Hola Ivy! Wherein I Introduce My *Daughter*
This brief post will not nearly capture all of the awe and coziness and exhaustion and delight and fear and everything else that we feel when we consider our new and lovely and velvety soft and sleepy little star, Ivy Elizabeth.
She was born nearly three weeks ago at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital — my favorite hospital for getting babies; you should try it! — after a scheduled C-section.
Pregnancy cripples me. However, I make fantastic babies.
But instead of deciding they are ready for their debut and that it’s time to come out, these babies cling to my ribs like stubborn monkeys, never descending into my pelvis to be delivered in the old-fashioned way. Well, thank goodness that Caesar and his mom shot us forth into modernity, what with unusual surgeries and delicious salads and snippy snip snipped haircuts named after him.
Ivy was born without complication, thanks in part to a fantastic obstetric, anesthesiology, and nursing team. She was held up for me to see doing her first little lion roar and oh how I laughed and cried to see her out in the open for us to get to know for real, rather than getting to know just through the knees and elbows and hiccups!
One distinguishing characteristic of this baby is her petite size. Her fabulous bruiser brother was nearly 9 lbs, which may have been slightly exaggerated because he’d been pumped full of liquids and pitocin while they tried and failed to induce him out of me in the more typical way, but still: big.
Ivy weighed a mere six pound and five ounces, a fuzzy headed blue eyed slip of a thing. But she’s a super eater — constant, efficient, happy — and she’s gaining like wildfire and pleasing her mother no end.
She doesn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows, in stark contrast to her brother, who was born in high definition, looking manly, like a captain of industry. This is my sweet delicate little baby baby baby, sleepy and squinting and meowing questions about why she’s been brought out into the light.
More Ivy trivia: her toes and fingers are extraordinarily long. She might be a pianist, everyone says. With her hands and with her feet, is what they don’t say. If you want someone to grip your finger with their toes, Ivy is your gal. She already has talents!
We took her to the doctor and this was certainly a freak accident but she rolled over on the table. When she was less than a week old, she rolled from her tummy to her back. Great: tiny or no, we wish for her to be strong and healthy and stubborn.
Welcome to you, our new and beautiful little love!
The Weird Sandwiches of Youth
In second grade, my favorite sandwich was a peanut butter and cherry: peanut butter spread with sliced maraschinos. I think that my dad might have made it up when my mom was out one day, and for an entire year, that is all I wanted to eat. And then, just when I was starting to glow from the inside out, I tired of it.
My husband, at unpredictable intervals, acts like it is acceptable to eat peanut butter and cheese sandwiches. I have never seen him do it, but regularly he’ll stroll into the living room late at night claiming that he just ate one. It is possible that he does this to push my buttons. He has also mentioned putting strawberry jam into an American cheese omelette. He is quite possibly a gastronomic enemy of state: not to be trusted.
Our son’s favorite sandwich is called a “prune quesadilla.” Like the peanut butter and cherry, it was created in a moment of parental desperation (my own) and has caught on like wildfire. I know that a quesadilla, by definition, implies cheese. But peanut butter can make tortillas stick together as well or better than cheese, and so we use the term loosely.
Unlike the sandwiches of our youth, or my husband’s current roster of sandwiches, it has a pretty good nutritional pedigree.
Prune Quesadilla
Ingredients
2 corn tortillas (Though, who is to stop you from using flour or some sort of hybrid? Not I.)
Peanut butter (Do everything in your power to get the kind that is ground peanuts and a bit of salt without sugar or replacement oils. If you are used to the processed kind, it will take next to no time to get readjusted to the good kind.)
Honey (We prefer the kind who lives in a bear, naturally.)
Prunes (There have been leaps forward in prune technology, and they are actually a moist, delightful, iron and potassium rich food. And it’s not like their sole purpose is improved gastric motility, so don’t be afraid of prunes.)
Procedure
Take 2 corn tortillas. Moisten both sides before putting them into the microwave for 30 seconds.
Transfer to a clean plate (one without condensation on it).
Spread with peanut butter. Drizzle with honey. Using poultry shears (or prune shears or a knife) snip bits of prune onto the peanut butter. Top with the other tortilla. Clap the quesadilla from hand to hand until it’s cool enough for a child to eat.
Slice, present, and wait for him to demand one the next day.
Another Sleep Invention: The Cannoli Saw
So, our lives are about to change. A baby will come and live with us. Whee! Scary, though, right?
Henry’s birthday will happen right after the baby is born, and I can’t help but wonder: how are we to go about celebrating normal / special life events through these life-changing events?
Last year, when he turned two, we had a pretty big party. It was held in a space down the street that we rented. Wait, was that in a wholly different economy? Wait, was I a part of the 1% then? Also, I made about a jillion different sorts of cupcakes with many sorts of creatively conceived and executed toppings. Fluff frosting with black Himalayan salt, lemon buttercream, chocolate ganache. I made a truck out of a poundcake. God, I hope he doesn’t remember how good life was when he was turning two, and we were rich, and birthdays were littered with poundcake trucks everywhere.
This year, we must keep it simple. These are the ways in which I hope to do this:
1. It will be at home, so we don’t have to go anywhere, and almost no one will be invited. Should you not be invited, please reference the blog post on this topic in order to mitigate your feelings of rejection. Should you be invited, please try to limit the communicable diseases you bring over, since I’ll have a 2 week old.
2. Lower your expectations regarding myriad, well-planned snacks. This time around, I will serve only round foods that someone else has prepared, with the possible exception of cupcakes, which would be cooked by me, but still will still be (hopefully) round.
The other foods will be bagels and their accoutrements (like SMOKED FISH, which I intend to eat by the fistful the moment I give birth), served in the round containers we will buy them in, as well as donuts from Peter Pan donut in Williamsburg, but I don’t even know if we’ll manage to get out there in order to buy some of the fabulously round, made-by-other people donuts. These are the donuts that you read about on the Internet. These are the donuts that you dream about. These are the porn donuts. These are the donuts that the other moms with two children manage to have at their kids birthday parties, where they also only serve bagels and cupcakes — perhaps a smidge of fruit. I do hope to be able to pull that one off.
When I’m nervous about something, I like to have a plan brewing in my brain. Sometimes I brew plans while dreaming. Last night I dreamt about the birthday party, and this is the menu I’d selected:
- lentil soup
- salad
- cannolis
The cannolis were cannoli shells covered with dark glossy chocolate, filled with ricotta cream, and decorated with berries. Wow, were these cannolis were a thing of beauty. I was delighted to be able to serve them at the uber casual birthday party. But there was a problem, in that the cannolis were too long for one person to comfortably eat. And you know how you can’t really cut a cannoli because that bumpy shell stuff will just crumble? I mean, even biting one is a problem, in my experience.
I sound like I think a lot about cannolis: I don’t, actually, when I am awake. But this leads us to my brilliant invention. In my sleep, I dreamt up a small, specialized serrated knife called a cannoli saw. It allowed you to slice the shell (chocolate-covered or not) cleanly so that one cannoli (cannolo?) could be subdivided between multiple party guests. And you could put the bumpy shell in your mouth one bite at a time, and any shattering would be private, and not down the front of your shirt.
Zoaster, move over. Another award-winning dream invention.
Yes, a Recipe: Shameful Chicken
One thing that I’ve discovered in the past few weeks is something I am simultaneously ashamed and compelled to tell you about. It’s a new (to me) way to bread and oven-fry chicken. One gets the sense that it would have been popular in the Better Homes and Gardens set in the 70s, though everyone was probably too busy buying Shake and Bake, because something in a box probably seemed easier at that point in time.
First, I was at Target and found some boneless, skinless, somewhat inoffensive looking (no hormones, the word “natural all over the package, etc.) chicken breasts. You know, in the grocery section they’ve wedged in among the toys and clothing and scrapbooking materials.
I cannot get over grocery shopping at Target, and yet I do it when I am there.
Anyhow, somewhat sustainably produced chicken breasts for $3, and I bought them. A few days passed. I don’t often cook chicken breasts. I find them boring and easy to ruin, though I do have a few fantastic go-to recipes for them. One of my favorites is with onion, almonds, and lots of butter. Another is with sage and prosciutto, which, let me tell you, I never have on hand.
“Austerity is the new abundance,” a friend recently said, and then said “or is it that abundance is the new austerity?” Anyhow, this is a sentiment I can get behind and I wanted to use up those Italian-seasoned bread crumbs before they lingered in my cabinet, uselessly, for too long.
What could I do with chicken and breadcrumbs? Surely something — it sounded like a winning combination.
I started googling and found that there is a popular recipe template using the following ingredients:
chicken
mayonnaise
bread crumbs
parmesan cheese
Whoa. The idea is that you mix mayo in with parmesan, dip the chicken in the mixture, coat with breadcrumbs. and cook briefly in a super-hot oven.
I lacked parmesan cheese but I had some shreddy Mexican mix, and I shook in a smidge of cayenne pepper, too. I started to coat the chicken. Then I realized that I hadn’t made enough mayo mixture, and I added an egg and some olive oil and a bit of salt. A little lemon for acid. I figured I was putting in the mayo ingredients without emulsifying them.
Basically, I’m on the road to the message that you can’t mess this chicken up. It was fantastic. I made it again last night with boneless, skinless thighs. Chicken thighs, that is.
With the breasts, I’d started them at 450 for about 12 minutes and then gotten scared and turned it down to 350 for about 10. They were perfect. Tender, juicy, and yet cooked through. Browned on the outside. With the thighs, I did 400 for about 22 minutes. And I used romano cheese that time. Both were perfect. It’s like secretly frying chicken in mayonnaise. Don’t tell anyone. But pass it on.
Buss Up Shut
This great thing happened yesterday. All of the people in our building were invited down to the super’s workshop to a holiday party thrown by the super and his wife and the work crew that runs our small co-op.
Henry and I, with our dreams (my dreams) of an early bedtime, would arrive first, long before Daddy came home from work. “We have to get down to Debbie’s party,” we kept informing one another, during the pas de deux of me trying to get him shod and clothed and then him wondering just why Mommy isn’t ready.
Debbie is our friend and Henry’s babysitter. She is married to the superintendant, who we also hire sometimes as a handyman, plus they live in the apartment next door to us and are always on the premises. Consequently, they are the fixedest of possible fixtures in our apartment-dweller lives. Henry, who associates all parties with singing and cake, did not want to miss a moment.
To properly celebrate, Henry wanted to be sure that he had ALL of his cowboy gear either on him or with him, so he had the boots, the hat, and the guitar he got for Christmas, and I was compelled to carry his hobby horse. A cowboy needs a horse and a guitar, he explained. Not to mention a mommy to help carry his accoutrements.
The workshop is across from the washing machines in the basement so I’ve seen in but never seen the part where the party was — a big cement block room with workbenches normally full of work but cleared for the occasion. The periphery was lined with chairs and some big tables set out for food, and there was Soca (Trinidadian Calypso) dominating the soundscape, and cascading twinkle lights strung everywhere. They had warmed up what must normally be a pretty cold room.
The food was all stuff that Debbie had cooked, and it came down in huge foil containers that were slotted into stands with sterno containers under them.
I love our co-op. It’s a blend of different skin tones and different professions — nurses, court reporters, journalists, teachers, editors, writers, retirees, and accountants. No one seems destitute, nor does anyone appear to be living the Nobu-going lifestyle of the idle (or working) rich.
Last night, lots of us were gathered around in the twinkle lights scooping up our gracious friend and neighbor’s Spanish rice, braised oxtail, neckbone curry, potato curry, tamarind sauce, and torn up hunks of roti, the delicious, layered buttery bread known in Indian food as paratha. “Buss up shut,” Debbie called the pan of roti.
It often takes Debbie and I a few tries to really get what one other is saying, but I searched on “Bust up roti” when I got home and realized that it’s called Buss Up Shut, and it’s a specialty from Trinidad, where those guys are from. It looks like a torn shirt, hence the “bust up shirt,” hence the “buss up shut.”
The one thing I didn’t get to try that I wanted to was the Hennessy with cranberry they were making.
The inside baby and I scarfed and enjoyed two plates of food. (Uh, one apiece?) One neighbor kept telling Debbie that she was disappointed not to see the mango sauce this year, but personally, I could not get enough of that buss up shut with the tamarind sauce. Henry was shy except for with Debbie and I, and despite his status as a rice aficionado, only wanted to try the cookies: a white kind with chocolate stripes applied to one side and the chocolate bottom, and some pink wafers.
Chatting with the neighbors, I went into a sort of time warp and only realized that two entire hours had passed when I saw Henry yawning and rubbing his eyes. By that time, lots and lots of us were there with huge plates of food in our laps, and drinks in our hands, and Debbie’s son, an ace drummer, was standing up and tapping a screwdriver against a bottle of booze both artfully and thoughtfully. We had to go, though, and came back up in the elevator balancing the horse, and the guitar, and a huge plate of food for Daddy.
Happy this year. And happy new year!
