pre “vacation to new york” checklist::

1.  buy socks.  i go on and on about how i wished i lived where there were seasons and chilly temps, but the fact is, i hate socks and closed-toe shoes.  most of the socks i unearthed in my closet had a distinct late high school/early college look to them so i opted to go out and buy some.  i’m not sure you could have a more un-thrilling purchase.

2.  find a vacation book to bring.  i was looking for something in the fiction department but ended up with malcolm gladwell’s blink.  fairly breezy social psychology is good, too.

3.  pack the boys off to abuela’s for the week.  check.  but not before i gave them some killer hair cuts.  killer mainly in the sense that i didn’t screw anything up this time.  asher’s first time in the chair was uneventful and he went from mullet to cute 2 year old boy cut.  no more baby semi-curls.  and elisha’s is good.  this time the gel accentuates the cut rather than covering up my goofs.

4.  drink a mexican coke and eat an empanada.  i’d heard a bit about mexican coke (different than ours because it is made with cane sugar) and even though i’m not one for pregnancy cravings, i’d been thinking about it for weeks so i’ll chalk it up to a pregnancy craving.  so on our way back from miami today we stopped at a little bakery that imports it.  i was wondering if i always think coke in other countries tastes better because it’s made with sugar or because i’m on vacation and even a warm, flat coke would taste good in rome or florence.  verdict?  i think it’s the vacation.  they did have imported fanta, though, and that is definitely one drink that is made differently, for the better, in other countries.  next time…

5.  print out boarding passes…or not.  how easily i forget that the tsa has a thing against us.

i’ve got a few friends who think we always eat adventurous and exciting foods.  we don’t.  we love to try new things and (usually) the boys do, too.  but our weeknight meals are typically standard dinner fare – roasted veggies, salads, bean dishes, pastas, roast or sauteed chicken, and on and on.

omar is more adventurous than me when it comes to full-on recipes, but i think of myself as pretty adventurous and resourceful when the fridge is bare and the goods left in the pantry are weird.  we’re less than a week away from a 5 night trip to new york so i have no desire to go grocery shopping right now.  i think of these times as kind of daring – what can i make the kids for lunch when we’ve already had way too much pasta, there is no bread for peanut butter, no cheese, and the crackers are all stale?

there was a lonely little can of salmon in the pantry.  i’ve read and read on how important it is to eat certain types of fish and know that many people recommend eating things like canned wild salmon if you don’t get enough.  i just really don’t care for the stuff.  but i got elisha all excited by saying he could squirt mustard and plop mayo into a big bowl and stir the salmon in for me.  then we tasted.  no tears or protests.  this was served with some oddly textured craisins and a stale-ish end of a loaf of bread.  nice.

10 minutes later asher is digging into his second helping with a tiny spoon (they eat almost anything when the spoon is tiny), i’d pawned my helping off on asher, and i look over to a quiet elisha.  sure enough he’s eating it but he is visibly shuddering when he swallows the stuff.  poor kid.  cheers to him, though, for not complaining.  i ended his misery by giving him a pickle (another random “all that’s left in the fridge” food).

while i was inflicting them with this meal, i kept thinking of the book i just finished – laurie colwin’s home cooking.  i thought my salmon story might fit well into either her “kitchen horrors” chapter or “repulsive dinners: a memoir” chapter.

after the lights are out.  giving elisha a final bedtime snuggle.

me:  what do you think we should name the baby?

elisha:  jesus.

me: hmmm

elisha:  did jesus give us juice or wine for the lord’s supper?

me:  (seriously?)  umm…wine.

elisha:  why we have juice?

me:  good question.  (at this point i figured i’d use big terms and hope he’d lose interest)  even before official prohibition, america became a bit hung-up on drinking and no one fought the good fight to keep wine as an accepted part of the lord’s supper.

elisha:  why?

me:  i’ll look up the details.  nighty night.

———

20 minutes and a google search later:

from a christianity today article:

Leaders of the 18th-century “evangelical revival” in Britain and America, though concerned about the immoderate use of alcohol, did not see wine, cider, and beer as alcoholic in the same way as distilled spirits (such as gin and brandy). However, in the 19th century, temperance became “teetotalism” or “total abstinence,” moving all alcohol (wine included) into the list of forbidden beverages. Many began to question why a beverage considered dangerous to drink was still used on the Communion table.

Motivated by these arguments, Protestant churchgoers and clergy sought a way to make unfermented grape juice. An American Methodist dentist, Thomas Bramwell Welch, and his son Charles were the first to succeed in this on a large scale. Charles Welch was a skilled marketer, and “Welch’s grape juice” became a popular beverage among total abstainers and the replacement for fermented wine on most American Protestant Communion tables (except in Lutheran and Episcopal churches).

and of course the individual cups that resulted as a fear of germs were made so as not to look like whiskey shot glasses.  but my favorite tidbit gleaned from the article?

…some marketers to evangelical churches have developed disposable individual Communion cups which contain both wafer and grape juice in separate hermetically sealed compartments.

to me this brings to mind handi-snacks.

]]> http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/conversation/feed/ 4 kate o. juice http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/flying-butter/ http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/flying-butter/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:46:27 +0000 kate o. http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/?p=1799 ]]>

there was a lot of uncertainty this past year.  but there was also apple cranberry butter.  in february omar and i made our first of a couple of trips to atlanta to look at a job opportunity there.  both times we went the weather was crisp and perfect and included a few visits to the flying biscuit.  i remember the food being quite good, but i remember liking the apple cranberry butter so much that when i decided to make it the other night i thought i’d probably worked up the memory way too much and figured it was a good possibility i was in for disappointment.

not so.  whew.  it’s good.  nutmeg and cinnamon and cranberry good.  it was like making christmas in a pot.  why in the world i didn’t think of halving the recipe, i don’t know.  but now i have 4+ cups of this stuff.  here’s hoping it freezes well.

here is the recipe if you’d like to give it a go.  note – the recipe is a bit vague on directions but i let my apples cook down for a good hour.  and unless you like to search for/chew on little shards of cinnamon stick, i’d suggest finding and removing it before you puree it.  ahem.

]]> http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/flying-butter/feed/ 7 kate o. applebutter1 applebutter2 applebutter3 http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/bears-and-bikes/ http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/bears-and-bikes/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:46:26 +0000 kate o. http://kateortiz.wordpress.com/?p=1795 ]]>

oh, i love this.  if there ever is a time that i can gush on and on about how cute these two are it’s when they strap on their buddies and run and bike around the house.  and asher has this cute/funny little voice he uses to ask if bear is ok about every five seconds while wearing him.

if this keeps up i envision all of us grocery shopping with a baby or bear wrapped around us.

i don’t like:

1.  wet cake.  just the thought of pouring a liquid on a warm, freshly baked cake makes my stomach churn.  rum cake?  out.  most tiramisu recipes?  sorry.  and until yesterday i thought most “upside down cakes” were out, too.  they just look wet, right?  then omar decided to make city bakery apple-raspberry upside-down cake from a passion for baking.  oh my.  very good.  and wouldn’t you know that the soupy fruit mixture stayed separate from the cake and it was all very un-wet.  and the smell while baking?  a mixture of summer with the raspberries and christmas with the apples and cranberries.

2. bad coffee orders.  yesterday a woman walked up to the register at starbucks and ordered something along the lines of a large, decaf, skim milk, three splenda latte.  now that is one yucky drink.  in these situations i long to pull such people aside, begin a conversation with them about good fats and real sugar, and give them a book like planck’s real food.

i like:

1.  almond extract.  i believe you can add it to almost anything and it will make it ten times better.  next time it’s going into the above mentioned cake.

2.  saturday morning park visits with the boys while papi works.  elisha is quick to point out that his favorite part of the morning was the dunkin’ donuts stop before the park.

the boys are getting into books that i really enjoy reading and we’ve reached the stage of library fines hitting us because the kid books go missing in the strangest of places.  the boys’ current top picks:  anno’s counting book by mitsumasa anno (love this book), ox-cart man by donald hall, any and all books in the bear snores on series by karma wilson, and summer by gerda muller (asher is especially fond of the the beach pictures).

i hit a reading dry spell for a couple of months but i looked over at my book stack one day and realized it was interesting again.

completed: the school of essential ingredients by erica bauermeister, the devil in the white city by erik larson

almost there:  home cooking: a writer in the kitchen by laurie colwin, men and women in the church: building consensus on christian leadership by sarah sumner

to start: netherland by joseph o’neill

october 9 ::

asher turned two.  last year’s birthday was full of planned presents, homemade gifts, and thoughtful celebration.  this year i woke up, realized i hadn’t done a thing, rummaged through the closet and found some lincoln logs and put a bow on top.  then we went to cracker barrel.  asher probably enjoyed this year’s version more.  just ask the deer head over the cracker barrel fireplace.  halfway through breakfast asher turned around and started talking to it, excitedly telling it what he was eating.  happy twos, ashie.

october 16 ::

omar and i went to a wedding in miami that was held at the monastery of st. bernard de clairvaux (a cistercian monastery built in spain in the 12th century). i’m a bit fuzzy on some of the history, but in the 1920s, william randolph hearst decided to buy the cloisters of the place, dismantle it, and rebuild it in miami.  it is beautiful.  but not so beautiful when you’re pregnant, it’s beyond hot, the wedding starts one and a half hours late (no joke), the food is served over three hours later (again, no joke), and your present “condition” doesn’t allow you to drink away your hot and sweaty cares.

october 19 ::

i finished up my library stash of the bbc show mi-5. i find it interesting that the brits have no qualms in killing off/letting go of characters left and right.  losing characters is seemingly always a rare tragedy on most american shows.  and i also find it interesting that the token american character is always loud, brash, arrogant, and says things like “pal” a bit too often.  then again, if i was cast as a british character in an american show, i think i’d always try to find ways to insert the word “mobile” when referring to my phone.  it makes me giggle.

for some reason spaghetti carbonara popped into my head the other day. fortunately, i didn’t let my thoughts linger on it too long because if they had the carbonara would have been plunged into the dreaded pregnancy category of “dwelled on it too much now can’t stand the thought of it.”

it popped up again when i needed to make dinner and had few ingredients and little desire to do anything that took too much time or too many dishes.  i remembered that tyler florence’s tyler’s ultimate had a spaghetti carbonara recipe.  side note:  go get this book.  his overuse of words like awesome, brilliant, beautiful, amazing, and even ultimate irk me a bit (case in point – this carbonara is evidently the “ultimate” one), but the man has some wonderful recipes.  we’ve made multiple recipes multiple times – the sign of a good cookbook.

and the carbonara couldn’t have been easier.  boil some spaghetti.  saute an onion with a few slices of bacon and pour that into a bowl with whisked eggs, cream and parmesan.  dump the cooked spaghetti into the bowl and cover with a plate to let the eggies cook and five minutes later a great dish with only a saute pan and pot to clean.  i would’ve been perfectly content to cozy up to omar and eat straight from the bowl (the romantic situation made even more so by the absence of more plates to clean) but our little boys still resort to fingers about half way through dinner and i’ve seen where their hands have been.

seriously good stuff.