Sometimes I daydream about going on the Whole 30 diet. What would my life be like if I didn’t eat grains and sugars and dairy things and whatever else you’re not supposed to have? I imagine myself, trim and lithe, comfortable in the most restrictive pair of pants. I’d have so much more energy, I’d be able to jog back to my car to get a shovel during Shovel Fit sessions at Joanna’s without feeling like my heart was going to explode. I wouldn’t even miss the sugar because sweet things would suddenly taste too sweet, oppressively sweet, and I’d rather just crunch on an apple with my strong healthy horse teeth. It’s the same nagging wondering that made me want to try meditation (which I’ve done 3 out of 20 days this month, ack.)- I feel okay now, but how much better could I feel if I did things that were good for me? I don’t really want to do Whole 30. I don’t like the idea of eliminating whole huge food groups from my diet. I want to be able to eat fresh bread and good butter without feeling like it’s going to kill me, and I don’t want to have to buy a $14 bottle of avocado oil.  But, I really do need to eat better. This week’s food photos, start to finish, tell the story of someone who is not eating enough/any vegetables. This week will be different, yes it will yes it will.

What I did do well this week was Shovel Fit. I worked at Blue Earth Farm on Wednesday, and used a real shovel this time (and also a broadfork! (you wanted to watch a video about using a broadfork, right?)) to turn soil in the new garden beds, I shoveled compost, I dug holes and planted artichokes. And then I spent all of my free time the rest of the week working to fix up my own vegetable garden, which had become a sprawling hellscape of neglect. I built raised beds out of cedar. I moved mountains of dirt from my failed hugelkultur to a corner of the yard where I’m going to make a new planting bed. I dug out all the weeds and installed metal landscape edging around the garden to keep the bermuda grass from creeping back in. I re-chicken wired the fence to keep out the dastardly chickens. I put down newspaper around the three raised beds to block out the weeds and spread out 20 bags of pea gravel and then went back to the store and bought (and then spread out) 15 more because my gravel-estimation skills are just that bad. I filled my raised beds with compost and planted seeds from my free box of zombie apocalypse seeds. Also, I googled the name of the company printed on the seed packets and the only things that came up were complaints with the Better Business Bureau and bad reviews about none of their seeds germinating. But they were freeee!

Anyway, that night, last night, a big storm rolled in and I got a tornado warning alert on my phone with a message to “take shelter now!” and it seemed likely that we were all gonna die and my last words were going to be about my pants being restrictive.

Here’s what we ate this week.

Pigs in Blankets, the Cheater’s Way. Canned crescent rolls lovingly wrapped around store-bought sausages. I’m givin’ the people what they want on Valentine’s day- processed foods made quickly and with minimal clean-up. I made a cheesy-ass tablescape the night before too, with our fancy plates and red candles and all the heart-suited cards from a deck of cards and red and pink foil-wrapped chocolates for the boys. Henry woke up and drew a Valentine’s picture for Andy, and then Andy had to leave for work and Henry said, full of melancholy, “I wish Papa were here so I could make him more Valentine’s pictures.” Most people would probably hear that and think their kid was being so sweet. Because I am so petty, I said, “Did you know Valentine’s Day isn’t just a holiday for Papa? It’s to show love for all the people in your life. You know who cares about Valentine’s Day? Me! I do! That’s why I bought you chocolates and why I’m making you risotto tonight!” Henry just blinked at me and then proceeded to not draw me a picture. I think it was an important lesson for both of us.

Butternut Risotto for Henry. No one else wanted to eat this because everyone else is sick of risotto. No matter though, Henry ate the whole pot of the stuff over the course of the next three days.

Steak on a Plate for Andy and George. No sides. Andy did the most romantic thing someone could do for me and rescued me from parkour. He came into the active play room like a knight in shining armor and I got to leave! It was glorious. I just went home and cooked risotto and steak, but how I cherished not having to spend another hour at MyGym!

Coeur a la Creme. This looks like garbage, and the kids hated it. How? Why? It’s whipped cream and cream cheese and white chocolate on raspberry sauce! Andy didn’t eat that much either but claimed to like it. I ate a fair amount of it but I’m not sure how I really felt about it. The white chocolate had a sort of funkiness to it. Is this a thing? Did I stumble into some bad chocolate? Or is this a characteristic of good white chocolate? I bought valrhona in bulk from Central Market, the best stuff I could find. I tried to google ‘white chocolate funk’ but got nowhere because it’s the name of a band. Anyway, now I have a coeur a la creme mold that I’ll never use again.

Potato and Chorizo Tacos. We’re still eating chorizo over here. I’m ready to be done with it but it has become a thing that both George and Henry will eat with gusto, though not with potatoes of course, because my children don’t like potatoes. Imagine me lowering my brow and pushing air loudly out of my nostrils like a cartoon bull. Anyway, the kids had potato-less tacos and Andy I ate it the real way for some variety.

Leftover Steak and Green Onion Quesadillas. See, variety! Look at all the things I can put in tortillas and call dinner! I have the time and space for one interest during the course of a regular day with my kids. Usually, it’s cooking. When my focus momentarily shifts to something else, like it did with fixing up the vegetable garden this week, our dinners become whatever shit I can find stuffed into tortillas. We ate some variation of this again on Saturday, but I didn’t take a picture because it looked pretty much like this.

Pork Shoulder Ragu with Homemade Pappardelle. The one real meal I cooked this week and I forgot to take a picture before I started eating! Bah! I don’t have a pasta maker so I rolled this pasta out by hand with a rolling pin in six little batches. It was marginally successful. I wouldn’t have done it at all except that we didn’t have any store bought pasta in the house and when I weighed the options of asking Andy to go to the store to get some on his way home and therefore leaving me alone with the kids for an extra 20 minutes versus just making it myself and having him be home on time there was a clear winner. The ragu was delicious. And came together with pantry ingredients plus the pork shoulder that I was going to use to make cochinita pibil with but didn’t because I chose to garden instead of sourcing banana leaves.

Alfajores with Homemade Dulce de Leche. I got to spend a beautiful afternoon with my friend Amanda for her birthday. I asked her what her favorite dessert was and she picked alfajores- so fun! The cookies are a breeze. I went with a more labor-intensive dulce de leche recipe, where you mix milk sweetened with sugar and flavored with a vanilla bean in a pot and cook it down for a couple of hours, instead of the traditional method of boiling a can of condensed milk. My father-in-law has a story about accidentally locking his family out of the house when he was a kid while a can of condensed milk was boiling on the stove. All the water boiled out of the pot and the can exploded, spraying condensed milk all over the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. I feel like this could be me, and that at this juncture boiling cans of molten sugar on the stove is just too risky.

Cucumber Cream Cheese Sandwiches with Mint, Chicken Salad Sandwiches with Grapes and Walnuts. Along with the alfajores and Christy’s unbelievably delicious cheesecake, we ate a bunch of little sandwiches and this glorious spinach and artichoke dip that I loved and a beautiful kale caesar salad featuring a bounty of lacinto kale grown by Amanda’s little sister Emma- I gotta ask her for that recipe- it was so garlicky and I loved the generous crouton to kale ratio- and some delightful little bites made by my sister, the master of the one-bite snack. She made these little hard boiled egg canapes with red onion and dill on a circle of crustless white bread that rocked my world. So we ate snacks and worked on our own craft projects and this is our model for how to have a successful birthday party.

Hoecakes with Buttermilk Crema and Pulled Pork, Sausage, Hash Browns, Banana Bread. And the next morning, bright and early, I hosted a surprise double-birthday party 9:30 AM breakfast for Andy’s mom and brother. I called it a brunch and someone said, if it’s at 9:30 it’s not a brunch, and I said, what about if I’m serving pulled pork? About that pulled pork. I put it in the oven before going to Amanda’s the day before and left instructions with Andy for the next steps- remove the lid after four hours and let it cook another hour to let the pork develop a dark crust. When I came home from Amanda’s the house smelled insane. And not in a good way- crazy intense and choking-ly pulled pork-y. I opened up all the windows and looked in the pot. The pork was okay, but the sauce, which should have been sauce-like, had been carbonized. I don’t know what happened. Andy followed the instructions I gave him, and I think I followed the recipe, but it’s J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who always gets this stuff right, and there weren’t any, “Help! My dutch oven is full of ashes!” comments on his post, so I think this one was on me. The pork was still okay, though, tossed with new sauce, and Mary and Dan had a happy birthday breakfast!

These kids toasted each other of their own volition! Thanks for capturing the moment, Joanna! Please notice George’s five beverages. Please do not notice Henry and George’s messy room or the bare concrete floors in my house.

Sparkling Cinnamon Swirl Bundt Cake, Gluten Free. This handy little cake answered the question of what kind of celebration dessert can be served to a gluten free dairy free crowd at 9:30 in the morning. It’s austere enough to be breakfast-y, but also special-feeling and delicious. You coat the pan with a thick layer of butter and then a heavy sprinkling of coarse sugar, which helps the cake release easily and gives it a wonderful shiny top and a delightful sugary crunch. The recipe in the book is for an espresso swirl bundt cake, which would have been delicious, I’m sure, but which I could not have served to children with a clear conscience. The author gives the option for the cinnamon variation in the book, and it was perfect. Also, I suck at swirling.

So yeah. You’ve seen the damning evidence. More vegetables, any vegetables in my diet starting…now.

Andy surprised me with a date to a fancy restaurant on Sunday night. I mention this as an excuse for not writing a blog post in time for Monday morning. I am not mentioning the name of the restaurant because I woke up this morning with rather a bad case of food poisoning, and I don’t think it was the restaurant, because yesterday (Sunday) I also ate some hummus that had sat at room temperature for five hours and definitely it was that that did it, right? Anyway, I don’t want to say the name of the restaurant and have you associate it with food poisoning when they probably didn’t do anything wrong. So, yes! Getting surprised with a date night at the end of a long weekend/week/several years with children is the greatest thing. I eat every single meal with my kids, all the meals, and they’re nice people and funny and it’s pretty okay except I have to get up a hundred times because someone needs more water or apple juice or a napkin or more rice or to have their hands held while they sit on the potty and my food gets cold. Instead of this, I got to leave it all behind and go out with Andy, who wore the very tight pants I love and who smelled of the cologne he has worn from time to time since high school, which makes me feel like I’m sixteen again. The restaurant was so pretty and I ate the most delicious chicken liver mousse on the smokiest grilled sourdough and it definitely did not give me food poisoning. I also had ravioli that was okay. It bummed me out a little because the pasta dough was made with whole wheat flour (no thanks ) and it was a little undercooked at the edges and the only thing worse than whole wheat flour pasta is undercooked whole wheat flour pasta. I still ate every bite and I loved being there, in a pretty place, wearing clean clothes and eating food that my kids hadn’t coughed on.

This morning I woke up feeling sick. My dear Molly texted to ask if I was home and then dropped by with a sack full of tacos for me and big fluffy pancakes for the boys in honor of Galentine’s Day, which as we all know is February 13 and is officially celebrated by plying your best lady friends with breakfast foods. We both agreed it was the ultimate tragedy to bring a sack of delicious greasy breakfast tacos to someone with food poisoning. I put the tacos in the fridge and fed the kids the pancakes. I skipped lunch but felt hungry by mid afternoon and went for it- I reheated that taco in the oven until the edges were hot and the middle was lukewarm and I enjoyed the fuck out of it.

Here’s what we ate this week:

Crispy Thai Pork with Cucumber Salad. I don’t remember Monday. I think we might have set some things on fire in the backyard? We definitely ate this pork! It all blurs together. So I’ll use this space for a weekly business update. We are no further on the insurance question. No one will talk to us or return our calls. Andy needs to order pump supplies soon (hundreds of dollars) so talking to a person would be nice, Gigi who allegedly does this for a living. Also (not entirely unrelated to my short-tempered snark in the last sentence) I’m really slacking on the meditation. I blame the dog. Gonna get back on that wagon this week.

Pages from Lies and Other Tall Tales, a delightful find from our local library. I can’t wait to have an excuse to use that hatching monkeys insult on someone.

Andy’s been teaching Henry to play poker. Here you see the product of Henry’s work to use one deck of cards to make poker hands ranked from worst to best. I thought it was fun!

Chorizo with Roasted Pineapple and Guacamole. I hated everything on Tuesday. Betsy DeVos was confirmed and I read that all the drama about getting one more Senator to flip to vote no was totally fake- that McConnell had the votes he needed all along, Murkowski and Collins had his blessing to vote no because it was better for them politically and he would still have the numbers he needed. It didn’t matter that Cornyn and Cruz received overwhelming feedback from constituents on the left and right begging them to vote against her confirmation because they are not responsive to nor representative of the electorate. They care about winning their Republican primary in 3 and 1 years respectively and nothing else. I should have known this was true, but I didn’t. To have so many people across the country reach out to their representatives and to have it not translate into changing a single Republican vote was, to steal a word from Gorsuch, disheartening. And then Cornyn had the absolute gall to put up a fundraising link on facebook right after DeVos’s confirmation. I commented on it to say I was so disappointed in his vote and that he had failed our children and old white guys felt compelled to chime in and say I’m a hack and a libtard. And then some mofo on the Austin Area Homeschooler’s facebook page posted a link to a Breitbart scholarship that is only available for white males and it just felt like everything was terrible and the world is only old white guys who get to do and say whatever they want. And then I had to go to parkour and that sucked too.

But the tacos were good. I rarely make the same meal twice in a span of two weeks, but George loved the chorizo so much last week and asked for it again this week so I did it. I’ll share the recipe here once I can work up the energy to type it up.

Parmesan Chicken with Red Cabbage and Baby Fennel Salad. On Wednesday I woke up ready to get shit done. I went to Blue Earth Farm and did Shovel Fit (light) with Joanna. I did not actually use a shovel. I used a little pick to break up dirt clumps in the new garden beds and I thinned out some lettuce. I don’t think I burned a lot of calories but I loved every bit of it. Working in the sunshine, talking to Joanna, marveling at the fact that our children could entertain themselves peacefully with minimal adult oversight. I’m gonna try to go once a week, and this week I’m gonna dig some big ole holes with a real life shovel. That night I researched how to do an open records request for our Senators, to see if I could ask for the number of constituents who contacted their offices about DeVos, and what way they wanted the Senators to vote. I drafted letters and researched who to send them to (harder than you’d think) and the next day I mailed them. I also mailed my ergo, that I have used to carry Henry and then George for the past five years, to Carry the Future, so it can be sent overseas to a refugee family in need. And I sent valentines. All of these things together had the effect of making me feel less powerless. I felt better. The chicken and salad were both good, but were not the focus of my day.

Last week my mom said, hey, great blog post but why didn’t you write about how well the kids are doing in swim class? These are for you, Gangie! We’ve had three classes, one a week, and Henry can swim to an island-y thing without floaties and George swam completely submerged, with help, for a couple of seconds. In this picture, he’s practicing turning around and getting back to the edge of the pool in case he every accidentally falls into one.

After swim class we dropped by Christy’s house because she had just gone to the Japanese grocery store and picked us up some treasures. She and her girls had to run to their next appointment but the boys and I stayed behind and (creepily) had a picnic of onigiri stuffed with salty salmon flakes and pickled plums on her front lawn.

A soup that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pho. It’s rice noodles in a ginger-spiked chicken stock with herbs and lime squeezed on top.

Miso-Glazed Salmon, Coconut Roasted Kale, Onigiri, Japanese Cucumber Salad, Not-Katsu. Speaking of bastardized versions of classic Asian dishes… Katsu is a breaded and fried meat cutlet. What I served was reheated leftover parmesan chicken with a dipping sauce that was not much more than ketchup mixed with soy sauce because I didn’t have any worcestershire sauce to do it right. Everything was pretty good though, even if it was an odd assemblage of items.

I woke up early on Saturday morning to help Jordan and Helen pick up the world’s largest couch. We won’t be starting our own furniture moving company anytime soon- we went to the wrong house and rang and knocked on the door at 8 in the morning. It was blessedly, mercifully, vacant, which we noticed after peeping in the windows. Once at the right house, we struggled to get the massive sectional through the front door, bumping an heirloom grandfather clock and denting the door jam in the process. So we suck. But Helen and Jordan have a sweet ass new giant couch! Then we hung out with Joanna for a bit at the Buda Farmers’ Market. Oh did I love that! I bought fudge and a Mexican chocolate brownie from the vendor across from Joanna. “Good witch” incense and kaolin clay soap bars from another lady, and green onions and thai red pepper flakes from another lady. This last vendor asked if I had a garden, and I said, yes, I’m building my raised beds now, and she gave me a box with dozens and dozens of carefully packaged and labeled seeds of all kinds. They’re from some doomsday seed company, meant for you to have all you’d need if the world ended right now but you and your seed box were somehow spared. She had 300 boxes to give away and we stocked up. Super exciting.

Strawberry Coconut Balls.

Out-of-Season Watermelon. These were my contributions to a little pre-Valentine’s Day party Helen threw for the kids in our lives. I also brought that (probably poisoned) hummus and some vegetables. It sat on the counter while the kids decorated valentine bags and gluten free brownies, ate pizza and chocolates, built fairy houses outside and played with bubbles. Then we drove home and I ate some of it for a snack and the rest, as they say, is history!

I hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! I’m making steaks for Andy and George and what else but risotto for Henry, with a super 80’s couer a la creme for dessert. We’ll talk about that next week! See you then, valentines.

I got to see Diana Kennedy at the Texas Book Festival in November. If I had dragged myself away from Facebook long enough to write a blog post that month, she would have been at the top of my list of (non-political) things to write about. She is a goddamn marvel. She’s 93, British, and fiercely opinionated. She wore tight leather pants to her session and told us, the audience, how shitty and wasteful we are. I was charmed. You can get a little taste of her glory in this interview with the San Antonio Express News. Anyway, I’m bringing her up here because one of the things she shared with us, when asked for her advice on how to live a good life, was to be more critical. Kennedy’s doing her part, for certain. Her newest book (an updated version of one of her classics) contains two separate chapters on her pet peeves, which she refers to as her ‘betes noires.’ Which brings me to my point. What is the best way to be critical?

I’m judgmental. Really judgmental. To me that means that I’m quietly critical, though I don’t have a poker face to speak of, so if I’m being quietly critical around you some of that judgment is going to come across without me having to say anything. But how should this play out online, in the Trump-era specifically, when you can’t see me wrinkling up my nose at the shitty thing you just shared? Is it worth speaking up and calling out your Facebook friends when this happens? Or better to not waste your time on it and judge them silently and move on? Don’t tell me that not judging them at all is option C. It’s not for me! Some examples from the past few weeks:

• After the women’s march, a friend posted a picture of some Army ladies in their fatigues holding big guns with the caption “Real women who march for rights.” I thought about asking her why being afraid that my family (and millions of others) would lose our health insurance and marching to try to make my voice heard meant that I wasn’t a “real woman.” But I ended up not saying anything. I thought about saying something snarky about not being a real woman again this week when this same lady invited me to a LuLaRoe (?) party. I didn’t say anything then either. But I judged, oh, I judged.
• Another friend posted an image of Kurt Cobain with a made-up quote from him saying that Donald Trump was just the sort of outsider our generation would call on to save our country. I thought about posting the Snopes article that explains that this is a made up quotation, but didn’t because this friend has put Snopes in her “fake news” category, so what’s the point?
• Someone else shared a news  article that said  Iran would ban U.S. citizens from entering their country in response to Trump’s ban and said “Oh darn! I really wanted to go there. Smirk.” I did leave a comment on this one, and tried to explain that this will have devastating effects for families and to urge him to think about the lives that would be upended by this.

So that’s what I did in three cases out of dozens, but what’s the right thing to do? Do you speak up every time and hope that you can get through to someone, or at least be a voice of dissent for other people who read this stuff? Do you stop following or ignore these people because it’s exhausting and the fight’s not with them, it’s with the politicians? I just don’t know. I wish Diana Kennedy was available to coach me through it.

Here’s what we ate this week.

Homemade Chorizo, Mexican Rice. Henry ate his way through the bowl of pickled red onions like they were a side dish. It was mesmerizing to watch.

Hoecakes and Bacon. A parkour anecdote! George and I head into the active play room where he immediately throws his body on a big peanut-shaped yoga ball. He rolls around erratically for a minute before moving on to the trampoline. Meanwhile, a little toddler wanders over to the peanut ball and picks something up. Her mom follows her and says loudly, “These are NAILS!” Of course they’re George’s. We’re still working on the master bathroom and there are little piles of nails here and there on the tables in my room. He’s been carrying them around in his shirt pocket all day, taking them out periodically and pretending they’re lightsabers, and I forgot they were in there. So I had to walk over there and say “Oh, I’m so sorry, those must be my sons- he’s been playing with nails.” She looked at me like I had two heads. It didn’t occur to me till later that night that most parents probably don’t let their three-year-olds play with nails.

And a note about hoecakes. Andy’s dad takes deep dives into any and every subject that interests him, no matter how trivial. There is a famous family anecdote about him spending hours in the barbed wire section of the Smithsonian reading everything they had posted about the history of the stuff. Recently, an episode of Cook’s Country led him to research hoecakes, and the meaning behind the name- were they cooked on actual hoes? (Signs point to no!) Anyway, he told me about how people would use them like bread to make pulled pork hoecake sandwiches, and I spent some time daydreaming about that. Later, when I was flipping through my Big Bad Breakfast cookbook looking for dinner ideas, I came across a recipe for hoecakes, along with a long headnote about the etymology of the name, and figured it was a sign that I should make them. They were delicious! I’ll have to try them again in sandwich-form when I can get my hands on some pulled pork.

Egg McMuffin. Thinking about hoecake sandwiches made me think about the time I made homemade McGriddles and that made me want a hammy eggy sandwich thing. That’s all.

Sticky Balsamic Ribs, Garlic Cheese Grits, Burnt Green Onion Dip with Curly Kale. When I was planning this menu I thought it might be too ambitious. The ribs and the kale (both genius recipes on Food52!) require multiple steps, and the grits have to be stirred continuously for 15 minutes while you’re simultaneously tending to the grilling of the ribs and the production of the weirdo kale dish. But I decided to go for it, because the kids have been playing together, without maiming each other, for longer stretches lately and maybe I could get away with it. It ended up being pretty damn hard to accomplish. George was impossibly clingy and needy and difficult the whole day. He clung to my leg, stood on my feet, stepped in my way every step of the production of this meal. I got the ribs on the table and went back out to grill the green onions (which is one of the top five best smells in the world, by the way) and he stuck his head out the back door to tell me that the ribs weren’t good. They were good. Don’t listen to uncharacteristically-rude George.

Red Beans and Rice.  Mary came to watch the kids for me on Thursday and I got to drop off the bags of stuff for Goodwill that have been hanging around in the trunk of my car for the last four weeks. I worked in the yard all afternoon, while Mary and the kids kept me company. Mary (she’s my mother-in-law, did you know?) talked about maybe doing a half Ironman in the fall (she’s also a super-human, did you know that too?) and it was the first time I have ever felt intrigued instead of repulsed by the idea of all that physical exertion. I don’t think I should start with an Ironman (I cannot jog the length of my block without getting a stitch in my side and giving up on the whole idea) but I do want to do something. Molly mentioned joining her for a class led by a Very Handsome Man in which you run on a treadmill on a steep incline while listening to hip hop music. This sounds promising (aside from the treadmill part). But I also want to do my brother-in-law’s patented workout program, Shovel Fit, in which you do grueling manual labor in the garden to get fit. Joanna has given me the green light to come out to their farm and get to digging. Opportunities abound!

Spaghetti Aglio e Olio with Roasted Brussels Sprouts. This is from the Food Lab cookbook, though it’s called pasta with three kinds of garlic, or something along those lines, but it was great. I’m sorry the recipe isn’t online- Lopez-Alt is the master of taking the same ingredients anyone would use for a classic recipe and handling them in a new way that makes it so much better than the swill I would throw together on my own.

I’m doing a free month of a meditation program. I didn’t know anything about meditation, and what it involved beyond sitting somewhere quiet with your eyes closed. What do you do while you’re sitting there quietly? I’m a bit behind already, but I did the second day on Friday, after the kids had gone to bed. It was a hearing meditation exercise, and I was instructed to listen to the sounds that were all around me, to take them in without judging them, to simply notice them and let them wash over me. Adelaide, our elderly boxer, spent the duration of this exercise at the foot of my bed snoring, farting, and then licking herself with her giant floppy tongue.

Super Bowl Fare. Meats and Cheese, Fruit, Cheesy Beer Muffins, Korean Fried Chicken Wings. We watched the Super Bowl and ate snacks in front of the TV. The kids were enraptured. They loved the game, they loved Lady Gaga, who they were surprised to find wasn’t a baby, and they loved getting to stay up past their bedtime to watch TV. These wings are delicious. I skipped the red pepper flakes because the kids were eating them, but there’s a full cup of sliced ginger steeped in the basting sauce, which lends a delightful, kid-friendly, spiciness to the wings. It was fun and sticky and fun.

That was our week! Some of it! For those of you who have asked about our insurance and my lady parts, two random bits of housekeeping: We still don’t know what’s happening with our insurance. We have been assured that people somewhere are working on it. Someone said we’d be covered for January. We don’t know if the new plan costs a trillion dollars or basically anything else about what’s going on. I went off birth control and had a normal period this month that lasted about a week like a normal human woman!

I’m off to meditate on how to be my best and most Diana Kennedy-like self while listening to the sound of dog farts. See ya next week.