Eggs In Hiding

Growing up, we always had a spare fridge in the cellar. It was kept stocked with beer and soda, no-name soda and Schaefer long necks – the refillable kind. My parents would order two cases of beer from the beer store, they’d be delivered to the back stoop and the empties would be taken away.

Every year at Easter, we’d dye six dozen hard-boiled eggs. After the requisite "hide them in the garden and hope you find them all", some of the eggs would get turned into egg salad, or tucked into school lunches, but most of them got pickled, and stashed in the downstairs fridge alongside the beer and soda.

The eggs were packed into quart sized mason jars, and took on an off-putting shade of grey green – from what spice, I’ve no idea. Despite the fact that they were a household staple, I don’t think I ever ate one.

Feeling nostalgic the other day, I thumbed through a bunch of cookbooks looking for some pickled eggs. I only found them in one cookbook, The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook. As befits an encyclopedia, it is comprehensive – running to nearly a thousand pages, and including at least 20 recipes for hard-cooked eggs.

The pickled eggs recipe is pretty straightforward (boil 2 T. sugar, 1 t. salt and 1 t. mixed spices in 2 cups of cider vinegar – pour it over a dozen hard-boiled eggs in a mason jar – let stand for a couple of days before using), but another recipe demanded to be shared.

EGGS IN HIDING

1 T. butter
1 can condensed tomato soup
½ pound American cheese, diced
6 hard-cooked eggs
1 cup cereal flakes, crushed

Heat butter and soup in top of double boiler. Add cheese and cook until melted, stirring constantly. Arrange halves of hard-cooked eggs (cut lengthwise) in buttered baking dish. Pour cheese mixture over eggs. Sprinkle with cereal flakes. Brown under broiler. Serves 6.

If you are brave enough to make this, and post a picture on your blog, I will send you a kitchen implement. Start peeling those eggs! And no, I can’t tell you what kind of cereal to use, but I think you should serve it on toast points.

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This post instigated in part by the Parent Bloggers Network on behalf of the incredible egg, and I approved this message.

Eco-Monograms in the Lunchbox

Everything has a story.

Years ago, my sister-in-law was working for the company that was assembling the land to build what's now a fancy hotel in New York. One of the properties that got bought and demolished was an old, funky hotel. In the brief moment between the last paying guests and the wrecking ball, we got access to the hotel and swooped through - acquiring leaded glass windows, kitchen ladles, #10 envelopes, oval platters, champagne buckets, a ceramic table lamp, a mess of stainless steel flatware, and a couple of bricks of plain white cotton dinner napkins, still wrapped in plastic fresh from the cleaners.

They're nothing special, the napkins. They'd look fine starched and pressed in a dimly lit dining room, but in the bright lights of my kitchen, lo these many years later, they're showing their liver spots, yellowy stains of indeterminate origin, resistant to bleach. I don't really care - I have so many that we can use freshly laundered cloth napkins with every meal and not run out before laundry day rolls round again. And given the amount of ketchup that gets blotted up on a regular basis, no napkin would emerge unscathed.

Back in September, when I was agonizing over what to do about lunch for the newly minted kindergartner, I assembled a bunch of plastic containers of various sizes, and some plastic utensils, and a little thermos - that is, lots of things to send back and forth to school. And I decided that, as long as the lunch box and all the bits and pieces were going back and forth, I'd send her to school with a cloth napkin.

I pulled out five of the hotel napkins, got some fabric paint and a stencil kit, painted her initials onto one corner of each napkin, and doodled on the other three corners with colored Sharpie. [Word of advice: Sharpie doesn't come out when you want it to come out, but it doesn't hold up terribly well in the way that I used it here - it bled a little and the color faded.]

You know what? It's March, and those five cloth napkins are still in circulation - which means that we've not used more than 100 paper napkins. Score!

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These cloth napkins are brought to you by Nature's Source and the Parent Bloggers Network, and I approved this message.

A Paean To Porridge

Porridge, by Spike Milligan

Why is there no monument
To Porridge in our land?
If it's good enough to eat,
It's good enough to stand!

On a plinth in London
A statue we should see
Of Porridge made in Scotland
Signed, "Oatmeal, O.B.E."

I never used to like oatmeal. It was served periodically when I was a kid, and I remember it as mucilaginous.  I far preferred Cream of Wheat and even Wheatena.

A couple of years ago, I discovered that my favorite sandwich shop served divine oatmeal - steel cut oatmeal, topped with cinnamon brown sugar butter, toasted nuts and/or dried fruit - I get everything, and it doesn't even need milk. And then the cook at the girlie's (former) daycare began serving oatmeal to the kidlets every morning, and Mir started asking for it in the morning.

So I started trying to make oatmeal at home. I tried a bunch of brands, trying to avoid the mucilaginousness I grew up with. The Silver Palate oatmeal cooks up nice and toothy, but it's hard to find. The McCann's steel cut is awesome, but spendy, and it takes a half an hour to make.  Good old Quaker Oats is fine if you use the old-fashioned variety and cook off all the water.  And hallelujah, I've just discovered that Quaker is now selling steel cut oats in the supermarket, for half the price of the McCann's.  

Now, on the two days a week that she takes the bus (and that we therefore have more time in the morning), I make a bowl of 5 minute oatmeal for the girl, and on Saturday or Sunday morning, we make a batch of the 30 minute steel cut for the whole family. It's a nice warm way to start the day in the midwinter.

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This post was written for the Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by The Quaker Oats Company. Quaker is being a good corporate citizen: from now until February 28, for every UPC from a Quaker Oatmeal hot cereal product that you enter at Start With Substance , Quaker will donate one bowl of oatmeal to Share Our Strength, a childhood hunger organization. One hitch is that you need to be a Facebook member to participate. I didn't really follow the rules (so what else is new), because I was supposed to tell you all how I help other people, but I've been down that road recently, so today you just get to hear about oatmeal. Okay by you? Don't forget that nice poem I found you. Does anyone read the fine print? 

How To Be A Mom

Carry Provisions
I keep a couple of Trader Joe’s fruit leather bars in my bag, for food emergencies. They’re pretty indestructible, unlike cereal bars (which turn into crumbs when banged around under the wallet and keys) or fresh fruit (which tends get dinged and leaky instantly), and they’re less likely to end up all over the car (like Cheerios or raisins).

Carry Tools
A carabiner is a godsend. When the child sheds a layer and expects you to carry it, you clip the offending garment to your belt-loop and progress. It’s also good for binding a mess of shopping bags together so you don’t keep dropping absolutely everything.

Carry Supplies
Yeah, the kid wipes her nose on her sleeve more often than not, but if I want to go after her dirty face with mother spit, I’d rather use a tissue. And for those times when she has to pee by the side of the road? Enough said.

Carry Distraction
Tucked in a Ziploc bag we’ve got a handful of crayons, a small notepad, and some Dover stencils. Waiting for dinner at a restaurant? Draw a picture.

Carry Entertainment
I love to listen to music in the car – love to put the (six) CD player on shuffle and be surprised at every turn. The child tends to want to listen to the same song over and over and over. So, make sure that one or two tracks of the sixty are things that she’ll like and that I find bearable, or even wonderful. Let’s put it this way: I love that she likes Springsteen’s Girls in Their Summer Clothes and k.d. lang’s rendition of Hallelujah.

Carry Tools that double as Entertainment
It’s always nice to have a flashlight handy – you never know when the power’s going to go out. But it can be great entertainment for a child too. I’ve got a penlight tucked into my bag, particularly fascinating because it makes green light.

Carry the Glow Necklace at All Times
Well, maybe that’s too idiosyncratic for a general “How to be a Mom” rule – but it’s on my list. Several months ago, she made me a “glow necklace” at school – “it’ll take away your bad dreams, Mommy”. It’s not even a necklace, it’s just a string of beads. It doesn’t glow. But it lives in my bag, and I run it through my fingers like a rosary, and think of the little girl who melts my heart every single day.

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These few of my favorite things are brought to you by Yoplait and the Parent Bloggers Network, and I approved this message.

Lunch: First steps on a road to obsolence

The girlie went off to school yesterday with grapes and cheese and a piece of bread and some homemade "cookies" (actually pie crust scraps baked with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar), and I stayed home and organized the lunch supplies into a plastic box, so all of the labor-saving snacks and plastic containers were in one place.

If I'm short on time in the morning, some of these things will help, right? Fruit leather, string cheese, juice boxes, applesauce, cereal bars, rice cakes, raisins and Fig Newtons. The problem is that there's so much trash involved with all of this stuff. But, baby steps. Eventually we'll get her eating out of one of those clever bento boxes.

And then someday, she'll be able to make her own lunch, and I'll be obsolete.

"This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as an entry for a contest sponsored by Brothers-All-Natural."

Dining Out with Small Fry

In our town, midway between our house and the kid's daycare, there's a restaurant. It's one of those tavern-type places with adequate food and a low-key atmosphere, and you can always get a hamburger if nothing else appeals. It's not a chain, it's nothing special, and kids eat free on Monday nights.

We avail ourselves of the Monday night special from time to time. I order a chopped salad with a side of mashed potatoes, W. gets a burger, Miss M. gets gloppy kid-friendly "mac & cheese", and everyone is happy. Almost every time we go there, we run into other people we know - like daycare compadres, or neighbors en masse with all kids accounted for.

One night, we went in and ran into another daycare kid, with her mom and baby sister. Miss M. and her friend were in pig heaven and we ended up switching seats so the kids were at one table and the grown-ups were at the adjacent table. The kids were under the table, across the room, and generally carrying on, but in a really happy way - there were no tears, there wasn't any whining, they were just having fun.

Well. Some couple across the room got completely bent out of shape about these two charming four year olds having the time of their little lives - at a restaurant, together, not at school! They seemed to think these kids should be wearing white gloves and sitting with their hands folded neatly in their laps. I think, if you go out to dinner at 6:00 on a Monday at a restaurant where kids eat free on Monday nights, you should expect there to be high-spirited kids, being kids. Next time, eat out on Tuesday.

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This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp. I don't usually do the PBN blog blasts that require such an overtly commercial blurb, but I confess to having a soft spot for Burger King. If we must stop for fast food, I generally choose Burger King. And it's all because of a family friend. He'd grown up in the food business, and ended up owning a bunch of Burger Kings. Every time he'd stop by our house, he'd leave behind BK swag: glasses, toys, tchotchkes, and this fine backpack I unearthed recently. If you click to enlarge, you'll be able to read the fine print:

(So you other restaurants can get off my back)

He was a mensch of the highest order.

Celery Seeds and Salt Water Pools

I grew up swimming in salt water. Not only did we go to the ocean every Sunday in the summertime, we belonged to a yacht club with a salt water swimming pool. To this day, I find fresh water weird to swim in. Your buoyancy is better in salt water, and salt water feels nicer in your eyes - after all, your eyes are filled with salt water.

Pretty much every day, all summer long, we went to the club. My mother camped out in one of the adirondack chairs, drinking iced tea from the tea lady. And we plopped in and out of the pool, seared our bellies on the hot slates, ate frozen Milky Ways from the snack bar, and hated every minute of "adult swim".

One day, I swam to the edge and tipped my head to slick my hair back, but I caught my chin on the concrete lip and ended up in the emergency room with six stitches. Two days later, my little sister, who was little enough to be swimming with a bubble, jumped into the pool backwards and split her chin open. Another trip to the ER, another six stitches. Hers were black; mine were blue. And a couple of days after that, my father did a cannonball into the not deep enough midsection of the pool, and sprained his ankle on the bottom. QED: bad things happen in threes.

Yesterday, I was poking through a box of family photos and found an envelope of old postcards of the town I grew up in, including two of the club. The photo of the clubhouse was taken before 1929 - because that building was replaced by a stodgy columned brick edifice. And I don't know when the photo of the pool was taken - but the pool looked nearly the same when I was a kid. In fact, I think some of the pictured chairs and benches were still around, thickly painted with white paint, though the wood framed diving boards had been replaced by a pair of springy modern diving boards (low and high) with metal frames.

It was nice growing up with that pool. We lived close enough that eventually we kids could walk down there alone. It became a home away from home, and a reason to never have to go to sleepaway camp.

And despite its echt WASP trappings, it was full of eccentrics. The local superintendent of schools hung out at the pool, drinking beer on ice in a skimpy black bathing suit. How could we take him seriously, knowing what he did on his weekends? A boy my brother's age wore the same Speedo that Mark Spitz had worn when he scored the seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics. That boy wore that suit every single day, and at the end of the summer, his buttocks were tanned with stars and stripes where the sun had snuck through the white in the pattern. Somewhere in there, my parents got divorced - but we still kept using the club. To keep everything copacetic, and to facilitate my father paying the bills for his kids' activities, the club set up a special account for us: Z226. Everyone else had an account number that started with the first letter of their last name; we had Z226. It was kind of dramatic and liberating, though it could have been like a scarlet letter.

A couple of times each summer, we'd have dinner on the terrace, standing in silence while they shot off the cannon and took the flags down at sunset. The house salad was always garnished with slivered red cabbage and dressed with a vinaigrette laced with celery seed. Every time I toss a little celery seed in my salad dressing, I remember that salad from the club.

I kind of miss it. The club that is. I can make a fine salad anytime.

[Inspired by Parent Bloggers and their Little Swimmers blog blast.]

The Gifts To The Magpie

Over the years, W. has given me lots of gifts - Christmas, birthday, Valentine's Day, there have been more than twenty years of events to mark. I still have the gray and black silk scarf that was the first present he ever gave me.

Plenty of times, he's given me something that he really wants for himself (don't we all?) - like more kitchen knives than anyone really needs.

But there are two things that stand out, two things I still have and that I regard with great fondness.

For Christmas one year, many years ago, when I had a low-paying non-profit job and he was free-lancing and we had no money, he bought me a pair of scissors. Just a pair of scissors. But they're hefty, sharp sewing shears with a comfortable red handle that well fits my hand. At the time, and for some time thereafter, I needled him endlessly about the scissors. But, I've grown an inordinate fondness for them and it pleases me to pick them up when I embark on some fabric-centered craftiness.

The best, though, was on Valentine's Day 2002. My sister had her second baby in the late evening on 2/13/02. A couple of hours later, my brother-in-law called to announce the birth. It was about 2:00 in the morning, and it was now Valentine's Day. Because we were awake, and because he was bursting with excitement knowing the perfection of the gift, W. fetched his Valentine's present for me. An iPod. The first generation iPod. It was well and truly a wonderful gift. I'd been lusting after it, but I was too abstemious to indulge myself. And his palpable exhilaration added to the all around thrill of that moment in the wee hours of the morning. I loved that gift. I loved loading it up with music and hitting shuffle and going to town. I love it.

I still have that iPod. Its battery is nearly shot, but it works fine when plugged in, so this past Christmas it became the all-Christmas-music playback device. I can't ever part with it even though it's no longer in daily use.

Some gifts are just right - sometimes immediately, and sometimes because they grow on you.

What's the most idiosyncratic gift you've ever gotten?



This post was inspired by the Parent Bloggers Network and GetInHerHead.

Report Card: English

Name: Miss M.
Age: 4 and a quarter
Grade: Pre-school

Subject
English – Poetry
Rhymes with abandon

Daddy:
What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Miss M:
Snap crackle pop with granola on top. Hey, pop and top rhyme!

Subject
English – Vocabulary
Able to use four-syllable words when one will do

Yesterday, she described a strawberry as gargantuan, when big would have been more than acceptable.

Subject
English – Grammar
Budding stickler for the proper use of language

Miss M. to her mother: I don’t want you to lay, to lie down with me.

Subject
English – Handwriting
Capable of writing name, largely unprompted

This sanctioned bragging brought to you by the Parent Bloggers Network and Jenifer Fox.

Bread and Jam - and Frances, and Ellyn, and Jessica

Me: You're full of beans this morning.

Miss M.: No, I'm full of lobster.

I can only think that this is because we've been reading (and re-reading and reading again) Bread and Jam for Frances before bed. Because, after Frances remembers that there are all sorts of wonderful things to eat beyond bread and jam, she trots off to school with a lobster salad sandwich. Maybe lobster was cheaper in 1964?

Frances is often held up as a poster child picky eater, but it's hard to argue that she really is - her bread and jam kick doesn't even last two days. The book starts with breakfast, at which meal she chooses not to eat her egg - there is no indication that she's refused everything but bread and jam prior. At dinner that same night, she chooses not to eat her veal cutlet in favor of bread and jam - and confesses to having traded her lunch for a friend's bread and jam. At breakfast on the second day, she isn't offered an egg - because, her mother says, "you do not like eggs." At lunch on that second day, her friend has an elaborate lunch with sandwich and pickle and hard-boiled egg and fruit and dessert, while Frances has bread and jam. At night on the second day, when presented with bread and jam, she realizes that "What I am / is tired of jam" and so has spaghetti and meatballs for dinner with the rest of the family.

And on to the finale - her own complicated and elegant lunch at school, complete with doily, a tiny vase of violets, celery and olives, a tiny basket of cherries, and the afore-mentioned lobster salad sandwich.

Meals with our small child are the typical mix of cajoling and rejoicing. She'll scarf down risotto like nobody's business, but steak? Nah. Hot dogs and cheese sandwiches, yes. Peanut butter, no. Sometimes we'll resort to white lies: "This is Pat's chicken - she told me how to make it." [Pat's the cook at school.] The chicken in question was a butterflied charcoal grilled chicken, with all the black stuff cut off, and ketchup on the side - and Pat had nothing to do with it. And the kid ate that chicken.

Mostly, I've tried to take to heart the Ellyn Satter dictum: "The parent is responsible for what, when, where - and the child is responsible for how much and whether." She's not going to starve. Sure, I wish she'd eat some more vegetables, but I'm not going to start pretending that pureed cauliflower is ricotta and neither am I going to lace chocolate chip cookies with chickpeas. And hey, even fancy organic hot dogs are cheap! If she starts demanding lobster salad sandwiches, we're going to be in the poorhouse.


[This is loosely in response to the Parent Bloggers blast in connection with the release of Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld.]

The Little Ford

Now that I’m a grownup, I drive a sober Swedish car – a Saab 900 from 1996, with a stick shift and a hatchback and a large pile of cracker crumbs in the backseat. It’s nimble, it gets good gas mileage, it has a six CD changer. What more could a girl want?

More. I want charm. I want magic. I want my heart to sing when I sidle up to my car in the parking lot.

And once upon a time, and really for a rather long time, 17 years to be precise, I had such a car. A little Ford Fiesta. It lived on the streets of NYC and looked like hell as a result. But it went like stink all day long, got amazing gas mileage, and was surprisingly capacious for a small car.

And it had charm. It didn’t have air-conditioning, but it did have those little tilting vent windows. It had a dent on the nose where I ran (gently) into the back of an (empty) school bus in stop-and-go traffic on the Long Island Expressway when I leaned over to get my Tab. Its gas gauge was idiosyncratically pessimistic – it had about a ¼ tank left when the gauge read empty – and all too easily one could be lulled into a false sense of security and then, oops, run out of gas on the FDR Drive. To lock the door, you had to open the handle while pushing down the lock button – so I developed a second nature method of opening the (driver’s side) door with my right hand while pushing the button down with my left elbow.

And the car was magic. I’ve written about it once before, about the time the muffler fell off. Another time, W. and I were driving leisurely through rural Pennsylvania, near the Water Gap, on a lovely Sunday afternoon, before cell phones were ubiquitous. He was driving, and noticed something awry, and determined that the car was burning up a wheel bearing (he knows these things). He pulled off the road near someone’s barn and we scratched our heads as to what to do next. With that, the barn doors opened and a guy came out. “Can I help you?” “Well, we’ve blown a wheel bearing.” “Come with me, and bring the jack.” With that, the guy takes off across the road and into a field behind another barn. There in the field: another white Ford Fiesta, junked, abandoned, rusting. They jacked up the parts car, pulled off the wheel bearing, and trotted back to where my little Ford was waiting. Transplant in place, $20 to our savior, we went on our way, marveling at our luck, and at the magic of the little car.

And possibly the best thing about the little car? When it was finally time to part with it, its floorboards were rotting out and driving through a puddle on the Cross Island Expressway caused the car to sputter to a halt, meaning that we made that Thanksgiving traffic jam, I’m sorry to say. But, through the miracles of the internet, we found some crazy people in New Hampshire who were racing Ford Fiestas, and they came to NY and paid me $400 for the little car, $400 so it could go off to another life as a racing car. What a way to go, eh? So much better than the ignominious junkyard that most cars go to when they die. A race car. My little Ford.

Someday, sooner than later, the Saab is going to go. Its clutch is weak, the display for the climate control (but not the control itself) is shot, and it really needs new tires. And I’m at a loss as to what could possibly replace it, especially since the poor Saab has never quite wormed its way into my heart the way the little Ford did.

You may well ask why I’m writing a paean to a Ford Fiesta – a car that’s not been available in the US since, oh, 1980. Well, MotherGooseMouse had a post today about her dear, departed Pacifica – and it turned out that her post was in response to a blog blast by the Parent Bloggers Network announcing Car Blabber at Ask Patty – and one thing led to another. Somehow, I don’t think this is what they’re looking for, but it’s what came to mind. I did rather like that Ford.