I write these posts by starting somewhere in the middle with the stories I most want to tell you, and then jumping around randomly and filling in the gaps as I muster up the brainpower to think of something to say about each meal and day. This means that there is no flow to my writing, no order, jokes, or plot lines that carry through from start to finish. You have likely already noticed this. This week, my  first stories were about the night I got my bedroom back, for a few brief and shining hours, while Henry and George tried to sleep in his room together. About Henry’s sudden and intense interest in cooking again, and about me getting into a bidding war on a stranger’s behalf over an acoustic guitar signed by Willie Nelson. By the time the rest of this week’s paragraphs were filled in, I was sitting at 3500 words and still had to come back up to the top to write this godforsaken part. So I did and here it is. Here’s what we ate this week.

The Outlaw Burger and Billie’s Cheese Fries from Billie Jean’s Burger Pub: A half pound burger topped with chopped brisket, caramelized onions, cheddar cheese, dill pickles, and barbecue sauce.  The fries are topped with smoked brisket chili and a fried egg.

Billie Jean’s has been on my radar for a while now, ever since South Austin Foodie wrote about it last September. It’s completely adorable. The building is new and modern and spacious. I don’t know why, but I pictured this place in a sort of grease-stained hole-in-the-wall. Actually, I do know why. I think it’s because of the clip art at the top of their website. But the place isn’t clip art-y at all. It’s pretty and shiny and the food was outrageous. We loved everything. They’ve got fun cocktails and there’s a Geeks Who Drink event there every Tuesday night, so I really want to go back.

Monday was a good day all around. Andy had his first day at his new job and loved it (huzzah!) and my sister and I went to the Wildflower Center with our parents and the kids. It was a cool grey day and no one was there, which makes my anti-social heart soar. And we got to eat at the cafe, since my parents were there and willing to pay for stuff, which we never had before, always lugging around coolers full of hummus and pirate’s booty instead. There’s nothing flashy about the food there- it sort of feels like the cafeteria at an old folks’ home- but with decent food. I had a cup of baked potato soup and a half a turkey sandwich that suited me just fine. We hung out in the Little House, where there’s a wonderful library of nature-based children’s books, and my dad read to the kids for a long time. It was really sweet.

The Chuychanga with Deluxe Tomatillo Sauce from Chuy’s. On Sunday night, my mom and dad went out to dinner with some old friends to La Condesa and had a wonderful time with them. They were split on their evaluation of the restaurant though. My mom thought everything was incredible, and my dad just wasn’t into it. The plates are tiny and expensive and you have to share everything. He loves chile rellanos but what you get at La Condesa isn’t the archetypal battered one stuffed with picadillo- it’s an unbattered red chile filled with some masa-y substance. My mom said it was delicious, but my dad said it made him pine for an oval-plate Tex Mex joint where you have a pool of beans on one side and a little salad that’s gone limp from sitting too long in the other corner of the super-hot plate. I knew just where we should go to scratch this itch: Chuy’s. It’s a chain now, no longer the funky independent joint on Barton Springs, but honestly the food tastes exactly the same, which is to say completely delicious, as it did twenty years ago. It’s hard to finish the chuychanga- a deep fried green chile chicken burrito served in a puddle of sour cream-enriched tomatillo sauce- but I pulled it off. And then we ate sopapillas for dessert, served warm in a puddle of honey, and I threw up on the table. I didn’t actually, but I was really full.

Chorizo, Potato, and Avocado Taco from Casa Alde. And then we woke up the next morning and drove to Buda for more greasy Tex Mex. You can tell that I was starting to feel the effects of eating burgers and chimichangas and cheese fries every day because I showed as much restraint as I could muster and ordered one taco instead of two. And then we went to the pool at my parents hotel and swam for around 4 hours. The damn thing was heated! We were so sad we waited until the day before they left to check it out, because it was amazing and the kids were thrilled to be there. This pool (at the Omni near I35 and Highway 71 if you’re curious) is huge and warm and is both indoor and outdoor- you get to swim under a little rubber flap to go from the inside part to the outside part. And there are fancy locker rooms and lots of fluffy towels. It was so great. I got a bad sunburn, and little red-headed Henry did too, in the patches of skin I’d missed near his hairline and right under his eyes. He had a sweet crazy streaky look from the red splotches on his pale skin for a few days, but it’s better now.

Burgers, Helen’s Potato Salad, Buttery Corn on the Cob, Greek Salad. We were hungry and tired after swimming all day, and the idea was floated to just order a couple of huge pizzas and call it a night, but I had gone three nights without cooking and was going through withdrawals. The kids and I ran to Central Market and bought the stuff for this dinner, and then Helen came over and helped me make it. I boiled the corn and the grilled the burgers; she made the greek and potato salads. We also had a big pile of watermelon and grapes and everyone ate all the things. I’m never hungrier than I am after swimming. The food tastes better too. Oh, and Helen’s got a nifty trick for potato salad- she adds little cubes of soft cheese- in this case monterrey jack- which is as delicious as it sounds.

Apple Crisp, Berry Crisp. I also made a couple of fruit crisps, both of which came together in no time and used up berries and apples left over from Henry’s birthday party. I had leftover salted caramel from Henry’s birthday cake too, so we spooned that over the apple crisp. It was a good scene.

The Food Lab’s Extra Cheese-y Grilled Cheese. We spent my parents’ last day in town swimming in that pool for another 3 hours. We had such a wonderful visit with them, and it was great to get to spend so much time with everyone together. We ate a lot of crazy food and ran all over town doing fun activities and the whole thing was exhausting and fulfilling. On the last night, at dinner, we talked about our favorite parts of the 9-day trip. I picked swimming, but after further reflection I think it was just the times we were all gathered around the same table. Even better if it was my table we were gathered around, eating food that Helen and I had made. I love that. Thanks for coming, mom and dad. I sure do love you.

They left for the airport in the afternoon and the boys and I came home and did nothing. I didn’t have a lot of food in the house, but I did have some shitty white bread leftover from our barbecue dinner last week, so Henry and I made this 18 minute grilled cheese sandwich from the Food Lab. It took forever to finish the thing, partly because I was letting Henry do most of the work, but mostly because you griddle both sides of the bread and then drop the finished sandwich on a bed of finely-grated parmesan and griddle it again, so you get a crusty salty cheese crust on the outside. We made a regular grilled cheese for comparisons sake and Henry said he preferred that one. The soft sandwich bread was so sweet that the finished sandwich tasted like a grilled cheese donut to me, so I’d call myself a fan.

The Food Lab’s Best Egg Salad. Andy and I ate egg salad sandwiches instead of grilled cheese (except I did eat all the crusts of Henry’s sandwiches) because we’re up to our ears in eggs from our chickens. The linked recipe isn’t quite the same as the one in the cookbook, but it’s close. The eggs in the book are hard boiled with a science-packed technique instead of the weirdo steamed version in the link. You bring a precise amount of water to a boil and drop the eggs in to shock them, so they’ll be easy to peel (a trick I learned from my mom who learned it from the Pioneer Woman) but Lopez-Alt adds another layer by only boiling the eggs for 30 seconds before dumping in 12 ice cubes, which lowers the water temperature to mimic the way you’d normally boil eggs, with a cold start, so the whites are creamier and the yolks are cooked through properly. He’s so smart. It worked perfectly. Also, he instructs you to crush the peeled eggs with your hands instead of chopping them for the salad. This makes so much more sense than the dumb way I used to do it- slicing the egg with one of those egg slicer gadgets on three different axes. Other than that though, the egg salad didn’t taste much better than any other version you’ve had. And I felt like it needed more acid, from vinegar or mustard or both, for tang. And now I feel certain that everyone has stopped reading this interminable paragraph about egg salad, so I’d better stop.

At bedtime that night, Henry got it in his head that he wanted to try sleeping with George and George agreed! And then he backed out almost as quickly. But I really wanted them to try it, to see if maybe George would sleep through the night if I didn’t climb into bed with him halfway through the night with my irresistible milk musk. So I lay on the floor next to Henry’s bed and held George’s hand while Henry spoke to George gently about how much fun it would be for them to sleep in the same bed, and not to be scared because he would be right there next to him the whole time, and then said, “I really love you, George.” Which is, as far as I can remember, the first time Henry has ever told his brother he loved him unprompted. I lay there in the dark, on the play-doh-crusted carpet, and beamed that I got to listen in on this conversation. I eventually had to nurse George to sleep, but then I left the room and closed the door on my two sleeping boys. I rejoiced in having my bedroom back for the night- I cleaned out months worth of clutter and leaning stacks of Berenstain Bear books that had been piled next to the bed and I read a book for my own self with the lamp on instead of with my phone’s flashlight face down on the sheets to give me enough illumination to read without being too bright to risk waking George. I woke up at 1:40 in the morning to find George shaking a still-sound-asleep Henry and saying “Mama, why won’t you talk to me?” I scooped him up and brought him back to bed so he could have some milk and we could go back to sleep.  It was the most successful a failed experiment could be.

The Forest Feast for Kids. Another something new for Henry (is this part of a 5 year old renaissance?)- he’s interested in cooking again. As a baby and young toddler, Henry did everything with me in the kitchen. Somewhere along the way his all-encompassing fear of the smoke alarm made him leave the kitchen all together. But he’s back! He got a $5 birthday gift card from the Book People birthday club and decided he wanted to spend it on a cookbook for himself. We looked through all the kid cookbooks they had and fell completely in love with this one. It’s so beautiful, and the food all looks delicious. She includes a section on fun drinks (grape fizz, watermelon smoothie), which is something Henry loves to tinker with, and a section in the back for parties the kids can create, like a Color Party with blueberry sparklers, yellow caprese bites, asparagus pastry straws, red salad, and sweet potato pizza. I love it all. Henry wants to cook dinner at least once a week until he’s cooked his way through every recipe in this book, which sounds just perfect to me.

Carrot and Zucchini Ribbon Pasta. This hit all the high points for a kid recipe- Henry got to use the spiralizer on the zucchini and carrot, cut thyme from the garden, and then eat what was essentially a glorified pile of buttered noodles. He ate three huge helpings and said at the end that he felt very proud of himself. Eek! He’s a darling. I liked it too!

Melon Cake. This recipe was love at first sight for Henry. So I bought the three melons, organic, because that’s all they had at Central Market, and with the yogurt and almonds that meant that this dessert cost around $20 to make- yikes. And you guys, the recipe has problems. Or else there is some riddle here that I can’t wrap my head around. Look at the recipe above and follow along with me, if you will. You’re supposed to cut a 4-inch section from the center of each of the three melons, then stack these three center sections on top of each other and cut off the rinds, right? Well that’s completely insane. We tried it (we used a ruler and everything), and ended up with a (obviously) foot-high tower of melon that looked nothing like the picture in the book and which would have been completely impossible to cut and eat slices of. So we cut each of the 4-inch sections into 1-inch sections and made four melon cakes that matched the photo in the book (except we ignored the instructions and put the watermelon on the bottom because it didn’t have a hole in it like the other two did (where the seeds were removed) and doesn’t that make more sense?). So either the recipe is horribly flawed as written, or else I misunderstood what it was telling me to do entirely. It’s easy enough to figure out what you’re supposed to do to turn melons into a stack filled with yogurt, but I’m trying to teach Henry how to use a recipe, so it felt shitty to have to ignore and change the instructions. Everyone loved the finished product, though.

A boy and his chicken. (It’s not actually his chicken but I felt the caption would be diminished in the explanation of this chicken’s provenance.)

George, not at all impressed with a baby goat.

Vietnamese Caramelized Ginger Chicken, Stir Fried Baby Kale, Rice. We spent much of the day at SpringShine, a festival and fundraiser for Whole Life Learning Center, a sweet little hippie school that my niece and my friend Christy’s daughter both attend. In addition to this pretty great petting zoo there were bouncy houses, tons of crafts and games, and shockingly great food. Apparently some of my favorite Austin chefs have kids that attend the school- there was chana masala and samosas from G’Raj Mahal, an African sweet potato and chickpea curry from Cazamance, and lots of other delicious stuff. There was also a silent auction and therein lies the tale. Christy had a million jobs to do and roles to fill at this event- she floated between tables filling in wherever she was needed, often manning two stations at once, and barely had time to sit down or eat. In addition to this, a family she knew had seen and fell for an item in the silent auction- a guitar autographed by Willie Nelson- but they were leaving and wouldn’t be around at the time the auction closed to make sure they had the top bid. They asked Christy to do it for them, to bid until they got the thing with basically no upper limit on what they were willing to spend, and she’s super nice, so she said she would. With 10 minutes left before the auction ended, Christy was heading up the henna booth, so I offered to write down the bid for her. The top bid had been $200 for hours, so I didn’t think this would be a big deal- I put down a bid of $225 for these people (the minimum bid increment) and then realized that the people who had been hanging out in the corner by the guitar were gunning for this thing too. She bid $250, I $275, and back and forth, super awkwardly, with a few asides from the other bidder about it not being cool to bid for someone who wasn’t here, and that she was bidding for her daughter, who was hoping for the guitar, both of which made me feel sweaty and red-faced) until we got to $500 and I figured I should go ask Christy what to do. We called the family I was bidding for, and they said I could go up to $700, so I went back in, with two minutes left in the auction, and did more stressful back-and-forth bidding. When the auction closed, I had just written the last bid of $700 and won the damn thing for this rich family in absentia. I felt like a huge asshole. But it did raise more money for the school, so that’s something, right? Christy texted me later to share that the man who donated the autographed guitar actually had two, so the other family paid their top bid and got one too! So all is right with the world, except for the nervous sweat stains in my tank top.

The chicken is from A Bird in the Hand and it was delicious, but I couldn’t find a recipe for it online. You marinate the chicken overnight in fish sauce and buckets of grated ginger and then cook it with onions in a stock-y caramel lime sauce that’s pretty glorious. And the leftovers are perfect to use in another recipe in the book, Chicken and Pumpkin Laksa, a coconut soup I’ve never heard of. We’re having that later this week.

Mother’s Day Breakfast Tacos from Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ. Andy wins all the prizes for Mother’s Day. He took the kids to Valentina’s and got me these majestic barbecue breakfast tacos (they were handing out sweet baby roses for moms too, so I got some of those), and bought me the Hot Bread Kitchen cookbook too. HBK won the Piglet cookbook competition this year, and this was the first time I got to have a look inside of it- it’s engrossing, and I want to make absolutely everything in it. It’s really cool because there are recipes for meals that go with the breads you bake, so it’s a more well-rounded cookbook than the other bread baking ones I’ve seen. And the breads are from all over the world- there’s pita, tortillas made from your own nixtamal (provided you can get your hands on field corn that’s fit for human consumption and calcium hydroxide), injera, lavash, and so many others. There’s a beautiful focaccia-like bread called nan-e barbari, which is used in a muffuletta recipe a few pages later. And, and! There’s a Passover buttercrunch brittle to make “if you were to find yourself with boxes and boxes” of leftover matzo, which is me, exactly me, after giving up on the unleavened bread ritual 4 days into Passover. After breakfast Andy took the kids to the park and I got to garden and work on this blog post and talk to my mom. Then I ate a bowl of froot loops and a slice of peanut butter toast for lunch because it’s mother’s day and I can do what I want to. (I love, and have since I was a kid, the combination of a fruity cereal like Trix or Froot Loops alongside a slice of peanut butter toast. It just works.)

The Food Lab’s Best Corn Chowder, Avocado Toasts. I’ve written too many words already, but I will say that this really is the best corn chowder. The corn stock is simmered with fennel seeds that permeate the finished soup in a really beautiful way. The Food Lab is 50 goddamned dollars but the recipes are all so successful that I think I might have to own it.

And that’s all the things! I’m so happy I got this post done on Sunday and I’m back on track for being a bonafide blogger again! Except I still have to go back up to the top and think of something to say in that first paragraph. It’s probably not gonna go well. Let’s see! I know that you’ve already seen, because you start at the top and not the bottom, but I don’t, so the whole thing really is a mystery to me. Until next week!

Henry has been having bad dreams. The subject matter is sweet and interesting, but I have been sworn to secrecy so I can’t share the details with you. We’ve done everything we can think of to help him get past his fears- we wrote the story of the dream down on a piece of paper and set it on fire, we’ve learned about what happens in your brain while you’re sleeping and about the science of dreams, we’ve talked about the fear itself and of what would happen if his dream came true. None of these things really helped all that much. We were at the library a couple of weeks ago and in need of new novels to read before bed. I always look in the bluebonnet award winners section first, and found a book called Nightmares! and I thought, maybe this will help! It didn’t. It’s about nightmares that become real and can actually kill you. So we stopped reading it and have just been reading Shel Silverstein and Berenstain Bear books before bed instead, and things seem to be better. All this is to say, I really want to finish this Nightmares! book. I want to read it instead of writing this blog post. It’s not super great, but it’s a fun and easy young adult story about witchy things and I want to know what happens. Also I’m tired. We spent the weekend celebrating Henry’s 5th birthday with a do-whatever-you-want day  on Saturday and a birthday party on Sunday, both of which were a lot of work. And my parents are in town from Portland and we’ve been living it up with lots of outings and dinners out, which means I haven’t been cooking that much and I don’t have much to show you. All of these things together made me not start this blog post on Sunday, even though the kids were both asleep by 7:30, and made me not want to write it on Monday either. I tried for a while, but then I gave up and finished Nightmares! instead. So here we go on attempt three to write this thing! S’gonna be great. Here’s what we ate this week.

Chorizo Tacos, Rice and Beans, Guacamole, Mango Salsa. A welcome feast for my parents! Helen let me take a picture of her plate because she’s so good at making stuff look pretty. My plate looked like total shit compared to this. You can tell it’s Helen’s plate because of the two varieties of cheese in the upper right quadrant. Also, no meat. She went for the soyrizo I put on the table instead of the far more delicious chorizo that was also available.

I was gonna try to hang with a semi-legitimate Passover regimen this year where I didn’t eat pork or chametz (any bread-like thing that’s not matzo) for the full 8 day run of the holiday. I made it until my parents got into town on Tuesday and we had Tarka for dinner and I ate a lot of naan and Helen’s homemade chocolate chip cookies for dessert. With that sacrilege under my belt I decided to abandon the notion entirely and just serve a steaming pile of crispy pork for dinner on Wednesday with a fat stack of flour tortillas and more chocolate chip cookies too.

Food52 Potluck Picnic: Broccoli Salad with Bacon and Raisins, Watermelon Salad with Tomatoes and Feta, Seven Layer Dip, Tabbouleh, Ham and Cheese Scones, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Fruit, Probably Other Stuff That Wouldn’t Fit in the Frame. There’s no picnic like a food52 picnic. There were six of us and enough food for at least twice that many people, all of it delicious. Also, I love these ladies. We talked about the best place to get great feta in Austin (Phoenicia), back-seat driving, and about how we develop recipes (I’m including myself in this ‘we’ even though it’s been two years since I’ve written a recipe). Most of us do it by making something once and then tweaking the ingredients or instructions when we write the recipe to try to correct some of the problems we had. But some enterprising folks, like the genius lady behind the bundt cake pictured below, make a thing half a dozen times to ensure it’s right. I admire the hell out of that, but what do you do with all those less-than-perfect bundt cakes? I feel like I don’t have the room for error (time-wise or money-wise) to shoot for perfection, but oh am I grateful to those that do!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, The Chocolate Chip Cookies I Already Talked About, Whole Orange Bundt Cake with Five Spice Streusel. Barbara (drbabs) has a real way with cookies- these oatmeal ones were outstanding- perfectly spiced and just the right amount of crisp and chewy. And Nancy made this bundt cake, which captured everyone’s hearts. Most of all Andy’s. Nancy brought tupperware for us to take some home and Andy said it was one of the most delicious cakes he’d ever eaten.

Blueberry Buttermilk Cakes. These were for our friend Sean’s birthday. We love Sean. He took Andy under his wing at Andy’s first job out of college and they’ve been friends, and occasionally colleagues, ever since. And Sean is the guy who got Andy this sweet new job after the other one went south a few weeks ago so, yeah, he gets a pile of cupcakes.

Leftover Soyrizo Tacos. All the real chorizo got eaten on Wednesday but we still had a big soft mass of untouched soyrizo, so the kids and I ate it in griddled taco-form. I bought Frieda’s soyrizo from Central Market because it was the only kind I saw, but it didn’t hold a candle to the stuff Amanda put on top of those molletes from a week ago. Hers was crumbly and greasy and exactly like chorizo in all the best ways and this stuff was like a chunky red paste that got thin black sheets of char on its underside instead of browning and which stayed pasty instead of crumbling, in spite of my repeated jabbings with a wooden spoon.

On Friday we went to Pinballz for lunch and I ate a giant salad and all the pizza crusts from Henry and George’s pizzas and all of Andy’s leftover fries. I didn’t take a picture. And then we went home and everyone came over a few hours later and we ate another huge meal- this time barbecue from Terry Black’s. I didn’t take a picture of this either. We’ve eaten out so much with my parents while they’ve been in town and I’ve had this weird hang up about not photographing those meals because I didn’t cook them, so I feel like they shouldn’t be included on the blog. But Helen reminded me that this blog is only kind of about home-cooking and more about how I spent the last week, with the food pictures in the mix to provide a sort of framework. So, sorry I can’t show you my big salad and pizza crusts. I’ll take pictures of more stuff next time.

Salted Caramel-Toffee Icebox Cake. When I was flipping through The Everyday Baker for the first time a few months ago, Henry caught a glimpse of this cake and asked if he could have it for his birthday. I was happy to oblige- I liked all the words in the title very much. Icebox cakes are just cookies layered with whipped cream and allowed to soften, but this adds several layers of outrageousness to that simple formula. First you make a caramel and add enough salt to make it taste salty. Easy enough. Then you chill it and then beat half the cold caramel with cream to make an insane salted caramel whipped cream, which you pour on top of 40 chocolate wafer cookies and let chill for a minimum of 36 hours. The one in the book is so pretty (see the photo in the link), and mine was completely hideous. I had trouble getting the whipped cream between the cookies so I didn’t get the pretty stripes you see in the book photo and the cookies were naked and exposed on the edges of the cake too. The taste of the thing was intense. Too sugary and too rich. I ate my plateful anyway.

Henry hasn’t played Candy Crush in six months, but he saw a Candy Crush-branded snow cone maker at Target (this product wraps all his favorite things into one $29 box) and it reignited his passion for the subject matter. Helen and Jordan bought him the thing and an armload of syrups for his birthday and Helen designed a tech-free version of the game to go with it- that’s the little squares you see face-down in front of him in the above picture. It’s one of his favorite birthday presents. Also, he’s had snow cones every day since his birthday.

Dessert at Uchiko. When Henry turned 4 we spent his actual birthday doing all of his favorite things. Andy took him to the black light bowling alley in the UT Student Union, I took him to Uchiko for a taste of the best sushi in town (he had come to love grocery store avocado rolls and I wanted to show him what the best stuff tasted like), we hung out at Butler Park, and then went to Amy’s Ice Cream. For his 5th birthday, Henry asked if we could do all the same stuff, exactly what we did for his 4th birthday, again. With the additions of cherry pop tarts for breakfast and fancy $5 buttered noodles for lunch. So we did. My parents joined us at Uchiko and we lived it up- Henry and George both loved the sushi, and we got three desserts too. The fried milk dessert at the top, the $3 happy hour special dessert at the bottom (jasmine cream with a cilantro granita and pineapple which came out with a little glass dome on top so it looked like a terrarium), plus a cool olive gelato dessert with lemon curd and chocolate, which I didn’t take a picture of. I thought after all that we might be able to scrap the Amy’s ice cream idea, but Henry was resolute that we follow through with the plan. We played in the park for a while after dinner and then went to Phil’s Ice House where the kids played on the playground and mostly ignored the cup of ice cream we bought. Henry had a very happy day.

Henry’s Party Spread. And then we had his birthday party the next day. It was a lot. Andy’s of the don’t-make-a-big-deal-about-birthdays persuasion and I fall somewhere past the the far end of the other side of that spectrum. I go way over the top. I tried to rein it in a bit this year by only inviting family and the few friends we see almost every week, but still, it was a lot of work to fill the table with food after staying up late not-eating ice cream with the kids.

The view from the other side of the table. You probably didn’t need to see this.

Mini Gluten Free Corn Dogs. Henry has recently fallen for Sonic’s corn dog wacky pack, so I wanted to make mini corn dogs using cocktail weenies for his birthday party. I was gonna put ’em on sticks but realized the day of that I didn’t have the toothpicks or the bamboo skewers I thought I did, so I just rolled the little weenies ( 😐 ) in Cup4Cup and tried to get enough batter to cling to them so the sausage-y bits wouldn’t be exposed. These were ugly but delicious. Henry didn’t eat any of them, and instead he ate two Sonic corn dogs that Helen bought for him immediately after the party ended, with a big buffet of homemade food still sitting on the table. The heart wants what it wants.

Tortellini Pasta Salad with Pesto, Olives, and Parmesan. A perennial Henry favorite. And mine too. I did him a solid by not putting any extraneous vegetables in the mix (artichoke hearts, roasted tomato or zucchini) like I normally would. Nothing but carbs and olives.

Deviled Eggs. Man these are so ugly. I boiled only enough eggs to fill up this platter, and fully half of them had the yolk pressed against the shell, which means you’ve got a paper-thin layer of white that just rips clean off when you peel the things and I’m left with mutant half-eggs that I nestled in the platter and piped filling on top of anyway. I begged the early-arrivals to eat the ugliest ones so the other party goers wouldn’t see them and judge me for them.

Vegetables, Ranch Dip, Hummus. Nobody likes celery. Everything else got eaten but I still have a tupperware full of untouched celery sticks in the fridge.

 

Fruit. Nothing to add here.

The theme for this party was balloons and numbers. Henry wanted to have They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the 123s album playing during the party (we forgot to do this) and have a series of increasingly ridiculous balloon activities to perform. Regular old water balloons were first. We bought two packs of those outrageously-expensive-but-worth-the-cost water balloons that promise that you can fill 100 in 60 seconds and they were enjoyed immensely and all used up in almost the amount of time it took to fill them. Next, we tried to fill water balloons with watercolor-tinted liquid via squirt guns and throw those at a big canvas. They were difficult to fill and nearly impossible to pop, given the piddly amount of liquid I was able to squirt into each balloon, but we had fun trying.

I mean, come on with this baby! She’s too good!

Our next and final balloon experiment was also a fun failure. We wanted to fill water balloons with whipped cream for reasons unspecified. We didn’t know if it would work and didn’t know what we’d do with the things if it did, but we tried anyway. The generic redi-whip can pushed out all its air into the first 5 balloons, along with a little bit of whipped cream, and then left a can full of liquid cream to be sadly dribbled into the balloons for the kids who weren’t pushy enough to ask for one of the first ones. Still, everyone thought it was pretty funny. George’s hair was crisp with dried cream for the rest of the day. And actually still was as of this writing on Tuesday because they haven’t had a bath yet. Full disclosure.

My mom snapped a series of these photos for me and I look creepy in every one of them.

 

Strawberry Buttermilk Cakes, Salted Brown Butter Cocoa Crispy Treats. And thus ended Henry’s birthday weekend extravaganza. This kid has been the center of my universe for the last 5 years. We still spend nearly every one of his waking minutes together and I’m so happy I get to do so. He’s an amazing little person. In turns intense and sentimental, cerebral and physical, inventive and methodical. He loves the garden, and the chickens, and the fireflies, and I love to watch him explore them. He loves to be quizzed on math problems while being pushed on the swing and he has quietly learned to read sometime in the past year. He remembers dates with stunning accuracy- reminding us when Adelaide is due for her flea medicine, when baby Simran will be two months old, when we last went to Pinballz or to Amanda’s house, or flew on an airplane. He feels enormously tall and big-footed and heavy and also so small and frightened of toilets that flush automatically and of sleeping without his mama or papa. Today he ate a pizza at a movie theatre. One by one, he ate each slice down to the crust and then put the crust back in place around the edge of the pan until he was left with a circle of perfect crusts. He’s a really neat kid and I marvel at him every day.

Andy got a job and my uterus is okay! It has an extra-thick luxury lining, as it turns out, which doesn’t matter to anybody. Andy’s job is very exciting. It’s in south Austin, which  will cut his commute in half, at least, and he’ll be working with great friends in a small studio doing video game programming on lots of cool, varied projects. I’m so happy for him. Bad news for him because he likes working and good news for me because I like having him home all the time is that he doesn’t start until May 2, so I get him for another week! And we got chickens! We moved the coop from our neighbors house to ours with the help of Dustin and Jordan, our burliest friends, on Sunday morning, paid them for their kindness with foot long chili cheese coneys from Sonic (I got chili cheese tots- kosher for Passover!), gathered together for our Passover Seder, and then wrangled the chickens from our neighbor’s yard after dinner. On Monday morning we woke up with the sun to try to finish the barely-started fence around the coop where we had stuffed the chickens the night before. I didn’t want to let them out of the coop until we had the chicken run finished because these birds can fly over a six foot fence and would flap their fat little bodies back over to my neighbor’s place a few houses down the street and then we’d have to wrangle them all over again. So Andy and I worked as fast as we could, the chickens squawking angrily at us from inside the coop the whole time, until we finally had the fence sealed up and could let them out. Henry is enamored with them. He collected six eggs from the nest boxes yesterday and kept opening the carton to gently cradle them in his hands, one at a time. This morning we checked again and he decided to just stand in the run with them for a while, thrilling as they took sips of water from the big bowl or buried their bellies in the dirt bath area. I’m happy to be back in the chicken farming business again too (she says, one day in). They’re fun animals and I love the backyard eggs. I am awkward and bad at saying meaningful things about life, but I did want to say thank you so much to all of you for your support last week when things felt scary and uncertain. It helped me so much, even though it turned out nothing was wrong in the first place, to feel so connected to all of you. Would it be weird to say I love you? Yes? I do, though. Here’s what we ate this week.

Classic Diner-Style Smashed Cheeseburgers with Fry Sauce. I got my blood work done. The lady called me back by yelling “Arr-yell-ee?” into the waiting room and I thought about correcting her on the way back but then thought it didn’t matter, but then the first question she asked me was to say my full name and birth date so I got to say it anyway without looking like a douche bag. She was a nice lady. So was Fabiola, the lady who did my pelvic ultrasound and trans-vaginal ultrasound, which is taken vis-a-vis the vagina by a large rod. The room was dark and quiet though, and I stared at the grid between the ceiling tiles and no kids were climbing on me so it wasn’t so bad. After that, I came home and we all went to the library, and then to the park, and then to Helen’s house to play a bit, and then home to play some more and I felt completely exhausted. Emotionally exhausted too. And I have very few emotions! Andy and I joke (sad jokes) that the kids are going to be emotionally stunted because the only ones we ever demonstrate are happy (sometimes!), frustrated (often), and angry (not gonna quantify this one). But I knew I must be emotionally exhausted because I almost cried, I thought about crying, while listening to Rogers and Hammerstein’s In My Own Little Corner, because isn’t it sad that the whole world doesn’t open its arms up to Cinderella except in her daydreams? I’m disgusted with my weepiness.

These burgers are legitimately the best I’ve ever made. They’re from The Food Lab. I was supposed to serve them with the toppings on the bottom and forgot, and doing so probably would have solved my only beef with them (a pun.), which was that the bun got soggy really quickly. If I had put the iceberg lettuce on the bottom, it probably would have acted as a barrier and kept the bun dry. Side note- I think this was the first time in my life I have ever purchased iceberg lettuce. Henry kept insisting that it was cabbage. Side note to the side note- the burger without cheese or fry sauce is Henry’s, and upon serving it to him he asked that the lettuce and tomato be removed as well. He enjoyed his dry burger, though! Moving on. I loved the fry sauce and the onions between the cheese and the burger- they steam a little in there and lose some intensity. It’s a great recipe.

Roasted Butternut Squash Curry with Garlic and Tomatoes, Naan. Fabiola said I’d have my ultrasound results in two days, and I didn’t want to spend any more time worrying about this stuff, so I decided to finally try to decorate a wall in our house that has been blank, save for literally 45 nail holes where I attempted and failed to install a gallery wall, for months. Andy offered to take the kids to parkour (the greatest gift of all time) and I planned to make dinner while they were out so I could burn the naan as much as I wanted and not have to worry about the smoke alarm scaring Henry, but first I went to Target to look at all the things I could buy for my decorating project. I spent forever there but didn’t buy anything, and then I had to race home to actually finish the naan before Andy got back at six, which was tricky. After the kids went to bed, I spent all night thinking about this wall, and texting about it with Helen. Helen was super supportive and talked with me about decorating minutiae for hours. I know, and she knew, that I was doing what Brene Brown (haven’t read the book because I found the back cover quotation to be a turn off, but I’m absorbing some of the messages through osmosis) calls “numbing out.” I took on a meaningless project and obsessed over it so I wouldn’t have to think about the probable huge tumor that was going to explode inside my body at any moment. But I don’t feel bad about it. I’d much rather do something, anything, than spend more time  worrying about stuff I can’t control.

Ham, Cheese, and Leek Scones, Wedge Salad. The next morning George had his first teeth cleaning at the dentist’s office, and he was so dear in that big chair- so serious and polite- that my heart broke a little with his smallness. Then we met Helen at Target and I bought a few things for the decorating project and we played in the toy aisles for 40 minutes and then we went to Taco Bell. The kids have been to one, but it’s been a long time. Henry asked for a bean burrito and ate the whole thing, so I asked him if he’d liked it. He said “not especially, but I didn’t want it to go to waste.” Fair enough. George asked for a crunchy taco and then ate my seven-layer burrito instead, so I ate his taco. I have refused to eat anything with meat in it from Taco Bell since I was in high school but parenthood changes a person. I thought the taco was incredibly delicious. George napped on the way home and was up past midnight (the horror). In between these things the kids spent a long time catching fireflies in the backyard and we ate this completely bizarre dinner of wedge-shaped items. Ham, cheese, and leek scones from the Violet Bakery Cookbook, which are pretty good but contain two fulls cups of yogurt which gives them a tangy quality I didn’t love. I’ve got a half-dozen of them in the freezer to eat at some point. The wedge salad was to use up the iceberg lettuce from our burgers and was from The Food Lab. It was so hard to eat, but it tasted pretty good if you could get a bit of each component balanced on your fork and into your mouth. We all struggled with this. Yes, I did serve the kids giant wedge salads. They ate the bacon but left just about everything else.

Sloppy Joes. Thursday! Mary day! I still hadn’t heard about my ultrasound and I had finished decorating that wall so my brain needed to know the answer or find something else to fixate on. I called the doctor’s office and the lady said they hadn’t received the results yet, but that she’d call and then call me back. I left the kids with Mary and went out to lunch with my friend Erin and ate delicious sushi and talked about all the people we used to hate at work- it was the best. And then it was after noon, and my doctor’s office closes at noon on Thursdays so I figured I wouldn’t hear anything until the next day. I came home and ground 6.5 pounds of venison with my meat grinder (thanks, Helen and Jordan!) for Mary, who paid me in still more venison and by watching my kids for hundreds of hours for no pay. I was pressed for time for dinner after going shopping for Passover food and had hamburger buns to use up after our burger dinner, so I just made sloppy joes with lots of ketchup and brown sugar. They were a hit, obviously.

I cooked a lot of stuff on Friday but forgot to take a single picture of anything. I made those awesome granola bars, a big pot of Mexican rice, and brought stuff to make quesadillas to Joanna’s house at Blue Earth Farm, where we got to watch three happy grunting little piglets eat papaya and watch their honey bees gather nectar from the millions of wildflowers that cover their ten acres of land- it’s a gorgeous place. I asked Helen and Joanna whether it was rude or not for me to show up at someone else’s place with a full lunch. Does it look like I think the host could not or would not feed us? We thought maybe it did. Still, everyone liked the rice! While we were there, I thought I would call my doctor’s office again, and that’s when I noticed a missed call and message from Thursday- how did I miss this?! It was my gynocologist, calling to say that everything looked just fine, that my uterine lining was thick but that’s ok, that weirdness with my cycle (I won’t get into this on my food blog where I have already discussed trans-vaginal ultrasound rods) could probably be explained because I’m still nursing George and that gums up the works. I felt instantly relieved and instantly judgmental of myself for getting so carried away with worry over nothing. Still, I was so grateful for the good news.

Matzo Brei. I’ve had a giant 5 pound box of matzo in my kitchen for the last three weeks, and every morning I’ve looked at it and thought about making matzo brei for breakfast, but I made myself wait for the first morning of Passover because I didn’t want to be sick of it before the week of eating matzo started. Oh but it is delicious! Like Jewish migas. I like the savory version with tons and tons of black pepper.

Chicken Salad with Mango, Purple Basil, and Ginger. Helen and Jordan came over at lunch time so Helen could polish all the silver for Passover the next day, and I served all the leftovers in the fridge for lunch because I needed room in there for the foods for our Seder. So I put leftover sloppy joes, leftover potato/sausage/kale casserole (I made this on Friday along with the million other things I forgot to photograph), and this chicken salad out on the table. I didn’t have stuff to make a standard chicken salad, so Helen encouraged me to just throw everything that needed to be used up into the mix. Top of the list was an old withered mango and some dried-out scallions. I chopped up purple basil and grated some ginger and mixed all that stuff together with mayonnaise, lime, and curry seasoning. Are you horrified? I thought it was really good. I ate it for dinner too.

Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters! Molly took this picture of me and Helen (thank you, Molly!) and danced around a bit trying to get the glare off my glasses but it wasn’t in the cards. Our seder was supposed to start at 4, and at 3 we had the table outside, beautifully set by Helen, with a delightful tablescape on the kids end with Moses parting the red sea and a parade of lego people and Jake and the Neverland pirate characters walking through it. We were feeling so relaxed and competent- ahead of schedule for the first time ever- when it started pouring. We had to rush outside, move all the millions of plates and cups and silverware off the tables, carry them inside, dry everything off as best we could, and reset the table. We looked like frantic, sweaty, crazy people when our guests arrived. Luckily they already know that we are frantic, sweaty, and crazy so we didn’t have to try to pull ourselves together.  We left the soaking wet tablecloths in place but otherwise, you wouldn’t have known that anything weird had happened.

The Seder Plate. We didn’t grow up celebrating Passover. I remember doing it twice- once when I was little and once when I was in high school. And we never went to temple, so all the knowledge Helen and I have acquired for this stuff comes from the internet and an old paper haggadah for fourth through seventh graders at the Edgar F. Magnin Religious School at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. I don’t know exactly how this found its way into our hands, but it’s great. Even so, it’s too long for our mostly atheistic/agnostic tastes, so Helen has been whittling it down, adding and removing bits as we explore how we feel about them. This year we sang the four questions for the first time, partially in Hebrew, with the goal to sing the whole thing in Hebrew next year. I sing the candle blessing at the beginning, but would be utterly ashamed to do so in front of a practicing Jew because I’m certain I’m saying the words wrong. In an effort to keep the kids engaged, Helen made a Passover bingo game, where they had to listen for key words. She put a “Jews are Free!” space in the middle, which I thought was a nice touch! The winner got a head start in searching for the afikomen- a hidden piece of matzo that the kids have to find before the dinner can end. I love the meal, and all the rituals, and I felt like we got it mostly right this year. I’ve got to spend more time on the internet reading about the Seder plate though, because every time I struggle with what to say about everything. “The egg symbolizes new life? And rebirth? But it’s burnt to show this is hard?” That was about the best I could do.

Passover Charoset. I so wish I could find this recipe online for you- I looked around for a while and came up empty-handed. But if you’re serious about raising your charoset game, check out The New Persian Kitchen from your local library and make this Iranian Passover charoset- it’s the best I’ve had. Its got apples and dates and honey and pomegranate molasses and almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and spices. It’s glorious.

Braised Brisket with Rhubarb and Honey, Green Beans with Ginger and Mustard Seeds, Latkes with Applesauce and Sour Cream. Yeah, I burned some of the latkes. I’m a consummate hostess, so I took the burniest ones for myself. Look at my Granny’s wedding china! My parents shipped it to Texas for me in time for Passover, and Helen polished them (the edges are sterling silver, you guys) and I was so happy to get to use them. See at the top of the plate? Partially obscured by burned latkes and a blob of sour cream? That’s my grandparents monogram- Susan and Israel Zide. Isn’t that the loveliest thing you ever heard? The green beans are Indian, but I thought they went with the meal pretty well anyway. And the brisket is my very very favorite. The linked recipe monkeys with the details a bit, but is almost the same. The smell of the meat braising in the rhubarb sauce is one of my top 10 favorite kitchen smells. Unfortunately I forgot to put the spice rub on the brisket on Friday, which meant it couldn’t go into the oven until almost 10pm on Saturday, which meant it wasn’t done cooking until 1:40am on Sunday, and wasn’t cool enough to go in the fridge until 3am. Andy stayed up and did it for me so I wouldn’t have to (swoon) but it meant missing out on some of the prime smelling time. Oh and no one else in the world eats latkes for Passover- they’re a Hanukkah food- but we love them so much that we do it anyway. Also, you’re not supposed to eat meat and dairy on the same plate, but we do that anyway too.  I don’t change the Passover menu plan much from year to year and I’m pretty sure I made these exact comments last year.

Koloocheh, Chocolate-Covered Caramelized Matzo Crunch, Macaroons. These cookies are made with wacky flours- fava bean (I subbed garbanzo flour), coconut flour, and tapioca starch. Because these are not really grains, I figured these cookies didn’t count as chametz, but I’m not sure what a Jewish scholar would say about that. We all tasted a bit of the batter from the bowl and it was so bean-y and chalky that I had the taste in my mouth for the next 15 minutes. They were much better after being baked, but they were light years better with real flour (or Cup4Cup) instead of the bean dust. The chocolate caramel matzo (aka matzo crack) is universally adored and I’m obsessed with these macaroons from the Violet Bakery, as I’m sure you’ve gleaned from my repeated mentions of them.

This really is the best holiday. I love getting to do this ceremony with my friends and family, who are funny and kind and thoughtful and a joy to have around the table. I love the division of labor where I get to be in charge of the meal and Helen takes control of the table-setting and the ritual and ceremony. Everything comes together, even if it rains on your fancy tablescape and you have to leave the dinner early to go wrangle your new chickens from your neighbors house. Happy Passover, y’all.