Breast Milk to Africa

Thanks to Megnut, I read today about an organization helping African babies by shipping expressed breast milk to them. I never had enough breast milk for my own baby, and had to supplement, but the idea of pumping and donating is a selfless one with tremendous payback. Good karma.

Hot Little Biscuits

I love biscuits, and I find that they amplify and complete a simple meal, like the "porky pea soup" I pulled out of the freezer last night. [Yes, that's how W. labeled it when he put it away, and it was indeed porky.] But most biscuit recipes make far too many for our little family of two adults and one unpredictable child, and since they're best right out of the oven, I don't like to have leftovers. So, I've finally perfected a recipe to make biscuits for two (or three). It uses only one cup of flour, and makes about six biscuits. I've given a couple of options - one for the leavening, one for the liquid. I've had a can of Bakewell Cream in the cupboard for awhile, along with a can of buttermilk powder in the fridge. If you have either, use - otherwise, don't. The somewhat unorthodox baking method works beautifully and comes from the back of the Bakewell Cream can.

Hot Little Biscuits, for two or three people

1 cup flour
1 t. Bakewell Cream*
1/2 t. baking soda
OR 1 1/2 t. baking powder in place of the Bakewell Cream and baking soda
1/4 t. salt
2 T. butter
3/8 cup milk
OR 3/8 cup water + 1 1/2 T. buttermilk powder in place of the milk

1. Preheat oven to 475° F.
2. Mix all dry ingredients together (this includes the buttermilk powder if you're using it).
3. Cut butter into smallish pieces, about 1/2" chunks, and add to the dry ingredients. Using your fingers, toss the butter to coat with flour, and quickly squish the butter pieces to flatten. Work quickly so the butter doesn't melt from the heat of your fingers, and keep squishing until all the butter is in nice little pieces.
4. Quickly add the liquid (water or milk). Stir with a butter knife until it comes together. Using the knife, carve out five or six lumps of dough and place on a non-stick pan. Pat them if they're too unruly looking. They should be about 3/4" thick.
5. Bake for five minutes at 475° F. When the timer goes off, turn off the oven and leave the biscuits in the oven for another 10 minutes, until golden brown.

*Bakewell Cream is a substitute for cream of tartar - when combined with baking soda, it becomes like baking powder. Here's a good explanation. The Bakewell Cream makes really fluffy biscuits - they rise better than those made with regular double-acting baking powder.

Annals of Knitting

What possessed me to try and make a hat out of "fur" yarn? Argh. I cast on and started knitting, decided that the cast on was too tight and spent about 20 minutes unraveling it. The fur ties itself in knots. Argh. Once I got going, it was okay - but if there are any errors, I'm not fixing them!

Ideas for Choreography

When I was a small person, my mother used to take me to the ballet. Not only did she take me to performances, she took me out of school to attend open rehearsals and the like.

In 1973, I wrote a letter to George Balanchine, suggesting an idea for a ballet:



Little did I know that Jerome Robbins had already made that ballet - in 1953. He called it Fanfare.

I never got a response to my letter.

Knitting Projects #3 and 4

I made two more hats! The one on the left used a mess of little scraps of yarn, and was knit flat and sewn up. I'm sending it to the local NICU. The one on the right was my first attempt at using a circular needle (and switching to double-points for the decrease at the top). I think it's charming and I'm going to give it to a friend who's about to have a baby.



I bought more yarn today.

Truely Whimsical, and now you may bow

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Entirely Miss Reverend Lady Magpie the Prickly of Mabe Burnthouse Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Word of the Day: Beeves

I've been reading Michael Pollan's book, An Omnivore's Dilemma, and scratching my head at his use of "beeve". I could figure out what he means from the context, but it's peculiar enough (to me anyway) that I finally looked it up.

In addition to being the meat from a cow/steer/bull, a beef IS a cow/steer/bull. The plural of a beef is beeves. Granted, it's archaic. But odd, no? Especially because Pollan uses the singular back-formation "beeve" to refer to a single cow/steer/bull.

And just in case you were wondering, the meat of a pig is called pork, but "the pork" is not an archaic equivalent to "the pig". The pork is something that gets doled out in Washington and Albany.

Apple Clafouti

Apple Clafouti is the other Julia Child recipe from last month's Christmas Meme. This is also from Mastering the Art of French cooking, but it's the one from Volume 2. She has clafoutis in both volumes.

It seems that the original French name was "clafoutis" - singular, but with an "s" at the end. John Thorne, in Outlaw Cook, has a nice chapter on clafouti - specifically, on making/eating them for breakfast. Here is his description:

Clafoutis (more and more spelled "clafouti" these days - perhaps because the "s" makes the word look plural to American eyes) is usually considered a dessert. From the Limousin region of France, it is traditionally made by filling the bottom of a buttered baking dish with stemmed but unpitted black cherries, covering these with a batter, and baking this in an oven. The result is a custardy, slightly puffed, lightly browned confection, dotted with pieces of the soft, fresh fruit. It is eaten warm or cool, dusted with powdered sugar."

This is a wonderful, simple dessert. It's rich but not cloying, and leftovers are perfect for breakfast - all that egg, you know.

Here's Julia's recipe:

Apple Clafouti

1/2 cup currants
1/4 cup dark rum
1 stick of butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar
6-7 apples, peeled and sliced
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
enough light cream added to the remaining rum to make ½ cup
1/4 t. cinnamon

1. Mix currants and rum and let stand.
2. Spread half the butter and half the sugar in a jelly roll pan. Add the sliced apples. Cover with the rest of the butter and sugar. Bake 25 minutes at 375°. Scrape into a glass baking dish (i.e. 10” Pyrex pie plate). [This part can be done ahead of time.]
3. Drain the currants (reserving the rum) and pour half the rum over the apples.
4. Beat eggs and sugar until thick and yellow. Add flour, rum/cream and cinnamon. Add currants. Pour over apples and bake at 375° for 25 minutes.

Frisky Chimps

Sometimes the best reads in the Times are the little AP stories that run under the heading “National Briefing”. By best, I mean the kind that cry out to be read aloud or otherwise shared. Here’s one from today:

Who’s Your Daddy?
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 18, 2007

A female chimpanzee at a sanctuary has given birth, despite the fact that the facility’s entire male chimp population has had vasectomies. Now managers at the sanctuary, Chimp Haven, are planning a paternity test for the seven males who lived in a group with the female, Teresa, a chimpanzee in her late 40s who had a baby girl last week. Once they identify the father, it is back to the operating room for him...

This begged a few questions for me. Did anyone know she was pregnant? Do chimps have the same propensity towards genetic abnormalities in the babies born to older moms that humans do? Did she have any prenatal testing (amnio, CVS) given that she's of advanced maternal age? Or is that not advanced maternal age for a chimp? And if they did do genetic testing, and did find an abnormality (is there a chimp equivalent of a trisomy?), would they have done anything about it? The mind reels.

Spam Poetry

This was in the dummy type in a spam email this morning. I think it's like Seussian poetry. [I put the line breaks and initial caps in; the question mark was there.]

Sithstar
Warsstar
Warsthe
Star wars?

The Disappearance of Diapers

Ah joy. Miss M. is mostly potty trained. I've retired the jar of treats (said jar which may be one of the queerest things I've ever done). We bought the last enormous box of diapers on the 29th of October, and there are still plenty left for overnights. She transitioned into undiepants all the time on the 30th of October. She hasn't had an accident at school in quite awhile, and only one at home in recent memory. (Have I cursed our run of luck by even saying that?)

We started potty training in earnest about 2 months before she turned 3. Right around then, she moved up a level at her daycare, from the toddler room to the 3s. Different set of teachers, some new kids, a new rhythm to the day. At the end of the first month, one of the toddler room teachers spent a week with the 3s, filling in for an absence. I think that that week with a known face from the past during the day really helped to get the whole concept across.

Next step is overnight - she's close to being ready, but I'm not quite ready to let the diapers go at night - especially because she doesn't yet know how to open her bedroom door. And if she does learn how to open the bedroom door, I might have to try cooking spray.

Snips From My Diary

Months ago, I cleaned out a dresser at my mother's house, and found a trove of diaries and journals and notes from junior high school. Notes meaning: little tiny scraps of paper in handmade envelopes, all from one friend of mine, named Ann. We passed these back and forth with great regularity, discussing friends, boys, teachers. Last night, I sat in front of the fireplace, reading them whilst drinking wine, and burning as I went. I saved some of the best of them, and there's one journal that I didn't get to.

Here are some choice bits from a diary, from the spring of 1974, when I was 13:

Today I learned how to convert from F° to C°.

I didn’t write the past two days because I was busy but Friday I did relatively nothing and Saturday I went to Gigi’s*. We went to the park to have Gigi’s picture taken. Some dumb lady thought I was her kid. She’s 63 and I’m 13. God, some weird lady.

Saturday night, Mom and Pop had a party. Boring.

Nothing, literally, happened on Tuesday!

The oh-so-scintillating inner life of a 13 year old.



* Gigi was my grandmother. She lived nearby, close enough that we could bicycle over to her house for root beer floats and the cookies that were always in the pantry.

Potatoes

I bring my daughter to work periodically. I brought her in in December, so she could be at our office Christmas party. We went in a little late, so she didn't have to be there ALL day. I brought DVDs and other entertainment, we went out to lunch together (ah, macaroni and cheese), she did errands for me (took checks down the hall to be countersigned, and even brought them back), we Xeroxed her hand - you know, all those kid-in-the-office things.

She's been coming to the office since she was tiny. I started back to work (that is, back to work IN THE OFFICE*) one day a week when she was two months old, and brought her in on those days. Then it was three days a week, and she came two of them. Then, at about four months, I was back in the office full time, and she came every day, and we had a babysitter who worked half time out of the office. Every morning, I'd strap her into the Bjorn, and take her to work on the subway. I'd arrive at the office at 10, hand Miss M. over to Norma, and Norma returned with her at 2. Sometimes they went out, sometimes they stayed in the building. From 2 to 6, Miss M. was with me, or sleeping, or being passed around the staff. I had a pack 'n play and a stroller and a bouncy seat and an exersaucer and other assorted baby needs parked in an unused area of the office.

When she was 8 1/2 months old, we moved to the suburbs and I couldn't keep bringing her to work. Besides, she'd started crawling and it became untenable.

The point is that everyone in the office knows her pretty well. The day after the Christmas party, my boss was talking about her - her personality, charm, smarts - in short, about how great a kid she is. She is a great kid, and I'm often amazed at how outgoing she is. I don't think of myself as outgoing at all, though I'm certainly better than I used to be. So I rolled my eyes like "where'd she come from?" And he says "Plant a potato, get a potato". At first I thought: he's calling me a potato? But then I realized that it was an odd little compliment to me - my smart and charming daughter is that way because I am. Or because he thinks I am. Or whatever. It was actually a really sweet thing. "Plant a potato, get a potato."

Where did the phrase come from?


* There was not one day of my maternity "leave" that didn't include a call from my boss or someone else in the office, and every week, they messengered a package of mail and checks and other things to look at and/or do. I'm not complaining - I was on full salary the whole time, and it kept me in the loop so coming back wasn't too hard.

P.S. That picture? Miss M. asleep on the floor in the corridor outside of my cubicle, about 7 months old. She'd crashed there, and people had to step over her.

Need a new ringtone?

If your ringtone is annoying everyone around you, maybe you need this one by John Cage.

[Thanks to Mother Reader for the link, and a good laugh at lunchtime.]

Word of the Day: Pulchritude

Doesn't it sound ugly? I've always thought pulchritude just seems like it must mean something icky, ugly, not nice.

But no:

It's a noun, meaning physical beauty (especially of a woman), per WordNet. And the adjective form is pulchritudinous.

Video Thursday Thirteen

For today's installment of Thursday Thirteen, here are the top rotation DVDs in my 3 year old's collection (in alphabetical order):

1. Babe
2. Dumbo
3. Fantasia
4. Lady & the Tramp
5. Looney Tunes - 28 of them on 2 discs
6. Mary Poppins
7. Milo and Otis
8. My Neighbor Totoro
9. Olive, the Other Reindeer
10. The Nutcracker (New York City Ballet)
11. Wallace & Gromit - 3 Amazing Adventures
12. Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
13. The Wizard of Oz

#9 and #10 are put away until next Christmas. Much as I love the Nutcracker, it was viewed, oh, 20 times between about December 18 and January 4. And Olive had never gotten put away LAST Christmas, so we were having Christmas in July.

GEORGE!

Dear Dooce,

I think you have ruined Curious George for me. Everytime I read it to Miss M., and get to a spot where GEORGE is in capital letters because he’s a bad little monkey, I think of you and your George. Argh.

Over and out,

Magpie

A Paean to Ramen

Today's Times had both an editorial and an obituary of Momofuku Ando, the guy that invented ramen noodles. Although I've eaten them on occasion, they were never a staple for me (but I'm almost tempted to go get some for lunch). The editorial was wonderful. Here's a lovely snip, lovely even as it focuses on the noodle's flaws:

There are some imperfections. The fragile cellophane around the ramen brick tends to open in a rush, spilling broken noodle bits around. The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been. The aggressively kinked noodles form an aesthetically pleasing nest in cup or bowl, but when slurped, their sharp bends spray droplets of broth that settle uncomfortably about the lips and leave dots on your computer screen.

More Complaining

I'm on a roll:

27 December 2006

Gordon Segal
CEO
Crate and Barrel
Corporate Headquarters
1250 Techny Road
Northbrook, IL 60062

Dear Mr. Segal.

Earlier this month, I placed an internet order for some flatware as a gift for my recently married brother. I ordered 12 place settings on behalf of my mother, and the completer set for myself to give, and had everything shipped to my mother’s house.

We were appalled to find out how much you charged for shipping – frankly, it’s price gouging.

The package, according to the UPS tag, weighed 14 pounds. Using the calculator on the UPS website, that package should cost $9.96 sent ground from 60540 to 11050. Yet, you charged us $59.84 – a sixfold markup! Gouging. Sorry, no other word for it.

I think you should be ashamed of yourself.

My mother was sputtering – as she put it, she could have taken a cab and back to the Manhasset store for quite a lot less than that (she is unable to drive as a result of a medical condition). I thought I was doing us both a favor by having the flatware delivered to her house – but in fact, I caused her and myself a great deal of unnecessary unhappiness at the state of the universe as a result of having placed the order on-line.

I would appreciate a refund of $50 – the approximate difference between the actual shipping cost and the price that you charged me. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Magpie

Enclosure: packing slip

On Thursday, 4 January, I came home to find a voice message from Crate & Barrel customer service explaining their shipping rates, and crediting my account for the $50 I requested. The woman said that shipping of orders over $200 was charged at 10% of the order, but that customer service would take circumstances into account. In other words, complaining may well get you a reduction on the shipping. She didn't apologize, but I did get my money back.

I know how to complain

Letter sent:

17 November 2006

H&M Hennes & Mauritz LP
47 West 34th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001

To Whom It May Concern:

My small daughter received the enclosed scepter (and a tiara) last weekend for her birthday. Within hours of receipt, one of the rhinestones had fallen off and the head had broken off the stem. It was not being bashed around at all. She is enormously disappointed – could you send us a new one?

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Magpie

Result - new scepter AND tiara by mail.

Word of the Day: Panache

Okay, you probably know panache as "flair" or "je ne sais quoi" - you know, he had that certain something.

But here are the definitions from Wordnet:

1. (n) dash, elan, flair, panache, style (distinctive and stylish elegance) "he wooed her with the confident dash of a cavalry officer"
2. (n) panache (a feathered plume on a helmet)

In other words, did you know a panache was the thing on the top of your hat when you were in the marching band in high school?

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Last month, in the Christmas Meme, I referenced two favorite recipes from Julia Child.

Here's the Garlic Mashed Potatoes, a/k/a Puree de Pommes de Terre a L’Ail:

2 heads (30 cloves) of garlic
1 stick of butter (4T + 4T)
2 T flour
1 cup boiling milk
salt
pepper
2-1/2 lbs baking potatoes, peeled and quartered
3-4 T whipping cream [you can get away with whole milk]
4 T minced parsley

1. Separate the garlic cloves. Drop garlic into boiling water and boil for 2 minutes. Drain and peel. [Mostly, this step is to make the garlic easier to peel. But it also gets the cooking going a bit for the next step.]
2. In a small heavy-bottomed saucepan with a lid: cook garlic slowly in 4 T. butter - covered - for about 20 minutes until soft but not browned.
3. Add flour and stir over low heat for 2 minute. Off heat, stir in milk, and salt, and pepper to taste. Return to heat and simmer for 1 minute, stirring. [Julia then has you put this white sauce through a sieve or puree it in the blender – I never bother.] Set aside.
4. Boil the potatoes in salted water until soft. Drain and mash them. Return to pan and stir over low heat for a few minutes to evaporate some of the excess moisture. As soon as the potato puree begins to form a film on the bottom of the pan remove from heat and beat in the other 4 T. butter one tablespoon at a time. Add salt and pepper to taste. Beat in the garlic sauce and enough cream to reach the desired consistency. Beat in the minced parsley and serve.

It's from Mastering The Art of French Cooking (volume 1) by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child. It's a staple at our family holiday meals - goes with beef, lamb, turkey, goose. It's even good cold, if there's any left.

The Apple Clafouti will follow another day.

The letter M

The graphic design firm that does the work for my office sends out eccentric holiday "cards" each year. This year's was a little bound book, "The Alphabet: A Critical Assessment". Its contents were originally on a blog called Speak Up - here is an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

Speaking of my name, check these out. now those are 2 sweet letterforms. Is it any wonder that a line of “m”s denotes “yummy”? Mmmmm. The cap is unique and strong; balanced, and open in a way that doesn’t interfere with other letterforms. The lower case echoes the sturdiness of the cap, with all feet firmly on the ground, but with those 2 nice curves. I’m so glad my name begins with M!

Thank you Marian Bantjes! I like M too!

Stuffed Animals to Iraq

Awhile ago I read, on Parent Hacks, of a suggestion as to where to send outgrown toys and such. Asha revisited this today, and included a link to an Army Corps of Engineers story about the distribution of the toys.

Over the weekend, I drifted through the house collecting spare stuffed animals (how they accumulate!) and boxed them up. They went in the mail today. It seems so little, but I hope that some children in Iraq will be pleased with their gift.

If you too want the mailing address, here it is:

Edmay Mayers
USACE - GRS
APO AE 09331

Panhandling

What is going to happen to the bums and panhandlers (and buskers for that matter) when cash disappears? I walked by a guy soliciting pennies for the homeless today, with not a cent in my pocket. Granted, I was on the way to the bank to deposit a check and withdraw some cash from the ATM, but still - not a cent. And we move more and more towards a plastic cashless society. So what becomes of the panhandlers?

Knitting Project #2

Following the completion of the hat, I figured that I'd better use up the lovely screaming Orlon yarn, so I embarked on an afghan "square" (it's really a 7" x 9" rectangle) for Warm Up America. By making those wacky polka-dots, I got to practice changing and carrying yarn colors. And I cast on, and off, all by myself. It too is going in the mail tomorrow. I think I need a real project now, with real yarn, and a real goal.

Knitting Project #1

I got a hankering to knit something recently. A long time ago, I'd made a sweater, which came out completely strangely. Misshapen and unwearable. So I'd put it aside and didn't think of knitting until a couple of months ago. After kicking it around in my head, I poked around on the web and got inspired to participate in Save The Children's Caps to the Capital. I dug up some old yarn at my mother's house, found my old knitting needles, asked someone in my building to teach me how to cast on again (I remembered knit and purl, but not casting on or off), and made this here hat for a little baby. It borders on hideous, and is far from perfect, but I'm enormously pleased with myself. It's going in the mail tomorrow.

Eight Bookplates

I got a nice set of bookplates for Christmas, from my sister, and I've just stuck them into eight favorite cookbooks (and no, my name isn't Sarah Koffman):

1. Baking with Julia (Dorie Greenspan)
2. English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Elizabeth David)
3. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volumes 1 and 2 – bow down to Julia
4. The Book of Tarts (Maury Rubin) – because I am the Queen of Tarts
5. The Cake Bible (Rose Levy Beranbaum) – from which I made my wedding cake, and my sister’s, come to think of it
6. The James Beard Cookbook – from which I learned to make the perfect strawberry shortcake, using a rich biscuit dough
7. The Joy of Cooking, 1953 – I also have the 1975 edition

Third Thursday Thirteen

Herewith, for Thursday Thirteen - thirteen books received for Christmas - by the three of us, not just me. There are others - these are just the thirteen presently near to hand.

1. A Stew or a Story (M.F.K. Fisher) - collected short pieces
   
2. Book of Longing (Leonard Cohen) - poetry
   
3. Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
4. Dirty Sugar Cookies (Ayun Halliday)
5. English as She is Spoke (José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino) - hysterical!
   
6. Little Tree (e.e. cummings/Chris Raschko)
7. Olivia’s Opposites (Ian Falconer)
8. Pete's a Pizza (William Steig) - which I have already read to Miss M. three times today
   
9. The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) – 2 copies, oops, my sister's getting one back for her birthday
   
10. The Reluctant Dragon (Kenneth Grahame)
    
11. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats)
12. There’s a Monster in My Backpack (Lisa Moser) – thanks to Mother Reader who reviewed this a month or so ago - it sounded charming, and it is.
    
13. Wondrous Strange: the life and art of Glenn Gould (Kevin Bazzana)
    

Other books include The Twelve Dogs of Christmas, a cookbook by Donna Hay, Turn Turn Turn (an illustrated copy of the psalm with a CD of Pete Seeger singing the song) and a book of homophones written and printed by my sister-in-law.

Is there a theme here? Kids books, food books, word books, art and music books.

Holiday Chaos, or, Bad Things Happen in Threes

When I was about 8, I split my chin open on the side of a swimming pool. Two days later, my then 3 year old sister split her chin open jumping backwards into the same swimming pool. Different crews in the ER - she had black stitches, I had blue. A few days later, our father did a cannonball into, yes, the same pool and sprained his ankle. Bad things happen in threes.

Two weeks ago, W. had a root canal, which subsequently got infected. Last week, Miss M. came down with pinkeye, thereby missing my brother's wedding celebration (her pediatrician said she needed to be quarantined for 24 hours "unless you don't like them"). The next day, the plumbing at my mother's house clogged, requiring a call to Roto-Rooter and heroic measures by W., who babysat the plumber while three stories worth of sewage poured into the basement and all of the rest of us went to see the Nutcracker.

Nothing bad has happened since - fingers crossed - so bad things really do happen in threes? Let's hope so.

Totemic Thursday Thirteen

Another Thursday Thirteen - this time = Totemic Food Pairings!

1. Byrrh and Soda - Byrrh is a kind of aperitif, pronounce to rhyme with beer. My mother used to drink it occasionally, with club soda. Hence, Byrrh and Soda - sounds like you're mixing Budweiser and Coca-cola, no?

2. Fish Eyes and Glue - what you call tapioca when it's made with big pearl tapioca, the kind that's about 1/4" in diameter.

3. Waffles and Baked Beans - a family joke. It was, alledgedly, a favorite supper of my paternal grandfather's. I have actually never eaten waffles and baked beans together, though we've had many family discussions about the idea of putting a single bean in each crevice of the waffles.

4. Tomato Soup and Cottage Cheese - a strange and wonderful combination. The tomato soup must be Campbell's; the cottage cheese is your choice. I happen to prefer a "pot-style" cottage cheese, it's drier and works better with the soup. You put a big blob of cottage cheese in the bowl, grind some pepper on top, and add the piping hot soup. Yum.

5. Yogurt and pretzels - a nice lunch on the run. The pretzels should be small and broken up a bit; the yogurt should be Dannon with the fruit on the bottom. Once upon a time, this was wonderful with the now departed Dannon Dutch Apple yogurt flavor. The combination of soft and hard, sweet and salty, is hard to beat.

6. Peanut butter and sardines - perhaps another family joke? My maternal grandfather claimed to like a nice sandwich of peanut butter and sardines - he said that the peanut butter held the sardines on the sandwich.

7. Cottage Cheese and Pickle Relish - another quick lunch. I eat this occasionally - again, the sweet and savory combination is great. I like to pretend that the pickles are vegetables and therefore good for me.

8. Popcorn and Sherry - my paternal grandfather served this as hors d'oeuvres for holiday gatherings. The popcorn must be freshly popped in a pan, with salt and butter. The sherry must be Amontillado. He always presented the popcorn in a tall, straight-sided wooden bowl. My mother surmises that a vague rancidity in the bowl added to the distinct flavor of the popcorn. In any case, they do go strangely well together - the nuttiness of the sherry, the salt and grease of the popcorn.

9. Nassau County Snacks - okay, this one is terribly idiosyncratic. I grew up in Nassau County; the county colors are blue and orange. So, Nassau County snacks are Cheez Doodles (orange!) served in a blue enamelware bowl. Blue and orange.

10. Endive and Watercress - served as a salad for holiday meals. It's a great peppery, clean salad and it makes a nice foil for a standing rib roast or other big rich piece of meat.

11. Gin and Tonic - they just go together. It was the only mixed drink at our wedding. We had wine, champagne, beer and gin & tonic. What more do you need?

12. Orange Juice and Cranberry Juice. Yes, it can be a mixed drink if you add vodka, but just orange and cranberry together is a great combination. Somehow, the two together transform into a third flavor.

13. Ginger Ale and Saltines - what you have when you're sick. I don't even like ginger ale, but it does wonders for an upset stomach.

Christmas Trees

While we got our tree and got it up in a timely fashion, it took a number of days to actually get it decorated. But now that it is, it makes me happy. I love coming into the house and smelling the tree, and trotting over to turn it on is almost the first thing I do.

Carrying the boxes of ornaments up from the cellar and lovingly unpacking them and fondling them as they go on the tree is so memory filled, in a wholly affectionate way. First the lights go on. Then the tree topper - an old glass finial type topper. Then the little old ornaments at the top of the tree. As I make my way down, the ornaments get bigger and less fragile (and newer). Concessions in the past to cats and in the present to the toddler mean that there are ornaments on the tree that I'd just as soon not have, but practicality dictates some unbreakable ornaments for Miss M. to poke.

Getting the tree itself has often been some kind of an adventure too. There was the tree that was part of the party decorations for the early December opening night party of The Forest by Robert Wilson and David Byrne at BAM a long time ago. After the party, I single-handedly crammed a tree (free!) in the back of the Ford Fiesta at an ungodly hour of the night, drove it home from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, and lugged it into my apartment. My then boyfriend (now husband) got up in the morning and was stunned to discover a tree that hadn't been there the night before. Another time, we bought at tree at the Union Square market and brought it home on the subway.

Wrapping Paper

Every week, Miss M. comes home from school with two or three of those big sheets of newsprint covered with tempura, you know, art. I can't keep them all, but I feel guilty tossing them. So, the vaguely color appropriate became Christmas wrapping. It's also been used as birthday wrapping for her school chums. And, I believe I wrapped all of her own birthday presents in her own wrapping paper...

Mozart

My new favorite website is the complete Mozart archive. It is completely searchable, and returns pdfs of everything he wrote. Everything. I keep printing things out, like I'm going to sing the Queen of the Night aria next week. If I did, I might sound a little like Florence Foster Jenkins.

Silent Night

At last check, I have 36 versions of Silent Night in iTunes.

A particularly wonderful one is Silent Night played on the musical saw, on the Asylum Street Spankers Christmas record.

[Can you tell how old I am? Records are still records, even though they're CDs.]

Thirsty Thursday Thirteen

I grew up in a sailing community. On Thursday evenings in the summer, there was a little racing series called Thirsty Thursdays. Cocktails under sail. It wasn't about the racing per se, as much as the being out on the water for a sunset sail and a picnic on a weeknight. With that in mind, here's my thirsty Thursday Thirteen - beverages for a work day seguing into a holiday meal:

1. Black Coffee – made from freshly ground Peet’s house blend
2. Hot Apple Cider from the Union Square Greenmarket
3. Lemon Zinger tea
4. Seltzer (plain or lemon-lime)
5. Chicken Noodle Soup (well, it’s mostly liquid)
6. V-8
7. Coffee with milk, and a chocolate chip cookie on the side
8. Gus Pomegranate Soda
9. Gin & Tonic, heavy on the lime
10. Billecart-Salmon Brut Rose
11. White wine, especially a nice crisp Sauvignon Blanc
12. Apple Ice wine
13. Calvados

Bangoo?

During her bath last night, Miss M. announced to me: "Bangoo's a kind of watermelon when you wash your hair." What on earth could she mean?

Motherhood

I have a subscription to Brain Child - it was originally a gift from my sister, the first Christmas after Miss M. was born, and I've continued to renew it because it's good provocative germane writing.

The Winter 2007 arrived in the mailbox last week and was promptly devoured. Well, no I didn't eat it. But I did read it cover to cover.

I frequently feel like some kind of mother imposter - just flying by the seat of my pants, trying to keep Miss M. on an even keel. And that pretending-to-be-someone's-mother feeling is often exacerbated in the presence of other mothers (unless they're clearly slacker moms, too!). So while reading an essay* in Brain Child about a woman and her adopted Chinese daughter, I was struck by this passage excerpt:

I had to develop an expression which showed slight embarrassment and wry amusement along with great fondness...

She goes on about her kid's exploits in the grocery store (watching the lobsters! singing "Old MacDonald" in the meat department!), but that description floored me - I know it so well - slight embarrassment, wry amusement, great fondness - oh yes, daily.

* The essay is My Girl: Made in China, raised in Illinois, by Gale Renee Walden.

Disney Cheese

Last week's New Yorker had a piece by Anthony Lane about Walt Disney - a book review, mostly, but broader and more rambling than just a book review. Disney, blah blah blah, more Disney, more blah blah blah. Then this:

To understand Disney's advance, you need to go to Paris. In particular, you need to go to Paris before January 15th, to the Grand Palais, which is home to an exhibit of Disney's art. This in itself is astounding. To the French mind, Disney represents the arrowhead of American cultural assault, and if America were to return the favor it would need to mount a major retrospective of soft, unpasteurized French cheese at the Metropolitan Museum.

This stopped me in my tracks (on the tracks; I was on the train). What would a cheese retrospective look like? Would tasting be involved? Soft cheeses are usually young - can you have a retrospective of young cheese? Would there be cave replicas? Affineurs on display? A didactic interactive display of pasteurization and why it knocks the character out of cheese? Don't get me wrong - I love cheese. I just thought the idea of a cheese retrospective was something else.

Christmas Music

I have a sickness. I have 2.7 days worth of Christmas music in iTunes. More than 30 versions of Jingle Bells. 36 of Silent Night. 20 of O Holy Night. It goes on. The next door neighbor suggested that perhaps my husband needed a support group.

But there are others out there! Sweetney posted a whole holiday mix tape - she's my kind of girl.

Word of the Day: Absquatulate

Absquatulate is one of my favorite words. Every time I use it in conversation, I get a "huh?". It means, no joke, get up and squat elsewhere.

The only definition I found on the web was at Wordnet:

(v) abscond, bolt, absquatulate, decamp, run off, go off, make off (run away; usually includes taking something or somebody along) "The thief made off with our silver"; "the accountant absconded with the cash from the safe"

"Get up and squat elsewhere" is better, no?

Christmas Meme

I found this at Irish Goddess, and borrowed it for here.

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
To drink while decorating? Sherry, preferably a nice amontillado.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
Santa wraps, I wrap, Daddy wraps - we all wrap.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
Only white.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
Nah. Where do you get it anyway?

5. When do you put up your decorations?
Well, the wreath is up and the tree is going up tomorrow.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?
Julia Child's Garlic Mashed Potatoes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Maybe I'll post the recipe later.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child:
Making endless numbers of cookies and decorating them with multiple colors of piped royal icing.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
What do you mean?

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
Never. And every year we pester my mother to let us do so.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?
With white lights, and old glass bead chains, and glass ornaments - lots old, some new. I will reluctantly put some non-breakable ornaments on the tree as a concession to the 3 year old.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
Love it Especially when there's a snow day.

12. Can you ice skate?
I haven't skated in years. I used to be able to do a waltz jump.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
My favorite gift ever was when my husband woke me up at about 2:00 in the morning on Valentine's Day to give me an iPod. I still love my Pod. I can fill it up with days worth of Christmas music.

14. What’s the most important thing about the holidays for you?
Putting iTunes on random with the Christmas music.

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?
Julia Child's Apple Clafouti. Simple, delicious, and not too rich. And good for breakfast the next day if there are leftovers.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
The huge party at my mother's house every year on Christmas Eve. Of course, it's not happening this year - but we'll figure something out.

17. What tops your tree?
An antique blown glass tree-topper.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving?
Giving. I like making lists, buying things, wrapping them, and watching people open stuff they didn't know they needed.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
It is not possible to answer this question. I do like Pavarotti singing O Holy Night with an Italian accent, though. And it's fun to belt out Jerusalem around the piano.

20. Candy Canes!
That's not a question.

Snowflakes

Cost of an IUI ~$3000.
Cost of a simple IVF ~$10,000.
Julie's Snowflakes = Priceless

Phenomenal Woman

Thanks to Mitali at The Fire Escape I got to re-read a favorite poem this morning. Maya Angelou was the speaker at my college graduation, nearly 25 years ago. She was (and is) wonderful - a force of nature and a great inspiration. And her phrase "Phenomenal Woman" - or more commonly amongst my fellow alumnae, "Phenomenal Women", so as to encompass the all of us - has become a catch-phrase, a slogan for the class.

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a model's fashion size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies.
I say
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my steps
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please
And to a man
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees
Then they swarm around me
A hive of honey bees.
I say
It's the fire in my eyes
And the flash of my teeth
The swing of my waist
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say
It's in the arch of my back
The sun of my smile
The ride of my breasts
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say
It's in the click of my heels
The bend of my hair
The palm of my hand
The need for my care.
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Searchers

Oh the Google searchers. Someone landed at my site having typed "Sharks Patrol By Cake" into the Google search engine. I love that.

Grammar

I wasn't very interested in the article, but I read every word of the sign in the accompanying photo. It's nice to see that Tyson's internal signage is so well grammar-checked.

[If the photo is too small to read the sign, it says "Don't Walk To Fast For Floor Conditions".]

Striped Socks and Starbucks

Or, alliteration is fun. Okay, I digress.

The other day, I asked Miss M. what she'd like to get Daddy for Christmas. She said "striped socks". Where that came from, I don't know. We're not a household of patterned socks; mine are usually black or white though I do have a few patterned ones, W's are usually black or another dark solid color, Miss M's are bold and pastel solid colors. So this afternoon, we walked into town to find some striped socks. Sure enough, at the somewhat twee clothing store in town, we found some. She picked the color, I paid, we left.

For further amusement, we went to Starbuck's for hot chocolate. Generally, I think Starbuck's is the evil empire. My pet peeve is that if you ask for a cup of coffee with milk - i.e. not a fancy latte or some such, just a plain old coffee with milk - You Have To Put The Milk In Yourself. I'm sorry, but that's not service. If you go in there with a little kid and a handful of shopping bags and an umbrella and and and...you can't do it. They should put the milk in your damned coffee.

Anyway, back to this afternoon: I asked the cashier for a small hot chocolate with a spare cup - figuring that I could split it and add a little milk to one to cool it down for Miss M. The cashier said, "we can put it in two cups for you". Okay. So we go to the end of the counter to wait for the cups, and the coffee maker lady (I can't bring myself to say "barista") hands over two full cups. Full. She didn't make one hot chocolate and pour half into a second cup - she gave us two. For the price of one. I was strangely moved by this - who'd have thought that Starbuck's was capable of such generosity?

Holiday Gift Guides

Wow, a lot of people are way more organized than me. I root around the net while wasting time at work, but I can't get it together to actually make lists with links of ideas of gifts to buy. But other people do and have! Cool Mom Picks has a bunch of interesting stuff, usefully organized by recipient. Miss Doxie has a hysterical list of things to buy and where to get them. Mighty Girl always has lots of great picks - I drool over her picks on a regular basis. And besides, it's December 1st and time to get cracking on your shopping if you haven't finished it already.

Exit NaBloPoMo - Tomorrow You May Rest

Phew. This has been interesting, this posting everyday. In fact, I've averaged 1 1/2 posts per day: including this post, I've logged 45 posts in the 30 days of November - and yes, I posted every single day. Weekends have been the hardest...all of a sudden it's 9:00 on a Saturday night and, oh no, what to post? But for the most part, it hasn't felt like a millstone around the neck. I've had stuff rattling around in my head looking for an outlet, and this posting business has given me someplace to put it. And there's more to come. I've got two draft posts in the queue, and a bunch more on a to-do list.

Thank you, M. Kennedy, for the needed kick in the pants.

Go, Dog. Go!

I love Go, Dog. Go! I don't mind reading it to Miss M. a lot (it's in heavy rotation again these days). But here's what I hate.

Four times in the book, a girl dog encounters a boy dog and asks "Do you like my hat?"

The first three times, the exchange ends:
"I do not."
"Good-by!"
"Good-by!"

[The fourth time, the boy dog loves the party hat.]

Here's what makes me nuts: "Good-by" is not how you spell it.
I cringe every single time.

The Jungle

One of the blogs that I read fairly regularly is The Gurgling Cod. Recently, Upton Sinclair has come up in two of his posts. The first was a couple of weeks ago, and includes a link to a hilarious and artless rap video deconstruction of The Jungle by a couple of high school girls. Totally worth watching.

Yesterday's post of his takes off from Peter Hoffman's op-ed piece in the Times last week about curing meat, and his inability to do so in his restaurant Savoy, due to all sorts of food safety regulations. The Cod segues from Hoffman to Sinclair and The Jungle, and points out the fact that the book is so often held up as an indictment of the food industry at the turn of the century, and that it spurred the legislation that created the now FDA. In fact, the meatpacking industry is just the hook, the MacGuffin if you will, to a book that's really about immigration and labor relations and poverty and socialism.

I recently read The Jungle, somehow having missed it in high school. I'm interested in food, local food production, sustainable agriculture, cooking, eating - that whole matrix of things. The Jungle gets referenced so often, I thought it was time to read it. And I was startled to find that it really is about so much more than the Chicago meatpacking business of 1906. As Sinclair supposedly said: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Interesting.

Three Year Olds

The other day, there was a piece in the Times about the use of psychiatric drugs in children. It was a troubling story, as while there are lots of cases where kids do well on a drugs, there are other kids being dosed with drug combinations that are not well tested in children, and that may or may not do any good, and may in fact do harm. But that's not my point. Midway through the piece, there was a description of a three year old child that raised my hackles:

Fate Riske, 3, of Fond du Lac, Wis., takes two antipsychotics and a sleeping medicine to control what her mother, Elizabeth Klein-Riske, said were hours-long tantrums, a desire to watch the same movies repeatedly and an insistence on eating the meat, cheese and bread in her sandwiches separately.

I'm sorry, but I'm the mother of a three year old, and frankly, that sounds like normal three year old behavior, not something that needs three medications. My kid will watch the same movie three times in a row, and wants "plain pasta" for dinner every night, and throws fits because she can't wear her black patent leather party shoes to school, and in no way is she a candidate for medication. Sorry, no.

An Academic Chain Letter

Thanks to Raising Weg I learned about an academic experiment about how quickly stuff travels about the blogosphere...so I'm trying to participate. With that, here's my link to Scott Eric Kaufman's own blog, which spells out what he's trying to do, and what he wants you to do:

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply that he's one of them.
   
3. Ping Techorati.

Please don't ask me what "Ping Technorati" actually means. I just scribble stuff, and follow instructions.

Vanity Plates

My favorite license plate ever: ENTROPY

On a Ford Fiesta. Not mine. Yes, a long time ago.

Someone Else's Thanksgiving

I am impressed - I want to be invited next year: A Thanksgiving Odyssey

Pincus, the flying horse

W. and I are always trying to teach something new to our little person. When stopped at a light near a Mobil station, Miss M. pointed to the sign and said "that's a flying horse". We told her that its name was Pegasus. This morning, in the bedroom, apropos of nothing, W. asked her what the flying horse was called. She said "Pincus".

Christmas is coming!

Helped my mother buy a tree yesterday, bought a wreath hanger for myself, finished my shopping last Tuesday, organized the iTunes holiday music (don't ask how many Christmas tunes I've got), and today, made my own little Christmas postcard. If I can figure it out, later I may add snow to this here blog. Okay, I'm a dork.

Asparagus

Tomorrow's Times has a piece in the magazine - in the food column - about arguing with a loved one over a fancy dinner at the beginning of a relationship. When W. and I were first dating, he had a deal with Continental Airlines, and we were able to go to Paris twice for long weekends. Because the airfare was free (with first or business class upgrades!), we were able to splurge and eat very well.

One night, we had dinner at Le Pré Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne - a charming and romantic old school restaurant. While there, we had our first big argument - about asparagus - namely, what part of the plant do you eat. I was right (as usual!). As the meal went on, the restaurant starting clearing out. Eventually they turned the lights down. We thought this was quite offputting - were they trying to kick us out? - until we discovered that they'd turned the lights down so that the private fireworks in the garden for the largish birthday party also at the restaurant would be better visible. It was a stunning end to a memorable meal.

Taking the Westbound

I think that reading the Douglas Martin's Times obits should be mandatory for all for the rich glance into the obscure that they offer. Today's gem was the obituary of one Steam Train Maury, also known as the Grand Patriarch of the Hobos, and the Life King of the Hobos East of the Mississippi, dead at 89. More than a mere obit, the piece is a tiny history of hobos in America.

When The Washington Times asked Mr. Graham in 1989 whether it was true that some hobos used deodorant, he answered: “It’s a shame, but I don’t know what we can do about it.”

I could quote endlessly, or you could go read the elegant obit. I do wonder though, is/was there a Life King of the Hobos West of the Mississippi?

RIP, Steam Train Maury.

Thanksgiving

Thank you to Miss M. for being a wonderful, funny, willful, charming, smart and cunning little girl. Thank you to Dr. Chung and CRMI for making said girlie possible. And thank you to W., for being her father and my husband, and for cooking nearly all of the Thanksgiving feast we will consume later, except for the things his mother is making:

Turkey (locally grown)
Cauliflower stained in red wine (from the Campagna cookbook)
Hashed Brussels Sprouts (from the Union Square Cafe cookbook)
Garlic Mashed Potatoes (from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1)
Parker House rolls (W's mom)
Cranberry Onion Chutney (from Epicurious)
Fresh Cranberry sauce (W's mom)
Pumpkin Pie (W's mom, from his grandmother's recipe)
Apple Tart (my sole contribution, with a piecrust made from yesterday's lard)

Lard

I bought a pound or so of unrendered leaf lard at the Greenmarket this morning, to try in a pie crust tomorrow. I googled how to render it, I'm planning to use about 30% lard to 70% butter, and I'm making a simple apple tart with it.

It seems to me that I'm beginning to have a few too many posts about pigs and their culinary uses. Maybe I need a new label for PORK.

Meat and Drink

The things that show up in the Good Grey Lady: Pork Margaritas

Will wonders never cease?

My brother's comment was "Wow. Finally, someone has invented the Perfect Food."

Jet Blue and the Cheese Man

I make these cryptic notes to myself of things to write about...mostly the list is single word entries...but one item was this title: Jet Blue and the Cheese Man. It sounds like a kid's book, doesn't it?

Last month, I went to California for a long weekend with my mother, who doesn't walk terribly well, and my daughter, who's only just three now and wasn't yet three then. I poked around on the web for plane tickets, with the one caveat that we had to fly non-stop from NYC to LA - no stopping in Cleveland for hours and changing planes. It came down to a handful of flights - most going to LAX, or Jet Blue to Long Beach. In a moment of great thrift and lucidity, I realized that I had enough mileage points to book all three tickets on Jet Blue and so I did. Jet Blue into Long Beach turned out to be a great solution. Long Beach is a tiny airport - you get off the plane by walking down the stairs onto the tarmac, the baggage claim is about 100 feet away from the plane, and you can see the car rental kiosk from the baggage area. All this was perfect for one older gimp and one willful toddler. Even though Long Beach is about 20 miles south of LAX, and therefore farther south of where we were headed, the ease of transition from plane to rental car - at both ends - made up for the extra miles.

The other wonderful thing about Jet Blue was that everyone gets a TV on the back of the seat. Miss M.'s TV was tuned to Nickelodeon (I'd have preferred Noggin, but they didn't have it) most of the time and she was duly fascinated. She watched without sound because her headphones kept falling off and finally she just forgot about them. On the trip back, Nick seemed to be having a SpongeBob marathon - all SpongeBob, all the time. Well, Miss M. had never seen SpongeBob before, and kept calling him the Cheese Man. I had no interest in correcting her - who would? And she is still calling him the Cheese Man - we saw a SpongeBob helium balloon in the supermarket the other day and she said "Look, it's the Cheese Man". And frankly, the character really does look like a hunk of swiss cheese.

Parent Hack #1

Lots of the time I feel like I'm pretending to know how to be a parent, kind of like I'm pretending to be a grown-up (and what am I going to do when I grow up anyway?). Today, though, I feel like a real parent - my carabiner hack is on Parent Hacks!

Hot Dog

I am slowly working backwards through Michael Ruhlman's blog, and enjoying it immensely. Tonight's nugget:

The hot dog is what’s known in the trade as an emulsified forcemeat.

Today's adventure began with a visit to the holiday train show at the New York Botanical Garden. The train show is awesome, although it was staggeringly crowded even though we arrived at 10:10am (why weren't they all in church?). The trains weave through the shrubbery in the conservatory and around fabulous replicas of famous NYC buildings, all built of botanical bits and pieces. It's good for kids AND train buffs AND crafty types.

Afterwards, we had lunch at a fine hot dog stand - Walter's in Mamaroneck. When we got there, Miss M. was asleep in the car so I waited with her while W. went to fetch the dogs. And waited. And waited. Eventually he returned, with five dogs for the three of us and fine coffee milkshakes. Why the wait? Turns out that someone further up the line had ordered THIRTY SIX hotdogs. THIRTY SIX. It torpedoed the line.

But here's the question - how many of those people eating Walter's split grilled dogs on toasted buns know that a hotdog is an emulsified forcemeat?

O unctuous pig

Yup: Pork without fat is sex without orgasm.


I was very happy to stumble on Michael Ruhlman's blog this morning, via Foodmomiac. Ruhlman has written some great books about food and cooking - including The Soul of a Chef and The Making of a Chef. The last section of Soul has Ruhlman hanging out in the kitchen at The French Laundry. I was salivating by the end and wanted to jump on the next plane to San Francisco.

Ruhlman also wrote a book called Walk on Water - a book about pediatric heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. I had bought this on impulse because I'd liked other stuff that Ruhlman had written and I like reading about medical stuff. Problem is, I bought this on Election Day in 2003, at the PTA book sale at the school I was voting at, when I was about 37 weeks pregnant with Miss M. In a flight of amazing masochism, I devoured the book in days, reading with horrified fascination and a sick feeling that I was somehow jinxing my poor little babe in utero. Luckily she was fine, but it really wasn't the best choice of reading material in my then delicate condition. And all that said, it's a fascinating book about a world one hopes never to enter.

Woman kicked off plane for breastfeeding!

Can you believe a woman was recently kicked off a Delta Airlines flight for discreetly breastfeeding her child!? Here's an article on it, and here's where to sign the petition to support breastfeeding.

It's time to tell Delta Airlines to get a clue and be supportive of breastfeeding mothers; and to tell Congress it's time to pass the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding mothers. Why this hasn't happened yet is a mystery to me.

Cross Promotion Gone Wild

Here's the subject of an email I got in the office this morning:

Watch the Staples MailMate Shredder on The Office tonight!

I'm so perplexed I don't even know where to begin. Did the folks promoting The Office put Staples up to this? Is Staples just so excited that their shredder will be on TV that they sent out this email?

Quentin

I found this a while ago. It amused me. I have a long-standing fondness for Gorey and particularly The Gashlycrumb Tinies. If you don't know the book, click here for some more letters or here for the whole thing.

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're normal, but deep down you really just want to strip off your clothes and roll around in chicken fat.
Take this quiz!

Democrats

Fascinating stats on last week's election, courtesy of Rick Hertzberg in the New Yorker:

In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

Found Objects, or The Joy of Motherhood

Walking to the train this morning I sensed that there was something in the pocket of my rain jacket. Underpants! Clean ones, that I'd stuck in my pocket yesterday on the way to the pediatrician, just in case Miss M. needed a spare pair.

Later on, I stuck my hand in the pocket of my jeans and turned up two pink plastic hairclips, not mine.

No-Knead Bread

Nearly a week after the article was published, the article and related recipe for No-Knead Bread are #8 and #9 on the Times list of most emailed articles. People are hankering for bread I guess. I haven't tried it...but I think I will this weekend.

Smitten Kitchen already tried it, with only one good arm...

Spam humor

Mostly the spam just annoys the hell out of me, like this morning when there were almost 300 new messages and only 15 or so were legit.

But this header made me laugh.

Subject: [SPAM] Re: Turd Ferguson pakmansc

I think it's a character in a Carl Hiaasen novel - Turd Ferguson. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Toddler Logic

This morning in the car, Miss M. announced to me "animals have fur, but we have blankets." Yes, indeed.

Dishes

How did we get so many dishes? I remember thinking the same thing when we moved 2 years ago and I had to pack up THREE complete sets of china, plus a whole mess of assorted plates, platters, bowls, cups, casseroles, etc.

Today we had a birthday party for Miss M., who turned three a few days ago. Cleaning up afterwards involved a lot of handwashing - many pieces are too big for the dishwasher. I found myself musing whilst handwashing - remembering where they'd come from, who'd given them to us, why we'd bought them.

1. Glass cake stand - from W.'s grandmother
2. Another glass cake stand - a gift from my mother (includes a dome for keeping your cake fresh, or you can turn the whole thing upside down and use it as a punch bowl)
3. Handmade cobalt blue glass plate with irises cast into the back of it - a wedding present from a board member at a place I once worked
4. Oval Armetale dish - another wedding present, from an elderly neighbor of my mother's - actually her husband was still alive then, so it was from elderly neighbors
5. Two large white plates with blue lines - bought by us in Maine one year, because we'd rented a house for a week, and the house had only small dark brown plates, and we just couldn't eat dinner off of those plates, so we bought these nice big plates at a housewares store in Ellsworth
6. A big round white platter with blue edging, by Dansk - once upon a time, long before we were married, W. bought a whole set of Dansk Bistro china for me. It's one of the three sets of china we have - the other two are by Cuisinart (also blue and white) and Crate & Barrel (white with raised dots and lines)
7. Another big round white platter with blue edging - bought by me at Fishs Eddy as a gift for W. - but really I bought it because it's a very flat plate and therefore good for serving tarts and quiches
8. A pottery bowl made by my cousin
9. Another pottery bowl - given to us as a wedding present - it has a lid, I think so it can be a covered vegetable dish. Which begs the question, what IS a covered vegetable dish?

I could go on all day about this, but I won't.

PoMo

Everytime I think or write NaBloPoMo I think "PoMo - isn't that short for post-modern?" (my mid-80s graduate school career rearing its erudite head).

So I googled PoMo and found a bunch of references to some Native Americans in California. Who knew?

From Wikipedia

Pomo may refer to:

* Pomo people, indigenous peoples of Northern California
* Postmodernism, an artistic movement emerging from and reacting to modernism.

Stunning Timewaster!

I heard about this distraction at Mother Reader, and had to post about it here. Wow. Try it. But don't blame me!

Wistful

I went to an event last night, an annual benefit that my father always buys tickets for, and that I've been to regularly for the past number of years (except three years ago when I was in the hospital after Miss M. was born). I went to the ladies room and suddenly remembered that four years ago I'd been on stims for IVF#2 and had to shoot up in that there ladies room. The stalls were big and clean and the doors went all the way to the floor and there was a convenient lip along the top edge of the tile that gave me somewhere to put the syringe and vials and stuff. It was a powerful flashback, made wistful - IVF#2 failed. I hadn't thought about all of that messy IVF drug work in a long time. And I'm glad it's behind us, and that IVF#3 resulted in the divine Miss M.

Biblical Animals

And for today's Times chuckle:

Yesterday, for example, Eliot Spitzer was scheduled to vote on the Upper East Side at 7 a.m., Andrew Cuomo was scheduled to vote in Lower Manhattan at 10 a.m., and camels, sheep and a donkey were scheduled to arrive at Radio City Music Hall for its Christmas Spectacular at 1:15 p.m. — which has nothing to do with Election Day but seemed important enough to share.

Thanks, Dan Barry.

This shouldn't be in politics

Lieberman is not MY elected official, but it burns me that he (and others) say things like this:

“I will try in every way I can, every day I am your senator, to reach out in a way and get things done in a way that honors and sanctifies God’s holy name,” Mr. Lieberman said in his victory speech.

When I'm in charge, "under god" is coming out of the Pledge of Allegience.

NYS Comptroller

I voted for Hevesi, with reservations, but the Hevesi/Callaghan race was indeed odd, and this (from today's Times) is a tiny bit heart-breaking:

Mr. Callaghan was emotional in defeat, untying his bow tie and choking back tears as he addressed supporters at an Albany hotel. “I cannot help but regard the decision of New York voters as odd,” he said.

The un-tying of the bow tie is what got me.

On an semi-related note - why is it a Comptroller? I suppose I should just go look it up.

This is not about politics

I met Senator Clinton yesterday at the train station, and introduced myself as Wellesley 82. She leaned over conspiratorially and said "We should have a secret handshake."

Cheese Swanwiches

Here's my favorite parent hack: speedy cheese sandwiches, a/k/a quesadillas.

Buy a package of flour tortillas, whole wheat if you're feeling virtuous. Grate some cheese - cheddar, monterey jack, colby, muenster or some combination of those, or whatever you like (maybe not brie or Humboldt Fog). Spread all of the tortillas out on the counter. Cover half of each one with grated cheese. Fold all of the tortillas in half and press down along the fold line. Stack them up with parchment paper between and slide into a plastic bag (or two) and freeze. When you need a quick lunch, pull out a frozen sandwich and plop it in a dry non-stick (or seasoned cast iron) pan. Heat until it starts to brown on one side, then flip it over. Cut into triangles and serve to hungry appreciative toddler.

This is hardly any work for a whole pile of swanwiches.

Pump Moms, part 2

The close reader of the post below about pumping will note that I said I pumped at my desk. It's actually a cubicle.

I started out trying to be private about the whole thing. I carted self and pump down the hall to my boss's dressing room - which had a lock and a phone and a private bathroom. All well and good until I got tired (very quickly) of the trek down the very long hall. So I started using his office - with non-locking glass doors - but there was a phone and I could tuck myself in the corner and be pretty much out of sight. Fine for a while, until people realized I was in there and some just wandered in to talk. I think the final straw was when said boss sent someone in to talk to me. So then I gave up hiding and just started pumping in my cubicle. I was discreet: I could talk on the phone, work on the computer, and talk to people who happened by. Really, no one could see anything scandalous...though they did know what was going on.

When it was all over, I made a speech at a staff meeting and said that I appreciated the consideration and accomodation that everyone had offered me, and that I hoped that they would all be as supportive of other nursing mothers in any future situations they might encounter.

Sasha/Sacha

My father just called to ask if there was anything in today's Times Arts & Leisure section about Sasha Cohen's new movie. After a moment, it dawned on me that he'd confused the figure skater with Sacha Baron Cohen - who does have a new movie out. But he was asking about the figure skater.

Aw, Hedgedog!

Thanks, Fussy!

The Joy of Squirrels

The New York Times reviewed the new edition of The Joy of Cooking the other day. In the course of the review, they touched on the various changes made to Joy over time - what styles and recipes and techniques have come in and out of favor. I have two earlier editions - 1953 and 1975. The 1953 edition was my grandmother's and is complete with her pencil markings in the margin, and amusingly, some of my pencil markings from days when I cooked with her.

This paragraph:

The game sections offer another example of nostalgia run amok. The 1997 book removed references to porcupine, raccoon and squirrel, omissions that have been held up as proof that “Joy” had lost its soul. The new version includes no recipes for those creatures, although it does suggest they can be cooked like chicken. (To be fair, the rabbit-skinning diagram is back, and the venison section is much improved.)

sent me to my earlier editions to check on the squirrel techniques.

In 1953, the squirrel section begins "there are proverbially many ways to skin a squirrel."


In 1975, the instructions begin "To skin, don gloves to avoid possible tularemia infection."


It seems to me that Joy was losing its soul, and its joy, by 1975.

Another difference between these two editions...note the shoes in the drawings. In 1953, there are delicate old-style ladies boots doing the holding down of the squirrel. In 1975, we're wearing steel-toed work boots.

Pump Moms

The other day, I spotted a woman on my train carrying a Medela Pump-In-Style-Advanced backpack. The PISAs don't have any label or logo on them, but they do have distinctive zipper pulls, so the bag was identifiable to me, a former pumper. Everytime I see one of them, I feel like a member of a secret sorority. I thought of tapping her on the back and asking "how old is your baby?" but I restrained myself.

I pumped for a year. At the beginning, it was because Miss M. was a lousy nurser - so at the start I was pumping seven times a day. And I still had to supplement with formula. Eventually, I cut back to pumping four times a day - which was actually fairly sane. I'd pump before leaving the house, and before bed, and twice during the work day. I was lucky enough to have two pumps, so I didn't have to haul one back and forth to the office. I had an ancient PIS borrowed from a friend that lived under my desk for a year, and a new PISA that stayed home and went away for weekends. So just the milk and bottles travelled to and from work. And I got the whole thing down to a bare minimum. I'd pump at my desk, put the milk in the fridge and leave the horns unwashed until the second pump of the day. At the end of the day, I washed the horns for the next day and left them to air dry at my desk. I never sterilized anything.

Eventually Miss M. figured out the nursing thing, but I kept pumping because I was away from her for most of the day. And all through that first year of hers, we supplemented with formula - not much, 2 to 10 ounces per day, maybe 25% of her intake overall.

[The title of this post comes from the name of a Yahoo group - it was a useful resource for tips and support and sources during those pumping days.]

Proust

This morning on the train, I was sitting next to a man whose smell reminded me of an old boyfriend. Old, like more than 20 years ago. I can't quite put a finger on it, it wasn't a smell of cologne, and it wasn't body odor, and it may have been more in the clothes than on the person, but whatever it was, it provoked a sharp involuntary memory. The mind indeed works in curious ways. Many times a smell will conjure up some past experience, but sometimes doing something will do the same thing. Nearly everytime I decompress by doing a Sudoku puzzle in bed, I think of a woman I knew - an aquaintance really - and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what the association is. She died recently. Maybe it was that I was following the saga of her death in postings on the web, each night just before the bedtime Sudoku...? Who knows.

How Many of Me?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 2 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

But there's only one person with my name with an Amazon.com wishlist!

NaBloPoMo

Hmm - can I do this? I'll certainly try!