Ben’s new song, Rock and Rocking:
[moderate strumming on the ukulele]
Rock and Rocking
A knock on the door means someone’s at your house
If you have a candle lighter, you can light a birthday candle
If you have a fireplace, you can light a fire
If a fire alarm rings that means there’s a fire
If you have some books that don’t have words, you can write some words in a book
[furious strumming on the ukulele]
3 comments February 9th, 2006
I still remember when my sister first contacted me about a writing group – with childcare! — that was starting up in Berkeley. I was a new mom in San Francisco, journaling like crazy, trying to make sense of my changed life, but I couldn’t get it together, too overwhelmed by my colicky boy, to join the group. Months later, the group was becoming a website and some time after that, I was invited aboard as an editor. It’s hard to believe that colicky boy is now a robust preschooler and Literary Mama is now a thriving website with a gorgeous anthology.
But, despite my opening, I don’t have maternal feelings toward the book. Others were much more directly involved in the birthing of this collection. And although editors are often referred to as midwives, I don’t have that relationship to the book, either. Rather, I feel toward the book the way I do when I run into a mom friend, familiar from the playground, all dressed up for a cocktail party. I almost don’t recognize her in her finery – she’s so familiar, yet I can’t place her at first — but I’m delighted when I do: Wow! You look great!
So after pausing to admire the gorgeous cover, to appreciate the comfortable weight of the book, I dove right in to see how the essays I know best, the ones that ran in Literary Reflections, look in their new home. Joanne Hartman’s lovely, quietly funny Evolution of a Muse speaks to me even more directly now that my first muse has started to talk back, and my second reminds me to capture these fleeting baby moments before they evaporate.
Lizbeth Finn-Arnold’s encounter with Henry Thoreau in Out of the Woods (an essay which is inspiring some thoughtful discussion over at Midlife Mama and at ReadingWritingLiving) starts bitterly: Thoreau may advise “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” “But Thoreau wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in his tiny cabin with my two tots.” But a visit to Walden Pond with those rambunctious kids helps Lizbeth figure out how to create the solitude she needs to write in the midst of her chaotic life.
Finally, poet Nicole Cooley’s essay starts “A confession: I was one of those people I shake my head at now, a woman who thought having a baby would not change my life.” She goes on to detail just how completely, how importantly, her baby changes her life and her poetry.
The revelation to me, with my essay-writer’s bias, is the poetry in the book, which I confess to rarely reading on the site. Lori Romero’s shape poem, Pregnancy, opens the anthology with a wonderfully fresh take on what can be, in less assured hands, something of a gimmick. Her recitation of the distractions and discomforts of pregnancy almost made me miss it. In Meegan Mulholland’s extraordinary Miscarriage of an English Teacher, the speaker’s careful, continually correcting grammar tries to keep a tight rein on the emotions of dashed expectations. Rachel Iverson’s gorgeous Namaste brings tears to my eyes with its simple, lovely wishes for her child: “a lemonade / stand white sand, green corn / tamales, sidewalks and marine / layer mornings/ newsprint on your fingers, / bubble baths, earthworms in / black dirt, satellite t.v. and / at least one big win…” And Linda Lee Crossfeld’s moving Packing the Car makes me grateful that my son is still just packing a lunchbox.
But the writing in this anthology is not all poignant moments and wistful reflections. These writers are funny. The fabulous Jennifer Eyre White’s Analyzing Ben flat-out cracks me up. In Lisa Rubisch’s How to Make a Meat Pie and other Tales of the Ambitious Mother, cooking for her toothless child inspires one of my favorite sentences of all time: “Feel terrific about this milk shake of meaty love you’ve created for your son.” These writers are sexy, whether they’re flinging chocolate at their daughters to teach a lesson about love, or stealing away for a charged moment with another kid’s dad. These writers are smart, compelling, and tough.
I could go on. I shouldn’t go on. Stop reading this blog and start reading the book.
February 6th, 2006
I order our produce box on Sunday evening when I’m relaxed and sort of rested and have ambitious plans for a week of home cooking. By the time the box arrives on Wednesday afternoon, I am usually wishing there was a lasagna inside.
So imagine my disappointment when I opened this week’s box and discovered that I thought leeks would be a good idea. Leeks are nice, but they have to be cleaned and chopped and cooked, and to me (and at the risk of bringing the wrath of leek-lovers down on me) they are not much more than onions that go bad faster. Really, carrots are so much simpler. I know of really only two good things to do with leeks (leek & potato soup and sweet potatoes Anna) and I pretty much ate my fill of leek and potato soup in college.
So imagine my delight when Wednesday night I opened the latest Real Simple, the magazine I love to hate (more on this another time; suffice to say right now, I just don’t recognize myself in its pages. And yet, I subscribe.) to find a recipe for butternut squash soup. With leeks! And it tastes really pretty good.
Here it is, with my emendations:
4 leeks
1 3-pound butternut squash
1 bay leaf
3/4 tsp kosher salt
5 c stock
1/4 c shelled raw pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
olive oil
By the way, these are the quantities listed in RS’s recipe, but use your best judgment, or what you have on hand. I made the soup with 2 leeks, two squash, and without measuring the stock – I just poured it in until it looked like soup — and it tasted great.
Real Simple suggests peeling the squash (you can do it with a regular vegetable peeler), seeding it, and chopping it into 1-inch chunks. I’m going to recommend another way to deal with the squash, even though I know some people will balk at turning on the oven to make a soup. But this is really easy, and makes a more flavorful soup:
Preheat the oven to 375. Line a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper, silpat, or simply spray with a little oil.
Halve the squash lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Fill the squash’s cavities with unpeeled cloves of garlic. Depending on the size of your squash, you could probably get a full head of garlic in there. This is a particularly good use for those “fiddly cloves of garlic” as Deborah Madison calls them, that are as much peel as useable garlic. Now drizzle the cut sides and the cavities of the squash with a bit of olive oil, flip the squash onto the pan (cut side down) and roast about 45 minutes or so, until it’s nice and soft. Once it’s out of the oven and cool enough to handle, scoop the squash into your soup pot. You can squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skins into your soup pot too, or squeeze it onto pieces of toast to eat as your reward for cooking your family soup. Your call.
Another digression, regarding stock. Before I had kids, I would have made my own stock for this soup, using the squash seeds and their accompanying scraped-out strings of flesh. You can put them into the soup pot with a slosh of olive oil and a chopped-up celery stalk, a chopped carrot, the leek tops, a bay leaf. Sauté it all for a few minutes, then deglaze the pan with some white wine and then several cups of water. Let it simmer for half an hour or 45 minutes (unlike meat stock, veggie stock doesn’t get better the longer it simmers) then strain and use. But now I have kids and we’re doing well to have homemade soup. I use store-bought stock these days.
Back to the soup.
Slice the leeks (all the whites and the tender greens) into half lengthwise and then into half-circles. Put them into a big pan of water (the bowl of a salad spinner works nicely for this) and let them sit a minute to get all the sand out. Then scoop the leeks into your soup pot.
Add your roasted or raw cubes of squash, the bay leaf, salt and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes or so, until the squash (if you started with raw cubes) and leeks are tender. Remove from the heat, then pick out the bay leaf and puree. Pour the soup back into the soup pot and keep warm till serving.
Meanwhile roughly chop the pumpkin seeds and rosemary. Heat a bit of olive oil in a small skillet and add the seeds and herbs, stirring occasionally, until fragrant (2-3 minutes). Obviously you can skip this garnish, but it’s tasty, and I’ve learned recently that pumpkin seeds are particularly good for you.
Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds and herbs.
1 comment February 5th, 2006
I am not a runner (though lately I run about eight miles a week). I don’t call myself a writer, either, though I write every day (and last month’s Mother Talk has me thinking I should claim the title for myself). But these days I feel similarly about running and writing. Urgent. Compelled. Anxious for the time to do them both, and relieved when I get an uninterrupted hour.
It hasn’t always been like this. I ran a little before I got pregnant the first time; it’s good, cheap exercise, and I lived near Golden Gate Park, so a new and different route was always available to me. But I didn’t miss it when my pregnancy made running impossible. I walked, did some yoga. When Ben was a baby, a friend and I joined a gym with childcare; the first day we went, we blithely signed our kids up for 90 minutes and hit the stairmasters. Ten minutes later, one of the childcare staff was flagging us down and we returned to find our weeping children clinging to the gate. So much for the gym.
Meanwhile, graduate school had pretty much sapped me of the urge to write for years after I finished. Writing a dissertation can do that to you. I started keeping a journal during my pregnancy and for the first time (six journals later) I have kept it going. But the writing was often no more than a log tracking short naps and sleepless nights.
Then one day this summer I found myself in my doctor’s office with my third case of strep throat in as many months. I was rushed and distracted, using the examining table as a changing pad for my squirmy, poopy new baby. I wanted to get my prescription and go.
But my doctor asked me how I was doing and the floodgates opened.
“I’m sick, and I’m tired, and I hate feeling like this and I want you to give me something that will make it all better, and I know you can’t, you can only give me antibiotics, and I hate taking antibiotics when I’m nursing even though you assure me it’s okay. I just want to be better. What can I do?”
Now, I love my doctor. She’s old-fashioned and maternal, and normally I don’t really go for that. I already have a mother, thanks, that’s enough. When I go to her office and see all the wizened Chinese ladies in the waiting room I feel like I do when I’m watching a baseball game on TV and a Viagra ad comes on: Oh, I don’t think I’m the target audience here. But she stayed open late for me once on a Friday Christmas Eve, when I called from my son’s pediatrician’s office in a state because my son had just been diagnosed with strep throat and I realized I had a sore throat, too, and she would be the difference between a tolerable Christmas weekend and three days spent writhing with pain and fever. She returns my phone calls, she talks to me about my life. She’s available.
So when she looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “You need to get more rest, and get more exercise,” I paid attention. And when she followed that up with a glance at fussy Eli and a smile and said “Good luck with that!” I didn’t even want to slap her. I took it as a challenge, and I set out to show her I could make myself better.
I went out and bought some new running shoes, loaded up the nano (a gift to Tony which I quickly hijacked) with Kanye West and jogged up and down the hills of Mill Valley breathing in the blooming gardens and freshly-mown grass. It was always hard to get going; there was always the fear, as with writing, that maybe today it wouldn’t go well. But I began to notice some changes. I was sleeping better. I was fending off illness. I took my running shoes on a family vacation and ran in the rain, and for the first time in years flew cross country without getting sick.
Then one day the nano wasn’t charged up so I just ran. At first I had one of Ben’s songs pounding through my head (”She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…”) but then I managed to shut it out and start thinking about a journal entry. Now I don’t even bother with the nano, though I do wish I had some kind of machine that I could download my brain into so I wouldn’t lose the running ideas the minute I come in the door and Ben runs to me. (”It’s called a tape recorder,” says Tony. “But that takes talking, “I say. “I just want the machine to know.”)
I was at my doctor’s office recently, dropping off new insurance information with the receptionist, and my doctor spotted me in the waiting room. I hadn’t seen her since our talk last summer. “Good for you,” is all she said.
And today as I’m thinking about a book project a friend proposed, I put my head down and ran halfway to the ocean before I noticed where I was.
1 comment February 3rd, 2006
Ben: Mama, when you were a little girl, did you want to be a mama when you got big?
Me: You know, I did. I wanted to be a teacher, too, but I always wanted to be a mama.
Ben (whiney): But Mama, I wanted you to want to be a symphony conductor!
1 comment February 2nd, 2006
At the risk of needing to change this blog’s name to tofuandcaroline.com (the eponymous tony might have something to say about that), I should offer up the best simple tofu recipe I’ve made, from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This is the standard tofu we make for stir fry, one of Ben’s favorite meals (and one he is learning how to cook! More on that another day).
Carmelized Golden Tofu
1 pound of firm tofu, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
3 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
Drain the tofu and, if you have the time, blot it a bit with paper towels. Heat the oil in a medium nonstick skillet over fairly high heat. Add the tofu and fry until golden. It takes a few minutes to color, so let it cook undisturbed while you do something else (really! leave it alone!) then come back and turn the pieces over. Don’t let them get dry and hard, but 5-6 minutes a side should give them some nice color. Remove the tofu from the pan, turn the heat down to medium, and put in the soy sauce and brown sugar. Whisk them together a bit and then add the tofu. Toss well, simmer for a couple minutes, then add a few tablespoons of water and cook till the sauce coats the tofu nicely. Turn off the heat; let the tofu cool in the syrup for 10 minutes before serving.
4 comments February 1st, 2006
I’ve been a vegetarian a long time now, but I really don’t proselytize about it, and I take true vicarious pleasure in the meat-eating of my friends (recently I was out to dinner with some friends who ordered head cheese. Head cheese! And they loved it and I was so pleased.) Further, tofu and tempeh just can’t replace meat and never will. Bacon is bacon, and bacon is delicious (I continued to eat BLT’s for an entire summer after I started calling myself a vegetarian), and you’ll never get anything so bacon-y good made out of soy. Still, other than bacon I don’t much like meat, and never learned to cook it so well I wasn’t afraid I’d poison myself, so I don’t eat it. But you won’t catch me putting tofu in a burrito or someplace else it doesn’t belong. I try to be pretty upfront about tofu; if it’s in something I’ve made, you’ll know it’s there, and you can probably pick it out if you really want to. But we’ve learned some good things to do with it. Here’s one we tried recently:
Moosewood Sesame Tofu with Spinach
1 pound firm tofu
1/4 c sesame seeds
2 tbsp dark sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
a few drops Tabasco or similar (we have chipotle tabasco, which tasted good)
2 tsp vegetable oil
3 cloves chopped garlic
10 oz baby spinach, rinsed
Slice the tofu lengthwise into 4 rectangular slabs, then halve the slabs to make 8 square pieces. Spread the sesame seeds on a plate and press each tofu square into the seeds to coat evenly.
Heat the sesame oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Place the tofu squares in a single layer in the skillet and cook about 5 minutes. Turn them over carefully and cook another 5 minutes. Now add the soy sauce and tabasco, and turn the tofu squares over again to cook about one more minute, until most of the liquid is absorbed. Transfer the tofu to a plate, leaving the stray sesame seeds in the pan.
Add the oil & garlic to the pan now and sauté about 30 seconds. Add the still-damp rinsed spinach and cook a minute or two, until wilted but still bright green. Season with salt & pepper.
Put the spinach on a platter and top with the tofu. If, like me, your partner went to costco and you have quantities of spinach to use, then serve your tofu and spinach with the following:
Green Rice
1 1/2 c white rice
2 1/4 c water
3 scallions (or a handful of chives)
4 c loosely packed spinach
black pepper
Cook the rice. While the rice is cooking, coarsely chop your scallions or chives and rinse the spinach. Saute the scallions/chives in a bit of oil for a minute or two, then add the spinach and cook till just wilted. Puree in a blender till smooth, adding water or stock if necessary.
When the rice is done, fluff it with a fork and stir in the spinach puree.
2 comments February 1st, 2006
OK, OK, I know everyone’s probably already seen this, but after all these years it still makes me laugh.
February 1st, 2006
Thanks to Andi for a link to one of the coolest things I’ve seen on the web in a long time. If it works on onesies, my life will be complete.
Now, I willl try to find the Japanese cat video for you.
1 comment February 1st, 2006