My little gastronomes

Welcome to the June 2013 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting in Theory vs. in Reality
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants are sharing how their ideas and methods of parenting have changed.
***


"I'll never cook a separate meal for my children," I said, back in those innocent days when my firstborn was growing apace, nourished by nothing more than his mama's milk, as I thought scornfully of other families I'd seen doing just that. "Why should they need different food? Children's menus are an abomination. He's going to be a little gastronome."

I love food. I have a (fairly) healthy and varied diet. I enjoy vegetables, with broccoli right up there at the top of my list, and kale a new entrant not far behind. I enjoy cooking and baking, sweet and savoury. I like to make Indian food, Italian, Tex-Mex. I have eaten Korean and Ethiopian, Mongolian and French. I own a tagine, and I've used it too.

My children, I thought loftily, will not suffer as I did at the hands of their grandmother. My mother, a wonderful woman, was not a natural cook. She likes to say that some are born cooks, some achieve cookery, and some - like her - have cookery thrust upon them. She fed me and my father admirably for many years, with wholesome home-cooked food that was often not burned. But my parents come of meat-and-two-veg stock, where one veg is always a potato. "Meat" includes fish (on Fridays), but vegetarian meals are unheard of, unless you're actually one of those odd people, a vegetarian. "What did the good Lord put animals on the earth for if not for us to eat?" she'll ask you. I stopped getting into that argument a long time ago.

When I have children, I thought, I'll cook nice food.

And now I do cook nice food. My husband can vouch for it. He's a wonderful and appreciative audience. Our kids, however, not so much.

I don't think a single pea went in, then or since.

I conveniently forgot that before my foodie-esque incarnation, I was a pretty fussy eater, and it had little or nothing to do with my mother's cooking: I was just made that way. I still remember the first time I tasted a pea (and swallowed it whole so it would go quicker). I remember putting sugar on raw tomatoes in salads to make them more palatable. I remember picking the chunks of beef out of the sauce of the stew, carefully scraping off any vestige of onion or whatever else might have been there. I remember the day I finally tasted a burger, and I'm pretty sure I was in double digits by then.

My husband too, it turns out, was a picky eater. As number five of five, he probably didn't encounter much pushback from his parents, who I'm sure had stopped noticing by then. If you didn't eat it, one of your siblings picked up the slack pretty quickly.

So of course, genetically as well as karmically, we were quite likely to produce a couple of picky eaters between us.

I started out as well as I could with my children. I ate lots of vegetables in my pregnancies. (And a fair number of toasted waffles and chocolate milkshakes too.) I breastfed my kids exclusively for the first six months, and continued well (very well) into "extended" territory. I introduced fruits and vegetables early. I provided them with a variety of attractive options. I read Ellyn Satter.

If my second child had been my first, I would probably describe her as a picky eater. As it is, I'm delighted that she eats a broad range of things: pizza, pasta (one brand only), scrambled eggs (sometimes), cheese (-sticks), baked beans, sausages, chicken (but never in nugget form), apples, strawberries, broccoli, even. (Yay broccoli!) That's about it, mind you. Nothing with a sauce, nothing mixed together, nothing differently made, at the moment. She's four. I think that's how they are.

Healthy meal. That's not even chocolate milk.

Her big brother, though, is far worse, and subsists on a diet of peanut-butter sandwiches, breakfast cereal, milk, and crackers. He's a self-proclaimed vegetarian, except that he won't eat a vegetable. In the past few months we've had some steps forward with tiny bites of raw carrot, some apple, a few grapes: these are a big deal for my seven-year-old. (Yes, he's seven. This has been going on a long time. Even as a baby, when they eat everything, he was resistant to tasting things.)

My son is healthy and growing. He's rarely sick, and he's right at the 50th percentile on the growth charts, where he's been since he was about 9 months old. The doctor encourages him to eat some fruits and vegetables, but beyond that she's not particularly worried about him.

I have, of course, spent many fruitless (hah) hours obsessing over his diet, coming up with plans and sticker charts, blogging, enquiring, self-flagellating, wheedling, putting my foot down, and generally worrying about all of this - but in the end, I had to accept that eating, like sleeping and pooping, is just one of those things you can't make someone else do. I cook a nice dinner for the grownups every night, our daughter might eat some of it or something else reasonably decent, and the boy has another peanut butter sandwich.

The good food is in the house. He sees it, he smells it, (he gags and removes himself to the other room), he knows what it's called. He sometimes even helps cook it. He has no interest in eating it, most of the time, though now and then he announces that he wants to taste, say, lettuce, and I give him a bit and he nibbles it and recoils in horror.

I have taken all my assumptions about how to get children to eat healthy food and tossed them overboard. My son is a smart kid, he loves school, he's growing and healthy and fast and strong. He eats what he eats, and it sustains him. He's a pain to take on vacation or out for a meal, but such is life. I have faith that he'll get around to eating more variety some day, and we'll let him get there and welcome him with open arms and a full plate when he does.

Just don't tell my mother he's a vegetarian. She won't understand.

Then he sat down and ate an entire apple, just like that.

***
Visit Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

• Know Better, Do Better. Except When I Don't. — Jennifer from True Confessions of a Real Mommy was able to settle in her parenting choices before her children arrived, but that doesn't mean she always lives up to them.
• Judgments Made Before Motherhood — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama looks back on her views of parents she came in contact with before she became a mother and how much her worldview of parenting has changed!
• A Bend in The Road — Lyndsay at ourfeministplayschool writes about how her visions of homeschooling her son during the elementary school years have changed drastically in the last year - because HE wants to go to school.
• I Wish Children Came with Instruction Manuals — While Dionna at Code Name: Mama loves reading about parenting, she's not found any one book that counts as an instruction manual. Every child is different, every family is different, every dynamic is different. No single parenting method or style is the be-all end-all. Still, wouldn't it be nice if parenting were like troubleshooting?
• The Mistakes I've Made — Kate at Here Now Brown Cow laments the choices she made with her first child and explains how ditching her preconceived ideas on parenting is helping her to grow a happy family.
• I Only Expected to Love... — Kellie at Our Mindful Life went into parenting expecting to not have all the answers. It turns out, she was right!
• They See Me Wearin', They Hatin' — Erin Yuki at And Now, for Something Completely Different contemplates putting her babywearing aspirations into practice, and discussed how she deals with "babywearing haters."
• Parenting Human Beings — Erika Gebhardt lists her parenting "mistakes," and the one concept that has revolutionized her parenting.
• Doing it right: what I knew before I had kids... — Lucy at Dreaming Aloud, guest posting at Natural Parents Network realises that the number one game in town, when it comes to parenting, is judgement about doing it right. But "doing it right" looks different to everybody.
• A synopsis of our reality as first time parents — Amanda at My Life in a Nut Shell summarizes the struggles she went through to get pregnant, and how her daughter's high needs paved the way for her and her husband to become natural parents.
• Theory to Reality? — Jorje compares her original pre-kid ideas (some from her own childhood) to her personal parenting realities on MommaJorje.com.
• The Princess Paradigm — Laura at Pug in the Kitchen had planned to raise her daughter in a sparkly, princess-free home, but in turn has found herself embracing the glitz.
• Healthy Eating With Kids: Ideal vs. Real — Christy at Eco Journey In The Burbs had definite ideas about what healthy eating was going to look like in her family before she had kids. Little did she realize that her kids would have something to say about it.
• How to deal with unwanted parenting advice — Tat at Mum in Search thought that dealing with unwanted parenting advice would be a breeze. It turned out to be one of her biggest challenges as a new mum.
• How I trained my 43 month old in 89 days! — Becky at Old New Legacy used to mock sticker charts, until they became her best friend in the process of potty training.
• My Double Life: Scheduling with Twins — Mercedes at Project Procrastinot was banging her head against the wall trying to keep up with the plan she made during pregnancy, until she let her babies lead the way.
• Parenting in the land of compromise — As a holistic health geek trying to take care of her health issues naturally, Jessica at Crunchy-Chewy Mama regrets that her needs sometimes get in the way of her children's needs.
• Practice Makes Good, Not Perfect — Rachael at The Variegated Life comes to see that through practice, she just might already be the parent she wants to be.
• 3 Dangerous Myths about Parenting and Partnering: How to Free Yourself and Your Family — Sheila Pai at A Living Family shares in theory (blog) and reality (video) how she frees herself from 3 Dangerous Myths about Parenting and Partnering that can damage the connection, peace and love she seeks to nurture in her relationships with family and others.
• 5 Things I Thought MY Children Would Never Do — Luschka at Diary of a First Child largely laughs at herself and her previous misconceptions about things her children would or wouldn't do, or be allowed to do.
• Policing politeness — Lauren at Hobo Mama rethinks a conviction she had about modeling vs. teaching her children about courtesy.
• The Before and The After: Learning about Parenting — Amy at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work reminisces about the perspective she held as a young adult working with children (and parents) . . . before she became a mother.
• Parenting Beliefs: Becoming the Parent You Want to Be — Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses how we can make a mindful decision to become the parent we want to be. Decisions we make affect who we will become.
• The Great Breastfeeding Debacle — In Lisa at The Squishable Baby's mind, breastfeeding would be easy.
• What my daughter taught me about being a parent — Mrs Green asks, "Is it ever ok to lock your child in their bedroom?"
• Sensory Box Fail! — Megan at The Boho Mama discovers that thoughtful sensory activities can sometimes lead to pasta in your bra and beans up your nose.
• Montessori and My Children – Theory vs. Reality — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now shares her experiences with Montessori parenting and describes the results she sees in her now-adult children.
• I Like The Mother I Am Now More Than The Mother I Intended To Be — Darcel at The Mahogany Way thought she would just give her kids the look and they would immediately fall in line.
• How I Ended Up Like My Tiger Mom With Peaceful Parenting — Theek at The Laotian Commotion somehow ended up like her Tiger Mom, even though she purposely tried for the complete opposite as a peaceful parent.

Transatlantic subtleties: dessert v. pudding

This came up in my comments one day, but it deserves a disambiguation post of its own, so here you go.

Dessert is dessert wherever you are: something sweet that you eat after your main course. Breakfast does not get dessert, but my children still ask for it. Lunch should not get dessert but sometimes it does. Dinner, conversely, doesn't always get dessert around here. Sometimes your chewy vitamin is dessert. You takes what you gets. If I was a good French mother, dessert would always be fruit. I'm neither good nor French.

I digress; dessert is easy, is my point - so long as you're talking semantics rather than parenting.

Pudding is another matter entirely.

In Ireland (and the UK, I daresay), pudding mostly is a synonym for dessert. Thus: "What's for pudding?", "Where's my pudding?", and "I want pudding!"

However, it does have a couple of other specific uses:

steamed pudding - a dessert traditionally made with suet (animal shortening, like Crisco) that comes out cake-like but is eaten hot. It's a more old-fashioned thing, and most people these days only encounter one at Christmas - Christmas pudding is a dense, dark, alcohol-soused mixture of raisins, sultanas, currants, mixed peel (and glace cherries if you're into that sort of thing), just about held together by some fluffy stuff. It's basically just another form of Christmas cake, but to be eaten warm with whipped cream and brandy butter. Variants might have amusing names like "spotted dick" or "pig's bum", as well as the more palatable-sounding treacle pudding.

blood pudding - in Ireland this is black or white pudding - definitely a savoury, not a dessert. It's a sausage made with pigs' blood that you might fry up a few coins of for breakfast with your rashers and egg. You either love it or hate it.

In the US, pudding is a specific type of dessert - a thick, viscous, sweet slurpy stuff that's often vanilla or chocolate flavoured. The closest thing to it I might have encountered in Ireland is Angel Delight. Something between the texture of thick custard and slightly runny blancmange, maybe. You can mix it up from powder or buy it ready made in little individual pots, or probably even make it from scratch.

So we have learned that pudding is always dessert (except when it's not) and dessert is not always pudding. Did I clear everything right up? Oh good.

Feast report

Today we went to the zoo. Surprisingly, quite a lot of people seemed to think Black Friday would be a good zoo day, but the weather was perfect as it so rarely is for the zoo, and we did well. We saw a cheetah and the lions, some distant gorillas and a sad orang-utan (do they ever look otherwise), the reptiles and some indolent sea lions. The absolute highlight, however, was the naked mole rats.

Thanks to this book, which we have from the library, the children had heard of naked mole rats. But when I told Dash we could see them at the zoo, he reacted as if I'd just told him the unicorns would be coming up on the left.

"Ha ha."
"No, really. They're in the small mammal house."
"You're just being silly."
"I promise. They exist."
"Really?"
etc.

When we finally got to the small mammals we had to charge past all the (many and various) tamarins, pausing briefly at the two-toed sloth (who looked like nothing so much as a black labrador poking his nose out from under a comatose afghan hound), to get to the perspex tubes (to simulate tunnels) of naked mole rats. They weren't all that exciting in person, but the children were thrilled by their mere existence.

That's a lion in the distance. Left of the tree. See?

*******

But that's not why I'm here, and that's not why you're here either. You came for the food, didn't you? Well, the food is what you're getting. A report on yesterday, that is.

As we had no company for Thanksgiving, and we don't particularly like turkey, and we don't feel any weight of tradition on this culturally-not-ours day, I usually try to do something different. This year I saw a recipe for ribs, and the photo was so enticing that I decided to pull the slow-cooker out of the enforced retirement it's been in since its disastrous maiden voyage in 2004.

I'm here to tell you that it was a roaring success, and I might have to use the crockpot more often than once every eight years now that I've discovered this.

To accompany, we had baked potatoes and lemony green beans, and a nice shiraz which is probably the wrong thing to go with ribs, but we're not fussy.

Of course, I had to make a pie, even if I am anti-tradition. Apple, if you please. It was delish.

Pastry hearts. Because hearts symbolise Thanksgiving, right?

Then I was left with half an hour to spare and some extra pastry, so I took the half-can of pumpkin that was sitting in the fridge, looked up some recipes, and made mini pumpkin pies too. Mostly because Mabel had announced at her school feast on Tuesday that she loved pumpkin pie. She didn't like mine, of course.

Splats of pumpkin

The jury's still out on these, I admit.

I don't think we're having a turkey on Thursday

I spend a few days thinking about jeans and shoes and suddenly it's Thanksgiving week and there's no food in the house.

Ah well. Food comes and goes, you know, but boots are good for at least two years, I'd say. I have a pair of boots upstairs that I bought in 1999, actually. I wore them at least once last year. (I'd wear them more often if I had any call for 2.5-inch heels on a regular basis. But somehow I never feel that first-grade pickup is the right time. Or daylight, for that matter.)

The reason I'm suddenly getting all twitchy about how untrendy I am is, of course, that we'll be going home to Dublin for three weeks at Christmas, and while not exactly the fashion capital of the western world, the stakes are a tiny bit higher than they are here. The season that's in it gives rise to opportunities to dress up, for one thing, and people there do tend to dress up a bit more. I just want to look like I'm not totally submersed by my soccermom lifestyle, that's all.

[And then I thought: submersed isn't a word, you idiot. It's submerged, or immersed. But I looked it up and it is a word and it means just what I meant it to, so that's nice.]

And when you only see people once a year, or there's the chance you'll be meeting up with people you haven't seen for ten years, or meeting people you've only interacted with on the Internet, not to mention the fact that the tiny statistical probability of bumping into an ex-boyfriend is raised by at least 75% if I'm walking down Grafton Street rather than to first-grade pickup, you want to look at least reasonably not awful.

[Yes, I know I just changed from second person to first and back again in the same paragraph-long sentence. I did it on purpose. So I did.]

Anyway. Back to food. It is slowly dawning on me - these things take time to percolate through, as my friend Thrift Store Mama was just talking about today - that my fruit and vegetable intake is not really up to recommended standards. I always thought, if I thought anything about it, that I wasn't great on fruits but my vegetables made up for it. It's true that I do like vegetables, but it's also true that breakfast and lunch are often quite vegetable-free meals for me. Breakfast is basically a free pass: I see it as an opportunity for guilt-free carbing. Lunch would have a vegetable if a vegetable happened along, but all too often it's some riff on a ham and cheese sandwich, with maybe a crescent or two of apple that Mabel didn't eat. So that leaves dinner, when I probably get in two servings of vegetables easily enough, but that's still three away from even the most basic daily requirement.

This train of thought began when I read Jamie at Light and Momentary mention that she was aiming for nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Nine? How could anyone eat that much food, I wondered. Well, hey, apparently that's my recommended daily intake. And here I was thinking I was failing at just five, when in fact I'm failing miserably at nine instead.

Oh well, I thought, I'll just eat nine servings a day and I'll be slender and full of energy in no time. And yet, thinking did not make it so. I think I had one and a half extra servings yesterday, and one today, and they all involved baby carrots and hummus, which are quite nice but not nine servings nice. (Also, I don't think I'm meant to eat eight servings of carrots every day. I'd turn orange.)

The difficulty is that vegetables, and fruit for that matter, just don't have that fluffy or crunchy or dough-like baked consistency that goes as well with a nice cup of tea as, say, muffins do. Or cookies. Or a piece of cake or a scone or a brownie. Nobody sits down for a cuppa and some broccoli florets. Or coffee and a carrot. (Stick of celery? Brr.) Even a quarter cup of raisins just don't cut it with a hot beverage, unless they're liberally surrounded by oatmeal and sugar and baked into some sort of, let's say, cookie-type vehicle.

So far I'm batting about 50/50 on whether I think "Now I'll have a cup of tea and something chocolate" or "Now I'll eat a healthy snack," but even if I add one serving a day for this week, it's a start.

I think this is one for the "Best intentions" tag, don't you? I probably need to start a "Went awry" tag too.

Seasonal produce

I am here to tell you that if you didn't think you liked eggplant (or aubergine, because we're fancy like that in Ireland) it's because you were doing it wrong. Specifically, like me, you may have never bothered to salt and drain it, because who has time for that sort of thing? People who know how delicious it makes eggplant, that's who. I just recently bothered, for the first time, to take my eggplant out a bit ahead of time - an hour is good, in the morning is great - slice it thickly, and spread the slices out on some kitchen paper. Then I shake salt all over them, both sides, top with more kitchen paper (paper towels, whatever you call 'em), and weigh it all down with a few hefty cookbooks. I just did it now while my waffle popped out of the toaster, and the butter still melted by the time I was done.

Later on, when you put the eggplant into whatever you want - this, perhaps, or just ratatouille, or vegetarian lasagne, which is what I'm planning today - it will turn out to be both chewy and creamy, and a most wonderful vehicle for the garlic that I exhort you to use liberally. If I was Nigella Lawson, the word unctuous would be bursting forth right about now, but I'm not, so I won't go quite that far.

The other thing I've been doing lately is massaging my kale. (I told Facebook about it and got a few entertainingly salacious comments. My work there is done.) From being a person who never even thought about kale to one who decided she didn't like it, I have lately come down heavily in favour of the curly dark-green leaves. It started with this recipe for quinoa salad with kale and cranberries, which I ate for most of the summer. A little fiddly what with the roasting of the walnuts, but totally addictive. You can leave out the shallot (or even the onion) if that's too much trouble, and you won't miss it.

But then I got even lazier, and decided cooking the kale was too much trouble for a salad. And I remembered something a friend had said once, in my pre-kale-eating days (when I was offloading a bunch of donated kale onto her, actually, because I didn't think I'd use it) about massaging kale. How ridiculous, I thought. Maybe you and your kale are on those sort of terms, but I prefer to keep mine at fork's length, thank you. But about a week ago, I googled "massaged kale" and came up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable suggestions. Basically, you put your (washed and de-stemmed) leaves in a bowl with a shake of salt and a sprinkle of oil, and you work it with your hands until the fibres break down, turning this tough saute-only veg into a perfectly nice wilted salad leaf. (I have been told that you can also just leave it alone for an hour or so and the dressing will do the work on its own, but I like instant gratification.)

Then you can put a bit of what you fancy on top and call it salad. Some dried cranberries and a shake of roasted sunflower seeds with a drizzle of red wine vinegar or avocado and lemon juice are two versions I tried last week, but there are a ton of options. I think you need something a little sweet to counterbalance the leaves, but probably just a pinch of sugar or a drop of honey in your dressing would do the trick quite well.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to stop getting hungry again at 2pm when I've had a big bowl of kale salad for lunch at midday. When I find out, I'll let you know, because otherwise it seems like an ideal way to counteract the effects of the muffins.

Thrifty

I really have to bake something, because I have a playdate coming over this afternoon and it is my God-given duty to provide my friend and her children with something unhealthy but not chocolate to reject/eat, and I spent the morning at the thrift store where I not only picked up some great clothes for Dash to wear some day when he fits size 7s and 8s - so in about five years, then, but I don't care because I got him a very nice Hilfiger shirt for five bucks - but also became a VIP member and started a rewards card, so I think we can say I'm really hardcore now. Now that Mabel's taking a nap, which will only be one hour and no more, I promise on my honour as a mother, I have blogging and baking to do both, at once and simultaneously together at the same time.

I seem to have decided, without actually noticing it happen, to start making all the recipes that I pinned to my Food board on Pinterest instead of just drooling over them, so suddenly I have roasted vegetable soup halfway made and am committed to making kale and quinoa salad with cranberries, of all things, for dinner, or lunch, or some meal when we will feel like eating healthy stuff and I'll be all smug and also boosted in necessary vitamins and minerals and protein and not meat. (I should also mention that I made these sweet-potato and bean burgers the other night and they were quite delicious and I highly recommend them, and who knows, even your children might eat them, not that mine gave them a second glance but I'm sure that's my own fault for doing something wrong at a very early stage in their vital development. Probably that time I dropped them on their heads. Stomachs. Whatever.)

The reason I went to the thrift store was because I had this wonderful idea. Like everyone else in the Western world who has children and lives within 500 miles of IKEA, we have a lot of colourful plasticware, and it's starting to bug me. It doesn't dry properly in the dishwasher, and the plates are getting all scratched from cutting crusts off sandwiches, and despite assuring you all that we had given up sippy cups about a year and a half ago, we haven't really, though technically we have because we mostly use straw cups instead, but it comes to the same thing.

When we're away from home and the kids have to use real crockery and proper glass glasses, nothing terrible happens except that I'm more careful about not letting them wander around with a drink in hand, which is probably a good thing. So I thought, inspired partly by my friend Mrs Quimby who once mentioned that she lets her girls use little thrift-store creamers (milk jugs, that is) to practice pouring, that I would acquire some cheap china and small chunky glasses, and let the kids use those instead of the plastic. They'll think it's exciting, I'll think they're getting civilized, it's a win/win.

So I did, and we will see how it goes. I just hope I can figure out how to get the permanent-marker prices off the tumblers before we start using them.

Elephants

When you invite people over for food, it's usually important to have something to eat in the house. Similarly, when you invite friends over for drinks, it's customary to have more than just our usual milk, water, or fruit-and-vegetable juice available. And so it was that I went to the shops again this morning.

B and I, as many people do, spent our twenties expanding our tastes for drinks both fruity and hoppy (though not at the same time), well-chilled or mulled, spicy, bold, well-rounded, Russian, slammed, shot, bubbly, flaming, muddled, colour-changing, or with a slice of clove-studded orange floating in them. Whether it had a nice creamy head or came in a fancy glass, we were probably happy to try it.

Then we had a baby. First there was the ritual giving-up-of-alcohol-during-pregnancy for me. And then the cautious re-introduction of just a little alcohol while nursing. And then we moved from Texas to Maryland and somehow I felt as if we were moving trans-Atlantically and couldn't take anything comestible with us, so I gave away our few bottles of spirits and we arrived here without so much as the makings of a gin-and-tonic to our name.

And thus, almost, we have stayed. We like a beer with dinner, we drink wine now and then, but hard liquor has not been a part of our lives recently. My aunt and uncle stayed with us before Dash turned two, and gifted us with a bottle of gin - for some reason - when they left. It has - I kid you not - sat unopened in the freezer ever since.

(B would like to point out that that's not strictly true. We've only lived in this house for 18 months. Before that, it sat unopened in the freezer in our old house. And there was probably some period when it was in transit from one freezer to the other and therefore was in no freezer at all.)

My point still stands. We're pathetic, that's what. I had great intentions of having gins-and-tonic this summer, because what could be more refreshing, right? But then I was stuck looking for tonic water that didn't have high-fructose corn syrup in it, because I couldn't believe that was necessary. And when I finally found it, in the organic supermarket, I couldn't believe it was that expensive, so I didn't buy it. B eventually circumvented all this by going out one day a few months ago and just picking up a bottle of Schweppes, HFCS and all, and that has sat unopened in the fridge ever since.

So today we said, "Right. Let us have on hand this Christmas the makings of cosmopolitans. And maybe bellinis."

I went to the supermarket that has alcohol. I needed more sugar for icing the Christmas cake anyway (more on that in a few days, I promise) and more bread for Dash's interminable peanut-butter sandwiches (guess what he's having for Christmas dinner?), and a bottle of wine for the day that will be in it, since we've already started into the one I got before. (Note to self: should stock up with more than one wine bottle at a time. Maybe need to throw a party so people will bring us wine.) I got a lime, for the cosmo's. I got peach juice for the bellinis. We already have a bottle of prosecco in the fridge that needs to be used.

Then I realised the supermarket-with-alcohol doesn't stock spirits. So I got back into the car and drove to the liquor shop. At least this isn't Pennsylvania, where no supermarkets have any alcohol at all, and you can't even buy beer and wine in the same establishment. And nothing on Sundays.

I picked up a bottle of Guinness to make beef-and-Guinness stew with for Christmas-Eve dinner. And a bottle of vodka for the cosmopolitans. I contemplated the Cointreau, but it was too expensive. (I have only just now looked at that link up there and discovered that's meant to go in the cosmo too. I think we used to make them without.) Where's duty-free when you need it? When will we ever be travelling light enough to think it's a good idea to add a heavy glass bottle to our luggage on the way home from the airport?

I came home. We still need at least cranberry juice for the cosmo's, and there are only two beers left in the fridge. Entertaining will have to wait for another trip to the supermarket. In the meantime, would anyone like a bellini? I think we'll be having some with our bacon and pancakes on Christmas morning.

Mabel raiding someone else's Christmas drinks stash two years ago

Tofurkey or not tofurkey

I love the days when I have a legitimate reason to make B take the kids out for a couple of hours, turn on some music, and potter happily around the kitchen all afternoon. Even though I always say that Thanksgiving isn't our holiday, and so we feel no compulsion to celebrate with anything special, the general widespread culinary busy-ness always infects me and it turns into one of those days after all.

A few weeks ago, as I may have mentioned, I saw a recipe for carnitas on Smitten Kitchen, and decided that maybe we should have traditional Thansksgiving tacos, just as the pilgrims did.

On Tuesday I garnered the ingredients I needed, except for the meat, which I couldn't find in Safeway. Never mind, I thought. Fate will provide. Indeed, in spite of a day sandwiched by a dental appointment for one child in the morning and a doctor's appointment for the other in the afternoon, fate, in the shape of the local co-op supermarket did provide: there was a large pre-packaged piece of pork shoulder in the meat fridge, and when I asked at the counter they said that the butcher would happily let me have just the three pounds of it I needed, and even cube it for me as per the recipe.

Then there was the question of dessert. Dash has been pestering me lately to make caramel, ever since he tasted some caramel dip for apple slices at a halloween party. He didn't eat any of the apple, but he very much enjoyed licking off the caramel. I keep telling him that I've never made caramel, and it's very tricky, and I don't have any cream so I just can't; but evidently the notion took root because as I wandered around the co-op waiting for the butcher to do his thing, I vaguely remembered that there was a recipe somewhere for caramel apple cheesecake. That sounded nice, and I had ricotta in the fridge to use up. So I bought some apples.

When I got home I found the recipe, in Nigella's Feast, but it turned out to need apple schnapps and no actual apples at all. As well as cream and other things I still didn't have. So that idea was shelved. This morning I made chocolate ricotta muffins with the ricotta, which was only about a cupful and not nearly enough for cheesecake anyway. But I still had all those apples.

This afternoon I looked at the clock, asked B when he wanted to eat dinner, and then informed him that they'd better scarper quickish so I could put the meat on right now - carnitas take almost as long as a small turkey after all. Once the meat was aromatically braising in its margarita bath (as Deb calls it), I thought some more about dessert and vaguely searched the Smitten Kitchen website for "apples". Bingo. A last-minute tarte tatin.

I've never made tarte tatin before, and didn't realise that the apples were actually cooked in caramel before being pastried, but once that became apparent, it was the obvious solution. I ended up using the pastry from the first recipe I found and the apple/caramel method from the second, because Deb said it was more foolproof. And I used my stainless steel pan with a plastic handle for the caramel part, transferring to a glass pie dish for the baking. As the arrangement of my apples was more rustic, shall we say, than artistically exact, it didn't destroy anything. And the whole thing turned out most satisfactorily in the end.

The carnitas worked miraculously - one moment I was looking at all the brining liquid still in the pan and wondering whether I should cheat and take a scoopful out to help it reduce; then I did a spot of washing up to clear the decks and when I looked again, there was only a tiny puddle left in the bottom and the chunks of meat were starting to brown up amazingly and fall apart just as predicted. (So much so that I took a photo, even though Deb's is much more appetizing, just to show you that even mere mortals can achieve this.)

We* had our carnitas on warmed corn tortillas, with jicama slaw (about two-thirds of a jicama and one carrot, grated, with three finely sliced spring onions and this dressing), queso fresco, avocado, and fresh limes for squeezing. It was just like being back in southmost Texas in the hallowed booths of Mister Taco. (And believe me, for all I malign Texas, that's one of the things we miss.)

And now I'm just waiting, with an extra glass of wine, for B to put Dash to bed before we break out the vanilla icecream and dig in to the tarte. With great forethought, I didn't try too hard to give Mabel a nap this afternoon, so it's 7.15 and she's fast asleep. For now, at least.

*The children, lest I need to comment, did not have any. Dash has had his usual peanut butter sandwiches today, and Mabel, despite being presented with various other foodstuffs, has eaten half an apple for breakfast, three cheesesticks for lunch, and no dinner all all. Oh, and two chocolate ricotta muffins for snacks. Maybe that was an error.

** Mmmm. I have a mouthful of chewy sugary appley goodness as I type. I am a total tarte-tatin convert. A tart for tarte, if you like.  I don't think I'll ever make a plain old apple pie again.

Optimism

Three of the children in Mabel's class, one of whom was at our party on Sunday, are now ridden with some horrible plague-like virus, and I find myself already looking at her with that nostalgic indulgent expression reserved for pathetically ill children. When I picked her up from school one of the parents involved (who was there, but without her ailing offspring) apologised profusely and said that she thought Mabel's eyes already had the glazed I'm-getting-sick look. I'm hoping against hope that she was wrong, but I can't tell. I thought she looked preternaturally pale with oddly pink cheeks, but she was probably just warm from running around inside, as it was raining in the playground.

She's acting perfectly normally, and this is one of those times when I'm really glad we're still nursing, because I will continue to tout its amazing immune-boosting properties until the moment she comes down with a horrible rash and a fever of 104.

Still, today is her last day of school for the week, so she won't be marinating in the Petri dish that is a classroom full of two- and three-year-olds, so maybe the clanging chimes of doom won't sound quite so loudly in a few days and we'll be spared. Maybe.

We have absolutely no plans for Thanksgiving, and I like it that way. I have no intention of thinking about it till next Wednesday at the earliest (since my mother-in-law will be here from this Friday till Tuesday), though I did see a recipe I wouldn't mind trying.

Sorry, I was distracted there. Dash sat down at the table beside me to do his homework, except that he wasn't so much sitting as jiggling furiously on the chair in deep denial of his need to pee. Twice he stood up to go, and then sat down again, and my last nerve was busy shredding itself on the cheesegrater of infuriation as I waited for him to finally give in. (I'd love you to think that I sat calmly by, letting him figure this out for himself, but I'm not that saintly. I exhorted him vehemently several times to answer the damn call of nature before nature ran down his legs and onto my kitchen floor.) He's gone now. Hang on a minute while my blood vessels return to their normal size.

 Dum-de-dum... Anyway.

One day last week the kids were playing outside on their bikes, as we have been doing every day after school in the lovely autumn weather that has now given way to persistent rain, and Dash was singing-counting to himself as he circled round and round and round. He got to the highest number he could possibly conceive of (probably having skipped a few on the way):

"What's after a hundred and eight, Mummy? Is it a million?"
"No, it's a hundred and nine."
"Wow. And what's after that? Is it a million?"

That's optimism right there. I don't know where he gets it from.

Viva España

I want to try to remember something.

Spain. I was fifteen, on exchange in Valencia, halfway up the east coast. My host family were from Madrid, but they summered at the beach near their cousins. Their father would come down on weekends, and the mother, three children and I were there, looking out on, sunbathing beside, and swimming in the Mediterranean, the whole time. From where I'm sitting here it sounds unbearably exotic, but at the time it was just the sea beside them, as the Irish Sea was the sea beside us. Only warmer.

One evening we drove up into the mountains for dinner with the extended family. The place was a low, whitewashed building on the top of a hill; dark brown wooden benches inside, little in the way of plush or decor. There were no menus: Isabel's uncle had a conversation with the owner, and after a little while a huge platter came out to our table. On it was a roast of succulent garlicky, rosemary-y lamb surrounded by slivers of potato that had been fried in the meat's fat. I don't remember liking lamb particularly before then, but ever since I've been a committed fan.

I ate other amazing things that summer: tiny fish deep fried in the lightest of batters probably minutes after they'd been caught - a mouthful of salty crunch and essence of Mediterranean summer. Snails, even, sizzled in garlic, chewy and good so long as you didn't dwell too long on the fact of what you were eating. Sweet dripping galia melon; watermelon like a pink iceberg; big, firm, white-fleshed peaches; fuzzy-cheeked apricots - I'd never been a big fruit-lover, because it turned out the versions I'd had in Ireland were black-and-white snow to the technicolour clarity of these ones. We were an apples and bananas household at home; rhubarb and gooseberries when our friends down the road with a big garden had more than they could use, but not much else beyond tinned peaches and the odd honeydew loaded with brown sugar to make it palatable. Ireland is not the place to learn to love fruit the way I did in Spain.

I still look for peaches like those. I don't think I've had snails since. But in New York last weekend I had lamb that rivalled the lamb I remember from that night in the mountains - a personal roast of my very own, the meat falling off the bone and delicious; though the lemon potatoes couldn't hold a candle to the crispy discs of the earlier meal.

Some years later in Spain I learned to like olives - the pits spit on sawdusty floors - and strong beer; and a pincho of tortilla with a glass of red wine, preferably at 11am on a Saturday. On the way to Lisbon, I discovered what real tomatoes tasted like. I threw strands of spaghetti at the kitchen wall to see if it was done (when it sticks, it's ready); I found that a fried egg sits perfectly on top of tomatoey rice; and that I could cook dinner for myself and enjoy it. I even roasted a leg of lamb, studded with plenty of garlic, for Christmas dinner.

Come to think of it, I have Spain to thank for a lot more than just my degree in Spanish.

Post-party

This morning, once the kids were at school, I was planning to do nothing. Maybe take a nap. Maybe just read an actual book. (Probably one I've read many times before, so it wouldn't be too challenging.) Have a cup of coffee in peace. That sort of thing. There's play-doh smushed into the carpet, new toys that have yet to be assigned homes strewn about, serving dishes waiting to be washed, thank-you cards to start on, and I'm sure the laundry is piling up again, but I was going to ignore all that.

Then I took Mabel to school and somebody asked me if I'd mind awfully switching my co-op day with them, because they had meetings all day at work and hadn't realised that today they were supposed to be helping at school. I suppose I could have said that my mother-in-law is coming on Friday and I have a house to clean and a shopping list as long as your arm, but while those things are true it wasn't exactly an accurate representation of my plans for the morning, so I suckered up and stayed.

The party went well, thank you. The children played, the adults drank wine and beer, everyone ate and said nice things about the food. We spirited most of the presents upstairs before Mabel could demand to open them right away, and there were hardly any fights over dolls or lego trains. After the cake we opened the back door and let them loose to frolic in the large pile of leaves our back garden so kindly provides at this time of year. As the light dimmed, I looked vaguely out the window and thought I should take a photo, but I didn't get round to it.

 

Mabel had a new dress. She took off her new shoes before the guests arrived, and put them back on the wrong feet, and wore them that way for the rest of the evening. Whatever. It's her party, she can do what she wants to.

This is my favourite cake for birthdays. Probably because Nigella calls it "Birthday Sponge," and I have no imagination. You have to track down Bird's Custard Powder for it, which might be more or less difficult depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on, but it's totally worth it.

I decided that we needed butterfly buns. They're a staple of Irish birthday parties, but they were new to my neighbours. Take an undecorated cupcake, slice the top off and split it in half. Dollop cream (or buttercream) on the flat top, and stick the two pieces back in at an angle, to make the wings. Decorate with strawberry quarters, or candy, or whatever you like.

This was the finished spread, just before it was dismantled. We have pigs in blankets (mini-sausages wrapped in Pillsbury crescent roll dough), peanut-butter-and-jelly fingers, butterfly buns, pita chips, chocolate cornflake buns (melted Mars Bar [Milky Way in the US] mixed with cornflakes - another classic with a twist from Nigella), lemon ricotta muffins, grapes, and - last-minute gotta-hava-vegetable: baby carrots. Also present: hummus, salsa, ranch dip, M&Ms, mini marshmallows.

A lot of the mini muffins were left over, but that's okay - they freeze well. I think I made too many yellow things, but I was trying hard to steer away from the chocolate end of the spectrum.

Onward and upward. Tomorrow I have to start thinking about guests, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas. Or maybe I'll just read a book.

The best laid plans always involve spending a lot at Target first

For lunch, I have had several pretzel crisps and some trail mix, a rolled up slice of ham inside a rolled-up slice of cheese, some of yesterday's roasted cauliflower straight out of the fridge (and very delicious it was too) and a cup of tea. That hits all the major food groups, even if it isn't very pretty.

What happened was, I spent an hour at Target picking up bits and pieces for our upcoming Very Busy November: new towels because we'll be having a guest, snacks and notebooks for the kids for our road trip to NYC this weekend, last-minute birthday presents for her highness, who just happens to be turning three in Two! Days!, a loaf of bread and a pair of cosy pyjama bottoms for me because they were there and I need cosy pyjama bottoms. I didn't even find the storage bins I was looking for. (They can't be wicker, becuase B hates wicker with the passion of a thousand firey suns. I believe he averts his eyes every time the laundry hamper comes into view. And they need to be smaller than the canvas ones they sell in Target, because those are just a tiny bit too tall for my purposes.)

Then I rushed back to pick up Mabel from school in the nick of time, running into a set of roadworks on the way to slow me down, of course - I imagined myself being pulled over for speeding once the road was clear again (not that I was speeding, Dear, of course) and whether I would get into even more trouble if the first thing I did, rather than reaching submissively for the registration details in the glove compartment, was to grab my phone and dial a friend to go and retrieve Mabel from the playground in time; luckily, no such thing came to pass, but it was a close run thing - but Wednesday is the day we usually take lunch to the playground with a group of friends, and I hadn't brought lunch. So I rummaged in the Target bag and realised that I could purloin some of the road-trip snacks, and we took juice boxes, pretzel chips and trail mix along the wooded path to the picnic tables.

Five minutes later, Mabel said she wanted to go home. So home we came. She's now asleep and has spent enough time coughing without waking up that I'm convinced she's about to come down with some horrible lurgy just in time to (a) make her birthday miserable and (b) stop us from going to New York.

Here's hoping not. I have new crayons, new notebooks, and a couple of those invisible-ink colouring pads for the kids for the journey. What do you bring to keep your children happy on a road trip? Also, any tips for things we should definitely do in New York on Saturday - assuming we get there? The weather should be pretty nice. Fingers crossed.

A day late and a dollar short

I'm going to post a What's for Lunch Wednesday post, except that I didn't get the photos out of the camera till today, so it's not Wednesday any more.

(Mabel loves Thursday, because it's named after Thor, her favourite of the Avengers. Except when her favourite is Wasp, or Ant-Man, or Captain America. Last night she was very excited to hear that today would be Thor's Day.)

Other people who shall remain nameless always get their post up in time, so if you go there you can read more about yesterday's food and follow the links to everyone else's lunches.

I packed the big lunchbox for me and Mabel yesterday, full of good stuff that of course came back mostly uneaten. This is why I don't feed my children: they don't eat food. In our lovely green Goodbyn (that always gets admiring glances) I have apple slices, grapes - quartered because they were big fat ones with choking hazard written all over them - some watered-down red juice (V8 V-fusion), a mini yogurt, and quesadillas. Mine had black beans from a tin (well rinsed) mixed with a spoonful of chipotle salsa and some grated red cheddar. Mabel's had ham and cheese, because she doesn't like purple beans. All she ate was the yogurt.

Those mini yogurts, by the way, are called Danonino and are unappealingly labelled "Dairy Snack". But if you look at the ingredients, they have no HFCS and are mostly just milk, and have 19% of someone's required protein (I don't know if that's a toddler's or an adult's) as well as calcium and some other good things. In Europe we have tasty little pots of stuff called Petits Filous, or Petits Suisse, or simply fromage frais, but all those words are French and therefore would be frowned upon by Les Etats Unis. From the taste, these little guys are almost the same, a little milder perhaps, but clearly the Danone company is stumped to find a decent name for them.

So that was lunch. Mabel hasn't been eating much lately, but between the fact that she's been on antibiotics for almost three weeks now to make sure she doesn't develop Lyme disease - and it seems to be working, because the mystery rashies have gone away and the target-shaped one is fading nicely - and that she came down with the snurfles at bedtime last night and is currently streaming snot, I'm not too surprised. It's not like she's slowed down any with the nursing, I can promise you that.

****************

In other news, I'm painfully - painfully, I tells ya - aware that the banner graphic is horribly out of date, and I have a nice autumnal photo all ready to go for up there to replace the swimming pool we haven't been to since August. But Blogger tells me it's too big, so I'll have to wait for my IT advisor to come home and do clever things with Gimp to make it fit. I hate iPhoto. For an iThing, it's really annoying. [... Update: Done!]

While I'm talking shop, I have to say I'm very tempted to change Monkey's name to Dash. What do you think? He's just not a Monkey any more, and it also turns out that Monkey is a very obvious and boring thing to name your blog son. Mabel has been playing The Incredibles a lot - she likes to be Violet and look after her baby brother Jack Jack - and has taken to addressing Monkey as Dash. It's a good name for him, since he likes to show us how fast he is at every available opportunity. (It also fits the Halloween costume I picked up for him at the thrift store last week to a T.) Do you think I should? Would it be too confusing? Do you care? Etc.

Cereal offender

When I first moved to the USA, I was baffled and bedazzled by the supermarket aisles, with their millions of unfamiliar foodstuffs in such enormous quantities. The cereal aisle, in particular, took my breath away. I've always been a fan of cereal - Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning of my childhood, two Weetabix after I came home from school, a packet of Kellogg's Variety mini boxes for a treat every now and then, with Coco Pops as the highlight of the week. As I got older, I embraced Special K - because the very act of eating it makes you thinner; and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are like Frosties for grownups.

But cereal in America didn't taste the same. Between the extra sweetness of even my favourite old reliables, and the funny taste of the milk - no matter what percentage I got - it tasted weird. The milk here is different from my beloved Avonmore SuperMilk of yore, but I think a major part of the difference can be boiled down to four little letters: HFCS.

When I found out about high-fructose corn syrup, I decided I didn't like the sound of it very much. Call me insular, but I felt it would be better for my palate and my health to try to keep the basics of my diet in the US as much like my Irish diet as I could.

Initially, this was because I didn't want to move home and find that nothing was sweet enough for me any more. Now that I have two small people relying on me for their nourishment (directly and in-), I'm continuing to avoid HFCS as much as I can in our everyday foods. At first I felt that my reasoning was a bit feeble: if I didn't grow up with it, and if they wouldn't get it in Ireland, I don't want them to have it here. Then I read about Michael Pollan's book and discovered that one of his rules for eating is that if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it, it's not food. So I felt vindicated, because I'm pretty sure neither of my grandmothers would have an iota what that sickly sweet stuff was, or what it would be doing in bread, crackers, yogurt, or corn flakes.

I'm not obsessive about what my children eat: they're not allergic to anything, and if there's candy from Easter or Halloween or parties, they can have it; but since Monkey's diet in particular is so limited, I do try to rein him in on the blatantly anti-nutritious goodies while I still can. I've managed to eliminate HFCS from the bread, cereal, crackers, yogurt, ketchup, ice cream, and even the cookies that we buy on a regular basis (the kids don't get the cookies: I do). If Monkey has Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Ritz crackers in school for snack, I'm not going to make a fuss, but I don't buy them for home consumption. When he has chocolate milk, I try to make sure it's the sort without HFCS.

I don't spend hours reading labels: I just find the item I want, and then it becomes part of our regular shopping list. Did you know, for instance, that Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats have HFCS in them, but the Safeway own-brand ones don't? Isn't that strange?

So. (That was just the back story.) As you may know, we like to go to IKEA every once in a while. (Though I must admit that since the buying-things-for-the-new-house frenzy has calmed down, I find fewer excuses to go.) Now, it's not that I think of IKEA as a bastion of health food, but they do make a big deal of their kids' food options. The chocolate milk there is HFCS-free, so that's something, and usually, assuming I could run the gauntlet of ice-cream demands, I would get the children a yogurt each and be happy with a sticky bun for myself.

But lately, it has seemed that every time we go to IKEA, Mabel ends up like a whirling dervish, acting like someone who's an hour past her naptime even when there's still an hour to go. The last time this happened, it finally dawned on me that maybe I should be putting two and two together. The yogurt in IKEA is Trix yogurt: a small pot aimed directly at the jugular of youth, with pink and yellow dairy product together in one HFCS-enhanced sludge. I looked it up when we got home. If you google "Trix yogurt," the first two hits after an ad for "Nutrition to help your kids grow up strong" and some images, are a series of blog posts detailing how horrible Trix really is, how it's a big old pile of nothing good for you complemented by totally unneccesary additives and colourings.

So maybe, just maybe, that's what sets Mabel off like an increasingly intractable rocket each time we go there. It could be the HFCS itself, since she's not used to it, but it's more likely the infusion of Red #40 and Blue #1 as well as the unnamed artificial flavourings.

I'd have been better off letting them have the ice-cream, except that now I want to know what they put in that, and it doesn't come with an ingredients list printed on the cone.

Saturday dinner, after all

Seven in a series of (just over) a week of dinners.

Since this is the dinner I was planning for Thursday, and then for Friday, I thought it only fair to give it to you as well, though it brings my total number of nights to eight. To be honest, I've quite enjoyed doing this, and it makes thinking up blog posts really easy, so in a way I'm sad to see it end. But it would stop being interesting quite soon once I started to recycle dinners you'd already seen, so I'll just have to make my children say funny things and go back to my old ways.

This is one of my emergency dinners, which I end up making about once every two weeks or so. Everything comes from the freezer, so it's always there. Yesterday afternoon I had an uncontrollable urge to make a chocolate cake, so dinner was a bit of an afterthought. I added broccoli because it basically functions as anti-cake and lets us have more. (Then I forgot the broccoli and produced it when our plates were almost empty, but let's not quibble.)

Without more ado: vegeburgers and oven fries.

The cake came out of the oven and I turned it up to 400F. Mysteriously, and a little worryingly, it told me that it was immediately at 400, even though it had been at 300 just a moment before. I took it at its word and put the chips (that's Irish for fries) in straight away. Waiting for the oven to get to 400 is usually the longest part of making this dinner, so it was nice to skip it.

I cooked the vegeburgers, which are Morning Star spicy black-bean burgers, and no doubt full of things we shouldn't eat, but I don't care, on the Foreman grill, because they only take about seven minutes that way. Back in the long ago, pre-children, I used to make my own black-bean burgers (they were closer to black-bean sloppy joes really), but doing that would make this much less of a no-effort meal.

I scavenged the last two slices of swiss cheese from the fridge and melted them on top for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, I split and lightly toasted two sesame seed buns in our handy four-slice toaster.

On a good day, I have half a red pepper that I can grill with the burgers, which really adds to the finished article, but this was just a regular day. I did manage to put a few leaves of baby spinach on top, though.

And served with HFCS-free ketchup, which I was very pleased to find on the shelves. We don't go through a lot of ketchup, because this is basically the only meal we eat it with (I just didn't come from a ketchup-centric household), but Mabel loves it so I'm happy to give her the better stuff.

... And then I remembered the broccoli.

 

Mabel ate a lot of ketchup, conveyed to her mouth with a number of chips, supplemented by a further number of my chips. She also had at least one piece of broccoli, so I was happy.

And then we all had some cake.

Looking at the food we've eaten over the past eight nights, I can sum it up thus:

Protein:  sausage, meat-free, meat-free, chicken, fish, meat-free, meat-free, meat-free
Carb: potato, pasta, pasta, rice, quinoa/breadcrumbs, couscous, rice, potato (fries)

As far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty good spread - I'd say we usually have between two and four meat-free nights a week; I try to eat fish once a week, but it's more like every two weeks; we had leftovers only one night, we ate out once, I ate from the freezer once, and I put a dinner in the freezer for a future date. I went food shopping twice, though I won't try to claim that I didn't replenish milk supplies or pick up other things in Target or the local co-op in between.

I'm sure there are many other scales according to which my week's cooking has failed miserably: you'll note that after the first day I didn't even bother to mention how much of any of this the children ate, and I'm clearly negligent in the area of side salads. We don't really do dessert, but there were some strawberries and there are always cookies with my coffee after the children are in bed.

Broccoli. Or is it brocolli?

On Monday night, still in the pre-queasy stage of this pregnancy, I made a huge pasta salad that would last me for lunches for the rest of the week. I'd made it once before for a pot-luck, and it had been a huge hit, so I was delighted with my yummy lunch. I had to leave out the feta, though, so I cunningly added some edamame to make up for the missing protein.

Sadly, by the next day my yummy lunch didn't look so pleasing to the innards at all. I wanted something salty and crunchy, not this slithery vegetably white stuff. Bah. I've been dutifully eating it all week anyway, but there's still a pile left in the fridge because I'm just not shovelling it in the way I expected to.

Instead, yesterday I went to the supermarket and stocked up on healthy snacks so that I can nibble at my desk in between meals, thus perhaps staving off the icky feeling. And some ginger ale. Now I'm grazing on roasted salted almonds and craisins, which are really good and packed with protein and vitamin C and good oils, and I feel like an exemplary expectant. I also have a small serving of pasta salad and a yogurt in the fridge, as well as a tub of cottage cheese (more protein) with an added spoonful of my very delicious rhubarb and ginger preserve. Because ginger is good for nausea, see? I just hope I feel like eating it sometime, because at the moment it's falling into the "sounds slimy, not crunchy" category. Maybe I should hide my almonds in my cottage cheese.

And for tonight, we have salmon steaks with new potatoes and broccoli. This week's vegetablicious menus are brought to you by the necessity to make up for last weekend's Mexican food extravaganza - and I mean food in Mexico for two days straight, so it was mostly wheat and cheese in one form or another. (And no beer for me. Sadness.) I think it's telling that I don't know the Spanish for broccoli - apart from salsa verde, I don't think they do green veg there.

Pie opportunity

I don’t think I ever got around to writing about the frito pie, did I? Okay then.

Culinary delights of south Texas, part umpty. Actually, I don’t know if this is native to south Texas or Mexico, or the midwest, or where. But it seems to me like the ultimate trailer trash food. (I mean that in a totally non-insulting, Nigella Lawson way. Though I have to admit that it repulsed me, and I don’t know if Nigella would condone it. But maybe I’m just missing the greatest taste ever, like her recipe for ham cooked in Coke. I haven’t tried that either, but I totally would. Anyway.)

So there was a winter celebration or some such “it’s Christmas but we can’t call it that” event for all the staff back in December. We had fun carnival games like ring tossing and pie throwing and tins of cans knocking over, and they had burgers and hot dogs and frito pies. I joined the frito pie line because it was shortest and everyone at my table was headed that way, and as we shuffled along I asked what a frito pie was. “Chilli and cheese”, they said. Okay. We got closer and I watched what was happening at the top of the queue. First the people doling out the food would pick up a packet of Fritos. (Fritos are corn chips, very bad for you and tasty in that way where you can feel the fat slither straight from your gullet onto your hips but you Can’t Stop Eating until the bag is empty. Luckily, they make the bags fairly small. I honestly can’t think of an Irish equivalent. Let’s say it’s like a packet of Rancheros, just for comparison.)

So, they take the Fritos. They cut along the side of the pack to open it as wide as possible. Then they take a ladle of chilli and pour it STRAIGHT OVER THE CHIPS IN THE PACKET. Followed swiftly by a ladleful of cheese sauce. (I’m sure that should be cheez sauce. The really synthetic luminous sort.)

Hey presto, Frito pie! Eat it with a plastic fork.

I goggled quietly and moved to the hamburger queue instead.

For the record, I didn’t try it so all I’m saying is that it looked gross. If it tastes like ambrosia and/or is the signature dish of your region/family/tribe, well good for you and I clearly missed a treat. And I’m aware that my capitalization of Frito is erratic. I did it on purpose.