Rat melon

Brian and I have been checking out Cute Overload a little too often because last week when we went to Arbor Farms we couldn't resist tossing this in the cart:
That may look like a normal melon, but allow me to give you a sense of the scale:
It is about the length of a three-year-old's tibia. Another bonus: it was only $2 and gets along well with Kermit the Frog.

Brian, always one to push things just a step further, then created this last night:

A rabid-red-eyed rat-melon.

Despite the kids' affection for the mini-melon and my fear that they would take mutilation of the rat badly, they ate some of it (yes, even Ian!). Unfortunately, the taste didn't match up with the cuteness factor--full-size melon tastes a lot better. This one was a little bit over ripe and had a distinctly squash-y aroma. I know, melon is technically a squash, but I don't like to be reminded of its savory sibling while eating it.

There is still a good amount left over which will be transformed into rabid-rat-melon popsicles later today (blenderize them with a little juice of your choice and freeze in a popsicle mold).

It may not seem like popsicle season to all of you out there (especially since we woke up today to find a dusting of snow) but to the small people in this house it is never too cold for popsicles.

My new buddy

I've got a new buddy in the kitchen:
I've been a little slow on the uptake here but cast iron is fantastic! About a month ago I bought an already seasoned Lodge cast iron frying pan from Amazon (you can get them locally at Kitchenport, but Kitchenport is far too dangerous a place for me to enter with a three year old). There has been a buzz about the dangers of Teflon among the avian-owning community (of which I am not a member). Enough food freaks have heard about how Teflon fumes can kill a budgie and started thinking twice about frying their eggs in the self-same bird-killer pan. The NY Times magazine had a funny article by Chef Daniel Patterson whose environmentalist girlfriend made him get rid of all his Teflon pans; his quest to make light scrambled eggs finally arrived at a fairly involved process of poaching scrambled eggs and straining them.

I'm too lazy for all that rigmarole before I'm fully caffeinated, so I thought I'd try the old fashioned non-stick pan: seasoned cast iron. It may not be the greatest pan for scrambled eggs (I still risk the Teflon for my slow cooked creamy scrambled eggs), but for pretty much every other cooking task for which I used to reach for a non-stick pan, I now use the cast iron. Fried eggs, pancakes, chicken paillards, grilled cheese sandwiches, so far nothing has stuck to it. I was concerned that the garlic loaded chicken would lead to garlic flavored pancakes the next morning, but a soak in hot water and a soap-less scrub with a brush got out any offending odor or flavor.

The only downside is the weight. The pan lives on my cooktop even when not in use because it is so damn heavy I fear I will brain myself if I keep it up on the high shelf where I store my other pots. I also bought a silicon tube-like thingy to slip over the handle so I don't inadvertently fry my palm when the pan is hot.

Last night my new buddy helped me to make dinner:
I finally got around to making the kafta recipe from January's Gourmet magazine. It was good, though I advise anyone who thinks about making the kafta to abandon the grill and cook the kebabs under the broiler. I started these on the grill and after losing about a third of the quantity of each meat stick to gravity and flames, I very carefully eased them off of the grill (one big spatula and a pair of tongs) and onto my broiler pan. I think if I had stuck with the grill we each would have had one mere morsel of meat and the rest would have fallen to its ruin. How the hell you are supposed to get a ground meat mixture to stick to skewers I do not know. Maybe bamboo skewers would help, but I only have metal ones.

The kafta flavor was really good--the right amount of spice, herbs and pine nuts to highlight the lamb without overwhelming it. I was underwhelmed by the zucchini chunks that the recipe included. They were marinated in a lemon-olive oil mixture and were supposed to be grilled too, but as I had run out of skewers I popped them in my new buddy and cooked them on the stove top. The skillet cooked them up perfectly with nicely browned sides, but the flavor was just too bland next to the assertively spiced kafta.
I altered the yogurt sauce that goes with the kafta and made it more like a tatziki sauce with grated cucumber instead of chopped mint. Mint would be nice when I have a big tuft of it growing in a pot on my deck, but the effort of tracking down mint in March in Michigan I deemed not worth the effort. I also put only a teeny bit of garlic in the yogurt sauce so that a small girl would eat it and eat it she did--she tried pulling the whole bowl over to her place and digging in with her spoon. It took a bit of convincing that the yogurt sauce was to be shared by everyone at the table.

Next time I make the kafta I'll probably skip the zucchini, rice and yogurt sauce and serve it with hummus, good pita bread and a romaine/tomato/cucumber salad tossed with lemon, olive oil, salt and sumac. And hell, maybe I'll try and pan fry the meat tubes in my new buddy and skip both grill and broiler.

the garment that divides us

You are either a poncho lover or a poncho hater. I don't think I've ever met someone who is on-the-fence about said garment. I have always lumped myself in the "hater" category but I now have to qualify my position.

I now declare that I hate all ponchos that don't have green monsters on them.

I am officially in love/covet/envy/want-it-want-it-want-it NOW mode with this poncho.

Bumpy cables

Because I have the attention span of a flea and because I got a really good deal on the yarn, I started yet another knitting project, this time making bumpy cables:
At first I thought the bumpy (seed stitched) cables were kind of creepy, like they had sprouted pimples or something. But I'm growing fond of them. So far I've messed up the cables and had to redo them twice, which is a pretty good run for me. I don't often make cabled stuff because I don't have that attention-to-detail sort of personality and will knit along happily and then look back and realized I've twisted one cable (usually way at the bottom) the wrong way. Much cursing then ensues.

So I'm trying to train myself to stop and look at what I've done fairly regularly so that I catch mistakes before I've gone on too far.

I do really love this yarn--it isn't some fancy schmancy fiber--just Paton's Merino that I got on sale at Joann.com. But it is soft and springy and very red. I'm making the sweater pictured below (I bought the pattern at Elann):
and yarn for the entire sweater cost $42 (and that includes shipping--the yarn was on sale for $5 for a 100 gm ball and I had a 20% off coupon). And for once, I am actually using the yarn that is called for in a pattern and I'm following the pattern rather than making lots of changes. I was quite tempted to do some modifications, particularly to all the seed stitch panels, but finally decided that a) I kinda like the pattern as it is written and b) I'm sick of dealing with all my "I'm smarter than the pattern" blunders (see all the damn mistakes I made on that Ribby cardigan). It is humbling, but true--I am not smarter than the pattern. So I'm actually going to try and complete this sweater by (gasp) following the rules!

Undies in a bunch vs. Knickers in a twist

Depending on which side of the Atlantic you are from I've either got my undies in a bunch or my knickers in a twist about Zadie Smith's new book On Beauty.

Unfortunately, after reading this book, I don't think Smith would recognize the incongruity of an American uttering the latter phrase.

I'm hardly in the first to comment that Zadie Smith has a tin ear for American English (though I didn't know about the problem before reading the book)--go look at Blue Pencil's wonderful post dissecting all the mistakes in just the first few pages. Also, there are a number of readers' reviews on the book's Amazon page that detail other inaccuracies.

Shall I tell you what triggered my editorial instinct? Not food mistakes (for once) but clothing, an area in which I am hardly an expert since I live in jeans and t-shirts (a friend expressed surprise recently when I wore a shirt with buttons). But even such a non-clothes horse knows that you don't call a turtleneck a polo-neck and a tanktop a vest when you are writing in the point of view of an American character. Another gaff that had me snorting with laughter was when a group of rappers was offered "a crate of beer" rather than a case of beer after a performance.

Smith's editors should be scolded in a big way for letting this many mistakes through; Deb (aka Blue Pencil) pointed out that Smith thanks numerous editors and copy editors all of whom should be dope-slapping each other to bits now.

The inaccuracies aren't merely linguistic--Smith may have spent some time at Radcliff, but she has no clue how the American university system works. There were so many red flags that yanked me out of the story. It would be too tedious for me to list them all (though please do feel free to e-mail me and we can have a big old bitch session together). I am still wracking my brains as to why Smith set this at an American university and not a British one. I don't see how this book was improved by hauling it to this side of the Atlantic and I can imagine it having far fewer errors if it was set in an environment that Smith knows better.

And now, on to the actual story. In the moments that I was able to turn a blind eye to all the distracting errors I tried hard to get into this book. Smith says in her opening note that the book was "inspired by a love of E. M. Forster" and that she wanted to "repay the debt with hommage." Oh dear. I love Howards End and clearly Smith does too, but I don't think that I should re-write it.

Unlike Forster, almost none of Smith's characters are complex or sympathetic--most are pretty despicable. The only character who did retain the subtlety of the original was Charlene Kipps, the mother figure based on Mrs. Wilcox. Unfortunately, she also appears on the fewest number of pages. Forster manages to make his characters have unappealing sides to their personalities--no one wants to go cuddle up with Mr Wilcox and one could accuse Helen Wilcox of being bullheaded--but they are not so caricatured that one would dismiss them outright. But spend an hour in a room with Monty Kipps or Zora Belsey? No thank you.

Also, when does paying hommage to one's favorite book merely revert to laziness? Smith lifts scenes almost word for word from the original. The two most glaring examples are the scene with the Kipps family after the mother's death in which they reject a handwritten note bequeathing a family painting to Kiki (in the original Mrs. Wilcox writes that she would like Margaret to have Howards End) and the scene at the railway station in which Mrs. Kipps wants to take Kiki to see a painting at another house and is intercepted by her family (Mrs. Wilcox wants to take Margaret to Howards End and similarly is intercepted by her family). Reading these two scenes made me extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed for the author (Smith, not Forster). Did she really have nothing new to add? Was it necessary to "borrow" every aspect of the scenes?

One reason I'm spending so much time dissecting my reaction to this book is that I really loved Smith's first book, White Teeth, which dealt with race, class, and gender politics in a way I can only describe as graceful and light (despite the weightiness of the topics). Her characters in that book were so warm and alive and complicated. Now I want to go re-read both White Teeth and Howards End to rid my mind of this impression of Smith and to reclaim Forster's story from Smith's version, which unfortunately became more parody than hommage for me.

Note to self

Staying at home and indulging in, say, $900 worth of massages, wine and babysitters, would be a better way to get through winter (and the school break) than to spend that money on airfare.

We had a dickens of a trip to visit Brian in AZ (he's on a two-week work trip). Silly us, we thought it would be "fun" to break up the daddy-drought and go someplace sunny for a few days of Ian's school break. Both kids got sick (again). Ian was screaming in pain from pressure in his ear on Saturday (we drove to the top of a small mountain and the change in pressure triggered it) and then Saturday night (and Sunday night and last night too) Fiona spiked a fever. She's a mess--hasn't been eating, won't take Tylenol (every night she and I have a massive wrestling match to get her fever lower including sticking her in a bathtub of cold water--you could hear the screams for miles--but at least after that she took her damn medicine.)

To add to the "pleasure factor" of our (ha!) vacation, our flight out on Wednesday evening was delayed 4 hours--they boarded us, pushed away from the gate, went back to the gate, got us off the plane, put us back on the same plane, pushed away from the gate again, went back again, got us off the plane and then finally put us on a different plane. All after the kids' bedtimes. We finally got to AZ at 4 AM (their time--6 AM here) and Ian was so exhausted he promptly threw up.

Yes, the sun was shining and both my kids looked like little moles squinting up at the sky and complaining about how bright it was. There were moments between bouts of sickness where things went ok--a trip to a science museum, a 4 hour playground visit where the kids were overjoyed to be playing outside--but all in all, a vacation I'd prefer to forget.

God it feels good to be back home where they can scream without waking up an entire hotel and there are lots of videos with which to placate them.

Beverage news and memories

You may (or may not) recall that last October Ami and John brought over three affordable bottles of wine for us to drink and decide which one they should buy a case of for their bonfire.

I have some excellent news: my favorite of the three they brought
is on sale at a ridiculously cheap price at Arbor Farms. They have it for $4.99 a bottle plus you can get another 10% off if you buy 6 or more bottles which makes it $4.50 a bottle. That's cheaper than some bottled water! So I went and bought a case and now we have a house red that will help us get through the rest of the gloomy months. It's a punchy Syrah, not terribly complex, but able to stand up to common fare like, spaghetti with red sauce or, Mexican chocolate cupcakes...

On another beverage front, Jam Faced's recent post about tea got me thinking of my own addiction. Go look at his post for a beautiful photo of what looks like my ideal cup of tea. It is in a lovely bone china cup, to start with. It also looks strong and milky and has a perfect tea biscuit to nibble on while you sip.

The photo and post hit a raw nerve since for the past two weeks I've been out of my favorite tea and have been trying to find a substitute. Unfortunately I'm addicted to Peet's English Breakfast blend which I can only get via mail order. I order it a pound at a time (and a pound is a LOT of tea) but somehow I thought I was on my second to last tin rather than the last one so I went through a period in limbo land. If I was more organized I would have placed the order right away but in between the chaos and, oh, let's see, the chaos of my life with the two rug rats I would forget daily to order the tea and then remember daily at tea time when I was faced with inadequate substitute brown brews. Finally I propped the empty tin on the keyboard of the computer so I would remember to place the order the next time I got on-line.

Thankfully, this week the tea arrived and this afternoon I sat down to this:

The ingredients for a happy afternoon Kate

In the Peet's-free interval I tried two teas that I don't remember being as bad as they were: Taylors of Harrogate Imperial Tea Room (loose leaf) and Twinings' English Breakfast (in--ugh--tea bags). I was not a girl raised on snooty tea; "tea" when I was growing up was plain old Typhoo tea leaves. We stuffed boxes of the stuff in our suitcases (along with many packets of McVities Plain Chocolate Digestive Biscuits) every time we visited the relatives in England. I thought Typhoo was downright wonderful stuff compared to the Lipton that was served everywhere else.

The Taylors was strong, it had that going for it, but there was no bouquet. And the Twinings tea bags--weak brown water. Yes it had some caffeine, but no taste. I really don't remember becoming such a tea snob, but I think Peet's has ruined me--their tea is whole leaf (not the broken crumbles of Typhoo) and really has a flowery bouquet. It isn't super strong but that can be dealt with by adding an extra spoonful to the pot.

Now that I have the Peet's in hand, I have been attempting to come close to my memory of drinking the ideal cup in front of my Granny's coal fire in her 18th C farm house up on the Yorkshire moors. I know, this is a vain quest since there are so many elements of my daily life that lack the atmosphere of the memory, but a girl has to dream and I dream of tea.

I even bought some Thomas Organic Creamery Creamline Milk the other day (once I got my Peet's supply) which is from local pasture-fed Jersey cows, is non-homogenized and low-temp pasturized--about as close as I am like to get to the milk my Granny had delivered every morning. It helped, but I fear that the ideal cup is beyond me simply due to the vividness of my memory. So I'll keep looking back at Jam Faced's post and keep on dreaming.

I did experience a positive memory moment this week by re-reading Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; it was a quick and pleasant trip back to the past. After the first few chapters it became abundantly clear why I loved this book as a kid: there is a headstrong heroine who can't keep her temper and there are nice descriptions of food.

By page 17 I was seduced by "a box of chocolates about a foot square by six inches deep, swathed around with violet ribbons" and a little further down the page "a confectioners' paste board carton filled with every imaginable variety of little cakes--there were jam tarts, maids of honor, lemon cheese cakes, Chelsea buns, and numerous little iced confections in brilliant and enticing colors." Mmmmmmm. Must go track down little cakes to go with tea.

Kid-Lit

In the past two days, I've read two of Kate DiCamillo's kid books and the one pictured to the left is fabulous.

There are appealing characters who are remarkably complex especially when you take into account the economy of the writing. But the prose isn't simplistic in the least and does not talk down to kids. The author uses words like "perfidy" and tells you if you don't know the word to go look it up. And the plot moves along quickly but also knows when to slow down so that the experience of reading it isn't breathless.

The illustrations, by Timothy Basil Ering, are also beautiful. I can't say I'm the greatest fan of having illustrations in books that aren't strictly "picture books" because often they don't jibe with the prose (I read a horrible edition of some Trollope novels last year which had the most hideous illustrations and completely ruined the spell the prose would cast) . But Ering renders DiCamillo's story perfectly; it is a treat to turn the page and see one of his beautiful, smoky drawings.

I also read DiCamillo's first book, Because of Winn-Dixie. It was ok. The southern voices were done well and again, there was an economy to the story, nothing superfluous or excessive. But I can't say that I found the plot or characters that interesting. I'll definitely be reading The Tale of Despereaux to my kids (I think Ian is almost ready for it) but I doubt I'll read them Winn-Dixie.

DiCamillo's books might be directed at a slightly younger audience than I have been craving so next up I'm going to revisit a favorite children's author: Joan Aiken. I loved her book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase when I was a kid--I must of read it 10 times. It turns out that this book was the first in a series dubbed The Wolves Chronicles so I checked out the next book in the series Black Hearts in Battersea. I am hoping that a re-read of Wolves and this next book turn out to be as good as I remember. I just noticed that Nixie Knox has Wolves on her recommended books side bar and since I like (or, let's be honest here, love with an unreasonable passion) many of the other books on her side bar, maybe my adolescent self had decent taste (in books at least) after all.

My favorite cupcakes

We have a three year old in the house now and yesterday we had a plate full of these to celebrate:
One of the great things about having kids is the many opportunities for cupcakes. I hate baking traditional cakes, but love making cupcakes--there's no anxiety about whether the cake will stick to the damn pan, stacking layers, or doing an elaborate frosting job. If you asked me to make a traditional birthday cake I'd be pissy. But make a batch of cupcakes? Sure!

My enthusiasm for cupcake making is helped by the fact that I happen to have found the best chocolate cupcake recipe in the world. These cupcakes are extremely easy to do and I love the fact that the batter is made in a saucepan. They are so good that you don't need frosting. They are actually better without frosting--once I made them with a bittersweet chocolate pecan frosting and it totally overwhelmed the cake. I prefer to just dust a little powdered sugar over them and if you want to spruce them up, use a stencil. (The "3" above was printed out in a big font on the computer and then cut out with scissors.)

The recipe calls these Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes because there's a little cinnamon and quite a lot of vanilla that punch up the chocolate. These flavor enhancers are lovely, but what really makes these cupcakes great is the moistness of the cake: they aren't dry or heavy. Just terrific moist cake. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I must also state that these cupcakes go pretty well with red wine. Not that I served the small creatures any wine with there cupcakes (tempting), but there were a number of moms who looked just about as tired as I felt (Friday, 4 PM, go figure) and we all washed down our cake with Shiraz...

Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes
adapted from Rebecca Rather's recipe printed in some food magazine (I can't remember which)
makes at least 24 cupcakes--I made 24 and still had a good amount of batter to eat raw while they baked.

2 sticks (1 C) unsalted butter
1/2 C Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 C water
2 C granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 C well-shaken buttermilk
2 T vanilla
2 C all purpose flour
1 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt

1. preheat oven to 350. Put cupcake papers in your muffin tins.
   
2. melt butter in a large heavy saucepan over moderately low heat, then whisk in cocoa. Add water and whisk until smooth. Remove from heat.
3. Whisk in separately sugar, eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla.
4. Sift together flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt into a bowl. Then sift again into the cocoa mixture and whisk until just combined (it will be a little bit lumpy).
5. Fill cupcake papers to about 2/3 full. Bake for 20 minutes until a skewer or toothpick comes out clean. It's a moist cake, so don't worry if a few crumbs stick to your tester.
6. Allow cupcakes to cook and then dust with powdered sugar.
   

Adolescent Lit

I suspect that the reason I've been feeling fed up with the adult fiction I've been attempting has nothing to do with the books themselves. I think, at this point in February, I'm simply fed up with being an adult.

So as an attempted antidote, I checked this out of the library:

We'll see if this Newbery Award book has the desired effect of taking me back to the many hours I spent as a kid curled up on the couch in the wintertime reading and escaping. I don't have any memory of being bummed out by winter back then, mainly because I lived many of those dark, cold days in imaginary landscapes rather than the one outside my door.

This is the kind of book I should be reading out loud to my kids in the evening (which means the librarian didn't give me a funny look when I checked it out). I've been trying to get them into chapter books, but it is a hard sell for Ian--he'd much rather look at an anatomy textbook or read a book about electricity. The kid is into facts. I suspect Fiona will be a good candidate for this kind of book when she gets a little older since her imagination is always going full steam ahead. Most of the time I have to guess where the hell she thinks she is. Often I am reminded of Claudette, the tiny little secretary of the Department de Pays Anglophone at the University of Bordeaux. She regularly would utter the following phrase after a confusing encounter with one of the spacier of my fellow lecteurs: "Je ne sais pas quelle planete il habite, mais ce n'est pas le meme" (roughly, "I don't know what planet he's living on, but it isn't the same as mine.") That is Fiona in a nutshell.