Still, with the Avett Brothers

On Friday night, sweetie & I saw the best concert of our lives -- the Avett Brothers, at First Avenue, a club in Minneapolis. It was even better than their show last summer. We loved every single minute of it, and we were practically depressed the rest of the weekend because it was over. I would talk more about this incredible show, but my previous attempts to show my readership the light on the brilliance of the Brothers have been met with resistance (you know who you are, losers), so I won't do so again here.

In other news, signs of spring are appearing here in the frozen tundra. Specifically, we see grass! Disgusting, muddy, brown, matted patches of grass, and it's beautiful in all of its hopeful, energizing splendor. Most of the grass is still covered with snow, but more is melting every day. I even ordered seeds this weekend! I'll probably do a separate seed post soon, but I'm planning to start some of my own in my workroom under a fluorescent light, and then direct seed the ones that I can. I'm planning an herb and lettuce bed, a separate mint bed, kales & swiss chard as edible landscaping along the front walk, and lots more in the back beds. Again, more later.

Also to celebrate spring, we took a big walk around the lake with friends. Only in Minnesota do you celebrate the 42-degree weather the first weekend in March with a 3 mile walk around a frozen lake with the whole family.

And the weekend was capped off with me watching the Oscars alone in bed while Matt worked. Someone please explain -- who told Charlize Theron that dress was a good idea?

The Beauties

Well, discussion in my last post sparked lots of commentary, so I thought that you would all love to see a picture of my gorgeous girls (and by this I, of course, mean the Le Cresuet pans).

What you see here is the 7 1/4 quart Dutch Oven and the 3 1/2 quart buffet, both in Dune. I love them desperately. The buffet was a last minute decision, but I'm thrilled with it. I've made dinner in there twice already in the past three nights of cooking, and I'm going to use it again tonight. It's going to prove to be very useful, I'm sure. And I'm sure some of you are thinking (as my sweetie did ), "Why Dune when there are other so much more interesting colors?" True, some would consider this choice boring. But it isn't to me. To me its classic and tasteful and gorgeous. I absolutely love the decorating combination of creams and whites because it is clean, simple, fresh, bright and versatile. Those colors are the palette for the whole kitchen (and the better part of the house, actually). We also got a 9 1/2 in. non-stick stainless steel saute pan, which has also already seen a lot of use. One of the best thing about all of these is that Le Creuset offers a lifetime warranty. Anything ever happens to the pan, just bring it back and get new one. Ahh, love.

Another Tuesday morning

I'm writing this blog post well-aware that no one will likely read it, save Sweetie. Jeff is in Asia, Brian is in trial, Andrew is neck deep in a thesis and Nilda has a life. With only five readers, it's amazing that I so willingly crumbled when faced with Boy Wonder's guilt-trip and now attempt to blog with regularity. I need to re-think the theme of the blog, to aim for some consistency. But then again, with only five of you reading it, who cares? Blogging has served the worthwhile purpose of maintaining our friendships -- making me, at least, feel like you are all not quite as far away -- but without the hassle of direct human contact. Hah.

I should have put some toasted pecans in my steel-cut oatmeal this morning.

For lack of a more compelling topic, I shall talk about my kitchen activities. I've always been somewhat hit-or-miss with my culinary endeavors. Usually the quality of the results suffers from lack of patience and failure to research properly my methodology. And then there's the perpetual problem of failing to be creative enough to use up -- fully -- what I have, instead of making unnecessary grocery store runs.

I was inspired on our mini-vacation to Texas by a fabulous cafe, The Lunchbox. It was open for breakfast and lunch, and relied heavily on locally sourced ingredients. Galveston is not yet too deeply invested in the local food movement -- no real presence of farmer's markets, co-ops, or health food stores. This is particularly unfortunate since the climate is so amenable to year-round growing, but apparently the soil isn't so great, and why waste land for food when it can be used to refine oil? So this place, just two blocks from my brother's apartment, is unique, particularly because it serves as a farmer's market of sorts, allowing patrons to purchase extra stuff from the owners' network of farmers, which includes backyard gardeners.

Anyway, the owners had some great stuff on their menu that got me to thinking. And I came home and started reading through some more of my cookbooks -- particularly Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking and my Alice Waters Collection.

Then, on Saturday, we went to the Le Creuset's outlet for it's sale, and I got a couple of new pans. They are gorgeous and I adore them and they make me want to spend more time in my kitchen playing around and experimenting. Words cannot adequately express my love for these enameled cast-iron beauties.

And we're also going to be doing a little project in the kitchen -- taking out some kitchen cabinets over the countertop peninsula and installing some heavy-duty open shelving on the wall on top of our sideboard. I'm going for a rustic, eclectic "country" kitchen, something that is worthy of being the heart of the house. We've got the fireplace/grill in here, tons of light, open to the rest of the house, great view of the backyard (and the garden, come spring), so I'm super excited.

This past weekend I made some fantastic oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with walnuts (which were absolutely incredible dunked in our morning coffee). Sunday night Matt made burgers (ground beef from our CSA -- yum!) on our indoor grill in the kitchen fireplace with some lemon garlic broccoli. Yesterday I made a chicken stock that came out really well. For lunch I did an avocado & grapefruit salad. Last night for dinner I threw together (in my beautiful new Le Creuset casserole) a dish of local polish sausage, onions, sweet potatoes, canned tomatoes and cannellini beans, with red wine, sage & oregano. It was pretty decent. Today I'm going to make some lemon blueberry cookies substituting half of the flour for almond meal. I'm working on getting some gluten and refined sugars out of our diets, so I've got to get cracking on some more cookie recipes.

Ok, enough talking to myself. Time to exercise.

#'s 5, 6 7 and 7 1/2

During our trip to Galveston, I powered through a bunch of books. So I continue my quest for 25 this year with the following:

5) Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink Ph.D.: this book was basically a regurgitation of tons of studies this guy has done about how and why we eat what we do. Some pretty interesting tidbits in there, including that children of big families tend to eat more, faster because of the "you snooze, you lose" mentality regarding dinner and snacks. As the only girl in a house of three boys and a dad with a big appetite, if there was something yummy in the house, I learned to eat as much as I wanted as fast as I wanted, lest it be gone the next time I was hungry. Unfortunately, this rarely applied to fruit or vegetables, but instead to poptarts and doritos. Those things never lasted more than a couple of hours in our house. The most notable example of this phenomenon occurred when "we" ate all of my brother Mike's birthday cake (I believe I was in college at the time, so it wasn't me, and I'm pretty sure that the bulk of that cake was digested by my father, having likely forgotten it was anyone's birthday). Anyway, an interesting book, and I think there might be some noteworthy items in there for Andrew's thesis.

6) Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski: my first work of fiction in the group. This is the story of an American journalist bumming around Thailand while his girlfriend is there teaching English. He gets caught up in the story of a female anthropologist imprisoned for murdering a missionary. She commits suicide right after finishing a couple of papers on life inside the prison. It was a pretty good book -- I got through all 300+ pages in about a day and a half, but the ending was somewhat anticlimactic. Tons of build up to some incredible ending, but then just kind of fizzled. Maybe I read it too fast and missed something. But still interesting. Almost made me want to move to Thailand. Definitely made me happy I'm not an anthropologist.

7) Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer: admittedly, this was re-read. My brother had borrowed it and I had run out of books to read for the ride home, so I just re-read this one. And I loved it -- again. I came home and dug around for more of the stories of the other climbers and the backlash against Krakauer for his alleged finger-pointing in the book. I actually don't think that he was blaming anyone in particular, and I think he did a decent job of accepting some blame himself, which he may or may not deserve. He was one of the first ones down, seemed to be physically one of the best off, both before and after the summit, but he didn't take part in any way in any of the rescue efforts. He even left Beck Weathers lying in the tent freezing and started down on his own, apparently on the advice of the other climbers, all of whom concluded Weathers was going to die anyway and they would have enough trouble getting down on their own. So, it might be that Krakauer is a self-centered douchebag, or maybe he was just crazy tired and doing his best to stay alive. Never having met the guy, nor having ever tried to climb anything higher than Crowder's "Mountain" (read, "big hill"), in Charlotte, I'm not going to judge. Regardless, he writes a great book.

7 1/2) The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang: This book describes the events surrounding the Japanese takeover of Nanking, China in 1936. By conservative accounts, the Japanese tortured and massacred at least 200,000 Chinese (some estimates have it as high as almost 400,000), most of whom were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. I had to stop this one halfway through, to stave off the inevitable nightmares and depression. There has been lots of backlash against this book -- no doubt Chang had an agenda. She's a Chinese-American whose grandparents have fled Japanese invasions. So, she's pissed. Specifically, she was taking issue in the book with the fact that Japanese war criminals were never prosecuted for the atrocities of Nanking, nor has the Japanese government ever atoned or apologized for the brutality that occurred there. The descriptions (many of which included pictures) detailed the murders and rapes (including rapes of pregnant women, which the Japanese soldiers completed by using a bayonet to slice open her abdomen, rip out her intestines, then the baby, then bayoneting the baby; sons being forced to have sex with their mothers; fathers being forced to rape their daughters). The Chinese were allegedly beheaded, burned alive, buried alive, eaten by dogs, etc., etc. Lots of Japanese historians question the death count (although independent agencies have estimated, conservatively 260,000) and the mode of death. But it seems fairly solid that in six weeks, Japanese soldiers individually killed more people than those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm not necessarily saying one was better or worse than the other, but ever since I was a kid and learned about those bombings, I've been ashamed, and I've questioned how America and humanity could ever engage in such an act (this is the same guilt I carry about the Japanese internment during WWII, slavery, the massacres of Native Americans, etc. -- in short, I'm ridiculously naive and idealistic). But now I have a little more perspective -- the Japanese weren't saints themselves, nor were the Chinese. But my feelings about escaping to an island somewhere (it used to be an igloo, but my love for winter is fading quickly...), shunning my national identity, avoiding politics and commercialism and materialism, has been strengthened significantly.

My children don't speak English

Matt and I thought we were teaching them how to speak and understand English as their native language, but we can now see that we were wrong. The common English words and phrases listed below are utterly incomprehensible to our children. Following the English phrase, I will include our perception of what Noah & Luke hear us to be saying.

1. "Don't ask me again" = ask me again in 3 minutes, but this time with more intensity.

2. "Please aim for your pee pee into the toilet" = try to hit the wall, the floor and even the shower curtain, depending on your angle, but do whatever it takes to avoid the toilet.

3. "Please go put your shoes away in your room" = throw your shoes into the middle of your room while you stand in the hallway.

4. "Please just leave me alone for 10 more minutes so I can finish exercising" = stand next to me for the next 10 minutes screaming "NOW NOW NOW!!!"

5. "Luke, you cannot have your mimi [pacifier] if you aren't sleeping" = stand there, close your eyes, and make snoring sounds, but under no circumstances let go of the mimi.

6. "Go wash your hands" = put your hands under cold water for 1.2 seconds.

7. "If you don't take a bite to at least try what mommy cooked for dinner, you aren't going to get any dessert" = push your plate away screaming, then crawl onto mommy's lap, cuddle her adorably, and ask if you can have your dessert now.

8. "For the love of God please pick up these legos before one of us hurts ourselves" = this one seems to have no translation whatsoever. Such a phrase repeatedly falls upon deaf ears. I think the vaccuum cleaner bag is the new lego container. But if those boys think I'm sifting through that nastiness (again) to find their missing lego piece, they're nuts.

9. "Ok, but this is your last one" = you can have as many as you want, so long as you continue nagging mom!

10. "Relax, just relax" = Louder! LOUDER! DON'T STOP NOW!!

#3 and #4

Today I wrapped up two books. First is I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson. I'm a huge fan of his, having read A Short History of Nearly Everything, Lost Continent, and, one of my all-time favorites, A Walk in the Woods. This one did not disappoint. It's a compilation of the columns he wrote for a British newspaper when he moved back to U.S. (Hanover, New Hampshire) after having spent the past 20 years in Britain. Here's my favorite passage. He's describing his attempts to find a winter pastime in New Hampshire, and here he's taking his daughter ice-skating:

And I do know how to skate, honestly. It's just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overecited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of the pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as twelve feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from udner me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and i had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

"Wow!" said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. "That ice is hard."

"Hey, let ME see," cried by head and instantly down I went again.

And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extremities of my body -- shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs -- hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator."

Admittedly, this strikes a cord given our recent recreational activities. Great, quick read.

I've also just finished How to Practice; the Way to a Meaningful Life, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Interestingly enough, this one wasn't quite as entertaining as #3. I was interested in learning a little more about Buddhism, so when I came across this on an endcap at a Target, I figured, "what the hell" (because, of course, all life-changing spiritual awakenings are prompted by purchases off an endcap at a major discount department store). I figure there are two kinds of people who would read this book, a) those people who wanted to read something by the Dalai Lama, to learn more about Buddhism, b) those people who were interested in putting themselves on the path toward enlightenment. Now, not everyone may know which category they fall into when they open the book. I was keeping an open-mind. I mean, I have been to that one Buddhist meditation retreat (it was three hours long, and I spent the final two hours and 45 minutes thinking about how incredibly uncomfortable I was having to sit criss-cross-applesauce), AND Buddhism seemed to do a lot for Tina Turner (at least according to Angela Basset's performance in What's Love Got to Do With It). So I was thinking, at least superficially, maybe I should get on board.

Well now, having finished the book, I can safely say that I am the "learning more about Buddhism" type. I'm not sure that the path to enlightenment is easily navigable for a stay-at-home mom in suburbia. Not that I didn't get what His Holiness was saying (ok, well, I didn't get all of it), but it's just that that shit seemed really hard. For what it's worth though, the tenets of Buddhism seem to come down to one thing: help others, and if that's not possible, do no harm. That's something I can aspire to.

For parents of young children

This article speaks to me, in what I aspire to as a parent, and in what I am horribly guilty of as a parent. And on this particular subject, it should be noted that I always negotiate with toddlers.

"Snack Time Never Ends," The New York Times.