Five Ways to Eat Tomatoes

Collin Brooke's Rhetsy has a bit of the old school blog about it.  It's powered by TinyLetter, so it arrives by email, but each week's contribution has a few links, with some comments from Collin about what he finds of interest.  I like it.

He's called for lists of five, and that inspired me to dust off the old blog. It's August, and in northern New England, August is tomato time.  So what's on my mind?  Five ways to eat tomatoes.  (Although what I really need are 500 ways to eat zucchini.)

1. Slow-roasted oven tomatoes.  Yes, it can be hot in tomato season.  Yes, three hours is a long time to leave the oven on.  But these tomatoes are simply a taste of heaven.  I dream about these tomatoes all winter long.

2. Raw tomato sauce. Another Smitten Kitchen recipe description--she adapts it from Gourmet.  And I like her notion of simply asking people what recipes they adore. Trusting people who don't like to cook to find the most reliable recipes intrigues me.

3. Another raw tomato sauce, this one from the most unlikely of places: PMLA (104, 1989), the rather stuffy journal of the Modern Language Association.  When I first started graduate school, a requirement in the MA program was a proseminar for new students.  The proseminar professor brought in a recent issue of PMLA, showing us that a graduate student had published a piece in it.  He wanted us to know that publication was something we could do (this was back in the mid '80s, when graduate education was not professionalized in the way it is now; more graduate students publish more pieces these days.)  PMLA--which I never read anymore, having moved away from literature and the MLA--always reminded me of my imposter syndrome as I started graduate school.  But in 1989, this piece by Susan Leonardi captivated me: it opened with a recipe, and it referenced Nora Ephron.  That's my kind of literary criticism.  I keep this issue of PMLA on my cookbook stand, even though you really don't need to follow the recipe once you've read it more than once.  But it amuses me that I have a tomato-and-oil-stained PMLA in the kitchen.

4. Sliced, on toast, with salt.  Classic. Simple.  Tasty.

5. Tomato soup, with chickpeas, pureed.  The chickpeas create a creaminess that you'd swear comes from cream, except it's not. In the winter, pair with a grilled cheese sandwich.  In summer, perhaps a salad?

So what are your favorite ways to eat tomatoes? (Can I slip in a sixth, in my list of five?  Munching on sun-warmed cherry tomatoes as I garden is pretty darn delightful.)

School is starting again, but I find myself holding onto summer with each bite of tomato.  May we all have a bit of late-summer sweetness as the seasons progress.

Good Viewing: Love Makes a Family, and Practice Makes an Eater

Just a short pointer to a very cool documentary made by The Devotion Project.  It's called Listening from the Heart, and it profiles two loving women and their almost four-year-old son.  He's got a feeding tube, and looking at them feeding him, and doing what they call "therapeutic meals" brought back so many memories for me.  The Fitch-Jenetts keep a blog, and I'll be adding it to my feedreader.

Holidays and Conferences

• I just spent 3 days off line. There's something to be said for that, although I'm having fun catching up with all of you friends-in-the-computer.
• We stopped at the National Bottle Museum. I love quirky museums, and I love Politica, who stopped to park even before I'd finished my "It's open!" sentence as we drove by. And Curious Girl clapped when I said we were going into the bottle museum, and wondered whether she should bring in the blue water bottle she'd been drinking from.
• Curious Girl's first report card came home last week. We have a teacher conference in the morning. I'm looking forward to it: kindergarten is clearly going well for her, and her teacher seems to have connected with CG quite well. I'm curious to hear a bit more about CG's social habits in class, and I have a few questions about how persistent she is with challenging tasks at school.
  
• I like CG's school quite a bit. But the report card? Spectacularly uninformative in some key ways. The scale refers back to the state standards, for several reasons, including that "A standards-based report card gives "parents a clear understanding of what their children know, what they are able to do, and what they need to learn in relation to the standards." So the scale on the report card is "Exceeds/meets/nearly meets/fails to meet standards and then "little evidence." Problems here include:
• "little evidence" is not actually on the same scale of exceeding-to-not-meeting any given standard. There might well be little evidence of a student meeting a particular standard; little evidence sounds like a comment about what there is to evaluate, not an actual evaluation.
  
• the report card does not actually point us to anywhere where the actual standards are explained. I remembered that there is an explanation of the report card on the school website, but the explanation there focuses on the transistion from the old (2 years ago) format of report cards. I had to google the state standards.
• the school website does gloss the scale, though, and says that "little evidence" means that "Student's achievement shows little evidence of meeting grade level standards."
  
• When your kid "meets the standard" in October, does that mean she has met the (end-of-grade) standard? Or that she meets the where-we-think-we-are-with-this-standard-in-October-standard?
• CG "exceeds" the standard in music performance. (Yay! I got a 5! she said as we looked at the report card together. She has no clue what the numbers actually mean but clearly has solidly grasped the notion that 5s are bigger than 4s, and at the moment, bigger is better in her book.) On the state standards site, the document I found about arts standards says that there aren't kindergarten level music standards.
• All of this is more philosophically troubling me to me than parentally troubling: CG is having a fine time in kindergarten, and we already knew that this is totally the right time for her to be in kindergarten. (Anyone reading here who's obsessing about whether to repeat a year of pre-K: do it. CG wasn't ready for kindergarten a year ago, and she is in totally the right place now. I could have obsessed about something else during her first year of pre-K. It was such the right call.) So it's not like I have serious questions about what's going on in kindergarten. She's learning to read, she's loving math, she's quizzing us on what are living and non-living things (the subject of the science unit this fall). She likes school, and she's making friends. That's pretty much my idea of good kindergarten outcomes right there.
  
• I really need to come up with a good Thanksgiving entree. But not tonight. Magpie suggested a potato pie, but I am hoping for something with protein (to go along with the turnips braised with maple syrup, and turkey and traditional trimmings my sister will prepare). I'll make bread or rolls of some sort. But what protein? Time to get decisive.
• Except it's time to go to bed. So decisions will have to wait until tomorrow. But comments on non-turkey Thanksgiving options are welcomed!
  

A Good Chard Recipe

Wondering what to do with all the chard you might be seeing at the farmers' market? Wonder no more! A while back, Ianqui turned me on to Jack Bishop's cookbook A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, which is a great, seasonal, everyday cookbook. Here's his recipe, more or less, for sauteed greens over a white bean puree:

Heat oil in deep pan, and then throw in 2 thinly sliced onions. Cook until the onions are tender. Add 4 garlic cloves (I used less, as that's all I had on hand), and cook 1 minute. Add chard and some salt (he says 2 1/2 lbs of chard--I have no idea how much the bunch I had on hand weighed, to be honest--it looked small, so I had only used 1 onion; wash the chard before you chop it, and discard the stem and thick part of the rib). Cook until the chard is wilted, about 5 minutes (he says to cover and cook, but I didn't notice that part until I started typing here. oops.) Taste, and add salt and pepper to taste. Once the greens are wilted, you can keep them in the pot for up to 10 minutes covered before serving. Or so he says. I kept them in the pot, covered, for half an hour while waiting for Politica to come home, and they were still pretty tasty.

Serve over white bean puree: Bring 1 1/3 cups vegetable broth to boil in a pot. Put the brother in a a blender or food processor, and puree with 3 15 oz. cans of white beans (rinsed and drained). (I tried doing it in the pot with my immersion blender and it didn't work too well--not enough liquid? Also, I had only 1 can of beans, so I cut back on the broth accordingly.) Heat 3 minced medium garlic cloves in 2 T oil, then add the bean puree to the skillet, stirring constantly (or as often as your child/pet/spouse/partner/house will permit, which in my case was far from constant). It will thicken up! Season with salt and pepper when it's at the consistency you want.

This was easy and yummy.

I'm off to visit my father tomorrow, back later in the week, no doubt with tales to tell! Happy cooking, one and all. (and happy Yo-ing to Ianqui, of course!)

Slow Cooking

This is my week to get things off my to-do list that I've been feeling guilty about not doing. In August, Magpie tagged me in a recipe meme: 4 simple recipes. Here goes:

1. Enchiladas Calabaza, inspired by a recipe from a restaurant in Graduate School City. Take a butternut squash and bake it (sliced in half the long way, seeds scooped out, cut side down on a greased baking sheet) at 350 degrees F until soft (maybe 20-30 minutes? depends on big is the squash. You could also peel and boil, but peeling is a pain). Let it cool, and then scoop into a bowl. Add cream cheese (half to a whole package, depending on how big is the squash) and some onions sauteed with garlic, cumin, and cinnamon, to taste. Mash all together. Scoop into tortillas,and shape into enchildas. Put into a greased baking dish, and cover with chopped tomatoes (canned or fresh) and/or salsa, and grated cheese. Bake until cheese is melted and everything is warmed through. You can make the filling ahead of time, and then just bake a little longer to heat it all through.

2. Ianqui's V8 soup. OK, I'm cheating, since it's not my own recipe. But I've made it, and I love it. It's amazing, it's easy, and it is the cure for whatever ails you.

3. Low(er) Fat Guacamole: mash an avocado with a can of kidney beans and a jar of salsa. Yum!

4. Matzoh brie: whisk some eggs and a little milk, and crumble matzah (egg & onion is my favorite here) into the egg mixture. Let the matzoh soak up the egg mixture, for the most part, and then saute in a pan with a little oil and/or butter, stirring, kind of likc you are cooking scrambled eggs. New Recipes from Moosewood uses cream cheese with their matzoh brie, which is not bad, but not necessary. Eat quickly, as it cools.

and a bonus recipe, a recipe from Linda, which we make every Thanksgiving: Green Beans. Slice 6 cloves garlic, and saute in 3-4 T olive oil over low heat, with some oregano. Add green beans, the juice of 2 lemons, some lemon zest, kosher salt, and about 1/2 cup of water. Turn to boil, and then simmer, covered for 30 minutes or until the water evaporates. The beans get yummy and soft.

Four off-the-top-of-my-head recipes: enjoy! I am not going to tag anyone. I'm always happy to be tagged, but my bloggy neurosis acts up when I have the opportunity to tag readers (what if you're not reading? what if you don't want to be tagged? what if the sky falls...). So I'll leave it up to anyone reading who might want to share some recipes to do so. Happy cooking.

How to Measure

Baby Blue today offers instruction on how to tell the difference between so so big, big, and little big.

From our breakfast table, CG had a new approach to measuring liquid (not) drunk. She had maybe two sips of her minty chocolate soymilk at breakfast, and when she announced she was full, Politica asked her how much she had drunk. "A hummingbird amount or a cat amount?" I asked, when she just looked perplexed, clearly trying to find an answer that would suggest to Politica that much had been drunk when in fact, it hadn't. "A kitty amount!" she said enthusiastically, and hopped down. I nerdily interjected that hummingbirds actually eat quite a lot relative to their own weight, and she said, "Well, cats don't eat very much. So a kitty amount is small."

So there you have it. Measurement approaches from the small and mighty. Inches and ounces leave much to be desired --who needs to be counting all the time, anyway?

Cuteness, Food, Wiggles

We were on the road a bit earlier this week, and Curious Girl and I were on our own for dinner one night. She was tired, so I took her to the sushi bar. The food comes quickly and she likes getting to see what the sushi chefs are doing. We were seated right in front of the octopus and the salmon, and she asked me to identify all the fish we could see. "I want some octopus," she said, after first wondering whether the octopus could sting the chefs. She insisted she wanted to try some octopus. I don't actually like it, so I didn't want to order it--I tried getting her to wait until we could eat with Politica, who does like it. But as I didn't want to 'fess up to not liking octopus myself (the most we ever say around here is "I'm not up for that tonight"), and as the menu said it was only $2.00 for a single piece of sushi, I went ahead and ordered a piece.

"Is that tape?" CG wondered, pointing to the piece of seaweed that was wrapped around the octopus and its bed of rice. Then she wanted to know where the tentacles were, whether it could sting, and pronounced herself too nervous to try it. I ended up insisting that she try a bite. Usually, we don't direct her eating much, but in this case, I thought it was OK: she had pushed me to order this food, and I'd gotten it just for her, so I thought she should try it. Eventually, she did. And she liked it! The sushi chefs were really enjoying her running banter about it.

Things got a bit surreal when Curious Girl asked me if this octopus was Henry. "Of course not, Henry is underwater with Henry's Big Band," I answered. "No, I think this is Henry." (This is CG's latest play pattern: she allegedly invites us to interact or make choices in play, but she knows what she wants all along. You can see why this is my and Politica's favorite knock knock joke these days--CG doesn't get it at all, but Politica and I think it's way funny.) So then we had to talk to Henry about how he was doing, how she was eating him, how she likes his music. Quite surreal. But she had a few bites, and used the octopus to lap up a ton of soy sauce. I heard her on the phone talking to my mother about eating octopus today, and the story she tells is that she was nervous and didn't like it at all. She was nervous--but at the time, she liked it OK. I'm sure my parents weren't saying anything positive about her experience. But I thought it was pretty darn cool that my girl tried the octopus. And I thought Dr. Corndog, among others, would get a kick out of the Wiggles/food juxtaposition.

It was an interesting evening: the sushi chef started talking to me about how she had three children, but she had lost eight babies, and how even now when her kids are grown up, when she sees people with babies, she cries. Curious Girl was having trouble following the conversation in the moment, but she asked me what we were talking about. "That's so sad!" she kept saying. It was. But I was glad to know a little more about the woman who was making our food.

Bonus conversation: one day last week Politica said to Curious Girl, "You're my favorite!" Curious Girl replied, "You're my favorite, too!" And then a few seconds later, she said, "So that works out well, then."

Stood Up, Again, by That Boy

Enjoying as we are this good spring break while working full time, things have been, well, slow around here. And lately, slow and snow flurry-y! In April. And it's not like we live in New England, where I used to expect this sort of thing. Not quite the spring ambiance for seders.

But we've had fun at the seders this year. Curious Girl was quite excited about hunting for the afikomen (to be accurate, really, she was excited about the possible prizes for finding the afikomen, which in our house are really prizes for looking for the afikomen. With only two children in attendance, and given our preference for cooperative games anyway, it's prizes all around. this year, bubbles and books). She was also quite enthusiastic about making afikomen for everyone. As she and Young Guest did some coloring while we got the last few things ready for the meal, she colored afikomen for each of the grownups. "Don't look while I hide it," she'd say. "Then you can find it later." The making and the hiding were really all she needed to do--somehow, later one, none of us hunted for the colored afikomen, and I noticed one is still hiding in the bathroom. Note to self: finish cleaning up.

We used A Night of Questions for the seder, chosing seder 2, "Less is More," from their alternative TOC in the back. Last year, with these same friends, we'd read through the play, but this year, we skipped the play. Our friends were (rightly) concerned that the play was pretty much over the heads of our children (almost 5 and almost 3, respectively), and our friends were also wondering how their toddler was going to react to the story and the death of the first born (especially given that they had lost a baby in the second trimester just last month). So we opted for My Very Own Hagaddah's telling of the story for the Maggid part of the seder--something that made CG quite excited because there would be a time in the seder to switch to her very own book! such thrills. I hadn't actually read through MVOH in advance, just checked to see that it did, indeed, have the story in it. Turns out it doesn't even mention the death of the first born, and it credits Moses with the singing and dancing on the other side of the Red Sea. So let's just say it leaves a bit to be desired. We added in a bit, extemporaneously, and went back to Night of Questions. It's a good hagaddah, but flipping around in a big book doesn't always make for smooth transitions. Note to self: next year, copy the TOC for everyone to make finding places easier.

We used two CDs--the one that goes with Night of Questions and Andi Joseph's It's Seder Time!. CG really wanted to do the Miriam freeze dance on the latter CD, and I like the Mah Nishtanah version on her CD, sung by kids. We all sang it together, CG's medley notwithstanding, because CG is shy of performing and didn't really want to sing alone. "I'll sing in my head, Mama," she proposed, but she liked it when we all sang together. We played the CD for the opening song about the order of the seder, and for the groovy egalitarian blessing after the meal. Miriam's freeze dance is a cute little song, but way too long, as it turns out. CG liked the concept of dancing with timbrels more than the reality of percussion in the living room. But at the end of the seder, when I put on the next-year-in-Jerusalem song, she grabbed my hand. "Mama, come dance!" and so we danced, she and I, in the living room, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Note to self: next year, with the iPod and a seder playlist, to make switching songs easier.

CG was very interested in Elijah, which surprised me, since the amount of time we spend talking about Elijah is nil (although she does like to sing Elianu Hanavi a lot--they sang it for havdalah at her school all last year). We have an Elijah's cup that she made on the table, and she kept leaning over to ask me, "When is it going to be time to look for That Boy?" True, she can't spell very much yet and has lots to learn about print conventions, but I could tell she was speaking with capital letters about That Boy. "When is That Boy going to come? Is he going to come drink from his glass?" "I want to go look for him. I'm going to yell, ELIJAH! COME HERE!" When it was finally time to actually open the door for Elijah, she was quiet. But she stood at the door for a long time, sticking her head out, looking from side to side. I heard her whispher to Young Guest, "We're looking for Elijah." Young Guest nodded sagely.

We had asparagus guacamole on the table for munching, so no one got super hungry during the seder (which did go pretty quickly). We dipped lots of things in chocolate for dessert, which was fun. And I made, in advance, the dessert I thought was too complicated. Art-Sweet was right: those matzoh heath bars are yummy. I didn't even follow the recipe properly, and they still turned out yummy. I used a recipe mostly like this one, but I stirred the toffee mixutre for more than 3 minutes to get the butter and sugar to mix together, inadvertently put the chocolate chips on the toffee right away before baking (for 7 minutes, not 15), and broke the matzah up after it cooled. And sprinkled nuts on the warm chips. So I'd say it's a flexible recipe, hard to mess up, and really hard to resist.

We started the seder with a chametz hunt, mostly because Curious Girl had made a little chametz hunting kit at a chavurah a few weeks ago, and she wanted to use the little flashlight they gave her. So we didn't use the feather or spoons she had decorated, and no blessings were said, and it wasn't even a very comprehensive hunt (as mostly I don't cook the pasta this week, but I don't bother moving it anywhere). But it was fun, and the kids used the flashlights again to look for the afikomen. That was fun.

More later on seder 2. Here's wishing all my readers a weekend of good food and good company!

We're Having Matzah, Of Course

I bought a box of organic matzoh at Whole Paycheck today (Promised Land brand--they're not bad, actually) and Curious Girl wanted to eat them right away. Politica pointed out that next week, it'll be all matzoh all the time, and she might want to wait, but CG wanted matzah, and chocolate. So we had some matzah and nutella after dinner. As I was getting it out, I heard CG say to Politica, "I love my matzah!" to which I replied, "Well, then have I got the holiday for you!" "Passover?" she said. I nodded. "We're having matzah, of course!" she pointed out with glee.

The other night she was in the bath, and I heard her singing a little bit of "Ma Nishtanah" (the four questions about why Passover is different from other nights, usually sung by the youngest person who's able to sing it), which then morphed into "Under the Sea," (from The Little Mermaid) and then into "Down by the Bay," and back into some pseudo-Hebrew. "I want to sing those at our seder, Mama!" she called. Since it's the time of year when thoughts turn to seder rituals, I thought I'd toss the medley out there for anyone looking for something a little less traditional. Who knows, the water-themed Ma Nishtanah could become a family legend.

A few random thoughts to close: Matzah and nutella go well together, in case anyone wondered. I think we'll make our own chocolate-covered matzah next week. There are some rather complex recipes out there for that, but I'm going to try one that seems simpler. Simple is our byword, what with CG's spring break and our lack of spring break. Nothing could be simpler than boiling eggs, but last year (as we never eat hardboiled eggs), I ended up googling how to boil eggs, and went with Julia Child's recommendations, which I link to again as a public service for anyone like me who's a little fuzzy on the egg math.

So there are days left to plan the seder(s). We'd better get to it, if we don't want to let Curious Girl pick all the songs.

Kids, Food, and (Dis)Order

The M Grow (Baby) Blue festival has me thinking yet again about kids and food. Phantom's posts about Baby Blue's weight trigger lots of memories for me, and I have a particular fondness for BB's favorite drink (a cream/ice cream/soymilk mixture, if I recall correctly), as it's just the kind of thing we served CG for years. But not so much these days. Over the past couple of weeks, Politica and I have realized that Curious Girl is really a pretty regular kid when it comes to food. Her teachers say she eats a ton at lunch, and they're very impressed that she takes some of everything. She doesn't always eat everything, but she puts a little bit of everything on her plate (they have a little mini-lunch line for the preschool, with an entree and two side dishes and some kind of fruit, plus yogurt, bread, and PB in individual servings on the table for anyone who wants it). She drinks water all day long when she wants it. So we don't need to do much of anything about her eating anymore, other than watch it and enjoy. If she eats, she eats; if she doesn't, she doesn't. I will encourage her to drink if her lips are looking chapped, but that's about it.

Getting here was--as I've written before--not uncomplicated. When she was an infant, on the feeding tube, getting 5 or 6 feedings a day, people told us we were making her fat. (I look back at pictures and yes, she did have chubby baby cheeks then, but she was also way underweight and undernourished, and the size of an average child half her age, a fact lost on most of the commenters.) When she was a little older, and starting to eat, we were encouraging high calorie foods. People told us we were setting her up for a life of bad food habits, because chai made with whipping cream, Lindt chocolate balls, whole milk, and pasta drenched in butter just aren't good for kids. Then we worried that we were wasting food, because we'd put 8-10 samples of food on her plate, hoping she'd eat some of it. And then there were the people who said, when she had a feeding tube, "oh, when she's hungry enough, she'll eat." Er, no. Hence the tube.

Through it all, we just kept serving lots of food, stressing a consistently positive attitude toward food. We never say we don't like something, just "Oh, you don't feel like that tonight? Here, try this item on your plate instead." "Maybe next time." My pseudonymless friend and I have had many a conversation about my reluctance to label foods bad. I find a lot to like in Michael Pollan's notion that foods with many and unpronounceable ingredients are problematic; I won't defend people who pour Mountain Dew into their child's feeding tube when there are other liquids available; I believe in a balanced diet. Yet I'm relunctant to tell Curious Girl that X food is bad and Y food is good (pseudonymless friend taking the oppostie approach in order to instill good food decisions). To be honest, I did have to do some major internal changes to adapt to the diet I wasn't feeding my child: I had envisioned a crunchy granola diet for my child, and what I was feeding her, and how I was feeding it, was less than ideal. While other new adoptive mothers were talking about using the bottle feedings as attachment time, I was learning to use a feeding tube, and then going out to buy Cheetohs (which you can't choke on, becasue they dissolve in saliva) for speech therapy homework. But I got over it all, becuase I needed to for CG to learn to eat. So we served our foods along with the cheetohs. We followed the heavy cream with an offering of granola and yogurt (and didn't laugh when she ate the granola flake by flake).

I had an eating disorder for years, through much of college and graduate school. Therapy worked, in that I eat a pretty normal diet now, and I maintain a normal weight, and I know in my head that it's healthier that way. But there's an eating disorder in the back of my head much of the time, pulling at me to eat when I'm filled with any kind of negative emotion, making me feel that I am gaining weight as I eat. I know this is physiologically impossible, and most of the time, it's a distant little impulse. But still, it's there.

I don't want Curious Girl to know that impulse. That's beyond my control, of course; she'll have her own demons to fight, and I can only do what I can to give her the emotional wherewithal to deal with them. I can't say that my own sense of food issues came from anything my parents ever said about food. But my embrace of food is a pretty direct reaction to those eating disordered years. I had so many rules about foods that were good to eat and portion sizes and meal timings, and I want to teach CG that food is fruit of the earth, fuel for our bodies.

Now that she's a normal-eating kid, I'm having to come up with responses to things other parents just set up from the get-go, like requests for candy and treats. I have started saying that some foods taste good but don't have a lot of nutrients for our bodies, so we have to enjoy them only some of the time, in and around other foods. I talk about the timing of meals, how it is not snack time now because dinner is starting. But still, I serve a little picnic to her before breakfast, a picnic that is usually a sweet treat (a leftover eating encouragement). I let her eat whatever she wanted from the party bag she brought home this afternoon. I don't say it's bad for you. I just say, "save some room for dinner." I tell her she is beautiful a fair bit, and I tell her she is strong, and we never talk about weight.

Will it matter? I don't know. I'd like to take credit for her broad palate, but I don't know that our own eating habits affect her so much. Plenty of her friends seem to be pickier eatiers than their parents. But I hope she'll think of the table as a place where there are lots of good foods, in reasonable size portions; that she'll think of the kitchen or dining room as places where people came together to eat, and that she'll remember they fun while they were doing it.

And I hope this is enough for her to find her own demons. I don't want her sharing mine.

Super Musings

Guess who we're rooting for around here? This is all Curious Girl's doing. A month ago I don't think she knew the name of the local football team, but thanks to the brainwashing program (er, spirit-building-activities) at her school, she's been telling people "Our Team has One More Game! They won!" for the past few weeks, and she wanted to make Our Team cupcakes for the Super Bowl Party we're heading to later today.

I don't really understand the mania: growing up in New York, I was surrounded by passionate sports fans, fans who were often involved in bitter rivalries. Of course, my youth was pretty much a period of drought for most of the NY teams, but I just can't remember the entire place going so batty for any team leading up to a game. Some of the private schools around here have no school tomorrow because of the Super Bowl. That's insane: what are working parents supposed to do?

I'm not entirely unenthusiastic when it comes to sport. I was hooping and hollering in my living room when the New York Football Giants won in 1986-87. My father has had season tickets to the Giants since the early 1950s, and in that time he's not missed more than 10 games (and most of those have been lately, when he's been in Florida for part of the football season). He and his footballs buddies are aging, and some of their sons have taken over the seats. They have their traditions, like dad's opening day suit (the same one all these years), and the berets one of their mothers knit for them, now faded from all the sun. I'm not actually much of a football fan, but I love the Giants because I love my dad. They're just part of the family tradition. So I root for them, and the other NY teams of my youth, and I've never really worked up sports allegiances anywhere else. I rooted for my college's teams while I was there, and when I lived in Canada I rooted for the Maple Leafs and the Blue Jays, but somehow that seemed different (and I still root for Team Canada in the Olympics). So all this enthusiasm about two midwestern teams in the Super Bowl?

But my daughter does. While she can do cheers for the Giants and loves to wear her "Go Giants Go" dress (as she calls the cheerleading outfit my father sent her, and we've seen no reason to explain what cheerleaders actually are), she has been transformed into a local team fan by the relentless public enthusiasm and the team spirit day held at school on Friday. She likes both, she tells me, and I had to tell a bit of an untruth in a conversation about what teams I like. Curious Girl couldn't quite cope with the fact that we might not like the same teams, so I said, well, I like Local Team, AND the Giants. I know that my child is not an extension of myself. I know that the place you grow up makes an imprint. I understand that Curious Girl will have her own interests. But it is odd, even for a not-very-passionate-fan like me, to have a child articulating preferences for teams which just don't register on my radar. A lesson in separation, I guess. And an amusing one, in that CG's idea of how to celebrate the Super Bowl is a) to have a party b) put chips in a bowl and c) wear a fancy, fancy dress and red sparkly shoes.

Something Marla will appreciate about our football cupcakes: Nutella makes excellent frosting. Very quick, very tasty.

Mice Like Spaghetti, But Find it Hard to Access

I have several draft posts started--the G-for-Granola post that Pilgrim/Heretic gave me, a post on weight and eating--and then a few more drafting in my head, on motivation (how to motivate a child, how to motivate faculty, and really, is it possible to motivate someone else and is it counterproductive to even frame the issue that way), and thoughts on death (remarks for my predecessor's memorial service, Curious Girl's recent questions about death).

But all these topics get pushed aside for tonight so that I can bring you the breaking news from the natural kingdom, er, the basement: mice like spaghetti.

I realize I run the risk of scaring away Moreena in taking up this subject, but a blogger can't always stick with the safe subjects, right? We've had mice in our basement since sometime late in our renovation project. For a while last winter the cats were killing them and leaving them in the downstairs hallway, something Curious Girl was, well, curious about. "Look! I want to see!" she would say, as I tried to clean them up without getting too close and without somehow implying that her enthusiasm for the dead rodent was something to be changed. If she wasn't scared of the dead mouse, why make her so? Still, I was happy when the cats seemed to put an end to the mouse population.

But then it turned out that the mice had simply learned to stay in the basement, or at least on the landing down to the basement, where we have an old bookcase serving as a pantry. We've learned, over time, what not to store there: mice will eat Halloween candy (they liked butterfingers best), and goldfish. Tonight I discovered that they also like spaghetti, uncooked. They had apparently worked a system for rooting the spaghetti strand by strand out of the container to nibble. I was impressed by their industriousness even as I was rather grossed out.

So I removed the package and said to Politica, "Should we throw it all out?" "Of course not," she said. "We'll be cooking it in boiling water. It'll be fine." I had meant, should we throw the whole package away, but she was telling me that we didn't even need to throw away the package that the mice had been nibbling in. I pitched the mouse-opened package anyway, but stored the rest of it in a kitchen cabinet, having more rationally determined that since the packages weren't opened, the food inside was fine.

So tell me, am I overzealous in pitching the opened package or is Politica oversomethingorother in being willing to keep it?

Thanksgiving for Vegetarians, and a nerdy language observation

Here's what we'll be making for Thanksgiving:

• mushroom filo pastries (from Moosewood Celebrates--they are totally divine and I'll post the recipe if anyone's curious, and carnivores never notice the tofu in the filling, which turns kind of creamy. yum.)
• cranberry sauce
• salad with greens and other things, probably brought by Pseudonymless Friend and her husband, who are the very best salad makers I know
  
• quinoa vegetable pilaf
• bulghar wheat rolls (unless we buy brioche rolls at the bakery)
  
• roasted pears
• pumpkin bread or pie
• cupcakes (if Curious Girl still wants them for dessert)
• wine (interesting suggestions in the comments to one of APL's recent bullets)
  
• sparkling juice
  

Linking to APL's bullets reminded me that she recently posted an accent quiz, as did Scrivener. (both observed some of the limitations of the quiz.) I teach linguistics sometimes (I don't identify as a linguist, but I have some linguistic training and come at linguistics in the borders among philology, linguistics, and composition), and thus take a particularly nerdy delight in Curious Girl's language development. I did take the online quiz (which, surprise! pegged me as a northeasterner, and had some odd comments about New York in relation to northeast.) I'd rather tell you a dialect story than post the code to my result, so here's some phonological fun for Friday:

I had a little bag of Q-tips sitting on the banister in the upstairs hallway. CG brushed past them, and they fell down to the first floor. She dashed down, picked them up, and said, "Mama! The coupons! The coupons!" A confusion only made possible by the fact that she pronounces coupon with a [kju]/cyoopon. I've noticed myself alternating the two pronunciations of coupon, so I guess she's learning and I'm influenced by what's a little more prevalent here (although these maps show both pronunciations pretty well mixed).

So there you have it, a menu, some phonology, and two bullet lists in one night! We're having duper fun here on a Friday night.

Sunday Randomness

• Via Femiknit Mafia, a very smart and funny op-ed piece from today's Boston Globe about the gay agenda. Read it on her post and be prepared to laugh outloud while you discover just how it is that me and my people are taking over the country.
• I love language and language development. Curious Girl has started using duper as an intensifier because I sometimes use the phrase super duper. Today she told me that swimming was "very duper fun" and in the midst of that long crying jag she was wailing about her "duper favorite blankie" (which has since been found by Politica. Phew.) I think her language development is duper cool.
• Ianqui's relief about having somewhere to go for Thanksgiving makes me wonder what, besides turkey, people are planning to make for Thanksgiving. Our evolving tradition is to make mushroom-tofu stuffed phyllo triangles, a recipe I'm happy to share. Anyone up for a non-traditional holiday recipe swap? I started menu planning this weekend and am in search of a few side dishes. And sure, I could look in more cookbooks, but what I really love about recipes are the stories that go with them.
  
• Laura's post today on the centrality of teachers modeling learning got me browsing over at Alex Reid's blog, and I quite liked his post about lecturing, which reminded me a bit of the comments at Deb's recent post about audiocommenting. I have a lot of posts brewing about teaching, writing, and department chairing, so I'll push myself a bit in that direction with this little bullet point on the importance of considering what do students do when they are learning? It's easy to think about the content to be covered in any given course, but it's probably more important to think about what will students be doing in class. Practially, materially. So it's not enough to say "we'll be thinking critically about X." What are the activities, the steps, the moments of engagement that will produce, say, critical thinking, or flexibility, or whatever the more general goal is?
• The number of labels I just attached to this post seems ridiculously large. Oh well.
  

Children and Food, Part Two

There were some great comments and questions on my previous post about eating, so I thought I'd respond to some of them here.

• Phantom wondered about how to tell whether choices were helping her kids (who have strong personalities) or not. I realized that choices weren't helping when they became distractions, when the choice itself became conflicted. Sometimes, Curious Girl would say, if I asked whether she wanted toast or cereal for breakfast, "toast." But then when I brought the toast to the table, she'd dissolve into tears. "But I wanted cereal!" wah. Or she'd move back and forth between two choices and not settle. I still do offer a few choices--lately, I ask at dinner whether she wants chocolate milk or regular milk--but mostly I get her making some other kinds of choices, like getting her plate and cup off the low shelf we've set up for them, or getting placemats out for the family. When the choice leads to meltdowns, not good. (duh. Like you needed me to tell you that.)
  
• Arwen noticed that sometimes, it's OK to let a child not eat and even, horrors, be hungry! Chichimama wondered about what I do if CG refuses to eat what I've served. That rarely happens, in part because I usually serve multiple items (yogurt, apple slices, and pasta, for example, or pickles, bread, soup, salad). Small servings are key, and I usually try to put something on her plate that I"m fairly certain is on her A list of foods at the moment. If she doesn't eat, sometimes I will encourage drinking milk instead. But Arwen's comment resonated with me: I still have trouble watching her not eat, but I need to be OK with that.
  
• Elswhere noted that MG is prone to meltdowns if she hasn't had protein. It is hard, trying to teach a child to listen to her body. (And I"m like Renaissance Woman: very grumpy when hungry and not always quick to eat myself.) We try to deal with that problem by offering hors d'oeuvres (say, while cooking) or arriving at school pickup with a lunchbox and snacks--so I'll bring some string cheese or yogurt tubes to school with me so I can give her some protein right away. I'd rather have a biggish snack and a smallish dinner than a big dinner preceded by lots of grumpies.
• One of our neighbors has a policy that the kids can always go make a PB & J sandwich if they don't like dinner. It's an interesting concept--not sure we'll go that route, but it's interesting.
• We don't have dessert all the time, but when we do have dessert, it's available to all. If Curious Girl didn't eat her meal, I'm not likely to break out a dessert. (But maybe that's not true--at least some of the time, if she didn't eat dinner, I"m likely to break out the ice cream for dessert, figuring that it will convey calories, protein, and calcium.) Dessert is separate enough from dinner around here that CG isn't able to see dessert as something she can eat instead of dinner. We never make dessert dependent on eating a meal, though. It's a treat for anyone who wants it.
• When CG asks for seconds on one item (say, the noncaloric pickles) before eating other things on her plate (say, the protein and calorie containing grilled cheese), I will usually say something like, "eat the food you have and if you're still hungry, I'll get you more pickles." That doesn't push cleaning the plate, but it does encourage responsible eating. Sometimes--like at a pot luck dinner we went to this evening--i won't insist she eat ALL the food before trying seconds of something she liked, but I will watch to make sure she has made some sort of effort to eat food she chose.

I really appreciated all those comments: I love trading stories about how different families negotiate these issues.

Throwing Away Pharaoh, Wishes for Happy New Year, and Help from Julie

"I threw away Pharoah," Curious Girl said to me at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday, after informing me that the sun was PINK! and wondering was it wakeup time just yet. "You threw away Pharoah?" I said, somewhat groggily. "Yes, I threw away Pharoah, because he's so mean. I threw him away," and she gestured emphatically.

"You mean, in your head, in your imagination, you threw him away so you wouldn't have to think about him?" She looked at me with that sort of exasperated pity that four-year olds have much of for parents who don't follow their mental leaps. "No. For real. With the baby birdseed."

Ah yes, the baby birdseed. Tashlich.
which we did this year after the family service for Rosh Hashanah, using birdseed at the pond on the property. We'd talked all together about some things we might like to toss away: meltdowns, lack of patience, grumpiness. But CG took a different tack, and threw away someone mean, someone scary. Not a bad way to start the year, just tossing out the bad.

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Some bloggy maintenance, from Julie, who always knows her stuff: any bloglines readers should reformat the feeds you've subscribed to http://granolacrunchy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full. That should keep you up to date--which assumes, of course, that there are posts here to be up to date on. Being a good department chair is making me a not-so-good blogger, but believe me, I've tons of posts brewing in my head. My big challenge as chair: keeping time to write (both academic stuff and blog stuff). And my current wonder about blogger beta: why won't my expandable posts work anymore? I miss them. And you probably miss them too, since I can go on a bit. The folds are nice.

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Back to the new year: I found the camera! (the first version of this post had no photo). I forgot to take the picture until we'd eaten half the loaf, so you have to imagine a full circle. But it sort of looked like Phantom's. I also can't find Phantom's post in which she photographed her beautiful Rosh Hashana challah--but as you can see, ours was similar, only covered in sprinkled colored sugar and cookie sprinkles. Curious Girl wanted to take challah to school to share with her friends, and when I said they could dip it in honey for a sweet new year wish, she wanted to put chocolate chips in it. "That's my good idea, to make a sweet year," she said. I wasn't sure chips in bread dough would work out, so we did the sprinkles on top. It was pretty tasty, but not so pretty after the first three days. We talked about why it was braided round (the year goes round and round, I was trying to tell her), and when I said, "can you tell when one year ends and another starts?" she said "I can!" How, I wondered. "Because we make round challah." (this was, I have to point out, the very first year of round challah, but it became an insta-year-detecting tradition). Very funny.

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So I'm late in wishing anyone celebrating a new-ish year a sweet one, but good wishes are never out of style, right? So good new year to you and yours; happy October to you and yours. Here's to a fall full of words for us all: I'm liking my new job, but I'm missing my blogs. So a call to renew some habits is quite timely for me.

Children and Food

Phantom's posts about Baby Blue and weaning have gotten me thinking again about what I've learned as we've supported Curious Girl's eating habits (quick recap for newer readers: Curious Girl couldn't swallow as an infant, and she had surgery to insert a feeding tube when she was 9 months old; at almost 4, she finally had it removed, and in between we had lots of speech therapy to train her muscles and habits). After several weeks of eating with a lot of different people, I'm also moved to wonder why so much of our conversation with children concerns what foods they like and don't like. Now, my approach to eating and mealtimes isn't going to work for everyone, but here are some thoughts on fostering a healthy relationship between children, parents, and food.
The main thing I've learned about eating is that you can't force someone else to eat. You can try (and I've done that--not my best parenting), but it won't work, and all it will do is take up time, increase agita, and leave you wondering just why it was worth it to go through all that fuss for oh, say, an extra half ounce of milk (that would be 10 calories for anyone counting.) As we started to get Curious Girl increasingly independent with mealtimes, we relyed on Ellyn Satter's advice: it's our job to serve the food, and CG's job to eat it. I had to learn not to take CG's refusal to eat as a referendum on my cooking ability, not to take any single meal as an omen about a lifetime of eating. I had to learn to be patient.

When we were working on CG's eating skills, first we had to work on the mechanics, something I assume isn't an issue for most readers of this blog. Our early therapies were all about developing muscle tone and stamina; CG had to learn how to move food around in her mouth, how to take bites with her back teeth, how to swallow in bigger, smoother gulps. Once the mechanics were in place, we had to work on social habits: making the table a fun place to be, making meal times family times, making meal times a treat.

We did this in a number of ways: at first, we had special toys that came out only at the table. We ate together, sitting down, leaving our focus free for each other. We learned eventually that CG eats better if we just serve a plate, leaving the extra servings in the kitchen. If she can see family-style servings out in front of her, she often gets distracted by wanting more, more, more on her plate. We also learned that smaller portions are less overwhelming and more likely to be eaten.

As an upper-middle-class family, our early parenting was filled with forced (and often fake) choices: do you want the yellow cup or the blue cup? the round piece of cheese or the square one? toast or cereal? milk or carnation instant breakfast? but we learned that taking food choices away helped CG eat more. The choices, even forced two-choices, frequently led to confict. She'd waver, unable to decide. Or she'd change her mind. There would be tears and anger. So I just stopped asking her what she wants, and I just serve. Every now and then I'll let her choose between items or even make up a menu on her own, but for the most part, I just announce what we're eating.

But I do listen to her, and if CG says 'can we have chocolate chips for dinner?" I'll often say, "Sure!" and then put two or three chips as a garnish on her plate. That way, she gets what she wanted, and I still get to serve whatever dishes I have planned. And really, isn't it fun to have pickles for breakfast or chocolate syrup on pancakes every now and then? I do keep Curious Girl involved with our meals: she helps me cook almost every day, we bake bread, we get out cookbooks and select menus during the week. Last night, she saw me eating some matzoh, and she told me she wanted some for breakfast. "Mama! I have a good idea! We could put some chocolate chips on top and cream cheese underneath it, on the matzah for breakfast. Isn't that a good idea?" By morning, she'd forgotten, but that's probably something we'll eat one of these days.

We keep our food discourse totally positive. The World's Greatest Speech Therapist told us that it takes 31 tries before a baby knows whether it likes a particular food. So there's no point in letting a first rejection of a food guide anyone's impression. We just keep serving what we want to serve. It took 3 weeks of peaches on Curious Girl's breakfast plate before she finally started eating them, and now she loves them. But even when she wasn't eating them, I never said, "oh, you don't like peaches." I would just say, "well, you don't have to eat them today if you don't want to," and I'd talk about how much I like peaches or what else we could do with peaches (peach smoothies, peach pancakes, peach muffins, etc.). The deep dark secret I'm keeping is that I really can't stand watermelon. I don't eat it when CG and Politica are eating it up and loving it. "I don't want any right now, thanks," I'll say if CG offers to share her watermelon with me. If CG says "I don't like X" at the table, we redirect, always telling her that she doesn't have to eat it today, but pointing out, say, that it's a new food and she doesn't know yet, or that it's a food she's loved before.

We try to keep Curious Girl a positive influence at the table, too. One of my major pet peeves is when other children see food and announce, "I don't like that." (CG will follow suit and say "Oh, I don't like that too," no matter how much she likes the food in question.) A word of advice to anyone eating with young children: don't tell them what your children or grandchildren don't like to eat. What good can come of that? Tell them stories about people liking food. Or tell them stories about a fun thing you did that morning, or tell them a joke. But don't sit down to a meal and tell stories about people who won't eat the food being served. It's not helpful.

We've also used incentives around eating, so far the only place we've ever had an organized incentive plan. We started with our speech therapist, who had us giving CG a small sticker for every sip, and a bigger sticker for every ounce she drank (which will tell you something about how little CG would drink, once upon a time). We had various other drinking games at work (involving a specially decorated eating bucket, placemats, sponges, and toy animals, to name a few--the basic idea being that for every choice or action there's a sip or bite (or for every bite or sip a chance to do something with a toy)), but the one that has hung on is the treasure chest. I found an actual treasure chest at a garage sale one day, and when CG drinks up a big glass of milk, she can pick something from the treasure chest. When she was really little, we could recycle things in the treasure chest, but these days we have to trade out the little treats: lollipops. stickers, barettes or ponytail holders, little pieces of jewelry, a key chain that one of us has gotten at a conference, that sort of thing. At this point, we only do the treasure chest if she asks for it, which she still does pretty regularly. But the thing is, the incentive works only because there's no pressure. If she wants it, great. If she doesn't want it, great. If she tries for the treasure chest and doesn't finish the drink, that's fine, too. It's easy to get wrapped up in the notion of a child getting the incentive, but that's not our job. We keep it stocked, we keep it safe, and if she gets the treasure chest, hurray. But there's no tension at the table if she's not headed in that direction.

And really, what we are after are mealtimes without tension. Ianqui wondered a while ago (in a post I can't find to link to) how her readers handled mealtimes--do we eat as a family or not? I love family meals (although we each teach one night a week, so we miss one dinnertime/bedtime, but that also makes for a special two person meal on those nights). The World's Greatest Speech Therapist really helped us think about the longterm family mealtimes we wanted to have, and it's working out just fine. CG doesn't eat only junk food, despite all the high calorie things we fed her as an infant. CG does eat, despite all the meals she had that consisted of tube feedings she barfed up instantly and three nibbles of the tail of a goldfish cracker. She loves to cook, she loves to go to the farmers' market, she loves to help with our vegetable garden. She has an adventurous personality (in a "hold me in the sling, mama, while i have this cool adventure" kind of way) that has served her well: even when she took only 3 nibbles a day, those 3 nibbles were of different foods. She'll try most things, and that's a personality trait.

I lay this all out not to recommend this as The Way to Get Your Child to Eat (although I do believe that power struggles around food are profoundly dispiriting at best and dangerous at worst). Each of us has a different family dynamic about meals and foods, each of us has a different personality that makes trying new foods more or less difficult. But given how negative so much of the discourse about children and food can be, I thought I'd lay out our path to dinners that get eaten by three, in the hopes that anyone struggling with children who can't or won't eat, or can't or won't gain weight, can find something useful in a story about taking the long view, learning patience, and letting a child come into her own eating habits in her own way.

Cooking with Shades: Cauliflower and Chickpea Soup

note: curry powder recipe now appears in comments
When lots of other people were sharing recipes last week, I was too busy working on organizing my own recipes to decide what to share. So here's my contribution to the virtual dinner party: curried cauliflower and chickpea soup, topped with a cranberry chutney. The recipe is from one of our newer cookbooks, Simple Suppers, the 2005 publication by the Moosewood Collective. It focuses on simple, everyday meals:

1.5 c. chopped onions (especially if you're three, wear your sunglasses when you chop to keep your eyes from watering)
1 T vegetable oil
1.5 T grated peeled ginger root (I use the ginger-in-the-squeeze-tube these days)
1.5 T curry powder (I use homemade curry, the recipe from one of Julie Sahni's cookbooks; I used only half this amount last night b/c we ran out, and CG is not big on spicy food these days anyway)
.5 tsp salt
1 15 oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
3 c. water or vegetable broth (I used Imagine brand's broth-in-a-box, although sometimes I also use powdered veg broth)
1 small head cauliflower (small hands can easily chop cauliflower with a cheese spreader)
1 28 oz can diced tomatoes
Cranberry Chutney
sprigs cilantro (optional; I left it out as I think cilantro tastes like soap)

In a soup pot, cook onions in the oil for a few minutes, until they soften. Add ginger, curry power & salt; saute for a minute or so, stirring constantly so the spices don't burn. Add the chickpeas and the water, cover, and bring to a boil.

Cut the cauliflower into small pieces. When the water boils, stir in the cauliflower and tomatoes (this is another good moment to don sunglasses, since it keeps the steam from going in your eyes. It's also fun, and may make you giggle. But no matter how much you giggle, be careful not to touch the pot. CG is very good at safely giggling while stirring and wearing shades.). Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the cauliflower is tender (around 5 minutes).

Remove the pot from the heat when the cauliflower is done. Puree 2-3 cups of the soup in a blender and stir it back into the pot. (I got distracted by CG last night and didn't even read this paragraph. The unpureed soup is yummy, but pureeing it would make a nice texture now that I read the whole recipe. Live and learn!) Top each bowl with a spoonful of chutney and cilantro, if you like that sort of thing.

Serves 4-6 and takes about 35 minutes start to finish. Chopping the cauliflower is the most timeconsuming part. Good with naan, chapatis, or other bread; we had challah.

The Cranberry Chutney:

1 T vegetable oil
2 c. chopped onions (I don't think I used this much b/c CG needed to eat quickly so I chopped only 1 onion)
.5 tsp. salt
.12 tsp black pepper (.12 = one-eighth for readers who don't do decimals easily)
1 T white or cider vinegar
1 T graded peeled ginger root
1 tsp. grated lemon or orange peel
pinch cayenne (I left this out due to CG's love of mild food these days)
1 16 oz can whole-berry cranberry sauce

In a saucepan on medicum heat, warm the oil and cook the onions, salt, and pepper until the onions are translucent, around 5 minutes. Add everything except the cranberry sauce and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. (I halved the recipe, and found the pan dried out a bit, so I didn't cook it as long as the recipe recommends). Add the cranberry sauce and stir (the cranberries spit water and cranberry juice out of the hot pan, maybe b/c my mixture was dry?) Serve hot, warm, room temp, or chilled.

I wasn't sure I was going to make the chutney: it seemed like more trouble, I wasn't sure we'd all like it, and the soup smelled great as is. But I am really glad I did it. It really made the soup, and it looked beautiful ladled on top.

Not much cooking around here: CG had a minor surgical procedure this morning (in and out of the OR before 8:30). She's a trouper, but it looks like we'll be sitting around on the couch, co-parenting with PBS and recovering with the Weather Colorforms we never got around to giving her for the December holidays. It's made a great post-surgery treat. So I'm off to snuggle my girl. Happy eating, everyone!