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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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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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 90th 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.
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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.
1) Inside, I've been finding it really hot, so we had to bring up the electric fans from the basement early this year. 2) In my email, ...
