Once, twice

Your place is inside someone.
the closing of their heart
a landscape scaled to story

what if you knew everything
About why my sister looks like
my sister, the slap of silence;

the beating that is the phone ringing
The lament of memory in all
the half-remembered childhoods

what if those habits are only errands
dead from scorn; like butter asking
to be left out, sleepy in the sunlight

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Ginger + Garlic

Knowing I have two jars in the fridge plus the curry powder mom made in the coffee grinder = two nights of easy curry anytime I want...


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Project

All morning, the kids and I walked around town putting up posters for Ubuntu Canteen.

A day perfect in so many ways.

Somebody

hide behind a plate of food
Athena, Medea, Cambodia
and spiteful

walk crippled and curved
rainbows, Bowflex, Botox
and spatial

big pans of market moons
orbit unobstructed, doubled
in riddle

One minute of rant; one moment of funny

So... not a good couple of days. I think I may need more help than sympathetic ears and on-tap multi-generational snuggles. Can't really talk about it because (a) I already growled at my parents when they insisted that I tell them (b) mostly I don't know.

I do have a very strong feeling that my squeaky vocal delivery and my default-setting smiles are interfering with everyone's ability to take my weltschmerzen seriously. That and the suspicion that everyone has fallen for my protestations: Really, you guys! Really! Cooking and cleaning up after and chauffeuring and entertaining a family of six while prepping and teaching and grading three courses (90 students; at least twenty seem to e-mail me every day) is nothing. Really, it's easy!

The teaching and a houseful of family IS fun and I'm sincere about being grateful to be able to do it. Then also, feels like there is something I could/should do to care for myself--but I don't know what. Therapy? A drug regimen? More than six hours of sleep? Not caring if the house looks ready for the photo team from Architectural Digest every fucking minute? That the kids get assigned and balanced calories at every meal? What?

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We're listening to the radio stories about 9/11 with tight throats and goosebumps. Amma breaks the spell with an earnest warning that none of us should go downtown today. Our downtown =  < 3500 people. Any terrorist coming for us would have to be lost. Or a total underachiever.

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Thithi

Give back the words
give back
bring back the calls

call the hungry raven
to eat food
made for grandfather

the flicker of long ago
words echo
in my eyes

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Eating People is Wrong

I have absolutely nothing against Gwyneth Paltrow--Shakespeare in Love may have even been my favorite movie for a while (because really, how many movies are made for Eng. Litt. people?!).

But this month, when my subscription (thanks, friend L!) showed up, I knew I couldn't leave it out on the kitchen table the way I usually do with Bon Appetit's gorgeous food porn. This month, Gwyneth Paltrow is on the cover.

Not saying Gwyneth isn't gorgeous, just saying I don't want to eat her face. I'm sure she too would encourage that sentiment.

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Din

minds waiting on tables
dinner on minds, in air

your hands are fish
your mouth is water

your belly pregnant
with fancy flames

tender are vegetables
lost in becoming language

steam stretches branches,
falls thick and everywhere

my voice finds its legs
and children, dinner is here
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Morning Recipe

Downstairs, last night's dinner
ghosts in a sea of cinnamon tea

Quiet. Light bubbles, fills up,
curls in my cup--misty as milk

Stir in two children
(I take it sweet.)


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Song Soup

Dinnertime. I have half an hour to make the soup Baby A and I made up in the car this morning in the ten minutes between Mills Lawn Elementary, where we dropped off Li'l A, and Baby A's preschool.

This soup has beans (red and black) and veggies (I used frozen gumbo ingredients) and potato dumplings (I used pillowy gnocchi from a package) and is finished off with the grated manchego from earlier this week and a handful of leftover parsley and oregano (distressed, humiliated, and super stressed from my kids mishandling them).

Everything was going well until Li'l A said with a teasing, big-sibling smirk, that soup would taste better with Melody (Baby A's tattered stuffed mallard) in it. I was so shocked I dropped to my knees in front of Baby A who promptly clutched Melody to her chest and burst into loud and (overly) lavish tears.

To teach Li'l A a lesson, we give Melody a special hug and a treat. Then we snatch up Li'l A's favorite song (The Killers, Human*) out of the air as it plays on Pandora, ball it up, and drop it into the soup pot.

Dinner was delicious.

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* I love Li'l A's interpretation of the lyrics "Are we human or are we dancer(s)?"--It's a song about Destiny, he told me. "Are we human or do we have to follow a routine like dancers?" (Let the record show that he is a "Bollywood Dancer" in the school production of Jungle Book, and is all too familiar with being expected to follow "the steps.")

(Which reminds me that when my Amma asked Kindergarten me if I knew "my steps" for the Christmas play at schooI, I promptly nodded, fetched my sketchbook and drew her a set of stairs. Also, after that particularly spectacular misunderstanding, I fell asleep on stage and forgot to make my offering--I was a "flowergirl"--to the blessed baby Jesus.)

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Big Freeze

Today is the kind of day that's wrong and abhorred. Icy cold.  And raining. The nerve of Ohio. At least I didn’t have to carry toddlers and hurry kids into school. (I use the plural although I have only one of each.)

Why is my university working on President’s Day? No idea. It took twenty minutes to separate from my pajama-ed loves and say goodbye this morning.

An extra two minutes to wonder if I could claim President’s Day was a kind of a religious observance for me. Big A helpfully pointed out that I’m not even American.

They’re making Star Wars pancakes. Bums.

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We still got it

Big A and I fell in love in New York. And though we’ve hung out with the kids heaps in the city since those early days, there is some lingering sense of surreality about revisiting places which were all about our passionate freefall with two kids, and as more responsible adults. Because, I guess, the “we” that we are in Yellow Springs is irrevocably tied to our personae as parents, but the “we” that started in New York is all us. In my head--at least--the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, Clinton Street Bakery, MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, KGB Room, Penn Station… exist merely as picturesque backdrops and bit players in some grand narrative about us and our self-centered fascination for each other. Barf :).

We drew up a complicated and ambitious list of where we wanted to eat that was typically Balthazar for breakfast, Saravanaa Bhavan for lunch, and Motorino’s for dinner. We skipped Balthazar, but I guess two out of three isn’t at all bad. And the night before that we got a corner booth at the fancy steak place, which meant that the kids could play pirates to their heart’s content and I could get tipsy off of beachy drinks (I didn’t realize until I typed that out that there was an ongoing ocean theme there!). At Saravanaa's my people were talking really loud and at Motorino’s the NYU kids were worse behaved than my own, so we made out ok.

2011: More New York!

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Baby Talk 2: The too tasty

Talking about baby talk with T reminded me of this.

Li’l A used to eat a kichri that I used to make him (with rice, and lentils and garlic and peppercorns and chicken and veggies, almonds, and olive oil, pressure cooked and mashed) every day for lunch. When I left him with my mom in Bangalore while I finished up a few things in Oxford, my mother made him this kichri (under my urgent request because this was the only thing in the whole world that would meet all his nutritional needs). Ammama probably futzed around with my rather no-frills recipe a bit. Because after the first spoonful, Li’l A smacked his lips and told her: Ammama, too tasty! Too tasty!

My mother took this as endorsement of her superior cooking skills. Whereas in fact as she found out when he refused to eat any further, he meant it literally. It was too tasty--there were too many tastes in it.

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How a family of four turned veg(etari)an

I have always loved food. Even more than the eating of it, I love the process of making something that nourishes the ones I love. I love the way it looks, feels, tastes. I love the enthusiastic “click” sounds my baby makes as she nurses, I love Big A’s post-prandial cough, li’l A’s too infrequent scraping of an empty plate, I love hearing my sister say she lost ten pounds she wanted to lose, I love the pediatrician slotting my babies above the 90^th percentile on the growth chart. I love making big, healthy colorful presentations of food, I like taking pictures of it; my collection of cook books almost rivals my collection of South Asian fiction (and I’m paid to work on only one of those).

Somewhere around the time I acquired a household to run, meals became about (an animal) protein volumized by sides of veggies, grains, and beans. This wasn’t the way I ate growing up, although, I’d grown up in a meat-eating household and even at my most anorexic, I’d still happily eat a little bowl of my mother’s chicken kurma (hold the rice) once a week. It was safe to say I thought of meat as necessary to a well balanced meal and that I enjoyed it. As recently as last year, when Chai embarked upon a month-long vegan challenge—I found it frighteningly austere and extreme. I thought I could never do without sushi, without a cup of morning milk, without a nibble of cheese now and then.

I thought that even if I made the shift, I would crave animal products. I did make the shift about four months ago. Can’t say I’ve craved any kind of meat.

I don’t intend to be a vegan vigilante, so skip this paragraph if you don’t want to give up animal derived products. All I had to do was read about factory farmed animals. That’s it. Even as I read that hens cluck to their unhatched chicks to teach them different calls, I knew my scrambled eggs were, in a manner of speaking, toast.

I’ve continued to cook meat for the family since then—it seemed like the caring, Buddhist thing to do. But Big A has been unhappy about the unfairness of the situation and yesterday we decided that he and the babies would join me. I’m glad; lately I’ve had doubts about the health benefits of meat/milk/eggs and have felt that I’m putting unhealthy, unhappy products into my children’s vulnerable bodies. So for now we’re keeping a bag of microwaveable chicken nuggets for Li’l A because that’s the only food he really pines for and otherwise eating more veggies, whole grains, and beans. The babies and Big A will still use eggs and a minimum of cow’s milk. I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer—our farm share has the exciting job of fully filling our bellies.

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Smells like fish, tastes like salvation

I have a cold. What kept me going today (other than my family calling me, “snotface,” and making me beam, shiny nose and all) was bowlfuls of “Robust Winter Fish Stew.”

It’s a recipe that I saw in The Whole Foods Bible, although typically for me, the recipe provided an improvisational entry point rather than a inflexible plan of action. I added julienned ginger, slivered garlic, snips of fresh tarragon and oregano, plus hearty red potatoes to the called-for crushed tomato base with onions and cannellini. I used freshwater fish, but in retrospect should have used something fattier and brinier--salmon may be.

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How I know it’s *definitely* time for a snack-break

When halfway through a book about pre-Elizabethan England i read
the queen “delivered the prizes…”
as
“the queen delivered the pizza.”

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Sweet Deception

If you happen to visit and I claim, with mandatory sweet smile and saintly mien, that I made payasam (kheer) just for you, don’t visualize me reading War and Peace in its entirety while I stirred a pan of boiling milk to the right consistency.

It’s more likely that I spent the $ 0.49 (buy two, get one free) on Priya brand Kheer Mix, added it to water, stirred the goo for 10 minutes, and then snuck in a tin of condensed milk, a bunch of ghee-fried almonds, cashews, pistachios, raisins, and a few strands of saffron.

If I didn’t tell you, you’d never know. And that wouldn’t be right. Where the payasam’s concerned, love Priya (not maya).



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When Life Hands you Lemons…

It's surely time to make your much-loved salad.

For the dressing: Whisk lemon juice, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pinch of fresh pepper and crushed garlic.

Pour on: Layered baby greens, tomatoes, baby carrots, kalamata olives, red beans, and crumbled feta.

Bonus cosmic thumbs-up (wink on the side): When you find peace at the center of your tomato :).

Lamest Rushdie Reference *Ever*

Dave Zinczenko’s recipe for SalmOn Rushdie on p.148 of his book, The Abs Diet.

As prepared by Big A, however, it’s delightful--despite the generous robustness of the portion--and i, therefore, give you the recipe in its entirety:

Salmon Rushdie (number of Powerfoods: 5)

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon flaxseed
1 clove garlic
4 6-ounce salmon fillets

Green vegetable of choice
1 cup cooked rice


1. In a baking dish, combine the oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, flaxseed, and garlic. Add the fish, coat well, cover, and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

2. Preheat your oven to 450 F. Line a baking sheet with foil, and coat it with cooking spray. Remove the fish from the marinade, and place the fish skin side down on the baking sheet.

3. Bake for 9-12 minutes. Serve with a green vegetable and rice.


Makes 4 servings.

Calories per serving: 411; Protein: 40g; Carbs: 15 g; Fat: 20 g; Saturated fat: 3 g; Sodium: 231 mg; Fiber: 1 g.

[P.S. Zinczenko has a lot of funny font things and italics going on in the recipe, but I thought I’d spare you that.]

[P.P.S. Sort of relieved on Rushdie's behalf that this recipe wasn't Padma Lakshmi's brainchild.]


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