Church Avenue Chomp

it emanates an almost holy light. oh wait, that's just the oven bulb.

. . . their baby might taste like this. Or look like this.

People, it’s time to jump ship on making pancakes. I mean, really. Mixing, sifting, there might be baking powder or was that soda, tempering butter into eggs, or was that vice versa. Keeping wet and dry separate?

Versus the Dutch Baby, which has SO MUCH going for it. Basically it’s an oven-baked buttery eggy puff pancake that is somehow redolent of a donut in yorkshire pudding format. I tried to fit more adjectives into that sentence and it just doesn’t work: you need to taste it.

It takes a bit of time in the oven, but the prep is lickity split —perhaps one minute of prep — and while it cooks you can either lay on the couch painting your toenails, or you can wipe day-old hummus out of your child’s neckfolds, depending on how you like to spend your free time.

I posted the other day about my own kid kissing me on the mouth, and chances are good that all this love is due to the fact that on 2 separate days we slept late and then got up and ate Dutch Babies rather than oatmeal.

I got the best DB recipe I have found from Sugarpea on RecipeZaar, who claims, in her profile, to dislike liver, oysters, mint, dill, and licorice. That’s a whole lot to not eat, Sugarpea! But I really like that one of her recipes is called Brussel Sprouts Mojo, because her husband sometimes invents dishes and whatever he invents is called whatever the ingredients are, plus “mojo.”

Anyhow Sugarpea points out that B & B’s make Dutch Babies because they are sure-fire: I think they make them because they are EASY. I’ll give you the broad strokes below but you might want to save her recipe in your bookmarks since her timing is a bit different, plus she believes in measuring the vanilla.

Dutch Baby

Serves me and my husband or me and my baby.

Oven to 450.

Mix in one bowl with a whisk:

3/4 C milk

1/2 C flour

this baby is faking nonchalance, but he did act impressed. i swear.

2 eggs

1.5 T sugar

Vanilla

Salt if you are using unsalted butter.

A few minutes before the oven is at 450, put 3T butter in bottom of a cast-iron skillet. Not a huge skillet, not a tiny one. Maybe 9 inches? You can also use a pie plate. Let the butter melt, then brush it around the side of the pan. Put whisked ingredients into the pan. Put the pan into the oven, cook for

maybe 18 minutes, reduce heat to 350, then cook for about 8 more minutes.

Remove, gaze with wonder upon your delightful puffy and beguiling breakfast, saying “Whoa” a bunch of times if you are us, dust with confectioner sugar if you feel like it, and serve however you like. We served with sliced strawberries but try berries, apples, chocolate, nutella, lemon juice, bananas, maple syrup. Go forth and go nuts!

It’s been a red-letter week for hugging and kissing, both by babies, and by strange men. I blogged about the being kissed by babies here. On to the scandalous strange men aspect of the story.

By Strange Men

This is not the man who kissed me.

I had a *bad* day the other day. In brief:

* Henry’s babysitter is going to work with another family 3 days a week. She should, because I’m not giving her enough hours, but it still means I need to find appropriate childcare for a whole day. Ugh.

* I had a meeting in midtown which got canceled, piggybacked with

* A dr.’s appointment that was not of the calendar of the dr. in question, who

* Informed me while I was there, though I didn’t get any services, that they don’t take my new insurance.

In light of these things, my head was spinning. I understood little except for the fact that, having been thwarted in so many ways, I needed to turn immediately in the direction of the gym.

I walked out onto 43rd Street, towards the subway that would take me briskly gymwards, when a man in a suit with a huge grin stopped in front of me, his arms held open in a highly welcoming gesture.

“It’s so good to see you!” he proclaimed, stepping towards me, closing his arms, giving me a big hug. Then, in the style of someone from another country, which was pretty much his whole style, he grabbed my face and kissed me on both cheeks.

In New York, people are always kissing each other hello. Women often air kiss, men often are a bit more genuine in their kisses.

And I admit that I frequently have a problem placing people. I admit this. So I wasn’t completely surprised. And he was so adamant about how good it was to see me that I was stalling while trying to find the most polite way to get across my message, which was “Wait, who the heck are you?”

I came up with:

“I’m so sorry . . . I can’t quite place you at the moment?” This should not have been phrased as a question, because by the time I got to the end of the sentence, I had realized that there was basically no question in my mind. I had not met this person before.

“I met you with Stacy!” he proclaimed. “Absolutely, the other day. Wonderful, just wonderful to see you.”

I took him in again. Shortish, dark suit, Indian appearing, late 30s or early 40s. Flipped through a mental Rolodex. Nope, rang no bells. Neither did Stacy.

“Stacy?” I asked. Tentatively.

“Yes, Stacy from Wall Street!” Ok, now I knew we were going in the opposite direction.

Where do I start, I wondered.

“It’s just that, I’m a mom at the moment? So I rarely leave Brooklyn. I’m actually quite sure we didn’t meet. But, you know, it’s very nice to meet you now.” I can’t say why I was afraid of hurting his feelings.

“Yes, you see! Stacy is also from Brooklyn!”

Right. Me, and Stacy, along with the other 299,999,998 of us, are from Brooklyn.

He finally gave up. And he said “Well we know each other now. So wonderful.”

Which was my line, except he took it a step further. He moved forward and hugged me again. This surprised me. And then he kissed me on either cheek, except . . . no. That’s actually not what he did. He kissed me on my left cheek, and then, without stepping back and coming back in, he went straight for my mouth. It was the right side of my mouth, somewhat near my cheek — but, no. It was on my lips. Absolutely.

I was flabbergasted, but do not have a behavioral template for how to react when a tremendously cheerful and otherwise seemingly well-mannered man starts to try to lay the mack down with me on the street. I was already feeling flummoxed when he found me. And I’m always too tired lately to think in a wholly crystal clear manner. What to do?

He grabbed my hands, flicked his eyebrows up and down twice, and said, “We really need to spend some time together!”

I stared at him. I wiggled my hands. I wasn’t afraid, I just wanted to be out of there without any other hugs or kisses . . . or even necessary conversations.

It’s like when I shop at DSW and someone suddenly starts following me and asking would I like to be part of a DSW club. No, I wouldn’t, I shop here in order to be ignored. Don’t your marketing people know anything?

And it seems that on 43rd Street, the Code of Ignoration should be even stronger. I wasn’t even doing anything provocative, like going on vacation in Continental Europe, for crying out loud. Why did this person still have my hands? He still had my hands.

Still, I felt a pressure to be nice to him — and that is what marks me as prey, though my theory on that is more complicated. I do believe that in balance, life is enhanced by being a trusting and kind person. However, I think that if someone murders me, it’s not unlikely that I’ll be apologizing to them as I breathe my last. Just in case the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding on my part, you know.

I considered telling The Kisser that I have a husband. But to what end? It’s not like I would go and “spend some time” with him, at the Westin or elsewhere, if I didn’t have a husband. That wasn’t exactly the issue.

So I settled for “I have to go home now.”

And he grabbed my hands tighter for one moment and inquired, with great fervor, “How old is your baby!?”

And I said, with great fervor,

“He’s a year!?”

And I tore away and we both scuttled off, me going westwards down 43rd Street, in the general direction of the Westin, and he towards Grand Central, back to wherever it was he called home.

My Question Is:

My question is: what was his experience of the interaction? Did he really think he knew me? Or do I just look like a person who would try to avoid hurting your feelings for a while, at least until the fourth kiss?

It was good to get back home to Brooklyn. To the one year old. To my husband.

To Stacy?

This is the second and last part of an extraordinarily small series. You can find Part I here.

Thanks to Photomish Dan on Flickr for use of the self-portrait.

It’s been a red-letter week for hugging and kissing, both by babies, and by strange men.

Yes? Yes. Okay, first thing first.

By Babies

Henry has taken to approaching me with a large wide-open mouth, which he very gingerly places somewhere on my head. Cheek, eye, mouth. He waits for a beat and breathes out. Sometimes he licks me a little bit, sometimes he brushes me with his teeth.

Aside from my fear of being experimentally bitten, it’s the best.

It happens a lot first thing in the morning, if we are snugglenapping because I’ve gotten into bed with him (no, not his bed, a big normal bed in his room) in order to get a bit more sleep.

It also happens on the changing table, after I save him.

When you lay Henry down to try to change him, which I only do when it’s absolutely necessary, he acts like you are crushing out the very light of his soul. He acts like a person about to throw himself upon a funeral pyre. Unhappiness is all relative, I guess.

Sometimes it gets so bad that I help him stand up again just so he can catch his breath. Then he sees me as an ally and is so relieved to be upright that he hugs me tight and kisses me on the head. This is ironic, of course, because I am the person who made him lay down on his back in the first place. Is this Stockholm Syndrome? Not quite, I don’t think.

I also, ironically, get lots of hugs because I can’t seem to keep the fire alarm from going off, and Henry feels sick with fear and tries to clambor into my own skin with me. The fact that I keep thwacking the offending machine with a broom until it falls off of the wall, 10 feet to the floor where the battery shatters out of it, might not help. However, this is the only way I can definitively get the beeping to stop. I hate that he is scared. But I do love when he hugs me. That is not why I fill the house with smoke, though. I think there is something wrong with our stove. Or maybe it’s our pans.

Part II, By Strange Men, will come next.

Thanks to Jannie-Jan on Flickr for Creative Commons use of the lips pic.

I’m always trying to take my favorite nephew, aka JEK, to a restaurant called Mortenson’s.

I love our trips together because it’s time well-spent, usually just the two of us. And I love it at Mortenson’s because it’s the sort of place where they cook with actual butter, and where they don’t get cooked chicken shipped in, pre-sliced, in a tub.

It’s not exactly a diner but it is a family restaurant of pretty good caliber. The real draw is that they make their own ice cream there. Every kind is listed out and described in a book at the table called the “Library of Flavors,” so you have ample chance to read and ruminate throughout the meal.

Mortenson’s is perfect.

JEK, meanwhile, is always trying to get me to take him to a fast-food restaurant, and I don’t have any idea why. Doesn’t he know we’re all into sloooooooow food these days? Doesn’t he know that ice cream from a machine that has had clay infused into it for thickness isn’t as good as Moosetracks or say, Almond Joy? Doesn’t he know that aunts don’t buy fast food?

I’m a Mortenson’s bully.

When we arrive, it’s usually after he’s made some incisive comments about my driving. He is 9 and knows how to get exactly nowhere, but he can tell when you keep turning around because you can’t quite find Mortenson’s, and he’ll show you his exasperation. He doesn’t have all day, here. He’s got to get home at a decent hour, so he can resume thinking about aliens in earnest.

Once I’ve located the restaurant and we’ve pulled into a parking space, I forget he is nine and become anxious about him crossing the parking lot. Does he want to hold hands? He does not. But as soon as we cross the threshold, my focus switches and I start hugging my wallet to my chest. This kid has me dribbling parsimonious comments for the remainder of the trip, because of the battery of questions and requests he levels at me.

Can I give him some quarters for the gumball machine?

Am I going to buy him a Mortenson’s Frisbee?

Would I care to at least keep an open mind and consider buying him a Mortenson’s Frisbee?

We went several weeks ago, and one thing that struck me from that visit was that he kept taking my picture, and then looking at the result and asking me if I am getting enough rest. Ahem.

In the car on the return trip, we had a conversation that came around to the topic of beauty. When I asked him what makes someone beautiful he replied, as if he had it all thought out,

“Well, I’d say that looking well-rested is pretty important.”

Ow.

We went to Mortenson’s most recently on Friday. He rode with his dad. I drove with Matthew and Henry.

The moment we sat down in the restaurant, JEK ordered a Belgian waffle with strawberries and whipped cream, as well as a hot chocolate. The moment the hot chocolate arrived he called the waitress back and asked for squirty cream. The moment she brought the cream over he told her that he’d like to be the one to apply it to his drink.

She grabbed the can tighter, in a motion similar to the one I make with my wallet, and she made up a pretty good lie about how it was a tough can to use unless you were like, sixteen or however old she was. She doled him out a good amount and yet managed to not give up the can. I had to admire her.

I looked at the huge pile of cream on his drink. “This is perfect,” I told him. “Because in my imitation of you at Mortenson’s, which I was doing for your mom just an hour ago, everything you order has whipped cream on it.”

So we took a picture, though it doesn’t reflect the chocolate fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream and . . . you guessed it, that he ordered about 10 minutes later. Three out of three things he ordered had whipped cream on them.

I’m not sure that it’s his fault. I remember him being perhaps two years old and being presented a plate by my mother. It had chunks of cut up hot-dog around the perimeter, with squirts of whipped cream interspersed between the chunks. I am not willing to assert that there was any food on the body of the plate.

I remember being completely torn about whether I was excited or worried about that meal. I’m still torn.

For many years between then and now, JEK lost his taste for hot dogs. But over dinner, when we were playing “what’s your favorite food with tomato in it,” (he made up this game, but clearly, we share some genetic material), he gave me a recipe for a sandwich that he has perfected.

He initially called it the Meaty Mangler, but then he amended it make it sound less scary.

I can’t remember the real title but I’ll update when I get the correct info. In case you’d like to try the Meaty Mangler at home, to see if it is your favorite tomato-filled food:

TK née Meaty Mangler

• Bread
• Some kind of meat (“ham, hot-dog, or meatball”)
• Ragu sauce
  
• Garlic powder

Walking home from the subway along Foster Avenue one night last week, something miraculous happened. Well, miraculous at least by my rubric.

I was passing by what New Yorkers call a “deli,” but not what people in other parts of the country think of as a New York deli. Rather, “deli” as in a small corner store with lots of Vitamin Water and cigarettes and some highly processed meat of the “luncheon” variety. Salted, shaped, and preserved, I cannot imagine a less healthy, or beguiling, eating alternative.

I was crossing the street near a deli notable for the bumpy Indian bitter gourds hanging around in wooden boxes outside of it when a large man trudged by me carrying a huge portion of recently butchered meat on his shoulder. It was the opposite of processed. There was a long white spikey object bouncing along off of the top of the meat. The man carrying the meat struggled up the steps and into the store.

I must have turned and stared without realizing it. I was wondering whether it was a skinned lamb, and trying to reconcile the white bouncing part into that scenario when a man dress in a Kurta pajama and a pillbox hat beckoned to me. He was standing at the back of a panel van.

Due to the few things I know about abductions, I have a grand terror of panel vans, to the degree that I cannot take out the trash at night if one is parked in front of our house. Since we live on an aspirational block with many contractors, it’s rare that a panel van is not parked in front of our house. It’s rare that I take out the trash.

However I do not, like many Americans, have a fear of men in Kurta pajamas and pillbox hats. In our area of Brooklyn, you don’t stand out if you are dressed as such: you fit in.

I found myself eager to begin my conversation with Kurta-pj’ed man, and despite the fact that he was luring me over to the back of a panel van whose doors were open, I cheerfully joined him.

He gestured to the inside of the van, which, I noted, was covered with blood and body parts. I reconsidered for a moment as he asked,

“Do you know what that is miss?

(I only wish you could hear my Indian accent for the duration of the blog post. You’ll have to imagine it: something between Indian like Homer Simpson would do, with a little bit of Leprechaun as well as some splashes of Transylvanian. This is, by the way, the trajectory of all of my accents. This guy was Bangladeshi, by the way.)

“Um, some beef?”

Exactly miss! That is part of the side of cow. And do you know what is that white part?

“The . . . tail? Why would the tail be attached? Oh, because of oxtail?”

Miss, are you a food critic? You  . . . you do not have trouble with spicy miss, do you? You can try the oxtail at the Village restaurant on Coney Island Avenue. And this? do you know what this is? gesturing to a uniformly maroon and slimy flat organ.

“Looks like — a liver?”

Indeed miss! Have you ever seen a cow heart?

I don’t think so but I can tell it won’t be long now . . .

And he pulled one out of a box to show me.

There is a new trend in our part of Brooklyn of delis carrying Halal meat. Again, these are stores that cater to people living on or around the block that they are on. If you go to the back of the store, there’s the butcher case. And apparently, what I’d been thinking of as an ice-cream and paper towels deli had turned into the sort dealing Halal meat.

This is great, so far as I am concerned, because I’ve been told that this meat is sourced more locally, farmed in a better way, and distributed via fresher channels than most meat in the grocery store.

I think that if I were reading this, I would not be sure what the intention was. In other words, does the person behind the story think it’s gross and weird to be stopped by a Bangladeshi man next to a bloody van?

No. Rather, delightful. Delightful and in fact, important. I frequently lament the fact that we live among so many people of different cultures, but that we don’t actually interact. We certainly don’t sit down together and talk things out, or schedule playdates together, and in the case of men wearing traditional Middle Eastern or South Asian dress, we almost never even acknowledge one another with a hello.

Whereas this guy offered to let me tour his Halal slaughterhouse in Paterson, New Jersey.

I could not have had a bigger grin on as I arrived home that night.

Mom, don’t worry, I won’t go alone.

Thanks to ToastyKen on Flickr for use of the globe!