My friend Christy is completely lovely and wonderful and had been talking about starting an enneagram group for months. The first few times I heard her mention it, I pictured enneagram as some sort of scientology/new age pyramid scheme thing, I’m ashamed to admit. It actually doesn’t cost any money (so not a pyramid scheme), is not a weird cult, and instead has been an amazing tool to help me learn more about myself and the people I love, and how to have compassion for other people. A group of us have spent the last year meeting once a month at Christy’s house to learn about it and get feedback from each other about whatever was bothering us at the moment. In enneagram, there are nine personality types, and I won’t go into it too much because it’s way more complicated than that really, but I will say that I’m an 8, The Boss, The Asshole (they only imply that last title). Eights are aggressive, which doesn’t mean they punch you in the face, but does mean that they walk fast and do what they want to do and get shit done, often/occasionally at the expense of others needs or feelings. They convert most of their emotions into anger and they hate to be controlled. They’re leaders who always have a plan and bring energy to everything they do. I really didn’t want to be an 8. For the first several months I clung to the idea that I was a fun-loving 7, The Epicure (isn’t that a good title?). Sevens want to experience everything in the buffet of life and are full of charm and charisma. I thought I was that because I love to plan for new experiences and I like to make new recipes everyday and always keep things feeling exciting and fresh. But motivation is important, and I realized that I care more about trying new things and visiting new places because I want to be an authority on them. I want people to come to me with food questions and I want to know all the answers. So, 8.

On Friday at our last enneagram meeting, we watched a video of a panel of people, one of each of the nine personality types, talk about their numbers. The eight lady, when asked what she wished people knew about eights, said that we like information given to us in a straightforward way, and so we do that for others. Nobody else likes that, it turns out. When someone comes to you with a problem, sometimes they just want empathy, not for you to skip past that step and tell them what the solution to their problem is. I do this all the time, and it’s true. People hate it. It is mystifying and frustrating to me, but I think I get it now. When I was explaining this to Andy, he looked at me questioningly. “Remember at breakfast,” he said, “when you asked if you should take the kids to the grocery store while I took a shower or if you should wait so we could all go together? And I said, well of course we should all go together, because that’s the better option for you of those two options, and really you wanted a secret third option that was for you to go by yourself to Wheatsville? If you’re straightforward and direct, why not just say that?” I have no idea, Andy. Let’s chalk that one up to the feminine mystique.

Here’s what we ate this week!

Central Market Cooking School, Preserving Citrus Class with Cathy Barrow. Thai Flavored Citrus Salad with Spiced Candied Buddha’s Hand, Roasted Orange Salty Caramel Duck Breast with Basmati Rice, and Saute of Snow Peas and Julienned Carrot, Meyer Lemon Curd Shortbread Tart.

At 5 in the morning George started thrashing around next to me and chatting to himself. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and pretended to be asleep, hoping he’d somehow drift back off on his own. He didn’t. Instead, he made the same gagging swallowing sounds your dog makes for 30 full seconds before throwing up, and for the same reason. My slow-witted nighttime self managed to move just quickly enough to get his head over the edge of the bed so he could throw up on the carpet instead of on the sheets. I made no move to clean it up, and instead George and I fell back to sleep. The poor kid got a fever and slept on me much of the rest of the day, and Andy was really sick too, and I felt bad for them, I did, but I felt worse for me because I’m narcissistic and was so blue that I would have to miss the cooking class I’d been looking forward to for weeks. If just Andy or just George were sick I’d have felt ok about leaving them for a few hours, but leaving both of them, one to care for the other, plus another kid on top of that, felt cruel.  I pouted to Andy that I guess I should call to cancel the class and he said no way, that he could totally do it. I demurred, but Andy insisted that it would be ok, so when the time came, I left, guiltily and also giddily.

The class was brilliant. I am fully obsessed with Mrs. Wheelbarrow and her life and how she spends her time. I want to be just like her, which sounds creepy, unless you know her and then you’d probably agree with me. I want to dedicate three days to candying citrus peel the right way so I can have it on hand to serve to my guests on delicate little plates at the end of a dinner party. I spent the class staring at her in starry-eyed amazement. At the beginning of the class she mentioned (while she was preparing a lemon squash) that you should never toss the zest or the juice of your citrus. If you’re just eating the flesh or using the juice, peel off the zest first and keep it in a bag in your freezer to toss into soups or stir fries, and extra juice can be frozen in an ice cube tray to use for later recipes. Isn’t that lovely? (Read her Washington Post article for more ideas for citrus).

And the food, you guys. You don’t have to cook in these classes. You get to sit comfortably with your food52 friends while the cooking school assistants bring you drinks, wine even, and generous portions of the food you’re seeing demoed in the kitchen. I couldn’t find a recipe online for the first course, but it was sublime and would be easy enough to replicate at home without a recipe- slice up a variety of citrus, toss it with a fish sauce-y vinaigrette, toasted coconut and salted peanuts or cashews, and handfuls of cilantro. You will want to eat it over and over again. The roasted orange salty caramel sauce over a crispy duck breast was everything good in the world. And you can serve it over crispy tofu too! And a big wobbly slice of lemon curd tart on top of that. I am completely confident that no one was happier to be in that class than me. I relished every stomach-bug/kid free moment of it. I raced home after the class was over and was delighted to see a happy George run out to meet me at the car, and Andy was feeling better too and everything was ok!

…

On Sunday morning I abandoned Andy again (feel free to judge me) and went out for a fancy brunch at Odd Duck with my best friend and roommate from college, Julia, who was in town from Boston for the weekend. It was so great. We ate pig face-stuffed parker house rolls and shredded goat with sweet potato tater tots while reminiscing about life in the Performing Arts House at BU. I have, legitimately, the worst memory in the world and it was so fun to be reminded of all the stuff we cared about back then. A little dirt for you. Julia and I lived together for three years, until I illegally moved in with Andy for senior year, and we had a rotating cast of characters share the 3 bedroom suite with us in that time. One girl, a hippy chick who I would probably have really liked if I didn’t have to live with her, had all the sex with her boyfriend. Which, yay, good for her! Except that she lived in the front room that you had to walk through to get into your own room. Also, this fellow had the worst BO of any person, alive or dead. When they had sex, the smell would fill the room like a thick, choking gas. I’d unlock the front door and it would hit me in the face and I’d know to keep my head down and walk briskly through the room while they hastily covered themselves with a sheet. Another girl was the sort that never paid for her toilet paper and instead took yours and that shit fills me with rage. I am a naturally uptight person. I was inclined to hate her for being annoying and stealing resources, but also, she would leave bottles of douche laying around the bathtub. Julia and I would see it and say, what the fuck? Why is she leaving this out for the world to see? When she moved the douche bottle to be right next to our toothbrushes by the sink we decided to say something to her about it. It turns out the bottle was just in French and it was shampoo or something and we are the stupidest people in the world. Also Julia reminded me that there was someone that I lived with for a whole year whom I had completely forgotten. That’s messed up. Anyway, it was so much fun to see you, Julia! Come back to Austin so we can play Settlers of Catan again and glare at the people who steal the longest road card.

I have no picture of dinner because I think we didn’t eat one? I don’t remember. The kids both fell asleep before 7, which is unheard of, and I was so happy, until they both woke up at 9 and stayed up until after midnight and everything was horrible again.

Parmesan Chicken, Northern Spy’s Kale Salad. Probably because of being sick, or lack of sleep from the night before, Monday didn’t go well. I had to stop the kids from hurting each other every minute of the day, and we couldn’t go anywhere because George still seemed sickly. Henry was in such a bad mood and I was angry with him for being so damn difficult, and I knew he was going to have a problem with the Annie’s mac mixed with broccoli I wanted to make for lunch, so I said he could eat that or he could eat whatever he could put together himself from the snack shelf and refrigerator. He was furious, but then decided that he would make his own lunch, dammit. And nothing cold or snacky either. He was going to heat up some leftover Mexican rice on the stove. I stood by the pot of noodles I was making while he dragged a chair into the kitchen, pulled down a giant pot, opened the tupperware, dumped the rice into the pot, and then puzzled over how he would turn the heat on on the stove. I didn’t want to help, but also didn’t want him to burn himself, so I turned the stove on for him. But he didn’t know to get a spoon and stir the rice so it didn’t stick, and I was so exasperated with him for wanting to make a second lunch and for all the morning’s battles that I was super snippy with him and eventually just took over. I handled the whole thing badly. Our moods improved after lunch, and Henry even washed and scrubbed his own giant rice pot. We went outside and built a fire and roasted marshmallows. And I don’t know if this is a thing that everyone has done, but I put a roasted marshmallow on a piece of peanut butter toast and it was like seeing the face of God. I recommend it.

The next day was so much better. We went out for pizza at Conan’s, a little dive down the street, and the kids played Ms. Pac Man and we all, really and truly, enjoyed each other’s company, which felt wonderful after all the sickness and misery of the past week.

Roasted Chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing, Gravy. As we were leaving parkour on Tuesday, I set my phone down next to me while I buckled George into his carseat. It slid slowly off the seat and tumbled softly to the ground and shattered. The last time I did this, in very similar circumstances actually, I didn’t want to spend the money or time to get the screen replaced, and so just lived with it, until the glass crumbled off in big chunks and the thing just stopped turning on. So we spent Wednesday traveling up to north Austin and hanging around the smart phone repairz (doesn’t that z inspire confidence?) shopping center while some enterprising young teens fixed my screen. It was actually a lot of fun. We spent most of the time in a little Japanese grocery store. I let the kids each pick out one thing and George picked an adorable Hello Kitty strawberry chocolate bar, and Henry picked a huge sack full of what looked like jello shots. They sell handmade onigiri there and Henry and I each got one of those too, Mine was filled with “salty salmon flakes” and Henry opted for “plain”. Just rice, that means. They were delicious! I loved my salty salmon flakes. They were salty. And the crunchy seaweed wrapped around the triangle of warm rice was so fun too. Crackly. The jello cups contained no alcohol but otherwise were what they appeared to be. Henry and George ate probably a dozen each right there in the parking lot.

I love a roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. And Henry and George have inherited my fondness for stove top turkey stuffing, so I planned to buy that too, but it appears to be too low-brow for Central Market. They sell the pepperidge farm kind instead. I turned over the bag to see how much boiling water and melted butter you have to mix with the package and was horrified to see that I had to chop and saute onions and celery and mix in chicken stock. What’s the point, you guys? This is but one step away from making my own damn from-scratch stuffing! The stuff ended up tasting weirdly sweet. Never again. Give me stove top or give me death.

Alton Brown’s Granola Bars. Out of a choice of chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, raisins, and dried pineapple, my weirdo kids picked pineapple as their preferred granola bar mix in. I ended up being the only one who ate these but I did really enjoy them! The chocolate and peanut butter ones were obviously the first to go. These take forever to cool, and if you try to cut them before they have completely cooled they’ll ooze into floppy piles of wet oats that taste good but look bad.

Lemony Cheese Blintzes with Spiced Peach Jam, Hashbrowns. The kids sat with me on the counter while I spent over an hour making blintzes. They took turns measuring the ingredients for the batter and filling and then watched and expressed their shock at how long it took me to cook the crepes, fill the crepes, and fry the crepes in butter. They’re worth any amount of time though, and Henry and George, their blintzes spread thickly with jam, agreed.

Green Chile Quesadillas, Beans. I was sort of a mess in the kitchen on Friday. I made banana bread in the morning and first, forgot about the coconut oil I was melting on the stove until I smelled it and saw that it had turned a golden color and was smoking. I moved it off the heat to let it cool while I assembled the rest of the ingredients and then poured in the oil, which I thought had had time to cool off but I guess had not because it sizzled furiously when it hit the batter and I absolutely saw bits of cooked egg in there. I pressed on anyway, and the stuff wasn’t all that bad, aside from a weird sort of burned oil aftertaste.

I was heading to our last enneagram meeting of the year cycle that night and had planned to make samosas because my friend Christy had requested them, but I realized that I didn’t have enough oil to fry them. Then George fell asleep on me and stayed there for two hours. The whole time I was reading books to Henry and trying to think of what else I could bring. If George wakes up right now, I thought, I’ll have enough time to soften butter for cookies. No dice. If George wakes up right now I’ll have enough time to make flour tortillas and can bring stuff for tacos. No dice. I finally got to start cooking 45 minutes before I had to leave and lamely made a pile of cheese and hatch chile quesadillas and served the things with a pile of beans.

Leftover Bean and Hashbrown Tacos on Homemade Tortillas. I get to do something really fun! I joined the Austin Food Bloggers Alliance last spring when I overhauled my blog and I have not taken advantage of a single one of the many benefits (free food at new restaurants primarily) of joining, but jumped at the chance to write a post about the best breakfast tacos in Austin to be part of their annual city guide. This means that I get to spend the next several weeks eating breakfast tacos around the city, and I’m so excited. We went to TacoDeli on Saturday morning and I’ve got a long list of other (and more authentic) places to try, but will you please tell me if you’ve got a favorite spot you think should be included? Please and thank you!

We spent the afternoon at the library and then at Dove Springs, throwing rocks into Onion Creek, and then came home and ate our second meal of breakfast tacos that day.

Salmon Teriyaki, Rice, Kale Salad with Carrot Ginger Dressing. We drove out to Johnson City this morning to go to the Science Mill, which I’d heard about from my sister Joanna, who was surprised to find a legitimately good science museum out in the Texas hill country. She was right- it is incredible! The place is beautiful, gorgeously landscaped and modern, and the exhibits are thrillingly different and engaging. They have a converted the old silos into exhibit rooms- one has a huge light wall running up to the ceiling that has thousands of bulbs that light up when you send a text in the space as it detected your cell phone signals. Another had a room filled with a giant color-changing fractal ceiling, and another was an art exhibit featuring paintings that correspond to the seven chakras along with the associated Tibetan bowls that each played a different note of the scale when struck with a leather mallet. What?! Amazing, Johnson City. Inside, my favorite exhibit was a table filled with sand that had a topographical map projected on it that changed in real time as you manipulated the sand. Also a microscope with slides containing real live tardigrades, aka water bears, aka the weirdest living things on earth. Henry loved playing with a 3D computer program and George loved playing with a complicated ball and pipe wall. Also they have an adorable cafe with sweet local and organic choices and things like Sunflower Butter and Jam sandwiches on the kids menu. You should go right now.

I thought the sweet sauce on the salmon would win Henry and George over, but they were only interested in rice at dinner. I should really stop serving the stuff. The salad dressing recipe makes four cups, which is certifiably insane. Also it’s too biting with that much onion, but otherwise great.

Does reading this post make you worry that I’m too down on myself? Andy thought I called myself an asshole too many times, so I deleted some of them. Honestly, I think I’m pretty great, and right nearly 100% of the time. I even sort of like being an asshole. Just a note to reassure you that you don’t need to reassure me. But how very kind and dear of you if you wanted to! Instead, please talk to me about tacos.

 

We went to Portland! My sister and her family and me and my family flew to my parents beautiful home in Oregon and stayed for a week. We got to spend time with both of my brothers and their wonderful sons and hang out in some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Portland feels like Austin, except better in every way. The landscape is ridiculous. Everywhere you look is brimming with life and green and fresh. You can drive one small hour to the east and be in a snowy winter wonderland. You can drive two hours to the west and be on the beach. When people come to visit Austin, I say, hey, check out this one block that’s kind of cool on North Loop, or these three blocks on South First, or a little strip on Burnet. Every single neighborhood in Portland has streets that blow these offerings out of the water. (Sorry Austin!) Adorable bungalows converted into craft supply shops or charming little restaurants line every block. Food trucks, amazing museums, beautiful public parks. I love it there. And it was so wonderful to see my mom and dad and my brothers and their kids. The cousin thing is so amazing- Henry and George have only spent time with Jack (10) and Leon (5) a couple of times, and they were all fast friends. I wish we lived closer. My parents were great too. My kids are such a handful- loud, rough, and boisterous, and my mom and dad were completely patient and loving and kind with them, which made the trip so much easier. But still, it feels a little stressful to be in someone else’s home for a week with two maniacal small children, no matter how many times they reassure you that they don’t care how many drinks your kid spills on their clean white carpet 😐 We spent everyday running full tilt through all that Portland has to offer- playing in the snow on Mt. Hood, visiting museums, parks, and playscapes, and eating a lot of sugar. We abandoned the no screen time rule and watched Inside Out, Peter Pan, and introduced the kids to Laurel and Hardy, which Henry declared to be the funniest thing he had ever seen. We went to bed each night at the same time as the kids and we were all instantly and deeply asleep after all the day’s activities. It was a beautiful trip and I’m so grateful to my mom and dad for making it happen and for hosting us so generously, and to my siblings and their families for taking the time off to be there too so we could all be together. Here’s what it looked like!

Crispy Thai Pork with Cucumber Salad. This was a few days before our trip and I remember nothing about the day except that George, who eats nothing but heavily-processed carbs (*cough* cheetos *cough*), ate fully half of a hothouse cucumber after it’d had a run through with a spiralizer. So I’m spiralizing everything from now on. Also, this dinner is the greatest, except that I really just need to double it because Andy and I never want to stop eating and have to force ourselves to so there will be some leftover for him to take for lunch the next day.

Broccoli Aglio e Olio with Gremolata Breadcrumbs. I love a pile of breadcrumbs on pasta, but otherwise I didn’t think this was anything too special. Keeping it brief, y’all, cuz we’ve got 24 more photos to talk about!

Did I overwhelm you? Don’t leave me. We’ll get through it!

Black Bean and Roasted Sweet Potato Tostadas. This was Tuesday, the day before we went to Portland, and I had so much to do. We had to go to the library because our books were due back while we were away, and I check out a literal 30 at a time, so that overdue fee racks up fast. We were also out of stamps, and I had by some miracle finished all of our holiday thank you notes and wanted to send them before we left, so I looked to see if there was a post office on the way to the library, and there was, hurrah! And that’s how I spent 45 minutes of my life in line at the worst post office in the world to buy some stupid fireworks stamps. I don’t know how post office funding works, but I’m calling bullshit on there not being a kiosk in the Burleson P.O. When I saw there wasn’t a machine I thought about just leaving, but there were only four or five people in line so I stayed. It seems physically impossible that 4 customers could take up 40 minutes, but they did. There was one employee and one customer was doing a passport application for their kid, which I know from excruciating first-hand experience takes forever, and one was just picking up a package, but the employee took the slip and disappeared for 10 minutes before returning with the thing. The kids were with me and chose to pass the time by climbing the walls and display cases and I let them, in protest of having to wait that long to buy stamps. I am a whiny baby and just wrote 300 words about waiting at a post office. Moving on!

Wednesday, travel! George’s face about sums up the airplane experience. It was ok! I ate a Scholtzsky’s sandwich and George and I went through all 400 of the little things I had brought to entertain him on the plane in rapid succession, and then he took a bunch of selfies. Henry spent much of the four hour flight on an addition workbook I grabbed from the dollar section at Target. He loved it! I had also bought him a reading readiness one (he is already sort of reading so I didn’t know if he’d be into it or not) but he decidedly was not. One of the first pages was an alphabet chart where you had to fill in the missing letters. There was an S and then a blank, and Henry put T U V, and then noticed that U and V were on the next line and was furious that he had made a mistake. I was sitting with George at the time and saw that Andy and Henry were struggling over the workbook. I offered to switch places with Andy, who said that Henry wanted to destroy the book and he’d been trying to stop him. I asked Henry if that’s what he wanted to do, and he tearfully, angrily, answered yes, so I let him. He ripped out every page, one by one. And at the end I asked him if he felt better. He said he felt calmer but that he “rather missed” the workbook. We read The Secret Garden instead. We got in late, and my dad had built a beautiful roaring fire in their fireplace and my mom had made a big batch of tuna salad for sandwiches (Mom, why is your tuna salad so much better than mine? Will you share all your secrets with me?) and we enjoyed being together and not being on a plane.

We spent much of the day on Thursday at the OMSI, a fabulous science museum. They have a chemistry lab with exciting experiments set up with step-by-step instructions and Henry loved it. His favorite was one where you mix some stuff in a flask and then cover the top with a balloon and swirl the mixture around, causing the balloon to inflate. We did it all over again as soon as we had finished. George loved a little area filled with pristine white sand and the water play room, but his big thrill came when Auntie bought a bag of popcorn for everyone to which she had smartly chosen to add a scoop of red and pink Valentine M&Ms. George deftly plucked out the candies and pushed them into his mouth with his pudgy little index fingers. My mom made a gorgeous huge batch of her wonderful chicken mole for dinner, which I sadly forgot to photograph. You can find the recipe here.

Snow snow snow! We went to Timberline Lodge, towards the very top of Mount Hood, and the site where the exterior shots were filmed for The Shining. Henry and I both look furious in this picture, but we actually just have mouths full of snow. Tasty!

We took 17 selfies, with a selfie stick, no less, and at least half the people are blurry in every shot. This was the best one, I think. The lodge has an all-you-can-eat buffet that is so good. My favorite things were a roughly-pureed butternut, apple, and celery soup, little crab cakes with a radish creme fraiche, and tiny caramel chocolate cheesecakes that were so light and rich and I ate fully four of them.

BLTs with Chips. We were all exhausted by the time we got back to the house, but thankfully Helen made us a huge pile of sandwiches. Henry and his sweet cousin Leon had played for hours in the snow: building forts, having parking lot snowball fights, and sledding over and over in a perfect little halfpipe with a clearly marked “no sledding” sign that we chose to ignore. I didn’t move around in the snow that much, but I did hold George in the ergo almost the whole time because he hated the cold and doubly hated having snow touch his hands. Walking up the hill with George, my feet sinking six inches deep with each step, made me feel desperately out of shape. I did manage to drag myself up the hill once to sled down by myself. It was exhilarating and terrifyingly fast and I yelled “I hate this I hate this” the whole way down. I liked it once it was over and I hadn’t died.

It rained most of the time we were in Portland, and all day on Saturday, so we spent the day at a big insane indoor playscape called Play Date PDX. We have places like this in Austin, but this one blew them all out of the water by adding a coffeeshop, a place to buy beer, and a legitimately decent cafe where you could order big crisp pizzas, hummus plates, a soft German pretzel that could feed a family of four, and anything from a long list of finger foods like hard boiled eggs, grapes, and carrot sticks. It was utter chaos in there. Every table was filled, and the playscape, which was like a three-story version of the sort you’d find at a fast-food restaurant, was crawling with kids. Somehow Henry, George, and their cousins Leon and Jack, managed to stay together almost the whole time, and I got to sit at a table and eat snacks and catch up with my brother, Caleb. While we were out, my mom made two of her famous dishes- a rich and creamy baked ziti and the carrot cake I grew up eating by the greedy fistful. It’s a dense flavorful version packed with coconut and shredded pineapple and it tastes like childhood.

I’m stating the obvious, but Oregon is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The drive along the Columbia river to get to Multnomah Falls was completely thrilling. The river is on your left almost the whole time, and is the biggest river I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. On the right you pass monstrously tall trees, immense moss-covered boulders, mountains with trickly waterfalls, and big frozen ponds. And though my photograph is probably in the running for the worst one ever taken of the big falls, the place itself is full of magic. George fell asleep on me as soon as we got out of the car and I put him in the ergo, so I had some time to kill while he slept and thought I’d give the one mile hike to the very top of the falls a try (the .2 mile hike to the bridge in the photo was quick and easy). It started off ok, but I was exhausted by the time I reached a “switchback 3/11” sign, which is where I should’ve thrown in the towel. We pressed on until we were about halfway up and the path turned completely to slippery ice, right next to the side of a cliff, and people were falling down in front of us (not off the cliff, I should clarify). I gave up. But luckily George woke up just before we made it back down to the bottom and said, “oh, look! a waterfall!”

After the falls we headed to Cooper’s Spur, a little place my brother Caleb had wanted to check out pretty far down the east side of Mt. Hood. It is absolutely the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. We were basically the only ones there, and it was perfectly silent and blanketed in newly-fallen snow. The kids sledded up and down the hills, one of which passed over a little burbling stream that George spent almost ten minutes throwing snowballs into.

This was the best picture I got that contained both George and Henry I think George has ketchup on his face.

I had to include this outtake of the cousin shot because it’s so adorably sad. Poor Phinnie! These boys needed a lesson in the proper way to arrange themselves for a group shot.

Much better!

Cooper’s Spur has a little tavern that serves pretty good food! I got fish and chips, and also ate most of George’s chicken tender kids meal. My body requires lots of battered-and-fried meats before going out into the cold. If you look closely you can also see the head of my high-quality pizza dinosaur drawing.

We came home and improvised a dinner. Helen had the idea to make panzanella with some baguettes that had grown stale on the counter, and my mom had all the ingredients to make it happen. We also had crackers and cheeses and a big pile of sliced pepperoni.

Now we just need to work on the ‘walk softly’ part. It was cold and rainy the next day, but my kids desperately needed a wide open space to run around in, so we headed to the playground in Washington Park, a huge area with a children’s museum, zoo, arboretum, and other stuff. They didn’t care a bit about it being wet and cold, but the adults did! We stayed for as long as we could stand and then headed to the children’s museum.

My brother Cameron heroically met us there with a million perfect donuts from Blue Star Donuts, a place started by a fellow he used to work with. They are rich, dense, and bready little marvels. I got to try a lot of them but loved the spice cake and a doubly chocolate one with some kind of chile kick the best.

For our last big dinner together with both my brothers and their boys, my mom bought rib eyes for folks that wanted them, and there was a smorgasbord of other stuff for people who didn’t. Summer squash couscous with sultanas and pistachios, a salty meat and smoked salmon board, fruits, herbed marcona almonds, citrus-y olives, cream cheese with a spicy blueberry sauce Helen whipped up, hummus, and leftover panzanella. It was so wonderful to have all of us gathered around the same table.

My mom must have spent three weeks baking stuff for our visit. When we got there she had four kinds of cookie dough in the freezer (gingersnap, chocolate crinkles, snickerdoodles, and these, an almond joy-inspired cookie with chocolate chips, shredded coconut, and chopped almonds- so good!), plus my favorite pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, plus that wonderful carrot cake. Also muddy buddies, which some of us may have eaten for breakfast in a bowl with milk as if it were cereal. Not naming names.

Though there were a hundred wonderful moments on this trip, the absolute best part was seeing these kids play together. Jack, the oldest, and Leon were so wonderful to my boys and Phinnie- kind and patient and brilliantly engaged. Henry has talked about them nonstop since coming home.

On our last night in Portland, my mom had planned for us to pick up their favorite barbecue from a nearby place. We called over and over again and no one picked up, so we, stupidly, decided just to drive over and order in person. They were closed for a holiday party. It was late and we had no backup plan, so we called Helen and asked her to put in an order at a Chinese place she had noticed earlier, that my mom and dad had never tried. It was delicious! Also, a lot of food. The people packing up the food put in about 14 fortune cookies, which I took as an indication of how many people they thought this amount of food would feed. The six of us (not counting kids, who don’t eat anything) made a pretty decent dent in it, but we left our parents with a ton of leftovers. We have a history of this apparently. Helen remembered that after we had just arrived in LA, my parents tasked us with ordering Chinese food to feed us and the movers and we somehow spent $400. The movers left with a grocery bag full of takeout containers on each arm.

Then we all got the stomach flu and flew home! Not strictly true. Henry became fully and desperately sick the last day in Portland, Andy didn’t get sick until Friday, and George didn’t catch it till the wee hours of the Saturday morning. I have sort of felt nauseous but didn’t have any of the more sordid symptoms and the nausea might just be related to my queasiness about cleaning up after the kids. Regardless, we’ve eaten mostly sandwiches and done mostly nothing since we got back home. Also our cat has apparently been sneaking into a neighbors open window and attacking and bloodying his cat. So I guess you could say things aren’t great around here. Nowhere to go but up? Time will tell!

Since that’s a bad ending, I’ll leave you with this tangentially-related quote from George:

Me, on a walk with George and Henry yesterday: “Look, George! A cat!”
George: I like cats! (long pause, somewhat accusingly) I won’t eat one.

 

I’m a resolution-maker. I make them all year long, and I feel 100% committed to them, until I don’t, and then I abandon them and move on. This happened a lot in the past year. Last January, I gave up sugar. I didn’t eat it for about a month, I felt exactly the same, and then I slowly went back to my old ways. I resolved to read more books in 2015 and started a list of the ones I read in the Notes app on my phone. There are six books on that list and it hasn’t been updated since early April. Throughout the rest of the year I resolved to not eat rice (nope), stick to a food budget (nope), and be better about taking and sharing pictures of the kids (definite nope). So not great. But I have stuck to some of them. I resolved to revitalize my food blog and post regularly and I did it. We decided to give up screen time altogether and we did it and are still doing it happily. I took the kids camping, by myself, twice, and not only survived but had a blast doing it. And even though my own book list is pitiful, the list of novels I read with Henry this year is staggering. All the Fudge books (he loves when they tell each other to shut up), most of the Ramona books, tons of Roald Dahl, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and dozens of novels we selected at random at the library, including one with Poop Fountain in the title, which ended up being a lot better than I expected, one called George, which turned out to be about a fourth grader who is transgendered and was absolutely wonderful, and Wonder, which we’re reading right now and is beautiful and engrossing.

So even though I flake out on some, or a lot, of the resolutions I make, I still think there’s value in putting your list of goals out there. So here goes. This year, I want to try to be nicer. I say stupid, careless shit to people all the time. I want to try to keep things in perspective more and try just being quiet instead of saying something without thinking. I want to spend more time doing things with my hands, and less time on my phone (another incomplete resolution from last year). I have been much better about this but I still scroll idly through facebook far more than I wish I did. I want to knit, I want to watercolor, I want to whittle, I want to needle-felt. I want to do these things in the company of other adults who also like to do these things. I want to eat more vegetables, more raw foods, more salads. There are so many burgers, pizzas, and sandwiches that I’ve posted in the last few months and so few green things. I want to continue to work on being patient with the kids. I want to stop and appreciate them for who they are, meet them where they are, and help them with their struggles rather than just get angry and frustrated. And probably 40 other things that I’ll think up, try, and possibly abandon over the course of the year. So, yes! For one last hurrah, here are some pictures of burgers and pizza.

Risotto Balls, Tomato Butter Sauce, Apple and Fennel Salad. I woke up in the morning with George at my side, and he was so sweet and peaceful and I was filled with love for him, so I told him. “George, I love you.” And he looked at me and said “You love me and I love you, but I’m pooping.”

I really meant it when I said I wasn’t going to make risotto again for a long time because I’m so sick of eating the stuff- it’s fuckin’ dinner porridge. (Side note: My friend Jeffrey showed me the greatest show on the internet, with two Australian lady-comics, where one’s a food intolerant and one’s an intolerable foodie and I love it more than anything. They call risotto hot wet rice in this episode, and they’re right, of course. This episode, where they quit sugar, is my very favorite one. Please watch all of them because I want to reference it all the time and nobody knows what I’m talking about. Oh yeah, it’s NSFW). But anyway! I do still love fried risotto balls dipped in tomato sauce, so we had that for dinner with all of the leftover risotto from last week. Since Henry was the only one who ate any, I made a ton of balls. Enough for all of us to eat for dinner, plus 15 more to freeze. It took forever and I don’t want to do that again for a long time either. We ate it with a sliced fennel and apple salad from The Kitchen Ecosystem, which I couldn’t find a recipe for online, but it’s exactly what it sounds like plus lemon juice and olive oil. It’s pretty good but didn’t mesh well with the risotto balls. I’m not sure what would go better- caesar salad maybe? Or no sides. Just a big heaping pile of fried balls.

Ultra-Smashed Cheeseburgers. This photo looks like one of those in a series of what school lunches look like around the world. Look at what they’re feeding those poor school children in Greece, you might say. Also I way over-mayonnaised that bun. After the picture I scraped it off with the knife and left the knife balanced on my plate. George ignored his burger and chips but did repeatedly jab his tiny finger into my mayonnaise glob and ended up eating most of that, which is, let’s just say it, pretty gross.

We went back to Barkley Meadows, which is an amazing park that doesn’t show up on any of the map tools on my phone, but once you find it, you’ll love it. They have enormous pecan trees there, and there were hundreds of pecans all over the ground, so we spent a good amount of time gathering them in George’s knit hat. The hat got upturned and the nuts had to be re-gathered several times, but they did make it home, where I am very slowly and inexpertly cracking them.

Pita Pizzas. We had a shit day on Wednesday. I don’t know what the deal is- disruption in our normal routine, too much sugar from Christmas, or what, but Henry was a real bear, and Andy and I had no patience and we all spent the day angry with each other. We also spent the day completely rearranging and cleaning the house, and that part felt amazing. We haven’t watched TV or played video games in a couple months now, and still, our living room consisted of a couch facing a big TV that no one was watching. I thought that was stupid, so my sister helped me brainstorm a better layout and we moved everything around, so now there’s a rocking chair and a big white shelf with semi-attractively arranged kids toys where the TV cabinet and television used to be. I love it. And we put the TV in the room with Andy’s computer and took most of the kid stuff out of there, so it’s way more like an office/entertainment room for Andy, which he really likes too.

As part of our big clean-up project, we decided to finally address the problem of our gross-smelling ornaments. I don’t know what happened exactly, but somewhere along the line, our Christmas tree ornaments picked up a noxious BO smell. Maybe it was just one smelly ornament that infected the others. Maybe we all secretly smell and only notice it on the ornaments. Who knows. But every year we open our two ornament boxes and the smell hits you in the face. And we put them on our lovely fresh-cut pine-y tree and the pine smell is completely replaced by a BO smell. Andy said we didn’t have to be chained to a BO tree for the rest of our lives. That we should try to clean the ornaments and if that didn’t work we should throw them away. So I tried to clean them. I washed the soft ones in the washing machine, I made a pile of ones that absolutely could not be washed and we smelled each one individually to see which ones could stay, and the rest I tossed into the top rack of the dishwasher, filled the thing with detergent, and ran it. This was unsuccessful. For one thing, they still smelled bad after they came out of the dishwasher. For the other, worse thing, I stained the inside of the dishwasher, and basically every ornament, a brilliant pink. The paint came off two shiny red styrofoam apple ornaments I’d put in there and coated every surface with an impenetrable spray of paint. We salvaged what we could and threw the rest away. But I’m reminded of my failure every time I open the dishwasher and see those cheerful pink racks. Here’s hoping that we’ll at least have a BO-free tree to show for our efforts in 2016!

Andy reminded me that on this day one year ago we had to take George to the hospital after he fell off our piano bench and snapped his collarbone in half, so our day was comparatively a lot better than that one!

New Year’s Eve Dinner: Crispy Roast Pork, Black Beans, Mexican Rice, Guacamole, Red Chile Chicken Tamales. New Year’s Eve started off the same way as Wednesday, with everyone pissy and grumpy with each other. It rapidly improved for me, though, because Andy took the kids out of the house to run a million errands and I got to stay home and make spicy pavlovas and a pecan brittle and a six-hour roasted pork shoulder AND clean the house, which is an honest-to-God genuine pleasure to do if the kids aren’t around to immediately undo the work you’ve done. My sister and her family and Andy’s sister and her family came over in the afternoon and it was completely wonderful. All the kids have been getting along, for the most part, and it is a joy to watch them play. And a bigger joy to not have to watch them play. We sat around the table for dinner and the kids ate and then disappeared. We found them all coloring pictures quietly in Henry’s room. I mean, what? I was really happy with how the food turned out too. The pork was the best. I shredded the thing according to the recipe and left all the fat in the pan with the shredded pork and popped it back in the low oven to stay hot and to crisp up a bit like carnitas and it was everything I hoped it would be.

Pumpkin Pavlova with Pecan Brittle. This photo is bad, and you can see my pants and a filthy chair cushion and a blob of guacamole on a plate, but the dessert was wonderful. The pavlovas, the big meringue disks, are livened up with a generous sprinkling of wintery spices and ground ginger, the filling is made of whipped cream and pumpkin puree (the comments on the recipe seemed to indicate that you should ignore the recipe and whip the cream and then fold in the pumpkin, because otherwise the stuff might not whip up, so that’s what I did and it worked beautifully) and you sprinkle both layers with a finely-chopped sweet and salty pecan brittle, which I made from the pecans we collected at the park. My brother-in-law Javi described the dessert as a pumpkin pie that you had inflated with air, so it has about 1/10 the amount of pumpkin. It’s true. If you don’t love pumpkin pie, like me, you should give this a go. It’s really fun.

The kids mostly don’t love fireworks. Sparklers are a big hit though. Henry will only hold a sparkler when it’s gasping it’s last breaths, because otherwise it’s too loud and scary. George, on the other hand, was all in. He twirled around with all the sparklers, almost set my hair on fire, and then held all the roman candles too. Other than that, we just got some fountain-type fireworks because they’re little and quiet and pretty. Andy bought one giant fountain for our big finish, which turned out to send big, sort-of real fireworks up into the sky, which was fun for the first couple shots. But then it fell over and spun around and shot the rest at us and we ran away terrified. No one got hurt, and it was exciting, so it was a suitable big finish to a fun day.

Broccoli Cake with Roasted Butternut Wedges. Andy’s mom came over on New Year’s Day and watched the kids while Andy and I spent several hours cleaning out the garage, which had become treacherous to walk through. We had amassed over a hundred egg cartons, a habit leftover from keeping chickens, I guess, dozens of paint cans, 30 or so giant reusable dirt bags, because I never remember to bring them when I go to buy shovel-it-yourself dirt and I just buy more, and heaping piles of scrap wood. Add this to all the wheel-y/roll-y things for the kids and it was getting to be an issue. It’s so nice now- you can walk unimpeded from the car to the house and I just feel like twirling in the open space every time I do.

I cleaned out the fridge too, which was full of semi-rotten produce, and I had to toss the purple cauliflower I bought two weeks ago because it had some weird black growth on it. So cauliflower cake became broccoli cake. This thing is like a cross between a savory, eggy cake and a quiche. It wasn’t my favorite thing, and it took a while to make so never again. 

S’mores. After dinner we did the last of the morning glory sparklers from the night before, built another fire, and roasted s’mores. It was a fun moment of family togetherness after a couple of days of not feeling so connected to each other. Andy and I were the only ones who ate s’mores, actually. The kids prefer plain roasted marshmallows, weird, and preferred to eat them inside too.

Thai Coconut Soup. We didn’t have plans on Saturday, but at the last minute my sister called and said she was heading up to north Austin for a free demo class at Heartsong Music, a fun parent/kid music class that I’ve heard great things about but that costs a trillion dollars. We got the last two spots and drove up there and it was really fun. One little girl was there with 5 adult family members and was completely miserable- she screamed through most of the class. George was quiet and reserved at first, but warmed up when we got to do scarf dancing around the room. Henry loved it all, start to finish, except for an egg-shaking song that went on forever. Later that evening, Andy and I were trying to remember how a song about a cobbler had gone and we found we’d completely forgotten it. Henry chimed in and sang the whole thing for us, and I said “Wow, Henry, you have a great memory!” and he said, “Why?”, and I said “Because you could remember all the words to that song- I never could have come up with that!,” and he said, shocked, “But we heard that today!” Even so, kid. It’s a fun song though. You chant the words while banging one fist on top of the other in time to the beat.

There’s a cobbler down the street,
Mending shoes for little feet.
With a bang and a bang
And a bang, bang, bang.
With a bang and a bang
And a bang, bang, bang.

Mending shoes the whole day long,
Mending shoes to make them strong.
With a bang and a bang
And a bang, bang, bang.
With a bang and a bang
And a bang, bang, bang.

After the music class, we ate a late lunch at Tarka, a nearby Indian restaurant, so we weren’t all that hungry by the time dinner rolled around. We just ate bowls of this, the most perfect soup in the world. Everyone loved it.

The coming week brings something very exciting- we’re going to Portland, Oregon! My sister’s family is going too and we’re all staying with my parents for a week. I get to see my brothers’ families and my beautiful nephews. We’re going to take the kids to the place where they filmed The Shining and they’ll get to see snow for the very first time. We’re going to go to an amazing science museum and on a trip to Multnomah Falls, where we’ll see a gorgeous frozen waterfall. We’ll eat good food and be all together for the first time in a very long time and I’m so excited. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post on time next week, but I’ll be back to share the stories I accumulate as soon as possible. Happy New Year, dear readers! And thank you.