Whew and catch up #1

We are back among the non-technologically cursed! Well, Brian's still suffering a bit but I am happily typing on my whiz-bang new computer. It has taken me a little while to shift and organize all my crap on this computer and I still don't know the in's and out's of the new operating system. But suffice it to say there is no longer a cloud of static and swear words hovering over our house.

Now it is my task to do some catch up posts that took place while I was in techno-la-la-land. First up:

The Lady Food Blogger's Picnic!

Patti and Kim had the brilliant idea to invite together local women food-freaks who they had encountered on the blog o' sphere for a face to face meet up and pig out. Thanks to their social and organizational skills, I got to meet the authors behind:

64 sq ft kitchen
The Community Farm Kitchen
A2eatwrite
Teacher in the Hood
Mother's Kitchen
The Farmer's Marketer
The Hungry Masses
Eat Close to Home
Fruitcake or Nuts
Diana Dyer
Could you hum a few bars?
and Victoria who runs the Local Food Workgroup

Once we got over being seen in person, we settled around a table groaning with food and got to know each other. It was impossible to get a bit of everything on one plate. My first attempt looked like this:

Starting at the top: a green salad with cilantro dressing, beet salad, bbq beef, brown rice and kale, swiss chard custard, kale chips, and baguette with white bean dip.

Here are a few photos of other delicacies which I consumed on round two:

Patti's star biscuits and strawberry jam

A cous cous salad

Completely addictive raspberry lemonade--I think I drank about 4 mugs full of this bliss.

There was also dessert which included a lovely red current tart (recipe here), an olive oil and walnut cake (recipe here) with balsamic drenched plums, and some classic cherry pie. Yes, I tried all of them. And then I slouched down in my chair to accommodate my stuffed belly and went into a lovely food coma.

What did I bring? I brought the raw beet salad. Unfortunately I didn't take a pic (just that little pile of magenta peeking out from under the green salad above). A few folks who aren't fond of beets tried it at the picnic and asked for the recipe, and then I tried out the leftovers on a friend who is married to a Ukrainian and her dislike of beets has been a source of conflict in their otherwise happy marriage. She had two servings (along with a sigh of relief) and also wanted the recipe to ensure future marital bliss. As a beet lover, I liked the salad but missed the earthiness that comes out when beets are roasted. But this lack of the "dirt factor" was probably what the beet-haters among us appreciated.

The Power-to-Convert-Beet-Haters Salad
loosely adapted from the Stonesoup blog recipe

4 or 5 medium sized raw beets, peeled (put on rubber gloves to do this--it'll stain the bejeezus out of your palms)
zest of one orange
juice of 1/2 orange
2 T red wine vinegar
2 t whole grain mustard
4 T olive oil
1 C toasted chopped walnuts
1/2 C chopped flat-leaf parsley
1/4 C chives, chopped (optional)
1/4 C fresh basil, chopped (optional)
1/2 C crumbled feta (optional)
kosher salt and pepper to taste

1. Grate the beets using a food processor (or manually, but prepare to be splattered with magenta juice).
2. Whisk together orange juice, zest, vinegar, mustard, olive oil and salt and pepper in a medium sized bowl.
3. Toss the beets with the dressing. Let sit for at least 1/2 hour (but can happily sit overnight in the fridge too).
4. Before serving, toss in the walnuts, parsley and other herbs if you are using them. Top with crumbled feta.
5. Warn the beet neophytes that their pee will turn pink after consuming this salad, otherwise they might get a little freaked out.
   

Posh Nosh

Thanks to MJ for directing my attention to this hysterical British parody cooking show, Posh Nosh. I haven't watched all the episodes yet, but so far episode number 8 is my favorite--Brian and I were hooting with laughter.

I love the way they take the normal cooking verbs and replace them with absurd synonyms: alineate (slice) and excite (saute) the chorizo, exonerate (pour off) the fat, jig (sift) the flour, savage (chop) the leeks, embarrass (peel) the garlic clove, waltz (add) in the rest of the milk.

But there are so many things to love--the repressed hostility between the husband and wife, the snarky comments about peasants and commoners, the ridiculous theme song, even the Posh Nosh parody products advertised during the credits. Do you fancy trying "Provencal Capers in a Wild Monkfish & Red Onion Marmelade"? Me neither. Each episode is under ten minutes so I'm trying to ration myself and not just watch them all in a binge. They are perfect for days when I take myself too seriously in the kitchen.

Techno whine

Remember that cute iMac I bought as an antidote to my computer problems?

Sigh.

One month later, I am worse off that I was before. Now I have NO computer, having over optimistically bequeathed my former PC to my kid to make room on my desk for the shiny new Mac.

What happened to the Mac? I got a lemon. It crashed 10 times in a row after I set it up. I finally figured out how to get it to give me an error code, called it in and was told to take it to the Apple store for repair. When I got there they informed me that while they could replace the hard drive right away, they didn't have the other part that was failing, a little heat sensor and it would take a week to get it in (a week? WTF?). I sighed and left my computer at the store.

A week later I got a call saying that they had replaced both items and the computer was still crashing and spitting out error codes. The guy on the phone recommended giving up on this computer and getting a replacement. The only hitch? It'll take another 2 weeks to get the replacement (2 weeks? WTFlyingF?).

I thought about lugging the bequeathed PC back down stairs (it doesn't have a wireless card yet so I can't use it for internet access), reattaching the snarl of wires and just going back to the way things were. But I've decided instead to try this weird thing called "Patience." I know, it's a strange concept waiting for stuff, particularly in this age of instant gratification. I'm trying to make it a little life-lesson. But it doesn't really go well with blogging. I have nowhere to upload my photos and there are a few posts, particularly one of the Lady Food Blogger's Party hosted by the amazing Patti AKA Teacher in the Hood which I attended recently and the meeting of my book/eating group that is happening tonight, that really deserve to have their photographic glory displayed.

How am I posting this whine, you ask? The answer is, not easily. The technological cloud that hovers over our house affected not only the iMac lemon, but my husband's PC which got infected with a load and a half of spyware and viruses at just about the same moment that I was plugging in the iMac for the first time. (Yes, he is an engineer and should have known better than to let his anti-virus subscription expire in 2005, but as I've said before, he is the optimist of the family, though perhaps a little less optimistic since his poor computer was messed with.) After much tinkering, his computer is still not back to normal, but it will now let us connect to the web again. There is a lot of stuff it won't do and poor Brian is going through some Medal of Honor Pacific Assault and Need for Speed 3 withdrawal, but I'm enjoying his company in the long summer evenings more. (See? That's me looking at the bright side, something I don't normally do!). My productivity has been affected by our technological challenges, but while the kids are at morning camp this week, I've been spent time in my son's room at his small desk with the functional but not-connected-to-the-internet PC and cranked out another 2000+ words on my neglected novel. I like to think that writing while immersed in a kid-atmosphere (and picking the bits of K'nex from between my toes) is helping the atmosphere of my fiction, but truth be told, I'll be happy to return to my grown up office as soon as a functional computer arrives. Cross your fingers for me; this household needs all the good technology karma it can get.

Cripes!

One of the key items that kept us sane while driving from Colorado back to Ann Arbor was a book on CD that I checked out of the library. I had read Kate Dicamillo's The Tale of Desperaux a few years ago and thought it was a lovely book; when I saw the audio version, I thought the kids would like it and it was a book that I wouldn't mind revisiting.

Now I'm raving about this book on CD to everyone I know, even those folks who don't have kids. It really was one of the best readings I have experienced. Graeme Malcom captured every nuance of the prose and each character's voice was incredibly distinct. Sometimes I feel like an audio book is a nice supplement to reading the book, but doesn't necessarily capture everything the printed book has to offer; maybe it is the pacing or maybe it just doesn't match up with the voices I hear in my head. But this book on CD stands alone just fine and does an even better job with the various accents than I could in my imagination. The kids loved it and so did Brian to the point that we didn't want to stop the car because then we'd have to stop the story. We've taken to quoting memorable lines to each other: Miggery Sow's "Gaw!", Antoinette's "Eeet eeez such a disappointment" and Desperaux's brother's regular exclamation "Cripes!"

I also brought along an audio copy of some Junie B. Jones books (which we've never read but a mom I know told me that her kids laughed at the audio version) and found the narrator's voice so excruciatingly shrill that it was only on for about 5 minutes before I hit the eject button. Believe me, we didn't need to import any more examples of shrillness into that car; my kids were doing a fine job on their own!

I selfishly brought with me the second half of Inkspell on CD (at 15 CDs it takes a while to get through) which I listened to on my mp3 player. I'm sure Brian would have enjoyed this book, but I thought it was too scary for the kids. The first book, Inkheart, was read by Lynn Redgrave, who I thought did a pretty good job with the reading--her voice is deep enough that she can capture the male characters well. But Inkspell was better, both in the plot and in the reading. It was read by Brendan Frasier, who apparently has become good buddies with Cornelia Funke and appears as Mo in the forthcoming movie of Inkheart. The plot of the novel is perfect for a book-dweeb like me in which the people in the book find they can "read" themselves into the plot of their favorite novel. The rampant book-love that runs throughout the series is very gratifying (one of the characters refers to her books as "her children") and Inkspell also played with all kinds of perplexing literary questions about narrative, agency and rewriting of plots. I can imagine some happy grad student writing a paper about the meta-narratives in the book and how the author handles all of them (if only they let grad students read something as fun as this book). Though I think this is a well-read book on CD, I did need to go back and read the book in the hardcover version when we got back. One thing I discovered was that Funke starts each chapter with a quotation and these quotations are not in the audio version. Many of them are really lovely and varied so I was happy to get these little gems of authorial emphasis in addition to the chance to read at my own pace and wallow in the plot for as long as I liked.

And to close with a bit of good news, the third book in the trilogy, Inkdeath, comes out in October!

Antidote

Today I fervently embarked on concocting an antidote to the mediocre road food I consumed while on vacation:

A caramelized onion, goat cheese and pancetta tart with a salad from the garden with two kinds of lettuce, peas and snipped chives. And a glass of The Wolftrap syrah that some nice friend left at my house.

There is plenty of good food to be had in Colorado, but my access to it was limited by the two picky eaters with whom I traveled. I gave myself a talking to before we left in the hope that my frustration level at missing out on good available food would not impact my affection for my kids. And mostly it worked. But I was craving my kind of food in a big way when we got back, so despite the fact that no one had clean underwear, the bags remained unpacked and the cat was desperate for attention, I spent a good amount of time today making tart crust, caramelizing onions (which I'd forgotten take forever to caramelize without burning) and heading over to the garden to harvest lettuces from between the really tall weeds that had sprung up in the week of neglect. Priorities people! The Kate Monster must be fed!

Brian was working in Colorado and the kids and I flew out to meet him, then we all went camping together at Rocky Mountain National Park before driving back to Michigan. While we were there

a boy I know turned 8 years old,

we hung out with some marmots who were mighty blase about their spectacular surroundings,

we went to a place where kids feel big and grown ups feel huge,
and we hiked up to exquisite mountain lakes and feasted on the views.

So the lack of literal feasting wasn't such a hardship after all. But I'm glad to be back to my verdant garden where I can make myself the kind of food I love.

Plastic surgery...for dragons

Recently Fiona has become much more critical of the stuffed animal dragons she owns. I was told that a purple dragon (which she asked Santa for the day before Christmas thus sending Brian on a mad dash all over the place trying to find one--mental note, get the kids to visit Santa way before Christmas Eve this coming year) had to be sent back to Santa. This wasn't right after she received it, mind you; she had been insanely in love with Darby as soon as she saw him. This occurred a good two months later. One morning she she came downstairs sobbing because Darby didn't have horns.

I tried guilt tripping the kid into thinking she'd hurt Santa's feelings if she sent it back. No deal. She was sobbing so hard that it was getting hard to understand her, but I think the gist of what she was saying was that Santa's elves could fix him and at least then he'd be happy because he'd have what every dragon needs.

Sigh. The kid would rather have the toy be happy and "complete" than keep it herself and have it living a life unfulfilled. Once I realized she wasn't being a completely selfish little brat, I figured I'd have to give a little minor plastic surgery a try.

I dug through my fabric stash and found some brown wool felt. I got Fiona to draw what Darby's horns were supposed to look like, took her pattern, cut out the felt and sewed the horns on. They aren't perfect, but they made her happy, Darby didn't have to be shipped back to Santa and it wasn't that much work.

But now, four months after receiving a beautiful Chinese Dragon for her birthday, King Kornivised Keenivore (as he is known) was presented to me for his own much more extensive surgical enhancements. No tears this time, which was a relief, but maybe an excess of confidence in the surgeon's talents. King has horns, but no wings, no nostrils (which I was told makes breathing fire very challenging) and no triangle on the tip of his tail.
He looks pretty good to me (ok, the lack of nostrils is a little weird when you start to think about it...) but look at that eager little face waiting for Mama-the-surgeon to work her magic.

Wings are a lot trickier than horns. We had to use Google images to look at all the dragon wing options and I managed to steer her toward some I thought I might be able to reproduce. I dug out some more brown wool felt--two colors this time so that the underside of the wings would be a different color, and to give the wings a little heft so they wouldn't be flaccid (horrors! flaccid wings!)
I used some embroidery thread to add some (primitive) veins.
Then I sewed them on his back. They looked pretty good for my first wingoplasty.

Riding on that success we added the triangle to the tail. Fiona still hasn't come up with a good explanation of what purpose the triangle serves. Rudder, perhaps?
Then I got out more embroidery thread and added some black flaring nostrils. Luckily the photo is blurry because these were a lot harder than they looked. I still can't quite figure out why--I mean, embroidering an oval, how hard can it be? But I had to rip out a few really lumpy and lopsided nostrils before we got a couple of acceptable nostrils (though they are a little petite for a truly ferocious dragon).
Life is much better with nostrils. At least, that's what King told me.

So what comes next? Am I going to be asked to graft talons on toes? She did suggest I sew scales all over a furry dragon and I just pretended I didn't hear her. But if she wears me down and pulls another of those heartbreaking sobbing fits...well, maybe dragon skin grafts are in my future.

U Pick without the pain!

Yesterday I discovered that you can do U Pick and not by physically uncomfortable! The (wonderful, atypical) cool weather we are having meant I took Ian, Fiona, their friend Nick and my mom (aka Granny Jan) out to Rowe's Produce Farm to pick a peck of peas and some strawberries and I didn't sweat buckets! And the kids didn't start complaining after 5 minutes that they were hot and wanted to go home! I've dragged these kids on many a U Pick adventure, but we've never worn long pants and never left the fields still feeling sane (though I always leave feeling a little full...)

Because my kids are strange, they were much more enthusiastic about picking peas than strawberries. Peas are the only green vegetable they eat. Ian ate one and said "Yummy!" which I think I have waited about 6 years to hear (since he decided at age 2 to become a conservative eater). We only got him to try peas again last summer and he realized that despite being green, they are not evil.
Besides, you can also pretend to have a long green nose with a pea...who knew they provided such entertainment value!

Then we headed over to the strawberry field and I helped my mom pick a load of strawberries for her to make jam (I'm too lazy to make my own and she's a nice mom and gives me some).
I brought home about a quart of berries just for snacking, but I didn't need too many because as I mentioned, my kids are strange and don't eat strawberries (they will eat strawberry jam.) But their friend Nick loves strawberries almost as much as he loves arugula (yup, a 5 year old who eats plain arugula like my kids eat potato chips). So while Fiona and Ian played in the dirt, Nick kept me and Granny Jan company and I got the gratifying view of a boy with strawberry juice dripping down his chin:
Once I told Nick that anything he ate in the field was free (the foolish farm owners didn't weigh him on the way in and on the way out!) he went a little crazy. I hope he didn't have a tummy ache later.

For dinner I made a pasta dish that just screams "Spring!":
It's whole wheat spaghetti, ricotta, lots of snipped basil, thyme and oregano, some garlic sauteed in olive oil (I wish I'd had some of my green garlic, but couldn't make the trip over to the garden to pick some), a lot of ground black pepper, and those glorious peas. I wanted to preserve the perfection of the peas so I didn't really cook them: I just put the shelled peas in the bottom of the colander and when the spaghetti was done, I drained it over the peas. It was even briefer than blanching. I ate two heaping bowls of this and plan to eat the same thing all weekend, at least until my pea supply runs out!

Bonne Anniversaire a moi!

So yesterday I turned 39 and celebrated by (finally) getting myself this:
a computer that, god willing, won't crash two times a day.

In the evening, Brian and I walked down to Eve and had a lovely dinner. Brian started with a bowl of curried mussels and I ate a lot of the fantastic sauce (no mussels for me since my body now violently sends shellfish back up the pipe...). We both had salads and split their beef tenderloin entree (which is way too big for me to eat on my own) and drank a nice bottle of Australian Shiraz from their Excursions selection (wines under $30 a bottle.) I really appreciate this part of their wine list--it is actually what made me decide on Eve over Pacific Rim when I was musing over where to go for dinner. I think there is something so decent about having a reasonably priced selection of wines on the menu.

When desert rolled around, I knew I wanted their triple chocolate pots de creme with the accompanying quantity of whipped cream, but I couldn't decide what to drink with it. I couldn't stomach the sweetness of desert wines which I usually only like when paired with a cheese plate, so I asked the waitress if they had any Eau de Vie and unfortunately they didn't. I love a good Eau de Vie that burns as you breathe in and when you exhale you get a blast of fruit essence. So Brian and I went a different route and each got a Guinness to go with the pot de creme and it turned out to be a really nice combination.
The only thing that would have made it better was if it had been draft Guinness with a creamier head. But the bitter nutty darkness of the beer really went well with the richness of the dessert.

My favorite thing about the restaurant came at the end when I went to the bathroom -- I guess I've never used the bathroom at Eve because otherwise I would have remembered the mirror:
All over the face of the mirror are lovely French phrases complementing the person being reflected which meant that instead of looking at myself while washing my hands, I read "Oh, que tu es jolie. Que tu es belle..." etc. I have no idea what I actually looked like when I went back to our table (I suspect a little flushed from wine and stout) but I know I had a big grin on my face after reading that I was "la quintessance de la beaute." (Brian tells me that in the Men's room is a similar mirror but with all the phrases printed in English which I think is too bad; the French definitely adds romance.)

I would LOVE to have a mirror like this in my bathroom--talk about a daily reminder that beauty isn't really about how you look but how you feel.

Taking it up a notch

Well now she's done it. That Ami. She took it up a notch.

To what am I refering?

Why, the hosting of our book group. I hosted last month and I gotta say I'm glad that I'm not the person who has to follow Ami (Hi Meagan! Thanks for stepping up to the plate!) Don't get me wrong, the evening at my house was perfectly enjoyable: we talked about The Welsh Girl (which I was happy to read again) and ate a combination of British and German food that actually went together rather well:

Sole with creamy leek sauce, minted pea puree, German potato salad and red cabbage, with white wine and beer to drink.

But we were all crammed around my small dining room table that seats 4 comfortably, 6 in a pinch and was really too cramped for the 8 people in our group...I had a little music playing and had cleaned up the worst of the crap around the house, but that was about it when it came to ambiance.

The exquisite evening at Ami's complemented the book we read: William Trevor's My House in Umbria. Trevor's prose is so subtle and the untrustworthy narrator, Mrs Delahunty, is so complicated that we spent a good deal of time discussing what was real and what was imagined in the story. Trevor's ability to write cringe-worthy scenes while maintaining your sympathy for the main character raises complicated feelings which we discussed while gathered in Ami's backyard, drinking Gin and Tonic's (in honor of the main character) and icy homemade Limoncello and Orangcello from Lea's sister:
The weather was perfect as we gathered around the table--a little breeze to keep the mosquitoes away but still sunny enough for us to imagine ourselves in an exotic locale. And Ami set a beautiful table:

Peonies and party favors! Ami photocopied some of her favorite Trevor short stories for each of us to take home. (photo courtesy of John Baird)

And of course the food didn't disappoint (I'm wracking my brain for a time when a book group meal failed to live up to expectations...). There was chicken diavolo cooked on the grill, a beautiful salad from Marilyn's garden, sauteed vegetables, Italian bread and of course, plenty of good red wine.

Here I am helping myself to some more of that good red wine. (photo courtesy of John Baird)

I made a dessert from a cookbook that I had neglected for very petty reasons: La Tavola Italiana is a perfectly decent book that has suffered the sin of acquaintance. I bought the book shortly after TAing for a man who had to be the worst Shakespeare professor I have ever witnessed. I was put in the awkward position of having to serve as his apologist to kids who were clued in that their $20,000+ tuition should have offered them better than what this guy was presenting. What does this have to do with the cookbook? The professor was friends with the authors of the cookbook and they mention him by name in the introduction to a few of the recipes. Once I read that a recipe came from his kitchen, well, it just turned my stomach. But thankfully after owning this book for at least 10 years, I have (mostly) recovered from my grad school experience and can once again open the book without gnashing my teeth. So I finally made something out of it!

Ricotta cake with sweetened almond ricotta and strawberries.

It was pretty decent. The cake wasn't anything mind blowing; I liked the pine nuts that studded it and it had a pleasant spongy texture. But it was a fine platform for the consumption of sweetened ricotta and strawberries and tasted particularly good with one of John's expertly pulled espressos. The ricotta (whole milk, not skim) had a few tablespoons of amaretto and a few teaspoons of powdered sugar stirred in. I pressed it through a sieve to make sure it was creamy and not lumpy. Simple, but really nice.

The whole evening was leisurely and graceful and none of us was in a rush to get back in our cars and leave such an enchanted place.

Happy women. (photo courtesy of John Baird)

A perfect photo of Marilyn--she is always able to get us to smile! (photo courtesy of John Baird)

Torn between yelling and praise...

I'm having a parenting moment in which I am terribly torn between yelling at my kid and praising her.

I went into her room this morning and found this:

[translation of the writing in the photo from Left to Right: PUFECATBED=Puffy Cat's Bed, PUFECALIDERBOCS=Puffy Cat's Litter Box and PUFECATFOODBUL=Puffy Cat's Food Bowl]

Wow! What great writing for a 5 year old! Damn! That writing will never come off! Sigh.

The offending toy (Puffy Cat) being put in "toy time out" (i.e. the top shelf of my closet)

Despite the fact that she used "washable" markers it won't come off. With a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser I can get it to fade a little, but it also takes the latex paint off the wall.

I had a similarly conflicted moment a few weeks ago when Brian was out of town and I was trying to get the kids in bed. Fiona had a spectacular meltdown--normally I'd say she's the easier of my two kids, but when she loses it, she really loses it. After an incredible display of lung power, I finally got her to go in her room to calm down, but while I was trying to get Ian settled, she went down stairs, got a piece of paper and wrote:

"I HAT MOMY"

and drew a picture of a heart with a red line through it. Then she marched back upstairs and taped it to the wall of Ian's bedroom (where I was) which triggered his protective urge and then he was yelling at her for being unkind and she was screaming again at both of us. I didn't know how to react since I was conflicted between praising the good writing and being completely sick of dealing with the tantrum which, far from being over, had now escalated to include her brother.