Camping
I wrote this post in June and never posted it. I am posting it now, right before I go camping again. (In early December! And again it is a kid-driven decision! But I am doing it!)
*****************************************
I am going camping. Camping for 4 nights. Several hours upstate, away from home.
If I recall correctly, the last time I went camping was 35 years ago.
(!!!!!!)
I was 11, it was the first time I’d gotten my period, I was going with a friend whose family I didn’t know too well, and it was beach camping.
Reflect on the sub penultimate noun phrase in the sentence above. You know the one. And hey, I survived! Aside from those facts, I don’t remember anything except the image of a pristine white tent on sand at night, light emanating from within. Is beach camping even a thing? I would not know, not being a camper. My brain may be accessing a piece of stock photography from glamping in Dubai. It is possible.
But my kids want to go camping. It is so nice to give them experiences. And I keep running into people who like to camp. “You like to camp?” I’ll say, conversationally, and they’ll turn and look me steady in the eye and say “I LOVE to camp. It is my favorite thing.”
(It is possible that everyone I run into lives here, and people live here because they love stuff like trees and rivers, and they therefore also camp. Sort of like when you go to the gym and marvel at how thin everyone is. But: when someone is so soulful, so positive about something like that, you’ve got to think hard about it.)
Last year, in my shift away from accidentally living in New York City for 17 years, I had an epiphany, or maybe I made a decision to stop thinking about it like this:
Camping: you have to sleep outside.
to
Camping: you never have to go back in!
There is nothing I love more than sleeping on my sleeping porch. The kids love it, too. It’s pretty much what sealed the deal on this house. That and the light in the living room. And the view. And the brightly painted doors. And the insouciant taxidermy that was everywhere. There is actually a lot that contributed to this being my dream house. (Dream house for me: lots of others have made it clear how they feel about taxidermy, insouciant or no; doors which don’t really work, regardless of hue.)
I recently got a cot and little puffy mattress that fills itself with air, no one knows how, so the sleeping porch is my deal for many warm nights now, and it makes the sleeping porch that much better.
Of course, the sleeping porch does have 2 solid walls, a roof, no bears, and is thirteen paces from my bed and a mere eleven from the bathroom. How to bridge the delta between sleeping porch sleeping and having to sleep outside? By which I mean never having to go in?
Hmmmmm . . . Buy an on-sale tent as big as the house?
Sometimes when I am trying to get my daughter to try something new, something she will most certainly love — most recently a Juan Canary melon — she won’t do it. Just won’t. It doesn’t seem to matter that other melons are her favorite foods: both honeydew and cantaloupe make her so happy that when I put them into a grocery cart, she looks up at me all soft-eyed, and offers the most earnest thank you. Other mothers have stopped and grabbed me by the arm on hearing her tiny, speech-impeded gratitude on the topic of melon. With the canary, I explain that it looks orange but it tastes green. Yum! But she won’t try the new, despite the joy that the known has brought.
Camping seems like one of those things that is so basic but with the potential to be just the best best thing — like eating or sleeping or color or swimming, so elemental — that I can’t write it off. I must try the melon, so here we go.
Baby Hater
My baby is six. But she’ll always be my baby, etc. etc.
She’s getting sort of leggy to be considered a baby, though. Speaking of which, do you know what she hates the most?
Babies.
I love babies. Anyone, any baby at all, any species, I’ll snuggle it up if you give me the chance. They are so funny, so expressive, so alien and familiar at once. And let’s not forget the sartorial opportunities they can provide. I literally cannot drag my eyes off of them, because I am fond verging on creepy.
The girl child, though . . . a baby hater.
In the grocery store one day I say “Look at that hat!,” referring to the hat of someone very small in a chest carrier. I can only see the back of the hat but it is charming — has a fuzzy texture, I believe it had some wee animal ears involved in the design and construction.
My daughter turns without realizing what she is about to see. And then back to me, glaring with smoking-hot anger eyes. “You made me turn my head to look at a baby . . . AND I HATE BABIES!”
The hatred of babies by a six-year-old girl entertains me no end; these fresh-faced sweeties, just coming into their own, are more often moony and maternal over anything soft and small. But this kid reserves all that for animals.
Referring to a family who know with three kids the other day, I say, “There is the middle one named Violet. Do you remember the big sister’s name?”
“I do. Her name is Jane. But then also there is the baby, which, I HATE BABIES!”
She doesn’t want to have a baby, because being pregnant seems horrible. Hmm, who could have given her that idea? She’s also clear on the fact that she doesn’t want to take care of a baby. She would like a kid though, so her provisional plan is that I’ll handle the babyness of it all and then she’ll take over when it’s a kid.
I shouldn’t encourage it, or get her to say it because her contrarian attitude is so heartfelt, unusual, strongly expressed and therefore delightful. I don’t want her to end up hating babies in a real sense because she talked about hating babies so much when she was still adjacent to her own babyhood. But maybe she really does hate them. And maybe I am solidifying this in her identity by typing it down in letters.
At the end of the day I sort of like it when women don’t want babies, aren’t swayed in their decisions because of some fervent biological desire they never chose; it makes me feel like we females aren’t just a pack of baby-wanters, whereas I personally have done nothing and probably will continue to do nothing to dispel that myth.
It takes all sorts, it takes a village.
It takes a baby hater and it might take a baby hater’s mom.
Horchata
My kids’ elementary school hosted a “World Culture Night,” which was the best. Since we’ve left Brooklyn, we see many more leaves and rivers and chipmunks and other animals who are not rats than we used to; things could not be be better in that regard.
We also meet a lot fewer Bangladeshi butchers and have been invited to zero parties where unheard-of herbs are synthesized into delicious salads by savvy Caribbean women. I cannot remember the last time someone tried to serve me a turkey neck in a curry. And I guess I am a little sad about that.
thx to ryan pickle from flickr
But for World Culture Night, all families with a penchant towards a particular culture were invited to make a booth with music, crafts, fashion, and foods from whence they came — either recently, or never, because it was actually their grandparents or someone who came from there.
I would not have had a lot to contribute unless I made a Wethersfield, CT booth with a red onion costume, a tri-cornered hat balanced atop, and shiny shoes buckled below, piccolo in fist, with a mouthful of butter-and-sugar corn. But: I didn’t think of that until afterwards.
My enthusiasm for the cultures of others led me to ask a friend whose grandparents are Mexican if she’d like any help. My daughter had just finished a unit on Mexico and my son had cried real tears recently after I explained that we are not, in fact, at all Mexican. (The same thing happened with Jewish a few years back.)
We worked with another actually-from-Mexico family who had great ideas and execution, not to mention bona fides. (Meanwhile, it has been fun to field casual but focused lines of questioning about what part of my family is Mexican.)
At WCN, our booth had a station where kids could make paper flowers out of tissue paper and pipe cleaners. It had five huge, beautiful king’s cakes, with candied fruit atop, sliced thin for tasting. It had a chart so you could understand that the words for so many of your favorite things — chocolate, avocado, coyote, tomato — come from the Nahuatl language. Our booth had a line 1000 children long where you could get your face made up in Day-of-the-Dead makeup. And it had children modeling colorful serapes.
My contribution was horchata — which is basically the drink form of rice pudding. I drank a lot of this when I lived in Texas and now I drink it anywhere else I can find it. I usually share it with someone, because it’s pretty sweet. We served it in tiny little cups. It’s delicious and was quite popular with grownups and kids alike.
Children are a suspicious lot and many of them were wary of tasting a drink they hadn’t had before. I told them to dip a finger in and then lick it off, and most of them wanted their allotted cup, and seconds.
Several adults asked for the recipe so I am publishing it here.
HORCHATA RECIPE
For this recipe, you will need:
- Long grain white rice
- Water
- Sweetened condensed milk or sugar and milk (You can basically do whatever you want, and it will be delicious)
- Cinnamon (sticks or ground)
- Vanilla
Horchata is not unlike banana bread — no matter what you do with it, it is going to be delicious. Unlike banana bread, if you are not happy with the result, you can monkey with it until you do find it delicious.
If you want to make quite a bit, soak a bag of rice in a large bowl or stock pot. Soak cinnamon sticks in there, too, if you have them. After several hours, blend some of the water with some of the rice in a very strong blender.
Very strong.
Strongest.
Blend the cinnamon sticks too if you’d like. After blending for about a minute, the rice should be smaller. Some of it will be ground completely, but expect a gritty slurry at the bottom. Strain the liquid and the partial slurry that comes out with it. To the rest of the ricey chunks in the bottom of the blender, add milk and more sugar than you would like to admit. Add a dash of vanilla and ground cinnamon if you haven’t used any yet. Blend until you are tired of blending it or are starting to smell that warm rubber smell which signifies the motor ruining itself. Then, strain the milky sugary liquid into the first liquid you strained. Stir and taste it. Is it good? Is it so so good? Or does it need more sugar?
Clean the slurry out of the blender to start anew with the next batch. Begin again with several cups of the ricey water and a couples of inches of rice. Blend, strain. To the grit at the bottom add cinnamon, vanilla, milk or more water and sweetened condensed milk, blend again, strain again, and clean out blender.
Repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. For some of the sugar — or all of it — you can use sweetened condensed milk. Taste for cinnamon and vanilla. Do not be alarmed at the accumulation of soft, ground rice at the bottom of your container. It has the consistency of ooblek, but not the properties.
Serve over ice to lots of suspicious children and delighted adults. It tastes like a nap in a glass.
Bejeweling the Mango: Trinidad Chow
I went to a 6 year old’s birthday party at a bowling alley.
The lights. The music. The flashing animated rabbit declaring who got a strike, and who got a split. The little guests so delighted to be together, to celebrate their friend, to practice new wobbly math skills to understand the score.
Some children used a ramp-like contraption which in effect bowled the ball for them. My own bowled analog, but pitched each ball more downward than forward. The games progressed in a spirit of amped-up camaraderie, and though I only had to get ice for one wounded child who had stuck her hand into the unforgiving maw of the ball dispenser, it is safe to say that we were all overstimulated.
Soon enough we moved to a party room, where a vast super hero cake lorded over a populous congregation of smaller cupcakes. Bowls of candy overflowed in the middle of the table and balloons bobbed to the ceiling. As hot dogs and pizza slices were passed around and punch was spilled on the tablecloth, the hostess drew my remaining, fractured attention to some food geared towards an adult palate.
And that is when I met the Mango Chow for the first time in my life, and I found something to zero my focus in upon.
Be careful! my friend warned, as I spooned some orange cubes flecked with . . . could those be wee wisps of green herb? Slivers of garlic? It can be a bit spicy, she said.
There is something so pure about mango. The hue of ripe mango flesh has a smooth, unvariegated intensity and gloss. But the arc of flavor is phenonemal. Some fruits are elemental: think apple, banana. But mango is already complex. Some claim it’s too sweet, but in reality, it’s the acidity and the almost delicate dusty flavor at the finish that make it so special for me. I love mango by itself. My kids beg for sliced mango as a dessert, and can frequently be heard squabbling over who gets to suck the pit.
If plain old mango is a party in the mouth, one could postulate that salting and spicing a mango would be like gilding the lily: too much. But this kind of salad is more like bejewling the mango, playing to its natural beauty. It’s like draping a beautiful person in beautiful fabric.
Memorial day is this weekend. This salad, with garlic, lime, chilis, and herbs, it just what you want on your table. No lie.
Trinidad Chow
Ingredients
4 cups cubed fruit (try it first with mango! pineapple makes sense, too! throw some halved grapes in!)
6-8 culantro (use cilantro if you can’t find culantro)
2-3 garlic cloves
Hot pepper to taste, sliced or minced — eg. habanero or scotch bonnet, or hot pepper sauce
Salt
Lime juice
Procedure
1. Mince culantro (or cilantro) and hot pepper.
2. Crush, grate, or mince garlic.
3. Peel fruits, if required.
4. Cut fruit into bite sized pieces.
5. Season to taste with minced culantro, hot pepper/s, garlic and salt.
6. Toss all ingredients together.
7. EAT.
Church Avenue Chomp 