ahhhhhh

The kids have been subdued, this is what my sangria pitcher looks like and I feel much better now that the malondialdehyde and hydroperoxide in my system have been neutralized by the polyphenols in the wine. And I also feel better because of the ALCOHOL!

I made it with a bottle of La Vieille Ferme red--super cheap this month at $5.47 a bottle at Plum Market--a lemon, a lime, some sugar, and what was left in the triple sec bottle. The swig of wine I took before dumping it in the pitcher made me think it would be fine without the (ahem) fortifications, no bells and whistles, but perfectly drinkable which is more than I can say for most wine at this price.

uggggggg

The kids have no camp, no plans, no nothing this week and they are driving me nuts. Fiona, at the tender age of 5, has learned to whine "I'm bored" like a droopy teenager. Due to this pleasant state of the homestead, I have come to two realizations: 1) I better find some kind of camp for the other week we have nothing planned or else I'll throttle them and 2) I am not drinking enough wine, especially considering that Slashfood reported on research that red wine increases longevity. It looks like a pitcher of sangria is going to be made and consumed tonight.

Elixir of Life Recipe

Meg was kind enough to e-mail me with the recipe for the Elixir of Life AKA Pomegranate Mojito.

Pomegranate Mojito
makes 1

1 oz Pama Pomegranate Liqueur
1 oz premium white rum
1/2 oz lime juice
2 T simple syrup
about 10 mint leaves
ice
club soda

Muddle syrup and mint leaves in a glass. Fill glass with ice. Add Pama, rum and lime juice. Top with club soda. Garnish with a slice of lime and/or more mint leaves.

Catch Up #2--taking it up yet another notch

Remember how I mentioned that at our last book group meeting Ami took it up a notch? Well Meagan hosted in July and damn if she didn't take it up yet another notch. I seriously don't know how I'm going to host after these displays of elegance...ah well! Luckily I haven't got a competitive bone in my body so I'll just serve food at my dinky table with my mismatched glassware and still have a grand old time!

But I am very happy to go to the homes of friends who are generous enough to include me in their celebration of good taste! Meagan set up this elegant table on her back patio:
While inside Meg used her muddler to great effect:

Ta da! Pomegranate mojitos!

That's how I imagine the elixir of life should look. Oh man, I want one right now...

And it just got prettier from there. Ami made a lovely, labor-intensive appetizer from the French Laundry Cookbook.
Let me see if I can remember all the components--the base is made up of a chopped tomato compote and the green pool around it is chive oil. The next layer up consists of blanched green beans in a thickened cream vinaigrette and it is all topped off with frisee tossed in olive oil and a little sea salt.

There was also a lovely summery fresh mozzarella salad, chlodnik (cold buttermilk cucumber soup), redskin potato salad and an amazing array of gorgeous grilled vegetables with a fresh herb vinaigrette.
And what was all this culinary and decorative splendor in honor of? Thankfully a really good book. We read Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and it is fantastic. (Warning to all relatives--you'll probably get a copy of this for your birthday or Christmas!) Stylistically the novel is very quiet--even shocking events are related with a lack of histrionics. And the plot of an old man remembering the most significant summer of his youth is contemplative without ever getting sentimental. What amazes me still when I think back to the book is the subtlety with which the author told his story and how much he left out. This is a book that trusts its readers to fill in the gaps--there isn't one moment I can think of that is obvious and there were many times where I re-read a scene to make sure what I thought was happening was what was really happening. I also loved how every question wasn't answered--there were plenty of gaps in the story, particularly in the part told in the present, that are never explained. But then, this is a book that exemplifies the "show rather than tell" dictum of good writing. Like Meagan's gracious and elegant hosting, this book is a hard act to follow.

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.