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[2010/02/23 10:27 pm]
This icon popped up as someone's last.fm user pic, and the kitten head bopping along to Martin Solveig's "Boys & Girls" is just too awesome!
We hosted Sunday Dinner this week, and for the occasion I decided to make savory galettes and white bean salad. For the galettes, I provided a few different protein and veggie options and let folks choose what they wanted in theirs. All in all, it worked out really well!
Talk about tasty!
This was a fun experiment, and I learned a few things:
- Making the pastry dough the night before was a brilliant, time saving decision. - A single-serving galette is much smaller than you'd think, and they're very filling. - If I'm going to bake more than four at a time, I need more baking sheets. - Next time, start the assembly much more in advance, starting with preparing the filling choices, and just bake them all at once so folks can eat together. - Next go-round on the gluten-free dough, add xanthan gum to make it a little more sticky. This batch was yummy, but more crumbly than I preferred.
Both dough recipes are easy enough to make that I can prepare a batch over the weekend, and store it in the fridge in single-serving portions for use during the week. I can even make mini-galettes for Bean to take to school!
I've been remiss in taking, and posting, PODs for quite a while. No time like the present, though.
We (Andan, Amailah, Serena, Cella & I) drove up to the city on Sunday for brunch at Kat & Vin's. The food was, as usual, divine. Afterwards, everyone headed up to Alamo Square to enjoy the afternoon sun. Amailah had the best time chasing dogs around the park; her gleeful cries of "PUPPEEZ-PUPPEEZ-PUPPEEEEEEZZ!!!" could be heard across the green as she went running towards one dog or another. Kat brought her blue bubbles, Vin and Solenne entertained us with their juggling, and we generally lazed about in the sunshine.
Later that night, as we put Amailah to bed, a mournful cry of "PUPP-EEE-EE-EEEEEZ!!" could be heard through the house. She eventually settled down and slept, I hope to dreams of wet noses and furry, friendly bodies to cuddle.
[2009/11/22 9:22 pm] Standing in my bathroom, I’m trying to reorganize the clutter. I’ve just purchased some bamboo boxes to make the counter space look less messy, and I’m having to rearrange the medicine cabinet to make everything fit. I have a habit of collecting things, I think I’m not done using them so they sit, and eventually I throw them away. I pull down a container of Burt’s Bees belly balm, the stuff I used daily while I was pregnant, and I open the lid to take a whiff because I remember loving the smell of it. The moment the aroma hits me it’s like pulling a piece of myself out of the lotion. I can remember, and feel, what it was like to be exactly who I was in those moments I used it. All of the anticipation, fear, anxiety, frustration and wonder of being pregnant, becoming a parent, changing my life so thoroughly and hoping that I would be up to the task...
All of my life there have been scents that have captured memories, emotions and pieces of who I was. These scents pull me back to those moments in time and it’s like replaying a video that also conveys emotion and physical sensations.
Pipe tobacco: We call my mom’s father Peacock, though no one knows exactly why my sister started calling him that when she was little. He is a tall man, full of laughter and love for his family. He always has a pipe, and the smell of it is sweet and pungent. I love the rich color of the tobacco, and I love how he always smells of it when I crawl up onto his lap. He goes away for a time, I don’t know how long, but when he comes home he is tired all the time. He doesn’t laugh as much, though he is always happy to see me. I am four years old when he dies. Years later I am in high school when I go to visit my grandmother and we discover one of his shirts in a trunk upstairs. She gives it to me, along with a picture of him from the war. The shirt still smells like his tobacco, and I am certain that she had put these things in the trunk all those years ago and never opened it until now. I take the shirt home and wear it constantly, hating to wash it because every time I do the scent I remember so well grows weaker.
Hawaiian Tropic Tanning Oil: It’s summer, and I’ve put on my yellow bikini with the ruffles on the butt. I’m taking swimming lessons at the local pool and my mom is rubbing me down with oil. As the summer progresses my skin turns a rich, nutty brown and my hair brightens. I learn to swim underwater and feel very proud of myself as I walk with my sister up to the snack bar. We order hot dogs, Snickers bars and drinks we call Suicides. Summer is perfect.
Cow manure: (I know, right?) My dad is a veterinarian, with both an office practice and a van for making farm calls. I become familiar and comfortable around all kinds of animals, learn to let calves suck on my fingers and how to clean out the airways of puppies that have just been born. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know what death was, or what a dog’s heart looks like when it’s full of heartworms. I know that there’s a black snake in the building behind the office, and that there’s a reason Daddy lets it live down there. I learn that poke berries are poisonous, but make a wonderful paint when mixed with water... and I learn not to get any on my clothes, because it never comes out. I watch countless operations on animals of various kinds, and I am excited and pleased when a Sunday finds me as my dad’s assistant for an autopsy on a calf.
Neutrogina shampoo: I am little, and I know that the safest place in the world is with my Mama. I look up at her, and I think there isn’t anyone as beautiful. She teaches me to sing, to make pancakes and scrambled eggs, and in the summer my sister and I go with her to pick blackberries. She makes jam and cobbler with the berries we don’t eat right away, and when she makes the pastry crust she saves the cut-away pieces for us, baking them with a little bit of sugar on top. Winter arrives, and when we come inside from the snow she puts us in front of the wood stove with dry clothes and pans of warm water for our hands and feet. I love her so much, sometimes I feel as if I’ll burst from it, and I never want to leave her side. I’m six when I tell her I love her and I’ll never leave her, and she tells me that she loves me too and when I grow up I’ll change my mind. I’m twelve years old before I believe her. I’m thirty-four when I finally understand how difficult it sometimes is for her to live so far away from her children.
Hershey’s syrup, from a can: Sometimes I visit my mom’s mother on my own. She takes me to the library and lets me pick out any books I want. I have no chores, no schedules, and nothing to do but sit on the front porch glider and read. We take occasional day trips, to Natural Bridge or Monticello, and in the evenings I make two small ice cream sundaes. We sit in the den and watch the television, or read quietly until bedtime.
Fresh roses: It’s just rained and there are tiny drops of water all over the roses at Reynolda Gardens. The smell of damp, rich earth is heavy and comforting, and while the rain has stopped the sky hasn’t yet cleared. Later, the full moon is out and it’s now impossible to tell the color of the blossoms. I’m not looking at them much, anyway, until I’m given one perfect bloom from a nearby bush. I’ll see later that it’s a silvery lavender, which becomes my favorite color of rose, and I’ll decide in later years that it was probably fitting that they are so splendidly colored but don’t carry much in the way of scent.
Nature’s Gate shampoo: I am fifteen again, visiting New Mexico and staying with my sister in Los Alamos. It is a beautiful place and I’m filled with wonder by the whole visit. Hiking in the desert, camping, Aikido classes, walking around Los Alamos at night, visiting the duck pond during the day. The skies are crystal blue and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The air smells clean and pure, and I fall in love with this place, convinced that I belong more in New Mexico than I ever did in North Carolina.
Jasmine oil: It’s 1997 and I’m lying in bed at the Abbey. It’s “monsoon season” and the afternoon rain has just cleared. The bells are ringing at the church a few blocks away. Life feels perfect, and I’m filled with hope that this time I’ve chosen well for myself, and some small fear that it will all fall apart like the others. Twelve years along, I still feel incredibly lucky. [2009/09/24 10:34 pm] ... and usually, they're things like:
I can sit for a long, long time watching my Mac's screensaver.
I hate wearing socks. This conflicts somewhat with my boot obsession.
Several times a week I go through my flickr stream and look at my pictures of Amailah. [2009/09/24 7:27 pm] When I was pregnant and around some mothers who were using sign language with their young children, I fell in love with the idea of giving children the tools to communicate before they are able to speak clearly. I learned a few essential signs (“milk”, “more”, “food”, “change diaper”, etc.) and resolved to teach them to Bean.
When she finally came along, the reality was a little different than it had been in my head. I was really the only one signing to her, and even then it was sporadically. You can imagine my surprise when she started signing back. At first, she just knew “milk” and “more”, but she’s picking up more signs as the weeks pass and the sign language isn’t inhibiting her verbal development one bit. Depending on what she’s trying to say, she may use just words, or signs, or both, and she can construct simple sentences. “Milk, please!” is a common phrase around our house these days.
She was in my arms in the kitchen last weekend, and she started pulling away as if she wanted to get down.
“Do you want down?” “Na!” “Can you say ‘down, please’?” “Dow?” *rubs her chest*
Its interesting what words she’s learning, too. Her first word was “duck”, and then “cat” (pronounced “AT!!”). She’s got a few more under her belt now, but it’s by no means an expansive vocabulary. She’s a good mimic, though, and she learns fast. We walked out the front door on the way to school one morning, and she pointed at the porch light and said what was clearly intended to be “lightbulb”.
It’s been argued that teaching kids sign language early on can help their verbal speech skill development. Certainly, in my limited experience, it hasn’t hindered things and it’s made all of our lives a little easier, because she can now express things she can’t quite pronounce. [2009/09/22 11:12 pm] My little girl no longer looks like a baby. She hasn't, really, in a little while. She just passed her first birthday! Watching her grow like this, it seems like she's always been as she is now, and yet it seems like just yesterday I could comfortably cradle her in one arm.
I've always said that I wanted to have a garden, but in the past my attempts at maintaining one were sporadic at best. I never got into it as much as I'd needed to in order to keep it going.
Until this year, anyway. In addition to the rosemary and fennel, which grow around here despite an inattentive gardener, I've added:
two tomato plants, one cherry and one heirloom
three pots of strawberries
Italian and Thai basil, thyme
a flame-colored African daisy
a flame-colored dahlia
a huge pot of peppermint
a zebra plant which failed to thrive at the office and is doing wonderfully outside
an oblong planter with three lavender
a pot with one echinacea and four lantana
a hummingbird sage, which is a CA native and drought resistant
two purple monkey flowers, also CA natives and drought resistant
a flame colored monkey flower (at right), CA native & drought resistant
a small oblong planter with two pumpkin vines
I didn't add all of these things to the yard at once, but the collection has grown over the last few months. It's been intensely satisfying to go out in the morning and check on them, pinching back spent blossoms, making sure they're thriving where I've placed them, giving them the water they need, watching as new blossoms and fruit come in.
I can't adequately express how excited I am about tasting the first heirloom tomato from my garden.
This is all container gardening, though, I haven't planted anything in the ground yet. There are plans for a raised-bed vegetable garden along the side of the house, and eventually there will be places for most of these plants. The ground here is very hard, and very rocky, and I may decide to go with raised beds for everything. I don't know yet, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the fruits of my labors and trying not to go overboard because I know I'll run out of room for containers!
