We’ve been listening to a lot of Hamilton lately, and while I love it, it makes me feel like I haven’t done anything with my life. Lin-Manuel Miranda is only a few years older than me. Why haven’t I written a groundbreaking musical? Or furthered a good cause? Or why don’t I at least know more about history (I was an American history and political science major in college and I don’t remember a lick of it)? I said this to Andy and he helpfully pointed out that Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius, with the award to prove it. I thought that I could, at the very least, really throw myself into this blog and do the best job I possibly could on it. But by the time I got the kids in bed last night, did my daily yoga (I’m on day 23/30!), and got the pictures edited and uploaded, it was 11:15 and I was exhausted. I lied down on the carpet and savored doing nothing for what felt like the first time that day. I want to be truly great at something, but for now I feel like I just have to get through the day until I’ve finished all the work and finally get to lie face down on the floor. Here’s what we ate this week.

Lemon Ricotta Pancakes and Sausages. You’ll also need this basic dry pancake mix recipe, though you’ll only use about half of it. And you’ll also need this homemade ricotta recipe, though you’ll have to double it. Did I lose you? These are thrillingly delicious. The ricotta took a literal 5 minutes to make and was 100% better than the store-bought stuff and also fun and also much cheaper. The pancakes taste like blintzes- like blintzes in a pancake costume. Make ’em when you’re feeling fancy.

Herb-Packed Falafel with Pita, Tahini, and Greek Salad. We stayed home all day, and I finished my book. Does this strike you as notable? It is a full-fledged milestone. I sat on the couch and read fifty pages, during the day. Yes, the kids sat next to me much of that time, Henry calling out the page number every time I turned one, and George asking for milk, or to go pee, or for whatever else he could think of incessantly, but I got through it and it felt amazing. (Side note- it was The Silkworm, the second book in JK Rowling’s pseudonymously- written detective series, and I thought it and The Cuckoo’s Calling were both fun reads. I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan, in spite of every book of hers being very nearly the same, and this scratched that itch.)

I’ve just noticed that I cooked J. Kenji Lopez Alt recipes almost every night this week. This is his falafel, and it’s amazing. You soak the chickpeas overnight, but don’t cook them. Instead you blitz them up in the food processor with tons of herbs. You let the mixture sit a bit so the chickpeas can release some starch, and then you sort of squeeze it into balls. It barely holds together. I’ve made several falafel recipes where the things disintegrate when you put the balls in the hot oil, so having them nearly fall apart when I was forming them made me really nervous. But he said they would hold together and they did. And they’re perfect. Super crunchy outsides and tender, green, and flavorful insides. We got to eat them tucked inside of some of that delicious Hot Bread Kitchen pita I had saved in the freezer, and with a greek salad with our first homegrown cucumber. It was a dinner that made me happy.

Cheeseburgers, Corn, and Barbeque Chips. Mary came over so Andy and I could go on a date! I left her and the boys with what I thought was a slam-dunk kids’ dinner- no real vegetables, just meat and carbs- but we came back and found that the kids barely ate anything. The corn was untouched, George ate none of his burger and Henry ate barely half. Most mysterious. Were they horrible? I had made an extra burger and ear of corn for Andy to take to lunch the next day, and he reported back that they tasted great. But can he be trusted? Has the whole world gone mad?

St. Edward’s Park. Usually when Andy I get the chance to go on a date, we do pub trivia at In.gredients. It’s super fun. You do have to eat vegetarian food from a deli counter reheated in a microwave, but the trivia more than makes up for it. But this time, Andy thought it would be nice to go on a hike and have a picnic. Isn’t that the cutest damn thing you ever heard? We went to St. Edward’s Park (it’s not by the school), and we brought our big silly dog with us. It was an easy hike along the water, and there were so many beautiful things to see. Little waterfalls, forts made out of cedar branches, a big heart at the base of a tree made out of little stones, and this very cool dam and dozens of cairns. We sat on a flat rock by the water and ate boursin and salami and strawberries and baguette. Our dog Adelaide was delighted to share the picnic with us. At the end of the hike we tromped through a field of waist-high wildflowers, which would have been romantic if I hadn’t developed a crippling fear of chiggers. We didn’t get any though, so the date was an unequivocal success.

Fish and Chips and Heinz Baked Beans from Full English. Friday morning marked the fifth day since George had swallowed a penny. The poison control people told me to call back if he hadn’t pooped it out by then, and so I did. They said I had to call his doctor to see what to do next. So I called and was put on hold for a very long time. Long enough for Henry to go outside, stand, for one reason or another, on top of the metal nesting box that sits on the ground next to the chicken coop, knock it over, and cut his bare foot on a sharp screw on its side. It wasn’t a bad or deep cut, but he had been barefoot in a chicken coop when it happened, so I spent my on-hold time washing out the scratch, putting neosporin on it, and frantically googling ‘tetanus.’ Since Henry is up to date on DTaP, and had his last shot only a year ago, I figured we would be okay. I still considered asking the nurse about it, since I was going to be speaking to her anyway about the penny inside George, but then I decided not to in case calling about a penny in one kid and then mentioning that my other kid walked barefoot in a chicken yard and cut his foot meant I would be flagged as a negligent parent in some CPS database. The nurse said that if George didn’t poop out his penny in the next 24 hours, we would have to take him to after-hours care for an x-ray. Then he would need to be x-rayed every week for the next four weeks to see if the penny was progressing, and if it wasn’t, then we’d have to go in and extract the thing. Boo.

I got to leave all these unpleasant things behind and go out to dinner with Helen and Christy, ostensibly to plan for the foods we’ll make on an upcoming camping trip, but mostly to drink tea and eat cakes and fried foods and enjoy each other’s company. It was really nice to get out.

We went to the Stonewall Texas Peach Jamboree on Saturday. It was everything you’d want from a small-town Texas peach festival, minus the peaches. There were remarkably few peaches. We got there in time to catch the end of the parade, where the kids were delighted to stand on the side of the road and catch a wagon-load of the candy and lollipops that were being tossed out by people on the passing floats and vehicles. The event was free, there were lots of great (free) activities for kids, plus entertainment for kids (this magician was the best of all time! And Henry got called up to be his assistant! OscarMunoz.com!) and adults- there was a 42 tournament (some spades/bridge-like game played with dominoes which appears to be a Texas thing?), and a washers tournament, and a peach-y baked goods competition which I considered entering but didn’t for lack of time. The only real nods we saw to peaches were the display of prize-winning peach bushels and a taste of peach cobbler ice cream, which was dreamy. It seems like most of the big stuff happens at night. A rodeo, plus a rodeo-like thing for kids called mutton-bustin’. I was really sad we had to miss that. But it was fun just being out in rural Texas for the day. Also, an old cowboy had to duck in front of us in line at the baby cow sausage tent (more on this below) and he tipped his hat and said “excuse me, ma’am” and I positively beamed with the charm of the whole thing.

His and Her Fair Foods. Opa’s Reuben Wurst and Frito Pie. We read the menu at this food stand after watching little baby cows get roped in a stadium as a warm-up for the rodeo that evening, and joked darkly, when we saw that this Reuben wurst was made with veal, that you’d get to walk over to the ring and pick out your baby cow like you might pick a lobster from a tank. And then Andy ordered the damn thing! He said it was ok. I went with the classic, and no more humane, I’m sure, frito pie.

On the way out of town, we stopped at a peach stand and bought a basket of the peaches that had fetched 2nd place in the peach bushel beauty contest. And then we listened to Hamilton all the way home and George fell asleep and stayed up until 11 at night. Still, a good outing.

Quesadillas with Mexican Street Corn. In addition to the roadside peaches, I bought four ears of corn, which I cut off the cobs to make this corn thing from The Food Lab. I’ve made lots of versions of elotes, but I always substitute sour cream or crema for the mayonnaise the recipe calls for, because the idea of squeezing mayonnaise on to corn sounds disgusting to me. How wrong I’ve been! This was so perfect. The quesadillas are, as you know, what I put on a plate when I have nothing else to put on a plate, and were just fine.

And also: GEORGE POOPED OUT HIS PENNY. I have never felt such joy when looking at feces. It took him six days, but he did it, and now we don’t have to get x-rays and do a baby colonoscopy or whatever horrible thing they do to get pennies out of toddler intestines. I am so, so happy.

Hanging around with everybody’s favorite chicken, Naked Neck. Happy Father’s Day, Andy! Have an ugly chicken! The kids obsessively catch and re-catch the slowest, huskiest chickens. Noodles, whom they have dubbed “Big Puffy Chicken Noodles,” probably spends more time being lugged around by Henry or George than she does on the ground. She’s a tolerant lady. But Naked Neck is the ringleader of the flock, and elusive, and they’ve never managed to catch her. Hence the thrill on Henry’s face when Andy nabbed her on Father’s Day.

Perfect Grilled Steak, Grilled Peach and Burrata Salad, Crispy Smashed New Potatoes. My idea of a perfect Mother’s Day is getting to spend a lot of time by myself, and I assumed, rightly, that that’s how Andy would prefer to spend Father’s Day. So in the morning, while Andy slept in, the boys and I drove down to Casa Alde to get him some breakfast tacos. A big round-bellied older fellow wearing conductor’s overalls and a little hat came in and walked up to the counter while we were waiting for our order. I was prepared to love him, because, obviously, his outfit was adorable. The waiter asked if he had called in an order and he answered, with a sneer, “Yeah, but I gave it to a woman so who knows what happened to it.” Fuuuucckk. My blossoming friendship with Misogynist Santa née Adorable Train Conductor Guy is effectively over.

I made Andy a steak on the grill, and it came out pretty well using the “perfect grilled steak” recipe outlined in The Food Lab. I grilled some of the peaches we picked up in Stonewall and arranged them on a platter with torn burrata, which is the world’s greatest cheese (like mozzarella impregnated with millions of milky mozzarella babies), basil, and a balsamic vinegar reduction (I learned all this from Abbie! xoxoxo). This would have been delicious but the peaches were not sweet, and tasted watery, sour, and bitter from being charred on the grill. Boo. The crispy potatoes are an Andy favorite and they turned out just fine.

Andy is an incredible dad. He comes home from work and does the shit I’ve been refusing to do for the kids all day. Primarily, play a Captain Hook game where you have to pretend to be Captain Hook and say “Stop that dreadful racket!” when the kids make loud noises, or go out and feign surprise at the sight of the chickens when the kids say, “Hey Captain Hook! Wanna see some big birds outside?” It’s so tedious, but Andy always does it. He’s really nice and I love him and I love that I don’t have to be Captain Hook.

Solstice Altar. Boom! Check it out. Tangerines. Candles. Floating candles in bowls of water with chamomile blossoms. Yeah, I had to use Hanukkah candles for my candle sticks because I’m out of tapers, but still.

We’ve been celebrating the solstice since Henry was a baby. The first year, it was just a fire in the backyard with s’mores, like the pagans did it. But every year our celebration has gotten a little more involved. This year, we had a color feast and did arts and crafts projects and, of course, ate more s’mores.

A Colorful Feast for the Solstice. With colorful flowers from Amanda. These are all from her backyard! Look at those perfect zinnias. I’m super jealous of her gardening abilities. And see my selection of solstice-y books on the shelf in the background? I live for this shit.

A juicy shot of that honey maid box. It ruins the ambiance of the color feast, but we had to have a tray full of s’mores stuff.

Crudites with Edamame Hummus. Not as good as regular hummus, but green, so.

The 100th shot of a fruit platter on my blog. Gonna keep showing ’em to you, though. This one features more of those flavorless peaches.

Honey Lemonade Jello. With the beautiful springtime honey from my sister Joanna’s bees! I wanted to include some sort of ritualistic thing with this very special honey, made from bees sipping the nectar of the literal millions of wildflowers on Joanna’s ten acres of land in nearby Buda, because it seems to me like magic, to get to ingest this sweet sticky thing that is the product of the bees’ hard work and flowers and sunshine. I imagined reading a poem while we each dipped perfectly tiny little wooden spoons into the honey jar and let the sweetness dance on our tongues. Instead, I stirred it into some store-bought lemonade along with some gelatin and said nothing of its symbolism to anyone. Next year, though! Ritual honey-eating is happening.

Blueberry Sparkler. This tasted mostly of water-y blueberries, but the straws fancied it up nicely. It’s from Henry’s Forest Feast cookbook. You put 1/4 cup of frozen blueberries into a glass (instead of ice), add 1/4 cup of any kind of berry juice, and top it off with sparkling water and a lemon slice. Why do some of the blueberries float and some of them sink? And what about that rebellious fellow caught in purgatory in the middle glass? Some things to ponder.

Joanna brought a rad rainbow craft from Pinterest. Listen up, y’all, I’m about to save you hundreds, maybe thousands of the dollars you were planning on spending on colored sands to make your own sand art. You can make sand art-like stuff by rubbing colored chalk on table salt. It’s easy! It’s fun! Behold.

Yes, I made a solstice altar but did not change my children out of pajamas. These are my priorities.

After we ate s’mores, we clipped herbs from the garden- rosemary, lavender, oregano, and lemon balm- formed a circle around the fire, walked around it three times, and threw in the herbs and made a wish as we breathed in their scent. This was another place where it would have been good to have a poem, or a song, or something meaningful to say, besides just counting to three. Notes to self for next time: add a honey ritual, find and insert witchy pagan poems wherever possible.

I think that the kids liked all this stuff. I hope they did. But really, I did it for me. We all got to sit around the table and paint pictures of sunshine by the candlelight from my badass solstice altar, and read lovely books together, and eat rainbow foods, and play drums by the fire, and it is everything that I want from life. Maybe a collection of cheaply-made sand art will be my legacy. Take that, Lin! Happy Summertime, friends!

I know, I know, that you don’t come here to read about my reflections on world news from the past week. You’re here for a story about George swallowing a penny, or for one about finding a hidden nest of chicken eggs situated immediately above the family of rats that lives in the corner of our yard, or to see what I did or did not burn this week (more on all these things later). And I don’t know what to say about the mass-shooting in Orlando, but I know that anything would be better than silence.

I woke up on Monday and called my senators and US representative, which meant listening to a recording of Ted Cruz’s voice before 10 in the morning. I signed a few petitions on the White House petitions site. I read about the victims and about the people of Florida standing in line for hours to give blood while Muslim women handed out food and water. I dusted off my twitter account to tweet my representatives. I’ve done pitifully little, I know, but it’s better than my usual MO of feeling sad and doing nothing. Or of resorting to my old standby of getting into flame wars with gun-loving folks on Facebook. That feels good at the time- getting all red-faced and shaky and getting to vent your frustration with all the stupid shit in the world by tearing apart some loser you knew in junior high. But what does it accomplish? Fucking nothing. Worse than that. The junior high loser is now more firmly entrenched in his opinions because you told him he was an idiot for believing them. I don’t want to be a part of those conversations anymore. It is, to me, a monumental waste of time and energy. Instead, I will call my representatives in between calls to the doctor and poison control center about George swallowing that penny. I will vote in every election. I’ll look for connections and respectful dialogue with people with whom I disagree. And I’ll set a bag of dog shit on fire in honor of Dan Patrick, because come on.

If you want to do something and haven’t, Everytown for Gun Safety has seven things you can do right now to help, and an easy interface to do them. If you’ve got ideas for other things I can do to be productive, that might have a higher potential for success than trying to turn Cornyn and Cruz into advocates for gun safety, please share them in the comments.  If you think I’m advocating taking your second amendment rights away and you hate me now, you can tell me that in the comments too. I promise to be cool. Here’s what we ate this week.

Carnitas Tacos with Black Beans and Cotija.

Actually, no. I knew it would feel gross to come in here this week and jump in with an introduction about the petty dramas in my life in the past week when we have so many larger fish to fry/melt down into slag. But now that I’ve written that intro paragraph it doesn’t feel any more seemly to get back to business as usual. I guess in my head, it feels like a metaphor for how I and the collective we acknowledge the horrors of the moment and then get on with our regularly scheduled program and all too quickly forget what needs to be done. How do I talk about dried out carnitas and pennies in little kid shit now, knowing that it symbolically, and probably literally, represents me moving on. It’s a sad sort of helpless feeling. I probably have done just about all I’m going to do here. I’ve called my representatives and signed some petitions, and that pretty much puts me at the limit of what I know how and am willing to do. Fucking sad. There’s some honesty at least.

So, on with it then. I burned the tortillas and let the carnitas, really just shredded leftovers from last week’s bo ssam, reheat too long in the oven so they were dry and crispy, but still- salty meat in a taco. I was tired after a day of hosting twenty or so unschoolers under the age of six at our house. Usually our chickens wander around the backyard during the day, but I kept them locked up for this event for lots of reasons. 1. At a little unschooler’s gathering in South Austin last month, at a beautiful homestead that also happens to have chickens, a few of the kids (one of mine included) found a clutch of eggs and smashed them gleefully. I don’t want that. 2. We have short fences and high-flying chickens and it was all too easy to imagine the chickens fleeing from eager young fingers by making a run for it. 3. Back when we had chickens the first time, a three year old guest at Henry’s birthday party tried to wrangle a chicken and accidentally broke its neck. They’re surprisingly weak little things. Everybody did seem to enjoy watching the chickens all the same, especially Naked Neck who is practically a side show attraction.

Sausage, Egg, and Cheese Breakfast Tacos. We only had 6 flour tortillas left, and, as you may have noticed, I have completely given up on making them from scratch.  So I, because I am overflowing with selflessness and grace, let my family have them while I ate my tacos on corn tortillas like a sucker. But then, because I am actually neither selfless nor full of grace, I pointed this out to Andy, who hadn’t noticed, so I could be properly thanked for my good deed.

Avocado, Kale, and Cheddar Sandwich. I have convinced myself, rationally I think, that it is healthier for me to eat big squeezy fistfuls of avocado instead of the buttered noodles and grilled cheese sandwiches that the kids request at lunch time. This sandwich was so good.

Buttered Noodles with Parmesan and Marmite. But then since there were leftover kid noodles I decided to eat those too. It was for science, though, because my friend Ben told me that you could stir Marmite into buttered noodles and I wanted to try it. I either have a terrible palette or added too little, possibly both, because it didn’t taste much different than plain buttered noodles. I was too lazy to get up and stir in more of the stuff. I’ll just have to do a repeat experiment.

Hot Bread Kitchen’s New Yorker Rye. The only place I could find this recipe online was over on the godforsaken yahoo site. Next to the story, they have a “what to read next!” feature, that starts with an article entitled “It Happened to Me: My Stomach Exploded and I Couldn’t Eat or Drink for Six Years,” followed by an ad for Macy’s. This bread turned out really well. I’ve been enjoying it toasted with lots of salted butter for breakfast, and we’re having patty melts later this week with the last slices.

HBK’s Batard. The rye uses a good amount of pâte fermentée, which is like a small batch of bread dough that you’ve allowed to age in the fridge for a day to deepen its flavor. There was enough of the stuff leftover to make another loaf of bread, so I went for it.

HBK’s Reuben, Green Salad with Cashew Tamari Dressing. All this bread-making was inspired by the photo of an oozy, slippery reuben from the Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook (photo, but unfortunately no recipe, in the link). I had to have it, and it was every bit as delightful as I had hoped. The rye was perfect. You slather, I mean really pile on a homemade thousand island dressing on the bread, and then top that with really good swiss and meat that you’ve heated for a minute in a hot pan, so its edges go all dark and crispy. I skipped the sauerkraut because it would have meant another $4 and I was already over my grocery budget for the week. And I served it with salad! I don’t even know myself anymore. When I told Henry we were having salad with cashew tamari dressing for dinner he actually cheered, and then he did eat loads of the stuff. This dressing is magic.

Strawberry-Peach Crumble. Since I was spending all day in the kitchen anyway, and because I had peaches getting wrinkly in the fruit bowl, I made a crisp for dessert. It was perfect. One of those rare and special times when something you whip up hastily at the last moment ends up being the best thing you’ve cooked in a good long while.

French Toast. Henry had a red-letter day on Thursday. He asked for French toast for breakfast, and because I had a day-old batard sitting around, I made it for him. Then we spent the whole day working on his electronic snap circuits projects. He made a working AM radio with a power switch, volume control, and tuner by following the project outline in a book, with no help from me, while George stuffed extraneous resistors and capacitors down his shirt. Really! I have it on video. I took a few videos, actually. Here’s one of Henry demonstrating an improvised project:

Henry also spent a good portion of the day reading every number on his six multiplication table posters, from 1×1 up to 84×84. George and I checked out of this exercise and read a million Berenstain Bear books instead.

Butterscotch Blondies, Gluten Free. And then, because Andy had toastmasters and I had three more hours to kill before he got home, we went to the pool with friends and ate these for dinner along with some tube yogurts and trail mix. I don’t feel bad about it.

Also, I don’t know if I impressed upon you enough how important it is for you to make these things. They are not hard, don’t psych yourself out about the caramel on top, and they are showstoppers. You won’t regret it. They were great gluten free, but took a lot longer to cook.

Crispy Coconut Kale with Roasted Salmon and Coconut Rice. That white fatty stuff oozing out of the salmon is a sign that I cooked it poorly (according to my skimmings of the salmon section of The Food Lab). I even made a half-hearted attempt to rub the stuff off with my fingers before taking this picture, but it didn’t work and I gave up. This is a good little weeknight dinner. The coconut rice feels special, and the kale goes all crispy in places, like kale chips, and you pour a delicious coconut oil/sesame oil/tamari dressing all over everything and it’s very very good.

Dinner After a Birthday Party. We were hot and exhausted and happy after a day at a splash pad for an unschooling friend’s birthday party. The kids ate more than their fair share of cheese pizza and cake, and then we kept them awake on the drive home with lollipops from the goody bags and red gatorade. Andy and I were still hungry though, but had that bleary dehydrated feeling you get after a day in the sun, so I just ate half a tub of store-bought hummus and Andy had his specialty, Safari Cocoa Crunch and Mallow Oats mixed together in one big bowl.

Corn and Black Bean Pico de Gallo. I added that avocado in later. Thought you should know. We had gone nearly three days without getting any eggs from our chickens. I knew this meant there was a secret nest somewhere, but I had searched the periphery of our yard, poking around in all their favorite hiding spots, and had turned up nothing. I was thinking about it on Saturday night, one of those random thoughts that pop into your head before falling asleep, and I remembered that I’d seen Light Bronze (Henry has a penchant for selecting straightforward, unimaginative chicken names) hanging out behind the tree near the compost bin. So, Sunday morning I went back there and found the damn thing. The chickens had engineered a lovely little nest atop a pile of brush that sits next to the compost, and there were 10 perfect eggs nestled inside. A delightful little family of rats lives under this brush pile. I see one of them every night when I go out back to close the fence around the chicken run. After the chickens go into their coop for the evening, the little rat comes out to investigate the scraps of food the chickens have left behind that day. When it sees me, it zooms back to the nest beneath the brush. I don’t mind the guy and have no plans to oust him. That’s my whole story.

Strawberry Goat Cheese Wrap, Nutty Couscous, Peanut Butter Coconut Balls. Henry made us this dinner! Nobody liked the strawberry wraps. Not Henry’s fault- there was way too much goat cheese and it overpowered everything else, and I was the one who spread that on. But the couscous was delicious and I loved those date/peanut butter/coconut balls. It took Henry a really long time to roll them, and his balls got smaller and smaller (there’s probably a better way to say that). I stepped in at the beginning to roll one ball and show him the size they were meant to be, but he politely declined my help and rolled them how he liked, and I let him, hard though it was for my Type-A kitchen persona.

Peach and Tomato Panzanella, Thai Flank Steak Salad. Monday morning, while I was calling Sen. Cruz, George swallowed a penny. He had showed me the penny in his mouth and I said that coins were dirty and easy to choke on and that they shouldn’t go in your mouth and he acquiesced, or so I thought, until he made a strange gagging noise and burst into tears and said, “I’m so sorry!” I was worried it was lodged in his throat at first, because he was crying and saying, “won’t I ever feel better again??” But then he said that oh, he did feel better. The doctor’s office told me to call poison control. The poison control lady launched into a speech I’m certain she’s given 4000 times. I had to give George something to eat and drink. If he didn’t throw it up (he didn’t!), he would probably pass the coin on his own in 1-5 days. We’ve got to poke around in his poop until we find the thing though, because if it’s not out by the 5th day we have to go to the doctor to talk about what to do next. So that’s fun. At least George still prefers to poop all of his poops on a little red plastic potty that sits in the middle of the rug in our living room, so I don’t have to figure out how to scoop the stuff out of a big toilet and find a suitable examination tray. As of this writing late on Tuesday evening, the penny is still at large. Will keep you posted.

We swam for another three hours on Monday and then came home and I made this flank steak salad (actually made with a huge skirt steak, that weighed over two pounds- a peace offering after I skimped on the amount of meat the last time I made this) and a peach and tomato panzanella. They were delicious and summery and wonderful together.

Thanks for sticking with me through this weird post. I don’t feel any closer to knowing how to honor the suffering and sadness from last weekend and still talk about what we ate for dinner. It’s hard to know what to do, about any of it. If you’ve got any answers for me, I’d love to hear ’em. In the meantime, love to you all.

I try to be honest on this blog. And open. Way more than I am in real life. You’ve probably noticed, and may even feel that I share too much (fair! I have a dog throw up story headed your way!), but I do it for a couple of reasons. One, I think it makes these posts more interesting. When I go back and read the first posts on this blog, straight food talk with nothing of me in them, I’m shocked at how boring they are. “Have you had raw beets?!” I asked with all the excitement one could muster. Wouldn’t you rather read about George picking out a red plastic margarita cup at Target? (You’re in luck.) Maybe these posts are just boring in different ways, but they are at least more original, so, yes. Reason number two is that it’s good for me. Speaking enneagramatically, which is not a word, I’m bad at acknowledging and recognizing my feelings (I convert any and all negative feelings into anger), I’m bad at being vulnerable (I always want to look confident and in control), and I’m bad at sharing my weak and darker moments with others. This blog allows me to reflect on all that stuff, and even to share it with you in a way that is highly appealing to me because I don’t have to tell you everything in person. All this to say, thank you for coming here and reading about the ups and downs in my life- it means a lot to me.

For those of you keeping track, I am on day 9 of the 30 day yoga challenge I started last week and I love it. And I’m happy to have stuck with the thing this long instead of abandoning it in lieu of eating more zucchini muffins while re-watching The Katering Show. In the spirit of not over-sharing (for once) I will spare you the added challenges of doing yoga after having two babies, but ask me about it in person and I can practice being vulnerable with you. Namaste, fuckers.

I don’t think you’re fuckers, but I liked the sound of that.

Tender Italian Meatballs with Rich Tomato Sauce. This is perhaps the first recipe I’ve tried from The Food Lab that I’m not crazy about. The balls were fine, but they were obnoxious to put together. The ingredient list is huge and includes wacky things like soy sauce, gelatin, anchovies, and 1/2 a teaspoon of marmite. That marmite is 7 goddamn dollars! I  was gonna spend some time making fun of the ‘yeast extract’ but then I read its wikipedia page and it actually seems pretty cool. It’s salty and you put it on toast and crackers and in cheese sandwiches and it’s got a lot of folic acid and B vitamins! So okay, marmite, I’ve changed my mind and now think you’re adorable. Anyway, all these extra ingredients made meatballs that taste just about the same as the meatballs I normally make, which don’t cost $400. Also, I burned the hell out of my hand while I was making them. The oil popped and splashed all over my fingers while I was taking its temperature between batches. It hurt so much that I cut off a giant piece of aloe from the front garden, which is likely peed on by passing dogs on the daily, and rubbed it on myself over and over again at parkour, like a weirdo. Anyway, I’m sticking with my old meatballs. And maybe I’ll add marmite.

Zucchini and Red Onion Fritters, Caprese Salad, Corn on the Cob. We went to Target and bought a pile of random crap we don’t need. Except for the puddle jumper floatie for George, which allows him to swim virtually unassisted through the water and makes my life easier, so, necessary. The kids each got $3 to spend on whatever garbage item appealed to them most. Henry picked out three colors of chalk spray which shot feeble squirts of mildly-tinted water on the pavement that faded almost immediately. George picked out a cheap squirt gun, but then vociferously abandoned it after spotting a red plastic margarita glass. I kept the squirt gun in the cart, sure he would change his mind, but he didn’t- he was all in on the red cup. And he has used it every day since, to have a little bit of apple juice. He pretends he’s drinking other things, like lavender lemonade. I came in from the backyard covered in mosquito bites and George asked me if I would like him to put lavender on them (putting lavender essential oil on bites makes them stop itching) and proceeded to dip his finger in his juice and touch it to each of my itchy spots. It was the dearest moment. It made me feel cared for and made me wonder if George and Henry feel that way when I put lavender on their itchy spots. I hope so.

I was going to make kale, onion and cheddar m’smen (that deliciously oily Moroccan flatbread) from the Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook for dinner, but then spent too much time helping Henry with his electronic snap circuit projects- he’s a boy obsessed. We’re on project 206 of 305 and his projects are getting increasingly more complicated and I am having to help less and less. He made a complicated water alarm with resistors and capacitors and transistors and jumper wires all by himself today- so cool. Anyway, I had to improvise a quick dinner and I came up with this. I didn’t use a recipe for the zucchini fritters and should have- these were limp and soggy. A good day, soggy fritters notwithstanding.

Would-Be Baguettes. Yeah, they’re not supposed to look like that. I let them rise too long, and then when I went to slash the tops with a very dull knife they collapsed into sad little puddles. I baked them anyway, and we ate them anyway, but they could not reasonably be called baguettes.

Otherwise, we had a very nice day together. Henry and I did eight more hours worth of electronic snap circuit projects and I got to sit under a tree and look at my new Taproot magazine while George played in the sand. It was so lovely and unexpectedly cool outside that I sang a little song:

Me:
Sitting under here
I like it under here
It’s such a very nice day to
Sit
Outside

George: What’s that from? Hamilton?

Broadway here I come.

Pork Bahn Mi. Andy made this sandwich and took this picture for me! I made the pickled carrots and roasted pork and terrible baguettes and he put the things together when he got home from work (I ran off to a peach party, more on this later). The kids were filthy from playing with the hose in the sandbox and one of the chickens flew into the neighbor’s yard and had to be rescued, and then a different chicken flew into the other neighbor’s yard and also had to be rescued. But by the time I got home, the kids were clean and had eaten and all the chickens were in the coop, so good on you, Andy!

Yellow Peach Crumb Bun. Or Crumb Bum, as Abbie likes to say. This is basically a peach coffee cake. A thick slab of yogurt-y cake, topped with a pound and a half of sliced peaches, topped with an egregious pile of crumble. It was well-received, but I liked the top two layers a lot more than the cake-y business on the bottom. Maybe I’d just rather have eaten a peach crisp. It’s from the Violet Bakery Cookbook and I’m sorry I couldn’t find the recipe online, because it’s worth having in your arsenal for the name alone. Like blueberry boy bait or wiener wraps.

I took my crumb bun to a peach party with these ladies! All food52ers that I know and love, with special guest, Bevi, in town from Vermont. It’s weird that we inadvertently dressed in the same color family. It makes us look like sister wives taking a snapshot for our family’s summer newsletter.  What a delight to get to eat a mountain of peach-y things and talk to dear friends without a kid around to muck it up! (Do I need to put a disclaimer about loving my kids here or have we reached the level of familiarity where we can acknowledge that kids muck things up?)

Peaches and Soft Cheese with Meyer Lemon Chutney. Bevi made the chutney, which was tart and wonderful, from a Laurie Colwin book. I’ve never read her stuff, but I’m told she’s funny and sarcastic and that I must. Abbie made the cheese and surrounded it with perfect peaches and basil. We ate scads of the stuff on slices of baguette. A real one, not the garbage ones I made.

Flank Steak Salad with Grilled Peaches. Abbie also made this! Shit yes.

Peach, Pecan, Red Onion, Smoked Cheddar, and Arugula Salad. And Barbara made this! I love the TLC that went into this salad- look at those tiny cheese cubes! And Barbara removed all the stems from the arugula like a badass.

Beet and White Bean Dip and Crudites. Nancy brought this massive crudite platter and made the mistake of setting it down next to me. I ate a lot of pepperoni.

Simple Summer Peach Cake. And Barbara also brought this lovely peach cake from food52. The flavor of the cake, which is made with some almond flour and extract and nutmeg, is much more sophisticated than the big slabs of crumb bun I served up, but they both have their place in this world.

Black-Bottom Meatball Pizza. I feel like throwing in the towel on pizza. It’s way too stressful to try to make it in the oven the right way, with the thing preheated to 550 for an hour, because, though the pizza comes out great, it always sets off the smoke alarm and Henry loses his mind. So I thought I’d try to hack a pizza oven in the grill. I lit the last of our charcoal and a big old pine stump in the chimney (the barbecue kind, not the Santa kind) and let it get roaring hot, then dumped out the coals and wood, put down the grate, and then put my baking stone on top of that and let it preheat for a good long while. This failed spectacularly. The top of the pizza looked pretty damn good, but the bottom of the pizza was black, black, black. I cut the bottoms off the slices and we ate the floppy remains but they were unpalatably smoky. I put the burned bits into the compost pile next to the chickens, where they sat ignored and got rained on. Then Adelaide (our boxer) discovered them and later threw up a pile of black and orange stuff on the carpet in George’s room. A failure from start to finish. And it sucks too- to make that pizza dough I fed the sourdough starter, which takes a day, made a sourdough-leavened pizza dough, which takes another two days, gently shaped it into rounds, and then utterly destroyed it. Such a waste. Just like the baguettes. Bread is hard.

Pita. But here’s a success! This pita from Hot Bread Kitchen was delicious, easy, and made a million (16). It needed a hot oven too, but Andy took Henry to Best Buy to try on headphones (Henry had never been and walked in, looked around in wonder, and said, “What is this place?”) and to Phoenicia to buy olives and feta and baklava for our dinner, and I was done before they got back without setting off the smoke alarm, huzzah!

Pita with Pork and Tzatziki, Greek Salad, Olives, Crispy Potatoes. Here’s what we ate, minus the baklava.Those little Moroccan olives were so so good! The pork, which is actually wild hill country pig of one sort or another, shot by my father in law, was leftover from the bahn mi sandwiches. We stuffed it into the pita, which sort of split to make pockets, with tzatziki and kale. Good stuff.

Bo Ssam, Cucumber Salad. I was just bragging about how much more open-minded Henry and George have become at eating what I put in front of them, but they both just ate rice and complained about all the other elements for this dinner.

Andy watched the kids the whole day while I worked in the backyard, hoeing up weeds that have covered the far-back section of what is supposed to be a decomposed granite path for nearly a year. I loved getting to do that so much. I skipped lunch (unheard of for me) and worked until three in the afternoon. When I came in, this roasted pork smelled better to me than anything else I have ever smelled. And I’ve smelled lots of stuff, y’all. I ended up overcooking it, but it was still pretty great.

Chocolate Zucchini Muffins. We hosted little unschoolers today, and you know I love to share a platter of muffins and make whole handfuls of children sad when they ask if they’re gluten free and I shake my head slowly. I’m the worst! In my defense, that flour is expensive. This recipe made 48 mini muffins and 12 standard sized muffins- a lot. We went through ’em though. We had a great day with these families! It’s stressful for Henry, who has stated his preference for working quietly with his electronic snap circuits over interacting with people, but he did a pretty great job today. And George too, I think, though later he confessed to hitting a kid a few times, and I saw him push Phinnie down when she wanted a turn on the tricycle. Still, this is progress!

Happy summer vacation! I hope you get to enjoy some lavender lemonade in a cheap plastic novelty cup.