The Yummy Mummy Cooks Gourmet

"To Hell with Summer" Seafood Chowder

2009-11-05T20:43:00.022-05:00

And with Autumn comes the simplicity and joy of just playing in the leaves...

And also chowder. This recipe will warm you on those chilly days, but is not nearly as heavy as braising something. I'm not quite ready for the heavy winter braising. This chowder will remind you of days with more sunlight and less frost and things that are green, yet, will warm you right to the bone. Just perfect for right after jumping in a fat pile of leaves.

As an aside, I load this recipe with prawns. My kids always ask for extra prawns and if there isn't enough, there's hell to pay. And, as you know, I always avoid the hell to pay.

xo YM

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"To Hell with Summer" Seafood Chowder

Ingredients

6 ounces meaty salt pork, rind removed or slab bacon, and diced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium onions
6 to 8 sprigs fresh thyme, chopped
A pinch of tarragon
1 dried bay leaf
2 lbs small red potatoes, skin on, sliced into quarters
5 cups shrimp stock (See Note 1)
Kosher or sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 lb skinless haddock, catfish, monk fish or cod fillets, preferably over 1 inch thick, pinbones removed (See Note 2)
2 lbs of uncooked, shrimp with shells on (use shells for stock)
1 1/2 cups heavy cream (depending on how thick you want your chowder)
8 chives, cut with scissors into fine pieces
Several handfuls of fresh or frozen corn
2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley (garnish)
2 tablespoons minced fresh chives (garnish)

1. Cooking Note: Shrimp stock can be made simply from the shells of the shrimp you are using for this recipe. Just add to a pot whole a small whole onion, 2 whole carrots and a few stalks of celery. Sweat them a little in oil and butter. Add shells to the aromatics. Sweat those for a couple minutes. Add a little splash of white wine, if you want. Salt and pepper. Add water. Let simmer - but not boil - for a half hour. Voila! Home-made shrimp stock. Betcha cant' buy that at Whole Foods! I usually make this the day before so I'm not making chowder and stock at the same time.

2. Cooking Note: You can use any combination of your favorite seafood - don't let me box you in - clams, scallops, mussels, lobster, go nuts. Just make sure you know cooking times for the seafood you choose. You don't want a pot of over-cooked shrimp and under-cooked lobster. If you need help with that, ask your fish guy. They usually know.

Preparation

Heat a soup pot over low heat and add the diced salt pork or bacon. Cook until the pork is a crisp golden brown. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the cracklings to a dish, leaving the fat in the pot.

Add the butter, onions, thyme and bay leaf to the pot and sauté, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, for about 8 minutes. The onions should be soft and caramelized, but not fried.

Add the potatoes and stock. The stock should cover the potatoes. If it doesn't add water. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook the potatoes vigorously for about 10 minutes, until they are soft on the outside, but firm in the center. Smash a few potatoes against the side of the pot and cook for a minute or two longer to release their starch. This will thicken the broth a bit.

If you feel you have too much broth and your chowder might be too soupy, remove some broth with a ladle to a bowl and set aside. You can always add more to the pot if you need it. If you end up having extra broth, freeze it for your next chowder.

Reduce the heat to low and season with salt and pepper. Add the fish fillets and cook over low heat for a couple minutes. Add corn at the same time. Remove the pot from the heat and allow the chowder to sit for 10 minutes. The fish will finish cooking in the pot.

Gently stir in the cream and taste for salt and pepper. You can refrigerate the soup and reheat later or eat it immediately but I like to let it sit a bit. Just don't stir it a lot or you'll break up the fish. This recipe cannot handle lots of fussing. Just season and leave it.

Add cracklings. Serve with minced chives and parsley, either in individual crocks or in a single pot brought right to the table.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

2009-10-26T08:15:00.017-04:00

I cook in Lucy's pre-k class every Monday. Last week we roasted pumpkin seeds. This week we make pumpkin pancakes. Before that, we made meatballs. We cook everything on an electric flat top, circa 1970.

The group, which changes every week, has about 20 minutes to make a snack for all 20 kids and teachers eat, too. The snack will sit 15 minutes before it is passed out. We have a hot pot, electric flat top, microwave and a hot plate to cook on. There is a fridge.

Picture it, six eager 4 year olds gathered round a boiling oil spurting frying pan, and dipping their fingers into raw meat and eggs. It's not a cooking class it's a tragic episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Some things about 4 year olds and cooking:

1. When cooking in a pre-k class you are always just one recipe step away from everyone losing their shit. Believe it or not, just cooking pumpkin seeds in oil and dousing them with salt is like a huge endeavor for a group of kids.

Even though, the temptation is to do something amazing and complicated with the kids, like making head cheese or flambeing something, or adding an extra step like beating egg whites until they're stiff (for pancakes), they can just hold it together long enough to put a few ingredients into a bowl before they start hucking hot, oily pumpkin seeds at each other with spatulas.

2. Kids pick their noses and cook at the same time. They just do. Do not question or leave the frying pan to grab the kid a tissue. Someone will nearly set themselves on fire half way to the tissue box.

3. Most 4 yr olds cannot recognize garlic and onions by sight or smell. No judgments on other people's kids, just sayin' I baffled them with my fresh produce.

One kid was able to identify Worcestershire Sauce as "barbecue", so that's something.

4. There's always one kid... There is definitely one kid in the group that is DYING to touch the hot griddle. DYING. I see her leaning in, putting her face super-close to the oil and dangling her fingers over the heat, sort of playing with the idea of slapping her whole hand onto the flat top.

This is the kid who is going to grow up to have unprotected, drunk sex with rock stars in bad hotel rooms. I kinda love her.

5. Someone will cry. It might be me. In the girls bathroom. It's junior high all over again.

6. Prepare for your kid to secretly hate that your being nice to other people's kids. Or not so secretly, as Lucy informed every kid in the group that she gets to do every step of the dish and do it first because I'm her mom and she's done all this before.

And that's when you realize the problem kid in the cooking class is the one you brought into the world. And so I'm not just cooking with the kids and preventing them from scorching themselves with burning oil or making sure they don't impale themselves on a fork. No, I'm making sure my daughter doesn't go all Kim Jong iI on the more good-natured, better-raised children in her class.

7. There was an episode with cheese... I look away for one second to shut off the flat top after the meatballs are done. To provide a safe environment, of course. I am ever-vigilant.

But I took my eyes off the container of grated cheese. What was I thinking? For one second. One measly second. Next thing, I know 6 little fists have plunged into the cheese, shoving it in their mouths, throwing it in the air. There is a snow bed of cheese on the floor. It is a blizzard. A cheese orgy. There is fighting. Jockeying for position next to the container. Someone is shoved. A herd mentality has formed. One kid slips on cheese and risks being stampeded by the cheese freaks. There are nearly tears. Cooking in pre-k becomes a cage match of death.

Then, the head teacher, Lisa, steps in and in a nano second, order is restored. She shuts off the lights and the kids drop the cheese. They look at her and immediately put their hands on their heads. I do, too. I am in awe of her powers.

I crave that kind of power in the world.

8. I convince myself the teacher thinks I'm a crappy parent... I like to torture myself.

9. I pick raw meat out of a child's hair... Hey, it happens.

10. The kids want me back Well, yes. Of course. But Lisa will be picking cheese out of her radiators until March.

YM
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Roasted Pumpkin Seeds on an Electric Flat Top in a Pre-K Classroom

1. Remove seeds from pumpkins. You'll need two pumpkins for most humans but four if you are providing snacks for 20. Pumpkins look big but some are not so fertile in the seed department.

2. Separate as much pumpkin gunk as you can from the seeds by hand.

3. Take seeds and put them in a nice big bowl and add cold water. Most of the seeds will rise to the top and the gunk will sit at the bottom. Remove with a strainer.

4. I wash the seeds again in a strainer just to get any remaining gunk off. (If there is gunk om the seeds, it will mold over, so you want it off)

5. Spread seeds out over a tea towel and let them dry out overnight.

6. When you are ready to cook them, use a cast iron, regular fry pan or if you are in pre-k, a griddle. Heat pan. Add olive oil. I like my seeds nice and oily, so don't be stingy. Add the seeds and cook them until they start to turn a nice golden brown on one side and tumble them over to cook on the other side. This will take 5-7 minutes.

7. Remove with a slotted spoon to a paper towel. Let the excess oil drain. Sprinkle generously with salt or any other herb, spice mixture you like. Can be saved in a plastic container for a week or so, but are better eaten warm and immediately.

The Vegetable Soup Rich People Make When They Own A Country House

2009-10-20T21:15:00.024-04:00

This scrumptious vegetable soup was one of our first lovely Autumn meals in our new...wait for it...country house. Hooot!

David hates it when I tell people we have a "country house". Right now, he's freaked out and his skin is crawling, but he doesn't know why.

When he hears me talk about our new "country house", he actually cringes and jumps in and explains to people that the house is a fixer upper, a run-down, unloved, ugly thing that needs our undivided attention to reach it's full potential, an investment, something that will eat up copious amounts of our free time. We closed on Monday and he already refers to it as our little "Money Pit".

A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of twittering about "our country house". I was trying to get into the spirit of the country. I have to get into the spirit of the country because, well, I'm from the country and did everything I could to get out of the country, only to marry someone I thought would never leave the city and have him convince me we should be buy a house surrounded by carpenter bees nesting in our siding, an exploding deer population that eat every plant in their wake, nights that are pitch black and have strange eerie scratching sounds coming out of the backyard and no concierge.

That's right. Not one single person down stairs to pick up my packages or keep robbers and murderers from breaking into our apartment.

But I was trying to get into the spirit...

So, I was fantasizing about the gorgeous farm stands loaded with local produce and wine country in New Paltz, where the house is, and The Culinary Institute of America right down the road, the actual green house in my house where I can have a garden year round and grow lemon trees - Can you believe it? Lemon trees - and the amazing light from the cathedral ceilings and the space, the space, the space and the good restaurants and rockin' chefs, and the idea that we might have a yard full of egg-laying chickens next Spring, the scads of grass-fed beef that you can find everywhere and my happy rock climbing husband who is excited about having a house nestled in the Shawanagunks, the best climbing in the Northeast.

And weirdly, we have more sex in the country. Must be the air. But the best thing - no more camping in a tent, so we can be near the nature. Thank you, Jesus.

I was getting excited. So, I twittered about it. The spirit moved me, so kill me.

This prompted a call from David. He actually stopped working to call me from the office and tell me to stop calling it "the country house", lest people mistakenly think we are rich.

So, we've been working on names for the house ever since. How to describe our little "homestead", "shack", "hut", "Camp Foster" without making it sound like we own the Kennedy Compound. We are in New York after all and "country house" is synonymous for weekending in the Hamptons.

But I do this exercise for David. Frankly, I like having a "country house." I look forward to a parade of ants trooping through my kitchen and flying bugs the size of grapes getting tangled in my hair. I look forward to the really gross bathrooms that cry out for renovation and the kitchen tile that is beyond repair. I look forward to the kids having a city life and a country life. City friends and country friends. I look forward to long Sunday Suppers with a full clamoring table in a proper dining room. I dream about designing a gourmet kitchen. I look forward to losing myself in a garden and cussing at the woodchucks.

I just look forward. And despite what our bank accounts look like, we are rich.

I will take pictures at "the Casa" or whatever we are calling the house next weekend and give you a tour. Until then, try this soup, as you say "Good bye" to our lovely Autumn.

xo YM

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There are just enough lovely fall vegetables still hanging around the farmers market now to make this divine soup. There was a similar recipe in Gourmet a month or two but it was for a "stew". I can tell you that we don't eat stew here, the kids will turn up their noses at stew, but they will devour soup. So, I keep my broth soup like, but feel free to chunk it up with tomatoes, if you prefer a stew.

So, this soup is lovely, completely vegan, and deliciously simple. I gave you some ideas about vegetable quantities and such but really just go nuts at the farmers market and pick veg that looks good and that you like. Then, eyeball the quantities. Like zucchini? Add more. Despise eggplant? Leave it out.

Just enjoy this last taste of Fall.

The Vegetable Soup Rich People Make When They Own a Country House

* 1/3 cup olive oil
* 2 onions, chopped
* 2 celery ribs, cut into slices
* 3 carrots, cut into slices
* 4 garlic cloves, chopped
* 1/2 cup water or chicken broth
* 4 fresh tomatoes, chopped
* 3 handfuls of green beans, trimmed and cut pieces
* 2 red bell peppers, cut into chunks
* 2 small zucchini, cut into slices
* 1 smallish eggplant, cut into chunks
* 3 medium boiling potatoes, peeled or un-peeled, and cut into 1-inch pieces

Heat oil in a pot over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add onions, celery, carrots, and garlic and cook until pale golden, about 10 minutes. Add eggplant and water and cook, until eggplant is slightly softened, about 10 minutes.

Stir in tomatoes and bell peppers, then reduce heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, blanch green beans in a saucepan (about 3 minutes). Remove with a slotted spoon. Bring water up to a boil. Do the same with the zucchini and remove. Bring water to a boil. Add potatoes and do the same. Drain and remove.

Add all the blanched vegetables to stew and simmer, stirring, until all vegetables are very soft, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

The School Year is Kicking My Ass (Part 1 of 2)

2009-10-14T08:39:00.009-04:00

I didn't realize that I had been living this life of luxury. This is my life before Lucy started school. My life after school started is in the following post. Note the differences.

My Life Before Lucy Started School

5:00-6:00: I get up early and write, either my stuff or for a client. I mean to exercise, but that never really happens. So by the time the kids wake up, I feel fat and sedentary but accomplished. I have purpose. I am woman. I roar a lot.

7:30: I do the dishes from the night before, clean up kitchen. Prep David's lunch. Start prepping hot breakfast for everyone and everyone likes a different breakfast, so I'm prepping three completely different breakfasts, not including my own, which is caffeine and whatever anyone else doesn't eat and I can scrape off the plate with my fingers.

8:00: David gets up, showers. I poach eggs for him. I start a load of wash.

9:00: Kids start getting up. Lucy first and then Edie more toward 9:30. They transition from bed to couch and ease into their day with some cartoons. Maybe they are still dirty from the day before, who knows.

David eats poached eggs, sprinkled with salt, herbs and a nice cheese, whatever we have on hand. Lucy eats egg whites cooked in butter and sprinkled with salt and chives. Edie eats sausage, usually wrapped in a paper cone so she can hold it in her hand and eat it like a lolly pop while standing around.

10:00: David leaves for work. I hand him his lunch, which is usually leftovers reconfigured from the night before, with a salad, usually spinach and lots of vegetables, goat cheese and walnuts. The kids finish up breakfast, kiss daddy good bye and we start our day.

The rest of the day: Well, we live like kings. We usually spend the next two hours bathing. Really. There is playing in the bath, lots of bubbles, swimming in the tub, hair washing a couple times a week. It's an extended affair almost always that involved laughing, smiling, tears when shampoo time took too long or sap dripped into our eyes. There was so much emotion. It was a microcosm of life

Then, there is play with friends, our house, other people's houses, or at fun public places. When it's hot we are outside, in pools, in sprinklers on playgrounds. When it's not nice or too cold, we stay inside, usually with friends and cook, play games, eat and hold impromtu parties.

We do whatever we want. Whatever little thing pops into our heads. We feel like making meatballs, we do it. We take three hours going to the store and picking out ingredients and then, bring them home and with everyone sitting on the counter, we dive into the piles of meat and make the best freakin' meatballs ever. They rock. We are the stuff of legends. And the house is a mess from stem to stern, most days, but these are the days of bliss and we never care.

We don't have meal times or formal meals. We eat out of the fridge when we are hungry. There are always healthy snacks on the bottom shelf of the fridge within hands reach of a kid. Most days the kids eat some kind of home-made soup for lunch. We are soup people. My kids are soup people. Sometimes we spit in the wind and decide lunch is gonna be guacamole and chips. We surround ourselves with towers of books to devour, and dig in until the bowl is empty and our fingers are covered in salt and guac. Who the hell is gonna tell us otherwise? WE ARE FREAKIN' KINGS. The total boss of us.

4:30: I prep dinner, if I hadn't already prepped it in the morning. The kids watch a little TV while I'm in the kitchen. A way to unwind. I am so ahead of myself. My fridge is full. The kids are nourished, happy, relaxed. I have dinner ideas in my head way ahead. I am improvising, creating more technically-advanced recipes, really stretching myself from a culinary perspective. I'm chopping like the Ginzu knife man and little shards of carrots are flying all over my kitchen. I'm freakin' Martha Stewart on steroids. Only nice. And not as pinched.

5:00-7:00: I take the kids to the residents terrace in our building with the monkey bars on it. Every parent in the building with small kids hangs here at the end of the day. We drink a beer and watch the kids play and reconnect. It feels like home here to the kids. They know every child and adult intimately.

7:00: David comes home and hangs with the kids on the terrace while I make dinner. Usually whatever one is prepped and ready to go. We eat together either on paper plates on the terrace with wine in paper cups, or at home gathered cross-legged around the low coffee table in the living room, picking off each others plates and over-lapping each other with stories of the day. After dinner, the kids fall into bed late, exhausted, happy, dirty. David works. I write stuff. And even with our laptops in front of us, we watch DVD's of Dexter and Lost and The Office and manage to chat, cuddle, re-connect. And we also have sex, but you probably realized that.

See? Life of luxury. Now, compare to my life now...(see next post)

xo YM

The School Year is Kicking My Ass (Part 2 of 2)

2009-10-13T20:47:00.024-04:00

This is part two of my life continued from the post above:

My Life After Lucy Started School

5:30: I'm up. Some days I have to move the car on the street. I get a "Vente black ice tea, no water, no sweetner" at Starbucks when I am too lazy to make it myself.

6:15: I write for a bit. I drink my tea.

7:00: I make Lucy's lunch. This lunch thing is a bit like a science experiment. My credentials as a serious cook and food blogger are meaningless here. Just because she eats it at home, does not mean that she wants me to pack it artfully into her bento box and send it to school.

And every day as I labor over the contents - fresh carrot sticks, slabs of mozarella, a little bin of pistachios, home made pizza magarita, stir fried rice, linguine carbonara - I take silent bets about how much of it she will eat. It's like my own soap opera inside my head. What will she like better, the panko crusted fish bites or
the edemame? Will she snub the farfalle with peas or will she send back an empty box? Oh how the sight of a nearly empty box makes my heart soar, although I never let on, never show that any of this matters to me. I ask her matter-of-factly and she tells me in the same matter-of-fact voice. It's like a game we play.

The pressure of it all is excruciating.

Everyday after we get home, I search the bag and see what was eaten and what was left. It always surprises me. The thing I think is going to be a winner, is the thing left untouched. And vice-versa. Scientists will find a cure for cancer before I figure out what my kid loves to eat for school lunch.

7:10: I wake up Lucy. And usually David. I carry Lucy's mumbling, raccoon-noise making little body to the sofa where she watches Pink Panther episodes until she drifts into near consciousness.

7:15: I poach David eggs but the timing is sometimes off because he's in the shower or out of the shower or I hand him the eggs when he is trying to put one leg into his underpants. Sometimes he is so rushed and behind schedule, he has to eat while putting on his socks. Sometimes he just looks at me and silently lets me off the hook without making him breakfast. I love him for this.

7:15-7:45: We are dressing. I am chasing Lucy around the house with a brush and pony tail holders, which leads to an exhaustive negotiation about the hair. How much I brush it, where I brush it, can I brush it while she is laying on the floor and bouncing her head up and down? I say despicable things like, "Mary in your class has beautiful hair. I'm sure she sits with her mommy for a long time getting those pony tails just perfect." Ugh. When I hear myself, I want to slap myself across the face.

Lucy also uses this time to share with us how much she doesn't want to got to school and how her life would be much more improved if we just let her stay at home and watch unlimited hours of Wow Wow Wubzy.

8:00: Sometimes Lucy is dressed, hair combed, usually I'm fishing clothes out of the laundry to make that happen. But she hasn't eaten her hard boiled egg or her "lightly toasted bagel with butter" - which is exactly how she orders it and if you give it to her even medium toasted, because maybe you're busy and doing 10 things at once and you leave the bagel on a little too long, she will limply toss it back on the plate and ignore it nearly into non-existence.

Sometimes Lucy's eaten her egg but the back of her hair is rolled up into a ball of snarls so thick it projects out of the back of her head like a poltergeist. Sometimes she is half dressed and putting her shoes on on the bike as David is taking off, but her hair is reasonably combed and I have popped a bagel into her hand, which she probably finishes while whizzing down 125th street in the bike seat. Sometimes she doesn't eat at all. And I don't feel even a smidegeon guilty for that because well I'm just happy to get her out the door before I morph into one of those ugly, screamy moms.

8:15: I clean the kitchen. Maybe write some more. I pick up and mutter that I live with gypsies and how all I do is clean. Seriously, I'm reduced to muttering.

Rest of the Day: Edie wakes up. We play. We read. I examine her poop and declare that they look like meatballs. Or green snakes eating malted milk balls. Some days we meet people and go to zoos, museums and other engaging public places. Edie and I walk two miles to Lucy's school to pick her up.

Two days a week, I walk two miles to drop Edie off at her school. On those days she breaks the record for a three year old who can say "I don't waaaanna to go to shcool...I don't waaaaana to go to school...I don't waaaaannnna to got to school..." so many times that I consider enterng her into the Guiness Book of World Records. Then when we get there, she clings to me as if I am handing her over to ax murderers only to be running wild and laughing with a bunch of kids five minutes later, as if I was erased from her memory.

3:00-4:00: I pick up kids. Make small talk with other parents. I usually embarrass myself when I learn that my kid is the only kid who didn't get any books from Scholastic because I never submitted the order form, and I didn't submit the order form because the check book disappeared and I have not been able to find it, so I kept saying I would do it on-line, but of course that actually never happens, so there you go...crappy parent amid a sea of people getting it right. Or at least this is what it feels like.

We return home on the bus, carrying 15 pounds of groceries I forgot to buy earlier, because I am no longer a long-term planner. I am a grasper of straws, trying to get a handle on the schedule, always a step behind. Always a quart of milk shy in the fridge.

I hop on the bus with my grocery bags, an arm-full of toys, a stray shoe, a double stroller a four year old who is pissed and cranky after a full day of behaving nicely in school and a three year old who just wants to be home and is not afraid to tell me 100 times in succession.

One day last week, I broke down and bought the girls little bags of Gold Fish (You know how much this kills me. See? School is helping me abandon all my principles) thinking they'd have a better bus ride home. I left the bus with the floor strewn with goldfish, parents shaking their heads and both kids sobbing because I wouldn't let them eat Gold Fish off the floor.

4:30: I make the kids take a bath. They holler about having to shampoo or do any kind of basic hygiene maintenance. I stick wet kids in front of TV and make them dinner. I become a cliche. The TV is my babysitter. I stare into the fridge hoping I had the good sense to prep something in the morning (sometimes) or figure out how to simply make something awesome on the fly before the children's stomaches explode in unison.

One kid hits the the other one just as I am covered to my elbows in egg batter and panko. Or they come in the kitchen demanding to help, which was great when we lived our life of luxury, but these days I am fighting the clock. So I stop making dinner to make them a healthy snack, give them two knives and a tomato and tell them to go at it. They eat the healthy snack and butcher the tomato while I finish cooking.

It's a game show. A sick, twisted game show.

They mess up and destroy either the kitchen or another room while they are cooking or waiting for more food. There is probably tomato on the wall. Within the hour, without much supervision, it looks like we live in one of those houses on the show "Hoarders".

5:30: We eat. Without David. If the kids wait to eat with David, they will not be in bed or able to settle until 10. We tried this. We can't do it. Sadly, family weeknight dinners all together are out. We become a statistic.

6:30: David comes home. There is re-newed energy. They bounce on beds. They make a deeper, more refined mess, with more tiny toys and little parts strewn everywhere and a much more gripping attention to destruction. If there is a pile of clean folded laundry somewhere, they will knock it to the ground and use it as their "dance floor".

6:45: I pour myself wine. A big honkin' glass of wine. I feed David and pour him wine too. We de-brief about the day, everyone chiming in about stuff that happened to them. The kids hang onto him while he eats and as if I didn't feed them at all, eat off his plate for a second dinner. We defy the statistics and end up eating together after all.

7:30: Books. Brush teeth. As of this post, Edie has gone two days without brushing her teeth. I've taken away all sweets, treats and chocolate milk. Still, I hand her the brush expectantly and she shakes her head and says "I no want any chocolate milk anymore." I consider that I need Super Nanny to come to my house and straighten us out.

8:00- 8:45: Bed. Let me just put it this way: You know how on TV, the really pretty Mommy leans in to her child's room, the child is laying still under her tucked in blankets, Mom winks, says "Love you, Muffin", shuts off the light and quietly closes the door? Um, well that's not us. Our bed time is a mixture of cajoling, threatening, soothing, kissing and ultimately after much stalling and asking "Why? Why? Why must I go to bed?", we get two snoring, beautiful kids.

8:46: There is quiet. Weird, really.

9:00: David is working on his laptop. We kiss, cuddle. Adult talk. Watch Lost on the Roku box when Edie hasn't stolen the remote and stashed it in an obscure, never-used Hello Kitty bag in the back of the closet. I work on my laptop, returning e-mails, reading blogs. David and I send e-mails to each other even though we are sitting right next to one another. We look up periodically and laugh about something, remind each other of a task, tell a funny or stupid story. Sometimes we make love. When we aren't comatose.

I have about an hour, maybe two, or maybe none at all, before I fall into bed completely exhausted.

I miss my life of luxury. But...eh, this is a life, still and all.

xo YM

Gourmet

2009-10-08T06:38:00.016-04:00

I just wanted to say a couple things about the closing of Gourmet Magazine.

First, what is most sad is that people who love their work and depend on their paycheck, no longer have either. That is the real tragedy here.

Second, Ruth Reichl seems like a very cool lady - talented, passionate, tough, a smart cookie and the very opposite of a food snob. I'm pretty sure she will land on her feet.

Third, I was going to let my subscription to Gourmet run out. True.

I have cooked many recipes from Gourmet, posted some of them here and most have been lovely successes, but I felt that Bon Appetite, with its adventurous, tasty but manageable recipes and short, creative, but scan-able articles with the cool layout just met my needs more.

I agree with my neighbor Kian at Redcook that Gourmet's beautiful photography and long rambling travel pieces were luxurious, gorgeous and lush. They were relevant, for sure. Maybe the best in the business. But frankly, these days, I barely have time to scan an article or read a page at night before my head slams into the pillow, much less lay on my sofa with my feet up and delve into the riches of a food excursion to Bankok, complete with recipes that take so long to prep and make that I would have to hire a babysitter and program 20 hours of Wonder Pets onto my DVR just to make it happen.

Bon Appetite is just a better solution for people who are excited by food and cooking and eating, but don't have all weekend to hold up in their kitchens making 32 different flavors of jam. I love jam, mind you, I love making jam, but the family will throw spatulas at me if I disappear into the kitchen making something they can't eat for lunch.

If Conde Nast had to let one go, better it be the old icon, instead of the re-vamped upstart. They are merely responding to ad sales, subscription numbers, a changing media business, a morphing food culture, and demand. You can't really blame the boys in Conde Nast accounting for not being sentimental.

Fourth, make no mistake - the death of Gourmet is not an indication that food culture is being dumbed down by people who throw their "cooking made easy" dishes on the table on nights when they aren't microwaving the Gorton's Fish Sticks or pulling a "Kids Cuisine" TV dinner out of the freezer. Those people aren't reading Bon Appetite or Gourmet anyway.

But this might be a sign that not everyone who loves to cook, eat and enjoy food has to prove their kitchen prowess by languishing in the kitchen for hours at a time while their husbands bang the secretary and the kids zone out to Xbox. Unless you are Thomas Keller or a professional chef, food isn't the end. It's the means. At least for most of us with families.

My cooking is partly about fulfilling myself, being creative, expanding my culinary experience and cooking techniques, making more and more from scratch, and occasionally getting some feedback that makes my head swell, but it's mostly about feeding people. And feeding people isn't the thing of long, gorgeous, spiraling articles and otherworldly photography.

It's real, immediate, no nonsense, unfussy and right now.

It means I need almost constant inspiration with very little time to cultivate it. When I need information and inspiration, it must come quickly, succinctly and pack a wallop.

It means making the most of my time in the kitchen so I can cook amazing, tasty, healthy, do-able food, constantly introduce new ingredients, herbs, seasoning, tastes and textures, make many processed food items like broth and sauces from scratch, make a bunch of people with disparate preferences happy and still have the energy to clean up, wipe the flour off my face and have two minutes with my husband and kids (or maybe even to myself) before I have to herd everyone to the bathroom and throw everyone in bed. And do this, sometimes more than three times a day.

See? No time for long rambling magazine trips to street markets in Thailand.

So, there is a part of me that is sad that Gourmet has hit the skids. Sad, mostly for the people who worked there and are now trying to figure it all out for themselves. But mostly, I feel like Gourmet is just another cautionary tale for media that doesn't have sense enough to know when change is upon them.

Kale Chips

2009-10-06T20:17:00.001-04:00

This is exactly the kind of dish that my friend Lara, who is a vegan, describes as "the kind of food that you would laugh at me for eating."

And she's right. I do like to mock the vegans. I have to because I now am surrounded by vegan friends. I must have done something very bad in my former cooking life because now most of my best friends are vegans.

These people, incredible, loving, wonderful people that they are, have no real appreciation for my short ribs or pork belly or pork cracklins or for that matter, lobster with drawn butter or a great hunk of aged cheddar or Saint Andre or just a humungous knob of butter in just about any sauce. In fact, they are repulsed by it.

What? Repulsed by butter? I don't get it. How is it even possible that people don't like butter? Butter is the definition of awesome. It says so in the dictionary. And bacon. Don't get me started on bacon. I'm flumoxed.

But yet, I love these people and so, I have been trying to perfect my vegan kitchen repertoire. Because I didn't actually have a "vegan kitchen repertoire" and because if I didn't get one, we'd never be able to eat together. As much as I want to, saying, "I have a box of saltines in the cupboard for you to munch on" doesn't make for good friendships.

So, here's what I found out about veganism...you need to use a lot of olive oil (fat) and salt to make it taste good. If you see "fat free vegan recipes" out there, run for the hills. They will taste like communion wafer. Unless you don't have a very good palate and then, I suppose you'll put anything in your mouth.

And I think as a general rule, you should stay away from "fake foods" if you are a vegan novice (like me) fake bacon, fake cheese, fake butter. It's like some foreign land of products that you - as a non vegan - will have no idea how it shapes up in a recipe. And fake bacon is just wrong anyway. On so many levels. It's blasphemy, really.

My strategy has been to just do wholesome dishes with good fresh ingredients and just use what you are allowed to use from the pantry. But it feels a little like cooking in some game show where they give you a bottle of ketchup, a head of iceberg and 2 bunson burners and ask you to whip up a gourmet meal for six dignitaries from Sweden.

This is where kale chips make their entrance. I'm not a huge snacker, as you know. Snacks generally set off the carb-meter around here and most of you remember that David is generally opposed to carbs and I'm pretty sure that pumping your kids with organic crackers is still pumping them with crap even if it's organic crap.

That said, I also do not want to eat a snack that's not really a snack, but just boring, healthy leaves cloaked as a snack, with some hippy telling you how awesome it tastes and how good it is for you, but it really tastes like cardboard and dandelions. My taste buds are all over that kind of deception. When I do snack, I want it to taste great.

I am surprised - gobsmacked even - that a snack made of kale can actually taste good. Our friends Chuck and Corey, vegans of course, fall all over kale. They would french kiss the kale if they could. They don't try to disguise it in their cooking either or hide it in a sauce. They just put it right out there. Big buxom heavy leaves in their pasta, for instance, for all to see. Not one ounce of kale shame in that family. Their two fantastic kids age 4 and 2 inhale the stuff as if they've sprinkled it with chocolate and unicorn dust.

This is the exact opposite of me - I have kale shame. I see kale as a dark, hairy, unwieldy, bitter monster with a weird after taste that I hope never finds it's way into my farmer's market basket, for fear it might choke out anything delicious in the kitchen.

So, I have tried to find some love in my heart for kale and it has happened with kale chips. The preparation is easy. And the snack-pay-off is high. These taste great. Just rip the leaves into jagged shreds, coat and bathe them in olive olive and salt. (I do believe the kale is just a means of transport for the oil and salt, but still...) And bake for 10 minutes on a flat baking tray. They crisp up so beautifully it is surprising and they are so light in your mouth that they nearly disappear into a whisper on your tongue.

Tomorrow, I will make these for Lucy's pre-school class for their snack. This will be real test. Will 20 four year olds eat kale chips as if they've been given a bag of potato chips? We'll see. Lucy hasn't even been able to bring herself to try these yet.

But Lucy's teacher asked me to bring in a kale leaf for Charlie the class guinea pig, so I'm guessing if he'll eat it and half her class will try it, so will Lucy.

Lucy might not model me, but she'll surely model the guinea pig.

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Kale Chips

Ingredients

1 bunch of Kale
olive oil
salt

Preparation

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Tear kale off the heavy stem. Rinse well in water and dry as best you can with paper towel. Rip the leaves into jagged pieces. Each of these will be a "chip". They need not be perfect. They can be a variety of sizes and shapes.

Put the kale in a bowl. Pour in some olive oil - eyeball it, a glug or two - and get your fingers in there and work the oil into the leaves until they are all shiny and covered. Add more oil if necessary. You don't want them wet, but definately glistening and tinged with oil. Sprinkle with salt and toss gently to evenly coat the leaves.

Lay the kale pieces out on a baking tray. They should not be over-lapping or they will steam instead of bake. Each should have it's own little place. Put tray in oven and bake about 10-15 minutes or until the kale is crisp.

Best if eaten warm but not necessary. Try not eating the entire thing.

What I Miss Most About Summer...

2009-09-30T22:03:00.016-04:00

Twilight. Sunset falling across the fountains at Columbus Circle. Warm, magical, anything-can-happen air. Little girls so free that they abandon dresses and shoes and cares. And dance. And think of nothing but their release, their bodies moving like wild, jungle butterflies. With the city wrapped around them. And David and I smiling at them nearby. Close, but not too close.

And all of us content, thinking nothing but happy, free, warm, fleeting thoughts.

Sucka! Udon Noodles with Broccolini, Chicken, Cherry Tomatoes & Butter Beans

2009-09-27T06:27:00.028-04:00

So, Lucy told me yesterday she thinks I like Edie more than her.

These were her exact words. She had her sad face on when she said it. She has a sad face. It doesn't come out very often but when it does, it's powerful, mind-warping stuff.

Then she said that she knew this was "for real" because I get mad at Edie more and so this means, in some world where the uncontrolled expression of anger equals love, I like her sister more.

So, I learned three things from this discussion: (1) one or both of my kids think I love one of them more than the other, (2) I yell a lot at one particular child, (3) And somehow this is a good thing. A ringing endorsement of my adoration.

Of course, this just boosts my current belief that I am like the most painfully confused parent on the planet.

Now, it is important to bear in mind that David is quite sure I am being played and that Lucy knows exactly how to manipulate me and drive me bananas and she is using her God-given right as a daughter to drive her mother completely insane. Or get extra attention. Or make me give her cash. Or whatever is going on in that cunning brain of hers.

He reminded me - with his calm, motivational-speaker voice - that when kids this age express what they're feelings, they often don't get the details right. Good point. Then, he muttered something about mothers and daughters and crazy people and then, something about headless chickens. The rest of the time he was telling me what a sucker I was.

Pep talk over. I still felt like shit.

Truth is, after the "week of going to school without David" last week, I noticed how much easier it was for me to separate from Edie. Because of the extended breast feeding and the weaning, which was rough on both of us, Edie and I have this long history of intimacy, a clear understanding of our place in each others life, a close unbreakable bond that is expressed over and over throughout the day and the success of having weaned and gotten through this tough "giving up the boob thing together."

I feel quite sure that Edie knows how much I love her and what her place is in my heart. I can urge her to get into the class room a little harder, a little more assuredly - I can be tougher on her - because I know that she is sure I won't abandon her.

But when Lucy was having a tough time making the transition to school without David, I wanted to pull her in and tell her she didn't have to go to school. I wanted to save her from her sadness and tears and show her that I would save her. That she was that important to me, so important that I would break the rules for her.

I wanted to do this because I have abandoned her. We have that history. Edie was born when Lucy was 17 months old. Lucy went from being my one and only, to being the one who's demands were not as urgent as the new baby's. And it was David who jumped in and healed that wound. He showered her with extra attention. Slept next to her at night, doted over her, made her feel special. This cemented their bond. She knows no rejection from him. She never had to wait for him to finish up with the baby. Or stood by as he took the baby's needs ahead of her own. She is sure of him.

And, of course, I'm still trying to make up for this with Lucy every day. Even though she has no memory of any it. Even though she doesn't demand any sort of repayment or penance. Even though she probably doesn't care anymore what happened when she was a baby.

Because, well, I like to create problems that didn't exist before, and never actually solve them, but just worry about them incessantly and carry them everywhere on my back, like a big sack of rocks, and torture myself for the hell of it.

And I explained all this to David in the car last night on the way back from the country, while the kids slept. And he told me all my heartfelt concerns were, well, hooey. That I was projecting my fears onto the children. That this was about me, not them. He was using his motivational speaker voice again. And then, he said a lot of nice things about how we love our children - both of them - everyday and ways in which Lucy gets more than Edie. And it was good to remember that.

And then he told me that he was really happy he didn't have to live in my head and that it must really suck being me and having to deal with all these crazy thoughts all the time. Then he quoted his shrink. And suggested I go back into therapy.

Then, he thought we should have sex. Because apparently sex will make me feel less guilty about having stunted my childrens sense of well-being. And of course, I have no idea when I'm being played by a member of my own family, so I thought that sounded like a great idea.

Sucka!
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The first time, I made this dish, I got the idea from Vegan Yum Yum (a really fantastic vegan food blog) and did a version of the recipe as a vegan dish. But, um, yeah, it needs chicken. Just sayin'. So, here is the omnivore's version. If you are vegan, just take out all whispers of the bird.

I named the dish "Sucka!", well, because you know why.

I love using udon noodles instead of Italian pasta for many dishes. I find the noodles are satiny and slippery and delicate. Kids love slurping them up. Also, the butter beans, which are a gentle, sweet little bean, do not feel at all like large bugs in your mouth the way lima beans do and they provide extra texture to the dish which makes it special for a quick week night meal.

You heard me...lima beans feel like cockroaches in your mouth. Again, I'm just sayin'. See? You don't want to be inside my head.

Sucka! Udon Noodles with Broccolini, Chicken, Cherry Tomatoes and Butter Beans
Makes enough for 4 people

Ingredients

2 bundles Udon Noodles
Oil, about 2-3 Tbs
A knob of butter
Chicken, two breasts, skin on
6-8 Stalks of Broccolini, depending on size
1/2 tsp Red Pepper Flakes
Salt and pepper
12-15 Cherry Tomatoes, quartered
1 15 oz. can of Butter Beans, drained and rinsed
2 tsp of whatever Italian herbs you have on hand, rosemary, thyme, oregano
Balsamic Vinegar, for drizzling
A 1/2 cup of chicken stock or pasta water
Parsley, chopped

Preparation

Wash chicken. Heat a cast iron fry pan on high heat. Add a squirt or two of oil. Put chicken pieces, fat side down, in pan. Leave it until it has a nice sear, 3-4 minutes. Flip and sear the other side. Take out of the pan and on a cutting board, start cutting pieces off the bone or if it's boneless, start cutting up chunks. The chicken will not be fully cooked at this point and that's great because it will cook perfectly when we add it to the pasta mixture later. When you have a good pile of chicken slivers, put them aside.

Heat a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add udon noodles and cook for four minutes (or per package directions). Rinse noodles in cold water but save the pasta water. After rinsing, set noodles aside in a bowl and add a little pasta water back in to prevent noodles from sticking.

In the pan with all the nice, hot chicken juices, add a bit more oil and a good size knob of butter and scrape up those lovely bits on the bottom of the pan. They'll add flavor. Keep the heat at medium. Add broccolini and coat with oil. Season with a pinch of salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes. When the broccolini starts to turn bright green (just a minute or two), push them to the edge of the pan.

Add the quartered cherry tomatoes. Stir and coat in the spices and oil until they soften up, 1-2 minutes. Once tomatoes are softened, add butter beans. Stir everything together and let them get nice and warmed through. Take the veg out of the pan and set aside in a bowl.

In the still-hot pan, add a 1-2 Tbs more oil, if needed. Add the chicken pieces and let them cook through until they are no longer pink. Add cooked udon noodles to the hot pan, seasoning with salt and Italian herbs. Toss to coat the pasta. Once the pasta is coated and is heated through, add back the broccolini, beans, and tomatoes. Taste and season with more salt or pepper if needed. Throw some chopped parsley on top for bright color.

Plate and drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar if desired.

Separation Snappper (Baked Whole Red Snapper with Herbs)

2009-09-22T06:26:00.019-04:00

This post is called "Separation Snapper" because Lucy was doing this awesome job going to school, barely looking back to notice us, lots of new friends, every one has been invited to our house to play. It's been ecstasy for all of us. I saw blue skies ahead. Life was freakin' great...

And then...BLAMO!....David goes on business trip and we interrupt her school routine, where David takes her to school on the bike, and Lucy just freaks out.

Next thing I know she's standing at the street corner screaming and crying refusing to take one step closer to school, while I am deprived of caffeine, toting a half asleep Edie, who is pissed I've gotten her up early three days in a row and would rather be in bed undisturbed by the whole early morning school routine. And then, Lucy spends most of her school day mournfully drawing monotone pictures of her and her dad with smiley faces and dolphins and wild flowers, and the other kid's parents pat me on the back, shaking their heads, and say things like, "Having a hard time at drop-off, huh?"

Um, yeah, brainiacs. Thanks for the keen observation.

And the afternoons also blew while David was away because that was the week Edie started a small preschool alternative program two afternoons a week and she has been adamant that separation is not, nor ever will be, in the cards. (Thank you extended breastfeeding) She pretty much spent her first two days of school clutching my knees and refusing to take anything that was handed to her unless I touched it first and gave it to her. Once, she tried to take off her underpants. And she laid across the table while some kid tried to put together a puzzle. She whispered "home" in my ear about 30 times. It was painful. For everyone.

Then, David came back.

Angels sang. Harps played in unison. Church bells rang. And all of a sudden Lucy liked school again. She loved all her friends. She skipped down the sidewalk on the way to school. She started picking out cute little dresses to wear and black Mary Janes. She hummed while she got dressed in the morning. She let me run a brush through her hair. I put a damn barrette in her hair. It was like cooperation central.

And Edie, in what can only be described as the single biggest turn around in the history of the world, decided to take her teacher's hand and go to the roof top playground at her school to play with the kids. Alone. Without clutching my legs like a koala baby hooked to its mommy in the Outback. She didn't look back. The gymnastics teacher said she was a ball to have in class. It was like David's return made everyone feel safe and secure. All was right with the world again.

David is never allowed to travel without us again.

And basically what I figured out is, it's me. I'm the freak that disables my children and makes them go in reverse. (I told my friend Tamara this and she said, "Yes Kim, its you.) I bring out their need to come home, to have home-made soup in bean bag chairs while reading Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and then, spending the next four hours with meat on our hands making meatballs together in the kitchen. I bring them home. Pull them in close. I also make very good accents when I read books. My Strega Nona/old-Italian-woman-accent is legendary.

David pushes them out, empowers them with big responsibilities, gives them adventure, makes them try new and different things and gets them on planes to countries all over the world. He applauds them when they face the fear and persevere anyway. I say dumb things like, "Oh honey, if you're scared to ride that horse, it's okay, you don't have to."

But David, he inspires them to do it, to face things head on and with a gentle, loving nudge, they are on the horse, a little scared at first, but also a little excited, and the next thing you know they are laughing, smiling, full of themselves, trotting down the trail, out of reach, wanting to do it again, only this time by themselves. And there I am, stuck at the paddock, biting my knuckles, imagining the horse running off with a small child bound up in the reins, terrified, in peril, alone, out of my reach (my mind goes there. alot) and craning my neck to find out when they hell they are coming back.

So, my children would never leave the house if it weren't for my husband and I'm grateful to him. He's back now and everyone loves school. No more morning tears. Or whining. I don't have to drag anyone down the street to school. We're all together and everything is all good.

And today's our anniversary. So, even better.

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So, Separation Snapper...Lucy picked this out for supper after one our harder days without David. She wanted "pink fish with eyes", which is a whole red snapper. Fish with it's head on always makes Lucy happy. Running around Whole Foods gathering up the ingredients for this dish took her mind off her rough day and allowed the three of us girls to reconnect. This is what we threw together when we got home.

When you order the fish from the market or fish monger, get them to clean and scale it. If your family would prefer the "no eyes" variety of fish, you can use fillets just as easily, (and bake them for about 25 minutes) although the whole fish makes a more dramatic presentation. You can also have the fish guy separate the head from the body, so you can cook it and present it with the fish and then whisk it away if someone freaks out about it (Ewww the fish has eyes!) or let them play with it. We always end up playing with the fish head. No shame in that.

Separation Snapper (Whole Baked Red Snapper with Herbs)

1 2-to 2 1/4-pound whole red snapper, cleaned
1 tablespoon finely minced garlic
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice or a few generous squirts from a lemon
5 or 6 sprigs of lemon thyme
10 chives (uncut)
Parsley minced and used at the end for presentation
1/4 stick butter, cut into pieces
2 lemons, cut int wedges (save a few for presentation)
Salt and pepper

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Use a good size baking pan. Butter the pan a bit to keep the fish from sticking. Wash fish, pat dry with paper towel and place it in center of a pan.

Season cavity of fish with garlic, salt and pepper, and lemon juice. Dot cavity with butter. Arrange some lemon wedges, lemon thyme sprigs and chives inside cavity. (You really can use whatever herb combination you like - I won't yell at you) Season outside of fish with with salt and pepper. Squeeze lemon over outside of fish. Salt and pepper the outside. Top with a couple lemon slices, if you like.

At this point, you can store the fish in the fridge for up to a day. If you can prep the fish ahead, dinner is just putting a pan in the oven. Simple.

Bake fish in oven until cooked through, about 35-40 minutes, depending on the size of the fish. Transfer fish to platter. Serve with a sprinkle of parsley and a generous little pile of lemon wedges.

Cumin-Scented Beef Kebabs

2009-09-13T16:09:00.012-04:00

I'm back from my self-imposed summer vacation, people.

The one where I intended to read a lot and get back to the kitchen and get a pedicure and get my ducks in a row, whatever that means, and prepare for Lucy going to the big school and getting caught up on all things not-internet-related. I also vowed to clean out and organize my entire house top to bottom. Yeah, right.

Truth be told, I meant to do all those things - I did, in fact, write and cook a lot, test recipes, try new ingredients - but I didn't actually read much, except the two pages I can get through before my head slams into the pillow at the end of the night from sheer exhaustion. So, I'm not much brighter than the last time you read me.

But I did get Lucy off to the big school, where we had to scream her name to get her to say "goodbye" to her poor, old, totally abandoned mom and dad. Truth is, I was not one of those bleary-eyed, sentimental parents hovering at the door, sobbing while their kids tumbled into their first class circle. No, I was elated. Proud that she was so ready. So happy. So in her own element. So big.

I thought I'd be mush. I was surprised actually. I thought, "Oh maybe this is how I'll feel dropping her off to her college freshman dorm room. Maybe I won't be crushed, abandoned, almost-empty-nested. Maybe I'll just be proud and happy that she is ready to make her way in the world." Uh. I'll settle for not laying on the floor of her dorm room and screaming "No, No...don't do this to me. You can't leave your mother. We have to grow old together" while half the freshman class looks on, thankful I'm not their parent.

Oh, and I never cleaned and organized my entire house. And I never got that pedicure. Some summer resolutions are left undone. I shall move those to-do list items to the fall. I want a pedicure so my toes will look great while I wear....boots. Nice.

Anyway, there have been a lot of changes here in these last few weeks - and I'll just tell you about them over the next few weeks of posts - but don't get your bunions in a bunch because we aren't pregnant, so it's not that. Geez...you guys always jump to conclusions.

Other than that, I have something for you to make. Something to get us moving out of our lazy, hot and altogether too short summer and into the crisp breezes and baskets of Macintosh apples of Fall. On to Halloween and princess costumes and steaming hot pies out of the oven and weirdly-shaped, rotting pumpkins in your window sill that you totally forgot, until the smell reminded you that it was still there and intense pleas for a certain parent to turn our apartment into a haunted house that can be enjoyed by all the neighbor children and also, I suppose those people who dress up their kitchen tables with gourds and corn stalks, like they have been french kissed by Martha Stewart and breathed in the very life force of crafting.

Bring it the on, you beast. I'm back and waiting for you.

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Cumin Scented Beef Kabobs
from Gourmet Magazine

To make the brief jump from Summer to Fall, I suggest a dish that does well on the grill or on the stove in a very hot cast iron pan. I've tried them three ways, grill, cast iron pan and broiler and the first two yield the best results. The broiler is serviceable, but you just can't get the right crunchy, oily texture, where the spices carmelize on the outside of the meat forming a hot, spice-infused crust for the soft, yielding meat inside. For the cut of meat, I like the boneless short rib best, but any nice fatty cut should work just fine.

These cumin-scented beef kabobs from Gourmet Magazine are easy, quick and great for a spicy week-night supper. Throw the meat in a bowl with the marinade the night before or morning of and put them in the pan for dinner that night after you kick your shoes off. A lightly grilled pita and greek salad will make for a scrumptious late summer meal. Or pair it with a thick and hearty white bean soup and thick crusts of bread for that blustery day.

Oh and also, meat on a stick is a big winner with my kids. It's way better than using a fork apparently. And after the meat is eaten, they make nice swords and impalers. Make extras cause you'll be standing at the fridge eating them at 11. And they work great in a lunch box.

Ingredients

* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 2 tablespoons finely chopped oregano
* 2 garlic cloves, minced
* 2 teaspoons ground cumin
* 1 teaspoon ground coriander
* 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
* 2 pounds sirloin flap steak or flatiron steak, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces

* Equipment: 12 (12-inch) skewers, soaked in water 30 minutes if wooden

Preparation

Stir together oil, oregano, garlic, spices, and 1 teaspoon salt in a bowl, then toss with beef. Marinate, chilled, at least 2 hours.

Prepare grill for direct-heat cooking over medium-hot charcoal (high heat for gas. Or heat a cast iron fry pan over high heat. Thread about 4 pieces of beef onto each skewer, leaving small spaces between pieces, then transfer to a tray. (For the fry pan, you can use the skewers but once I just cooked the meat up quickly in pieces and dropped the juicy pieces onto a stick for the kids to eat and carry around. Whatever works for you, will be fine.

Oil grill rack, then grill beef, covered only if using a gas grill, turning, until browned but still pink inside, 4 to 5 minutes. No cover for the cast iron pan, but same length of time.

Am I as Obsessive as Christopher Kimball? (Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps)

2009-08-09T14:45:00.026-04:00

Oh, this man.

David is in Australia again and I am my usual basket case. If you've been reading for a few months, you already know what happened the last time David went to Australia without us.

Well, he's gone again for the week and I'm back to checking the rooms to make sure the ironing board in the closet that looks like it could be a serial killer is actually an ironing board. (This kind of thoroughness takes time and energy) I also have to check the door to make sure it's locked 30 times before I go to bed (kid you not) and I'm pretty busy fantasizing that every little noise in the night is actually a ghost, and that any minute the bed will shoot straight up to the ceiling and whirl around and around, and the cupboard doors will start opening and shutting by themselves.

I've also been watching the cats a lot lately because I hear that if they act squirrely it's because there is something poltergeisty in the house. They are my barometer. If they look calm, I'm calm. If they chase a piece of fuzz across the floor, I'm calling 911.

So, this post will be short because all this looking out for things that could hurt us is exhausting. I am much too busy worrying that the airline mechanics haven't had a proper nights sleep and they will screw up the mechanical inspection of my husband's plane. I check CNN on my phone all day to make sure there haven't been any plane crashes. Even as I write this I feel that even joking about it could send a negative vibe into the air and change the course of the future, so let's stop talking about plane crashes now, okay?...The plane will be fine.

Good plane. High flying plane. Plane of sturdy, well-maintained parts and excellent staying-in-the-air power. Breathe, Kim. Breathe

But there's more...Once this trip, I even had this elaborate fantasy trying to imagine how the girls and I would ever be able to live without David should he survive a plane crash, but come out of it with amnesia and not recognize us and by the end of the fantasy, after we had worked through our deep sadness, I had figured out like 20 different ways I would work selflessly, toiling like Mother Theresa to help him remember our faces and reclaim his life. Seriously, this all played out in my head.

See? Busy, busy.

So, I'm going to leave you the meal David requested for his last meal before he left for Australia. And even now, I hate calling it the "last meal" because well, bad vibes and all (and that made me remember that I haven't even had time to write you my theories about terrorist attacks and what could definitely happen with that), so I'm calling it, "The Get-Your-Butt-Home-in-One-Piece Thai Pork Lettuce Cups". That covers it all, doesn't it?

Now, these are from the most recent issue of "Cook's Illustrated" and I love them and so, I'm giving you their complete recipe here because they, too, are obsessive compulsive and since I did not try this recipe with 24 different cuts of pork, who am I to challenge Christopher Kimball on his own brand of crazy? Although his sounds ways more fun than mine.

I will concede that I made a few changes only because I made this on the fly and we live in Harlem and finding a head of bibb lettuce in Harlem is impossible. I used a beautiful leafy red lettuce and did the best I could. It all went down the same.

Leftovers & Next Day Lunch

Also, I suggest grinding up extra pork loin and keeping it uncooked for the next day and making extra rice. That way you can make pork fried rice for lunch. Splash a little fish sauce on the pork and mix a little shredded ginger in there with your hands. Throw some chopped onions and garlic in the wok when the oil is glistening hot. Add the pork breaking it into little pieces as you go. Get it nearly cooked through and add leftover cooked rice. Mix it all in together and scramble an egg scrambled in there. Salt, pepper, a handful of cilantro. Awesome Chinese lunch.

Another thing, about Cook's Illustrated - I suggest not buying the magazine and buying the online subscription. It is hard to remember which magazine in your den has the perfect pot roast recipe and holding onto old magazines is a space-swallower. But their website is great. It's $30-ish a year but you can search for recipes, product reviews and cooking methods as you need them. It's really a terrific site.

Here's the recipe. David loved these so much, he took what was left with him on the plane. Enjoy!

Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps (Or "The Get-Your-Butt-Home-in-One-Piece Thai Pork Lettuce Cups"

Serve 6 as an appetizer or 4 as a main course. Published September 1, 2009. From Cook's Illustrated.

From Cook's Illustrated: We prefer natural pork in this recipe. If using enhanced pork, skip the marinating in step 2 and reduce the amount of fish sauce to 2 tablespoons, adding it all in step 5. Don’t skip the toasted rice; it’s integral to the texture and flavor of the dish. Any style of white rice can be used. Toasted rice powder (kao kua) can also be found in many Asian markets. This dish can be served with sticky rice and steamed vegetables as an entrée. To save time, prepare the other ingredients while the pork is in the freezer.

INGREDIENTS

1 pork tenderloin (about 1 pound), trimmed of silver skin and fat, cut into 1-inch chunks (see note)
2 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon white rice (see note)
1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
2 medium shallots , peeled and sliced into thin rings (about 1/2 cup)
3 tablespoons juice from 2 limes
2 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
3 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh mint leaves
3 tablespoons roughly chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1 head Bibb lettuce , washed and dried, leaves separated and left whole

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Place pork chunks on large plate in single layer. Freeze meat until firm and starting to harden around edges but still pliable, 15 to 20 minutes.

2. Place half of meat in food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped, 5 to six 1-second pulses. Transfer ground meat to medium bowl and repeat with remaining chunks. Stir 1 tablespoon fish sauce into ground meat and marinate, refrigerated, 15 minutes.

3. Heat rice in small skillet over medium-high heat; cook, stirring constantly, until deep golden brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to small bowl and cool 5 minutes. Grind rice with spice grinder, mini food processor, or mortar and pestle until it resembles fine meal, 10 to 30 seconds (you should have about 1 tablespoon rice powder).

4. Bring broth to simmer in 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork and cook, stirring frequently, until about half of pork is no longer pink, about 2 minutes. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon rice powder over pork; continue to cook, stirring constantly, until remaining pork is no longer pink, 1 to 1½ minutes longer. Transfer pork to large bowl; let cool 10 minutes.

5. Add remaining 1½ tablespoons fish sauce, remaining 2 teaspoons rice powder, shallots, lime juice, sugar, red pepper flakes, mint, and cilantro to pork; toss to combine. Serve with lettuce leaves.

(Photo: I didn't take this picture and have no idea who did, otherwise I would've credited it. My wraps were horsed down before I could snap a picture. Sorry, total slacker this week.)

My Sordid Confession (Served Up with Mario Batali's Cacciatore)

2009-08-06T21:45:00.019-04:00

So, we are going out to play on the playground yesterday and Lucy really wanted to wear this dress that she loves because her father loves her in it. And she looks just beautiful in it. Really.

And this is great, except I knew she was just going to get it filthy and I was kind of hoping it wouldn't be in rags by the time she started school in September. Not to mention that I am, in fact the world's worst housekeeper and laundress, so I have no shot of getting out a big grease/ink/grass/propane/red wine/Kool Aid/blood/mud/you-name-it stain out of said dress.

That and - here's where I make a sordid confession - I have this little disorder that I have kept a kinda-secret (Okay, I have more than one disorder. Who am I trying to kid?). David knows about it and I've worked on it with my therapist, but other than that, this is not the kind of thing you brag about at industry functions and family reunions.

Then, I passed it on to my daughter and bang! - I have to deal with it. Right out there in the open. Parenting sucks that way. I really tried not to pass it on to her. I tried doing everything the opposite or reverse or backwards, but it must be encoded into her DNA, cause she's just like Mama.

We, Lucy and I, like to save things.

And by save things, I mean we like to get things brand new and then, like, never use them. That way they can always remain in their perfect, unfettered state and never be worn-down, sullied, bruised, creased, dirtied, folded, bent, or worked into any other unseemly man-handled condition. Oh yes, we like to use things, but only if they aren't totally special or we have a back-up of the special thing, a perfect replica waiting in a drawer in the wings, or if the special thing belongs to someone else. Then, we can have at it.

Don't get me wrong, I intend to use that one gorgeous, expensive, cool-looking Williams Sonoma pot holder. But when company comes. Or I cook a dinner for Stephen King. Or Gael Greene. Or when the Food Network people come to see me cook a demo for them. Or when pigs fly. But dammit, I'm going to use that awesome potholder someday. I'll just keep it right here for safe keeping until the perfect opportunity comes.

Except the perfect opportunity never comes. And the pot holder sort of molts and discolors from years of sitting alone in a drawer. And I continue to use my cheap ugly pot holders.

This strategy has worked similarly for Lucy. At Easter, she and Edie got these big chocolate Easter bunnies in their baskets. Edie, glutton that she is (like David, of course), sat right down and power-chowed that Easter Bunny. By 9:30 in the morning that bunny was dust. Not one ounce of hesitation.

Lucy, on the other hand, held the package in her hands. Admired the beautiful box. Opened the cover just a bit to peek in at the beautiful chocolate bunny. She held it. Stroked it. Made it sing. Then, when she thought the warm room might actually make the bunny melt, she demanded that I put it in the freezer immediately.

Every day, I'd say to her, "Lucy, don't you want to eat some of your bunny?" And she would say, "No, I want to save it."

Little did she know that every night after she had gone to sleep, her father would open the freezer and snap off a piece of ear. A nose. A tiny foot. Within a week, David had eaten the entire bunny. And Lucy had forgotten all about it, never having tasted a bit of it.

In this house, Edie and David make out the best. Their motto: you snooze, you lose. They are unapologetic.

So, I've been making an effort to encourage Lucy to just use things. Trying to explain to her that the world is full of plenty, not scarcity. That there will be more Hello Kitty stickers after all the Hello Kitty Stickers in her drawer get used. That things are there to be used, not be attached to. That what is important is us, our love, our lives, our health, our joy, our time together. The things, they come and go.

And I'm explaining it to myself, as well, that there are more pot holders in this world, that perfection is not important, that enjoying things and people are, that holding onto things prevents me from embracing new things, that this is not the legacy I want to pass on to my girls. I hear all of it in my head and for the most part, it has been working. I'm using the potholder. And Lucy has been admiring less and digging in and using things more.

But occasionally, we slip into our old ways. Yesterday when I saw Lucy wearing the new dress she loves so much, I faltered. I wanted her to save that dress, keep it clean and new and perfect for that perfect up-coming occasion because as David says full of sarcasm, "You're afraid we won't be able to buy another $8 dress from Target, which is ridiculous."

Okay, I know. I'm an idiot.

But I thought I had her. Lucy was considering my arguments and my logic and considering taking off the new dress and swapping it for the older one I was holding in my hand. I had her thinking about it.

And then she put her hand up to stop me, like she was Diana Ross or something (Stop! In the name of love, before you break my heart...) and said in the most assured voice I've ever heard come out of her little body, "Mommy, you worry about yourself and I'll worry about me."

She wore the dress. The grasshopper surpasses her teacher.

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I may have forgotten and given you a chicken cacciatore recipe in the past few months, but this one is my take on Mario Batali's recipe. I really like it. Wholesome. Comforting. It's lovely. You should try it. And the sauce is also very good and very simple, although I prefer mine, because well, it's mine. (I also like this old post. So, it's worth a look-back.)

Pollo alla Cacciatora
Serves 4 people and a couple kids

2 cloves garlic, minced
1 branch rosemary, leaves only, minced
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
one 3-pound chicken, cut into 8 serving pieces, rinsed and patted dry (or just the pieces you like, breasts and legs work just fine)
2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped
1 pound portobella mushrooms, stems removed, cut into 1-inch cubes
4 ounces pancetta, cut into 1/2 inch dice
4 ribs celery, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 cups Basic Tomato Sauce (recipe below)
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup chicken stock
pinch of sugar
pinch of hot red pepper flakes

Night before:

In a large bowl, combine the garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper to taste, and add enough olive oil to make a somewhat dry paste (3 to 4 tablespoons). Add the chicken and rub the paste evenly over the pieces of chicken. Cover and refrigerate.

Next morning:

In a dutch oven, heat 1/4 cup olive oil over high heat until smoking. Brush the excess rub from the bird, and sear the chicken pieces, in batches if necessary, until browned on all sides. Transfer to a plate lined with paper towels. Place in fridge. Feel good your dinner for tonight is nearly prepped.

About 50 minutes before you want to eat:

Take chicken out of fridge. Bring to room temperature. Add the onions, mushrooms, pancetta, and celery to a stock pot and cook until the onions are golden brown and the pancetta has rendered its fat, about 8 minutes. Drain off the excess oil, then add the tomato sauce (use this recipe below from Mario Batali or this one, The Yummy Mummy's "Never Buy A jar Again" Marinara, or use the stuff from a jar, but please don't ever tell me about it. My head might explode) and wine, stirring with a wooden spoon to dislodge the browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Add the stock, sugar, and red pepper flakes and bring to a boil.

Put chicken to the pot, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Uncover and cool until cooked through, about 15 to 20 minutes more. Transfer the chicken to a festive platter, top with the sauce, and serve.

Mario Batali's Basic Tomato Sauce
From Molto Italiano

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 Spanish onion, cut into 1/4 inch dice
4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme
1/2 medium carrot, finely shredded
two 28-ounce cans whole tomatoes
salt

1. In a 3-quart saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until soft and light golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Add the thyme and carrot and cook until the carrot is soft, about 5 minutes.

2. Add the tomatoes, with their juice, and bring to a boil, stirring often. Lower the heat and simmer until as thick as hot cereal, about 30 minutes. Season with salt. This sauce can be refrigerated for up to 1 week or frozen for 6 months.

Don't Mess with Mama (Or How Roasted Tomatoes Make Everything Better)

2009-08-03T22:33:00.019-04:00

So, this was the kind of day I had yesterday:

There was only one plastic case that holds all the princess toys. This was a problem because Edie wanted one and Lucy wanted one. So, I got creative. I explained to them calmly that we only had one princess case, but that I could find another for Edie that was just as good. This was just fine with Lucy who was happy to have full ownership of the princess case.

That is until I procured a plastic bag from a fancy pet store with a big paw print on the side. Well, that was great for Edie who set about loading all her princess supplies into the very cool paw bag. But Lucy cried and demanded I find her a paw bag. But of course I only had one.

So, I got creative again. I went to the gift wrapping bin that I hide under the bed and found a gift bag with a garden of flowers all over it. Lucy likes flowers. I knew I was in.

Tears dried immediately. Lucy was elated. But, oh yeah, this sucked for Edie who was left with the crappy plastic paw bag. And the water works began. And not just water. There was wailing, high-pitched, crazy-ass, someone-call-social-services-a-child-is-being-misused wailing.

That is until I found, in the bin, a bag with a cat on it and knowing Edie loved cats - like, lurves the cats - I proudly raised it up so Edie could see it. And she beamed from ear to ear. Beamed, I tell you.

I was the Goddess of all Mothers. Healer of the world. Mender of disputes. I was Mother Theresa, only fatter, less wrinkly and more fertile. And liking sex a whole lot more.

And Lucy saw the cat bag and all its awesomeness and then, looked down on her own dilapidated, sorry excuse for a garden, flower bag, that I had the audacity to give her, and fell into a crumpled heap on the floor pointing to the great and awesome cat bag and mouthing the words between gulps of air.

"I...w-w-w-want...c-c-c-cat...bag...waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

And this is why mothers often feel compelled to drink vodka at 10 am.

So, I picked them both up - and they were both wailing by this time and had thrown their bags to the floor in disgust and horror - and I carried them to the sofa in the living room and looked into their sad, pathetic, bagless eyes and said in the most compassionate voice I could muster: "I love you. You are good girls. But you're driving me bat shit crazy. If you don't pick a bag and like it, we'll stop everything and I will...WASH. YOUR. HAIR.

They were panicked. Wide-eyed. They stopped crying. The room turned cold and silent. God, how they fear the clean. I freaked 'em out.

"That's right. I'll wash your hair." I say to them. I am bolstered. Empowered. The control has changed hands. They are wondering why their mother had turned on them. Years from now, they will discuss this moment in therapy.

"And I'll use conditioner. We may have to rinse TWICE."

"Um, we don't want to play with bags anymore." Lucy says definitively and Edie nods in agreement. They both slide off the couch, happy to get away from me.

And I, my friends, do "The Naked Dance of Glory" around the living room and celebrate that the balance of power has been restored. And I still have the magic. The mojo. The bling. I can do anything.

Bring it on, toddlers of the world. You are no match for me. Hear me roar! HAAAAA!

___________________________________________________________________________________

Okay, this is exactly the dish you need after securing enough paw bags to keep every one of your kids freakin' blissed out.

This is actually two separate recipes I adapted from the August Gourmet. Separately, they are nice. Together, they are insane. This was devoured at Edie's birthday party by crazy toddlers and adults alike. It also has the distinction of being vegan, if you have a vegan guest coming to your next gathering, this will satisfy them. But really, after a crazy day with the kids, you'll want to just eat the whole bowl of these things by yourself. With a box of wine.

The first is a recipe is for Garlic-Oregano Pita Bread, which is basically just a grilled pita drizzled with warmed olive oil that has been infused with garlic and oregano. And the second is slow roasted tomatoes that have been drizzled with olive oil and flecks of garlic and roasted in the oven on very low heat for 8 hours.

Cut the pita into triangles and serve on a platter next to a bowl of the roasted tomatoes and let people scoop it up themselves. Or make little pizzas. Whatever, but both take little active kitchen time and yield bold results.

Here they are:

Slow Roasted Tomatoes

Yield: Serves 4 to 6
Active time: 15 mins
Total time: 6 to 8 hr

Ingredients

* 4 pounds tomatoes, in fat wedges
* 6 garlic cloves, minced
* 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Preparation

Preheat oven to 200°F.

Put tomatoes, cut sides up, in 2 large shallow baking pans. Combine garlic and oil and spoon over tomatoes. Season tomatoes with salt and pepper and roast in oven 6 to 8 hours (tomatoes will be reduced in size but will retain their shape). They will also get loose and light aromatic sauce will pool around the soft tomatoes. It will be just the right consistency to lop up all the goodness with a thick pita round.

Cooks' notes 1: Roasted tomatoes keep in an airtight container, chilled, 2 weeks. Bring to room temperature before using. They are better on day 2.

Cooks notes 2: I started roasting these the night before for 4 hours. Then, I covered them and put them in the fridge and popped them in the oven 4 hours before I needed them. Came out perfectly and all the sitting around over night, really set in the flavor.

Garlic-Oregano Grilled Pita Bread

Yield: Makes 6 servings
Active time: 20 min
Total time: 30 min

Ingredients

* 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
* 2 garlic cloves, smashed
* 2 tablespoons finely chopped oregano
* 6 (6-to 8-inch) pocketless pita bread rounds
* Kosher salt to taste

Preparation

Heat oil in a small heavy skillet over medium heat until it shimmers. Cook garlic, turning once, until pale golden, about 1 minute. Discard garlic and remove skillet from heat, then stir in oregano.

Prepare grill for direct-heat cooking over medium-hot charcoal. I used a cast iron fry pan on a medium-high flame indoors.

Grill pitas, 2 or 3 at a time, covered only if using a gas grill, turning once, until grill marks appear, about 2 minutes total per batch. Transfer to a cutting board and cut into wedges. Put pitas on a platter and drizzle garlic-oregano oil over them. Be generous. It's just fine if it's a little sloppy in the bottom of the dish, people will be soaking it up with pitas before you know it. They are scrumptious. Sprinkle with salt.

Big & Small

2009-07-28T07:50:00.020-04:00

Edie turned three this week.

I could write you a sappy post about what that means to me, about how for the last six weeks we have prepared for the this day by slowly weaning her off the breast, sadly and sometimes catastrophically, and that one night, it was so hard for her to give up the boob that I broke down in tears with her in my arms and apologized to her over and over until she held my face in her hands and said, "Don't cry, Mommy. I'm okay." Gah!

I could also make this post about how she goes to ballet with Lucy every Friday and how she looks in that damn adorable tutu and how, unlike Lucy who does the "kissing hand" ritual with me for like 5 minutes when she says good-bye, little Edie, little secure, confident, nothing-gets-in-my-way Edie just runs into the room without even looking back at me. Not even a wave. Or a thanks for the memories. Or hey, that was cool you did all that laboring and pushing back in July 06. Thumbs up, Ma. Nothing.

Like I'm not even there. She is definitely the kid that is going to break my heart and move half way around the world to Hong Kong when she grows up. I just know it.

And I could tell you about how she graduated from Early Intervention and speech therapy just yesterday. When she started in January, she barely said 20 words. The intake person described her as "nearly mute". Now, we can barely get a word in edge wise. She is a non-stop stream of descriptions, assessments, opinions, ideas and thoughts. She is bursting forth with singing, with nonsensical characters and stories. She is pure imagination unleashed. She has learned from Lucy to narrate everything she does..."I'm washing my hands now. Oh, where's my towel? I think I need soap. Soap is fun. I like soap..." The other day I heard Lucy tell her, "Edie, please stop talking to me so much. You're driving me crazy." Beautiful.

I could also share with you that Edie has her Mommy's temper. The difference between us is that I wage an on-going 24/7 battle to maintain and contain my hairy dragon. Edie feels no need. It doesn't happen everyday, but when just the right measure of tiredness, or frustration mixes with a lost Barbie or a spilled cup or a lost turn, the hairy dragon can come bursting out from nowhere. And it's always a doozy. She goes totally limp, screaming the most high-pitched, ear-shattering scream possible, and lays on the floor kicking in the air and throwing her hands around and begging me to pick her up, only to fight me off when I do and go completely rigid, so I can't gather her up and try to help her calm down.

One time, a few weeks ago, we were on 5th avenue in the 50's. The sidewalk was teeming with people. Edie was tired and we were weaning off the boob and she lost it over something and she screamed so loud and for so long in the middle of the sidewalk, a crowd actually gathered to watch and make sure I wasn't hurting her or kidnapping her or something. The screaming and flailing and bartering and soothing and attempted cuddling went on for almost an hour. Security people came out of their buildings to see if someone needed to be called in to help. I finally had to pick her up, amid stares and pointing and curious concierges coming off their posts to see what all the fuss was about, to sit on the floor of a nearby office building and give her boob.

Then, like that, she was fine and the tears were dried and she was asking to go to the Disney store. Go figure.

All that stuff is real and important, but what I really want this post to be about is how Edie herself characterized perfectly what I think "three" is all about.

The other day, we were at Lucy's friend's house playing. A couple of Lucy's friends still treat Edie like a baby because only recently has she caught up to them developmentally and so they often lag behind a little bit getting the hint that she isn't a baby anymore. In some ways, this works for Edie. They give her a pass on having to share and if she really wants a toy, they give it to her. She also gets to be the patient when they play doctor, the baby when they play house and these are all prime, attention-getting roles.

On the other hand, she is being directed by the other kids, told what to do, where to stand, what game they are playing next and most irritating of all, these kids often feel the need to pick her up without her permission and carry her around the room, as if she were a doll. Did you know four year olds are hard-wired in their DNA to want to pick up kids smaller than themselves and carry them around and look up at you with a proud smile and say, "See? I'm carrying her." And four year olds are also designed to be little narcissists and crap at picking up cues and so all of Edie's protests, like screaming, saying "NO", crying or running away seem to go unheard.

A day of fun and many frustrating attempts to carry Edie around the room, led to an amazing conversation she and I had in the bathroom. I was wiping her bottom. As you know, many important things happen while wiping poop from bottoms and Edie said: " Everybody thinks I'm a baby...And this makes me happy. And this makes me sad."

OH. MY. GOD. Such an abstract and complicated thing for a little kid to articulate. I was thrilled for her. Thrilled she is both big and small. Big enough to tell the four year olds to back the hell up and leave her alone and young enough to still like playing the patient who needs both a stomach bandage and a cast for her broken leg and must be rushed into surgery.

Big enough to have the words to have relationships with older kids and play imaginary games with them about dragons and princes and magical wands and gardens full of Black Eyed Susans. Big enough to be eager to go to school alone, without me. Big enough to eat sushi and love asparagus...and chocolate ice cream and M&Ms. Big enough to tell knock knock jokes and pummel her sister in a wrestling match turned all out pillow fight and say something so weirdly funny that she has Lucy hyper-ventilating and rolling on the floor.

But still small. Small enough to love to go to sleep every night in the pouch with her head on her Daddy's chest. Small enough to miss having boobie and wanting to visit them dancing in the M&M aisle in Duane Reade (that's where she thinks they went. Small enough know exactly how to drive her older sister and their friends bananas and doing it with the most menacing little grin and using that grin to totally get away with it.

Small enough to make me remember that just a minute ago, just a short blink of time ago, she was a tiny, tiny baby that I barely knew and that David and I had made and now she is all kinds of things I had no input in. She is just herself. Just Edie Just perfect. Both big and small.

Happy Birthday to my baby, Edie. God, I love her.

Harlem's Hungry Kids, NYC 2009

2009-07-13T22:26:00.030-04:00

Part One: New York City's Free Summer Lunch Program

Two to three days a week, the girls and I head over to the 145th street pool which I conveniently located directly across the street from our house. It is a lovely, clean, beautifully-maintained pool with a great sprinkler and fountain park.

It also has free lunch.

NYC has a summer free lunch program and every kid in the city is eligible to have a free bag lunch. If you go to the pool around noon, the staff hands out these white bags and the kids hang out by the pool on their towels and eat them. At first, I resisted free lunches since we are not the intended recipients, but there are lots of lunches at the pool and if they don't get eaten they get thrown out, so my kids hop in line.

Well, honestly, you'd think Wolfgang Puck himself was handing out gourmet lunches. My kids LURVE free lunch.

There is something exciting and amazing to them when someone hands them the waxy white bags, the way they are kept in this dark freezer pack and they take the bag to their towels and curl back the paper to see what's inside. It's like opening a Xmas present. All expectation and excitement.

There is always chocolate milk. Always. And this is exciting enough. But there is also a sandwich, usually peanut butter and jelly on wheat or ham and American in a tortilla. They are thin, paltry sandwiches, often without adornment or condiments. There is an over-whelming amount of white in the lunches. But still, they are sandwiches and sandwiches are, oddly enough, exotic to my kids.

We just don't make a lot of sandwiches around here. When David and I first started dating we would lay around the house after making love and leisurely make thick hot sandwiches of Gruyere and ham and local tomatoes and arugula with some special sauce we concocted together in our post-love making haze, naked in the kitchen. We were sandwich whores. There wasn't a sandwich we didn't make and inhale.

Then, we each gained 10 pounds and we decided those sandwiches were the culprit. We never went back. Sandwiches have all but been psychically banned from our thinking. And I kinda regret it, although my waistline is smaller.

For lunch with the kids, we're either butter-poaching flounder, or making pasta and some kind of home-made but thrown-together sauce or other, or scooping up some homemade soup which I always have stashed in the back of the fridge. But no sandwiches. I think I'm, like, neglecting my kids. They are sandwich-deprived.

Every time we have the bag lunch, I feel a little sad that somehow David and I have pummeled what could be the children's life-long love of good, over-stuffed sandwiches. Or even the sheer joy of a peanut butter and fluff sandwich. Uh. What could be better? The free lunch reminds me that our food choices have altered their preferences. Then, I realize we have shaped their little minds in good ways too and I feel the all-powerful rapture and influence that is parenting. It immediately makes me want to marinate something.

Anyway, back to free lunch...every bag lunch has a side dish, sometimes potato salad, or cold string beans in a weird vinaigrette. These tend to fall flat. I watch all the kids eating. About half eat the potato salad. Weird string beans? Nobody.

Oh, but the carrots? A winner. The lunches often include a small bag of carrots. Nothing special. No dip. Just small carrots in a little individually-sized cellophane bag. Well, you'd think my kids had been given a bag of M&Ms. They tear into the little bag and gobble down the carrots and Edie lifts her face to me and begs, "Buy this, Mommy. Buy this."

Do you think I can get them to eat raw carrots as a snack at home? Rarely. But at the pool? It's like the magical bag lunch from Happy Carrot Land.

Part Two: A Little About The Politics of Bag Lunches

That the kids like this lunch and find it so extraordinary is funny and surprising and also a testament to the fact that they are two and nearly three years old and unaware of the stigma of eating a free or subsidized lunch. They are unaware why there is free lunch and all the politics that come with it. They are not marginalized or made fun of because they are eating free lunch. They realize they are affluent to some degree - and probably feel more affluent than we really are, since there isn't a day that goes by that a new crappy plastic toy isn't clutched in their little fists, but they also are unaware that everyone else is not equally affluent. To them, every kid in the neighborhood can pester his mother for a cheap crappy toy from Duane Reade and get it on command.

To them, every child has what they need. And a new Barbie Princess is as necessary as a lunch. The bag lunch is a novelty to my girls. They know if they don't want what's inside, mama will make them something else when we get home.

The free lunch is not a reminder to me that we are surrounded by hungry kids. I don't need to go to a poor, rural community in Alabama to know that children go hungry. It's happening right here. Right down the street.

Don't believe me? Bring a bag of pistachios, a bunch mandarin oranges and a bucket of chalk to our local playground and watch yourself be surrounded by kids who haven't eaten anything but Cheetos in hours and who are so craving structured play and adult attention that they will hang with you - uncool adult - and you'll find that you are supervising an art project with 20 kids. Add one girl who should be in a photography class because she likes taking pictures so much, has your camera and a party on the playground is born. This doesn't happen on the stuffy, eyes-on-the-sidewalk, keep-your-hands-in-the-car, are-you-trying-to-abduct-my-kid?, Upper West Side.

I know kids that I see everyday at the playground and the pool, know them by names, know details about how their mother's last boyfriend used to hit them hard, and have never, not once, seen the parent. Right down the street.

There is much craving, both for food and positive attention, going on this city. The free bag lunch has made me think a lot about Tom Lee and Ezra Klein's discussion of school lunches ever since they came out in response to Alice Waters Op-ed in the Times a few months back. There has been much talk of meals cooked instead of processed and warmed up, gardens grown in public schools, students learning to harvest, cook and enjoy locally-produced, well-cooked food and meals, food as art, not just craft. I love food and cooking, so I'm all for the dream. Alice Waters' ideas are admirable and amazing and completely miss the immediate needs of this community.

We've got bigger issues to tackle here in Harlem. This is bigger than learning about sustainable foods and how to cook on a hot plate in a classroom.

Let's just make sure the kids aren't hungry first. As Tom Lee has said so practically, let's just feed the kids and make sure they are getting the adequate nutrition their bodies need. Let that be our foundation. That, along with all the uphill forces working on them from society, peer pressure and in their homes - will be enough of a challenge. Or an impossible Sisyphean feat. But then, we can build from there. And that's when we give Alice Waters a call and ask her to bring seeds and organic soil.

As for me, I might decide in the Fall that Lucy's bento box lunches at Central Park East II will not suffice and I might channel Alice waters and try to re-invent their whole food sourcing and cooking issues at the school. I might become the Norma Rae of school lunch. Maybe I'll start growing organic corn on the roof of the school. It's possible. I could go that way...

On the other hand, what I might just do is continue to try to influence my little parcel of the universe. I might just focus on making sure my kids eat well, know good food, know where it comes from, learn the value of experimentation and adventurous eating and see the value of cooking instead of pressing the button on a vending machine.

Just doing that is going to be hard work, with lots of successes and failures. And ultimately, I think that's how you change the world anyway, one kid at a time.

Dear David, Please Come Home & Save My Sorry Ass

2009-07-08T23:11:00.009-04:00

I'm generally not one to call David at the office and tell him I'm about to strangle the kids and he should drop everything and come home and bail me out. But I did, in desperation, send him this text message yesterday:

Update: House a wreck. Edie wailing and begging for boob, like, all day. Presents, kisses, abundant amounts of patience and ice cream did not help. More crying. Just poured myself some booze. We adore you and require your serene guidance and wisdom at this difficult juncture. Before your wife's head explodes. xo

God bless him, he came home early.

xo YM

The Post My Husband Doesn't Want You To Read

2009-07-06T23:48:00.012-04:00

Let me set the stage for you...

July 4th weekend. A camp site. The morning. Everyone slept like babies in the tent. David plays with the kids so I have time to write. I sit at my computer at the picnic table with the cord plugged into an outlet in a log that also gave us a steady stream of water...okay, the camping wasn't all that rustic. So, sue me. There is bright sun, blue sky, dew on the grass, parachutes tumbling in the breeze over our heads, the smell of pine and river and grass.

I'm working on the book. David is piling the kids into the car. He is taking them to the mountain store where there is food and supplies and an array of toys in the side yard that they love to play with. This is my time to write. I am excited. Grateful. We are all excited about what we are going to do.

Edie is so excited to go on another adventure with Daddy that she forgets to have boob and I am thrilled because we are trying to totally wean her off by the time she turns three, which is, like, in a couple of weeks. And I tell David to reward her with M&Ms at the mountain store because my tactic has been to give her "three M&M's" (because she is almost three and three is the magic number) every time she chooses to forgo breastfeeding.

Basically, I have been hiding a huge bag of M&M's in the freezer and dolling out little secret rations to her every time she gives up breastfeeding. Yes, I am bribing my child with chocolate as a way to wean her. Someone call La Leche. Or Al-anon. I can give classes on this kind of enabling.

But it's been working, so if you scold me in comments, I'll just swear at you or something. I don't mess with what works. Anyhoo, I tell David to pick up the M&M's and the kids pile in the car and I write for, like, what seems like hours in the big blue day. And it's paradise.

And then, David comes back and the kids are uncharacteristically FREAKING OUT. There are tears in the pool. Screams in in the tent. Agony everywhere. Children are like falling to the ground in uncontrollable spasms and making shrill demands as if we were their servants. They are like small, mangy, growling animals. I barely recognize them. I am ready to trade them for a camel and a good milking cow.

This is when my husband looks at me and says in the most matter-of-fact, tone imaginable, "Look, Kim...we can't do this anymore. They can't have M&M's for breakfast."

Okay, so skip to the conversation where I ask, "Um, they only had M&M's for breakfast?" and he says, "Um yeah, you told me to buy them M&M's" and I say, "Um yeah, but I didn't say they could have M&M's for a breakfast and um, like, I give Edie three, not...30 for a reward." And he says, "Well, you didn't say THAT, you said buy them M&M's and you know, you never said, 'Feed them breakfast and give Edie three M&M's as a treat...You should've said that."

And now I realize it. And I start laughing so hard I can barely talk - I get like that, where something strikes me the right way and I am hysterical with laughter and David has absolutely no idea why - and through the tears I manage to say, "Oh my God, this is going to be THE. BEST. BLOG POST. EVER. You fed the kids M&M's for breakfast. BWAAA-HA-HA..."

And I'm on the ground now. Unable to speak and I'm kind of holding up one finger, telling him to wait, I'll recover momentarily. But I'm gasping for air and clutching my side. And that's when he threatens to withhold sex in protest. And, of course, this is the last thing I want. 'Cause I like the sex with my husband. A lot. But I'm still laughing so hard there is spit coming out the side of my mouth. And I'm already writing the blog post in my head.

xo YM

Going Camping. God Help Me.

2009-07-02T06:29:00.004-04:00

July 4th weekend. Think of of us.

No, think of me.

Think of me in a tent. Sleeping on the hard ground. Cooking over open fire while attempting not to accidentally dip my sleeve into the flame and set myself ablaze. Think of me in a bathing suit. In broad daylight. (No really, this sucks.) Watching my children play with bugs and dirt. And more bugs. And making mud pies out of camp dirt. And bringing it all into the tent to show me and dropping it into my sleeping bag. And more bugs.

And speaking of bugs, think of me defenseless against those big buzzing things that bang up against the tent every time someone so much as turns on a flashlight so they can pee. And speaking of peeing, guess where I'll be doing that? Not in a bathroom. Oh, and I think I'm going to get my period. On yet another camping trip.

And yet I am happy to be dirty with my family, who I know will enjoy this little outdoor adventure. While I'm changing my tampons in the bushes. And even for this, I am grateful.

I wish you the very best Fourth of July. Love to you all.

xo YM

The Restaurant Nazi

2009-06-22T23:29:00.016-04:00

Lucy has taken to playing restaurant lately.

Oh, she likes to cook with me and she likes to occasionally kick me out of the kitchen - like when she makes lemonade - and she attempts to make an entire container-full completely on her own, only to scream my name every five seconds to bring her lemons, sugar, water, spoons, ice and to actually squeeze the lemons. And then, somewhere she has figured out that all good lemonade must be made with a couple of mint leaves peeking out of the cup - thank you freakin' Max and Ruby - and so she demands that I procure mint leaves, like magic, straight from my butt and hand them to her.

Damn. Am I glad she can make that lemonade completely by herself.

The other thing she and Edie have been doing is taking a bowl of water and just raiding my spice drawer for whatever they find and just making "soup", like nutmeg, lemon, sugar, fennel, hot pepper, Tabasco, basil, sesame oil, "soup". Or cilantro, celery seed, egg yolk, olive oil, bubble gum, stick of butter "soup".

And tonight it was a large pyrex bowl of "sauce" and by "sauce" I mean a thick sludgey concoction of cloves, garlic, fennel/thyme meat rub, cherries, banana, curry and cumin "sauce", which I was forced to try "for real" and had to swallow and smile because they were monitoring my esophagus like little binocular-wearing scientists.

Anyway, tonight's "sauce' - which she quickly decided to re-name a "soup" because perhaps, she thought it was more marketable, more in line with her brand identity - was named "Spicy Pumpkin Soup" and due to a healthy pouring of curry powder, it was in fact, orange. And it looked pretty spicy.

She had also decided to serve it to me as if we were in a restaurant. But not just any restaurant, a restaurant where people order you around with furrowed, intimidating brow and make you do everything they say whether you are enjoying it or not. That kind of restaurant. Where, like, the chefs make their patrons cross their legs exactly they way they want them to under the table or they will bark at you to move and then fall over into an ear-splitting tantrum if you don't actually do it the way they have imagined it in their heads. That kind.

Lucy, when not in preschool or dancing around the room in costume, singing the libretto from "Shrek: The Musical" or doing something ridiculously cute like saying "hanga-burger" instead of "hamburger", is a Restaurant Nazi - Adolf in Sleeping Beauty underpants.

This is our exchange after the several times she had to forcefully re-position my ass on the dining room bench, until it met her specifications. She was wearing a little apron and writing in a small notepad:

Lucy: What do you want? (if she were chewing gum and wearing a red beehive, she'd be Flow from the TV show "Alice")

Me: Well, I guess I'll have the hamburger with a side of...

Lucy: You don't want that. (frowning, scribbling hard lines in her pad)

Me: Um, I don't?

Lucy: No. You want Spicy Pumpkin Soup.

Me: Um. yes...Okay, I want Spicy Pumpkin Soup, please. (I'm a little scared at this point, but trying not to show it)

Lucy: (visibly happier, still scribbling whatever in her notebook) What do you want to drink?

Me: Milkshake. Black and white. Super thick.

Lucy: (shaking her head and looking up from her pad) No, you don't want that.

Me: No?

Lucy: You want white wine.

And then before I can say anything, she pops the notebook closed, secures it in her apron pocket and kind of spins around and heads back to her kitchen, which she set-up in our library, and I am scared at this point to think about how much of the Spicy Pumpkin Soup is now soaked into my carpet.

A few moments later, after some quick bickering and jockeying for positions, I see Lucy and Edie coming around the corner each carefully carrying one side of the bowl of orange gruel, er, I mean soup. They are very excited. They have hopeful expressions. Me too, I was thinking, "Dude, I hope they don't forget that wine."

But, you know, I was just too scared to ask her for it.

xo YM

I've Been Gone Awhile, Haven't I?

2009-06-04T21:50:00.010-04:00

Um, so first let me tell you that this is us grocery shopping. I start with this so you know some things stay the same. Grocery shopping with the Fosters is and always has been an endurance sport.

Notice my kids are wearing underpants on their heads and have decided to bring half their stuffed animals and carts and strollers, which I ended up having to carry home, along with a full trolley of groceries, because well, bringing all that stuff seemed like a great idea when we started out, but not so much fun a few hours later when everyone was tired and crying.

So yes, these peculiarities of my little family have stayed the same, but how I feel about this blog has changed. I'm sure you noticed that I just stopped writing. I know you noticed because you wrote me e-mails and told me and tried to woo me back with your nice talk and compliments and for this, I am grateful. The blog is the problem. Not you.

Truth is, I had decided to stop writing this blog altogether. Really decided. Firm. A few days ago I was composing my final blog post in my head, trying to figure out why and what I was thinking. I was dreading it. I kept putting it off. That is until someone I didn't know at all left this message in my box:

Hey Kim!

I know I don't actually know you, but of all the blogs I read (about 20... Yes, I'm ashamed) yours is by far my favorite. You said once before that getting emails helped motivate you so--get posting Girl! :)

Much Love,
Brande

So, first - thanks Brande. That was very cool of you. And your e-mail made me realize why I started writing this blog in the first place. I started because I'm a writer and I love to, need to, must write to be happy, sane and not bark at bank tellers and my husband. I started because I love good writing, great stories. I love funny, poignant writing. I wanted to write about this experience and write well. That was all that concerned me.

But the business of blogs has changed over these past years. It has become something else. It is not so much about the writing. It is about getting comments, getting bigger blogs to recognize your work, counting your readers like a neurotic bean counter on Google Analytics. It's about conferences, media appearances, handing out business cards, meet-ups, networking, give-aways, sponsorships.

I realized after reading people's Twitters that there was a whole world out there I didn't even know existed. Food writers, moms, bloggers in general, whatever, were flying all over the country, having meet-ups, attending conferences, meeting each other at bars, solidifying friendships and creating these powerful bonds that they parlayed into greater influence on the net. Yes, much about having a successful blog is luck, but another facet of that is being connected both on the internet and in person. You have to show up.

People take care of their own. This is a natural part of things. It happens here. I support bloggers with whom I have connected. But in the larger world of the web, I'm not very connected. I'm, like, in the AV club in high school. I couldn't be connected, of course, because you can imagine how long it takes us to get the grocery shopping done, I mean, that doesn't leave much time for developing my "Mama Brand", does it?

And really, I guess that's what I figured out in my time of abandoning this blog. I don't want to develop myself as a brand - just a person, a cook, a writer, an author, a mom, a wife, a friend, a person on the hunt for adventures and a person just trying to do everything with passion, instead of flying through it all half-assed, hoping something hits the wall and sticks.

I want to savor every little moment.

I don't want to be on a plane flying all over the country going to conferences and drinking in bars with other cool women, although I'm sure it would be a hoot. I just want to stay around home for this, because I like people who wear underpants on their heads. I like four hour shopping trips that end in tears and crushed eggplant. It makes me happy. I like not missing any of it, or most of it.

I don't want to examine each post I write and wonder if I've supported my mission to conquer the world.

I just want to write well with a quirky, funny take on things. I want to never see ads cluttering up my blog. You should kill me if I ever do a give-away or hold a contest. That stuff is great for other folks, but it just isn't me. And you probably know this, but for the record, I will never let some company pay me and then try to endorse their product in my blog without telling you.

I don't want to think of myself and this blog as some kind of construct or business model. I want to make friends with people because they are cool and share my interests and passions, not because they might be influential in helping me get new readers or extend my presence on the net. I want to help new bloggers and be generous with my time when I can. I want to never be too cool or too big to respond to a new commenter or blogger, even if it takes me forever to do it.

I want people to read my blog, but not because I want to position myself for a two minute stint on Good Morning America, although I would do the stint if offered, it just isn't my raison d'etre. I want to not be one of those irritating bloggers - I've done this before - who drums up sensationalist, nonsensical topics, just to get into the fray, cause a dog fight and then, jump right in. The latest media-driven discussion of what it means to be a "bad mother" comes to mind...ugh, who cares?

I want you all to read. I do not want to write in a vacuum. I do want people to enjoy my writing and I love hearing from people when they do. I also don't mind shitty comments from time to time. That's all part of it. I want to be a part of a community and I want to be as avid a reader of your blogs as I am a writer. I want to be there for you, too. I just want to do it all with some kind of purity of purpose. I want to just be Winnie the Pooh. And be. Not for a purpose or a mission or a goal.

And so, that's what I figured out in my mini-sabbatical. And I'm gonna try to honor it here. If I don't, you have my permission to call me on it. I respect your opinion. You know me very well. You proved that when you picked up falsehoods in the chapter I wrote and posted here. You were straight shooters and I like that.

Just know that I appreciate you coming here. That I consider you friends. That I will try not to disappoint, you or myself. I will also try not to disappear again.

xo YM

And As We Leave Santa Monica...

2009-05-18T11:34:00.010-04:00

I wanted to give you a little round-up of my thoughts before we get on the plane back to NYC:

1. Earthquakes make your trip more exciting. Yes, as Krysta at Evil Chef Mom noted, I was an earthquake virgin until last night. On Twitter she asked me, "Is this your first quake?" Like she was asking me if this was the first time I ever had ice cream. Awww, how cute!...Your first quake! (Bitch) Apparently, I am also an earthquake weenie because I was legitimately freaked out. Under the bed? By the bed? Run outside? In the bathroom...no, that's tornados. Seriously...UNPREPARED for the big one.

2. There are large, blood-sucking ticks here in SoCal. And you can get bitten by them in your hotel room. David spent spent a couple hours in the Santa Monica emergency room after finding a large, blood-engorged tick hanging off his leg. When he returned, we found one on my back. Then, I went to the hospital. We had to have the bastards cut out of our bodies with forceps and scalpels. It was like minor surgery. The nurse was all, "Oh, I'm not going to tell you what the doctor is doing right now 'cause it's pretty gruesome." Thanks, Nurse Atilla the Hun. The kids never got the ticks. Good thing or I would've gone all mother load on someone. We moved rooms. That was the end of the ticks.

3. Disneyland is simply the happiest place on earth. You guys were right. It is cool to go to Disneyland. Way cool. Watching the girls meet Sleeping Beauty and the other princesses was amazing. They were over the moon. Also, the park is un-like any other amusement park. It is clean. People are happy, never crabby on line or barking at other people. I only heard one kid crying the whole day and it wasn't mine. No one ever tells you, "Oh your kid can't put her feet there." or "She's too little to ride Dumbo." or "Sorry Miss, your children need to be clothed." There is this air that anything is possible there. And in the end, I wanted to buy stuff to remember the day. I didn't feel bludgeoned into spending too much money and lived to feel horrible about it later. Disneyland marketing is like Tinkerbell's magic fairy dust. It makes me do stuff and feel good about it later. Anyway, Disneyland truly feels different than other theme parks. If you can't have fun with your kids there, you just can't have fun. Thanks for encouraging us to go, it was a wonderful day for all of us.

4. Santa Monica has a lot of vagrants. I know I'm stating the obvious here but there are lots of homeless people everywhere. And they are tan and pissed off. Everyday, a vagrant yelled at me. EVERYDAY. One morning, a middle-aged woman with a lot of luggage smiled at me and said "Hi" and I smiled and said "Hi" and then, she began yelling after me, "I wasn't saying "Hi" to you, lady because I was being nice. I just wanted to see if you'd say "Hi" back. I wasn't trying to be nice or anything, lady because I think you suck. I just wanted to see what you'd say..." Okay, I really thought she was someone's Gramma waiting for a car to pick her up to go to the airport. I thought she crocheted things and made cookies for her grand kids. The Santa Monica vagrants didn't want me to give them money, like capitalist NYC vagrants. No, they just wanted to yell at me, to vent a little, to get a little therapy by the beach. They used me as their punching dummy. I feel as though I made a therapeutic contribution here.

5. Everyone is very friendly by the beach. I was shopping at the grocery store, Von's, for food and snacks for the hotel room and a store employee came up to me and said, "How is your shopping experience today? Finding everything you need?" The employee was smiling, a lot. She looked oddly sincere, although I wasn't exactly sure because I live in NYC and no one has actually ever asked me how my shopping experience was. I mean, I kinda had no idea how to answer. It occurred to me she might be trying to set me up to pick my pockets or steal the cash out of my purse. I answered her quickly with a smile that I was great and then, quickly got away and checked my purse in the frozen food aisle. Cash still there whew! Seriously, very friendly, out-going people here. Like the NYC-born guy, J.J. who lives next door to the hotel who gave us free VIP passes to the amusement park at the pier. A nice bunch of folks, I tell you.

Okay, so today we head back home. I'll post some pics when I get there. Princesses will be involved and perhaps the single most innovative grocery shopping apparatus for families ever invented. Seriously, amazing. And totally SoCal.

I've missed you guys. Ready to head back to the real world...although the kids just want to go back to Disneyland.

xxoo YM

Living' It Up at the Hotel California...

2009-05-12T05:34:00.008-04:00

Just wanted to let you know about two big things in my life:

1. I dropped my brand new Black Jack phone in the toilet on Mother's Day and so I have no phone. No e-mail. No freakin' Twitter when I am away from home. This was my Mother's day gift to myself apparently. Not having a phone is, for me, a little like cutting off my feet and then asking me to walk around.

I will tell you that the phone died a valiant death. It actually worked for a whole day, tempting me into thinking it had somehow defied the soaking of Edie's urine, but alas it, croaked. And so again, as a Mother's day gift to myself, I had to buy another phone. At retail. Retail sucks.

2. And this brings me to the other big thing. My new phone is being delivered to the Hotel California in Santa Monica, where we will be staying this week. David is in LA on business and the girls and I will be on the beach, playing in the sand, riding the rides on the pier and re-learning the fundamentals of board walk food. I still have yet to teach the girls all about the wonders of a good funnel cake. There is much to do.

Then, we will totally do the lame parent thing and take them to...gasp...wait for it...Disneyland. That's right, we've totally caved. We have lost all parent coolness and hipster credibility, if we had any left at all. We thought we would be taking our children on food tours of Italy, Safaris in Kenya and rock climbing trips to Tibet, but instead, like generations of parents before us, we are taking the historic pink death march of hell to the home of the Disney princesses.

And it's like we sprinkled magic fairy dust in the kid's broccoli because they are absolutely freakin' OVER THE MOON about Disneyland. And really, they have no idea what it is. They've had their little noses pressed up to the computer looking at other people's vacations on YouTube and dreamily saying things like, "I love Sleeping Beauty. I can't wait to see her dress." Eh, good lord.

Those crazy hotels in Cali have Wi-Fi, you know, so I will be posting. And Twittering once I get my new phone delivered on Wednesday. And if any of you live near Santa Monica and have two small children longing for a play date, well, you know where to find us - by e-mail or "living it up in the Hotel California"...

And you're gonna totally be singing that song all day. Promise.

I'll post again Wednesday-ish.

xo YM

I Interrupt This Blog to Brag About My Husband...

2009-05-05T23:19:00.010-04:00

Yesterday, David was nominated for a Tony Award. His second nomination. This one is for Slava's Snowshow, which played over the holidays on Broadway and was nominated in the Special Theatrical Events category.

Yeah. Yeah. I know the guy is pretty cool. Now, if I could get him to not leave balled-up black socks all over the house, as if he were leaving a trail for himself out of the woods, well, then we'd have something.

Of course, we're not planning on winning the Tony or anything. There are 4 shows in the category. And to give you an idea of the competition - He's up against Liza Minnelli (Liza’s At The Palace) and Will Ferrell (You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush), so you know, Liza and Will are going to collectively pummel his ass.

But I think we have a great shot for third place. That's something, right?

No matter. We'll be the couple at the Tony's telecast in June, drinking heavily from the flask tucked in my tiny beaded purse, intermittently twittering about the bored, over-dressed celebrities seated around us, and making a quick exit so we can be the first in line at the buffet at the after-party. And really, that's us in a nutshell, isn't it?

Seriously, what a lovely thing to happen to such a lovely man. And for the record, I totally married up.

xo YM

Fear of Swine Meatballs

2009-05-03T20:43:00.018-04:00

I'm back, people. And here to tell you I am not afraid of Swine Flu. I am, however, afraid of swine, um, I mean pork.

Or at least I was until a few years ago. I come from a world where mothers and grandmothers and generations of women before them believed that a single piece of under-cooked pork could fell an entire village. If one of the women folk saw any pink - perceived or otherwise - in a piece of pork, she would throw herself in front of my plate, as if she was saving me from on-coming traffic. And God forbid you had a little stomach ache after eating at the neighbors house, one of the women folk would get all worried and start calling the doctor, "It was Patsy's pork. I knew I saw some pink in my piece...For cryin' out loud, that woman's gonna kill someone with her pork butt."

Swine was never to be messed with. It was the meat that could kill.

From the time I remember, I believed that pork was a dry, tasteless meat that was akin to eating a sneaker. I never loved anything pork-related - except bacon, of course, which is like food of the Gods and if it didn't exist would make, I believed, killing a pig for food absolutely unnecessary.

Pig as I knew it, was served after a good hearty incineration in the oven until it was bone dry and throat-closing. You'd have to be drunk to eat this stuff and believe it didn't taste like shoe laces. I never had really succulent, juicy pork until I was well into my adult years and definately by accident because I would never have ordered it from a restaurant on purpose.

Think I'm nuts? If you don't believe me, all you need to do is go to a BBQ joint where there is always a disclaimer on a prominently-placed sign saying that pink meat is just fine in BBQ/smoked meat and is not a sign that your meal is underdone or that you will have to be admitted to the ICU several hours after paying your bill. Every BBQ joint has one of these. And there is a reason - someone from my family might be eating there.

So, when I was reading Matthew Amster-Burton's new book "Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater" - a fantastic and funny book that will give you some great ideas about cooking for and eating with your kids - he was going on and on about pork meatballs and I thought I would give them a whirl.

In the past, I have been faithful to Rocco DiSpirito's mom's recipes for meatballs, which involve a veal, pork, beef combo with breadcrumbs. (For the record, I also often make a variation of her marinara, which is both easy to make and lovely to eat.) Matthew suggests all pork and as filler, bread and milk in his meatballs.

He even brazenly says that the secret to good meatballs is more filler/less meat, which I had never even considered, so I tried out his theory and discovered that more filler, gives a lighter, fluffier meatball and the milk/bread filler is way easier to work with than the breadcrumb one.

The meatballs were awesome, but working with ground pork makes me a little crazy. There is always a child around here that needs to be held or breastfed or comforted or needs a juice just when I am up to my elbows in killer meat. And so, I was going to the sink a lot to wash my hands, which is fine except I kept getting raw pork meat all over the handle of the faucet and so, I'd have to wash my hands and then reach over to turn off the water, only to remember that I turned the faucet on with my swine-covered hands and I had probably reinfected myself. I washed my hands and the faucets, like 30 times.

I also kept having utensil issues. I kept forgetting which utensil I used on the raw meat, so I kept having to go in the drawer and get out a new one to use for the other food. I used about 30 different spoons, forks and knives just for the preparation of this one meal. I had to re-wash flatware just to get through dinner service. And even then, I wasn't sure that some of the swine hadn't lived through the surge of hot tap water and soap. I would've felt better running them through the dishwasher, but there was no time.

And then there was what happened to the gigantic wedge of parmagiano that we bought at Costco. I was adding the cheese to the meatball mixture when I realized that I grabbed the wedge with my hands all porky and probably contaminated the whole thing. I was horrified because (a) it was our only parm and (b) it was so huge and so expensive that to throw it out was like throwing cash right in the bin.

I was flumoxed. I kept staring at the infected edge wondering what to do: throw it in the bin or wash it off and hope innocent parm-eaters don't perish. It was a real toss-up - throw it in the bin, kill people. Throw it in the bin, kill people.

This should have been a no-brainer.

But I couldn't throw it away. It looked perfectly fine and I was bound and determined I would figure out a way to scrape off the bacteria and make it a viable hunk of cheese again. Surely 100 other people have googled this, right?

I did this neurotic dance as 4 children and 4 adults waited for their lunch - Bin. Death. Bin. Death. There's me, frozen, holding a contaminated wedge of cheese. I was a mess. Finally, I washed the cheese in hot water and stashed in a plastic bag in the fridge. I could deal with this later after the guests left. I had more than enough cheese in the meatballs. I still have no idea what happens to parm when you wash it. I'm too afraid to look in the fridge this morning.

As I write this, I'm pretty sure there is a spot on my counter harboring live and active raw pork bacteria, just waiting for me to touch it and infect everyone around me. Every once in a while I walk into my kitchen and just spritz the counter for good measure. I'm sure it will stay there for weeks. I'm contemplating having David rip up the counters and build me a new kitchen.

So, forget the swine flu. That's for amateurs. I have my own swine issues to deal with. Cooking with ground pork turns me into an obsessive-compulsive mess. It's in my genes, written into my DNA.

Still, the meatballs were great. But at least with veal I can pretend to be a sane person. I give you your choice here. Enjoy!

xo YM

PS: And thanks for all the e-mails gently telling me to get off my ass and post something. I love you all.
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Matthew Amster-Burton's Pork Mini-Meatballs
(Also known as The Yummy Mummy's Fear of Swine Meatballs)

2 slices of white sandwich bread, crusts, removed torn into pieces (or just a quarter loaf of the skinny Italian loaf, which was all I had)
1/2 cup milk
1 large egg, beaten
2 ounces grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (Not sure how much I got in before I contaminated the wedge)
2 tablespoons minced fresh oregano (I usd dried because it was what I had on hand)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 pound or so of ground pork

1. In a bowl, combine the bread and milk and mash with a fork until it forms a paste. Stir in egg, Parmigiano, organo, garlic, salt and pepper. Add the pork and mix (hands work well)until well combined.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick (or cast iron) skillet over medium heat. Drop 1 tablespoon dollops of meat mixture into the skillet. (The meat mixture will be soft, but don't worry about that, the meatballs hold together nicely.) Working in two batches, brown the meatballs on two sides, about 2 minutes per side and transfer to a plate.

Make your marinara (either Matthew's from "Hungry Monkey" page 142-3 or Mama's or your own favorite) and bring a large pot of salted boiling water to boil. Add your pasta and cook until al dente. Drain. Combine the pasta, sauce and meatballs. Serve.

Mama DiSpirito's Meat Balls

1/3 cup chicken stock
1/4 yellow onion
1 clove garlic
¼ cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped fine
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 lb ground pork
1/2 lb ground veal
1/3 cup plain breadcrumbs
2 eggs
1/4 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp salt
3-6 cups of Mama's Marinara or your favorite marinara sauce
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

1. Place the chicken stock, onion, garlic and parsley in a blender of food processor and puree.

2. In a large bowl, combine the pureed stock mix, meat, bread crumbs, eggs, Parmigiano-Reggiano, red pepper flakes, parsley and salt. Combine with both hands until mixture is uniform. Do not over mix.

3. Put a little olive oil on your hands and form mixture into balls a little larger than golf balls. They should be about ¼ cup each, though if you prefer bigger or smaller, it will only affect the browning time.

4. Pour about 1/2-inch of extra virgin olive oil into a straight-sided, 10-inch-wide sauté pan and heat over medium-high flame. Add the meatballs to the pan (working in batches if necessary) and brown meatballs, turning once. This will take about 10-15 minutes.

5. While the meatballs are browning, heat the marinara sauce in a stockpot over medium heat. Lift the meatballs out of the sauté pan with a slotted spoon and put them in the marinara sauce. Stir gently. Simmer for one hour.

6. Serve with a little extra Parmigiano-Reggiano sprinkled on top. Serve alone or over spaghetti (in which case, you will need 6 cups of marinara).

Yield: Serves 4 as antipasto or over spaghetti