I ripped up all the carpet in my house. And all the plastic laminate that looks like wood but is actually just pictures of wood glued to plastic that smelled like one hundred thousand tennis balls when I pulled it up. And I stacked up all this flooring and carried it out to two big bagster bags (that’s half bag and half dumpster) in our front yard. And I did it all by myself, mostly! It was dusty and satisfying. Before I set up the bagster bags, the filthy carpets and filthier carpet pads were rolled up and piled in a heap by the front door. The kids loved that pile of dusty old carpet. They climbed all over it and named it, for reasons I still don’t understand, The King of England. George would say, “Hey, Henry! Let’s go climb the King of England!” and they’d run off to hurl their bodies into the heap, sending clouds of dust and pet hair swirling through the air. Andy and I set up the first bagster bag and moved the carpet pile in the dead of night. George woke up the next morning and burst into tears when he saw it was gone.

We’re getting new flooring, a strand-woven bamboo. I thought it would be here by now but it turns out we’ve got at least three more weeks to wait for it. I will use this time to fret about my children falling out of bed and cracking their heads on the cement.

Speaking about fretting over the untimely demise of my children- Andy and I went away for an overnight trip to San Antonio this weekend and left the kids with Andy’s mom and dad. This was our first night away from them. Andy’s mom is brilliant with the kids, and they adore her and Art, but still I found (crazy) reasons to worry. What if they fall in the pool? What if they mess with the dog while he’s eating and get mauled? What if Andy and I are in a fiery car crash? We really need to write a will. But everything was okay! Great, even! The kids had fun, they got to eat pancakes and watch movies. Andy and I got to talk to each other and hold hands and eat without having to stop to help George pee on the potty. And sleep through the night, with no one climbing into our bed at six in the morning to rub my elbows! We went to PAX, a video and tabletop gaming expo, and got to see our puzzler friend Mike who makes amazing games, one of which, Thornwatch, we got to playtest. I was a Sage, trying to protect little villager children from being carried off by gliders using my elemental forest magic. A mighty fine way to spend an afternoon. We also saw Mike’s panel, went out to a fancy and weird dinner (more on this later), and played a bunch of board games in the massive tabletop gaming room, including my favorite from last year, Morels! A mushroom foraging game! I lost both times. Andy’s just a better mushroom forager.  We also really liked Hounded, where one person plays as a fox and the other person plays as a five-team hunting party trying to kill the fox. I was the fox, and your goal is to flip over the tiles that make up the game board and uncover the morning, afternoon, and evening tiles without getting cornered by the hunters, each of whom have their own chess-like movement abilities, and this time I won. So foxy. Probably the overlap between people who come to my blog for food/uterus stories and people who also want to hear about board games at length isn’t great, so I’ll leave it at that. We had a great time and we were so lucky to get to strike out on our own for a day- thank you Mary and Art!

Here’s what we ate this week.

Easy Weeknight Chili with Blue Earth Farm‘s Heritage Ground Pork. Look at how I’m a real food blogger with that artful cilantro splash in the corner. It’s there and not on top of the chili because we weren’t hungry yet but the sun was going down, so I put some chili in a bowl, took its picture, and then slopped it back in the pot to sit until we were ready to eat it. This chili is from The Food Lab and is worth the price of admission. The recipe’s not online, or else I’d link it here. I think a bracing amount of tomato paste and a splash of whiskey at the end are what set it apart, but this amazing and beautifully fatty ground pork didn’t hurt either.

Okonomiyaki, Thai Sweet Potato Salad. I’ll be honest, I half-assed the implementation of this salad and completely ruined it. I used all the lime juice in the world which turned out to be too much. I ate the peanuts off the top and gave the rest to the chickens. Or else we threw it away so Adelaide didn’t go out there in the cover of darkness and eat lime-y sweet potato hunks and then throw it up on our concrete floor. Andy does the clean up while I play a pirate game with the kids on my phone so I don’t know where this stuff ended up. Okonomiyaki is good and cabbage-y!

Christy’s Honey Flank Steak, Gwyneth’s Sesame Noodles with Roasted Broccoli and Furikake. This is a perfect after-parkour dinner, when I get home at six and we have to eat right away. The flank steak marinates in hefty pours of honey and tamari plus a fistful of minced ginger overnight, and then you can grill it up quickly right before dinner. The noodles are even easier. I added broccoli that I tossed in coconut oil and roasted at 425 for 15 minutes, so we weren’t just eating meat and noodles for dinner.  The kids just ate meat and noodles for dinner though. Henry painstakingly removed the scallions and broccoli from his pasta and put them in a little pile on the table next to his plate. George said he didn’t want to eat any of this stuff, but later pulled his chair up next to the meat plate and picked out the choice crispy bits. Bah.

Pupusas with Curtido and Refried Beans. This meal obligingly used up the ends of things that have been hanging around the fridge and pantry. The last hunk of cabbage leftover from last week’s winter slaw and this week’s okonomiyaki became curtido, an oregano-y quick-pickled cabbage condiment. And a sack of tamale masa that’s been in the pantry since Christmas became the dough.

I made a bunch of cheese-filled pupusas, which are a cinch, and a couple bean-filled ones, which are a nightmare. Henry doesn’t like cheese so I probably would have done this for him anyway, but I had to do it this time because we’re in our second week of a dairy-free experiment for him because he’s been complaining about his stomach and the doctor said it’s probably dairy. It looks like she’s right because he hasn’t complained about his stomach at all. Which is good and kind of sucks too because Henry loves all non-cheese dairy- he guzzles milk, yogurt, sour cream by the bucketful. I’m hoping he can still have a little in moderation- noodles with butter and parmesan, a slice of cake- and just not do the crazy glass of milk + bowl of yogurt breakfasts he’s become accustomed to.

Roasted Chicken, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, Sage Stuffing. I want a thanksgiving dinner approximately every 8 weeks. This month’s installment cut out anything virtuous and doubled down on carbs and gravy.

On Friday, the kids had their first of 18 weekly swim classes, and they loved it. Each of their teachers were fun with a masochistic streak- Henry’s teacher encouraged the two kids in her charge to kick water in her face with their flippers, George’s teacher asked him and another tiny child for high-fives after each round of activity and would then throw herself underwater when they acquiesced in a sort of slapstick routine to show how strong the kids’ high fives were. She did this EVERY TIME. I think she’s in her early twenties, but still, how can anyone muster that level of energy? After class, we walked around a nearby Randalls to look for something the kids could eat for dinner with Andy while I was at enneagram. They proposed blueberry pop tarts, which they had never tried (being ardent devotees of the strawberry flavor) and I said, fuck it, let’s go for it.

Botika. And a real dinner! Out on a date with Andy! We ate a million more things than this, but I didn’t want to be the asshole who took pictures of everything. When I read about this menu online, I was so excited. It’s South American + Japanese fusion and I wanted to eat everything. We almost did too, because it was happy hour and also restaurant week. We tried everything on the happy hour menu, split the restaurant week menu, and got a bonus order of eel and hamachi nigiri. Some things, like that nigiri and the mushroom and green chile empanadas from the top photo were really good, other things were not, like the eggrolls at the edge of the bottom photo which tasted of nothing and came with a sickly sweet dipping sauce, and a cube of pork from the restaurant week menu that was so dense it was almost impenetrable. Worse though, was the befuddled service. The first thing they brought out was two orders of the empanadas- we said we’d only ordered one and the lady said, oh okay! This happened again with the eggrolls. And then they brought out the nigiri and said, we are SO SORRY this took so long, when it definitely hadn’t. For the rest of the happy hour items, someone would come up to our table and ask if we’d received our tuna tartar yet, or how about the Japanese peanuts? (N.B. Don’t order the Japanese peanuts). And after the happy hour stuff they just stopped bringing things for a while. Finally, our waiter came back to ask if we’d gotten any of our restaurant week stuff yet, and we said no. Eventually we got the rest of the courses- a tiny empanada, this time duck-filled, that came with a sadistically spicy peanut sauce, a miso soup that was supposed to be South-American-ified with cubes of queso fresco instead of tofu, but which were not present in our serving, that crazy pork brick, and a mango pudding that we asked to come out with the pork and our check because we had been there for eons and wanted to get back to PAX. Everyone was really nice- the waiter, the ladies that brought the food out- but it seems like they have no idea where the food is supposed to go once it comes out of the kitchen. It was the same story at all the tables around us. A server brought a bowl of soup to a guy sitting next to us and then bizarrely sort of accused him of trying to take a soup that he hadn’t ordered/paid for. At the table on the other side of us, a server brought out a dish of noodles but didn’t know what she was holding or who at the table ordered it, so she said, “I have some noodles. With, uh, vegetables?” And a guy was like, “Uh, I ordered the short rib noodles?” And she said “Yeah, I said that’s what this is.” So weird! Also, they had a giant dragon head ice sculpture. That’s neither here nor there, but in reckoning the pros and cons of a restaurant, you can’t not mention a dragon head ice sculpture. Also the bathroom is pretty. So you know. I guess I can’t recommend it. Unless you have lots of time to spend eating occasionally good and occasionally not good food and would enjoy watching the surreal theater of servers being sent out into a sea of tables holding something, they know not what, for someone, they know not whom.

I wrote all my non-foodie stuff at the bottom this week. Spoiler, it’s about the women’s march. You can stop reading now if you don’t like women, or marches, or women marching. But first, a quick update on last week’s bad news:

We still don’t have the insurance worked out. Andy’s old company changed insurance plans and changed the company that manages their insurance plans. The new company said, “hey guys, is anyone on Cobra?” and Andy’s company said, “uh, we don’t think so?” So there we are. The law says we have coverage for 18 months, whether the company changes plans or not, so we should be covered, but these are not words that anyone has spoken to us yet.

The bad plumbers reared their ugly heads again, in the form of apparently not having soldered any of the couplings for the copper pipes they put in. They were all leaking. The guy came back out and said he forgot to do it. I called the office afterward, because they’re terrible, and they need to pay for the hole in the drywall they had to cut to fix their mistake, and no one called me back, so I called again and my voice was all shaky and I talked too fast and relayed the whole sordid tale to the patient receptionist who assured me that someone would call on Monday. We’ll see, patient receptionist, we’ll see.

We had to call another plumber because our washing machine was leaking and our dishwasher overflowed. I researched the guy on yelp and everyone raved about him. He came out and was professional and fast, and affordable, and super religious. He had a lot of different crosses on his person- around his neck, on his belt buckle and phone holster thing. Obviously, this doesn’t matter. Except: I was reading to the kids from this horrible library book about the Jedi, which is long and awful, and there’s a page that lists traits of the light side and the dark side. The plumber overheard, poked his head around the corner and said, “You know what that’s really about, right?” I mentally said “Here we go,” and shook my head, and he said “Republicans and Democrats.” I said, “Well, I’m not gonna ask you which one is which!” He didn’t say anything else on the subject. I assumed, because he was a white religious guy, that he was a Republican, but I suppose it’s possible that he wasn’t? I didn’t want to wade into those waters to find out.

The kids are better! Andy’s mostly better! I somehow never really got sick?

Here’s what we ate this week.

Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder. Rub yer meat (I heard it) in equal parts white sugar and kosher salt and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. Cook it at 300 degrees for 4-6 hours, until fork tender, basting as often as you please.

Farro with Green Olives, Butternut Wedges with Sage Pesto, Roasted Pork. I ate my pork with farro and butternut wedges, but decided to be benevolent and give Andy some tortillas and lime for his to spare him the olive-packed alternative.

Fried Brussels Sprouts, Thai-Style Citrus Salad. You top this salad with toasted coconut and salted peanuts. I had extra, and was eating five-finger pinches of the stuff while waiting for the chicken to finish cooking, and offered some to the kids. They agreed to try it, after wrinkling their noses up suspiciously, so I set the bowl down on the table between them. A few minutes later, Henry pulled the bowl closer to him, out of George’s reach, and George burst into tears and yelled that Henry couldn’t have ALL OF IT! Andy moved the bowl back to the middle, joined me in the kitchen, and whispered that Henry was only eating the peanuts and George was only eating the coconut and they still couldn’t share it.

The Stuff I Mentioned Above, Plus Roasted Orange Salty Caramel Chicken. This sauce is everything that is good in this world. Put it on anything.

Onigiri, Doraemon Donut-Like Thing, California Satsumas, Mochi Strawberry Treat, Grape Soda, all from Asahi Imports. My friend Christy’s daughter Ella is 14 and the coolest. She’s a hardworking, ballet-dancing, violin-playing badass. She’s in love with all things Japanese and is in the process of learning the language. For her birthday, I asked if we could go visit my favorite Japanese grocery store and buy stuff to make some traditional dishes, and she excitedly agreed. Everything in this store is adorable, amazing, and comes with complicated unwrapping instructions. Except the oranges, which we had to figure out how to open with our own brains. That cartoon cat pastry is a yeasted bread filled with something very much like chocolate pudding and topped with a sugary cap. They make tons of different onigiri, rice balls- Ella chose salty salmon flakes and I went with a pickled plum filling. We loved both. The soda bottle has a glass ball seal that you’re supposed to press down before you drink the thing. Ella and I took turns jamming down on it with our fingers to no avail. I found a pen in my purse and was able to ram it through with that, at which point the ball falls an inch or so and settles into half-pipe-shaped section in the top of the bottle and rolls around pleasantly while you sip. We then realized that the cap has a built-in mechanism to punch that ball down, so take note and learn from our fail.

In case you wanted to see the inside of that strawberry mochi treat. That’s anko (red bean paste) surrounding the strawberry. The mochi on the outside was thick and almost uncomfortably soft, like the flesh of a room-temperature corpse. The taste? Delicious! More strawberry-stuffed corpse-balls, please!

Homemade Onigiri, Stuffed with Chicken Teriyaki. After our snack, we combed through every shelf in the store. We bought two beautiful ceramic rice bowls, one with bunnies, one with a big fat cat, two sets of bunny chopsticks, some novelty candies, and the ingredients we’d need to make miso soup and our own onigiri, this time stuffed with chicken teriyaki. We used recipes from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art and loved the results, although we abandoned the very difficult triangular onigiri-shape in favor of the infinitely easier ball-shape. The teriyaki sauce was made with 7 tablespoons each of mirin, sake, and tamari plus one tablespoon of sugar, cooked down until syrupy. We coated some leftover cooked chicken breast we found in the fridge with it, chopped it up, and mixed it with more sauce. We couldn’t stop eating the sauce- it tastes like a complex salty caramel. The onigiri recipe says to affix a one-inch strip of toasted nori on top of your rice triangle as if it were the roof on a cottage, but we just wrapped whole sheets of the seaweed around ours and enjoyed the ratio that way, even if we did look like goats eating newspapers as we munched our way through them. We didn’t make it to the miso soup, but I hear they made and loved it the next day. It’s a great store, a great cookbook, and I got to experience both with an amazing young woman- thank you Ella! Let’s do it again right away. I’m dreaming of more platters of onigiri.

Ramen. I bought a few things for myself from Asahi, these perfect ramen noodles among them. I simmered the bones leftover from our roast pork in chicken stock along with some dehydrated shiitake mushrooms and scallions. I boiled the noodles in water. I crisped bits of leftover pork roast in a pan, made 6-minute eggs, and sliced some scallions. Then I strained all the solid bits from the stock and put all the elements together, along with a couple pieces of crispy seaweed. It was slurpy and salty and rich and I loved it. I wish I had broken the eggs open for the picture because they were the most magnificent orange. Our chickens stopped laying in August (so hot!) and then never started up again, I have no idea why, until a few weeks ago. Now we get one, two, or even three eggs a day and I’m reveling in having a full carton of backyard eggs in the fridge again. These eggs came from Goldie, the fastest chicken, who was also the one who lost half her backside to a possum attack this fall. She looks resplendent in her new feathers now and she is laying one small, perfectly smooth, cream-colored egg a day.

Pecan/Date/Coconut Balls. These are classified in my head as restricted diet food- something I can trot out when I need to provide a gluten and dairy free snack. I’ve been craving them all the same, despite the totally unsexy mental file folder I’ve put them in. They’re sweet and filling and that’s all I’m really looking for. It’s 1/2 cup of pecans (or any nut or even nut butter), 10 dates (pits removed), 1 cup of shredded unsweetened coconut, and a tablespoon of honey, all whizzed up in the food processor, then scooped into balls and rolled in 1/2 cup more shredded coconut. That’s it. It’s adapted from Henry’s cookbook, The Forest Feast for Kids, which we have not cooked from in many months and should cook from again soon.

Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips and Candied Ginger. I wrote about this last week, I think, but I hadn’t put in the candied ginger. I made it again so I could try it with the ginger, and it’s rad. This version is gluten and dairy free, made with Cup 4 Cup, coconut yogurt, and melted coconut oil instead of butter. Really, it was good. But it also ended up tasting like alcohol, weirdly. I’ve read that older bananas have some amount of alcohol from the fruit starting to ferment, but these bananas were no further along than normal banana bread-bananas, yellow with a heavy mottling of brown spots… It looks like I may have gone off the rails here, I’m rambling about bananas. I’ll stop now. It’s a good bread.

Skillet Tamale Pie, Roasted Vegetables, Winter Slaw. I brought the above treats as well as a GF/DF tamale pie and the winter slaw to my sister’s house on Friday night where some of my favorite women in the world gathered together to make our protest signs for the women’s march in Austin the next day. We ate, we laughed, we drew on our posters with giant markers (thanks, Joanna!), and we talked politics.

And the next day, we gathered with 50,000 other Austinites and marched. (Yes, Helen did cosplay as Evelyn Couch from Fried Green Tomatoes). The whole experience was thrilling. Every single person was kind. As we waited, a huge but orderly crowd, to make our way through the few open gates that led from the Capitol lawn to Congress Ave, Phinnie started to cry. It was hot, and she needed to nap. Strangers shaded and fanned her with their signs, sang her songs, and let us go ahead of them to get through the gates faster. She fell asleep and slept for the duration of the march. Meanwhile, we marveled at the beautifully diverse crowd around us and at the funny, clever, and poignant signs. We chanted, “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!,” and “Love Trumps Hate.” A young girl led us in a chant of “I am woman! Hear me roar!” and it was so moving I could have cried. People hung out on roof tops and cheered us on. Others brought drums and beat out cadences of the chants. It felt, and was, historic- the largest march in Texas history. I’m so glad I was a part of it, and that I got to do it with my best friends.

I know some people, many, maybe, don’t understand why we did it. They think we should get over it, that everything is going to be okay. And hey, that’s your right to think that. I don’t think everything is okay now, and I am worried about the path we’re on. I marched for healthcare, because all evidence points to Congress repealing the ACA without a replacement, which will leave 18 million people suddenly without health insurance, and people will die as a result. I marched for the LGBT community, Muslims, Jews, black people, brown people, poor people, victims of our criminal justice system, immigrants, refugees, the disabled, and other oppressed groups who have seen an increase in hate crimes and who face an administration that doesn’t respect them. I march for women, who should get to make their own damn reproductive choices, should get equal pay for equal work, and should get to live in a society that values, respects, and supports them with great public schools and great affordable childcare. I marched for the earth, because, Jesus. Primates are endangered, the earth is warming, the ice is melting, the storms are intensifying, the oceans are rotting. I marched for myself, I marched for my sisters and brothers and all the causes that weigh heavily on their minds. Together we sent a powerful message that we are here and that we won’t be ignored.

So, y’all. In the words of my sign, which I stole from a tumblr:

Organize. Resist. Agitate. Protect.

Love you.

The virus. The boys woke up sick on Monday morning. Fevers, coughing. George refused to eat anything, wrapped his arms around my neck, and stayed there all day. Henry was not eating as heartily as he normally does but was doing much better than George. We played Scat (aka 31) while George slept in my lap. The next day, the fevers were worse, the coughing was worse. But we were still doing okay. We hung out in bed and read books for hours. Every night, George would come in to my room around midnight, wrap his arms around my neck, pinch and rub the skin on my elbows, and stay pressed against me for the rest of the night. On Wednesday morning, George woke up next to me and screamed out in terror. I soothed him, offered him milk. When he had calmed down, I asked why he had cried. He said, “Because I dreamed I was alone.” Also on Wednesday, Henry’s cough got so bad that he couldn’t eat without throwing up. I did not know this was a thing, but it very much is, at least in Henry’s case. We had several spectacular episodes of uncontrollable cough-vomiting. When they were still sick, still feverish, on Thursday, I called the doctor. They said to give the kids honey for their cough, to medicate fevers over 102 and to put a humidifier in their bedroom. We did all these things. The kids spent almost the entire day in bed with me.

The plumbing. In the midst of the vomiting and cleaning up the vomiting and the clinging and the exhaustion, we are remodeling our master bathroom. I mentioned this last week, along with the problem of the 700 pound bathtub that was sitting on top of a drain that the plumber broke. Well, we decided to go ahead and get rid of the tub and do a walk-in shower instead. We ordered a shower pan through the plumbers who said it would be in on Monday. It wasn’t, and it turns out that they didn’t know when they were gonna get it. Jordan, my brother-in-law and ace tile guy, was gonna tile everything this week, his last opportunity to do so before his semester starts on Monday. But all that hinged on getting the shower pan in. It finally came in on Thursday, and the plumbers turned up early on Friday morning to install it. The kids were barely functioning by then. I was reading them books in their bed and soothing George, who kept crying. After the plumbers had been here awhile, I went to see how things were going and looked at the shower pan. It was a big flimsy plastic thing with a bumpy texture on the bottom and sloped sides. It was decidedly not the tileable shower pan we had talked about. They hadn’t installed it yet, it was leaning against the wall, so the plumber stopped and called his boss, who said that they would have to charge me for the shower pan and what they had done so far- $1100. I didn’t have any fight in me- I was exhausted, but I said, I just can’t pay you for this shower pan. It is not what I asked for and I’ve lost more than a week waiting for it. They ended up taking it off, and I paid them $800 for the time they had been there that morning. I ordered the right kind of pan from Home Depot and we’ll install it ourselves when it gets here next week.

The foot. Also, the ear infection. On Thursday, George followed me out to the garbage can when I was taking out the trash because we were attached at the hip by this point. On the way back he stepped on something sharp and burst into tears. It bled and I grabbed a paper towel and put pressure on it until it stopped. I felt mad at George. This is horrible I know, but I did. I wanted to be able to take the trash out by myself. I wanted to not have any more problems that needed my immediate attention. If there’s something out in the world that shouldn’t be stepped on, George will find it and step on it. He steps in chicken poop every time we’re in the backyard, often twice, and I have to take him inside and wash his feet. So when he stepped on this thing, whatever it was, I stopped the bleeding, thought about bringing him to the sink and washing it, but decided to just put neosporin and a band aid on it. He didn’t put his heel down for the rest of the day. On Friday, he still wasn’t putting weight on his foot. We tried giving him a bath to see if the wound would open back up enough to let us see if there was a splinter or piece of glass or something inside, but it didn’t. Then I sterilized a needle and tried to use it to peek into the cut while Andy held George. This didn’t work because George didn’t like my ham-fisted attempts to poke needles into his feet. So I called the doctor’s office again. They said he would have to come in. So Andy came home to stay with bedridden Henry and George and I went to the doctor. As we were walking into the building George told me his ear hurt. It turns out George had an ear infection, the first of his life, and would need antibiotics. The foot wound was also infected, so the antibiotics would help with that too. We had to go downstairs to get x-rays of George’s foot. We did that. We went back upstairs where the doctor said they couldn’t see anything, but if George still wasn’t putting weight on his foot by Sunday we would have to go to the emergency room where he would be put under and they would cut open his tiny little wound and pull out whatever splintery thing was in there.

The insurance. On Saturday, both kids were still so sick, and still had high fevers. But Andy was home! It felt glorious to go out. I went to the farmer’s market and bought every vegetable. I went to Blue Earth Farm and bought meat. When I got home Andy said, “I got some more bad news.” And I said that we had already done all the things. Everything was already bad. Wrong again! A letter had been delivered to notify us of changes to our insurance plan. The changes listed? “Plan dropped.” Effective two weeks ago. Our insurance is (was, I guess) Cobra-ed through Andy’s old job. His new job is with a small business start-up thing and doesn’t provide healthcare- the other employees are able to have health insurance because of Obamacare. To keep things simple in the midst of the job change, Andy had decided just to Cobra for 18 months and then buy healthcare through ACA when that ran out. So we don’t know exactly what happened, but maybe Andy’s old company dropped their insurance plan, probably to move to another one? No one informed us that this would happen, and in fact, the company they contract with to handle their health insurance plans charged us for January. Andy’s gonna call on Tuesday, when the Humana office is open again, to see if we have any options here, but things don’t look good. The timing is unbelievable. That this would happen on the heels of the one week this year where we’ve been to the doctor for sick kids, got x-rays and antibiotics, had a forehead wound glued shut with what I’m sure is a very fancy and expensive glue, and had the prospect of a visit to the emergency room for toddler foot surgery on the horizon boggles the mind.

And now it’s Sunday, and things are looking just a little bit better. George’s temperature is back to normal and, since late Saturday afternoon, he is walking on his hurt foot again. So no emergency room! I hope! Henry still has a mild fever, but he ate two bowls of rice for dinner tonight and a three small squares of a milk chocolate and toffee bar that was part of a spectacular gift basket that my sister dropped off for us. His coughing jags are still really bad though. The doctor said the cough may linger for two to three weeks, poor kid. Andy is sick. And using his free time to research Obamacare plans. Thank god for the pre-existing conditions clause! My type-1 diabetic husband would be in really dangerous waters right now without it. I have called my senators to note this.

Here’s what we ate this week. What Andy and I ate this week, I should say, because the kids have subsisted on little bites of nothing here and there. Also, I stopped cooking on Thursday because it was all just too much. Also also, Andy, beautiful human that he is, let me escape to a cookbook gathering at my friend Abbie’s house where I got to eat several magnificent dishes from Ottolenghi’s cookbooks while not cleaning up vomit.

Roast Chicken. Henry used up all my butcher’s twine last year during his booby trap obsession. I never remember to buy it so I shove bamboo skewers through the legs instead, which tears the skin and makes the thing look a little gruesome but sort of gets the job done.

Roast Chicken, Garlic Cheese Grits, Pot-Roasted Collard Greens. It’s too dark to see them, but these grits are brilliant. The recipe is from the Big Bad Breakfast cookbook, which my sister Helen gave me for my birthday, and I want to make and eat them again right now and every day after that.

Wonton Soup with Heritage Ground Pork. This is a Gwyneth P. recipe. That’s a little rhyme for you. Except her recipe uses ground chicken, which I replaced with delightfully fatty pork, and she has you cut the wonton wrappers into noodles, which sink to the bottom of the pot and stick together in big clumps. So I just put the meatballs in the wrappers instead. This wasn’t any better. The meatball part is great, the wonton part was soggy and bland and unpleasant. It is maybe the brand that I bought? Or maybe I cooked it too long? The meat and the broth and the vegetables are delicious though. I’m gonna keep making this but skip the wontons, or add rice noodles or something instead.

Leftover Garlic Cheese Grits with Ham and Arugula. For breakfast I reheated the leftover grits and stirred in some chopped ham and a handful of arugula and loved it so much. Does the look of it gross you out? On the heals of all my vomit and foot blood talk?

Garlic and Ginger Meatball Salad with Cashew Tamari Dressing. I had more meat than wontons, so I put about a cup of the gingery meatball mixture from our wonton soup night in a ramekin in the fridge and fried it up for my lunch the next day. I loved this! Every salad should have meatballs.

French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon. This is where everything went to shit. Wednesday. I made this cake after reading about it in A Homemade Life. It sounded charming, with the recipe measurements based on the size of little French yogurt jars. Are you jaded and find this idea disgustingly twee? I half do and half don’t. I didn’t love this cake though. Instead of adding the oil to the wet ingredients and then folding in the dry ingredients like every other cake recipe, you mix the wet and dry and then stir in the oil last, which means that you have to stir the cake a lot, over-mixing it to get the oil to blend in, which in turn leads to a cake that has a slightly heavy, almost rubbery texture. Why do this? Also, I wanted it to be a lemon cake, and it’s not. It’s a yogurt cake. The lemon syrup I poured on top didn’t soak in very far, so the top of the cake tastes like lemon and the rest of the cake tastes like nothing.

The worst part was that when I served the cake to the boys, along with cups of tea with lemon and honey for their sore throats, Henry took a big gulp of tea and then threw up all over the table, on the watercolors we had done, on the deck of cards we had played scat with, and on the plates and cups and forks in a stunning reenactment of the rainbow birthday cake debacle.

Shaved Fennel Salad with Asian Pear and Parmesan. I cleaned up everything and then sat on the window seat in the kitchen and didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat. Then I made this salad, also from A Homemade Life, along with some chicken salad sandwiches from leftover shredded chicken. The salad is like the one in the link, except it has thinly sliced Asian pears instead of mushrooms. It’s delicious and easy.

I stopped cooking on Thursday and Friday. The kids needed constant tending and the only other meal I had planned was one the kids would love (farro with lots of green olives and roasted butternut squash with sage pesto) and that Andy would not love (olives and squash). So with the kids not eating I’d essentially be cooking that just for me. No thanks. Andy got us burritos from Wheatsville on Thursday. The kids asked for and then couldn’t eat avocado sushi. On Friday, desperate to get the kids interested in eating again, I asked them what they would want if they could eat anything. Henry wanted Mexican rice, George wanted pizza. Andy got both on his way home, and both kids managed a few bites of their chosen items.

Avocado Sushi, Roasted Baby Bok Choy + Roasted Tiny Green Bug That I’m Pretty Sure Was The Hard Crunchy Thing I Bit Down On. I tried again with the avocado sushi, this time homemade, and really delicious, cooked from a recipe in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, which is wonderful. The bok choy at the farmer’s market was so adorably tiny. I washed them, cut them in half and found them to be full of dirt, and washed them again. While cutting one in half I discovered a little green spotted beetle, alive and well. I shook it into the compost bucket to be carried outside later. Or I thought I did but must not have because I chomped down on what felt like a crunchy roasted green spotted beetle. I kept chewing, swallowed, and ate the rest of my half of the bok choy which proves conclusively that I am a full-grown adult.

Mixed Cauliflowers with Golden Raisins, Ricotta, and Capers.

Burrata with Blood Orange, Coriander Seeds, and Lavender Oil.

Chicken Livers with Red Wine, Smoky Bacon, and Cherries.

Chicken Thighs with Burnt Miso Butterscotch and Pomegranate and Walnut Salsa.

Orange Polenta Cake.

And what a finish! Abbie hosted an Ottolenghi cookbook celebration and I got to eat all of these things! The two salads, made by Abbie and Molly (yes, ladies?) were spectacular. I loved the cauliflower so much and it was very much like one that I loved from the now shuttered St. Philip restaurant, which provided the perfect segue for my food gossip about the misdeeds of the former head chef, Philip Speer, whom I described as a train wreck, before learning that one of the ladies in Abbie’s kitchen is a family friend of his. She was so nice about it and said that Philip had gone to rehab and turned things around and is now teaching about addiction and substance abuse in the service industry. I was mortified. But it’s a good lesson to not be a dick and tell gossip-y stories about people. Not just because you might be talking to a friend of that person, but because it’s a shitty thing to do. I have so much to teach the world. Moving on. The chicken liver recipe had a trillion steps and so many ingredients, and expensive ones too, and which I will never make for these reasons but which I enjoyed the hell out of today. I would have kept eating it until everything was gone if I wasn’t just jam-packed with social grace. The chicken with burnt miso was a huge hit too. You get to spread miso on a sheet pan and burn it, then whiz it up in a food processor to make a rich dark delicious paste. You spread this on top of pan-fried chicken thighs, broil it until it’s bubbly, and serve it with a pomegranate walnut salsa. Everyone loved it and thought it would be perfect dinner party fare. It’s beautiful, excitingly new, delicious, and not all that complicated. And lastly, Barbara made this show stopping polenta cake, which was like nothing I’ve ever eaten, in a good way. It had a delicious crusty, crumbly bottom, a middle that felt almost like custard, and a top of jammy, caramel-y orange slices. There is still good in this world after all!

Stay healthy, friends. Don’t insult local pastry chefs. Make your kids wear shoes when they go outside. Talk about shower pans more than you think you need to. Make sure the bugs really have crawled out of your bok choy. Call your mother. That’s all I got.