Lettuce
Top five things I hate about lettuce:
1. washing it
2. drying it
3. when someone else hasn’t dried it and so it is wet; I find this to be barbaric and ruinous to my potentially considerable enjoyment of a salad
4. when the pieces aren’t small enough to eat without cutting (I don’t mind making it small enough myself)
5. when someone doesn’t believe that it doesn’t have to be washed even if it’s in an expensive box and has been triple-washed, because, see 1.
Top six things I love about lettuce:
1. I really love the cool, acidic accompaniment that it makes to dinner; I like to have salad with every single dinner.
2. I even like a handful of greens with my food if it is not dressed.
3. I like iceberg when it’s on tacos, because of the crunch.
4. I like arugula because it’s a crucifer, which is both
a. healthy and
b. an excellent word.
5. I love the herbed blend that comes in a box and tastes like dill and cilantro, even though it is expensive.
6. I love that you can get romaine subbed in for iceberg a pizza restaurants.
Winter Zoo Trip
We made out like bandits for Christmas, but one of the best gifts we got was a family membership to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
With this pass, we can go to any zoo or aquarium we want for free. We can go every single day if we want: these places are open 365 days a year.
Do you know how great having somewhere to go is? If you are not a parent, then you don’t fully realize how great it is.
A parent of a young child knows that you are never too far from the whirling, swirling “what can we do now” vortex of doom.
You are most likely to get sucked into the vortex during the afternoon. But you are far more likely to fall in during the afternoon if you didn’t get out in the morning.
Let’s see: getting out in the morning. It’s fantastic when the weather is fine, isn’t it? You need very few clothes and no socks. Your child needs few clothes and new socks. You can blow bubbles or kick a ball or take free city-sponsored swim lessons or run through a sprinkler or go down the slide. You can buy iced coffee. You will run into other families out doing the same stuff, and that will spawn even more stuff to do. You can eat out at restaurants, and the kids can muck around in the back garden while you drink wine.
If I am putting summer on a pedestal, so be it. I do remember a few concerns about sun and heat, but they seem rather inconsequential at the moment.
Getting out the in morning is also fantastic when it has just snowed, I will admit. Fresh snow is lovely, isn’t it? It’s so clean and bright and inspiring. It’s not scary if you shove some in your mouth on purpose or by mistake, or if you fall down in it. Just getting out in the fresh snow can be an activity. Maybe we’ll watch a plow and yell “truck!” a lot of times. Maybe we’ll make a tiny snowman. Maybe we’ll watch the super shovel, or we’ll get tossed into a snowbank. Or maybe we’ll just tromp and laugh.
What is less clear is what the activity should be when there is 275 feet of dirty snow on the ground. When there are cigarettes sticking out of the snow, and gray exhaust stains on it, and pee holes from dogs drilled down into it, it’s hard not to feel as if it is surrounding us, and closing in on us. How about when it’s so snowy that we can’t find the car and wedge the door open in order to sit in it and push buttons, let alone drive it to a friend’s house? My child is too young for movies and isn’t enrolled in school. There are community activities nearby, but not every single day. There are also commercial activities. But while I like watching him bang sticks on the floor and being sung to—I really do—I feel conflicted about the $25 an hour it costs. Still, it is crucial to get him out. It is crucial to find an activity that involves more than eating scones. Plus, the scones are far enough away that we need the stroller, and many of the sidewalks and intersections don’t have good enough clearance for the stroller.
The stroller has become problematic for other reasons. Due to the robustness of my scone-filled child, I can barely manage to carry it up the stairs to the platform. I can’t stand having it around when we’re not using it, and he doesn’t love to be in it. So more and more, we just walk to the train. I am lucky to be mother to a transportationaholic, and to live 1.5 blocks from an above-ground subway.
The train is VERY convenient if we are going South. Or returning from the North. But it’s actually inconvenient in one direction, all of the time, because the Northbound platform is out of service. So what we do is put on all of our clothes, all of them, and then walk slowly to the train, yelling “BALL!” every time one of us wants to stop and get a snowball. (Henry, who is opposed to mittens for reasons he chooses not to discuss, picks them out; I carry them. We are a team!)
Then I carry him up the stairs to the platform. Mostly we want to go north, so we wait for the train and take it one stop south. In our excellently hokey part of Brooklyn, with dead end avenues, that’s 2 blocks. We get off, I carry him upstairs to an overpass and then downstairs to the platform again, and we wait for the northbound train.
Yesterday, we did this on the way to the zoo. I did a cost – benefit analysis and then decided that we’d walk all of the parts to and from the train rather than take the stroller.
So we walk to the train, went up, went south, crossed to the northbound platform, and went north. Weirdly there was not a seat for Henry. More than one person dug their nose deeper into a bible when they saw us coming. This made me very crabby. How about acting the bible out instead of reading it? I wanted to shriek. How about giving my 2 year old a seat so he doesn’t have to hold the pole and lurch around?
Instead, I rearranged the pole-grippers to get Henry a good spot. Finally, a young Russian woman gave Henry her seat.
On the other end of the journey, once we’re at street level again, Henry is walking when suddenly he falls over. Don’t be alarmed, this is a pretty undramatic occurrence: he’s pretty short and extremely resilient. When he falls I usually ask “Y’okay?” and he says “YES” and gets up and continues without a moment’s hesitation or even any eye contact. Sadly, he got a bit of muck in his boot this time, and we kept having to stop to try to make him more comfortable. Then the shortcut to the zoo was all snowed in. We walked and walked and walked. It really wasn’t too far, but it started to seem pretty far. We finally arrived. It’s a bit desolate at the zoo in the winter: the sea lions just roll their eyes at you. They were behind such a large ring of snow, though, that Henry couldn’t even see them rolling their eyes. But there are still striped mice to see, and meerkats, and golden lion tamarins, and the plain old tamarins. The baboons don’t like the snow so they had been spirited away, and we didn’t manage to walk the trail, but we were happy to see the tiny frogs and a bunch of piranhas. (“DADDY! DADDY!” Now we know what daddy’s spirit animal is.)
The trip was rather short, because a nap needed to be taken and a snack needed to be eaten. Still, it was wonderful to have gone, even if it seemed like a rather extreme trek, and Henry spent the entire walk back to the subway staring at the sky and begging to take an airplane home rather than the train.
An airplane? Clearly, everyone needs a vacation.
Tiny Assemblages
I went to college with a guy named Scott Rolfe. For one year or maybe two, we both lived on the quiet floor, in one of the nicer dorms.
Scott is pretty quiet. I suspect that sometimes I was quieter than I was at other times. I had an illegal pet chinchilla who required a lot of exercise, so I’d let him out of his aquarium and into the hallway, which was fun and exciting until it was time for it to get him back in. At that point, the whole thing became impossible and exasperating. The process of ensnaring often involved a lot of other people. Scott sometimes helped with the ensnaration.
For me, chinchilla wrassling was approximately sixteen hundred hobbies ago; I have since hung up my teeny, tiny rope, and retired.
Scott had and still has a longer lasting pursuit, which was making art. He was the first person I ever met to make what he called “found object art.”
He’d find something shiny and think about it and put it together with other shiny or not shiny things he had found, and suddenly, he would have a precious sculpture that had a life of its own, out of bits of this and that.
Things like this amazed me. They still amaze me. I go in for the written arts, and the tasty arts, and sometimes, the musical arts. But when it comes to creating visual arts, I’m stumped. However, I definitely know what I appreciate.
Scott has recently come up with a series that I truly appreciate.
These small animalpomorphic pieces really have personalities and lives of their own, though they are like, bolts and paint and squiggles and bits of strainer. But then suddenly, whoops, there is an actual whale!
Or something with feet, and not just feet, but feet that hint at how funny and charismatic the little made-up animal is.
Scott lives in Austin. This is his website. It will please you.
The Road to Beer Batter Bread
This is why there was no food in our house:
Last week, I decided not to grocery shop, because we would be going out of town on Friday. Yay! Out of town! We were going to see great old friends. We were going to celebrate a milestone birthday of one of them. We were going to have roast lamb, and Peking Duck. We would introduce our children if they had not met, and feed them cake if they were old enough, and while they were eating cake, we would also eat cake, but ours would have sparkling shiraz as a complement to the dark and yet buttery chocolate frosting. What a weekend!
There would be chorizo with eggs. I brought some crazy Italian chocolate sauce with peaches in it. I brought our monthly “cheese of the month club” cheeses as an offering to our hosts. It seemed as if we might all contract gout from overindulgence, but we were going to laugh an awful lot while doing it.
On Friday evening we arrive at the home of the friends we will be staying with.
We admire their excellent baby; they admire ours. They present us truffles on crackers.
Hmm. As it happens, I do not want a truffle on a cracker. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, except for during the 9 dark months of pregnancy. But this is not that. I finally accept a truffled cracker. I’m about to tuck into it when . . .
“What is that smell,?” I say to our beloved and genteel hosts, who are excellent cooks.
“That’s the chicken cooking.”
The smell is physical evidence of the fact that they are roasting a chicken for us. Roasting a chicken is a divine act: an act of love. The wine is starting to flow. There is a glass of red at my elbow. Our friends are also making a sauce out of some swank chocolate in a waxy paper, to serve us for dessert. But I’m waving my hand in front of my nose, overwhelmed by the smell.
I find myself unable to eat the chicken, or the potatoes, or the Australian feta we brought. My wine goes untouched.
I do manage to eat some chocolate sauce on some ice cream.
Then, we go to bed. They’ve given Henry a bedroom upstairs but Matthew and I are staying downstairs on their white upholstered pullout couch. I go to sleep. I wake an hour later in a cold sweat.
I understand immediately that the flu has come to conquer me. It has come to try and ruin the nice furniture of my friends. The flu is trying to put obstacles between me and my chocolate frosting and sparkling chiraz. It is here to make me suffer physical indignities in a space that is not even mine to collapse in and vomit all over.
The rest of the weekend is pathetic. Cower cower cower, sleep sleep sleep, sick sick sick. After resting as much as possible on Saturday, I realize that things smell good and not bad. I’m starving. That must be a sign. It has been 24 hours since I started to feel awful. Another sign! These things are advertised as taking 24 hours.
I take a bite of potato. I go up in flames. The flames last all night.
At the Peking Duck restaurant on Sunday, I order a bowl of plain broth and try not to cry. The only thing keeping me from crying is how dehydrated I am. That, and the special Italian elixir designed to replenish my flora. I drink the orange elixir, very gently and slowly.
Sunday, I’m well enough to return home. I’m exhausted, embarrassed, dejected, and still sick. My blood pressure is so low from lack of fluids that I can’t carry anything without my heart pounding. I’m unable and unwilling to eat. Grocery shopping is out of the question.
It is on Monday, too. It is on Tuesday. I sit listlessly on the couch watching Freaks and Geeks and thanking heaven that I managed to get a babysitter.
By Wednesday I am better, but I have a lot of appointments I need to conserve my energy for. I will also need to bathe. Plus, it’s snowing. There is no way I can shop.
And then suddenly it is today, and we wake up to 11 feet of wet snow on the ground. I’m ravenous, as are the other two people I live with, and there is no food other than frozen Jello and raw pork in the freezer.
We have no:
bread milk eggs fruit pasta crackersYou know what? That is only a partial list of what we do not have: the full list is exhaustive. Things we don’t have:
Everything, almostIt is easier to say what we do have:
1 banana to be split 3 ways 1 piece of toast that my husband already ateRaw pork in the freezer (it’s already mixed into Chinese dumpling filling!) some tomatoes in a box
apple butter
I can’t get to the grocery store. The car is out of the question, the trains are questionable, and I guess I could walk, but instead I go to the deli down the street and buy what I can:
Beer milk eggs spaghettiapple sauce frozen spinach frozen squash, just in case of, I don’t know what, Y2K or something
I cannot bear to purchase form of peanut butter that they sell, which is not only processed and sweetened and filled with palm oil, but it is all of these things and then “30% reduced fat!” on top of that.
Nor can I bear the Wonder Bread.
But wait! I can make beer batter bread, which is bread that only uses: flour, sugar, and beer. Also, salt, butter, and baking powder if you use all purpose flour.
My sister used to say she was “afraid” of yeast. The idea of something “alive” sitting and waiting in her refrigerator waiting to be “activated” . . . she found it creepy. I’ve always love the simple and fun schtick of using beer to sidestep both the liquid and the yeast of traditional breadmaking.
Somehow you also get to sidestep kneading and rising. You also get to pour a huge quantity of butter over the top, and it was easy enough for me to make with my two year old, who also loved to eat it.
Make this bread. This version is from Epicurious, adapted from a Stephan Pyles book. He is a famous Texas chef from . . . Dallas I think? I can’t remember. You know what, make this bread even if you aren’t weirdly desperate for bread. It’s great during the winter and the beer thing makes it so much fun. It was a real hit around here today. It’s good with butter, or for toast, but it’s best with stew or chili: something meaty. One editorial comment is that it will take longer to cook than this claims — though perhaps that’s because I didn’t get my beer down to room temperature before making it.
Ingredients
- 3 cups flour
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 bottle (12 ounces) beer, at room temperature
- 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 375°F. In a mixing bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. Add the beer all at once, mixing as little as possible; the batter should be lumpy.
Pour the batter into a 9-x-5-x-3-inch loaf pan and brush with the melted butter. Bake in the oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Turn out onto a rack to cool.
Interim Update
Hi giraffe. Hi readers.
I have a small flu problem that keeps me from being able to do anything but farm out my child to outside caretakers and sit quietly on the couch.
Yesterday I used all spare brain wattage to figure out how, during the sole hour I was responsible for Henry when he was awake, we could watch Yo Gabba Gabba on my computer. (That way, we wouldn’t have to do anything else.)
I’d heard great things about it, but here’s a hint: when feverish, Yo Gabba Gabba is potentially creepy.
It’s also confusing to an eager near-two year old, who wants to know what everything is.
“What’s that! What’s that!”
Er, that’s a green striped thing that I wish would stop jumping?
“What’s that! What’s that!”
I don’t know. It is not an animal and I don’t know it’s name.
“What’s that! What’s that!”
Not sure but it looks like if you washed it, it would never dry properly. And it might never smell the same.
“What’s that! What’s that!”
No idea, honey. A monster with bumps? It’s a good dancer though, isn’t it.
These answers are not good enough. I need to regain my authority. To do that, I need to regain my ability to eat.
I’m rescaling Maslow’s hierarchy. The ability to digest should be down there on the lowest flattest part, because that is key.
See you all when I get a few levels back up!
Church Avenue Chomp 