Horse and Ernie
I’ve been dangling Henry’s birthday party over him, rather like a carrot—or an apricot—when things get rough in the evening.
Things are getting rough in the evening. We have been on what i like to think of Hawaii time. We go to bed soooooooper late, and get up sooooooper late. I think this might be because Henry’s dad just started working later hours, so if Henry went to bed at a normal time, he wouldn’t get to see his dad.
Henry’s brilliant solution is to refuse to go to bed. Then when his dad gets home, he is WAY TOO excited to go to bed.
In the evening, I cannot stand this scenario. But in the morning when I wake up and it’s 9:30 and my child is snoozing peacefully and I feel like a cheerful human lady instead of an overtired koala-clawed hag, the late bedtime moves from the “terrible problem” category into the “really cozy” one.
Part of the problem around bed time might be that he is still recuperating from the horror of dinner; I know that it is taking me some time to recover from dinner. At this juncture, Henry sees no reason to eat anything other than dried apricots for dinner. Full cream coconut flavored yogurt, his favorite sort of pasta, asparagus spears broiled just the way he likes them: no, no, no. He pushes these things away and points unremittingly to the cabinet.
He’ll have two dried apricots and a side of screaming please. No: he’ll have the apricots, and he’ll give me the screaming.
When I was making some food for New Year’s Eve, I turned around and he had shoved his entire mouth full of prunes. If you try to remove the prunes from him, he will mount an aural nuclear offensive. If you don’t remove the prunes from him, we don’t need to imagine the sort of nuclear offensive.
Don’t worry, he is the farthest thing from underfed. Normally he eats at least one good meal a day, and I’m trying not to sweat the rest.
At times like this, after I have limited the prunes, after the first phase of the tantrum is over, I might bring up his birthday.
We talk about the cousins who will come, his grandparents, his babysitter, a couple kids he pals around with.
The other day I asked him if he wanted anyone else to come.
“Horse,” he answered, definitively.
“Ernie,” he added, after thinking for a moment.
Okay, one key lesson from parenting: don’t ask if you can’t deliver.
Another is: do not store apricots at eye level.
Impending Disney
It has been suggested that I go to Disney. And you know, I might sell some organs and do just that.
Our kid is 1.917 years old. He doesn’t know about Mickey Mouse yet, and wow, would it be great if he didn’t, um, ever, but he loves to do pretty much anything. Well, he loves to do almost anything so long as it doesn’t involve a fish—or worse, multiple fish—swimming directly towards him.
Actually, scratch that. While he formerly was terrified of aquariums, we went to the New York one yesterday and he was game even to have the walruses stream towards the plate glass window he was standing and touching, then do a backflip just as they reached the window, so that it’s entire zillion pound body was just on the other side of a piece of glass from his hand. You could look at the walrus straight in the eye. It made him laugh instead of scream.
And when looking at fish, he said WOOOOOOOO! with great enthusiasm, rather than trying to claw his way out of there by any means possible.
So, I amend my statement. My 1.917 year old loves to do pretty much anything, including visit aquariums. And he especially loves to do things that make kids happy, and he especially loves to do those things with his cousins.
He has two cousins on my side of the family: my sister’s kids. Amelia is a great friend to him. Just like a sibling, except for loving and kind. And he clearly looks up to Justin, who is 8.5 years older and who knows how to work the TV and everything. Like, not only can Justin push the buttons on the remote, he doesn’t turn it off, or turn the volume all the way up, or stop a DVD in its tracks, or make a menu appear that no one can make go away. Justin, who has also been known to dress up like Batman, is a total hero to Henry.
Their dad Rudy, who married my sister back in 1994, has been one of my favorite people for going on 17 years. He called the other day and said “I’ve been thinking that the six of us should go to Disney.”
He’s an accountant. plus he was the one who called with the idea. I tried to do some quick math in my head to keep up with him. Who would be included in the six? Oh. I see. That’s his little family and my little family. His little family used to go to Disney all the time, on trips planned by my sister, but they haven’t been since spring of 2007.
I haven’t been to Disney World since I was six. Cool! I remember eating dinner with the Magic Kingdom lit up in the background. We also ate fried chicken with my father’s cousin who lived somewhere else in Florida. They had red ants and an empty swimming pool, and truth be told, that is what I remember more clearly.
Thank God I don’t have to go to Disney is what I used to think when my sister would tell me about the trip they were planning.
“It’ll be great,” Rudy said when he was introducing the idea of our trip. “You can take Amelia to the bathroom.”
He also shared his plans with us that we get up really, really early every day, and get out of the hotel as fast as possible, and let Henry konk out in the stroller rather than having actual naps, and also, we should actually make our dinner reservations now.
Like most vacations described and or planned by other people, this does not sound like fun. I’ve taken a personality test, and I know that I don’t even like to plan my own vacations. My idea of a vacation is that you don’t have to plan anything. Here is a vacation: waking at 9, drinking some delicious dark roast coffee with warmed milk an outdoor cafe while the land just over there is lapped by salty waters and I write in a journal. Later, I take the sort of walk that doesn’t freeze me or gives me blisters. After a swim in a coldish ocean, I sink my brain into a novel in the late afternoon hours before dinner. Then an aperitif, and the chance to learn about delicious local specialties that I can eat in company of people from a different culture. Wine without sulfites, but not too much of it, is an important part of my vacation. I get to go to bed in a cozy bed at a reasonable time. It doesn’t involve Disney, and it doesn’t even my own child, let alone everyone else’s children.
I am an INFP. One definition of an INFP is that you like to be alone a lot. Another is that you can’t stand to plan vacations. How does an INFP who likes to go to bed late and start the day gently, rather than early and with sunscreen and lines and activities and speaking to other people, contend with all of this?
It’s time. I know. We’ll have an excellent time, I am actually certain of that. Plus my sister would want me to go. Well, she would both want me to go, because we will be taking a version of a vacation that she planned, and she loved that vacation. But I am also wholly aware that she would want to punch me for being able to go when she cannot. What she would want is she would want us to go. The seven of us. But we’ll have fun in her honor. I just have to reconsider my self-image a bit first.
Short Rib Season
I love short ribs. If you don’t, it’s either because you don’t eat animals, or because you haven’t gotten around to trying them yet.
(Animals? Short ribs? That “them” up there seems to refer to the trying of animals. I guess those reasons are sort of the same, aren’t they?)
There’s a new grocery store not far from us. I’m not thrilled with the butcher section but I did find some short ribs that looked pretty good the other day, so I picked up two packages.
Like oxtails, short ribs are a cut of beef—no, oxtails are not ox—that is normally very inexpensive. The bang for the buck is great, but the trade-off is that it requires a specific method of cooking. See, these cuts have a lot of connective tissue, and therefore needs to be cooked for quite some time to soften them up. However, if you braise short ribs — by definition, brown them in fat and then cook in a covered container in liquid — you can melt the connective tissues. And while it takes a wee bit of planning up front, there is apparently little more delicious as well as silky in the mouth than melted connective tissues!
(If you are a vegetarian, I apologize for this whole post, which is shaping up to be in poor taste. If you want something that tastes good, try collagen! Doh!)
I’ve made a few different recipes — one braised in a huge quantity of red wine and another with pancetta and tomatoes and ground savories and lots of herbs.
They both require seasoning before searing. That seems reasonable enough to me, and it is part of the definition of braise. But they other day I decided to try a Korean route to the short ribs. I looked through a favorite cookbook, and everything that was required for the recipe was something I already had, aside for green onions. It was snowy so I decided that I’d just use regular chopped up onion and see if the resulting product suffered from my cheating.
Another draw to the recipe is that instead of searing beforehand, you simply put everything, all at once, into a Dutch Oven. After a few hours on the top of the stove, pat dry, brush with sesame oil, and finish in a hot oven for ten or fifteen minutes. (It’s like the sear part happens afterwards, which in a way, makes more sense.)
These are easy. They are fantastic. The recipe is from the Complete Meat Cookbook, which is one of my all time favorites.
I served with brown rice and an okra and corn combo. I ate some leftovers on polenta, but rice is really what you want with this.
Korean Style Oven Browned Short Ribs
from The Complete Meat Cookbook by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly
Ingredients
10 garlic cloves, peeled 1/2 C soy sauce 1/4 light or dark brown sugar 3 T chopped fresh ginger 6 whole green onions or scallions (I just chopped up a medium onion) 2 T rice vinegar or cider vinegar 2 C water 3 pound English-style short ribs, boneless or bone-in, trimmed of external fat 2-3 T Asian sesame oil (toasted)Procedure
Put ingredients except sesame oil into a Dutch oven, making sure ribs are covered by the liquid. (I needed to add more water.) If not, add more water and soy sauce. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to a summer, and skim foam. Continue to cook uncovered until the ribs are quite tender, 1.5–2 hrs.
(Before I did this, my ribs sat overnight and I could take the fat off of the top.)
Preheat the oven to 450. Remove the ribs from braising liquid. Pat them dry and lay them bone side down (all but one of the bones had fallen out of my ribs) on a rack above a roasting pan or use the boiling pan provided with your stove. Brush the meat with the sesame oil. Roast the ribs in the middle of the oven until their edges are crispy, 10 to 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, skim any fat from the surface of the braising liquid. Discard bones. The sauce should have a rich, beefy flavor. If not, boil over high heat to concentrate the flavors. The sauce shouldn’t get too thick but remain soupy. Ladle the sauce into shallow bowls and put a rib or two in each. Serve with rice and vegetables.
The Complete Meat Cookbook is one of the best cookbooks I own; buy it.
PS Here is the post where I reference Giada’s short rib recipe — to be eaten on fresh pasta with shavings of chocolate. Or, go straight to the with chocolate recipe.
Mopespace
“Mopespace” is an important vocabulary word in our house.
(It’s pronounced “mope space.”)
We created it in reaction to the fact that when an adult (A) is sad, other adults who love them (B, C, or D) have a tendency is to try to talk them out of it, or convince them that things aren’t so bad, or to remind A about the great stuff.
That’s all well and good sometimes, because sometimes a gloomy A just needs a little perspective, or even a distraction.
But sometimes A needs to be able to complain or realize that things aren’t what they want them to be and adjust to them. A needs space to mope. It’s not always easy or natural for B, C, or D to grant mopespace to A, though.
(If you are trying to figure out who the letters pertain to, they pertain to everyone. Everyone is A. Everyone is B or C or D. It’s just the way that things seem to be as an adult.)
This is how a conversation might go, let’s say on the telephone.
B: “How are you doing?”
A: “Enh, you know. This week I just feel like
- an old person
- my foot will never heal
- I’ll never make my first million
- I’m the last person on earth who isn’t married
- they should just throw me into debtor’s prison because that’s where I belong
-
my muscles emigrated to an unknown Spanish-speaking country over the holidays
- I might be myopic
- I wish my sibling didn’t die
- I’ll never get pregnant
- I’ll be pregnant forever
- other
- all of the above
Then B needs to decide what to do, and often comes up with something like this:
B: “Oh, really? But everything is really pretty great, if you look at it from this other angle, which is mine and not yours, and not even necessarily truthfully mine, but I don’t know how to comfort you when you’re sad and ‘dead air’ on the phone makes me really uncomfortable.”
In this common scenario, mopespace has not been granted from B to A.
There is a stunning quantity of moping to be done before at at the instance of a loved one’s death, and I’ve needed space to do it, but it’s not good to take up all of the oxygen on earth to do it.
For a long time I have paid someone to discuss this and other things with me, and it’s been helpful to rent some time to dedicate to problems, and also to get some perspective.
Last week, I started a new project, which is bereavement counseling.
Death is death is death, and it happens to everyone, and it is everywhere, and is by definition quotidian, though it’s also totally profound. And I’ve been stunned from the very beginning at what a rippling 3-D experience my sister’s illness and ALS diagnosis and death were.
The bereavement group is just six week program but everyone who is going has lost someone to ALS and is trying to make some sense of it. It’s sort of like getting an extra storage locker of mopespace.
We’re not supposed to talk about the counseling, but we did agree that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of space for grieving in daily life and that hopefully this will give us all some of that. And kudos once again to the ALS Association for organizing services for people in need of them!
In Praise of the White Waterfall
If you’ve ever counted calories or done Weight Watchers or followed a low-carb diet you know that as an adult, you can’t eat noodles in quantity and still fit into the pants that you already own. You can’t eat a lot of rice, either, but rice was never all that fun to eat in the first place. If you do eat rice, you can at least eat brown rice, which is not really any worse tasting than regular rice, plus it has the added benefit of making you feel good about yourself, whereas the delta between good pasta and whole wheat pasta is huge and uncrossable.
In your calorie-counting quests, you may have encountered a desperate zealot or two, bubbling over with advice. If you met the one I am thinking of, she might have told you that next time you are craving pasta, you should just get some thin green beans, and boil them, and put tomato sauce on them. Then eat them, and voila! You are not getting any fatter than you already are!
She forgot to mention the need to unfocus your eyes and unplug your memory so that you can mistake the cellulose texture for the good chewy starchy texture of pasta. I haven’t tried the beans scenario, but it seems pretty bad. I mean, I like green beans just fine, but my pinkish and oblong fingers seem closer to noodles than green beans with tomato sauce.
Enter the white waterfall. That’s what “shirataki” means. Have you had shirataki noodles? They are white gelatinous noodles that apparently reminded someone, somewhere in Japan, of a white waterfall.
They are high-fiber noodles without carbohydrates. A whole bag has very few calories. The kind I buy are made from tofu, and so they have protein. Shirataki noodles are the anti-noodle: the miracle unnoodle, who has sidestepped all of the traditional noodle problems.
If you’ve lived on earth for more than 20 years, you know that if you manage to sidestep normal problems, weird ones will crop up in their place. Shiratakis are no different. When you snip open the bag, you will notice that they stink. I’m sorry, but even the packager acknowledges it. They talk about rinsing and parboiling to dispel the “authentic odor.”
They smell pretty authentic, all right.
But who cares? You can get around the odor to eat noodles without carbs. I know you can.
Shirataki noodles may require a bit of unusual management, ie, draining, rinsing, parboiling, drying in a pan, and then cooking. However, you’re allowed to eat noodles. I wouldn’t recommend having them with pasta sauce, though I haven’t tried it, actually, and I should certainly do that and report back before I dissuade you here. I do *highly* recommend them with Asian flavors.
Today for lunch, I beat one egg and cooked it flat in a pan, then removed it and sliced it. To the pan I added onion, garlic, ginger, broccoli, and mushrooms.
I’d rinsed and drained the noodles, and boiled them for 2 minutes. I’d drained them, then dried them in a nonstick pan over low heat, just to help them dry a bit.
I tossed the noodles in with the vegetables and added a sauce I’d stirred together from soy sauce, rice vinegar, peanut butter, and sugar. I added the strips of egg.
The noodles have a slightly unusual texture, but I like it quite a bit.
A meal fit for a king! A svelte and worldly king.
PS My child hated them. He ate one frond of broccoli and sniffed one noodle and dismissed it completely. It still smelled bit too authentic for him, I suppose, but you should try them.
Church Avenue Chomp 