Church Avenue Chomp

I’m leaving for Connecticut today to my sister and the rest of the family, but don’t worry, I have made provisions, through YouTube, for you to have some excellent entertainment.

See, while I’m away, Henry and I won’t get to snuggle on the couch, even when it is 104 degrees, and watch this on my phone. Consequently, you should watch it lots of times.

I’ll give you a moneyback guarantee that you will like it even if you are upwards of 40 years old. Or downwards of two.

That is hearsay, since I am not that thing in italics, nor am I downwards of two, or will I ever be again.

The second verse just kills me. I finally realize what was missing from Itsy all along: cake.

You should also watch the other Caspar Babypants videos on his YouTube channel. I just stumbled upon him the other day but really, he is brilliant. I like the one about the little ghost and the baby in Hawaii and the bear who costs $9.99. Please watch the Island Hop. Really really good fun stuff.

That said, the Monkey River video is the stuff nightmares are made of, at least mine, and should probably be avoided.

giant flat planet of swimming

Henry is taking “swimming lessons!” And they only last 3 weeks, so I’d better blog about it fast.

With so many kiddo activities costing $25 per hour, I’m pleased and proud that he’s taking free city-sponsored lessons in Brooklyn’s Red Hook pool.

My sister and I grew up taking lessons at town pools. And now I still go to pools run by the town, except that now, the town is the city.

For those readers who don’t live in New York, I wish you could experience pool culture here for a moment.

I’ll try to describe:

You go to a pool. It is a production, because it is probably not directly down the street, and because you have to lock everything up using a lock, and there are rules like “if you are going to wear a tee-shirt onto the pool deck or into the water, it must be a white one” and “don’t wear a hat!” but as in most pool visits, it is worth it!

Instead of it being a complex with a baby pool and a medium pool and a sort of big one, like a 25 foot long pool, or a 25 yard pool, or a pool that looks really really long because it is actually Olympic Size — imagine that — instead, you go to a pool that is Olympic length (LONG), but that is, in actuality, the width. Though it seems like the length, since the lane lines are painted down that way. But don’t get dizzy, only a small portion of the pool is designated for lap swimming. The Olympic sized pool within the pool isn’t even visible from this picture, in other words.

As for the other dimension of the pool, should you think of it as the length or the width, it simply incalculable. I don’t know how to calculate it and I tried to look it up but have lost interest in the actual dimensions. It’s much more fun to tell you about the sign that says “No more than 1132 people in the pool at one time.”

No — that is really what the sign says, and I will try to get the photo evidence. In the meantime, please focus on the other photo. Those big silvery space alien things have signs on them that say “don’t climb.” I assume that this is because they are so dangerously big!

You know when you are looking at the Crate and Barrel catalog and you’d be wondering how big a particular bowl is but then you don’t have to wonder, because someone has aptly placed a lime or a bunch of grapes into the bowl so that you get a sense of size? Well, this picture has a million limes in it, but you just can’t see them, because the pool is SO BIG. No, really, I wish this one included a watermelon, or better yet, a tractor trailer truck, so that you could see the scale. Just trust me: it’s big.

It’s like a giant flat planet of swimming.

The lessons, by the way, are excellent. While other children express trepidation about entering the pool, Henry nearly wrenches my arm off to get in fast.

As for the curriculum, we are just led through a series of songs and different patterns of walking around in the water by a man who seems somewhat overwhelmed, as evidenced by his not knowing the words to Fuzzy Wuzzy, Three Little Fishies, and Twinkle Twinkle. (He does know a heck of a lot of verses to London Bridge, to his credit.) Mostly I just carry him around — that’s Henry, not the instructor — while we sing. And it’s pretty much what he’d like to do all day every day: songs and playing in the water. Another parent scolded me for using the “wrong hold” yesterday, which I thought was pretty hilarious. After I was done being defensive and wanting to shove her face into the water. (“Here! Let me show you another ‘hold.'”)

Tomorrow the session ends but I think we can sign up for another session starting next week.

see? not scary.

I wanted to get an octopus painted on my son’s wall before he was born. “Don’t you think that might be scare a baby?” asked my therapist. No, no, no, don’t you see? It would be smiling, and possibly winking. It might have a hat on, plus all those cheerful legs? No baby of mine would be scared of something so delightful as an octopus.

However, I am now remembering another comment the therapist once made about octopus. On the occasion of my husband turning 40, I decided to have a party at which an octopus salad would be a guest star. So in my laundry list of things I was telling her I did one week, I mentioned “taught myself to cook an octopus.”

She was lamenting my myriad responsibilities and said that she thought that cooking octopus was definitely something I could cut out of my schedule. This record of negative octopus comments leads me believe that she must be

Whatever her issues are, I feel about octopuses the way I feel about most animals: they fascinate and delight me when they are alive, and once they are dead they sure are delicious. I love octopus when cooked into a Turkish casserole with cheese, or sliced with oil in a cool salad, or grilled in the Greek way with a nice char and some lemon, or with garlic and white beans.

I love octopus but I also love Brooklyn, which, with the exception of a J. Crew store, has everything! Everything, even a store called the Octopus Garden, which is an speciality octopus retailer. If you are looking for it, don’t look on Bay Parkway, because if you take the bus all the way out there, eager with your fistful of madmoney ready to spend on a new friend or two, you will be disappointed when you learn that the Octopus Garden has moved to Avenue U.

This was a project that I undertook before I had a car. So on the bus to Avenue U, I considered all of the conflicting advice about cooking this creature that has a reputation for being . . . stretchy. And bad texture sends taste out the window, so I was admittedly nervous in my quest to get a meaty and pleasantly chewy guy ready for my guests, and leave the elastic complaints to the squid-eating community. (Of which I am also a card-carrying member, of course.)

There are all sorts of theories on how to get octopus to not be chewy. Greek fishermen, I’ve heard, slam them against a wooden dock again and again. Some people boil it with a cork and swear that that’s the secret. “Simmer it slow,” some say. Others advise quick cooking to keep it tender. If you freeze it first, that will make it easier to chew. “Boil it twice!” I think that someone also recommended an ice bath to me.

Finally I came home with two gray but soon to be purple betentacled cephalopods. I referenced this video for the cooking of the octopus, though I admit to having gone in a different direction with the dressing. But it was very easy and they were delicious as part of a Spanish extravaganza.

It remains one of my favorite animal proteins. I had a surprisingly simple but memorable presentation of octopus last night, at relatively new wine bar in our neighborhood called the Castello Plan. Somehow, the idea of a wine bar doesn’t appeal: I think I picture sitting on a stool and having too many different sorts of wine and not enough to eat. Also, I have a child whose primary hobby is to demand to drink whatever I am drinking, and his secondary hobby is knocking over wine. But I have to say: I left the kid at home and went with my friend Jennifer, and this was really sort of a perfect outing.

Air conditioning! Chilled red wine! Charcuterie! Adult conversation!

Four cheers. Jennifer and I ordered some spicy cured pork shoulder, a raw Swiss cheese, the pickle bowl, a cucumber salad, and a plate of duck confit. I’d recommend any of these thing except the pickle bowl, which was a perfectly respectable plate of pickles, and was only disappointing in the lack of variety: it was a lot of cuke, whereas we were hoping for something a bit more varied and unusual.

We were also drawn to a part of the menu called “conservas.” The options were mussels, sardines, cod liver, and octopus.

We chose the octopus and were brought a wooden board with a dab of red stuff (tomato paste), a dab of bright yellow stuff (mustard with chopped chives), some preserved lemon slices, shards of green onion, sliced bread, and the pièce de résistance: the octopus.

Except: there it was! Sitting in a can, all chopped up. Well, an ovular tin, with the lid pulled back halfway. “How incredibly novel!” we thought. A place on Cortelyou cans its own octopus! Like that place on Newkirk that made its own butter! Or wait, is this some sort of commercial preparation with the label removed? Am I on candid camera and being watched for my reaction to getting a can of octopus in a restaurant? Is this genius, or a rip-off?

Suffice it to say, any kitty on earth would have gone nuts over this treat (which did end up being pre-canned), but so did we. Perfectly tender, in slightly garlicky oil, these tender chunks on a slice of bread with tomato, mustard, onion, and pickle(d lemon): wait a minute. The condiment combo reminded me of something, and I hesitate to tell you what.

It was sort of like an open faced fast food hamburger with octopus rather than that horrible, horrible beef. But it was excellent, plus the lemons were just the absolute perfect complement. It was clever, delicate, perfectly delicious, full of protein, and frankly, will be a great change from tuna as a pantry favorite.

The next time I shop, I’ll be looking for some cheap and cheerful Goya or Del Sol canned octopus to dress up with lots of nice condiments.

Yay Castello! Great service, too, and homemade chocolate bark for dessert. On the binary scale of thumbs up or thumbs down, this is a definite thumbs up.

PS, I Love You

One early evening I found myself stomping up and down Brooklyn’s Foster Avenue, pushing the baby carriage, singing very loudly without necessarily realizing it:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave

His soul goes marching on . . rap a tap tap

Tap tap tap tap:

Glory, glory hallelujah .  .  .  .

I realized about midway through the song.

You see, as soon as the baby came out of gestational hiding, we decreed that we would to listen to Pete Seeger all of the time. Actually, Matthew decreed and I was too busy staring in glassy-eyed pain at an alarm clock, waiting for eight minutes to be up soes I could stop feeding on the left side, to issue any vetoes.

Relearning the words to these American classics gave Matthew something to do while he boiled everything in sight. (My vision of him in those early days is standing over a huge steaming cauldron, witchlike, staring at the plastic pump and bottle parts bobbing: taking care of his new family. It makes me want to cry with gratitude and it makes me yearn for those exhausting but extremely special times, even the alarm clock ones. However, I do not think that he would feel a yearning for this, and this is part of the reason why I am the mom.)

As it turns out, Pete Seeger is amazing and fun and highly digestible, be you a tiny person or the mom or the dad one. Soon enough, we all loved him. PS, we love you.

The first time I left the baby for an entire day, pump in hand, brow in a furrow, I returned home to see Henry dancing in his high chair to Yankee Doodle, eating spicy spinach takeout from the Afghan restaurant down the street. He actually could not have looked any happier at all. That was months ago.

Now Henry’d throw that spinach swiftly to the floor (“UH-OH”). Still, he’s really into that cd, particularly Jimmy Crack Corn, which is a song that Abraham Lincoln also loved to dance to while in his car seat, coincidentally, and later, play upon his banjo. I know this because of Wikipedia.

Old Paint

My current favorite is “I Ride an Old Paint.” It talks about dogies, which are something that my own dad always sang about (though he did the Roy Rogers version.)

This song is really moving and plaintive. Listen to it, really listen to the words. The great thing about these American ballads is that they are so familiar, but there are stories behind all of them, political stories, stories told through vernacular language, double meaning. Reading through interpretations teaches so much about history and culture and attitudes. Getting to know these songs is like eating except you can do it on long trips in the car without worrying about grinding crumbs into the upholstery.

Below, I’ll put my questions about I Ride an Old Paint, as well as some of the answers I’ve found. (I’ve been singing the song to myself a whole lot.)

I can’t find Seeger singing it in a way that I can embed so here are some Wainrights:

a. What’s an Old Paint? It’s a Pinto, ie, a horse that looks like it’s been splashed by paint. For some reason we (you know, me and the cowboys: we) normally call them by the Spanish name.

b. Is Dan a good name for a horse? I mean, if my friends had horses, 2/3 of them would be named Dan. But back then? Dan was and is the perfect name for a horse; don’t overthink everything!

c. What’s a hooleyann? The houlighan is specific rope throw to catch corralled horses.

d. Who are Fiery and Snuffy? It’s “the” fiery and snuffy, ie, nominal adjectives, not given names. The fiery and snuffy are either colors of horses (pintos and buff ones), or more likely, personalities. The fiery and the snuffy dogies would be likely to cause a stampede, so you ride around them slow. That said, if I ever have twins, Fiery and Snuffy it is.

e. What are dogies, again? Dogies are calves without mamas, perhaps called that because they had to have grass too soon instead of milk, and their bellies swelled way up. They are tiny cows with no parents and matted tails and raw backs and bad gas and no one to give them gripe water. “Dough guts.”Oh, dear.

f. And what is this song really about? It’s apparently a song sung to cattle to calm them at night.