Not a convert

OK. I did it. I tried it. I even tried to have a decent attitude about it. But I am not a winter camping convert.

The frozen beach

We looked at interesting ice formations:

And slip-slided around a lot. It looks pretty enough, but there were 30 MPH winds whipping across the lake that (literally) lifted Fiona up and knocked her flat on her butt. At first I thought she was just slipping a lot, but no, she was actually being beat up by the wind. That's the way I like to spend my 4th birthday, what about you?

Thanks to the Outback Oven and Duncan Hines, on Saturday evening we baked Fiona's birthday cake. The oven thingy worked surprisingly well. And we all appreciated the sugar rush to keep us warm.

We gave up on going out on the ice after that first afternoon and when we ventured outdoors we stayed behind the trees to get some shelter from the wind. There were moments of levity, like when we built a snow tunnel through the drifts:

Going in

Coming out

And then there were times that the kids and I just got fed up:

I'm cold, this balaclava makes my head look like a worm, and I want to go home.

The big bummer wasn't even the cold (though it was significant and we had to get up three times a night to put more wood on the fire or else wake up--or not wake up!--frozen), it was the darkness. Northern Michigan doesn't get that much daylight in February anyway, and Saturday was the only day the sun came out. Inside the cabin it was perpetual gloom. I imagine in the summer, with the long summer days, with doors wide open and the ability to sit outside without freezing to death, the place would be pretty nice, rather than oppressive.

I did a fair share of huddling before the fire with my headlamp on trying to escape my reality. Luckily, I brought an excellent book:
I'm trying to finish the last few chapters of Half of a Yellow Sun before I head off to France tomorrow. I can't say reading about the Nigerian/Biafra post-independence civil war in the 1960's gave me great feelings of levity, but it is beautifully written from a variety of different perspectives. I found Ugwu, the houseboy to a pair of intellectuals, the most compelling character. His views are raw and unvarnished; I hesitate to call him "pure" because he has a fair amount of goodly lust towards big bottomed women, but through his observations, sometimes as common and telling as how a yam is cooked, the war is rendered in sharp outlines, not muddied by the idealized political rhetoric that his boss spews out.

I'm going to try and blitz read it tonight so I can bring cheerier reading with me to Europe; you know, happy books like this one:
Hmmm...Maybe The Brief History of the Dead isn't the most upbeat selection...

A carrot for a donkey....

My kid's mid-winter vacation starts this afternoon and while other families are heading South for a glimpse of the sun and some outside frolicking, we, being completely irrational beings, are heading North.

That's right, it isn't cold enough for us here in Ann Arbor, so we are going to a rustic cabin on Lake Huron up in Cheboygan State Park.

Is this my idea? Ahem. No. My kooky husband has decided it is high time the kids and I get a taste of winter camping, and he thinks he's being all benevolent and easy on us since we get to stay in a cabin rather than the 4 season tent. The cabin has a wood burning stove. And bunks. And an outhouse. Unfortunately the pump is turned off for the season so we'll be melting snow. And did I mention that we have to hike in a mile (with a 6 and 4 year old and all our crap) to get to this cabin? And did I mention that I've been sick and still feel pretty crappy?

Boo hoo hoo for me.

Deb has been trying to help me figure out why I am reacting so strongly against this trip since I am a gung ho camper in the spring/summer/autumn time.

I think there are two biggies with which I'm wrestling. The first one is pure and simple--an outhouse in wintertime. And the fact that I will be the one stuck taking the 4 year old girl to the outhouse when she has to go at 2 am and listen to her scream as her bare butt hits the metal seat. It just isn't fair being a girl.

The second one has to do with winter outerwear and claustrophobia. I have a little problem when it comes to clothes. Most of my friends know me as a pretty comfortable slob--t-shirts, soft jeans, floppy sweaters, and sneakers or Keens--and there are two situations in my life in which clothes become a real stumbling block for my happiness. The first isn't an issue for this trip because it involves wearing fancy/nice/formal clothes most of which leave me at the end of an evening ready to claw them off of my body. The other situation most definitely is: winter outerwear. This trip will involve every type of winter clothing all piled on: snow pants, boots, jackets, gloves, wool socks, scarves, hats, snowshoes (that 1 mile hike isn't on a groomed trail so we'll be blundering along). And even worse I'll be wrestling the two kids into their assorted winter gear.

I can tolerate this gear for an afternoon's sledding outing. I deal with it and then rip it all off as soon as I'm in the door. But the idea of spending 4 days getting into and out of all this confining crap sounds horrific. My fragile little sensory problem is going to be in full time overload.

So what is a balking donkey to do?

Focus on the carrot.

Because folks, I don't think I'd be going on this trip if there wasn't a serious carrot waiting for me the following week. A week from today, after my frozen toes expedition, I am heading off to here in the South of France where, for the next week, I will wake up to this view:

That would be Monaco off in the distance.

Here's the even better part--Brian is staying home with the kids and I am going to this blissful place with friends John and Ami, and Ami's sister Shelia.

I'm sure I'll miss Brian and the kids, but this will be the first time I've left the critters with Brian for more than a weekend alone (well, technically not alone since some adoring grandparents will be hovering about them). Brian and I had our week-long trip to Germany and France last year during which I was able to remember the pleasures of travel without kids. Don't get me wrong, I love traveling with the kids and seeing how they react to new places and situations, but sometimes a mama just needs a damn break.

And as if heading to the South of France wasn't good enough, there is another big plus: this trip is costing me very little money. Thanks to Brian flying off to China and other places he had a load of frequent flyer miles that got me my plane ticket. And the apartment we'll be staying in? Ami's lucky and generous step-mother won the week's rental in a charity lottery and gave it to her. Because we won't be spending money on plane fares and accommodation, I anticipate channeling some of the saved funds toward food. And I'll be in good company in this pursuit because both John and Ami have excellent priorities; that is to say, shortly after waking, both of them consider the important question "what are we going to eat today?" I'm sure the markets and restaurants around Nice will have lots of wonderful answers for us.

All the tea in China

I have 5 new boxes of tea from China. Unfortunately I do not read Chinese and have no idea which is which! I've tried the brown (tasted like a Yunnan tea I have) and the yellow (Jasmine pearls; even I can identify that). Is there anyone out there who can read the labels for me?

The 5 boxes are the peace-offering/I-missed-you gift from my husband when he came back on Friday from his emergency trip to Shanghai.

Why an emergency trip? Well, about a week and a half earlier he received some really freaked out phone calls from the engineering big wigs saying that something was messed up with the Chinese release of a Cadillac. Brian calibrates the transmission on the American release of this car and had to get his ass over their pronto to help whoever had dropped the ball. So as soon as he could get his Visa fed ex-ed from the consulate, he was off on a plane to Shanghai.

A Chinese billboard of said soon-to-be-fixed car

Now normally getting to go to Shanghai would be great! But under these circumstances, it was not so great. He worked 13 hour days (he had to be at the engineering facility for the 8 am and 8pm conference calls back to Milford) and got to know the road between his hotel and the engineering facility pretty well. The rest of Shanghai? Well, he had one afternoon free before he got back on the plane and he moseyed around a little, took photos of the architecture in the smog and bought tea and other quirky stuff for the kids.

That's the main Art Museum. He didn't have time to actually go inside...

Of course, with his absence I indulged in a little self-pity, after all he got out of town for the coldest week we've had this year--the snot froze into little plugs in the kids' noses, so they even cancelled school for two days.

The kids were rather maniacal from being cooped up and stuck with just me for a week. When he returned with the cute clothes he brought them, they were so excited that they danced around like little wind up toys:

Fiona in her "Sparkles the Rescue Cat Dress"

Then we fed them some of the Chinese New Year candy Brian brought home for them and they got even stranger:
The candy includes such delicacies as:

Gummy Corn on the Cob

and

Pudding flavored squishy puffs

Squishy puff kids in their padded (pudding flavored?) Chinese outfits

The big bummer (in my opinion) of the trip was the lack of time to eat. Brian got to know the Chinese cafeteria food pretty well. Finally on his last evening there, he was taken out for a banquet-style meal and gorged himself on what he described as wonderful food. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring the camera to this event (or maybe he was too embarrassed to have to explain his wife's food fixation and why he was photographing all the food...)

However, I did learn that airplane food can look really tempting, provided you fly first class through Tokyo and order the Asian meal:

Yes, people, that is sashimi on an airplane.

We're trying to get back to normal (or as normal as we get) but it is a challenge with one parent whose body clock is 13 hours off from the rest of us. Yesterday Brian sat down with Ian to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book with him (Ian has just discovered these and loves them; I appreciate them on a new level since you can have some pretty interesting conversations with a kid about narrative and what makes a good story after reading one) and when I went up to check on them, Ian was reading with his book propped up against his sleeping Dad. Dad made it through one "choice" in the book before collapsing.

My solution to the slumbering papa? Why, make him some tea, of course! After all, I have five new varieties from which to choose!

Defining an audience

I'm starting to feel a little strange about the books that I'm loving of late. I just finished this book:

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party

and it marks the third book in the space of a year that I think is absolutely fantastic and which is classified as Young Adult fiction. This book and the other two, The Book Thief and Fly by Night, are three of the most intelligent, risky, poignant and beautiful books I've read and I can't understand why they aren't considered "adult" literature. If the only reason is that the hero or heroine of each book has not reached the age of majority, well, that's a pretty pathetic reason. And if this is the case, I don't see why Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would be an "adult" book since the main character of his novel is a 12 year old named Oscar; yet the New York Times Book review graced him with a review (and not in the segregated children's books issue). All three of these "Young Adult" books attack such huge and, dare I say, adult issues with such subtlety and complexity that it leaves me breathless.

I'm trying not to be cynical and put it all down to marketing. For all I know, it is smart to market a book as a YA work--maybe there is more of a market for good YA fiction than adult and the authors are raking it in rather than pinching their pennies. But if I wasn't a regular blog reader of such kid-lit blogs such as Bookshelves of Doom, A Fuse #8 Production and Big A, Little a, I probably would have missed these titles and that just makes me mad. Maybe these books are YA because their authors have written for a YA label in the past. But I still don't get it. I gave The Book Thief to my mother for Christmas (yeah, I know, nothing like a good fire bombing and tale of WWII miseries to cheer someone up at Christmas time...but I still think it is an exquisite and hopeful book despite the grimness of its subject.)

My latest read is set in the American Colonies shortly before the revolution. As a former 18th C lit geek (i.e. my first MA degree), the representation of the period, with its fondness for experimentation, political treatises and formal language was beautifully executed. But the story of a slave boy who is raised as an experiment in classical education and the abilities of Africans, told from (mostly) the boy's perspective, became much more than an exercise in 18th C arcana; it is a meditation on freedom, affection, liberty, and science, and how all of these "principles" are manipulated by society for personal and political gain. Really complex deep stuff that makes me want to pull out my Hume and Godwin and Wollstonecraft and re-read them--I can't say that another novel has had that effect on me in a looooong time.

My happiest revelation came at the end of the novel when two significant words of the title sank in: "Volume 1". I can't think of happier words for a besotted reader. Now I'll be anxiously watching for Volume 2.

Just what I needed

My book group met yesterday evening and it was just what I needed.

I'd been having one of "those" days. The three year old kept shouting at me "I'm taking you to jail, but you have to drive!" every time I asked her to do something (it's cute the first time or two that you hear you have to drive yourself to your own incarceration; it gets less funny the 30th time...). The six year old has been obsessed with the computer lately and cares more about it than any humans; yesterday was no exception and included some epic battles of wills with his teachers. He followed that up on the way home from school with one of those confusing/disturbing declarations: "I was too sad to go to my focus study so I got to go spend time with Kit (the librarian) who is always really kind to me." I tried to dig and find out what the hell that sentence meant--why was he sad? had someone been unkind to him? Kit is a lovely person and I can understand why he'd want to spend time with her, but what was the problem with his focus study (which is this really cool two week long mini course that the kids get to do three times a year at his school)? But it was like talking to a wall: I couldn't get any information out of him.

By 4:30 I felt like I had been banging my head into a post for a few hours--dazed, confused and with my confidence in my mommy-skills totally shot. There were moments yesterday when I thought about handing the kids off to Brian and just going upstairs and crawling into bed, but somehow I got myself into the kitchen to make my contribution to the book group feast and Sarah and Lea picked up my sorry ass and drove me out to Ami's house.

It took 3 large glasses of wine and some pretty potent chocolate, but after an evening with these culinary therapies, and the best therapy of all, the company of some wonderful women, I felt a whole lot better.

We talked about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (which I raved about here) and as the narrator reflects back on her upstate New York adolescence from her present location of Paris, we had French food. Well, sort of French...Everyone else made French food and I brought an Italian antipasti that I'd been wanting to make since I was given this book for Christmas.

We started by sipping (or in my case, swilling) a really nice wine that Marilyn brought which, despite its rude name, Fat Bastard, is from Languedoc grapes (look at the cute hippo on the label!) With it we had my antipasti:

warm Gorgonzola custards with an arugula, pear, and walnut salad

The custards didn't come out of their ramekins as nicely as I'd have liked and so looked a little like a pile of scrambled eggs, but they tasted fine. The combination of the cream and eggs mellowed the bite of the Gorgonzola and the pear, arugula, walnut salad was the perfect bit of sweetness and freshness to keep the custards from being overwhelming. The dressing couldn't have been simpler, a little walnut oil and some balsamic, but I used really good balsamic, an 18 year old one from Morgan and York ($18 for 18 years, seems like a good deal to me!) and it really made a difference.

Then Ami served a gorgeous, huge, juicy, roasted chicken and made some smashed-then-roasted potatoes that were fantastic (must get the January 2007 copy of Fine Cooking for the recipes).
Sarah brought a classic salade crudite with matchstick beets, celery root and carrots in a shallot vinaigrette:
The sharpness of the vegetables cut through the richness of the chicken and potatoes--really a lovely pairing.

And then it was on to chocolate therapy provided by our favorite sweet-tooth of the group, Lea:

pots de creme with an ample dollop of whipped cream

John came in an pulled an expert intense espresso to go with the dessert. I decided to also have a little more wine...

my kind of triumvirate: red wine, chocolate and espresso

I got myself into a blissful groove of alternating a sip of espresso--a bite of pot de creme--a sip of wine--a bite of pot de creme--a sip of espresso--a bite of pot de creme, etc.

And by the time Sarah delivered me back to my door, with a full belly and a buzzy brain from the wine/espresso combo, I felt like I could face another day, no matter how flawed it may be.

I'm not really ready for this....

My almost 4 year old is reading. Yesterday we went out to dinner with my parents and Fiona took a crayon and circled what she wanted on the kids' menu: popcorn shrimp, applesauce and milk. It was a little disturbing when she handed it to me, since, oblivious mom that I am, I hadn't noticed her reading anything before then. But I was pleased to see that her reading vocabulary is focused on food! Wonder who she gets that from....?

Winter Interlude

Yesterday I finished my grading early and the kids were gone with Brian at the Plymouth Ice Carving Festival thingy, so I found myself with a little time on a cold day to sit in my favorite chair and read.

I'm in the thick of a wonderful book which deserves its own post: Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise. And I decided that it would be even more enjoyable with a nice cup of tea and a couple of these lavender shortbread cookies.

Luckily, I had made the shortbread on Friday. If you need quick shortbread therapy, these are not the cookies to make; they need a couple of days for the lavender flavor to permeate the cookie. I ate one on Friday and thought it was just OK. But the two I had yesterday were perfect--each bite contained a whisper of lavender in the sandy, buttery cookie base.

If you know (or hope) you have an hour or two of leisure coming to you in a couple of days, make these shortbread in preparation and then guard them from the small people or animals or ravenous grown ups (I've taken to lying to my small people and tell them that anything I don't want them to eat is really spicy. So far they haven't caught on.)

Lavender Shortbread

1 C unsalted butter, softened
2 C all purpose flour
1/2 C sugar
1/2 t salt
1 T dried lavender buds

Beat the butter and sugar until creamy and well combined. Add the flour and salt and beat again until combined. Add the lavender and mix until they are spread pretty evenly through the dough.

Press the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic and then chill until firm, about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 325. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until it is about 1/4 " thick--thicker than you would for regular sugar cookies. Cut into whatever shape you want. Put on a silpat or parchment lined cookie sheet and bake until golden about 20 minutes.

Living in Lucite Land

The sun came out yesterday and made the whole world look like it had been dipped in Lucite. It is blindingly bright and beautiful--even mundane maple seeds look incredible when encased in ice. The more poetic among you might have thought glass, or crystal, but having been raised in the 70s when Lucite was cool, that's what comes to my mind. For those of you who can't get enough of the beauty of the ice, there are a ton of images on Flickr that capture the magic: I like this one, and this one, and this one in particular.

What to do when your world is encased in ice? Well it helps to hunker down in a comfortable chair with a cup of spicy hot chocolate and grade a pile of these babies:

It's composition grading time again!

and then when your brain starts to fog over, why not read a chapter or two of this?

Oooo--the ServSafe coursebook! The English Major in me is offended by the spelling of the title...

This semester I'm taking a Sanitation and Hygiene class out at WCC. The point of this class is to teach you not to poison anyone for whom you plan to cook. Do I all of a sudden have a great interest in bacteria and food poisoning? Nope. But I really want to take some of the cooking classes offered at WCC and this is the prerequisite. Last fall I received an e-mail from Zingerman's Bakehouse about the classes they are now offering which sounded like a lot of fun. I looked into it, passed out from the price (average class is $100 for 4 hours, though some cost more, some less), and realized it was out of my budget. Then someone on the Annarborfood yahoo e-mail group to which I belong tipped me off to the best deal around when it comes to cooking classes. The former manager of the Bakehouse, Carol Deinzer, is now a Professor in the Culinary Arts department at WCC. Her 3 credit hour Baking I or Pastry I classes meet for 10 hour per week for seven and a half weeks (half a semester). That's 75 hours of instruction for $213 (plus textbook costs). Now that is a good deal (and within my budget).

So this semester I'm back in the classroom one evening a week learning how disgusting my kitchen is since I am nowhere near keeping my facilities at a "food safe" level of operation!

"A valedictory chorus to our childhood..."

The title of this post is a quotation from the last page of a novel I just finished. If you told me that a book was "a valedictory chorus to our childhood" my first reaction would be to assume it was pretty nauseating. Usually, when I think back to being a teenager, the dominant emotion I feel is relief that I got through it, a "God that was hell, I never want to go back" rush of thought. Most of my friends today were not the kids in high school for whom those were the "best years of their lives". More of us were geeks and theater or orchestra nerds, the kids who made it through and are most likely much happier today than we were back then.

But then, I have a peculiar memory which, unfortunately, has the ability to render in great detail moments from the past of great unpleasantness. When it comes to good memories, perhaps because they are less dramatic, my brain seems to let them go much too easily. For the last 7 years I have been (thankfully) married to a guy with a remarkable memory who can help me reconnect with good/funny/loving moments from the past. But I met him a little late--there were a good 29 years before Brian during which I know good things happened but which I only sometimes vaguely remember. A photo album can help release some of those memories from the gray matter, but only to a point.

It is an unusual feeling to read someone else's words, and fictional words no less, and feel like you have been reconnected to your own memory. But Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? has done just that and for the past week or so, I've been experiencing rushes of memories of what was also wonderful about being a teenager. I drove past (the now-toxic-from-the-dioxin-plume) First Sister Lake over by Dolph Park and WHAM I had a memory of walking down there on a warm Spring night when I was 16 with my first boyfriend. I remember the frogs peeping, I remember the purple skirt I was wearing, I remember the smell and softness of the air. Nothing dramatic, no eventful happening, just a really nice moment from my past, and something that until I finished this book, I hadn't been able to access.

I read this book before, a few years ago, and liked it enough to put it on my recommended books list. But this re-reading was such an unexpectedly rich experience and it emphasizes in my mind why I re-read books. This time I wasn't reading for plot and so I was able to notice other things. I could focus on how perfectly the intensity of friendship between Berie and Sils is rendered. I was able to see how Moore does something in this book that I think is extremely difficult--she doesn't gloss or romanticize youth; she shows how hard and tedious and complicated and messy it is to grow up. But she also captures the energy and excitement and the bursting feeling of potential from that time.

Here is a statement from the adult Berie that says it so well:
"I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it....I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood...anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed--I wanted it back!--those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself."

I don't mean to imply that life as an adult is a disappointment; being a somewhat high-strung person, the stability and grounded-ness of adult identity is a daily relief for me. But the book is a reminder that life isn't always about being safe and comfortable and there is an exquisite chaotic beauty to that phase of life where you as a person are not yet defined.

I must remember to re-read this book when Fiona is starting high school. I bet by then she'll dislike my presence and be completely embarrassed by me (as any normal teenage girl should be). I'm sure we'll have lots of battles. But I hope this book helps me to step back and see the big picture of the phase she'll be going through, to remember those crystalline moments that occur in the middle of such a messy period of life. The book makes me want to have a generosity of perception, to hope for and be excited about the bursts of transformational energy that appear at this age amidst all the pain-in-the-ass behavior. I don't expect to share any of this with her, but I do hope to be aware enough to notice it.

Gifts that feed my obsessions

When I was a kid, on Christmas afternoon, my sister and I would call up our respective best friends and start the conversation with "whatdidyaget?"

In the spirit of good natured greed, here are a few things I received that will feed my obsessions.
This book:
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill

My dad, a Greek-ophile if there ever was one, loved it and wants me to love it too (nothing like reading under the pressure of parental expectation...) But seriously, I think if I have a goblet of dark wine on hand, the Wine-Dark Sea and I will get along well.



This book:
Antipasti: Fabulous Appetizers and Small Plates, by Joyce Goldstein

I'm thinking that an Antipasti party might be the perfect antidote to the post-holiday slump. Wouldn't a warm Gorgonzola custard served with pears and arugula cheer you up?



These fun tools:

a stainless steel pasta scooper to replace the crappy plastic one I had. This scooper seems to have it in for the wee kitties on the window sill.



a blow torch from my mother-in-law:

How many Mother-in-Laws give their Daughters-in-law tools that could be weapons? Hello Creme Brulee fest!







I finally finished this and count it as my gift to myself:

Red red red, the antidote to winter gloom! It still needs to be blocked, but I'll get to that later...







And finally:
This item of exercise paraphernalia designed to keep the aforementioned Gorgonzola and creme brulee from settling too firmly on my person:


Unfortunately, there is no snow.








To leave you with a smile, I present the cutest/weirdest present that my kids received:



A tiny froggie pot with grass growing out of his head.




So, whatdidyaget?