beets

while making this beet salad yesterday, omar and i realized that the past 4 or so nice restaurant visits we’ve had (spanning from miami to north carolina to new york city) have all involved beets.  so i think i now look at beets as something of an exotic treat, which is funny considering most people’s distaste for them (how about we place bets on who will be the first to comment and tell me of their hatred of the poor veggie?).

i was an adult before i had my first beet.  during our first year with a csa in miami we got a whole bunch of them and we dutifully roasted them and tried them.  and then i promptly pureed them up and fed them to a baby elisha who would down anything at the time.  i didn’t mind them so much but they are a kind of peculiar tasting vegetable that i think, for most people, take a bit of getting used to.  i’ve discovered that for me, the kind of odd, firm sweetness needs to be balanced with something acidic and something crunchy.  so with my two-pronged requirement for beet consumption figured out, i can proudly say i now love them.

we created this salad from a hodgepodge of different recipes and have tweaked them all enough to call our own.  and don’t skip out on boiling the beet greens. they really are great with the vinaigrette.

roasted beet, apple, and candied pecan salad
serves 2 with plenty of leftover vinaigrette and pecans

3 medium-sized beets with greens attached
1 apple, cored and chopped
1 recipe candied pecans found here (though you’ll only use a few from the recipe in the salad, they store well in the fridge)

for vinaigrette:
1 clove garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
3 TBS red wine vinegar
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

cut off the beet greens, leaving about an inch of stem.  wash the beets and roast them on a cookie sheet at 400 for about 45 minutes or until a sharp knife pierces the flesh easily.  let cool until easy to handle.  using paper towels, rub the beets to get the peel off.  cut up into bite sized pieces.

bring a pot of water to a boil and add greens.  boil greens for about 2 minutes, or until tender.  drain and squeeze dry with paper towels.

combine vinaigrette ingredients and stir with a whisk.

plate each salad individually, starting with greens on the bottom, then beets, then apple.  add vinaigrette then top with pecans.

*omar added some goat cheese on top but i decided to consume my dairy in the form of butter slathered on a baguette on the side.  seems like a win-win either way.

popping…

out of my belly ::  my daughter.  it’s kind of like one night she wasn’t there and then the next morning – boom.  baby.  and then she decided to take up yoga and do seemingly constant and funky moves that make even this thrice pregnant woman think this is just perhaps the most bizarre thing ever.  omar and i can just sit and stare at the belly ripples she makes.

out of our yard :: carrots.  omar was weeding along the side of the fence the other day in an area that is truly just about as wide as what you see in the picture.  a concrete sidewalk sits almost right up against the fence.  well, wouldn’t you know that he spies some carrots growing.  crazy.  we initially planted some carrot seeds in a pot about six yards from the fence but they never sprouted.  evidently the little seeds just hiked up their skirts and marched across the deck and settled next to the fence.  perhaps they thought they were too good for a container garden.

into my mind ::  wondering if people still use ipecac for croup.  last night elisha woke up with croup, and i kept thinking about the scene in anne of green gables where anne comes to the barry’s rescue and saves minnie may barry from a bad case of croup:

Anne went to work with skill and promptness.

“Minnie May has croup all right; she’s pretty bad, but I’ve seen them worse. First we must have lots of hot water. I declare, Diana, there isn’t more than a cupful in the kettle! There, I’ve filled it up, and, Mary Joe, you may put some wood in the stove. I don’t want to hurt your feelings but it seems to me you might have thought of this before if you’d any imagination. Now, I’ll undress Minnie May and put her to bed and you try to find some soft flannel cloths, Diana. I’m going to give her a dose of ipecac first of all.”

while i didn’t have anne to turn to, i did have dr. sears and after a good steam in the bathroom-turned-sauna and a trip out into the night air, he settled.  and i now know about “stridor” and am fascinated by the word.  the poor guy ended up being fine and he and asher (who was also up because of a rather unpleasant cough) got to have a 1 am viewing of charlotte’s web.  good times…for them.

february 2

morning

noon

night

i’ll take another, thank you.

sometime in the middle of last week i called omar at work after having yet another rather drawn-out and exhausting “discussion” with my two yr old about why yes, he must wear clothes when we go out.  i remember saying, “if you ever have a woman call you wanting to pour out her heart and guilt over why she’s not sure she’s really “called” to this whole motherhood thing…send her my way and i’ll commiserate with her.”

in truth i could step back and get a little perspective.  we’d been gone for awhile and were having to get back into the swing of things.  omar was also gone a lot last week, and oh right, i’m pregnant and struggling with a temper that has reared it’s nasty head like i never knew it could.

so it was like one big joke when i chose to use saturday and some time away to go to an ADOPTION CONFERENCE. seriously, more kids?  perhaps i’ll choose to blame my friend laura who alerted me to the conference in the first place.  but really, adoption is something both omar and i want to do, and i actually think it was quite humbling and good for me to sit with hundreds of other people and realize that on my own i didn’t really want to be there and that when i try and figure things out on my own and without prayer, i can’t even handle the kids God’s given us already.

i ended up seeing some old friends while there and afterwards one of them mentioned that they didn’t hear anything really new or groundbreaking.  i agreed but added that that was good.  the situation of orphaned children has and always will be the same – they need families and as christians we are called, all of us in some way, to help the fatherless.

my heart is slowly being chiseled away at.  i’ve always wanted to adopt but thought perhaps just an infant, or a “healthy” baby, or at least a young child that wouldn’t mess up our current “birth order”.  but lately i realize i don’t have any biblical reasons to back these ideas up (i’m not saying that i don’t think these are ever good things to consider – i’m just speaking of our situation here).  i want to want the children that God desires to place in our family, whoever they are and whatever they look like.

the one statistic that i learned about on saturday and keep thinking about is the number of kids in the government system that are cleared for adoption (not all foster kids, just the ones with terminated parental rights) – 125,000.  that number struck me as oddly small.  oddly “do-able” if all people, particularly christians, would consider taking one or more of them in.

i’m almost finished with russell moore’s adopted for life: the priorty of adoption for christian families and churches, a book i’d recommend to everyone in the church no matter what age or stage in life.  this passage seemed fitting for me considering all the new thoughts i’ve been having on what “type” of child would work best in our family.

It’s true that adoption isn’t “natural.” We have adoptions because we live in a world groaning under the curse of sin and death. Fathers abandon mothers. Mothers get pregnant without marriage. Parents are killed. Diseases ravage villages.  It was not so from the beginning. The hard questions about adoption – and the easy ones too – are only with us because something’s gone wrong with the world.

Adoption is modeled after the natural family. But the biological family is also modeled after something – the kingdom of God in Christ. King Jesus tells us his reign is hidden from the “wise and understanding” but is revealed to “little children” (Matt. 11:25).

The childlike kingdom we’ve come into is filled with transracial adoptees like you and me. It’s made up of “special-needs” orphans like us. Sometimes adoptions turn out with families that look remarkably similar – almost “natural,” you might say. But let’s not fall for the carnality that values boys over girls, that pits ethnicities against one another, or that is repulsed by physical or emotional weakness. Let’s be the people of Christ, and, like him, let’s teach ourselves to welcome children into our homes, even those our culture tells us we’re not supposed to want.  pp 165-166

calamitous

i’m not quite sure why omar and i were so trusting of a 2 and 3 year old playing alone out back.  for several reasons our little container garden has been rather…um…neglected?  but through all the neglect, some little tomatoes were working their hardest not to make us feel completely incompetent.  they were still green but getting bigger by the day.  the boys, though, thought they looked good and ready enough to add to their rock collection in the back yard.  nice.

alton, alton – you’re kind of letting us down.  i walked through the door the other day to find omar making some chocolate mousse (i love my husband) but was just the slightest bit suspicious when i saw that alton uses gelatin in his mousse recipe. the words “jiggly” and “firm” kept coming to mind when i thought about the possible outcome.  the texture and taste right when the mousse was finished was good, though perhaps a bit too strong even for me, but after setting up, the mousse was rather hard to get a spoon into.  perhaps the dessert was kind of a bust, but it has resulted in many laughs from me and omar as the boys have been beyond confused when we talk about eating “moose” as a treat.

brought to you by the letter “c”

CAKE  ::  i always seem to have a tube or can of almond paste in the pantry. actually, for the past 4+ years i think it was the same tube and it got tossed or donated when we headed to north carolina last spring.  but when we moved back to florida later that summer the cupboard just seemed naked without the stuff. so a can was bought and there it lived for six months.  then i saw a recipe for thomas keller’s almond cake and a cranberry syrup on smitten kitchen.  both the cake and the syrup are easy and i had an excuse to use the little spring form pans that usually just take up space in the cabinet.  omar and i agree that the cake was even better the next day after being reheated in the toaster oven – it made the top and edges kind of candy-like/crunchy.  *note* if you decide to give the recipe a try, heed all the instructions about length of time you mix ingredients, temperature of butter, and sifting the flour.  there is no leavener so if you don’t sift and chill and whip you’ll get little almond bricks.

COVER  ::  i was sad when gourmet closed up shop.  omar and i actually made their recipes and their photography was gorgeous and most of their articles well written.  they switched our subscription over to bon appétit and i’m still on the fence about whether to renew or not.  on the plus side are some of the recipes and writers (i always like molly wizenberg’s columns) but on the negative side – an often snarky food writer that answers readers’ questions and the photos.  the most recent issues have such close-up, glossy, unappetizing food shots, especially on the covers, that you kind of wonder who gave the ok to them.  we got the february issue in the mail yesterday and i took one look at it and the words “meat goo” popped into my head.  perhaps i’ll just stick to the website and epicurious archives.  i think saveur magazine is going to win the official replacement prize in our house.

CUPS  ::  it’s the passing comments that often make big impacts on me.  brite made a comment on my post about the boys’ tea time that made me want to reach out and hug and kiss and thank her.  she casually noted how she and her kids had daily tea time and worked on memory verses and catechism.  revolutionary to me, friends.  i have been really struggling on how/when in the day to work with the boys on these things.  morning?  they’d rather run around like maniacs and work off all that sleep.  before lunch?  hungry and verging on exhausted from the morning is not a pretty combo.  right after naps when still a little quiet while sipping grown-up drinks like tea in little cups that they are beyond enamored with?  right on.  three cheers for brite.

while boys nap

i rest.

and catch up on my attempt at fifty two fifty two.  i’m about finished with Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion, and Truth in the Immigration Debate and hope to finish The Architecture of Happiness in the next few days. perhaps not the best two books to read at the same time.  good books, but you know how sometimes you start books that you are really interested in and actually like but somehow get stuck??  a friend and i had a brief but good discussion the other day about reading books that perhaps aren’t the most thrilling or quite the page-turner you thought they’d be.  now i’m all about closing up a lousy book and not feeling the slightest bit of guilt if it is truly a waste of time, but i don’t want to tell myself or, more importantly, my boys that all reading and studying is exciting.

i also got a chance to watch a TED talk by agronomist louise fresco. from the TED site - Louise Fresco argues that a smart approach to large-scale, industrial farming and food production will feed our planet’s incoming population of nine billion. Only foods like (the scorned) supermarket white bread, she says, will nourish on a global scale.  i heard about this particular talk from ellie and she’s got some great thoughts on the lecture.  totally worth 18 minutes of your day. thanks, ellie!

and on this particularly long nap day i even snuck in a bit of the first episode from the new emma by masterpiece theater.  it took me a few minutes to get over the fact that the actress who plays emma also played the creepy younger sister (18 yr old version) in atonement. but i managed and now i’m enjoying it, and the story is as great as ever with an always intrusive emma, awkward mr. elton, and jonny lee miller doing a great job as mr. knightley.

ode to cold snaps

i arrived home yesterday.  gone are the 50 degree-ish days of when i left two weeks ago.  but really, no complaints.  and minutes after walking in the door i heard omar say these beautiful words – “while doing a major tree trimming job on the tree that is next to our fence, the neighbors found four dead iguanas in the branches.”  music to my ears, people.  the cold and windy weather dries out my skin but kills iguanas.  i’ll take it.

omar also came back from a visit to his parents’ house with a bag full of little bananas that got tricked by the cold into ripening too soon.   cute little things that made for excellent caramelized bananas this afternoon.  full sized bananas are often a bit much for me, but these little guys?  perfect.

as i was unpacking suitcases it was a bit sad to put the sweaters in the back of the closet.  i like to think cold weather clothes are more flattering than summer clothes.  times that by 100 when you’re pregnant.

tea time

i loved beatrix potter as a kid.  and i loved this tea set.  it has stayed with my parents and the boys got their first tea time with it today.  they ate up their cookies and downed their honey-laden, milky white constant comment tea – the first tea i remember drinking.

i had my own tea time yesterday.  friends and i went to a little tea room for lunch. a girly place full of girly decor and girly food.  but my one problem with girly food is that i’m starving an hour later.  add pregnancy on top of that and i probably should’ve just swallowed my pride and ordered a double salad plate and an extra scone slathered in clotted cream.

crafts

craft for kids ::

peanut butter/birdseed pine cones.  the boys liked this.  we think the birds liked it, and we know that the squirrels really, really liked it.  after a couple of days they pulled up the strings, bit off the pine cones and then made out like bandits.

craft for mama ::

champagne/belgian beer cage bistro chair.  tops on my list of pregnancy frustrations is the relative lack of beer or wine drinking (please don’t read into that that i’m a heavy drinker – it’s more along the lines of “we want what we can’t have” kinds of things).  tops on omar’s list of “frustrations when kate is pregnant” is my sipping his beer or wine, though i think he likes the extra kisses he gets after he has a glass of wine (wink).  so when i saw this little craft on design*sponge i figured omar would happy – he could drink his beer in peace and i could be distracted with a craft.  hil-arious.

rest

i used to wonder why pastors and their families went far away from home on vacation.  and stayed away for at least a week or two.  now i know.  omar’s work is good.  my work helping him is good.  it’s just a bit more intense then i could have ever known.  i think it first hit me a couple of months ago when omar and i were both on a subway in brooklyn on our cell phones having two conversations with hurting people.  conversations that couldn’t wait for us to get home.

being a couple of states away makes it just a bit easier to rest, especially mentally. but i’m realizing that i am also having to learn how to be better at resting.  and i think i am.  in the busyness of everyday life at home lists need to be made and checked off, bills tended to, laundry done.  truthfully all of this still needs to take place, to an extent, even while on vacation, but i’m learning to not let things get to me so much while away from everyday life.

like bouncing a check to the irs.  not getting to me as much as it would have while in the thick of life down in florida.  (true story, by the way.  i did have a moment of freak out when i realized my online banking mistake and googled “bounced irs check” only to find an article that was titled “there is dumb and then there is dumber.” moral of the story is to go immediately on vacation when you realize whopping tax errors and then you won’t feel so bad.)

va-ca-tion

what i do on vacation

go on dates with omar and friends to places like circa 1922 where we eat delicious things like crêpe cannelloni filled with red peppers and goat cheese and laugh a lot.

discover bifrost arts.  how did i not hear about them and their music before now? here is a good article explaining the project and their albums of hymns and spirituals.

walk by my mom’s grand piano and become inspired to pull out some music only to realize this will probably make the headache a bit worse so settle on taking some pictures of it.

discover that molly wizenberg/orangette now has a podcast.

decide to make the new york times chocolate chip cookies that call for a 36 hour rest time in the fridge.  one might see this as an inconvenience, but i see it as an opportunity to snack on cookie dough for 36 hours.

questionable

::  my choice of the boys’ christmas present.  we get them a play kitchen.  this was in part a ploy to get them out of our kitchen drawers and cabinets.  they proceed to spend more time raiding our kitchen drawers and making off with various trivets, spatulas, and pot holders.

:: my honesty.  around christmas day i got all excited about trying to accomplish reading 52 books in 52 weeks.  so i started on my list and began jane eyre.  i finished on new year’s eve.  my conscience wouldn’t bother me if i finished it on january 1st but i guess it is a bit dishonest to add it to the 2010 list.  perhaps i should start my 52 weeks with the last week of the year??  perhaps i shouldn’t obsess so much about these things??  and if you haven’t read jane eyre you’re missing out.

:: evidently, my sanity.  after three and half years with the same phone, i finally caved to getting a new one.  when i told the saleslady that i wanted a basic phone because i’m a no-frills phone kind of girl she eyed me suspiciously.  when it came out that i don’t even text, she was incredulous.  ”seriously?!” she asked. seriously. such people do exist.

:: men who push around dog strollers.  head to boca raton if you’d like to see how rich old people spend their time.  each time i go i am shocked by the number of dog strollers i see.  i was even more shocked today when i saw a women parading around while holding her pooch.  behind her the gray-haired husband dutifully pushed along the pink dog stroller carrying his beloved’s purse.  soon after i promised omar that i would never make him do such things.

three kings day

today is epiphany.  the decorations came down and the camels and wise men payed us a visit.  last night grass and sticks were gathered to feed the camels.  and fittingly, crowns were worn in honor of the kings.  i taught elisha “the little drummer boy” and we read ezra jack keats’s illustrated version of the song.  it has beautiful pictures, especially of the kings.

what did they bring the boys?  a book each and a couple of cookies – life’s essentials.

almost a year ago to the day…

i wrote about this very topic – journaling…or diary-ing…or homemaking notebook-ing or whatever you want to call it.  i tried last year.  i really did.  i wanted a place where i could write out our daily activities, quotes i came across during the day, things the kids say, recipes, bible verses, etc.

what ended up happening was that i started writing down lists and ideas and quotes on random pieces of paper that were handy.  and i think i jotted notes down in two or three journals i had lying around.

so.  round two?  i went out yesterday and bought a book specifically for this.  a big journal with pages big enough for sketches and articles or pictures i come across as well as the daily “to do” lists and quotes and verses.

i love looking through my great-grandpa’s diaries.  they are simple and full of everyday tasks that he did.  they weren’t the place for his “deepest thoughts,” so it appears from what he recorded, but they are a record of what he did and who he was.  i’d like to have something like that to hold on to.

i also did this early in the morning with the boys playing around me.  i don’t think i’ll do that everyday but i’m trying to do a better job at letting them see me do and write and read about things i love.  it’s been easy for me to just wait until they are napping or in bed for the night before i work on projects or read my own books or write.  i don’t want them to think i only read books about dump trucks, play games like candyland, fold laundry, and take pictures primarily of them.

finally, i would like to add that i’m writing this while sitting in front of the fire (!), wrapped in a blanket (!), and loving that fact that it’s only in the low 50s (!) outside right now and blustery.  love it.

missteps

misstep #1 by omar

poor omar.  we’ve lived here less than six months and in that time he has broken two french presses.  he is definitely not clumsy and i totally blame the ceramic kitchen sink (don’t buy one…).

misstep #2 by both of us

long after the remains of the first french press have been carted away and just after the remains of the second are good and gone, guess who finds out that you can buy replacement glass carafes for your french press?  that would be me.  you can actually buy multiple spare parts for your trusty french press.  you can even buy a neoprene french press cozy from this site i never knew about.  then again, why would anyone want a bland neoprene cozy when you could have one of these?

misstep #3 by alton brown

alright.  we are alton brown fans in this house.  omar is even 5 recipes into his goal of completing all the recipes in his new book this year.  and it’s only january 3.  the steak was great.  the fried leftover mashed potatoes were excellent.  the scrambled eggs that included some rather painfully detailed and over-the-top instructions were wonderful.  the coffee?  horrible.  to break in (ha!) the new french press and knock another recipe off the to-do list, we decided to follow alton’s coffee instructions.  we even pulled out the digital scale, people.  the proportions were fine.  the killer?  he has you add salt to the grounds to take away the bitterness.  and not just a pinch.  now isn’t part of the enjoyment of drinking coffee that slight bitterness that accompanies it? heed my warning – don’t ever try this.

misstep #4 by wendell berry

not coffee related but indeed a misstep.  while listening to an interview with wendell berry, asher overheard him say the word “stupid” and just about lost it. it’s a no-no word in our house (though asher tries to get around this by substituting the word “snoopy” in context) and even i have been corrected by my 2 year old.  i doubt mr. berry is ever corrected much for his language but there you have it.