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Old Foods and New Years

There are some things that my mom made when I was a child that I still remember with a poignant, nostalgic hunger: cinnamon buns at Christmas with white frosting and red maraschino cherries on the top (memorable because my mother, a responsible mother of the 70s and 80s, shunned red food colouring); tea biscuits with winter suppers, to be devoured afterwards with margarine and homemade jam; hot milk sponge cakes on lazy Sunday afternoons; pancakes on Saturday mornings while we watched HOURS of cartoons.

It's funny what we take away from our childhood, this brief, haunting space of time. I have had - and, I will say with no real modesty, made - any number of delicious things in my adult life, but none of them possess the same enchanted glow as a bowl of orange jello brought to me in a silver bowl when I was in the hospital at 8. I can't even remember what my birthday cake tasted like this year, beyond it being delicious, but I could tell you in detail about my childhood birthday cakes, delicate and chocolate and sandwiched together with strawberry preserves.

I read in a cookbook ages before I had kids that it was important to keep in mind what "taste memories" we are building for our children, which I mentally squirreled away, thinking at the time that it sounded like quite sensible advice. Now, though, I'm not so certain - I don't think we get to pick what "taste memories" our children take away from childhood, since my kids have no memories at ALL of me ever making things that I am quite proud of and make WAY too often (brownies, anyone?) but speak yearningly of doughnuts that their grandfather bought them two winters ago.

And then there are the things that I make without even thinking about, like the tray of polenta squares (totally simple and from the cookbook that came with my son's lunchbox) that I pulled out of the oven last night, and which my husband had never even SEEN before, since they're normally packed in school lunches and eaten before he gets home. Yet I make them nearly every week and they're received with a surprisingly rapturous glee by my kids, this food that I rarely even think about and that he'd never even seen.

Most people go into parenthood wanting to give their children a good childhood, to give their children happiness, sweet-tasting and mild. The problem with children, though, is that they're actual people and live in the actual world and we don't actually get to control other people or the world - well, I don't, although that feels unfair. And we also don't get to say what memories they'll keep from their childhood, which is sort of depressing, just like my stupid polenta squares.

A lot of people take stock of their health in January, and make plans to eat healthier in this still-new year. It's certainly not a bad idea - my personal resolutions are to eat more fruit, to have more vegetables with supper and to cut back on how many processed foods we eat, but I have other food resolutions beyond those. I want to make more soul-feeding foods, more foods that will stay (possibly) in their memories long after childhood is over, long after this goes from being their home and just becomes the house they grew up in, long after childhood is over and this all has just become memory, vivid and bittersweet and gone.

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Another snow day! On the last one, ten kids made it to school, which amuses me. The Girl has heard such wonderful things about snow days that she's insisting that she MUST GO, which also amuses me - I would never, ever have voluntarily missed out on a chance to legitimately Not Go To School as a kid (or now. School. Shudder.), but my daughter is made of different stuff.

Yikes! There are gusts of freezing rain and howling winds wrapping themselves around my cozy house. I think I'm keeping her home, anyhow.

This is a more wintry winter then we've had in years - I don't think there was really much snow at this time last year and this year, the banks are huge, taller than The Baby's head. We went for a walk last week, and she looked disconcerted by these walls of snow on either side of her, which I hope she remembers - the cold, the narrow white corridors, the snow falling forever and ever.

My dad phoned me on Saturday and asked if he could take the kids out into the bush to get our Christmas tree. I had to put down the phone for a moment while I hyperventilated at the very idea, and then my husband suggested he go too, so that was all right. They headed over to my uncle's farm, and my dad and The Boy argued over my father's choice of a tree - it was, The Boy warned him, MUCH MUCH TOO SMALL and grandma would NOT like it. But my husband chose a very nice tree for us, and my dad cut down the little tree for himself and we brought our tree home and decorated it:

And while we were doing that, my dad went back into the forest - this time with my disgruntled mother - and got another tree. What happened to the small tree? Apparently, it is now on my porch. Oh boy.

At last count, we're having 17 people here for Christmas. This doesn't daunt me - they're just family and they're easy to entertain, especially since we have all of the grandchildren here - but I'm a little bit boggled AND WHO COULD BLAME ME at the very idea of what to feed that many people. So. Here are my rough ideas for right now:

1. I'm going to have a tray of veggies, dips and cheese fondue set out for those who find Christmas dinner a bit hard to wait for, as well as a coffee and tea bar. Are there any other snacky things I should set out? How about beverages?

2. Christmas dinner is going to be a roast turkey and a cold glazed ham. But side dishes! What can I possibly make? Have any of you ever made a side dish in your slow cooker - and if so, what? My aunt is bringing a sparkling jello salad, but I'm still going to make aspic because apparently it JUST ISN'T CHRISTMAS without my brothers and fathers asking for the aspic OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Family jokes! Fear them! So I'm also going to make some over-the-top mashed potatoes, dressing and gravy, something with sweet potatoes (but WHAT? I hate marshmallows and I hate nuts. Any other festive ideas for sweet potatoes?), probably some Brussels sprouts... and what else? Remember, I'm having a GAZILLION PEOPLE over here, so a lot of side dishes are probably a good thing.

3. And then dessert. I'm making Pavlova (filled with pomegranate seeds, I think. so pretty!) and probably a buche de noel (rolled cakes like that are MUCH easier to make than you might think!) - should there be anything else? I'm thinking yes, but WHAT? I would love to have a beautiful table set up with desserts, so what would look pretty and festive? IDEAS! HELP!

The First Batch of Christmas Cookies

Today is a snow day, and so one my kids has gone back to bed and the other one is working quietly on a massive box robot in the living room and yet another one of my kids is eating bananas and watching Little Bear. My husband called me from the drive to work, telling me that he was driving behind the snowplow and booooorrrred.  Doesn't it seem early in the winter to start having snow days?

Lucky for me, though - I am, however unwittingly, prepared for this snow day because the Baby and I spent yesterday evening making sugar cookies to decorate today. Like most little wee kids, she loves helping me bake, and so I try to make as many safe baking opportunities as I can for her. I realized mournfully on Friday night that even though we make lots of cookies together, she had never had the fun of making sugar cookies - and then by a lucky coincidence, the current issue of Living Without magazine WHICH I BOUGHT ON SATURDAY featured a gluten-free sugar cookie recipe! Obviously, we were meant to make them.

So we did.

Here she is pouring the gf flour blend into our stand mixer, the handiest thing in our kitchen. The funny thing about working with little kids is that you start out humouring them and before you know it, there's this competent little person working alongside you. Look at her pour that flour!

Now she's peeking at the butter, which she just dropped in.

This weekend was our church's Advent play and potluck lunch, and I really felt a warm glow when I realized how much of the food she could safely eat - everyone is so careful about ingredients and letting me know what's in their contribution and her grandpa made a big batch of her very favorite baked beans, too. With small children with severe food issues, like my munchkin, it's really hard to keep them from feeling deprived - so much of the world is off-limits to them. Living in such a small town, though, means that everyone who knows her knows what her food issues are, and she's surrounded by people who make a huge effort to keep her safe and happy.

Super artsy close-up!

I appointed my husband Official Household Food Photographer, and I think it's a definite improvement. The Baby had scampered off her cooking chair by now, since I don't think little kids belong around running machinery - just fyi for the safety minded readers who like to email me whenever I post about cooking with kids. Blogging, much like living in a small town, means that everybody knows your bizness. That's okay. I don't mind.

Look at all those cookie cutters! The wee ones that The Boy is using were sent to us by Bren J. and whoo, they are a hit. I want to make an entire batch of wee gingerbread acorns, now that I think about it - wouldn't that be cute? And I could dip the tops in chocolate? Adorable!

So that was some Sunday evening fun at my house, and The Baby blithely poured and used cookie cutters and the small child-sized rolling pin without any thoughts for all of the many things she's not allowed to do, and the house was fragrant with the smells of early Christmas, of butter and vanilla. There are many more cookies to come.

November is No Fun

Now that Halloween is over, I have had several people ask me what our plans for Christmas are. And that is just not the thing to ask someone who is still more than slightly nauseated by the really disgusting amounts of candy she's eaten over the weekend, really. But as I was sketching out our plans for the month, I suddenly realized that we don't have a free weekend again until January.

Welcome to the holiday season!

We were shopping on the weekend and sometime between trick-or-treating and Saturday morning, every store we went into had completely gotten rid of all of the Halloween stock and brought in the Christmas stuff. It was jarring.

I've actually done a fair bit to get ready for Christmas so far - I've placed an order for my husband's Christmas presents, found sources for the kids' Saint Nicholas gifts, and made lists of things I want to bake this season - although the Things I Want To Bake list is sort of an on-going project and not so much a sign of my organizational skills as a sign of my all-consuming cookie gluttony. But I certainly don't feel Christmasy yet, nor should I, since it's still nearly two months away. I mean, really.

Do you do Christmas baking? I know lots of women who set aside a whole day to bake dozens and dozens of cookies right at the beginning of the season, which I find sort of... well, icky. Cookies are at their best within the day or so that they're made - unless you're making those old style spicy cookies which need to age for a while to really get at their eating peak - and so generally those big batches of Christmas cookies are past their prime by Christmas day. I'm more of a makes 'em when I wants 'em kind of baker, and right now, I pointedly do NOT want any Christmas cookies, thank you. It is November 3rd and I still feel yucky from my Halloween gastronomical overexertions.

I don't like November much. It's just a month in-between things, and I generally use it to stock up on my bronchitis for the year. I used to get badly depressed every November without fail, but now I'm too busy online shopping to really notice, so that's a comfort. And by the end of the month, I probably WILL feel like baking cookies again, even if the idea boggles my still-candy-addled mind more than a little bit right now. Maybe. Or maybe I'll just sulk on my couch until 2009. We'll see.

Sick Day

dAll of my kids - every single one of them - are sick today.

They're not VERY sick (they just have colds) but they're all sick enough to keep them home from school, and the one who is always home is feverish and miserable. Right this minute, though, she's happy - deliriously happy - because her big brother is reading the Sears Christmas Catalog to her.

Because I didn't have two kids to rush off to school this morning, I got dressed instead, putting on some new clothes instead of wandering around dozily in my pajamas until the need for food and friends and mail forced me into regular people clothing. So I put on my new skirt and a sweater and some tights and came out, and my son boggled and asked me, with some considerable worry in his voice, if I was going to a funeral today?

I think I should maybe wear skirts more often.

Speaking of dressing up: it's Halloween this Friday! The older kids asked us, forlornly, if they could maybe have storebought costumes this year, so now they're being The Nylon Ninja and The Walmart Witch. The Baby is being a beautiful purple butterfly in handpainted (by her father, thank you) wings. And I am being the mom who makes lots of Halloween-themed food this week, from ghost-shaped sandwiches in their lunches, to a Frankenstein's monster made out of Jell-o, and of course, Caramel Apples. (the burn scars on my hands from previous caramel apple-making sessions are aching just thinking about it....) Today, I'm going to make my good pumpkin spice bread (I'll get the recipe up later!), which my kids love to eat slathered in cream cheese - something comforting for a day when everyone is achy with a mean cold and outside the bare trees whisper into the bitter wind that soon it will be November.

In the meantime, though, it's still October and there's gluten-free bread in the breadmaker, pumpkin bread in the oven AND I'm wearing a new skirt, listening to my happy (if rather feverish and runny-nosed) children play in the next room, little things that add up to happiness, the small joys that make up life.

Happy Thanksgiving!

... if you're Canadian, that is. One of the first Canadian Thanksgivings was held by Martin Frobisher* who held a formal Thanksgiving ceremony in 1578 in what is now Newfoundland, and the Native Canadians held autumn feasts even before that. Another explorer, Samuel de Champlain**, along with the settlers who came with him, held huge Thanksgiving feasts at the same time in New France (or what is now Quebec.).

*And then he became a pirate. True story! Ah, Canadian history - so badly taught in school.

** He did NOT become a pirate, although he did go on to explore as far as Lake Huron. I could actually go take a picture of a local sign saying that Sameul de Champlain was RIGHT here! Was this ever mentioned in our grade school history? Nope.

And to celebrate our vast and storied and poorly taught history, we have ordered a pizza and are spending the day watching American Thanksgiving cartoons. Since we spent the past THREE DAYS eating turkey and stuffing and sweet potato casserole and pumpkin pie over and over and over again at an ever-changing array of relatives houses, another day of Thanksgiving food might kill us dead. Also, I don't think my liver could take another day of Thanksgiving revelry.

While I was sleeping in, recovering from the aforementioned Thanksgiving revelry, my husband - GOD BLESS THAT MAN - made scrambled eggs for the kids for breakfast in our brand-new frying pan.

Isn't that a gorgeous pan? It has a safe ceramic coating, unlike the scary stuff that coats most older nonstick pans, AND it's made from recycled stainless steel!

Note the milk in a bag.... I think I feel a patriotic tear in my eye. Sniff.

The frying pan, my husband reports, was a pleasure to cook on. And in the name of thoroughness, he also took a picture of the pan RIGHT AFTER the eggs were done cooking:

 

Ta da! They weren't kidding about that non-stick part. Also, I think my husband should take over as House Food Photographer.

Now this year's Thanksgiving is fading into memory, even though we're still in it, and I've already pinpointed my one favorite memory - my fine young son helping clean up after dinner at his great-aunt's last night:

What a good boy.

Another year! I am very thankful - even hungover and melancholy - for the ridiculously lavish blessings in my life, for family and friends and ridiculous amounts of turkey dinners.

Gloom and Comfort

I am well in the middle of my autumnal blahs - at least, I hope it's the middle. It would be terrible to think that you're halfway through some grim thing and in reality, you're just standing on a crevice, looking down. But I think it's already peaked and is packing up its black bags and heading home, really.

At one particularly grim point during the weekend, I considered deleting my blog, which I might have done had my husband not been busily working on finishing up the summer camp book ALL WEEKEND LONG. I don't think I've been away from a computer for that long since 1995, and it felt very strange. So instead of a terse "C-YA, world!", I sat around reading cooking magazines all weekend and making long, long lists of all of the comforting things I will make, someday, these vast, consoling waves of sugar and butter. And then I made Shepherd's Pie for dinner last night and some baked apples, which was also very good, although the kids refused to eat any of the Shepherd's Pie, which they normally really like. Outside, the pretty part of autumn is ending and all that's left are yellow dried up leaves and bare branches.

It's a good thing I didn't delete my blog on the weekend because that Shepherd's Pie segueing right into bare branches thing I just did right there? ART. (and you can't see this - or I HOPE not - but I just cracked myself right up back there. Hahahaha. Art.) So I think that I'm on the mend when I can make myself laugh again, and there's also Thanksgiving to look forward to, as well as eating three Thanksgiving dinners. THREE. Good golly. But there's nothing more comforting than Thanksgiving dinner, I think, the stuffing and the glazed sweet potatoes and the pumpkin pie and the soporific turkey and the endless family squabbles dug up from the mists of time. Awesome.

As soon as I'm done writing this, I'm going to go gather up The Baby and go to the store for eggs and laundry soap, and then we're going to spend the rest of the day doing laundry and making oatmeal cookies to line our cooling racks and gluten-free molasses bread to rise in the bread machine and the house to put in order again, these ordinary domestic comforts as outside it gets colder and colder and the yellow leaves all fall onto my yard and my steps.

So tell me your favorite gloomy weather foods, what spells comfort for you - and tell me something cheerful and good to keep me company while I climb the stairs back out of this.

Coffee and Crying and Cookbooks

It was a beautiful weekend - we drove through some leafy country places at one point and the red trees and the golden, mellow autumn light and the farm fields quiet in the fall were all so beautiful that I was speechless with it. But today we woke up and there had been a hard frost and my kids sighed and put on warm hats and mitts and piles of scarves. That's the way autumn goes - one day it's so beautiful and red and orange and gold that you could just sob and the very next day it's FREEZING and the trees are bare and there's still a month to Halloween.

I'm a bit... oh, melancholy, let's say. And I hate writing about it, but there it is, this big dark sulking thing between me and my words. I sat down this morning at 6 to write this, started blankly at the screen for a while and then gave up. I kept BURNING things on the weekend - first a whole pot of rice and lentils, for Pete's sake (who burns RICE AND LENTILS? What a goober.), and then a pot of carrots and then a tray of peanut butter cookies and then my freaking HAND AND ARM. Yeouch.

My husband is REALLY REALLY busy right now, but he took some time off from working this weekend to make his mopey wife delicious cafe lattes with frothed Baileys on top.

He loves our espresso maker. He brought it into work for a week earlier in September and played barrista, but then I missed it, so it had to come home again. And now he uses it to make his sad, sad wife decadent drinks in the evening, placing the warm tall mugs in my hands and ruffling my hair and telling me over and over again that I WILL feel better again soon. He promises.

Being depressed is boring. And READING about someone being depressed is MIND-NUMBING. So instead, I'm going to write about my favorite cookbooks, since writing from them will apparently be safer than actually cooking for the next little while. Here we go!

1) The I Hate To Cook Book by Peg Bracken, with illustrations by Hilary Knight.

I don't actually hate cooking at all, obviously, and this cookbook is perhaps more cooking than most reluctant cooks would now be willing to attempt, but it's still HILARIOUS and the recipes are surprisingly relevant for a cookbook that's nearing its fiftieth anniversary. My favorite recipes from it: Cockeyed Cake, Friday Night Sandwich, Old Faithful - but pretty much everything holds up well.

2) The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham.

Breakfast tends to be a terribly neglected meal, but there's really no reason for that, as this spiffy cookbook attests. It's full of egg recipes and muffins and breads and hot cereals and custards and pancakes, all sorts of ideas for starting your day off in an interesting and pleasurable manner. My favorite recipes from it: the whole chapter on pancakes, chocolate custard, orange marmalade cookies and the caramel oatmeal topping, for when the children have been very good.

3) Family Fun Fast Family Dinners

This is a slim cookbook, but every recipe in it is a winner - interesting things to make that your children will actually eat. My favorite recipes from it: Something-For-Everyone Tortellini Salad, butterscotch pudding, Smoky Rice and Beans - but it's full of good recipes, the sort of things that appeal to the whole family and not just the adults OR the children.

4) Canada's Best Slow Cooker Recipes by Donna-Marie Pye (this is sold under a different title in the US)

I LOVE my slow cooker, but most slow cooker cookbooks tend to be extremely reliant on canned soups and unsophisticated, hamburger-heavy recipes. This book, however, has an interesting mix of beverages, main dishes, side dishes and desserts, with nary a can of soup in sight. My favorite recipes from it: Tangy Red Cabbage with Apples, Tuscan Chicken Legs, Lentil Curry with Squash and Cashews, Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup.

5) 500 Best Muffin Recipes by Esther Brody

My oldest child grouchily told her grandmother the other day that I never make desserts - "Mom only makes MUFFINS," she said, the poor, poor child. And this is the cookbook I use, a bare-bones, unromantic book with pretty much any muffin that you could ever think of. Muffins for Christmas morning! Muffins with fruit in them for breakfast! Muffins to tuck into lunches, savoury cheese muffins to go with soup for supper, muffins to make when the cupboards are practically bare. Of course, in a cookbook this big there are bound to be some duds - I just skip over the whole chapter on "Microwave Muffins", shuddering -  but you'll never need another collection of muffin recipes again. Also, "muffin" sounds funny. My favorite recipes: Miniature Orange-Dipped Muffins, Applesauce Snackin' Muffins, Very Ripe Banana Muffins, Apple Wholewheat Muffins, and a lot more.

So. In the comments, let me know a) your favorite cookbook and why (I need ideas for my Christmas list!) OR if you don't have a favorite cookbook b) Your favorite coffee drink that my husband should make me tonight. I feel better already, just thinking about fancy new coffee and stacks of nice new cookbooks.

Almost Back To School

My kids head back to school on Wednesday - an odd day to start back - and thus starts my yearly struggle to keep them fed during the school day. The children's school board has instituted the odd "Balanced School Day", which divides the day into three blocks of extended "teaching time" and two "Nutrition Breaks", followed by two 20 minute recesses.

I am unenthusiastic about this.

In part, I don't feel like one of my children (the male one), in particular, is served well by the abridged recess time and in another part it's HARD to pack a decent lunch that won't look rather decrepit and unappetizing by the second time the kids are poking around in it. If The Girl is any measure, kids eat all of very favorite things - cookies and cheese strings and crackers that look like fish but taste oddly of cheeeez - on the first "Nutrition Break", and then come the second, all that's left is a brown banana and some carrot sticks and a crushed egg salad sandwich*, so they go down the hall and tell their grandma, the teacher, that they've eaten all of their lunch and can they please have some of hers?

*Not that I blame her, now that I've written it down. That sounds NASTY.

Does your school have food bans in place? Ours has a peanut ban (there are several children with peanut allergies, the youngest one having a severe allergy which has caused him to nearly die on several occasions - and none of the families in question are in a position to keep their children out of school.) - the other school in town has a nut AND a fish ban, and I've heard of other foods being banned as well. Some psycho parents try to smuggle foods containing peanut butter into their children's lunches, under the banner of "No One's Gonna Tell Me What I Can Pack For My Kid" and as the mother of a child with serious food issues, this makes me feel, um, violently outraged. Your child's desire for a peanut butter sandwich does NOT come before another child's well-being. I recall reading with some shock a discussion of this very thing on a blog, and a teacher was commenting that she LIKED peanut butter and crackers and how dare anyone tell her not to bring them to school? Um, if the need to protect a child from serious harm doesn't come first for you, Ms. Teacher, you need to find a new field of work NOW, preferably one that doesn't involve contact with other human beings.

Whoa, I'm angry! My heart is racing and everything!

Okay. So I'm packing my kids zucchini bread and pasta salad (the kind with a vinaigrette) and some homemade hummus and veggie sticks for the first day of school (this was specifically chosen by the Girl, who loathes sandwiches), as well as a few mini Oreos so the other children still recognize them as their own kind, and some orange wedges to impress the teachers and which will be returned in pristine, untouched condition. How do you handle school lunches? Do you and your kids see eye to eye about what they should bring to school? And is there problems at your school with other parents who don't see the need to stick to food bans?

A Magical Supper Making Tour

I frequently press my husband into service while I'm making supper - it helps speed along food preparation and I like his company. For instance, last night, I made him dice up some pears, as this Awesome Action Shot will show you:

Slicing Pears ACTION SHOT! We bought the pears in a wee, cunning basket because they were just so cute and then they tasted like wood, of course. Pears are almost never worth eating.

What is wrong with my cutting board? Ick. That's our fruit-and-vegetable board, and it bears the stains of the glop of a thousand tomatoes. Lovely. Anyhow, while he was slicing the pears on The Nasty Cutting Board, I prepared the rice:

I love my rice cooker - I'm not any good at timing all of my various parts of supper to come out at the same time, and so the rice cooker is great. It cooks the rice and then when it's done, it politely switches to "warm" and just keeps it perfect until supper is ready. I use it at LEAST four times a week! 

I also took some chicken out of a marinade and prepared some vegetables. Raw chicken - I don't know if you know this - is NOT very photogenic, so instead I prepared this artist's rendering for you:

Apparently, I need to get out into the sun a BIT MORE OFTEN. My hair was looking unusually terrific, however.

My husband was still slicing pears at this point.

I made a gluten-free version of this Caramel Pear Pudding:

Note the care and attention to pear slicing detail. Awesome work, honey. So I popped that into the oven for an hour, and it cooked alongside the chicken, and when it was done, it looked like this:

Tasty!

The whole meal was good, really, and NO effort at all - turning on the rice cooker, placing some chicken on a baking sheet and preparing a simple batter - and the resulting meal was a real kid-pleaser. I also made enough rice and chicken that I can make a simple soup today for lunch, although my plans to have some leftover dessert for breakfast this morning where thwarted by the whole thing being devoured last night. Whoops.

The chicken/vegetable(generally broccoli)/rice template is always a winner at our house, as is chili/cornbread, spaghetti/salad, and soup/sandwiches. Having a few simple meals that I always have the ingredients for and that the kids will eat is like money in the Bank of Good Cheer. And I'm needing some cheer, because I have one last week before I must face my bete noire, my nemesis: PLANNING HEALTHY SCHOOL LUNCHES. Ugh.

Stones and soup

We were away for the weekend, and it was a good, GOOD time. I personally played Singing Star with my brother and sister-in-law so much that my voice is still hoarse and raspy today. I also spent all of our money and now we are paupers. Well-dressed paupers.

GOOD times.

The ride home yesterday afternoon was hilariously awful - the hottest day of the summer, maybe, and there we were in our air-conditioning-free vehicle, driving home for HOURS with our squabbling children. And since we're practically Amish, we don't have one of those little car dvd players to distract them from their inter-car conflicts, which is a decision I always rethink whenever we're in the car for longer than three minutes. But we made it home, everyone present and accounted for and rather bad-tempered and discovered that there was NO FOOD in our house and that all of the stores in town were closed.

YIKES.

There is, I should add, SOME food in our house - I have the world's largest stockpile of canned lentils and beans, for one - but nothing that really sang out to be eaten. My husband made some pasta (I actually believe that pasta is one of those self-replenishing things, like that magic blanket in the fairy tale), and I cheerfully made some plans to go shopping the next morning, which would have been fine, EXCEPT my older kids have an all-day VBS this week and LUNCH MUST BE PACKED IN.

DOUBLE YIKES.

The Girl very calmly set to work, finding yogurt, grapes and juice boxes for the next day. But we were out of anything that could become sandwiches (no bread! no tortillas! no crackers!) and out of anything that could go in a thermos and it looked pretty grim.

"We will make lentil soup," The Girl said calmly, and the two of us stood side by side in the cooler evening, peeling carrots and chopping celery and garlic and apples and onions, letting handfuls of dried red lentils fall through our fingers, pouring golden broth on top and adding cumin, curry powder and ginger to the slow cooker, letting the fragrant smell drift through our house as the kids put on their pajamas and brushed their teeth, home again. This morning I heated up the vibrant yellow and orange soup and smiled at it, at our one stone soup, this magical blanket of plenty that we made out of nothing.

And later this morning - when the older kids have been delivered to VBS, their lunchbags clutched in their hands for the first time in months - The Baby and I will go grocery shopping, filling our cart with crackers and bread and fruit, letting the empty spaces in our fridge and cupboard fill back up, like an exhaled breath. 

Not A Sweet Post

My grandmother and I were talking about sugar yesterday, and she said that she used to make dessert for her skinny, skinny family every day. I make dessert about twice a week, I said, which caused my oldest child, Miss Snortypants, to guffaw.

"Twice a week?" she said. "Nuh-uh. More like twice a MONTH. Or TWICE A YEAR."

The poor little thing. Her mother never makes dessert. Or what SHE considers a dessert: chocolate cake with lavish fudge frosting, chocolate brownie cobbler with chocolate sauce, slabs of homemade brownies studded with white chocolate chunks... Those are somewhat rare, occurring once a month or so, while we do have frequent servings of less thrilling desserts - fruit crisps, oatmeal cookies, and lots of sometimes-successful gluten free experiments.

I was sitting beside another mother a few months ago while our sons were attending swimming lessons, and chatting casually with her while adding a few things to my week's menu plan. She was reading it over my shoulder and pulled a face when she saw how many desserts where on the list.

"That's a whole lot of sugar!" she said. And then her kid waddled out of the pool and she gave him a can of pop. I AM NOT KIDDING.

One can of pop has a quarter of a cup of sugar. If your kid drinks two cans of pop a day, your child is drinking HALF A CUP OF SUGAR A DAY. That is CRAZY. Add in fruit juice - which I think is nutritionally a terrible idea - sweetened fruit drinks, freshy (or "fleshy", as The Baby called it this weekend), sweetened iced tea, and you have a ridiculous amount of sugar and empty calories being consumed by most children every single day. (and their mothers - a very popular Canadian coffee chain's Iced Cappuccino has 17 TEASPOONS of sugar in it and 700 calories. Gah.) Add to that the sugary boxed cereals, prepackaged lunchbox snacks, canned soups, granola bars and all of the rest of the average Canadian child's diet, and you have a nation of kids who are swimming in cheap, over-processed sugar.

So instead of all of that, my kids get bowls of oatmeal or homemade granola or fruit smoothies, homemade cookies in their lunchboxes, and the occasional homemade dessert (more frequently than ONCE A MONTH, twerpy Daughter!). It takes a bit of planning and a bit of effort - but neither as much effort or planning as you might think - tonight, I'm experimenting with making rice pudding in our rice cooker, which is an idea that occurred to me over the weekend - we'll see how it goes, although I've had so much luck with adding in ingredients in the rice cooker that I'm pretty confident that it will be tasty.

Sugar is not the enemy. The enemy is our unthinking overconsumption of sugar and the way that we've all cheerfully accepted these shelves full of nutritionally terrible foods as part of our everyday diet. No matter how well I think we might be doing, however, my children's quiet griping suggests that all is not well at my house, that they feel shortchanged. (which seems ridiculous to me, but there you have it.) How do you balance your children's desires for the foods that they see advertised and see their friends' eating with their need for a healthy diet?

We Have A Winner!

Congratulations, Holly Sisson! Cuisinart's gorgeous pressure cooker will soon be headed your way! That was fun - I'll have to do more giveaways.

I am so, so frazzled this morning. Frazzled and exhausted. We went to a family reunion this weekend - my paternal grandmother's relatives - and it was great, but now I feel like I spent the weekend running marathons every night instead of what really happened (eating a lot of buffet meals, meeting people and playing one frantic game of The Amazing Race.). Then we staggered home yesterday, completely worn. So we're sitting around the house, and I look at the clock and realize that it was 7 p.m. AND I HADN'T EVEN STARTED DINNER! Yikes!

Meals as rushed as last night's dinner ended up being, I'm here to tell you, are not very good.

I read TONS of comments from last weeks post about how people are really struggling to get healthy, high quality meals ready for their families on a daily basis. I remember when I first was a mother and dinnertime would roll around and I would get this sullen "I have to feed them AGAIN?" feeling - but that was before I discovered the Wonders of Meal Planning. Here's a little bit of my upcoming week, with some notes:

Tonight, we're having a roast chicken with lemon, mashed potatoes, some grilled vegetables and a spinach salad. I'm making a buttermilk cocoa cake for dessert, as well as a batch of frosted, gluten-free chocolate cupcakes (I'm going to freeze most of those to bring with us on a trip next weekend.). While I'm in the kitchen and the oven is on, I'm going to make a pan of granola.

The leftover chicken will become chicken salad sandwiches for my husband's lunch tomorrow. Tuesday's supper will use some medium-sized zucchini a friend gave us, which I'm going to stuff with a spaghetti sauce and ground beef (hamburger I bought on sale and froze. Whoo!) mixture and serve with a quick tomato and avocado salad. And then on Wednesday, I'm making an economical brown rice and spinach casserole for supper, which will DOUBTLESSLY result in endless complaining from everyone in my house. Wah wah, you freaking babies!

Okay. So that's a quick overview of our Gastronomical Week. Meal planning sounds kind of daunting when you first think about it - where will you find all that time to sit down and THINK of all this stuff? - but in reality, it's MUCH quicker than desperately trying to think of what to make at the end of each workday. I generally sit down on Friday evening for half an hour and sketch out our week, drawing up my grocery list at the same time. After the next morning's shopping, I am DONE thinking about what I have to make for the REST OF THE WEEK. Easy! 

How does your household handle meals during busy weeks? Are you struggling with meals, or does your family have a good handle on preparing healthy, tasty meals? Share your cooking strategies and advice here, as well as your favorite quick cooking books, magazines and websites, and I'll use it all in a big weekday cooking post next week.

A Burning Question

I normally have tons of cooking adventures to write about, but this week the most adventurous thing that happened to me was burning my arm quite badly while making Rice Krispie squares - and the irony was that I was making them because I didn't want to make anything more complicated. Oh ha ha, me!

It's a pretty dandy burn, actually, and has been great for freaking out my kids, but it also has been reminding me that there are lots of bad things that can happen in the kitchen. Knives! Boiling water! Broken glass! Falling off of the chair that you've pushed up to the cupboards to get the stupid trifle dish down! And since I cook A LOT and I'm accident-prone to begin with, you may gather that I also have more than my share of exciting kitchen incidents. The funniest - in retrospect, although NOT SO MUCH AT THE TIME - was the time I blew up an entire sink full of dishes by first heating them up on the stove and then throwing a bottle of frozen water on top (ta da!), and the scariest BY FAR was the time The Boy (who was only 2 at the time) pulled AN ENTIRE DISHWASHER on top of himself. And just the memory of that - ACK. He was okay, but STILL.

There are the safety rules that we all know (at least, I hope we all know them): keep pot handles turned in towards the stove, for example. And then there are things that SHOULD be well known kitchen rules, like "always make sure you close your upper cupboards so that when you reach down to get something, you don't brain yourself as soon as you stand up." If I had this nicely embroidered on a sampler, maybe, I would have far fewer kitchen accidents, but alas, it's hard to find an olde time vintage sampler with "Close Your Cupboard Doors, You Moron." embroidered on it by some gentle hand.

Here's how our kitchen renovations are going along so far:

Oh yeah. That's my bedroom AGAIN. We haven't been able to start our kitchen renovations yet, which means that my husband has been doing tons of smaller renos around the house, and that we FINALLY have the beginnings of a nice bedroom! When he started painting yesterday, we weren't sure if the ceiling was pink or if it only LOOKED pink because of the walls. The answer is kind of obvious now, isn't it? So we're going to have that all finished by mid-week, which will be nice - especially nice, since we're camping out with the kids right now. And having a nice bedroom will be our tenth anniversary - ten years this Friday! - gift to ourselves.

The kitchen renovations should start - I HOPE - in August. What should we make sure to include in our plans? Is there anything in your kitchen that makes your life much easier?  Open cupboards or not-open cupboards? And most importantly, what colour should we paint it? Our theoretical kitchen renovation thanks you.

Unsummer

Someone forwarded me this article on chocolate chip cookies, and I read it with a great deal of interest - did letting the batter rest for 36 hours make a flavor difference? So I dutifully made a batch of cookies, following their recipe - minus the expensive "bittersweet chocolate discs" because I don't live anywhere where I can buy those and also because I am cheap. Instead I did a housemix of all of the chocolate chips we had in the house, some butterscotch chips AND some M&Ms. But I did sprinkle a few of the cookies with a bit of sea salt, as called for, and did three test batches - one right away, one 24 hours later  and one 36 hours later.

Ah, Science.

With my older kids and my parents as testers, we tried out all three batches. And you know, it's really kind of hard for chocolate chip cookies hot from the oven to be disappointing - they're just a pleasing thing. The sea salt cookies were not a big hit ("What is the matter with my cookie?" - The Boy), although I think that with a better chocolate it would make more sense. So the first, immediate batch was a general crowd pleaser.

 

This is it - the one picture I was able to take before my camera's batteries died. DOH!

The second batch - the 24 hour one - was also a hit and they DID have a slightly deeper flavour. Obligingly enough, the 36 hour batch WAS the best, but I was a bit tired of trying out chocolate chip cookies by that time. I don't know if the difference was profound enough for me to suggest refrigerating your chocolate chip cookie dough for 36 hours, because at MY house, when I make cookies, it is because we want cookies RIGHT NOW. Should you want to make Superior Cookies, though....

I also made some zucchini bread recently, which was fine, and many many loaves of soft white gluten free bread. I found this recipe and have had consistently great, Baby-pleasing results, which is nice.

I love, LOVE that tray the bread is on. So ugly!

This is not normally a big baking time of year for me - it's hot! we're busy! This summer is cold and wet and grey and most days find me baking something, in between taking The Baby to the beach in SWEATERS:

Isn't THAT summery? Yeah. Hence all the baking and chocolate chip cookie testing, the oven practically the only warm thing for miles around.

All of that cold summer stuff gathered up in my heart and by yesterday afternoon I had HAD it. So I went for a walk with a friend, The Baby screaming "MAMA DON'T GO!" very dramatically at the door since I never go anywhere without her. I was gone for a while (my friend told me a very exciting story about nearly getting eaten by a bear - thrilling!) and when I got home, my family was nowhere in sight. It was a sudden absence, not being there when I expected to come home to our house full of their noise, barreling out the door to see me. I rounded the house, the wind erasing all other noise, rounded the corner of the yard - and there they were, suddenly, having a parade in the golden, cold sunlight, all of their faces turning to greet me and the sudden warmth rising up, this instant and radiant joy. Summer.

Possible Shark Sightings

So we went grocery shopping on the weekend, because we are Party People, and I don't know if you've noticed, but grocery store prices have gone up a bit. Flour - do you buy flour regularly? If you're not a baker, flour might not play such a big role in your life, but flour is TEN DOLLARS MORE EXPENSIVE than it was five years ago and twice as expensive as it was last summer.

Remember a few summers ago when all of the news outlets were like "SHARK ATTACK! SHAAAAAARK!"? I spent that whole summer quietly convinced that I was going to get attacked by a shark, even though I live inland and the last shark sighting here was, mmm, never. I'm a naturally anxious sort, and even though I can tell when the news outlets are just fear mongering, when there is fear to be mongered ("mongered"?) I am your gal. And so this weekend, standing at the check out line with my groceries costing me FIFTY DOLLARS more than they did six months ago, I could hear every fiber of my being shrieking "SHAAAAAAAARK!"

We have to do some cost-cutting, obviously. I'm not going to cry too much about this since there are people starving in the world, and places where there are food shortages and so my groceries costing substantially more still makes me lucky. Still, though - it's hard to look at our already pared-down budget and try and figure out what we can cut, when we already live such relatively spartan lives. It makes me feel sort of grim and tight-lipped, although another part of me feels a sort of pioneer resilience to this, that I may as well roll up my sleeves and start making my own laundry soap because there's really no sense in complaining.

A while back, I was talking with a friend who I've known since The Girl was a baby and her daughter was a baby and we both were young and poor. We were laughing about how very, very poor we both had been and then she said "Things aren't any easier now, are they?". We both went silent as we wondered how that could be, how we could be making technically middle-class incomes and still feel as poor as our student days, as the days when we walked for hours with our babies in second-hand slings, too poor to go into stores.

Of course, we're not that poor anymore. But your expectations and worries keep adjusting accordingly regardless of how much money you make - I worried when we were poor and I worry now that we're not poor and I'd probably keep worrying about money if we made a million dollars a year, although that doesn't seem too likely. And now my groceries cost more and we have to cut back a little bit, but my children are still well fed and the wolf isn't actually at the door and the surface of the lake is still calm and shark-free.

So without trying to monger fear: are you cutting back right now? How are you handling the higher food prices?

The Pancakes of Philosophy

It's Monday but it's weird because my husband has taken the day off, so he's in the kitchen making pancakes right now and I feel a bit unnerved because he's home. I like having him home - well, of course - but I'm not used to having him around for several days in a row. Add to that our weird, unsettling weekend - oh, it's too long to go into everything that's happened - and I'm feeling rather jumpy and not much like myself.

I also feel like eating pancakes.

I AM SO HUNGRY.

My mother - and if you're related to me, you already know what I am going to say - makes the most freakishly delicious pancakes in the world. They were always what we would have for breakfast on Saturdays, eating startling numbers of pancakes on tv trays and watching HOURS of Saturday morning cartoons. My cousins schedule their trips through town so they can show up at my parent's house at breakfast. Several times a year - especially in the summer, when chokecherries are in season - my mom will phone us first thing in the morning and invite us over for breakfast, sending us whipping through farm country in our pajamas.

And my pancakes, irritatingly enough, did NOT measure up, especially if you like pancakes that don't weigh 500 pounds and that don't have big raw spots in the middle. Nasty. But my children perversely continued to insist that pancakes were part of their rights as children and I dislike feeling thwarted, so I continued to make batch after batch of rather gruesome pancakes.

Making the switch to using a griddle made a BIG difference. I use the Cuisinart Griddler and I've had a lot of success with it, but I've also learned how liquid the batter should be (liquid enough to pour quite easily) and when to turn the pancakes (before they scorch a dark, dark black, for one.).

This pancake, for example, is just about ready to turn. And that was an EXTREMELY difficult thing to take a picture of - as was this, a picture of pancakes cooking nicely on the griddle:

One of those pancakes is getting a bit friendly with another pancake. I'm sometimes an inaccurate flipper.

And I just ate a plate of pancakes prepared - and prepared very well - by my husband and YUM, THEY WERE GOOD. Finding a pancake recipe that I really felt was my own made a big, big difference, and we're all VERY fond of this sour cream pancake recipe, which requires nothing more difficult than separating eggs. I've taught The Baby how to separate eggs, which she does the way French chefs do, I've been told - by straining them through her fingers. So there's nothing daunting about separating eggs, should you have never done so - my three year old child does so calmly and effectively (and also messily, but whatEVER. The point of life is not to keep yourself as clean as possible.).

I think that if I had a manifesto, it would have a large section about cooking being not only a very essential skill (what on earth do you eat if you don't cook and how healthy can THAT be?) but also that cooking (for the most part) is VERY easy. One of life's startling revelations is that making pancakes from scratch is just as easy as making pancakes from a mix - and they are ASTONISHINGLY better. And the skills that you'll pick up from something like making pancakes (separating eggs, beating egg whites, folding batter and the like) will lead easily to bigger and better things, until one day relatives will drive fifty kilometers out of THEIR way first thing in the morning to eat something that you are famous for, which is a very pleasant state of affairs.

Now I'm going to go finish my breakfast.

My Vegetable Love Should Grow

I was grocery shopping this weekend - I lead a wild life - and the sales clerk, who was a woman in her early 30s, held up a leafy vegetable, needing me to identify it so she could punch in the code. It was kale, which she'd never heard of before. "What do you DO with it?" she asked me, looking at it dubiously, this big clump of dark-green, heavily-veined plant stuff in her hands.

I told her that I was going to add it to a white bean soup and serve some of the rest as greens, which got me sort of a weird look.

A lot of people, I find, don't eat greens - which is a weird looking sentence, when I look at it dispassionately. "Greens"? But I grew up having a wide variety of lightly boiled green leafy vegetables, generally tossed with some apple cider vinegar, since my mom loves vegetables tossed with apple cider vinegar and to me that's just standard vegetables. Beet greens? Bring 'em on, I'll eat them. Swiss chard? Dandelion greens? Gosh, I should be just bristling with obnoxious good health, all evidence to the contrary.

"I tried asparagus for the first time last weekend," said the friendly cashier, "and I really hated it. It was all mushy."

That sort of sentence fills me with despair because a lot of people are game enough to try new vegetables - although who has never eaten asparagus? Good grief. What do these people EAT? - but when they don't have the basic cooking skills needed to prepare them in the proper way, the vegetables don't even get a chance. I told the cashier that she should try roasting them and give them another chance, which earned me another dubious look. I was obviously a Weird Vegetable Lady, and I guess I'll just have to hang out with my mom.

"Try this!" I'll say, cheerily. "I found it growing in the barnyard! That smell? Oh, it's APPLE CIDER VINEGAR, of course!"

I always worry that I'm going to become one of those deeply judgemental, gauntly pebble-skinned health food store types. We used to know tons of them when we lived in Small City, and I have the following story to illustrate exactly what I fear becoming: The Girl was little and had fallen and the only thing, I say somewhat defensively, that would cheer her up was a bag of nacho chips. All righty. So we were sitting on a park bench and she was happily eating her chips when one of our scrawny, grey-faced acquaintances came over to chat. "I just find it so cute that you guys don't worry about what you eat!" she said.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH, shut up.

And at the same time, a LOT of people eat next to no vegetables, unless you really make a big argument for potatoes and canned corn and coleslaw. Vegetables aren't even all that off-putting - it's not like trying to develop a taste for offal or something - but people get into their supper ruts and the next thing you know, you're 31 and you've never had asparagus, which is just SAD. There's no reason for it - most vegetables cook quickly and there are many, many kid-friendly types out there and they ARE good for you, and developing a taste for vegetables will make you feel pleasantly self-righteous and virtuous. Yes, I am now a Vegetable Advocate, and I'm going to work my way through the alphabet of vegetables, starting with asparagus, since it was the vegetable that inspired my new mania - so today, my recipe site has how to steam, roast and slightly fancy-up asparagus and tomorrow will be B and so on, although I imagine I'll run into some troubles with U. And X.

How about you? Does your family like trying new vegetables, or are your kids like my husband as a child, who would hide under the table if he realized that there were onions in his food? (he's stopped doing that. Just fyi.) Do you have an unusual vegetable that you enjoy, or will I be sitting alone with my beet greens?

One For My Baby

Wow, I'm tired this morning. So very tired. NEWBORN BABY TIRED. What's with that? I did get up at FOUR THIRTY in the morning (there's a 4:30 in the morning now? Apparently.) to make breakfast for the participants in the Relay For Life, but that was on Saturday and so it's probably not why I'm still tired two days later. Maybe I have a bug.

Speaking of bugs: I was just terrified of baking with yeast (see? smooth, that's me. Yeast is a teeny little microrganism, but is actually a type of fungi and not a bug.) ANYHOW. I was terrified of baking with yeast for years after my teenage baking experiments resulted in a lot of mockable hockey puck loaves. Baking with yeast, I decided, was hard, and so while I was cheerfully doing all sorts of other baking, I carefully left yeast alone. The year I turned 30 - ack, almost 6 years ago - I decided that I wasn't going to be thwarted by a freaking fungal microrganism, and so I rolled up my sleeves, signed a children's book on breadmaking out of the library and figured it out. It wasn't hard at all, either.

And so I cheerfully have spent the last six years making LOTS of bread and yeast-raised coffee cakes and cinnamon buns and then my youngest child was diagnosed with celiac disease and I've been frustrated by my inability to make her decent bread every since. It was a return to the nasty hockey puck loaves, and I became very discouraged - so the Baby has lived on quick breads and muffins and toasted slices of tiny little store-bought wooden gluten-free breads. I wanted to put a warm slice of bread into her little hands, fragrant with yeast and melting butter, and it hurt my heart more than a little bit.

On Friday, Cuisinart sent me their gorgeous breadmaker:

I noticed as soon as I unpacked it that it had a gluten-free setting and so I cautiously and without much optimism set to making the recipe for gluten-free molasses walnut bread that came with the breadmaker, skipping the walnuts because we're not a nut-lovin' family.  And what happened? Slightly less than three hours later, we had a gorgeous loaf of bread, smelling of molasses and yeast and with a gorgeous texture and taste. My husband and I ate slices, wide-eyed with shock and pleasure, but the Baby wasn't quite as taken - the bread had a sophisticated, less sweet taste and she's only three. The bread got gobbled up by everyone else in the family, and the final bit was turned into breadcrumbs and frozen for future use.

So my job was to figure out a bread for a three-year-old's palate - something sweet, I figured, something with no "bite", no complexity. I pictured a white loaf, with a slight texture from quinoa flakes (The Baby can't tolerate oatmeal), sweet with honey and brown sugar.

Here's the batter, ready to go:

And then it set off to work - chug chug chug.

Three hours later, I was able to place a slice of warm bread in my Baby's hands, sweet and lightly textured and rather crumbling since it was still so hot when I cut it:

And my Baby was happy about it. So happy, in fact, that she took a big bite out of it right before I took the picture. HEY, KID.

The recipe STILL needs work - I need to work on the proportions of the wet ingredients - but so far, so good. The Baby is sitting on the couch cheerfully eating bread, this most basic of foods that we make suddenly hers, too.

The Pie of Failure

One of the very discouraging things about cooking and baking is the grim feeling that a recipe might not turn out when you need it to. Like, oh let's say when your post is due this morning and you got up early to pit cherries - that is the most boring thing to do in the world, by the way. Boring and messy, red juice everywhere. - and you have a deadline and a birthday party to go to this VERY afternoon and so this pie MUST GET BAKED and then you get distracted for two freaking minutes and the crust scorches and there is NO time to make another one.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Sigh.

Here's how I went wrong.

I bought some early cherries this weekend, for one. They're not quite in season but I saw them and thought "I WILL MAKE A PIE AND IT WILL BE AWESOME" and brought home a gigantic, expensive bag of sour, tasteless cherries.

Then I pitted them this morning, sleepy after a frequently interrupted night. Thank you, Baby, for being such a shrimpy insomniac.

I found the recipe I wanted to make, this one and it's a very good recipe - I've made it a few times before, but decided to show off this time by making my very tasty tart dough instead of the graham cracker crust. And my tart dough IS good - very good - and very easily made:

You cream 8 tablespoons of butter in a food processor.

And then you add ¼ cup of sugar and cream THAT together.

Easy. After that's creamed nicely, add 1/8 tsp of salt, half a teaspoon of vanilla and 1 cup of flour. Mix that together.

Now take your blob of tart dough and spread it into a pie pan:

Smoosh it all over evenly with your fingers until it's pie-crust shaped, obviously:

Isn't that nice? Prick the dough all over with a fork and CHILL IN THE FREEZER FOR AT LEAST HALF AN HOUR AND UP TO OVERNIGHT. In my hubris - and heck, my hurry, I skipped that part. Don't.

Bake the FROZEN crust for 25 minutes. It should be a lovely golden brown when cooked and not a charred black. Charred black means YOU DID IT WRONG and that you have to stand there carefully cutting the top of the crust off and that your pie will now LOOK FUNNY. Cool your non-horrible crust on a wire rack.

Then I creamed together the cream cheese filling ingredients - that part wasn't hard - and tossed the halved, pitted cherries with some melted strawberry jam and assembled the pie, which looked rather depressingly like this:

Yeah. So it looked all right, and even though it was meant for supper, I decided that it needed to be taste-tested - the things I do for you guys - and took one small piece.

The pie crust was all right - like a flaky shortbread cookie and pretty delicious, even slightly charred.

The cream cheese filling was ambrosial. For someone who is rather cold on cheesecake, I certainly do love cream cheese.

And the cherries were HORRIBLE. Tasteless little red blobs tasting only of strawberry jam, all that effort for not much. As I said earlier, it was discouraging and yet there is nothing nicer in the whole world to eat than a nicely-made fruit tart on an early summer's day and these things HAPPEN. "Dry your eyes upon your apron, brave housewife!" one old cookbook of mine rather patronizingly exhorts, while I will say - mostly to myself - not to cry, for Pete's sake. It's just a dumb pie and the next one will doubtlessly be better.

Not All Salads Are Good For You

I woke up yesterday morning at 6:30 to find The Boy staring down at me intensely.

"I'm making you breakfast in bed," he announced. "So you'd better wake up." And that was how I started Mother's Day this year, sitting groggily in bed and eating toaster waffles with LOTS of syrup, my son sitting beside me and just beside himself with pride.

"STOP EATING IN BED!" The Baby demanded. "That is GWOSS."

Later on that day, The Girl went to Canadian Tire with her dad and picked me up a foot spa, facial steamer and manicure set, so I was very spoiled on my Mother's Day. I wasn't a bit relaxed, though, since I had one of those harried non-stop weekends and sometimes when people say things like that they're bragging, like Look How Interesting And Popular I Am, but I'm not, really. What I AM saying is that I am so exhausted today that my brain hurts and the next couple of weeks promise to be equally frantic, so I really felt like I'd EARNED that facial steamer, you know?

1) Friday evening - we attended the school concert, complete with the bellydancing display of Despair. Did I mention that we're having grim-faced discussions about homeschooling AGAIN?

2) Saturday - we threw an all-day-long party for The Girl (with a High School Musical Theme - aggggghhhh) and one of the guests got cracked in the head by an over-excited pinata whacker, who may have been yours truly. I need to lay down on the floor and feel nauseated with guilt just thinking about it, thanks. 

3) Mother's Day and I had a restful breakfast in bed at 6:30 in the morning, as mentioned, and then had to make a ton of macaroni salad for my dad's surprise 60th birthday party, which gave me a chance to use my new food processor:

What a weird thing to take a picture of! But the food processor snaps on to the top of my stand mixer and it's very handy. Once I had the carrots grated, I was able to make my rather-tasty macaroni salad:

For the record, that was a TREMENDOUS amount of macaroni salad - enough to feed several dozen potluck-goers, for example. And yes, I do feel corny when I'm making macaroni salad, thanks. And then we went to my dad's party, which actually WAS a surprise - my mom had told him that she was having us over for dinner and then all of a sudden there was his family - his brother and sister-in-law, his sister and brother-in-law, his neice and her husband, and my dad was very pleased, which was nice. My grandma wasn't feeling well and couldn't make it, but sent her DELICIOUS carrot cake with my aunt, and my dad was well and properly feted.

And then we went home and the long exhausting weekend was over. Now we just have a camping trip and a monster truck rally and a yard sale and a weekend trip and then it will be the summer. Phew.

 

Until Next Year

The Baby's birthday party cake was very nearly a total failure. We used two boxes of gluten-free cake mix in a bundt cake pan and the cake ended up having very little height - Barbie looked like she was standing in a knee-high inner tube when we experimentally stood her in the center. The kids went rummaging through the giant bin of Barbies for another victim, rejecting the idea of using Barbie's baby "sister" - yeah, RIGHT, Barbie - and finally settling on a forgotten doll from the Madeline series, bought several years ago when I was idealistic about keeping Barbie out of my house and almost immediately discarded by The Girl.

But look! Now she's having her moment of antebellum cake glory, the star - for one day - of the show:

My husband assembled and decorated the cake, carefully icing on little shoulder straps because, as he said, strapless dresses are just inappropriate on dolls that young. He's a good sport. He also put all of those little doohickies on the cake with TWEEZERS.

I think someone trimmed that doll's bangs at some point.

The Baby had one guest although we'd invited two others but one was out of town and one woke up sick on the day of the party, which is the peril of being a very young kid - you're at the whim of parents' travel schedules and/or the very young's propensity for catching every thing that comes along.

My husband spent the whole party hanging out in the kitchen with this gorgeous thing:

I'd have bugged him about it but a) he HAD spent all morning making that beautiful cake and b) he was making mochachinos for me and my friend, who brought her princess-dress-clad daughter to the party while wearing a lavender bridesmaid's dress and big fuchsia Scarlet O'Hara hat herself, awesomely enough. That kind of sartorial bravery demands a special coffee, I think.

When I told him that Cuisinart was sending me an expresso maker, he just about cried. I think he's generally pretty happy that he married me - or at least he's resigned to it - but in that moment, you could tell that he felt like our marriage was a VERY good idea. And now he spends his weekends making us high octane coffee drinks, which is a pretty excellent thing to do on a sleepy Sunday.

And then The Baby blew out her birthday candles before we finished singing Happy Birthday, before I had a chance to get the cake over to her side of the table, looking suddenly so much older in her party dress and fancy ponytail, this suddenly big girl eager for cake and wishes and fun with friends.

Now I have exactly one week to catch my breath before starting all of this over again with The Girl, this ridiculous sugary extravagance that says the same simple thing every year - oh, we are so very, very happy to have you, our blessings, our children.

Weary Birthdays

It IS The Baby's birthday today, and I baked her a grand total of zero cakes.

Late April and early May are SERIOUSLY birthday packed months for us - all of our living grandmothers, my parents, two of the kids' uncles, most of our aunts and uncles, tons of cousins by the score and both of my daughters all saw fit to jam themselves into a three week period that I like to refer to as Cakemas. Or I would refer to it as that if I wasn't so busy eating birthday cake every five minutes and having permanent elastic marks under my chin from wearing one of those pointy birthday hats for three solid weeks. And yet I managed to not make my own CHILD a birthday cake today. I was busy.

Today was yet another in a series of just TERRIFIC medical tests due to last week's troubles, and living where I do, I have to go out of town to have my apparently-fascinating clockwork peered at, which meant I've been gone from my home since 6:30 this morning and didn't get home until 7 p.m., birthday girl in tow. My mom, bless her, stepped in and made The Baby her requested supper - spaghetti - and The Girl made her a gluten-free chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and it was great. I don't have to make everything myself, even though I feel like I should.

My older kids slept at my parent's house last night - we had too early a morning planned to get them off to school, so it made sense - but I woke up in the middle of the night and just felt bereft without them, two of my kids sleeping away from me and the other quietly turning a year older in the dark room beside me and we left home in the misty quiet morning, The Baby clutching her new Barbie to her chest and weeping with exhaustion. And she was such a trooper during a very long day, waiting in hospital waiting rooms and being astonishingly patient for a just-now three year old, and I think that we will make cupcakes again tomorrow, even though the rest of this week - and several weeks to come - are rather ripe with birthday cakes, because she's a good girl and three years ago today I held her in my arms and thought "Oh, I KNOW you." No matter how lovely tonight was, I still want her to have part of her birthday from my hands. So tomorrow, we're going to blend our gluten free flours and our butter and eggs and sugar and make lemon cupcakes, for how sweet and sad life is, for my Baby, my tough, tired-out little kid who is THREE already.

Hair and Cake

Every day I get to comb through The Baby's hair, which looks like this when it's brushed:

... and like a matted mop of yarn when it's not. Then there's The Boy, who has hair that stands straight up, rudely disregarding the laws of gravity and so needs his hair gelled down and brushed into reasonable shape before school. The Girl is on her own with her hair, but tends to get some maternal bossing when it comes to keeping her bangs out of her face. I once read that medieval mothers - the good kind - spent at least an hour a day delousing their children's hair and I thought "OH THOSE POOR WOMEN" and now I spend at least an hour a day with a bottle of detangler in my hand, chasing some ungrateful kid down. Life is funny even when it is sad.

My husband came home last night with a clutch of lilies for me, and The Girl, seeing them in their vase, decided that we needed to have a tablecloth and candles supper with it and so we did, my husband making pasta with sun-dried tomato sauce and red peppers and then I decided to make a chocolate cake but we were out of butter. So my husband tucked the kids in and headed over to the convenience store and the chocolate cake - this one - came out of the oven at nine o'clock, at which point a little blond person peered around the stair railing, EXTREMELY eager for a piece of chocolate cake.

Whenever I'm stressed out, I bake. There's probably better ways to deal with life but I've not found them, and there's something about the predictable combination of butter and chocolate, sifting together flour and sugar, something that helps. I like to roll my sleeves up, it turns out, like to make something sweet to mark the things that happen in this life.

Note the tablecloth.

And that's how I spent last night - sitting in a rocking chair across from my daughter in a rocking chair, eating chocolate cake warm from the oven while outside in the dark, the snow was melting and crocuses were rising from the ground, ready to greet me with the morning.

The Secret Language Of Food

As I was taking pictures of slices of pie last night, The Girl grouched that None Of Her Friends' Mothers took pictures of THEIR desserts, which is how you can tell that her life is a Vale Of Sorrows. It was a very good pie - for a long time, I was less then enamored of meringue and suddenly I see its uses as a less sweet, less rich counterpart to EXTREMELY rich pie fillings, like the chocolate+condensed milk + butter+egg yolk cream filling above. The Girl - always one for enjoyable heapings of drama - gasped "Mom! You're so CLEVER!" when I pulled it from the oven. Well, that's nice to hear. And then she ate two slices in rapid succession. SUCCESS!

I don't make desserts every night. I do bake frequently during the week, but normally it's just prosaic things like "muffins with VEGETABLES in them", as my poor horrified son says. The current dietary wisdom says that sugar is a wicked, wicked thing and I'm not enough of a rebel to totally thumb my nose at the gaunt, hollow-cheeked nutritionists (wait - I forgot "grey skinned." I feel better now.). I do make desserts often ENOUGH, though, that you would think that my children wouldn't treat them with such shocked cries of delight, as though they'd heard there was such a thing as dessert but never thought they'd actually SEE it.

She's not an eater, my Girl. At least twice a year, we have the Worried About Her Weight speech with her doctor - she doesn't weigh 50 pounds yet, and her six year old brother has already passed her while being a slim lad himself - and generally it ends with frustrated shrugging all around. There's nothing WRONG with her, aside from being finicky and small, but her diet feels like something I should be able to fix. She interprets my worried hovering over her eating as criticism of her, as me being unhappy with her capable, clever self - and I interpret her poor appetite, foolishly, as a rejection of me.

And this is silly and wrong, of course, but we love our kids so much that we tend to watch, in some private, dark part of our heart, for signs that they love us BACK, for signs that they forgive us for being crabby and impatient, that it's okay. And so certain things can become laden with unearned symbolism, this meatloaf transcending meatloaf and becoming my fear, for example, of impending adolescence, the zucchini muffin my apology for having to rush them out the door every weekday morning, those carrots sticks representing my fear that my kids are going to get SCURVY.

And chocolate meringue pie, of course, becomes my wish to love my children with a sweet and uncomplicated love - as rich as butter, as sweet as sugar and as deep as chocolate - to become, if only for a moment, this imaginary perfect mother, with something remarkable in her hands.

Things you might read while standing in line

... at the grocery store:

FRIENDLY ROBOTS COOK MY FOOD

That's a pressure cooker. I was a bit nervous about using a pressure cooker for some reason, and I wasn't sure why I'd want one. Pressure what now? But a friend of my husband's was EXTREMELY excited when he found out that we had a new pressure cooker, telling us that it was his VERY favorite kitchen tool and like a reverse slow cooker. Slightly emboldened, I decided to make sausages and peppers - one of our favorite things - for supper on Saturday night. So I browned the peppers:

And I also browned the sausages, which I'm not going to post a picture of, since sausages look flaccid, pale and flabby in their uncooked state. Ick! Then we closed the lid and FOUR MINUTES LATER:

Ta da! It was REALLY fast - really, really - and not even a little bit intimidating. It's a great weeknight cooking tool, AND it's cute, a friendly round little robot:

Do you see the yellow pail behind it, holding all of my messy motley of kitchen things? That was my Grandma's candy pail, living on a low shelf in her pantry for my convience and full of caramels. I pass by it 500 times a day and each time feel the same little pang of loss and nostalgia, sweet on my tongue. And DO look out my kitchen window and note the lovely weather that greeted me this morning. It was SO very, very heartening that I went outside and made a little film for everyone of the LOVELY SPRING WEATHER that's lifting my heart today.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Bah! Also, my voice is funny sounding - nasal and weird. Double bah! And it's not the first of April, but I was confused by all of the snow or SOMETHING.

Carrot Cake And My Aching Heart

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about the bread catching on fire inside of our elderly, avocado-coloured toaster? That was fun. Look what Cuisinart sent me!

Now my house won't burn down. AWESOME.

And WHAT am I toasting inside that fantastically retro-looking toaster? What epicurean delight awaits me?

Pop Tarts. Ha.

So we didn't do anything VERY fancy for Easter supper last night - we had a family dinner with my parents and my two brothers and my sister-in-law the night before, with my kids the sole, doted-upon kids at the party, and that was really enough. It really makes me respect the appetites of people back in the era of several-day-long feasting, because all it takes NOW is one big meal and I'm pretty much set for a week, but I'm a frail modern person and obviously lack the admirable stomach of olden times. I DID exert myself enough to make a VERY GOOD carrot cake - gluten-free! - with a thick cream cheese icing and it turned out (have I mentioned this already?) to be completely tasty, so I was rather pleased.

Things like carrot cake work quite well in gluten-free cooking, because the moisture in the carrot/pineapple/applesauce mixture works on the often-off putting texture of the gluten-free flours. It felt quite triumphant to make a gluten-free cake that is practically indistinguishable from a regular one, which might feel like a minor thing to you but it's a HUGE deal when your child has food issues. The Baby DOES have a limited diet and ordinary life is fraught with these hidden dangers for her and it sucks, frankly. Yes, there are many, MANY worse things in the world, but she's just a very little kid and she has trouble eating in restaurants, she can't eat the candy handed out in church on Easter Sunday, can't eat her friend's birthday cake - and she NOTICES and feels heart-breakingly left out. My poor little girl.

So now she can have carrot cake. Too bad carrot cake isn't a real preschool favorite, but it's progress. Which brings us back, oddly enough, to the Pop Tart hanging out listlessly at the start of this post. "I want THOSE," The Baby said, pointing at the commercial for Pop Tarts on the television. "Yes, Pop Tarts for me."
"They've got gluten in them," I said, probably not even looking up from my magazine, "You can't eat them, remember?"
She was quiet for a few minutes and then I heard a sad little sniffling noise and looked up to see that the poor little girl was just sitting there and crying quietly, all of these things that she just could never have too heavy on her little shoulders.

So this week, I'm going to attempt to make homemade gluten-free Pop Tarts, which is just insane, really. I have some gluten-free pastry mix and I'm going to roll it out and fill it with jam and squiggle some icing on the top, the real Pop Tarts here for sculptural comparison purposes. It's the best I can do for my kid, this effort which is both more then enough and never enough, this constant work which we all must do to keep life from breaking our children's hearts too early.

Der Peeps, Der Peeps

It's Saint Patrick's Day, although we celebrated on Friday. But in honour, here is my favorite men's trio singing Danny Boy:

Mostly I'm just celebrating because the kids are back in school today, and I'm acknowledging this joyous event by cleaning my house from top to bottom because it's ICKY. I've also been on the phone for most of the morning as all of my fellow mothers, freed from a week spent endlessly amusing our always-grateful offspring, reached joyously for the phone to call me and make plans for later this week, which apparently will be a really social time in my life, filled with coffee visits and leisurely walks and playdates for The Baby. But today will be spent scrubbing my kitchen floor and vacuuming the inner workings of the couch and wiping grubby handprints off every vertical surface in my house, this brief martyrdom to acknowledge that my children were home and now they're off again.

At least I'm not these guys:

Sandwich One: Hey, buddy! Whatcha doing?

Sandwich Two: Just hanging out - AAAAAAAGGH!

SQUISH.

I LOVE making panini - there's something so very, very enjoyable about squishing sandwiches. And they're tasty, too - observe:

Note the delicious melted cheddar oozing out - good grief, why am I always so HUNGRY?

Heh - I just noticed that I got a bit carried away with Photoshop's blur feature and my plate looks like it's deliciously levitating above the table. Crazy.

And inside, there's roasted chicken, cheddar, red pepper, mozzarella and garlic mayonnaise - a concoction carefully assembled by The Girl, who has her own ideas about food. Simple and yet freakishly delicious. I wish I was eating this sandwich RIGHT NOW. But instead I had some rather uninspired leftovers and when I'm done writing, I'm off to clean some more, which is grimly pleasurable in the almost-quiet of the house, the sudden restfulness of just having one kid at home.

Oh, and for the first time in nearly nine years (give or take a few months in between babies), WE HAVE NO CHILDREN IN DIAPERS IN OUR HOUSE. This household may never purchase another bag of diapers again, which is both wildly cheering and stabbingly poignant and also - let's be frank - financially awesome. "More money for sandwiches!" I write, cheerfully, pretending that my heart isn't made out of Precious Moments figurines and melted cheese and wouldn't be happier with babies forever, that the door to that room hasn't closed forever, quietly but firmly, and there's no going back in.

Monday Leap Ahead

The Boy just very cheerfully helped me invent some spicy soup for lunch, full of tomatoes and peppers and onions and garlic and then he grated Monterey Jack cheese on top. It's quite good, although I'm not normally a soup fan. I've been feeling a bit mournful recently, though, and soup is comforting to the whiny soul.

My inner clock is wildly confused by the time change - I keep cheerfully thinking "Oh, it's mid-morning" until I look at the clock and realize with a start that it's now lunchtime, apparently. I'm tired on top of my confusion, too, since I haven't been sleeping recently but have instead decided to lay awake and staring into the murky darkness, listening to trains rushing through town on their way to someplace else. So tonight I'm going to attempt to make a gluten-free carrot cake, moist with applesauce and covered in cream cheese icing, because if I can't SLEEP and I've decided to be O Woe Is Me, at least I can still eat. And thank goodness for that.

The kids love helping out in the kitchen, which has been our primary entertainment so far during the March Break - visiting friends and leaving the house being out of the question while we wait out the stomach bug. The Girl could actually do much of the household cooking herself, something which I'm rather proud of, although she's not allowed to put things in the oven at all (she's short!) and is only allowed to stir things on the stove if a parent is RIGHT THERE. How old are kids when they can use the oven on their own, do you think? The Girl is a steady, responsible child, but she's still only 8, and that line between being over-protective and not protective enough can sometimes be a tricky one.

Every Friday, we make homemade pizza. When we first had The Girl, we ordered in pizza every Friday but that was expensive and unhealthy and then we moved beyond the reach of pizza delivery places anyhow and so now we either purchase a pre-made crust and go on from there OR I make some pizza dough - it's REALLY EASY - and then my husband cheerfully rolls out the discs. The kids do one, we do the other and then we watch a movie (our one movie a week because we are No Fun) and just relax. Oddly enough though, I've never taken pictures of something that we do at least 40 times a year - maybe because it's such a mundane weekly thing that it just doesn't occur to us to take pictures. But this weekend we did. Observe!

My husband rolling out pizza dough.

 

I'm standing on the stairs above him, by the way. Our kitchen is SMALL and two adults cannot work in there at the same time. Also, that is a weird, weird angle.

Ta da!

That's my Cuisinart Flatbread Oven to the left, which is just about my favorite thing in the world.

And here's the pizza, all topped up. I'm feeling MORE THAN A BIT like The Pioneer Woman right now.

That IS broccoli on it. Many years ago, a friend of mine joyfully told me about a pizza shop that sold pizzas made with whole wheat crusts and broccoli as a topping and I thought "ew." And now I put broccoli on my own pizzas, which is how you can tell that I am a sophisticated adult and also a mean mother. There's also mozzarella, goat cheese, sweet Thai chili sauce and red onion on that particular pizza and I feel hungry just looking at it.

And here I am - the back of my head, anyway - putting the pizza into the oven.

And it looked like a pizza when it came out but we were hungry and ate it, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

And so that is what we do every week. I think it's very easy to fall into these food rituals without knowing it - a friend of mine took her kids out to a certain restaurant every Sunday after church because it was on the way home but it wasn't until she missed one weekend and her daughter wailed out "This isn't what we do on SUNDAY!" that she realized that it had become important to her kids, something that was now part of their expected week. Routine and ritual are a huge part of family life - our Friday pizza making, another friend's Monday soup-and-sandwiches - all of these things add up to being so much of what a family is. What foods say family to your children? And what foods say home to you?

March Forward

Posting was unusually sporadic last week - I was rather sick and more than a bit uninspired. We have been sick SO much this winter, with at least one family member being ailing every day since January first, and apparently we're not alone in our cooties-covered condition - several families in town have told me the same thing, that they've been endlessly sick since Christmas - but even with that knowledge I'm feeling more than a bit smote. Smoted. Besmited.

I had made careful plans last night for school today, with The Boy being declared well enough to go, even though he was pale and with a deep, Edgar Allan Poe-style cough, and just now, as he was eating his hearty breakfast (waffles - the TOASTER KIND because I AM SICK and a chocolate banana milkshake*) my mom phoned and said that the school buses were canceled and I just about burst into tears, which is what makes me suspect that I might not be a good homeschooler, although I've been toying with the idea of building a giant bubble over my house to keep the germs out. Germs and Bratz.

(*do your kids like milkshakes and fruit smoothies as much as mine? A good blender and some fruit and there's a part of your healthy breakfast, as those ads for cereals made entirely out of sugar say.)

It's March break at the end of this week. One of the things I have to do today in between stealing a few naps and lethargically doing some tidying is to make a list of fun things to do next week - although I feel a bit like it's an exercise in hubris, since someone has ended up in the hospital every March break for the past two years, me in 2006, The Baby in 2007, and some superstitious part of me just wants to hunker down with a giant bottle of Vitamin C and some antibacterial handwash. But the list of good times must be made because we might be well, might have some good times ahead of us in our near future after all.

So that's what I'm up to today - next week, I'll post my playdough, watercolour and fingerpaint recipes (all very, very easy), just in time for March break. I'm drawing a bit of a blank as far as other ideas go, though - what are your ideas for keeping kids busy and happy over the March Break?

The Comfort Of Almost-Spring

I have to write a grocery list this morning, and it's making me fretful. My husband - he's back! hooray! - has offered very kindly to run to the grocery store on his lunch break and all I have to do is send him a list of groceries by 11, which is in 45 minutes. This should NOT be a big deal.

My husband was away this weekend at a church retreat and I was startled by how quickly I slipped into lazier eating habits. Without him here, the urge to make FAMILY dinners evaporated and we lived on frozen pizza and frozen lasagna and bagged salads, which are nice in a pinch but not the way I'd like to eat for the rest of my life. This three day vacation from real cooking was nice, but now I find myself yearning to REALLY cook, to make beautiful spring foods. The snow is still deep and the air is still cold, but something smells like spring and suddenly I know that winter WON'T last forever, which is the opposite of how I felt last week, this grim resignation to being chilled and bundled up forever. Now I feel like eating lemons and asparagus and going on a diet and swearing off my morning hot chocolate because spring actually WILL come, sooner or later.

The foods that promise comfort in late winter, that post-Christmas time, are a familiar crew - stews and baked pasta and molasses cookies and the smell of bread cooking in a kitchen as you come in half-frozen from some horrible storm. Summer foods are also easy to think of - a fresh tomato salad, corn on the cob, hamburgers sizzling on a grill - but the food of early spring is stumping me. It's not REAL spring yet, so the fresh rhubarb and asparagus are still weeks away, but something in me has cheered up considerably and I want this week's cooking to reflect that, to turn towards the hope for spring. Now all I have to do is to take this idea and translate it into a week's worth of meal plans, turn THAT into a grocery list and email it off to my husband, easy-peasy.

Is this a general phenomenon? Are you feeling like eating lighter, springlike foods now, or are you still wanting a hot bowl of stew? And what foods say spring to you, what do you want to cook when the snow suddenly starts magically melting away?

Some Things Are More Helpful Then Others

This morning started dramatically when the bread caught on fire in the toaster. Happy Family Day to me!

My husband shuffled wearily out of bed - he was sleeping in, the poor man - and turned off the smoke detector without even raising an eyebrow and went wearily back to bed, because I'm forever setting the smoke detector off while I'm cooking. The stupid smoke detectors are just too SENSITIVE. Our 40 year old toaster has perhaps had the biscuit. Maybe. (and if my camera's batteries weren't dead, I would have caught a picture of the flaming toaster, but alas....)

It's been that sort of month. We're all still vaguely sick - the virus that's made the rounds in town really hangs on, apparently, and I spend much of my time feeling either chilled (because of the winter that WILL NOT END) or kind of nauseated and bleh and not much like making supper, despite being possibly the world's hungriest person. And yet my inconvenient children still want food, which means that I've been relying on my rice cooker that Cuisinart sent me A LOT:

I throw some rice and water in, turn it on and go lay back down - meanwhile, the rest of supper has been cooking all day in the slow cooker and come supper time, the food has pretty much cooked itself. It's very handy, especially this time of year when everyone is feeling kind of cruddy and it's cold and  you want something warm and comforting for dinner.

I hesitated before posting that picture, because you can see The Baby's chubby hand as she attempted to put a different lid on the pot. The rice cooker had just been turned on and so wasn't hot yet, but it's important to remember that much of the kitchen is a very unsafe place for children - a young toddler was recently horribly burned locally while playing in the kitchen, and hearing that has caused me to review our household rules about children in the kitchen. The Baby helps me measure rice and water into the unplugged rice cooker, but is not allowed near it once it's hot. The Girl is allowed to use the hand mixer with supervision, but she's not allowed to put pans in the oven. The Boy is allowed to carefully chop bananas with a sharp knife so long as a parent is watching, but he's not allowed to do most other things because he's a SIX YEAR OLD BOY and I don't know if you're around SIX YEAR OLD BOYS a lot, so let me tell you: they are an unpredictable people.

That poor toddler's accident was all over the local news for a while, and a police officer who was interviewed said that the kitchen is not a safe place for children, the end. And it's really NOT, but it's a measured risk on our part - doing the best we can to insure our children's safety while raising them to be people who can competently feed themselves. Having a daily relationship with the preparation of the food that they eat is vitally important, I think - not just to teach them the most basic of life skills, but also to have them respect the labour that goes into food, to see it not just as something that magically shows up in a restaurant or from a box. And before you know it, they go from beloved little nuisances to being actually helpful, there being no pause from their attempts to dump black pepper into the cake batter to being suddenly able to make much of supper, this arrow-fast path to adulthood.

Wherein I Say The Word "Cookie" A Lot

My friend E. makes the best cookies in the world. I am not exaggerating.

Not that my cookies are bad - not at all - and any homemade cookie can beat any grocery store bagged cookie any day of the week, but E. has a special cookie gift. She has a rare cookie talent. One of these days, she WILL write a cookbook (Possible titles: "These Cookies Are Better Than Yours"; "Finally, Beck Will Stop Bugging Me For My Recipes.") and that knowledge makes her a bit shy with her recipes, which is a shame when you're sitting at home all weekend quite sick and wanting her rather magical double chocolate chip cookies. So, being the resourceful type, I flipped through my cookbooks until I found a recipe that sounded similar and set to work.

The first thing I had to do was to preheat the oven to 350 and line my cookie sheets with parchment paper - but I was off in the washroom blowing my nose (isn't that an awesome thing to write in the middle of a recipe? Yes.) and so I had my long-suffering husband line the cookie sheets for me.

Then I creamed together:

1 cup softened butter

3/4 cup white sugar

1/2 cup PACKED brown sugar (that means that you smack it all down with your fist, because loose brown sugar can be really light.)

Once that was fluffily mixed together, I added 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Proof!

I always double the vanilla in recipes, by the way, since vanilla is PRETTY tasty. Don't double THAT amount of vanilla, because I think four teaspoons of vanilla would be pushing it.

In a medium-sized bowl, I mixed together:

2 1/4 cups flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder - OH NO! I was out of cocoa powder! My poor husband sighed and put on his boots and walked to the store for the THIRD TIME THAT DAY and brought me back some cocoa powder. Thank you, honey.

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

Then I stirred that with a wooden spoon into the creamed butter stuff, and then I added a whole bag of white chocolate chips. Which was probably a bit more than one cup, in case you buy your white chocolate chips in mighty bagfuls or something.

I used a tablespoon to drop them onto the cookie sheets, leaving space for them to spread as they cooked (although I didn't find them terribly oozy cookies), and baked them for 12 minutes. (you may want to turn your sheets at the six minute mark.)

And WERE THEY AS GOOD AS E'S MAGICAL COOKIES?

Nope.

They WERE pretty astonishingly tasty, though - buttery and chocolatey with the creamy richness of white chocolate, and my children ate DOZENS of them. And until my friend E. FINALLY writes that cookbook, these are probably your best bet and one of the very best homemade cookies I've ever had.

Round and Round

I made doughnuts yesterday, which was a lot of fun in that "I AM NOT DOING THIS AGAIN FOR A YEAR" sort of way - I like rolling out the dough and cutting out the doughnuts and watching them puff up fat and golden in the bubbling oil and then dipping them in sugar afterward, hot and fragrant. It was a grand time, although I'm not exactly recommending you rush out and try making doughnuts since it's probably the most dangerous thing I do in my kitchen, what with the boiling oil and all.

My hands bear witness that I like to cook - my right hand is spotted with small red burns today, just one of the side effects of making doughnuts yesterday. (another one? Fatness.) Old small scars mark the many times I grated my knuckles absent-mindedly, mistook my thumb for an onion, bumped my hand against the top of the oven. And yet I DO love to cook most of the time, although right now I feel dried up and barren, out of ideas and out of hunger. I wake up from dreams of lemons, wanting something fresh and tart in my mouth while my hands ache with their reminders of the costs of winter's heavy food.

I'm making pierogies tonight - how's that for fresh and light? - and I love the soothing mindlessness of rolling out the big sheets of dough, filling them up with potatoes and onions and cheese. I flipped idly through a magazine article on dumplings last night, and was startled by how global they are, that every culture seems to have something women made from dough and modest fillings - although gluten-free pierogie-making has been a big failure so far. The little packages disintegrated as soon as they hit the water, which was also the fate with my experimental gluten-free doughnuts yesterday, too.

I did make a batch of baked gluten-free doughnuts last summer and they were happily received - look how little The Baby is there! Sheesh! - but I don't know, they don't feel like the REAL thing. And tonight, I'm just going to bake her a potato, these half-measures that are both enough and not enough, this once a year treat that I cannot give her, no matter how hard I try. 

Brownies Make It All Better

We are - as I've written about in boring, endless detail on my other blog - recovering slowly from some grim illnesses, including one that led to me experiencing the delights of nasal swabbing. (if you've never had one, let me warn you - it's less fun then you might think.) Being mildly sick in bed is sort of pleasantly relaxing if one is allowed to recline in catered-to splendor on piles of pillows and such, but having to look after one's sick children while one is sick oneself is a hideous punishment, this endless rheumy misery. It might also lead to one no longer referring to oneself in the first person, apparently. The Flu: FEAR IT.

The Girl decided yesterday afternoon that the only thing that would help her in her recovery was a pan of homemade brownies, which made me beam with pride - that's my girl! Brownies are ridiculously easy to make and the homemade kind just so much unthinkably better then the mix sort, which have the revolting taste of rotten cheese and are not substantially easier to make. IF I'm going to eat something indulgent and unwise (and I likely am, being me), I would much rather have it taste of chocolate and butter and sugar instead of preservatives and stabilizing ingredients. And homemade brownies are a perfect first baking project  - simple to make and rewarding.

Double Chocolate Brownies

Turn your oven on to 350. Lightly grease an eight inch square baking pan and set it aside.

In a small pot, put:

6 tablespoons butter

6 ounces semisweet baking chocolate, chopped into chunks

1/4 cup cocoa powder.

Place it on LOW heat and stir constantly and vigilently until the chocolate and butter are mostly melted. Take it off the heat and stir, and then use a spatula to scrape into the bowl of a stand mixer or into a medium sized mixing bowl.

Add:

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Now beat on medium speed until the batter is combined. If you don't have a stand mixer, use a hand mixer and if you don't have one of those, you can just use a spoon. Make sure you stir well.

Add:

3/4 cup flour

and beat until well blended, scraping down the sides occasionally.

That's it. You're done. Scrape the batter into your prepared pan, smoothing the top a bit with your spatula. Bake for 35 minutes (more or less).

Isn't that EASY? There are a few things you should do before you bake, the most important of which is to MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ALL OF THE INGREDIENTS YOU NEED. I don't know how many times I've been in the middle of a baking project and then realized, bleakly, that I was out of eggs or baking powder, but that says more for the current grim state of groceries in our house then any ongoing egg shortages. Still: check first.

The last of the brownies was packaged up and tucked into The Girl's lunchbox, as she bravely headed off to school again after missing nearly a week - paler and thinner but game and having a day that is full, I hope, of sweetness, full of friends and books and running outside on a suddenly well-again day.

After The Party

Thanks to a big hockey tournament, my son had only female guests this weekend - although he was perfectly happy with his party, it did reinforce a certain forgotten birthday party rule: ALWAYS CHECK BEFOREHAND THAT KIDS CAN COME ON THE DATE YOU'VE PICKED. Learn from my mistakes, people!

But he had a lot of fun, and it was a great little party. Look at the fantastic cake his dad made:

It was a big hit, although the kids really favoured certain colours over others - the red and white pieces were eaten up quickly, while we had quite a lot of blue left over and the yellow was absolutely untouched. There's probably some interesting psychological reasons behind all of that, but the cake itself was unvaryingly chocolate AND made from a mix, since kids rarely eat more then the icing and frankly, my feelings get hurt when my homemade chocolate cake is uneaten.

My husband makes all fancy birthday cakes in our household - I'm in charge of mixing together the cake mix, since apparently that's REALLY HARD, and then my husband cheerfully puts together something remarkable. He's made trains, Legos, a monkey, a fairytale castle - all of which astonishes some people, which in turn surprises me. My husband is an artist - why would he also not be good at decorating cakes? He's also the one who decorates for birthday parties, for the same reasons. Birthday parties, apparently, are Women's Work, and even though my husband is vastly more talented at creating them then me, it still startles people to hear that it wasn't yours truly who stayed up until midnight making the cake.

We had the grandparents in for cake last night and I went into the kitchen with the cheerful intention of making a buttercream meringue icing, which then FAILED UTTERLY. I served bare cake to our parents - luckily, angelfood - with the grim feeling that I'd ruined The Boy's birthday, who sat there happily eating his favorite kind of cake, cheerfully unaware of my angst. Sitting here now, though, I can tell that he had a good, happy birthday, with friends and phonecalls from far-away family and lots of presents and several cakes and he settled down to bed last night contented and pleased.

Our living room is still awash in red, yellow and blue streamers and swags of red, yellow and blue balloons - we'll leave them up until next weekend, and then let the house be bare for a week until the start of February. The kids have big plans for decorating for valentine's day after that, and then it's Easter and then it's only a hop skip and a jump until my daughters' birthdays, time fleeting past us unnoticed and my children waking up bigger every morning.

On Cooking

"Well . . . !" said Elizabeth Ann, very much surprised. "I didn't know it was so easy to cook!"

"Easiest thing in the world," said Aunt Abigail gravely, with the merry wrinkles around her merry old eyes all creased up with silent fun.  (Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield)

I think anyone who cooks at all has something that they are terrified to make - for me, for ages, it was Anything With Yeast and Things Made Out of Meringue. I don't know why I was quite so terrified of beating egg whites, in retrospect (easy!), but I can remember with a grim delight my earliest experiments in yeast breadmaking, these heavy leaden loaves, the size and weight of hockey pucks. Yeast was obviously a mystical substance, requiring near-magical powers to use successfully and I sadly avoided it for the next decade.

Then one day, I was following the Toddler Girl around a children's library and on display was a breadmaking book for CHILDREN. I seized it and read it from cover to cover - and made my first successful loaf of bread that very night. You should knead your dough, the author wrote, until it feels like your earlobe, smooth and pliant, and with that sentence, breadmaking was solved for me. (Oh, and their cheerful description of how hot the water for yeast should be - not so hot that you can't hold your finger in it comfortably.) I don't remember anything else about the book - not the title, definitely not the author - but I owe the mystery author a debt of gratitude.

And meringue was just plain easy. I don't know what I was worried about with that. Separating eggs? Using a hand blender? Neither of those are very intimidating, but I'd look at a lemon meringue pie and feel overwhelmed. And slightly nauseated - I don't like meringue on top of pies. But as a Pavlova - oh, that is a DIFFERENT thing!

Pavlova is a delicious dessert that comes originally from Australia - a round meringue disc that gets filled with whipped cream or lemon curd and then topped with fruit.

I made it last night for our Epiphany dinner, it being suitably festive, and yet gluten-free and ALSO low in fat and calories enough not to make my heart feel like it was suddenly coming to a Christmas-glutted stop. (well, low in calories before I piled whipped cream on it. Still.) And it's easy. And it looks fancy. And it tastes like heaven, really.

Pavlova

4 egg whites

a tiny pinch of salt

1/2 cup of white sugar

1 teaspoon vinegar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 tablespoon cornstarch

Preheat your oven to 400F. Cut out a piece of parchment paper (you'll find this near the wax paper in your grocery store) as big as your cookie sheet, and with a pencil, trace a supper plate onto it. You'll want an 8 inch circle. Butter the paper - I used baking spray - and move on to making the meringue.

Using an electric mixer, beat the egg whites and salt until they're fluffy. Add the sugar and beat for a few seconds and then ad the vinegar and vanilla. Now you're going to do some serious egg beating - mix the egg white mixture until it makes stiff peaks - the mixture will be resisting the beaters a bit and when you turn off your mixer and lift it up, little egg mountains should form. Sprinkle the cornstarch on top and lightly blend it in.

Now pile your meringue onto your greased parchment paper and gently spread it around inside the circle. You'll want to make high sides around the edges and a smooth center, like you're making a meringue bowl. Put the sheet into the oven and IMMEDIATELY lower the temperature to 250F.

Now leave it there for an hour and a half. When you take it out, it should feel set (and rather like a big piece of stryofoam), but still soft and squishy. If it's not done, give it another 15 minutes-half an hour. Now let it cool completely - you can make this much earlier in the day and then assemble it right before serving.

To serve, lightly whip some unsweetened cream, and pile that in the center of the Pavlova, leaving the rim untouched. As prettily as you can, arrange cut-up fresh fruit on top of THAT and serve to 6 VERY impressed guests.

Isn't that EASY? Thanks, in part, to our current gourmet food culture, many people think they can't cook ANYTHING - but really, anyone can cook. It is, as Aunt Abigail said up at the beginning, the easiest thing in the world and all you need to do is get started.

Very nearly Christmas

My life is one big crazy to-do list right now, this huge list of things that must happen or I'll ruin Christmas. No pressure there or anything. The Baby and I just went out into the briskly cold and cheerful day and decorated our porch FINALLY - my husband hates putting up the outdoor decorations before his birthday and this weekend was just INSANELY busy (we saw SANTA! SANTA! I KNOW HIM!) and it didn't get done by The Appropriate Person - aka MY HUSBAND - so I had to, for the millionth year in a row. (Isn't that the saddest thing you've ever heard?) I asked The Baby how the porch looked and she gave it an appraising, critical look.

"The porch looks AWESOME!" she said. And then she high-fived me for good measure. I'm going to get her to judge all of my efforts from now on: she is unreservedly on my side and everything I do is AMAZING.

Sometimes it occurs to me with this sudden shock that she is NOT a baby anymore. In four months, for example, she will be three. Three! That's a big kid! And there's no new baby on the way, which has never happened before - I have never had a child this age and not been pregnant, and parenting an old toddler/young preschooler without feeling exhausted/queasy/hugely fat is an odd sensation. Mostly I just feel bereft, though, with songs about a baby playing constantly in the background, this feeling of never again.

And then I make some cookies.

I don't know what the next phase of my life will hold - undoubtedly lots of baking, but as for everything else, I don't know. There's a chorus of lovely, supportive people in my life saying that I should write a book but that would involve prolonged effort and I don't like THAT. (which is why, I suspect, that I'm good at life with small children - our attention spans match.) I have no desire to go back to school, no desire for a career, no desire to do much of anything besides being at home with a small child I love and when that period of my life gently ends, will I look back on it as my one vital decade? Boy. That's a depressing thought.

So I guess I'll end up writing that book. It beats wringing my hands and weeping for the next 30 years, which is what I'm making it sound like RIGHT NOW. Maybe I'll be very good at it. Right now though, I would love to rest my hand gently on my own belly while all those Christmas songs are playing, would love to look into my new child's slate grey eyes for the very first time. Someone, my husband always says gently, had to be the last child, and The Baby will be ours.

Next year, The Girl will be nine and The Boy will be nearly seven and The Baby on her way to four and so this is my last year with a houseful of small children at Christmas. This is our last Christmas with children eager for magic and crafts and cookies and every day they get older and older and Christmas gets closer and my to-do list won't finish itself, no pressure there or anything.

Food Gone Bad

There's not enough written, I think, about bad food - failed meals, awful things other people have served us, horrid things we like to eat in private - unless it's in one of those embarrassment columns, the adult equivalent of that Young Miss column where girls write in with "hilarious" tales of getting their periods in awkward places. (like in an all-white convertible, let's say.) "I was so embarrassed when I accidentally served a blue turkey on Thanksgiving!" writes the humiliated but game submitter. "Ever since then, my family mocks me until I cry every holiday!"

But failed food isn't funny, not REALLY. Food costs money, for one thing, and a ruined meal can seem like a big platter of money turned to ashes. And it's humiliating to fail, only funny long afterwards and with a LOT of effort - who wants to be known forevermore as the witless woman who served a blue turkey at Thanksgiving?

I was once at a meal where everything had gone wrong - the dinner was a nauseating failure, the milk was spoiled, even the olives had been opened to reveal a thick layer of mold - and there was nothing really to do about it. Our hosts lived too far away from anywhere and were too poor for the meal to be replaced and so it was eaten, my husband and I hiding things our daughter quietly handed us in our pockets and bags, drinking her spoiled milk ourselves when our hosts backs were turned to save their feelings.

"Thank you. It was delicious," we lied afterwards and left, stopping a few miles down the road so I could throw up in a ditch.  My husband and I still remember that meal years later with a lurid nostalgia, it being a truly unique final meal with some dear declining people, their final attempt to take care of us once more and what could we do but lie about it to them? They loved us and we loved them and wanted to spare them any pain.

My husband's birthday is coming up quickly. We generally invite his parents and grandmother and my parents to go out for dinner with us and then back here for cake afterwards. Sounds like a nice evening, right?

Dear Young Miss: I ruin my husband's birthday cake every year. What's up with that?

IT IS TRUE - every year, my husband's birthday cake is a nightmarish, lumpy horror with a texture like a kitchen sponge or a brick or something terribly in-between. I CAN bake cakes but something about making a cake for all of our parents causes my cakes to fail, like a wicked changeling switched in the oven for my real cake (which is, of course, delicious and airy and beautifully frosted and being eaten by mean little imps in the basement, no doubt.). It doesn't bother me so much about my own parents, since they've had plenty of occasions to eat my regular, successful baking, but wrecking a cake that my in-laws are going to eat EVERY TIME? Oh, that's embarrassing. And every year I head into the kitchen with the same good intentions and the same grim results, and every year, my husband cheerfully eats his awful, awful cake and then kisses me.

"Thank you," he always says. "It was delicious."

Everyone carries with them a

Everyone carries with them a list of things that they would like to have, I think, this secret list of wistful belongings. At the very top of mine - not surprisingly, I suspect - was a stand mixer, which I have wanted for YEARS. Stand mixers say Serious Baker, I think, and how I WANTED one. Every Christmas, my husband would get a list from me of the books and various odds and ends that I wanted, to dole out to various interested family members and you may gather, of course, that a stand mixer featured prominently on every year's list. If I was more mature, I'd likely have said an offhand "Oh, whatever you get me will be more than fine", but I've never claimed to be particularly mature.

Look what Cuisinart sent me on Friday:

So this year, whatever you want to get me for Christmas is FINE.

And what else did I do this weekend, besides having longheld wishes gratifyingly satisfied? Well, I was SICK. I had felt sort of off for much of the week, a combination of having mysteriously lost my generally astounding appetite and feeling vaguely headachey and tired and if you read my blog on Saturday you already know how I spent Friday (short answer: throwing up.). I was SO sick that I lost seven pounds in two days, which sounds grand in writing but in real life? Oh, not so much.

So anyhow, by Sunday I was recovered enough to spend the evening cheerfully couched with a large stack of brand new December magazines, the most cheerful pastime that I can even think of. The bonhomie induced by the holiday-themed magazines makes me generously inclined to magazines I generally pass over - like Bon Appetit, which informed me last night that Vienna has a "vibrant mod cuisine" ("Oh, who DOESN'T know that?" said my husband, when I informed him of Vienna's vibrant modishness.) and included a menu for a grim God-Is-Dead Christmas dinner. ("Wild Mushroom Ragout on Crispy Polenta with Comte Cheese"? WHERE IS THE STUFFING?)

It also included an interview on the very last page with a young author. I can't imagine that being interviewed by the terrifyingly pretentious folks at Bon Appetit would be a comfortable experience, needing the combination of extreme amounts of the Right Sort of world travel, culinary sophistication and the general air of formidable wealth. The young author - who I won't name out of kindness, since everyone googles themselves - did her very best, saying that the three writers she would like to have for dinner would be Virginia Woolf, Henry James and FREAKING DOSTOEVSKY. What a coincidence! Those would be the three writers I'd pretty much least like to have for dinner - Virginia all droopy and depressed and eating a few leaves of lettuce, probably, Henry with his ferociously bad digestion and Dostoevsky wolfing everything down and speaking only Russian. What a grand evening THAT would be, with me encouraging Virgina Woolf to just have one bite of the delicious wild mushroom ragout and Henry James letting out apocalyptic belches. Oh, and Dostoevsky glaring at everyone. Fun.

I don't know WHAT I'd answer to the three authors question - offhand, I'd say C.S. Lewis, who was apparently a nice, pleasant man and someone I find theologically inspiring, Agatha Christie, because I think she'd be fun, and Emily Bronte, because I think she needed a cheerful outing. And who would you choose?

Mostly, though, I'm not into speculative (and deceased) dining companions. Mostly, I'm just glad to be feeling well enough to make cookies for - and with - my three children, and very delighted to be using my splendid new stand mixer which is, I think, a very cheerful state of affairs, being happy with daily state of your own life and the real people around you.

Hands off, buddy. They're not gluten-free.

Oh, yummmmmmy.

Look what I made last night:

That's a Baileys Irish Cream cheesecake. I keep suddenly being AWARE that it is in my fridge, waiting. The cheesecake DOES have a destination, thank goodness - The Baby and I are going to a party this morning, and the mothers in attendance should take besotted care of it. The cheesecake is traveling in the springform pan until we get to the party - the pan helps the cake maintain its shape.

The recipe was REALLY simple - it's an unbaked cheesecake recipe, which means that it's well within the reach of any cook, no matter how unsure of your baking skills you might be. Just make sure that you read through the recipe first and give the cake adequate time to chill. Here's the recipe:

Bailey's Irish Cream Cheesecake

For the Base:

2oz (50g) Butter

5oz (125g) Digestive Biscuits, crushed (or you can do what I did and use graham cracker crumbs)

For the Filling: 1 packet soft cheese (such as Philadelphia) (my note: this is the equivalent of four smaller packages of cream cheese, okay?)

1oz (25g) Caster sugar

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 pint/250ml fresh cream

3fl.oz (75ml) Baileys

Method: Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the biscuit crumbs. Press the mixture into the bottom of an 8" loose bottomed baking tin. Chill for at least an hour.

Beat the cream cheese, sugar and lemon juice together until smooth. Whip the cream and fold with the Baileys into cream cheese mixture. (And oh my goodness, how did I ever whip cream before I had this?) Pour onto the chilled biscuit base and chill overnight.

Push up removable base and decorate cheesecake with chocolate shavings or fruit.

My husband was absolutely stricken that I made a cheesecake that wasn't for him, so I ended up making us these for a nightcap last night:

Mint-Night Madness

To a blender, add 1 cup ice, 2 oz. Baileys mint chocolate liqueur, 1 oz. milk and 1 scoop chocolate ice cream. Blend and pour into a wine goblet and garnish with a mint chocolate.

That cheered him RIGHT up.

Want more recipes for Bailey's? Check out Kath's post at the Girls' Night!

A Love Letter

So I spent the morning at the clinic with The Girl and then we cheerfully walked home together in the cold rain, her new diagnosis a small dark cloud over us.

It turns out that she's asthmatic. We suspected as much, but now it's been verified and they're trying to figure out what sort of medications her fragile 48 pound self can handle. It's not very bad news but it's not very good news, either. It reminds me again how precarious parenting is, this lesson that we learn over and over again, how this huge love is bourn by these tiny mortal people when they should be made out of something guaranteed and death-proof.

Sometimes, in that middle-of-the-night-and-sleepless kind of way, I imagine what my life would have been like if I had never had children. Would I be happier without this terrifying burden of love for them? I read a letter in Chatelaine magainze - I think the November issue - by a woman who had delayed child-bearing to travel around the world for decades, apparently, and then given up on fertility treatments. She was glad, she wrote, that she had travelled and would never have given up that experience just for a child.  I sat there blinking in disbelief that this was her cheerful conclusion and not "I wasted my freaking LIFE wandering around the world like some shiftless hippy and now I've been deprived of having a baby in my arms because of it." Which I guess firmly settles where I am on the whole "Happier without kids?" question that occurs to me occasionally - yes, travel is all well and nice, but I would, if given the choice, pick a walk home in the cold rain with my pale laughing child any day over standing on some sandy beach in the South Pacific without her.

Grey clouds call for blue cheese, I think, and so tonight I'm going to make potato-leek soup with blue cheese (if it's any good, I'll post the recipe tomorrow) and homemade bread and toast myself with a glass of white wine for another long day over again and hopefully for clear skies tomorrow.

Wolves

My friends here in Small Town run the Small Town economic spectrum - some of my friends are small town rich (a nice house on the good street in town, a couple of shopping trips to Toronto each year, a boat and a car that wasn't bought used) and some of my friends are living on almost unimaginably tiny amounts of money, surviving by their cleverness and their ability to stretch a small amount almost endlessly. We are in the middle of the Small Town spectrum - enough money to pay the bills and enough leftover for the kind of pleasant small extras that make life fun, so long as we're careful all the time.

Recently though, I have felt financially imperiled - debts piling up, expenses spiraling out of control - and Christmas is in 56 days, as my children constantly are reminding me. It's a chilly Novemberish sort of feeling, this not-enoughness, and so I spent some time combing through frugality websites, reading endless hamburger recipes and tips for buying used shoes. I pictured a grim future for us, with me wearing someone else's old polyester dress (the kind that comes pre-stained in the armpits) and feeding my children on cheap starches. My husband gently suggested that I had perhaps been frugal enough for one day and I instead sulked in a bubble bath and read M.F.K. Fisher's "How To Cook A Wolf."

WELL. If you ever want to feel IMMENSELY better about your financial affairs, THAT is the book to read. The food shortages and rationing from World War II certainly put our temporary financial drought into a much more cheerful perspective - we have to watch our spending for a few weeks, while that book contains recipes for pigeon and has a certain grim chapter called "How To Keep Alive."  And it also contains the finest recipe for gingerbread  - the cake kind - that I know of, just the thing to make on a cold November morning, when you need its spicy richness to chase the wolves right away from your door.

Edith's Gingerbread

• 1/4 cup shortening (although I'm using butter)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ginger, cloves and salt
• 3/4 cup boiling water
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda (this is not a typo - you add soda in TWICE to the recipe, so it's listed twice in the ingredients. Trust me on this!)
• 1 1/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 beaten egg

Cream the shortening and sugar. Mix the spices, flour, and baking powder together. Beat the 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda into the molasses until it is light and fluffy and mix into the shortening/sugar mixture. Add the 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda into the boiling water and then add it to the molasses mixture, alternating with the flour mixture (so you're going to do it this way: a bit of boiling water and stir, then the flour and stir and then the rest of the boiling water.). Fold in the beaten egg when the batter is well mixed (it's going to be a THIN batter. Do NOT thicken it!), and pour into a greased and floured 8" square pan. Bake for about 20 minutes at 325.

My children like to eat this in thick steaming slabs with butter. I like to eat it with applesauce and some beer. Whichever way you prefer, it's a lovely thing, whether you're rich or poor or someplace in the precarious middle.

The Anti-Heloise

When I popped into my parent's house yesterday to pick up The Boy after his sleepover, my dad was sitting at the table chatting with some documentary filmmakers who were there to do some work with him.

"And there's my daughter!" he announced cheerfully. "She has a blog!"

They politely asked me what it was about, and after giving my father a brief, dark look, I mumbled something about "parenting and cooking."

"So it's tips and such, then?" one of the filmmakers asked. GOOD GRIEF, NO. Can you even imagine ME writing one of those Hints From Heloise type blogs? ("Found a dead mouse? Phone your husband at work and scream until he comes home and takes care of it!") Some women are GREAT at managing household things, but whatever fairy handed THAT gift out at their cradles managed to pass over me altogether. The things I AM good at - babies, baking, holidays, lounging around and reading, coming up with adjectives - can often feel too slight and trivial to matter much in a world where it often feels like everyone but me has a big defining career, something that they are good at that MATTERS. And too often my blog can feel like one prolonged exercise in misplaced narcissism - especially when I'm trying to explain what it is to people who are looking at slouchy, unimpressive me, wondering what I would ever have to write.

But I love my odd, narrow little life and I'm very good at the few things I'm very good at - like annually burning the caramel for our annual caramel apples or dressing Barbies with The Baby for HOURS or making pizza every Friday night. (I LOVE my flatbread oven SO. MUCH.)  And so most of the time I'm pretty good at feeling pleased with my choices because I am where my talents are best used - but some days, I wistfully imagine a grown-up career with real business clothing doing, I dunno, accounting and probably drinking vodka at my desk because that just does NOT sound like something I want to do. And yet living my life the way I want to makes me feel a bit like one of those historical reenactors, spinning wool in my pioneer dress and being Ye Olde Homemaker.

The filmmakers were still waiting for an answer.

"It's about me," I said, and grabbed The Boy and ran like the wind to the car, dodging barn cats and rutabagas and heading home with all of my children intact, ready for another big day of doing the stuff that I'm mostly pretty good at, which does NOT, let me state emphatically, involve handy household hints in ANY way.

Poison Apples

The Boy had decided earlier in the day that the two of us should make "cookie cutter cookies", as he called them, and so I made the dough (while he stood behind me, stealing bites of sugar and butter), I rolled out the dough and cut it out (while he took off with the cookie cutters to play farm), and I baked the cookies (I don't know where he was at this point). Then when the cookies were cooled off, he proudly brought a big plate of them into the living room and announced that he'd made cookies. Fair enough.

The cookies sat around nudely until bedtime, when we frosted them, my children crying beside me. I think it was the cookies that made the kids cry, or maybe the fumes from the food colouring (we DID use a lot) or maybe it was that Mama had been a big crab all day and I kept snapping at the kids until finally both of them were sobbing. Yep. I stomped into the living room and sat sulking in a chair until my husband came up to me, furious, and told me to go look at The Boy's face. So I did.

Oh.

Have you ever had one of those revelatory moments where you realize JUST LIKE THAT that you've been a jerk? It's a nasty feeling, this sudden falling away of all of the self-righteous martyrdom, this revelation of a meanness of spirit, a cruel littleness.

I apologized to my kids and hugged them on my knee and admired their cookie decorating handiwork and they sniffled and permitted me to hug them, because after all, who better to comfort you when you are sad than your mother? By the time they went to bed - stuffed full of cookies and milk - they were cheerful again and all was restored.

Someone once told me that her children were only allowed to watch her bake - that she would put up the baby gate in the living room and her children would peer mournfully over it into the kitchen while she cheerfully made banana bread, which struck me at the time as quietly hilarious. Of course, now I feel like she was wise, that I should be perhaps furiously baking in a cage myself, cackling away and making apples as red as poison.

My children cheerfully filled up their lunch containers with cookie apples (and, mystifyingly enough, cookie DOLPHINS) this morning, chattering away to each other and hurrying off to school. The cookies will be untouched by me, though, one taste of sad self-knowledge being more than enough.

Squirrels and Butter Tarts

My oldest daughter has been collecting a lot of acorns on our walks recently, and has amassed an impressive number. I thought to ask her what she planned on doing with all her many, many acorns, and she told me that she was planning on roasting and eating them.

Oh. Well, of course. Who doesn't look at an acorn laying on the dirty, dirty ground and think "Hey, those squirrels may be ON to something?". But it turns out that acorns are only vaguely edible and even getting to the point of vague edibility means that you have to hull them and roast them and pulverize them, at which point my daughter lost her enthusiasm for the whole affair, and thank goodness. I like seasonal cooking probably more than the next person, but I balk at hulling acorns.

It's unseasonably cold right now, which has thrown me into full seasonal baking mode as well as forcing me to dig the winter coats out of the attic. All summer long, I felt only the vaguest interest in cooking at all, and now it's a constant desire to Bake Things, these things that smell like home when you come in the front door. The same force that makes the squirrel scuttle around and gather up any of the acorns my daughter missed causes me to decide that I really, really need to try making butter tarts again.

I don't recommend making butter tarts - they're HARD! Mine turned out all right, but I don't have the knack of making them, really. One of my friends is BRILLIANT at making them, but she's also the sort of person who thinks nothing of calmly baking 20 pies in one afternoon AND she works full-time. I'm a little bit in awe of her practical capability, and plan on taking her with me if I ever get shipwrecked on a desert island - she would keep me ALIVE. So should you possess her startling degree of hard-working competency, than you will probably be a butter tart making pro in no time.

The best of the lot, sadly.

The kids loved the butter tarts, even though they were kind of a flop - The Boy headed off to school this morning happily munching on one, waving goodbye to me with a sticky hand. And supper tonight should be fairly foolproof and comforting - shepherd's pie (with a mashed sweet potato topping!) and apple crisp, the sort of thing to warm a little heart that has spend the day in the sudden autumnal chill, this weather that tells us in no uncertain terms that winter is fast upon our heels.