Before kids, I used to go to yoga once a week with my friend Molly. Our favorite instructor was Dean, a chiseled older fellow who had a lot of pithy sayings, my favorite of which was “If it’s not one thing it’s your mother.” After Henry was born, Molly and I would still find time to go every couple of weeks, but I haven’t been back since George was born. I’m not a person who values physical fitness. I couldn’t run around the block without becoming red-faced, hot, and wheezy. And that doesn’t really bother me. But lately, I’ve had the weirdest urges, cravings almost, to be able to go from lying on the floor into a handstand in one swift motion. I want to be able to move like a break dancer. Isn’t that weird? Where did this come from? I don’t know how you get strong enough to do the things my body wants to do, but I figured I’d try to start by doing yoga at home everyday. When you search youtube for ‘yoga’ you get Yoga with Adriene, who seems to have the market cornered. And she’s good! She’s like Jennifer Garner meets Rachael Ray, without the husky smoker’s voice. She’s silly with a big toothy smile and she makes lame RR-style jokes (she says Hey-O in an obnoxious way). Anyway, she gets the job done. She has a 30 day yoga challenge, and I don’t want to brag, but I’ve done three days, almost in a row, and watched the intro video too. So this obviously isn’t just another one of my fleeting fancies, if that’s what you were thinking! You don’t know me! Here’s what we ate this week.

Okonomiyaki. Do I look like a Top Chef wanna be with that sour cream swipe? You can tell me. I’m throwing in the towel on trying to pipe the sauce over the top of the things like the pros do, because it makes me look like a goddamned loser. This was last Monday, the day I got hit in the face with a corn dog. The day actually improved after that. I was furious, but once we got home, the kids just wanted me to read to them. We ended up reading over 1000 pages in the few hours before dinner- we added it up- including a little kid chapter book I remembered loving when I was a kid called The Chocolate Touch. It’s a play on the King Midas story, but instead of turning everything to gold, this kid turns everything he touches into chocolate. That’s probably obvious, huh? I loved reading about him eating a whole tube of toothpaste that tasted like rich chocolate mousse and drinking thin watery chocolate from the water fountain. I love food.

Challah with Bevi‘s Strawberry Rhubarb Jam. Bevi is a talented food52er who will be in Austin this week! We’re going to get together and eat a lot of peaches while she’s here. In the meantime, she sent the Austin food52 crew jars of her homemade jam. I hit the jackpot with this strawberry rhubarb number. It is deliciously tart and shines like rubies. I’m eating it on toast and in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the daily.

Potato, Kale, and Sausage Casserole. That link doesn’t take you to a recipe, just to a prettier picture of the casserole. The recipe is in Taproot magazine, which is everything I aspire to be, minus a break dancer, in one lovely package. I know this is super wintery, and doesn’t make any sense for dinner on a 90 degree day, but we had all the stuff for it on hand and I wanted it. I ended up way undercooking the potatoes and we had to put the casserole back in the oven for a long time, and then the whole thing got overcooked and lost all of its appeal. Boo.

We got to spend the morning swimming at our friend Abbie’s house. Abbie has a heated pool surrounded by a lush, colorful, well kept garden. And if you need to go to the bathroom, as the kids did approximately 35 times during our visit, it won’t be filled with baby potties and dust and hair. It’s clean AF. It throws the way I live into stark relief. We are so gross. I came home and cleaned the bathrooms.

Spicy Thai-Style Flank Steak Salad, Grilled Corn. Now here’s a bonafide summer supper. George can’t resist a raw ear of corn. Can you tell which one is his? This recipe calls for 2 pounds of flank steak, but I always get sticker shock at the meat counter. The stuff is $12 a pound! Can I really spend $24 on meat for one dinner? I bought 3/4 pound of flank steak instead and it was such a desperately sad amount of meat. Henry and George ate their allotment greedily and then searched the limp lettuce pile for stray pieces. Next time I’m just gonna do the thing the right way.

This was delicious, by the way. It’s from The Food Lab cookbook- I have a copy of my very own now after a beautifully generous friend read that I wanted it here and bought it for me. I am the luckiest. Also, I’m going to randomly mention all the other things I want here more often. Anyway, this recipe is not exactly like the one in the book- J. Kenji ditched the chives and added one small cucumber in the book version. It’s otherwise the same. I added more greens and spiralized the cucumber because it radically increases the chances of the kids eating it.

Grilled Peaches with Ice Cream. It’s a crime to heat up your grill in the summertime and not grill peaches.

Light and Fluffy Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes with Blueberry Lemon Sauce. This looks like the crime scene photo of a stack of pancakes that died of head trauma. I have complete control over the menu plan and no one questions this. Sometimes I cast around for ideas though, and this week, Andy said pancakes, so I made ’em. The kids were thrilled. I also, learning from the flank steak fiasco, bought two full boxes of sausages, so we had a thrilling number of them. Henry ate 9 of the 20. The pancake recipe is also from The Food Lab. They’re the best ever. Super rich from tons of buttermilk, sour cream, and melted butter, and a little more labor intensive than other recipes because you whip egg whites and fold them into the batter, but it makes a ton and they were cooked all the way through and rich and light and fluffy, as advertised.

Friday Night Fish and Chips at Full English. We went out to eat! With the kids, at night, like real people do. It felt novel. I love Full English. It is 5 minutes from our house and has a cozy, roughed-up vibe that puts me at ease because it doesn’t feel like the kids could destroy too many things in it. There are lots of shabby couches for lounging and a few tables for eating too. Henry walked in and said testily, “I thought we were going to eat in a restaurant, not somebody’s living room.” Sick burn, Henry. The fish and chips are on point. They also sell a battered and fried banger if you philosophically object to fish and it is as weird as it sounds. We had a really fun night!

Pool Party Fare: Hot Dog with Sauerkraut, Melon and Basil Salad, Barbecue Chips, Hippie Tortilla Chips with Guacamole, Pasta Salad, Cornbread Salad with Grilled Corn, Goat Cheese, and Peaches. We went back to Abbie’s on Saturday for a Memorial weekend cookout. We swam for hours and hours and I ate all these things! That cornbread salad was easily my favorite thing on the plate- Abbie please write down this recipe! And the kids were honestly pretty great. Henry befriended some chesty ladies, Andy got to drink a couple glasses of a peachy wine, and I pulled George and Phinnie around in a pool float for probably 45 minutes while they laughed and smiled, so I think everyone had a good time.

Butterscotch Blondies. These blondies, you guys. They’re one of the very best things I’ve made this year, I’m sure of it. They’re outrageously buttery, crackly and sweet, with pockets of melty chocolate. They’re topped with caramel shards, which you make yourself. This might turn you off for two reasons: 1) the word shards is too much like the word sharts 2) that sounds like a hard extra step. I’m with you on the first point, but the second one doesn’t hold water. This step takes a couple minutes and is so much fun. You get to make a thin easy caramel that you then shatter into small pieces- it looks like broken beer bottles, and then you scatter about half of it onto the unbaked blondies, where they melt perfectly and add a deep dark flavor. If you’re going to try them, and I hope you do, use the linked recipe for the blondies (it has U.S. measurements) but this one for the caramel shards, which follows the instructions in the cookbook where you make a caramel with water and sugar. Lebovitz changed this step for some reason and it sounds like his caramel stayed crunchy on top of the blondies, which you don’t want. Melty, soft, and oozy is the way to go, I think.

Cheesy Beer Muffins. Andy’s new boss hosted an ice cream social on Sunday, and I wanted to bring a snack to share but had no idea what to pair with ice cream. That morning, I finally settled on an intriguing recipe called “wiener wraps” from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, went out and bought the ingredients, came home and found that I had no where near the four hours I needed to actually make the damn things before the party. So I cast around desperately for another idea. I randomly opened The Everyday Baker to this muffin recipe, realized I had all the ingredients on hand, and went for it. They were great. I only had Christmas beers on hand and they were super hoppy, which I hate, but it didn’t come across too much in the finished muffins.

Rosemary Parmesan Popcorn. I also brought popcorn. I put tons of chopped rosemary in the oil when I added the popcorn kernels but you couldn’t taste it at all. Anyone have a hot tip for making popcorn actually taste like rosemary?

Curly Kale and Curly Pasta Salad, Apricot Bites. This is a Henry dinner! He picked out the recipes from his cookbook and Andy helped him make them. They did a great job except that they had added the four kale leaves to the cooked pasta whole. I found this mystifying and pointed out that they should be chopped. This gave me a little insight into how Andy must feel every time I express interest in one of his (many) areas of expertise. What’s an IRA? Please can you explain a googolplex to me again? Do I use the word laid or layed or lied here? He’s a lot nicer than I am. Anyway, while they were cooking, I got to hang out with Phinnie while Helen and Jordan celebrated their one year anniversary. Happiness abounds! Phinnie is an undeniable delight. She’s just so. nice. She laughed joyfully as I pushed her on the swing, ate a pretzel, sat in a little box with George, went on a walk, and blew bubbles, happy and pleasant the whole time. I’m not going to write a comparison between her disposition and the boys’, but you get the picture. They’ve got their own strengths!

Bonita Myer’s Wiener Wraps, Cheddar Scallion Rolls. I’m not going to sit idly by when I’ve got all the ingredients for wiener wraps in my possession. These are pigs in blankets! Why, oh why, would you call them wiener wraps? It doesn’t even make sense- they’re made with little sausages, not hot dogs. You make the dough by dumping flour and butter and yeast and stuff into a bowl and mixing it, then kneading it for a minute, then letting it sit for two hours. Super easy. Then you roll it out and wrap it around sausages and let it rise for another hour or two. I had lots of extra dough so I decided to top it with scallions and grated sharp cheddar and roll it up like a cinnamon roll. I brushed them with the fat leftover from cooking the sausages and sprinkled them with salt and pepper. These are both winners. The recipe’s not online but I’ll take a picture and send it to you if you needs must have wiener wraps in your life.

I had written a paragraph here lamenting how there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things I’d like to do, but deleted it after I realized that I sounded like a privileged asshole. And I am one, I know, but I don’t want you to think of me as such. Poor Arielle! Doesn’t have enough time to do yoga and read a book and write her blog post on time! These are all princess problems. I’m lucky to get to spend a couple hours every night doing whatever I want to now. There was a time not so long ago, when George wanted milk every fifteen minutes and I was lucky to get to leave the bedroom at all. Or before that, when I spent my evenings editing educational guides for the STAAR test. Goo. It’s so much easier to complain about what I don’t have than be grateful for what I do. I shall endeavor to do better! See you next week, friends.

I got hit in the face with a corn dog yesterday. Not in an accidental, “Oops! Sorry about waving my corn dog near your face!” way. In an exhausted angry five year old using a corn dog as a weapon and bashing it repeatedly into my chin way. I had to struggle with him to wrest it from his grasp. The whole incident was just so depressing. I later ate this corn dog. I sat down to write this blog post, after getting the kids off to bed early, and just stared pitifully at the screen. It was such a lousy, exhausting day. Henry had several meltdowns that I didn’t handle well and I felt guilty and sad. I had nothing clever or interesting to say about a slice of frittata and a pile of unadorned kale sitting on a plate. So I gave up and Andy and I lay on the floor for a long time and listened to the Hamilton soundtrack and I felt a lot better. And today was a lot better too. George was in the shit, instead of Henry, but his meltdowns are a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Time marches on! Here’s what we ate this week.

Pesto Frittata with Kale Salad.  Hamilton and Andy-time may have lifted my spirits, but they failed to inspire me to have anything interesting to say about this boring frittata and some salad. I stirred a bunch of pesto into eggs mixed with leftover broccoli and sundried tomatoes. Who cares!

We went to Little Unschoolers in the morning, at our friend Karen’s beautiful home in south Austin. I covet her chicken run. It’s made out of thick cedar branches and has a beautiful arched entry way. Andy and I threw our fence together with recycled chicken wire and semi-rotten bamboo poles and it looks even more ramshackle than you would imagine something built with those materials would. Anyway, her house is less than five minutes from Gattitown, so Helen and I said fuck it and went there for a late lunch. I ate a pile of pizza and a lot of salad bar chocolate pudding. And Henry achieved a milestone he has been waiting more than two years for- he is 44 inches and officially tall enough to ride the bumper cars. He was so serious about the whole thing- he didn’t smile once the whole time he was learning to manuever his car and bumping into mine. I honestly think he viewed it as a “with great privilege comes great responsibility” situation.

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I got to leave the kids with my mother in law and Andy and go make pies with my friends! Eep! Barbara, Abbie, Molly, Helen (and Phinnie!) and I all gathered in Barbara’s home to make pie and talk about lady parts. It was so much fun. The gathering was ostensibly called so I could show Barbara how I make a big fat flaky pie crust, but I rushed through it and I don’t think I successfully showed anyone anything. And I was talking too much and let the dough get way too soft, so it stuck to my fingers when I was crimping it, which led to a pretty ragged finished product. Molly did capture these pictures of the top of the pie being latticed, though. Thanks, Molly! We all peeled the peaches, and then cut them up and tossed them with a little white sugar and a little brown sugar and ginger and penzey’s pie spice and cornstarch and outrageous amounts of lemon zest and juice.  It was extraordinarily delicious, even if we did end up including a peach pit in the finished product. Molly has luck for the next year, we supposed, like you do when you get the plastic baby in your slice of king cake.

Peach Pie. Fresh out of the oven the juices bubble madly, but they thicken up as the pie cools. We ate huge hot slices though, so it was deliciously messy. We used this crust recipe, minus the vinegar and plus two tablespoons of sugar, and mostly made up the filling recipe, using one tablespoon of cornstarch for each pound of cut fruit and a modest amount of sugar as outlined in this recipe, and topped it with egg wash and a lot of turbinado sugar.

Quiche with Red Onion Cheddar, Mushrooms, Leeks, and Tons of Herbs. We wanted to make a savory pie too, so we all brought stuff to throw into an impromptu quiche. Turns out we all love cheese- we had 5 kinds to choose from- and only Molly brought vegetable matter- leeks and herbs from her garden. Barbara found some mushrooms in her fridge, so we cooked those with the leeks and a lot of sage, and then piled that into a prebaked crust that had been filled, to my complete horror, halfway up with grated cheese. We had decided to use the two novelty cheeses Abbie brought- a mustard seed cheese and a red onion cheddar, both of which tasted incredible on their own. Helen grated a big bowl of the stuff and I dutifully spread it over the crust, questioning myself with each mounting handful. We poured the egg mixture (6 eggs beaten with tons of parsley and 10 ounces of whole milk) on top and baked the thing for 40 minutes in a 400 degree oven. This thing was incredible! Light years better than my standard quiche. The huge amount of grated cheese had mixed completely with the egg and together they made something light and rich and souffle-like. I’m dying to make it again. I’ve gotta track down that red onion cheese. I’m going to have a hard time not filling every quiche shell halfway up with cheese from now on.

Bolillos. Fun fact: bolillo is Spanish for puffy vagina.

Molletes with Black Refried Beans and Soyrizo. I didn’t have avocado or the Valentina’s hot sauce Amanda uses, but these were so delicious anyway. I want to eat molletes every day. If you want to buy soyrizo and live near an HEB, skip the fancy stuff in the produce section (Frida’s- it’s weird and dry and pasty) and head to the real chorizo section instead, where you’ll see a tube of Cacique-brand soy chorizo nestled among the porky ones. It’s good and greasy and crumbles like the real stuff.

Sweet Potato Noodles with Pesto. I saw a mesmerizing video of a sweet potato being spiralized and wanted to try it, so Henry and I made this for lunch. We overcooked the spoodles, as I assume they’re called because people are horrible, and nobody liked them. I ended up boiling some regular noodles instead.

Coconut-Lime Pork Tacos with Black Beans and Avocado. Henry and I got to go on a date to the Austin Cactus and Succulent Society meeting. A neighbor of ours has been a member since 1975 and has been encouraging us to go. I thought it was worth a shot, because Henry was really into cacti and succulents a while ago (he had a cactus-themed third birthday party and used his birthday money to buy a cholla and a bunny ears cactus), and because we were told there would be free snacks. And oh, were there! Henry and I had eaten a bunch of these coconut-lime pork tacos before we left, so I didn’t eat the snacks, but Henry loaded up. He picked out tortilla chips, popcorn, crackers, a small piece of pink nougat, and raspberry-coated almonds. There were three huge platters of sliced bundt cakes- a chocolate one with a strawberry slice on each piece, an orange one with a mandarin orange wedge on each piece, and a strawberry one with more strawberries on top. I thought that was adorable, but Henry wanted no part in it. Some old guy looked at Henry carefully serving himself the food from the buffet and laughed awkwardly and said to me “He just gets to pick whatever he wants?” In my head I thought, doesn’t everyone? But I just laughed a little and smiled in reply. I don’t know what that guy was thinking about. Maybe he thought it was cute that Henry was serving himself food, as if this was a novel skill for a five year old, like a puppy standing on its hind legs? Or maybe he thought it was inappropriate that I let Henry pick out what he wanted and serve himself? I have no idea. We sat down and he happily ate his snacks, swinging his legs in the big chair while we waited for the meeting to start. And then it did. A botanist from Tucson had come to deliver a 200+ slide presentation on the agaves of Northern Mexico. Henry made it through the agaves of Sonora, but by the time we got to the next state, Chihuahua, he was getting real fidgety. He said he had to go pee and I asked him if he’d like to just leave after he went to the bathroom, and he said yes. On the walk back to the car:

Me: “So I guess you weren’t that interested in this meeting?”
Henry: “I just got tired of looking at all those pictures of cactus.”
Me: “Those were agaves!”

We laughed and drove home.

Challah and Hamburger Buns. The boys and I spent the morning driving out to Pflugerville to go to an estate sale which included over 2300 bolts (bolts!) of fabric- the lady who died owned a quilt shop. It took forever to get there, and I accidentally got on a toll road, like a sucker, and when we finally made it, the line to get into the house went down the driveway and past the next house. We stood in line for about 10 minutes and it didn’t move. Henry kept sidling up awkwardly close to the lady standing in front of us, and I had to keep asking him to back up. So we left, boo. All those precious bolts of fabric! We drove to IKEA, where I had planned to go anyway to buy a birthday present for my sister Joanna. We headed straight for the cafeteria and Henry and I both ordered the meatball plate. Yes, I know it’s horse meat. They’re so tender! And I love that lingonberry jam. Henry’s kid’s plate came with five meatballs. I looked up after eating my first one and saw that he had just finished his last one. I sadly tipped five of mine onto his plate, and he swallowed those immediately too, so I gave him the rest of mine and just ate his and my mashed potatoes for lunch. And then we spent 14 hours in the curtain section, where I debated buying the safe choice- grey linen curtains, already sewn and ready to go, or the amazing choice- a splashy hot pink and white fabric festooned with huge bright green broccoli florets which I could sew into curtains. After much soul-searching, while the children took turns pushing each other in the cart, I picked the grey ones. George fell in love with the picture of the $1 IKEA cinnamon rolls when we checked out, so I bought him one. This was a huge mistake. Instead of sleeping on the way home as I’d hoped he would, he licked all the frosting off of the cinnamon roll, got all hopped up on sugar, and screamed because we were stuck in traffic for an hour. And then I didn’t even get to eat the remains of his slobbery cinnamon roll because Henry got to it first. Saddest.

I had a million things to cook when we got home. I did a bad job on this challah. I didn’t let it rise long enough and it was dense and small. My fault. I’ll try again.

Coconut Macaroons. The challah called for three egg yolks, so I made macaroons with the leftover whites. These are great, but I think we’re all sick of them. I brought some to my enneagram class that night and left a few at home for the boys, where they sat in their tupperware, mostly untouched, until I fed them to the chickens today.

Fennel with Olives and Capers. My friend Carla had made this recipe from Plenty More and raved about it. She had to track down a big bottle of verjus for the recipe, which tastes like tart grape juice, so she gave me a jar full so I could make the recipe too. When I saw that it called for both olives and capers, two of Andy’s very least favorite foods, I knew I would be the only one who would eat it at my house. I took it to enneagram instead, along with some leftover focaccia, and everyone liked it very much.

Pineapple, Greens, and Tofu with Roasted Chile-Coconut Dressing. I am filled with pride when I get to show you a big green salad that we ate for dinner. But usually eating them leaves me feeling bored and hungry. That is mostly not true with this salad, which is filled with all sorts of exciting things that can keep you interested for much longer than your regular run-of-the-mill salad. Basil, cilantro, mint, scallions, and shredded cabbage are tossed in with the greens. Tofu, pineapple, and salty cashews or peanuts are piled on top, and the dressing finishes the thing off spectacularly- it’s like a salty, spicy, garlicky, lime-y coconut caramel.  These are all good things.

The very best thing that happened last weekend, though, was Andy’s and my first trip to the bingo hall down the street from us, where we got to celebrate Joanna’s birthday. Oh I loved it! It smells like smoke- people are still allowed to smoke indoors there! But we got to sit in a non-smoking room, which still smelled, but in a stale sort of way that made me nostalgic for the San Marcos skating rink we used to go to in high school. And it’s so complicated! The games move quickly and are all different with weird rules and fun gimmicks. And you get to use a paint dabber to mark your spots! And they have a snack bar with a mile-long menu filled with mostly fried and meat-stuffed or -topped items that is truly the stuff of dreams. I very much like the idea of having a weekly bingo night.

I know I’ll miss having little kids when Henry and George are older and able to function more or less like normal people, but things like the prospect of a weekly bingo night with Andy and not getting a corn dog to the face will surely ease that ache. See you next week, friends.

This is a chigger PSA. Do you know what chiggers are? If so, you’re free to skip this part.

Chiggers. The name sounds vaguely racist. Like the first time I ate a crawdad and the (very nice) man who prepared them said, “You’re a coonass now!” And I was like, what the hell is that term? Is it a racist thing? Anyway, not enough people know about chiggers. This has come up twice in that past week, so I’ve got some solid anecdotal evidence to back me up here. The first time I got them, I woke up in the middle of the night with the craziest itchy bites all over my nether regions. I assumed it was just some bizarre pervy mosquito with a taste for lady parts. But then the bites lasted for days and days and I googled “itchy mosquito bites crotch” and found out about chiggers. They are tiny red mites that live in tall grass and are most active in the summer. They climb from the tall grass onto your body and seek out folds in your skin, or places where your clothing presses tightly against your body. They love to bite you under your underwear and bra. The bites can look big and mosquito-y or small and pimply. They itch terribly and last from 1-3 weeks. Helen got them a week ago and worried she’d been bitten by a Zika-virus mosquito, cuz the bites were so bad and because she’s a worrier. I told her about chiggers. Then we visited our dear friends, who were covered in the bites after spending weeks playing in the tall grass around their home. I told them about chiggers. Then the boys and I all got chewed up by chiggers. But at least we knew what had happened! Which is something, right? They’re monsters, really. They bit my nipples, you guys! Both of them. Helen gave me her generic-brand calamine lotion, which expired in 2014, but still helps a bit. We’re on day 4 and things aren’t feeling so bad anymore.  All this to say, stay away from tall grass in the summer time. And if you wake up with red bumps all around your crotch, it’s probably chiggers. Or something that I have no business advising you on. Here’s what we ate this week.

Chicken and Pumpkin Laksa. We went swimming with our friends! It was a freakish 72 degrees outside and overcast and the water was freezing but still so fun. We brought tons of snacks and spent a lot of time eating next to the pool. Phinnie, that magical niece of mine, stumbled over nothing and sat down hard on a bowl of beautiful fruit Helen had brought, scattering blueberries and orange segments everywhere. It gave me a twinge of nostalgia for the not-so-long-ago time when I couldn’t set a plate of food on the floor because one toddler or another would invariably step in it and track hummus across the house.

We all loved this delicious noodle and coconut milk soup from A Bird in the Hand. I had never heard of laksa, googled it, and it turns out I had also never heard of the cuisine it comes from, Peranakan, which is a combination of Chinese and Malay cuisines. The recipe’s not online, near as I can figure, but lots of other laksa recipes are, and they all look delicious. Looking at that recipe made me sad, because it’s from an Australian site, which reminded me of The Katering Show, my dearest love, which has a full new season of episodes available, but only for people who live in Australia or are good at computers.

Chile Verde with Pork. There’s a ball pit at parkour and there are red, orange, yellow, green, and blue balls (blue balls) and one, one, purple ball. It was our precious play thing until it vanished under mysterious circumstances many weeks ago. This week, George and I found it, along with a passel of other balls, crammed into a piece of equipment with a small crack and a lid that doesn’t come off. I tilted it on its side and jammed my arm as far into the crack as I could, and my elbow hurt for a few hours afterwards, but we got that purple ball out. Also there were two other purple balls in there so the first one lost some of its mystique. That’s the most notable thing I can remember about Tuesday.

My mother in law, Mary, gave us some of the wild pork and venison they had in their freezer, from animals that my father in law had shot, including two pounds of shoulder steaks, which I think were pork, but I’m not super sure about that. Free meat!! These shoulder steaks had the wackiest sets of bones running through them, and it took a fair amount of work to separate the meat from them. I also ran into shards of things that were hard and metal-y and possibly bullet shrapnel? It weirded me out, but I looked at all the pieces carefully and hoped that I had found any stray pieces of bullet, or whatever that stuff was. I said nothing to my family about this and everyone ate it happily, in blissful ignorance that any bite could find them chewing on bullet bits. I was a little wary. No one reported anything amiss. Another successful dinner!

Passover Buttercrunch Brittle. This is from the Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook and I was so excited to try it. I had 3 1/2 boxes of matzo in my pantry leftover from a Passover regimen I flaked out on. The recipe calls for microwaving this brittle though, and I don’t have a microwave, so I tried to just do the same sort of thing on the stove top. I’m not sure if it’s because of this, or because the matzo was stale (we used the 1/2 box that had been opened since Passover), or because the recipe’s just not great, or all of these things, but this was terrible. I know it’s not fair for me to not follow the recipe and use stale matzo and then complain that I didn’t like the outcome, but this was so dense and hard to chew and generically sweet and I wasted a cup of nuts and 1/2 a cup of raw, local honey and felt bad about it. I threw it away. I’m going to stick to matzo brei and chocolate caramel crunch to use up the last three boxes of matzo.

Butternut Risotto. I still hate risotto, but it’s been a while since we’ve had it and Henry has been going through withdrawals. When we were picking out a birthday cookbook for him at the book store, he found one with a recipe for risotto and said, we need look no further! It was a shitty cookbook, though, and a bad recipe, so I told him I could just teach him how to make the butternut risotto he loves, and then we could get the pretty cookbook with the screwy melon cake. So Henry made this risotto. I set up the stool in front of the stove, and he used two hands to move ladlefuls of simmering stock into the rice and squash pot, and then stir it, repeat for 30 minutes. Halfway through he started to climb off his stool, announcing that he was tired of stirring and was going to go outside to play and I tilted my head back and laughed wickedly and said he had to stay and stir. In the end, I know he thought it was worth it. Look how he garnished it! With rosemary he chopped himself and onion blossoms from the garden. He ate three bowls of the stuff and was so proud. Andy and I ate a bowlful each. Henry did great, but we’re just so sick of the stuff. After the kids were in bed Andy went to Taco Bell and we had a second dinner, cuz we’re gross.

Turkey/Bacon/Avocado Sandwich. It doesn’t look like much, but this is the glamour-shot version of what I ate for dinner on Thursday. Which is to say, it’s a lie. Here’s what I really ate:

All the stuffing and 3/4 of a sandwich. This photo is still sort of a lie because I ate easily twice this amount of stove top stuffing. George was the one who had asked me to buy the stuff (I got to go grocery shopping by myself while Mary watched the kids!) so I made it for dinner. He said, after being asked repeatedly, that he definitely did not want a sandwich, he just wanted stuffing, but he always wants the opposite of whatever I end up doing, so once I got to the table he did want a sandwich. I selflessly gave him one quarter of mine. That’s all I could spare.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. I made a big batch of cupcakes and sent half of them to work with Andy and took the other half on our playdate. I came home with two cupcakes (there were 7 cupcake-eaters at the playdate) and promptly ate them. And Andy (who works with three other people) also came home with two, which means they hit those cupcakes pretty hard. But I ate the two he brought back home the next day, so I’m the reigning cupcake eating champion. Did you think this was going to be a cupcake logic problem? It has that setup, but is instead just a long boring story about how much I like cupcakes.

Focaccia with Tomatoes, Broccoli, and Pecorino. Another Hot Bread Kitchen recipe. It was good, but not as good as my favorite focaccia. It had a sort of egginess to it, even though there are no eggs in the dough, that reminded me of the bread at Schlotzsky’s. I brought it for lunch, to a family who just had their fourth baby, but the mom had made a feast for us that blew the focaccia out of the water. Columbian beans and rice, served in a pretty little bowl with little piles of tomatoes, chopped cilantro, and avocado around the edge and a perfect fried egg in the middle. It reminded me of bibimbap and I really really loved it. Here’s a recipe that’s sort of like what we ate.

Chilaquiles with Columbian Beans. I got to take some of those incredible beans home with me, and served them alongside chilaquiles from Hot Bread Kitchen. I was super full from eating all those cupcakes, but made the effort to pack this stuff in too- it was so good.

Flan. Carla, the mom who feeds her family of six and also my family, also sent me home with a pan full of flan. It was wobbly and creamy and felt real good in my mouth. Can I say that? I did it.

Pie Face. If you have been aspiring to be the best giver of gifts that children love and parents hate, you can give up right now, because my sister Joanna has this title in the bag. Exhibit A was the cat piano they sell at Target, which has settings to meow in place of playing regular piano sounds and also a full suite of terribly rewritten children’s songs all made over to be about cats, sung by a bunch of tone-deaf kids. If that wasn’t bad enough, there are also controls to speed up or slow down the tempo of these songs, which Henry does with relish, creating symphonies of discord with the many tools afforded by the cat piano. And for his birthday this year, Joanna gave Henry Pie Face, which Andy and Henry played for the first time last week. You put your face in a hole and wait to see if you’re going to have whipped cream hurled at you or not. As you can see, it was a hit!

Risotto Balls, Mozzarella Sticks, Salad. I had originally served myself two risotto balls and one mozzarella stick, but quickly saw that I would need to add a third ball. My site is already classifed as erotica by content control software programs after I linked to some mushroom porn last summer. Also, I was the only one who ate a salad, and I mostly just did it to save face with you guys.

Andy’s Adelaide  impression. This might win the prize for creepiest picture on my blog so far. It is posted here for no reason except that it was taken this week and why not.

Peach Pie, Gluten Free. We’re having a food52 pie-making meet up on Tuesday, and we’re making peach pie, so I wanted to do a test run. I made this one for a belated Mother’s Day brunch at Joanna’s house. It was all bubbly and hot in this picture, but it settled down and the sauce thickened up nicely as it cooled. A good pie.

Carrot “Noodle” Salad. Henry made this carrot salad for the brunch, from his new cookbook. It tasted mostly like a pile of carrots, but that’s not so bad, right? Needs more lemon juice and oil.

Extra Crispy Roasted Potatoes. And I made some shockingly crispy potatoes. I followed the recipe in The Food Lab cookbook, which is not exactly like the linked recipe. Only 3 pounds of potatoes are used, tossed with the same amount of fat, and roasted at 450, not 500. The recipe worked, like every recipe I’ve made from the Food Lab, exactly as written. I had my doubts about these potatoes not sticking to the pan- it seemed like a glue-y mess when I dumped them on there, but at the 25 minutes mark, the spatula slipped right under them, and 25 minutes after that they slid easily off the sheet pan into my serving platter. They were great.

Pesto Pepper Pizza. For dinner that night, Henry made us two of these pizzas from his cookbook. We made the pizza dough and the pesto, chopped the peppers and shredded the cheese together, and Henry rolled out the pizzas and assembled them himself. Except that he dumped all the peppers into a heap in the middle of the pizza and I asked him to spread them out a bit. I’m going to give myself a pat on the back for controlling my type-A-ness while watching him roll out the dough, though. I loved this pizza! The pesto/pepper/mozzarella combination is a good one.

Later that night, after doing very little on my blog and instead reading some of The Cuckoo’s Calling, a book my mom gave me before George was born that I’m just getting to now, I went into the computer room to say goodnight to Andy and he had his headphones on and looked at me and then looked back at his game to pause it. This infuriated me. Why couldn’t he just take his headphones off for a second? Why did he have to take the time to pause the game? I’m getting my period. Wish my family and people in line with me at the grocery store or wildflower center luck in the coming week.