I had enneagram class last Friday, and I was struck with the thought that I had nothing to complain about. I always look forward to these classes- they’re led by one of my favorite people on the planet, it’s a full 3+ hour evening out of the house away from my (delightful!) children, spent in the company of other women, something I basically only do once a month, on enneagram nights. Also, it’s a potluck, so that’s awesome. Also, it helps me grow as a person, which should have been the first pro on my list. But I also looked at it as a place to sort out all the big problems I was grappling with at the moment. This week was the first time I felt like I didn’t have a big thing I needed help working through. Andy, the kids, my family, my friends- I feel pretty damn good about all of it. Part of me, the insane-person part, worries that this satisfaction means I’m going to get hit by a car or have one of those blood clots in your leg that kills you instantly and without warning, like the girl in Love is a Mix Tape. But part of me just feels grateful. I used my time to talk about things I feel like I could be doing better- like being kind to strangers in grocery stores or at the wildflower center (I yelled at someone there last week when I thought he was cutting in front of me in the ice cream line. 😐 He may or may not have been there first, the jury’s still out.) But it was helpful, truly, to get to be contemplative about optimizing my human experience with feedback from a circle of smart, successful women. But then, at the end, one of the women shared something she had learned in her yoga practice, something her teacher had told her that had stuck with her: You’re the blue sky. Clouds and storms may come and go, but you’re always you, always there, always peaceful and tranquil, above it all. And all the other women in the group said, oh! That’s so perfect and lovely and useful! And I thought, what the fuck good is that? How? When would you stop in the midst of a conflict and be comforted by the notion that you’re the blue sky? I’ve clearly got plenty more work to do on the self-improvement front. Here’s what we ate this week.

Black Bean Taquitos, Guacamole, Garden Salad with Cilantro Lime Dressing. The kids and I spent a beautiful morning at an unschooling friend’s house- I got to take a tour of her massive vegetable garden and delight in her giant meyer lemon tree, which had thousands of purple-y white blooms. Henry and George had fun too, though George hid his shoes deep in the woods after convincing himself that another kid had taken an interest in them, and Henry got a bit rage-y on the trampoline. I don’t know what we did the rest of the afternoon, but it somehow got to be six o’clock and I had no thoughts about dinner. This situation always results in a dinner that combines tortillas and beans in one fashion or another.  I defrosted a dozen corn tortillas, put a spoonful of beans and a sprinkle of grated cheese in the middle of the first one, rolled it up awkwardly and dropped it in a pan of too-hot oil where it instantly unfurled, sending beans hissing throughout the pan. Well, shit, I thought, this isn’t right. How do I usually do this? Oh yeah, you’ve got to dip the tortillas in the oil first so they’re super pliable, then fill, roll and fry. I did that for the rest of them, but the oil was full of  frizzled beans and cheese that clung to the tortillas, so they were sort of weird. So shattery though! When you ate it over a bowl of salad, with a decent creamy dressing, big flakes of salty, crunchy tortilla fell off and became crouton-like.

The Food Lab’s Hummus. My blog reads like one long internet recipe comment- I hated your recipe because it didn’t work after I changed a bunch of shit. I love JKLA and the Food Lab, I have complete faith that this recipe is beautiful and delicious when you follow it correctly, but I didn’t, and it wasn’t. I was gonna, but then I saw that you’re supposed to use a full cup of tahini for 1/2 a pound of chickpeas. That is so so expensive, you guys. One jar of tahini, which is $5-7 here, usually lasts me through 4 or 5 batches of hummus. This recipe would have wiped out my whole jar, for a smaller amount of chickpeas than I normally cook. So I made half a batch of the tahini sauce, which really is magnificently fun and science-y (read the linked recipe for the scoop on blending whole, unpeeled garlic cloves in acid to neutralize the allicin that gives you hot messy garlic mouth while still packing in tons of garlic flavor). Anyway, I halved the sauce, and mixed it with the unhalved amount of chickpeas, which are cooked until they’re sloppy tender, blended into a funky milkshake, and then, presumably, thickened up a bit with the magic of that tahini sauce. Since I didn’t use enough of the sauce, the chickpeas were watery and bland. It was a stupid call on my part, not to halve the chickpeas, and I ended up pouring most of the insipid hummus water down the drain 5 days later. There are lots of cool techniques in this recipe to explore and apply to my own hummus operations, but I’m feeling lazy at the moment and complacent in my standard hummus practice.

Coconut-Lime Pork Tacos with Black Beans and Avocado, Homemade Tortillas. I fell off the tortilla-making wagon, even though they’re loads better and not much work at all, but got back on it this week because I was cooking out of the pantry, so to speak, and didn’t have any store-bought tortillas to my name. The pork, I’ve mentioned here loads of times before, is one of my favorite weeknight meals. It comes together super fast and the flavors (coconut milk, garlic, smoked paprika, lime) are so much fun. I spent all week forgetting to take notes about what we did each day and the goings-on of Tuesday have fallen completely out of my head. We went to parkour, I know. Oh yeah, and George fell between the metal rungs of a climb-y thing and hit his nose and got an instant nosebleed and both of us were covered in blood, which totally freaked Henry out. It turned out ok. Hey, yum! Tacos!

M’smen and Fresh Herb Platter. At the last minute, we decided to celebrate Purim this year, for the first time ever. We didn’t do most of the stuff you’re supposed to do- being charitable to those in need (ouch), going to temple to hear the reading of the Megillah, or bringing gifts of treats to friends and family while dressed up like Haman and Queen Esther (next year, y’all). But we did sit down and have a feast of sorts, and we also acted out the totally dramatic and R-rated story as a family afterwards, under the brilliant direction and narration of Auntie Helen. It begins with the King of Persia executing his wife after she refuses to show off her naked body to him and all his drunk friends and only gets darker from there. Anyway, it was a good time! I cooked food from The New Persian Kitchen, since the story took place in Iran. I didn’t go to the store, so had to improvise some of the stuff. This fresh herb platter is supposed to include a beautiful warm oil and herbed feta, and should be served with lavash, and you fold the herbs and cheese and some of the frittata below into the flatbread. I wanted to make a flatbread from Hot Bread Kitchen, but I don’t own the book, and the only recipe I could find online was for M’smen- a Moroccan flatbread that is thick, oily, and salty, and sounded amazing. And it was! The process of making it was similar to making tortillas, except that you use 14 gallons of oil while stretching, folding, and resting the dough. It’s fun and so good. You’re supposed to eat it with salt and honey and I will have to make it again to do that.

Herb Frittata with Walnuts and Rose Petals, Minus the Rose Petals. This could not be coaxed out of the pan, so we just pried pieces out one at a time. It looks horribly dull but the flavor was wonderful, especially eaten with a bevy of herbs in that oily flatbread.

Super-Jacked Koloocheh: Date and Walnut Filled Cookies. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It is completely my fault- I’ve made the recipe as written before, with coconut, garbanzo, and some other wacky flour, but this time around I was cooking out of the pantry and just used all-purpose. I’m not sure if the spreading problem is a result of the flour, or not chilling the dough long enough (though I did as the recipe specified), but I was horrified when I pulled them out of the oven. That being said, these were absolutely insane. I had no ground cardamom so crushed the seeds from pods myself in a mortar and pestle, and the big flecks of cardamom made the cookies feel magical. They were soft and spicy and the date and nut paste in the middle made them even more wonderful. These are what Persian Jews make for Purim, as opposed to the famous hamantaschen that’s so popular here. I far far prefer these.

Rice Salad with Nuts and Sour Cherries. A dear friend had her baby last week! He’s gorgeous, she’s gorgeous, and I got a chance to bask in their gorgeousness last week, when it was my turn to bring them dinner. She had recently bought Ottolenghi’s Plenty More cookbook, so I wanted to make recipes out of it for her and her family. I’ve had this salad at a food52 potluck before, and loved it, but had never made it myself. It is a total pain in the ass! You have to cook pots of basmati rice, wild rice, and quinoa separately, let them all cool completely, then caramelize onions, make a vinaigrette, chop tons of herbs, and toss all the stuff together with a medley of toasted nuts and unsweetened sour cherries. It is so good- even my green-averse children loved it (I gave them a little scoop for lunch), but I don’t have it in me to make it again soon.

Root Vegetable Pies. These little pies, which are so much more complex than their humble name implies, were the main course to be served with the rice salad. The inside is filled with butternut squash, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, curry and caraway, aged cheddar and cilantro. It sounds like a totally bizarre combination, but it works. I was running late, and didn’t have time to let the little pies cool at home, so I put the hot pan in the car, brought along a butter knife, and sawed around the edges and painstakingly transferred them from the tray to a tupperware container while stopped at the red lights between my house and hers. They are so delicate- the whole process stressed me out.

Carrot Muffins. I made a big batch of my favorite carrot muffins for the happy family too, but my kids took out 5 of them before I got the rest packed up.

Saddest Hamantaschen. Ooph. I had leftover date and walnut paste from the deliciously ugly koloocheh a few pictures above, and had some leftover pastry dough from making the root vegetable pot pies, and it was still technically Purim, so I thought I’d be very clever and make them into hamantaschen-looking treats. They tasted great, even the jam “filled” ones, which flattened out of their tri-cornered hat shape the second they hit the hot oven, but they, unlike Queen Esther, won’t be winning any beauty contests. That’s a bad Purim joke for the one of you (Jeffrey) who’s in the market for those.

Root Vegetable Pie. Cabbage and Apple Salad. That pot pie recipe makes way more filling than you need for the pies. I remembered that from the last time I made them so I doubled the pastry recipe and we had a modification of the pies for dinner. I had a tiny head of purple cabbage in the fridge, and an old apple, so we spiralized the thing (George’s main thrill in life) and mixed them together with a vinaigrette made sweet with the last of our apricot jam and a sprinkling of clover leaves that George and Henry collected from the garden.

Venison Chili. I made a giant pot of this chili, which was mostly just black beans that needed to be used up and a big can of fire roasted tomatoes that were on sale at Whole Foods the day I yelled at everyone, plus a Dickinsian amount of diced venison backstrap- the only meat I had in the house. It was too tomato-y, but you can eat almost anything when it’s topped with sour cream and cheddar and scooped up with tortilla chips.

Strawberry, Ginger, and Poppy Seed Scones. I got the Violet Bakery Cookbook from the library and fell head over heals in love with it. There are a trillion things I want to make from it: cinnamon buns, ham/cheese/leek scones, yellow peach crumb bun, chipotle and cheddar corn muffins, ginger molasses cake, butterscotch blondies (with caramel shards!), and a drop dead gorgeous cherry cobbler. But these scones were at the top of my list. They’re packed, packed with crystallized ginger. An ungodly amount. Also, four times the amount of poppy seeds I bought. They’re just lovely. The ginger, which was so sharp and spicy before baking, totally mellowed and tasted just right with the strawberries that went all jammy in the hot oven. I’m a fan. This was my contribution to ennegram potluck night. The other contributions were two big salads and a platter of fruit, so it’s easy to see who’s the glutton of the group.

Radish Salad. I had some high school friends over for dinner on Saturday. One of whom, an old friend from theatre, I hadn’t seen since high school. We’ve been facebook friends for a while and I just admire the hell out of all the cool stuff she does, organizations she works for, Selena halloween costumes she wears, etc that I really wanted to see her again, and after months of talking about it, we finally made it happen. I knew I wanted to make a quiche from the Bouchon cookbook, which is always delicious and ideal for a dinner party because you’re supposed to make it the night before. Anyway, I wanted a punchy salad to serve with it, because it’s so rich, and April Bloomfield’s description of this radish salad sold me. You chop up a full pound of radishes, then use your hands to smash basil leaves and sea salt into them, which coats the things in basil oil. Then you add thick and thin slices of parmesan and crush those into the radishes with your hands too, which makes some of the cheese bits get creamy and leaves lots of big hearty chunks too. I’m not sure I really noticed the basil in the end product and my parmesan chunks were on the too-chunky side of the spectrum, but it was a good foil to the quiche and it all got eaten, so that’s something.

Pan-Fried Asparagus with Basil. April Bloomfield’s description of this won me over- I loved the idea of letting the basil leaves get a little crispy in the pan with the asparagus. It was good, I’d say, and made total sense alongside the rich, eggy quiche. Henry took a bite, turned to me, and said, “Mama? I’m going to say something just to be polite. I really like these green beans.”

Bouchon’s Quiche Lorraine. One of the great loves of my life. The magic here is in the onion confit, two and a half pounds of onions that you slowly melt on your stove over the course of about two hours. They’re not caramelized- they’re transparent yellow and slippery- and the flavor is larger-than-life. Obviously, I don’t know how to describe it. Larger-than-life is not helpful, I know, but I’ve got no words. If you try it, you’ll know what I mean.

Squash, Brown Butter, and Sage Quiche. When I saw this quiche in the Violet Bakery Cookbook, I knew I had to add it to our Saturday menu. I didn’t think one quiche would be enough for 9 people, and thought this looked so pretty, even if it is super autumn-y. I was unhappy with the amount of flour in the pastry when I read through the recipe- only 1 cup! I like 1.5 cups for my pie crusts, because I like them thick, with big fat crimped edges- but gave it a go as written. I’m so happy I did. The crust is amazing, and, along with with last-minute pour of brown butter-toasted sage leaves- made the quiche. The crust is very thin, but you prebake it with parchment and pie weights (standard) and then remove the paper and brush the whole of the crust with egg wash, which I had never seen before and is completely genius. It made the crust shiny and crackly and it is so thin and flaky. Really lovely.

Coconut Macaroons, Local Strawberries, Egg Yolk Chocolate Chip Cookies. The money shot. The macaroons and chocolate chips cookies are both from The Violet Bakery Cookbook. The macaroons are worth the cost of the book- the best I’ve ever made by a far cry. The chocolate chip cookies are great too. They’re richer than the normal set, but also more tender, more chewy, and more crisp on the edges. But what makes me really and truly love them is that they go together. You use three egg yolks for the cookies and the macaroon recipe calls for four egg whites, so you have a built-in excuse to make both every time. Even more wonderfully, I had one last jar of lemon curd in the freezer and used the last egg yolk to make another batch of The Everyday Baker’s lemon bars to bring to Easter dinner the next day. I’m out of eggs and full of desserts and couldn’t be happier.

We spent Sunday eating all manner of meats on sticks at Sherwood Forest Faire. We went with my sister Helen and her family and my sister Joanna and her daughters. I spent the week before sewing a fairy costume for my niece, Lucy (more on this later), and pulled the rest of our costumes together the night before (photo evidence of this, including George looking surly and Henry looking surlier in his new furry vest, later too). I love this place. This love is mostly centered around food, but it’s also about all the neat things I get to look at whilst eating food. The costumes are spectacular- the kids loved and were terrified of a fellow in an adorable fox costume and were simply terrified of a lady in a wolf costume. Took us a minute to decide she was a wolf. My first thought was bear. I’m bad at animals. The pine-y woods were gorgeous, and the day was cool and lovely too. We saw a magic show with Merlin, a dog show with an adorable clown couple and their pups Peanut and Polka Dot (Henry fell deeply in love with Peanut), and a band on a stage that shot fire balls into the air on the downbeats of their songs. We ate frito pies, sausages (on sticks, course), smoothies, baklava, french fries, steak (also on sticks!), baked potatoes stuffed with pork, honey sticks, and more baklava. We failed as parents by not buying funnel cakes for our children, but otherwise, the day was a success. I have a lingering dehydration from the frivolity, but spending the day eating a lot of meat and walking around in the sunshine did help me get a full nine hours of sleep that I haven’t had in a long time. The rest of the week was good too! Here’s what it looked like.

Cherry Pie. A pie for pi day! The filling is just the gloppy stuff that comes in a can, but I made the crust using the recipe and technique in the link. I brushed the top with egg wash and sprinkled it with a lot of turbinado sugar and baked it for a while, over an hour, until the crust was deep brown and the filling had bubbled up through the holes in the lattice. The crust is remarkably flaky, like a chewier puff pastry. I didn’t hate the cherry glop either.

White Lasagna with Swiss Chard, Leeks, and Gruyere. Helen and I were at Joann Fabrics with our kids on Monday morning, because I needed stuff to sew my niece’s ren faire costume, when a lady in a black apron walked up to us and asked if we’d be interested in free haircuts for the kids, because she had someone applying for a job as a hair cutter and no kids around for her to try out on. Helen and I were both confused, and asked if she meant right there in Joann’s? She said, no, she worked at Snip-Its, a kids’ hair cup place next door. We’re dumb. Henry and George both said they wanted haircuts, so we walked over and did the thing. The trick at Snip-Its is that they put the kids in front of a screen showing a weird hair cut cartoon so they can cut the hair while the kids stare at the screen, slack-jawed. It worked for my kids, who are starved for screen time. Henry ignored the plot of the cartoon and instead relished in the progress bar at the bottom of the video, and then delighted in telling everyone he got to watch a 9 minute 13 second video.

I halved the recipe for this lasagna and it still made plenty and damn, it was good. The kids ate up every bite, did not complain about the chard, and asked for seconds. The gruyere in the bechamel goes so well with the leeks and greens, and I far preferred it to the standard red-sauced lasagna. Definitely going to make this again.

Vietnamese Lemongrass and Chile Chicken, Stir-Fried Broccoli, Rice, Coriander Blossoms. In my continuing quest to cook from A Bird in the Hand without actually buying the cookbook, I found this recipe on the Splendid Table website. I didn’t do it right at all (I used leftover shredded chicken instead of raw, marinated chicken, so I had to monkey with the recipe) but even so the flavors were delicious. I even, to prove to myself that I’m not completely lazy, trotted out to the garden and snipped some cilantro flowers to garnish the chicken with. Eat your heart out, Heidi Swanson.

I don’t mean that. She is a better person than me by every metric.

Naan. Hot Bread Kitchen and Made in India were the two finalists in the last round of the piglet, so I found recipes from both books online and made them for dinner on Wednesday. I was really excited to make this naan, which I serendipitously had all the ingredients for after accidentally buying plain yogurt instead of vanilla. My heart broke when I read that they’re cooked in a 500 degree oven though, because cooking anything above 425 almost guarantees that my smoke alarm will go off and Henry will be terrified. I decided to try to sneak it by him by opening up all the windows and turning on the fans (it was warm outside and almost made sense to do this), but he noticed immediately that I had preheated the oven to 500 and freaked out. So we made a plan. He sat at the picnic table in the far corner of our backyard with headphones in his ears and listened to They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science album while George and I cooked the naan. The recipe is flawless- the naan cooks beautifully in four minutes, two per side, doesn’t stick at all to the pizza stone, and is fluffy and rich and thick and extraordinary eaten warm with melted butter and salt. It made me really want to buy this cookbook.

Cauliflower, Cashew, Pea, and Coconut Curry, Naan. From Made in India, I made a curry, which also used ingredients I had on hand. I love when that happens. It was great! And super simple. I loved the garnish of fried cashews on top. Also, it got the best possible compliment from Andy, who chose to take leftovers of the vegetable curry for lunch instead of leftovers of the chicken stir fry, which he also loved, and which scores extra bonus points for including some kind of meat. Andy would eat a 100% meat and garlic bread diet if given the option. So good on you, little curry!

Thai Flavored Citrus Salad. I finally got to make the fancy birthday dinner I had planned for 9 days earlier and had to cancel because George was sick! I had to re-buy most of the citrus for this salad because we’d eaten it so it wouldn’t go bad, but the big pomelo sat stoically on the counter the whole time and looked no worse for it.

Roasted Orange Salty Caramel Duck Breast. Cooking six duck breasts was more stressful than I thought it would be. I had a pan of the sauce going (which is completely insane- look at the title, you guys! Roasted Orange Salty Caramel! It’s got everything!), but anyway, a big pan of that on the stove, a pot of rice in the oven (I really favor the oven method for cooking rice) and had to find a way to also squeeze two big pans to slowly crisp the duck breasts onto the stove too (I have only two large and two small burners) and then fit those pans into the oven with the rice pot. It was a juggling act, but everything miraculously came out ok, the duck breasts all cooked to the recommended 150 degrees, and the sauce as outrageously delicious as I remembered it from Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s citrus cooking class.

Meyer Lemon Curd Shortbread Tart. We finished the meal with this sunny tart, which, while lacking the recommended whipped cream “rosettes” was still completely delicious. Everyone had two slices.

Oreos. This is a Joanne Chang recipe, of Flour fame, and the linked recipe (with shockingly lousy photo) gets it right. Unfortunately, I got to the recipe via Tipsy Baker’s cookbook, which I love, really and truly, but which, I read afterwards, changed Chang’s instructions from “Cut the log into 32 slices, each a quarter-inch. Set them on the baking sheets 1 inch apart.” to “Cut the dough into scant 1/4-inch slices. Place them on the cookie sheet. They can be as close as 1/4 inch apart, so pack them on there.” Italics mine. To show that that instruction is stupid. Don’t pack them on there! They will be weird and square and raw-edged after being sliced apart if you do. Stupid square oreos.

And another thing. These aren’t Oreos. Given the choice between a sack of double stuf oreos and another batch of these, I’d pick the sack every time. That didn’t stop me from eating a ton of them, but I felt it only fair to warn you I don’t think they’re worth the effort. They’re, oddly, better on day 2 and even better on day 3 though.

I made cookies because I wanted to send a little package of something along with a thank you note to two of my neighbors. One is a lady who lives on the corner, and put up a giant light-up cross in her yard at Christmas time and has kept it up and illuminated ever since. That’s not why I wanted to thank her, by the way, that’s just all I knew about the lady until a few weeks ago, when Henry and George and I were walking down to the stop sign and she came running out of her house to bring them a bag of her favorite orange jelly candies that she had bought at the Cracker Barrel for her birthday and didn’t want to finish. George and Henry, mostly Henry, ate them all while she stood with us on the corner and told me she’s a great grandmother, that she loves the Cracker Barrel, and that she really loves Jesus. She asked me if I loved Jesus too, and I said sure! I decided not to mention that I’m a non-practicing Jew. She was a nice lady. A week later she drove by while Andy was mowing the lawn, asked if ‘this was the house where the lady lived with two little boys’, and handed Andy a giant Foleys bag full of stuffed animals, Easter baskets and eggs, a pinata, and several souvenir rock collections stuffed in a fanny pack. It was pretty rad. Hence, thank you note No. 1. The second was for a neighbor who has encountered us on our “agave tours” of the neighborhood, where Henry identifies every variety of plant he sees. She thought we might want three giant posters of chicken and other fowl breeds, since Henry liked “information.” She was right! Thank you note and cookie sack No. 2. People are nice!

Leftover Thai Citrus Salad, Tom Kha. That bit of do-good-ery, or at least, do-what-you should-do-ery with the Oreos was inspired in part by me being an asshole at Whole Foods earlier in the day. We went to a park and splashed in a creek for a few hours in the morning, and I was hungry by the time we got to Whole Foods, where I had decided to buy the kids a slice of pizza. We stood in the pizza line as the guy in front of us bought up all but one of the remaining slices, so I knew we’d have to wait, and just stood there. A couple minutes later, another guy walked up and the pizza lady asked him what he wanted, and he said he wanted that last piece of pepperoni, and I said “Excuse me! We were here first!” And she said, “oh, you haven’t been helped?” And I said, no, and told her what we wanted, and then, ungraciously said the guy could have that last pepperoni after all because we’d have to wait for more anyway. The guy didn’t know we hadn’t been helped, and the pizza lady made a simple mistake, but I was rude to both of them because it was my turn, you guys. When we got our pizza and made our way over to the dining area, all the tables were full, except for a little kid one near the window. I told Henry and George that we could just sit there, but as we went to sit down another lady turned around and said that she and her kids were planning on sitting there (she had been near the table but I hadn’t noticed her) but that the kids could share, “two and two,” she said, because there were four little chairs and four little kids. I said, huffily, that we would find somewhere else because I needed to sit too. We asked to share a big table nearby and I sat and realized that I’d been a dick again. That lady was there first, and was super nice to offer to share the table, and I was completely rude to her. I sat facing her while I ate my slice of pizza, watching her eat a little salad with her two girls at the kids table, wearing her namaste shirt with perfect hair and makeup and felt horrible. I knew I should apologize, but still it took me the whole meal to get up the courage to do it. When we were both sorting our stuff into the compost/recycle/landfill bins (Whole Foods, you guys) I said I was so sorry for being rude to her and thanked her very much for offering to share the table. She was really nice about it, but I felt sort of shitty the rest of the afternoon. Giving sub-par Oreos to the neighbors helped though.

El Pollo Rico. A couple days earlier, when the weather was warm and breezy, I had opened the window in Henry’s room and a warm gust blew the intoxicating aroma of chicken al carbon into my face. We live less than a block from this chicken drive thru, but the wind has to be just right to carry the smell our way. I opened my mouth and breathed it in and sighed happily. So on Saturday, when the whole family was walking home from the thrift store, carrying a few items we needed to complete the ren faire costumes we would be wearing the next day, and we passed the chicken place, Andy and I both decided to just go for it. It was $14 to feed all of us (including more tortillas and two more tubs of rice, not pictured because the kids were eating them when this photo was taken) and so so good.

Queen Anne’s Lace, AKA Wild Carrot. We walked around the block after dinner to 1) see if the giant-light-up-cross lady had picked up her thank you note and Oreos from her front porch (she had!) and 2) to smell a wisteria that was in bloom. It smelled amazing, and the lady who lives at the wisteria house said Henry could pick one if he liked! And then we found the biggest wild carrot of all time, and Henry begrudingly posed for a photo with it, and then we left it on our driveway to get all withered and dried out.

This is the costume I sewed for my niece. It ended up being roughly three sizes too big for her, but she seemed happy with it all the same. It reinforced for me what an abysmal seamstress I am. I knew approximately 10% of the stitches the pattern called for. Which means I basically only knew what to do when the pattern said to “stitch”. When it called for an “understitch” or a “staystitch” or a “slipstitch” or an “edgestitch” I could only shake my head sadly and guess. Hand sewing the lining of the vest (the dreaded slipstitch), nearly killed me. As did forcing a 12-inch piece of elastic through the tiny opening in the casing of the skirt, which had a perimeter over a yard long. This stuff probably means nothing to you if you don’t sew, and makes you think I’m hopelessly sad if you do, so I’ll stop. Suffice it to say, I’ve got a lot to learn.

And that’s it! And here’s us! Tired and mostly happy after a long day at the fair. You’ve got two more weekends to go and then that’s it till next year, so don’t miss your chance to eat a lot of be-sticked meats and make your terrified kids take pictures with adults in animal costumes. Until next week!

Sometimes I want to write an opening paragraph and other times I have no idea what to say. I’m gonna make the executive decision to make this paragraph optional. This week, I’m opting out. I’ve got lots of fun stuff for you below though, lots of stuff. Lottery tickets outside a gas station, the supreme ennui that leads a person to opt out of garnishing their kale salad with coriander blossoms, and having your ass handed to you after daring to feel smug about your parenting. Also, hot and wild chicken dreams. That last one’s not really in there, but I do talk a little about chicken at the end. Here’s what we ate this week.

Roasted Fennel and White Bean Dip, Sausage Balls. You can’t taste the fennel and the dip gets a crusty spittle around the edge. It tastes like under-flavored hot hummus and I hated it. Andy said it was ok! No matter, I will happily eat a meal of sausage balls. That half-dish of white bean dip is still sitting in our fridge as of this writing.

We had a beautiful day on Monday. It was one of those days where it feels fun to have children. They were playing happily with each other. We spent hours outside together, doing fun experiments that the kids invented, and I had a smug happiness about what a great job we’re doing as parents. This feeling, the feeling that you’re doing something right, at least in parenting, is a harbinger for bad things on the horizon. Fun fact, I wanted to type ombudsman instead of harbinger in that last sentence and looked it up to see if it meant something like harbinger but it doesn’t. It’s not even kind of close.

Pepper-Crusted Yellowfin Tuna with Avocado Orange Salsa, Onigiri, and Stir-Fried Spinach with Peanuts. George was awake for what felt like the whole night, and I was too, sneering angrily that he needed to let me sleep and exhibiting a complete lack of patience. In the morning, of course, he had a fever. We had had plans to have a big fun dinner that evening. I was going to recreate the citrus cooking class meal I ate recently for our friend Dustin’s birthday, I had spent $35 on duck breasts and another $12 or so on pomelos and blood oranges and weird citrus fruits, and had made lemon curd and we had to cancel the whole thing. The day was just horrible. On Monday, I posted a slow-motion video of Henry popping a balloon full of water and I had to talk myself out of captioning it with “back to the grind!” in a sarcastic, boasty way that was meant to convey how joyfully we live our lives. Don’t you hate me? But Tuesday really felt like a grind. I texted Andy to say “Dinner is cancelled, parkour is cancelled, we’re just going to sit here and hate each other instead.” And that’s mostly what we did. The kids fought the whole day. Lack of sleep left me feeling short and angry, and I felt resentful that I didn’t get to cook my fun dinner. Andy mercifully came home early though, and I decided to cook a bunch of different fun stuff (I froze the duck breasts) as a pick-me-up.

The dishes I cooked don’t make any sense together, but I made them all anyway. When I had originally made a menu plan, this meal was going to be teriyaki salmon, rice, and the linked stir-fried spinach with peanut recipe, which I read about on Tipsy Baker and had been meaning to try ever since. But the frozen salmon I buy at Wheatsville was $12 a bag and the frozen tuna was $7. And tuna shouldn’t be cheaper than salmon right? And this was legit sustainable tuna, not the stuff that comes packed in a can of dolphin blood. Fresh tuna is fancy and salmon is mundane, everyone. So I bought the cheaper tuna and figured I’d do something Asian-y with it. I ended up finding a recipe in The New Best Recipe that used all stuff I had on hand, and used up some of that mountain of citrus I bought for the dinner we wouldn’t be having after all. I swapped out onigiri for plain rice because Henry is obsessed with the stuff and I wanted to see how easy it was (it’s super easy), and taken all together it was dinner. Everybody ate it, and the mood in the house improved. We went to bed immediately after and slept all night.

Banana Bread. Wednesday was dark and stormy and wonderful. We stayed inside all day and listened to the rain and made banana bread and ciabatta together. I remember nothing else and I’ve written about this banana bread approximately 800 times already, so I’m gonna stop talking.

Creamy French Lentils with Mushrooms and Kale, Ciabatta. I had put this on the menu plan a couple of weeks earlier, and bought the stuff for it too, but kept putting it off. I guess a dark part of me didn’t want to eat a bowl of lentils and kale made creamy with “plant milk.” By the time I got around to making it, one of my mushroom containers was moldy. Did you know mushrooms could get moldy? That seems weird to me, that a fungus can grow other different kinds of fungi. I threw that package away and made the recipe anyway, even though the other package of mushrooms was probably suspect. My picture won’t inspire anyone to make this, but you ought to click through and look at the photo of the dish on The First Mess (I accidentally typed The Fist Mess at first, which would probably lead you to a very different sort of blog)- it will inspire you and it should- this dish is beautiful. You sort of make a creamy mushroom soup and then toss it with tender lentils and shredded kale, and it’s good and vegan, unless you eat it with warm, thickly-buttered bread like we did.

Lemon Bars. Since I had extra lemon curd on hand from our not-party on Tuesday (which is obviously not a problem), I made lemon bars to take to my sister-in-law on her moving day. Joanna and her family are moving to Buda! To a farm! They’re going to raise pigs and make honey and plant an orchard and do all the most wonderful and exciting things and I’m so excited to be close enough to them to benefit from all these things (think of all that pork, you guys!), and to get a taste of what it’s like to run a farm without actually having to run a farm. If you’re interested in following along on their adventures, check out Blue Earth Farm on facebook. More updates as they happen! Meanwhile, lemon bars. These are made gluten free with cup 4 cup, and the crust is a sort of standard shortbread, but with an egg yolk thrown in, which makes the crust beautifully rich and tender, but still sturdy enough to support the weight of that jiggly curd. They’re from The Everyday Baker and I wish the recipe were online for you!

Lacinto Kale and Pecorino Salad. I also brought them this kale salad and a mountain of honey ham. I feel like a super fan mentioning Tipsy Baker twice in one week, but I loved her assessment of Heidi Swanson (this is her salad recipe) in this recent post, where she takes issue with Swanson’s suggestion to garnish a dish of yogurt with rose petals or “a bit of bee pollen” for being offensively twee. I love twee, but I just don’t live that life. I can’t imagine a time when I’ll care to garnish anything with rose petals. Even this salad, which is actually pretty hearty and straightforward, calls for a garnish of “any herb flowers you might have.” I actually have a garden full of the ‘cilantro blossoms’ she specified in the recipe, but I was unwilling to walk out into the garden to snip them for this. So maybe laziness is the main factor separating me from a Heidi-like lifestyle.

Pepper Jack Quesadillas, Avocado and Lime. Are you squinting? This photograph is the last of the long dark (72 degree) winter. With the start of daylight saving time, I should be pretty much guaranteed to have natural light for all my pictures, and things will hopefully look a little better around here. As a celebration, I decided to max out the exposure and saturation in this sad quesadilla picture to go out in a bad-lighting, retina-burning blaze of glory.

Skirt Steak Fajitas, Smoked Paprika Sweet Potato Fries, Black Beans. Fajitas were on the docket for Friday night, but it rained all day again (not that I’m complaining! I want every drop of the stuff), so I broiled ’em. I’m going to be exiled from the state for fajita negligence a la Matthew Sadacca. Not only did I miss out on the smoky flavor of charcoal-grilled fajitas, I set off the damn smoke alarm, which is Henry’s waking nightmare. He stood outside the back door and screamed in abject terror while Andy fanned at the detector to get the wailing to stop. Dinner was otherwise good and uneventful.

First Springtime Strawberries. I was so excited to see these at the farmers market. I left them on the counter for a few hours, and they made the whole kitchen smell incredible. Then I cut them up and dusted them with sugar and served them at lunchtime. And do you know what? I had to needle and cajole my kids into trying one. I thought to myself, because I am an insane person, that if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse or the global food market ends because of peak oil/climate change/what have you, then they’ll be sorry they didn’t eat all the warm local strawberries they could when they had a chance. That’s fucked up, isn’t it, but that’s what I thought.

We went to a friend’s birthday party down in Buda in the afternoon and then decided to go out to dinner with my sister and her family. It was a Saturday night, the start of spring break, and maybe the start of SXSW(? I have no idea when this starts), so we wanted to stay close to Buda and not risk battling throngs of people with three tired preschoolers in tow, which meant our choices were limited. So we went to The Texican Cafe. We grew up going to this place, eating soft flour tortillas out of the plastic warmer with big pats of land o’lakes butter, and I loved it then, but it is objectively not great. The same sort of generic Tex Mex you’d get anywhere, really. Andy and I weren’t all that hungry because we had eaten both our own slices of cake and the boys’ slices of cake 30 minutes earlier, so we just split an appetizer plate. It came with 4 jalapeno poppers, which were, delightfully, resting in a pool of warm pepper jelly(!), 4 chicken taquitos (I will eat taquitos in any form, from any source), and little red tortilla chip bowls filled with queso (100% melted velveeta with no pesky vegetables to get in the way), sour cream, and guacamole. So basically, I loved it. Helen even ordered us a round of flour tortillas with butter, for old times sake. Also Andy had a margarita in a glass large enough to hold a baby head. After dinner we walked down the strip mall sidewalk to the gas station at the end, the U-Pak-M, where we bought ring pops and lottery tickets and sat on the sidewalk in the warm evening twilight for an hour. The stuff dreams are made of. I really mean that. Also, Henry won $9 in his outrageously complicated Bingo scratch-off game!

Roast Chicken with Dill and Leeks. The Piglet is upon us, and oh I love it. Food52 starts with a list of their favorite cookbooks from the last year, asks a series of judges to pit one against another, tournament-style, and ultimately crowns a champion. The judgments are thrilling. Either because the writing is fun, or innovative, or informative, or because it’s not any of these things and some dark-hearted know-it-alls tear the judge to ribbons in the comment section. Those are fun to read too. Judges are told that they must test at least two recipes from each book, but woe to the person who does the minimum! That’s sure to get you at least 90 comments seething with outrage at the presumption that you could judge a book by cooking two measly recipes from it. I’m secretly in that camp too, though I’m not the type that would ever log in to a website to berate someone for disagreeing. Anyway, so far this piglet season, I’ve added three books to my Amazon wish list: The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, The Violet Bakery Cookbook, and A Bird in the Hand: Chicken Recipes for Every Day and Every Mood. Before the reviews, I had zero interest in a book all about chicken, but I have become a woman obsessed. Every recipe mentioned sounds glorious. Here’s the review that put it on the top of my wishlist. I hope to buy the book soon, but in the meantime, I googled around for recipes from the book that are already online, and found this one- a roast chicken with dill, potatoes, and leeks. I had bought a bunch of dill at the farmers market because it smelled intoxicating to me, but didn’t know what to do with it, so this fit the bill nicely. The preparation was easy, with the exception of smearing a dill butter all over the raw bird- the butter, though softened, absolutely would not stick to the bird and I ended up dropping wads of the stuff anywhere I could get it to balance without slipping off. Oh also, the linked recipe is from the UK and I had to look up celsius to fahrenheit conversions and also had to measure out what 4 centimeters looked like and also guess what “put it on the hob” means (I presume it’s what they call a stove burner?) but you guys, I am smitten. Smitten, I say. The smell from the oven while this thing was cooking is extraordinary! The potatoes and leeks are swathed in a rich sauce, bright from lemon and dill, deep and roasty from chicken stock and drippings, and the chicken is absolutely perfectly moist and crisp-skinned and glorious. I loved it beyond measure. Andy said it was good, but not great, because he doesn’t love dill. Bah. If you love dill, you should make this immediately.

I’m out, y’all. Have a great spring break! We’re going to go see Zootopia and spend the rest of the week actively avoiding other spring-breakers. Until next week!