind a dimly-lit room, we can either read or doze as we hold her, and there are much worse things than a quiet hour with a sweet sleeping baby.

Afternoons, we often get together with other kids and parents. Yesterday, I told her we were going to see Jane, Max, and Ella* and she said, "And cheese!" As it happened, she was right.

I'm running out of time (father-daughter music class ends in five minutes), so here's the rest of the day, shorthand:

Dinner: a struggle.

Bedtime: easy.

This kid: the darling of my heart.

*not their real names

Context is everything.

Pea ha papah!

Mo pea ha papah!

More peas and pasta?

[Emphatic nod]

Would you like more fish paste?

No hih pase. Pea ha papah.

Okay, here you go.

Otay!

[eats by the fistful]

ooooh noooo! papah!

[sound of pasta hitting the floor]

I take it you're done?

Ou'!

Peasant Food, Times Two

It's cold and grey and I'd much rather be rolling around on the floor with Cleo, so I've been making a lot of one-pot hearties. While good and filling and very leftoverable, food like this can sometimes get a little stodgy. So here are two adaptable recipes that welcome the addition of some fresh (or fresh-ish) vegetables.

Red Lentil Dal

one cup red lentils (actually a gorgeous orange, which fades to a sad putty during cooking)

2 or 3 cups water

1 tablespoon oil or ghee (or more)

1 tablespoon curry powder (or more)

subject to taste and availability:

minced garlic

minced ginger

chopped garlic

zucchini

green beans

tomatoes

peas

carrots

cilantro

salt

Bring the lentils and water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cover. While they cook, saute the onions in the oil. Once they're soft and browning, add the ginger and garlic. Once they're also soft and browning, add the curry powder. Stir briefly (you don't want to burn the curry powder, but you do want to warm and toast it in the oil), and then add the mixture to the cooking lentils. If the lentils seem too dry, add more hot water. It they seem too soupy, leave the lid off and let it cook down. Aim for an oatmeal-like consistency, and cook long enough that the lentils totally fall apart into brown sludge. It'll be ugly, but tasty and digestible. While the lentils simmer, assess your vegetable options. Add raw vegetables now, so that they can cook. Leftover cooked vegetables can be added at the end, along with fresh tomatoes and cilantro if you have them.

Pasta Fagioli (sort of)

2 italian sausages

1/2 cup tiny pasta

1 can garbanzo or other beans

miscellaneous vegetables

1 pint grape tomatoes

fresh basil

grated parmesan

black pepper

olive oil

lemon juice

Simmer the sausages and beans in water to cover. Once the sausages are cooked, chop them up and add them back in to the pot. Add the pasta and any raw vegetables you want to use, along with more water if necessary. Once the pasta is done, add any cooked veg you have, and heat throughly. Just before serving, mix in cheese, fresh tomatoes, and basil. You probably won't need to add salt, because of the cheese, sausages, and beans, but taste it and see. Drizzle olive oil and lemon juice on each serving.

Happiness, Aisle Six

I try to be a good person. I try to make the world a better place. But all my previous efforts in this area are looking pretty paltry lately.

In terms of people-made-happy versus time-and-effort-expended, nothing I've ever done has been as effective as taking Cleo to the grocery store. Even on days like today, when she has a runny nose and is wearing a mishmashy sort of outfit, color-wise, she can be depended on to delight at least seven separate people in the course of a twenty-minute visit to the grocery store. She wiggles with delight as I put her in the cart, and proceeds to point and wave excitedly at all the people we pass. She loves identifying all the foods, even if she's more enthusiastic than accurate. Any round fruit or vegetable between three and six inches in diameter is an "App-puh!", any white, yellow, or orange hunks are "cheeeee!", and any boxes that show beige-ish, squarish foods are "kack-uhrs!" Another shopper who appears at the end of the aisle is hooted and waved at like a long-lost friend, and many people get called Da-da (a mark of seriously high esteem). If a fellow shopper has app-uhs, cheeeee, or kack-uhrs in her cart, Cleo lets her know that they have a lot in common, and shall we have a chat about it, perhaps over a little snack?

I've seen people go from surly and harried to completely charmed and at ease within seconds. Some people are immune to the charms of a loud, slightly grubby baby screeching at them (can you imagine?) but most people walk away in better moods than they approached in. I like to imagine those people leaving the store, being more patient drivers, nicer to their co-workers, more likely to give to charity... Well, maybe I'm reaching. But I do sometimes think of Cleo as the butterfly that starts a hurricane, only with goodwill. So I don't feel bad these days if I forget something at the store and have to go back the next day. Every little bit helps, and the extra gas is just the cost of doing business as a milkman of human kindness.

Timeline, Yesterday

8:30 AM, at the park with Cleo: "Today's his birthday! I'll call tonight."

2:30 PM, driving home from a Hallowe'en party with a sleeping pumpkin: "Can't forget to call tonight!"

6:15 PM, feeding Cleo crackers: "I bet he'll be home from work soon. I should call in an hour or so."

3:30 AM, waking suddenly: "Crap."

Happy birthday, Pops! Hope you had a great day, even though only half your children managed to call you.

Dinner for a Baby

Good news, loyal readers! Another fairly boring post! I know, I'm a giver. You needn't thank me. I do it out of love. Here's a tasty, easy, healthy, quickish baby meal that's good freshly made, or straight out of the fridge.

Spinach and Cheese Pasta or Food Brick (hat tip to the inventor of Lunchblock)

1 pound uncooked smallish pasta shapes

1 pound frozen spinach--the good kind*

24 ounces marinara sauce

1 to 2 cups shredded cheese

Thaw the spinach and chop it up nice and small. If the pieces are too big, they'll be pick-out-able by a dextrous baby. If a dextrous baby does not eat your cooking, chop it any old way, but do chop it so it doesn't straggle off the fork in a pathetic way. Cook the pasta, drain it, and mix it with the sauce and spinach over medium heat. The pasta will absorb some of the liquid from the sauce, which is good. Once it's evenly mixed and very hot, turn the heat off and add the cheese. Stir briefly, then let it sit so the heat of the dish melts the cheese. If you keep stirring and heating, the cheese will glob up and get generally goopy. If you let it melt without harassing it, it'll stay evenly distributed and won't get rubbery. Once it's melted, you can serve and eat immediately, or you can proceed with the Food Brick portion of the recipe, which is this:

Pack it firmly into a leftover container. Refrigerate overnight, or until thoroughly congealed. Unmold it from the container, and if you packed in it tightly enough and used a suitably adhesive quantity of cheese, it will be a solid block which you can then slice into little hunks which make excellent, neat finger food for a toddler. Without the Food Brick portion of the recipe, this dish is messy enough that it might cause your co-parent, if you have one, to turn to you mid-meal, covered in sauce and cheese, and say, "Is there some other way people feed their children?"

*If you're a frozen vegetable comparison shopper, you'll know what I mean. In my neck of the woods, it's Stop & Shop "Nature's Promise" Cut-Leaf Spinach.

Barf City

The first time she threw up, it was helpful. A friend of mine, also with an eight-month-old, was wondering what the difference was between spitting up and throwing up, and Cleo obliged with a textbook example (markedly more forceful, more voluminous and more smelly than spit-up, if you're wondering). My friend went home reassured that her baby had never vomited, and Cleo and I went home with a bit more dirty laundry than we'd gone out with.

The second through fifth times were only helpful in that they convinced Cleo's doctor and parents that she had trouble digesting foods containing soy. But they were mainly stressful, messy, and exhausting for all concerned. She'd be surprised by the first barf, resigned to the second, and get progressively weaker and more pitiful every subsequent time (usually every ten minutes for a couple of hours, depending on how much soy she ate). It was rough for all concerned, but we have refined our baby rehydration techniques, which follow, in case they might be helpful to anyone else:

Ice chips will sometimes be taken when sips of pedialyte are refused; once pedialyte is voluntarily sipped, five swallows every two minutes are a good maximum (more can trigger more vomiting), and once it's been twenty minutes with no vomiting, ten swallows every two minutes, then increase again after another twenty minutes, etc. The relationship between hydration and alertness is direct and dramatic, which is scary when a baby's dehydrated, but quickly reassuring as they start to take fluids again. I hasten to add that this is based on one family's experience with one child, and may or may not be applicable to anyone else. If you find yourself with a dehydrated kid, follow your instincts and go to the doctor or the ER if that's what you feel is necessary.

We had her tested for allergies, and she's not allergic to soy foods, her gut just has a hard enough time digesting them that they get forcefully evicted about two hours after she eats. We've discovered that even small amounts of soy can set her off, and there are small amounts of soy in lots and lots and lots of packaged foods. Soybean oil doesn't have enough soy protein in it to cause her problems, nor does soy sauce (at least in small amounts--we're not doing any more research, thank you very much).

The day care center she goes to two mornings a week provides lunch for the kids, which is great, but they're understandably spooked by anything resembling a food allergy, so they gently recommended that we provide the grain/protein part of lunch for her. This is fine, but they (for good reasons) also ask that all food brought in be vegetarian and nut-free which limits our options a bit. No soy, no meat, and no nuts bring us to beans and cheese and eggs. And eggs bring us to egg whites, which seem to cause problems for Cleo's gut as well (less dramatic, other end, still not so nice), so we're down to beans, egg yolk and cheese, which is why I was delighted that she ate these:

Vegetable Fritters

egg yolk

flour

wheat germ

cooked chopped vegetables

salt and pepper

Mix according to whim and inventory, fry like pancakes, serve to baby.

Other popular lunch items have been:

bean/cheese quesadilla: allowed to cool, cubed.

mac and cheese and peas

white bean puree on pitas

cream cheese sandwich

pasta, red sauce, spinach, generous amounts of cheese

tortellini

beans, pasta and pesto

The Days These Days: 15 months old

She wakes up at five, and this is so much better than four, I take pity on her and bring her into bed for a crack-of-dawn snack and a little nap. She nurses on one side, looks up at me and says, "Mo!" as if I might forget, and then nurses on the other side. She sleeps between us until six-ish, when she rolls over, stands up, and says either "Dada!" or "Cheese!" depending on how hungry she is, I suppose. Her version of cheese sounds like "deezh!" or "jeezh!" or sometimes just "deee!" She loves cheese, and gets excited and asks for it whenever she hears a similar word: jeez, she's, peas, please, Jesus, etc.

Her dear Dada gets up with her at six and they do the dishes and clean the kitchen while I sleep in until the luxurious hour of 7:30-ish. Then we all eat breakfast together, and she waves and says "Ba-ba" to her dad. I check my email, she plays, and eventually she realizes that we are inside when we could be outside, and she reminds me that it's time to go "Outh!" She gets her hat, and we head into the back yard, where I rake leaves into piles and she helps me by spreading them around again. I work slightly faster than she does, so it's a net benefit to the yard, and keeps us both happy.

Naptime's around ten, and lasts for a precious thirty minutes. She wakes up and goes instantly from half-asleep and bleary to bright eyed and grinning and asking to see Dada. So we go upstairs to the office and say hi. Once she's changed, we go see friends or go to the park or the market. She loves her friend Ari, and asks to see him at least twice a day: "Ar-ruh? Ar-ruh?" We have lunch, and she eats either almost nothing or an astonishing volume. According to the parenting books, I'm supposed to cultivate an air of detachment about this. It is hard. But her average diet is varied and plentiful, and she gets bigger and heavier all the time, so it's all going well. She loves noodles, apples, rice, bananas, cheese, crackers, carrots, oranges and peas. If nothing else is available, she'll eat green beans, white beans, tomato, bread, egg yolk, vegetable fritters, chicken, and fish. She will spit out avocado every time, along with anything that's too big or too tough for a kid with only two teeth.

The afternoon nap is similarly brief, and at three o'clock is the changing of the guard. I go to my studio, and Dada takes over, and there's generally a trip to the park. At the park, or, in Cleo-ese, "guck! guck!" she climbs up and slides down the slide feet first, on her belly. Her ability to do this all by herself is directly related to the Dada school of park/kid management, i.e.: let 'er alone, she can do it. I admire this approach, but I find myself having to jam my hands into my armpits and hold myself back from hovering when it's my turn at the park.

At six, I come home and it's time for a wash and bed for Cleo. Our current baby-bathing technique is for one parent to shower, the other to hand in a naked, grubby baby, wait five minutes, and then remove and wrap in a towel a wet, clean baby, and bundle her off to be pajama-ed. Inexplicably, she loves this whole process, including being held right under the shower for a good rinse. Well, she tolerates that part. She loves everything else, especially the towel.

The current bedtime story list has grown: we're now up to (in strict order) Miss Mary Mack, Mr Brown Can Moo, The Little Book of Hugs, Yummy Yucky, and Goodnight Moon. Each of these has its own favorite phrase or page or illustration, and there is a lot of pointing and conversation and turning back and forth of pages.

Once sleep is firmly established (I've Been Working on the Railroad), it's time for grown-up dinner. This meal has been drifting downwards in quality recently, and hopefully we hit bottom the other night with frozen fish, frozen peas and carrots, and rice. But that's another story.

Temperature Fluctuations, Target Practice

We've taught Cleo that hot food has to cool off before she eats it, and she helps it along by blowing intently--sometimes on the hot food, sometimes off into the air, just as a supportive gesture, I guess.*

We have also taught her to love peas. Hooray. She eats them by the fistful, which is nice, considering her disdain for many other vegetables.

Both those things are good, but I hadn't realized that, combined, they create a situation. Say her mouth is full of cooled peas and her tray is full of hot peas. Yes. She has learned that she can make Mama laugh really really hard if she blows peas across the room like a little pellet gun.

*She has also started blowing when she steps out into the cold air. Which, although not a proven way to warm the planet, might bear some research. You have your farting cows, your belching gas-guzzlers, and your chilly toddlers. Someone get on that.

Impressive writing even if she weren't sleep deprived.

A woman named Evany had a baby ten weeks ago, and has now written one of the best descriptions I've ever read of life with a newborn (minus the love and wonder, which she covers elsewhere in her post):

"I feel like I’m constantly playing that game Concentration, where you have to puzzle together plastic shapes into their appropriate holes as time tick-tick-ticks away, and if you don’t finish in time the whole game flies apart and you leap six feet into the air and spend the rest of your shellshocked life in therapy. I’ll get maybe two minutes into a bath or a bowl of oatmeal when The Tyrant Awakes (“Baby Alive!” yell Marco and I) and it’s back to the mommy salt mine. And even when he does manage to sleep for longer than a handful of minutes, the downtime is tainted with the looming spectre of his potential awakening. I always have one ear cocked for baby yells, underscoring my long, house-bound days with a spicy mix of tension and intrigue."

I had kind of forgotten about that, and now I remember just enough to feel very grateful for a fourteen-month-old who sleeps in fairly predictable chunks.

Fritters! Hooray!

Here's the recipe. Story later (she likes it! Hooray!).

Cleocakes (or Frenchiefritters)

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons flour

1/3 cup finely chopped cooked chicken

1/3 cup finely chopped cooked cabbage

salt, pepper, and curry powder to taste

Mix the flour and egg yolks until they're smooth. Add the chopped ingredients and seasonings, then fry like pancakes. This can, of course, be adapted to include any kind of leftovers and seasonings. I bet a sweet apple one would be delicious.

I am braced for angry emails

I don't usually touch on controversial subjects here because I have both affection and respect for my readers, who are an impressively diverse bunch. But a topic has come up in my life which is impossible to avoid. My mind has been changed, I have switched sides, and I wanted to let you all know how I came to my realization: the toilet paper should come off the bottom of the roll, not the top.

I had been an "over-the-topper" ever since I stayed at the Savoy in London twenty two years ago. That's how they did it there, and I figured if they thought it should be that way, well, they must have come to the right conclusion. It was also the first hotel I stayed in where they folded the end of the toilet paper into a dainty point, which I found exceedingly elegant. So while I never folded the end like they did, I did put it on the holder that way, with the sense that I was doing something right.

My eyes were opened this weekend when I took Cleo into the bathroom with me. In the past, she's been content to play with the bath mat or a small toy, but this time the toilet paper attracted her attention. She batted at it with a downward swipe, and it obligingly let loose a whole stream of lovely white paper. She was delighted, and gearing up to do it again when I distracted her with a plastic cup placed on the edge of the sink and asked her if she could reach it.

This kid cannot resist a challenge. The paper, while amusing, had been done. That cup, however, was the Everest of the moment. I admit that I feel a smug sense of victory when I outsmart her like this, until I remember that she's only 14 months old, I am 408 months old, and it would be a sad state of affairs if I couldn't. While she was reaching for the cup, I quickly re-rolled the paper and switched it around. The cup attained, she turned back to the paper and gave it another downward swipe. It spun around its little bar, but nothing more exciting than that, since the end was being held in by the spin, not unfurled as it had been before. She did the infant version of a little oh-well shrug, and went back to her old buddy the bath mat.

My eyes were opened, and my mind was changed. In a house with cats or babies, or anyone else that's likely to find paper-unfurling entertaining, the paper should come off the bottom of the roll. It is possible, of course, to unfurl the paper by swiping at the roll with an upwards motion, but that's just not as natural a gesture (try it), and so while not impossible, unfurling becomes less likely. In a house with no infants or cats (or, say, a fancy hotel populated largely by adult humans), this rule does not apply, and you can use whatever logic you like to decide which way is preferable. But those of you who live with small, curious creatures, your way is clear.

PS: Confidential to S. in Cazenovia: If you would like to leave a comment, look below the end of the essay, down there where it says "0 comments." Click on it, and a window should open which allows you to type to your heart's content. Then, where it says "choose an identity" you can select "anonymous" and then click "publish your comment." Or, you can just call me! It's always nice to hear your voice!

Hot, Tired, Hungry

Since the Era of The Kid (EK) began, my time in the kitchen has shrunk. We get to the end of the day, the baby's in bed, the most urgent chores have been done, and we have about 45 minutes to cook and eat before our foreheads start drooping table-ward. But I hadn't realized exactly how much things had changed until recently.

The other day, feeling that the man of the house deserved an extra-good dinner (I don't remember now what feat of domestic heroics he had performed--they tend to run together these days), I made one of his old favorites from the Era Before the Kid: Pasta with Kale, Sausages and White Beans. This is a fairly straightforward recipe, and I used to make it all the time, EBK. But going back to it after more than a year, I couldn't believe how long everything took. You par-cook the sausages, then slice them thinly at an angle, then brown the sausage slices (on both sides!), then take the sausage out of the pan again, then deglaze, then saute the garlic, then put the poor beleaguered sausage back in, along with the kale, which had previously been blanched and chopped, and the beans, which are easy. Good god. Now I know what I did with my time before Cleo was born. Apparently, I spent the last ten years cooking dinner.

But, by this spring, I had pretty much come to terms with the new normal, and had some good standbys: pizza, curry, chili, soup, and pasta-with-stuff, all of which could be cooked mostly if not all the way ahead, and so I could make a bunch of dinners at once. This routine worked well all the way through a cool, rainy early summer, but then the weather changed. The last few weeks have been hot and humid and sticky and horrible, and while we've coped fairly well during the day (wading pool, one window AC unit, and, if all else fails, The Horrible Mall), dinner is a challenge. I don't mind eating something warm for dinner, but I draw the line at standing by the stove while it gets that way. All my best summer recipes are from EBK, and so involve a lot of labor and/or a lot of farmers' marketing. So I'm at a loss. This is not one of those times when I recount a dilemma and then recount my solution. No, this is one of those times when I say, "Help! What do you make for dinner when it's hot, you're exhausted, and you have 20 minutes until plate/table contact?" Extra credit if you chime in in the next two hours, and you suggest something that uses only ingredients currently in my fridge.

Quinoa Salad

This is a magical recipe. It's not only tasty, it's also vegan, gluten-free, delicious with meat, great by itself, very healthy, can be made ahead (but doesn't have to be), is good at any temperature, and is pretty cheap given how marvelous it is. If you're still not convinced, know that it's also pretty, with its flecks of red and green and gold. Its only drawback is that it takes a little bit of work--but just tedious work, nothing finicky. This makes a lot--maybe 10 servings as a side dish? Great leftovers, great packed lunches, great for a crowd, so I always make a lot.

It's based on a recipe from the 1997 Joy of Cooking, but over its years in our kitchen it has evolved quite a lot. So change it at will, and let me know if you discover any particularly crackerjack variations.

1.5 cups quinoa

1 large clove garlic, minced

5 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon cumin

2 15-ounce cans garbanzo beans

2 red peppers

1 vidalia onion

1 cup sun dried (or roasted) tomatoes

1 bunch parsley

1/2 cup pine nuts

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

red pepper flakes to taste

salt to taste

First, cook the quinoa in 3 cups water (I use the rice cooker). While it's cooking, here's your list of tasks:

Mince the garlic.

Mix garlic, olive oil, and cumin in a large (huge) bowl.

Add each ingredient to the bowl as it's ready:

Rinse and drain the garbanzo beans.

Dice the red pepper and onion.

Finely chop the sun-dried tomatoes.

Finely chop the parsley.

Toast the pine nuts.

Stir in the vinegar, pepper flakes, and salt.

Add the cooked quinoa.

Mix, eat now or later.

Update/Pastries

It's been a busy summer. Cleo would now walk everywhere if only we would let her (out the door! straight off the front porch steps, Wile E Coyote style! down the street after the garbage truck!). She also has a single tooth and a burgeoning vocabulary, which I will lovingly list, in order of appearance:

Dada: Dada

Mama: Mama

dado: [sweet] potato

nana: banana

buh: ball

buh: book

buh: block

buh: baby

Yeah, maybe a few of those are a reach. However, there's no disputing that she is the master of the urgent point-and-grunt, her main way of telling us that she wants more food/our keys/to go on a walk/to send a text message to all her little baby friends so they can plot their mass escape.

In addition to baby development, there's been a lot of traveling (for all of us) and teaching (for me). Which brings me to the item that made me break my silence here: pastry. 

One of my students this summer brought Bismarcks to our last class. I was unfamiliar with both the pastry (insanely delicious) and the name (curious). So, being like a dog with a peanut-butter-filled bone when presented with curious information, I googled. And, dear reader, came up with the blog that I would aspire to write were I a Pastry Master: Joe Pastry

He is funny, informative, well-organized, comprehensive. What are you waiting for? Go be amused and/or learn something.